King and Joker

by Peter Dickinson

  “Of course I didn’t convince everybody, but there was only one of those who mattered and that was Bella herself—she knew in her mind it was OK, but I’m afraid I didn’t really grasp quite how frightened she was until Bert was on the way. She had a very bad time. Carlos’s death and the filth the GBP had chucked at her and that appalling confessor she’d had all became mixed in her mind. For the last couple of months she wasn’t properly sane. She practically lived in Nonny’s arms … if ever you begin to feel, Lulu, that Nonny doesn’t really care about anything very much, remember that time … well, in the end it was a perfectly normal birth, for a first child. She hardly used the breathing mask. Fine baby, just under eight pounds, with a decent head of hair. First thing we did, while he was still squalling, was to make a tiny nick in his calf and let her see the blood congeal. Next three months she spent having her nervous I breakdown, letting herself go with all the horrors she and Nonny had managed to keep at bay while she’d been doing her duty and producing me an heir.

  “So you see, Lulu darling, that anything that reminds her of that time, or the period while we were having trouble with the GBP, is bound to upset her. If she’d known the press-cuttings were still in the Library she’d have had them moved out long ago. But there’s something else which affects you in particular. I can assure you with absolute certainty that there’s no more chance of your being a haemophilia carrier than there is of any other of my female subjects being one. That is a medical fact. Your Factor Seven is the same as Bert’s and your Factor Eight is a bit higher. Personally I think this is a good thing for you to know about, but Bella can’t get it out of her head that if you start brooding on it you’ll finish up by going through the same horrors she did. There can’t be many British princesses who’ve led less protected lives than you manage to, but you’ve still got to put up with a bit of protection here and there. Quite often it will be for the protector’s sake, as much as for yours. I think that’s all. Any questions?”

  “Was I an accident?”

  His hand dropped from his moustache and his face took on a tense look she’d only seen before when his constitutional role was forcing him to accept something he thought morally wrong.

  “What do you mean?” he said slowly.

  “I’m sorry. Well, for instance, you know my friend Julie at school. Her parents weren’t meaning to have another baby and did. She says it was her first victory against them and she’s gone on winning ever since. I just thought, after what you’ve told me, that I couldn’t imagine Mother going through with having another baby on purpose. I wouldn’t mind being an accident. Honestly.”

  He smiled and relaxed.

  “Well, I suppose the answer’s yes, in a way. There was a good deal of pressure on us to have another child. But in the end—it was the early days of the pill and your mother got her sums wrong, and there you were, on the way.”

  “Did she have as bad a time with me as she did with Bert?”

  “Bella? No. She worked out a way in which she could face it.”

  “Then Granny was right!”

  “What the hell do you mean? You’re not to believe a single word my mother tells you, d’you hear? And you are not to talk to her about any of this again, ever. She’s Pm afraid those are orders, Lulu.”

  “I’m sorry. We hardly talked about it at all, I promise. She started it by telling me a quite different story about Grandfather being drowned by the Secret Service on orders from Lord … hell, I’ve forgotten his name.”

  “Halifax. That’s a perfect example. That story was invented by Goebbels during the war as propaganda, trying to make people think I was Churchill’s prisoner and things would have been different if there’d been a grown-up king in charge. As a matter of fact my father never had any time for Hitler. He said you couldn’t trust a man who wore such badly cut trousers And there isn’t a shred of evidence for the Halifax story—even that man Hochhuth decided he couldn’t write a play about it. But here’s your grandmother still repeating it.”

  “I thought it sounded a bit stupid, but you have to pretend to be thrilled with Granny. Then she started talking about secrets and said she’d tell me one about me, which was that I wasn’t born prematurely at all, but that you’d arranged to go to Glas-allt so that Mother could escape the flap. If you did, I think you were right. And I’ll never talk about it to anyone. You don’t have to explain about Granny. I know about her.”

  “OK, OK, OK. Well, provided you promise not to take it as evidence that anything else she tells you could conceivably be true, I’ll admit she wasn’t far out that time. I wish you could have seen old Durdy sitting on the window-seat and purring at you. It was lovely.”

  “I hope Mother was pleased too. And you.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course, Lulu. But we were all absolutely whacked. It’d been a much tougher birth than Bert’s—no horrors or anything, just much slower and more painful. It’s odd how these things go. You’d have thought … Anyway, we were all pretty tired, but glad to see you.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “Couple of doctors—I fixed them. I think Tim Belcher guessed—he was up at Allt-na-giubhsaich—and what’s more he didn’t approve. He didn’t say anything, but a bit later he asked to leave the Palace. I miss him. That’s the one thing I regret about the whole charade.”

  “It sounds a bit stuffy of him.”

  “Different people have different sticking-points.”

  “I suppose Nonny knew too?”

  “Eh? Oh yes, of course.”

  He blinked and grinned at Louise.

  “Glad you approve of her, Lulu. Has all this helped?”

  “Oh, yes … yes, a lot. Thank you, Father.”

  “There’s one other thing—I hardly need say it to you, because you’re such an old poker-face anyway, but perhaps I’d better. One of the problems about sharing a secret is that you have to learn to behave as though you are the only person who knows. Even when you’re alone with other people who know you’ve got to keep up a habit of acting and talking as though they didn’t, and so must they. Otherwise one day somebody’s going to make a mistake. You can talk things over with Durdy if you want to—I do myself—but nobody else unless you are expressly invited to. Got it?”

  “OK. Thanks. See you.”

  The rain had stopped and the world seemed re-made in the clean dusk. All round the courtyard the tall windows of the ground-floor rooms and corridors were like yellow pillars supporting an invisible roof of gladness. There was nobody else in the glistening square, so Louise danced a few remembered twirls from her ballet lessons, and wished that she could suddenly see Julie crossing the courtyard from the other corner so that she could halloo to her and hear their shouts echoing off the walls like the cries of gulls among cliffs.

  She was not merely happy from relief that the secret they’d been shielding her from had turned out to be a bit sad, but not dreadful. Father had been right, she now saw, when he’d said that she’d really been using that as a screen for masking other fears and resentments, but now she felt able to share in the happiness which Mother and Father and Nonny had created between them. It was like a quiet fountain of good water—no terrific jets and sparkles, but a basin from which you could drink as much as you needed and it would still be full.

  She didn’t want to spoil this feeling by going back to the zoo and talking to Albert about the joker, so she made her way up to her own room and turned on the radio. There were still twenty minutes before Pilfer would sound the gong as a signal that those of the Family who weren’t on duty somewhere should now congregate in Mother’s private drawing-room for the ritual Friday sherry which marked the start of the weekend. It would only be Albert tonight. She could tell him about the pianos then. There was nothing she wanted to do except to rejoice in the sudden melting of tensions, but unconsciously she felt a need to express her happiness in action. She picked up her brush and beg
an to slide it in slow, stroking movements down through her long locks. The radio was burbling its way through a programme of classic comic routines on record. A man stopped imitating steam trains and an extraordinary American with a voice like a shovel shifting coke began to sing a sort of song about his search for the lost chord. Louise moved to see what she was doing in the mirror. Her hair was in quite decent nick, with blondish tints of summer still glistening amid the near mouse. The threatened pimple by the corner of her nose had decided to recede, thank heavens. Granny’s right, she thought—I’ll never know. There’s no such thing as a pretty princess. Ugly princesses are dignified and pretty princesses are beautiful with nothing in between. The hairbrushing helped to prolong her purring mood—she was even half aware that the physical act was a distant way of sharing the pleasure that Mother and Father and Nonny had in each other’s bodies. Then, perhaps faintly alarmed by this awareness, she began to mime her mockery of her own potential beauty, throwing herself into fashion-model poses while she brushed and brushed as though she never need stop.

  “They said Mozart was mad,” snarled the radio, “they said Beethoven was mad, they said Louie was mad. Who’s Louie? My uncle Louie—he was mad.”

  She laughed aloud.

  She was standing sideways on to the mirror with her head bent over to let the hair hang down, but twisted so that she could see the effect. If you’d tilted the room through ninety degrees she’d have been looking straight up into the mirror, laughing. There was no wide-brimmed hat, no corner of picnic-cloth, but the laugh died and the rhythm of brushing stopped in mid-stroke. Frightened, she tried to recapture the pose and glance but the ghost was gone. Still she was certain it had been there, just as it had been in the photograph of Nonny that Father had shown her. Not the ghost of any one person but something that haunted between them. A likeness. A family face.

  Chapter 8

  In some ways the stifling calm of the Yorks’ house, Purling Park, was a good place to spend that weekend. Old Cousin Ted doddered and muttered all day round his croquet lawn. Occasionally Aunt Tim, mountaineering over her rockery, would look up and wave a friendly trowel at him, and if he noticed the signal he would wave a friendly mallet back, but that was quite a lively conversation by York standards. Some fool (Aunt Eloise Kent, probably) had once told poor Cousin Jack that he was doomed to marry Louise, and although he’d left Eton at the end of last half and was waiting to go into the army, he still blushed whenever he looked at her. It was lucky none of his five elder sisters was there, or they would have reproved him each time.

  Louise felt that nothing could change, no progress could be made, in that valley of sleepers, so she allowed the hours to drift past without thinking about what had happened to her. She went for two long rides with Jack, and took it into her head to be specially friendly and forthcoming; it was almost as though she felt she would never see him again. And she did her homework with particular care and neatness, because now it was nobody’s business but her own. But perhaps the lull made Monday at school worse than it might have been. Boring geog, boring math, boring hist, boring PE. A headache. Jerry in love with a girl in the Fourth Year. Julie, who’d normally have noticed there was something wrong and been nice about it, too busy teasing Jerry with hints that the frightful, posturing, busty mascaraed blonde he’d picked on was only pretending to be interested in a boy two years younger than herself because she wanted to be able to tell people that she went around with Princess Louise. Sulks. McGivan at the gate. Vile little dusty wind blowing up Church Street Knot of tourists outside antique-shop—nudges, stares, cameras, public face.

  Not any more, thought Louise, lengthening her stride. I’m out of that now. I’m ordinary. I’ll tackle Father tonight—no, hell, he’s in Durham—tomorrow. Another foul day to live through, and then I’ll be out of it. At least it gives me time to think. Why can’t I think?

  The trouble was she couldn’t imagine any kind of life other than the one she knew. It was quite easy to think of going away and living in one ordinary house with only five or six rooms in it and no servants, and having to make her own bed and all that. But she couldn’t put people into the house. She couldn’t imagine Nonny becoming Mother—no, Mummy—and leaving … leaving Aunt Bella? Ugh! Anyway, she won’t come—but they can’t make me stay. They can’t, they can’t!

  “Will Your Highness be coming in front?”

  McGivan was holding the door of the Triumph. For some reason he’d not left it at Granny’s but parked it near the Embassies, where she’d met the red-headed man. At least it wasn’t so far to walk.

  “I’ll go in the back, please. I’ve got a headache.”

  “Aye, it’s the weather, nae doot.”

  She didn’t smile at him as she climbed in. McGivan at best was a very moderate driver, with a tendency to move the car in a series of swoops and brakings, and today he wanted to talk, turning his head from the road as he did so.

  “Her Majesty’s back from Finland,” he said.

  “Good. Is she all right?”

  “Not a care in the world, and Miss Fellowes looking ever sae bonny with her.”

  No need to answer that, but McGivan’s snuffle implied that she should have.

  “Ye’ll all be taegither again the morn,” he said. “It’s grand to see a family so fond of each ither. It makes working for ye a real pleasure.”

  “I’m glad it does,” said Louise. “But I’m sorry, Mr McGivan, I can’t talk, My head’s very bad. Could you get me home as soon as you can?”

  Snuffle. A wild swoop and a violent halt at the Albert Hall lights. Louise hardly noticed. I can’t go, she thought, because there’s nowhere to go, and I can’t stay either. How could they do this to me? I thought I loved them. I thought they loved me. How could they? Suddenly she remembered Father, kneeling on the Palace grass, unnecessarily easing soil round the roots of a rhododendron for the sake of his own internal honour, when all the time it was a lie, all the time he was pretending to like a bush for which he didn’t care two hoots, and which Mother actually hated. And it’s the same with me. When he talked to me on Friday he only used the word “Mother” once, not counting when he was talking about Granny. “It was the early days of the pill and your mother got her sums wrong.” Otherwise he called them Bella and Nonny all the time. I bet if I could remember every word he said there wouldn’t be a single lie in it—except that it was all one lie. I’m not going to live with it, I’m not. They can’t make me.

  For the rest of the drive this single phrase battered round and round inside her skull. No other ideas emerged. Mother and Father and Nonny became just “they” and she was numb to their feelings and reactions. On the pavements, in buses, in other cars, the GBP drifted past, unreal, but ugly and demanding. You’ve got nothing on me now, she thought. Not any more. You can’t make me either.

  Sentries in scarlet came to the salute. The Triumph slid under the arch. Tacket, the porter, opened the door, Public face for the last time, ever.

  “Thank you, Mr McGivan. Thank you, Mr Tacket.”

  Neither of them seemed to hear. Had she said it at all? She ran across the hall and up the stairs, praying to meet no one. Her speed became a kind of flight, a panic rush through the nightmare ordinariness of the Palace, a yearning to escape from the servants, the carpets, the ghosts of dead kings. Only her own room was a refuge—hers, Louise’s, the place where she became real and not a gadget invented for other people’s convenience. She was panting hard by the time she reached the middle corridor but she raced along it, flung open her door, dashed in, slammed the door behind her and stood shuddering, safe in her known lair.

  It was odd that Sukie hadn’t made the bed, but somehow it made the room more personal than ever. When Louise bent to pick her yellow nightie from the floor only half of it came. Carefully she picked up the other half and discovered that it had been ripped in two, from top to bottom. And the bed had been made, but then som
eone had pulled it to bits.