Skeleton-in-Waiting (5 page)

“Have I? Doesn't feel like that, from inside—I suppose it never does. You were talking to Soppy.”

“Nice to see her.”

“What did you think?”

“She seemed a bit down.”

“Understatement of the year. She's pretty well at the end of her tether. So, if it comes to that, am I.”

“I was just thinking how smug and kempt you look.”

“Training.”

“Isn't it just the time of year? Christmases with Aunt Eloise must have been pretty good hell. Soppy says she used to get out of it by nipping off to Argentina, but I don't think you get away from your childhood that easy.”

“I tried to get her out there this year. I thought there might be a chance, with the FO wanting to pretend the Falklands War was only a sort of folk-myth which never really happened at all, but Mrs T. put her foot down. Don't you long for the days when you could go buzzing around the world incognito and everyone looked the other way?”

“The hacks would make a real meal of her, I suppose.”

“She's not been coping with the hacks that well, actually. I don't know. She knew what she was in for when she took me on, I thought.”

“You don't. No one does. I was brooding about Granny's marriage. No one else can imagine what it's like, and no one can imagine what their own one's going to be like.”

“Anyway, it isn't just the hacks. Did she tell you she'd sacked poor Bridget while I was in Oslo, for no reason she can explain? Just said the girl got on her nerves.”

“It happens.”

“Not like that. I tried to reason with her and she clammed up. She's eating much too much.”

Louise just stopped the burst of laughter. How could he tell? Soppy's appetite was known to be limitless. It had been a family joke since nursery days. But she could see that Albert had taken that into account and was still bothered.

“You saw what she had on her plate?” he said. “She'll fill it up a couple of times, and then she'll do her duty by three or four puddings and top off with a few slabs of cheese—and then as soon as we're home she'll be at the fridge for a snack.”

“She ought to be in
The Guinness Book of Records.”

“They wouldn't let her in. She cheats. She's taking pills to help shove it through.”

“Oh. I must say that doesn't sound too good.”

“No. Any ideas?”

“Well … I think she's bothered, too. I said something about how spruce you were getting to look and she started talking about how everybody was different … Do you still love her, Bert?”

Albert protected himself from any direct display of emotion by going into his Father-imitation, poising the tips of his fingers together and giving a snort through his moustache.

“Trick question,” he said. “When did you stop loving your wife? I love her OK, but in a different way from a few years back. Much more complex. I mean, for instance, it includes a good deal of irritation sometimes. It's like, oh well, for instance, the shift from the intense simplicities of folk music to the interwoven diffusions of polyphony, if you follow me.”

“I don't.”

“Sorry. I forgot. Well, then, it's like coming off the high moorlands where you can see for miles and there isn't a soul in sight and the winds of heaven to breathe, to walking through close farmland with hedges and twisting lanes and business calls to make on the way.”

“That's more like it. Perhaps Soppy's hankering for the hill-tops.”

“You can't stay there for ever, but monogamy still rules in my case, if that's what you mean. That wasn't why she sacked Bridget. I don't think that's the problem. For instance, she found an old snap of Aunt Kitty Bakewell in her twenties, long before she showed any sign of going off her trolley, dolled up as a man for some kind of fancy dress do in a white tie and tails and looking stunning. First glance you'd think it was Soppy herself. And she keeps dragging Kitty into conversations—not right in, just hinting and then pushing her out of sight again.”

“Soppy's always looked terrific in uniform. Piers is mad about her.”

“Piers is just kinky about women in uniform. Look how he got Mother to dress up in her Irish Guards outfit last Christmas. To my mind it all goes back to his being found on that bus. His mother must have been some buxom conductress, and he's working out his pre-natal influences.”

“Seriously?”

“No. Of course not. But I'm serious about Soppy. I think her problems are mostly down to Aunt Eloise.”

“Do you really? Soppy always gives the impression of being the only one who can handle her.”

“As she grew up, she evolved various strategies and techniques, but she wouldn't have had them when she was a child. All it means is that everything's deeper-buried, hidden from her conscious mind, so she has to blame her problems on things that are happening to her now, like not being allowed to go to Argentina. I don't know what it is about some people's mothers.”

“At least we've been lucky with our own. Did you meet Alex Romanov? His was a handful too, by the sound of her. You might've noticed me taking him over to woo poor Aunt Bea.”

“Oh, him … looked as if he was making a go of it, too. Where did you pick him up?”

“He was talking to Piers about AI. He used to correspond with Granny on a regular basis, he says. He's got a lot of her letters, long ones, full of the sort of things she used to say about everyone.”

“Has he, by God? That's what you were telling Sir Sam? No wonder he looked a bit haunted. What's he going to do?”

“Try and con them off him somehow, I should think.”

“Why bother?”

Louise stared. It seemed too obvious to argue about. There was no question of the Palace allowing Granny's papers to be published as they stood. Even letting Alex Romanov get as far as trying to publish them, and then having to go to the courts to get them suppressed, would wake an absolute volcano of guesswork and rumour about what might be in them.

“You know what I think?” said Albert. “Seriously. The best way to deal with a time-bomb like this is blow it up in the open. We should help Mr Romanov get the stuff published.”

“Count. Or Doctor. You did say ‘Seriously'?”

“Father writes a pious foreword. That gives the Palace a bit of a say, and Sir Sam can blue-pencil the iffy bits.”

“It's all going to be iffy in Sir Sam's eyes.”

“Time he went.”

Albert had spoken casually, as if adding a footnote to the conversation. Louise looked at him. He shrugged. The gesture, allied to the slumped, clubland pose, had a masculine ruthlessness about it which Louise found hard to associate with the Albert she had known all her life until they had moved into their separating marriages. Sir Savile seemed a large and unchanging object in her mental landscape, single-mindedly loyal, according to his lights. Now, in Albert's eyes, it was time that bit of landscape was cleared. Soppy was right. Albert had changed in aspects less obvious than the cut of his beard.

“Is there anything you'd like me to do about Soppy?” she said. “I could try and get her to talk if you want. I don't think it would be much use just telling her to cut down on the calories.”

“No, of course not. I wanted to know what you thought, and talk about her a bit. There's no one else, so I'm afraid you've got to bear with it.”

“All I can suggest is you might try getting back up on the hill-tops a bit. Perhaps she isn't ready for ordinary country walks all the time. I know it's difficult—no use if you're faking it. Couldn't you set up some kind of escapade, something that really felt like a break-out … I don't know, smuggle her out to Argentina in a false nose and then arrange to turn up yourself, unbeknownst to her. She canters across at the end of the second chukka and there you are holding her remount.”

Albert laughed, then sighed.

“You remember how we used to fantasise about what they could do to us?” said Louise. “Putting us in the Tower, and us appealing to the European Court of Human Rights? I mean, how would they physically stop you … ?”

“You're not helping, Lulu.”

“Sorry. I know.”

“My fault. I oughtn't to have bothered you.”

“I really want to help. I like Soppy a lot, for one thing. So does Piers. Can I talk to him?”

“If you want to. I suppose he's got an angle on what some of it's like which we can't have. What I'd like is next time she starts hinting about Aunt Kitty I'll see if I can't persuade her to talk to a psychiatrist, just to set her mind at rest. Then if she gets on with him …”

“Her,” said Louise.

“Oh. Right. I'll ask around. Time we were getting back?”

They rose.

“Thanks,” he said. “You mayn't think it, but that's helped a bit.”

“Any time. It matters more than most things.”

“I know. Had I better take a squint at your Romanov friend? You never said what you made of him.”

“He's got a lot of charm. It's real. It was there for Aunt Bea, too.”

“Talked to any of the others? They strike me as a rum lot.”

“I was thinking about Granny. You know, she wasn't really civilised. I wouldn't have put anything past her.”

“Right.”

3

“… I thought we might be seeing him again anyway,” said Piers. “It's not that often we bump into a chap who can get along in both our languages.”

“Let's have a supper in your flat. You can ask the Stokeses and Isabelle. Tracy and I can talk obstetrics while you four zoom around on the higher plane.”

“If you like.”

“I'll get Joan to find a hole in the diary. Not too soon, or Alex might smell a rat.”

“It's you and your lot who are doing the rat-smelling, in my opinion. Alex struck me as a decent enough bloke.”

“I thought so too, what I saw of him. You've got to expect us to be jumpy about Romanovs. Even leaving Granny out they're an odd lot. There've been some terrific scandals.”

“Would you say that an excessive sense of personal honour was an hereditary characteristic in them?”

(Piers, as usual when bed-talk turned to the Family, was trying to distance himself by adopting the tone and phraseology of the sort of don who must have been pretty well extinct even in his student days.)

“I don't know. Granny was the only one I knew well. When it suited her, I suppose … Why?”

“One could conceive of Alex deciding that since your grandmother entrusted him with her letters partly in the hope that he would use them to continue her various feuds after her death, he might regard it as his duty to do so.”

“And there'd be quite a bit of money in it, too. Anyway, could he? How much is a literary executor allowed to do? If the family don't want it, I mean?”

“It would depend on the wording of the will, I imagine. In any case Sir Savile's office will presumably exhume some pre-Reformation statute in Norman French which empowers your father to have any subjects disembowelled who attempt to publish his mother's correspondence against his will.”

“I can just see the headlines. That's the whole point, darling. There'll be almost more fuss if it gets out we're trying to put the lid on things than if we let it all come out. And it doesn't make any difference that Granny will have got it all wrong. Look at the poor old Dingwalls.”

(When, on the announcement of Louise's engagement to Piers, the hacks had discovered that on the groom's side no family at all existed to be harried for childhood memories, incredible efforts had been made to excavate a hidden past. The search itself had become its own news. One line had been to hunt up doubles of the new celebrity, especially in the neighbourhood of Coventry. A foreman of an abattoir had been found living at Leamington Spa who had a definite resemblance, so his parents—the father had also been in the meat trade—had had to put up not only with several weeks' ferocious scrutiny but with a series of “revelations”, all foundationless, about one or other of them having a secret in their past, once shameful but now in the eyes of the hacks glorious beyond belief.)

“You realise that if Alex is motivated as Sir Savile seems to fear, inviting him to supper may be interpreted by him as meaning that he has hooked his fish?”

“He has, hasn't he? If he's fishing. But if he is then someone's going to have to talk to him somehow, and if he isn't we'll just have had a nice supper-party.”

“Sir Savile could send some pin-striped emissary.”

“Father's always dead against that, if he can help it. Next thing you know is Security have got in on the act and his phone's being tapped and someone's faked a burglary and gone through his papers, and then you've got questions in the House and there's hell to pay. Perhaps I oughtn't to have told Sir Sam in the first place.”

“I'd have imagined Security had enough on their plates preventing us from living our own lives the way we want to.”

“It won't last much longer, darling. It's just another scare. They'll find Gorman's brother living it up under an assumed name in New Orleans, or something. It'll blow over. They always do.”

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1987

1

“T
hat you?”

“…”

“Now listen carefully. I've got something, might do. Got a pencil and paper?”

“…”

“There's someone called Alex Romanov—don't know how you spell it but it's the same as the Russian royal family used to be. Don't know his address. The point is, he's got hold of a lot of letters the old Dowager Princess wrote, the one who had the funeral last week. They're full of all kinds of dirt about the royals. What I was thinking is, suppose you could get a line on him …”

2

Choosing christmas presents was another thing that had quietly changed its nature over recent years. Inevitably, as it swelled and swelled, the Duty List had had to be standardised—so many hampers from Fortnum's, bottles from Berry Bros, soft toys from Hamleys, all the way down to tights from Marks and Sparks. Joan took care of that, and Louise started signing the cards in September. But even choosing things for the Family, which of course she did herself, was no longer the fun it used to be; not living among them now she lacked the confidence of rightness she needed in matching present to person. For instance, a colleague of Piers had set up a three-man company in the Industrial Park attached to the university to make and market gadgets and toys he had invented as a by-product of his research. The fancy intercom Louise used in the nursery was a prototype of his, and this year he had come up with a sort of magician's wand you could point at any light-fitting in a room and make it change intensity or colour. The toy needed special light-fittings, of course, and was about three times as expensive as Mother would have approved of, but it felt perfect for Father—or would have, two Christmases ago. It probably still was, but Louise didn't feel the same certainty and inward satisfaction that she would have in the old days. Perhaps Father had changed, like Albert. Would Albert really be pleased with his weaver-birds? And so on. Even Aunt Bea …

Louise had always given Aunt Bea a huge jigsaw which she took about three months to piece together and then passed on to a hospital. She was strangely puritanical about it, refusing to look at the picture on the lid but letting it gradually reveal itself as she nudged the pieces around with her pudgy white hands, trying and sighing. It was hard to say how much pleasure she got out of the task, in fact it seemed more like some sort of mystical exercise she was forced to perform as part of her duties, bringing into the world images that had hitherto existed only in a royal mind. Louise wanted the picture to be worth the trouble so, though she could easily have asked Joan to tell Hamleys to send a big puzzle while she was ordering the teddy-bears, she preferred to choose it herself. Only after doing so—it was a Lowry snowscape, with soaring factory chimneys and the usual matchstick figures—did it occur to her to wonder whether Aunt Bea would still be interested.

Though it was still four weeks till Christmas she decided on impulse to deliver it herself, and try to guess from Aunt Bea's response whether it was still welcome. At the same time she could see how Aunt Bea was settling in at Hampton Court, and then ring Mother that evening and report.

Royal impulses have built-in safeguards attached, checks and balances, like the British constitution. Louise had this one half way through a speech of peculiarly embarrassing self-importance by the new Director of one of her favourite charities, Wells for the Sahel; she had been in the Sahel, looking at its work, only eight months ago, just before her pregnancy was officially announced. She remembered the pale grey dust, the flies crawling around famine-huge eyes, the hands too listless to brush them away. Now, as the ghastly man pontificated on and on, she could almost sense the water seeping back down into the aquifers leaving nothing but a slop of mud at the bottom of a hundred expensive holes, as if pulled by the same forces as the dwindling interest of the full-fed financiers round the tables. There was nothing she could do. She had already said her brief bit—she wasn't much of a speaker—her function was to bring the punters in, a barker at the tent of charity. Now this crass egotist was making a mess of the whole effort. She kept her mask of smiling attention fixed but switched her mind off, as far away as possible—snow—the Lowry—the jigsaw, bought that morning en route to the luncheon …

Louise was used to the knowledge that at a function like this, and especially with a speaker like this, a good third of the audience would at any given moment be looking not at him but at her. One of the skills Mother had insisted she should acquire, right back in nursery days, was that of opening her handbag, taking out pad and pencil and writing a legible note under the table without moving a muscle that anyone could see. She drooped an arm over the back of her chair with the note between finger and thumb. Constable Evans—just a spare waiter to anyone else at the meal—came to her shoulder and seemed to pick up a napkin from beside the chair. She felt his hand take the note. By the time the speeches were over and Louise had evaded the Director's attempt to monopolise her and done her best to reverse the receding flow of charity by smiles and nods of admiration for two or three big-wigs (double-starred as likely contributors in the unusually good briefing some dogsbody at the charity had sent Joan) the royal impulse had become a Movement Schedule (revised). Evans would have rung Joan at Quercy. Joan would have told Security that HRH would be back an hour late, and why; she would also have rung Aunt Bea; Security would have alerted the people at Hampton Court, and also told the local police that HRH would be passing through; a route would have been agreed, avoiding road-works, and motor-cycle police posted to ease the passage past other bottle-necks—a perk which Louise still felt mildly guilty about, wishing she could have sat out the traffic-jams like any other citizen. Security wouldn't hear of it. They didn't take her crashing though red lights, of course, behind sirening outriders, but they tried to magic her through as if she wasn't there, because the longer she was out on the road, stationary in a jam, especially in an obviously official car after a publicised function from which she could conceivably have been tailed, the more chance there was that somebody might try something. That was what Security said, and though even after Chester Louise couldn't really believe it, she let them have their way. It was seldom worth fighting them. They could make life just as difficult for her as she could for them.

In fact she barely noticed the journey, spending it discussing with Carrie Crupper what if anything to do about the bloody Director. Carrie was the only child of rich, divorced, dotingly demanding parents. By strength of character she had resisted those pressures, insisted on being educated where she chose, mainly in France, and become fluent in three languages. Rather like Piers she seemed to have chosen her own personality, in her case compiling it from opposing elements, street-cred accent, Laura Ashley clothes, cynico-anarchist politics, Filofax-organised days. She'd been making her way up a plush PR firm when Louise had met her. After a couple more meetings, without much hope but because she liked her company, Louise had asked if she'd do a fill-in stint as lady-in-waiting. That had gone well. Carrie had instantly made the job into much more than most people did, and then, unasked, had offered to take it on as one of the regulars for a couple of years. She said it was a good career move, but that might have been one of her jokes.

Ladies-in-waiting have more function that is usually supposed. They have connections—Carrie's were mainly City, a godfather on this set of boards, cronies of her parents on that and that, members of her own circle scrambling up towards t'other. Wells for the Sahel was very much a glossy-brochure and multi-vice-president charity, so Carrie knew some of the people on its council. She could easily call a couple of them about something quite different and mention, as if in passing, that HRH hadn't been very impressed by the Director. That would be quite a big gun to fire at the bastard and Louise was eager to do so, but Carrie gradually whittled her fury away not by saying that the man didn't deserve it but with the old real-world arguments which Louise knew perfectly well—he would have his own power-base: it was still too early in his contract to try and shift him; he'd got good contacts among the tricky Sahel governments; and so on. By the time that the car slid in through the main gate of Hampton Court, Carrie had toned Louise's fury down to manageable disappointment, to be expressed by Joan sending the man only a formal File E letter of thanks. Carrie would ask a few questions, but later. Don't meddle if you can help it, Father always said. (He was a meddler himself, but then he couldn't help it.)

“They never seem to get any further,” said Louise, gazing out at the corner of the canvas-covered scaffolding that veiled the state apartments. “How long is it since the fire?”

“Three years? Or four is it? Builders are always the same. Doesn't matter if it's putting a new loo in a basement flat or rebuilding a palace. They just come and put their mark on a job by knocking a hole in a wall or something. That means no one else can have it and they can go off and finish all the other jobs they'd promised they'd get done the year before last.”

“We went round it while it was still swilling with water from the hoses. It was ghastly.”

“I just hope Lady Surbiton doesn't go smoking in bed.”

“Oh, they don't think the old dear was smoking. She was reading in bed with a candle on her chest.”

“Dead mediaeval. I reckon this must be it.”

The guard who manned the barrier across the entrance to the private apartments was waiting outside his booth, despite the cold. He swung the pole up with one hand while saluting with the other. The Rolls sighed to a halt. Evans came round and opened the door. Another guard was already saluting by the dark little doorway with the brass plates beside it. I'm going to have a lot less fuss next time I come, thought Louise. The guard ushered them into a murky lobby and rattled the lift-gate open. When he made as if to accompany them up Louise stopped him. The lift, grimy oak with battered brass fittings, doddered up.

“It makes me feel like a wood-worm,” said Carrie. “Or a death watch beetle or something. You know, tunnelling through all this timber.”

“Father says that when they were clearing up after the fire they found two residents no one knew existed. They'd just been living here for ever, like spiders in cracks. I think it's just one of Father's stories.”

“Surprising Lady Surbiton didn't want to go on living at KP.”

“There was a pretty little cottage she could have had, but she was determined to move right out. She can be surprisingly obstinate, under that softness. She said she'd go and live in a hotel till we found her something. It wasn't any problem, actually—there's a lot of apartments empty here. Father's having a battle with Mr Ridley, who can't see why he shouldn't privatise them.”

The lift stopped at a dark lobby, the winter light through a small diamond-pane window barely enhanced by that from an iron ceiling-lantern. The door opposite the lift had a brass plate with a name on it, illegible from polishing, like a name on a tombstone. The plate on the door to the left was covered by a card with “Surbiton” lettered onto it in a large, childish hand. A woman was already standing there, leaning on an ebony stick and ringing the bell. She paid no attention at all to the arrival of the lift. The door opened.

“My dear …” said Aunt Bea.

She stopped and peered at the woman through her thick-lensed glasses. Her pale face seemed to float disembodied in the gloom, with her mouth opening and closing so that she looked like a fish in an aquarium tank. She pulled herself together and began to apologise in her usual near-whisper, softer than ever now that her increasing deafness had lost her control of it.

“I'm so sorry. I imagined …”

“Hello, Aunt Bea,” said Louise. “Hordes of visitors.”

The strange woman turned at the voice, acknowledging for the first time that there might be someone else in the lobby. Her movement and attitude, as much as the face that now came into view, revealed the cause of Aunt Bea's behaviour, which Louise had taken for characteristic fluster at finding a different caller on her doormat from the one she'd been told to expect. There was more to it than that. In this dim light, and seen with Aunt Bea's vague vision, the woman was Granny.

The moment you looked at her properly, of course, she wasn't. Granny wouldn't have used a stick or worn a neat grey suit with a matching toque. The large brooch in the toque would have been more her line, if the diamonds were real. You couldn't imagine this woman flinging an arm out in one of Granny's whirling gestures, or calling you by absurd and largely invented Russian-sounding endearments, but she stood as straight and carried her head with the same challenge. Her face was from the same mould.

She glanced at Carrie and Louise, apparently without recognition, then turned back to Aunt Bea.

“Lady Surbiton,” she said, “I am your neighbour, Mrs Walsh. It is time we made ourselves acquainted. May I come in?”

“Oh, but …” began Aunt Bea, but Mrs Walsh was already past her, hobbling with quick, imperious steps along the hallway. Louise stepped forward and kissed Aunt Bea.

“It's all right,” she whispered. “Don't send her away. We're hardly staying. If she lives next door you'd better start off on the right foot with her.”

Aunt Bea sighed with relief. The idea of her sending anyone anywhere—let alone as formidable an intruder as Mrs Walsh seemed to be—was absurd.

They found Mrs Walsh standing in the middle of Aunt Bea's living-room, looking systematically around. The decor and furniture were pure Aunt Bea, that is to say as dull as human lack of imagination could make them, with a forest-green carpet, cream walls, crackle-parchment lampshades, dozens of slightly out-of-focus snapshots which didn't quite fit their frames, green self-stripe chair-covers with dull gold braid. But the room, with its low ceiling and leaded casement windows and lack of straight edges or square corners, imposed a character of its own, giving a sense of being a cell in this huge old complex, surrounded by scores of similar cells, all of them carrying the imprint of quiet and secretive generations living out their lives there. Beyond the windows, under a dismal December sky, canvas-covered scaffolding veiled the opposite side of the courtyard where the work was still going on to repair the damage caused by an old lady living just such a life, including a preference for reading in bed with a candle on her chest.