by William Kuhn
Soon Dickon was going absent without leave from his public school to join demonstrations in London against genetically modified corn, and in favor of sustainable, small-scale agriculture. She read him the riot act and told him he must finish school. This decided him against it, and he disappeared from the school to join a group of activists who were living in makeshift tree houses to block the construction of a highway bypass. The headmaster got wind of where Dickon had gone, but the school soon lost touch with him altogether, and so did Anne. He didn’t respond to the phone calls she made to the mothers of his friends. He had no mailing address. He no longer came home. He had the income from a small trust fund that had become his at age eighteen. He was gone.
Anne did her best to conceal this grief from everyone she knew, keeping her answers vague when people asked about Dickon. It was about this same time that the doctors had diagnosed her rheumatoid arthritis, and she was convinced that the emotional and the physical malaises were connected. The coffee shop soothed her because the scruffy young man at the counter reminded her of Dickon the last time she’d seen him. The other young people seemed to tolerate and accept and even to acknowledge her presence in a way that her son had increasingly refused to do in their last years together. She liked that too.
Then one morning as she was nursing her lukewarm coffee and reading the paper she came across an article about Greenpeace. Activists in pontoon boats had been harassing Japanese whaling vessels to protest their killing endangered species of whales. A photograph showed a daring pass by one of these pontoon boats, which was dashing just in front of the prow of the much larger whaling ship. The larger vessel would have cut the pontoon boat in two had they collided. The caption to this photo read: “Dickon Bevil commanded the Greenpeace protest against the Japanese whaling ships Wednesday.”
She was seized by a moment of terror that slowly became a moment of pride. What he’d done reminded her of the feats of courage that had often been spoken of when she was growing up. Charging machine guns, parachuting behind enemy lines, escaping from the German prison at Colditz: these were all daring acts that had been performed by family members in the last century in the two World Wars, and they were part of Bevil family lore. Here was Dickon taking his place in that story. She took out a used envelope from her handbag and began drafting a letter to him. “My darling Dickon,” she wrote, using the same legible hand she used in The Queen’s correspondence. No, that wasn’t right. It ignored too much of the ill feeling that had grown up between them. “Dear Dickon,” she started again, but that was too heartbreakingly common for the beginning of a letter to an only son. How could she be friendlier? She’d once had a cleaner who’d sometimes left her cheerful notes that began “Hi Lady Anne!” so she tried that, “Hi Dickon,” but, no, it was hopeless. Didn’t sound like her at all. She crumpled up the envelope, gathered her things together, and walked unseeingly out of the shop and onto the street.
Eton had the unusual distinction at the turn of the twenty-first century of being one of Britain’s most famous public schools, not because it was public, because it wasn’t; nor for sending more of its boys on to Oxford and Cambridge than any other school, which it didn’t. It was still costly to send a boy there for the usual five years between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, but there were many more boys there on scholarship than ever before in its history. It was also more diverse than at any other time in its history, but that wasn’t the reason most parents tried to get their boys in. It was because more future prime ministers had gone there than to any other school in Britain. It was because the Duke of Wellington once offhandedly remarked, nearly two hundred years ago, that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. It was because many were under the impression that the boys still wore top hats.
The school was laid out along an eighteenth-century high street down the hill and across the river from Windsor Castle. Tourists poured out of buses and trains twelve months a year to go through the public rooms of the Castle, but they almost never took notice of the school not more than a few hundred yards away. Eton had a gothic chapel that was the equal of St George’s Chapel within the Castle walls. It had boys walking up and down in white tie, tail coats, and square-toed motorcycle boots, which they were allowed to wear under their striped trousers. It had playing fields laid out along the towpath bordering the river. Although there were no rules to prevent outsiders coming to see it, outsiders almost never did. The boys themselves sloped around Windsor in semi-disguise after hours, wearing the same low-hanging jeans, trainers, and baseball caps akimbo that other boys their age also wore. After four in the afternoon, when the dress rules were relaxed, an Eton boy who happened to be in Windsor trying to buy a sticky bun or a forbidden can of lager was as hard to pick out as a leopard in the jungle with his spots.
It was to this school and this society that Rajiv’s parents and grandparents were thrilled to learn that he had been admitted. This was Britain’s ne plus ultra. Now the family had indisputably arrived. When he got there, Rajiv found otherwise. First, all his new acquaintances started calling him “Paki bastard.” It was affectionate, he knew that. Their method was to use the most appalling invective they could imagine as a way of being friends with him, but it revived memories every time they did it of the bad incident when he was younger in a Holborn alley. He told no one about that. It would have been against the boys’ unspoken code to bring up any real racial grievance.
Second, when he was included in a group of boys invited up the hill to visit the Castle and dine in the private apartments of one of The Queen’s senior courtiers (his grandson was the same year and in the same house as Rajiv), he found that Eton didn’t protect him from the ignorance or the narrow nationalism of the older generation. The courtier had begun by assuming that Rajiv would know the geography of postcolonial Simla, where the courtier had spent many happy summers while working with the Indian army. “Haven’t been there, sir,” said Rajiv politely.
“Not been there?” said the courtier. “Why, it’s the most beautiful mountaintop spot in all the world.”
“Ah yes, sir, no doubt. But, you see, I was born here.” All the boys addressed men older than themselves, their teachers of course, but all others too, as “sir.”
“Mother came to Blighty to find a decent hospital and have you, I bet.”
“No, sir. She was born here too.”
“What?”
“Both of my parents were, sir. We’re British.”
“But you’re Indian, surely?” he said, looking confusedly over Rajiv’s head.
“Well, my passport is British. My grandparents on both sides came here from India after the Second World War, but my parents were born here.”
The courtier said to himself, “But you’re still foreign,” at the same time as he said genially to Rajiv, “Have some more of this Côtes du Rhône, boy. It’s delicious.”
Rajiv could read both the spoken and the unspoken messages on the man’s face. He also knew the Côtes du Rhône was not the best wine in the courtier’s cellar. He’d been pawning his second-rate stuff off on the visiting boys. Rajiv knew a thing or two about throwing parties, as he was one of the most popular boys of his year. He kept a constant supply of Diet Coke, beef jerky, Mars bars, and fizzy water in fruity flavors in his bedroom. It made his small room, with its narrow bed and wooden desk, the place of first resort for most of the boys in his house, who preferred to be crowded there in a warm fug, laced with constant ribaldry and laughter, than in the unheated and lonely quarters assigned to them. Rajiv did not forget what the courtier had said to him, and repeated it in an elaborately posh accent to his friends, complete with exaggerated facial expressions. It became one of the boys’ favorite stories. It sometimes rankled, nonetheless, and he did not dare tell his parents or his grandparents, because it would have upset them.
Rajiv was completely immune to the passions and romances that went on among the adolescent
boys. They teased him about being from the “Sotadic Zone,” as India lay in a geographic region, so they’d been taught in a course on global history, where homosexuality was relatively tolerated, especially as compared to the Christian West. But in fact he didn’t find the boys at school remotely appealing. Their sisters were different. He was wild for them, and though he knew exactly what jokes and insults to use in speaking to their brothers, he constantly said the wrong thing when he was introduced to girls his own age. “You’re so sexy!” he said to one demure sister, and her brother cringed at how badly Rajiv had put his foot wrong. He’d been made fun of by the boys, and told not to do it again, but his next outing was just as bad. On the Fourth of June, an annual school festival that celebrated the birthday of the school’s most famous patron, King George III, a whole commuter train full of sisters and female cousins and girl friends of friends took the line down from London Waterloo to the Windsor & Eton Riverside railway station. The girls were all dressed in the slatternly fashion of the times and vied to show as much breast and thigh as was possible within the bounds of decency, which shocked most of the adults present as entirely indecent. Here Rajiv would have been well within the bounds of reason and frank assessment if he’d said to any number of girls, “You look so sexy!” Instead, he tried “You’re so beautiful,” and “You look incredible.” Neither of these worked any better. The male verbal style the girls were willing to reply to was ironic, yawning, and laconic. Dozy was the thing. Although the girls had tried hard to put their clothes together, it was not done for the boys to comment on what they looked like. At Rajiv’s overly serious compliments they just giggled and turned away. He hadn’t understood, and he couldn’t imitate the correct form. He was too keen.
William de Morgan had entered the Royal Household by working first for The Queen’s sister and then for her mother before arriving at the pinnacle of royal service, working for the sovereign herself. It was the palace version of trying out a show in Boston or Philadelphia before putting it on Broadway. To have survived working some years for Princess Margaret or Queen Elizabeth, demanding engagements in their own right, established pretty clearly a member of staff’s discretion, talent, and staying power in the face of many provocations.
Among her friends, Princess Margaret was legendary for being an impossible houseguest. If she didn’t have a whiskey and water in her hand by half past six of an afternoon, there might be several ugly incidents at the supper that followed. She had to have a canopied bed, and she had to have guest lists well in advance, from which she often crossed off people whom she didn’t like. She’d never had proper work to do. She’d been happier among the stylish and the hedonistic than among the dutiful and the self-sacrificing set that surrounded her sister. She was her sister’s exact opposite. She was covertly jealous of her elder sister’s position, while pretending all the time that she was assisting in keeping it up.
Princess Margaret had detected right away in William’s interview with her a prissy earnestness that she might have fun playing with, as a cat plays with a vole before killing it. Of course he came well recommended from all the best places. His excellence as a butler was not in question. Her own ability to live with him in her private rooms was what she wanted to know about, because, frankly, the servants knew everything. Hiring a man to be in and out of all the rooms in your house at all hours of the day was a little like sleeping with him. She first met him at the cocktail hour in her sitting room in Kensington Palace. She sat and didn’t ask him to join her, so he stood, not exactly at attention, but at a respectful distance from her. “And what was it like working for the sheik?” she said, fishing for some gossip she might retail at a dinner party later on.
“Well . . .” William replied, aware that what he said would be repeated, and not wishing to compromise his former employer in any serious way, “ . . . they had quite a lot of gold leaf on the ceiling.”
“Have you seen the new state rooms at Windsor? The ones done up since the fire? Acres and acres of gold leaf. If you walk in on a sunny day you’ve got to wear your dark glasses. It might be Miami Beach.”
William gave this a small quarter smile. To laugh at it too openly would only have been all right if he had been sitting down and he were an HRH at the least.
Princess Margaret allowed a pause to fall. She swirled the ice cubes around down at the bottom of her glass, ruminating.
Giving her a warmer, and slightly more conspiratorial, smile than he’d given her before, William said, “I daresay Your Royal Highness could use a top-up as this important decision is considered.”
At this she smiled more naturally, and held out her glass. He took it from her and went to the bar at the side of the room to fill it up. As he was making her drink, she called out to his back, “Nothing to decide. You’re engaged.” Then she paused to consider. She did like to drink, it was true, but she wasn’t entirely happy with the fact that William had worked this out so quickly. “Oh, and by the way, don’t let me catch you in the closet trying on my shoes.”
William was glad he had his back to her when she said this, because it took him by surprise, and he needed a moment to clear the stricken look from his face. As a boy, he had adored sneaking into his mother’s closet to put on her high-heeled shoes and to pose in front of the long mirror wearing them. They made him feel taller, more elegant, more desirable in his own eyes. No one had ever caught him at it, nor had he gone in for dressing up in ladies’ clothes much beyond his boyhood. For most of his career he’d been working, and he hadn’t had the time.
He turned to bring her the drink with his face a mask of clear unconcern. “No, Ma’am.”
“Nor my frocks,” she said, still hoping with patient malice to get a rise from him.
“No, indeed.”
“There are one or two furs of course.”
“Are there, Ma’am?”
“You mustn’t try them on either.”
“No.”
“Nor the parfum.” She thought she might get him with the odd surprise word in French.
“I promise.”
“I see,” she said with a reluctant sigh. “That will be all.”
William withdrew to the double doors, and just as he was about to reverse through them, closing them with a small bow, he came back into the room as if he’d forgotten something. “What size did you say you were, Ma’am?” Then he closed the doors and she let out a delighted whoop, slapping the velvet pillow at her side.
When, several years later, one of Queen Elizabeth’s butlers died, William was recruited to fill the spot. She had a reputation for being sweet as a sugar plum, but in fact the old Queen was tough and didn’t mind stealing away the best staff from her younger daughter, if need be. Princess Margaret had grown used to this kind of behavior from her mother, so when William came in to make his farewell, she said simply, “Rat,” and dismissed him with a wave of her hand that might have been either angry or affectionate.
The Queen Mother’s parties were often as gay as her younger daughter’s had been. Among the regular guests were bachelor biographers, gossip columnists for the highbrow newspapers, and disgraced curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The staff was gayer still. William enjoyed working in Clarence House for Queen Elizabeth, but it hadn’t been an easy posting. She liked anything that was an extreme statement of style, so large luncheons on warm days were often moved impromptu to underneath a large spreading shade tree in the garden. Beautiful to look at from the terrace windows, but it was a lot of work at the last minute to get the table on a level out there on the uneven turf. She was a demanding but also a charming boss, referring to “this intolerable honour” if anyone happened to refer to her position. Usually only the unschooled did this, as her staff knew the topics to avoid. Working with a cadre of high-strung and extremely touchy gay men had been one of the biggest challenges of his career. Even though he was gay himself, it was hard to know what stray comment woul
d set his colleagues off. They tended to be harsher and more judgmental about gay staff than about the occasional straight waiter who was brought in as a temporary for a big occasion. All of these colleagues were talented, and some were good-looking, but William wasn’t in the least attracted to them. Something about their love of drama entirely put him off them as romantic partners.
When Queen Elizabeth died, in 2002, The Queen cherry-picked the youngest of her mother’s staff to come over to Buckingham Palace. The older ones were pensioned off. When William arrived in the big house, he looked about him with a sense of pride. He’d now reached the top of his profession. With any luck, he’d be allowed to stay, and possibly to reach retiring age himself working for The Queen. There was no question that the work would be a challenge, but he was also confident he could do it. What he now hoped to do was to look about himself and to find some real friends at work, to fill some of the emotional need he’d sometimes repressed when working at his other posts. Almost immediately he met Shirley MacDonald, and although she was fifteen years older than him, she was just like him in having given her life to the job and her caring every day about doing it well. Most afternoons he made an excuse to stop by the room where she was pressing clothes with a steam iron. They’d have a little gossip about what was going on. Who on the staff was in trouble, who was in favor, and who was out? This progressed to their having a regular Saturday evening on their calendar whenever they were both in London. They’d go to an Indian restaurant off Victoria Street for a curry early in the evening and then often afterwards see a film. The films they enjoyed most had something to do with their jobs, so they’d loved seeing Judi Dench playing Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown, and Cate Blanchett playing the first Queen Elizabeth. They’d also seen a kind of pseudo-documentary about life in a Russian palace called The Russian Ark, which confused and stimulated them at the same time. Their all-time favorite was the film where a butler and a housekeeper of an aristocratic house before the war fell in love, but didn’t ultimately get together, The Remains of the Day. They liked it not because they thought it referred to their relationship with one another, although they pretended as if it did, but because it captured the dedication and self-denial that both of them felt in their work together at the palace. Their interpretation was exactly the reverse of the disapproval the filmmakers had intended.