King and Joker Read online

  Durdy’s sniff was not loud, no longer the potent warning it had once been. Just as baby pheasants know that they must cower at their mother’s brief chuckle when a hawk-shape floats above, so generations of small princes had learnt to bite short what they were saying at the sound of Durdy’s sniff.

  “I’m sorry, Durdy. I didn’t mean …”

  “Tittle-tattle.”

  “No! I mean it is interesting and I am inquisitive, but that doesn’t matter. You see, now I know it changes the way I feel. I’m very fond of Nonny … in fact I suppose I love her … I’d never thought about it … that’s what matters, isn’t it? I’ve got to know how to feel.”

  “There, there, darling. I didn’t mean it. I knew you weren’t that kind. I’ll tell you that His Majesty and Miss Fellowes were very great friends when Her Majesty was still in that convent of hers.”

  “But did Mother know when she married Father? All right, you needn’t tell me, Durdy—I bet she did. And she had to become a Protestant!”

  Durdy, a bigoted anti-papist, smiled with great satisfaction. “And all she got in exchange was being allowed to open a lot of jam factories and bridges! I think it’s a scandal! I’m not going to stand for any of that! I’m going to start a Princesses’ Lib movement—I’ll write to all the cousins and order them to join. We’re going to marry for love, yum yum. You can be patron, Durdy.”

  Sometimes Durdy’s head twitched on the enormous pillow. This meant, Father said, that her will to move had been so strong that the paralysed muscles had actually responded a little to the signal from the brain. For a moment Louise thought that she’d been trying to laugh at the joke—she used to have a lovely squeaky cackle—but then the tiny indrawing of the withered lips showed that the joke had gone too far.

  “Fair’s fair, Your Highness. May I trouble you to change the subject?”

  Louise gave an irritable extra impetus to the rocking-horse which made its rockers growl on the floor for the next few swings. When Durdy said “Fair’s fair” it meant that the argument was now settled and that none of the squabbling children should dare complain. And when she used the ancient protocol whereby only those of royal blood, however young, could change the subject, then the subject got changed. Louise had heard her do it to Father.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “I’ll tell you about the toad. Somebody snitched Father’s ham this morning, and when he went to carve his slices there was this gigantic toad under the dish-cover.”

  “Disgusting!”

  “Oh, Father didn’t mind at first. He thought Bert had put it there. In fact he put the cover back and called Pilfer in and complained about the ham being off and Pilfer lifted the cover and fainted, but not too badly, Father said. Then Sir Sam turned up and found out that none of us had done it and started to take things very seriously, and told us about a joker who’d caused a lot of trouble in old Toby’s time …”

  “I remember that. Yes indeed. There was a darkie ambassador coming to present his credentials—we didn’t have so many of them in those days—and somebody hired a lot of other darkies to dress up and come along and pretend to be the one. The real darkie got turned away. I believe it caused an Incident.”

  “Wow! This one’s stuck inside the Family so far. He leaves a red cross. The toad was the third joke but Father wouldn’t tell us what the other two were—I bet you know, Durdy—won’t you tell me? Please.”

  Sniff. Ah well.

  “It’s funny that they should take it so seriously,” said Louise. “I mean, Bert’s always playing practical jokes—in fact it runs in the family, doesn’t it? Poor grandfather was a great practical joker, and so was King Edward, wasn’t he? Did he ever play a practical joke on you, Durdy?”

  “Not on me, darling. But I remember one Christmas at Abergeldie—I don’t know what we were doing there at Christmas, it was usually Sandringham—when he was still only Prince of Wales. He came to visit his grandchildren in the nursery one evening; it was bath-time and we had a very pretty little Scots under-nursemaid we’d just taken on. I was nursemaid and Bignall was Nurse. His Royal Highness had some ice in his drink and he slipped a piece down the back of this girl’s uniform. The poor child giggled and squealed and blushed like a beetroot. Bignall did not take it in good part.”

  “It sounds a pretty feeble sort of joke to me. What became of the girl? Did she get sacked for giggling?”

  “Those that ask no questions will be told no lies.”

  Oho. So something had happened, and not that sort of something. Great-great-grandfather—Edward VII—was in the history books, and on TV even, with all his sex life public property. The royal past was covered by a fog like the exhaust from a juggernaut lorry, a trail of mystery­ swirling along behind, only gradually settling. Great-great-grandfather’s ruttish habits were now mostly plain to see. Great-grandfather was still half covered by the discreet cloud. As Prince Eddy he’d been dissipated—you were allowed to know that, but still not exactly what his dissipations had consisted of. But then he’d almost died, and then he’d married Great-granny, and one shock or the other had sobered him up and in the end they’d become King Victor I and Queen Mary, loved and respected through the fog. Poor Grandfather …

  “Why do we always talk about my poor Grandfather, Durdy? Was it just because he got drowned before he could become King, or was it because he had Queen Mary for a mother and Granny for a wife?”

  “Her Royal Highness is in a very nosey-parker mood this morning.”

  “Oh, Durdy, you’re impossible. I bet he was dissipated too.”

  Sniff.

  “I’m serious,” said Louise. “I mean I’m not serious about Grand­father being dissipated, supposing he was. I don’t see how it matters now. But I am serious about Father and Mother and Nonny. I think they’ve done very well by Bert and me. We’ve very lucky with them, managing so tidily, and keeping us all happy. I mean really happy. What I hate is mess.”

  For a moment Louise thought that Durdy was going to do another of her sniffs, but instead she opened her eyes and said, “There’s someone in the Night Nursery.”

  Louise couldn’t hear anything, but Durdy bad always had hearing of extraordinary sharpness. Every rebel mutter she had picked up. If she’d been Pope at the time (Albert once said) she’d have heard Galileo’s exact words. I beg your pardon, Mr G, but exactly what still moves? Come on, spit it out. I’ll have no secrets in my Curia, if you please. And if anything the paralysis of her body had made her senses sharper still.

  Now Louise caught the light pinging buzz from beyond the door, which meant that Durdy had pressed the two outer fingers of her left hand, the only two parts of her once busy body that she could still control, down on the buzzer that lay beneath the bedclothes. After a few seconds the door opened and Kinunu came prancing in, smiling as if she’d been enjoying the most marvellous illicit joke She did her mocking curtsey to Louise and came on round the bed, where she contrived both to smile and frown at the dials of the apparatus that stood where the bedside-table should have been. Louise never looked at this, never even noticed it, managed to cut it out of her consciousness because, like the monitor camera, it was an intruder on the ancient order of the Nursery. It was there to keep Durdy alive, to monitor her breathing and pulse, to adjust the temperature of the bed, and twenty other things which Louise didn’t understand. Father had pinned up a chart above it, showing where all the needles ought to be. Kinunu peered to and fro between the chart and the machines. At last she turned to the bed.

  “All OK mithmith,” she said.

  “I daresay,” said Durdy sharply. “And who’s your friend, Miss?”

  “Pleathe?”

  “I heard a man’s voice in the Night Nursery, Miss.”

  Kinunu hesitated but didn’t seem at all to mind the bullying bite of Durdy’s tone. If anything it only increased her look of wicked innocence.

  “Come in here
, whoever you are,” called Durdy.

  A shoe squeaked. The door moved as though the wood itself were shy. McGivan came creeping in.

  McGivan. Albert’s account of how he had been found went like this: Father had been opening a new police station at Inverness, and that had involved the inspection of a guard of honour of police constables. Father (Albert said) had been in the uniform of a Colonel of the Black Watch, kilt and all. There he had been, His Britannic Majesty, Fid Def etcetera, pacing blue-kneed through Invernessshire drizzle, pawing at every fifth dummy to utter a gracious remark. One (asthma, poor sod) two (whisky) three (can that moon face be the start of Addison’s Disease? Remember to tell his Chief to have him checked) four (mild astigmatism) five—“Well, officer, and bow long have you been in the Force?” “Twelve year, fower months, Sirr.” “You look very well on it.” “Thank you, Sirr—.” One (pity his mother didn’t have those jug-ears operated on) two (nothing much visibly wrong there) three (whisky) four (coronary in a few years) five—“Well, officer … hello, haven’t we met before?” “They made me shave the moustache, Sirr.” “Shouldn’t happen to a dog! But where have I seen you?” “In your wee looking-glass the morrn, verra like.” “Good God! Chief Superintendent, were you aware that this officer bears a strong likeness to me?” “Yes, Your Majesty. We felt it was a choice between his removing his moustache or not taking part in the parade. It was his decision which.” “Ahem! Uh! Ahem!” (That was Albert’s version of how Father swallowed his fury at this interference with the personal liberty of one of his subjects.) “Yes, of course, Chief Superintendent. Difficult situation for you. Still … What’s your name, officer?” “McGivan, Sirr.” “Well, McGivan, I would be very pleased if you would grow your moustache just as it was. Otherwise I’d have to shave mine off and that’d be an expensive business because they’d have to change all the stamps, you know.”

  This was one of Albert’s party pieces. Despite his own jungly hair he managed to do both Father and McGivan so well that it made even Mother laugh. Louise could see, instant to her mind’s eye, how McGivan’s brow wrinkled like a spaniel’s at the notion of it being his fault that the stamps of the United Kingdom had all to be changed. She could also sense how the Chief Superintendent (Albert made him lanky but pompous) fretted at the knowledge of Father’s anger and his own lack of grasp of its cause, and his eager promise to check out the suspect coronary and Addison’s disease. And then Father pulling at his own moustache to hide his smile at the thought of the fun he could have with a double.

  “What on earth do you want him for?” Nonny had asked.

  “Oh, all sorts of things,” Father had said. “He’ll be both useful and amusing. Anything where he doesn’t have to say much. He could swear in Privy Councillors like nobody’s business, for instance, or …”

  “Vick. No,” Mother had said.

  “But don’t you see how much spare time it would give me? I could …”

  “All right—perhaps not Privy Councillors, but there’s all sorts of other idiot appearances I have to make …”

  So in a way it was a good thing that Father’s scheme hadn’t worked. McGivan was amusing, but not useful. It was astonishing that two men so alike—with the same high colour, the pale pop eyes, the shiny dome amid the sparse relics of gingery hair, the little drooping moustache, the arms too short even for the pudgy body—it was astonishing that despite all that they should look so different. Albert said it was like chimpanzees—you laugh at their parody of human behaviour because they’re so inhuman. If they looked more like us, they’d seem less funny. So McGivan was a joke because, despite being the spit image of the King of England, every movement he made—every blink, every frown of worry, every anxious smile, every shuffle of his tiny feet—was totally unroyal. That had been obvious the moment Father had first led him in, dressed in identical suits (Father’s clothes never fitted, but with him the shabbiness was somehow arrogant; with McGivan it was mingy) and stood with him in Tweedledum and Tweedledee pose in the drawing-­room. He’d been desperately shy, very snuffly and Scottish, poor man. After a couple of drinks he’d made a surprisingly passable shot at doing Father’s voice. But when he’d at last been eased out of the room Mother had shaken her head.

  “Nobody huould mistake him for you, but nobody,” she’d said. “He is not a King, Vick. You are, in spite of everything. Even Mr Huillie Hamilton huould know the difference.”

  “Nonsense, darling. What do you think, Nonny?” Nonny had put on the innocent-little-child look she used when she was about to make one of her rather creepy jokes.

  “He might do for your lying-in-state, I suppose.”

  So here was McGivan, amusing but not useful, creeping round the Nursery door, smiling and frowning and trying not to rub his hands together like a comic grocer. These days he wore his moustache waxed into neat points and spoke with an accent broader than he’d ever used in Scotland. It was as though, feeling he’d been a failure in looking like the King, he’d now determined to look and sound as different as possible.

  “Come in, Mr McGivan,” squeaked Durdy. “And how are the ankles?”

  “Verra much improvit,” said McGivan. “It’s the liniment His Majesty prescribit, ye ken.”

  “Still there’s nothing like Pommade Divine, I always say,” said Durdy. “And what can we do for you, Mr McGivan?”

  McGivan hesitated.

  “Och,” he said, “Awed. I was after askin’ Her Royal Highness a few questions aboot yon eencident wi’ the toad at breakfast. I am instructit to investigate, ye ken.”

  Nice for McGivan to have something to do, thought Louise. Officially he was one of the security police at the Palace, but there wasn’t much in that line anybody felt like trusting him with. In one early episode he’d been sent on some outing as Albert’s bodyguard, had got lost and then had made such frantic efforts to rejoin his Royal charge that the local police had arrested him. Albert had had to bail him out.

  “Fire ahead,” said Louise. “I don’t think I noticed anything special until Father lifted the lid.”

  “The whole Family was no verra obsairvant the morn,” said McGivan­. “Noo, Your Highness, when ye cam into the breakfast-room, who was there, besides yourself?”

  “Oh, I was first down. I usually am. Mr Pilfer had only just rung the gong. I suppose that makes me chief suspect, because I’m pretty sure nobody went fiddling around with the ham-dish after I came in.”

  “Och, you and Prince Albert are already eleeminated. Baith o’ ye were in Scotland when Her Majesty had the misunderstanding with the advertising agency, and also when the eencident occurred in His Majesty’s toilet.”

  “In Father’s loo! Honestly? What incident, for God’s sake?”

  (Albert said it was really Durdy’s fault that Father’s time on the loo each morning had become part of the Palace ritual almost as sacrosanct as, say, the Changing of the Guard. No wonder everybody had been so stuffy about the nature of the earlier jokes.)

  McGivan coughed and looked away. Durdy sniffed.

  “Oh, all right!” said Louise. “What else can I tell you?”

  Painstakingly McGivan took her through all the details of the toad-finding and Pilfer’s faint, seeming most interested in things that couldn’t possibly be any help. Her impatience must have showed.

  “Ye ken I must ask questions of the serrvants,” he said. “And I canna do that unless I can tell them I have questioned the Family equally severely.”

  “Yes, but surely you want to start with who knew about the toad? I think Prince Albert said it only arrived yesterday.”

  “Correct,” said McGivan. “I checkit the box mysel’. It could have been a bomb, ye ken?”

  “But who else knew? That’s the point.”

  “Aweel, Sergeant Theale crackit a wee bit joke aboot it. Was Constable Sanderson there? I dinna mind. And there’d be the messenger who took it to the Prince.
Aweel. Aye, yon’s a guid suggestion, Your Highness. Verra guid for a lassie. I’ll investigate on those lines. Aye.”

  With another monstrous snuffle he crept away. Kinunu giggled as he left, but Durdy sighed.

  Are you tired, darling?” asked Louise. “Shall I go?”

  “Not tired, only old,” whispered Durdy.

  “How old? Don’t tell me. As old as your tongue and a little older than your teeth. Right?”

  Durdy smiled peacefully and closed her eyes. Louise bent to kiss her forehead, nodded to Kinunu and tiptoed away. Walking back down the corridor she took the oxer and the water-jump each with an absent-minded bound. Visiting Durdy always made things seem all right—Nonny and Father, for instance: in half an hour that had stopped being a strange new portent and become something that Louise had known and accepted all her life, without knowing that she did so. In fact as she went down the stairs she was thinking neither about that, nor about the clearly impossible suggestion that Durdy should be moved to a nursing-home, but about the joker. An incident in Father’s loo! Wow! It was funny but it was also a bit uncanny. In some ways Father was a very secretive person, so not many people in the Palace would be aware of how much his morning ritual mattered to him. That meant that either the joker had been dead lucky in his choice of target, or he was one of those who knew—somebody “among ourselves”.

  Chapter 3

  “How old? Don’t tell me. As old as your tongue and a little older than your teeth. Right?”

  Miss Durdon felt her face smile, felt the brush of lips on her forehead, listened to the loved footsteps tiptoeing away, heard Kinunu’s giggle and shut it out of her mind. My last baby, she thought. My very last. The thought drifted her away, back and back.

  A sunlit terrace. Great lumpish hills, brown and mauve with heather. A dark pine plantation. Heavy grey stone walls below fanciful turrets. Over all this the sunlight, northern and pale. On the lawn between the castle and the pines at least twenty lolling dogs, and on the terrace a tea-time ritual, with wicker chairs, cake-stands, four tall ladies all in black, two kilted servants holding silver trays, a funny little Indian in a turban pouring out tea. The ritual centres on a stout little grey-faced lady whose solid outline is made vague by billows of black lace. She has an Aberdeen terrier on her lap. Her face, sulky in repose, smiles with sudden eager sweetness as into the picture walk three small girls in white, wearing wide white hats. Durdon sees them from behind. The smallest girl, Princess Rosie, gives a couple of skips of happiness but Princess Louise hisses her back to propriety. They curtsey to the old lady whose pudgy little hands make a patting motion against her legs, causing the girls to settle like white doves around her knees. The Indian gentleman hands her a plate and the old lady takes a knife and cuts a rock bun into equal sections which she gives to the girls as though she were feeding three of her dogs. Durdon watches all this with anxiety—that Munshi, she thinks, how can you tell if his hands are clean? The old lady smiles along the terrace and speaks to one of the other ladies, who beckons. Durdon checks that the baby in her arms has not started an unprincely dribble and walks forward, less nervous than she’d expected. The old lady scuffs the terrier off her lap and holds out her arms for the baby. As Durdon rises from her curtsey and passes the royal bundle across their hands touch. The Queen looks straight into her eyes.