Van Gogh's Room at Arles (25 page)

“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.