Van Gogh's Room at Arles (27 page)

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!