And now it is the Queen of England who does not have his attention. She taps a Scrabble tile lightly against the game board.
“Oh,” Bale startles. “Forgive me, Majesty.” And begins (not without wondering whether it isn’t being in a palace which has somehow caused his — their — lapse, the trance, the magic narcotics of his frozen animation: Has a century passed? Is Elizabeth still queen? Has the boy come into his inheritance by now? Enjoyed his tenure and relinquished it to a child itself no longer a child who for his part has handed over the depleted yet intact privilege of his title to the next in line in the orderly take-turn, marathon sequences of life and death? Is the kid ancestorized now, his portrait in uniform hung in a hall?) to tell his schemes.
“When I realized,” he says, interrupting himself, overriding his improbable, inopportune parentheticals, “we had pretty well come to the limits of my son’s medical options, I began to question whether he had been justly served. My wife, Ginny, and I had embarked on this search for a cure for what we’d been told at the outset was incurable. After the docs had conferred, after the second opinions, after the tests and operations and experiments, I began to see that Liam was really no better off than when his difficulties had been first confirmed in those initial interviews with the doctors in that first surgery of the National Health. Worse off, really. For by now the invasive procedures had been introduced. They beat my kid up, Your Royal Highness. With the best will in the world they worked him over. They took off his hair with their toxins and gave his liver third-degree burns. They softened his bones like modeling clay and grew little ulcers in his gut. They turned his blood into dishwater. They caused him such pain, Monarch. It’s not as if they didn’t warn us about the side effects. Every other word out of their faces was side effects: diarrhea, nausea, depression, and drowsiness”—and has some idea where his vagrant notion of a spell had come from just now—“weakness, fatigue. And everything with his parents’ permission. All, all of it approved at the outset, Sovereign, the sacrifice added to his sickness like a cover charge, risk built into his bill like the V.A.T. We were dippy for risk, spellbound — enchanted, I mean. Desperation whips up courage. It clothes consequence and dresses the bogeyman in high fashion. Oh, I think we were mad. Into science like astrology. Beside ourselves as gamblers doubling up on their bets. You’re ruler here, Ma’am. Tell me, is there a law of diminished returns? Should you hope with your head? Wouldn’t we have been better off if we’d boarded the ship for the sunny isles? Chosen the course of the stubborn old bastards, the ones who stuff pleasure into their winding sheets like a sort of Egyptians — port and cigars and a pinch for the nurses that doesn’t just elevate blood pressure but positively launches it? Hey, the only thing my kid never lost was his looks. Those he had on his deathbed. You saw his pictures, you followed his case. Did he go like a goner? Did he look like one? Teenage girls wanted his autograph. He was dreamy as a rock star, they said. Wouldn’t we have been better off to have given him a cram course in debauchery? Whatever it took? The rarest dishes and the richest sauces? Ardor, toys, and all the final cigarettes and secret wishes of his imagination?
“Well. You see what I mean. Where we went wrong. We never rewarded him for his death. He should have lived like a crown prince, Queen. We should have sent him off to hunt in a red coat. We should have brought him to opera and sat him in boxes. We should have hijacked the sweet shoppe and turned him loose at the fair. We ought have sent him on picnics with hampers of ice cream. We should have ground his teeth down on scones and flan and ruined his eyes on the telly. We should have sent him to sleep past his bedtime. We should have burned him out on his life, Dynast. We should have bored him to death.”
“Oh, I say,” the Queen says, clutching her purse. Bale knows that the woman — he recalls her odd patience with weather from photographs, news clips, her jungle and rain-forest tranquillity, her snowstorm serenity, her comfort in climate — has seen it all but wonders how much she’s heard. He senses her alarm, is alarmed himself. This is not the way he presents himself to patrons. With financiers he is reserved, refined as their boardrooms, sedate as a bank. Only to his suzerain has he said these things. Nor, till now, has he given much thought to his distinction, all that’s been granted him: his private audience with his Queen, his presence in the strange, off-limits room. He’s never seen it in photographs and cannot now remember how he reached it, has only a vague memory of having climbed a staircase, come down a corridor, rather, he imagines, like the corridors in First Class on good steamships, a queer notion of being pulled along. Yes, he thinks, in the wake of the beautiful young woman, sluiced as wood, debris, sucked and maelstrom’d, shipwrecked, beached. Even the sight of his Queen’s pocketbook strikes him as not only the most informal thing he has ever seen but the most intimate as well. I saw her cheat, he thinks, then wonders, My God, did that set me off? I am mad, I am. I’m lucky she don’t call the coppers. Which, he sees now, is not quite the case. Footmen have appeared. They stand along the walls in their livery, their rococo chests puffed as the breasts of birds. Bale is certain they have been signaled, high-signed. Or perhaps the room is wired.