Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Town Crier Exclusive, Confessions of a Princess Manqué: “How Royals Found Me ‘Unsuitable’ to Marry Their Larry”

Sunday, January 12, 1992

How We Met

I shouldn’t have thought I’d have gone public like this. Well, to begin with, there’s the question of our musty old laws, isn’t there? Oh, solicitors have gone all over it with their fine-tooth combs to see that the paper’s in the clear. I never referred to myself as “La Lulu,” and neither did Lawrence, Crown Patriciate, Duke of Wilshire, nor any other of their royal lord and lady highnesses and mightinesses. Nor all the king’s soldiers, nor all the king’s men. There’s no such person. That was chiefly an invention of the press; a legal fiction.

For a supposedly free country the press in this land is fair gagged and hobbled by all its Official Secrets Acts with their preemptive seditionaries and thorny libel laws like so many unexploded mines and bombs lying about the landscape. Self-serving, anti-blasphemy law’s what it is, establishment gossip insurance. Hence, if you want to know, the reason so-called checkbook journalism got invented right here in Fleet Street. To cover, if one’s a press lord, pardon me, one’s derrière. Because no one believes this stuff. “For entertainment purposes only,” as they say in the Horoscopes. It’s my humble opinion a lot of the buggery fascination in this country comes right out of that tradition, the tradition, I mean, of being all caught up in this or that condition of contingency, laying out advance positions, fortifications. Larry himself told me not even the old Roman legions made more of a thing of putting out guards, that the Brits invented lookout men so-called, and that the principle of the alibi has its roots in English common law. What I’m saying is that your sodomy had its origins in simple sport and getting round the rules as much as ever it did in pleasure— in seeing, I mean, just how much one can get away with. Oh yeah, it’s all a game. I have my theories, and one of my humble own pet ones is that the very ideas of Monarchy and Blood and Class come right out of that same tradition.

But I can almost see Sir Sidney reading my copy over my shoulder and complaining to his editors about what in bl-dy, infinite h-ll do I think they’re paying me for, certainly not my theories, and why don’t I get on with all the nasty bits? In due time, Sir Sid, in due time. I just want it understood that no matter what you or anyone else thinks, I’m not in this for the money. If the investigative reporters on the Sunday Times team wanted to write up my story they could have had it for nothing. But of course they wouldn’t dare. It’s the paper of record. People might believe it.

I’m not in it for the money. I’m not. I want it told is all. But because Larry is Larry — and I don’t blame him, I really don’t, I still believe he loves me, I really do — and the Royal Family is the Royal Family, there was just no way of getting it done unless I took Town Crier’s fifty thousand pounds sterling and did it myself.

And though I’d never acknowledge I owe the public a thing — what, after the way I’ve been depicted in the papers, on the telly and the oh-so-civilized BBC 3 even? — it may almost be my patriotic duty to let it know some of the real circumstances by which it is ruled. La Lulu, indeed!

“Oh yeah,” you’re saying, “for God and Country, for England and St. George.” “Hell hath no fury,” you’re saying, “like a woman scorned.” “Or tattood!” you’re saying.

We met, as everyone knows, in Cape Henry, on the westermost of the Lothian Islands, fifty or so nautical miles from Santa Catalina Island and the village of Avalon, themselves about a thirty-minute ferry ride from Los Angeles and the southwest coast of California.

Whatever you might have read in the press to the contrary, I was not at that time in any way connected with the Ministry of Tourism; I did not sell coral or exotic flowers to day trippers from the States — ridiculous on the face of it since the United States government has strict rules preventing anyone from bringing any sort of flora or fauna into the country — or work behind the counter in the souvenir or duty-free shops at the airport. I did not sing with the band at the hotel. I had been made, like several of my countrymen at that time, redundant, and was sharing expenses and living the life of a sort of glorified beachcomber with two other girls in a discounted, low-season, already two-a-penny shelter more wicky-up than guest cottage or even hut with its rough, frond-covered frame, and dry, thick, still sharpish- edged grasses, which my cut hands too well knew to their sorrow and that sometimes in the mornings after a particularly issueless — even out there on the Pacific it was still just as much a drought as ever it was on the California mainland — but powerful blow of the previous night, we actually had to reweave back into the semblance of a wall. Often we’d pick up the odd fifty pence “sewing houses”—as we named our queer profession — for some of the older or less resourceful of our beachcomber colleagues, or shaking out mats, or sweeping up sand. Beachcombers, indeed.

“Oh, damn,” I told Marjorie on the early morning of the day of Prince Larry’s visit, “I’ve gone and cut my hands. I see I shall have to go into a different trade. Have you seen the aloe?”

“There is no aloe, Louise,” Marjorie said.

“How can there not be aloe? Living as we do, where we do, there has to be aloe.”

“We are quite out of aloe, Louise.”

“Impossible. I saw it myself it can’t have been but two days ago.”

“You are not the only party who sews houses in this house, Louise. You are not the only one with stigmata.”

“My fault, Louise, dear,” said Jane. “I was down for the aloe run. I’m afraid I forgot. If you wait, I’ll go after I beachcomb myself some sandfruit for my breakfast.”

“Sandfruit gives you the runs. Why do you eat it?”

“I quite enjoy the runs, Louise.”

Now to this point the public knows nothing of this. My friends Jane and Marjorie swept aside by history, their own stories lost if not to time then to time’s blatant disregard of a proper attention to detail, which I, as a public figure so- called, begin to suspect happens with the stories of most of history’s cohorts, so apparently caught up and transfixed by the shine of celebrity and notoriety. But actually such trashing of individuals and their particulars is as much evasive action (like piling up sunblock on one’s skin at the beach, say; just so much more posting of guards, just so many more lookouts, the fiddle of yeomanry our national sin) as ever it is the logic of a true humility. Well, it’s never the logic of a true humility, and what I think, what I think, really, is that like sodomy, like buggery, our notion of subjectivity, of submitting — submitting? volunteering! — to be the subjects of kings and queens has to do with wanting to disappear, with building up heroes to draw the lightning. Limelight was ever a distraction to time’s healthy, childlike fear of limelight. (This is fun, you know? Limelight has its compensations, hey, Sir Sid?)

So to this point, the public, for all the attention it’s paid us, knows absolutely nothing. Jane and Marjorie not only out of the picture but never in it to begin with. (No, I’m not making this up. Not any of it. I’m English as the next bimbo. There’s still all those official secrets acts and libel laws. Why would I stick my neck out? Yet I hardly flatter myself I think I’ve earned any of those fifty thousand pounds yet.)

That drought you read about? You don’t know the half. (Is that to be my theme here?) It played California hell, put half the state out of work, and not just the agricultural illegals up out of Mexico. Trained dental technicians let go. What, you think not? All that water running all day, all that rinse and spit? Shipping clerks and gift wrappers in the best department stores laid off because of the water shortage or forced to quit because they couldn’t work up enough moisture to lick one more label or stick on another fancy seal. Going on the dole for parched tongues and chapped lips. Or my own case.

I left England because of a tragic love affair (which since it has nothing to do with my involvement with Larry I’m under no obligation at this point to discuss with my public, so-called) and came to the States not to emigrate but in order to put some time and distance between my heart and its circumstances. It had been my intention to be gone no more than six months, but as the old saying has it, man proposes and God disposes and, in the half year I’d given to it, nothing had been resolved. Even back then, in the early days of the drought, it was still easy enough to find a job in Los Angeles. You know some of my background. You know that while I had something of an independent income it was never near big enough I could afford to live abroad indefinitely without finding means to supplement it. Also, it’s good for people to be gainfully employed. It makes life that much more interesting.

So I went for an au pair girl. My English accent was all the character I ever needed. I offered to show my passport but they wouldn’t even look. It didn’t make any difference to these people. Almost every au pair in Beverly Hills was an American actress hoping to catch on at a studio. They could all walk the walk and talk the talk. A reason I wasn’t found out when my photographs started to appear in the papers, I think, is that if they remembered me at all, the people of the house must have thought they recognized me from the industry. Besides, it didn’t last all that long. For a great democratic show a lot of these people began to lay off their “nannies” and “au pairs” even before the drought started to bite. They gave us bonuses and apologized that they had to dismiss us because we’d become “just one more thirst that had to be quenched.” And continued to quench the remaining household thirsts with the same bottled mineral water they’d been using all along. Restaurants were still hiring on, but it didn’t need any Greenwich Mean Time celestial clock watchers to see that the hostesses they employed were just more actresses and that when the time came they’d let these go just as quick as all the rest of those other nanny-cum-film stars. (And the time came and they did. Even the less expensive restaurants were selling bottled water by the glass then. The difference was that very few people believed it wasn’t tap water they were actually paying for. Oh, I know, I know. I really do. This sounds like satire and the States sound much like England and, in some ways, it is and they are. And I still can’t even get the punctuation right. Can’t or won’t. Preferring much that’s American to that which is British. Putting my full stops inside the quotes, for example. Choosing the Yankee zed in “civilization” to the s in its chiefly Brit VAR, as they say in Webster’s. Dropping my e out of “judgement.” Slipped between the cracks of two different worlds. And if that’s one of the reasons the royals found me unsuitable to marry their Larry— and, in an odd way, it is — it’s the least of them.) Suffice it to say, however, I didn’t even bother to apply. And set up instead for an ordinary housekeeper’s job making up beds in a hotel. What I never expected was the unwillingness of people from parts of the country unaffected by drought to endure even for one or two days whatever insignificant parch they might have been put through in the one two days it would have taken them to do their business. When the drought really became serious the girls with the English accents were the first ones to be cut.

It was all very well for me to be larky and thirsty while I still had a job. My employers were paying my health insurance, after all. But once I was without work I knew that I would have to find something for a — ha ha — rainy day.

I still had no reason to go home. Well, I’d fallen a. over t. for the climate, hadn’t I? That was when I first thought of Cape Henry and the Lothian Islands. In England even the King is on the National Health, even the Queen.

(Still another aside: I can’t shake the sense I have of Press Lord Sir Sidney reading over my shoulder as I write, and I’m beginning to feel if not my obligations to the readership, then at least Sir Sid’s sense of them for me, and I find that compelling and, in small ways, oddly touching and will, when there’s time or it seems fitting, henceforth alert my readers — or maybe only Sir Sidney himself — that they — he — may skip over the asides until I take up my “story” again, or “la Lulu’s Account,” or whatever they’re calling it these days on hoardings on the sides of buses. Anyway, you know what seems strange to me? The general, disparate, all-purpose exile that moves over the world. That piecemeal, bit-by-bit colonization of earth. People, for whatever reason, coming together on all sorts of foreign shores, washing up in the strangest places. The mysterious working out of the great queer plot of the planet. Different motives, mutual ends. Well, it finally accounts for the very idea of empire, doesn’t it?)

Whatever I may feel now it no longer seems unusual to me I hadn’t even known Jane or Marjorie back in Los Angeles. Indeed, when the three of us met at the beachcomber estate agency where we let that wicky-up, and not three or four days later one of us — I forget which — suggested we might pick up the odd pound or so if we put our backs into it and helped with the morning ablutions on other people’s shelters, I naturally assumed — as I later discovered we each did — that my two new friends were just more actresses marking time and waiting to be discovered. Which brings me back to that missing aloe and the first time I saw the Prince.

Well, it was those embargo, or quarantine, or meat-and- potato prohibitions of course, the flora-and-fauna rules, all the high-priority, low-level laws of jealous international agreement and stickler decree by which nations claim they not only protect themselves but insinuate the superiority of their Nature over your Nature. Showing the flag, grandstanding the public on the cheap— all that subject population, all those abiders. And getting, Prince Larry, grand photo ops out of it, too, making the most of his signature gesture. Though I swear to you, I’d forgotten all that, had been away from England almost two years by then. Out of sight, out of mind. One forgets. Though I suppose the things one forgets are always perched somewhere near the tippy tip of one’s head, because when I saw him there posed in the aloe shop, quit of his equerry and all his retainers, I remembered at once of course. This was the one who made a point of buying off the local economy all those ceremonial wreaths he’s charged with laying on all those public buildings, natural monuments, and great men’s graves. And maybe that’s why those ordinances came into being in the first place— because whoever made up kings figured it might come in handy one day, that someday this prince would come. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the ruling class is nothing if not clever.

And he was handsome. I remembered from my life in England that he was handsome, but now he was possessed of an almost surfeit of beauty, and of an age when he was at its (or he of its) very peak. Like special fruit that has come into its season. Don’t mistake me, this is no mournful occasion, the sad affair of a moment, some here today, gone tomorrow mayfly condition. I’m not speaking of God’s or humanity’s fairy tales, the ephemeral, too delicate arrangements of nature and myth. Yet there was a kind of hapless nostalgia to him, some secret knowledge. I do not think I noticed this then. How could I have done, I was a different person then. So I didn’t notice it; I only remember it. I don’t even know if the Prince was aware of it. I believe rather not. As I say, I allow him what I allow myself. Some secret knowledge, the long-term profit of the heart. Yet something, something. Got up, it might have been, in his very swagger, the peculiar, put-everyone-at-ease pomp of his self-consciousness. He was at once breezy and shy with a crowd that, knowing his habits, had gathered early in the morning or stayed up all night (some of them) in Cape Henry’s discrete shopping district on the westermost island of the long Lothian Islands chain. An anomaly, one of those freaks not so much of geography as of naming and settling. Those fifty or so nautical miles off Santa Catalina would be an example. The counterpart American village of Avalon hard by on California’s southwest coast would. Just a thirty- minute ride as the ferry floats.

Sad as Spring’s first perfection, the trees never so beautiful again as they were in the prime joyous days of their first being though they had weeks, months, seasons, even half a year yet to green. Nor ever so ripe as in those first close- cropped days of their initial blooming.

So I saw him but didn’t recognize him, don’t you know.

The prince waved at me. Not the elbow, elbow, wrist wrist wrist of majesty gone easy on itself, the accustomed, practiced pacing of what had already been a long reign, but something more awkward, more attractive than that — a matter, a question of image. And, though I was surprised, I could hardly have been aware of my awareness. “Good god,” I remember thinking, “was that a prince?” Not “Was that the Prince?” Caught short, clued-in finally only by the royal retainers pretending to try to keep up. If the Prince knew it was only some dog-and-pony show he didn’t let on. Only later, in the town square (and mall and tourist trap) did I recognize him, don’t you know.

Though I’d known he was coming of course. As did Jane, as did Marjorie. We’d even discussed our plans to go see him. Allegiant, interested, dutied, patriotic’d. (Curious, too. We forgot because we were new on the island and caught up in our individual rebeginnings.) In the square the Prince picked up his pace, as the retainers, seeming genuinely to try now, did theirs, though knowing in their accustomed souls they could never keep up but that somehow they had an obligation if not to the realm then at least to their corps, to some tradition of equerries, retainers, and handlers, knowing it would cost them nothing to be loyal, that this Prince would have his way with them no matter what they did, so that even if they did let up their merely shown-flag haste would lose out anyway to the real power of his insouciant, sincere deferentials and bluff, awkward bearing. The crowd not crowding him but fallen back as if he were some battle prince out of history, not boarding or clamoring him as if he were a rock-and-roll star, his fans not standing tiptoe, just standing back, behind the velvet ropes, not in retreat, fallen back even from me, so the Prince, seeing what was what, turned to one of us, to me in this instance, and spoke up. “Oh,” he said, “I’m terribly sorry. How inexcusably rude of me. I was just going into this shop.” “Go in, Your Highness,” I said, and, courtly as could be, nice as pie, His Highness singals, “After you.” Of course I defer. As does the Prince. As then do I. Until, in a kind of shock, the crowd signals, “Well, if it’s what His Highness wants …” So I go in. And Larry turns to the people in the road and signals “After all of you.” And passes them through like someone taking tickets. Like an usher. Like a cop directing traffic or a coach waving a runner in from third. And then goes through himself. Leaving the others behind like people lined up for the second show. Leaving the show-biz retinue behind too.

And this occurred— that I might have been the only non-show-biz type left in the shop, my Prince’s lone remaining bona fide witness, a fiddle if not of yeomanry then of just that much more hero-building effacement, more historic gull to the historic shill of all those drawers of the lightning; behind the elaborate lines and colorful smoke screen of all that cadre of lookouts and posted guards— that this was just for my benefit, that I was as necessary a part of the process as the Prince himself; that all that was left in the aloe shop now were myself and the show-biz tourists got up in the lamb’s cloth of what was merely that much more retinue— that even the wreath-and-aloe saleslady was a show-biz wreath-and-aloe saleslady. (But conflicted, too, don’t you know. Mindful that perhaps I’d been in the States too long. Where they take their drawers of the lightning even more seriously than we do in England, and almost every other person in the crowd — not counting the armed chaps on the roofs and in all the windows or the reporters who ask some of the toughest questions at the press conference — is Secret Service, SWAT, or CIA.) And, My, I’m thinking in the tropes of a paranoia turned inside out, all this attention. For little me? Why, thank you, kind sirs and mesdames, and thank you, kind Sir. Self-conscious as the recipient of a singing telegram, don’t you know, or a guest of honor, or someone not used to it at her very first Command Performance.

I may have been blushing; I was probably blushing. Whereupon the most remarkable thing.

He dismissed them.

In that same efficient semaphore with which he’d passed them through. At the same time, seeing me with my banknotes in my hand, signaling me to remain behind, and freezing the show-biz wreath-and-aloe lady in her place. One look, one look did it, one all-inclusive gesture — this complicated syntax of self-assured silence. So that when the shop had cleared and he finally spoke to her, I was the only one left to hear.

“I’m looking,” says the Prince, “for a wreath. Do you do wreaths?”

“Oh yes, Your Highness, but we’re such a small village. The resident population can’t be but four or five thousand at most, though closer to four, I should think.”

“Yes?” goes His Highness.

“Just enough commissionaires to open the doors at the taxi rank, just enough porters to handle the cobble and trim of the holiday makers, just enough publicans and innkeepers, barmaids, tapsters, and potboys. Just enough ostlers. Just enough chars. Just enough buskers to sink in the streets and play their guitars outside the cinema.”

“So?” says the Successor.

“Just enough drivers to drive the red double-decker buses and just enough Pakis to collect your fare and hand you your change. Just enough unarmed bobbies to answer questions about directions and make sure the pubs close after last call. Just enough Tommies. Just enough of the King’s Home Guard Cavalry to stand in the sentry boxes under their bearskin busbies and challenge the tourists to provoke reactions for snapshots. Just enough men to change the guard outside the Governor’s Palace. And just enough people to pick up the post from the kiosks for day trippers to send home just for the sake of the canceled stamp.”

“I don’t make out …” says the Heir Apparent.

“Just enough cockney accents; just enough Liverpudlian, Yorkshire, Welsh. Just enough Scots, Sir; just enough Lincolnshire. (Though we both know, don’t we, Sire, how clannish East Englanders are and how they pretty much keep to themselves.) Just enough C of E rectors to offer up mass and call out the number of the hymn from the Book of Common Prayer. Just enough choristers …”

“… your meaning.”

“Well, it’s not as if we had a proper cemetery, is it, Highness?” says his subject-apparent.

“Madam?”

“Well, we’re an outpost of Empire, aren’t we, Prince? Closer to the States than Bermuda, we are. We drive on the left side of the road here, we do, and quainter we are than bowlers and bumbershoots. We’re an enterprise, we are.”

“I’m not sure …”

“You’re not sure? You’re sure.”

“Is this the way, madam, you address your future King?”

“Well, you’re not my King yet, you know. And really, M’lud, when push comes to shove you haven’t any real power. You can’t shut me up in the Tower or have me beheaded, can you? I mean, you’re all symbolic-like, aren’t you?

“It’s the bargains you come for. You came for a price on the flowers. It’s your way and it’s charming, and you’re quite famous for it, but do you know what I give for a wreathing? The labor alone? The cost of all that coiling and twisting and interweaving? We’re not, as I say, a big population — three or four thousand at most, but closer to three, I should think. And no more graveyard to speak of than what fits in back of a church. And the artisans died out. And most of the personnel on this tight little fun fair of an island, this picturesque theme park of an empire — those not gone to bush — posted back to Britain before they’re fifty. And it isn’t as if we’re equipped to lay out holiday makers, so I have to bring in extra hands, don’t I? Navvies and erks and night porters. Factoti. So I’m dead sorry, Wilshire, my wreaths have to be pricey.”

“I’m still looking,” he says to me, “you go ahead.”

“Some aloe, please,” I tell the woman and give over my banknote while at the same time I try to hide my cut, chafed and burning hands.

“It’s ready,” she says, “but wasn’t it Jane’s turn, or Marjorie’s?”

“Jane quite forgot, I’m afraid,” I said.

“No, please,” said the Prince. “Wait and I’ll help you with that.”

In the end he didn’t bargain with her, he didn’t even seem angry. He let her rude remarks pass like the great gentleman he was. “I’ll take that one,” he said, and pointed to a large, leafy wreath interlaced with long ropes of bright yellow flowers.

“Yes,” said the awful woman, “it’s the only one we have, isn’t it?”

“If you know so much about my ways,” said the Prince, “then you know I never carry money. Indeed, I hardly ever look at it. My personal equerry will take care of you.” He turned to me. “Give me that,” he said. Well, I was confused. The aloe plant was rather big, and he was already carrying his great heavy wreath. I half thought he meant to steal it from me.

His equerry was waiting outside. All the others had gone. Not even a bobby was to be seen in that queer, translated, odd English street. No cars were there, no red double-deck buses with their extraordinarily high route numbers — I already knew there were only two routes in that tiny town and that while they took you past different points of interest, both ended up discharging their passengers at the same spot — and now the place, except for the shops on the High Street — the greengrocers, the Boots, the W. H. Smith, the Marks and Spencer, and various others — the hire purchase and estate agents and removal companies and cafes and fish- and-chips, the offtrack betting, the theatre and the cinema, et cetera — seemed not so much deserted as abandoned, evacuated even. In the distance I could just make out a residential area— a block of flats, an occasional thatched roof, one or two County Council-looking structures.

“It seems we must pay a hundred pence on the pound to the tick,” he told the fellow. “Organise it for me, would you? There’s a lad. Oh, and take this for me, Colin, I’m assisting the girl.”

He handed the wreath over to his equerry.

He relieved me of the aloe plant and, exposing my raw, rubbed hands, said, “Oh, your poor hands.” He broke off a leaf and squeezed out its white juices. Laying the plant down, he rubbed the stuff across my palms and the back of my hands. He spread it up and down my fingers. It was as sticky as sperm.

“You’re not a tourist then,” he said, chatting me up like any young man any young girl.

I saw what was up, I knew what was what. “This isn’t some droit du seigneur thing, is it, Your Peerage?”

“I hate that,” said the Prince.

“What do you hate?”

“All those awful ‘Your This’ and ‘Your That’ jokes. Calling me ‘Highness,’ calling me ‘Wilshire.’ ‘M’lud.’ Calling me ‘Sire.’ Calling me ‘Peerage.’ Having a prince on. She was right, though, that dreadful woman. I am ‘symbolic-like,’ I have no real power. It’s almost the start of the next century. People have had it with Royals. They’re starting to agitate for reforms. We can’t say we blame them.”

He suddenly seemed boyish, he suddenly seemed shy.

“Say, you’re not one of those Let’s-Trade-Places sort of princes, are you?”

“What if I were?”

“Well, I should be very sorry to know it, My Lord Grace,” I said, teasing him.

(Flirting! I was actually flirting! Not only for the first time in years, but with someone whose power, symbolic or not, was as real to me, or to my outraged class-conscious blood, as it might have been not so many centuries before when he could have shut me up in the tower, or had me beheaded, or made me his strumpet. Am I getting warm, Sir Sid?)

“Lawrence! My name is Lawrence, and if someone doesn’t call me by it soon, I shall go over the wall!”

“‘Up the wall,’” I corrected.

“Over it, by God bl-dy f--ing he-l! Over it!”

“Oh, Prince,” I said, by which I meant speak to me, make yourself clear, help me to understand.

“Well you would do,” he said as if reading my mind, “if you spent any only three days filling the appointments on the Court Calendar. Any only three? Any only two. One!

“I’m young. Not yet thirty. It isn’t that I’m bored— though I’m bored — so much as exhausted. And these tours are the worst. I put on a good show, I give them a run for their money. Well, you saw! It would kill a normal man, what I do. I’m like a trained athlete. But there’s just so much even a trained athlete can take. During the Season I put in a half hour at a Ball, then rush on to the next. And the next. And the next. I mingle and mingle and mingle. And always with some aide-de-camp or plenipotentiary two decades older than myself at my ear and whispering the names of those I must greet as if they were state secrets. What I need is someone at the other ear giving me the names of all those plenipotentiaries and aides-de-camp. Well, you saw. I called him ‘Colin.’ My equerry. That wasn’t Colin. Colin is heavier.

“But these tours are exhausting. They take it out of one.

“Hither’d in America forty miles in a motorcade to watch two innings of a ballgame, and yon’d to take one course at a banquet.

“And all the time working out our rehearsed idiosyncrasies. Well, you saw. One young prince was famous for trying to perfect a steam-powered perambulator most of his adult years. And there was another, this royal was owed a permanent crown for a back tooth. When she died the monarch who succeeded her insisted the work be completed by the dentist. I understand the poor man had to pry the dead queen’s jaws open in order to replace the temporary with the permanent crown. He delayed his mother’s burial for thirty-five hours until the dentist who’d been working on her could make good on the crown.”

“How mean, how awful for the dentist.”

“Not really. The fellow got a ‘By Appointment to HBM’ plaque out of it and the new king earned a reputation for being frugal.

“So you see. It isn’t so easy being in my position.”

“There’s lots have it worse.”

“Are there? Do they? Oh, I hope so!”

Sunday, January 19, 1992

How We Got Engaged

“Lord Mayor Miniver, My Lord and Lady Lewes. Anthony Fitz-Sunday, Right Honorable MP from the Lothian Chain. Miss Bristol, honored guests, loyal subjects, and welcome friends. We would be remiss if we did not take the opportunity today to tell you how very, very glad it makes us feel to be home. Even though till this morning we had never set foot on your beautiful island, Cape Henry, or, indeed, as much as glimpsed the Lothians on the horizon like so many gray serpents at the bottom of a spyglass.

“We were ‘too young’ to accompany His Royal Highness, our father, when he visited these islands with Her Royal Highness, our mother, in the sixties, or to accompany them on their second tour when they returned in the seventies, by which time we were engaged in our training at the Royal Naval Colleges at Dartmouth and Greenwich. For the reason we did not come with them on His and Her Royal Highnesses’ yacht on its famous round-the-world cruise in the sixties was not, as the story that was put out at the time had it, that we were ‘too young,’ but that, even at five, when most children that age have already become jaded by the roundabout and demand to be taken on thrill rides at Battersea Park that might put off men and women four and five times older, we had not yet found our sea legs. Now it will not do, of course, for a future King of England not to find his sea legs. After all, what is it they say—‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves …’?

“But our theme is coming home, pride, gladness, the almost physical release one feels in finding oneself in the bosom of one’s kind, within, as it were, all the warming fires of consanguine blood, all the …

“Pardon us. We are no metaphysical prince and the last thing on our mind today is speculation, let alone attempting to fit such speculation to a lofty rhetoric. Henceforth, we shall endeavor to banish from our speech that which as merely Prince we had only arrogated anyway— the royal, we mean, pronoun, and address you properly, with ‘I,’ with ‘me,’ with ‘my’ …”

And I, though I was close enough to him to have heard his words — in a front-row seat, actually — even without benefit of the various microphones on the lectern before him that fed the words into the public-address and other equipment, one mike, I guessed, for radio, one for TV, another perhaps for the local archives, and still one more for the high-resolution Minicam machinery used by the crew that traveled with him in order to prepare a documentary on

Lawrence for French TV— all the time thinking: Miss

Bristol? Miss Bristol? and parsing the eloquent syntax of the name’s placement between the Right Honorable MP from the Lothian chain and all those loyal subjects, honored guests, and welcome friends.

“… and because I do not feel symbolic here in what is neither protectorate nor commonwealth, republic nor state, hegemony nor league nor loose association. Not confederation or jurisdiction, not even this, well, not Canada, with— Their Majesty’s faces on the money or no — all its pretensions to home rule, but only, quite simply, this honest-to-God home, a place which actually has its own MP— this vestige and outpost, this geographical quirk, like an outbuilding, say, as accessory as Northern Ireland or Wales. …”

Thinking, Miss Bristol, Miss Bristol?

“… where I am not just passive witness, watching the ritual dances, accepting the flowers, the grayish leis of rotting bones and teeth, hearing the tuneless, gibberish chants to the arrhythmic, asyndeton claps on human skin and heads like the pat-down hand search of someone suspicious picked out of a line filing through Customs. But home, at home, taking my ease, feeling at ease, and laying this wreath at the tomb of Captain Spears-Henry out of ordinary common courtesy, not ceremoniously, but rather like a guest bringing a bottle of table wine to his hostess at a dinner party.”

Thinking, wondering, trying to translate the priorities— after the Lord Mayor and nobs and hons, but before the gentry, all those captains of all that cottage industry which was the reason the town existed at all; before the spouses; before the Anglophiles over from California and up from Mexico for the day. Miss Bristol? Miss Bristol?

“Yet I would not have you think Cape Henry is just another stopover on my voyage. Indeed not. For me it will forever have its associations, even its historic associations, even — dare I express it? — its romantic ones. For it is here, in this lovely place, that I have the pleasure and honor of announcing my engagement and of introducing my fiancée to you.

“Miss Bristol? Louise, darling, would you please join me on the rostrum? Our friends so very much want to meet you.”

For a moment nothing happened at all. Then there was this pure reflex noise of reaction, almost, I should imagine, like the sound on a battlefield when flashes of light are followed by the pop of shells— some inside-out physics of sound and light. One could hear the motor-driven cameras, this buzz of photography as everyone in the crowd turned and snapped pictures of everyone else, clicking off random, indiscriminate images, shaving their odds, wasting their film, hoping that if they just took enough pictures the chance of taking the right one and of catching the pleased Louise, whoever she might be, would be just that much more enhanced. Even the French camera crew wheeled, recklessly aiming their Minicams. It was the din of farce.

The press could not buy up all of them. There must still be, in private collections, at least fifty photographs and a dozen videos of my at-first-startled, then bewildered, and finally annoyed, face.

Louise was not in the least pleased.

“Come up, come up,” commanded the Prince and, when I did not move, actually started to clap his hands, leading the applause, exactly as if he were an entertainer in a club trying to embarrass a member of the audience into coming up on stage with him.

I was not pleased, I was not embarrassed. If anything, it was out of some vestigial patriotism I joined him. I swear to you, loyalty was what first got me into this fix.

I let him take my hand. I let him hold me. I let him kiss me in public. I kissed him back. I swear to you, it was out of duty I did it, this old atavistic, juvenile echo of my first impressions of the Crown, of God and Country.

In the same fashion I stood passively by as he explained to our countrymen the history of crossover blood, of kings and commoners. In the same fashion still, I held my tongue while the s- of a b-- went on about what a boon it was for the imperial stock to indulge such marriages. I think I was visibly shaken only when he announced that he had obtained his parents’ prior consent to make this engagement.

(All right, Sid, he’d comforted me. Are you satisfied? Those spermy juices of my aloe plant on my palms and fingers. What, did you think I was stone? I’m not stone, I wasn’t stone. Are you stone, are your readers? Why, then, do they turn these pages? So I’m not stone. Nor any pedestaled female woven of ivory by some Pygmalion. You men. Though I’ll say this for him— he comforted me. H- 1, even if he wasn’t Pygmalion, he could have been some perfect prince of massage!

(Why did you give me that check? No one’s perfect. My failed and tragic love affair, remember? That sent me packing from England off to the States to put some distance between my heart and its circumstances? For what I thought would be only six months, but which in the event …?

(All right, Sid, we’d d-- the — d! W-’- done the deed, I say. There, are you satisfied?

(But it didn’t have to be fifty thousand pounds now, did it? It didn’t even have to be the Prince. All it had to be was a woman, any woman. Any woman owning up. Any woman owning up to what she put there and then what he put there. Whatever it was that sent me packing in the first place. Whoever it was. Or whatever it was I did with whoever it was I did it with during my hiatus, or exile, or expatriation, or whatever you want to call it, in the States. Because I’m not stone. You don’t pay a stone fifty thousand pounds just to know who’s thrown what where. I’m telling you. You men!)

Fortunately, I’d dressed for the occasion (even though I didn’t know what the occasion was going to be, even though I didn’t know I was the occasion I was dressing for), and had on a flowery silk print dress, with a stylish but oh- so-proper hemline, with matching high-heeled shoes and a large, wide-brimmed straw hat. I fancy I seemed rather like a prince’s fiancée and would have looked at home at Ascot, under a tent at Henley for the boat race, or at any royal garden party, but was as overdressed for this lot — because outpost or not, home or not, even England or not, it was still the provinces — of tourists, day trippers, and holiday makers, in their blue jeans, sportswear, and bathing costumes, as the Prince himself in his bespoke suits, custom ties, and handkerchiefs, and all his never-to-be-broken-in, throwaway shoes, might have seemed before a band of Fiji Islanders performing their ceremonial fire dances, or rain- making, or sacrificial bloodlettings or somesuch, and that he’d been at such rhetorical pains to distinguish them from just moments before. (And I’ll tell you this, Sir Sid; one of the downsides of being a prince, or his fiancée either, is that you’re never quite comfortable in the clothes you wear. And between the fittings and all those public appearances one’s always making, you hardly have time to breathe, or — pardon my French — find a spare moment to go to the W.C. Larry was quite right when he complained about his boredom and exhaustion. He was quite right when he said that about his being like a trained athlete. These people must shower three and four times a day. In all their untried, first- time-out boots, waders, and brand-spanking-new fishing gear, cunningly worked creels and the packed seaweed that lines them as if for fresh fish flown in daily to world-class restaurants. Athletes indeed. Like artists’ models or film stars trained in the arts of standing still, posing, their muscles as glib as bird dogs’, hounds’. Speaking for myself, I know I became this like trained — pardon my French — bladder athlete during my reign as his Princess manqué. Pardon my French.)

All right, Sid. I know. I still haven’t earned it. A tuppence of toilet humor don’t make a dent in fifty thousand pounds.

We went back to the wicky-up.

“Now I know what all that aloe is for. You weave wicky- ups, don’t you?”

“How would you know about something like that?”

“Oh, I’ve been around,” he said.

“You?”

“I bivouacked in plenty of places like this when I set up for a sailor. It wasn’t all Dartmouth and Greenwich at Dartmouth and Greenwich. The Royal Navy was never any respecter of persons. The British Empire depends on its Fleet even if it ain’t the British Empire anymore. I may as well have been a cabin boy as a prince for all the difference it made to my warrant officers. So, sure, I’ve woven plenty of walls from these sharp, saw-toothed fronds. We called it ‘sewing houses.’”

“That’s what we call it!”

“We?”

“My roommates and me. Jane and Marjorie. I think they’re actresses.”

“So, certainly. I’ve swept up many a peck of sand in my time, and taken what comfort I could from what aloe I could get whenever I could get it. Of course,” he said, “it isn’t supposed to be as important for a man to have smooth, creamy hands as it is for a woman, Louise.”

He took both my hands and held them in one big, smooth palm.

“Yech,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing,” he said, “I was just thinking about all the times I beachcombed sandfruit for breakfast, and how it gave me the runs.”

I withdrew my hands.

“What?” he said. “What?”

“It gives Jane the runs, too,” I told him coolly.

“Look,” said the Prince, “didn’t you just ask whether I was one of those Let’s-Trade-Places sort of princes? Well, I am, Louise.”

“A commoner in every port, is it?”

“No,” he said, taking back my hands and pressing them to his lips. “What, are you kidding me, Louise,” he muttered his demurrers, looking up, “you know me better than that.” He took me in his athlete’s arms. It was thrilling, Sid, thrilling. Well, he was handsome. And all those months in the States living one’s life like a more-or-less nun. And him with all his dark good looks. I tell you I felt like a nurse in a novel.

So, what with this and what with that, we were soon enough rolling round down on the sandy floor of the wicky-up enjoying a bit of the old leg-over, so given up to passion I didn’t realize what happened when we crashed into the hotel bellman’s cart Jane and Marjorie and I used to hang up our clothes and was all we had for wardrobe or even for furniture in that tiny hut, spilling the clothes, tumbling the coats and shifts and dresses and gowns down from where they hung on the rack, Prince Lawrence so excited and lusty I could almost believe his earnest demurrers of just three or four minutes before.

(Was I naïve, Sid? Who’s to say? Anyway, I don’t think so, for what was the morning line on this prince while his two younger brothers and two younger sisters were off sowing their wild oats and getting their names in the papers, making it into the gossip columns with their famous scrapes and muddles that had always the faint air about them of throwbacks to different, gayer times— like ne’er-do-wells running with a fast crowd, and fortunes lost gambling; careless Sloane Rangers sent down from Cambridge or Oxford, or come away with dubious seconds and thirds; his siblings excused or explained away or even written off by their place in the birth order? Only that, baby-boomer prince or no baby-boomer prince, in the curious reign of the peculiarly marked incumbency of these particular sovereigns he was conscientious, notable for the advantage he took of photo ops — and why not with his beauty? — and for his solicitous gestures, his polished idiosyncrasies and special relationships with all his inferiors — well, I was an example, wasn’t I? — and that he might be too good to be true, right down to the impression he gave of having just stepped out of a trailer on locale somewhere, of being this, well, film star got up as a prince, not a hair out of place, all perfected and rested while a stand-in stood on his mark taking the heat for him while the crew got ready, setting the lights, fussing the sound, till they sent a gofer to the trailer to fetch him— “Five minutes please, Prince”—and he stepped out, majestic and grand as you please, his jacket and tie and collar as perfectly in place as they’d be on some little girl’s cutout of a jacket and tie and collar that she tabs on a doll that she’s punched from a book.)

So excited and lusty that at the moment of truth he neither called on God nor made the customary noises and growls and oh! oh! oh!s of satisfaction but shouted out: “IT WAS THAT ALOE THAT BROUGHT IT ALL BACK!”And from somewhere deep within his seafaring engrams and naval neurals actually began to sing— “On the road to Mandalay,/Where the flyin’-fishes play,/An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay!”

“Good Lord,” he said checking his new watch and jumping up to gather his new things when we had done, “just look at the time, will you! They’ll be waiting for me! Hurry, Louise, but don’t rush. I’ve reserved a seat for you!”

So as least I didn’t make a complete fool of myself, and either luck was with me or I’d had the unconscious foresight to be dressed for the occasion when Larry called me up to stand beside him on the reviewing stand. Even though I was still uncomfortable. And I’m not only referring to my state of mind when I say that — though, as I’ve said, it was out of vestigial patriotism that I was up there at all — but literally, too. Physically uncomfortable. Well, there was sand in my high-heeled shoes, in my stockings and in the dress I was wearing. And though it doesn’t come through well on the videos (thanks to that flower print I had on), not even on that special high-resolution tape the Frenchmen were using for their documentary about Larry, if you know where to look you can almost just see the aloe stains and vague patches of chlorophyll on my dress from when the Prince and I were rolling around in abandon on the frond-strewn clothing-carpeted floor of the unwinding wicky-up.

(Sid, “I’ve reserved a seat for you!” not “I’ll reserve a seat for you.” Sid?)

There was a press conference of sorts, ad hoc, shouted out, summary as an encounter with prime ministers or presidents on the way to their helicopters. The Prince’s unexpected announcement of his engagement was the proximate cause, but it was only my appearance with him on that provisional reviewing stand, or rostrum, or stage, or, considering the occasion, pulpit or hustings even, that the reporters started to call out their questions.

It was to me, not Larry, they called.

“Miss Bristol! Miss Bristol!”

“Miss Bristol?”

“Miss Bristol, over here. Over here, Miss Bristol.”

“Louise? Oh, I say, Louise.”

The Prince squeezed my hand, but thinking he must know me, I’d already acknowledged whoever it was that used my Christian name.

“Yes?” I said. “You, the one standing. Off to the side.”

“The Prince says he obtained the King’s and Queen’s prior consent. Have you met their Royal Highnesses then? And I have a follow-up.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see how troubled Larry was, but he needn’t have been. I’ve already said that about duty and loyalty. It’s what they say about heroism, too. That you don’t even think about it. That it comes second nature or not at all. That you fall on the grenade or jump in front of the oncoming car to push the child away without thought to the consequences. I was already answering the man’s question.

“Not actually met them,” I said, “but I’ve heard so much about them. What is your follow-up?”

“Would you show us your engagement ring?”

I extended a finger with a loud, fussy-looking costume- jewelry ring on it.

“That’s it?” said a female reporter crouched in the front. “That bauble? That’s what he gave you?”

Smiling, I looked over at the Prince. Who seemed discomfited. To put the best face on it. To say the least.

“Yes,” I said, “hardly the Crown Jewels, but isn’t it sweet? It has incredible sentimental value.”

“Oh, I do love you, Louise!” the Prince curling me to his side whispered in my ear. Then he spoke into the microphones.

“When we get back to London we’ll run up to the Tower and Miss Bristol can have her pick of a proper jewel,” he volunteered shyly.

“Sir? Oh, Sir?”

“Over here please, Sir.”

“Yes, then,” he said, “last question.”

“Sir, Miss Bristol referred to the ring’s sentimental value. Could you describe for us, Sir, what were some of the circumstances under which such meaning come to accrue about a ring what is so obviously a piece of cheap jewelry?”

There was this long, complicated, almost squeezed look of helpless discomfort in the Prince’s eyes. “I won it for her at the fair?”

Because I think I was starting to love him then. Well, not actually love him of course. Not yet. Not so soon. But certainly the beginning of some such feeling.

I stepped forward.

“He’s so modest,” I told them. “Do you remember when the Prince was in New Guinea?” I was speaking directly to the chap who had put the question. Vaguely, he nodded. “It was a gift from a Cargo Cult there. Who had it, according to the beliefs of its members— from God. Hence, as you see, its sentimental value.”

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so very much for coming,” said the Prince.

(A lot of this is in the public record. I know that. I haven’t even begun to budge those fifty thousand pounds yet, have I, Sid? I’m giving you my side. If you think that doesn’t count for much, wait, be a little patient please.)

Then, suddenly, his retinue reappeared— that magic, show-biz retinue of royal retainers, equerries, and handlers, that sworn corps obliged not just to the Realm but to each other as well, so professional you didn’t even see them coming. One moment they weren’t there (or you weren’t conscious of them), the next moment they were. Not even noticeably swelling the crowd but almost like actors in some cleverly staged play who merely by taking up a prop or altering their position somehow manage to change not only their character but their actual roles. I even spotted Colin— or, no, not Colin, Colin was heavier, but Colin’s stand-in— the one who’d gone into the shop earlier and paid for the fateful wreath while the prince carried the fateful aloe.

Because I couldn’t see Jane, because I couldn’t see Marjorie. And me musing along: Why, he was ripe! (“I’ve reserved a seat for you!”) Not not just any woman, any woman owning up, any woman owning up to what she put there and then what he put there. And not just any prince but this shy, diffident, earnest one. That explains it. It could as well have been Jane, it could as well have been Marjorie. That explains it. All the biff-bam of our encounter. Explains his fire, explains his lust and abandon on the frond-strewn clothing-carpeted floor of our unwinding wicky-up. This prince, this shy, diffident, earnest, and virgin prince. It was only a question of being in the right place at the right time, a serendipity, some upside-down, inside-out For-Want-Of- A-Nail thing. He was the conscientious one, the one with the character. That’s why I say fateful. That’s why I say it could have been Jane, it could have been Marjorie.

On shipboard or boatboard, or whatever it’s called when it’s the Royal Yacht and the distinctions still aren’t clear in a working girl’s head, he asked how I knew he’d been to New Guinea and that he’d actually seen a Cargo Cult.

“Why, I thought you’d been everywhere, Sir.”

“I have been everywhere.”

“Oh, my,” I said, “this isn’t to be another of those Poor- Little-Rich-Prince conversations, is it? Filled with languor and acedia and lots of lecturing about how one mustn’t judge until one’s plunked down one’s behind on another man’s throne.”

“Louise!” shocked the Prince.

“You’re not going to make me play How-Heavy-Hangs- the-Head again, I trust.”

“I’m sorry if I bore you.”

“Bore me? You don’t bore me. How could you bore me? When you suddenly up and announce I’ll be Princess of England one day, and that when you succeed to your succession I’m entitled to walk a neat two or three steps behind you. You lead, I follow. Why, we’ll look like one of those silly, overdressed couples that show up on the telly during the International Ballroom Dance Competitions. I think the only thing you left out is who gets to wear the number on the back. So, no, you don’t bore me.”

“You didn’t turn me down, Louise. You spoke up to those reporters.”

“Yes. Well. There you have me, Prince. Suddenly I thought you needed defending. It was like doing my National Service. My British passport was practically burning a hole in my purse.”

“You don’t love me?”

“Excuse me, Sir. I figure you can easily enough get yourself out of whatever it is you think you’ve gotten yourself into. That whole business this afternoon could have been something you made up on the spot to detract attention from coming late to your own ceremonial. It certainly wasn’t to make an honest woman out of me.”

“What if it were?”

“Well, it would have been too late, woul’n’t it? You can just drop me off anywhere you think it’s convenient.”

Was I fishing? Haven’t I already said I was starting to feel something for him?

“Louise,” he said, “we’ve been intimate!”

“I was right,” I said, “you were a virgin!”

“Where would I have found the time?” he demanded. Yes, Sid, demanded. He was angry now. His face was red and he wasn’t blushing. He might almost have been that battle prince out of history he’d seemed to me that morning. (That morning. My God, was it still the same day?) For all I knew he could have thought it convenient to throw me overboard then and there. I think I may have flinched. I saw him make a deliberate effort to calm down. “Where would I?” he asked again, softly. “These sailors are some of the same people you saw with me on shore this morning. They were at the proceedings this afternoon.” He lowered his voice still more, speaking in a register so deep it could have been amorous. “Your eyes were shut,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m under a sort of constant surveillance. Well, not surveillance exactly. No one actually spies on me. It’s just my nature, Louise. Even in public school at the Royal Naval Academy when the other boys had no trouble doing number two in front of each other in the open stalls I had trouble doing even number one.” He looked away. Abashed, he gazed down at the deck. “I’d wait until they were asleep and then I’d get up in the middle of the night … I was always costive,” he admitted. Then, his resentment apparently not leveled at me this time, he altered his tone again. “Well I’m going to be their King one day, aren’t I? It isn’t seemly. A king oughtn’t to be seen in his throes. It isn’t seemly. Noblesse oblige. Kings must set an example. Forgive me, Louise, I know it must sound mad to anyone not in my position but if it ever got out that kings f-t and p-ss and shi-like other people it could destroy their reigns. That they vomit or mas--bate or have fantasies about women g-ng d-n on them, or are sometimes too ravenous at their food, could go bad with them. I know it must seem mad.”

“Too right.”

“So how could I?” he said as if he hadn’t heard me. “Because except for the odd birthday party when I was a child and ran about doing naughty things to my cousins at the bottom of the garden, messing their frocks and playing silly games with them, playing Harley Street, playing Spin the Jar, playing Postbox, where would I have found the time? And I’m always so tired, and— ”

“So you do mean to tell me your troubles.”

“We can talk about anything you want, Louise.”

“Why did you say we were engaged? Why did you tell everyone you’d obtained Their Majesties’ prior consent to the engagement?”

“Not just their consent. Their encouragement.”

“They don’t even know me,” I said.

“Well, I was ripe,” he said, echoing the term I had used to describe him to myself only that astonishing afternoon.

(And I’ll tell you something, Sir Sid. For the first time I began to regard it as a possibility. Not only the engagement, but the possibility of the Royal Wedding, too. For the first time began to think it might not be a bad tradeoff— a life with a mad Prince and then another with a mad king. To be Princess of All the Englands. And he was handsome. Possessed, as I say, of almost a surfeit of beauty. And I would be one of the world’s richest women. And, too, I was starting to have these feelings for him. Tell me, my dear press lord, was he the only game in town or was he the only game in town?)

“Ripe?” I said.

“They too,” he said. “All of us.”

“Meaning?”

“They signaled their eagerness to abdicate. They’re ready to step down. It came in over the wireless. ‘Sparks’ passed on the message.”

“What are they like, your family?”

“Well, you know about my cousins.”

“Not your cousins. Your mum and your dad.”

“The sibs get their names in the papers.”

“You get your name in the papers.”

“The columns,” he said disapprovingly. “But you know that of course.”

“I’ve been in the States two years. They have their own distractions and preoccupations in the States.”

“Oh right,” he said. (You see, Sir Sidney? How our affair was proceeding? How at once whirlwind and old hat it must have seemed to the both of us? It didn’t seem possible to me it was still the same day. Larry had probably already forgotten those two years in the States I had told him about. We were like some old married couple. We couldn’t remember each other’s sizes.) “I love them. It’s not that,” he said. “It’s not even that they’re bad. They’re lively, they’ve very good hearts. But I’ll tell you the truth, Louise, they’re not fit children for the sons and daughters of royalty. I blame the parents.”

“You blame the parents?”

“Our crowd has a saying: ‘It starts in the castle.’”

He had me jumping. I couldn’t read him clearly. Now some girls will tell you the first thing they look for in a man is a nice smile, or a sense of humor; or they look at his hands, his teeth— if he keeps them clean. His nails, his hair. Or see can they tell if he’s vulnerable, say. Something physical, something spiritual, six of one, half dozen of the other. But the very first thing that catches my attention about a man is whether or not I can read him clearly. If he’s mysterious, inscrutable. Well, it’s in the tradition. In my tradition. He had me jumping. I felt like a nurse again, Sid.

“They’re irresponsible, Louise. If we weren’t merely symbolic, what I’m saying would be treasonous.”

“They signaled they’re ready to abdicate, you said. Step down, let you take over. You’re the conscientious one.”

“Make me Regent before my time, you mean.”

“You’re twenty-nine.”

“Damn it, Louise, it’s not even their fault.”

“What’s not? Whose fault? I don’t follow. I’m not reading you clearly.”

“Alec’s, Robin’s, Mary’s, Denise’s. It’s not their fault. It’s George’s, our father’s fault. It’s Charlotte’s, our mother’s. Who introduced them? Who taught them to run with a fast crowd, rattle about in all that loose company? Who do you think leaked their names to the columns? Who lazied them down from University? Who coaxed them away with those dubious seconds and thirds? Two years ago? They weren’t like that two years ago. How could you know?”

Sunday, January 26, 1992

How I Was Received

Of course we were expected. They knew we were coming. They must have been waiting. They must have prepared the whole thing.

They looked like sovereigns out of Noël Coward. He might have been the actor/manager of his own touring theatrical troupe, she his principal player— sixty if she was a day, yet still called on to do ingenue parts, sophisticated ladies.

Because it’s amazing how much can be kept from the public, how there’s spin on the spin control, these now-you- see-it, now-you-don’t arrangements.

There Their Majesties were, two conflagrant figures, Himself in a red silk dressing gown and seated on an honest- to-god throne with a yellow ring of gleamless crown perched light and rakish on the top of his head like the wavy concatenations on a suspension bridge or the points on the crown of some picture-card king; Herself in a gilt chair a few feet off to her husband’s side and chugalugging smoke through a long silver cigarette holder.

He didn’t even look like the King. Because this was the stuff that didn’t get into the papers. I was certain I was the only one not of their inner circle ever to see such a sight. There were what seemed like ancient props from the repertoire lying about— scepters and orbs out of Shakespearean history plays. Indeed, it looked more like the greenroom of a theater in the provinces than like a room in a proper palace.

“M’boy!” the King said, pushing down from his throne, spry for a man his age, embracing his son. “Welcome! Welcome!

“And is this your young lady? And welcome to you, m’dear! I must say I admire your taste,” he told the boy as he deftly let go his arms around Lawrence, placed one hand on my shoulder, touched my rear end with the other and, shielding us from the Prince’s view, pinched me. Alarmed, I said nothing, merely, in a nervous attempt to brush it off, curtsied in His Majesty’s direction where I was met by his palm cunningly there to catch my curtsy and which he pressed smartly against my breast. “Ah,” said the King, hamming it up, projecting, stopping the show, “You’re worldly! She’s worldly, Lawrence. Excellent choice, lad, excellent! Good! I don’t much care for priggishness in a man, and quite despise it in a gel!”

“Do let go of her for a moment, George,” said his wife, “so I may give her a whiskey. Have we such a thing as ice? Make yourself helpful, my darling, just would you? The poor thing has come all the way from the States and is almost certainly in need of ice.”

“There is no ice,” the King pronounced solemnly.

“My husband informs me that there is no ice. We were all a bit nervous that the ice would have gone off so of course it seems that it has. I do apologize. I am so very ashamed. But please don’t think too ill of our people, there are some quite civilized patches here and there in the Kingdom. Larry, you shall have to show your young friend — Louise, isn’t it? — that she’s not to judge by us, that not everyone does these blue, druidy things at the solstice. Of course you don’t have to drink that if it’s too despicable, dear. Should you not rather have one of those sweet, poofy drinks that don’t absolutely require ice — Louise, isn’t it?”

“I’m fine, Ma’m. Yes, Ma’am, Louise.”

“Charlotte, dear, or as it seems you’re to be my daughter-in-law, Mother, or Mummy either if that’s more comfortable for you. We don’t stand on ceremonies here. Larry will have told you that, I expect. Ceremonies are such a bore, finally. They so throw one off one’s fun. But Americans would know that, wouldn’t they?”

“I’m not American, Ma’am, I’m British.”

“Charlotte,” she drawled, “or Mother, or Mummy.” Then, glancing pointedly toward the King but without skipping a beat, went on. “Well, I’m happy to hear it,” she said. “In that case, nothing that’s happened this evening and nothing that happens shall leave the premises.” Though she was talking to me her eyes never broke contact with the King’s which, incredibly, seemed to dodge and to dart, to shy and startle and evade, but which despite all he could do to escape her accusing examination had locked onto his own nervous squinny as effectively as some deadly, heat-seeking missile fixing an enemy in its laserly sights. King George tugged at his ascot, ran a finger about an apparently tight collar. It was, on both their parts, the hammy King’s, the sophisticated lady’s, the most remarkable acting I’d seen that evening.

“Speaking of which,” she said.

“Which?” I asked in all innocence.

(Because the minds of these people don’t ever bother with transition. It isn’t anything owing to contempt, Sid, for others or even for ordinary sequitur, some lack of respect for logic and all the connected dots of aligned synapse— the half hour at one Ball, the fifteen minutes at the next. The single course that’s taken at this banquet and cup of coffee and bite of dessert that’s taken at the next. The two innings’ worth of witness at a ballgame, say. The rush of all that nextness, I mean, all that press of a Royal’s business Lawrence spoke of before seducing me. Because their minds are always racing, Sid, always jumping ahead of themselves, from one thing to the other, not only their power symbolic but their presence, too— their here-today-gone-today, spread-too-thin essence.)

“Which?” I asked.

“Why, of fun, dear. I should have thought Lawrence would have told you.”

“Aye,” said the King, rubbing his hands together, his sham discomfort at having been found out already forgotten. “Tell the children about the party you’ve arranged in their honor, Charlotte. Have you et?” he asked enthusiastically.

“Well, Prince Alec will be here,” she said, “and I think Princess Denise blah blah blah and, oh yes, I’ve invited the sweetest assortment of jolly incumbents in some of the most arcane of our traditional offices to meet you.”

“Invited, Charlotte?”

“Well, commanded. Did I say invited? I thought I’d said commanded.”

(I tell you, Sid, it doesn’t get out. You’d never recognize them in the streets for all that their portraits are on the stamps and the money, couldn’t guess at their improbable behavior, or at any of the broad farce of our slapstick Royals. I swear to you, Sid, all they care for is to be off by themselves— more ethnic than Africans, more tribal than cousins.)

Odd as it may seem, that sweet assortment of jolly incumbents Charlotte referred to, and who I implied constituted their inner circle, weren’t necessarily blooded, though all, at least in some political or vaguely gangsterly sense, were connected. Most of them held public office. Don’t mistake me. Not one of them could pick up a telephone and have someone killed. If Their Majesties’ powers were symbolic, their own were less real. Whereas monarchical power hadn’t always been so ceremonial — though even today, this late in history’s game, there are absolute monarchs who don’t have to trouble to pick up a phone, they can kill you themselves — theirs had always been ceremonial and smelled of basic, blatant ineffectuality, of the merely traditional and picturesque, like Swiss Guards standing outside the Vatican at an uptight attention posing for tourists and protecting, in a time of car-bombing, plastique-throwing terrorists and kamikazes, some other age’s pope in only their fourteenth- century caps, billowy shirts, and silly pantaloons, with only their pike staffs.

(Am I a keen observer of the passing parade, or am I a keen observer of the passing parade? I can almost hear you taking on about those fifty thousand pounds again. “Get on with it, get on with it,” you’re saying. But I throw the op-ed stuff in gratis. You didn’t bargain for that when I signed on, did you, Sid, that true confessions has its themes too?)

Yet even at that, even on the most traditional and ineffectual level, what almost all these offices had in common was death’s oblique symbolism.

There was the London Royal Intentioner, whose duty it was to greet every parade of warriors returning to the city from the front, glorious and victorious — and abject, too, what with all those riderless horses and muffled drums and black, mournful, crepe-draped artillery pieces and other death-decked-out matériel — to discover their intentions, whether they were peaceful toward the Crown. I have it by report that he simply took the commander’s word for it, on the principle that he would not have been a commander if he had not first been a gentleman. I say I have it by report because I didn’t get to ask the Royal Intentioner himself. He canceled at the last minute. He told the King he was too busy to come to the party. It gave both Their Majesties a laugh.

Which seemed, really, to be the point of the party.

“They’re court jesters, aren’t they?” I asked the Prince. “I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? They’re court jesters.”

“Ask someone else,” the Prince said coolly.

“All right, I will.”

And did. I was a little tight. George was feeding me drinks now, volunteering to refill my glass every time I took three or four swallows from it or set it down for a minute.

“There’s a good girl,” said the King as if I were a child sick in nursery and he was holding out a spoon of my medicine.

“Goodness me,” I said, “you’re plying me with drink, aren’t you, Dad?”

“Call me, George, sweet thing,” said His Royal Highness.

I admit it, it’s a turn-on to be plied by a king. As Lord Acton might have said, “Power seduces and absolute power seduces absolutely.”

(Well, you know my track record, don’t you, Sid? C.f. All that about the Prince and his beauty.)

Though I acknowledge he never touched me. He didn’t even pinch me again. Our Sovereign was on his most sovereignly behavior. The kingdom was in good hands, if its Princess manqué wasn’t. Perhaps it was Charlotte’s presence, or the Prince’s sour mien, or it could be the King no longer found me attractive tipsy, or maybe he was bored with causing scenes, though that’s a bit hard to credit.

“These people are like court jesters, aren’t they, George?”

“Ask someone else,” the King said, breaking off, and then, practically phoning in his performance, flatly, “Ah you’re worldly. She’s worldly, Lawrence. Excellent choice, lad. Excellent good.”

And did. Still tipsy and even a little turned on by the room itself, by my situation (the former Louise Bristol, recently exiled to America with just enough to live on for about six months but beginning to feel the pinch as the time wore on and then, later, this au pair girl in her late twenties and, further on down the road, a maker of beds in the Housekeeping Department of a Los Angeles hotel and, later still, a down-on-her-luck, pushing-thirty beachcomber and sewer-of-houses and sandsweepstress, but currently fianceé to Lawrence Mayfair of the House of Mayfair and, not then knowing myself manqué, future Princess of England), sat down beside a stocky, almost preternaturally rosy-cheeked, jolly-seeming man of about fifty or so.

“Are you a court jester too?” I said, prepared by now to be told to ask someone else.

I would like my readers to know I know I was rude, brazen even, and that it will not do to dismiss this, to write it off to the fact that I was drunk. Ignorance of the— Well, you know. Nor do I plead my low tolerance for alcohol or put down to drought and holes in the ozone layers the extent of my thirst. Not much that brought on my troubles in this account was of my own doing but I openly acknowledge that which was.

As sometimes occurs in narrative what happens next is not always what is expected. The somewhat cherubic, rosy- cheeked, jolly-seeming man did not send me away. If he had, chances are I wouldn’t have left. His very avuncularity intensified my feelings of euphoria. I was not only brazen now but mildly randy, flirtatious, teasing, lightly touching his arm, deliberately brushing against him where we sat together on a sofa, my voice raised but not hysteric; acting out, strutting my stuff with the rest of the players in the room. I do not put it down to drink, I do not. I was tipsy as a gambler on a roll, mood-swung, high on luck, the boost in my fortunes.

“I am Selector of Ropes,” he answered simply, and it was as if he’d chastised me, so struck was I by the depth of his underacting. “Henry VIII was not an unfeeling man. He invented the position.”

“I never heard of your office,” I mentioned conversationally. “What is it you do?”

“I am not your straight man,” he said.

“Truly,” I told him. “I don’t know. I’m only asking.”

“We look at hemp.”

“Yes?” I said.

“We look for finer and finer rope. Softer silk.”

“Why?”

“Henry was not unfeeling. He had no stomach for beheading his women.”

“Why did he do it then?”

He looked toward King George.

“Go on,” the King said softly. “Tell her, Selector.” The room was already quiet. Now it was still. You could hear a pin drop.

(Mark this, Sir Sidney. Mark your marked manqué.)

“He’d already broken with one tradition when he withdrew from Rome,” the man said, still restrained but rushing now, doing with rapid pacing what before he had done with calm, “why would he want to break with another one?”

Then, suddenly, he pulled another technique from his quiver, assumed yet another style, closer to what the King’s had been when the Prince and I first came in, gesticulating wildly, playing for laughs.

“He was ahead of his time, don’t you know. Oh yes. Didn’t ’alf ‘old with axes, ’e didn’t. Not ’im. Not ’enry. Haxes was sharp and wulgar. All that spilled blood? That were Royal blood!” And stage whispered, “’e anticipated hinterregnums, rewolutions— ’e hanticipated ’angings!

“Oh yes, one of my predecessors introduced the Windsor knot to make it a bit more comfortable around the royal neck of one of them Tudors or Stuarts or Windsors or May- fairs. Just in the event, don’t you know!” he said, the last sentence delivered as if it were some famous, uproarious tag line. And sure enough the King was red-faced, almost hacking up his laughter. Even Charlotte was grinning.

There were other jolly incumbents. One came up to me, bubbling with inside information, tricks of the trade.

“You know those royal orders monarchs sometimes wear? Those broad, colorful bands of cloth that pass down diagonally over a king’s or queen’s right shoulder like the supporting straps on Sam Browne belts? Well, if the color scheme isn’t carefully coordinated or the order clashes too severely with the rest of the costume, it could throw off the entire occasion. That’s why our kings and queens have always had art directors.”

“You’re the royal art director?”

“No, I’m in a related field. Monarchical medallions can be very heavy. Well, they aren’t shields made out of tin, are they? Often they’re heavy enough to tear a fabric apart, so the fabric has to be reinforced to support patches to fix to the cloth of ceremonial gear — your designer dresses, your gowns and robes and uniforms — to support the weight of those medallions. That’s what I do, I’m Royal Fashion Engineer.”

And another who said he was Royal Taster and credited his astonishing slimness to the fact that he had to keep his palate clear in order to distinguish among the flavors of the various poisons that had, over the years, been used in attempted regicides. He felt, he said, he owed it to his sovereign to partake, at most, of one or two spoonfuls of royal soup, a bite of meat, a sip of wine, a nibble of bread. I was reminded of Lawrence working his symbolic presence during the Season’s Balls and dinners and, now I noticed it, of Their Majesties’ own trim, fit figures.

“Ahh,” I said, “that explains it. They owe them to their diminished dinners.”

Royal Taster smiled. “Just so,” he said, exactly as if he knew to what I referred.

Royal Peerager spoke to me. He told me, rather too pointedly, I thought, that it was his job to watch out for pretenders. The Mayfairs, he said, could be traced back to Lear and Macbeth.

He would have gone on — I was interested enough despite a fear of the silly starting to take hold in me — but just then some new personage, burdened by several parcels, burst upon the scene.

“There you are!” King George said.

“And high time, I would have thought,” Charlotte scolded. “You knew I especially wanted you to meet your brother’s new fiancée.”

“As if ever he had an old one, Mother dear,” said Princess Denise.

(For that’s who it was, another ingenue for what might turn out to be — I hadn’t met Princess Mary yet — an entire company of ingenues. She’d changed in the two years or better since I’d last been in England. I suppose her picture had been in the papers plenty of times but the truth is I had enough on my mind in those days not to have noticed. Well, not actually the truth, Sid. What the truth actually is is that I consciously tried to avoid what was going on at home, to the point that I wouldn’t even go to an English film or watch Masterpiece Theater on the telly — which I’d started to call TV — and had stopped drinking tea. So the last thing I needed was to keep up with the British fascination with the prurient goings-on of its more hereditary characters, pushing aside as much as I could of the silly gossip that surrounds one — surrounds? embraces — in both countries like climate. Maybe America was the wrong place to go. Perhaps I should have chosen somewhere less civilized, some hot, plague-ridden African place, where I might have comforted dying children and futilely brushed away flies from their faces that the children themselves were too weak to brush off and probably didn’t even notice for all that the flies crawled across the huge, swollen surfaces of the very eyes they didn’t even seem capable of shutting. So why would I? What did I need it, Sir Sid?)

I hardly recognized her, though how much could a seventeen-year-old girl, now a twenty-year-old young woman, have changed in two years? There was something slightly askew and off-plumb about her appearance, and as soon as she burst into speech as she’d burst into the room (as one is said to “burst into song,” from a standing position as it were— like some instantaneous, transitionless transformation or sea change or jump cut in the pictures), I thought I knew what it was. It was as if she’d undergone some powerful, personal Damascene rearrangement— a persona inversion of the seventeen-year-old, almost womanly creature I vaguely remembered from photographs I’d seen in the papers over two years before into the twentyish, pretty, oh- so-girlish young thing before me — before me? practically all over me — now.

Although she was got up as a sort of latter-day flapper— fringe swayed at the bottom of her too-short skirt like the fringed, beaded dividers that separated backrooms in the décor of thirites-era movies, or plays set somewhere in the Orient, from the low taverns and bars on the ground floors of whorehouses, places where sailors are shanghai’d or slipped Mickey Finns — with dark, wide eyes immensely open and sketched in with eyebrow pencil, and her red, fire- engine mouth had been painted into a pout at once as cynical and cute as someone about to cry, this flapper- cum-ingenue seemed hyperactive as a kid at a slumber party.

“Why, Larry, she’s adorable! You’re adorable, Louise! Isn’t she adorable, Father? Isn’t she adorable, Mother? You’ll make just the most brilliant Princess, Louise. No wonder even an old pooh like Larry lost his heart. Well, I should think so. Here, sweetheart, here are some things I bought you. (That’s why I was late, Charlotte dear. So there!) I just guessed at your sizes, but don’t fret if nothing fits. We won’t even bother to return it, we’ll just give the stuff away to our servants or those absolutely smashing Mounted Horse Guards in Whitehall to offer to Oxfam. Then we can go shopping for all new things!”

As she spoke she produced one exotic garment after another from her various boxes and bundles. I recognized the names of boutiques all along the Kings Road, some so chic I’d supposed they’d shut up shop years ago. I couldn’t have told you the function of some of this garb or, had the Princess not held a few of the pieces against me, have identified more than the general area of the body they were supposed to cover. Of the material of which they were made I could have told you nothing, only that much of it must have been experimental.

“Oh, Louise,” she said, “you look quite fabulous in that!”

She was enjoying herself and, to be frank, I was too. Despite the public character of our performance, I felt comfortable, somnolent, spoiled and at ease as a teen having a makeover.

In the end, however, she discarded almost all of it, dropping stuff on the floor, kicking it away, a bit disappointed in both of us because we’d both failed to live up to some vague, preconceived image she had of me which her gifts represented, but pleased, too, because now we could go shopping for new things, just, as she put it, “us two girls.”

She paused a moment, then retrieving a sort of turban, held it out toward my head. “Never mind,” she said. Carelessly, she dropped it again. “Of course,” she said, “we won’t really know until we do something about that hair.”

She began to bat at my hair rather as if it were on fire.

When I continued to flinch Charlotte at last intervened. “Oh do stop, Denise, you’re alarming her.”

“I’m only trying to help, Mother! I’m only seeing if it can be fixed. If you’d only stand still, Louise! So I know what to tell the hairdresser before us two girls go shopping again.”

“For goodness’ sake, Denise,” said Prince Lawrence, “stop carrying on about ‘us two girls,’ why don’t you? It’s ‘us two girls’ this and ‘us two girls’ that. ‘Us two girls,’ indeed. How can you speak so? You’re a Princess of England.”

“I was putting her at ease.”

“Oh please,” the Prince said. “Louise is my fiancée. One day she’ll outrank you.”

“Oh, Lawrence,” said the Princess, “we’re all of us only these accidents of birth, so why must you be so stuffy all the time? It really is too boring. Anyway, it isn’t even true. Dear, adorable, brilliant, fabulous, and absolutely stunnin’, charmin’, smashin’, and perfect for you as she quite so most obviously is, I am the daughter of royalty, after all, and darlin’ Louise here is only a common commoner. So what do you mean she’ll outrank me? She never will, will she, Royal Peerager?”

“Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors,” the Royal Peerager said.

“What do you mean?” Charlotte said. “I never understand what you mean when you say that.”

“Me t’ know … you t’ fin’ out,” he muttered, sulking.

“Really, George,” Charlotte objected, “listen how he speaks to me. Do I have to put up with that? A proper king wouldn’t stand for it. I daresay a proper husband wouldn’t.”

“It was a joke, Your Royal Highness,” the Peerager said. He turned to my mother-in-law manqué. “It’s a joke, Your Highness.”

King George sighed. “Well,” he said, “I suppose she is dear and adorable and brilliant and all the bloody darlin’ rest of it. I only wish Their Royal Caterers and all the Holy British Empire’s Florists and Band Leaders would just get on with it so we could have the damned wedding and retire. If she’s all right with you, she’s all right with us. Your friend passes muster, Prince,” he said as though I really didn’t.

“Where’s Alec?” the Princess broke in. “I thought Alec was coming. He promised he would. He should have been here by now.”

“I told him to come, I spoke with him just this morning. Oh my,” Charlotte said, as if remembering something she’d forgotten. Troubled, flesh-is-heir-to things played across her features, plain, ordinary as a sneeze, and, quite suddenly, she ceased to look regal, bereft of even those vestiges of bearing left to her in even only her theatrical ways. “Oh my,” she said again, worriedly. “Today’s the seventeenth.”

“That’s right,” Denise put in, “tomorrow’s the time trials.”

And now Charlotte was possessed of a flustered, lashing, unfocused anger, her rage oddly, ineptly maternal, like the helpless, confused rage of a woman just back from hospital with her first child. Even before I understood the reference of her anger I understood the reference of her anger. “He collected his new Quantra today!” she cried. “He’s off testing his damned limits, isn’t he, George! He’s off pushing his damned envelope!”

“He’s a perfectly capable young man, Charlotte, You mustn’t coddle him. The boy knows what he’s doing.”

“Oh, George,” she said, “if only he did. I wish he did.”

“It’s just an automobile. He’s been driving a car since his eighth birthday.”

“Too right,” she said, “the day he swerved to hit the gillie to avoid hitting the gillie’s dog.”

“That was an accident, Charlotte.”

“The man will never walk again, George.”

The King nodded. “I know,” he said, and for the first time that evening neglected his posture. “Look here, Ropes,” he said. “Look here, London Intentioner, Royal Peerager. Look here, Royal Taster, look here all. I’m sorry,” he said. “I am so really very sorry, but the Queen, worried as she is regarding our Alec, is a bit out of sorts this evening. Now our revels all are ended, thank you very much for coming.

I started to move off with the rest but Prince Lawrence motioned me to stay. Princess Denise, patting the broad piano bench on which she was seated, indicated I should join her.

“He’s crashed the car,” Queen Charlotte said. “I know it, he’s crashed the car.” Unexpectedly, she turned to address me. Denise, very softly, was picking out a tune on the piano, providing a sort of quiet background music behind her mother’s speech. She was very good. “He’s probably had one too many. He’s fond of surprising people in their local, Prince Alec is. He loves it when they fall all over themselves to buy him drinks. And him a prince,” she said, giggling, taking up another role. “Not once has he ever volunteered to return the favor, Louise. He brags on this as if the most wonderful service he can render them as a Prince of the Realm is to let them stand him drinks.”

“It is,” the King said wistfully.

“He’s so charming,” Charlotte said.

“Very charming,” said his sister, never breaking the rhythm of her sad, bluesy tune.

“But too much of a drinker,” his mother said. “George dearest, what’s the horsepower on the new Quantra?”

“It has a Rolls-Royce engine,” my Larry said, “I heard it can be pushed up to a thousand horses.”

“A thousand horses. A veritable cavalry,” the King said, interrupting his own husky, hummed accompaniment to Denise’s accompaniment.

“Should he be driving it through the streets?” wondered the Queen.

(Did you know, Sid, they may not be brought up on charges? I didn’t know that. I don’t think most people know. I daresay you yourself don’t absolutely know. Oh we’ve all heard rumors from time to time, and many of us have known of someone of whom it is said that once she’d known someone who was supposed to have known someone else who had had it on good authority from a friend with a pal who had connections with a person who used to be in a position of authority, but all of it is just so much blown smoke or, rather, smoke wrapped in time, or mist. Smoke wrapped in mists wrapped in time lost in legend, like the identity of Robin Hood, say, or who Christ’s cousins were.

(It isn’t even a question of influence. Of course they have influence. Everyone has influence. I have influence. And for darn damn sure it certainly isn’t written down anywhere. I mean, you could search in all the books and charters, pamphlets and whatnot in the British Museum and never come across it, and of all the controversial things I’ve set down here — the King’s Pinch, how Larry was a virgin when he done me, how Royals behave at home when they let down their hair — surely this is the most controversial. That they can’t be brought up on charges, that that gillie who was sacrificed to his own dog and was run over when Alec was eight and out on a joyride and who’ll never walk again while Alec, eight-year-old or no eight-year-old, but simply because he was a Royal and not only couldn’t be hauled into court but wasn’t even grounded, for God’s sake, and who to this day drives a souped-up thousand hp Quantra capable of whipping down the narrowest, twistiest country lane in all of England, never mind powering about Trafalgar Square or Piccadilly Circus pressing the pedal to the metal!

(This isn’t rage, Sid, so don’t mistake me. It isn’t rage but merely the gentlest indication to my gentle readers to let them know how badly I feel to have lost out on so much, because if only a pipsqueak younger brother at a two or three times remove from the throne can have so much freedom and latitude, then how much more free and how much more wide would the latitude be for the bona fide royal- wedding-related bride of the out-and-out King! Sid, I mean, they’re not even licensed! All that hocus-pocus and rigmarole and long, winding trail and trial by blood descent they have to go through just in order to get to be considered to be in the just royal aristocratic running, and then they’re permitted to skip and finesse entirely the simple red tape of filling out a form to apply for a driver’s license! I mean, once in a while you can depose them, or maybe actually even kill them, but you can’t sue them for damages if you slip and fall on their walk if they haven’t shoveled their snow or they blindside you for life on the clearest day in the world when they drive home drunk from the pub where you’ve bought all their drinks!)

Denise, sighing, said, “Please, Mother. Mother, please don’t,” and shut the lid over the piano keys as if she’d finished the evening’s last set. “No use to fret, darling,” she said, and took up the Queen’s hands in her own. “Mustn’t be anxious. Alec’s all right. You’ll see. He’s much too fond of his life to give it up stupidly. There,” she said, “that’s better. You look so much better. Doesn’t she look so much better, Father?”

“A dainty dish to set before the King,” the King said.

“Oh,” she said, “you two!” And she might have been some cosseted Midlands farm wife dismissing a compliment and not the sophisticated lady of an hour or so earlier. She’d been smoking all evening but her long silver cigarette holder was nowhere to be seen. Denise for that matter had ceased to appear girlish, had as effectively suppressed that side of her personality as she had seemed to make the piano disappear by closing its lid. Only the King remained in character, and it occurred to me to wonder whether that wasn’t what differentiated him finally, that what made a king a king was the power of his concentration, that what may, as Denise put it, have started as an accident of birth wasn’t maintained by some absolute act of the will. How else account for the staying power of a reign, our image of kings — and queens too — as persons, whatever their age, continuing in their primes, long enough at any rate to put their stamp upon an era?

(I don’t want my readers to think I was that objective, already this journalist of a princess manqué taking notes, recording her impressions. Not a bit of it! I was swept up, I was plenty swept up. So swept up, in fact, I never took Lawrence up on his offer to run off to the Tower with him to have for engagement ring the Crown Jewel of my choice, but kept instead the fussy costume-jewelry ring I had bought for myself on the ground floor of a Los Angeles department store and had shown to the reporters back in Cape Henry. So I was swept up all right, plenty shook by these people, as much taken by them as any who pay their good money to read this stuff. Still, a girl will have her instincts, won’t she, Sir Sidney?)

Having pumped Charlotte up with her reassurances, Denise now made an effort to reinforce her original entrance, displaying her earlier, larkier pedigree. Turning back the clock, she mimed an excited, jumpy applause, impaling herself, whatever her reasons, on some sort of dismal, faked enthusiasm.

She seized on me as if I were someone from the audience pressed into service to assist her.

“Never mind, dear,” she assured me, “rudeness is just Alec’s way. It isn’t as if he means anything by it. It’s only his way of getting attention without actually having to try to kill anyone. His bark is way worse than his bite, though, once you get to know him, that is. It’s really too devastating he’s not here though. I shall never forgive him. No. I shall never forgive him. We’d planned to take you round Knightsbridge to show you to all our mates. Have you your card with you? Not to worry, we can have one made up in the morning. Did you know, incidentally, it was Alec’s idea to reintroduce the calling card back into society? If there’s nothing to do, sometimes we’ll both take up a bunch of them and drive out in my Jag to Croyden or Putney or Willesden Green and pop them through the postal slots of some of the ratepayers. Can you imagine the looks on their faces? Such fun!

“I know,” she said, “we can call on some of the cousins. We can call on Cousin Nancy, we can call on cousins Heide and Jeanne and Alice and Anne— Cousin Anne is in town, isn’t she, Lawrence? I say, Lawrence — oh look, he’s blushing — is Cousin Anne in town?”

“Leave off, will you, Denise!” my intended yelled at her.

“Pa,” she appealed, “make him stop. Show him who’s King.”

“The both of you stop.”

“Oh all right,” she said, “I won’t show you Nanc — I mean Anne.”

“Denise!”

“Anyway,” the Princess confided, “often — well, sometimes — Alec and I— Oh, speak of the devil.”

And, suddenly, someone who could, in accordance with all his advance notices, only have been Alec, blustered into the room. He was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk. His clothes were torn. Alec the Rude, glancing once about him, at Charlotte and George, at his sister Denise, at his brother Lawrence, the King-in-waiting who’d been off working the world and whom he couldn’t have seen in at least two months, looked in my direction, came toward me, bowed deeply, and kissed my hand loud as you please, quite solidly, and dead center on its costume-jewelry ring finger.

Sunday, February 2, 1992

How He Courted Me

It wasn’t jealousy as you and I know it. Well, it wasn’t jealousy at all, really. No matter what you’ve read in the press, the truth is I was never attracted to Alec. I don’t really think he was attracted to me. I’m not telling any tales out of school if I remind the public that Prince Alec is not highly sexed, only heavily hormoned. His skin, if you look closely, is actually rather fair and only appears swarthy because of the dense stubble of five-o’clock shadow that covers it. I don’t know why he doesn’t grow a beard. Unless of course the vaguely tough-guy look on his handsome, somewhat disheveled face is something he deliberately cultivates. Like the dust-up (rather than car crash) it turns out he provoked on the evening of my first visit to the palace. Which is why, really, I was never attracted to Alec.

Well, put yourself in my place. Knowing, I mean, what I knew. About, I mean, that business of their never being brought up on charges. Mere Figureheads? Symbolic power? I should think not. No, they can’t take us into foreign wars and don’t even have all that much say-so in domestic matters. They couldn’t, I daresay, fix a ticket for anyone below the rank of a marquess. But forget about not being allowed to make laws or fix tickets. But not ever having to answer to anyone? Symbolic power? Power like theirs, the power, I mean, to run amok with impunity, is the most seductive and dangerous power there is. So so much, I say, for the pretty myth of their Figureheadhood!

Yet there’s no denying it. It is seductive. All that force, all that dash and fire, all that vim and verve. To wink at precept and live in some perpetual state of willful disregard the indulged, insouciant life is a temptation indeed. I was not tempted.

I am, I think at least as much a woman as Prince Alec is a man. Where he is testosteronagenous and aggressive, I am largely progesterogenic and nurturing. And I never forgot that Alec is a bully — is this libelous? let them go prove it— and that too much of his bravura is vouchsafed by his princely immunities. If he was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk, if his clothes were torn, what had he to lose in a dust-up? He’s on the National Health, his clothing allowance is seventy-five thousand pounds a year. You should see the other guy.

To his credit, Lawrence was not jealous. To mine, I never gave him reason to be.

(Sid, let them bring me up on charges. Let them just try! In this La Lulu-Tells-All enterprise we’re supposed to be engaged in here, let me remind them that I haven’t done, I haven’t told all, not yet I haven’t. Only what relates to me. And this isn’t blackmail. I haven’t asked for a penny of their money. I wouldn’t, I won’t. And if they try to put me under a gag order, I’ll just take my story somewhere else. I’ll get in with the Yanks and give it away free to the paper with the highest circulation!)

So.

On then to my whirlwind courtship, my introduction to the British press, my background, who my people are, what I did for love, et cetera, et cetera.

The public’s up to here with most of this anyway, so I’ll simply synopsize what they already know, or think they know, throwing in where warranted one or two of my theories.

Of course it really isn’t enough for me to state that Alec and I were not attracted to each other. Who would believe me? In light of all that photographic evidence? It’s only natural the public would want some proof to counter the claims that we were up to something. In a civilization like ours, where each new dawn brings with it a fresh breath of scandal, in our Where-There’s-Smoke-There’s-Fire world, in this brave new age of nolo contendere and out-of-court settlements, the tendency is to believe in the failure of human character. Well. Unfortunately I can offer no proof. However, I think I can supply the reader with a context, what proper journalists call a backgrounder.

Consider England’s circumstances, the sociology of our times. Despite anything I may have said, or, rather, because everything I’ve said about the deeply cynical nature of the Zeitgeist is true, our sudden appearance in the social sky was welcomed, even applauded. It is simply in the nature of things when they are at their worst to hope for the best. What better time to hope for the best? Very well then, I come along, or Prince Lawrence does and I come along with him. It’s announced we’re engaged, that your future King has chosen his future Consort. We are both an item and a distraction, something like a hopeful leitmotif in an otherwise dreary composition. We not only know we’re a field day for the press, we positively count on it. Because it’s true, all the world does too love a lover. They size me up, they eye my breasts, they look at my legs.

I am, quite literally, presented at Court. We have become, the two of us, a Season unto ourselves. It’s middle to latish summer, just after Wimbledon, about. A time of hampers and picnics in people’s private deer parks. We go round to meet the peerage in their stately homes— dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts and lowly barons. I meet the Lawrence’s grandparents. (Sid, I haven’t told all. Only what relates to me. This isn’t blackmail!) I meet some of those famous cousins of Larry’s, and am surprised at how plain they are— astonished at this one’s buck teeth and that one’s incipient hump. And am seized by a sudden shyness when they look too knowingly at me.

The paparazzi are having a field day. They are meant to, of course. This exercise is as much for them as it is for us. They are to be my conduit into the homes of my prospective subjects. (La, will you just listen to me with my count- my-chickens? Pride goeth before a fall.) Butlers and gillies and that magic show-biz retinue of Larry’s that I hadn’t been conscious of since we got off the yacht have been given instructions to let them be as we make our way through the daily round. They are not to be disturbed so long as they stay in the trees or hide in the bushes with their long lenses and special equipment. At certain houses they are even given sandwiches and offered tall, cool glasses of milk.

As our tour continued during those three or four weeks of visits in that spectacular English summer when the conditions for photography, that smashing, perfect balance of light and shade, were so ripe that the dullest of that gang of paparazzi would have had to forget to load their cameras or remove their lens covers to fail to get perfect pictures, the family affair became a family affair. I mean we were joined by Larry’s sisters and brothers.

I mean— enter Alec.

The man had an absolute instinct for when a picture was about to be taken. Oh, how that horser-arounder could horse around! It was uncanny. Quicker than an f-stop or the setting of the shutter speed, he could reach across a field of vision and thrust himself into a photograph without leaving even the faintest trace of a blur. He was, that is, a scene stealer par excellence, and probably inherited his natural gifts for mugging, timing, and blocking from the innate theatricality of his parents. (Because Darwin was right, Sid. I’m just a simple celebrity, just this year’s flash in the pan, but even I can see that when, over the years, the necessity for monarchs to be the stalwarts of eras and policies dropped away, they must have oh so gradually adapted and become instead these figures for pageantry, this little, highly specialized race of creatures who are at their best set off in golden coaches, as fashioned for tableau vivant as if they’d been invented by tailors and jewelers.) At any rate, Alec was a sort of genius of displacement. He could so dispose imself — by a look, by a gesture — that it often appeared in these photographs as if I were looking at him admiringly, even though my attention may actually have been engaged by some particularly astonishing effect in one of the fabulous gardens on one of the fabulous estates we happened to be visiting that weekend. Conversely, he could somehow intuit when my face was about to assume what, for lack of a better term, I can only call a compromising expression, and then flash some last-minute smile of yearning and longing in my direction. Or, magically, he might appear next to me in certain photographs where I cannot even recall his being part of the group. In these pictures our eyes seem to be holding hands.

“Look here, Alec,” I told him one day, “this will have to stop.”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Those photographs of us that appear in the papers and magazines.”

“It’s not my fault there’s freedom of the press in this country. Areopagitica, don’t you know.”

“Just stop it that’s all. Columnists are beginning to suggest things.”

“I wonder why,” Alec said. “I have no interest in you.”

He was telling the truth. I think it was out of simple mischief he did these things. Alec was rather like one of those irrepressibles, a best man, say, who might thrust his finger up behind the groom’s head in the formal wedding portrait.

In the event, Larry was never jealous and, if he ever harbored even the least suspicion about either of us he gave no hint. It was Princess Denise to whom it occurred that something might be fishy. In my own, Lawrence’s, and Their Majesties’ presence she brought it up herself, and in almost the same abrupt words I had used.

“Ho hum ho hum hum ho,” replied Alec.

“He’s your brother,” Denise said.

“Yes, I know. Lawrence the Steady.”

“Good lord, Alec, sometimes you can make me so cross!”

“I love all my children equally,” Charlotte put in.

“I love all my children equally,” King George said, giving the line a different reading.

Prince Lawrence barely looked up from the charts he was preparing for our honeymoon voyage.

Well. Alec didn’t bother to stop pulling his faces even after Denise and I called his attention to those potentially damaging photographs. You will recall, I’m sure, what he said the single time he was directly challenged about any of this by a member of the press. “You may say,” he said without blinking an eye, “that Louise and I are just good friends.”

Whatever the public’s speculations about Alec’s and my behavior, I was too caught up in the genuinely hard work— harder work, oh much harder, than when I was in California running the vacuum, cleaning washrooms, scouring toilets, turning mattresses, making up beds; harder even than the hours I put in out in the Pacific rubbing my hands raw, raising blood, and doing without the benefit of appliances to entire wicky-ups what I’d been obliged to do to only a handful of guest rooms in the Los Angeles hotel — of our official engagement and ceremonial but backbreaking courtship to take all that much notice of what I knew to be vicious, baseless rumor, no matter what I, or Denise either, may have said to Alec when we confronted him. Perhaps Lawrence’s own phlegmatic response lulled me into an unrealistic appraisal of my danger. (Or perhaps — do you gather my meaning, Lord Sidney? — I had not yet come to appreciate the subtler, almost chemical properties, exchanges, and reactions of families.) So, much was lost on me. Though I’ll be frank, I didn’t blame myself then and don’t blame myself now.

Who would in my position? New to fame? I mean fame, my friends. And if, today, I can write myself off as a simple celebrity, in those days — I hadn’t realized until I put down that last phrase how very long ago they now seem though it can’t have been more than four or five months back that all this took place — I was an historical figure, a matrix for monarchy, the potential breeder of queens and kings. It’s no wonder I was under such close, if misdirected, scrutiny.

As I was saying.

New to fame. New, though at twenty-eight I was perhaps a few years past the right age for it, to a whirlwind tour— indeed, there were times when I actually thought of myself as living in a kind of montage — of social geography I’d seen depicted in films — bars of crayon light spelling the names of nightclubs in flashing pulses of neon like a kind of urban code; wheels spinning on roulette tables with colored chips on special numbers like canted stacks of denomination; dice on green baize; corks popping out of champagne bottles; dance halls and dance bands, the musicians sitting primly on chairs behind music stands whose vaguely scrolled shapes were like the fronts of sleighs; couples barely moving to slow, easy music from some universal time zone of romance; sleek cars on streets still shiny from recent rain— all the world that did too love a lover wrapped in creamy layers of early A.M. cliché—but never really believed existed.

Oddly, it was at these times I most had Larry to myself. It was as if the paparazzi had been bought off, or as if we’d somehow managed to give the Prince’s family the slip. Maybe this was only a professional courtesy — another tradition — paid to princes during certain of the more tender phases of their courtships. And odd, too, how strangely returned to myself I felt, and to a time when I was not yet the toast of Western and Mediterranean Europe, shy, almost defensive.

There was, for example, the incident at The Springfield, one of Britain’s, indeed the Continent’s, most important but — because of its relative inaccessibility and the steepness of the stakes risked there — least frequented gambling casinos. The Springfield is in Llanelli, an unattractive borough and port town of under twenty-five thousand in County Dyfed, South Wales. Lawrence, who wasn’t much of a gambler—“More Denise’s, Mary’s, and Alec’s line of country,” he’d said both times we’d been to London clubs, quickly adding that craps, cards, roulette, and offtrack betting were some of the nation’s principal industries and, as such, required his attention during our engagement, as, once we were married, our presence would be expected at foundries, coal mines, and shipyards; it was good, he said, for tourism — drove us down as much, or so I was told, to see his old boyhood chum, Macreed Dressel, the casino’s owner, as to show the flag.

In London, no matter I was no more gambler than Lawrence, I rather enjoyed the glamorous ambience of these places, enjoyed the exotic liquors they passed round, enjoyed the au courant fashions of the women, the striking black-tie presence of the men, was enchanted by the sourceless background of classical chamber music played by live, but hidden, musicians, so at odds with the ostensible activities in the big rooms, but so fitting, too, suggesting as it did an earlier age, some fastidious buck-and-wing of cotillions and quadrilles, of silk breeches and linen petticoats, great fortunes won and lost, love tragedies and suicides and young men killed in duels.

The Springfield, however, was a different story.

For one thing, after what Larry had told me about the club, about its being a kind of Lourdes or Mecca for people of serious fortunes, a place so remote it was almost as convenient to approach by ship as by rail or airplane, I had imagined a sort of Monte Carlo for the rich, even picturing those freaky, out-of-the-way palm trees you sometimes get in Great Britain here and there along this or that ocean current, my mind actually conjuring a ruined castle (brilliantly restored, of course), the chamber musicians of the London clubs augmented by a full-fledged orchestra, gaming tables like an incredible furniture, fine Oriental scrim displacing the ordinary baize beneath the dice, gracious suites where guests refreshed themselves after an evening’s play, magical fountains and gardens where wild animals, odorless, disported, their killing teeth and dangerous claws removed. …

In the event, of course, The Springfield was as plain as its name.

And stranger, too, than anything I had yet conceived under the spell of my touched, teched, chosen, prenuptial fairytale life.

It was as drab as anything else in that drab port town and, in lieu of the safe lions, gardens, and tigers of my overheated imagination, hadn’t even the advantage of a view of the sea. And rather than the cunningly restored castle I’d imagined, the structure itself was nothing more stately than both sides of an ordinary semidetached. Nor was there anywhere to be seen the extravagant, requisite fashions of the London clubs. Here, the men’s suits and ladies’ dresses could have been seen between five and seven P.M. on the station platforms, or staked out along the steep ascending and descending escalators, and in every car on the London Underground.

Here the unadorned men and prosaically clothed women — many more men than women — not only hadn’t arrived as couples but, one understood, if they recognized each other at all it was only what they had observed of one another’s habits at the gaming tables. One understood — and this was not my overheated imagination rekindled — that one was in the presence if not of disease then at least of obsession. The Springfield, like some sanitarium-in-reverse, was given over to the practice of gaming as sanitariums were once given over to a cure for tuberculosis, or, nowadays, to losing weight, say, or weaning people off drugs.

Macreed Dressel, Larry’s old pal (though it was never clear to me how Larry had met him, he proved so entirely strange I never pressed the Prince on the subject), was standing in the doorway when we arrived. Unlike anyone else I was to see there that evening, Mr. Dressel was got up, in a sort of costume like Rick’s in Casablanca, as if the white dinner jacket and the carnation in his lapel were meant to identify him as the owner/manager of the place.

“Larry!” he shouted as we stepped out of the car.

“How are you, Macreed?”

“Is this she? Oh, it is! It is indeed, but take my advice, my dear,” Dressel said while we were still several yards off, “what those photographers have done to you is actionable! Were I your solicitor I’d advise you to haul them up on charges! The most beautiful woman in Europe and they shoot you as if you were some common starlet!”

“What’s an old poof like you know about beauty in women?” Larry said.

“Oh nothing, nothing at all. You’ve quite found me out, yes you have.”

“Have you seen my brothers and sisters?” Larry asked.

“What do you take me for?” said Macreed Dressel as if he’d been insulted.

“Have you?”

“No, of course not! Certainly not! I should say not! Not in ages!”

“You’re quite certain?”

“Quite certain! Absolutely! I’d take my oath on it! You have my word!”

(Oh, I should have been a queen, I really should. I have the temperament, I mean, certain passive instincts. I am, I mean, occasionally visited, as women are supposed to be, by great illuminating flashes of knowledge, received as Sinai conviction. Because I knew what this was all about. The Prince, who was no gambler, in exchange for Macreed’s promise never to admit his siblings into the casino — that fast crowd, those ne’er-do-wells, the fortunes they owed in gambling debts — had undertaken to come to Llanelli in their place, volunteering to dip into his own Royal-Duke- of-Wilshire-Heir-Apparent’s funds rather than have them, though more experienced in these matters than he, venture from their smaller reserves and diminished reputations one solitary pound. I asked myself, Louise, say what you will about him, is not this Lawrence the Steady one hell of an honorable man? Then thought to myself— Whoops, Louise, whoops there, what about Alec and Denise and company, aren’t they not only the fastest runners in that pack of ne’er-do-wells and compulsive gamblers, but Princes and Princesses of the Realm in their own right as much as Lawrence himself? What’s to prevent a three-star bully and photo hog like Prince Alec who doesn’t lack for the temerity to enter any low pub in the kingdom to demand of the locals that they stand him drinks, or to provoke dust-ups with no thought to his victims’ safety and well- being, no matter what he may have for his own, and then come away, barreling his Quantra at one hundred, one hundred twenty-five, and one hundred seventy mph with a souped-up, one thousand hp Rolls-Royce engine under its bonnet through the narrowest passageways in Bond Street, from going into any damn gambling den he thinks to take it in his head to go into and not only playing for, but actually determining what the table stakes will be? And, Sid, because it’s you I’m talking to in case you didn’t catch on, I knew the answer to that one, too. It was because, even though they were Princes and Princesses in their own right, they were never as much so as Lawrence. Who was Heir Apparent, practically as good as King already. By virtue of which, at least to pledged professionals like Mary and Robin and Alec and Denise, oathed to primogeniture, to the simple principles of fealty and liegeship and obligation, were servants to Order, to some pure, attainable ideal of Succession, wouldn’t their brother have loyalty and compliance, if not actual out-and-out faith, practically coming to him? An Heir Apparent who stood above those mere Heirs Presumptive as confidently as Alec, who not only felt at ease in those low pubs and on those only just civic lanes and roads and motorways, and who, the Heir Apparent, were he of a mind to, could have commanded of the younger brother that he stand him to the same stout that the younger brother had just expropriated from the day laborer in the low pub. So that all he ever had to say to any of them was, “Steer clear, no little romps at the gaming tables for you kids, but, whatever you do, stay the hell away from The Springfield!”)

“Will you be purchasing any chips this evening?” Macreed Dressel asked me after we’d freshened up.

“I’m not much of a gambler.”

“Oh,” said Macreed, “but it’s so boring to stand by watching someone else hazard. I don’t care how much in love two people are, it makes for a damned tedious evening. No, surely you ought to put yourself at some risk.”

“No, really, thank you, I’m fine. I’ll try to bring Larry some luck.”

“I can’t sell you a few chips? Two or three thousand pounds?”

“Louise?” said Larry, turning to me.

Well, I’m not much of a gambler, and Dressel was right, it is tedious to watch other people make bets. When I was in America, I noticed that every local television news program would run the winning lottery numbers across the screen. What could have been of interest to no one except the three or four people out of the several hundred thousand who’d purchased tickets seemed to take up an immense amount of time as the numbers went by. Then they’d put the numbers up a second time. (I have the same reaction watching the weather report or listening to the scores of games.) Actually, when the only thing at stake is money and depends on chance — oh, I know there’s a certain skill, and even bits and pieces of character involved in understanding house odds, in knowing when to risk and when to stand pat — I have trouble developing a rooting interest. I’d have to know all the gambler’s circumstances before I could get involved. The kick I got in those London clubs had more to do with watching how people behaved, what winning or losing meant to them and, well, quite frankly, the clichés about English character are quite accurate. We’re too stiff- upper-lip to give much away.

But this is what I meant before when I said that at these times — when the Prince and I were off on our own and, well, dating — I felt most returned to myself. Because the truth was, I hadn’t any money. Denise had taken me shopping. What I wore in Llanelli Denise had put on my back. Even my shoes and undergarments had been billed to the Princess’s wardrobe allowance. I took my meals at one palace or stately home or another, or dined in England’s finest restaurants and it hadn’t cost me a cent. (Indeed, I never even once saw a bill presented.) I slept each night in a spectacular room between gloriously smooth sheets on wonderfully stuffed pillows in beautifully embroidered pillow slips on a marvelous turned-down bed, and not only was everything free but I never even thought to bring my hosts a gift.

Only when Macreed Dressel had offered to sell me chips, and only when Larry had turned to me and spoken my name, “Louise?” did it occur to me that I had no money. That it’s all right to accept every hospitality — even the hospitality of the gift of the clothes on one’s back — except the hospitality of money. And, as I had no money, and would take none from Larry — even though it would have been disguised as Macreed Dressel’s chips — I did, I felt returned to myself.

“Let’s get on with it then, shall we?” Lawrence said, and Mr. Dressel opened an ordinary door and led us through it and into his graceless, charmless gambling parlor, which would, had not the common wall in the ordinary semidetached been knocked through, have been two quite ordinary lounges.

Lawrence is a steady and responsible man but not a stern one, and his tone, when he indicated it was time to begin the ordeal, was more pleasant than stoic or neutral. And though there was nothing inflated in his voice when he told his old friend he was ready to get on with it, no more blame or censure coming from him than if he’d been pulled up short by a kink in his muscle on a walk in the woods, just this perfectly agreeable signal that whatever it was that might happen to either of them on the rest of their ramble, for his money, rambles were a crapshoot anyway, no one was responsible, not him, not his old pal, all three of us knew where Macreed Dressel stood. These were the inflections of some accustomed, charming dominion, so maybe I wouldn’t have made such a hotshot Royal after all. I was too old to learn the language, I would speak it with an accent for the rest of my life.

At first, I didn’t even recognize that this was where the gambling happened. It looked as if gambling were still illegal in England and that Dressel had a tip that The Springfield was about to be raided by coppers from the flying squad. True, there were card tables, but these were all lightweight, the kind whose legs fold and that you put back in the closet when your company has left. There was a tiny toy roulette wheel on an upright piano pushed against the dark, flowered wallpaper, its keys uncovered as if the piano player had had to leave in a hurry. Indeed, it was as if almost everyone had left in a hurry. I knew better, of course. The seven not in our party, the five almost shabby men and two dowdy women, I took to be some of the highest rollers in Europe, though perhaps this was only my imagination, ready for awe, kicking in again, were seated around a couple of card tables, the two dealers (not, as it happens, the “house”; Dressel was the house) as quiet as the people to whom they dealt, not bothering to keep up any chatter about the value and implications of the face cards, a music I’d particularly enjoyed at the two clubs we’d visited in London. They didn’t, for that matter, even bother to look up when the future King of England came into the room. And, for my part, it was the first time in months, the first time since that funny little stutter step the Prince and I did outside the aloe shop in Cape Henry, I hadn’t been stared at. I was a little disappointed.

I’ve said I understood I was in the presence of obsession, that the plain clothes they wore were signs of their indifference to everything but the compulsive gambling they were engaged in inside the featureless, institutional-looking Springfield. In an odd way they could have been, caught up in their furious concentration on each other’s cards, a kind of support group. I was wrong though, as Larry later told me, to think that great fortunes were won and lost there. The truth was much scarier. These people were so rich that, while they gambled, just the interest compounding on their money in secret São Paulo, Seoul, Luxembourg, and Cape Town accounts, in banks in Spain and Peru, more than covered their losses. It was like that old premise in one of those films where characters have to get rid of great amounts of money within a specified time or forfeit their claim on even greater amounts of money. That would almost explain why the dealers dropped their customary running commentaries, all their clipped, kibitzless silences.

“Well,” Macreed Dressel said to the Prince, “what’s your pleasure then, sir?” Except for his white dinner jacket he might have been a publican asking a customer for his order.

“What’s that one?” asked the Prince.

“Bless me, Larry, your high rank hasn’t spoiled you not one whit, you’ve still your not inconsiderable instincts for the fun of a thing! That one, why that one’s bezique, those ladies are enjoying a friendly game of bezique! There’s aces, kings, queens, jacks, tens, and nines in bezique. You score your points by melding particular combinations of cards or taking tricks. Meld a queen of spades and a jack of diamonds and you win even extra points. It’s quite like pinochle. The difference is you play with sixty-four cards ins— ”

“All right,” Larry said, “I’ll do the bezique one. How much?”

“Well,” Dressel said, “let’s see, I believe the ladies are playing for ten quid a point. Six or seven thousand quid should do you just grand for a few hands of bezique.”

“I’m new at this. I’m not much of a gambler. I’ll take ten thousand pounds.”

He didn’t watch as the women played out their hand. He didn’t sort his cards when he was dealt them. I don’t think he even looked at them. He was behind three hundred points at the end of two hands and, when it was his turn to deal, he wondered if the ladies minded if he raised the stakes to twenty pounds a point. It was up to them, he said, and they quickly agreed to the new arrangement.

“You’re both of you too good for me,” he told them after another two hands. “I’m quite out of chips, I’m afraid. How much more do I owe? Is it four hundred thirty pounds? Yes, I see it is. Macreed?”

He paid Dressel for an additional four hundred thirty pounds’ worth of chips and graciously thanked the women for permitting him to sit in on their game. He had, he said, to excuse himself now because he wanted to get back to London at a reasonably decent hour and he saw there were still some more games he needed to learn.

“What’s that other one?” the Prince asked his host.

“Well, that one,” Dressel said, “is chemin de fer.”

“All right,” Larry said.

“In chemin de fer two hands are dealt. The players bet against the dealer. See, Mr. Collganardo is dealing now. The winning hand is the one that comes closest to, but doesn’t go over, the count of nine on— ”

“All right.”

“—two or three cards. It resembles baccarat.”

“All right.”

“You put up fifteen thousand pounds to start.”

Larry gave him the money. It took him only half an hour to lose seventeen thousand pounds over and above his original fifteen-thousand-pound investment. When it was his turn, one of the players told him it was dealer’s choice and that he could change the game if he wanted.

“Euchre, what’s euchre?” Larry said.

“Euchre is cards,” Macreed Dressel told him. “A player is dealt five cards and makes trump by taking three tricks to win a hand.”

“Only five cards but he has to take three tricks to win? I don’t know, it sounds to me that euchre can be pretty slow going. I like it when there’s a bit more action. What’s whist? I’ve heard of whist.”

“Whist is even slower than euchre.”

Larry let out a sigh. “If you gentlemen will excuse me,” he said apologetically, rose, and gave up his place at the table. “What’s the fastest?” he inquired of Dressel.

“Well,” Macreed said, “for your purposes I’d have to say that roulette is the fastest. Roulette lasts for only so long as it takes the wheel to slow down enough for the little steel ball to settle in one of the thirty-six little compartments.”

“And I bet on the number it will come to rest in? Is that about it?”

“That’s about it,” Macreed Dressel said. “You can always, what we call, ‘hedge your bets,’” he added. “You do that by putting your chips down on more than one number.”

“It doesn’t sound as exciting if I hedge my bets.”

“Well, no, it isn’t as exciting.” Macreed Dressel went over to the upright piano and took the toy roulette wheel down off its top and placed it on the piano bench. This was to be the venue for the game. “A moment, Prince,” he said. “I’ll fetch you a chair.”

“No no, don’t bother, I can stand. It will be more exciting if I stand.”

“As you wish.”

“How much?” Larry asked.

“I don’t know,” Dressel said quietly. “Whatever you want. I’m at your service.”

“Could you tell me,” said the Prince, “could you tell me how you make your money?”

“I take twenty percent of what a player gives for chips. If I sell you a hundred pounds, you get eighty pounds in chips. Between fifteen and twenty percent is pretty much the rate in private clubs.

“Ah, fifteen percent.”

“Twenty percent at the upscale clubs. I don’t impose a limit, I don’t employ dealers.”

“I see.”

“In roulette I’m the house. I pay if you win and collect if you lose.”

“I wonder, could you tell me,” said Larry, “in roulette, in roulette, do I purchase chips at the upscale rate? Is that about it?”

“Yes,” Dressel said, reddening.

“Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

The others had laid down their cards and were watching the Prince. It was very moving. My fiancé put all his chips on number twenty. Macreed spun the wheel. The steel ball settled in number five. It was very moving.

“You beat me?” the Prince said.

“Yes,” Dressel said, “it seems I have. Yes.”

“Good show, Macreed!” said the Prince. “Well played, old friend!”

All seven gamblers stared at him.

“We’ll be going back now,” Lawrence said, and took a check from his pocket, which I’d seen him make out earlier. He stuffed it into Macreed Dressel’s white dinner jacket. “Here,” he said, “for your trouble.”

It was very moving.

I’d never felt closer to him. He never said a word to Dressel about his brothers and sisters.

It’s been said that the life of a member of the Royal Family is as different from the life of a member of even the upper middle class as the life of a member of the upper middle class is from the life of a caveman.

I eat, I have clothes to wear, even in Cape Henry there was a place for me to go to sleep every night. But I have no money. Certainly they pamper me, they give me these clothes, they see to it I’m fed. They even seem fond of me. Still, the fact remains, I have no money. It would be unseemly of them to offer me any, it would be unseemly of me to take it, even walking-around money, even chump change. I have no money. By that measure alone — I’d never felt closer to him — we were separated by the greatest distances, the widest ways. So I did, I felt returned to myself. Can you understand what I’m trying to say?

Even two or three weeks after our visit to the club in Llanelli in Wales, it was still the montage, that blur, I mean, of love and courtship like a kind of tour. We felt (or I did) surrounded, protected by romance like some cloak of delighted (real or not, present or not), unseen onlookers — the forgiving interested, call them — whose psychic stand-ins Larry and I were, almost their representatives in some parliament of hearts, as emboldened by youth and looks and luck to get away with the outrageous, the murder of the daily, as someone genuinely funny, say, or as a pair of attractive, tired tipsies— dressed-up, black-tie, wee- small-hours types in the back of someone’s milk truck, clippety-clop, clippety-clop— so many of love’s and wooing’s vouchsafed antigens around us it seemed as if, though (the paparazzi called off, Larry’s parents, brother and sisters and cousins and all the peeraged rest of their high-placed pals on all their great stately estates given the slip) I had him to myself now, we were on some honeymoon before the honeymoon — but that’s what romance is, isn’t it? — a high holiday of mutual regard. It would have been impossible even to imagine a lovers’ quarrel. We’d have had to have drummed one up— one of us take offense at the color of the other’s clothes, or argue whether this or that restaurant deserved a third star.

We went to the theater and never told them in advance we were coming. We didn’t ask for the royal box, or even dress circle (Larry wore off-the-rack clothes for the first time in his life), but chose the upper circle or took out-of-the-way seats deep in the Gods where we could hold hands. When we were recognized in restaurants — it was surprising how seldom we were — we refused the best tables and Larry tipped the maître d’ to find us something toward the back, near where the staff took its cigarette breaks, or waitresses traded their shifts with one another because they had dates, or their kids were sick, or blokes were coming to have a look at the spare room. Or sought out third- and fourth-world restaurants, restaurants from countries that hadn’t been completely charted yet, and sampled exotic meats killed in the Amazon rain forest, and exchanged spoonfuls of each other’s soups made from rare Indonesian and African birds, or puzzled how deeply into the rinds of seals and sea otters it was wise to eat and tried to figure out what to do with the beautiful phosphorescent skins and soft bones of tropical fish. And went to motion-picture houses where we stood on line with everyone else when the show was changing and, once inside, stared at ourselves in the newsreels as if we were other people, or laughed about Alec’s genius for omnipresence. And, if the feature was a romantic comedy, we watched it, completely absorbed, as forgiving of the slapdash principals as if we were those unseen onlookers, the forgiving interested, and the characters we forgave were ourselves.

It was like dating. Well, it was dating. It was dating exactly. The Prince confessed he’d never had so much fun and admitted that, yes, maybe he was a trading-places sort of prince after all— just this poor Prince looking for a pauper.

(Sid, we were on the same wavelengths. I felt returned to myself and so, to hear him tell it, did Larry.)

And it was still the montage the night Larry took me in his crestless, unmarked Jag on a remarkable drive around London.

We crossed the Thames near where the original London Bridge once stood.

“It must have been quite gorgeous, London Bridge.”

“Hmn, yes,” Larry said, “and profitable. Our family once had the rents from it.”

“The rents? From London Bridge?”

“Many of the most fashionable homes in the city were built on it, some of the best shops, the smartest stalls. Well,” he said, “location is everything.”

“It’s possible for people to own bridges?”

“It’s possible for kings and queens to own bridges. Kings and queens may own anything, Louise. We could lay claim to the rents and rates on the entire London Underground if we wanted. On the Green, Blue, and Red Lines. On any of them. On the Number Thirty-nine and Seventy-four busses.”

“Oh, lay claim,” I said.

“There’s the rub,” he said.

We rode on in silence for a while. It was a beautiful evening. I let down my electric window. This time of night, the air was almost balmy. I relax in a car, and Larry was an excellent driver.

“Take Lord Nelson’s monument there, for example,” the Prince said.

We were in Trafalgar Square.

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s ours, it belongs to us. Just imagine what would happen if we asserted our rights, though, tried pulling him down. The people wouldn’t stand for it.”

“Why would you want to pull down Admiral Nelson’s monument?”

“I don’t. I’m a sailorman myself, I admire Nelson. It’s the principle.”

We passed the National Portrait Gallery. Larry told me that belonged to them too.

“What, the National Portrait Gallery?”

“It’s practically the family album, Louise.”

“I suppose,” I said, “looked at that way.”

And went on, up Piccadilly to Piccadilly Circus and around the Statue of Eros — also in the family — and out to the British Museum — though they let others use it, also in the family, all, all in the family — and doubled back, past their parks and past their palaces, and on to where the Bank of England stood, and Larry stopped the car and turned off the engine and leaned across my knees and reached out to the polished-wood glove compartment where he kept a pack of cigarettes and took one cigarette from the pack and lit it before returning the pack to the glove compartment where it would stay for the week or so before he wanted another one.

“That’s yours too, I suppose?” I pointed to the bank. “The Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street?”

“The difficulty with theories about the divine right of kings,” he said, “is that not many people are religious these days. We’re holding on by the skin of our teeth. All that stands between us and the barbarians at the gates is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Louise.”

“Is the Bank of England in your family?”

“My father’s picture is on the notes,” he said, “and his father’s before that, and … Well.”

And started to feel his queer financial heroism again, my own poor penniless place in the world — I swear to you, Sid, the fifty thousand pounds you gave for my story means nothing, nothing — and the great distances between us, our immense, light-years differences. It made a girl giddy. It gave me the galaxial shivers, a taste, I mean — can you understand what I’m trying to say? — of the spatial creeps— all that power and certainty— the astronomical fundament and absolute baseline depths from which the Prince, as much of an explorer as he was a Prince, was reaching toward me— that, that’s how I felt close to him, by dint of the sheer exponential, mathematical space between us. I never felt closer. He lowered the electric window on the driver’s side and threw his cigarette into his street and started his engine. I began to move toward him. “Buckle your lap belt, please, Louise,” said the Prince.

Sunday, February 9, 1992

How Push Came to Shove

Because we hadn’t made love since that time on the island. Not even on the yacht coming home. Not in the palace, not in the castle, not in any of the great houses we visited. For all their false walls and secret passageways, their concealed staircases and special, complicated hidey-hole arrangements, their ancient comic architecture of tryst and farce (Lawrence was a serious student of architecture and claimed that the first adulterers, at least those bold enough to commit their adulteries under the very roofs they shared with their spouses, must have been aristocrats, because only aristocrats could have absorbed the high structural costs of weekend affairs and one-night stands; he felt that rather than a mark against the highborn, all their hanky-pank had its plus side; discretion, he said, was essentially an aristocratic idea), for all the opportunity such places provided for assignation, he never once came to me in any of them. He never once came to me anywhere.

“It’s because you’re so high-profile, isn’t it? We have to be careful.”

We were in the unmarked, crestless Jag again.

“I’m not afraid of the people in this kingdom. These people are my people. Why should I fear them?”

“Look,” I said, “if you’re at all unsure, if you want to back out of this …”

“Don’t be silly, Louise. I love you. Don’t you know that?”

“I think you love me.”

“I do love you. Almost from the time of our encounter in Cape Henry.”

“You were all over me in Cape Henry.”

I’d intended my remark as a rebuke. He hadn’t understood me.

“Oh,” he said, “taking the aloe plant from you, that was just chivalry. And when I saw the cuts on your hands, when you explained how you got them, that was just admiration for your bravery, the sympathy endurance earns one in a difficult world. But when you teased me”—here his voice dipped—“when we made love”—and here climbed back up again to higher ground—“and I saw how you handled yourself with the press when I sprung our engagement on you, and I realized how stunningly regal you so inherently are, that, my dear Louise, that was love!”

It was a pretty speech and, worthy or not of his noblesse oblige-obliged condescensions, brave or not, regal or not, like many women, I’m a sucker for pretty speeches, but that wasn’t what stirred me. If he had me jumping — he did, he did — it was the old business of my simple human illiteracy again, the even bigger sucker I am for men I can’t quite make out. (How brave or regal can I really be? There are gothic romance novels in my dumb-blond heart. I’m a throwback, Sid, a traitor to my liberated sisters.) For, even if I had not had the good evidence of his sexual aloofness, I would, a moment later, have had the even better evidence of his cloudy motives.

“Anyway, Louise what do you think this courtship is all about? This shouldn’t be a factor, yet it is, and more on my part, I think, than on Father’s or Mother’s, but do you know how much money it’s cost the Crown? Why in petrol alone! In nightclubs and restaurants and theater tickets!” (In our montage, like the cold chickens, salads, cheeses, caviars, and chilled champagnes laid out on a lawn on the splendid napery from those stocked, magnificent picnic hampers.) “But cost is the least of it; more important is the fact that I’ve given the world my word (let alone the nation) that we’re engaged. And we’re entering the final phases now. Guest lists are being prepared. Our appointment calendars are being synchronized with their appointment calendars. Heads of state have been notified. Such-and-such a president from so-and-so a superpower; such-and-so a chieftain from so-and-such a third- or fourth-world country. Contracts have been let out on bid for all those commemorative soupspoons and keychains — all that licensed Royal tchotchke and whatnot, which, cared for, or merely held onto long enough and passed from one generation to the next, might one day actually become the valuable museum-quality, self- appreciating marvels of historic artifact they’re cracked up to be.

“You must trust me, Louise, this is a very delicate time. Hath not a prince eyes? Hath not a prince hands? I feel what you feel, but preparations for the Royal Wedding proceed apace and aplomb. We can’t afford to place ourselves in compromising positions just now.”

“Oh,” I said, dismissively, “compromising positions. Fa la la, tra la la.”

Just then the car phone sounded its rapid sets of twin, paired, ringing gutturals, a noise peculiar to the British telephone system that always startles me, reminds me, no matter how often I hear it, of the signal for emergencies in the engine rooms of ships.

“Yes?”

“Larry, Alec. I rang up your Bentley and tried you in the Land Rover, but no one was home. Where are you headed? Is Louise with you? Give me your coordinates, I bet I beat you there, vroom, vroom.”

“What do you want, Alec? This phone isn’t secure.”

“Mary and Robin are with me, Cousin Anne is.”

“How are you, darling?”

From the way he reddened each time her name was mentioned, I’d long ago realized Anne must have been one of the cousins my intended had fondled and whose frocks he’d looked up as a child.

“Hello, Anne,” he said, “I should have thought you’d know better than to get into a car with my brother.”

“Well, you never take me anywhere.”

“She’s teasing you, Prince,” Alec said. “She’s told me of just incredible places you’ve been together.”

“Traffic is quite serious today,” said Larry. “This phone is not secure,” he hissed. “I’m ringing off.”

“No no, wait,” Alec said. “It’s about your wedding. Hallo? Louise? It’s about your wedding.”

“Hello Alec.”

“Hello Louise.”

“Hello Mary.”

“Are you still sore?”

“Hello Robin. No, no, I’m not at all actually.”

“I didn’t mean any harm. I was drunk.” He paused. “I was drunk as a lord!” he said, and laughed heartily at his obscure little joke.

“What do you mean it’s about the wedding?” Larry broke in.

“Why the Royal Wedding. Your wedding.” Mary was my favorite among Larry’s siblings. Indeed, she’s the only one with whom I’m still in touch. I say this without much fear of jeopardizing her situation since she’s always been pretty open about our friendship, treating me kindly in the press, the only one of them, in fact, to have stood up for me and gone on record that she never thought I was “working” the Prince. Mary certainly doesn’t need my endorsement. Probably it would go better for her if I kept quiet about it, but in my view loyalty begets loyalty — though wasn’t it, in fact, loyalty to my idea of the Crown that allowed all this to have gone so far in the first place? — and, for whatever it’s worth, I think, though it’s untrained, Mary has quite a nice voice and, except for the fact that rap might not be the material to which her sweet little instrument is best suited, I see no reason, though she’s a Princess, she shouldn’t make a perfectly decent career in show business.

“What about it?”

“Well, we were thinking.”

“Alec and me.”

“Me too. It was my idea.”

“It was Robin’s idea.”

“But it’s your wedding.”

“We’d have to clear it with you first.”

“Absolutely.”

“Of course.”

“No question about it.”

“We’d never go behind your back.”

“He’ll never go for it.”

“Oh, Anne, we don’t know that.”

“He’ll never go for it. You’ll see.”

“This isn’t a secure phone.”

“Would it be all right, do you think, if we wore, well, jeans, to the wedding?”

“Jeans? To a Royal Wedding? In Westminster Abbey?”

“I told you he wouldn’t go for it.”

“Well, not jeans, or not jeans exactly. Regular morning coats and top hats for the boys, actually.”

“And gorgeous gowns for the ladies. With these ravishing big hats and really swell veils.”

“Just cut like jeans.”

“From stone-washed denim.”

“Oh, it would be such fun! The Sloane Rangers would just die!”

“Hello, Denise.”

“Hi, Louise,” she said, and I had this image of Britain’s Royal Family stuffed into Alec’s Quantra like so many circus clowns. If George and Charlotte, preparatory to standing down, had not been off on what they must surely have thought of — the Nöel Coward King, his Nöel Coward Queen — as their final farewell world tour — after our initial meeting, and with the exception of a few subsequent appearances with them at the house of this or that duke or marquess or earl, I seldom saw them — taking their last curtain calls in Tonga and Singapore, Belfast, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth ports of call, I could comfortably have thought of them back there with the rest of the zanies.

“You’re wasting your time,” Anne said, “he’ll never go for it.”

“Not so fast. Give him a chance. Let him think about it.”

“No,” Larry said. “I don’t want to think about it. It’s out of the question.”

“You see? What did I tell you?”

“You never know, he could have said yes.”

“The child is father to the man,” his cousin said.

Larry rang off.

“What did she mean, Larry?”

“What did he mean?”

“What did who mean?”

“What did he mean are you still sore?”

“Robin?”

“What did he mean?”

I didn’t want to quarrel with him. So I made something up. I don’t even remember now what it was. Just some harmless white lie I passed off. To keep the peace. (Probably I picked up on the word “sore.” Because that was mostly how we spoke to one another in those days— in all love’s thrust-and-parry, in all its stichomythic Ping-Pong tropes of engagement. Each hanging on the other’s words as if love were some syntax of Germanic delay. Because this wasn’t as it had always been with me, Sir Sid. Accustomed as I was to arias, soliloquies, lectures, speeches, promises.) Let’s say I said, “I don’t know, Larry, you know how Robin is. He probably thought he offended me.”

“Did he?”

“Well, yes, I suppose he probably did.”

“He drinks too much. He isn’t kind when he’s drunk. He forgets who he is.”

“He forgets what he is.”

“Hmn. “Yes,” Larry said, “he forgets what he is.”

I always thought of Prince Robin as the pie-faced one, of his strange, vaguely rubbery features at once sullen and cheerful like the pressed pug nose and big puffed eyes on a victim of Down’s syndrome. He reminded me rather of that actor Charles Laughton.

Two or so years ago, when I first saw California, I remember how very surprised I was that it looked exactly how I thought it would look, and seemed, it seemed, just how I thought it would seem. This wasn’t déjà vu or any mystic sense of Tightness; the sense, I mean, that California was some fate I’d been preparing for. Often it’s nothing more than, oh, the availability of the world through all the telecommunication satellites that are constantly orbiting it, sucking up and spewing out geography across incredible distances so that nothing, not its poles, or rain forests, or the deepest trenches in its oceans, is unfamiliar to us. It is, I think, some salient hallmark stamped in perception and stuck in the blood. In the event, my years in America had largely cut me off from the hype from home, yet I knew before knowing him what Robin was like. He was a type, but we are all of us types. How could we be in the same rooms with each other if this weren’t so? We should want bars between us, the protection of cages. Robin is Robin, neither mischievous like Alec nor playful like Denise, and of course he has none of Mary’s sweetness or Larry’s sense of responsibility. What can I say? I wanted bars between us, the protection of cages.

(What can they do to me? They don’t go to court. A few years ago an intruder was caught in Charlotte’s bedroom, sitting on her bed, watching her sleep. He was dragged off by bobbies. They searched him for weapons, asked him a few questions, and then released him. What can they do to me, Sid? I signed on to tell all and haven’t told all. — Not yet, and they know it, so what can they do? What can they do to me, I hold all the cards. What he is, our Robin, is evil.)

This was before any of that stuff found its way into the papers. So, playing on “sore,” I made something up. The Prince hadn’t a clue. No one had said a word about tattoos.

Prince Robin had taken me aside.

“Have you spoken,” he whispered, “with the Royal Peerager?”

I mentioned the time I’d seen him in the King, his father’s, palace.

“Yes,” Robin said, “he told me about that. He’ll be in touch with you. He has some things to impart. After you’ve seen him, I should very much like it if you would get back to me.”

Well, I thought, this was a mystery, but it’s often in the nature of people with whom one is uncomfortable that they say enigmatic, baffling things.

The Royal Peerager approached me at a charity ball and asked me to dance. I looked over at Larry, who was engaged in conversation with a fellow I recognized (without ever having met him) as one of his cohorts in earnest resolution. I turned back to Royal Peerager and shrugged my assent. Believe me when I tell you I’d quite forgotten Prince Robin’s puzzling statement regarding any further encounter with, in Queen Charlotte’s words, one of that “sweet assortment of jolly incumbents” who defined and so helped preserve many of the arcane rituals in our land (as one is first alarmed by, and then dismisses, the dark, abrupt remarks and elusive hints of certain — what can they do to me, their hands are tied — passive aggressives), so that I was all the more taken aback when, while we were still dancing, he began to recite, neither in conspiratorial tones nor stage whispers, in perfectly normal conversational accents, protected, I guess he would have thought, by the plain, preemptive music of the orchestra, this strange report:

“Though they may have seen its representation a thousand times, most of the people in this realm haven’t the foggiest when it comes to the coat of arms of their own Royal Family. It could as well be Braille as heraldry for all they make of it. I say this not to disparage so much as to congratulate ourselves, for in the main it’s as well that our subjects should not too much understand the devices and emblazonments, mottoes, bends, and color schemes of their genealogical betters. It’s all right with us they haven’t mastered leeks and lilies, fess and mantling; nor can parse achievement, hatchment, or do any of the revealing, reductive mathematicals — quartering, dimidiation — of descent. They can’t tell crest from ’scutcheon, some of them, or tabard from surcoat. They’ve never learned the difference between five bears rampant and six lions crouching, nor can they decline the symbolism of twenty martlets perched on gold.

“On balance ’tis no detriment. Else let them loose to browse the privatest pages of our diaries or knock about in any castle’s well-kept closets. Freedom’s well and good for business, yet it’s better than not the general have not the keys to this partic’l’r kingdom, or even inclination to dent the knotty code of all our chesspiece, secret zoology, personnel, and architecture.

“Well played, Band Leader, well played indeed! Give us another!”

All the time I’m looking at him, don’t you know.

“Oh, listen,” he said. “Please do me the honor, my dear. This is one of my favorites.”

In fact it may have been one of his favorites. Whereas before he’d held me in the most casual way, like a brother dancing with his sister on Cabaret Night in the salon of a cruise ship, say, now Peerager drew me tightly to him. I think I was embarrassed. Larry and his friend were still in deep discussion.

“What,” I said, “what?”

He was at my ear. I needn’t have worried. This old smoothy was a smooth old smoothy. His voice laughed and chuckled as it spoke as if it were telling me dirty stories or giving me good gossip. Indeed, he even managed to shake his head and do something almost imperceptible with his eyes, closing them for a moment by way of a signal — No, no, don’t look now, but when you get a chance … — so that people seeing us must have thought we were talking about them and, offended, turned away.

Peerager said to me, “Hark! You’re to be his bride. Quarterly one and four: Argent, three eagles conjoined in fess gules. Quarterly two and three: Or, a King casting a knowing, sidelong glance displayed on a shamrock vert. Early in the seventeenth century the knowing glance was changed to a mask of tragedy. The tragic mask against the clover is a heraldric pun. The Mayfairs are descended from the Lears— née O’Leary — and are of Irish background.”

“What did he tell you?” Robin asked the next time I saw him.

“He thinks King Lear was a harp.”

“I’ll make an appointment for you with Royal Commoner!”

(Because what did I know, Sid? There are customs and protocols for everything, everything. Some historic, buried etiquettes of the anthropological— stunning arcana, Grimm’s laws, Great Vowel Shifts, the cryptic, hidden, hush-hush of a billion reasons. Why A precedes B, why zed follows Y; how it is condemned men get final cigarettes— and what they were offered before there was tobacco: fruit, a chance to hear their favorite song one last time, the opportunity to speak their last words. For everything. Why there’s music at weddings and funerals. Hadn’t I been there when that bevy of jolly incumbents came calling, that sweet assortment of royal intentioners and fashion engineers and selectors of ropes— all those messengers of the traditionals and ceremonials with their inexplicable explanations of the improbable arrangements of kings?

(So why wouldn’t I believe him when he told me I would have to see the Royal Commoner? I didn’t even know there was such a thing, but I hadn’t known there was a Royal Taster on the payroll either, had I? Then I saw him myself— the thin, bony guy who managed to live on a spoonful of this and a single bite of that and a mere sip of the other, keeping his mouth clean for the flavors of poisons he’d not only never yet tasted but would probably only recognize after the fact, and then just by how they differed from the ordinary taste of meat and sweets and bread and vegetables. So why shouldn’t there be a Royal Commoner, too? So far as I can see, there’s at least one of everything anyway. So why shouldn’t I believe that the office he held and the service he performed — to give instruction to commoners about to marry kings or queens or their immediate successors — maybe came up once, and never more than twice — and often never at all — during the entire course and tenure of one of these fellow’s careers?)

So that when I went down with Robin to Greenwich that time, it was with a certain sense of sedate obligation and almost spiritual — at least historical — resolve.

Not for one moment was I under the impression that I was taking holy orders or anything, but I have to admit there was certainly something solemn about the business, and I approached Royal Commoner’s dim figure in the dark old rooms in the ancient wooden chancery nervous as a convert coming for instruction to a priest. I couldn’t quite make it out — it was bright outside, my eyes had not adjusted to the gloom — but through an open door I thought I saw a vague form — it might have been female — hunched over the shape of what could have been a doctor’s fat black bag.

“Royal Commoner?” said the Prince.

“At your service, Prince Robin. And at yours, Miss Bristol.”

“You shall be brought to blood by matrimony,” Robin said quietly, “but you must do as he says.”

(How would I know? How would I, Sir Sidney? Haven’t I already said that there seems to be at least one of everything in this world? There are so many reasons and duties and traditions. For all I knew, maybe only the second brother of the future king could be the intermediary here. Maybe something of the sort was written into the tradition, as much a part of the customs and old deportments of humanity as the rule that brides and grooms aren’t to see each other on the day of the wedding until the ceremony.

(So how would I know, how would I, Sir Sid?

(Because we’re all of us anthropological. We are, we’re all of us anthropological. I don’t care how grounded a person may be, cosseted as a prince like Lawrence or Robin, made over like the only issue of oldest age, like Sarah’s child, Isaac, or hopeless as kids in welfare hotels, the sun comes down every night and there are fearsome things in the dark: smells and hints and clues and sounds of death and worse things after, the horrible, stacked loneliness of men, the abominable godawful odds against anyone’s not only ever managing to make it in the long run, but even so much as managing to just plain cope — the insomniac’s wakeful doubts and all the low blood sugar of the human race.

(So tell me, why wouldn’t there be anthropology, why wouldn’t there be ritual and faith and all the mumbo-jumbo of cultural reinforcement?)

“Of course she will, Prince Robin,” Royal Commoner said pleasantly, “why wouldn’t she? Do as I say?”

“Well,” said Robin, “it isn’t as if I actually spelled things out for her.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh my.”

“What?”

“Oh dear,” he said. “This is awkward, this is very awkward.”

“What?” I said again.

“For God’s sake, Louise, don’t make such a fuss. You too, Royal Commoner. It’s not painful or anything. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

“No, of course it isn’t,” he said. “It’s not painful. There are topical anesthetics. Aren’t there topical anesthetics, Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo?”

“Even without them,” the woman said, for it was a woman I’d seen in the doorway, and she was carrying a doctor’s bag. “Well, the tattoo needles barely break the skin. It’s the powerful new dyes they have today that makes the marks.”

“Tattoo needles?”

“You told her nothing?”

“You’re the Royal Commoner, Royal Commoner.”

“Is this what you’re wanting then?” the woman asked me. She held up a cartoon with details from the coat of arms the Royal Peerager had described earlier — a gold mask of tragedy superimposed on a green shamrock.

“Catherine the Great was tattooed,” the Royal Commoner said.

“Catherine the Great already had noble blood.”

“Cher’s tattooed, some of the biggest stars.”

“Cher isn’t engaged to a prince. What is this? What are you handing me? You’re not the Royal Commoner, are you? There’s no such thing, is there?”

“Certainly I’m the Royal Commoner. I am and no other. What do you mean, anyway? You’re not a queen yet, you’re not even a princess. Not yet you’re not. You’ve a lot to learn, Miss Bristol. You have to take my instructions. You think Royals don’t get tattooed? It was a ransom thing. It was in case of Moors and Saracens. So they’d know what they had if princes and princesses, kings and queens, fell into the wrong hands. It was for their own protection. It’s for your own protection, Miss Bristol. Tell her, Prince. Ain’t I right? If I’m lying I’m dying.”

I turned toward Robin. “Show me yours, then,” I challenged.

“Oh, I’m not tattooed.”

“Well, there you are,” I said.

“Where am I? I’m not the King, I’m not his Successor!”

“Please!” said the one who was supposed to be the Royal Commoner impatiently. “The both of you!”

I must say I was more than a little surprised to hear him speak out so boldly to someone who, however far down the line of succession he may have been, was, after all, a prince. Perhaps that’s why what he said next had some claim on me.

“Because it wasn’t me who made the rules. I wasn’t there whenever it was whoever it was said whatever it was had to be had to be. I’ve no say-so in the grand affairs that command history, the long by-and-large of incremental, ad hoc necessity, that piecemeal tinker and rising to social or biologic occasions that are all solutions, adaptations, and evolution ever are. I never seeded the oyster with sand. I was ever too small fry to cause an effect, I mean. What have I to do with the world? It’s the curious meddle, stitch, and thick of things that gets things done. I’m just Royal Commoner, is all. My God, Prince, Miss Bristol, you don’t even know my name. But when a living, breathing oxymoron of a man raised up to oral tradition and the learning of the law comes up and says to you that a tattoo isn’t just, or even primarily, for the pomp and primp and privilege of sailormen in Southampton’s or Marseille’s or New York’s low parlors, why maybe you ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Catherine the Great was too tattooed! Cher is! And what is a tattoo, anyway? Semiotics, all those ultimate passwords of the flesh. Mother riffs, John-Loves-Mary ones, all those scratched affidavits, skin’s deepest language. Flags, semaphore, and the body’s loyalist bunting!”

Oh, how that man could talk!

I’m half hypnotized before he’s done and don’t even see him signal Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo to come forward. I don’t see her open the bag she carries her tools in, don’t see her dip the needle into the pot of green dye, or feel her wash me down with alcohol along the back of my left leg where the knee bends, or rub the topical anesthetic into my skin. I don’t see the thin rubber gloves she’s wearing to keep from catching a dose of AIDS off me in case a drop of my blood leaks into the pores of her skin. Royal Commoner’s still talking away about a mile a minute. You’d think I was his troops at Agincourt and he was King Henry V rallying me, maybe jollying me along so I’d let Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo plant another one on the back of my right leg when she was done with the left. He was right, it is painless. I don’t even feel the damn needle when it starts to go in and out, in and out, like she was some seamstress and the sensitive skin in the back of my knee was no more sentient than cloth.

No. What brought me out of it at last was what had put me into it. I’m listening to this smooth talker and suddenly it occurs that, oral tradition or no oral tradition, something would have had to slip through the cracks. This guy was improvising. He was giving too many reasons. Somewhere in the gloom Robin was smirking.

So, no matter I risked tearing the back of my leg to pieces, I pulled away. I examined myself. It was too dark to see, but later, in the light, I saw that all she’d managed to do was circumscribe the topmost arc in the highest leaf of the shamrock.

(I’d put him off with a quibble. Punning on “sore,” admitting when Larry pressed me that, yes, Robin probably had offended me. Still, strictly speaking, I hadn’t lied to him. I wasn’t sore, just a little numb there where I’d taken the topical. And he had offended me. And, anyway, loophole and sophistry have ever been the mainstays of statesmen, providing them comfort and security, the sense they have to have of their own invulnerability, or they’d never get anything done. “None of woman born,” the witches tell Macbeth that other distant cousin of the Mayfair clan, and “… until great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come. …” And what about the stuff the Oracle fed Oedipus? Softsoap about killing his father and getting it on with his ma, so that all he thought he ever had to do to beat his fate was just get out of town? That’s in the tradition, too, for people so sold on tradition. And, anyway, for all I know maybe I was actually supposed to get that coat-of-arms tattoo. Wouldn’t that be something? I mean wouldn’t that really be something, Sir Sid, if it weren’t a hoax and all I have to show — didn’t I give back the clothes? didn’t I give back the jewels and Denise’s fun furs? — for my brief encounter with the Royals was just this tiny bit of a circle stitched to the back of my knee like a piece of green thread?)

“Hmn. Yes,” Larry said, “he forgets what he is.”

And lost in our individual thoughts — mine, now I’d stopped thinking about what happened in Greenwich, were of Larry, big and gorgeous in the driver’s seat, larger than life and more fit in his clothing (tweed now in the comfortable, abrupt autumn weather, tweed and cavalry twill and the softest oxford) than a man in a catalogue — we drove on in the crestless Jag to my parents’ house in Cookham-upon- Thames. Who knows what Lawrence was thinking of? The money this whole business had cost the Crown, perhaps, what a Prince’s love drew down from a dynasty’s treasure, of positions even more compromising than any I — horny in smoky fall’s apple ambience, the polished leather promise and poignant feel of its vaguely grainy fabrics — could ever have hoped to put him in, now he’d given his word to the world we were engaged.

I’m not being unfair to him, though none of this had occurred to me then, of course. How could it have done? I was in love, I thought I was to be his Princess. I guess I was just this romantic old silly. Tra la la, fa la la, hey nonny.

I had to hand it to Larry, I really did. With his Prince’s breeding and his almost cartographer’s knowledge of the lay of his lands, and his truly vast, dead-on sense of good husbandry, he had a sort of perfect pitch for his holdings, for all his rents and levies, and not only for his, but for the next lord’s over, too, and the next lord’s after that one, and for the next’s and the next’s and next’s, ad infinitum, filling up the shires and counties and districts and ridings of the kingdom with some genius for property, some blood-driven instinct for the fixed boundaries, qualities, and intrinsics of possession till all England was drawn in on the fine map of his understanding.

He knew the annual rainfalls, the crops and industries and roads and forests, had a feel for its weathers, its wildlife, the fish in its rivers, the birds in its trees.

Cookham is a river village, almost a suburban wetlands. It is, in the best sense, unspoiled, quaint, almost precious. I cannot say how, but Lawrence even knew how to dress for the occasion of its suburban Sunday circumstances, his twills and tweeds, though he was Prince, perfectly, carefully, considerately matched — I found this touching; it made me more anxious than ever to bed him — to their own, the twills, tweeds, and oxfords of their aspiring squires’ middle-class hearts. I hadn’t seen it before, but when we stepped out of the car Lawrence was even wearing one of those soft wool visored caps that are part of the uniform, and that one sees everywhere in the country.

“Country,” of course, is what Cookham so determinedly is. It was never large enough to be anything so grand as even the tiniest market town. It is what it must always have been— a few hundred acres of lovely, ever so slightly remote real estate, its rich dirts vaguely hydrologic, geologic, strangely expropriate, as if they’d been thrown up like magic muds from the bottom of the river, or washed off the surrounding farms like some thick, complex, compact silt. (Nowhere in England is the earth so stocked with bait; nowhere is the soil so amenable, or crowded with the nutrients for flowers. The gardens of Cookham are its glory, its flowers’ flaring pigments like wet primary colors.)

There is no school, no surgery, no library. There’s no place where one may purchase film, postage, tobacco, a newspaper. There isn’t even a shop to buy food. What there is is an old Norman church, two public houses, a BP station with a live-in mechanic, and an estate agent. The estate agent, with all the commisssions he’s earned from the never-ending sale and resale of Cookham-upon-Thames’s sixty-odd houses, must be a millionaire by now. The houses turn over so often not because of the damp — Cookham is damp — or because anything is so very structurally wrong with its housing stock, but because the village is such a marvelous place to live that people could never bring themselves to sell and live elsewhere were it not for the steadily, even incredibly, rising prices of the homes there. No matter what the rest of the economy is like, they double in price every half-dozen years. This is the rule of thumb.

We are, in a sense, a suburb of Richmond. A bedroom community where three out of four ratepayers have their income from antique shops, or the sale of estate cars, or are independent booking agents or the leaders of dance bands in fancy hotels. A queer aspect of society in a town so homogeneously employed is its conversation. People who book tours, for example, are, for some reason, reluctant to talk shop with others in the same trade. Instead, they’ll pick up this or that bit of special information from people in professions different from their own and impart their newly acquired expertise to anyone (conventionally that fourth ratepayer or anyone else not engaged in the flogging of motors, tours, or the sale of fine furniture, or the leading of bands) who will listen.

Father sells estate cars in Richmond but is something of a connoisseur in the antique French-furniture field. Similarly, it isn’t uncommon for antique dealers to know about palm- court orchestras or their conductors to be aficionados of world travel while professionals in this last enterprise will often tell you more than you’d ever want to know about estate cars. And so on and so forth in Cookham, a village of four idées fixes. Usually these conversations (monologues really) take place on weekends or in the evenings at one of the village’s two pubs, though the venue can shift, rather like the tides of the sea-flowing river upon which Cookham is located, inexplicably, mysteriously, almost whimsically, from one time to the next, so that a native whose rhythms are off, or who hasn’t kept up, may discover himself in a pub that has “fallen silent” and find himself consoling (and suppressing) his gregarious spirits in lonely drink.

Do we sound quaint, picturesque? Do I, almost automatically falling in as I do with the eccentric, swollen tropes of my hometown every time I come anywhere near it? Who never even moved here until I was already twelve years old and who’d all but left it for good after I took my O-levels when I was fifteen, and who did leave it for good when I had taken my degree at university, do I sound quaint, picturesque? Maybe all home ever really is is wherever we happen to live whenever we reach puberty. This might account for the extra edge of horniness I felt as we approached the village, might account for the open, shameless way I bumped and rubbed against Larry when he parked the crestless Jag and we started up the path toward my parents’ house, passing through the pretty obstacles of Cookham’s frequent stiles. That’s what I was thinking.

Lawrence was thinking something else.

“This place,” he remarked almost scornfully, “this place is a refuge for Royalists.”

“Have you been to Cookham then, Larry?”

“I know the type.”

“Why do you sound so put out? It seems to me Royalists would be good for your business.”

“Royalists,” he said, “don’t understand my business.”

“That’s dark,” I said. (Larry is dark, and me this pushover for men in solar eclipse; small print, close-to-the-vest guys who won’t give a girl the light of day. He had me jumping, he had me jumping and rubbing and bumping and grinding in my head.)

But, as I say, I had to hand it to Larry. My family is dead into that sort of thing. Like practically everyone else in Cookham’s damp, moldy clime, they worship the Royal Family. They take Town and Country, they’ve lifetime subscriptions to King and Queen.

“I hope they won’t make a fuss,” he said.

“Old poo,” I said, linking my arm through his, “you’re their daughter’s fiancé, why shouldn’t they make a fuss?”

“I hope,” he said so vehemently I almost couldn’t stand it, “they don’t treat me like some pop star dropping in on the family as a favor to a character in a sitcom on the telly!”

“You sound so mean. You haven’t even met them. Or is ‘your kind’ just privy by birth to the type?”

Now I see I was only encouraging him, egging him on, pulling strings.

“This place smells of bridles and neat’s-foot oil,” he said. “It stinks of polished gun stocks and the ascot resins.”

“Excuse us, Prince,” I said, “if we’re too caught up in the English dream.”

He glared and fell silent. We were but a hundred or so yards from my parents’ house now. (Larry had left the car behind Cookham churchyard because he’d been reluctant to bring the crestless Jag along the damp, unpaved ruts of the wagon road.) Was it my imagination, or were those our neighbors crouched down behind or slouched to the sides of their French windows and peeking out at us like so many posted hosts hushing each other and muffling their hilarity at the approach of the guest of honor at a surprise party? I couldn’t actually distinguish anyone but had this sense of urgent bustle at the periphery. The Prince, like some fast feint artist who had perfected distraction, incorporated it into his bag of tricks, a juggler, magician, or ventriloquist, say, seemed never to lift his eyes from the road but directed a steady stream of questions at me.

“Who’s the tweedy type with the string of pearls? Do you know the gent with the plate-glass monocle? What is that creature? Are those really jodhpurs he’s wearing?”

He meant Amanda Styles-Brody, he meant Winston Moores-Wrightman, he meant Charley Narl. I hadn’t seen them, but it could have been they. They were my parents’ nearest neighbors, but how, from this distance, could he possibly have known that Major Moores-Wrightman’s monocle was ordinary window glass? Were we, indeed, types and phonies? Were all Englishmen, or all peoples really, viewed from the height of a throne, so categorical? And might not even the behaviors of princes, of kings and empresses, from God’s point-of-view, seem at least a little ridiculous? Is He fond of a dirty joke, for example? “Look what we’ve here,” would He say, “the empress is having her period!”? Is there, I mean, something petty about even our physical requirements, something inimical in Nature to nature, not just our renewable need to eat and sleep and move our foods along the degrading alchemical chambers of their digestion, converting not only red, gross meat into excrement but even grains and greens? If so, then I was a goner myself, a laughingstock of the universe, what with the itchings and urgings of my physical nature, my rut now (growing stronger as we came closer to the actual rooms where puberty had happened to me one afternoon between the time I’d been “Mother” to two or three friends at high tea, and the hour the last girl had been picked up by one of her parents and taken home) nothing more than blood in league with this intellectual masochism inexplicably programmed into my romantic, muddy, through-a-glass-darkly, sucker- punch imagination and glass-jaw heart.

(The gothic, girly inclinations, Sid, that do me every damn time!)

Not once feeling anger, no matter I’d teased and quibbled with him, at the Prince’s disdain for our Cookham ways, so much as a heightened sexual desire. So that, despite Daddy’s carryings-on and the fuss he made, his almost maniacal blather as he poured sherry into each of our glasses, giving in some exaggerated chivalric parody not just my mother the wine before he offered any to the Successor, the Prince, Duke of Wilshire, future King of all the Englands, but to me as well, probably saving the Prince till last not just out of manners but so he could pay him the steadiest attention. Meanwhile, as I say, keeping up this incredible monologue about French antique furniture, at one time actually raising his glass in a toast to the Royal Collection!

“To your rooms, Sir!” proclaimed my mad father. “To the seventy-three excellent fauteuils, forty-one vintage ber- gères, and thirty-five folding pliants in your family’s palaces. To all the capital chaises in Wilshire House. To the master chairmakers: to each extraordinary Boulard, Cresson (I sat in one once!), and Gourdin. To your luxurious Jacobs, Senés, and Tilliards on the important Savonnerie carpets. To all the cylindrical, tabouret stools like so many upholstered drums, and all the beautiful banquettes along Balmoral’s, Buckingham’s, and Windsor’s walls. A toast to all cunning, exquisite finishing touch— your splendid accessories, the fire screens, gilt candlesticks, Imari bowls, Houdon marbles, and soft-paste porcelains. Your snuffboxes studded with gemstones like pimientos in olives. Clocks, chenets, bras-de-lumières, silver chandeliers, Kändler birds, girandole centerpieces.”

“‘These are a few of my favorite things,’” the Prince remarked darkly, wryly, but if Father even heard him, let alone understood him, he gave no indication. Me, he had me jumping!

Meanwhile, Dad continued his absurd toast, rattling off names like Caffiéri, Duplessis, Saint-Germain, Gouthière, Meissonnier, Thomire. I was not his daughter for nothing. I hadn’t heard him carry on in years, but the names of these classic metalworkers had been familiar to me since we’d first moved to Cookham when I was twelve and my father had taken up the eccentric conversation of the natives.

He was into the heavier pieces now, going on about commodes, chests of drawers, consoles, escritoires, Beneman’s famous games table where Marie Antoinette lost so much money one night that Louis XVI abandoned his plans to add another wing on the palace at Versailles and thus, through inadvertence and his wife’s bad luck at cards, put back the revolution and delayed his own beheading by perhaps three years.

He proposed toasts to the great cabinetmakers represented in the Collection— to Carlin and Canabas and Cressent, to Dubois and Leleu and Riesener.

I don’t know, maybe he was nervous. Maybe everyone in Cookham is nervous and they talk this way to cover it up.

He got round to the beds, the parquetry cradles in the nursery, the tall, sculpted, fabled four-posters in the King’s chambers, the Queen’s, the Princes’ and Princesses’, reeling off their inventory numbers in the Journal du Garde-Meuble. He toasted their dozen gorgeous canapés.

“How I should enjoy to spend a night in such a bed! A night? A nap! What dreams! I would exchange a year’s reality for the visions that might visit me in such circumstances!”

“Really?” said Lawrence. “Me, I’m a seafaring prince, I sleep in me ’ammock.”

Oh, he was wicked; oh, he was cruel!

Father looked as if he’d been slapped. Indeed, a red mark appeared to rise like a welt on his cheek just as if that were the place the Prince had stung him. Mother, who’d been quiet, who’d not once mentioned her garden or her work with Oxfam, who’d hardly moved, who’d hardly moved even as she curtsied when I introduced her to the son of a b-tch, and, in a way, whose silence and lockjaw paralysis of being was even more fawning than poor Father’s helpless logorrhea, quite suddenly appeared to slouch, to crouch, to squeeze in upon herself almost as if she’d been that tweedy, string-of-pearls neighbor effaced behind the closed French windows, muffling not hilarity but a horror so complete it might have been its counterfeit.

Had the Prince been scornful I would have broken our engagement then and there, I swear I would. I would have demanded he leave our house, that he quit Cookham forever. But he reversed himself, was all charm and a noblesse oblige you could eat off of. He papered over his rudeness with a joke and a compliment to my father’s astonishing knowledge of the holdings. “You certainly know your onions, sir,” he told him, and promised to conduct them on a guided tour of the palaces any time Dad thought was convenient. He would send, he said, a car for them.

“An estate car,” Father joked. “I’m in the trade.”

“Of course,” Lawrence said. “In Richmond. Louise told me.”

I detected no scorn on the Prince’s face, though I knew his heart.

Still, I could barely distinguish my anger from my pure let-fly lust. Indeed, they seemed to feed on each other. (Which just goes to show you, don’t it, Sir Sid, that you can take the girl out of the country, send her to California, have her go for an au pair, or a housekeeper in a hotel, and even, when the really hard times come, for a sewer of houses, till her hands run with blisters, blood, and aloe; spring her, I mean, from all dependence and parasitical, female juniority; from all, I mean, the pretty, petty echelons of servitudinal, wide-eyed love, to the point where her arms and back run with muscle, but — WHOOSH! BAM! POWIE! — let one dark put- down or one sharp look be cast in her direction — provided, of course, it’s the right direction — and she’ll mewl like a lass in a story. As if California never happened, as if she never turned a mattress or ever swept sand.) What can I tell you, he had me jumping.

We were on the pretty upholstered bench in our large lounge. (Not even Father would have called it a bergère. Not even Cookham would have called it the library.) Mother explained it was Sheila’s day off and went to prepare tea. I reached for the Prince’s hands and took them in my own. I brought them down into my lap. I put this gentle pressure on them. I shifted position ever so slightly. And leaned my weight into the Prince. Pressing myself against his haunch. Imperceptibly, I parted my thighs and began swaying from side to side. I flexed my buttocks, I arched my back. Beneath my dress my body rose perhaps a fraction of a fraction of an inch above the bench. I relaxed and, settling my weight, started all over again. I shifted, I swayed, I flexed, I arched, I rose.

I came up against the Prince’s hands. By displacements so gradual they were almost infinitesimal, we exchanged momenta. He began to bounce my body like a ball.

As I’ve already told you, what can I tell you, he had me jumping. Push had come to shove. Aiee, aiee. I didn’t care where I was. I didn’t know where I was.

Poor Father.

I say “poor father,” but I couldn’t have said then, as I can’t say with certainty now, whether he even knew what was going on. “Ever so slightly,” I’ve said, “imperceptibly.” I’ve said “displacements so gradual” and “almost infinitesimal,” and implied that moment of inertia when we transferred momentum. So maybe he hadn’t seen anything really. (It was moldly old damp Cookham, after all. It was a gray Sunday autumn afternoon in Cookham. The lights hadn’t been turned on yet. It was dim in the lounge.) So maybe he hadn’t seen anything. (And me hoping the water would never boil and get transformed into tea, wanting to spare at least one of them, you see. Look, we honor our fathers and our mothers. For a time, for a time we do. Then for a time, when the blood sings, while it rushes like wind through the terrible chambers and glands of our change and necessity, we don’t. Or can’t. Then, when we can again, we do again.)

So maybe it was just the awkward silence that launched Dad into speech.

“Do you know, Sir,” he said, “something that’s always bothered me, something I took the trouble to look up in the library but couldn’t manage to pin down. Well, I’m a bit uncertain about a title is what it comes down to is all. If the living mother of a queen is referred to as the Queen Mother, well, once you and Louise are married, after the coronation I mean, well, would Mrs. Bristol be the King Mother-in- Law? Would one be the King Father-in-Law? It’s only a point of order, of course. It isn’t important. I’m only just asking.”

“What? What?” said the Prince, who was breathing heavily now.

“Well,” Father said, “it’s simply a matter of— ”

“I don’t know,” said the Prince. “I don’t know, I’m not sure, I shall have to find out. Look,” Lawrence said, catching his breath, “we’ve had rather a long drive down from London. I find I’m suddenly quite tired. Perhaps it was all that talk of beds. I should so like to catch a nap. Is there a place one might lie down? Louise, you could show me. Please apologise to Mrs. Bristol for me, would you? I should quite like some tea, but after my nap.”

Sunday February 16, 1992

How Royals Found Me Unsuitable to Marry Their Larry

We were in what despite the intervening years, and (from the presence of the abandoned giraffes and tigers, monkeys and bears, somehow come down in the world, reduced to memento, simple stuffed souvenir) recognizably, too, was still my room (which even without any fine antique French furniture, could have been any schoolgirl’s, even a French one’s, in any epoch, who, come fresh to her menses was come fresh to virginity, too, since without their onset she couldn’t have known carnal desire, not carnal desire, that queer, obsessive magnetism of the skin and heart and head as much as of actual breasts or mysteriously furred-over sexual organs) on what was (never mind it wasn’t a rare four-poster and boasted no gorgeous canopy) still (fourteen or fifteen years after that alarming high tea with those two or three childhood friends) my bed, though it was scarcely longer or wider than a cot.

Because there must be something about the act of sex that is indifferent to space. How otherwise explain how two full- grown people — and one a prince with all that that suggests of dimension and line — could manage not only to lie down together on what the full-grown woman distinctly recalled having outgrown all by herself fourteen or fifteen years earlier when she was four or five inches shorter and weighed twenty or twenty-five pounds less, but thrash about on it too? And something in the act of sex indifferent to time as well. Or anyway oblivious of it, of anything but some overwhelming, all-inclusive Now. Because how else can one account for that seemingly magical obliteration or at least smudge of each intervening sequence from how we met to how we got engaged; through how I was received, and how he courted me, and how push came to shove, until almost the very day the Royals found me unsuitable to marry their Larry (not to mention the half-dozen Sunday installments, January 12, 1992, to February 16, 1992, inclusive, in which I not only tell all but apparently lay bare the soul of the entire Kingdom)? I mean how else can it be both the morning after one of those somehow issueless, drought-inspired, all-night Pacific blows in the two-a-penny wicky-ups when we — Jane and Marjorie and I — swept up sand and shook out mats and rewove walls in my good old beachcombing salad days before I was ever an all-but-crowned Princess rolling about on the floor of a wicky-up in mutual, amorous lock- leg and lusty, heartfelt grabflesh with your Heir Apparent, the two of us g — sing the he-l out of each other, spreading one another’s but-cks, squeezing one another’s p-rts (and the Prince singing out at the top of his voice, too, so that I actually had to cover his mouth in order to restrain him, lay hands on him, on a Prince, lest the guests, many of whom were our employers, recall — Jane’s and Marjorie’s and mine — in the adjoining huts hear him, those who hadn’t already left for the Governor’s Palace to see if they might not still get a chair near the reviewing stand where he was scheduled to appear that afternoon with Lord Mayor Miniver, Lord and Lady Lewes and Anthony Fitz-Sunday, muffling his “Road to Mandalay” exuberance — and the Prince 1-cking the very palm over his mouth — sand in the high heels, aloe stains, patches of chlorophyll in the stockings and dresses on the frond-strewn floor of the unwinding wicky-up) one minute, and seven thousand something miles away and all that happened to us in between the next; push coming to shove, to pushing and pulling and thrusting and parrying, to all Love’s earth defying sexual acrobacy on that same astonishing, flexible, accommodate cot where fourteen or fifteen years previous I first came to my virginity due to the simple human fact of the onset of my monthlies?

And he was singing now, too. Anthems, sea chanteys, tunes to hornpipes: “Rule Britannia,” “Popeye the Sailor- man.” My astonished parents downstairs, staring up at the ceiling toward my room had to be; mother; my struck- dumb dad. Outraged, or humiliated, or even pleased as punch that Lawrence, Crown Prince of England, to whom, if all went well, he would one day be King Father-in-Law, might be up in her old room serenading and di-dl-ng his one-and-only daughter.

Which is when I opened my eyes. At the thought of my dad in the lounge. At the thought of me mum holding tea. I opened my eyes. Outraged, humiliated. But still into it (the sex act an annihilator of character, too, indifferent not only to time and space but also to circumstance), horny withal, I mean.

To see Lawrence watching me.

“Your eyes are open,” he said.

“Yes.”

It was his hang-up. All that old business about his inability to make even n-mber one in front of his mates at the Academy, his Prince’s shame in having to — art and s-it and pi-s like other men, the reason he nursed his own v-gin-t-, his Prince’s aversion to ever having to show his throes. It was probably the reason he’d resisted making love to me since that day in the wicky-up.

I was suddenly fearful. Though I soon enough saw I needn’t have been. Because maybe if you hide your throes long enough you forget you ever have them. Maybe all throes, even the most humble, lowly throes of the body, like having to cough, say, or sneeze, happen in what you think is a vacuum, in some almost unpopulated world of princes and kings. Because he never saw my outrage, didn’t even notice my humiliation. Only — I was still horny, recall — the remains of my pleasure.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, not unkindly.

“I’m looking at my Prince,” I said, Mother and Dad already forgotten.

“Why did you open your eyes?” he said.

“You opened yours first.”

“I wanted to see if love disfigured you.”

“Does it?”

He kissed me on my eyes. I loved him more than ever then. More than when I couldn’t read him, all those times he merely had me jumping. More than the time in Llanelli, in Wales, when he did the bravest, noblest, most generous thing I’d ever seen done, and had not so much lost as traded however many thousands of pounds it was, to Macreed Dressel at the Springfield.

But he couldn’t leave well enough alone. I guess no one can.

“You never opened them in Cape Henry,” he said.

“Oh, la,” I said with whatever modesty I have, “Cape Henry. I didn’t know you very well in Cape Henry.”

“What was it, Louise?” Prince Lawrence said, “You can tell me.”

“Lar-ry,” I said.

“No, really,” he said, “we’re to be married. Surely a princess may speak her mind to a prince. I supposed you were making the world go away. Please?” he said.

“The absolute truth?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“I’m not any ostrich,” I said. “I don’t shut my eyes and imagine the world anyplace else than it already is.”

“I’m no more ostrich than you are, Louise,” Lawrence said. “I know you weren’t a virgin when I met you. You’re a grown woman, for God’s sake. You’d been to California. You’d worked as an au pair. You lived on a beach in a tourist attraction and had a great tan. You think it bothers me you weren’t a virgin? It doesn’t, it doesn’t at all. You’re a commoner, you’re not to the manner born. You’re not held to the same standards. One supposed you could have been fantasizing.”

“What, making up a man, you mean?”

“Yes,” Lawrence said.

“I had the Prince of England on top of me. Why would I make up a man?”

“Oh, Louise,” he said, and kissed me on my eyes again.

But I saw that he had mistaken me, or that I had misled him. Like him, I couldn’t leave well enough alone.

“It was another man, actually,” I said.

“What, a man in the States? Not your employer?” he said. “The one that engaged you, whose child was entrusted to you?”

“No,” I said, “certainly not.”

“Oh, Louise,” he said, “not when you were in the hotel! Not for some man in the hotel where you worked turning mattresses and changing sheets? Like any common, comely chambermaid?”

He was grinning from ear to ear.

“I was perfectly faithful when I was in America,” I told him evenly.

“Ah,” said the Prince, “I was right. On that beach then.”

“No,” I said, “not on the beach. Not ever in exile.”

“In exile,” he said.

“For almost two years I had an affair with Kinmonth- Schaire, the newspaper publisher. I was never, in the conventional or continental sense of the term, his ‘mistress.’ He did not ‘keep me,’ he did not ‘provide’ for me. He did not even have a key to my flat. We were ‘lovers’ in the ordinary star-crossed ways of our times. He was twenty-seven years my senior, and married. At the time he was only penciled- in for his OBE. We knew that even the faintest whiff of scandal would have put the kibosh on that quick as you can say Jack Robinson. Plus, he had a daughter my age engaged to be married to a fellow a class-and-a-half up from her own, and a wife who was both delicate and busy with preparations for their daughter’s wedding.

“What can I tell you; we were star-crossed; our timing was off, our cusps and zodiacal signs. Our houses were in the wrong neighborhoods.

“He gave me the money and asked me would I lie low in the States for six months. In three he’d have his OBE, he told me; in four his daughter would be safely married; in five he’d tell his wife about me and ask for a divorce, and in six it would be both safe and seemly for me to come back from America.

“And do you know something? He was right on the money, and as good as his word, he really was. He became Sir Sidney Kinmonth-Schaire, OBE. The daughter married, and he told his wife about us and asked for the divorce. And do you know what? Do you know what she did? The delicate wife? Can you guess?”

Lawrence looked at me.

“She laughed at him. She laughed and petted him and gave him a kiss on his eyes and said he was a fool, dear, and supposed that she must be one, too, but she’d have to forgive him because when push came to shove she guessed that that was the only choice left fools, because didn’t one fool deserve the other, and if he could just manage to let her know next time he felt himself going off the deep end they could put their fool heads together and come up with a way out of their muddle that might just save everyone embarrassment. She didn’t see any way round it, she said; he’d probably just have to eat the few thousand pounds it had cost him to put me up in America for those six months, she said.”

“OBE?” Larry said.

“Order of the British Empire.”

“OBE?” Larry said.

“Lar-ry,” I said.

“I never minded you weren’t a virgin,” he said. “It didn’t bother me to think of you sowing your wild oats with a fellow your age on a blanket set out on a beach in Cape Henry; nor even your doing it with some businessman type, a commercial traveler, say, someone in town for a sales conference, the two of you making steamy love in the Los Angeles hotel where you served as a housekeeper, thrashing about on the very bed in the very room you’d have to make up yourself when the two of you had finished. I minded none of this, Louise.

“But an OBE?

“I’m not small-minded, Louise. I could have overlooked it if the fellow in question had merely been one of my subjects. It wouldn’t have mattered to me he had seen you naked, had seen you in your throes!

“But an OBE? An OBE? An OBE is practically peerage, the next best thing anyway. Never mind the title is honorary, symbolic. An OBE has certain privileges. Ask Royal Peerager. An OBE? one might have to look him in the eye each year on the afternoon of the King’s Birthday Party under the canvas tent, or out on the lawn at Buckingham Palace.

“I’m not small-minded. I’m not.

“Oh, Louise,” he cried out, “what have you done, what have you done? Oh, Louise, what have you done? What you have done, Louise,” he cried out, “what you have done!”

I hope I can explain this next part. I said “he cried out.” He did. I mean it was a cry. It was fury and outrage and despair, the sound of a magnificent, powerful beast, new to pain, angered, stymied in a trap. A mortal noise so terribly affronted it was almost dignified!

Father, that soft, deferent, obeisant man, came running; Mother barely a step behind him. They burst into what— how can I put this? — now something historical had occurred there, had ceased to be my room.

“What,” my father, confused, blind to my nudity, blinded by the Prince’s, said, “what? What? What? What?”

“Get out!” Lawrence screamed. “The both of you! Get out, get out!”

“Don’t you shout at my parents,” I said, “don’t you dare. Never mind what he says,” I told my father, who had already begun to back out of the room. “His powers are only symbolic,” I told him.

“Well, of course,” Father shuddered, “all real power is,” and closed the door behind them as they left.

People have only heard rumors. Up till now no one really knows what was in the message Larry wired the Noël Coward King and his Noël Coward Queen on board their Royal Yacht on what was supposed to have been their final world tour as reigning monarchs. Well, ‘Sparks,’ of course, I suppose he’d had to have known. There’s always some ‘Sparks’ or other on duty when these important, eyes-only Ems telegrams go through, but apart from him, no one. I myself didn’t understand how one minute I could be engaged to a prince in what was to have been, in light of King George’s and Queen Charlotte’s mutual, simultaneous abdications, perhaps the most colorful, elaborate ceremony in the history of the realm, and the next minute, bam, the clock had struck midnight, and, all sudden widdershins, Cinderella was just another pretty face.

Larry told me. I didn’t ask. I don’t even think I wanted to know as much as he wanted to tell me, as though he were dying for me to find out just how clever he was, throwing his cleverness around like a drunken sailor.

“Three little words,” he said. “Three little words and you were done for, Louise. You know what they were? You know what I said in that telegram I sent?”

“What did you say in that telegram you sent, Larry?” I asked like his straight man.

“SHE’S HAD MISCARRIAGES!”

They said they’d take me to court if these installments appeared.

They’re blowing smoke, of course. They don’t go to law like regular people, these people.

So they threaten me. But I’ll tell you something, Sid, I don’t think they can touch me. After all, as I keep on saying, I promised to tell all but I haven’t. Not all. Not yet. There’s at least two column inches I’m holding back against a rainy day.

Meanwhile, I don’t know, maybe next time they’ll get it right, do it better, wheel-and-deal the way people like them are supposed to wheel-and-deal. Have the King, what do you call it, issue a proclamation maybe. Send out this call for the most beautiful virgins in the land. Set them tasks. Winner takes Prince, takes Crown, takes all.

That’s about it, I guess. The only thing I don’t get is why you offered me money for my story. I mean what could possibly have been in it for you, Sir Sid? I mean it isn’t as if you come out smelling like a rose or something. For a time I put it down to your sweeps-week vision, your tabloid heart, but that can’t be all of it, I think. Perhaps you hold a few column inches of your own in reserve.

What could they be, I wonder? Pride? The thrill of cuckolding a king? Even if it’s only at some double remove, once for before Lawrence even knew me and the other for before he was ever a king.

Or those throes, perhaps, their veronican image, for the refractive, fun-house homeopathics of the thing, some hand-that-shook-the-hand-that-shook-the-hand apostolicity of love.

You men!