King and Joker

by Peter Dickinson

  She stood still for several seconds, afraid to turn, knowing that whoever or whatever it was crouched beside the door. At last she forced herself round.

  In scarlet letters sprayed from an aerosol can the word marched across the wall. They had torn down her Led Zeppelin poster to make room for it. BASTARD. And a neat scarlet X.

  Although she felt very cold she was steady now and able to walk round the room and look for further outrages. The word was on her mirror, in lipstick. The Two Towers lay on the floor; she flipped through the pages and found the word twice, scrawled right across the type with a red felt pen. She stood and looked round. It might be anywhere.

  Slowly she crossed to the door, took the key from the inside, went out and locked the door behind her. Durdy. She had walked several paces before she saw that it wouldn’t be fair on Durdy because she couldn’t do anything. She felt her teeth clench as she thought of Father—it was his lookout, wasn’t it? But he was in Durham and not back for hours. Mother had an opera, one of the sort that start at six, she’d be dressing, and it wasn’t her fault. That wouldn’t be fair either. Nonny—Mummy—it was her look-out too.

  Louise turned and marched firmly back the way she had come, past her mined room, down two flights of the other stairs and along the lower corridor. At the fifth door she heard the fantastically rapid rattle of a typewriter, which meant that Janice, Nonny’s own secretary, was finishing off the day’s letters. She went into the sixth without knocking.

  Nonny was sitting in the middle of the floor with her eyes shut, concentrating. She didn’t concentrate on anything in particular, she used to say, because she didn’t know how. She just sat still and concentrated twice a day because it was good for her skin.

  “Nonny,” said Louise. She couldn’t say the other word. Nonny looked up, not frowning—that was hard to imagine—but not welcoming. She stared for an instant before swinging nimbly to her feet.

  “What’s up, Lulu? Are you all right? I’ve never seen you look like that.”

  “Can you come to my room, please?”

  “Will it take long?”

  “I don’t know. Yes.”

  “I’ll just explain to Janice. She has this thing about catching the post, but there’s nothing that can’t wait.”

  Louise led her up the stairs in silence. At her own door she suddenly backed out into the corridor and peered right and left on the off chance of catching a glimpse of someone skulking to enjoy the effect of his nastiness. Nonny stood waiting as though this performance, and the locked door, were normal protocol. Louise suddenly felt that she ought to warn her, but couldn’t speak. She led her in and shut the door behind her. Nonny stared round.

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  Her softness, her acceptance of the obscenity, her distance from the pain of it, broke Louise’s control.

  “It’s true. Isn’t it?” she said harshly.

  “Oh dear,” sighed Nonny. “What a way to have all this out. I’m sorry, darling—I truly am. I’d never have been a good mother anyway. Oh dear, what can I say? I do love you, and I was very happy when you were born … I’m making a mess of this. Lulu darling, do you mind if I go and fetch Bella?”

  “She’ll be dressing,” said Louise in the same drab, rejecting voice. “She’s got an opera. Ambassadors and people.”

  “She’ll come. You’ll stay here, Lulu, won’t you? Promise. Don’t look at the mess—read a book or something.”

  “They’re written in,” said Louise, but Nonny was gone. She couldn’t sit down. The defilement seemed to infect the room—the bed, the chairs, everything. She went to the mirror to start cleaning the lipstick away but was caught by her own reflection, paler than usual, large eyed, but calm as a crusader’s wife on a tomb. That’s the Nonny in me, she thought despairingly. Better not touch the lipstick anyway. She began to search systematically for other places where the word was written. It was like Sir Sam’s trousers—a series of booby-traps waiting to blow up. The joker had been tidy where it suited him—it was only because Sukie didn’t approve of princesses wearing coloured panties, and so always put white ones on the top, that Louise went through the drawer and found a pair with an aerosol B on their fork, half way down the pile. The logic of the search had begun to steady her, but this shook her like a fresh gust on a night of storm. She understood the violence behind the scrawl, the symbolic rape, and was still standing in a sort of shuddering trance by the shut drawer when Mother came in, magnificent in a long flame-coloured dress with a black velvet train sweeping cloak-like from the shoulders. Mother glanced at the word on the wall. For a moment her face whitened and hardened and then she was sweeping across the room with her arms held out and down in that remembered gesture of appeal Louise rushed to meet her, to be drawn by those cold arms into the private sphere of love, to melt into marvellous, painless sobs.

  “Oh my darling,” whispered Mother. “Oh my darling.”

  Somewhere around midnight the door of Mother’s bedroom opened and Father came in. He put on his pop-eyed surprise-and-outrage face.

  “Why aren’t you at the opera?” he said. “I had to go to Durham to get out of it.”

  “I had a stomach chill,” said Mother. “I had not had huone for three years, so it huas high time.”

  “You’ll have something else tomorrow if you and Nonny have drunk a whole bottle of my best champagne between you. I hope you’ve left some for me. Good God! There’s another in the bucket!”

  “Hue have been huaiting for you to come and open it. There is a clean glass on my dressing-table.”

  Louise could see him thinking as he fiddled with the wires and popped the cork. He grunted and poured himself a drink.

  What’s up?” he said in a slightly altered voice. “Somebody’s birthday?”

  **That’s right,” said Louise. “I’m having two birthdays a year from now on. I don’t see why you should be the only person to have an official birthday as well as an unofficial one. And I want presents on both of them.”

  “Right,” he said, going round with the bottle to fill the other glasses. “Health and happiness, Lulu darling. I wish Durdy was here. How did you find out? Was it something I said. I thought I’d been pretty canny.”

  “It was the photograph. I was brushing my hair when suddenly I saw who it was like.”

  “Mm. We’re going to have to think about that. Who did you tackle first? You know, I’d have expected you to wait and tackle me. Not that …”

  “Something else happened,” said Louise.

  “I huill tell you later, Vick.”

  “No, it’s all right now. I can manage. Champagne’s useful stuff, isn’t it? I’m going to have it on all my birthdays. It was like this …”

  Father listened, frowning. Louise in the mild daze of drink listened to her tongue telling the story, even explaining the nastiness of it, without having to recreate herself as the being at the centre of the shock. It was like a nightmare remembered on waking, apart from the reason why its foolish details were so frightening. She left out her own misery and sense of betrayal. That was over now.

  “I see,” said Father. “You seem to have kept your head, Lulu. Well done. Now, we have two separate problems—the joker and the likeness. They may be linked, because the joker may have found out about Lulu’s birth by spotting the likeness, though it isn’t very strong …”

  “But it’s very strong sometimes, Vick,” said Mother.

  “Let’s show him,” said Nonny, eagerly.

  Mother laughed and picked up the hairbrush. While she worked on Nonny’s hair Louise slipped into one of the pink chequered blouses and white skirts which lay on the bed, then sat to let her own hair be put into a pony-tail while Nonny dressed in the other set. Standing in front of the long mirror they slid their arms round each other’s waists and grinned inanely with heads bent to one side and legs in the pose of a comedy routine duo
.

  “I say I say I say,” said Louise. “Your public face isn’t as good as mine, darling.”

  “It doesn’t have to be, darling. Shall we do a command performance? Come on, Vick—command us to perform.”

  “I went to Durham to get out of the opera and now I come back to this,” grumbled Father. “OK, let’s get it over.”

  “You lead, I’ll try to follow,” said Nonny.

  Father trumpeted the theme from The Infernal Can-can. Mother clapped the rhythm. Nonny and Louise pranced. Nonny was extraordinarily easy to dance with; she made it seem as though she were actually wired into your own nervous system, so that the impulse that twitched your limb twitched hers at the same moment. It was a bit shaming that she could high-kick several inches further than Louise. The dance was very tiring, especially when Mother and Father began to speed the rhythm. Louise got in a tangle and brought Nonny tumbling on top of her. Father filled the glasses again.

  “Humph,” he said. “That’s enough. Don’t ring us, we’ll ring you. Mmmm … sorry to introduce a sour note, but we’d better get back to business. Of course I’m delighted that you’ve managed to sort things out between you so that Lulu can accept the pretty shabby way we’ve treated her …”

  “That huas my fault,” said Mother. “It huas all my idea.”

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t take some of the blame,” complained Nonny. “She’s my daughter, isn’t she?”

  “All right, all right,” snapped Father. “We’ve all behaved equally badly, but now we’ve got to decide what to do about it. The point is that pretending Lulu was Bella’s daughter is the only big lie I’ve told in my life, and I don’t think we can afford to let it come out. This is partly for Lulu’s sake: I know we think of her as every bit as much our legitimate daughter as Bert is our legitimate son, but we’ll never put that over with the GBP. If we let the truth out, Lulu will become twice as much a peep-show as she is already, without any of the defences that she’s got at the moment. And Nonny would have a pretty bad time of it, too. That’s one thing. The other seems to me even more serious. I’ve inherited a monarchy and I’ve done my best to keep it going so that I can hand it on to Bert. I think it’s worth while. I think the GBP like us, and in their funny way need us. But these are pretty hard times, with a million unemployed and all that. We can fend off the Willie Hamiltons of the world till the cows come home. If we have to we can also cut down on our expenses almost indefinitely, and we’d still be pretty well respected. But the one thing we can’t afford to do is let the GBP find out that we’ve been lying to them about Lulu. She’s extremely popular with them, and that makes it worse. It’s funny, but I suspect that the one thing that would really shake them would not be my having a mistress and an illegitimate daughter, but Bella conniving, aiding and abetting. Anyway, there it is. Personally I’d go to any lengths to stop the truth coming out. It’s absolutely essential that nobody should know …”

  “But people do know, Vick,” said Nonny. “There’s dear Tim Belcher for a start …”

  “You can count him out,” said Father. “I’d stake my life on that. Also all the others who’ve always known. Derek Oliphant—he was the obstetrician, Lulu; the Stuarts at Allt-na-giubhsaich—they got things ready and lent us the baby-clothes—they’re OK—you know what they’re like if anyone asks the most harmless question about us. Your mother, Nonny.”

  “Poor darling,” sighed Nonny. “She was far too ashamed of me to tell a soul. She took me to a ghastly hydro near Oban, Lulu, and made a great parade of my husband being in South Africa. You won’t remember her. Anyway, she never knew it was Vick’s baby.”

  “And my poor Inez is dead too,” said Mother.

  “Your maid who died in the plane crash?” asked Louise.

  “Oh, how she adored the intrigue of it,” said Mother. “Do you remember, Vick, huen …”

  “I remember a damned sight too much,” said Father. “But that’s the lot, Lulu. We decided from the start that we’d talk, think and behave all the time, even among ourselves, as though you were Bella’s daughter. For instance, we’ve never told Albert.”

  “But somebody else does know,” said Nonny. “Look what happened in Lulu’s room.”

  “Yes,” said Father. “I’ve got an idea about that. I think I might be able to sort that out, But if Lulu’s going to start growing more and more like Nonny …”

  “I’d like that,” said Louise.”

  “Tais-toi,” said Mother, sharply enough to break for an instant the gold haze of content in which Louise had been floating along.

  “It’s all very well your sitting around swigging fizz and dressing up identical,” said Father, “but we’ve got to take the thing seriously now.”

  “Huat do you think hue’ve been doing?” demanded Mother. “Hue spend two hours repainting Lulu’s room, and then hue come up here to huork out how they can be made to look different. You don’t expect us to do that until hue are sure how they look the same?”

  “Will you mind if I dye, Vick?” said Nonny.

  “Eh? Oh, dye with a Y. No, of course not. What colour?”

  “A sort of reddy brown. Bouffant. Lulu can stay lank. I’m going to wear a bit more make-up, all-overish, and she’s going to concentrate on her eyes. And I’m going in for tighter skirts so that I don’t lope so much. It’s indecent at my age, anyway. It’ll work, Vick. Do you want a demo?”

  “Not necessary. You gave me a bit of a shock about dying, that’s all. I’m sure you’ll make it work—I’m long past any amazement at the sheer flexibility of the female mould. It only seems a week since every other girl you saw was a Bardot, and then it was a Fonda, and now it’s … what’s that hussy’s name?”

  “I like that,” said Louise. “All we’re doing is what you did with McGivan.”

  “Time you were in bed, Lulu,” said Father abruptly. “One moment, though … Durdy. I was talking to her about all this the night before I went north, and she’s been fretting about what you’d feel when you found out. Nip up as soon as you can—tomorrow after school will do—and tell her it’s OK.”

  “Lovely. I’ll have tea with her. Don’t forget, Mother, I’ll need a note saying I couldn’t do my homework.”

  “I huill think of a reason, darling.”

  “Great. Well, good-night, parents all.”

  Feeling like an eight-year-old Louise kissed the three of them and swayed hazily back to her paint-smelling room.

  Chapter 9

  Louise hadn’t meant to worry Durdy by telling her about the rape of her bedroom, but Durdy got it out of her. She was impossible to lie to. Louise thought that she was like a pool among pine-frees, dark and still, miles from the nearest house, a pool where a kelpie lived. If you bathed in the pool and told the kelpie your troubles it would take them away. But it was no use telling it only part of your troubles, just as it was no use only dipping a foot in the pool. You had to undress and trust your whole self to that stillness among the black, hospital­-smelling pines. When she’d finished, she felt that she had somehow made a ritual acceptance of the new situation. She was Nonny’s daughter and Father’s, but Mother was still Mother and she could join hands with them and dance in the ring of love.

  She’d had a curious day, almost exactly like yesterday but completely different. Jerry’s love-sickness had been funny, his new girl absurd and a bit pathetic, Julie really amusing; even the headache—the mild buzz of a champagne hangover, like radio interference—had been something to clutch and cherish, a continual nudging reminder of the previous evening, of Mother bustling about behind the two chairs with brush and comb, prattling in a mixture of five languages like a hairdresser gone mad with ingratiation, of dancing with Nonny, of Father pouring out champagne to drink her health on her unofficial birthday.

  “The only thing that still bothers me is the joker,” she said. “I mean he knows, doesn’t he? What
’s he going to do next? He’s not just going to stop there, not when he’s got something like that to play with.”

  “Then we’ll have to stop him.”

  “But we don’t know who he is! Father said he’d got an idea, but …”

  “Then leave it all to your Father, and don’t trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.”

  “It’s troubling me already.”

  “Who did I hear saying just how happy she was? Some people don’t know their own minds, it seems.”

  “Oh, Durdy, that’s mean. I was only …”

  Sniff.

  Louise nudged the rocking-horse to and fro a couple of times. If Durdy didn’t want to talk about the joker, it wasn’t fair to make her.

  “You’ve no idea how miserable I was yesterday,” she said. “I was longing to get out of the whole princessing business, and I couldn’t see how. Have any of the others wanted that, Durdy?”

  “Lord have mercy, why, all of them, one time or another. No, I’m a liar. My first Louise—she was seven when I came to the Family—I don’t think she ever wanted anything except to do what was expected of her.”

  “A princessing machine. How did, she end up?”

  “Why, she was your great-aunt, the Queen of Romania. Dearie me, yes.”

  “The one who refused to shake hands with the Kaiser?”

  “She shook hands with me, though.”

  “I bet she kissed you too.”

  “No, never.”

  “Poor thing. I wonder whether anybody ever kissed the Kaiser. I suppose his wife had to—it must have been difficult without getting his moustache in your eye—I expect there were times when one of the ladies of the court suddenly started wearing an eye-patch and then everybody knew … Durdy, tell me honestly, weren’t you a bit shocked when Father told you he was going to set up with Mother and Nonny together?”

  “What I thought was my own affair.”

  “You can’t come that with me any more, Durdy. I know all about you—sneaking off to Scotland to aid and abet in the production of illegitimate babies and sitting purring in the window-seat when the deed was done.”