Clint stood with his arms akimbo in the anarchical locker-room of Back Numbers. Over nine hundred Larks lay slumped in drunken stacks, in leaning heaps; and Clint’s arms were charcoal to the elbow by the time he had assembled the thirty issues of the relevant June.
Like all the other yellow-mast tabloids, the Morning Lark ran a Casebook feature opposite its problem page. Its problem page did not resemble the other problem pages, with their typical integration of the commonplace (Our Loving Is Over Too Quickly) and the phenomenal (I Came Home To Find My Husband In Bed With My Dad: all this). The Lark‘s problem page dealt not in problems but in outlandish gratifications; it was in-house pornography, much of it written by Clint Smoker. On the other hand, the Lark‘s Casebook veered close to mainstream: in a dozen photographs with added bubbles for speech and thought, it dramatised the confusions of personable young people who tended to be dressed in their underwear.
Needing delay, needing equipoise, Clint dug out his mobile and called Ainsley Car.
‘Right,’ said the troubled striker, after a prompt. ‘I do Donna, then I have Beryl.’
‘Other way round, mate.’
‘I have Beryl, then I do Donna.’
‘Jesus. You have Donna, then you do Beryl … Doesn’t have to be Donna, mind.’
‘What about that “Amfea” …’
Clint remembered ‘Anthea’. Cheesy little blonde who was, none the less, sixteen. Very popular: posing with her mum in matching thongs.
‘Nah mate. “Anthea” fell pregnant and jacked it in. Her mum’s a gran at thirty-two.’
‘Okay then. Donna’ll do. I’ll do Donna.’
‘Have Donna,’ corrected Clint.
Ah, yes—this was it: Brett, Ferdinand and Sue. And for a moment Clint turned away … When you entered an escort agency for the first time and were received by the madamic coordinatrix: she gave you the ‘brochure’ and left you alone with it – and that was power. In that plump album each smile, each cleavage, each towering beehive represented different futures which, nevertheless, and on varying pay-scales, all promised the same outcome. Now, in contemplating Kate, Clint would be taking up a humbler post. It was more like a youthful blind date, when you peeked round the corner, then moved forward or walked away … Clint peeked, squinting. His eyes jolted down on her. Then with deliberate force he smacked his head back against the wall, groaned, laughed, sighed. No glamour queen or ballroom dancer, but prettily unassertive, and of the crowd, like a poster of a missing person. And could he see it? Could he see it? Yeah, mate, he could see it. Him and her, and hand in hand: ‘Hey, I’d like you to meet a very special friend of mine. Ladies, guys. Say hi to …’
Clint went back to his workstation, where he deployed angle-lamp and magnifying glass. It was an exceptionally compelling Casebook in its own right: a triangular predicament, as so often, but one with universal reach. In its opening frames you saw Sue at home with live-in lover Brett. Sue scrubbing the kitchen lino in tears, tanktopped Brett standing over her with his fists clenched; Brett watching the football with a pair of Union Jack underpants over his head, while Sue does the ironing; then Brett, clutching cue and dufflebag, telling Sue he’s off on a road trip playing pool for his pub. Enter Ferdinand. You looked at Ferdinand and you thought – you know: Shelley. Poet and dreamer, with his flyaway hair, his flowers and his flattery: your eyes are like stars … Sue had her clothes off twice. In the first shot she is being taken from behind by a Brett showing all his teeth – but her body was almost entirely eclipsed by the thought-bubble, ‘Gaw, I wish Brett had ever heard of foreplay.’ In the second, she lay on her back with her legs apart, but her modesty was preserved by Ferdinand’s streaming locks, together with another bubble, saying: ‘Mmm. Brett reckons only gays do this, but I think it’s lovely.’ The final frame showed Sue sitting alone on the blondwood bed, with elbow on knee and palm on cheek, eyes raised ceilingward: ‘I know Brett has his faults, but Ferdinand seems too good to be true. How can I choose between them?’
Low self-image, that is, thought Clint. As an afterthought he skimmed the ‘Words of Wisdom’ with which every Casebook drew to a close. Sue was advised, by Donna Strange, to forget about Ferdinand and stick with Brett.
Plaintive little smile on its face. Of course, she was only acting. But with that roundness of eye, that philosophical underlip: you couldn’t imagine her giving you grief, undermining you, belittling you … Don’t fret: you’re up to snuff, my darling. You’re all right. Yeah, you’ll do.
3. Cold Blow Lane
‘We’ll need the army for this one, sir.’
‘The army? Don’t talk rot, Bugger.’
‘Just a light, calming presence, sir. It’s a most … thankless situation. Forgive the gloom, sir, but I can’t even imagine a positive outcome.’
‘Nor can I. But don’t ask me to reconsider. I can’t refuse Loulou anything – as she well knows. That’s the whole trouble. She’s my cousin, after all, and she didn’t get into this fix on purpose. We’ll just have to get on with it.’
‘Sir. I don’t suppose now would be a good moment to discuss the ramifications of the Sino-Russian entente?’
‘Ramification number one being that I shall have to give up He Zizhen, I suppose. And if the pair of them fall out, do you think I’ll get her beck?’
‘Just to remind Your Majesty that nothing affects the people’s mood so much as the cost of filling their cars.’
‘I’m well aware of that, thank you, Bugger. Ah.’
Love entered. The impressive wingspan of his ears was picked out by the low sun that lurked behind him. He gave an arthritic bow and said,
‘If you’re ready, sir?’
‘Coming, Love: I’ll follow. What is it today, Bugger? Brucellosis. No. Q-fever.’
‘Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, sir.’
‘Ouch. And what’s that when it’s at home?’
‘Viral inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, sir.’
Henry IX rose and looked about himself. ‘Not much of a boudoir, is it? Now Bugger: you won’t get an attack of thrift, I hope. Have Blaise or Henri come and have a quick recce, and then spend money doing what they say. And get some decent furniture from the French Suite.’ He looked round the room through the fine drizzle of his dislike for it. ‘This place was good enough for my grandfather. But it’s not good enough for me. And Bugger.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I hesitate to tell you this because it’ll make you watch the pennies … I’ll only be using this place once. Do you take my meaning, Bugger?’
‘Very wise, sir.’
‘It would be a catastrophe.’
‘An absolute catastrophe.’
‘But I won’t be a swine and not say goodbye to her properly. Yes, properly, Bugger. That means I’ll make the position clear the moment she walks through the door. If she spends only ten seconds in this room that’s all the more reason to make it nice … Not many men have to subordinate their hearts to the price of petrol. I am one of them. And frankly it’s a bit much.’
‘I should look upon it, sir, as one of your many sacrifices.’
‘He will give no trouble. She will give no trouble.’
And the King’s private secretary agreed, on the whole. Brendan had of course run a check on He, months ago: daughter of the long-serving Chinese Ambassador in Paris; mistress for nine years to a Scandinavian head of state; probably in need of a nestegg. And she would get a nestegg, Brendan knew.
‘Sorry to lumber you with all this, Bugger. It’s not your job, but do make it comfy.’
Brendan was left alone, in the neglected gazebo. It wasn’t his job – but what was his job? Scandal-management, scandal-control. Scandals were like periodic tidal waves of varying height and mass. This business with Loulou – Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde: the wave did not tower or hover, but its innards might churn with surprising guile. Just now, the exposure of the King’s affair with He Zizhen would hide the sun – and would not stop, would not stop till
it had rolled through villages. And as for the wave that could be gathering for the Princess: it was the work of a thousand Krakatoas …
Leaning back on the striped sofa, Brendan was now warmed by a feeling of luxury quite unconnected to his immediate surroundings: John II’s chintzy – and of course chilly – lovenest reminded him of the Royal Train before Henry belaboured it with his millions. The warmth of ease had been drawn out of him by the silence – as he realised when a truck-sized lawnmower blew past like a whale before fading into the silence of distance. And that silence, emphasised by weakly festive birdsong, had allowed him to listen to his own heart and take warmth from it.
When Victoria was four she went to bed without saying goodnight, and Brendan had felt it – all the blood within him. When Victoria was fourteen … It was on the last leg of her California tour; diversion was at an end, and what awaited her now was boredom, royal boredom – boredom cloudless and entire. Halfway through the final afternoon it became clear to him that the Princess was no longer there, that she had sent out an emissary, a simulacrum, a lifesize photograph, leaving her soul to curl up in the dark somewhere while she smiled at strangers, smiled at strangers – as if being fourteen wasn’t work enough, he had thought … Later, with an apologetic inclination of the head, Brendan asked her to choose between this or that logistical punctilio as she approached the next unveiling or investiture: who should nod, who should bow. The Princess let her tongue slide out of the corner of her mouth and raised her hands towards him with the thumbs and forefingers in the shape of two V’s. ‘W’: ‘Whatever’. And he had felt it again, all of it, all the blood within him. Girls of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, they sometimes wear a look of panic: the eyes are trapped in the changing face. Where am I heading? From childhood the presence of the Princess had always contained agitation, a tremor of electricity; but there was no dismay in it. For the time being she looked like a thrillingly ardent woodland creature in an animated cartoon. Still, there wasn’t any doubt about the destination, which was womanhood.
He wanted to protect her, but for now he was passive, he was helpless. Well, one royal scandal at a time, he thought. Brendan felt like going for a twenty-mile hike. Instead, he took his laptop from his briefcase and started learning all he could about the prison riot in Cold Blow Lane.
Early that month the Duchess of Ormonde had swept south across the Thames to Millwall, there to cut the ribbon on a new shopping mall and fitness centre in the famously and stubbornly depressed manor of the Isle of Dogs. After the ceremony a peoplecarrier full of the Duchess’s security men mounted the pavement at speed, accidentally ramming the moped of a certain Jimmy O’Nione who, at that point, had half a second to live. The Isle of Dogs was the Isle of Dogs, and so the crisis merely intensified when O’Nione stood revealed as a career criminal (much incarcerated, with a mesmerising record), who moreover, on that day (judging by the disposition of loot and tool in his saddlebag), was clearly on his way from one crime to another. Two days after the shopping mall and the fitness centre had been plundered and torched, the Duchess’s office announced its intention to install a marble plaque in Cold Blow Lane, to honour O’Nione, which the Duchess would herself unveil (‘In memory of the valued member of the community, James Patrick O’Nione, who died so tragically at this site’). In the meantime Cold Blow Prison had come out in florid riot; the inmates had now made their base on the chapel roof, which overlooked O’Nione’s cenotaph.
The Cold Blow mutiny (Brendan now learnt) had nothing to do with Jimmy O’Nione – though he had, inevitably, spent a year or two behind its walls … The cause lay in the broodings of Prisoner Dean Bull, who, during a visit from his teenage girlfriend, Diana, began to have doubts about her constancy. ‘As a young offender prepares himself for a protracted sentence,’ blogged one old lag on the quickly assembled Cold Blow website, ‘you expect sentimental relationships to come under strain.’ So Dean feared that Diana, on her next visit, would tell him that she couldn’t wait twenty-three years. He was right. And he was ready. Brendan groaned, and sighed, and read on.
Preceded by his metal chair, Dean came through the plexiglass partition and set about Diana’s face with one of its shards. Now: every last prisoner in Cold Blow, not excluding Dean Bull, fully accepted that he would face a supplementary sentence and the loss of all remission. Dean, now twenty-one, would be released in his mid-fifties: this was fair enough. What rankled was the beating he’d taken from the guards. Because Dean, it was pointed out, had conducted himself, once his deed was done, with marked restraint, dropping his weapon and (after muttering, ‘See how that goes down down the pub Friday’) raising his hands in submission – before the first nightsticks chopped him to the ground. Some of the sterner romantics now sliding around the chapel roof (they had a seized laptop up there, and several mobile phones) argued that Dean had had no choice anyway, being a man truly in love, and what more precious token could he have offered than twelve years of his prime? More sober hands agreed that that wasn’t the point. What had come to pass was ‘a personal matter, strictly between Diana and Dean’. And then word came down from the hospital cells about the severity and duration of the stoving they’d given him …
By accompanying the Duchess to the shrine of Jimmy O’Nione, Henry IX was doing his favourite cousin a kindness: that was the thing to emphasise, thought Brendan. A nasty business (and a weird conjunction), made no easier by its timing: Henry was going down to Cold Blow on the morning after his final assignation with He Zizhen.
And on that day Brendan would have an unexpected message to pass on to the King, concerning the matter of the Princess.
Barefoot, and led by Colonel Mate, He walked the length of the ha-ha in the midgey dusk, and then emerged alone between the hedgerows for the last stretch to the lovenest of John II. In that lovenest, a nestegg (two baldrics of fire opals), and a king whose hand was already at his lips, bidding adieu.
Henry shot up from his chair and listened: He’s feet on the bare boards of the veranda … Once upon a time she had shown him the shoes worn by her greatgrandmother, the warlord’s concubine, in Shandong, where the Yellow River meets the Yellow Sea: they resembled the party boots of a three-year-old. The woman’s feet had been ‘bound’ in the traditional way – broken, crushed, then dressed and swaddled. This greatly increased her erotic worth (He explained to a horrified Henry): the crippled woman, when she walked, when she stood, evoked ‘a willow wavering in the wind’. He Zizhen had then imitated her grandmother’s agonised and papery tread, and the King’s arms had surged out towards her. Why? Why did he want to enfold that willow? The spectacle aroused him – but not as much as the sound of He’s feet on the wooden slats, registering her shape, her soft mass, the grasshalms on her dewy soles, all coming closer.
Shoeless, she was smaller, now, and he was correspondingly augmented, when he took her in his arms. He whispered what he had to say, and He whispered back. And He said she understood.
It was with sound, with a whisper, that she had first enticed him; and although the faculties of touch, taste, smell and sight, He maintained, could be reasonably well served in erotic play, what of the sense of hearing? In her view, the use of mots gros, of verbal cochoneries, was a plausible but ultimately misguided attempt to redress the deficit. Dirty talk was sadomasochism without the sticks and stones; and the King, clearly, wasn’t that kind of animal. He Zizhen, who moaned so musically among the pillows, additionally deployed the geisha device, rin no tama; Henry did not enquire too closely (it seemed to be a ball within a ball suspended in liquid), and he never sensed the slightest obstruction; he felt, however, that he was pacing or jogging or sprinting (this would depend on the gear she’d put him in) through the shallows of a tropical swamp. There was another office she performed noisily, even deafeningly – to the great joy of the King … Once, slumped in a deckchair on the Royal Yacht, he had awoken to this sound: it was the swimming-pool, slopping and gulping, smacking its lips, a storm within a storm on the Bay of Biscay. He h
ad stared out, and the brawny herring-gulls looked like sparrows before the great carry of the waves.
Now in his grandfather’s gazebo he lay back helplessly, like a child being changed. Soon (he thought) we will enter He, and she will sigh so prettily. And that is everything, everything: just to kiss and to say the name, whispering ‘Her’. Which was how you said it. Which was the sound of who He was.
‘I didn’t think it my place’, said Love, with a stretched look in his neck and forehead, ‘to confront His Majesty with it, sir. And God knows we get enough eccentrics. But the tone of it, sir, I thought …’
‘I’m quite sure you’re doing the right thing, Love,’ said Brendan Urquhart-Gordon, intrigued and encouraged by the timbre of Love’s disquiet – troubled, wondering. ‘As always.’
‘I thank you, sir.’
Brendan and other aides were at the Greater House, and climbing into their cars. The King had gone on ahead in some sort of armoured dormobile with Colonel Forster and his men, to Cold Blow Lane.
‘Chippy?’ called Brendan. ‘Have I got five minutes?’
‘At the outside,’ said Chippy Edenderry, exposing his watch.
He followed Love through the flapped door, decisively exchanging one atmosphere for another, darker, warmer, with the thick smell of sweat and soap and gravy dinners. Brendan inhaled it, and moved on, into the alternate world of belowstairs … It would have been far worse under Richard IV, of course, when domestic staff were paid the absolute minimum on principle (glory being power, and so on), but the House of England was always hedged by the smells and textures of vassalage – it was always waiting behind the flapped, floor-trailing door. Brendan knew that all servants hated their masters. Even Love, who was as loyal as they came, even Love would feel this hate. The hate smelt too: it was like the smell of mice. Brendan found unexpected relief in the contemplation of Love’s left ear: a vortex of iron filings.