Death and the Princess

Does that sound like a passage from the ghastly memoirs of some Edwardian gaiety girl, long past gaiety or anything else except mendacity? Well, my association with royalty wasn’t like that at all. You might say, I suppose, that the Princess brought a touch of glamour into my humdrum life. You might even say I brought a whiff of excitement into
her
humdrum life. But both these formulations are a bit too positive, compared with what actually happened.

Anyway, on the day in question I was lingering over a last cup of breakfast tea with Jan, my wife, and Daniel, my small son. They were shortly to return to Newcastle, where my wife is studying Arabic (for reasons that have never been entirely clear to me). I had nothing particular bothering me in the way of cases: about the only thing I was engaged on at the time was a leakage of classified information about welfare payments from a social security office. Cases do not come more tedious than that. Nevertheless, it was at that breakfast table that my life was invaded by royalty — though admittedly by minuscule royalty. The invasion signalled itself in the form of a ringing phone.

‘Perry Trethowan,’ I said.

‘Hello, Perry,’ said the gravelly voice of my superior, Joe Grierley, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

‘I’ve got one already,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be
finding a Mole in the Shoreditch Social Security Office. Feeding classified information about benefits to the
New Statesman.’

‘Forget it. You’re going up in the world, Perry. I picked you specially, because you’re couth.’

‘I am not couth,’ I protested. ‘And I do not like cases that involve noble families.’ (The last upper-crust family I’d been criminally involved with had been my own.)

‘Noble families? Who said anything about noble families? We can do better than that. You are going to be personal bodyguard to the Princess Helena. No less.’

‘No less?’ I burst out. ‘No more? might be a better question. What sort of a job is that for a man of my seniority?’ I’d just been made Superintendent, and didn’t at all fancy spending hours and hours attending charity matinées, royal tours of ball-bearing factories, and Girl Guide jamborees. ‘Surely you can find someone else?’ I pleaded. ‘Couthness can’t be in that short supply.’

‘Couthness is as rare as muffins,’ said Joe. ‘And as you will realize when you think about it, I wouldn’t have put you down for this without a reason. I’m putting you on with Joplin, who can do most of the charity matinée stuff. You are to have general responsibility for security. I’ll see you this afternoon, and put you into the picture about the whys and wherefores.’

I was slightly mollified. The thought of sitting in limousines making well-bred conversation about the weather had caused me to jump the gun a bit. I said with a sigh of acquiescence: ‘OK then, if I must. How do I address her, by the way?’

‘Your Royal Highness first off, and then Ma’am,’ said Joe. ‘Pronounced Marm. I know all about it. I once did the same for Princess Anne.’

‘Really? What was she like?’

‘Screaming blue murder most of the time, and wetting her nappies. It was a while ago.’

‘Well, at least mine is out of that stage,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, yours is out of that stage. If we could keep her in a playpen all day, things would be a lot easier. I’ll send Joplin and a car round to your flat at ten — right?’

‘I suppose so. Plain clothes?’

‘Uniform. And make damn sure it’s impeccable.’

So there were me and Jan spending the time until ten o’clock brushing hair and dandruff off my uniform and cleaning shoes to the sort of spit-and-polish brightness I remembered from my army days. At least that’s the sort of work you can talk over, and we spent the time dredging up all we knew about the Princess Helena.

‘She’s absolutely
gorgeous,’
said Jan, with more than a suggestion of impending suspicion in her eye.

And the fact is, gorgeous she was, and this was what everybody knew about her. She had started doing the odd royal chore about three years before, when she was barely out of her ’teens. The press had been enraptured, scenting limitless fodder, and the young lady had become patron of this, honorary president of that, until very soon she was taken on to the royal strength, with a nice little sum on the Civil List and apartments in Kensington Palace, which one gathers is the regular doss-house for minor royals.

Her connection with the Royal Family was not particularly close. She was the daughter of the Princess Charlotte, who was the daughter of — well, I forget who, but I think it went back to George V, or Edward VII or someone. Princess Charlotte had been mildly notorious in her time: a royal high-liver about whom risqué stories were told at cocktail parties, songs were sung at hunt balls. Not that there was ever anything much said publicly. Luckily her heyday had been in the post-war years and the ’fifties, when, if you remember, anyone who said anything faintly critical of the Queen was run through with middle-class umbrellas in public places,
and burned in effigy by Bishops in their Cathedral Closes. So there was never much in the newspapers and tattle-sheets, but — as I say — the whisper did get around. Jokes. Her name didn’t help . . .

Well, Charlotte had married a German princeling with a name as long as your arm some time in the late ’fifties, had produced the undoubtedly gorgeous little Helena, and had then divorced in a blaze of publicity. By now, it was the ’sixties, the age of
Private Eye,
and royalty was no longer wrapped in jewellers’ cotton-wool, or stuck up for worship on a side-altar. Long before the decade ended she had driven her sports car over a cliff in Sardinia, taking with her a highly unsuitable escort and an amount of alcohol and drugs unusual even for Italy. A lot of
dolce vite
ended roughly the same way at that time.

So my little lady was brought up very quietly in the country by other exceedingly obscure offshoots of royalty. I suspect they may have been scared of something hereditary coming out in her: they sent her to a ridiculously decorous girls’ school, the sort which seems to aim to turn out dowagers. Still, it seemed from what one read that they had not quite managed to snuff out that hereditary spark.

‘I wish I wasn’t going back to Newcastle at the end of the week,’ said Jan.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Not absolutely altogether,’ she said.

‘Come off it. Princesses don’t bed down with their police bodyguards,’ I said.

‘I bet her mother did,’ said Jan, and I didn’t feel like taking her up on that. ‘But it’s not so much that I want to keep an eye on you,’ she went on (why is one always insulted when one’s wife says things like that?). ‘I want to hear all the details. What the apartments are like. What she wears. What she eats. Who she’s going with. Particularly that. It’s not often you get a chance of
absolutely reliable inside gossip about the Royals. It’s usually “I know a chap who knows a girl who knows another girl . . .” ’

‘You,’ I said, ‘are a thundering, old-fashioned, arse-licking snob.’

‘I don’t know where you get that idea,’ said Jan, who did.

Then the car came, and I marched off to my date with the Royal Family — spick and span, resplendent, the very model of a modern police superintendent. Joplin was in the car already, and we went over the day’s security arrangements and some of the general do’s and don’t’s about protecting royal personages, about which he had been thoroughly briefed at the Yard. Joplin’s about twenty-two, and a marvellous bloke to work with. He looks stolid, sensible, even a bit thick in a pleasant kind of way — until you notice his eyes. Then you realize there isn’t a thing that he misses, not a detail. Those little London peepers are darting everywhere. He not only picks up everything that’s said, he photographs the scene while he’s listening, so that he can reproduce it for you afterwards, down to the tiniest detail. A marvellous young man, Joplin.

We got to Kensington Palace in a matter of minutes, or so it seemed. The driver, well-briefed, took us round to a discreet side-entrance, overlooking a street of embassies, and I took in a brief impression of a solid, comfortable Bill-and-Mary sort of pile while I talked to Joplin and sent him off to natter with the regular bobbies around the place. I myself was looked for, and met, very smoothly; then I was dribbled from flunkey to flunkey, like a genteel football, until finally I landed up in what must have been some kind of antechamber — mostly dark wood, with a peeling ceiling and a lot of musty greens and faded golds — and talking to a lady in her nondescript thirties. She had ‘lady’ written all over her, and was apparently ‘in waiting’ to boot. She was rather prim, severe, even
repressed, and would have seemed rather an odd companion for the Princess Helena, had it not struck me that she could have been chosen either by the young lady herself, to provide piquant contrast, or by Someone Higher, to act as a watchdog.

‘Her Royal Highness will see you at once,’ she said, in the sort of flat upper-class voice I like least, replete with frigidity and effort. She went on, as if screwing the words out, and forcing an appearance of amiability: ‘She always likes to meet new members of her security guard. But she has to leave for a luncheon engagement at eleven-thirty. I may have to interrupt you. She has very little idea of time.’

‘Worrying,’ I said.

She looked at me frostily, blinked, and led the way forward. I walked behind her, wondering idiotically whether there was any etiquette about room-entering that I was too raw to know about, whether it was right foot first or something lunatic like that. And I was still thinking about that when I was formally (very!) introduced by the lady-in-waiting, who then drifted in a superior manner out of the room.

And so there we were, together. And she was breathtaking, she really was — every bit as gorgeous as the press spreads suggested. I suppose delectable is the word that sums it up. She had a wonderful little body, confidently carried, and the dress she was wearing, while in every way royal, decorous, and hideously expensive-looking, still seemed to cling provocatively at interesting places and tantalize you by new suggestions every time she moved. Her hair was dark, short, and beautifully modelled around her ears; her mouth was wide, her eyes were enormous, dark and sparkling. Oh, she was a pippin all right!

‘Hello,’ she said. And then she giggled. ‘I say, aren’t you
large.’

The voice was a let-down, I had to admit. It was tinkling, trivial, more than a little silly. Possibly a voice for bed, but hell to hear over the breakfast-table.

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