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Choosing christmas presents was another thing that had quietly changed its nature over recent years. Inevitably, as it swelled and swelled, the Duty List had had to be standardised—so many hampers from Fortnum’s, bottles from Berry Bros, soft toys from Hamleys, all the way down to tights from Marks and Sparks. Joan took care of that, and Louise started signing the cards in September. But even choosing things for the Family, which of course she did herself, was no longer the fun it used to be; not living among them now she lacked the confidence of rightness she needed in matching present to person. For instance, a colleague of Piers had set up a three-man company in the Industrial Park attached to the university to make and market gadgets and toys he had invented as a by-product of his research. The fancy intercom Louise used in the nursery was a prototype of his, and this year he had come up with a sort of magician’s wand you could point at any light-fitting in a room and make it change intensity or colour. The toy needed special light-fittings, of course, and was about three times as expensive as Mother would have approved of, but it felt perfect for Father—or would have, two Christmases ago. It probably still was, but Louise didn’t feel the same certainty and inward satisfaction that she would have in the old days. Perhaps Father had changed, like Albert. Would Albert really be pleased with his weaver-birds? And so on. Even Aunt Bea …
Louise had always given Aunt Bea a huge jigsaw which she took about three months to piece together and then passed on to a hospital. She was strangely puritanical about it, refusing to look at the picture on the lid but letting it gradually reveal itself as she nudged the pieces around with her pudgy white hands, trying and sighing. It was hard to say how much pleasure she got out of the task, in fact it seemed more like some sort of mystical exercise she was forced to perform as part of her duties, bringing into the world images that had hitherto existed only in a royal mind. Louise wanted the picture to be worth the trouble so, though she could easily have asked Joan to tell Hamleys to send a big puzzle while she was ordering the teddy-bears, she preferred to choose it herself. Only after doing so—it was a Lowry snowscape, with soaring factory chimneys and the usual matchstick figures—did it occur to her to wonder whether Aunt Bea would still be interested.
Though it was still four weeks till Christmas she decided on impulse to deliver it herself, and try to guess from Aunt Bea’s response whether it was still welcome. At the same time she could see how Aunt Bea was settling in at Hampton Court, and then ring Mother that evening and report.
Royal impulses have built-in safeguards attached, checks and balances, like the British constitution. Louise had this one half way through a speech of peculiarly embarrassing self-importance by the new Director of one of her favourite charities, Wells for the Sahel; she had been in the Sahel, looking at its work, only eight months ago, just before her pregnancy was officially announced. She remembered the pale grey dust, the flies crawling around famine-huge eyes, the hands too listless to brush them away. Now, as the ghastly man pontificated on and on, she could almost sense the water seeping back down into the aquifers leaving nothing but a slop of mud at the bottom of a hundred expensive holes, as if pulled by the same forces as the dwindling interest of the full-fed financiers round the tables. There was nothing she could do. She had already said her brief bit—she wasn’t much of a speaker—her function was to bring the punters in, a barker at the tent of charity. Now this crass egotist was making a mess of the whole effort. She kept her mask of smiling attention fixed but switched her mind off, as far away as possible—snow—the Lowry—the jigsaw, bought that morning en route to the luncheon …
Louise was used to the knowledge that at a function like this, and especially with a speaker like this, a good third of the audience would at any given moment be looking not at him but at her. One of the skills Mother had insisted she should acquire, right back in nursery days, was that of opening her handbag, taking out pad and pencil and writing a legible note under the table without moving a muscle that anyone could see. She drooped an arm over the back of her chair with the note between finger and thumb. Constable Evans—just a spare waiter to anyone else at the meal—came to her shoulder and seemed to pick up a napkin from beside the chair. She felt his hand take the note. By the time the speeches were over and Louise had evaded the Director’s attempt to monopolise her and done her best to reverse the receding flow of charity by smiles and nods of admiration for two or three big-wigs (double-starred as likely contributors in the unusually good briefing some dogsbody at the charity had sent Joan) the royal impulse had become a Movement Schedule (revised). Evans would have rung Joan at Quercy. Joan would have told Security that HRH would be back an hour late, and why; she would also have rung Aunt Bea; Security would have alerted the people at Hampton Court, and also told the local police that HRH would be passing through; a route would have been agreed, avoiding road-works, and motor-cycle police posted to ease the passage past other bottle-necks—a perk which Louise still felt mildly guilty about, wishing she could have sat out the traffic-jams like any other citizen. Security wouldn’t hear of it. They didn’t take her crashing though red lights, of course, behind sirening outriders, but they tried to magic her through as if she wasn’t there, because the longer she was out on the road, stationary in a jam, especially in an obviously official car after a publicised function from which she could conceivably have been tailed, the more chance there was that somebody might try something. That was what Security said, and though even after Chester Louise couldn’t really believe it, she let them have their way. It was seldom worth fighting them. They could make life just as difficult for her as she could for them.
In fact she barely noticed the journey, spending it discussing with Carrie Crupper what if anything to do about the bloody Director. Carrie was the only child of rich, divorced, dotingly demanding parents. By strength of character she had resisted those pressures, insisted on being educated where she chose, mainly in France, and become fluent in three languages. Rather like Piers she seemed to have chosen her own personality, in her case compiling it from opposing elements, street-cred accent, Laura Ashley clothes, cynico-anarchist politics, Filofax-organised days. She’d been making her way up a plush PR firm when Louise had met her. After a couple more meetings, without much hope but because she liked her company, Louise had asked if she’d do a fill-in stint as lady-in-waiting. That had gone well. Carrie had instantly made the job into much more than most people did, and then, unasked, had offered to take it on as one of the regulars for a couple of years. She said it was a good career move, but that might have been one of her jokes.
Ladies-in-waiting have more function that is usually supposed. They have connections—Carrie’s were mainly City, a godfather on this set of boards, cronies of her parents on that and that, members of her own circle scrambling up towards t’other. Wells for the Sahel was very much a glossy-brochure and multi-vice-president charity, so Carrie knew some of the people on its council. She could easily call a couple of them about something quite different and mention, as if in passing, that HRH hadn’t been very impressed by the Director. That would be quite a big gun to fire at the bastard and Louise was eager to do so, but Carrie gradually whittled her fury away not by saying that the man didn’t deserve it but with the old real-world arguments which Louise knew perfectly well—he would have his own power-base: it was still too early in his contract to try and shift him; he’d got good contacts among the tricky Sahel governments; and so on. By the time that the car slid in through the main gate of Hampton Court, Carrie had toned Louise’s fury down to manageable disappointment, to be expressed by Joan sending the man only a formal File E letter of thanks. Carrie would ask a few questions, but later. Don’t meddle if you can help it, Father always said. (He was a meddler himself, but then he couldn’t help it.)
“They never seem to get any further,” said Louise, gazing out at the corner of the canvas-covered scaffolding that veiled the state apartments. “How long is it since th
e fire?”
“Three years? Or four is it? Builders are always the same. Doesn’t matter if it’s putting a new loo in a basement flat or rebuilding a palace. They just come and put their mark on a job by knocking a hole in a wall or something. That means no one else can have it and they can go off and finish all the other jobs they’d promised they’d get done the year before last.”
“We went round it while it was still swilling with water from the hoses. It was ghastly.”
“I just hope Lady Surbiton doesn’t go smoking in bed.”
“Oh, they don’t think the old dear was smoking. She was reading in bed with a candle on her chest.”
“Dead mediaeval. I reckon this must be it.”
The guard who manned the barrier across the entrance to the private apartments was waiting outside his booth, despite the cold. He swung the pole up with one hand while saluting with the other. The Rolls sighed to a halt. Evans came round and opened the door. Another guard was already saluting by the dark little doorway with the brass plates beside it. I’m going to have a lot less fuss next time I come, thought Louise. The guard ushered them into a murky lobby and rattled the lift-gate open. When he made as if to accompany them up Louise stopped him. The lift, grimy oak with battered brass fittings, doddered up.
“It makes me feel like a wood-worm,” said Carrie. “Or a death watch beetle or something. You know, tunnelling through all this timber.”
“Father says that when they were clearing up after the fire they found two residents no one knew existed. They’d just been living here for ever, like spiders in cracks. I think it’s just one of Father’s stories.”
“Surprising Lady Surbiton didn’t want to go on living at KP.”
“There was a pretty little cottage she could have had, but she was determined to move right out. She can be surprisingly obstinate, under that softness. She said she’d go and live in a hotel till we found her something. It wasn’t any problem, actually—there’s a lot of apartments empty here. Father’s having a battle with Mr Ridley, who can’t see why he shouldn’t privatise them.”
The lift stopped at a dark lobby, the winter light through a small diamond-pane window barely enhanced by that from an iron ceiling-lantern. The door opposite the lift had a brass plate with a name on it, illegible from polishing, like a name on a tombstone. The plate on the door to the left was covered by a card with “Surbiton” lettered onto it in a large, childish hand. A woman was already standing there, leaning on an ebony stick and ringing the bell. She paid no attention at all to the arrival of the lift. The door opened.
“My dear …” said Aunt Bea.
She stopped and peered at the woman through her thick-lensed glasses. Her pale face seemed to float disembodied in the gloom, with her mouth opening and closing so that she looked like a fish in an aquarium tank. She pulled herself together and began to apologise in her usual near-whisper, softer than ever now that her increasing deafness had lost her control of it.
“I’m so sorry. I imagined …”
“Hello, Aunt Bea,” said Louise. “Hordes of visitors.”
The strange woman turned at the voice, acknowledging for the first time that there might be someone else in the lobby. Her movement and attitude, as much as the face that now came into view, revealed the cause of Aunt Bea’s behaviour, which Louise had taken for characteristic fluster at finding a different caller on her doormat from the one she’d been told to expect. There was more to it than that. In this dim light, and seen with Aunt Bea’s vague vision, the woman was Granny.
The moment you looked at her properly, of course, she wasn’t. Granny wouldn’t have used a stick or worn a neat grey suit with a matching toque. The large brooch in the toque would have been more her line, if the diamonds were real. You couldn’t imagine this woman flinging an arm out in one of Granny’s whirling gestures, or calling you by absurd and largely invented Russian-sounding endearments, but she stood as straight and carried her head with the same challenge. Her face was from the same mould.
She glanced at Carrie and Louise, apparently without recognition, then turned back to Aunt Bea.
“Lady Surbiton,” she said, “I am your neighbour, Mrs Walsh. It is time we made ourselves acquainted. May I come in?”
“Oh, but …” began Aunt Bea, but Mrs Walsh was already past her, hobbling with quick, imperious steps along the hallway. Louise stepped forward and kissed Aunt Bea.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “Don’t send her away. We’re hardly staying. If she lives next door you’d better start off on the right foot with her.”
Aunt Bea sighed with relief. The idea of her sending anyone anywhere—let alone as formidable an intruder as Mrs Walsh seemed to be—was absurd.
They found Mrs Walsh standing in the middle of Aunt Bea’s living-room, looking systematically around. The decor and furniture were pure Aunt Bea, that is to say as dull as human lack of imagination could make them, with a forest-green carpet, cream walls, crackle-parchment lampshades, dozens of slightly out-of-focus snapshots which didn’t quite fit their frames, green self-stripe chair-covers with dull gold braid. But the room, with its low ceiling and leaded casement windows and lack of straight edges or square corners, imposed a character of its own, giving a sense of being a cell in this huge old complex, surrounded by scores of similar cells, all of them carrying the imprint of quiet and secretive generations living out their lives there. Beyond the windows, under a dismal December sky, canvas-covered scaffolding veiled the opposite side of the courtyard where the work was still going on to repair the damage caused by an old lady living just such a life, including a preference for reading in bed with a candle on her chest.
Mrs Walsh seemed now to have recognised who Louise was. She dipped into a centimetre of curtsey but made no effort to leave. Louise, partly to give Aunt Bea as much ammunition as she could for coping with such a neighbour, also out of straight curiosity, stepped forward and shook hands.
“Don’t go,” she said. “I’ve only come to give Aunt Bea her Christmas present. Do you know Lady Caroline Crupper?”
Mrs Walsh bowed her head towards Carrie and deliberately as a moving spotlight returned her gaze to Louise, using the convention that one waits for royalty to speak first to maintain herself at the centre of attention. Louise smiled at her and turned to Aunt Bea.
“Can Carrie and I rustle up a cup of tea?” she said. “We’ve been listening to speeches about deserts.”
“Oh, no, my dear. I’m sure I can find everything. I’m still unpacking, bit by teeny bit, but of course I got the tea-pot out first. So essential.”
“I’ll come and help,” said Carrie. “Four?”
Mrs Walsh nodded, waited for Louise to sit, and lowered herself into one of Aunt Bea’s bungy chairs, where she settled erect, looking regally out of place, like a hawk Louise had seen in a palace in one of the Gulf States on a quilted satin perch.
“Have you lived here long, Mrs Walsh?”
“For fifty years, Your Highness, since my husband retired as Junior Chamberer to His late Majesty.”
Did Mrs Walsh have the trace of an accent? Granny’s had come and gone as she fancied. Fifty years—Great-grandfather had died in 1938.
“He didn’t stay on for my father?” said Louise.
“He was somewhat older than I am, and it seemed convenient to the Palace that the young King should have attendants nearer his own age.”
“But you must have known Granny,” said Louise. “That’ll give you something to talk to Aunt Bea about.”
Mrs Walsh for the first time smiled, tight-lipped.
“I fear not,” she said. “As Your Highness may be aware, your grandparents’ marriage was not welcomed in certain quarters, and communications between the two households were maintained on a merely formal basis. I had in fact met your grandmother once, in Petersburg, when we were both girls, but never in England.”
The accent was still indeterminate, but in this slightly longer speech Louise could tell for certain, even before the reference to being a girl in St Petersburg, that Mrs Walsh had not been born English. Her precision of enunciation was like that of some of the German cousins, governess-taught, but the rhythms were slightly different from theirs.
“Are you a Romanov too?” she said. “You look a bit like her.”
Again Mrs Walsh smiled her thin smile, expressing not amusement but some error or misconception on Louise’s part.
“I am a Belitzin,” she said. “It is true that my grandmother was acquainted with the Grand Duke Aleksei Aleksandrovich, whose reputation was such that slander could not be avoided. Had there been any truth in it, which there is not, your grandmother and I would have been second cousins.”
Louise nodded. She was long used to the way in which people want to keep their cake of legitimacy and eat it in the shape of a royal connection.
“But family likenesses are extraordinary, aren’t they?” she said. “I was looking at my son in his cot the morning Granny died, and suddenly he looked just like her for a bit. I wonder if people with strong characters like Granny are more likely to be taken after. Do you have any children, Mrs Walsh?”
“One, Your Highness.”
Not a welcome question, obviously.
“How did you come to England in the first place? During the revolution, I suppose.”
Mrs Walsh did not exactly hesitate, but Louise sensed calculation in the brief pause.
“During the revolution, yes. We were fleeing from the Bolsheviks like everyone else. Our major domo bought us places on a train—my mother, my three youngest brothers, two or three servants, all the valuables we could carry. At first we travelled in a little comfort in a proper carriage, though it was very crowded, but then that was commandeered by a general of one of the armies, fleeing like us, and we continued our journey in a cattle truck. Later still our truck was pushed into a siding to wait because an axle had caught fire. The others in the truck crammed themselves into the rest of the train, but my mother decided to wait for another train in the hope that she would know someone in authority aboard and get a carriage again. So we waited. The siding served some mine. There was no town, nothing. Trains went by and did not stop. We finished our food. We waved and screamed at the passing trains. After three days we and the servants dragged timbers onto the track and stopped a train. It was full of soldiers, not Russian, not English—Serbs, I learnt later—going east, defeated, ragged. Some of them climbed out to drag the timbers clear, but when we approached the carriages to plead to come aboard others climbed down and struck at the servants with their rifles and started to drag me and my mother towards the train. We knew at once it was not because they wished to help us. One of my brothers tried to fight them but they cut him down. Then two men came running down the track and began to argue and struggle with the soldiers. One of them had a pistol and shouted at the soldiers in English, so we screamed at him in English, which of course we knew, for help. I was told later that the soldiers were running away from the battle because they had no ammunition left, but the Englishman had bullets for his pistol, so he fired a few shots and forced the soldiers to let us go. By now the track was clear and the soldiers climbed back onto the train, but somebody had found bullets for his rifle and he fired at us and killed one of the Englishmen, so we ran back to our wagon and the train left without us. The Englishman told us the next train would be full of Bolsheviks, so we buried my brother and the dead Englishman and walked away southwards. Fifteen months later we reached England, my husband and I and our daughter. All the others had died on the way. That is how I came to England. I was then seventeen.”
Skeleton-in-Waiting Page 5
