Skeleton-in-Waiting

by Peter Dickinson

  After nearly a year it still took Louise an effort of will to think of Quercy as home. Sometimes she imagined herself an alternative life. Suppose, for instance, we’d had a revolution like the one in Russia, of course there’d have been no question of Great-grandpapa and Great-grandmama and the great-aunts and great-uncles being shot in a cellar like the poor Romanovs—no, they’d just have been demoted to the ranks. Father would have been an ordinary doctor. Louise would have gone to the university as an ordinary student and met Piers somehow (all roads had to meet at that crossways, however you juggled history) and fallen in love and they’d have married or perhaps just decided to live together and started off in some ramshackle flat, she biking to her ordinary job and getting back in the evening festooned with carrier-bags … that might have felt like home, a nest she’d made, a lair she had to sweep and tidy for herself. But Quercy … it wasn’t the house’s fault. Or anyone’s. It had to be big, for a start, with room for office staff and servants and drivers and a flat for Joan and Derek, and a suite for the odd lady-in-waiting, all that. No way it wasn’t going to look a bit pompous. Then there was security. Security had turned down two other possible houses because they weren’t happy with the perimeters; either of them might have done in the old days, though there’d always been snoopers, professional and amateur, and regicidal loonies, besides the extraordinary number of lonely and inadequate citizens who believed that all their problems would be solved if only they could get to chat in private with this or that member of the Family—like a psychic version of the Royal Touch. But now there were potential regicides who weren’t loonies. Ten years ago Louise used often to walk, with one detective a few paces behind her but otherwise alone, from Kensington Palace across to Holland Park Comprehensive, and back again after school. Unthinkable since Chester. You lived in a sort of invisible force-field which moved when you moved, arriving with sniffer-dogs anywhere you were planned to visit a couple of days before you came and then surrounding you all the time you were there, armed and watchful on rooftops while you shook hands and fielded posies and chatted and moved on. Quercy was late Georgian, civilised, bland, symbolic of an era of peace, but for all that Davy, like his ancestors in the bloody centuries before, had been born in a fortress.

  It had been a two-and-a-half-million-pound present from the father of the bride.

  “I suppose it’ll do,” the bride had said.

  “Good as anywhere else,” the groom had answered.

  Piers’s only demands had been that they should live within driving distance of the university and that there should be one room where he could get a good fug up. He felt no need for a place he could think of as home. His home was himself, his habits and a very few possessions, like the blue mug he used at breakfast and the long-case clock he wound on Tuesdays. He created his notion of home as he had created himself, out of almost nothing. Even his name was one he had chosen when he was sixteen. No past contributed, no parents, no photographs of childhood, no mementoes. He had been discovered as a week-old baby on the back seat of a bus in a depot in Coventry. Later, of course, there were memories, but only if you asked, and then just lifeless dates and places—orphanage, schools, scholarships. No friends from before university. No one and nowhere he felt any wish to see again.

  Louise by contrast had so much past that sometimes she felt she existed in the present only as a dimensionless moving point, there to create fresh pasts by the ripple of its track. For a start there was the past stored in the public memory—hardly a week could have gone by since she was born without her picture appearing somewhere in newspapers or on TV. Last month a souvenir christening mug, five shillings new in 1963, had been sold at Bonhams for two hundred quid (Albert’s fetched only fifty because he was heir to the throne, so they were commoner). And the past beyond that—one person in three in the street, if you’d asked them, could probably have named her paternal ancestors back through five generations, which they couldn’t have done for themselves. Then inside that immense public past there was the semi-public Family past, the comings and goings of ramified relatives, Yorks, Kents, Spanish and Russian and Greek royals, Mountbattens and so on, a banyan of family trees, parts of the grove open for everyone to see, other bits in deep shadow, secret, merely guessed at by outsiders. And then inward to the past of the personal Family, Father, Mother, Nonny, Albert, and then Louise’s own private and treasured past, the central memories which had grown with her, made her, become her. Above all the network of places—the Palace, Balmoral, Windsor, Sandringham—which she collectively regarded as home.

  Moving into Quercy Louise had found herself at a loss, even in the most superficial matters such as choosing a wallpaper for the dining-room. The rooms of a proper home had existing wallpaper, which belonged; when you decided to change it you did so from a known base, a feel for the function of that room in your own psychic architecture. What did you do, confronted with a blank like Quercy? Louise’s answer had been to get a cousin of Nonny’s who did that sort of thing professionally, to make the decisions. For form’s sake there’d be a pretence of consultation and she’d rejected two or three ideas saying she didn’t like that colour, but with one exception she had let Quercy happen, and then found that she tended to feel as though she and Piers were the only guests in a comfortable but dull country hotel.

  The exception was the nursery. Louise knew what a nursery should look like and feel like. She couldn’t have everything—the fire was no good for crumpets and it was all a bit new, without the haunting sense of the procession of children who had passed through it, mottling and abrading, trying whether this chair would break or that chest push over, producing spillage and spewage, testing crayons on bare bits of wall, mountaineering along shelving and fighting toy wars behind battlements of books. But most of it was pretty well right. There were the rocking-horse and the pouffe and the Margaret Tarrant print of All Creatures Great and Small and the cardboard parrot and the Mickey Mouse clock (though it ran off a battery and kept perfect time) and the toy-chest with buttoned corduroy cover and the tall chair with tray and counting-frame and the smell of ironed linen and damp rusks and talcum. And, more important than anything, the right-shaped nanny. Small and neat, but cuddly. Watching Janine make her way back to bed Louise envisaged not the past but the future, a vista of children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren even, in whose own lives and memories that Russian-doll figure would become a much-loved landmark.

  She gave the dim-switch a half turn and stole to the cot. Davy was lying on his front with his head turned sideways and his right arm crooked up on the mattress in a Great Dictator salute. His breathing faltered in its rhythm, then steadied as he relapsed into that almost-too-perfect look which small children somehow put on in sleep. He’d be awake in a few minutes, so Louise stayed where she was, looking down. She had been leaning over the cot for a good half-minute before she realised that something was missing. Normally, if she stood like this, at this time of day, waiting over the cot for her son to wake, she experienced a faint but definite surge of maternal emotion, too primitive and physical to count as love, seeming to emerge from the pit of her stomach and flood through her body like a drug injected into the bloodstream. Not today. Perhaps she was too wide awake, after the shock of Granny dying and the other business about the bombers, but now she found herself gazing down as though her son were … no, not even a stranger, because other people’s babies could give you a bit of that sort of kick, and so could kittens and foals … but a specimen, an exhibit. Vertebrate, mammal, ape, human, infant, royal. Louise was alien as a guardian angel watching over the cot in perfect but emotionless duty. She felt outside herself, outside time. Time, in fact, displayed itself in front of her mind’s eye like the replica of the Bayeux Tapestry which stood at the end of an upper corridor in the Palace, the whole darned thing on a strip of canvas wound onto a pair of rollers so that you could trundle the strip forward or back with an electric motor.

  During last ni
ght time had trundled. The pictures had moved. A generation had gone (not quite, because Aunt Tim York was still puttering quietly on, but that bit of the Family had got out of synch so that at one time there’d been gossip about Louise marrying Cousin Jack, who really belonged in Father’s generation). Granny and her harp and dyed hair and crazy clothes had been wound out of sight, leaving Mother and Father on the left of the picture now, in the middle Albert and Soppy, Louise and Piers, on the right Albert’s two kids, and last of all, wound into view only a few weeks back, this cartoon baby in his cartoon cot. DAVIDUS NATUS EST said the clumsy letters above.

  In the bedroom the telephone rang. Louise reached for the intercom and switched it through.

  “Joan? You heard the news?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “It’s all right. No one’s going to miss her much, except Aunt Bea.”

  “Yes, I know. Still … I was calling to know if you’d like me down early.”

  “Late, if anything. Let’s all have a lie-in. I should think the Visiting Head’s off, as far as I’m concerned. The Palace will be ringing with the Guidance around ten—we’ll have a skim through the diaries and see if there’s anything we want to make a fuss about. Father says Thursday week for the funeral.”

  “Right.”

  “See you around nine, then. Sleep well.”

  At the click of the intercom Davy’s smooth forehead wrinkled then cleared. The clenched hand loosed itself, the ridiculous little fingers probed blindly at the mattress. A dream, just before waking, brief, but leaving the face changed when it ended. It wasn’t the sort of change you could measure or point at but it was there. Louise recognised the look at once. Davy’s visible eye was closed, his nose was a mere blob, his hair dark fluff, but his look was Granny.

  She bent and lifted him free. Still asleep he snuggled against her, fitting himself to her body like a piece of some soft jigsaw which belonged there and nowhere else in the universe. By the time she had stripped away his reeking nappies and padded him dry his lips were pouting into sucks. Deeply contented, with the drug of motherhood now flooding through her veins, she carried the last of the Romanovs back to her bed to feed.

  3

  As always, they lay in the dark and talked. It was already so much of a habit that when they had to spend a night apart Louise found that she needed to hold an imaginary conversation, muttering her own lines into the stillness, before she could happily fall asleep.

  “… it was quite peculiar. Do you believe in reincarnation? He looked just like her for a few seconds.”

  “You think he’s been on hold until your grandmother’s soul was free to take over?”

  “It makes a change from looking like Queen Victoria. Half the babies you see look like her. But you get these sort of flickers. You can see there’s a likeness but you don’t know who. One of yours, I suppose.”

  “Post-natal recapitulation. The foetus in the womb recapitulates the stages of human evolution. First it’s an amoeba, later it has gills, then it’s an amphibian and so on. Shortly before birth it has traces of a simian tail. Why should the process stop there?”

  “We were monkeys for much longer than Granny was Granny.”

  “I’m not suggesting Davy was recapitulating your grandmother. Suppose a period in prehistory when various human groups became largely segregated, with the result that particular characteristics tended to be bred into one group and not another, and then to remain as part of our genetic material. Sometimes they would emerge in a life-long likeness, as in your grandmother, but with the majority of descendants they wouldn’t manifest themselves except for the brief period in which the child was recapitulating that stage of its evolution.”

  “Is that genuine science?”

  “Just doodling. I could ask someone, if you like.”

  “I just love the idea of a pack of Romanovs wearing nothing except mink and sable hunter-gathering across the steppes for Fabergé eggs!”

  “More engaging to contemplate than to encounter.”

  “I bet you Granny would have come out on top if she’d been one of them.”

  NOVEMBER 1987

  1

  “That you?”

  “Well?”

  “…”

  “What do you mean, pressure?”

  “…”

  “Tell me this—supposing I went along with you, does it mean nobody getting hurt or killed?”

  “…”

  “It’s what matters to me—that and saving your stupid skin.”

  “And you can’t say more? Anyway, it’d be down to me to come up with something, wouldn’t it?”

  “All right. I’m not saying I like it, but I’ll give it a try. But listen, there’s your side of the bargain. You’re going to promise me, whatever happens, soon as this is over you’re getting out. And you’re not getting involved in anything else like this, ever again. Right?”

  “…”

  2

  It was part of our unwritten constitution, Father used to say, that there must always be one UMRF—Unpopular Member of Royal Family. Granny had held the office for more than a generation. It had certain perks, the best being certain freedoms from constraint experienced by those members of the Family who were expected to behave; now, finally, there was freedom from TV at her funeral. This gave the service a feeling of taking place back in the ’thirties, when all the public would have expected to see was a double-page spread in the Illustrated London News, drawn by an artist who had not been present at the ceremony. Granny had of course been born Russian Orthodox but she’d had to become C of E in order to marry Grandfather, so the spoken bits of the service were good old Prayer Book. For the music they’d got St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey to lend them extra basses who boomed away in furry deep voices trying to sound like Chaliapin. To Louise this seemed a much more agreeable noise than the flutings and twitterings she usually had to sit through.

  There was a good turn-out of Romanovs. The Palace were always jumpy about any dealings with Russian ex-royals, partly because of their experiences with Granny but mainly because the FO would come at them with tut-tuts if it seemed that any Romanov was being treated in a way which implied that he was still really royal and might one day come into his own again. For instance, there was only to be a buffet luncheon after the ceremony, so that nobody could say that the King of England had sat down to a formal meal with a claimant to the throne of the Tsars. Louise knew only three of the visitors by sight, so whiled away the musical stretches by studying the rest of them for Davy-likenesses and any other evidence of Romanov hunter-gatherer forebears. Beyond a vague foreignness she could detect no special shared traits among the men, but four of the women were striking in the same fashion, erect, pale-skinned and dark-haired, with strong-featured square faces—the famous Bagration look of which Granny used to boast not because she herself possessed it but because it came from the oldest royal line in Europe.

  The home-growns had come in force, almost the complete set: Granny’s own children apart from Aunt Louise, who’d refused to make the trip from Rome—she’d always hated Granny, Father said, with a sort of phobia quite different from what he regarded as his own rational detestation—Father and Mother, Uncle Billy and the Clarences, Aunt Anne and Uncle Boot Wroxeter and the Wroxeter cousins; the grandchildren, of course; and then the outer ring of second cousins, the Yorks and the Kents and their ramifications, complicated by divorces and re-marriages­—and not one of them caring a sausage that Granny had snuffed it at last. In all that solemn and apparently mourning assembly only Aunt Bea Surbiton could be feeling genuine sorrow, though perhaps a few others might share Louise’s mild regret—not that even she had actually liked Granny, but she had at times enjoyed her, her gusto, her panache, her irreverence (especially of all things that the English expected one to revere), her undauntedness in accepting her unpopularity and making the
most of it, wearing it like one of her absurd gaudy cloaks and flaunting it in the face of her enemies. Granny had been a flavour in Louise’s growing up. You didn’t want much of it, and not often, but from now on you were going to taste it only in memory.

  A bout of Slavic boomings ended. The organ took up with burps and tootles. The coffin-bearers—chosen from the regiments of which Granny had been Colonel-in-Chief, a rank she had relished exploiting to the maximum of military embarrassment—hefted the box and waited. Louise rose when Mother rose and leaving Piers in his stall joined the procession beside Albert, who was looking peculiarly kept and respectable. He had been tending that way for some while, his beard seeming to have become smaller and neater every time Louise met him—perhaps Soppy kept a pair of scissors under her pillow and snipped another millimetre away each night while he slept. The procession caterpillared to the vault. The organ whumped, fluttered and fell silent. The Dean turned and raised his head with a look of astonishment, as though he had imagined he had been wandering alone through an empty chapel, and now found that he had been trailing an entire royal family behind him. He drew a deep breath and twanged through his nose, till the choir drowned him with hootings and flutings.

  “Man that is born of woman …”

  “… hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower …”

  And jumpeth off pianos trying to catch parrots, thought Louise as the soldiers eased the coffin onto the platform that would carry it down into the vault. It settled without a bump.

  The machinery took over. The supernumerary basses rumbled fresh woe. Slowly the box slid away.

  “Made it,” whispered Albert.

  There had been suggestions in the press, as well as private chunterings among Palace officials, that Granny shouldn’t be buried in St George’s. It wasn’t just that she’d never been Queen. Her known Nazi sympathies, both before and during the war, were the main thing, but she had plenty of enemies from other causes who would have liked to see her buried less triumphally. Mother could well have been chief of those enemies, since Granny had set out from the start to make life as tricky as possible for the new Queen, but of course it had been Mother who had insisted that Granny must be buried alongside poor Grandfather.