King and Joker

by Peter Dickinson

  “It’s not for me to say, Your Highness.”

  “Oh, come off it. I suppose if King Victor turned out all right there’s no reason why Grandfather shouldn’t have—only I can’t believe Granny would have been as much help as Queen Mary. A bad start doesn’t really seem to matter much. I suppose Father really had an unfairly good start, being a boy King and refusing to run away during the war—I bet you had something to do with that, Durdy.”

  “We settled it between us, Queen Mary and Mr Churchill and I. Your Grandmother is not to be blamed, darling. She never really understood what the English are like, you see.”

  “I suppose when all your own Family have been shot for not clearing out soon enough you’re a bit inclined to want to scoot as soon as danger threatens. I’m glad Father stayed. It’s like him, isn’t it? And then everyone was eating out of his hand by the time the war was over.”

  Despite her promise to Albert, Louise found herself continually edging the conversation nearer the mystery. It was like a scab which isn’t quite ready to come off—you know it’ll bleed if you pick it, but the itch is too strong to resist. Durdy seemed unconscious of the path they were taking.

  “He got on very well with those Labour people,” she said. “He used to say that if he’d had a vote he’d have voted for Mr Attlee, but I daresay he was only teasing.”

  “I suppose all that helped a lot when he wanted to marry Mother. He got his own way over that, didn’t he?”

  “His Majesty gets his own way about most things. He was a terror in the nursery. Once he climbed out of that window, over the bars, and hung on and said he’d drop unless I took him to the zoo.”

  “Who won?”

  “It isn’t about winning or losing, darling. I persuaded him to come in without making any promises, and a little while later he went to the zoo with the Prince. That was the last time he saw his father.”

  In conversations with Durdy one king, led to another and you just let it happen. Normally Louise would have gone on with the interesting subject of Father being a terror, but the itch was too strong.

  “What had they all got against Mother?” she said. “When I was looking at the newspaper cuttings I saw a stupid headline about haemophilia, but that was all right, wasn’t it? I mean in spite of Uncle Carlos?”

  In the silence, broken only by the wooden tack of the cuckoo-clock, Louise heard Durdy begin on one of her sniffs and then turn it into a sigh.

  “If you want to know about all that, darling, you will have to ask His Majesty. I never understood it. Now may I trouble you to change the subject, Your Highness?”

  “No, Durdy, that won’t do. We did genes in biology last term, and sex-linking, and I told Father how funny it was seeing all the cousins in a table in a science-book, and he just said it wasn’t funny at all. I thought he was going to shout at me, but then he went gentle and told me that Mother wasn’t a carrier and he wouldn’t have been allowed to marry her if she had been, and so I wasn’t either. And he asked me not to talk about it any more.”

  “So that’s that,” said Durdy.

  But the scab was bleeding now.

  “No it isn’t,” said Louise. “Something’s wrong, something to do with Mother. I upset her badly the other day and now I’m frightened I might do it again. And I’m beginning to think it must be something to do with me. I mean, it’s funny their telling Bert about Nonny when he was ten, and then not telling me at all. Darling Durdy, couldn’t you explain to Father … look, at first I was just inquisitive and I suppose that was wrong, but now the way you’re all going on is making me feel … oh, I don’t know … as though there was something wrong with me which everybody was afraid to let on about.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you. Word of honour, darling. Nothing whatever.”

  “Oh, I know there isn’t really, in my mind. But with another part of me … it’s like those nightmares you have which you can’t remember­ when you wake up, only you know they’re there. If you could remember­ them they’d be all right. That’s why I can’t stop myself asking questions. OK, I’ll change the subject. Miss Durdon, be so good as to entertain me with the story of Lord Curzon and the elephant and the bad banana.”

  Although the Princess had gone, time refused to drift. Perhaps the tiny taste of melted butter and crumpet was still too strong. The drum of traffic too seemed curiously nagging. Miss Durdon was worried, and too tired with it to cut these last moorings and float free. She ran over the talk in her mind until she got to the Princess who might have been Queen … three Princess Louises there’d been, she thought, and weren’t they different! As different as chalk from cheese. The first one hadn’t really been Miss Durdon’s child, she had been Bignall’s—a plain girl, seldom smiling, always a foreigner in Miss Durdon’s own Kingdom (though when she was a Queen in her own right she’d refused to employ any nurse for her children unless the woman had first been interviewed by Nurse Durdon, an insistence that caused some diplomatic frettings during the Kaiser’s War). It was strange that Vicky, though there were only thirteen months between them, should always have been a native of that Kingdom, even in the ghastly days of her dying … Miss Durdon shut the image away by conjuring up the second Louise—a subject of that Kingdom, of course, a perfect baby, took her feed on the instant, slept all night, sat on her pot like a soldier…it wasn’t fair the way you couldn’t help loving some less than others, and do what you could they knew it. On the scrap screen in the corner was a picture of HRH Princess Louise in a pleated skirt and an eyeshade like the beak of a bird playing in the quarterfinals of the Women’s Doubles in the first post-war Wimbledon; and she still wrote once a month from Rome, long loose scrawls which only His Majesty could read, telling Durdy gossip about film-directors and cardinals mixed in with worming the Pekinese … still trying to grasp that little extra parcel of love which the tree could never bend down to let into her reach. And the third Louise.

  “My last baby. My very last.”

  As though her old lips had whispered a spell the moorings unloosed themselves of their own accord.

  The little window-seat is hard and awkward. Misty-bright light of the northern dawn streams through the panes onto the blotchy, wrinkled, writhing creature on Miss Durdon’s lap as she unwraps the warmed towel and, heedless of the tiny threshing limbs and the rasping shriek from the lungs, dresses the new-born girl for the first time. The baby is so light that every time she lifts her it feels as though she’s going to toss her in the air by mistake, but Miss Durdon is used to this sensation. It’s always like that. By the time of each new birth your arms have become used to lifting the baby before, without noticing how it’s put on weight, so when they once more lift a really tiny one they feel as if they were trying to float up like gas-balloons at a fairground. As the warmed flannel begins to shield it the baby’s yelling slackens, but it is still making that stuck-pig noise when the last little wrestle of getting the arms into the jersey-sleeves is over and Miss Durdon can lay the small downy head into the hollow below her collar-bone and begin to soothe the back as it retches for fresh air to yell with. In thirty seconds, almost as sudden as if she’d turned the wireless off, a yell becomes a sob and the next sob is no more than a suck.

  “Thank God for that,” murmurs the King, still in his shirt-sleeves, staring out over Loch Muick at the interfolded slopes of heather beyond. “Why do babies always have to get born in the middle of the night?”

  “Because it’s the quietest time, of course,” says Miss Durdon. “I expect if you look in your books you’ll find that the sort of animals that rummage around at night have their babies in the day. It stands to reason.”

  “Durdy, you’re a marvel. I bet you’re right. I’ll look it up as soon as we get back to civilisation. I wonder if anyone’s thought of it before.”

  “Course they have. You don’t have to think of it—you just know it.”

  “Ah, but you’r
e not a scientist. There might be a paper in it. Shouldn’t be too difficult to collect the statistics. I’ll ask old Zuckerman. Now, you know what happens next.”

  “What happens next is that you get some sleep, young man. So off to bed with you now.”

  He looks exhausted and no wonder. His face is white in the colour-draining light and sweat has dried his moustache into rats-tails. But he shakes his head.

  “Got to think things out. What’s the time? Four twenty. OK, I rang Tim at Allt-na-giubhsaich when? Just about eight last night. He’ll have got on to the Home Sec by nine, say. It’ll have leaked to Fleet Street somewhere soon after midnight—Tim’ll probably be staving off the local news-hound by now. I wonder where the nearest Privy Councillors are. Let’s say they’ll be coming down the glen by noon. Do they still have to bring an Archbishop? Dashed if I know. I’m going to get a good deal of stick for letting it happen like this, Durdy.”

  “If you don’t face trouble, trouble will come to your door. That’s what I always say.”

  “I know you do, except when you say ‘Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.’ But you’re right. We’ll make a song and dance about it. Sir Derek will back me up there was not the slightest hint she’d be three weeks premature.”

  “Don’t you worry. When they see my lovely new baby they won’t think about anything else.”

  The King laughs, still frowning. A faint voice comes from the bed.

  “You like her, Durdy? She’s up to standard?”

  “Oh, she’s beautiful, beautiful. I thought I was never going to have another one.”

  “I should think not, at your age,” says the King. “How old are you, Durdy?”

  “As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.”

  “You’re eighty-two. I shall have you made a dame for services to obstetrics.”

  “Don’t be silly. I wouldn’t say no to an MVO, though. That’s more my place.”

  “Hell. Perhaps you’re right. Anyway, this is the line we’ll take. OK, I was a bit pig-headed coming up to Glas-allt Shiel only three weeks before the kid was due, but medical opinion was that the Queen needed absolute peace and quiet—and dammit, I am pig-headed. Everybody knows that. And after all it is one for the history books—when was the last time a reigning monarch delivered his own daughter? We’ll put on a show—you too, Durdy. Don’t you go biting off journalists’ heads the way you usually do, or it’s no MVO for you.”

  Sniff.

  The King laughs again and returns to the bedside where he talks low-voiced and tenderly. Miss Durdon stares out of the window at the gleaming loch, and the slabs of pine plantation and the treeless slopes of heather sweeping down to the left of it. Somewhere over there, only ten miles away beyond Conachraig, lie Balmoral and Abergeldie. But where does Catriona McPhee lie? Where is that granite headstone? It is sixty years since Ivy last saw her and almost that since she last thought of her, but now she suddenly remembers the wild face dim in the glow from the night-lights, eyes closed, tears on the long lashes. She is startled. The baby snorts on her shoulder. Ah well, she thinks, it’s only natural.

  Chapter 6

  Holland Park Comprehensive School disgorges its pupils in tides. At one moment all the channels from it seem choked with strollers and scurriers; satchels swing, jaws champ gum, bikes wobble between the groups, last messages are shrieked. A minute later only one gloomy straggler mooches past. Then the next tide floods out.

  Louise deliberately timed her leavings to coincide with one of the tides. At first she’d done it in order to baffle the odd unimaginative photographer who might be hanging around for an informal snap, but now it was more for the sake of her bodyguard. He, poor man, came in for a good deal more chiyiking than she did, but if she went out in a crowd and didn’t even glance at him he could usually tag along without being noticed.

  The day after her crumpet tea she walked, as usual, with Julie and Jerry as far as Church Street, where the other two caught their respective buses home, then on alone past the antique shops as far as York House Place, where she could cut through to Kensington Palace Gardens. She was just coming out of the narrow, brickwalled path to the wide avenue where the Foreign Embassies drowse beneath the plane trees when the man appeared.

  He was about twenty, very tall, red-haired, with a thin, clean-shaven worried face. He wore an expensive brown jersey, dark trousers, suede boots. He took a quick but gangling pace from behind a tree, almost as though he were about to say “boo!” Without thought Louise put on her public face, the small non-committal smile and the glance of intelligent interest.

  “Shall I show you something, little girl?” he whispered. His hand was at his trouser-zip when the bodyguard reached him. There was a rapid, dance-like flurry and then the two men were standing with their backs to Louise, the stranger held in an efficient arm-lock. He didn’t struggle but threw back his head and began to crow swear-words, making them sound like a chant at a tribal dance. Louise turned away and crossed the avenue where she waited while the uniformed policeman guarding the gate of the nearest Embassy came striding down, talking as he did so into his shoulder radio. Only when he recognised her and saluted did she remember to take off her public face. Another policeman arrived from lower down. There were no questions. The stranger was still chanting his litany of dirt when the bodyguard handed him over and turned to follow Louise. It was Sergeant Theale. She waited for him.

  “Thank you very much,” she said. “Poor man. What’ll they do with him?”

  “That’s out of my hands, Ma’am.”

  Sergeant Theale looked small for a policeman, but this was really because he was very neatly made and within the limits of bodyguarding was a snappy dresser. He managed to achieve the same light tan all the year round. His face looked faintly Irish, flattish and small-nosed, and his hair was light brown and close curled. He held a Commonwealth Games Bronze Medal for the four-hundred metre hurdles. In contrast to McGivan he always managed to look happy. He wasn’t Louise’s usual bodyguard.

  “Where’s Mr Sanderson?” she said.

  “Dentist, Ma’am. Came on sudden with toothache, so I stood in for him. I only got to the school with a couple of minutes to spare.”

  “I’m glad you did,” said Louise. “Not that he’d have done me any harm, really, but it’s a bit shaking … I know it’s out of your hands, but could you put in a word for the poor man? I’m sure he needs help.”

  “He needs a good belting if you ask me, Ma’am.”

  Suddenly Louise saw what Sir Sam meant when he talked about Theale’s curious manner. There was a twist of tone towards the end of his sentences which made them sound as if he thought they were funny. It was very distinctive, though he probably didn’t know he was doing it. Louise put on her public face and took it off again.

  “Please see what you can do,” she said, turning towards Kensington Gardens. “No, please don’t drop back. I know I don’t look as though I minded, but … anyway, I’d rather not face my grandmother for a bit—besides, she won’t have finished practising. Let’s go and look at the ducks.”

  It was one of those September days which you sometimes get after a poor summer, as if July were trying to remind you what it could have done if it hadn’t been too busy raining. Half a dozen kites were up and four big model yachts were racing on the Round Pond. Loose Labradors and Dalmatians lolloped about. The green of some of the trees was mottling towards yellow, and a gang was working with chain-saws at two elms, dead of the disease. It was warm enough, in spite of the breeze, for Louise to take off her jersey and fold it into her satchel. While she was doing this a slim black boy in a yellow shirt came up to her. He must have been about ten.

  “Can I have your autograph, please Miss, um, Your Highness?”

  “Now, move along there please,” said Theale.

  “No, wait a sec,” said Louise. “I’d better explain. I’m not
allowed to sign autographs—it’s one of the rules. Oh, you’ve actually got your book. Hell! I know what, I’ll draw a duck for you and, put my initial in. Will that do?”

  “They’ll all say I did it myself, Miss.”

  “No they won’t, because Sergeant Theale will witness it. And anyway you’re not to show them, because then they’ll all be here tomorrow and I’ll never be able to come and look at the ducks again. That’s why it’s a rule … there. It’s a pochard, I think. Thank you, Sergeant. OK?”

  “OK,” said the boy. “So long. Thanks.”

  Louise watched him go. A moment before he’d been an individual. Now he plopped back and became part of the murky waters of the GBP.

  “Sorry, Mr Theale,” she said. “I can’t help bending the rules some of the time, but I needn’t have dragged you in.”

  “That’s all right, Ma’am.”

  They strolled on. Louise felt edgy. She hadn’t realised that Theale was such a stickler, and wished now she’d gone and sat quietly at Kensington Palace waiting for Granny to finish. Still she was stuck with her decision, and it was up to her to start the conversation.

  “Have you got any grandmothers alive, Mr Theale?”

  “No family at all, Ma’am. My parents died in a coach crash three years back, and they were the last.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  (The correct form of words added “That must have been a great loss to you,” but something told Louise they weren’t needed.)

  “I’d not seen them for three years before that. He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

  “I shan’t get very far in that case. Sometimes it feels as though everybody in the whole world was some sort of cousin.”

  “There’s some pretend they are. Some I know.”

  “Oh, yes. My father keeps an album of Rightful Kings of England. It’s one of his hobbies. He’s got about thirty at the moment, including two black men and one Chinese. He says he’s going to give a special Garden Party where they can all meet each other, but of course he won’t do it. It wouldn’t be kind.”