“I don’t know,” he said. “I was covered with a French overcoat, I think, and so they mistook me.”
“And now a French blanket,” she said. “So what’s the injury?”
He looked down toward his left arm, thought he might vomit, looked away.
“Don’t look then,” she said, patting his right shoulder gently. She pushed his fringe behind his ear. It was such an intimate gesture. He felt her touch warm him. The warmth stayed there. “You’ve hit your head too,” she said.
He could have watched her all day, he thought. It was the morphine, or the loss of blood. He must focus.
“I’m the batman to the Prince of Wales,” he said.
“Well, bully for you,” she said. “I’m the ambulance driver to Royaumont. I think I trump you right now, strictly speaking, as you need a doctor not a prince. And I couldn’t care less about batmen, much less about your jolly prince who got us into this mess. But I think we’re going to save that arm.” She looked around. “Close your eyes.”
“Why—”
“I said close them.”
He did as he was told. He heard another voice, male, speaking in French. “Driver, are you clear to go?”
“I’m taking this one as well,” she replied, also in French.
Perhaps she was French. The Canadians were French, weren’t they?
“He’s English,” the man said. “He’s going to the C.C.S. at Soissons.”
He had been out in the sun for hours, he knew. The longer he was out there, the less likely it was they could save his arm. He knew this too. He had seen the studies, the time between injury and aid being of critical importance. This was why they’d established the C.C.S. system, casualty clearing stations, so that the badly injured could get help. But no help had come so far, he thought bitterly.
“What will happen to him?” she asked.
“We’ve contacted them. They’re coming.”
He heard her voice, annoyed now. “No,” she said. “Soissons is cut off again.”
The man didn’t reply.
“I know him,” she said. “He’s a family friend. Let me take him to Royaumont.”
“You can’t just take every soldier you fancy,” he said, switching to accented English.
“I’m only taking one,” she said. “I have room.”
“No,” he said. “We can’t make exceptions. He’s English. He must go to an English hospital. We are funding Royaumont, not the English.”
There was quiet then. He opened one eye. They were alone.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re not finished yet, not by a mile. Give me a minute.” She smiled then and she looked so very young. It filled him with hope, which was the most dangerous feeling. He thought he might cry.
He bit his lip hard.
He watched her walk away from him, had the strongest urge to call her back. He was sure he would never see her again. Oh God, how weak he was.
It had been three days since the explosion. His wounds were septic, he suspected. She’d screwed up her nose when she uncovered his arm. He might die, he thought. It might be better than losing his arm, his left. He was left-handed.
Just then two French soldiers appeared, one with a head wound, the other a bandaged leg. They each took one end of the stretcher. She was with them, looking around. “Are we allowed to do this?” one of them said in French.
“Of course,” she said. “Quickly now. We must get him to Royaumont. He’s a batman.” That smile. In another context, he’d think she was making fun of him. But since she was taking him away from here, she couldn’t be unkind if she tried.
* * *
—
The drive was excruciating, long. The track was rutted. Every bump. The morphine had worn off, he could be very sure now, and while he couldn’t feel his arm anymore, his right leg, where he’d taken shrapnel, was aching, dully at first and then in full bloom. His head hurt too. He remembered then the unique noise as his eardrum burst, like the sea rushing in. Shocking, unrelenting, its report over and over.
The flash of light at the blast kept coming back in his mind’s eye. Was David with him? He couldn’t have been. Someone would have told him. David wasn’t there, he was almost sure; they’d never have lost him if David had been there.
He heard a church bell in the distance. His life was all about sound now, what he heard, and the sun, which shone through the trees and warmed his face. He would die here, in the sun, the distant bells.
By the time the two young orderlies were pulling his stretcher from the ambulance, he was entirely numb again.
Someone was calling out, “You didn’t say which are priority. This one?”
He could see a single pillar of what must have once been a church leaning precariously toward him and, next to it, a vine climbing a high wall.
Had she said Royaumont? Wasn’t there an abbey called Royaumont near Paris?
And then her voice in reply. “Yes, the stretcher is urgent,” she was saying. He heard accents, English, Scottish. Where the hell were they? “The others are all walking. But get him to X-ray soonest,” she said.
Seven
LONDON, 1997
I beg your pardon?” Victoria said.
Princess. He’d said Princess Diana. Ewan never used Diana’s title.
“Your tickets are sorted,” Ewan said. “Flights are full, so it’s the tunnel, I’m afraid. I think you’re on the eleven thirty. You’ll have to get a move on.” He looked at Daniella, who was listening to a call on one of the phones in the conference room, taking notes. She nodded.
“I’m sorry?” Victoria couldn’t concentrate on what Ewan was saying. Diana was dead?
“Go!” he said. “Harry says we’re redoing September.” Harry Knight, editor in chief of The Eye and owner of Knight News.
“Where?” she said.
He shook his head. “Paris, unless you have a better idea.”
Victoria looked around the room, trying to take it in. All eyes were on her now. “She’s dead?” Diana was thirty-six, Victoria’s age. Their birthdays were a month apart.
“And we’re covering it?” She looked at Ewan. “We’re pulling September to make Diana the lead?” Ewan despised the monarchy.
“Not the time, Tori,” Meredith said. Meredith was crying. Meredith was from advertising. People from advertising didn’t cry.
“How?” Victoria said.
“You really don’t know?” Ewan said. “Car crash. Paris. With Dodi Fayed.” He half choked as he said it. Ewan, her editor, was holding back tears, tears about Diana.
Dodi Fayed was the new boyfriend. Victoria had seen Nathan Ashbury’s picture, the one Nathan said The Sunday Sun paid him a quarter of a million pounds for. THE KISS! He took it after Diana telephoned and told him where she was, or so Nathan told Danny. You could never really trust Nathan, but perhaps it was true. Perhaps Diana had telephoned him and said, “Hi, Nathan, I’m in the Mediterranean on the Harrods’ yacht. Come photograph me.”
Danny had shot Diana, of course. He was one of the favorites. Sometimes, he said. He’d done that famous picture for The Sun in the early days of the royal romance, the one that made her skirt see-through. “She’s one of those women—loves a lens,” he said, which reminded Victoria of something, but she couldn’t think of what it was. “Until she’s in a bad mood, then she hates it. You can’t win with women like that.”
Victoria’s friend Claire was still working for The Eye then. She told Danny he was kidding himself if he thought anyone would like what he and his colleagues did to Diana. Claire was cynical about most things, but she’d always been in Diana’s camp.
“It’s a job, Claire,” Danny had said. “And I’m fucking good at it.”
Danny did have a kind of mental swagger, it was true. He was a good photographer, but you had to accommodate the swagger
if you wanted him to get a shot for you. It was probably the only way you could do his job and not kill yourself. That’s what Claire said.
Claire was right about the photographers though. You’d never want anyone doing what they did to you. Victoria was sure about that now.
Diana was dead? The truth kept coming in and out of focus in Victoria’s brain, her thoughts as thick and slow as molasses.
She opened her mouth to say something and closed it again.
“Do whatever you need to,” Ewan was saying, “but get moving. I’ll brief you after we finish here.”
“Okay,” Victoria said. She stood to go. “Hang on. I have a lunch today, the one you organized—Finian Inglis.”
Ewan looked away down to the left and back at Victoria. “Oh yes, of course.” He considered it. “Probably not for us.” He was tapping a pen on the tabletop absentmindedly.
“Why did you set it up then?”
“I don’t know, because it might be? Fin Inglis runs Barlow Inglis, the publisher, so he’s a somebody. They published M. A. Bright’s Autumn Leaves. He says there’s a second novel, Summer Sky or something.” Ewan rubbed his chin. “He seems pretty convinced.”
“By M. A. Bright?” Victoria said. “Well, that would be extraordinary, wouldn’t it?”
Ewan was looking out to the bullpen, weighing it up.
“What if it’s genuine?” Victoria said.
“I’ll eat my hat and yours.” This was Des Pearce, a personal friend of Harry Knight who had a column in Vicious. It was hard to say exactly what Des wrote about. What Victoria knew was that he didn’t write it very well, and yet month after month he garnered letters, from men mostly, who saw the world the way he did. Right place at the right time was what Ewan said about him. He kept middle-aged men happy, which, apparently, was part of the magazine’s job.
Dinosaur was what Claire, who now ran her own PR agency, called Des and old men like him who’d been kicking around newspapers when Lord Beaverbrook was a boy beaver, as Claire was fond of saying. “They just don’t know they’re extinct.”
Des was slightly reptilian in appearance, Victoria thought now as she looked over at him; big eyes, scaly skin, not much hair, a head that sat forward like a lizard, little fingers. Yes, one of those fat lizards on bent legs on that island . . . What was it called?
Diana was dead?
More reptile than beaver, for sure. Reptilian. Was beaverian a word?
Des interrupted her train of thought. “M. A. Bright must be a hundred and fifty if he’s a day,” he said. “It’s sure to be a hoax.”
Des knew everything, naturally.
“Oh, put a lid on it, Des,” someone said.
“Ewan?” Victoria said.
Ewan sighed. “Des is right. M. A. Bright would be old if he served in the First World War. I just had a feeling . . . Fin wouldn’t call for nothing.” He took a breath in, held it momentarily, and then sighed. “Look, do it. If we don’t, he might go to someone else and we’d kick ourselves if we let it go. Fin’s only contacted me because he and my father were at school together. Go and meet him and see what he says. We’ll put you on the first train to Paris after lunch.”
“I can go to Paris,” Des said.
The room went silent. Writers stopped clicking pens, keyboarders stopped tapping keys and all eyes turned to Ewan. The thought of Des Pearce covering the death of Diana didn’t bear thinking about.
“No,” Ewan said. “Victoria, you’re going.”
The noise resumed. “Yes, do the lunch,” Ewan said, looking at Victoria and not Des. “The dailies will cover the accident scene; we’ll be out of date by the time we print if we go for that. When you get to Paris you can file a weather piece for Harry for The Eye tomorrow. We can work out what we need for the magazine once we know the funeral arrangements. We don’t even know yet what the family’s doing. This will be tricky for them. I’m sure we’ll get something later this morning when the Queen comes down. I’ll see what our deadlines look like, how much we can push back.”
They’d locked up on Friday night. It was always a difficult time as Ewan was allergic to closure, a reasonable quality in a writer but a poor one in an editor. Victoria’s profile of a young British actress named Kate Winslet was the cover story. Danny had convinced Winslet to have her photograph taken in front of a painted brick wall at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, angels and devils in the background. It was Danny’s picture, rather than Victoria’s story, that ensured the story was on the cover.
Victoria had the best job in the world, her friends all said, and she made sure she agreed with them. Ben had said last night that she was the same as the photographers who waited outside their flat every morning. Did he say that? She shook her head involuntarily.
“Victoria?” Ewan said.
“Fine,” Victoria said, although she hadn’t heard his question.
“Are we really covering this for the magazine?” Des Pearce asked.
Ewan sighed. “I think we’ll have to,” he said. “She’s a major figure.”
“But Diana’s so tarnished,” Des said.
“What an awful word to use,” one of the younger journalists said. “She’s just died.”
“Yes,” said Ewan. “Des, forget it.”
“How long do you want me there?” Victoria asked Ewan.
“Until we know a bit more. I don’t even know how they’ll . . . bring her home.”
One of the interns burst into tears and excused herself.
As Victoria left the conference room, she heard Ewan instructing Danny to head up to Sandringham, where the family had been on holiday. “Get the boys. I want the young princes.”
Eight
SYDNEY, 1920
Helen pointed to the pile of letters on Mr. Waters’s desk. “Oh God, there’s all this as well. I think that’s only today and yesterday. Rupert hasn’t even put it on the correspondence desk. I have a speech to finish by this afternoon and there’s some government chap wanting a photograph approved. I don’t have time.”
“Are you American?” I said. I’d thought that was her accent before but now I was less certain. She might be English after all.
“Yes,” she said. “Good guess! My mother, anyway. She remarried when I was ten and we moved to England, so hardly anyone picks the accent. It’s all over the place. Since coming on the tour, I’ve become British or Welsh—Prince, Wales—but at home in New York I become quite the American.
“Actually, when the prince asked me to do this, I was on my way back to New York.” She picked up an envelope absently, took the letter out.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with you now,” she said then. “There’s a chief steward somewhere, but I don’t think he’s back on the train yet. He went to Government House to chastise the cooks over something I don’t care about. There are two other girls and Fanny, whose place you’ve taken. Well, enough said.”
Perhaps she had poured tea on someone, I thought.
“Is Mr. Waters nice?” I said. I had liked him very much. I hoped he wasn’t one of those sorts of fellows.
“Rupert,” she said softly. “Rupert is all about loyalty.”
She started to read the letter she had removed from the envelope. “This one. Poor fellow was denied access to the speech the prince gave at the university in Melbourne. He’s a graduate and they couldn’t manage to get him an invitation. I mean, really. He served with the Fusiliers. What should the prince say? I think he takes every war injury personally. It absolutely exhausts him.”
“He should treat the fellow to a train ticket to the next speech he gives.”
“Yes, that’s rather good. Excellent, in fact. Of course that’s what he should do. Aren’t you the clever one? He’s a prince. He can do anything. The minions are part of the do-minions, of course. Can you draft the letter and we can tell someone to arrang
e it?”
“All right, I will.”
“And then, while we’re waiting for the steward, why not just go through and see if you can sort them into order? I’ve really got to draft his speech for tomorrow. Our prince must deliver some remarks that the colony will think appropriate.”
He could start by not calling us the colony, I didn’t say.
Helen sat me at the desk to start reading the pile of letters. We talked through two or three and agreed what I’d do and then she left me there to go to her own office to start work on the prince’s speech. She told me to come and find her if I had any questions.
I quickly lost interest in the world around me—what would happen, when I’d get my uniform, where the kitchen was, why the steward hadn’t come for me—because the letters received by the prince were so engaging. I entered the worlds of these people who had written to someone who might care. Their families were not unlike mine. They wanted to tell their stories to the prince who had touched their hearts. Perhaps that was why my mother had insisted we come down here. Perhaps she wanted some acknowledgment of what our father had lost, what we’d all lost.
There were so many people harmed. That was the thing that struck me powerfully, skimming the letters. You would never have known it that first day of the prince’s visit, looking out at the sea of people in Sydney who were captured by the great joy of the visit. But there were letters from mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters of those who’d fallen. Loss was the experience they had in common.
From what Helen had said, the prince would want to help them if he could. I wanted to help them too, and that first poor fellow, the one who’d missed the talk, gave me an idea. We could lend a hand where possible, and acknowledge what people had written where there was nothing to be done.
By the time Mr. Waters came back from his meeting, I had the pile divided into three, starting with letters that could be sent a form reply based on one I’d seen on a file on his desk—although it was terribly formal, and from what Helen said the prince was not one for formality, so I rewrote it to some variant of the original:
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