The Business

And, dolt that I am, I swear that I still had absolutely no idea what was coming next.

'Kathryn,' he said, 'will you marry me?'

I stared at him.  For a while. 'Wi — Will I…?' I said, eloquently.  Then I felt my eyes narrow.  'Are you serious?'

'Of course I am serious!' the Prince squeaked, then looked surprised. 'Of course,' he said, in a normal voice.

'I…I…Suvinder…Prince…I…'

He searched my eyes. 'Oh, dear, this has been a complete surprise to you, hasn't it?'

I nodded. 'Well, ah, yes.' I gulped. 'I mean, it is.'

'Have I made a complete fool of myself, Kathryn?' he asked, his gaze dropping.

'Prince, I…' I took a deep breath.  How do you really, clearly, kindly say to someone you've come to like — even like quite a lot — that you just don't love them and so, no, of course you don't want to marry them? 'No, of course you haven't made a fool of yourself, Suvinder.  I'm very, very flattered that you —'

He turned sideways in his seat, crossing his legs and arms and casting his gaze to the sky. 'Oh, Prince,' I said, recalling the drunken call in Blysecrag a few weeks earlier. 'I know people have said this sort of thing to you before, used these words.  But I mean it.  I'm not just trying to be kind.  I like you a lot, and I know how much you must have…but hold on.  I mean, you can't marry a commoner anyway, can you?'

'I can marry whom I like,' he said resentfully, scratching at the tablecloth with one fingernail as though trying to remove an invisible stain. 'My mother and anybody else can go hang.  Tradition implies I must marry a princess or someone similar, but there is nothing but this…succession of precedents.  From an age when there were many more princesses around.  This is the twentieth century.  My God, it is almost the twenty-first century.  I am not unpopular.  I have taken the precaution, even though I have resented it, of gauging the reaction of people to you.  Ordinary people seem to like you.  My ministers do.  The Rinpoche Beies was most taken with you and thought we would be most happy.  So it would be a popular match.' He sighed. 'But I should have known.'

'Hold on, they don't know, do they?'

He glanced at me. 'Of course.  Well, not the ordinary people.  But I told the cabinet members in the plane on the way to Thuhn, and the Rinpoche before the reception the other night.'

'Oh, my god.' I sat back, stunned.  I remembered them all nodding at me, smiling and nodding at me.  They weren't just being friendly.  They were sizing me up!

'What about your mother?'

'Her I was leaving till later,' Suvinder admitted.

An appalling suspicion began to form in my mind. 'Who else knows?' I asked, keeping my voice cold and flat.

He turned to me. ' A few people.  Not many.  All most discreet.' He sounded bitter as he said, 'Why?  Are you so ashamed that I have asked you to marry me?'

'I said I was flattered.  I think I still am, but I mean does anybody in the Business know?'

He looked defensive. 'I don't know.  No, I mean, one or two, perhaps, knew that I, that I might…' His voice trailed off.

I stood up. 'This was all meant, wasn't it?'

He rose too, reaching out to take my hands in his while his napkin fell to the grass. 'Oh, Kathryn!' he cried. 'Do you really think so?'

I jerked my hands away. 'No, by the Business, you idiot!'

He looked mystified and hurt. 'What do you mean?'

I stood there and looked very carefully into his eyes.  There was a lot of stuff going through my mind in those moments, none of it nice and some of it positively paranoid.  So this was what they meant by thinking on your feet. 'Prince,' I said eventually, 'is this the way the Business makes sure that Thulahn is really theirs?  By having me marry you?  Did they suggest this?  Did any of them — Dessous, Cholongai, Hazleton - did they even hint that this might be a good idea?'

Suvinder looked as if he was about to weep. 'Well, not…'

'Not in so many words?' I suggested.

'Well, I think they know I…that I have very strong feelings for you.  I did not…And they did not…'

I don't think I have ever seen a man look so abject.

Sometimes you just have to trust your feelings.  I reached out and took his hand. 'Suvinder, I'm sorry that the answer is no.  I like you, and I hope you will stay my friend, and I accept that it was a sincere offer, from the heart.  And I'm sorry I called you an idiot.'

His eyes glistened as they looked at me.  He gave a small and sorry smile, then lowered his head until I couldn't see his eyes. 'I'm sorry I didn't protest when you did,' Suvinder mumbled at the table.  I looked down at the white tablecloth, in the man's shadow, directly under his face.  A clear droplet hit the linen surface, darkening it and spreading.  He turned away with a sniff and walked off a little way, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket.

'Suvinder?'

'Yes?' he said, still not turning to look at me.  He blew his nose.

'I am so sorry.

He waved one hand and shrugged.  He carefully folded the handkerchief again.

'Look,' I said, 'why not tell people that I'm thinking about it?'

He looked back with a smile. 'What would be the point of that?'

'It might…No, you're right, it's a stupid idea.'

He returned to the table, pocketing the hanky and taking a deep breath, his head high. 'Oh, look at us, eh?  I am ashamed at myself for spoiling a perfectly good picnic, ruining a most pleasant holiday.'

'You haven't ruined anything, Suvinder,' I said, as he held my seat for me.

'Good.  I must say, I'm still hungry.  Let us eat, shall we?'

'Let's.'

He hesitated as he was about to take his seat. 'May I say one more thing?  Then I promise never to raise the subject again.'

'All right.'

'I think I love you, Kathryn.' He paused. 'But that is not why I asked you to marry me.'

'Oh,' I said.

'I asked you to marry me because I think you will make a wonderful wife and because you are somebody I can imagine being with for the rest of my life, when perhaps love, of a sort, of a very important and special sort, might grow between us.  I think it is wonderfully romantic to marry for love alone, but I have seen so many people do so and live to regret it.  There are some lucky people, no doubt, for whom everything works out just perfectly, but I have never met any.  For most people, I think, to marry for love is to marry…at the summit, as it were.  It must be downhill from there on.  To marry for other reasons, with one's head and not just one's heart, is to embark on a different sort of journey, uphill, I suppose,' he said, looking embarrassed. 'My goodness, I do not choose my metaphors so well, do I?  But it is a journey which offers the hope that things will become gradually better and better between the people concerned.' He spread his hands and gave a sharp sort of laugh. 'There.  My thoughts on the Western romantic marriage ideal.  I did not put it, or rather them, very well, but there you are.  No more.'

'You put it just fine, Suvinder,' I told him.

'I did?' he said, pouring some more tea from the padded pot. 'Oh, good.  Please, another sandwich?  We cannot feed them all to the birds.'

Even moving higher than Thuhn, scaling tracks that seemed to zigzag up for ever to still higher valleys, you could find yourself beneath the lowest limit of an animal's domain; snow leopards that lived perpetually above the tree line and bharals that even in winter never descended below four thousand metres.

'You what?  You go to this remote Himalayan kingdom, the Prince proposes to you and you turn him down?  Are you fucking insane?'

'Of course I turned him down.  I don't love him.'

'Ah, so what?  Say yes anyway.  What girl gets a chance to marry a prince these days?  Think of your grandchildren!'

'I don't want grandchildren.  I don't want children!'

'Yes, you do.'

'No, I don't.'