King and Joker (17 page)

“That clock's fast,” said Durdy.

“That's what I told you,” said Louise.

“Never could trust the dratted thing,” said Durdy.

“Oh, Durdy!”

“I'll trouble you not to take that tone with me, young lady. And what was that you were saying about upsetting my poor little Kinunu?”

“It wasn't me, honestly. She was crying when I came in. I think she was fond of McGivan, you see. I know it sounds funny, but …”

“Nothing funny about it that I can see, Miss. You shouldn't laugh at things you don't understand.”

“Oh, Durdy, you did get out of bed the wrong side this morning.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. Me get out of bed! The idea!”

Louise was bewildered. Almost for the first time in her life, when she came to the Nursery for sanity and comfort, Durdy was refusing to give them to her. It was almost as though she was trying to drive her away.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean that. I'm afraid I'm making you a bit tired. It was my fault, shooting up here straight after breakfast when you aren't used to it.”

“Well, perhaps I am a trifle tired,” said Durdy, relenting. “I think I'll have a little nap. Come and have tea with me, darling, and perhaps I'll feel better.”

“That'll be lovely. We'll have crumpets. And anyway Nonny's supposed to be ringing up school to get them to give me some work to do, so I suppose I'd better go and see what she's squeezed out of them. Bye, darling. See you.”

Miss Durdon had just enough feeling left in her face to sense the touch of lips. She managed a thin smile as she closed her eyes and gathered her soul and mind into a single compact force, a force like the remnants of a professional army after a long battle. The trenches of her body might all have surrendered, but here at the central redoubt the last platoons could still be summoned into a disciplined unit, able to fight and endure. The will sent a message to the last outpost, the two middle fingers of her left hand, which still had enough movement in them to press the buzzer on which they lay. She kept her eyes shut until she heard Kinunu's step close by the bed.

“Yethmith,” whispered Kinunu.

“Hold my hand, Kinunu. My good hand. The one by the buzzer. Don't let go.”

She could barely sense the pressure of the small fingers, but used her will to construct the feel of the whole hand, a hand like Kitten's, not rough but feeling as though it had an extra layer of skin on it, a nurse's hand. Tear runnels textured Kinunu's smooth cheeks but her face was unreadable. Her dark eyes carried no message.

“You've been very good to me, Kinunu. I've been lucky. A lot of old women lie in bed all day waiting to die. Their nurses can't look after them, because there aren't enough. Nobody ever visits them. But I've been lucky, very lucky. I'm glad you came. Do you understand?”

“Yethmith. Old, old.”

She made a strange little gesture with her free hand. On royal tours Miss Durdon had sometimes watched Far Eastern dancers who seemed able to make every knuckle of each finger carry a charge of meaning. Kinunu often used the same kind of hand-talk. It was like a foreign language of which Miss Durdon knew not a single word, but could guess certain meanings from the tone. She'd seen this gesture before. It said to her that Kinunu came from a people where the old, however senile, were still respected for their mere age; to them the grey ranks of a British geriatric ward would have been a nightmare impossibility.

“I want to help you, Kinunu. I want to talk to you about Mr McGivan.”

She thought she could see a change, not in the face but somehow behind it. By a pulse of will she forced her two good fingers to move, to make the beginnings of a grip. For all her effort the pressure must have been as faint as a falling petal, but it was enough to make Kinunu look down and stay where she was. She shook her head and began to cry.

“Eee no thay me ee King,” she whispered. “Ee no thay me ee King.”

By listening to the woes and wonders of generations of children as they struggled through the entanglements on the frontier of speech, Miss Durdon had become almost telepathic in the interpretation of jumbled syllables. She had her own reasons for liking to see Kinunu moving about her room, but was not so lost in that old dream that she didn't know how the girl must have appeared to the other people in the Palace—so small and neat and secret that she was more of a pet than a person. And McGivan had been a pet too, of a quite different sort—like one of those smelly, hairy, useless old dogs for which certain English families seem to have such a strange leaning—a cat and a dog, with nothing else in common than that they were the Palace pets. Miss Durdon had long known that McGivan visited the Nursery whenever he got the chance; she had let Kinunu see that she approved of him—she still owed Kitten that much; but she had seldom talked about him directly, because that would have interrupted the dream.

Now, while Kinunu knelt by the bed with her cap fallen off and her blue-black hair streaming over her ivory arms, pouring out her own language smattered here and there with bits of lisped English, Miss Durdon thought at first that she was weeping only for the loss of the friend of her loneliness. She was not at all surprised to find that McGivan had taken what advantage he could of the relationship.

“Ee thay me ee King,” sobbed Kinunu. “Ee want kithkith.”

“So you let him kiss you?”

“Ee thilly. Ee want kithkith, but ee fraid. Ee want …”

She didn't know the word, but her demonstration caress woke a flush of feeling down Miss Durdon's arm, as though Kitten's ghost were stroking the withered flesh. The pang of memory left Miss Durdon unprepared for Kinunu's collapse forward on to the bed and the fresh torrent of sobs and syllables. She gathered that McGivan's ritual visits for a timid kiss and cuddle had been going on for some time, that he used to tell her that he was the rightful King of England, and that Kinunu had thought him foolish but amusing. But then something had happened, something which had caused this misery, and it wasn't poor McGivan's murder

“When, Kinunu? Yesterday?”

“Yethyeth.”

“And you took him to your room?”

“Yethyeth. Ee like …”

She pointed at the monitor camera and shaped her forefingers and thumbs into the rectangle of a tiny screen.

“Yes. Of course,” said Miss Durdon. “He liked to have the camera on and to listen to what we were saying?”

“Yethyeth.”

“And that happened yesterday. And then …”

“Kithkith a little. I laugh. Ee angry. Ee want … I thay ee nono … Ee …”

She slid into her own language, waggled her head, stopped speaking and gave a funny little twittering whistle, peering intently at Miss Durdon while she did so. Her hand and arm roved sinuously down the sheet. Her gaze moved to watch it. The twittering stopped., She craned towards it, hopeless, hypnotised. Then she stopped the play and turned back to Miss Durdon, peering for understanding through her silent tears.

“A bird and a snake,” whispered somebody's old lips. “A bird and a snake.”

“I thay im yethyeth,” sobbed Kinunu.

Miss Durdon had seen scores of Royal Visits, and knew that however Europeanised the monarchs might be, with their bowings and smilings from the state carriages and their well-turned speeches after the banquets, all sorts of foreign customs persisted at the lower levels of their entourages—the levels which lapped against the fringes of the nursery. She knew too that often these strangers considered quaint or horrible many things that the English took for granted. So it was no surprise for her to discover, as she disentangled smatterings, that Kinunu's grief was neither for the death of her lover nor for her own fall from chastity, but for her parents' financial loss, in that they would no longer be able to offer her on the marriage market as a virgin. Somehow she had got it into her head that McGivan would marry her, and the King would pay her parents the bride-price because it was his servant who had seduced her, and that would have been all right. So now she was weeping not for a lover but a husband. Her gabble ended in a strange wail.

“Ee no thay me ee King! Ee no thay me ee King!”

“There, there,” said Miss Durdon, for about the ten thousandth time in her life. “The Bible tells us we mustn't cry over spilt milk, and that's true. There, there, darling. We'll find you another husband.”

She spoke of it as though a husband were something like a toy cannon or a doll, replaceable at Hamley's. The important thing was to still the sobs and wails and let herself think. She was badly shaken, she didn't yet know why. Something was wrong. A snake and a bird. Kitten. King McGivan. Bastard. A word never spoken but endlessly brooded on in the thin-lipped, kirk-ridden household where the boy had grown up. A mother's boy. He hadn't lied to Kinunu when he gave himself the title, because he was Kitten's grandchild, and Kitten didn't lie. What she said was true, for her, until she changed her mind and said it was not.

“Mithmith.”

Miss Durdon opened her eyes and saw Kinunu standing by the bed, almost her teasing unreadable self again. Sure that Miss Durdon was watching her she put a hand on her slim stomach and made a rounding-out movement.

“Baby come,” she said.

It was probably only a question. She'd never managed to catch the English interrogative lilt.

“There, there, darling. We'll look after you. The King will find you a husband, and if there's a baby we'll look after it too. I'll be glad to see a cot in here again before I go.”

Kinunu probably only understood half of that but she picked up the tone and smiled.

“I'm tired, my dear,” said Miss Durdon. “Stay here if you want to, but I think I'll have a little nap. We'll look after you. There, there. Tired.”

In 1952, when His Majesty had still been a bachelor, he had taken Miss Durdon as part of his retinue on his Royal Visit to Ethiopia. There Miss Durdon had seen the whirlpool. It happened on a day when the men were shooting wild goat across a harsh mountainside and the women had gone ahead to meet them at the place chosen for their midday picnic, a canyon where a river dropped suddenly into darkness. This place had given her the horrors—the river driving peacefully for mile after mile between lush-creepered cliffs and then, in a few yards, gone into its smoking hole. Beyond the hole the canyon continued, bare rock now, rust-coloured, lifeless. Close under the far cliff, about twenty feet short of the falls, the whirlpool circled. Anything caught in it stayed there for a while, turning and turning, saved from the drop but trapped into this meaningless dance. But not trapped for ever. Miss Durdon had watched a dead animal, about the size of a rabbit, a sodden blob of fur, circle for nearly ten minutes and then, just as though the whirlpool had tired of it, edge out into the stretched water of the river and shoot over the edge.

She often thought of the place now. It had lost its nightmare quality and become an image of comfort. The Day Nursery was her whirlpool, in which she circled the weeks away on the edge of darkness. It couldn't last for ever. One day, despite all His Majesty could do, she would slip out and away. It would be soon, quite soon. She wouldn't live to see the cot in its proper place to the left of the windows, nor, asleep on the cream-coloured cashmere, the minute head of Kinunu's baby, flat-faced, black-haired, but showing for the first few days those heavy Hanover eyelids that might or might not return in middle age. No, she would never see that. Her time was almost up. Her last baby was no longer a subject of her kingdom. It had happened inside a fortnight. It wasn't the same as growing up—Princess Louise was still a child, still full of childish notions, but her own idea of herself had found its proper shape. She could do without Durdy now. Some of them had never achieved that, but Louise would be all right. My last baby. I can feel the tug of the current. I'm ready to go.

Miss Durdon's mind drifted, not on the usual purposeful voyage back to Abergeldie in the snow and Kitten in the dark, but among misty islands. She had never in her life felt the faintest prickle of yearning towards any man, though across the years she had been courted by a score of Palace retainers. Some might have really wanted her, others felt that they'd be doing themselves a good turn by hitching on to such a favourite with the Family, most a bit of both—it didn't matter. She'd long ago come to the conclusion that something in her own body—one of those glands His Majesty was so interested in—hadn't worked properly, and that was why she was so tiny, and had never grown a proper bosom, and never wanted a man. Or it might have been the adventure with Kitten, and her own decision to shut that side of her nature away. But whatever it was, this was one area of her long life where memory was no use to her as she tried to make sense of what Kinunu had told her. What would make timid Ian McGivan suddenly confident enough to stop telling the girl that he was King, suddenly strong-willed enough to become the snake to her bird? It would have to be something that overcame the old shame of his father's birth … If he'd known about Louise, known what had happened at the Glas-alit-Shiel, would that be enough? She tried to make the picture of the scene in Kinunu's room, but it wouldn't come right; it wasn't McGivan in his shapeless clothes who had suddenly grown angry and dominant—it was a stockier man, bearded, older, in evening dress; a tall hock glass stood on the dresser and a fat cigar smouldered beside it, already scorching the varnish; and it wasn't Kinunu whispering and pushing him away with strangely feeble arms.

No there was something wrong. The clock, too.

Miss Durdon gave her mind an angry shake to clear away the nonsense pictures, the baby in the cot, the old King in Kitten's arms. It's never gained before, she thought. It only loses. Five minutes a day in summer, three minutes in winter. His Majesty knows that, perfectly well. There's something wrong. I must stay here and put it right. I must do what I can for the Family, as long as they need me. I mustn't go over the edge yet—not yet.