Skeleton-in-Waiting (9 page)

“How's life been treating you?” she asked Alex.

“Benevolently at the moment, ma'am. The only cloud in my sky is that I am having unexpected difficulties with dear Lady Surbiton. For reasons known only to herself she has taken all the Grand Duchess's papers with her to Hampton Court, and now appears to have hired a dragon to protect her hoard. A dragon fluent in Russian, what's more.”

“Mrs Walsh. Her upstairs neighbour. She's helping Aunt Bea sort Granny's papers.”

“She didn't vouchsafe even that much on the telephone. All she will say is that Lady Surbiton isn't yet ready to see me. If I have the good fortune to be answered by Lady Surbiton herself she hands me over at once to the dragon. I suppose I should be grateful that they are doing the tedious part of a literary executor's job for me, but I would prefer to undertake it myself. Do you think there is any danger of their deciding to destroy anything?”

“Oh, I hope not. I mean, I know Aunt Bea's worried about the sort of things Granny probably said about people, but … Tell you what—I'll ring the Palace tomorrow and get them to tell her not to.”

“And this Mrs Walsh is to be trusted, you think? In other ways?”

“We're trying to find out. She's got a hold on Aunt Bea because she looks a bit like Granny. The first time I met her I asked if she was a Romanov too.”

“Is she?”

“She said no, but she as good as told me her grandmother had been friendly with a Grand Duke Aleksei who had a bit of a reputation.”

“Aleksandrovich, presumably.”

“That's right.”

“Fast women and slow ships,” said Mr Brown, getting his oar in rather too firmly from Louise's other side. Alex gave him a blink of encouraging surprise.

“Mr Brown's doing research in that period,” said Louise.

“Later—some of the émigré pamphleteers,” said Mr Brown. “But I have to know the antecedents. The Grand Duke had a penchant for ballet-dancers, didn't he?”

“Oh, Mrs Walsh is grander than that,” said Louise. “Her family name's Belitzin.”

“Belitzin?” said Alex. “I don't know of any Belitzins. Very grand, you say? It wasn't, for instance, Belayev?”

“No, Belitzin. A lot of my job's getting names right.”

Alex looked across at Mr Brown, who shrugged ignorance.

“I know a bit about the Belayevs, of course,” he said. “There were four of them still raising hell in Paris in my period, challenging everyone to duels and so on. One of them ran an Absolutist sheet for a few months, and two of the others put on counter-agitprop melodramas—there was one with a climax in the Ekaterinburg cellar which caused a riot when a lot of leftists packed the audience and broke the theatre up.”

“Yes, I remember my mother talking about it,” said Alex.

“The Belayevs were always interested in the theatre—they'd a family tradition of maintaining their own troupe of actors—or rather they employed servants who could also act. They insisted on their learning English, too, so that they could perform Shakespeare in the original language. Were there any daughters in that generation? I don't think so—just seven wild boys. Of course it could have been another branch of the family, but really, if a Countess Belayev had had a liaison with the Grand Duke Aleksei and produced a genuine Romanov by-blow my mother would certainly have told me. She took a veritably scholarly interest in such ramifications.”

“She isn't a spitting image of Granny,” said Louise. “She just has that look.”

“And she is now living at Hampton Court in a grace and favour apartment?” said Alex.

Louise nodded. She was aware of having told him more about Mrs Walsh than she'd meant to. His charm made it hard not to assume that he was already on your side in any difficulty or dispute. She looked for a way of half-changing the subject.

“What's her Russian like?” she said. “Sorry, they'll go away in a minute—Tracy was making me laugh in the kitchen. I mean, I don't even know if Russian's like English used to be in that generation, so you could tell from the way people spoke whether they were what my Uncle Ted would call pukka.”

“Oh, absolutely pukka. Very grand, very old-fashioned … the thing is, ma'am, I need to get past this dragon, to pacify or conquer it somehow. I must get Lady Surbiton to understand that she has no right to keep the papers. She should never have had them in the first place. I've taken legal advice, and it would be possible to insist—to take Lady Surbiton to court, if necessary …”

He shrugged and smiled, waiting for Louise to finish holding her breath. With one part of her mind she went on counting, while with another she wondered whether the naturalness of the gesture held any kind of threat. Impossible, it had said. Think of the fuss, the hordes of hacks, the offers from magazines and publishers … You'd much better help me make Aunt Bea see reason.

“Whoo,” she said. “Let's hope that's done it. Have you been in touch with the Palace? Jane Gordon-Byng's the person to talk to, I should think.”

“I have an appointment to meet Mrs Gordon-Byng next week, at which I hope to make some progress. She has been entirely friendly and sympathetic on the telephone, only nothing seems to happen, and I'm beginning to think that is how the Palace would prefer things to remain. I am not prepared to accept that, and if they won't help me I will have to do what I can on my own. Our interests with regard to Mrs Walsh, at least, are the same. We both need to know a bit more about her.”

“You mustn't worry about the Palace. They're always like that. You have to push and push to get them to move at all. But honestly I don't really understand why you're so anxious about it. I mean, did Granny write anything serious, apart from that coffee-table book about harps—and I'd be surprised if that was all her own work, anything like?”

“That's why I need to look at the complete papers. I really must for my own sake get this job cleared up. In some of the letters she sent me she refers to memoirs she's writing, mostly about her childhood in Russia.”

“Do you think she'd have stuck to it?”

“How can I tell, until I've seen the papers? It may be publishable fragments. On the other hand it may be mere wishful thinking. Then there is the question of a biography. She certainly assumed there would be one and suggested possible authors. Any biographer would need the use of her papers, and my assent as literary executor. How could I give that without having seen them? Then there are the letters themselves, though in view of their contents I imagine there would be a certain resistance from the Palace to their publication in full …”

“Damn,” said Louise. “It hasn't worked. I'm going to have to try something else.”

Nothing in fact worked. The hiccups persisted all evening. After supper Louise managed to permute her guests around to her satisfaction. The party broke up soon after midnight.

3

“I've still got them.”

“So I notice. Pope Pius had them for three years, I seem to remember. What did Davy make of them?”

“Didn't approve at all. Couldn't make out whether it was him or me.”

“How did you get on with Alex?”

“Like a house on fire, one way. He's very easy to talk to. I was pretty well above board, apart from not telling him about Mrs Walsh's book. I told him the Palace would want to see what was in the letters, because Granny was bound to have libelled half the people she mentions. He says that she left instructions for him attached to her will. She wants everything published, and the profits to go to some kind of music charity. He feels he's got to try and get something off the ground. He was just thinking about a book—he didn't even mention the hacks.”

“I don't believe he can be that naïf.”

“Nor do I.”

“Anyway, any publisher would want to recoup by serialisation—in the
Sunday Telegraph,
most likely.”

“He says he's got his copies in a bank now. He went a bit out of his way to tell me.”

“That certainly doesn't sound naïf.”

“I'd love to see Sir Sam sneaking around in a mask and a striped jersey with a sack labelled ‘Swag'.”

“Do you really think they'd go that far?”

“Faking a burglary? I don't know. You just can't tell when Security get the bit between their teeth. That's why I'm going to see to it that if there's any negotiating to do with Aunt Bea it's either Mother or me who does it.”

“What about Mr Brown?”

“I liked him. I wish it was easier to meet his sort more often, without fuss. It was nice having a reason for him to be there, so he didn't just feel on parade. He agrees with me the book's a fake, lifted from other books. He's found the main one for the first part. He couldn't help much about the adventure. I'd asked him not to talk about the book in front of Alex, because I didn't think it was fair to give Alex that kind of hold, but it turned out he was much more interested in the exile period so he and Alex spent most of their time sorting that out.”

“I saw you'd swapped chairs.”

“I'm not used to being talked across.”

“Do you good.”

“They didn't actually, but I could see it would make life easier, and anyway I thought it was about time you paid a bit of attention to Tracy. You have Isabelle to yourself all day long.”

“A totally different Isabelle, whom I rather prefer, if you wish to know.”

“Come off it.”

“But I have to admit I find Tracy slightly heavy going.”

“Do you really? I think she's terrific. You know she and Adrian were childhood sweethearts? It was ages before she realised he wasn't going to carry on at his dad's greengrocery. She swears she only got acquainted with him in the first place because she liked bruised bananas. I wish she could have some children. You know, most of your colleagues' wives can't help behaving as if they were almost-dons themselves, but Tracy says the hell with it. When people sort of hint that actually I don't have much idea what ordinary people are like, I think about Tracy. She's the real thing.”

“Everybody is in one sense genuine and in another sense fake. We all have to invent our own persona as a carapace for our inner incoherence. What you call genuineness in Tracy's case simply means that her self-invention was largely unconscious, whereas in a case like Alex's, or even more in mine, it is much more deliberate and willed.”

“Mrs Walsh too.”

“You seem, if I may say so, to be a little Walsh-obsessed at the moment.”

“You haven't met her. She's really something. A natural force. I've come to the conclusion that what's happening there is that Mrs Walsh likes dominating Aunt Bea and Aunt Bea likes being dominated, but they can't just start in on a relationship like that as if they were the only people in the world. They've got to have an excuse, something to be dominant and dominated about. Granny's papers are perfect.

And of course Aunt Bea is paying Mrs Walsh to help her and Mrs Walsh hasn't got a bean, despite swanning around with a forty-carat diamond in her hat, so she's got a good straight ordinary motive for spinning the work out as long as she can by fighting us and Alex off. The question is, if she's that keen on the money, mightn't she realise what she could make by slipping the odd titbit to the hacks? If I had to bet on it I'd say no.”

“Not realise? Or not slip?”

“Both, I think. Especially if she's already pretty jumpy—I don't know what about, but she is. What do you think?”

“I would be inclined to risk it, though for different motives. You don't want to do anything that might bring Security in on the act. Alex, by the way, tells me that he's under the impression that he's been vetted in some way.”

“I suppose so.”

“You approve?”

“No. Yes. No. I don't know. It's just something people have to put up with if they're going to have us there at all. Like sending the sniffer dogs in to a kids' home before I go and visit them. If Alex is going to have direct dealings with us Sir Sam is bound to have told Security, and they're bound to have run an eye over him. It's what they're there for. I mean, suppose his girl-friend's a member of the Red Brigade … or boy-friend, I suppose … what d'you think?”

“Why don't you ask Security?”

“Darling, it can't be helped. It's one of the things you married.”

“Of course.”

“All right. Be like that … I've thought of a cure for hiccups.”

“Hm?”

“Hm?”

FEBRUARY 1988

1

“T
hat you?”

“…”

“Listen, you can forget about Alex Romanov—he's gone and put all his lot of letters in a bank. It shows they're important, though, doesn't it, him doing something like that?”

“…?”

“Lady Surbiton? There's two of them in it, matter of fact—the other's called Mrs Walsh, and there's something fishy about her—they don't know what. Anyway, the Princess has been over to see them again—she's handling it all herself—that's another thing, shows how they want to keep it all hushed up. So you see …”

2

It was sheer bad luck, the sort of thing that happens when you're down already, just one hack in the wrong place—not even a royal-watcher either.

Apparently he was snuffling round on the trail of a bullion-robber who was rumoured to be holed up in Argentina. He had heard vague talk of comings and goings at a little provincial airport and had gone along to question the ground staff. His entry was barred, without explanation, so naturally he assumed he was onto something. After a grumble or two he drove away out of sight, parked his car and made his way back on foot to the perimeter fence just in time to see the private jet come in. He had his telephoto camera ready and got a very good picture in the two or three seconds when Soppy had taken her sunglasses off to kiss the wife of the billionaire polo-crony to whom the jet belonged. Even at that distance, even wearing a wig, she was unmistakable.

Louise woke up to the news. The BBC of course were doing their best to play it down, tuck it away, treat it as only a rumour, waffle on about the Princess's private visit to Florida, but you could tell from the tone of voice that they knew it was true, and serious. They just didn't wish to be seen in the front row of vultures prodding their beaks into the kill.

“Oh, God!” she said.

“What's up?” said Piers.

He had an extraordinary ability not to hear information which didn't interest him, as though he could physically stuff his ears with rolled-up pellets of pure thought. Louise explained.

“It might even be my fault,” she said. “I did say something to Bertie about smuggling her out to Argentina in a false nose. Anyway, nobody's going to believe we didn't all know. Oh, God!”

“Aren't you over-reacting?”

“No. I'm worried stiff for Bert and Soppy. It's pretty well certain to come out that they've been having a rocky patch, and with Soppy being hounded night and day that can only get worse. There's a real chance she'll go round the bend. Then there's us. If the hacks decide Father didn't know what was up that'll make it worse for Soppy, splits in the family—can't you just see it? And if they think he did it'll be a constitutional crisis—it'll be one anyway.
And
he's got Mrs T. to cope with. She'll be raging.”

“Enraging her is a popular move.”

“Be serious, darling. You realise you're going to have to tell your switchboard to tell everyone you're in a meeting or something. And …”

The telephone rang.

“Lulu?”

“I've just heard the news.”

“You didn't know before?”

“I thought she was going to Florida. Poor Soppy.”

“Poor Soppy. You realise what a bloody awful potmess she's landed us in?”

“Yes, but … she's right at the end of her tether, Father. I talked to her about it at Granny's funeral. Even then … Did Bert know?”

“Not answering his private line. Not available on his switchboard. What do you mean, end of her tether?”

“Bert talked to me too. He was pretty bothered. I told Mother.”

“Oh yes, I remember. All marriages go through phases. Anyway, it's a totally inadequate excuse. By God, if Bert put her up to it …”

An answering scream of fury burst from the baby-alarm, as though it had suddenly been switched on with Davy already in full cry. Louise pressed the S button.

“Go and ask Janine to pick him up, darling,” she said and pressed the S again.

“Are you there, Lulu?”

“Sorry, your grandson had started to yell too. I've got the generations bawling at me from both sides. Hold it again …”

Janine was already at the door, before Piers had reached it. She had a purple-faced Davy in her arms.

“Not in here,” said Louise. “Try and keep him quiet for five mins. Sorry, Father. No, listen. Shut up and listen. You've got it wrong. This is a mess, like you say, and I wish to God it hadn't happened, but that's not the important thing about it. The most important thing is we've got to try and help Soppy. And Bert. It
isn't
just a phase they've been having. They're both desperately unhappy and Soppy's on the edge of some kind of breakdown. That's what really matters. So what you've got to do is get onto Bert somehow or other and instead of yelling at him like a mad major
ask
him—don't get Mother to do it, ask him yourself …”

“Ask him what, for God's sake?”

“What we can do to help. Nothing about whether he knew, or why she's bolted, or any of that. Do you understand?”

“She's right, Vick.”

“Bloody line's bugged.”

“Hello, Mother. Don't you think …”

“One moment, Lulu. Vick, I have Bert on my line. Will you talk to him?”

“Will I bloody not! I've got the PM coming at ten!”

“Now listen, Father …”

“All right, all right, I heard what you said. Call you later, Lulu.”

The telephone didn't go dead. Louise could hear Mother's cool lilt as she talked to Bert on the other line, the thump of a door, a pause, and then Father's voice, level, calm and conciliatory. As she put the handset down it struck her that she had never talked to him like that before. She had argued with him, often, and had had soul-wrenching rows during her struggle to be allowed to marry Piers, but she'd never before shut him up in the middle of one of his rages and then told him how
he
should do things.

“May I go and get dressed?” said Piers.

“I'll be down as soon as I've fed the brat. Will you be off before that?”

“I'm behind time already.”

“All right. Give us a kiss. Don't forget to tell the switchboard you're in meetings all day.”

“You really think … ?”

“Unless you want to spend your time telling pushy little hacks that you've no idea where Soppy is and no intention of visiting the Argentine yourself and to the best of your knowledge our own marriage is in reasonable nick. Oh, and try and remember to ring Joan later this morning in case anything new's come up. You won't be able to get hold of me—I'm dishing out colours to one of my regiments.”

“Wearing uniform?”

“For your sake, darling.”

“Excellent. Remember to ask for pictures.”

Piers left, rubbing his hands like a miser in a melodrama. Albert hadn't been joking—he did have a kink about women in uniform and kept a scrap-book of his wife and female in-laws on parade. Soppy was really his favourite. Louise grinned, then shook her head as she wondered whether Soppy would ever wear uniform again. Time, she felt, had done another irrevocable trundle. The rules had changed, the angles of illumination shifted. Oh, bring back yesterday …

In the Daimler Louise flipped through the newspapers. The original hack had been working for
Today,
so they had the story across four pages. The rest had botched something together for their later editions. SOPHIE GOES ARGIE yelped the
Sun.
The
Independent
and the
Telegraph
chuntered about the constitution. By now the hyena-pack would be at Heathrow, knocking back scotches as they waited for their flight—this time tomorrow they'd be in the Argentine. The local hacks would be on Soppy's trail already. Father would have asked Bert to get onto her and tell her to come home, or at least to go back to Florida. Bert would agree to try. Soppy would say no. A snapping point? Awful for Bert. He must have known, must have …

The telephone bipped. Carrie listened and passed it across. Joan.

“Don't tell me,” said Louise.

“It's not that bad, ma'am. I've had Commander Tank on. He's been getting a lot of calls about your schedule for today, so it looks as if you'll have to expect extra camera crews. He's getting on to the adjutant to see if he can lay on some Falkland veterans for you to be photographed talking to …”

“There isn't room on the time-table.”

“If you cut eight minutes off the crèche visit and get to the mess four minutes late and don't have photos at the crèche which means you go there in uniform and change after …”

“While I'm feeding the brat? This isn't music-hall. Oh, all right. How's the Commander taking things?”

“All guns blazing.”

“OK. Too late to mess around anyway, but give him a ring soon as you can and see that he understands I'm not going to have him casting me as good girl to make up for Soppy being bad girl. It'll only get her deeper in the shit.”

“I said that. I'll tell him again, from you.”

With an inward shrug Louise passed the handset back. Poor old Tank. He'd spent—how long?—fifteen years at least acting as a kind of heat-shield to the Family, absorbing as much as he could of the otherwise unendurable friction of public curiosity into himself and his office, liked and laughed at by both sides, bluff, decent, another loyal servant. Time he went, too?

There were extra camera crews all right, a score of high-paid technicians waiting in sleety drizzle to record the Daimler swinging through the toy-fort gates in case that was all they got. But for Soppy's escapade there might have been just one from the local station, provided nothing more enthralling was afoot in the area. Louise turned to Janine.

“You'd better pick him up,” she said. “It's all right—someone will have a brolly. Mr Dyce will bring the cot. Try to hold him so the cameras can see him, but not as if you were doing it on purpose, sort of half in the background. Lady Caroline will ask someone to give you a chance to ring your parents, so you can tell them to watch the one o'clock news—we're pretty certain to be on. If he yells, let him. They'll love that.”

He didn't. Louise wondered whether she mightn't have told Janine to pinch him and stimulate an outburst—remind everyone that they couldn't ask for fairy-story-prince behaviour all the time. The whole visit was tense with Soppy's unhintable doings. The regiment had lost men on the hills above Port Stanley. The drizzle, still spiced with sleet, densened through the parade. Normally Louise would have let someone hold a brolly over her, but today she refused. Despite what she'd told Joan to say to Commander Tank it now seemed to her important that she should show that she was prepared to endure in this trivial way what the marching men endured. Objectively it was quite ridiculous that by sitting on a horse in a fancy-dress female version of a nineteenth-century colonel's uniform which reeked of wet labrador as the rain soaked in while lines of similarly soaking and reeking men tramped past to the thump and hoot of a band and the heads clicked round to stare at you and you answered by crooking your arm and holding the flat of your hand towards them under the peak of your kepi, you should be signalling to them and to anyone else watching, “Forget about my sister-in-law who seems to you to have gadded off on a self-indulgent jaunt among the people who killed your friends, because the real nation expresses through me at this moment our understanding of what you feel about their deaths,” but that was what happened. It was not a pleasant experience, either physically or emotionally. Louise tried to cheer herself up by wondering whether Piers would get an additional or a diminished kick from seeing her uniform soaked through. She doubted whether dark green serge worked the same way that a wet swimsuit did.

Carrie, typically, had got someone to find a hairdresser among the watching wives. The adjutant had come up with a genuine Falklands widow instead of veterans; though obviously a cheerful woman by nature, and just about to re-marry, she wept painfully during the meeting. Louise was used to having this effect on people, but this particular interview was made more stressful by the knowledge that the moment it was over the hyaenas would pounce and devour every scrap the woman had to offer, so it was impossible to say any more to her than the usual hateful stock of royal banalities. The presence of the pack—their demands not allowed for in the original time-table—jammed the visit tight. What got cut out was any moment of rest or quiet or human contact. Feeding Davy had to be done while the hairdresser patted and combed, and he then had to be dumped straight over to Janine for the burping and cuddling and talking-to, which Louise enjoyed doing for herself.

“You must be whacked,” said Carrie as the Daimler slid away.

“I'm all right. Did you get a squint at the news?”

“Janine did.”

“You looked lovely, ma'am. It really didn't matter about the rain.”

“Did they say anything about the Princess of Wales?”

“Oh, yes, that came first, but it wasn't … I mean just old clips of people playing polo, and some snaps of these friends she's with. I'm sure she's having a nice time, ma'am.”

Louise smiled. Joan would have taped the news. Janine wouldn't know what to look or listen for.

She was in the bath when the telephone rang.

“Tell them I can't,” she called, and continued her game with Davy, cradling his head in the water with her hands and letting buoyancy take care of the rest of him while he threshed his limbs in galvanic uncoordinated jerks, adding his gurgles of delight to the splashes and blinking with amazement when the water chose to hit back at him. For Louise this was the best part of the day, the communication of eye and smile and voice, the touch of his slithering soft flesh on her flesh, things of simple and unarguable importance, natural and true, nothing like the social and moral complexities of life with clothes, let alone uniform, on.