Death and the Princess (17 page)

‘Helena, off course, takes after me. That is something they could not rob me off. She hass a romantic nature, a poetic soul. She stands out against theess bourgeois, mercantile soulss. You too, my dear, haff a romantic soul. I can see it . . .’

It was all too Franz Lehar for words. I could see the delectable lady (recently married into this bourgeois, mercantile family) cast a nervous glance in the direction of her husband.

As they all trouped back for the second act, I heard a Very Distinguished Lady Indeed remark to Her Husband that so far it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected — a judgement she probably had to revise drastically before the end of a very long evening.

But end it did, eventually. The audience applauded dutifully (it made more sense when, after the lights went up, they applauded the royal party). There was one royal duty to be gone through before the evening was over: most of the occupants of the royal box went backstage to shake hands with the performers, dutifully lined up, paws at the ready. The press got some splendid photographs, including one of Prince Rupert gazing ravenously down into the cleavage of the buxom black mezzo who had sung Sélinka. It made a very good cover for the next issue of
Private Eye.
At last all the official stuff was over, and the royal party could slope off home for a cup of cocoa and some well-earned shut-eye (I imagined them all curled up around their hotties, superlative, royal hotties stamped with a monogram — corgi rampant against a gules background).

Me, I had left Joplin to look after the Princess in the last minutes, and had slipped into a greasepainty loo, where I had changed into a dinner-jacket. Then, some way behind the Princess, and leaving Joplin on guard in the corridors, I went back into the front of house and towards the Crush Bar, my valley of Glencoe, with
something of the same emotions that Miss Blandish must have had when she entered the hideout of the Grisson gang.

CHAPTER 14

Lions’ Den

In the plushy grandeur of the Crush Bar, in an area roped off specially for the occasion, the party was already in full swing. The arrival of the Princess Helena had created the expected stir, with the usual accompaniment of gush and fawn. By the time I got to the top of the stairs she was already the centre of an admiring group, which included Harry Bayle — taking time off from egalitarian politics, and looking, in his tuxedo, holding his cut-glass tumbler of Scotch, every inch the Establishment’s choice of future Prime Minister. The Princess smiled, ogled, giggled discreetly and was somehow regally provocative, and in all these ways she contrived to raise the sexual temperature in the room. Which, apart from those guests who were directly attributable to her, was not high.

I had hoped to be able to slip in unnoticed and go about my business of doing all in my power to avert Helena’s intentions to create well-orchestrated brouhaha. But it was not to be. As I entered the roped-off area I was hailed by a fruity, gin-laden voice.

‘Perry Trethowan, isn’t it?
How
good of you to come. I knew your Uncle Lawrence, you know. And your mother. I’m
dying
to have a talk with you, dear man . . .’

And here I was being commandeered by a strawberry-coloured woman, showing an unsuitable amount of puffy shoulder, who seemed to be assuming rights of property over me. Who could it be but Edwina, Lady Glencoe?

I had gathered by now the basic facts about Lady Glencoe. Nothing in her life had been particularly secret. She had had her first taste of notoriety in her debutante year, when she had followed the example of Nancy Cunard and taken a Negro pianist as her lover. So popular were Negro pianists at that time that there were not enough of them to go round, and I have the impression that boatloads of them must have been shipped over from the States, with Society Ladies standing on the wharf at Southampton and making bids. It was one way out of the Depression, I suppose. Because this was the early ’thirties, when the Prince was dancing with Wallis at the Embassy Club and the Labour Government was trying to reduce the dole from seventeen shillings.

When Negro pianists went out, the lady had taken a succession of lovers — energetic peers of the realm, a left-wing poet waiting to be killed in Spain, an Indian patriot in exile, a chargé d’affaires at the German Embassy, and a Welsh boxer. She had driven an ambulance for both sides in the Spanish Civil War, until they begged her not to. She had run a hostel for exiled Poles in the war, and later extended her charity to exiled Frenchmen, Belgians, Norwegians and Czechs. At the end of the war she was decorated, with an ambiguously worded citation. By then she was Lady Glencoe, and had produced an heir for the uncouth laird who had been hypnotized by her already matured charms. By the hard winter of 1947 he had hurled her out into the snow, he to go on to other Lady Glencoes, she to become hostess to the less hidebound younger lights of the Conservative Party. She claimed all the credit for making Macmillan Prime Minister, and played a walk-on part of a discreditable nature during the Profumo affair. Now, when the party had fallen into the hands of grocers and grocers’ daughters, she was a spent force, reduced to charity do’s and operatic gaieties. But
she carried herself with the air of one who had done a thing or two in her time, and might tell all, if only the Sunday papers would up their miserable offer for her life story.

‘Lady Glencoe?’ I said nervously, because the figure, like a barrel of wobbly lard, was wobbling uncomfortably close to my midriff. ‘Yes, I’m Perry Trethowan. I don’t know how you know me. I’m only here in my official capacity.’

‘But darling! I won’t let you blush like a rose unseen, or whatever flower it is. You’re so famous! Your picture in all the papers! So jealous-making! At the time I
marked you down,
so let’s have no
shrinking.
I knew you the moment you came up the stairs. And Dorothy confirmed it.’

I cast a look of ingratitude in the direction of the lady-in-waiting, who was chatting to a feeble-looking relative with a receding hairline and chin to match.

‘You’ll have a Scotch. Waiter! Here!’

‘I’ll just hold one — ’

‘No, drink plenty, dear boy. It’s on the house. In these dreadful times that’s the only way to drink really sufficiently. Oh, there’s darling Davina. I must fly. But I expect you to stay to the end, so that we can have a
gorgeous
chat over the dregs about your daddy’s going. Have fun, darling!’

Oh dear. Ripeness is all, said the poet, and I confess I could have dumped Lady Glencoe and all her dated daring on to the poet without a moment’s regret. She certainly wasn’t what I would have chosen for a
t
ê
te-
à
-t
ê
te
at the end of a long and tiring day. But with a bit of luck it might be avoided. I made for a quiet oasis where I might inconspicuously see and hear.

‘You do get around, don’t you?’ said an unpleasant voice in my ear, as I was sliding my bulk through the throng to a corner which hadn’t got singers or critics or upper-class nincompoops cluttering it up. I turned round
into the vapid, discontented face of the Honourable Edwin Frere.

‘Oh well,’ I said, with hastily assumed bonhomie, ‘I try to live it up while I’m here, you know.’

‘Don’t give me all that stuff about being just back from the colonies. I know who you are. You’re what I believe is nowadays called the fuzz. I should have guessed by your size. I don’t know what you were doing at the Wellington the other night . . .’

‘We’re entitled to our moments of relaxation, you know.’

‘Hmmm. Well, it seems odd. Because you couldn’t have known I was going to invite the Princess. I suppose you’re guarding her tonight?’

‘Something of the sort,’ I agreed.

‘Pity you don’t try guarding her from some of the types she encourages.’ We had come to rest in a corner near the bar, and he surveyed the room with undisguised contempt.

‘Look at them. That little actor fellow I gave his comeuppance to. What a jerk! That MP she’s always going about with. He’s an out-and-out Communist, you know, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him. And look at that one over there: he’s a footballer. My God, just imagine — a footballer mixing with this mob. As far as I’m concerned, they’re really off types, the lot of them. I’ve half a mind to tell her so.’

‘You’d be a fool to,’ I said. He looked at me bellicosely. ‘Can’t you see, you’re the one with all the cards. However she may play around now, you’re the only one that’s remotely acceptable. Can you see her walking down the aisle with a Northern Ireland footballer?’

‘Who said anything about marriage?’ muttered Edwin Frere, but I could see the idea wasn’t a new one to him.

‘You’ve only got to sit still and be a good boy, and the apple will drop into your lap,’ I went on.

‘It beats me why all these jerks are here, then,’ he said, after thinking it over.

‘Well, it’s obvious: the Princess likes a bit of excitement — you’ve seen that yourself. Then, when she’s been stirring the pot for some time, it boils over — and the Princess slips out, leaving someone else to pick up the pieces and shoulder the blame. She’s a past mistress of self-preservation. That’s why you’re all here tonight. You don’t think that opera we’ve just sat through was Jimmy McAphee’s idea of a good night’s entertainment, do you?’

‘Wasn’t mine either, come to that,’ grunted Edwin Frere.

‘The best thing you could do would be disappoint her. Don’t get involved with anyone, just talk to your own people and ignore the jerks. It would teach her to stop playing little games.’

‘I might, at that,’ said Edwin Frere. And he loped off to his own people (of whom there were plenty), leaving me modestly pleased with the hope that I had neutralized one of the threats. I remained there by the bar, holding my drink but not drinking, and tuning in to one after another of the conversations around me.

• • •

‘If I had my way,’ came the thick Ulster tone of Jimmy McAphee, immaculately dressed, and indistinguishable from the upper-crust mob except by the greater force of his personality, ‘I’d deport the bleeding lot o’ them.’

‘What
a good idea!’ said the witless society beauty he was talking to. ‘I mean, they do say they want to be Irish, don’t they? Why not just shunt them down over the border? You really ought to have a word with the Secretary of State about it!’

• • •

‘My dear,’ said Prince Rupert, to the delectable young thing with whom he was sharing a canapé, he nibbling one end, and she the other, so that their rather long
aristocratic noses rubbed in an almost Eskimo ecstasy, ‘if you don’t now, you vill regret it for the rest off your life.’

‘Are you quite sure you’re
that
good?’ she said, with a giggle and a toss of the head. ‘Anyway, I mean,
how,
or rather, gosh! I don’t mean how, but I mean
where?’

‘I em staying et Clerridge’s,’ said the Prince.

‘Oh good. Because it would be difficult to do it in Buckingham Palace, wouldn’t it, I mean — ’

‘In Buckingham Pellace I haf never bin able to do it et all,’ said Prince Rupert.

• • •

‘Oh no,’ said Lady Dorothy Lowndes-Gore, squeezing her strangulated voice out through her nose like the last bit of toothpaste in the tube, ‘that wasn’t
this
Lady Glencoe. That was Marjorie, Lady Glencoe. Glencoe has married five times, you know. Marjorie was the fourth, and she was nobody. This is
Edwina,
Lady Glencoe, the
second
wife. Mother of Glenclannish, who’s the heir. Edwina’s father was Earl of Kilgarvan. Irish title, of course.
Terribly
bad blood. Kilgarvan himself, you know, was practically court-martialled in the First War. And the
mother . . .’

• • •

‘Jeremy,’ said the Princess, smiling her sweetest and most demure smile, and purring like a cat in sight of the creamer, ‘I want you to meet Harry Bayle. Harry is an
awfully
good friend of mine. Harry has a lovely flat down the river, it’s absolutely the last word.
Terribly
smart. We go there
often.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Jeremy Styles, elegantly at ease, and smiling with utter lack of guile. ‘Are you an interior decorator?’

‘Oh Jeremy, you are naughty,’ giggled the Princess. ‘Harry’s a Member of Parliament.’

‘Oh,
the
Harry Bayle!’ said Jeremy, with a totally natural gesture of surprise and admiration that only an
actor could have managed. ‘This
is
an honour. I did enjoy your speech in the House in the defence spending debate. Splendid stuff. You should have gone on the stage.’

‘I saw your new play the other night,’ said Harry Bayle, similarly at ease, man to man. ‘Very funny indeed, I thought. It should run for years.’

The Princess Helena pouted unprettily.

• • •

Jimmy McAphee pushed past me on his way to get a refill, and then, a thought striking him, he swung his thick body around and measured me with his eyes.

‘Was it you, then, that rang me?’

I followed suit and measured him with my eyes. Under the elegant clothes the tough, vigorous body had a rather horrible force. Not someone to tangle with on a dark night in the Creggan. But then, I knew that. On the other hand, I didn’t feel I had much need to fear the man. He hadn’t figured very prominently in the Princess’s life over the last few months. And I suspected he was just a rough little go-getter whose eyes couldn’t see further than next week, but who marked the course of those seven days very determinedly.

‘Yes, it was,’ I said. ‘Just part of my job. If you think about what I said, it makes sense.’

‘Oh aye? Well, as it happens, I’d already decided to lay off the rough stuff and concentrate on my game.’

I was surprised he made any distinction. I murmured: ‘Very wise.’

‘Mind you, after sitting through that lot tonight I could well fancy a bit of a barny with someone or other. It’d get rid of a lot of steam. By — ’ he let out his breath in a great expression of disgust. ‘To think that people come here for pleasure!’