Letitia Unbound

by Trevor Veale

  Life changes the maid to the suitor

  And the prey to the hunter, my friend;

  For we all drink deep drafts from life’s pewter,

  And we all drain our mugs in the end.

  Near the bottom right corner, Godfrey had inscribed, in his loping but well-formed handwriting, the message: ‘Chin up, old thing – fifty-seven and still going strong! Much love, Godders.’

  Reading Godfrey’s stilted sentiments made her mouth curl into a sad, wistful smile. He was clearly trying to console her, in his clumsy masculine way, about the transitory nature of life and the advancing of the years. She accepted his stiff sensitivity as the best he could manage, and laid the card aside.

  She turned to a card illustrated with grapes and apples – and mercifully, not a rose in sight – from her aunt Flora in Croydon, England. The card reeked of spinsterhood, being lavender-scented and bearing the florid inscription: ‘From Your Loving Aunt Flora to Her Darling Lettie.’ Aunt Flora was her mother’s youngest sister and barely ten years older than Letitia. So why the accusing “57” in golden numerals, like a can of Heinz beans, on the front of the card? She was convinced it was a sly dig at her accumulating age. Why were people so keen to remind her how old she was getting? Still, it was nice that one member of her family had sent her a birthday card, given that the rest of them regarded her mother and herself as hoity-toity toffs for marrying into minor European royalty.

  This train of thought led her to reminisce the strange circumstances by which she had come to be Queen Letitia after being born and raised as Lettie Smiles in England. The fateful holiday on the Adriatic Coast after the windfall of the life insurance following her father’s death. The afternoon’s sunbathing with her mother on the beach that turned into a date with the handsome foreigner who said his name was Godfrey Prince! She had to laugh! It took a while for her to wrangle the truth out of him, that he was really Prince Godfrey, the Heir Apparent to the throne of Melloria, a country she had never even heard of. He was so stiff and aloof at first. Still, he did sweep her off her feet, and when his dad gave them the nod, that was it – boom, they were married! Her mother was all over him of course – she had to beat her off with a stick – and she even came to live with them in Melloria after the wedding! Her mother! She looked up at the antique ormolu clock above the fireplace and realized it was time to get ready for the dreaded visit. She let the card drop and rang for her maid.

  Chapter 8

  Dawna’s Awful Dilemma

  On the night before her wedding, Princess Dawna stumbled about her bedchamber, bumping into a sideboard and shaking the Sevres vase filled with roses.

  She was looking for somewhere to plug in her phone charger. Tori had sent lots of photos and she had barely had time to look at them when her phone died. Bummer! While it was charging, she decided to make another trip to the bathroom as her stomach was about to erupt. Just short of the bathroom door, she threw up. Embarrassment swept over her, the moment her stomach stopped heaving. She tottered over to the silken cord that hung beside the bed and pulled it. Now she would have to face the maid she’d summoned to clean up the mess. No, she couldn’t! Pausing to take a swallow of Evian from the glass on the nightstand, she disappeared into the bathroom.

  Sitting on the loo she could hear Sharon the maid knocking on the bedchamber door. “Come in,” she groaned and sank her head almost to her knees as she thought of the poor woman having to wade through a room strewn with bridal paraphernalia to clean up a puddle of sticky vomit. She hadn’t had time to clear away the hat-boxes and shoe-boxes that had spilled their contents and littered the bed with tissue. Elsewhere, intimate garments had been carelessly flung all over the place. Oh God, what a mess! A mess in more ways than one, she thought.

  After the maid had left, Dawna emerged from the bathroom and picked up the charged phone. She made a space on the tissue-strewn bed and curled up with her beloved Android. Although she loved her iPod for convenience when listening to songs, somehow the iPhone just didn’t cut it for her. All those apps were just too confusing! Clicking through dozens of pictures made her feel sleepy, however, and she lay the phone aside and closed her eyes. Now she was moving far away from her current woes and into the delicious land of dreams.

  Just before she fell asleep, while she still had some control over the images that floated into her mind, she remembered an incident so far back in her life that it set off an incredible unrolling of memories. The incident was slight enough in itself, involving a drunken kiss at a garden party from the son of a grand duke. But it was enough to change her life forever. The drunk boy jammed his tongue into her mouth and ran his hands over her body, and his clumsy probing terrified her. The day after the party she began seriously raiding the pantry and the refrigerator. She had been told by a friend at school that being fat meant boys wouldn’t grope you. She would wait until the servants were asleep and creep into the kitchen at Porcellan Palace, her home in Bulimia. She would make a peanut butter sandwich, tuck it under her nightdress and go into the bathroom to eat it. Her mother, Queen Ada, had been a binger and purger in her younger days, which was why she appeared slim and highly-strung, so Dawna didn’t feel entirely alone in her craving.

  At first her father, King Hector, would indulge her. “Oh, let her have another potato,” he’d say to her mother. “She’s a growing girl.” Her mother’s voice would become tense. “If she has a potato, she shouldn’t have dessert.” “She should have both,” her father would say, and he’d reach over and touch her cheek or hand or arm.

  As Bulimia was a normal monarchy, not a weird one like Melloria, she wasn’t home tutored after kindergarten but sent to boarding school and made a few friends. She was glad to get away from the palace – her mother had given birth to another girl, whom they named Hernia, because she had been a pain from the start. At night sometimes she and her two besties, Natalie and Anastasia, would sneak downstairs to watch old movies on the common-room telly. She was fascinated by Monroe and other screen goddesses, but didn’t want to be voluptuous – she wanted to be like her friends, who drank smoothies and were all bones and tight skin. She ate lean meat and salads with the other girls, then went to the kitchen at night and built huge strange sandwiches of cold bacon, bananas, peanut butter and cheese.

  One of her friends, Natalie, was thin, gangling and flat-chested, yet was attractive enough to boys for them to give her a second glance. The other, Anastasia, was thin and intense, a heavy smoker with a brittle laugh. She was also very intelligent, and her shyness with boys was due to her knowing she made them uncomfortable. Because she was smarter than they were, she couldn’t understand the levels they lived on.

  Natalie and Anastasia told their friends that Dawna never ate. When it was lunchtime, they watched her refuse the potatoes, ravioli and fried fish their Catholic school served up. Sometimes she only ate a salad. No one observed her making sandwiches and taking them to her dorm after classes. No one saw the store of Milky Ways, Butterfingers, Almond Joys and Hersheys Kisses far back on the shelf of her tiny closet, behind the jumble of musty clothes. She didn’t think of herself as a hypocrite in those days – she believed she was truly dieting. She just forgot about the candy she stashed away. During puberty she thought about candy with heavy lust. Thoughts about sex took second place.

  One night walking home from a movie, Anastasia told her she was lucky she didn’t smoke, adding: “It’s incredible what I go through to hide ciggies from the nuns!” Little did she know the yearning I had to be in bed in the dorm, Dawna thought, enjoying the sensuous pleasure of eating chocolate in the dark. I didn’t need to smoke, I certainly didn’t need to have sex – I already had my vice!

  She was really drifting now, right on the edge of sleep, but her schoolgirl memories led inevitably to thoughts of uni. She had gone to a girls’ college at Oxford to read history, where the other girls were mostly from wealthy families and wore charity shop clothes, work shirts and even overalls to shake off the memory of school uniform
s. To keep in with them, Dawna dressed in grunge, but from Harrods not Oxfam. In the refectory she ate the way she had at boarding school, not to maintain her deception or even to lose weight but because it had become a habit. She signed up for sports during Fresher Week, but later regretted it when in the locker room or out on the volleyball or badminton courts with the other girls. She saw how awful her body looked and began secretly gorging herself on candy bars.

  I like my body in parts, she thought, if not in whole. I like my blue eyes that are like mum’s. They’re not shallow eyes. I like my lips and chin, they’re okay, and the soft skin of my face, although my nose is probably too long. I like my hair – I like washing it and drying it, then laying naked on the bed, smelling of shampoo and feeling my hair all soft round my shoulders and neck.

  Thinking of uni, college, made her remember Tori, because that was where they first met. Tori was thin, short-haired and wore thick glasses. She basically didn’t give a fuck, although at night she would sometimes cry in Dawna’s room in the hall of residence. She didn’t know why she was crying, she said she was unhappy, but she couldn’t say why. Dawna confessed she was unhappy too, and when she moved out of halls and into her first flat, Tori moved in with her. One night, Tori talked for hours, sadly and bitterly, about her parents and how they had fought with each other before their divorce. When she finished she hugged Dawna and they went to their beds. Then in the dark Tori spoke across the room:”Dawna, I just wanted to tell you: One night last week I woke up and smelled chocolate. You were eating chocolate in bed. I wish you’d eat it in front of me, Dawna, whenever you feel like it.”

  She remembered the shame that burned her cheeks, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. She thought of pretending to be asleep, but realized that if Tori thought she was asleep, she’d tell her again another time. So she spoke up to get it over with.

  “Okay,” she said. “And if you want any choccy yourself, take as much as you like – it’s in the top drawer of my dresser.”

  It was a pivotal moment and for the next two years they shared apartments and exchanged emails during the summer vacs. Tori didn’t like staying with either of her parents, who hated each other and forced her to take sides, and Dawna found the dreary round of court life unbearable. She dreaded palace functions, where she was presented to aristocrats and foreign dignitaries as the eligible Princess of Bulimia. In their first moments of meeting, their eyes told her she was someone they were obliged to respect, but after the initial pleasantries their eyes would dismiss her. She didn’t really count until she had married a future king. Then there was her pain of a younger sister! Hernia had become the complete teenage rebel and was prone to show up at balls wearing a bra and miniskirt made from torn leopard skin and a diamond nosepin. She missed her friend terribly and longed to be back in the apartment with her. She even invited her to Bulimia, but somehow Tori never made it to her homeland until after she graduated.

  Each fall they greeted each other with embraces, laughter and tears, and treated each other to a gourmet meal with wine. Dawna was saddened, however, as graduation drew near, that they might never see each other again. Her existence was so divided, and the division would grow even sharper once she had married. The world she had been born into had nothing in common with their friendship and the intimate nights they shared. She knew it was unrealistic to imagine she could find a place for Tori at court. She couldn’t really ask her to be her Lady in Waiting!

  In the Easter hols before they took their finals, Tori fell in love. She emailed Dawna about him, but didn’t go into detail, and this hurt her more than if Tori had expressed the joy her words tried to conceal. They spent their final summer in the apartment they shared. Tori still valued Dawna’s sympathetic ear at night when discussing the hatred between her parents and her own bouts of misery, but she now spent her weekends at Cambridge where her boyfriend was majoring in music. He played viola in a string quartet. During the week she often spoke hesitantly of sex – she wasn’t sure if she liked it, though Michael obviously did. Dawna began to wonder if Tori was being truly honest, however, or whether she was keeping back those delights that she, as a virgin princess, would have to wait to discover.

  One Saturday night when Tori had just returned from Cambridge and was unpacking her weekend bag, she looked at Dawna and said: “I was thinking about you, coming home tonight.” Looking at her concerned face, Dawna prepared herself for possible humiliation. “I was thinking about when we graduate. What you’re going to do and the life you’ll lead. I want you to be loved the way I am.” She paused awkwardly, then: “Dawna, if I help you, really help you, will you - ?”

  “What?” Dawna asked, apprehensive.

  “– see a therapist about your eating disorder?”

  She shuddered when she recalled that moment, when Tori’s words hit her like a bullet. She said nothing, went straight to bed and, the next day being Sunday, went to a buffet restaurant serving brunch and ate everything she could, openly and shamelessly. She piled food onto her plate and went back again and again to the buffet counter. She felt there was a meaning to this, but it lay beyond her grasp. When she had eaten so much she was nauseous, she went to the bathroom and threw up.

  That night in the apartment as Tori lay sleeping, she ate all her candy bars then went to the kitchen and emptied the fridge. She brought it all up in the bathroom, making enough racket, she thought, to wake up the street. The next morning Tori walked out on her, telling her she was a lost cause, and she breakfasted alone on one scrambled egg on toast and a cup of black coffee. She burned the toast dark to reduce the calories, and from then on her breakfasts were the same. For lunch she ate broiled tofu with bok choi and soy sauce, and for supper a pineapple smoothie. She became weak with hunger in the evening and nervous and tense all day.

  She made the rigid diet her ritual for the next few days, alternating fish and chicken breast with tofu. It made her incredibly irritable. She had never before been so afflicted with bad temper, and she looked on it now as a demon which, along with her bingeing and purging, had taken possession of her soul.

  During an early evening walk in a little park near her apartment, she met Tori. They stood on a wooden footbridge looking down at a dark reedy pond. Tori talked sadly of nighttime and how darkness made her more aware of herself. She wondered at night why she was at college, why she bothered to study, why she was alive. She’d been staying with her boyfriend in Cambridge, but they had now broken up and she was homeless. She kept talking and looking like she was about to cry. Suddenly Dawna found herself saying: ”I’m sick of being a princess. I wish I could live a normal life like other people. I never want to go back to court again – I hate it!”

  Tori just listened without saying anything, and Dawna realized the pain and suffering in Tori’s face was strangely soothing. Then she felt ashamed. Before she could apologize, Tori turned to her and said gently: “I know, it must be awfully hard.”

  They went back to the apartment and made a pact. Tori would move back in and Dawna would let her do all the shopping. That way she would not be tempted to either binge or starve herself. Tori appeased her guilt by telling her she knew how hard it must be to go into a supermarket when you were a princess. This made her smile – actually it wasn’t hard at all, the hard thing was living in a palace! She remembered that summer as being golden – she began attending healing sessions with a practitioner of Chinese herbal medicine and took a weekly Tai Chi class. She and Tori both gravitated toward Eastern mysticism, and bought singing bowls and Tibetan incense for the apartment.

  She graduated with an upper second, good enough to appease her parents, and returned to Bulimia. Flying back over the Alps, she was reasonably pleased with herself and anticipated a warm enough welcome from her family – even Hernia now knew she wasn’t the complete airhead she had suspected! But she also realized she would have to keep her eating rituals a close secret, especially from her mother who had an uncanny knack of being able to flush out the truth
from her. The Eastern meditation she had dabbled in had certainly helped to calm her mind, as did the Enya and Clannad songs she played over and over. She resolved she would eat sparingly in public and voraciously in private – if she had to. With a brusque shake of her head, she refused the bag of pretzels offered by the stewardess. From now on, this is how her life would be.

  She had been right about her family’s reaction. Her mother had marveled at her slenderness – a rival to her own – and her father laughed and hugged her, saying “But there’s so little of you to love!” He told her she was beautiful and his eyes bathed her with affection. She felt herself squirm, however, fearing that this affection was about to go into overdrive. Her horrid sister brought her down to earth, saying that uni degrees were crap and that she was still a blond skank. But when the euphoria of the welcome party had worn off, she was glad to rush off to her room and fling herself on the bed. She wished she’d been able to stay in England or some other country and try to make a career in fashion modeling – something several of her friends had hinted she might be good at.

  In the ensuing weeks she had several bad moments when she thought bitterly of the struggle she had to endure to keep her weight down, of the nights of trying to sleep when her stomach growled like an angry bear. She had to deal with an irritability that would take command of her at any moment, and she knew her friendship with Tori was ending. Tori had promised she would attend Dawna’s wedding – and even be her maid of honor if required – which she gladly agreed to. Tori had even showed up in Angina, Bulimia’s capital, and she had feted her friend at court for a couple of weeks. But all that was winding down. Tori moved on to another country, and shortly afterward Prince Catheter of Melloria, their neighbor, was received at court. He had flown in ostensibly for a weekend of talks and duck shooting with King Hector, but at the gala ball held in his honor he danced with her and it was made clear their courtship had begun. He was the first man to kiss her, other than her father, since the grand duke’s son mauled her when she was sixteen, and she was not impressed. She felt no feeling of affection for Catheter but was prepared to do her duty. She was twenty-three and her parents had impressed on her the need to fulfill her role in life by marrying the heir to the Mellorian throne. She was even prepared to sacrifice her virginity, which, she now realized, she was going to miss after it was gone.