King and Joker (11 page)

“In fact, though it's jumping ahead a bit, I'll tell you another thing. In some ways Bella is a very simple-minded person, with an almost childish belief in the value of words. When we came to get married she absolutely insisted on our using a modern English ceremony. She had an out-and-out set-to with Churchill about it, because he wanted all the Thees and Thous but Bella insisted on my saying ‘You' because that can mean two people as well as one. We had a private ceremony, just the three of us, with two rings, before the service in the Abbey. I wept like a baby. I think what moved me was Bella's absolute insistence all along that she would not accept the guilt of murdering the love between Nonny and me. She was barely nineteen.”

He sat in silence for a full minute, pulling gently at the corner of his moustache, which he normally only did when he was amused by something.

“You don't have to tell me any more if you don't want to,” said Louise.

“Yes I do. We've left out the important bit, about the press cuttings. You see, when a king only marries one wife, there's still a third party to the contract and that's the GBP. I don't mind saying that it was a damned unpopular romance, not what they'd been looking for at all. First of all, before anything was announced, there was my government to win over. Churchill and Eden both hated it, but I fixed for Churchill to have a long session alone with Bella, and though in some ways he was a bit gaga by then he was still damned sharp about other things, and he spotted that I'd picked somebody who had the makings of a real Queen. So after that he grumbled but went along and did a bit to keep Eden in check. The FO still hated it, but I thought I could ignore them if I had the GBP on my side.

“In fact I made the biggest misjudgement of my life about the GBP. I thought there'd be the odd bit of sniping, but I'd had no idea of the shindy they'd manage to kick up. I'd reckoned on a general moan about Franco having been a pretty hostile neutral in the war, and of course they'd all have preferred a blonde—Bella didn't photograph very well in those days—and a scream or two from the idiot left. What I'd failed to take in was this: the GBP are a pretty irreligious lot, but they had—in fact they still have far more than most people realise—a sort of negative religion. They're hysterically anti-papist. I say ‘hysterically' in a technical sense, because it doesn't come out like that. They suppress the impulse and let it erupt in other ways, and in Bella's case it was in a fantastic series of ludicrous assertions about haemophilia. It was like everybody's nightmares coming together in the image of one monstrous bleeding baby. It shook me badly, and Bella even worse. They refused to listen to reason. For instance, they cottoned on to the fact that my mother was a member of the Russian Royal Family and simply refused to listen when we told them that the haemophilia came to the Romanovs via Alix, who married my mother's second cousin once removed and couldn't possibly have passed on the genes to my mother, so there was no question of our children inheriting the gene from both sides. They simply wouldn't let up. You've no idea of the bile and filth that got chucked at Bella. She's as brave as anyone I know, but there came a point when she wanted to call the whole thing off. I wasn't having that, so I forced old Churchill to let me do a broadcast about it all. I had several things going for me. For a start, though I can't claim any credit for it, I came out of the war with the GBP thinking well of me. Then I had got a genuine medical training—I've never ceased to thank old Attlee for that, whatever you may hear me say at breakfast—which meant I could put over that side of things. I told them that if I'd thought there was the slightest chance of our having haemophiliac children I'd never have begun on this. I told them what the disease was like—I let 'em see that I really cared. I didn't say straight out that I'd abdicate if I didn't get my way, but I managed to give that impression. I put over a pretty good performance—it was genuine, but it was a performance—and I brought it off. Within about a fortnight Churchill agreed that we could go ahead, and since then we've never looked back. I'd say that Bella was one of the most popular Queens in the history books by now, and has been for the past fifteen years.

“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 began 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.