‘You can’t blame television. At least he’s his own self when he’s being Nero. Maybe I should get him a bigger screen.’
‘That just puts the problem off for another year.’
‘There’s no time like the future,’ the Grand Duke said.
‘I say deal with it now.’
‘And get him to do what with his time instead? Read about wizards?’
‘Help you to rip the wires out of the palace for a start.’
‘For the thousandth time – there are no wires. It’s all done by electromagnetic waves.’
‘Rip the electromagnetic waves out then. They’re brain-cancer forming, anyway.’
‘There’s no proof of that.’
‘Our son’s the proof of that.’
‘I have a better idea. He’s eighteen. You know what he needs…’
‘Renzo, he might as well be eight.’
‘You still know what he needs…’
The Grand Duchess turned her face away.
Later that very evening Prince Fracassus was sitting with his father in the latter’s favourite gentlemen’s club. No one asked questions about Fracassus’s age.
If the evening saw Fracassus bobbing on uncharted waters, the morning saw him landed on a tropic isle.
He was used to waking with an erection and attributed it to the hours he’d just passed in his own company. But this morning he awoke to an unaccustomed sensation: when he looked at his erection he thought of someone else.
Great boner, he tweeted. Must be love.
CHAPTER XIV
When my love swears that she is made of truth…
‘After all that talk about prostitutes,’ Professor Probrius laughed, ‘you’d think he’d know how to find one.’
Dr Cobalt gently demurred. ‘You could say that’s to his credit.’
‘The Grand Duke is said to be distraught.’
‘Why distraught? You can’t be telling me he had his heart set on his son settling down with a prostitute.’
‘I don’t know about “settling down”. But whatever he had his heart set on, Fracassius has apparently broken it now.’
‘But not his mother’s, I suspect.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Most mothers aren’t troubled by their sons enjoying the company of women of easy virtue. They keep the channels of affection free for them. It’s feminists they’re frightened of.’
‘Do we know she’s a feminist?’
‘That’s the rumour. And a graduate into the bargain. Dark haired, too. And wears trousers. A dark haired feminist graduate with trousers and her own views. It couldn’t be worse.’
The furore – for no other word could do justice to the amazement and conjecture that spread from the basement of the Palace to the 200th floor – had a simple explanation. After a conversation lasting no more than fifteen minutes, Fracassus had asked the girl looking after the coats at his father’s club to marry him.
Prior to that, Fracassus had looked pleased enough with the company his father had found for him. Tactfully making his excuses, the Grand Duke had slid away, leaving his son in the company of women who gave a new meaning to the word classy. Tall, tanned, teetering, lustrous-lipped, generously implanted, and smelling of the best department stores, they entwined themselves around the Prince, who sat on a swing seat at the bar, swivelling to greet every new addition. They petted him. They blew in his ears, two at a time. Like butterflies skimming a flower, they brushed his lips with theirs, each passing on the nectar the others had collected. Looking for a way of describing how his mouth felt, Fracassus hit upon the image of a jam sandwich. He closed his eyes and swung his seat. Singly or in any combination his young manhood could devise, the women exhaled promise. Dr Cobalt had given him the words to describe their profession; now he had the plethorous Platonic reality of which the words were but shadows.
So why wasn’t he as carried away by the women as his father had every reason to suppose he would be?
They reminded him of his mother.
That was not a reason to give up on them altogether. Fracassus was not a boat burner. On many an evening watching slave girls dropping grapes down Nero’s throat he had succeeded in dispelling his mother’s likeness. It was a matter of narrowing his eyes and letting the blue flicker send him half to sleep. And anyway, in Nero’s world mothers and hookers freely swapped roles. So when he rose to go to the men’s room it wasn’t with the definite intention of not returning. But he had not counted on meeting the girl who took the coats. Rounded where the women he had left behind were willowed, dumpy where they attenuated, to all intents and purposes blind in that she hid behind owlish spectacles where the girls at the bar had shooting stars for eyes, and wearing trousers instead of a snow-fairy dress – it must be remembered that Fracassus had never in his life seen a woman wearing trousers before – she struck him with the sort of force that persuades some men to give their lives to god. That she did not in any way remind him of his mother was of course part of it; but it was her voice and confidence that overwhelmed him. She had the assurance to be frumpy. She had the self-possession to be bossy. Her voice, unlike that of any woman he had ever met, including Dr Cobalt, was not modulated to please. You could take her or you could leave her. Fracassus had been waited on hand and foot, but here was someone not in the slightest bit overwhelmed by his rank or apologetic about her own. It was either punch her in the face or fall in love.
Status seemed nothing to her. He was a Prince and she was a cloakroom attendant. So what? The job she was doing just happened to be the job she was doing. She wasn’t defined by taking coats. What was his excuse?
Fracassus asked her to leave the coats – he’d buy everone a new one – and join him at the bar. He was surprised by his own temerity. She frightened him, but made him comfortable at the same time. It was not permissible, she said in the most matter-of-fact way, for a person not a prostitute to join a club member at the bar. But if he wanted to wait for her she knew a little place she could take him too later. No red velvet. No crystal glasses. No tarts. ‘Will other women there be wearing trousers?’ he asked. She thought it likely. ‘Then I’ll wait for you,’ he said.
Her name was Sojjourner, she told him. With a double j.
The reason she wasn’t defined by taking coats, she explained over coffee in a paper cup and a cheeseburger on a plastic plate, was that she did it only to finance her studies. Fracassus looked deep into her owl-eyes and saw book shelves. ‘Have you ever finished a whole book?’ he asked. She laughed inordinately, throwing back her head and rolling her whole person. ‘A few,’ she said. ‘I’m even writing one.’
A great fear swept across the open plains of the Prince’s mind. Should he ask what her book was about? What if she told him?
Did it matter? He had got to this age well enough, never understanding anyone’s answer to a question. These things evened themselves out. She would never understand his world. They could not understand each other together. He saw their future: he watching a beauty pageant on television, she sitting on his knee and writing her book. Children? Yes, if he concentrated hard enough. He saw a young Fracassus watching a beauty pageant on television. And a small Sojjourner, dressed like her grandmother the Grand Duchess, winning Young Miss Urbs-Ludus.
‘You’ve gone somewhere,’ the real Sojjourner said.
‘I was thinking.’
‘About the women waiting for you at the bar?’
Fracassus looked away. ‘They’re not my type,’ he said. ‘They don’t read books.’
‘Can you be sure of that? How do you know they’re not financing their studies like me? It’s hard for a woman to get a grant. Prostitution is just one of the ways women get by in a man’s world. From a feminist perspective, prostitution in such a case can be a valid choice and is to be differentiated from coerced sex-working, which is not to deny that it reinforces a negative stereotype of women in a way that harms both sexes.’