Skeleton-in-Waiting (3 page)

“Post-natal recapitulation. The foetus in the womb recapitulates the stages of human evolution. First it's an amoeba, later it has gills, then it's an amphibian and so on. Shortly before birth it has traces of a simian tail. Why should the process stop there?”

“We were monkeys for much longer than Granny was Granny.”

“I'm not suggesting Davy was recapitulating your grandmother. Suppose a period in prehistory when various human groups became largely segregated, with the result that particular characteristics tended to be bred into one group and not another, and then to remain as part of our genetic material. Sometimes they would emerge in a life-long likeness, as in your grandmother, but with the majority of descendants they wouldn't manifest themselves except for the brief period in which the child was recapitulating that stage of its evolution.”

“Is that genuine science?”

“Just doodling. I could ask someone, if you like.”

“I just love the idea of a pack of Romanovs wearing nothing except mink and sable hunter-gathering across the steppes for Fabergé eggs!”

“More engaging to contemplate than to encounter.”

“I bet you Granny would have come out on top if she'd been one of them.”

NOVEMBER 1987

1

“T
hat you?”

“Well?”

“…”

“What do you mean, pressure?”

“…”

“Tell me this—supposing I went along with you, does it mean nobody getting hurt or killed?”

“…”

“It's what matters to me—that and saving your stupid skin.”

“And you can't say more? Anyway, it'd be down to me to come up with something, wouldn't it?”

“All right. I'm not saying I like it, but I'll give it a try. But listen, there's your side of the bargain. You're going to promise me, whatever happens, soon as this is over you're getting out. And you're not getting involved in anything else like this, ever again. Right?”

“…”

2

It was part of our unwritten constitution, Father used to say, that there must always be one UMRF—Unpopular Member of Royal Family. Granny had held the office for more than a generation. It had certain perks, the best being certain freedoms from constraint experienced by those members of the Family who were expected to behave; now, finally, there was freedom from TV at her funeral. This gave the service a feeling of taking place back in the 'thirties, when all the public would have expected to see was a double-page spread in the
Illustrated London News,
drawn by an artist who had not been present at the ceremony. Granny had of course been born Russian Orthodox but she'd had to become C of E in order to marry Grandfather, so the spoken bits of the service were good old Prayer Book. For the music they'd got St Paul's and Westminster Abbey to lend them extra basses who boomed away in furry deep voices trying to sound like Chaliapin. To Louise this seemed a much more agreeable noise than the flutings and twitterings she usually had to sit through.

There was a good turn-out of Romanovs. The Palace were always jumpy about any dealings with Russian ex-royals, partly because of their experiences with Granny but mainly because the FO would come at them with tut-tuts if it seemed that any Romanov was being treated in a way which implied that he was still really royal and might one day come into his own again. For instance, there was only to be a buffet luncheon after the ceremony, so that nobody could say that the King of England had sat down to a formal meal with a claimant to the throne of the Tsars. Louise knew only three of the visitors by sight, so whiled away the musical stretches by studying the rest of them for Davy-likenesses and any other evidence of Romanov hunter-gatherer forebears. Beyond a vague foreignness she could detect no special shared traits among the men, but four of the women were striking in the same fashion, erect, pale-skinned and dark-haired, with strong-featured square faces—the famous Bagration look of which Granny used to boast not because she herself possessed it but because it came from the oldest royal line in Europe.

The home-growns had come in force, almost the complete set: Granny's own children apart from Aunt Louise, who'd refused to make the trip from Rome—she'd always hated Granny, Father said, with a sort of phobia quite different from what he regarded as his own rational detestation—Father and Mother, Uncle Billy and the Clarences, Aunt Anne and Uncle Boot Wroxeter and the Wroxeter cousins; the grandchildren, of course; and then the outer ring of second cousins, the Yorks and the Kents and their ramifications, complicated by divorces and re-marriages­—and not one of them caring a sausage that Granny had snuffed it at last. In all that solemn and apparently mourning assembly only Aunt Bea Surbiton could be feeling genuine sorrow, though perhaps a few others might share Louise's mild regret—not that even she had actually liked Granny, but she had at times enjoyed her, her gusto, her panache, her irreverence (especially of all things that the English expected one to revere), her undauntedness in accepting her unpopularity and making the most of it, wearing it like one of her absurd gaudy cloaks and flaunting it in the face of her enemies. Granny had been a flavour in Louise's growing up. You didn't want much of it, and not often, but from now on you were going to taste it only in memory.

A bout of Slavic boomings ended. The organ took up with burps and tootles. The coffin-bearers—chosen from the regiments of which Granny had been Colonel-in-Chief, a rank she had relished exploiting to the maximum of military embarrassment—hefted the box and waited. Louise rose when Mother rose and leaving Piers in his stall joined the procession beside Albert, who was looking peculiarly kept and respectable. He had been tending that way for some while, his beard seeming to have become smaller and neater every time Louise met him—perhaps Soppy kept a pair of scissors under her pillow and snipped another millimetre away each night while he slept. The procession caterpillared to the vault. The organ whumped, fluttered and fell silent. The Dean turned and raised his head with a look of astonishment, as though he had imagined he had been wandering alone through an empty chapel, and now found that he had been trailing an entire royal family behind him. He drew a deep breath and twanged through his nose, till the choir drowned him with hootings and flutings.

“Man that is born of woman …”

“… hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower …”

And jumpeth off pianos trying to catch parrots, thought Louise as the soldiers eased the coffin onto the platform that would carry it down into the vault. It settled without a bump.

The machinery took over. The supernumerary basses rumbled fresh woe. Slowly the box slid away.

“Made it,” whispered Albert.

There had been suggestions in the press, as well as private chunterings among Palace officials, that Granny shouldn't be buried in St George's. It wasn't just that she'd never been Queen. Her known Nazi sympathies, both before and during the war, were the main thing, but she had plenty of enemies from other causes who would have liked to see her buried less triumphally. Mother could well have been chief of those enemies, since Granny had set out from the start to make life as tricky as possible for the new Queen, but of course it had been Mother who had insisted that Granny must be buried alongside poor Grandfather.

Louise agreed. After all, he'd really loved her. There were only two things everybody knew about Grandfather. One was his managing to set fire to his yacht during a practical joke with an exploding cigar and so getting drowned in a flat calm sea while he was still only Prince of Wales—extraordinary to think of a time when you could go yachting with a few cronies and not have posses of security men zooming all round you in power boats and helicopters. The other was that he'd really loved Granny. Mother and Father loved each other, of course, both officially and unofficially; they'd just had a bit of a fight to get married, too. Louise herself was known to be dotty about Piers, and had had to fight even harder. But if you'd asked your woman-in-the-checkout-queue to name you a royal romance, three times out of four she's still have answered “Oh, poor Prince Albert and the Grand Duchess.” She'd have been right, too, despite the fact that Granny was capable of conducting a world-class romance without really loving the other party much more than she loved her harp or her jewellery. She would have seen the lover mainly as an extension of her own personality. But Grandfather'd never had the imagination for that. He'd loved her and fought to marry her against his parents and the government, the Church, the hacks, and practically the whole of the Great British Public—even greater odds than Louise had faced for Piers. And then the GBP, like a tyrannical father in a costume drama, had suddenly recognised True Love and changed sides, so Grandfather had won. It was the only noticeable thing he'd ever done, really, but it was enough. Then he'd drowned, and fifty years of widowhood had juddered by, and now she was sliding down to sleep by her husband's side again.

Marriage is rum, Louise thought. All marriages, not just the slightly peculiar ones like Father's with Mother and Nonny. She didn't think she'd really considered this before. Getting used to Piers's peculiarities and finding ways of living together, as well as setting up house and having a baby, had been a mind-absorbing process, as inevitable as time seems to the time-bound. But now Granny, was drifting away to somewhere outside time, and seemed for a moment to be sucking Louise in her wake, enabling her not only to look at her memories but also at the possible lifetimes ahead, and feel the same strangeness in them all. She couldn't find words for the feeling. It didn't have much to do with love—love just made it all harder to think about. If Piers had been at her side she would have felt for his hand and he would have squeezed hers without seeming to notice what he was doing, but afterwards he would have asked “What was that about?” and she would have said “Oh nothing.” When she slid back into time she felt widowed.

She shook herself. A boy was singing solo in those bloodless, floating tones which always gave Louise the illusion that if only she could dissolve one flimsy barrier between her ear and her mind she might be able to grasp why people made such a fuss about music.

“… is not at our last hour for any pains of death to fall from Thee.”

Father stepped forward. Somebody offered him an urn from which he took a handful of dry earth.

“For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God,” twanged the Dean, “of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear sister here departed …”

Father tossed the earth down. It rattled like rain among the wreaths that covered the vanishing coffin. The Dean prolonged his last twang into a dying whine. The Family turned, processed back and peeled off to their places. Piers, unprompted, felt for Louise's hand and squeezed it.

The Princess of Wales—Sophia on her birth certificate, Sophie to the hacks, Soppy to anyone who knew her well—was standing by a window that looked out over the Home Park. The view was silver and brown and gold, pale clouds reflected from the ponds, withering grass-stems littered with yellow leaf-fall, all hues muted still further by the remains of mist, as though seen on TV with the colour-control down. Two of the best trees had fallen in the famous gale, their prone trunks adding to the melancholy. It was all very pallid, peaceful, English, nothing like Granny. Soppy as usual had been first to the tables and her plate had an Alp of food on it.

“How's life?” said Louise.

“Sacked my Bridget yesterday.”

“Oh, why? I thought she was terrific.”

“Got on my nerves. Don't talk to Bertie about it. He's far from chuffed. Still like that wench of yours?”

“Janine? I was thinking, oh, the morning after Granny died, how super she was. I keep finding her up and there when it's not even her night on. Luckily Davy's just beginning to sleep through, touch wood.”

“Mercy when that happens. Watching anyone else feed makes my tummy rumble. My two must've got conditioned to the idea of distant thunder with their meals—won't be able to digest without it. Tried keeping a few snacks my side of the bed, but Bertie complained about the crumbs.”

“I was thinking how tidied-up you're getting him.”

“Not me, darling. People change. Closer you think you are to them, less you notice. Then all of a sudden you've got someone else.”

Soppy popped a whole canapé into her neat round mouth and chewed double-speed, wrinkling her nose as she did so. She had an unusually small head with sharp little features and slightly pop eyes. Her body was long but neat, unaffected by her astounding appetite. She was said to be the best woman polo-player in Europe. Louise liked her, but she was not very popular with the Palace because of her tendency to say things they hadn't scripted.

“Piers says we aren't just one person like that, really,” said Louise.

“Uh?”

“Don't tell him I've told you. He says I always make things simpler than they are, especially anything to do with AI.”

“Trying to get computers to think for themselves, I tell people. Heard Uncle Boot ask him what was the point and Piers said he didn't guarantee a point. Very Piers. Quite a bit going on, I gather.”

“Lots, and all beyond me. Piers's line is trying to get the brutes to evolve a bit of intelligence for themselves.”

“Take him a few million years, won't it? Did us.”

“He's not going that far. I only said ‘a bit'. He doesn't want to evolve the whole shoot—in fact he says we didn't either. We evolved bits too, to cope with different sorts of things, and then lumped them together. He says I'm not really one person having one lot of thoughts and feelings, like I think I am. Really I'm a sort of committee, different bits of me politicking and squabbling away and then coming out with a sort of agreed statement and then I say to myself ‘That's what I think' which makes me think there's a whole me thinking it. We've got to think like that or we'd go potty.”

Louise realised that Soppy had stopped listening in order to gobble with yet more concentrated ferocity.

“Are you having problems with Bertie?” she murmured.

“No.”

Soppy had answered automatically and was about to shovel another forkful in when she seemed to pull herself up. Her eyes flickered over Louise's shoulder. Louise had herself glanced into the pier-glass between the windows before she had asked the question. It was all automatic, not that you knew there were people in the room who were likely to pass the gossip directly on to the hacks, but less obvious lines of communication—Aunt Eloise Kent hinting to a crony, the crony tattling to her chiropodist—lay always waiting, like the tentacles of a sea anemone poised in their pool for scraps. Soppy popped the fork-load in but munched more slowly, apparently thinking how much to say.

“It's not Bertie”, she said. “I mean, yes it is, but not like that. Hasn't got a girl, far as I know, still expects a good bit of action in bed. Anyway, it isn't just him. He's different, I'm different, everything's different.”