Van Gogh's Room at Arles (18 page)

“But our theme is coming home, pride, gladness, the almost physical release one feels in finding oneself in the bosom of one’s kind, within, as it were, all the warming fires of consanguine blood, all the …

“Pardon us. We are no metaphysical prince and the last thing on our mind today is speculation, let alone attempting to fit such speculation to a lofty rhetoric. Henceforth, we shall endeavor to banish from our speech that which as merely Prince we had only arrogated anyway—— the royal, we mean, pronoun, and address you properly, with ‘I,’ with ‘me,’ with ‘my’ …”

And I, though I was close enough to him to have heard his words—in a front-row seat, actually—even without benefit of the various microphones on the lectern before him that fed the words into the public-address and other equipment, one mike, I guessed, for radio, one for TV, another perhaps for the local archives, and still one more for the high-resolution Minicam machinery used by the crew that traveled with him in order to prepare a documentary on

Lawrence for French TV—— all the time thinking:
Miss

Bristol? Miss Bristol?,
and parsing the eloquent syntax of the name’s placement between the Right Honorable MP from the Lothian chain and all those loyal subjects, honored guests, and welcome friends.

“… and because I do not feel symbolic here in what is neither protectorate nor commonwealth, republic nor state, hegemony nor league nor loose association. Not confederation or jurisdiction, not even this, well,
not Canada,
with— Their Majesty’s faces on the money or no—all its pretensions to home rule, but only, quite simply, this honest-to-God
home,
a place which actually has its own MP—— this vestige and outpost, this geographical quirk, like an outbuilding, say, as accessory as Northern Ireland or Wales. …”

Thinking,
Miss Bristol, Miss Bristol?

“… where I am not just passive witness, watching the ritual dances, accepting the flowers, the grayish leis of rotting bones and teeth, hearing the tuneless, gibberish chants to the arrhythmic, asyndeton claps on human skin and heads like the pat-down hand search of someone suspicious picked out of a line filing through Customs. But home, at home, taking my ease,
feeling
at ease, and laying this wreath at the tomb of Captain Spears-Henry out of ordinary common courtesy, not ceremoniously, but rather like a guest bringing a bottle of table wine to his hostess at a dinner party.”

Thinking, wondering, trying to translate the priorities—— after the Lord Mayor and nobs and hons, but before the gentry, all those captains of all that cottage industry which was the reason the town existed at all; before the spouses; before the Anglophiles over from California and up from Mexico for the day. Miss Bristol? Miss Bristol?

“Yet I would not have you think Cape Henry is just another stopover on my voyage. Indeed not. For me it will forever have its associations, even its historic associations, even—dare I express it?—its romantic ones. For it is here, in this lovely place, that I have the pleasure and honor of announcing my engagement and of introducing my fiancée to you.

“Miss Bristol? Louise, darling, would you please join me on the rostrum? Our friends so very much want to meet you.”

For a moment nothing happened at all. Then there was this pure reflex noise of reaction, almost, I should imagine, like the sound on a battlefield when flashes of light are followed by the pop of shells—— some inside-out physics of sound and light. One could hear the motor-driven cameras, this buzz of photography as everyone in the crowd turned and snapped pictures of everyone else, clicking off random, indiscriminate images, shaving their odds, wasting their film, hoping that if they just took enough pictures the chance of taking the right one and of catching the pleased Louise, whoever she might be, would be just that much more enhanced. Even the French camera crew wheeled, recklessly aiming their Minicams. It was the din of farce.

The press could not buy up
all
of them. There must still be, in private collections, at least fifty photographs and a dozen videos of my at-first-startled, then bewildered, and finally annoyed, face.

Louise was not in the least pleased.

“Come up, come up,” commanded the Prince and, when I did not move, actually started to clap his hands, leading the applause, exactly as if he were an entertainer in a club trying to embarrass a member of the audience into coming up on stage with him.

I was not pleased, I was not embarrassed. If anything, it was out of some vestigial patriotism I joined him. I swear to you, loyalty was what first got me into this fix.

I let him take my hand. I let him hold me. I let him kiss me in public. I kissed him back. I swear to you, it was out of duty I did it, this old atavistic, juvenile echo of my first impressions of the Crown, of God and Country.

In the same fashion I stood passively by as he explained to our countrymen the history of crossover blood, of kings and commoners. In the same fashion still, I held my tongue while the s-- of a b---- went on about what a boon it was for the imperial stock to indulge such marriages. I think I was visibly shaken only when he announced that he had obtained his parents’ prior consent to make this engagement.

(All right, Sid, he’d comforted me. Are you satisfied? Those spermy juices of my aloe plant on my palms and fingers. What, did you think I was stone? I’m not stone, I wasn’t stone. Are
you
stone, are your readers? Why, then, do they turn these pages? So I’m not stone. Nor any pedestaled female woven of ivory by some Pygmalion. You men. Though I’ll say this for him—— he comforted me. H-- 1, even if he wasn’t Pygmalion, he could have been some perfect prince of massage!

(Why did you give me that check? No one’s perfect. My failed and tragic love affair, remember? That sent me packing from England off to the States to put some distance between my heart and its circumstances? For what I thought would be only six months, but which in the event …?

(All right, Sid, we’d d--- the ---d! W-’- done the deed, I say. There, are you satisfied?

(But it didn’t have to be fifty thousand pounds now, did it? It didn’t even have to be the Prince. All it had to be was a woman, any woman. Any woman owning up. Any woman owning up to what she put there and then what he put
there.
Whatever it was that sent me packing in the first place. Whoever it was. Or whatever it was I did with whoever it was I did it with during my hiatus, or exile, or expatriation, or whatever you want to call it, in the States. Because I’m not stone. You don’t pay a stone fifty thousand pounds just to know who’s thrown what where. I’m telling you. You men!)

Fortunately, I’d dressed for the occasion (even though I didn’t know what the occasion was going to be, even though I didn’t know I was the occasion I was dressing for), and had on a flowery silk print dress, with a stylish but oh- so-proper hemline, with matching high-heeled shoes and a large, wide-brimmed straw hat. I fancy I
seemed
rather like a prince’s fiancée and would have looked at home at Ascot, under a tent at Henley for the boat race, or at any royal garden party, but was as overdressed for this lot—because outpost or not, home or not, even England or not, it was still the provinces—of tourists, day trippers, and holiday makers, in their blue jeans, sportswear, and bathing costumes, as the Prince himself in his bespoke suits, custom ties, and handkerchiefs, and all his never-to-be-broken-in, throwaway shoes, might have seemed before a band of Fiji Islanders performing their ceremonial fire dances, or rain- making, or sacrificial bloodlettings or somesuch, and that he’d been at such rhetorical pains to distinguish them from just moments before. (And I’ll tell you this, Sir Sid; one of the downsides of being a prince, or his fiancée either, is that you’re never quite comfortable in the clothes you wear. And between the fittings and all those public appearances one’s always making, you hardly have time to breathe, or—pardon my French—find a spare moment to go to the W.C. Larry was quite right when he complained about his boredom and exhaustion. He was quite right when he said that about his being like a trained athlete. These people must shower three and four times a day. In all their untried, first- time-out boots, waders, and brand-spanking-new fishing gear, cunningly worked creels and the packed seaweed that lines them as if for fresh fish flown in daily to world-class restaurants. Athletes indeed. Like artists’ models or film stars trained in the arts of standing still, posing, their muscles as glib as bird dogs’, hounds’. Speaking for myself, I know I became this like trained—pardon my French—bladder athlete during my reign as his Princess manqué. Pardon my French.)

All right, Sid. I know. I still haven’t earned it. A tuppence of toilet humor don’t make a dent in fifty thousand pounds.

We went back to the wicky-up.

“Now I know what all that aloe is for. You weave wicky- ups, don’t you?”

“How would you know about something like that?”

“Oh, I’ve been around,” he said.

“You?”

“I bivouacked in plenty of places like this when I set up for a sailor. It wasn’t all Dartmouth and Greenwich at Dartmouth and Greenwich. The Royal Navy was never any respecter of persons. The British Empire depends on its Fleet even if it ain’t the British Empire anymore. I may as well have been a cabin boy as a prince for all the difference it made to my warrant officers. So, sure, I’ve woven plenty of walls from these sharp, saw-toothed fronds. We called it ‘sewing houses.’”

“That’s what
we
call it!”

“We?”

“My roommates and me. Jane and Marjorie. I think they’re actresses.”

“So, certainly. I’ve swept up many a peck of sand in my time, and taken what comfort I could from what aloe I could get whenever I could get it. Of course,” he said, “it isn’t supposed to be as important for a man to have smooth, creamy hands as it is for a woman, Louise.”

He took both my hands and held them in one big, smooth palm.

“Yech,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing,” he said, “I was just thinking about all the times I beachcombed sandfruit for breakfast, and how it gave me the runs.”

I withdrew my hands.

“What?” he said. “What?”

“It gives Jane the runs, too,” I told him coolly.

“Look,” said the Prince, “didn’t you just ask whether I was one of those Let’s-Trade-Places sort of princes? Well, I am, Louise.”

“A commoner in every port, is it?”

“No,” he said, taking back my hands and pressing them to his lips. “What, are you kidding me, Louise,” he muttered his demurrers, looking up, “you know me better than that.” He took me in his athlete’s arms. It was thrilling, Sid, thrilling. Well, he was handsome. And all those months in the States living one’s life like a more-or-less nun. And him with all his dark good looks. I tell you I felt like a nurse in a novel.

So, what with this and what with that, we were soon enough rolling round down on the sandy floor of the wicky-up enjoying a bit of the old leg-over, so given up to passion I didn’t realize what happened when we crashed into the hotel bellman’s cart Jane and Marjorie and I used to hang up our clothes and was all we had for wardrobe or even for furniture in that tiny hut, spilling the clothes, tumbling the coats and shifts and dresses and gowns down from where they hung on the rack, Prince Lawrence so excited and lusty I could almost believe his earnest demurrers of just three or four minutes before.

(Was I naïve, Sid? Who’s to say? Anyway, I don’t think so, for what was the morning line on this prince while his two younger brothers and two younger sisters were off sowing their wild oats and getting their names in the papers, making it into the gossip columns with their famous scrapes and muddles that had always the faint air about them of throwbacks to different, gayer times—— like ne’er-do-wells running with a fast crowd, and fortunes lost gambling; careless Sloane Rangers sent down from Cambridge or Oxford, or come away with dubious seconds and thirds; his siblings excused or explained away or even written off by their place in the birth order? Only that, baby-boomer prince or no baby-boomer prince, in the curious reign of the peculiarly marked incumbency of these particular sovereigns he was conscientious, notable for the advantage he took of photo ops—and why not with his beauty?—and for his solicitous gestures, his polished idiosyncrasies and special relationships with all his inferiors—well, I was an example, wasn’t I?—and that he might be too good to be true, right down to the impression he gave of having just stepped out of a trailer on locale somewhere, of being this, well, film star got
up
as a prince, not a hair out of place, all perfected and rested while a stand-in stood on his mark taking the heat for him while the crew got ready, setting the lights, fussing the sound, till they sent a gofer to the trailer to fetch him— “Five minutes please, Prince”—and he stepped out, majestic and grand as you please, his jacket and tie and collar as perfectly in place as they’d be on some little girl’s cutout of a jacket and tie and collar that she tabs on a doll that she’s punched from a book.)

So excited and lusty that at the moment of truth he neither called on God nor made the customary noises and growls and oh! oh! oh!s of satisfaction but shouted out: “
IT WAS THAT ALOE THAT BROUGHT IT ALL BACK
!”And from somewhere deep within his seafaring engrams and naval neurals actually began to sing—— “On the road to Mandalay,/Where the flyin’-fishes play,/An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay!”

“Good Lord,” he said checking his new watch and jumping up to gather his new things when we had done, “just look at the time, will you! They’ll be waiting for me! Hurry, Louise, but don’t rush. I’ve reserved a seat for you!”

So as least I didn’t make a complete fool of myself, and either luck was with me or I’d had the unconscious foresight to be dressed for the occasion when Larry called me up to stand beside him on the reviewing stand. Even though I was still uncomfortable. And I’m not only referring to my state of mind when I say that—though, as I’ve said, it was out of vestigial patriotism that I was up there at all—but literally, too. Physically uncomfortable. Well, there was sand in my high-heeled shoes, in my stockings and in the dress I was wearing. And though it doesn’t come through well on the videos (thanks to that flower print I had on), not even on that special high-resolution tape the Frenchmen were using for their documentary about Larry, if you know where to look you can almost just see the aloe stains and vague patches of chlorophyll on my dress from when the Prince and I were rolling around in abandon on the frond-strewn clothing-carpeted floor of the unwinding wicky-up.