King and Joker

by Peter Dickinson

  “I have not seen you before, have I? What is your name?”

  “Durdon, Ma’am. Nurse Bignall has the influenza, Ma’am.”

  “You are not very large, are you?”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  “Never mind. I believe children like small people, and you certainly look healthy. Where were you born?”

  “Thaxted in Essex, Ma’am.”

  “I know the place. Excellent people. Wait. I think I shall hand you back the Prince directly. They are not so amusing until they can talk, are they?”

  “I love them when they’re tiny, Ma’am.”

  “But you love us too, Durdy?”

  (Princess Rosie, three and a half; wide-eyed with sudden alarm under the starched hat-brim.)

  Durdon smiles quickly down at her, anxious to take the baby back and not be thought pert or intrusive.

  “Tell the child outright, Durdon. It is wrong to let them fret.”

  “Yes, Your Highness, of course I love you too.”

  “And my highness loves you.”

  The Queen, whose speaking voice is rather light and high-pitched, gives an extraordinary deep-throated chuckle. Princess Vicky, aged six, loses her frown of fright at Rosie speaking out of turn before Great-grandmama. The Queen seems not to have looked away from Durdon’s face during all this time but she has somehow noticed Vicky’s anxiety.

  “No,” she says. “Princess Victoria shall hold the Prince for me. You may retire, Durdon. I see that you will be with us for a long time, and will have other opportunities for nursing the little ones.”

  She nods decisively, as though settling a dispute between provinces of her Empire. Durdon backs away, terrified of tripping over one of the dogs and sprawling down in a vulgar flurry of petticoats, but at the same time content to see Vicky’s back bent to coddle her living doll …

  The time-drift quivers and for a hideous few instants Miss Durdon is standing in a vaguely seen corridor and hearing a voice screaming “Durdy! Durdy! Where’s Durdy!” That is Vicky dying of cancer at the age of fifty-two, a convert to Christian Science, refusing drugs but shouting in the delirium of pain for an older comfort. It happened in America and Miss Durdon hadn’t been there, but they’d told her about it. Now she uses her strong will to push the imagined scene from her mind and coax the drift back to that earlier time, the time of her first babies …

  Abergeldie, the Prince of Wales’s Scottish home, a few miles down the road from Balmoral. (However often the drift takes her back to this scene, Miss Durdon can never remember why the Prince should have been up there at Christmas, when he’d normally have been at Sand­ringham, nor why his grandchildren should have been visiting him without their parents. All that is vague, but the details of the actual event are as sharp-edged as a photograph.)

  Bathtime in the nursery suite, Two brown hip-baths on the floor. Small bright-pink bodies nestling into vast white towels. Steam, and the smell of talcum and Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, and the drift and hiss of a Highland storm against the shutters, and the new electric light very yellow. Nurse Bignall rigid by the fire with the hairbrush in her lap. Princess Rosie, nearly four now, turning away from the fire already wise enough to hide her grin of relief as the torture ends; her new-brushed hair floats with no weight above her shoulders, glinting in glistening waves, Durdon gives Vicky a last reassuring surreptitious hug, then makes her slip from her lap and go to let Bignall tug at the tangles of her coarse, intractable hair. Sober, Bignall does this with energetic pleasure, like a minister rooting out sin; tonight she has made herself a pot of “tea” before bath-time, a brown liquid which she drinks cold, without milk. Catriona is drying Princess Louise. Durdon can’t stop glancing at the new under-nursemaid; she is extraordinarily striking with her pointy-chinned small face pinkened by steam and nervousness, her red-gold hair piled under her cap, her full bust and tiny waist accentuated by the starched white apron of her uniform. Vicky’s first suppressed whimper is followed by the slap of the back of the brush on flesh.

  “Stand still!” growls Bignall. Durdon feels herself stiffen. Three times more, she says to herself, and I’ll take the brush out of that witch’s hands and face the consequences Oh, if only …

  As the door opens the whole room seems struck into stillness, as though they were all posing for a photographer.

  “Curtseys, girls,” says Bignall in her soldierly voice. Rosie does a beauty in her nightdress—grace will out—Vicky a gawky one, Louise a mere token in her towel. But Bignall, trying to lead the dance, stumbles and only saves herself by grabbing the fender. The tubby, bald, slab-faced, bearded gentleman in the doorway appears not to notice.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” he says. “I felt like a change of company, my dears. You’re lucky. I wish I had pretty ladies to bathe me.”

  Rosie laughs. She loves Granpapa—but then she loves everybody. The Prince of Wales closes the door and strolls to the fire, where he rests his cigar on the mantelpiece. The wild, foreign reek of it joins the plainer nursery smells. The ice tinkles faintly in the top of his tall glass of hock and seltzer. Bath-time proceeds, but only to the next whimper. No slap, but the brush was poised until Bignall remembered that there was a stronger power than hers in the room now.

  “Here, you!” barks the Prince. “You’re doing that too roughly. It is not the child’s fault that her hair has knots in it. You—you’re doing nothing. You brush the Princess’s hair.”

  Vicky tiptoes across to Durdon, too intelligent not to dread the consequences, despite the immediate relief. Durdon doesn’t even dare to look at Bignall. This’ll make it happen, she thinks as she begins to brush, What’ll she do? What’ll I do? She’ll wait till we’re back in England. Then she’ll … yes, she’ll go to Duchess May with a bottle of “tea” and say she found it in my drawer. She’ll say she found it up here, so she’ll go the moment we get back. I won’t have time to prove anything. It’ll be her word against mine. Vicky would bear me out, but I can’t …

  A sudden giggling scream and a man’s deep chuckle. Durdon, though she is tense as a terrier, manages not to jerk at Vicky’s hair as she looks round. Catriona appears to be having a fit, throwing her arms about and wriggling her whole body like a snake. Her cheeks are as red as a ripe apple and her giggles are made worse by her efforts to control them. Only her feet somehow remain respectful of the royal presence, as if they were glued to the floor. Rosie is crowing with laughter, Vicky smiling, Louise looking disgusted.

  “What happened?” whispers Durdon.

  “Granpapa put some ice down the back of her dress,” breathes Vicky.

  Bignall stalks slowly forward, a black pillar, a storm.

  “Sir, I must request you to leave my nursery,” she says. “The children are over-excited.”

  The Prince swings round, amazed. His cod-like eye stares at her and wavers. In the instant given her Durdon raises her right hand to her lips and tilts her wrist with her fingers cupped round an invisible glass. At once she turns back to the thicket of dark ringlets.

  “Stand closer to me,” snaps the Prince’s voice.

  “Sir?”

  “Do what you’re told, woman. Now breathe in. Out. Again. You’ve been drinking. I thought so. Get out of the room.”

  “Sir!”

  “Get. Out. Of. The. Room.”

  Footsteps. A gasping sob. The door. His voice again.

  “You there. What’s your name? Durdon, Come here.”

  Fully calm she puts the brush down and walks across to him, stopping when there is barely a foot between them. He is not a tall man, but her eyes are level with the first diamond stud of his gleaming shirt-front and she has to raise her head to his. She takes slow, deep breaths and lets them out, as if showing the Princesses how to do their regulation breathing exercises at the window each morning. The Prince’s breath smells of his cigar, and something else, musky and fierce.


  “Right. You take charge for the moment,” he says. “I will write to the Duchess tonight. Now, you, girl. What’s your name?”

  “Catriona McPhee, Sir,” whispers the child.

  “Come here. I shan’t hurt you. Stand there.”

  He puts his dumpy little hands on her shoulders.

  “Now breathe in,” he says. “Out. Again. Hm. I like a sweet breath.”

  They stand there for some seconds, the Prince staring at the girl and the girl looking back at him with her head half turned away, her bosom rising and falling under the snowy stiff linen. Suddenly he grunts, a slow and meditative sound, then wheels away to the door. At once Vicky, usually so hesitant, darts across the floor and catches at his sleeve, pulling him down so that she can whisper in his ear. When he straightens, his cold opaque-seeming eyes stare at Durdon. He nods and goes.

  As the door closes Rosie, inexplicably, bursts into tears.

  Time-drift again, but not far, not far. The current that floats Miss Durdon into the first two of those sharp-lit bays now always nudges her into their once-forbidden neighbour.

  A sob in the shadowed dark, and another. Nurse Durdon is awake at the first and sliding her sheets back at the second. For a moment the shadows seem to lie in the wrong direction, and then she remembers that Bignall is gone, and the smell of her and the fear of her, and now she is Nurse Durdon and has the tiny room between the Blue Nursery in which the baby Prince has his cot and the Pink Nursery where the Princesses and Catriona sleep. Their nightlights cast shadows through the two open doors, making angular patches, of dim yellow on the ceiling of the middle room. It is icy cold. The glitter of moonlight off snow-swathed slopes is sharp as a spear through a crack in the shutters. The sobs half-stifle, then still completely as Nurse Durdon creeps bare-footed into the girls’ room.

  Vicky is deep in dreams and no mistaking, though she sleeps frowning as always. Rosie has actually missed Bignall for a couple of days but in her sleep she has forgotten the loss and lies like a child made by God to express His pleasure in children, a sinless joy. Nurse Durdon has never heard Louise cry, or even sigh, and she sleeps with that look on her face as though she were already Queen of a flat kingdom full of honest, dull subjects. Catriona …

  Her eyes are shut, but her pretty little features are taut and even in the dimness a tear glistens on her long lashes. Nurse Durdon crouches by the bed.

  “Hush, hush,” she whispers. “You’ll wake the children. It’s only a nightmare.”

  “Och, but I’m frightened.”

  “It’s only a nightmare. Go back to sleep, you silly girl.”

  “I canna sleep. I havena slept a’ nicht. I’m frichtened.”

  “The idea! Here of all places!”

  “Aye, here of a’ places.”

  “I’m getting cold. Listen. If it will help for this one night I’ll treat you like one of the little girls and take you into my bed. That’s what I do when they have nightmares. But I won’t do it again, I promise you that.”

  Nurse Durdon tries to imitate Bignall’s gait as she stalks back to the middle room. Of all things! As if nursing four children weren’t enough, to have to nurse the nursemaids too! But Catriona’s body is so beautifully warm, as warm as fresh bread and as easy to hold as little Rosie, that the stiffness and irritation quickly ebb away.

  “If only there was never any men in the world,” sighs Catriona.

  “God made them for a purpose,” whispers Nurse Durdon. “We must not question His ways. Are you worried about some young man in your town?”

  “Och, no!”

  “What’s the matter, then?”

  “I canna tell ye.”

  “It’s not anything to do with the children?”

  “No.”

  “And you haven’t, stolen anything?”

  “No, no!”

  “Or done anything else like that?”

  “Then there’s no harm in telling me. I’ll help you, whatever it is.”

  “Ye canna.”

  “Of course I can. I know—one of the men here has been pestering you.”

  Silence, but the sudden stiffness of the soft body gives the answer. Poor child. Abergeldie is full of male servants, stifling in the musty rituals of their duties and then idle for hours. How their eyes must follow a child like Catriona. How, given the chance, they will tease her—and worse.

  “Never mind, child. I can look after you. I can see that your duties are changed so that you aren’t left alone.”

  “Ye canna. Ye canna.”

  “Of course I can. The duties of the nursery staff are my responsibility now.”

  A sob.

  “You’re being silly, Catriona. You will be all right, now you’ve told me.”

  “Och, didna ye speir what he did to Nurse Bignall?”

  “The Prince!”

  “Aye. Him.”

  “Oh, you poor child! Yes, I see. No doubt that’s why he came up to the nursery in the first place. But he cannot touch you here at Abergeldie, my darling, not with the Princess here. And when we go back to England we will not be in the same house with him, and he has his own lady friends there, and …”

  “Och, but he’ll hae me in the end. He’s the snake and I’m the wee bird in the heather. He’ll hae me in the end.”

  They lie in silence for a while until Nurse Durdon realises that Catriona has begun to weep again, without sobs, a helpless welling of slow tears. She lifts her head and kisses the salt lashes and runs a comforting palm along the soft back, as she would with a hurt child. With a wriggle like that of a fresh-caught salmon in a ghillie’s rough hand Catriona throws her arms round Nurse Durdon’s shoulders and drags her down to kiss her fiercely on the mouth. She is strong, and half again Nurse Durdon’s weight. She fights the first shying buck of surprise and revulsion, forcing heads and bodies together.

  “Let me go! Let me go!”

  “Na. Na. Be kind wi’ me. Ye’re sae bonny and wee. I love ye.”

  Catriona pleads on and on in whispers until, frightened and slow, Nurse Durdon relaxes into softness where touch tingles, breath smells of sweet fruit, nerves and muscles float in happy warmth. She finds that the muttered love-words her lips are saying twang with old Essex vowels. It is as though she had laid proper-spoken, careful Nurse Durdon neatly aside, like the dress and apron folded on her chair, and was Ivy, simple Ivy, in the caressing dark.

  Mostly Miss Durdon found it unpleasant to have no feeling at all in her paralysed body, not even to know except by smell when she had wetted or soiled herself; if the electric circuits in the apparatus by the bed were to fail, then she would not feel the fall in temperature except as a slowing in the activity of her mind and a drowning into sleep. But in one way the lack of a palpable body was a gain. For sixty years, while she had work to do and a chosen life to live, she had shut Catriona McPhee out of her mind, but, now that the work was over, almost every day she allowed the time-drift to take her back and eddy her round and round that one Christmas at Abergeldie, Unhindered by any sensations from the used-up scrawn that lay on the bed, smooth-skinned limbs would form invisible round her central will; they would feel again the stiffness of tight-buttoned boots and tight-laced whalebone, the crackling glossy crispness of fresh-starched caps and aprons—so like the crackling surface of the snow that had been touched by each day’s clear but feeble sun and then restarched by each night’s ruthless frost. It needed a little more will-power to shut out the endless, surf-like drumming of London traffic from across the Palace garden, where the buses and taxis growled up Grosvenor Place to Hyde Park Corner, but it was no effort for Miss Durdon to close her eyes and see the spaniels gambolling along a glittering slope, and the Princesses sedate in their furs like little squirrels but with brilliant eyes and glowing cheeks, and Catriona—Cat—Kitten—with her wild animal look, wearing her uniform like armour agai
nst the sword-sharp glances of the men who paced along the swept paths.

  Twelve days, eleven nights. Nurse Durdon during the diamond days, cased in that armour, careful and loving, watching the girls—Vicky especially—relax and lose the edge of wariness, discover that they were now free to live in the rejoicing instant, with nothing to pay into Bignall’s iron till at the end of it. Ivy during the caressing, trembling, whispering nights.

  • • •

  That eleventh night.

  “Och, and I love ye.”

  “Now you dan’t, Kitten. You just love to be stroaked. Shh. You lie still—I mun tark wi’ you.”

  “I winna listen.”

  “Shh, shh. Lie still, Kitten, still. I’m goin’ to tell the Duchess as she mun find you a good pleace in another family. I can meake her do that. Shh. Listen. This cawn’t last—it mun all end in tears. When we go South, deay after tomorrer, we’ll be in a real big nursery, wi’ two more meaids beside. But it’s not only that, Kitten. I mun choose. I mun choose now. Oh, Kitten, Kitten, you’ve bin tearing me in two—two people you’ve meade me. Oh, Kitten, I love you, more’n you’ll ivver love me, or anyone, but I cawn’t live like that. I cawn’t be two people. Not all my deays I cawn’t. I mun choose …