Skeleton-in-Waiting

by Peter Dickinson

  Louise agreed. After all, he’d really loved her. There were only two things everybody knew about Grandfather. One was his managing to set fire to his yacht during a practical joke with an exploding cigar and so getting drowned in a flat calm sea while he was still only Prince of Wales—extraordinary to think of a time when you could go yachting with a few cronies and not have posses of security men zooming all round you in power boats and helicopters. The other was that he’d really loved Granny. Mother and Father loved each other, of course, both officially and unofficially; they’d just had a bit of a fight to get married, too. Louise herself was known to be dotty about Piers, and had had to fight even harder. But if you’d asked your woman-in-the-checkout-queue to name you a royal romance, three times out of four she’s still have answered “Oh, poor Prince Albert and the Grand Duchess.” She’d have been right, too, despite the fact that Granny was capable of conducting a world-class romance without really loving the other party much more than she loved her harp or her jewellery. She would have seen the lover mainly as an extension of her own personality. But Grandfather’d never had the imagination for that. He’d loved her and fought to marry her against his parents and the government, the Church, the hacks, and practically the whole of the Great British Public—even greater odds than Louise had faced for Piers. And then the GBP, like a tyrannical father in a costume drama, had suddenly recognised True Love and changed sides, so Grandfather had won. It was the only noticeable thing he’d ever done, really, but it was enough. Then he’d drowned, and fifty years of widowhood had juddered by, and now she was sliding down to sleep by her husband’s side again.

  Marriage is rum, Louise thought. All marriages, not just the slightly peculiar ones like Father’s with Mother and Nonny. She didn’t think she’d really considered this before. Getting used to Piers’s peculiarities and finding ways of living together, as well as setting up house and having a baby, had been a mind-absorbing process, as inevitable as time seems to the time-bound. But now Granny, was drifting away to somewhere outside time, and seemed for a moment to be sucking Louise in her wake, enabling her not only to look at her memories but also at the possible lifetimes ahead, and feel the same strangeness in them all. She couldn’t find words for the feeling. It didn’t have much to do with love—love just made it all harder to think about. If Piers had been at her side she would have felt for his hand and he would have squeezed hers without seeming to notice what he was doing, but afterwards he would have asked “What was that about?” and she would have said “Oh nothing.” When she slid back into time she felt widowed.

  She shook herself. A boy was singing solo in those bloodless, floating tones which always gave Louise the illusion that if only she could dissolve one flimsy barrier between her ear and her mind she might be able to grasp why people made such a fuss about music.

  “… is not at our last hour for any pains of death to fall from Thee.”

  Father stepped forward. Somebody offered him an urn from which he took a handful of dry earth.

  “For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God,” twanged the Dean, “of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear sister here departed …”

  Father tossed the earth down. It rattled like rain among the wreaths that covered the vanishing coffin. The Dean prolonged his last twang into a dying whine. The Family turned, processed back and peeled off to their places. Piers, unprompted, felt for Louise’s hand and squeezed it.

  The Princess of Wales—Sophia on her birth certificate, Sophie to the hacks, Soppy to anyone who knew her well—was standing by a window that looked out over the Home Park. The view was silver and brown and gold, pale clouds reflected from the ponds, withering grass-stems littered with yellow leaf-fall, all hues muted still further by the remains of mist, as though seen on TV with the colour-control down. Two of the best trees had fallen in the famous gale, their prone trunks adding to the melancholy. It was all very pallid, peaceful, English, nothing like Granny. Soppy as usual had been first to the tables and her plate had an Alp of food on it.

  “How’s life?” said Louise.

  “Sacked my Bridget yesterday.”

  “Oh, why? I thought she was terrific.”

  “Got on my nerves. Don’t talk to Bertie about it. He’s far from chuffed. Still like that wench of yours?”

  “Janine? I was thinking, oh, the morning after Granny died, how super she was. I keep finding her up and there when it’s not even her night on. Luckily Davy’s just beginning to sleep through, touch wood.”

  “Mercy when that happens. Watching anyone else feed makes my tummy rumble. My two must’ve got conditioned to the idea of distant thunder with their meals—won’t be able to digest without it. Tried keeping a few snacks my side of the bed, but Bertie complained about the crumbs.”

  “I was thinking how tidied-up you’re getting him.”

  “Not me, darling. People change. Closer you think you are to them, less you notice. Then all of a sudden you’ve got someone else.”

  Soppy popped a whole canapé into her neat round mouth and chewed double-speed, wrinkling her nose as she did so. She had an unusually small head with sharp little features and slightly pop eyes. Her body was long but neat, unaffected by her astounding appetite. She was said to be the best woman polo-player in Europe. Louise liked her, but she was not very popular with the Palace because of her tendency to say things they hadn’t scripted.

  “Piers says we aren’t just one person like that, really,” said Louise.

  “Uh?”

  “Don’t tell him I’ve told you. He says I always make things simpler than they are, especially anything to do with AI.”

  “Trying to get computers to think for themselves, I tell people. Heard Uncle Boot ask him what was the point and Piers said he didn’t guarantee a point. Very Piers. Quite a bit going on, I gather.”

  “Lots, and all beyond me. Piers’s line is trying to get the brutes to evolve a bit of intelligence for themselves.”

  “Take him a few million years, won’t it? Did us.”

  “He’s not going that far. I only said ‘a bit’. He doesn’t want to evolve the whole shoot—in fact he says we didn’t either. We evolved bits too, to cope with different sorts of things, and then lumped them together. He says I’m not really one person having one lot of thoughts and feelings, like I think I am. Really I’m a sort of committee, different bits of me politicking and squabbling away and then coming out with a sort of agreed statement and then I say to myself ‘That’s what I think’ which makes me think there’s a whole me thinking it. We’ve got to think like that or we’d go potty.”

  Louise realised that Soppy had stopped listening in order to gobble with yet more concentrated ferocity.

  “Are you having problems with Bertie?” she murmured.

  “No.”

  Soppy had answered automatically and was about to shovel another forkful in when she seemed to pull herself up. Her eyes flickered over Louise’s shoulder. Louise had herself glanced into the pier-glass between the windows before she had asked the question. It was all automatic, not that you knew there were people in the room who were likely to pass the gossip directly on to the hacks, but less obvious lines of communication—Aunt Eloise Kent hinting to a crony, the crony tattling to her chiropodist—lay always waiting, like the tentacles of a sea anemone poised in their pool for scraps. Soppy popped the fork-load in but munched more slowly, apparently thinking how much to say.

  “It’s not Bertie”, she said. “I mean, yes it is, but not like that. Hasn’t got a girl, far as I know, still expects a good bit of action in bed. Anyway, it isn’t just him. He’s different, I’m different, everything’s different.”

  “Have you talked to him about it?”

  “Wouldn’t know what to say. Scared of burning my boats. See a psychiatrist, d’you think?”

  “They say it isn’t much use unless you actually want to
.”

  “Don’t. Anyway, I’m too young to go potty. Auntie Kitty was pushing sixty. Got any plans for that bit of duck? Thanks.”

  Louise let her plate be raided. Soppy sounded more than a bit miserable, curiously ashamed and scared. Her great-aunt, Lady Kitty Bakewell, had gone round the bend about the time Louise was born and had barricaded herself into the stable flat at Coryon and, with the help of her butler and a pair of shotguns, had held out for several days. She’d still been alive when Albert’s engagement to Soppy had been announced, and hacks had actually broken into the home where she was kept and tried to interview her. Other hacks had speculated on the possibility that the madness ran in the family. It had all been fairly typically unpleasant, not helped by the fact that there was something a little odd-looking about Soppy, something out-of-proportion, which came out in certain pictures, though in others she simply looked like the GBP’s dream, the doll princess.

  “Would it help if I talked to Bertie?” said Louise. “I wouldn’t say anything direct.”

  Soppy shrugged.

  “Probably just the time of year,” she said. “Always used to look forward to it. Skipped the whole grisly Christmas hoo-ha by nipping off to the Argentine for a couple of months.”

  “Two months, and no diary at all!”

  “Just polo.”

  “Bliss!”

  “I’ve managed to clear a fortnight in Feb. That’s the lot.”

  “But they won’t let you go there, will they? I …”

  “Course not. Florida.”

  “They play polo there?”

  “Pretty good. But … Hell, I don’t see why I can’t go to the Argentine if I want. I didn’t start the bloody war. I don’t care a hoot what happens to the bloody Falklands. They don’t belong to us. Never did.”

  Soppy’s voice was beginning to rise. If any of the anemone’s tentacles were floating near by, they’d be beginning to sense the presence of a titbit.

  “It’s just one of those things,” said Louise in a deliberately deadening tone.

  “Ta ever so, darling. Second help? I’m going to. Talk to Bertie if you want—better not try and tell me what he says.”

  Albert in fact was only a group away, listening to his mother-in-law, Aunt Eloise Kent, who was the obvious next candidate for the title of UMRF, though earning it in a different style from Granny, coldly self-willed, power-hungry and devious. Louise couldn’t imagine herself tolerating, let alone half-liking Aunt Eloise the way she had Granny, nor was this a possible moment to tackle Albert, so she drifted herself in the other direction, theoretically looking for some cousin or guest who seemed left-out, but knowing that the drift would continue till she fetched up alongside Piers. She found him by the fire, of course, scorching his hams while he talked to a stranger. They made a joke pair, the stranger small and shiny and round, bobbing continually on the balls of his feet like a balloon at a souvenir stall, and Piers bending over him with the vulture look he wore when amused or interested. In his funeral black, Piers could easily have been mistaken for an undertaker’s assistant who had been misdirected into the gathering and was making the best of the free meal. (He claimed to prefer beer to wine, but his glass seldom stayed full of either for long; he ate nearly as much as Soppy.)

  “Hello, darling,” he said. “Have you met Alex Romanov? Prince, is it?”

  “For today Count, I suppose,” said the stranger. “Usually plain Doctor. Your Highness.”

  He got it exactly right, the small bow, the touch of the hand, the accepting tone of voice. His eyes were bright with fun. He gave the instant impression that he expected to enjoy your company.

  “A proper doctoring doctor?” said Louise.

  “A philosophising doctor. They never told me it was improper.”

  “We’re in the same line,” said Piers. “Only Alex has gone where the loot is. Expert systems.”

  “Then I’ll push off and leave you at it,” said Louise.

  “Oh, please not, ma’am,” said Count Alex. “Lord Chandler and I can get together any time, but I may not have another chance to talk to somebody who knew the Grand Duchess well.”

  “I didn’t think you Romanovs agreed she was one.”

  (Granny’s claim to the title had been part of her general campaign of making people realise that for her marrying into the British royal family had been a come-down.)

  “In my eyes she was above technicalities,” said Count Alex.

  “You’re the only two I’ve met who had a good word to say for the old girl,” said Piers.

  “I met her just once,” said Count Alex. “When I was seven. I was taken by my mother for inspection. She wore more rings that I have ever seen on one hand and stuffed my mouth with small sweet cakes as though I’d been a dog.”

  “Trying to make you sick,” said Louise. “She did that.”

  “At the same time she said cruel little things to my mother. I didn’t understand them, but I could feel the cruelty and was intrigued, and often asked when we could go again. At Epiphany, with the help of my nurse—I had so many nurses and governesses, but almost all of them I contrived to make allies against my mother—I sent the Grand Duchess a card. I didn’t know how to make Russian letters, but I used Russian words. She must have been amused, for she replied.”

  “No! In that terrible green ink?”

  “Being a child I took it for granted. She wrote in green ink at first, but later changed to a pale, hard pencil.”

  “You mean she kept it up! She never wrote to anyone if she could help it. The telephone was a way of life to her.”

  “Not in my case. I found out when her birthday was and wrote again, but she didn’t answer. Next year I tried once more. There’d been some rumpus among the cousins, and I told her about it, for something to say, and this time she replied telling me that she had enjoyed my letter and if I heard similar stories I must let her know. We are an unimportant branch of the family, but my mother had made it her business to become a sort of nodal point in the network. She did not create scandal, but she processed it and passed it on. I would lie on my stomach and draw in my book and listen, and whenever I heard of one of the cousins doing something characteristic I’d tell myself ‘That might amuse the Grand Duchess,’ and send her a letter. After a while she began to reciprocate. We always wrote in Russian, so it was quite safe, but I know more about your family than you might think, ma’am.”

  He beamed. Louise smiled back, relying on a lifetime of face-control. Did he really not understand what he was telling her?

  “Granny wasn’t all that reliable,” she said. “I mean she once told me my grandfather was drowned by the secret service on orders from Lord Halifax to prevent her from becoming Queen and making friends with Hitler and stopping the Second World War.”

  Count Alex nodded. That must be in the letters.

  “Oh, there’s a lot of noise,” he said.

  “Almost white in her case,” said Piers.

  “Yes, white Russian noise,” said Count Alex.

  “You’re leaving me out,” said Louise.

  “Noise is gibberish from which one attempts to extract a signal,” said Piers. “White noise is pure random gibberish.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Count Alex. “It was a curious relationship. She let me understand quite soon that she had no wish to see me again. At first, I suspected that she may have been mainly concerned to create mischief for my mother, but if so she misunderstood the relationship, which was … let’s not go into that. Later, when she appreciated how well-placed I was to keep her au fait with émigré affairs, she used me for that, and also as a repository for some of her own spites and spleens. I agree with what you say about her unreliability, but it wasn’t total. Sometimes she would comment on what I had told her and add anecdotes about previous Romanov scandals which I was able to check. The facts she seldom did more than embr
oider. It was her interpretation of the facts which was grotesque.”

  “Have you talked to Aunt Bea? Lady Surbiton, you know?”

  Count Alex laughed aloud.

  “She is a figure of myth to me,” he said. “The Grand Duchess’s letters always ended with a postscript describing her latest persecution of poor Lady Surbiton. She claimed it was necessary to keep Lady Surbiton’s bowels open. Yet I gather Lady Surbiton was devoted to her.”

  “She’s heartbroken,” said Louise.

  “It must have been like one of those marriages—the sort where no one on the outside can understand how the couple make it work.”

  “All marriages are of that nature,” said Piers.

  “Except the ones which really don’t work,” said Louise. “Come and find Aunt Bea. She’s getting a bit deaf these days.”

  “How very extraordinary,” said Aunt Bea in her breathy near-whisper. “I had no idea. Of course HRH could be peculiarly secretive.”

  She sighed. Mother had settled her on a chaise longue and arranged a rota of the family to cheer her up, but none of them had achieved much, Louise guessed, until Count Alex settled beside her and started to talk, apparently focussing the whole of his bubbling attention on Aunt Bea’s soft, white, grief-dulled countenance. Louise was impressed. Most newcomers would have shown at least disguised reluctance to be transferred from talk with a newsworthy princess to a dull ex-lady-in-waiting. She was threading her way back towards Piers when her path was blocked by Father’s private secretary, Sir Savile Tendence. His attempt to stand aside was hampered by the three plates of walnut meringue he was balancing on one arm and the several brimming glasses in the other hand. He smiled his controlled tired smile.