‘Proceed as you think fit, Clint. And you said you were following through with our royal coverage.’
‘I’m on it, Chief.’
‘It warms your heart, doesn’t it, Clint. We always assumed that the royals were felt to be an irrelevance — an anachronism. And old Queen Pam, of course, was a rather forbidding figure. But now she’s been gone for two years, and what with the Princess flowering into maturity, there’s been a tremendous upsurge of affectionate interest — reflected in Mackelyne’s figures — across the entire spectrum of our wankership.’
‘Yeah well what it is is, now that Vicky needs a bra, it’s reminded them that Henry’s still on bread and water. They think it’s time he started getting stuck in again.’
‘You think?
‘Read Smoker on Saturday. Long think-piece.’
‘Title?’
‘“Is The King Normal?”’
3. Excalibur
He was in a ridiculous situation.
On the day of his birth the guns of the Royal Fleet all over the world boomed forth their joy. ‘Our thoughts go out’, said Churchill in the House of Commons (the Second World War was in memory yet green), ‘to the mother and father and, in a special way, to the little Prince, now born into this world of strife and storm.’ He was only a few hours old when he made headlines in every language and every alphabet. At school he discovered that his father’s face was on the coins he presented at the tuckshop, and on the stamps he used to send his letters home. Before his visit, as a twelve-year-old, to Papua New Guinea, the island tomtoms sounded all night long. He was still a teenager when he represented his country at the funeral of Charles de Gaulle: he stood between Mrs Gandhi and Richard Nixon. Then came majority, marriage, murder — and the crown: the recognition, the oath, the anointing, the investiture, the enthronement, the homage.
All his personal dramas were national dramas. He was in a ridiculous situation. He was the King of England.
Henry IX was staying at the Greater House, his unheatable 300-room drum in Southern Hertfordshire. He had dined à deux with his little brother, Prince Alfred, Duke of Clarence, in the private room of a three-star restaurant on the Strand.
‘The barman here, Felix, is absolutely marvellous,’ he had said. ‘He makes a truly splendid drink called a Scorpion. Ah, there you are. Two Scorpions! No: make that four Scorpions … Now tell me, dear boy. Are you going to merry this “Lyn” of yours?’
‘You know, old thing, I don’t see how I can marry anyone.’
‘Why ever not, you ass?’
‘Because I’m such a disgusting lech. We all are. Except you. Old chap.’
‘… Now where are those Scorpions?’
The words stayed with him. And as he sat up, alone, at home (before the fire, under a heap of rugs and dogs), waiting for Bugger’s call, Henry thought: yes, true enough. And why? Prince Alfred, at forty-nine, was still the hyperactive satyromaniac he had been from the age of thirteen (when he raped his first housemaid). His father, Richard IV, had gratified epic appetites, before his late marriage; and his grandfather, John II, was a notorious debauchee. And Henry IX?
By the time he reached his twentieth year, the Prince of Wales, as he then was, showed no more interest in sexual intercourse than he showed in polo or parachuting. He had a hectic and quite drunken social life, and many women friends. What, then, made him decline or ignore the countless importunities, ranging from the near-undetectable to the melodramatic, that tended to come a prince’s way? It seemed to be nothing more complicated than fear of effort. A concerned Richard IV, abetted by the Queen Consort, arranged for the Prince to be visited by a lady-in-waiting — a young widow called Edith Beresford-Hale. Edith surprised Henry one night in the Kyle of Tongue. The Prince had retired after a damaging night with the forty or fifty ‘guns’ who had come up to scrag his wildlife. Of course, Henry himself never had anything to do with that. But he gamely went along with Edith Beresford-Hale. She bounced him around on top of her for a couple of minutes; then there was a smell of fire-tinged male changing-rooms, and Edith made a joke.
Then the Prince did what the King and Queen had by no means intended. He fell in love with Edith — or, at any rate, he confined himself to Edith. Though press and public assumed that he was sleeping with at least one or two of the young beauties he frequently squired, Henry was faithful for the next five years. He looked in on Edith about three times a month. She was thirty-one, and of comfortable figure and temperament. Not unlike his mother: the tweed skirt, the hardwearing shoes.
So Henry was in his mid-twenties when he began to be disquieted by a younger friend: the Honourable Pamela North. He gave Edith a house, a world cruise, and a pension, and started paying court to Pamela. On the day after the Royal Wedding (and a princely marriage, said Bagehot, was the most brilliant edition of a universal fact) Henry wrote to his brother, Prince Alfred: ‘Everything was plain sailing, which was a relief. You saw when I kissed her on the balcony and the crowd went absolutely bonkers? Well, it was a bit like that in the bedroom. I felt the country’s expectations on my shoulders, albeit in a rather agreeable way. I felt them urging me on. And everything was plain sailing. You know what I mean: I was very good!’ And how could it have been otherwise, on that night, with his blood so thrilled and brimmed by the people’s love?
The Prince had just turned twenty-seven when Richard was blown apart on a fishing-boat off the west coast of Ireland. Also on board was the King’s cousin, who was the last Viceroy of India (and its first Governor-General); thus the murders had many claimants — Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and so on, as well as the more obvious and proximate suspects … Nevertheless, this period, with all its magnified emotion (emotion magnified by fifty million), saw Henry at his erotic apogee. England celebrated the Coronation in a mood of fierce defiance and euphoria; and the power-surge, for Henry IX, was carried over into the royal bed, with its gilt posts, its four boules bearing ducal crowns, its tester of purple satin embroidered with lilies, garters and portcullises, its valance of cloth of gold. During their second honeymoon, on the Royal Yacht, as the royal couple sat at table, serenaded by a romantic medley from a band of Royal Marines, Henry smiled sternly at Pamela when the hour of retirement drew near. Sexually, being king got him safely into his thirties (for a while, one of his many nicknames was Excalibur). But by now they were ‘trying’ for an heir…
After the birth of the Princess Victoria, Henry’s lovelife no longer looked to the calendar and the lunar cycle: now it looked to the appointment-book. This duty-roster approach became a habit. It was, of course, a bad habit. Love was by royal appointment, just like everything else. And the male, even the royal male, the most brilliant edition, cannot do this. He cannot master it: expectation — the appointment with expectation. On top of all this, Pamela, as she got older, looked more and more unmistakably like a man.
One afternoon, at five past three, the Queen Consort said, with gruff puzzlement: ‘What’s the matter with it, Hotty? Oh come on, this is hopeless!’ … And that was all it took. Not a single second of his waking life had a thing in common with anyone else’s, but Henry’s vulnerability, at least, was universal; here he came down from the mountain and took his chances among his fellow men. What was the matter with it? Good question. From this time forth, whenever the King saw a ‘3pm: Pammy’ on his schedule, he felt a force settle on his chest, like a harness; and it wouldn’t slacken until the rendezvous upstairs had somehow been survived. He searched his memory for a precursor of this apprehension, for he knew it to be there. Yes. The hours leading up to an earlier rendezvous, also by appointment: when he went to the housemaster’s study to be thrashed.