‘It could be postponed, sir. I don’t see how it was arranged in the first place, given the significance of the date.’ And he invitingly added, ‘With your permission, sir, I will be availing myself of the King’s Flight in – two hours.’
‘No, I’d better go ahead and do the lepers, now I’m here. Get on with it.’
Urquhart-Gordon knew the real purpose of Henry IX’s visit to Paris. He was obliged to conceal his astonishment that, despite the nature of the current crise, the King evidently meant to go ahead with it (and despite the atrocious timing, the atrocious risk). Now his eyebrows arched as he made a series of fascinated deductions.
‘And after the lepers – then what?’
‘You should be in the air by noon, sir. There’s the ceremony at Mansion House at two: your award from the Headway people.’
Again Henry IX blinked at him.
‘The National Head Injuries Association, sir. Then you go north,’ he said, and superfluously added, ‘to see the Queen.’
‘Yes, poor thing.’
‘Sir. I have Oughtred on hold and will liaise with him tonight at St James’s. We must avoid passivity in this matter.’ He shook his head and added, ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to begin.’
‘Oh Bugger.’
Urquhart-Gordon had an impulse to reach out and smooth Henry IX’s hair from his brow. But this would surprise the King’s horror of being touched: touched by a man.
‘I feel very sorry for you, Hotty. Truly I do.’
Soon after that the King went off to bathe, and Brendan sat on in the drawing-room. He removed his hornrims; and there were the tumid, vigilant brown eyes. Brendan had a secret: he was a republican. What he did here, what he had been doing for a quarter of a century, it was for love, all for love. Love for the King, and, later, love for the Princess.
When Victoria was four … The Englands were holidaying in Italy (some castello or palazzo), and she was brought in to say goodnight to the company – in robe, pyjamas and tasselled slippers, with her hair slicked back from the bath. She went to the cardtable and, on her easy tiptoe, kissed her parents, then exchanged particular farewells with two other members of the entourage, Chippy and Boy. Sitting somewhat apart, Brendan looked up from his book in rosy expectancy – as she wordlessly included him in the final transit of her eyes. Then she took her nanny’s hand, and turned with her head bowed. And Brendan, startling himself, nearly cried out, in grief, in utter defeat – how can I feel so much when you feel so little? All the blood within him … Brendan knew himself to be perhaps unusually fond of the Princess. Was it an aesthetic passion merely? When he looked at her face he always felt he was wearing his most powerful reading-glasses – the way her flesh pushed out at him like the contours of a coin. But this would not explain his condition in the Italian ballroom as Victoria went to bed without wishing him goodnight: for instance, the sullenly mastered temptation to weep. ‘Goodnight, Brendan,’ she had said, the following evening; and he had felt gorgeously restored. It was love, but what kind of love? These days she was fifteen, and he was forty-five. He kept expecting it to go away. But it didn’t go away.
Now Brendan looked again at the photograph of the Princess. He did so briefly and warily. He was wary for her, and wary for himself – for the information about himself it might give him. Of course the point was to serve her, to serve her always … Brendan marshalled his briefcase, preparing himself for the drive to Orly, the King’s Flight to the City of London Airport, and the working supper with John Oughtred.
Eight o’clock was on its way to the Place des Vosges. Downstairs, in the alpine vault of the kitchen, the security detail frowned over its instant coffees – and its playing-cards, with their unfamiliar symbols, swords and coins from another universe. Upstairs, Love, with a white napkin draped over his forearm, was setting the table in a distant corner of the drawing-room. He was setting it for two. Fragrant from his toilet, the King felt his way from one piece of furniture to another. In this room everything you touched was either very hard or very soft, invaluably hard, invaluably soft.
The house belonged, of course, to Henry IX’s especial friend, the Marquis de Mirabeau. Less well known was the fact that the Marquis maintained a further apartment in the Place des Vosges …
Now the clocks chimed, first in relay, then in unison.
‘If you would, Love,’ said the King.
Against the wall on the landing’s carpeted plateau stood a chiffonier the size of a medieval fireplace. This now began to turn, to slide outwards on its humming axis. And in came He Zizhen, greatgranddaughter of concubines.
Love bade her welcome.
When the clocks chimed again He began to undress. This would take her some time. The King, already naked, lay helplessly on the chaise-longue, like a child about to be changed. As she removed her clothes He caressed him with them, and then with what the clothes contained. He touched him. He touched He. He was hard. He was soft. He touched him and he touched He.
There came a ping, a vibration, from the chandelier.
3. Clint Smoker
‘The Duke of Clarence played Prince ChowMein last night, writes clint smoker,’ wrote Clint Smoker. ‘Yes, Prince Alf wokked out with his on-again off-again paramour, Lyn Noel, for a slap-up Chinese. But sweet turned to sour when photographers had the sauce to storm their private room. Wan tun a bit of privacy, the couple fled with the lads in hot pursuit – we’ll cashew! What happened, back at Ken Pal? Did Alf lai chee? Did he oyster into his arms and give her a crispy duck? Or did he decide, yet again, to dumpLyn (after he’d had seconds)? Sea weedn’t like that – so how about a kick in the arse, love, to szechuan your way?’
‘What’s this?’ asked Margery, who was passing.
‘Photocaption,’ said Clint pitilessly, leaning sideways so she could see.
Clint Smoker’s screen showed a tousled and grimacing Prince Alfred and a tearful and terrified Lyn Noel fighting their way through a ruck of photojournalists and policemen in steaming Soho traffic.
‘That rain’s not doing her hair much good,’ said Margery, who now took her place in the next workstation along. A ruddy sixty-year-old, Margery was pretending to be a glamour model called Donna Strange. She was also pretending to have no clothes on.
‘Yeah well it’s the drowned-cat look,’ said Clint.
An identikit modern uggy, Clint himself subscribed to the look-like-shit look (as he had seen it called), with closely shaved head (this divulging many a Smoker welt and blemish), a double nostril-ring in the shape of a pair of handcuffs (the link-chain hung over his long upper lip and was explorable by the petri-dish of the Smoker tongue), and a startlingly realistic, almost trompe-l’oeil tattoo of a frayed noose round the Smoker neck (partly obscured, it is true, by a further rope of Smoker blubber). And yet this man, with a laptop in front of him, was a very fine journalist indeed. Clint’s shoes also repaid inspection: two catamarans lashed in place by a network of cords and cleats.
‘Dear Donna: I am a nineteen-year-old heiress with a slender waist, a shapely derrière, and bouncers as big as your bonce,’ wrote Clint Smoker.
‘Actually not a lot,’ Margery was telling one of her phones. ‘Heels, ankle bracelet, and that’s it, apart from me thong.’
‘Me passion’, wrote Clint, and then went back to change that e to a y, ‘is to dress up in the shortest mini I can find and then go round all the shoeshops with no knickers on. I wait till the lad is on his little seat in front of me. You should see the way they—’
He then said in his uncontrollably loud voice, ‘Here, Marge, they do—’
‘Donna,’ said Marge, pressing the mouthpiece to her breast.
‘They do have blokes serving in birds’ shoeshops, don’t they?’
She shrugged a nod and said, ‘Do you darling? Well we all feel a bit fruity in the afternoons. It’s the biorhythm.’
‘… drool’, wrote Clint, ‘when I yank my—’
Supermaniam Singh poked his head round the door and said i
n estuary English, ‘Oi. He’s here.’
By the time Clint clumped into the conference room the Publisher, Desmond Heaf, was leaning over the cover of yesterday’s Morning Lark and sorrowfully saying,
‘I mean, look at her. Clint: nice to see you, son. I mean, look at her. That’s deformity, that is. Or obsessive surgery: Munchausen’s. They’re very unhappy people and they look it. See her eyes. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times. Keep the bosoms within reasonable bounds: forty-four triple-F would do as a benchmark. I say it and I say it. They go down for a while but then they always creep back up again. And then we get this.’
‘More centrally, Chief,’ said Clint, ‘it makes the paper too embarrassing to buy. I bet we’re losing wankers.’
Even before the first issue had hit the streets, it was universal practice, at the Morning Lark, to refer to readers as wankers. This applied not only to specific features (Wankers’ Letters, Our Wankers Ask the Questions, and so on), but also in phrases common to any newspapering concern, such as ‘the wanker comes first’ and ‘the wanker’s what it’s all about’ and ‘is this of genuine interest to our wankers?’ The staff had long stopped smiling when anybody said it.
‘Well said, Clint,’ said Heaf.
‘We wouldn’t be losing wankers,’ said Supermaniam. ‘You might find a blip on the rate of increase but we’re not actually losing wankers.’
‘Red herring,’ boomed Clint. ‘We’re losing potential wankers.’
‘I’ll have Mackelyne track the figures,’ said Heaf. ‘Who keeps putting these bleeding great … dugongs in the paper anyway?’
No one spoke. For the Lark was run along cooperative lines. The selection of the scores of near-naked women who appeared daily in its pages was a matter of cheerfully generalised improvisation. Naturally the editorial staff was all-male. The only women to be found in the Lark‘s offices were its tutelary glamour girls and the retirees who impersonated them on the hotlines.
‘I don’t know, Boss,’ said Jeff Strite – Clint Smoker’s only serious rival as the paper’s star reporter. ‘You get in a sort of daze after a bit. You go, you know, “Sling her in” without really thinking about it.’
Clint said judiciously (and loudly), ‘Some blokes do think you can’t have too much of a good thing, so there’s an argument for the occasional bigger bird. We’ve got to attract the more specialised wanker without grossing out the rank and file. It’s this simple: keep the dugongs off the front page.’
‘Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘Anyway, who are we to complain?’ said Heaf. Normally the Publisher had the air of a small-town headmaster – and one harassed by logistical cares to the point of personal neglect (so frayed, so meagre). But now he freshened, and said in a gurgling voice, ‘Gregory, be a good lad and make a start on the beverages, would you?’
Mackelyne had entered and taken his seat. They listened as he talked about the latest sales figures, the multimillion hits on the hardcore websites, the fact that the new sexlines had caused the collapse of the local telephone network, and the inevitability of the 192-page daily format. Then came the money numbers … At the Lark, all profits were shared, with certain steep differentials. But even young Gregory, who was little more than an office boy, had plans to buy a racehorse.
‘Now,’ said Heaf, a while later. ‘What have we got for tomorrow? Clint.’
There always came this moment (and by now the empty bottles of champagne were ranked on the Publisher’s desk, and the dusty air looked gaseous in the low sun, as if everyone had joined in one cooperative sneeze), this moment when the men of the Morning Lark tried to feel like journalists. There was of course hardly any news in the Lark, and no global cataclysm had yet had the power to push the pinup off the front page. Even the vast sports section did little more than print the main results; the rest consisted of girls climbing in and out of the kit of famous football clubs, girls chronicling their one-night stands with famous footballers, early and reckless photographs of models who were married to or living with famous footballers, and so on, plus a few odds and ends about adulterous golfers, satyromaniac jockeys, and rapist boxers. But current events of a certain kind were covered, usually on the lower half of pages two and four.
It was Jeff Strite who spoke. ‘The Case of the Walthamstow Wanker,’ he intoned. ‘And I don’t mean the Walthamstow Reader. It’s an interesting story. And it ties in with our Death to Paedophiles campaign. There’s this public swimming-pool, right? With a gallery? He’s up there alone watching a school party of nine-year-olds. Then this old dear, you know, Mrs Mop appears. The geezer does a runner, falls down the stairs and smashes his head in. For why? His trousers are down around his ankles.’
‘Because he was having a …?’
‘Exactly. Good headline too: Pervs Him Right.’
‘Excellent. And I see we’ve decided to go ahead,’ said Desmond Heaf, ‘with Wankers’ Wives.’
Back at his laptop Clint resumed work on the heiress with a passion for visiting shoeshops in short skirts. This contribution posed as a letter to the paper’s agony aunt, or ‘Ecstasy Aunt’, whose daily double-page spread was pretty well entirely composed by staff writers. Long narratives of an exclusively and graphically sexual nature were followed by three or four words of encouragement or ridicule, supposedly from the pen of Donna Strange. Readers did write in; and once in a blue moon their letters received the hospitality of the Lark‘s correspondence columns. These letters dramatised the eternal predicament of erotic prose. It wasn’t that they were insufficiently salacious; rather, they were insufficiently universal – were, in fact, impenetrably solitary. And they were never from women … Then, with a heavy heart, Smoker flagged the new photo-section alluded to by Desmond Heaf. It was to be called Readers’ Richards, ‘Richard’ being rhyming-slang (via Richard the Third) for bird, just as ‘Bristols’ (via Bristol City) was rhyming-slang for—
‘Why’d you want those bloody handcuffs in your conk?’ asked Margery, who was packing up. She was sixty; he was thirty: these facts had suddenly to be acknowledged.
‘Reminds me I’ve got a nose.’
‘Congratulations. Why’d you want reminding you’ve got a nose?’ Especially that nose, she felt moved to add (Clint’s nose was a considerable accumulation of flesh, but one uninfluenced by cartilage). ‘And what’s that rope in aid of?’
‘I’ll swing for you, Marge,’ said Clint in a softer voice than usual. ‘It’s my identity. Now shut it.’
He was still muttering viciously to himself when five minutes later his mobile sounded: the knock of a truncheon on a cell door.
‘Clint? And.’
And was Andrew New, one of the sempiternal figures in the Smoker universe, someone with whom he had formed the stoutest of bonds. And was Clint’s pusher. And this call was out of the ordinary. And hardly ever rang Clint. Clint rang And.
‘And, boy. Jesus, what’s that racket? She having another go then?’
‘Gaw, hark at this. “Harrison! Will you get your fucking arse into that bath!” Terrible it’s been. “And! And! Come and it im!” You fucking it im! I hit im the last time. Sorry, mate. It’s calming down a bit now. It’s not as bad as what it sounds … Uh, Clint mate. I think I’ve got a news story.’
‘Well you’ve come to the wrong place.’
‘Yeah, but you must have contacts.’
‘I’m tolerably well connected,’ said Clint untruthfully (and loudly. People placed near him in restaurants used to ask for relocation. That was when he still went to restaurants with other people). ‘Come on then. What is it?’
‘You know that bloke got done last night. Xan Meo. The actor that plays the banjo or whatever the fuck it is. What do they call him.’
‘Renaissance Man.’
‘I was there, mate. Fact. I saw them do im! By the canal. I was down on the path where I keep me stash. He’s just sitting out there having a drink and there’s this two blokes on him. They didn’t half fucking
give him one. No. They give him two. I thought: that’s him fucking telt. Then they give him another.’
Clint, at stool, had read about the attack in the Evening Standard. His interest was only mildly piqued.
And went on: ‘Seemed it was like, you know, payback time. Seemed like he’d grassed someone up and it was payback time. They’ve give the name. Said he grassed up Joseph Andrews …’
‘Well it’s no use to me, mate. Unless there was any topless skirt involved. Are you going to the Old Bill with it?’
‘That’s no fucking use to me, is it? There ain’t any reward or anything. No. I was going to flog it round the newspapers.’
‘Uh, don’t do that, mate.’ Clint considered. ‘It’s not that big of a story. And you might get yourself … Let me put out a groper and I’ll give you a call. What was the bloke’s name again – the one that got grassed up?’
‘“Harrison! And! And!” ‘And And said, ‘Gaw, Jesus. Here we go. Joseph Andrews.’
Clint Smoker worked in a sick building. It should have had a thermometer poking out of its first-floor window like a barber’s pole – not writhing, but trembling. In the 1970s it had ambitiously served as a finishing-school for young women hoping for preferment in the public-relations industry. So many of the students suffered from eating disorders that the entire plumbing system surrendered to the ravages of gastric acid. This in turn caused a ‘billowing fracture’ which warped its ventilation systems. The air was turbid with emanations, spores, allergies. Everyone at the Lark was always sneezing, sniffing, coughing, yawning, retching. They knew they felt sick, but didn’t know they felt sick because they worked in a sick building: they thought they felt sick because of what they did in it all day long … Today the sick building gave off an olive glow; a thin rain had fallen, and its face seemed to be dotted with sweat.
He shouldered his way out of there with a cigarette in his mouth. Big man: see the way the automatic doors jerked away from him in fright. Massive, pale, the flesh with the rubbery look of cold pasta; but Clint wielded the unreasonable strength of heavy bones. He kept winning these ragged brawls he kept having, on roadsides, in laybys and forecourts, with their flailings and stumblings, their miskicks and airshots. Clint’s brawls were about the Highway Code: heretical as opposed to canonical interpretations. And Clint was the Manichee.