King and Joker (9 page)

“I wonder whether you're right. I'll tell Albert, anyway. He was pretty upset about his toad.”

“Toads! Pooh!”

Theale held the front door of the Triumph open and Louise climbed in without thinking. They were sliding under the plane trees when he spoke. That was surprising for a stickler, like not putting her in the back.

“Excuse me, Your Highness.”

“Yes, Mr Theale?”

“Four-ten this afternoon you were with me, up by the Pond?”

“That's right. Why?”

“Did you hear about the pianos?”

“Yes.”

“So did I, and I thought while I was waiting for you I'd go down to the Gate-porter's, see how they let 'em through. Soon as they heard my voice they began to look at me pretty funny. Turned out that somebody'd rung them up, four-ten this afternoon, wanting to know whether the pianos had arrived all right. Said he was from the Red Cross.”

“Oh!”

“That's right, Ma'am. And this chappie that rang up had the same voice as me.”

“But …”

“Lucky I was with you, Ma'am. Normally this'd have been my afternoon off, except for Sanderson having the toothache.”

“But who on earth …”

“There's one or two, Ma'am. There's Palace messengers don't hit it off too well with us in Security, for instance. I'd begun to think someone might be trying to lay for one of us.”

“I think that's horrible—much worse than the jokes. But at least there's one good thing, Mr Theale—it means everybody knows you're not the joker now, doesn't it?”

Chapter 7

I
t was a long time since Louise had been “sent for”.

She was in Albert's zoo after school on Friday. It was going to be one of those dispersed weekends for the Family, which Louise so hated. Mother and Nonny were already on their way to Helsinki to open a British Week. Father was off in a couple of hours for a three-day tour of the north-east. Albert was driving down after supper to the Kents—he'd asked himself for the weekend in order to chat up Soppy Windsor; in the long-running Palace sweepstake on the eventual Princess of Wales the wise money was nowadays piling on to Lady Sophia Windsor. Mother had arranged for Louise to go down to the Yorks tomorrow morning, so Louise had arranged to keep her homework till then—it was a good deal more interesting than anything the Yorks were likely to lay on. She'd come to the zoo to tell Albert about Theale and the pianos—she hadn't had a chance earlier, because of his rush of official engagements before the start of his university term.

The zoo had once been King Victor I's gymnasium, built on Queen Mary's insistence and used with some reluctance by the monarch. It was a long, light room on the ground floor at the south-west corner of the Palace, with barred windows and unplastered stone walls. Albert had a laboratory bench against the left wall, but the rest of the space was taken up with tanks and cages. When Louise came in he was coaching his mynah through a Jacobite epigram and wouldn't let Louise speak, so she spent a minute or two watching Fatty, the Blomberg toad, rearranging its bed of leaves in its tank, and then moved on to play with the lion-maned tamarin. This was a new arrival, a creature of extraordinary beauty and appeal, a little gold ape with round blue eyes—slightly pop, like Father's—and tiny, human-seeming hands. It was very tame and would sit on your shoulder and look for nits in your hair; but when you had to put it back in its cage it would press its palms against the glass and wail. Albert had been given it by some South American President, and as soon as protocol allowed was going to pass it on to a larger zoo where it could have the space and company it needed. It was looking for a nut Louise bad bidden in her blouse pocket when the telephone rang.

The mynah broke off its lesson to do a bit of ringing too. Half the other animals, jealous of the attention it got, gibbered or shrieked at it. Louise snatched up the phone and put her finger over her free ear.

“Zoo,” she said.

“Zoo to you too, Lulu,” said Father's voice. “I've been chasing you all round the shop. Could you come along to my office?”

“Coming,” she said, and put the receiver down with a sense of being detached from the racket in the room. When she'd settled the tamarin back into its prison she saw Albert looking at her.

“I've been sent for,” she said.

“Good God!” said Albert.

“Good God!” creaked the mynah.

“Just listen to that,” said Albert. “You spend hours trying to teach it something worthwhile and you get nowhere, and then it goes and picks up a chance swearword it's only heard once. What on earth … Oh, sorry, Lulu, none of my business. Good luck.”

“Good God!” corrected the mynah.

Father's office was diagonally across the courtyard, but of course it was raining. This meant that Louise had to pass through something like a quarter of a mile of corridors and stairs. Though it was almost the weekend there were still plenty of people about, all of whom had to be smiled at as she passed. Don't be stupid, she thought. I haven't done anything wrong and anyway he's only my father with a small f. But still she was … not really frightened, no, but a bit more than nervous. Usually Louise felt not much different as a person from most of her friends—she was sure that all their families were pretty eccentric in some way or other and that princessing was something outside herself; outside the true, inner self—something only on the surface, like having a marvellous figure which made bricklayers whistle at you from scaffolding, or having a fearsome squint which made people on the bus stare for an instant and then look hard at the advertisements—but you could have either of those and still be pretty ordinary inside. Louise was sure that she was ordinary. That didn't change, just because she happened to be a princess and live in a palace. But now, marching along one of those stretches of corridor that felt and smelt more like an elderly, snobby hotel than a home in which real people lived real lives, she became aware of a process that was already beginning to happen to her: as she grew up, princessing would gradually infect the ordinariness, seeping into it, so that by the time she was as old as Mother she'd have stopped being an ordinary person and become an ordinary Princess. Right inside, perhaps, there'd still be a secret Louise, which nobody could reach, and she'd spend all her life defending its last few rights.

At the foot of the stairs up to Father's office she stopped, more for the sake of delaying the moment than in order to stare at the enormous painting of Kaiser Wilhelm greeting Edward VII on the station platform at Berlin. Father insisted on having this hideous thing hung where he could see it every day, because (he said) it was a perfect parable about putting on a show. Apparently Edward had taken it into his head at the last moment to go and visit another part of the train—some pretty lady, Louise thought. He'd still been there when the train stopped, and had climbed out on to a bare platform. Meanwhile, fifty yards along, was the glittering scene of the Kaiser and all his court, red carpet, band for the National Anthems, the works, waiting to greet a king who wasn't there. Edward had seen what was wrong and had climbed back into the train to work his way down inside and emerge at the proper place, but meanwhile somebody at the other end had told the greeting party to look for the King farther back. It had made an awkward start to the visit, to say the least. But the official artist had painted the scene as though everything had gone like clockwork, with the King stepping down onto the carpet to be greeted by his smiling nephew, with the courtiers standing like statues and the band blasting away in the background.

It's part of Father's own defences, Louise thought. It's a way of telling himself every day that putting on a show isn't the real thing. We have to live like that all the time, reminding ourselves … Father's shouting at meals, Mother's accent, Bert's carrots and teasing—they're all ways of giving the inside person a bit more room. Supposing we weren't Royals and Father sent for me—I'd probably call him Dad or something—I might be scared stiff but it wouldn't be like this. One of the reasons why Granny is so frightful is that she can't tell the difference between her inside and her outside. She talks more about being royal than anyone, but she doesn't understand it, not really—and that's why they're all so frightened of her. But I'm not. I'm too ordinary, and I'm going to stay like that. So there.

Father was reading his way through a despatch box with his usual incredible speed. His eye seemed to unzip each page, but at the end he knew what was in it, initialled it and laid it on the pile of ones he'd already read. Every now and then he'd add a scribbled comment. Louise waited by the door, looking round the ambiguous furniture and decor. It was like one of those trick-perspective pictures: stare at it and it looked like the room of a monarch who did a bit of doctoring; blink and stare again and it became the surgery of a doctor who happened to be King. The chaise-longue was a handsome bit of furniture, but the retractable light fitting above it turned it into an examination couch;
Black's Medical Directory
leaned against
The Statesman's Year-book
; on another shelf the wired hand and fore-arm of a skeleton pointed menacingly at the ebony statuette of a naked kneeling woman, souvenir of a royal tour in West Africa; and so on. It was all summed up in Father's favourite toy, which had been given him as a silver jubilee present by his colleagues at the hospital This lay on a special display table and at first glance it looked like a large book open at two dashing James Gunn pictures of an imaginary king and queen. But the pictures were painted on transparent film and so were those beneath them; as you peeled each layer back you found the monarchs first naked, then flayed, then exposing in succession their nervous systems, their innards, their veins and so on down to the bleached and grinning skeletons. Father loved it, but the rest of the Family thought it was disgusting. The room wasn't large or plush, but felt like a place where a lot of work got done.

Father stopped reading, stared at the paper for a moment, then wrote several lines of comment. When he'd added it to the pile he looked up.

“Sorry, Lulu,” he said. “Some clever men can be bloody fools. Durdy says you want to talk to me. Hello, what's up? You don't have to wear that face in here.”

“It's better than bursting into tears,” said Louise. “Oh, hell! Sorry. Read some more despatches.”

It must have been years since she'd last really cried. She let the sore little retching sobs come and go for a minute, then cut them short as sharply as an officer halting his platoon. As she mopped her cheeks she forced the djinn back into its bottle, corked it and threw it into her own deeps. She looked up to see Father watching her.

“I didn't realise things were as bad as that,” he said.

“They aren't. It's just that on the way here I suddenly began to see how trapped we are, all four of us.”

“I'm afraid I can't do much about that, Lulu,” he said in a careful voice, as though he were afraid of seeming impatient. “And you've got to remember we get the hell of a lot out of it. It's stupid to pretend we don't. Whether it's actually worth it depends on who's doing the sums.”

“Yes, I know. I don't know why I burst into tears. I suppose it was everything boiling up, and being sent for …”

“But you asked to be sent for.”

“I know.”

“Well, let's make a start on that. Why?”

“Is there anything wrong with me?”

He didn't seem surprised, but sat looking at her with his head on one side.

“What sort of wrong?” he said at last.

“I don't know. It's … well … did Mother tell you about when I brought her my essay about Elizabeth?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, but you tell me. It was a good essay, she said.”

“I got A minus for it. But that's … You see, we talked about Elizabeth a bit, and then Mother started talking about being loved, and I said I loved her and I sat on her lap and we began to have a bit of a cuddle—it can't have been very comfortable for her but I think she was liking it, and … I'd been thinking about her before, and how marvellous she is, and then I was telling her we don't get enough chance to show each other we're … I suppose a bit more than fond of each other …”

Her voice dribbled away into doubt. He was still looking at her but there was an amused light in his eyes and he had begun to tease the corner of his moustache.

“You'll be all right,” he said. “You're going to be damned attractive. You'll get all the cuddles you want.”

“I'm not talking about that,” she said furiously.

“Sorry, Lulu. I know you're not. It just crossed my mind. But it's more important than you think, whether you like it or not. Carry on.”

“Oh … well there we were, and suddenly Mother noticed how dirty my hands were and when I said I'd been looking at old press cuttings she went all stiff and sent me away. And next time I went to the Library the cuttings were being moved out and Mrs Suttery pretended that she wanted the space…and one or two other things, and Durdy …”

“You don't think we're all entitled to a little privacy, even from each other?”

“Yes, of course. That matters frightfully. But you see … well, look, those press cuttings had been there for ages and anybody could look at them. I know Bert read all about his own birth and Masefield's poem and so on. But as soon as
I
start looking … it's as though there was something which I, specially, mustn't be told about. It's not because there's anything wrong with the thing, but because there's something wrong with me.”

“You haven't got it into your head that you're a haemophilia carrier, Lulu? I give you my word of honour that you aren't.”

“No,” she said. “You said that before, and I know you'd tell me if I was. But look, of course you didn't have to tell me about you and Nonny, but it seems funny Mother telling Bert when he was ten, and then leaving me to guess. It's not as if I mind. In fact, provided Mother thinks it's OK, I think it's a good idea, because it makes Nonny really one of the Family. Sorry. I shouldn't have said all that. That's none of my business.”

“Yes, I see,” he said. “Perhaps we've been a bit clumsy. Certainly Bella over-reacted about the press-cuttings. I thought so at the time, but she was so upset that I let her have them moved. I think one thing I need to know is why you were looking at them in the first place.”

Louise never blushed, but there was an undertone of dry suspicion in his voice that made her feel as if she were going to.

“I wanted to find a picture of Nonny,” she said. “I wanted to know if she was always so beautiful.”

He laughed his big, raucous laugh, a curious sound coming from his neat and slightly pudgy body. She could see him almost yawning with relief as he stretched to open a drawer of his desk. When he flicked the photograph towards her it twisted in the air so that she had to scrabble it off the floor.

It was an old one, originally black and white but now with yellowish tinges. Nonny was sitting on grass. A corner of chequered cloth and a chicken-bone on a paper plate showed that it must be a picnic—not a formal, Royal one, but a bit of non-posh scoff in the open air. She was wearing a very simple polka-dot dress and a hat that was no more than a dark wide halo of brim and looking up into the camera, which must have been held nearly vertically above her. Louise could almost hear her laughter, though even in reality it was only a soundless bubbling of pleasure in herself and the world around her. (You had to know Nonny very well before you found out that her pleasure might not solely spring from the fact that she was talking to you at the time.) She looked about eighteen, but you couldn't tell—she still looked fifteen years younger than she really was.