Long Live the King (22 page)

‘But very well, we’ll go and talk in the library,’ Frank agreed and carried her drink as they walked together down the long stone corridor towards the library. She tried not to brush against him, but his arm always seemed to be in the way of hers. Their hands had touched once, reaching for the pepper pot at the Bishop’s table, and then his skin had felt cold and hard; like marble she had thought then. Now she saw it differently; it was like snakeskin, rough if you stroked it one way, smooth and slippery if you stroked it another. She was probably just stroking the wrong way.

When you got used to the splendours of the Palace dining table the conversation was so polite and dull – about the correct readings and the great Cranmer and how the creation of the Local Education Authorities would affect Church schools – she almost missed her father’s rantings. There was nothing to do but eat. Once she’d seen Frank changing place cards so as to sit next to her, and she was pleased, because he was only twice her age and not three or four times, as everyone else seemed to be. But then he only wanted to talk about the Oneness, Inner Peace and meditation, which sounded to her pretty much like staring into space and falling asleep, which she’d been doing a lot since her parents died anyway. He was being just as boring as anyone else. On the other hand what was wrong with people being boring? It was meant to be enough for them to be good, and Frank was certainly good, with his patient smile and kindly bearing, as if nobody else had reached his spiritual plane, or ever would. He didn’t drink wine or touch meat. He thought she, Adela, was an angel, which was flattering, but also meant that he somehow owned her or thought he did.

‘You’re quite the little bookworm,’ he said to her, as they turned into the sepulchral gloom of the library. ‘I admire the way you make the most of your time.’

‘My choice of book is quite limited, I’m sorry to say,’ she said. ‘There’s a review in
The
Times
– they pile up here in the library – about a book by this woman called Elinor Glyn called
The Visits of Elizabeth,
which I would so love to read.’

‘O dear me, no!’ said Frank, seemingly alarmed. ‘That’s not the kind of book it will do you any good to read. It’s salacious and better not written.’

‘I can only tell that by reading it,’ she said.

‘It’s not the kind of thing a man wants his wife and the mother of his children to read.’

‘Yes, but I’m not your wife or the mother of your children,’ said Adela. One of the advantages of being worshipped by a man, it seemed, was that you could be rude to him and he did not notice. Or perhaps it was that they didn’t listen to a word you said, being so full of admiration at the way you said it. ‘I want to know what men think they have a right to know and women have to be protected from.’

‘Knowledge comes in its own time,’ he said. It was the kind of thing he did say, along with ‘All is illusion’, which always seemed to her a not very cheerful thing to have to listen to.

‘I expect you are right,’ she said, to which he replied, ‘I know I am right.’

Adela sat down at one of the reading tables and he sat beside her and not, as she would have expected, opposite her. He took her hand. Her instinct was to snatch it back but she let it lie there. Snakeskin, she reminded herself. Stroke it the right way. He was quite pink in the face and his high wing collar cut into his neck. It looked very uncomfortable.

‘Your glasses are all misty,’ she said. ‘Shall I clean them for you?’

He took them off and handed them to her. He looked much better without them; his eyes lost their pebbly look. She used some of the soft silk of her sleeve to rub them with.

‘You are so sweet,’ he said. ‘Little Adela.’

He told her he had asked the Bishop’s permission to speak to her and had received it, and Mrs Kennion’s too. In a month or two, he said, Adela was going to join the cloistered life and it was a noble ambition. But she was without parental or family guidance and she was very young.

‘Do try and be precise, Frank,’ said Adela. She wondered where she found the temerity to speak to him in the way she did. For some reason he made her cross. He was sneaky, like a snake. ‘It’s not cloistered. Little Sisters of Bethany is a teaching order. I will be out in the world all the time.’

‘But you will still be able to be a Bride of Christ,’ he said. ‘To renounce the flesh is a very big decision for a young girl to make. You are a little young to make it, or to understand what you are doing.’

‘If I could read
The Visits of Elizabeth
,’ she said, ‘I might understand it a little more. And I don’t have a great deal of choice in the matter. I have to go somewhere. I can’t remain a charge on the Bishop’s goodwill for ever. My family show no sign of wishing to claim me. What do you suggest?’

‘Marry me,’ he said. She snatched her hand away.

‘No, hear me out.’ His glasses were misting up again. She did not want to go through life cleaning them up.

‘I have finished my time here,’ he said. ‘Too right I have. In May I’m sailing for Western Australia. We are a Dominion now: we can rule ourselves. A new bonzer land to build, a land of the future. Europe’s old, finished. Landscapes to paint, wider and larger and grander than you can believe. Edge of the old black stump, I’ll give you that, but shapes and colours to entrance your mind. And opportunities. My uncle’s died: I have the land, I have the power, I have the wealth. I’ll go in for oats. Low-acidity soil, great market potential. Breed horses too, perhaps. We have the best in the world. The home country spent one hundred thousand pounds on nags during the war, and as long as there’s people there’ll be wars. But most of all I’ll have you. I’m bringing back the real prize from the old world, the most beautiful woman ever born, that’s you, Adela, I knew from the moment I set eyes on you in that carriage. The Divine Essence put you in my way, sent smoke and flames to guide me, showed you to me in that mirror; they had chosen you as mine. They have a plan for us.’

He wanted to start an industrial school for the abos in Murchison, teach them proper painting, get them trained in art as well as mining; they loved caves but had to learn to gaze at the stars. ‘People say they’re not human, from another planet, but they’re just like us, just haven’t yet caught up with us, that’s all. You’ll come to love them, as I do.’

There was no stopping him. He was like her father, only he was unblinking, and staring into her eyes; his face was too near to hers. She thought he did not brush his teeth enough. His breath was not very nice, only it would be impolite to turn her head away. He said there was leprosy, only no one admitted it, he meant to start a colony.

‘Leprosy?’ she asked, alarmed. ‘Isn’t that when your fingers and toes fall off?’

He said he’d keep her well away from it, he worshipped her, every bit of her, even her little toes, when they were married he would sleep with them in his mouth. She thought she had misheard him, unless this was the great secret of married life. She could imagine Rumpelstiltskin behaving like that, creeping up on you and grabbing your feet. But hadn’t Frank said ‘when’ not ‘if’ they were married? He hadn’t yet given her a chance to say no. He was overwhelming her with words, as her father had done, only instead of saying she was stupid and plain he seemed to think she had secret powers and was beautiful.

‘I need you, Adela. You are
sattvika
: pure, so beautiful, from another, higher world. You are mine to save, mine to protect. My karma.’

Now he was saying he’d heard Henry S. Alcott speak in Melbourne when he was a boy: he’d had a vision, the wisdom of the Buddha must combine with the good oil of the Christians: all must stand under one umbrella of faith: universal brotherhood, the transmigration of souls made more sense than heaven, where all one did was stand about and sing. Where was the striving, the self-improvement in that? Adela could do the same work as the Little Sisters of Bethany in a new land where it never rained, only a hundred times more usefully. She could make a difference.

‘You must be the bride of a flesh-and-blood man, Adela, not a statue on a cross.’ Hadn’t Ivy said something like that once? ‘Christ, down the plughole, a splendid girl like you?’ It burst out of him. Then, reverting to the calmer language of the Palace, ‘Choose life itself, my darling, and not a dull safe shadow of it. I am here to teach and lead you. Choose life with me.’

It was quite a speech. He had prepared it but passion came breaking through, so he sounded quite mad. He was trembling. Adela leant forward and took off his glasses: so misty she thought he could barely see out of them, cleaned them and returned them. His hands were plump and white, and twice the size of her own.

‘Aren’t there crocodiles?’ she asked. She was half joking, bathos after so much fine speaking, but he did not understand jokes.

‘There are a few,’ he said. ‘A few salt-water bastards around the mouth of the Ashburton river but that’s further north.’

Then he said, ‘How about it, my splendid bush girl, how about it?’ and she laughed and saw she could do the laughing for both of them, just by listening to him.

Adela tried to think, but he had exhausted her with words. She longed to travel, to see the kangaroos and the koala bears for herself. The convent had seemed agreeable enough when she had been half starved in Yatbury: inevitable for her when she discovered the curse of womanhood; now she was not so sure. The nuns were such a dowdy lot, ducks not swans. Frank might be peculiar but Australia would be an adventure. There were lots of black swans near where he lived up a river he called a creek. Perhaps she could train them to come when a bell was rung.

‘But I don’t love you,’ she said. Was this an obstacle?

‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘A wife comes to love her husband if she’s young enough. I’m a decent man, Adela. I’ll love you as a husband should. My bloody oath! We have a house waiting for us, the white ants have been at it but we’ll soon get rid of the bastards. You’ll have to train the servants, but the native women aren’t too bad as nursemaids. A bit of white blood in them and they’re fine.’

Adela had a vision of a lot of little children with pudgy hands and thick glasses running round her feet, and big white ants trying to eat her toes. She longed to get back to the story of the Little Mermaid, but Frank was squashing her fingers, breathing into her eyes. There was dandruff on his coat collar. There was no stopping him.

‘We could build a little white temple down in the township, bring Theosophy to the natives. The Dreamtime and Nirvana are pretty much the same. Have you heard of Annie Besant?’

She shook her head.

‘I’ll teach you.’

His finger moved up and down on her wrist. There was a horrible fascination in it. If he talked for long enough she would do whatever he said, just to stop him.

‘The thing to do with the natives is never let them taste alcohol. Their metabolism won’t stand it. Their marital goings-on can seem strange when you’re fresh from the homeland, but you’ll soon get used to it. The thing we have to do is to set them an example of married love.’ He squeezed her small hand more. ‘Princess!’ he said. ‘Princess! My Eostre!’

‘Who?’ she asked.

‘The Saxon Goddess of the Spring. In hermetic lore the Queen of Creation. All bursting forth in abundance.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘What a hot little paw you have,’ he remarked.

‘Because you’re holding my hand so tightly,’ she said. He loosened it a little. She felt grateful.

‘I shouldn’t have looked in the mirror,’ he said, ‘but I did. I can’t say I’m sorry because I’m not, my bloody oath! But we’ll hit it off, I’m sure enough of that. We’ll make a fine pair, the two of us. I’m not bad looking either, I can say that for myself, Your birthday is on the 21
^st
of May.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I looked it up in the parish records,’ he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. She supposed it was. He knew everything about her. When he saw her naked in the mirror ownership of her had passed to him. ‘It’s better for us to wait until you’re seventeen, otherwise there’s probably the matter of permission from a guardian, and your uncle Dilberne doesn’t seem too good at acknowledging that’s what he is.’

Adela felt a pang of self-pity. Unwanted, rejected, orphaned, not good enough. At least Frank wanted her, and seemed to want her badly. She must find out more about Eostre.

‘So that’s settled. The
Cuzco
sails from Tilbury for Sydney on Monday the 25
^th
of May. Stops off at Fremantle with the mail, and drops us off too. All fixed. We’ll be married on Friday 22
^nd
of May in the Cathedral. The Bishop has space at one o’clock. He himself will give you away, the Canon will do the service. Everyone wishes you well! It’s all arranged, my darling. You’ll find your future husband quite a man for detail! We will have a shipboard honeymoon. Good seas that time of year till we get to the Cape, we’ll be fine. You’ll have to wear a black dress for the ceremony, of course, because of your parents, but it’s perfectly proper to have a white veil. I consulted Mrs Kennion on the point. I so long to see my little girl in a white veil!’

‘But I don’t want to miss the Coronation,’ she said. It was all she could think of to say. Perhaps she could run away before the time came. But where? How? She’d had a vague feeling that she could run away with Frank if needs must, but now it was Frank she must run away from. If she could.

‘You will be
my
Queen Consort,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’

‘I want a wedding present from you,’ she said. ‘
The Visits of Elizabeth
by Elinor Glyn.’

He was silent for a moment. He looked at her with eyes that were dewy and gleaming and happy. He bent his head and pressed his lips to hers and then forced a little edge of tongue in between her lips. It was totally disgusting. She tried not to show it.

‘Beaut!’ he said, satisfied. ‘Dinkum!
The Visits of Elizabeth
shall be our own. We’ll give it a read and then go to it hammer and tongs and pray for forgiveness later. You’ll know what it’s all about by then. Too right.’