‘The presence of the media …’
He paused. And continued:
‘… simultaneously cheapens and confuses one’s sufferings. Of course I am moved, of course I am shaken. But must I display my wounds to the camera? And this is when they are at their most respectful! “Don’t be afraid to shed a tear, Your Majesty”! It makes one want to vom. More and more viscerally do I feel that the media are base violators who poison everything they touch.’
He paused. How had Bugger put it? ‘The Princess should be told’, Urquhart-Gordon had said, ‘that there may have been a breach of her privacy.’ No, thought Henry: too early for that. And continued: ‘It seems to me that we two ought to have a “peptalk” on this very subject, and on security in general; I will come on Saturday (5th), and we can have a lovely chat in that perfectly decent hotel.’
There followed a fantastic display of diminutives and endearments.
Henry then rang for Love.
At Royston they began to slow. Up ahead, in an almost invisibly fine mist, lay the siding where large-eyed Urquhart-Gordon now stood with a lone detective. And the black car, beyond, with its driver. The train was still moving when Brendan climbed aboard.
Henry IX said, ‘Give me the bad first, that good may come of it.’
‘The discouraging news, sir, is that the photograph is not, in fact, a photograph.’ Brendan composed the sleek lines of his eager, clever face. ‘It is a still.’
He had mentally set aside quite a few seconds for Henry to take this in. And the King’s head actually idled on its base for a full half-minute before he murmured,
‘From a film.’
‘Well, yes, sir. From a film.’
Brendan heard Henry’s sigh — long and searching, with a muted whimper at the end of it.
‘From a DVD DigiCam 5000, to be precise, sir.’
‘You know, Bugger: I hope this comet or whatever it is smeshes us all to smithereens.’
‘It won’t smash us, sir. If it hits it’ll burn us.’
‘Even better. Hellfire. It’s no less than we deserve.’
Now Brendan contemplated his monarch. It seemed a nice question: in a life so straitened, so predetermined, so locked down — you’d have thought that there was no room at all for individual variance. But Henry was an established royal anomaly. Unlike his father, Richard IV, and his brother, the Duke of Clarence, and unlike so many other males in their line, Henry had piloted no jets or helicopters, commanded no icebreakers or minesweepers, drilled no troops, bunked in no submarines, simulated no fighter-evasion sorties, parachuted athwart no mountainsides. Nor did he share his house’s enthusiasm for horticulture, music, hunting, practical jokes and eastern faiths. Henry had merely loafed his way through a geography degree at Oxford and then got on with his social life. Even before he acceded, of course, his diary was plagued with ‘functions’, and he continued to shirk and chuck as many as he could. But the minimum was already a very great deal. Brendan thought that half the secret of the royal existence lay in the fact that it was quite unbelievably boring. You became a man of action to counterbalance this; you sought danger, exertion, intense states. And you busied yourself with arcana, with obsessional crankery — anything that would fill your mind. Henry was defenceless. He simply endured it, all the boredom, like a daily dose of chemotherapy.
Unlike his numerical predecessor, that glittering Renaissance prince, who was interested in astronomy, theology, mathematics, military science, navigation, oratory, modern and ancient languages, cartography and poetry, Henry IX was interested in watching television — or in staying still while it was on. Two years earlier, Brendan would have said that the King, at fifty-one, was senescent with ennui. For some reason his preternatural indolence endeared him to the million, and he had always been popular, despite everything (the gaffes, the insensitivity, the fathomless ignorance). They liked his frown, his blink, his sandy mop. Nowadays his numbers had in fact slightly dipped from their usual 75 per cent. The public didn’t want to see their king trudging down hospital corridors and having fiendishly strained conversations with turbaned community-leaders. They wanted to see him fast asleep at the races.
‘I went to her bedroom,’ said Henry vaguely. ‘It’s still a zoo of cuddly toys. She’s still so little, Bugger …’
Brendan reached for and unlocked his steel briefcase. ‘Sir, we’re somewhat further for’ard than we were. We think we have the location.’
‘The location?’
‘See, sir.’
Again the photograph — with the body of the Princess whited out of it. Though he recognised the propriety of the excision, Henry suffered a moment of snowblind alarm. Where had she gone? Whited out, like a mummy, like a ghost.
‘I thought we’d have to start by trawling through every bathroom in all the royal households, looking for that tub, that mirror, that basin, in that particular alignment. But Oughtred’s people have rather brilliantly narrowed it down. Look, sir. To the Princess’s left is a bar of soap in its dish.’
Brendan paused, giving Henry time to say,
‘Are you telling me that this is the only royal bathroom with a cake of soap in it?’
‘No, sir.’ Brendan dipped into his case and was presently unscrolling what seemed to be a poster or a silkscreen: twenty by twenty, and glossy to the point of liquefaction, and all white.
‘And what may I ask is this?’
‘The bar of soap, sir. Or rather a detail from it: the crest.’
Henry stared into the swimming cream.
‘It’s rather worn down, sir, but you see the indentation. A lily. Three petals bound together. The fleur-de-lis. That’s the brand the household uses at Cap d’Antibes. The Princess holidayed with you there for two weeks in August. And that, I submit, sir, was when her seclusion was surprised.’
‘That’s a pretty way of describing what I consider to be a capital crime, Bugger. Well then. Now what?’
Brendan had never seen it before: the King with a kingly air. He said, ‘With your permission, Your Majesty, Oughtred and I fly to Nice tonight.’
‘Given … Oh, poor darling.’
The two men listened to the train as it slowly rocked and knocked … Brendan considered. Victoria England, naturally, had already been the theme of many a national furore. The first of them erupted when she was seventeen days old: a sacked nanny claimed she had walked out because the Queen refused to practise ‘demand’ feeding. Six months later the country was similarly divided on the question of whether the Princess was ready to be weaned. And so on. Should she be allowed to ride a training-bike indoors without a crash-helmet? Should she be eating fast food on school outings? Should she have worn ‘that’ miniskirt at the ill-fated ‘Dunsinane Disco’? It was at this stage (the Princess was eleven) that Brendan started to detect a half-conscious salacity in the native fixation. No, not salacity: something indecent, but innocently indecent. When she turned twelve there was a sudden crossfire of think-pieces on the arguable virtues of a) sanitary napkins, and b) riding sidesaddle — in which the Princess was of course never mentioned. You could feel it gathering, building; it was on the people’s mind: Victoria poised between childhood and nubility. So much disquiet, concentrated on the precious membrane of the Princess … Brendan thought that the relationship between the English and the Englands was incestuous and narcissistic but essentially subliminal (sub: under; limin-: threshold); down there all was obscure, sunless, moonless, starless.