Van Gogh's Room at Arles (17 page)

Though I’d known he was coming of course. As did Jane, as did Marjorie. We’d even discussed our plans to go see him. Allegiant, interested, dutied, patriotic’d. (Curious, too. We forgot because we were new on the island and caught up in our individual rebeginnings.) In the square the Prince picked up his pace, as the retainers, seeming genuinely to try now, did theirs, though knowing in their accustomed souls they could never keep up but that somehow they had an obligation if not to the realm then at least to their corps, to some tradition of equerries, retainers, and handlers, knowing it would cost them nothing to be loyal, that this Prince would have his way with them no matter what they did, so that even if they did let up their merely shown-flag haste would lose out anyway to the real power of his insouciant, sincere deferentials and bluff, awkward bearing. The crowd not crowding him but fallen back as if he were some battle prince out of history, not boarding or clamoring him as if he were a rock-and-roll star, his fans not standing tiptoe, just standing back, behind the velvet ropes, not in retreat, fallen back even from me, so the Prince, seeing what was what, turned to one of us, to me in this instance, and spoke up. “Oh,” he said, “I’m terribly sorry. How inexcusably rude of me. I was just going into this shop.” “Go in, Your Highness,” I said, and, courtly as could be, nice as pie, His Highness singals, “After you.” Of course I defer. As does the Prince. As then do I. Until, in a kind of shock, the crowd signals, “Well, if it’s what His Highness
wants
…” So I go in. And Larry turns to the people in the road and signals “After
all
of you.” And passes them through like someone taking tickets. Like an usher. Like a cop directing traffic or a coach waving a runner in from third. And then goes through himself. Leaving the others behind like people lined up for the second show. Leaving the show-biz retinue behind too.

And this occurred—— that I might have been the only non-show-biz type left in the shop, my Prince’s lone remaining bona fide witness, a fiddle if not of yeomanry then of just that much more hero-building effacement, more historic gull to the historic shill of all those drawers of the lightning; behind the elaborate lines and colorful smoke screen of all that cadre of lookouts and posted guards—— that this was just for my benefit, that I was as necessary a part of the process as the Prince himself; that all that was left in the aloe shop now were myself and the show-biz tourists got up in the lamb’s cloth of what was merely that much more retinue—— that even the wreath-and-aloe saleslady was a show-biz wreath-and-aloe saleslady. (But conflicted, too, don’t you know. Mindful that perhaps I’d been in the States too long. Where they take their drawers of the lightning even more seriously than we do in England, and almost every other person in the crowd—not counting the armed chaps on the roofs and in all the windows or the reporters who ask some of the toughest questions at the press conference—is Secret Service, SWAT, or CIA.) And, My, I’m thinking in the tropes of a paranoia turned inside out, all this attention. For little me? Why, thank you, kind sirs and mesdames, and thank
you,
kind Sir. Self-conscious as the recipient of a singing telegram, don’t you know, or a guest of honor, or someone not used to it at her very first Command Performance.

I may have been blushing; I was probably blushing. Whereupon the most remarkable thing.

He dismissed them.

In that same efficient semaphore with which he’d passed them through. At the same time, seeing me with my banknotes in my hand, signaling me to remain behind, and freezing the show-biz wreath-and-aloe lady in her place. One look, one look did it, one all-inclusive gesture—this complicated syntax of self-assured silence. So that when the shop had cleared and he finally spoke to her, I was the only one left to hear.

“I’m looking,” says the Prince, “for a wreath. Do you
do
wreaths?”

“Oh yes, Your Highness, but we’re such a
small
village. The resident population can’t be but four or five thousand at most, though closer to four, I should think.”

“Yes?” goes His Highness.

“Just enough commissionaires to open the doors at the taxi rank, just enough porters to handle the cobble and trim of the holiday makers, just enough publicans and innkeepers, barmaids, tapsters, and potboys. Just enough ostlers. Just enough chars. Just enough buskers to sink in the streets and play their guitars outside the cinema.”

“So?” says the Successor.

“Just enough drivers to drive the red double-decker buses and just enough Pakis to collect your fare and hand you your change. Just enough unarmed bobbies to answer questions about directions and make sure the pubs close after last call. Just enough Tommies. Just enough of the King’s Home Guard Cavalry to stand in the sentry boxes under their bearskin busbies and challenge the tourists to provoke reactions for snapshots. Just enough men to change the guard outside the Governor’s Palace. And just enough people to pick up the post from the kiosks for day trippers to send home just for the sake of the canceled stamp.”

“I don’t make out …” says the Heir Apparent.

“Just enough cockney accents; just enough Liverpudlian, Yorkshire, Welsh. Just enough Scots, Sir; just enough Lincolnshire. (Though we both know, don’t we, Sire, how clannish East Englanders are and how they pretty much keep to themselves.) Just enough C of E rectors to offer up mass and call out the number of the hymn from the Book of Common Prayer. Just enough choristers …”

“… your meaning.”

“Well, it’s not as if we had a proper cemetery, is it, Highness?” says his subject-apparent.

“Madam?”

“Well, we’re an outpost of Empire, aren’t we, Prince? Closer to the States than Bermuda, we are. We drive on the left side of the road here, we do, and quainter we are than bowlers and bumbershoots. We’re an enterprise, we are.”

“I’m not sure …”

“You’re not sure? You’re sure.”

“Is this the way, madam, you address your future King?”

“Well, you’re not my King yet, you know. And really, M’lud, when push comes to shove you haven’t any
real
power. You can’t shut me up in the Tower or have me beheaded, can you? I mean, you’re all symbolic-like, aren’t you?

“It’s the bargains you come for. You came for a price on the flowers. It’s your way and it’s charming, and you’re quite famous for it, but do you know what I give for a wreathing? The labor alone? The cost of all that coiling and twisting and interweaving? We’re not, as I say, a big population—three or four thousand at most, but closer to three, I should think. And no more graveyard to speak of than what fits in back of a church. And the artisans died out. And most of the personnel on this tight little fun fair of an island, this picturesque theme park of an empire—those not gone to bush—posted back to Britain before they’re fifty. And it isn’t as if we’re equipped to lay out holiday makers, so I have to bring in extra hands, don’t I? Navvies and erks and night porters. Factoti. So I’m dead sorry, Wilshire, my wreaths
have
to be pricey.”

“I’m still looking,” he says to me, “you go ahead.”

“Some aloe, please,” I tell the woman and give over my banknote while at the same time I try to hide my cut, chafed and burning hands.

“It’s ready,” she says, “but wasn’t it Jane’s turn, or Marjorie’s?”

“Jane quite forgot, I’m afraid,” I said.

“No, please,” said the Prince. “Wait and I’ll help you with that.”

In the end he didn’t bargain with her, he didn’t even seem angry. He let her rude remarks pass like the great gentleman he was. “I’ll take that one,” he said, and pointed to a large, leafy wreath interlaced with long ropes of bright yellow flowers.

“Yes,” said the awful woman, “it’s the only one we have, isn’t it?”

“If you know so much about my ways,” said the Prince, “then you know I never carry money. Indeed, I hardly ever look at it. My personal equerry will take care of you.” He turned to me. “Give me that,” he said. Well, I was confused. The aloe plant was rather big, and he was already carrying his great heavy wreath. I half thought he meant to steal it from me.

His equerry was waiting outside. All the others had gone. Not even a bobby was to be seen in that queer, translated, odd English street. No cars were there, no red double-deck buses with their extraordinarily high route numbers—I already knew there were only two routes in that tiny town and that while they took you past different points of interest, both ended up discharging their passengers at the same spot—and now the place, except for the shops on the High Street—the greengrocers, the Boots, the W. H. Smith, the Marks and Spencer, and various others—the hire purchase and estate agents and removal companies and cafes and fish- and-chips, the offtrack betting, the theatre and the cinema, et cetera—seemed not so much deserted as abandoned, evacuated even. In the distance I could just make out a residential area—— a block of flats, an occasional thatched roof, one or two County Council-looking structures.

“It seems we must pay a hundred pence on the pound to the tick,” he told the fellow. “Organise it for me, would you? There’s a lad. Oh, and take this for me, Colin, I’m assisting the girl.”

He handed the wreath over to his equerry.

He relieved me of the aloe plant and, exposing my raw, rubbed hands, said, “Oh, your poor hands.” He broke off a leaf and squeezed out its white juices. Laying the plant down, he rubbed the stuff across my palms and the back of my hands. He spread it up and down my fingers. It was as sticky as sperm.

“You’re not a tourist then,” he said, chatting me up like any young man any young girl.

I saw what was up, I knew what was what. “This isn’t some droit du seigneur thing, is it, Your Peerage?”

“I hate that,” said the Prince.

“What do you hate?”

“All those awful ‘Your This’ and ‘Your That’ jokes. Calling me ‘Highness,’ calling me ‘Wilshire.’ ‘M’lud.’ Calling me ‘Sire.’ Calling me ‘Peerage.’ Having a prince on. She was right, though, that dreadful woman. I
am
‘symbolic-like,’ I have no real power. It’s almost the start of the next century. People have had it with Royals. They’re starting to agitate for reforms. We can’t say we blame them.”

He suddenly seemed boyish, he suddenly seemed shy.

“Say, you’re not one of those Let’s-Trade-Places sort of princes, are you?”

“What if I were?”

“Well, I should be very sorry to know it, My Lord Grace,” I said, teasing him.

(Flirting! I was actually flirting! Not only for the first time in years, but with someone whose power, symbolic or not, was as real to me, or to my outraged class-conscious blood, as it might have been not so many centuries before when he
could
have shut me up in the tower, or had me beheaded, or made me his strumpet. Am I getting warm, Sir Sid?)

“Lawrence! My name is Lawrence, and if someone doesn’t call me by it soon, I shall go over the wall!”

“
‘Up
the wall,’” I corrected.

“Over
it, by God bl--dy f---ing he-l!
Over
it!”

“Oh, Prince,” I said, by which I meant speak to me, make yourself clear, help me to understand.

“Well you would do,” he said as if reading my mind, “if you spent any only three days filling the appointments on the Court Calendar. Any only three? Any only two.
One!

“I’m young. Not yet thirty. It isn’t that I’m bored— though I’m bored—so much as exhausted. And these tours are the worst. I put on a good show, I give them a run for their money. Well,
you
saw! It would kill a normal man, what I do. I’m like a trained athlete. But there’s just so much even a trained athlete can take. During the Season I put in a half hour at a Ball, then rush on to the next. And the next. And the next. I mingle and mingle and mingle. And always with some aide-de-camp or plenipotentiary two decades older than myself at my ear and whispering the names of those I must greet as if they were state secrets. What I need is someone at the other ear giving me the names of all those plenipotentiaries and aides-de-camp. Well,
you
saw. I called him ‘Colin.’ My equerry. That wasn’t Colin. Colin is heavier.

“But these tours are exhausting. They take it out of one.

“Hither’d in America forty miles in a motorcade to watch two innings of a ballgame, and yon’d to take one course at a banquet.

“And all the time working out our rehearsed idiosyncrasies. Well, you
saw.
One young prince was famous for trying to perfect a steam-powered perambulator most of his adult years. And there was another, this royal was owed a permanent crown for a back tooth. When she died the monarch who succeeded her insisted the work be completed by the dentist. I understand the poor man had to pry the dead queen’s jaws open in order to replace the temporary with the permanent crown. He delayed his mother’s burial for thirty-five hours until the dentist who’d been working on her could make good on the crown.”

“How mean, how awful for the dentist.”

“Not really. The fellow got a ‘By Appointment to HBM’ plaque out of it and the new king earned a reputation for being frugal.

“So you see. It isn’t so easy being in my position.”

“There’s lots have it worse.”

“Are there? Do they? Oh, I hope so!”

Sunday, January 19, 1992

How We Got Engaged

“Lord Mayor Miniver, My Lord and Lady Lewes. Anthony Fitz-Sunday, Right Honorable MP from the Lothian Chain. Miss Bristol, honored guests, loyal subjects, and welcome friends. We would be remiss if we did not take the opportunity today to tell you how very,
very
glad it makes us feel to be home. Even though till this morning we had never set foot on your beautiful island, Cape Henry, or, indeed, as much as glimpsed the Lothians on the horizon like so many gray serpents at the bottom of a spyglass.

“We were ‘too young’ to accompany His Royal Highness, our father, when he visited these islands with Her Royal Highness, our mother, in the sixties, or to accompany them on their second tour when they returned in the seventies, by which time we were engaged in our training at the Royal Naval Colleges at Dartmouth and Greenwich. For the reason we did not come with them on His and Her Royal Highnesses’ yacht on its famous round-the-world cruise in the sixties was not, as the story that was put out at the time had it, that we were ‘too young,’ but that, even at five, when most children that age have already become jaded by the roundabout and demand to be taken on thrill rides at Battersea Park that might put off men and women four and five times older, we had not yet found our sea legs. Now it will not do, of course, for a future King of England not to find his sea legs. After all, what is it they say—‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves …’?