Sending his own signals, Eddy moves his shoulder slightly forward, shifting the arm with the mourning band, favoring it like a man with a game leg. He actually touches the black cloth. It is some private rigmarole, reflexive but loaded with a meaning he hopes will carry across the abandoned game board. He is not calling attention to his loss — tears form in his eyes, choke his throat, but this is because, like Ginny, whose taxi had been paid for with the last bit of Liam’s cure money, his armband has been purchased with (what?) the last of the mourner money — but to his vulnerability, his madman’s amiable harmlessness. He holds the black armband as if it were a white flag. And Elizabeth II understands. She smiles. Even the footmen seem to have uncovered his intentions. Invisibly, they seem to relax, expel air from their chests, breathe normally as other men.
“Yes?” she says, encouraging him.
“Over two hundred children can be expected to die of rare terminal diseases in Great Britain this year.”
“Oh, my,” says the Queen.
“You should understand that nothing further can be done for them,” Bale says, and he is recovered now, as decorous as if he is addressing a tycoon, a newspaper magnate. “For many of them, additional treatment would make them even more uncomfortable than they already are and only hasten the day of reckoning. In several cases their therapies have already stopped or will shortly. This is at their parents’ request or, in certain instances, at the request of the patients themselves. Their physicians have placed them on a sort of minimum maintenance: restricted diets, courses of high-potency vitamin injections, carefully monitored sleep regimens, even, when the discomfort becomes too great, narcotics on demand.”
“Les pauvres!”
Bale pauses. A peculiar thing has happened. He discovers that, at the crunch, he is unable to bring his argument round, that the kingdom’s foremost beggar, a man who has passed the hat among the nation’s leading industrialists and press lords and brought his case to the public not only through those shameless exclusives he sold but who, in those early days of his son’s illness, even climbed soapboxes in Hyde Park Corner and accepted Liam’s weight from Ginny, handing the child up to him at the end of his spiel as if the boy were conclusive, telling evidence in a legal proceeding, and who on one occasion actually walked along beside the buskers working the crowds in London’s theater district, Liam’s sad legend printed carefully across a sandwich board — this man is suddenly and quite inexplicably mute in the presence of a woman who, to judge from her assenting clucks and royal coos, is already sympathetic, predisposed toward the children who are now his cause. Perhaps he feels himself an intruder, inhibited by the wealth she represents, the difference her sympathies could make. Perhaps he is having second thoughts — indecisive at the last moment as a child choosing which chocolate to take from a box. Perhaps that’s it, that he’s caught among need’s swerving priorities, its competing demands on good men. Or that what he feels are the once- burned-twice-cautious misgivings of the wish-privileged in tales, and what he’s searching for is precise language, seeking to clause request in legalese, to seal it in the metric measurements of ironclad engagement. (But Bale knows. He is frozen by the peculiar kicks of juxtaposition, the odd sense he has always had of misalliance, incongruence, all the thrilling, discrepant mysteries and asymmetries of disrupt geometry. Once, before Liam had become ill, he and Ginny had left the child with an aunt to go on holiday with friends to the French Riviera. In Nice, quite by accident, they had come upon one of the nude beaches. “When in France…” his friend’s wife had said and removed the halter of her bathing suit. He had known the woman for years and, though she had always been attractive, he could not recall ever having thought about her sexually. Afterward, back in London, he could not look at her without remembering how she had appeared to him on that beach in Nice. Nor was he particularly aroused at the time. What he subsequently could not forget was that he had seen his friend’s wife’s breasts. He had never touched her, yet he could not get the incident out of his mind, and a part of him believed, and believes still, that he had somehow cuckolded the husband. What he felt, God help him, was a sort of pride. Another time, before he ever met Ginny, he had lived for a while with a girl named Ruth. They’d led a placid, almost deferential life together, each conveying to the other a wish to please. They never argued; were, for the six or seven months they’d been together, completely at ease, agreeable as twins. Only once, when a package they’d been expecting arrived at the flat, did they come anywhere close to quarreling. Ruth had gone to the door to accept the delivery. “Look, Eddy,” she said coming into the lounge, “the bed lamp from Heal’s, I think.” Bale took the carefully wrapped package and began to tug at the cord which bound it. It was strong stuff and he was having difficulty. “I’d better get a knife,” he said and got up from the couch on which he’d been sitting and started toward the kitchen. “Oh, don’t bother, luv,” Ruth said, “I’ll manage.” He turned to look. The tough cord snapped in her hands like a biscuit. “How’d you do that?” Bale asked. “Look,” she said, “it’s the lamp, all right, but the nits have sent us the wrong color. This one is green.” “How’d you do that?” Bale repeated. “Do what?” “Break the cord like that.” “Well, I don’t know. I guess I just pulled extra hard.” He took up the cord from where it lay on the floor and wrapped it around his hands. He couldn’t break it. “You’re trying to jerk it,” Ruth said. “Just pull. Here, see?” The cord seemed to stretch like elastic. She broke it effortlessly. They’d never argued, never fought. Without thinking about what he was doing, Eddy reached out with his open palm and tried to slap her. Instinctively she caught his hand and forced it down. She’s stronger than me, Bale thought. It’s not even a goddamn contest. Afterward it was Ruth who was embarrassed. “I’ll make us some tea,” she said. When she returned with the tea he wouldn’t drink it, and though neither ever alluded to the incident, Eddy was never again comfortable with her. It was the disparity, the misalliance, his nervous apprehension of her great physical strength, which he found at once threatening and compelling and with which he had become strangely obsessed, that made him move out. He was ashamed of himself, repelled by his new attraction for her.
(Now the cat has his tongue because this queen has once again kindled the disparities, stunned and bewildered him by the Mutt and Jeff arrangements of the world, the absolute unapartheid provisions and tableaux he so yearns for and dreads, the surreal displacements of his heart.)
“What I want,” he begins carefully, “what is needed—”
“May I go with them, Ma’am?” It’s the little boy. He’s seated to Eddy’s side and slightly behind him, one leg comfortably crossed over the other, swinging freely, at once as poised and at ease as an assistant brought back in an illusion. “With Mister Bale and the sick children? The little dying boys and girls? May I, Ma’am? May I? To Disney World? On their dream holiday? Oh, I hope so. I hope I may! There’s nothing to do in the palace.”