‘There,’ he said. ‘Now I have a notion that I deserve a drink.’
Henry sat back with it, his brandy, raising the balloon in both palms like a woman with a cup of something hot. For outside, beyond the treated windows, the blue morning had collapsed utterly, and the southbound motorway was a seething, sizzling mess of drenched metal and rubber, under skies the colour of dogs’ lips … When Henry came to the throne, about a quarter of the population still believed that he had been personally appointed by God; well, stress eczema, where he had it, surely exploded the Divine Right of Kings. It had first seized him, this condition, in the week after Pamela’s accident. Lord Fletcher drew the obvious conclusion; but Henry, still writhing from his epiphanic cur moment (‘Oh no, Pemmy. But at least this means … At least this means …’), suspected otherwise. It was not the accident so much as the inconceivably onerous task of breaking the news to the Princess. Henry, who could barely bring himself to be the author of the most trifling disappointment, who suffered for weeks if he denied her a final swim, a third lollipop, an eleventh bedtime story … There was a two-day hiatus (and news embargo) while she was spirited off a cruise ship in the Aleutians. Meanwhile, with tweezers and blowtorch, stress eczema was exposing the nerve ends of his nethermost fissures and faults. And when he told her, in the library at the Greater House, he additionally squirmed on his confidential nettlebed. Now welcoming the pain, now fully accepting it, he took her outside and walked her up and down the length of the stream for hours and hours and talked and talked and talked to her.
Brendan said: ‘By Christ, did you see that?’
‘He … disappeared.’
‘Hoo! They won’t be showing that again.’
‘He disappeared.’
On the television: a street scene, a loose group of shoppers, hurriers. And then one of them disappeared, leaving a hole in the world, with death tearing out of it.
After some moments Brendan said, ‘Horrorism. That’s what we’ve just witnessed, sir. An act of horrorism.’
Henry looked at him promptingly. The Royal Rolls, with its convoy of peoplecarriers, left the main road and entered the scalloped grounds of the Abbey.
‘Angst, anxiety, concern, worry,’ said Brendan, who recognised Henry’s tactic, his voodoo of deferraclass="underline" no talk of Victoria until the car was quenched of motion. ‘You are being chased by a wild beast which you already fear,’ he went on. ‘That fear turns to terror as the chase begins. And that terror turns to horror when the chase ends. Horror is when it’s upon you, when it’s actually there.’
But they weren’t there, and, ahead of them, the grounds swept on.
‘Continue, Bugger,’ said Henry tightly.
Almost floundering, Brendan said, ‘The bomber … To the bomber, death is not death. And life isn’t life, either, but illusion. There is something called the demographic bomb — the birth bomb. The bomb of birth, the bomb of death.’
They pulled up.
‘A form of words, Bugger.’
‘… Well, sir, I suggest you confine yourself to what we may reasonably suppose will soon be the stuff of common knowledge.’
‘Spell it out, if you please.’
Brendan did so.
‘Mm. Perfectly decent little place. I shall need you, Bugger, at ten to five.’
Between the Royal Rolls and the double doors of the Abbey lay a gauntlet of umbrellas.
Dear Princess Victoria,
Or how about, simply, ‘Victoria’? I expect you must be fed up to the back teeth with all the endless pomp and circumstance in your life. There’s none of that nonsense round here, and I cordially extend an open invitation for you to pay us a visit any time you like. Don’t stand on ceremony! We don’t subscribe to ceremony.
We usually dine at a reasonably early hour. Good plain fare, such as has been enjoyed in England for centuries. Our caravan contains two totally separate rooms. Once Mother has gone to bed, privacy is virtually guaranteed.
We will then have the leisure to relax on the divan and get to know each other over a few beers. I’ll start by kissing you oh so slowly. So gently. So tenderly. Oh so lovingly. Then when you say the moment is right and not a moment before (this is totally your ‘call’ as they say) I’ll haul out my
Brendan yawned, and stopped reading (there were many pages yet to come). He was in the lounge, with his briefcase on his knees, going through another batch of the Princess’s restricted maiclass="underline" mail she never saw. To begin with he had thought that the enemy might have shown its hand at some earlier point; he no longer thought it had, and persevered merely to give himself the feeling that he was getting somewhere. But of course these letters to the Princess were not from the world of pro-action. They came from the world of onanistic longing — and coarse sentimentality, and impotent sadism. Even at their most violent, and some were very violent indeed, they seemed to moan with inertia: a humiliated stasis. Nor would such men be going to France, bearing gold …
His wristwatch was cocked up on the table in front of him. He was ready. As he crushed the letters into their file (Restrained Correspondence) he asked himself why he had spent so long on such an obvious waste of time. He admitted that he indulged in fantasies of protection, of interposing himself between the world and the Princess. Was that his job, just now: a fantasy of protection?
* * *
With a show of capped teeth in his rubbery face, Captain Mate ushered him into the Oak Gallery — closed that afternoon, of course, for the King’s use. Henry and Victoria were on a chesterfield at the far end of the room, some sixty feet away. The remains of a substantial tea were being removed by Love and his helpers. As Brendan approached, and as the scene cleared, he found himself thinking of earlier times: father and daughter would spend whole days, whole weekends, lolling on a sofa like this, watching television or merely dozing and mumbling and occasionally rousing themselves for a game of I Spy. The King hadn’t changed; but she was older now, this autumn — more erect, and more inclined, it seemed to him, to maintain a distance between herself and her father.
‘How lovely to see you, Brendan.’
‘Always a delight, ma’am. I hope the Princess has had her fill of sticky buns?’
‘Oh yes. I had masses.’
‘And were they sufficiently “greedy”?’
‘Oh yes. Very piggy indeed.’
Brendan thought: I’m always behind — not a year behind, but always half a season. He said, ‘Forgive me. I’ve interrupted you.’
‘My daughter was discoursing on Islam, if you please,’ said Henry. Of course, the King was religious, in his way: strictly non-ecumenical Prayer Book Church of England. ‘It’s like talking to a bally mullah.’
‘Oh poo. I was making Daddy cross by saying that Muslims seem to have much more feeling for each other than Christians. There’s a real bond, and I think that’s very attractive.’
‘Is the Princess’, asked Brendan lightly, ‘feeling herself “drawn” to Mecca?’
‘God no. I don’t think I’ve got any faith in me. I just find it all very riveting.’
Henry was no longer dreaming of Alabaman prisons. He had hit upon a more aristocratic excoriation: the smoking poker administered to Richard II (for crimes of ‘effeminacy’). And then the usurper Bolingbroke journeyed to the Holy Land to purge his guilt with fire and sword … Henry had at some point been informed by the Duchess of Ormonde that fifteen-year-olds were fifteen-year-olds, and that he should be pleased it was religion she was keen on, and not anorexia. Recalling this, he bafflingly volunteered,