King and Joker Read online

  Father’s last remark had caught Albert at about his fortieth chew at a carrot-slice, so he had to wait another twenty before he could protest.

  “Me!” he said at last, “It wasn’t me! Damned silly thing to do! Somebody might have put that dish down on a hot plate! And anyway I’ve more respect for toads than to play practical jokes with them.”

  “Then who was it?” said Mother, accentless and angry.

  Everybody made not-me shrugs and grunts.

  “What’s this?” said Louise, picking a torn scrap of paper off the table. “I think it must have been under the toad. I think I saw it fall off the dish when Bert picked it up.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Albert.

  The paper was blank. Louise turned it over. On the other side was a single scarlet cross, scrawled with a thick felt pen.

  “Oh, Lord,” said Sir Savile. “It’s another one.”

  “What do you mean?” said Albert.

  “We’ve had a couple of other practical jokes, while you and the Princess were still in Scotland, Sir. The joker left a red cross like that both times.”

  “What were the jokes?” asked Louise. “Were they funny?”

  “We won’t go into that now,” said Father with a sudden snap of temper. “D’you think this really matters, Sam? I mean, it’s a nuisance, but we’re used to this sort of thing. Only this joker has a bit more sense of humour than most.”

  “That’s what’s bothering me,” said Sir Savile. “OK, there’s always going to be the odd frustrated little tick who gets his own back with a silly practical joke. We’ve seen ’em, time and again. But I can remember old Toby, before I took over, warning me about the other sort. I can see him, clear as if it was today, sitting in the arm-chair in my office and puffing that horrible black pipe of his and saying ‘What you’ve got to watch out for, me boy, is a real joker. They’re the type that don’t let up.’ And he told me a long story about the trouble they had with a run of practical jokes right back in your great-grandfather’s time, before the First World War. Never caught the blighter. Turned out to be a junior equerry. Died in the trenches, and his lawyers sent old Toby a sealed envelope confessing everything. Point about his jokes was that they could be funny, in a rather vicious sort of way. For instance, Trooping the Colour once, he managed to scatter getting on for a thousand stink-bombs all over Horseguards Parade. He knew the drill, you see, and didn’t put ’em where anyone was going to walk till you got several companies of guardsmen tramping about. Never knew when they weren’t going to step on another one, you see. Ghastly stink, ladies fainting in the stands, guardsmen going bright green, horses shying like a circus—wish I’d seen it, though I expect if I had I’d have been too angry to laugh. Another time, visit of the French President, 1909, he managed to get itching powder on the harness for the Glass Coach. Horses bolted half way down the Mall with King Edward, Queen Alexandra, President and his missus all aboard. Half the stable staff got the sack, but our joker didn’t care. He’d seen the Glass Coach bucketing down the Mall at a hand-gallop, with the King and Queen sitting there stiff as pokers, looking as though that was the way they always received State Visitors. And another thing about that joker—he left his signature too. So if old Toby didn’t like it then, I don’t like it now.”

  For Louise there were several ghosts in the Palace—not the sort of hauntings that get into books, but memories so strong that the person remembered seemed almost solid enough to come stalking along one of those stretching corridors. For instance, Queen Mary, after whom the liner had been named, had died nine years before Louise was born, but there were still people in the Palace who could imitate her icy accent and super-regal stance with such accuracy that Louise seemed to know and fear her more than she knew some living people. Sir Toby Smythe was another such ghost, having come to the Palace to work for the Master of the Household in the reign of Edward VII, and in 1922 becoming Private Secretary to Louise’s great-grandfather, Victor I, and only retiring on Father’s twenty-first birthday at the age of seventy-six. Louise knew all about Sir Toby; and his pipe; and his annual hiking holiday in German lederhosen which had got him thrown into Norwich jail as a spy in 1917; and his gallant but vain swim for help from the yacht in which Louise’s grandfather, the Prince of Wales, had drowned in 1937; and the ins and outs of his campaign against the other great ghosts (including Queen Mary) to see that Father, when he became King a year later at the age of ten, knew something about the actual lives of his subjects; and the fire-watching on the Palace roof during the Luftwaffe raids; and all that. Louise didn’t much care for Sir Savile, mostly because he’d been on what she thought was the wrong side in the fight over whether she ought to go to a state school or to a dismally snob fee-paying establishment, but she knew that if he called up old Toby’s ghost to witness that something mattered, then it did. This was no time to bait Father, so she crossed out the word “Todes” she’d put at the top of her notes and wrote “Toads”, then listened carefully to everything that was said. Immediately after breakfast she planned to go up to the Nurseries and ask Durdy about Nonny and Father, and whether it was all right, but it would be useful to have something else interesting to talk about in case Durdy clammed up. The joker would be ideal for that.

  In fact not a great deal more was said about him, because the fuss with the toad had already taken up half Sir Savile’s twenty minutes. Nobody needed to look at a watch—Louise herself never wore one—because Mother had a clock in her head and at exactly the same instant each day she would fold her napkin into its ring and say “Huell, Nonny …”

  It was a signal for Father to rise. When the King stands, all stand. The formal day—the day not lived “among ourselves”—had begun.

  “I’m afraid we’re a bit behind schedule, Sir,” said Sir Savile. “I’m supposed to brief you about the Mali Ambassador—the FO are a bit jumpy there. I’ve made a tape of their briefing.”

  “Toshack’s a damned fusser,” said Father. “I wish the FO would move him to another desk. 1 read the despatches last night, but I suppose I’ll have to listen to the bloody tape on my bog. Thanks.”

  Father marched away. Sir Savile held the door for Mother and Nonny, saw that Louise and Albert weren’t ready to leave, gave that curious heavy nod of his which was the vestigial remains of a court bow, and went. Albert yawned with relief.

  “That makes you look like a sea anemone,” said Louise. “All tendrils sticky red.”

  He snarled at her like an ogre and picked up Father’s list of suggestions from the O and M firm.

  “He oughtn’t to leave this about,” he said. “We don’t want a lot of rumours floating around about who’s getting the push. Where’d we got to?”

  “Two oh five. Sealing-wax.”

  He flipped through sheets.

  “That’s the last of that section,” he said, “Ah, now we’re really getting down to brass tacks. ‘Section Four. Domestic Arrangements for Royal Family. Two oh six. Princess Louise to advertise her services as a baby-sitter’.”

  “Come off it. They wouldn’t put that first.”

  “Careful, Lulu. You mustn’t get a reputation for being brainy. The GBP doesn’t go for brains.”

  (This abbreviation for the Great British Public was clearly “over the line” but just as clearly ineradicable. Even Mother sometimes slipped into using it.)

  “Shut up,” said Louise. “I’m going to go and tell Durdy about the toad. Bert, can I do next term’s project on it?”

  “Course you can. I’ll give you a hand,” said Albert, still running his eye down the list of royal comforts the O and M men wanted to chop.

  “I suppose I couldn’t take him to school tomorrow. I’d love to see some of those photographers faint.”

  “Princess Louise and friend. Is this her first romance? Better not, Lulu … Hey I Look at this!”

  Startled by the tone of genuine shock Lou
ise craned to read the line he was pointing at. “312. The transfer of Miss Durdon to a suitable nursing-home would represent a saving of £1620 p.a. in medical and other expenses.”

  “Durdy!” whispered Louise.

  “They must be mad!” said Albert.

  Chapter 2

  Several years ago, in her horse-mad period, Louise had placed an imaginary double oxer and a water-jump across the Upper West Corridor which led to the Nurseries. The horse-madness was long cured, but still, if there was nobody about, she used to jump the obstacles. If anyone was watching she merely sailed over them in her mind’s eye with the stop-watch ticking away the seconds needed to beat Harvey Smith’s clear round. This morning she walked through them without even noticing.

  Training had enabled her to suppress her reaction to the discovery about Father and Nonny. Royalty have to learn to behave like that. If a Queen is busy smiling and shaking hands with the wives of Australian officers and somebody whispers in her ear that her small son has fallen out of a tree and broken his collar-bone, she carries on smiling and shaking and slots motherly worries into the back of her mind until she can bring them out and cope with them. (This had actually happened to Mother.) In the same way Louise had slotted the Nonny business away until she could go and ask Durdy about it. Now, as she approached that moment, she realised that although she didn’t think she was shocked, it was still a shock in a different way, a quite new kind of thing. So she couldn’t assume that Durdy would be able to make it all come all right, as she always had so far when Louise had been troubled. This was something that belonged right outside the Nurseries.

  In the old Night Nursery Kinunu was doing Durdy’s ironing. This was quite unnecessary, except that for a hundred years a nursery maid had always done the ironing after breakfast and it comforted Durdy to smell that faint prickle of scorching still.

  “Good morning, Kinunu,” said Louise.

  “Morning, mithmith,” said Kinunu, turning and giving a little curtsey which, like everything she did, seemed unconsciously to mock the same action as performed by other people. It was difficult not to think of Kinunu as Siamese, because her big-eyed, flat-featured face ended in a little pointy chin just like a cat’s. In fact she came from a small Malayan hill-tribe, and had been chosen by Durdy from a set of photographs after the last nurse had left in tears. She’d turned out to be able to speak almost no English, and Father said her nursing qualifications were pretty rum, but she was the only nurse Durdy had never quarrelled with and then bullied into resigning. She was very small, barely taller than Louise, and she was cat-like in another way too—you instinctively wanted to pick her up and put her on your lap and stroke her to make her purr.

  They still called the room the Night Nursery though nobody slept in it, and it was completely changed from the old days. It smelt of hospitals. A washing machine stood in one corner, and a small laboratory bench under the window, but the most intrusive newcomer was the monitor screen and set of dials on the table against the inner wall. With these, whoever was in the room could hear every sound in the Day Nursery, see every inch of the bed that now stood there, and check temperature, breathing, pulse and a dozen other details about the patient who lay in the bed. There was a similar screen and set of dials in the little side-room, once Durdy’s own, where Kinunu now slept.

  Because Kinunu’s English was so poor there was no real need to switch off the screen and speaker, but the Family had got into the habit with other nurses before Kinunu came, so Louise did it now. Then she gently opened the door into the old Day Nursery.

  Miss Ivy Durdon, MVO, lay as always motionless in her iron-framed hospital bed with its head against the wall opposite the fireplace. She lay as still as the dolls on their shelf, as still as the pudgy pastel children lifting up their hands to greet the squirrels and blue-fits in the framed Margaret Tarrant print of “All Creatures Great and Small”. Apart from the bed and the console of instruments beside it everything was exactly as it always had been since Louise could first remember it. Though no child was now likely to fall from the windows, the bottom halves of each sash were still barred with white-painted iron outside the glass. The gas fire burped and whimpered behind the brass-railed mesh fireguard. The cuckoo clock tocked its wooden note. Its enemy, the Mickey Mouse alarm clock, stood on the mantelpiece with its arms at five past eleven, in a gesture of permanent surrender, never changing unless the nursery needed to be woken early for something like a Coronation or a Balmoral journey—never used now at all, in fact. The cardboard parrot nodded in the light draught between the windows.

  Louise tiptoed across and kissed the blue-veined alabaster forehead. Brown eyes opened and lilac lips smiled.

  “Good morning, Your Highness,” said the squeaky old voice. “Someone’s up early. Has someone done her business this morning like a good girl should?”

  “Do you still ask Father that, Durdy?”

  The lips tightened to keep a secret. Louise climbed on to the rocking-­horse and nudged it into motion. It was a proper rocking-horse with long curved rockers, and as you swayed it to and fro it gradually worked itself across the ancient, mottled green carpet. The Union had once tried to have it screwed to the floor after a stupid maid had rocked it to sweep under one end and then let it rock back on to her fingers; they’d said it was a potentially dangerous piece of industrial equipment. Durdy had stopped any of that nonsense, of course.

  Louise wasn’t sure where to begin—now she was here she saw that she couldn’t talk about item 312 on the O and M list—it’d only worry Durdy and Father would never let it happen. There was the toad joke, but if she started on that Durdy might get tired before they ever got round to Nonny.

  “How old am I, Durdy?” she said.

  “Thirteen and a quarter, darling.”

  “Am I old enough to be told things?”

  “What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.”

  “That’s nonsense, Durdy. You can grieve a lot more over not seeing things.”

  “Some people are so sharp they’ll cut themselves.”

  “Not me. Bert’s the clever one. Is there always a stupid one and a clever one?”

  You got side-tracked into questions like that with Durdy. Now she lay with closed eyes, remembering. Louise noticed a hank of gold wool on the rim of the darning-basket and deduced that Mother had started a new stool-cover yesterday evening.

  “Your great-grandfather,” squeaked Durdy suddenly. “When he was just Prince Eddy they all said he was a fool, but when he became King Victor he was good enough to beat His Imperial Majesty of Germany, and everybody used to say he was a very clever young man. They’re the sort that trip over their own feet.”

  Durdy viewed the history of her own times as a series of clashes between crowned heads. She herself had changed the nappies on the very bottoms that later sat on most of the thrones. For her the chief horror of the Second World War had been that the enemy hadn’t got a proper ruler, and so it had seemed to her a vague and shapeless evil, something (Louise thought) like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Father said that the war had only really come alive for Durdy with the entry of the Japanese Royal Family on the other side.

  Louise saw a way back to the Nonny problem. “Queen Mary must have helped a lot,” she said. “She cured Great-grandfather of his bad habits, didn’t she?”

  “Little pitchers have big ears.”

  “It must be very difficult for Kings. Poor Father. Does that sort of thing run in families?”

  Durdy could move some of the muscles in her face but not others. Her smile was still all right, but when she was displeased the down-turn at the corners of her mouth gave her the look of an ivory devil-mask.

  “Please, Durdy.”

  “Who’s been telling tales?”

  “Nobody. I just guessed.”

  “There’s nine wrong guesses go to make a right one.”

 
“I guessed at breakfast this morning. It wasn’t really a guess. Mother was getting angry and Father hadn’t noticed and Nonny coughed and I knew.”

  The devil-mask vanished.

  “High time too,” squeaked Durdy. “I was begging His Majesty to tell you only last week—no, I’m a liar, this very Monday it must have been—but there’s none so deaf as won’t listen.”

  “Father’s not very good at listening. Poor old man, he has to listen so much to people in his job, I expect it’s a relief to him not to listen to the Family. It’s not really a bad habit, is it? Oh dear—I don’t mean I think Nonny’s a bad habit either.”

  Durdy said nothing. Eighty years of rearing children had made her an expert in waiting to see which way the cat would jump.

  “It all depends what Mother thinks, doesn’t it?” said Louise.

  Still no answer. You learn not to discuss the feelings of your employers in front of their children.

  “When did it begin, Durdy? Nonny I mean? Was there anyone before her? All the Kings in the history books chop and change like anything, don’t they?”