So that when I went down with Robin to Greenwich that time, it was with a certain sense of sedate obligation and almost spiritual—at least historical—resolve.
Not for one moment was I under the impression that I was taking holy orders or anything, but I have to admit there was certainly something solemn about the business, and I approached Royal Commoner’s dim figure in the dark old rooms in the ancient wooden chancery nervous as a convert coming for instruction to a priest. I couldn’t quite make it out—it was bright outside, my eyes had not adjusted to the gloom—but through an open door I thought I saw a vague form—it might have been female—hunched over the shape of what could have been a doctor’s fat black bag.
“Royal Commoner?” said the Prince.
“At your service, Prince Robin. And at yours, Miss Bristol.”
“You shall be brought to blood by matrimony,” Robin said quietly, “but you must do as he says.”
(How would I know? How would I, Sir Sidney? Haven’t I already said that there seems to be at least one of everything in this world? There are so many reasons and duties and traditions. For all I knew, maybe only the second brother of the future king could be the intermediary here. Maybe something of the sort was written into the tradition, as much a part of the customs and old deportments of humanity as the rule that brides and grooms aren’t to see each other on the day of the wedding until the ceremony.
(So how would I know, how would I, Sir Sid?
(Because we’re all of us anthropological. We are, we’re all of us anthropological. I don’t care how grounded a person may be, cosseted as a prince like Lawrence or Robin, made over like the only issue of oldest age, like Sarah’s child, Isaac, or hopeless as kids in welfare hotels, the sun comes down every night and there are fearsome things in the dark: smells and hints and clues and sounds of death and worse things after, the horrible, stacked loneliness of men, the abominable godawful odds against anyone’s not only ever managing to make it in the long run, but even so much as managing to just plain cope—the insomniac’s wakeful doubts and all the low blood sugar of the human race.
(So tell me, why wouldn’t there be anthropology, why wouldn’t there be ritual and faith and all the mumbo-jumbo of cultural reinforcement?)
“Of course she will, Prince Robin,” Royal Commoner said pleasantly, “why wouldn’t she? Do as I say?”
“Well,” said Robin, “it isn’t as if I actually spelled things out for her.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh my.”
“What?”
“Oh dear,” he said. “This is awkward, this is very awkward.”
“What?” I said again.
“For God’s sake, Louise, don’t make such a fuss. You too, Royal Commoner. It’s not painful or anything. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“No, of course it isn’t,” he said. “It’s not painful. There are topical anesthetics. Aren’t there topical anesthetics, Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo?”
“Even without them,” the woman said, for it was a woman I’d seen in the doorway, and she was carrying a doctor’s bag. “Well, the tattoo needles barely break the skin. It’s the powerful new dyes they have today that makes the marks.”
“Tattoo needles?”
“You told her nothing?”
“You’re the Royal Commoner, Royal Commoner.”
“Is this what you’re wanting then?” the woman asked me. She held up a cartoon with details from the coat of arms the Royal Peerager had described earlier—a gold mask of tragedy superimposed on a green shamrock.
“Catherine the Great was tattooed,” the Royal Commoner said.
“Catherine the Great already had noble blood.”
“Cher’s tattooed, some of the biggest stars.”
“Cher isn’t engaged to a prince. What is this? What are you handing me? You’re not the Royal Commoner, are you? There’s no such thing, is there?”
“Certainly I’m the Royal Commoner. I am and no other. What do you mean, anyway? You’re not a queen yet, you’re not even a princess. Not yet you’re not. You’ve a lot to learn, Miss Bristol. You have to take my instructions. You think Royals don’t get tattooed? It was a ransom thing. It was in case of Moors and Saracens. So they’d know what they had if princes and princesses, kings and queens, fell into the wrong hands. It was for their own protection. It’s for your own protection, Miss Bristol. Tell her, Prince. Ain’t I right? If I’m lying I’m dying.”
I turned toward Robin. “Show me yours, then,” I challenged.
“Oh, I’m not tattooed.”
“Well, there you are,” I said.
“Where am I? I’m not the King, I’m not his Successor!”
“Please!” said the one who was supposed to be the Royal Commoner impatiently. “The both of you!”
I must say I was more than a little surprised to hear him speak out so boldly to someone who, however far down the line of succession he may have been, was, after all, a prince. Perhaps that’s why what he said next had some claim on me.
“Because it wasn’t me who made the rules. I wasn’t there whenever it was whoever it was said whatever it was had to be had to be. I’ve no say-so in the grand affairs that command history, the long by-and-large of incremental, ad hoc necessity, that piecemeal tinker and rising to social or biologic occasions that are all solutions, adaptations, and evolution ever are. I never seeded the oyster with sand. I was ever too small fry to cause an effect, I mean. What have I to do with the world? It’s the curious meddle, stitch, and thick of things that gets things done. I’m just Royal Commoner, is all. My God, Prince, Miss Bristol, you don’t even know my name. But when a living, breathing oxymoron of a man raised up to oral tradition and the learning of the law comes up and says to you that a tattoo isn’t just, or even primarily, for the pomp and primp and privilege of sailormen in Southampton’s or Marseille’s or New York’s low parlors, why maybe you ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Catherine the Great was too tattooed! Cher is! And what is a tattoo, anyway? Semiotics, all those ultimate passwords of the flesh. Mother riffs, John-Loves-Mary ones, all those scratched affidavits, skin’s deepest language. Flags, semaphore, and the body’s loyalist bunting!”
Oh, how that man could talk!
I’m half hypnotized before he’s done and don’t even see him signal Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo to come forward. I don’t see her open the bag she carries her tools in, don’t see her dip the needle into the pot of green dye, or feel her wash me down with alcohol along the back of my left leg where the knee bends, or rub the topical anesthetic into my skin. I don’t see the thin rubber gloves she’s wearing to keep from catching a dose of AIDS off me in case a drop of my blood leaks into the pores of her skin. Royal Commoner’s still talking away about a mile a minute. You’d think I was his troops at Agincourt and he was King Henry V rallying me, maybe jollying me along so I’d let Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo plant another one on the back of my right leg when she was done with the left. He was right, it is painless. I don’t even feel the damn needle when it starts to go in and out, in and out, like she was some seamstress and the sensitive skin in the back of my knee was no more sentient than cloth.
No. What brought me out of it at last was what had put me into it. I’m listening to this smooth talker and suddenly it occurs that, oral tradition or no oral tradition, something would have had to slip through the cracks. This guy was improvising. He was giving too many reasons. Somewhere in the gloom Robin was smirking.
So, no matter I risked tearing the back of my leg to pieces, I pulled away. I examined myself. It was too dark to see, but later, in the light, I saw that all she’d managed to do was circumscribe the topmost arc in the highest leaf of the shamrock.
(I’d put him off with a quibble. Punning on “sore,” admitting when Larry pressed me that, yes, Robin probably had offended me. Still, strictly speaking, I hadn’t lied to him. I wasn’t sore, just a little numb there where I’d taken the topical. And he had offended me. And, anyway, loophole and sophis
try have ever been the mainstays of statesmen, providing them comfort and security, the sense they have to have of their own invulnerability, or they’d never get anything done. “None of woman born,” the witches tell Macbeth that other distant cousin of the Mayfair clan, and “… until great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come. …” And what about the stuff the Oracle fed Oedipus? Softsoap about killing his father and getting it on with his ma, so that all he thought he ever had to do to beat his fate was just get out of town? That’s in the tradition, too, for people so sold on tradition. And, anyway, for all I know maybe I was actually supposed to get that coat-of-arms tattoo. Wouldn’t that be something? I mean wouldn’t that really be something, Sir Sid, if it weren’t a hoax and all I have to show—didn’t I give back the clothes? didn’t I give back the jewels and Denise’s fun furs?—for my brief encounter with the Royals was just this tiny bit of a circle stitched to the back of my knee like a piece of green thread?)
“Hmn. Yes,” Larry said, “he forgets what he is.”
And lost in our individual thoughts—mine, now I’d stopped thinking about what happened in Greenwich, were of Larry, big and gorgeous in the driver’s seat, larger than life and more fit in his clothing (tweed now in the comfortable, abrupt autumn weather, tweed and cavalry twill and the softest oxford) than a man in a catalogue—we drove on in the crestless Jag to my parents’ house in Cookham-upon- Thames. Who knows what Lawrence was thinking of? The money this whole business had cost the Crown, perhaps, what a Prince’s love drew down from a dynasty’s treasure, of positions even more compromising than any I—horny in smoky fall’s apple ambience, the polished leather promise and poignant feel of its vaguely grainy fabrics—could ever have hoped to put him in, now he’d given his word to the world we were engaged.
I’m not being unfair to him, though none of this had occurred to me then, of course. How could it have done? I was in love, I thought I was to be his Princess. I guess I was just this romantic old silly. Tra la la, fa la la, hey nonny.
I had to hand it to Larry, I really did. With his Prince’s breeding and his almost cartographer’s knowledge of the lay of his lands, and his truly vast, dead-on sense of good husbandry, he had a sort of perfect pitch for his holdings, for all his rents and levies, and not only for his, but for the next lord’s over, too, and the next lord’s after that one, and for the next’s and the next’s and next’s, ad infinitum, filling up the shires and counties and districts and ridings of the kingdom with some genius for property, some blood-driven instinct for the fixed boundaries, qualities, and intrinsics of possession till all England was drawn in on the fine map of his understanding.
He knew the annual rainfalls, the crops and industries and roads and forests, had a feel for its weathers, its wildlife, the fish in its rivers, the birds in its trees.
Cookham is a river village, almost a suburban wetlands. It is, in the best sense, unspoiled, quaint, almost precious. I cannot say how, but Lawrence even knew how to dress for the occasion of its suburban Sunday circumstances, his twills and tweeds, though he was Prince, perfectly, carefully, considerately matched—I found this touching; it made me more anxious than ever to bed him—to their own, the twills, tweeds, and oxfords of their aspiring squires’ middle-class hearts. I hadn’t seen it before, but when we stepped out of the car Lawrence was even wearing one of those soft wool visored caps that are part of the uniform, and that one sees everywhere in the country.
“Country,” of course, is what Cookham so determinedly is. It was never large enough to be anything so grand as even the tiniest market town. It is what it must always have been—— a few hundred acres of lovely, ever so slightly remote real estate, its rich dirts vaguely hydrologic, geologic, strangely expropriate, as if they’d been thrown up like magic muds from the bottom of the river, or washed off the surrounding farms like some thick, complex, compact silt. (Nowhere in England is the earth so stocked with bait; nowhere is the soil so amenable, or crowded with the nutrients for flowers. The gardens of Cookham are its glory, its flowers’ flaring pigments like wet primary colors.)
There is no school, no surgery, no library. There’s no place where one may purchase film, postage, tobacco, a newspaper. There isn’t even a shop to buy food. What there is is an old Norman church, two public houses, a BP station with a live-in mechanic, and an estate agent. The estate agent, with all the commisssions he’s earned from the never-ending sale and resale of Cookham-upon-Thames’s sixty-odd houses, must be a millionaire by now. The houses turn over so often not because of the damp—Cookham is damp—or because anything is so very structurally wrong with its housing stock, but because the village is such a marvelous place to live that people could never bring themselves to sell and live elsewhere were it not for the steadily, even incredibly, rising prices of the homes there. No matter what the rest of the economy is like, they double in price every half-dozen years. This is the rule of thumb.
We are, in a sense, a suburb of Richmond. A bedroom community where three out of four ratepayers have their income from antique shops, or the sale of estate cars, or are independent booking agents or the leaders of dance bands in fancy hotels. A queer aspect of society in a town so homogeneously employed is its conversation. People who book tours, for example, are, for some reason, reluctant to talk shop with others in the same trade. Instead, they’ll pick up this or that bit of special information from people in professions different from their own and impart their newly acquired expertise to anyone (conventionally that fourth ratepayer or anyone else not engaged in the flogging of motors, tours, or the sale of fine furniture, or the leading of bands) who will listen.
Father sells estate cars in Richmond but is something of a connoisseur in the antique French-furniture field. Similarly, it isn’t uncommon for antique dealers to know about palm- court orchestras or their conductors to be aficionados of world travel while professionals in this last enterprise will often tell you more than you’d ever want to know about estate cars. And so on and so forth in Cookham, a village of four idées fixes. Usually these conversations (monologues really) take place on weekends or in the evenings at one of the village’s two pubs, though the venue can shift, rather like the tides of the sea-flowing river upon which Cookham is located, inexplicably, mysteriously, almost whimsically, from one time to the next, so that a native whose rhythms are off, or who hasn’t kept up, may discover himself in a pub that has “fallen silent” and find himself consoling (and suppressing) his gregarious spirits in lonely drink.
Do we sound quaint, picturesque? Do I, almost automatically falling in as I do with the eccentric, swollen tropes of my hometown every time I come anywhere near it? Who never even moved here until I was already twelve years old and who’d all but left it for good after I took my O-levels when I was fifteen, and who did leave it for good when I had taken my degree at university, do I sound quaint, picturesque? Maybe all home ever really is is wherever we happen to live whenever we reach puberty. This might account for the extra edge of horniness I felt as we approached the village, might account for the open, shameless way I bumped and rubbed against Larry when he parked the crestless Jag and we started up the path toward my parents’ house, passing through the pretty obstacles of Cookham’s frequent stiles. That’s what I was thinking.
Lawrence was thinking something else.
“This place,” he remarked almost scornfully, “this place is a refuge for Royalists.”
“Have you been to Cookham then, Larry?”
“I know the type.”
“Why do you sound so put out? It seems to me Royalists would be good for your business.”
“Royalists,” he said, “don’t understand my business.”
“That’s dark,” I said. (Larry is dark, and me this pushover for men in solar eclipse; small print, close-to-the-vest guys who won’t give a girl the light of day. He had me jumping, he had me jumping and rubbing and bumping and grinding in my head.)
But, as I say, I had to hand it to Larry. My family is
dead into that sort of thing. Like practically everyone else in Cookham’s damp, moldy clime, they worship the Royal Family. They take Town and Country, they’ve lifetime subscriptions to King and Queen.
“I hope they won’t make a fuss,” he said.
“Old poo,” I said, linking my arm through his, “you’re their daughter’s fiancé, why shouldn’t they make a fuss?”
“I hope,” he said so vehemently I almost couldn’t stand it, “they don’t treat me like some pop star dropping in on the family as a favor to a character in a sitcom on the telly!”
“You sound so mean. You haven’t even met them. Or is ‘your kind’ just privy by birth to the type?”
Now I see I was only encouraging him, egging him on, pulling strings.
“This place smells of bridles and neat’s-foot oil,” he said. “It stinks of polished gun stocks and the ascot resins.”
“Excuse us, Prince,” I said, “if we’re too caught up in the English dream.”
He glared and fell silent. We were but a hundred or so yards from my parents’ house now. (Larry had left the car behind Cookham churchyard because he’d been reluctant to bring the crestless Jag along the damp, unpaved ruts of the wagon road.) Was it my imagination, or were those our neighbors crouched down behind or slouched to the sides of their French windows and peeking out at us like so many posted hosts hushing each other and muffling their hilarity at the approach of the guest of honor at a surprise party? I couldn’t actually distinguish anyone but had this sense of urgent bustle at the periphery. The Prince, like some fast feint artist who had perfected distraction, incorporated it into his bag of tricks, a juggler, magician, or ventriloquist, say, seemed never to lift his eyes from the road but directed a steady stream of questions at me.
Van Gogh's Room at Arles Page 21
