King and Joker (25 page)

She peered through the grief-monster for a final glimpse of Durdy and saw Theale bending over the bed. What was he doing to her? Did he know that he could still get at Louise through Durdy? Down below the firemen had halted—she could afford to wait a little longer and see what he was doing. The late September sun, clear and strong, seemed to distil the morning into silence.

“I can't die, Your Highness,” squeaked Durdy, with that old, familiar touch of petulance as though she'd been complaining about her inability to twist the screw-top off a bottle of cough-mixture. “I want to die, but I can't. Come and help me, please, darling.”

Unwilled, Louise's left hand rose from the bars and gripped the top of the sash. She saw Theale had turned to watch her.

“Go to the other side of the room, Mr Theale,” she said. “Right round the table. Go on. I'll count five, and if you don't go, Ill drop. I really will. One …”

He shrugged and turned away. He was beaten. Now it became difficult to move without the fear of the drop. There was sweat on her palms and her right leg was numb where the pressure of the sill had closed off a nerve-circuit. She worked her way tremblingly upright and stood flexing her ankles to get the feeling back—she'd need to be able to dash for the window if Theale tried anything. He was standing right over at the far corner of the room with his gun half raised. His bright-terrier look was puzzled now. She worked her way on to the desk letting him see that she could always get back out of the window before he could reach her. She took the three paces to the bedside with her eyes still on him.

“Don't die, Durdy darling,” she whispered.

“Over the edge. Going now. Let me go. My last baby. Let me go—oh, Kitten, let me go.”

“Oh, Durdy, I love you, but you must go if you want to. Oh, Durdy, there's only you …”

Forgetting all about Theale Louise crouched by the bed and slid her left arm under Durdy's shoulders. The body seemed as light as that of a dead bird picked up, fluffed and frozen, starved with midwinter.

“I mun choose,” breathed Durdy. “You've bin tearing me in two. I mun steay wi' my girls, and I cawn't teake you wi' me. I mun be their Durdy, alweays there. Doan't cry, Kitten …”

Louise was crying in smooth, easy sobs, sobs not wrenched from her but as natural as singing. She craned forward to kiss the mottled old cheeks and didn't start or look up when the room filled with a crash, a warning shout, the crack of a gun and the yells of men. Somebody touched her shoulder. She shrugged the hand away. Through the blur of tears she saw it come down, move the bedclothes aside and feel for the pulse of Durdy's “good” hand, whose arm lay along the sheet as thin as the shank of a heron. She kissed the dry forehead again and gently lowered Durdy back on to her pillows.

“She's gone,” said Father quietly.

The strangeness of his voice made Louise look up. Her tears distorted his face, but when she wiped her eyes on the sheet she saw that the real face was twisted with grief, like her own face reflected in the window. Tears ran down either side of the nose and hung in droplets from the corners and fringe of the moustache. He was looking down at Durdy.

Staring at him, at this real person, Louise rose groggily to her feet. She found Mother close beside her, pale and tearless, so she reached out an arm to hold her close to her. Several men were standing around at the other end of the room, and one kneeling by Theale's body where it lay face down between the table and the dolls' shelf.

“Shot himself clean as a whistle,” said somebody. “Neat little bastard to the very end.”

Chapter 15

M
iss Durdon's memorial service was held in St George's, Windsor, and everybody came, about a third of them incognito—the Norways and the Swedens and the Denmarks and the Belgiums and the Netherlands and the poor deposed Greeces and all Mother's Spanish cousins (forgetting for the day their feud about who should have succeeded old Franco) and a charming Japanese prince (representing the enemy, so to speak) and dozens of deposeds and exes, not to mention all the other cousins, innumerable Mecklenberg-Baden-Hesses and similar many-barrelled Germans, kissing and crying, besides all the home-growns—the Yorks and Clarences and Kents and so on, plus the usual swarm of Mountbattens, and quite a lot more who weren't really related at all but had, as it were, sent ambassadors to Durdy's Kingdom—children to stay for Balmoral holidays—Marlboroughs and Norfolks and such—a mighty ingathering, a royal mafia, a sceptred wake. Everybody revelled in the event, their enjoyment spiced by the knowledge that it was a very proper thing to be doing and perhaps the last time they'd get the chance.

But only the Family went to Durdy's funeral, the service in Balmoral kirk and the burial in the grounds of Abergeldie Castle. Father, supposing he'd wanted it, would never have dreamed of asking the owners of Abergeldie whether they would allow him to be buried in their garden; but he had no hesitation in insisting that they should let his old nanny have the resting-place of her choice. Nobody knew why she'd chosen it. Edward VII when Prince of Wales had merely rented the castle so that he could be within range of his mother but out of the immediate draughts and disapprovals of Balmoral. But chosen it she had, taking Father ten years ago to show him the spot.

So they buried her there on a drenching October morning, with streamlets runnelling off the stacked turves beside the grave and falling in continuous lines from the rib-points of the umbrellas. The minister had a bad cough. Louise saw Father looking at him, clearly wondering whether he ought to prescribe something.

It was a dismal little ceremony, but it felt right. Durdy was going to have a memorial tablet in the kirk, but here there would be smooth lawn, smooth snow in winter, under which she would lie as secret as the secret of why she wanted to be buried here at all, Louise thought it was something to do with Kitten. You couldn't call a young man Kitten, and tell him not to cry; and it wasn't the voice in which Durdy ever spoke to children. No one would ever know. But I shan't carry my secret to the grave, Louise thought. I'm not as strong as she was.

On the plane south everybody was tired and silent. Father read despatches and Albert a zoology text-book while Mother and Nonny played one of their endless games of six-pack bezique. Louise looked out of the window at the last light fading pinkly from the cloud-banks below. When it was dark, somewhere over Manchester, she got up and crossed to Father's chair.

“I want to talk to you,” she whispered.

He nodded, rose and led her farther forward to the compartment off the main saloon which he used as an office for work on longer flights. Two chairs, a bleak desk, the radio telephone extension. They sat down and he looked at her with a question on his face.

“I'm not going to get over it,” she said. “I can cope with it, but I can't go back to what it was like before.”

“Sorry about that. That was a good time.”

“Yes.”

“What do you want me to say, more than that I'm sorry?”

“I don't know. What did you say to Mother?”

“How did you know I'd told her?”

“The day after Pilfer … she was sitting in my room. I knew something else had happened. I didn't know what till I heard Durdy telling Theale that he'd killed McGivan, so it wasn't McGivan I saw.”

“All right. Yes. I told Bella just what happened. You want me to tell you?”

“Will it be any use?”

“Perhaps—if you think I'd gone up there, dressed up as McGivan, so as to get a chance of screwing Kinunu. Is that what you thought, Lulu?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you're wrong, my girl. Bella trusted me better than that. I suppose I'll have to go through it all again. Look, I was pretty well certain that McGivan was the joker, but I wanted to be dead sure. I'd made the same guess as you about him listening to the monitor. It was going to be tricky enough tackling him about what he knew without having to cope with not being quite certain whether he did know it. So I chose a point when I thought he'd be helping with the security check before the reception, waxed my moustache and trotted up to see Kinunu. You'll remember I asked you to go and have tea with Durdy. My idea was that McGivan had simply persuaded Kinunu to let him turn on the monitor in the Night Nursery and see what we were talking about, and I wanted to check how she reacted when I tried it. But I'd hardly put my face round the door before she was all over me, tugging me into her bedroom as though she couldn't wait for an instant. That's when I should have put a stop to things—then—soon as they started. But I didn't want to let on I wasn't McGivan and I did want to check about the monitor. Besides that, I was … well … inquisitive. McGivan of all people! I won't pretend, Lulu, that the sex urge wasn't there too, but at my age … after all, I spent a lot of my early manhood fending off women who threw themselves at me … it still happens quite a bit … you'd be surprised …”

“Go on.”

“I don't want to be unfair to the girl. She was very good to Durdy. But it was a bit outside my experience. One moment I was sitting on the edge of the bed and she was switching that monitor on for me—so far, so good, I thought and the next she was all over me, tumbling together, all our clothes on, she didn't even give me a chance to kick my shoes off, with me thinking of McGivanish things to say to get me out of this, and then, just as suddenly, she'd manoeuvred me to the edge of the bed, given a quick wriggle and heaved me off. That was fine by me. I got up, ready to go, when I saw her lying there, giggling and looking sideways at me. I saw it was a game, a game she always played. She never let McGivan get anywhere with her, and never would. She'd spotted that he'd never quite have the confidence … he had the most frightful mother, my grandfather's half-sister.”

“I don't see what that's got to do with it.”

Father shrugged.

“A bit,” he said. “And quite a bit with what he did to your room. In fact I'd bet that if Kinunu hadn't been leading him up the garden path and then slamming the door in his face, he wouldn't have exploded like that. Still … I won't pretend I thought about any of that at the time. All I thought about was old McGivan, never being given a chance by anyone, everybody's butt—oh, I know it was all my fault bringing him down to London in the first place—but here he was, and this cunning little bint … I blew my top. I'll teach her, I thought. I suppose I also thought that if I got her over the first hurdle then she might let McGivan have what he wanted and that'd make him easier to cope with. No, that's only a rationalisation. I was pretty blind with fury for old McGivan …”

“So you raped her?”

Father stared, looking for an instant as though he was going to yell at her. Then he smiled and pulled at his moustache.

“You saw her, Lulu. Did she look like a girl who'd just been raped?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“So I should bloody well think. The trouble with you, Lulu, is that you've become so grown-up of a sudden that one forgets that there are areas in which you haven't the experience to evolve an adult judgment. Look at it this way—what good would I be doing old McGivan if she hadn't enjoyed herself? Make her more of a tease, if anything. I suppose a text-book would say something like I aroused her sexual urge sufficiently to overcome a superficial neurosis … You want me to go into details?”

“No.”

“Well, that's what happened. Bloody good thing you didn't start shouting halfway through.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you can imagine I'd rather forgotten the original object of the expedition while all this was going on, but the monitor was there with you and Durdy burbling away about something, and I was just about coming up for air when I noticed Durdy was sounding a bit odd. She was telling you about some man—Edward the Seventh I think it must have been—and how women reacted to him.”

“That's right. She said she didn't know whether he was attractive. She said you'd have to be ‘a rich lady' to know that. She thought that with servants he was more like a hunter. And then she said something very unDurdyish about a wee bird in the heather.”

“Yes, I heard that. It made me feel a bit rum, I can tell you, but not half as bad as when you yelled out you were glad I wasn't like that and it would spoil everything.”

“I'd forgotten. I was right, wasn't I?”

“Everything, Lulu?”

“No, I suppose not. No, not everything.”

“Is what I've told you any use to you?”

“I don't know yet. I expect so. Yes. That foul clock …”

“I made a mess of that. I didn't realise how critical McGivan's time of death was going to be—I just put it forward as far as I dared—I'd made a guess at his body temperature. The first pathologist's report said he'd been dead longer, but there were a couple of discrepancies in it and they had it all re-checked—do you remember d'Arcy talking about that?—so I thought I could afford to hang on and see. Perhaps I was over-influenced by what I'd heard you saying about spoiling everything. Meanwhile Durdy guessed what had happened and got Kinunu to keep fiddling the clock, which only made it harder to back out of the mess. While there was still a good chance that McGivan had been killed by terrorists I didn't think the time of death would be absolutely crucial. But the mayhem in Bert's zoo shook me up … and then Pilfer … it took me a day or so to realise that in spite of the evidence I couldn't swallow the idea of Pilfer going off the rails like that. And then there was the fact that d'Arcy was the hell of a chap to persuade to look at things any other way than his own … But that very morning when Kinunu brought me your SOS from the nursery I'd made up my mind that as soon as I'd sat on my bog I'd go and tell d'Arcy that it wasn't McGivan you'd seen up there.”

He stopped at the sound of a light tap on the door, just audible through the engine-boom. At Father's call Captain Tabard's head poked into the office.

“Message from Heathrow, Your Majesty. We're landing in about ten minutes, and apparently there's quite a crowd waiting for you.”

“Oh Lord. How big?”

“About half what the Osmonds had last time they flew in. I saw that. Even half of it's a lot of people.”

“Hell,” said Father. “Can't divert, I suppose—not fair on the poor sods, anyway. Thanks, Captain. Will you tell Her Majesty?”

“Will do, Sir.”

The head withdrew. Father stretched and sighed.

“Well, I think that's all I can usefully tell you,” he said. “We'll just have to try to build things up, best we can.”

“There's something else,” said Louise. “You don't have to do this at once, and you'll have to get Nonny to agree—and Mother too, I suppose—but as soon as you can manage it I want people to know that I'm a bastard.”

He had started to get up, but dropped back into his chair and stared at her, very tense.

“We've only got ten minutes,” he said at last.

“I know. We can talk about it properly later. I don't want to hurt anybody. I've found I still love you—all three of you. But don't you see, if we hadn't had to keep it secret none of this would have happened? I suppose McGivan would have played his jokes, but they wouldn't have done any harm. But now he's dead, and Pilfer's dead, and Theale, and you went and made love to Kinunu, all because we thought we had to go on lying about me. I want to stop being a lie—provided Nonny agrees, I mean. That's important.”

“I'm glad you think so. But she's not the only one, Lulu. For instance, have you thought about Derek Oliphant?”

“Who's he?”

“The obstetrician who went along with us in pretending that Bella was pregnant when she wasn't I had to put a lot of pressure on him about that. He'd be ruined if it came out.”

“If it was wrong in the first place he needn't have agreed.”

“But don't you see, Lulu, I picked him because I thought he would give in to pressure? And he's only an example: the effects would be far wider than you can imagine. Put it this way—supposing it would involve my abdication, would you still insist on the truth coming out?”

“No. No, of course not. Would it?”

“About fifty-fifty, I'd say.”

“Oh … there isn't time, now … look, if you'll promise to see if you can find a way of doing it … it doesn't have to be at once … by my eighteenth birthday, for instance. But the other thing is I want to stop princessing and start living more like Nonny—I know I can't get out of everything, but … look, even if I've got to go on being a lie, I don't have to live like a lie all the time, do I? I won't let you down, but do you see …”

“I see very well, darling. It's my argument with Nonny all over again. But I'm glad you think her feelings are important. She doesn't show them, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have them. You ought to know that if anyone.”

“Because I'm a bit like her it doesn't mean I'm like her all through. I'm myself?”

“Of course you are; But listen. I told her about me and Kinunu …”

“I expect she thought it was funny,” said Louise sourly.

“She laughed. But there are laughs and laughs. It was Nonny who made me tell Bella.”

“Oh. I meant …”

He snorted and rose as the jet-boom changed its note. They went back into the saloon, settled into arm-chairs, swung them to face aft and worked the cunning seat-belts that locked them in that position for the landing. Do I believe him? thought Louise. Half and half. I bet he didn't say anything that wasn't true. But I bet he enjoyed himself with Kinunu. And I bet there's been things like that before—in fact I can remember Mother having that sad old face once when I was quite small. And he'd get away without her knowing most times. It's my fault, my minding so much. I wanted them to be a Paradise Island, but they're people. I expect Mother's done things she's ashamed of, by being careless or blind or angry. She can be almost mad when she's angry. I'll hurt people too, I expect, quite often. Granny's right about that. I must have hurt them horribly when I was hanging out on the window-sill, making up my mind to drop, thinking only about me and how I felt. I was even sort of glad I was hurting them. That's horrible … I was trying to make Story Parents out of them, and when they spoilt the story.