King and Joker (6 page)

“North Sea Gas isn't really so bad for this,” she said. “I think Father just made a fuss because it was different. I suppose when you've been toasting crumpets the same way for forty years … what trying circumstances, Durdy?”

“Oh, it was enough to try the patience of a saint, Nanny Cramp said. Everything so formal all the time! When Queen Ena went bathing there'd be these two great big soldiers in their best uniforms with their, guns, and they'd march into the sea beside her until it was deep enough for her to swim in. Nanny Cramp once saw them standing there, staring out to sea, with only their heads sticking out of the waves. Ridiculous! And if you were a Royal, everywhere you went in the Palace there'd be footmen all along the corridors to shout ahead that you were coming. Just fancy! The notions it might give a child!”

“And all that going on with poor Uncle Carlos dying too.”

“No, that was later, after they'd abdicated. They had to be very careful with him all the time, of course. Still, it's no use crying over spilt milk.”

Louise withdrew the fork again and with flinching fingers snatched the crumpet off and on to her plate, where she smothered it with butter. Her mouth began to salivate as the melting juice drooled into the doughy craters.

“Would you like a corner of my crumpet, Durdy?”

“Just to keep you company, darling.”

When Louise popped a tiny triangle of crumpet between the thin violet lips a stream of spittle began to flow uncontrollably from the corner of the mouth. This always happened, so she had a tissue ready and mopped with it until Durdy stopped her slow chewing and the stream died.

“Thank you, darling,” said Durdy. “You mustn't let yours get cold.”

“I've put it in the grate. It'll be quite hot.”

It wasn't of course, but it was worth having a tepid and congealing crumpet in order to perpetuate the rite of giving Durdy a corner of your food “Just to keep you company.” And the next one would come piping from the fire.

“I've got to go and have tea with Granny tomorrow,” said Louise. “Shall I give her your love?”

“My respects, Your Highness.”

“Oh dear. You know, I rather like her. I even like her being so awful. Sometimes I think I'm the only one who isn't afraid of her. Whatever she does, she can't touch me. I'm just out of her range. It's funny.”

Durdy said nothing. Privileged though she was, perhaps she felt it wasn't her place to take part in the criticism of might-have-been Queens.

“It's difficult to think of Grandfather really loving her,” said Louise. “Actually it's difficult to think of him doing anything, except drowning. I'm pretty sure what Victoria was like—almost as if I'd met her—and King Edward, and Great-grandfather and Queen Mary, but all the picture I have of Grandfather is a man with big eyes, wearing white flannels and looking worried.”

“He was lovely baby. How I remember the fireworks! He came after three girls, you see.”

“Don't give me that! Remember I'm the President of Princess's Lib, Durdy. Anyway it's against the law now. When Bert has children there'll be a little man watching to see that the girls get exactly the same number of fireworks as the boys. Just think—if it hadn't been for Grandfather we'd have had a Queen Louise—only I shouldn't have been here to see it, of course, and anyway they'd probably have made her call herself Elizabeth or something. Did Grandfather come and toast crumpets when he was grown up, like Father does?”

“I had to take a firm line about that. People used to say that he never wanted to leave the nursery, so Thursday visits were all I would permit. Sometimes you have to do things which fair break your heart.”

“Do you think he'd have made a good King, Durdy?”

“It's not for me to say, Your Highness.”

“Oh, come off it. I suppose if King Victor turned out all right there's no reason why Grandfather shouldn't have—only I can't believe Granny would have been as much help as Queen Mary. A bad start doesn't really seem to matter much. I suppose Father really had an unfairly good start, being a boy King and refusing to run away during the war—I bet you had something to do with that, Durdy.”

“We settled it between us, Queen Mary and Mr Churchill and I. Your Grandmother is not to be blamed, darling. She never really understood what the English are like, you see.”

“I suppose when all your own Family have been shot for not clearing out soon enough you're a bit inclined to want to scoot as soon as danger threatens. I'm glad Father stayed. It's like him, isn't it? And then everyone was eating out of his hand by the time the war was over.”

Despite her promise to Albert, Louise found herself continually edging the conversation nearer the mystery. It was like a scab which isn't quite ready to come off—you know it'll bleed if you pick it, but the itch is too strong to resist. Durdy seemed unconscious of the path they were taking.

“He got on very well with those Labour people,” she said. “He used to say that if he'd had a vote he'd have voted for Mr Attlee, but I daresay he was only teasing.”

“I suppose all that helped a lot when he wanted to marry Mother. He got his own way over that, didn't he?”

“His Majesty gets his own way about most things. He was a terror in the nursery. Once he climbed out of that window, over the bars, and hung on and said he'd drop unless I took him to the zoo.”

“Who won?”

“It isn't about winning or losing, darling. I persuaded him to come in without making any promises, and a little while later he went to the zoo with the Prince. That was the last time he saw his father.”

In conversations with Durdy one king, led to another and you just let it happen. Normally Louise would have gone on with the interesting subject of Father being a terror, but the itch was too strong.

“What had they all got against Mother?” she said. “When I was looking at the newspaper cuttings I saw a stupid headline about haemophilia, but that was all right, wasn't it? I mean in spite of Uncle Carlos?”

In the silence, broken only by the wooden tack of the cuckoo-clock, Louise heard Durdy begin on one of her sniffs and then turn it into a sigh.

“If you want to know about all that, darling, you will have to ask His Majesty. I never understood it. Now may I trouble you to change the subject, Your Highness?”

“No, Durdy, that won't do. We did genes in biology last term, and sex-linking, and I told Father how funny it was seeing all the cousins in a table in a science-book, and he just said it wasn't funny at all. I thought he was going to shout at me, but then he went gentle and told me that Mother wasn't a carrier and he wouldn't have been allowed to marry her if she had been, and so I wasn't either. And he asked me not to talk about it any more.”

“So that's that,” said Durdy.

But the scab was bleeding now.

“No it isn't,” said Louise. “Something's wrong, something to do with Mother. I upset her badly the other day and now I'm frightened I might do it again. And I'm beginning to think it must be something to do with me. I mean, it's funny their telling Bert about Nonny when he was ten, and then not telling me at all. Darling Durdy, couldn't you explain to Father … look, at first I was just inquisitive and I suppose that was wrong, but now the way you're all going on is making me feel … oh, I don't know … as though there was something wrong with me which everybody was afraid to let on about.”

“There's nothing wrong with you. Word of honour, darling. Nothing whatever.”

“Oh, I know there isn't really, in my mind. But with another part of me … it's like those nightmares you have which you can't remember­ when you wake up, only you know they're there. If you could remember­ them they'd be all right. That's why I can't stop myself asking questions. OK, I'll change the subject. Miss Durdon, be so good as to entertain me with the story of Lord Curzon and the elephant and the bad banana.”

Although the Princess had gone, time refused to drift. Perhaps the tiny taste of melted butter and crumpet was still too strong. The drum of traffic too seemed curiously nagging. Miss Durdon was worried, and too tired with it to cut these last moorings and float free. She ran over the talk in her mind until she got to the Princess who might have been Queen … three Princess Louises there'd been, she thought, and weren't they different! As different as chalk from cheese. The first one hadn't really been Miss Durdon's child, she had been Bignall's—a plain girl, seldom smiling, always a foreigner in Miss Durdon's own Kingdom (though when she was a Queen in her own right she'd refused to employ any nurse for her children unless the woman had first been interviewed by Nurse Durdon, an insistence that caused some diplomatic frettings during the Kaiser's War). It was strange that Vicky, though there were only thirteen months between them, should always have been a native of that Kingdom, even in the ghastly days of her dying … Miss Durdon shut the image away by conjuring up the second Louise—a subject of that Kingdom, of course, a perfect baby, took her feed on the instant, slept all night, sat on her pot like a soldier…it wasn't fair the way you couldn't help loving some less than others, and do what you could they knew it. On the scrap screen in the corner was a picture of HRH Princess Louise in a pleated skirt and an eyeshade like the beak of a bird playing in the quarterfinals of the Women's Doubles in the first post-war Wimbledon; and she still wrote once a month from Rome, long loose scrawls which only His Majesty could read, telling Durdy gossip about film-directors and cardinals mixed in with worming the Pekinese … still trying to grasp that little extra parcel of love which the tree could never bend down to let into her reach. And the third Louise.

“My last baby. My very last.”

As though her old lips had whispered a spell the moorings unloosed themselves of their own accord.

The little window-seat is hard and awkward. Misty-bright light of the northern dawn streams through the panes onto the blotchy, wrinkled, writhing creature on Miss Durdon's lap as she unwraps the warmed towel and, heedless of the tiny threshing limbs and the rasping shriek from the lungs, dresses the new-born girl for the first time. The baby is so light that every time she lifts her it feels as though she's going to toss her in the air by mistake, but Miss Durdon is used to this sensation. It's always like that. By the time of each new birth your arms have become used to lifting the baby before, without noticing how it's put on weight, so when they once more lift a really tiny one they feel as if they were trying to float up like gas-balloons at a fairground. As the warmed flannel begins to shield it the baby's yelling slackens, but it is still making that stuck-pig noise when the last little wrestle of getting the arms into the jersey-sleeves is over and Miss Durdon can lay the small downy head into the hollow below her collar-bone and begin to soothe the back as it retches for fresh air to yell with. In thirty seconds, almost as sudden as if she'd turned the wireless off, a yell becomes a sob and the next sob is no more than a suck.

“Thank God for that,” murmurs the King, still in his shirt-sleeves, staring out over Loch Muick at the interfolded slopes of heather beyond. “Why do babies always have to get born in the middle of the night?”

“Because it's the quietest time, of course,” says Miss Durdon. “I expect if you look in your books you'll find that the sort of animals that rummage around at night have their babies in the day. It stands to reason.”

“Durdy, you're a marvel. I bet you're right. I'll look it up as soon as we get back to civilisation. I wonder if anyone's thought of it before.”

“Course they have. You don't have to think of it—you just know it.”

“Ah, but you're not a scientist. There might be a paper in it. Shouldn't be too difficult to collect the statistics. I'll ask old Zuckerman. Now, you know what happens next.”

“What happens next is that you get some sleep, young man. So off to bed with you now.”

He looks exhausted and no wonder. His face is white in the colour-draining light and sweat has dried his moustache into rats-tails. But he shakes his head.

“Got to think things out. What's the time? Four twenty. OK, I rang Tim at Allt-na-giubhsaich when? Just about eight last night. He'll have got on to the Home Sec by nine, say. It'll have leaked to Fleet Street somewhere soon after midnight—Tim'll probably be staving off the local news-hound by now. I wonder where the nearest Privy Councillors are. Let's say they'll be coming down the glen by noon. Do they still have to bring an Archbishop? Dashed if I know. I'm going to get a good deal of stick for letting it happen like this, Durdy.”

“If you don't face trouble, trouble will come to your door. That's what I always say.”

“I know you do, except when you say ‘Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.' But you're right. We'll make a song and dance about it. Sir Derek will back me up there was not the slightest hint she'd be three weeks premature.”

“Don't you worry. When they see my lovely new baby they won't think about anything else.”

The King laughs, still frowning. A faint voice comes from the bed.

“You like her, Durdy? She's up to standard?”

“Oh, she's beautiful, beautiful. I thought I was never going to have another one.”

“I should think not, at your age,” says the King. “How old are you, Durdy?”

“As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.”

“You're eighty-two. I shall have you made a dame for services to obstetrics.”

“Don't be silly. I wouldn't say no to an MVO, though. That's more my place.”

“Hell. Perhaps you're right. Anyway, this is the line we'll take. OK, I was a bit pig-headed coming up to Glas-allt Shiel only three weeks before the kid was due, but medical opinion was that the Queen needed absolute peace and quiet—and dammit, I am pig-headed. Everybody knows that. And after all it is one for the history books—when was the last time a reigning monarch delivered his own daughter? We'll put on a show—you too, Durdy. Don't you go biting off journalists' heads the way you usually do, or it's no MVO for you.”