Shoeless, she was smaller, now, and he was correspondingly augmented, when he took her in his arms. He whispered what he had to say, and He whispered back. And He said she understood.
It was with sound, with a whisper, that she had first enticed him; and although the faculties of touch, taste, smell and sight, He maintained, could be reasonably well served in erotic play, what of the sense of hearing? In her view, the use of mots gros, of verbal cochoneries, was a plausible but ultimately misguided attempt to redress the deficit. Dirty talk was sadomasochism without the sticks and stones; and the King, clearly, wasn’t that kind of animal. He Zizhen, who moaned so musically among the pillows, additionally deployed the geisha device, rin no tama; Henry did not enquire too closely (it seemed to be a ball within a ball suspended in liquid), and he never sensed the slightest obstruction; he felt, however, that he was pacing or jogging or sprinting (this would depend on the gear she’d put him in) through the shallows of a tropical swamp. There was another office she performed noisily, even deafeningly — to the great joy of the King … Once, slumped in a deckchair on the Royal Yacht, he had awoken to this sound: it was the swimming-pool, slopping and gulping, smacking its lips, a storm within a storm on the Bay of Biscay. He had stared out, and the brawny herring-gulls looked like sparrows before the great carry of the waves.
Now in his grandfather’s gazebo he lay back helplessly, like a child being changed. Soon (he thought) we will enter He, and she will sigh so prettily. And that is everything, everything: just to kiss and to say the name, whispering ‘Her’. Which was how you said it. Which was the sound of who He was.
‘I didn’t think it my place’, said Love, with a stretched look in his neck and forehead, ‘to confront His Majesty with it, sir. And God knows we get enough eccentrics. But the tone of it, sir, I thought …’
‘I’m quite sure you’re doing the right thing, Love,’ said Brendan Urquhart-Gordon, intrigued and encouraged by the timbre of Love’s disquiet — troubled, wondering. ‘As always.’
‘I thank you, sir.’
Brendan and other aides were at the Greater House, and climbing into their cars. The King had gone on ahead in some sort of armoured dormobile with Colonel Forster and his men, to Cold Blow Lane.
‘Chippy?’ called Brendan. ‘Have I got five minutes?’
‘At the outside,’ said Chippy Edenderry, exposing his watch.
He followed Love through the flapped door, decisively exchanging one atmosphere for another, darker, warmer, with the thick smell of sweat and soap and gravy dinners. Brendan inhaled it, and moved on, into the alternate world of belowstairs … It would have been far worse under Richard IV, of course, when domestic staff were paid the absolute minimum on principle (glory being power, and so on), but the House of England was always hedged by the smells and textures of vassalage — it was always waiting behind the flapped, floor-trailing door. Brendan knew that all servants hated their masters. Even Love, who was as loyal as they came, even Love would feel this hate. The hate smelt too: it was like the smell of mice. Brendan found unexpected relief in the contemplation of Love’s left ear: a vortex of iron filings.
They entered a brownish parlour lined with straightbacked chairs. Ceremoniously Love now donned his white gloves, waggling his raised fingers into them, and Brendan gained the brief but comprehensive impression that he was about to be examined by a doctor of humble practice and increasingly uncertain skills. With a superstitious glance over his shoulder, Love indicated a low table which bore a telephone of recent design and an answering-machine of embarrassing antiquity and bulk.
‘You’re rather at the mercy of this contraption, sir. It’s the final message, I’m afraid.’
The white finger quivered down on the Start button, and Love backed out of the room.
It was not possible to skip or hasten, so Brendan, feeling the growing weight of Chippy’s impatience, had to sit through a series of yokellish instructions and enquiries from various caterers and vendors, plus three long and repetitive plaints from a bedridden relative, who hoped for Love’s help in a move from sanatorium to hospice. Then, suddenly, this voice, so heavily deepened and distorted that Brendan took it to be the final incapacity — the death-drawl — of the old machine.
‘For the attention of the King. On the last day of this month the material on the Princess joins that which is public and open to general observation. Note welclass="underline" the Palace should insist, and should continue to insist, that the material is faked. Faked, faked. Mere digital fabrication. Mere light and magic.’
Brendan became aware of the petulant honking from the drive. He pried the twin spools from the machine, which gave its contents up to him, in all innocence, seemingly scandalised by what it had housed. Then he strode down the tepid passage. The flapped door opened, and let him out, and closed again.
Just before noon Henry England debouched from Chopper F1 of the King’s Flight, hurrying low across the striped turf of Millwall Football Ground. He wore a silk cashmere overcoat, a dark lounge suit, and a black silk tie — in deference to the memory of Jimmy O’Nione (Henry’s office had already lamented the death, in evasively universal terms: a life so full of energy, cut down even as it flowered — this, despite O’Nione’s great age). On foot and under heavy plainclothes escort, he crossed Lovelynch Road, and joined the assembly on the broad forecourt of the Juno Estate. There he was greeted by the parliamentary member, the representatives of the local council, various trembling beadles and burghers, and a squad of shrunken, bemedalled regimental pensioners in their frayed crimson tunics, ready for one final war. The crowd, the press, the police, the light presence of soldiery in camouflage gear, the battlement of His Majesty’s house of correction, which beetled over O’Nione’s shrine: all this lay round the corner, waiting. But every other car coming down Cold Blow Lane gave the prisoners its toot of encouragement and support, and was answered by a ragged wail from the chapel roof.
Hearing this, Henry said vaguely, ‘Why don’t they just … get them down?’
‘They were hoping the weather would do it for them, sir,’ said the parliamentary member. ‘Best policeman in the world, the weather. Best prison-guard too. But now of course, sir, it’s unseasonably mild.’
The King might have remarked that the word ‘unseasonable’ had lost much of its force. The days didn’t care what season it was. Above them now thrummed high-pressure blue; the sky was vibrating with it. Henry was accustomed to feelings of hallucinogenic expansion: the sense that he was the same size, the same thing, as the United Kingdom (and Canada and Australia and whatnot). Now — underslept and breakfastless, sexually wealthy but also bereft — he felt that the sky, too, was his colony, and that he was at the heart of its blue vibrations.