After Zenda
A NOVEL
John Spurling
Copyright © John Spurling 1995. All rights reserved
TO NATHANIEL
red-haired, sometimes reckless and fond of opera,
but to whom the narrator bears no other resemblance
with special thanks for advice on medical,
media, middle European and military matters to:
David Gibson, Jonathan Gili, John Higgins,
Maria Melnik, John Powell and Jane’s
Information Group
“ . . for I love to see myself once again in the crowded streets of Strelsau, or beneath the frowning keep of the Castle of Zenda.
Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
Oliver Goldsmith: The Deserted Village
And since we arc concerned with what happened in respect of its reflection in what we are, we should perhaps include our genetic past: the organisation of genes which distinguished that unknown great-grandfather which now appears in the colour of my eyes and the shape (and, in part, the skill) of my hands.
What comes after may modify what went before, but it cannot expunge it. Layer upon layer; all a great and contingent mixture from which we cannot escape but to which what we are and what we do now is somehow a response.
Michael Oakeshott: On History
Preface
The small Central European kingdom of Ruritania was created on November 28th, 1893, when a young barrister/novelist called Anthony Hope Hawkins, walking back from winning a case in the Westminster County Court to his Temple chambers, suddenly thought of the story of The Prisoner of Zenda. A month later the book was written and, published in April 1894, was so successful that by July its author had decided to abandon the law and become a full-time writer. The sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, Hope’s only other excursion to Ruritania (apart from a volume of stories, set in an earlier period), though he wrote many other novels, was published in 1898.
My own rediscovery of post-Nazi, post-communist Ruritania was equally sudden. It was set off in 1992 by reading obituaries of the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanov, putative heir to the throne of Russia, whose last Tsar, Nicholas II, began his unlucky reign in the year The Prisoner of Zenda was published. Was it possible that the hero of Hope’s story had an heir? Not, of course, if the sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, told the whole truth; not unless Sherlock Holmes, whose Memoirs were also published in that busy year 1894, came back from the Reichenbach Falls.
And where was Ruritania itself? Many people seemed to think in the Balkans, but in that case why should the nineteenth-century visitor get there by changing trains at Dresden? And why should its capital sound so like the German name for the Polish city of Wroclaw - Breslau?
I decided to try the Carpathians and, having found the lost kingdom, to travel further into its interior than Hope needed to when there was a king in Strelsau and a rivalrous half-brother in Zenda and the main problem was dynastic rather than ethnic. I have provided a map of the whole country (drawn by Sandra Oakins) on the endpapers, but can’t guarantee its absolute accuracy, since I only carried it in my head while I was there.
This story is not a sequel to Zenda and Hentzau in the ordinary sense; more a reflection in a frosted mirror from the other end of a hundred-year corridor.
John Spurling,
London, 1994
1 An Ambassador in Regent’s Park
I wonder when in the world you’re going to do anything, Karl?’ said my brother’s wife.
I was bent over her fridge searching for a stray can of beer and the question came at me from behind without any warning except a weary sigh and a disapproving thump as she dumped a big bag of shopping next to my bare heels.
‘You didn’t get any beer, I suppose?’ I said.
‘I certainly did not. It weighs a ton, it costs a bomb and the only person who drinks it is you.’
‘And I’m just the guest who’s outstayed his welcome.’
‘You said it, not me.’
‘I can read your thoughts.’
‘That’s something you are good at.’
Written down, the conversation sounds heavy, but you have to imagine a light, bantering tone, like a fresh breeze on a thundery day. Actually Jennifer and I got on well together - my role as the useless layabout nicely balancing my brother’s as the plodding breadwinner who came home every evening from his job in the Council’s housing department with another day’s mortgage, insurance and gas bill paid for, but not much progress on the road of life to report. Jennifer, having put in a morning at the charity shop and done the shopping on the way home and now about to tidy the house, iron shirts and prepare supper, to a steady background of chat and soap-opera on radio and TV, could enjoy feeling superior to both of us in different ways. Women, in my experience, are mostly anxious, unconfident creatures and they want their men to be either subservient or masterful. Since they can never make up their minds between the two, their ideal would be both at once, which is obviously impossible on a regular basis, short of bigamy. So with my brother playing obedient and reliable and me playing feckless and bumptious, Jennifer was as nearly happy as any woman can be.
Unfortunately for her it wasn’t going to last. She was about to be left exclusively with my brother Freddy and I was going to have all the fun: which is what I’d always kept myself for and why - though I was a year older than my brother and pushing thirty - I hadn’t so far made the mistake of signing up for either a mortgage or a wife.
I did once have a job. The fee-paying school I went to turned me out on the world with only one ‘A’ level - and that was due to having a German mother and being bilingual - but while I was drinking around on my State handout I happened to meet up with an old school friend called Bob Featherly. He was doing very nicely in the City and took me into his firm. I really enjoyed that. It was the mid-Eighties, when Thatcher had just put Socialism in the bin and there were instant fortunes to be made. I drove a Lotus, rented an expensive room in Notting Hill Gate and had a new girl-friend every three months. It couldn’t last and would have got boring if it had.
Dad, of course, who had called his sons after Marx and Engels, thought it was sheer evil and wouldn’t even look at my Lotus. He died of what they said was lung cancer from all his long hours smoking and arguing with other dyed-in-the-wool Socialists in sealed rooms, but I thought was really grey grief over the triumph of Capitalism. He didn’t live to see the bubble burst in 1987. I wished he could have known that I had to sell my Lotus - it was a pain to me, but it would have given a momentary lift to his tight, down-turned mouth and brought a little joy to his rancorous heart. Mum, who had originally met him at some international Socialist congress in East Germany, but was far from being a convinced Socialist herself - she was the one who insisted on her children being privately educated - didn’t believe in my luck either and kept warning me about investing for the future, but she could see I was insanely active for the first time in my life and thought that must be a good thing in itself. Heredity works in strange ways and just as it gave me dark red hair and a long straight nose from several generations back, whereas Mum and my brother were fair with snub noses and Dad dark-haired with a sort of beak, it must have carried secret instructions about my life-style.
My summons came that very afternoon - a scorching day in May - while I was relaxing in a deck-chair on the little patch of balding grass at the back of my brother’s house. My sister-in-law, wearing her apron, came and stood in the kitchen doorway and shouted indignantly:
‘Phone-call for you!’
Friends occasionally rang me in the evening to fix a session at the pub, but who would want to speak
to me in working hours at standard rate?
‘Yes?’
‘Is that Mr Karl Rassendyll?’
‘It is.’
‘Can I speak with you, please?’
The voice was foreign, probably German. His English was silky-fluent, but he wasn’t quite bilingual like me.
‘Who is this?’
‘You don’t know me, but I shall introduce myself when we meet. May I suggest Regent’s Park tomorrow at 11 a.m.? Alongside the wolfs enclosure.’
‘What’s this about?’
‘I will explain everything, but not on the phone.’
‘How will I recognise you?’
‘I shall recognise you.’
‘How come?’
‘I believe the family resemblance is uncanny.’ And rang off.
The wolves were flaked out in the heat. Their enclosure was well shaded with trees and at first I couldn’t see any of the beasts at all, only the remains of their breakfast, a discarded knuckle-bone and a bare rib-cage being picked over by starlings. The wolves had flung themselves down here and there among the patches of long grass, dandelions and cow-parsley and were dreaming of chasing Russian troikas through a snow-bound forest.
‘Mr Rassendyll.’
He was a small, compact old party with a round, mainly bald head. He looked as if he might have made a living as a human cannonball. In fact, I discovered later, he taught fencing and violin at a private girls’ school nearby - or had done until recently. He was wearing a thin blue suit, very creased and shiny, with a striped tie - probably some genuine club which he actually belonged to, though people got quite indiscriminate about that in the Eighties.
‘Are you the person who rang?’
‘Colonel Danzing, Ambassador for the Republic of Ruritania.’
He bowed and clicked his heels - or they would have clicked if he hadn’t been wearing canvas shoes.
‘Ah, I remember now.’
‘You remember me? We have never met, Mr Rassendyll.’
‘I vaguely remember there was a country called Ruritania.’
This was the wrong thing to say and he looked irritated.
‘Shall we find a seat?’
We walked as far as an orientalish-looking drinking-fountain and read the inscription. It had been donated by a Parsee Knight of the Star of India in gratitude for the British Raj and inaugurated by Queen Victoria’s daughter, the Duchess of Teck, in 1869.
‘How curious and enticing are the B-roads of history!’ said Colonel Danzing. ‘Your great-grandfather, whom you so closely resemble, would have been a very young man at the time and his father, the Earl of Burlesdon, would certainly have known the Duchess of Teck.’
‘The Earl of Burlesdon? So I am a relation of his?’
‘A distant relation of the present Lord Burlesdon, but descended from the family.’
‘I remember Mum once asking Dad what connection there was, but he didn’t want to know.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. He would have considered such a connection politically compromising.’
‘What about Sir Cowarjee Jehangir?’
‘I know nothing about him.’
He sounded irritated again.
‘The philanthropic Parsee who paid for the fountain? Dad might have preferred a connection with him.’
He pursed his lips and walked on in silence. Like most Eastern Europeans he probably thought the English were too soft on coloured people.
‘You know a lot about my family history.’
‘It is part of the history of my country.’
‘Dad didn’t tell me anything about either,’ I said. ‘He was a history-teacher, but I got the impression he hated history.’
‘He was ideologically opposed to that kind of history,’ said the Colonel. ‘I myself once invited him - in my capacity as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Ruritania in exile - to a modest reception, but he replied that he could only regard me as a fiction and that, supporting the People’s Republic of Ruritania as he did, he had no wish to be associated in any way with its feudal past. In spite of that rebuff, I may say that when I heard of his untimely death in 1985 I caused our flag to be lowered to half mast and would certainly have attended his cremation if I had been invited. I felt that my own father, who had been Queen Flavia’s last Prime Minister at the time of the German invasion in 1939, would have wished it. One should never confuse the man with the office or vice versa.’
I was feeling confused myself. The Colonel indicated an empty seat in the shade and we sat down.
‘I see I must start at the beginning,’ he said.
The original connection between my family, the Rassendylls, and Ruritania was off the record. A Crown Prince of Ruritania with a mass of dark red hair and a long straight nose visited England in the 18th century and slept with the fifth Earl of Burlesdon’s pretty young wife. The Prince and the Earl fought an inconclusive duel at dawn, after which the Prince, who had been slightly wounded, returned hastily to Ruritania, while the Earl caught pneumonia and died. His titles and estates went to the only son, born seven or eight months later to the pretty Countess. This boy had thick dark-red hair and a long straight nose and every so often one of his descendants in the Rassendyll family would turn out to resemble him. Meanwhile back in Ruritania the Crown Prince eventually became King Rudolf III and many of his successors were red-haired and long-nosed. In 1876, as coincidence would have it, the new King of Ruritania, Rudolf V, and the then Earl of Burlesdon’s younger brother, Rudolf Rassendyll, were almost the same age and looked virtually identical.
‘That Rassendyll was your great-grandfather,’ said Colonel Danzing. ‘I never met him myself, of course, but to judge by the photographs and one miniature portrait in my possession, you are his living likeness. What is your height?’
‘Six feet one.’
‘He was an inch taller and usually wore a small pointed beard and a thick moustache.’
‘Usually?’
‘Except when he was impersonating King Rudolf V, who had shaved off his beard and moustache to please the Princess Flavia.’
‘My ancestor was some sort of con-man, then?’
Colonel Danzing stamped his canvas shoes and went red in the face.
‘Have you really not read the books?’
‘I’m afraid not. I never cared much for reading.’
‘There are also five or six films.’
‘I missed them all.’
‘I thought every English boy had at least read The Prisoner of Zenda.’
‘Not this one.’
‘I am astonished.’
He sounded outraged.
‘I suppose we must put this down to your father’s prejudice. He deliberately kept you ignorant of your heritage. Did your mother never discuss it with you either?’
‘Discuss what?’
‘Your connection with Ruritania.’
‘She never mentioned it.’
‘Incredible! What an evil era this has been! What a century of lies and distortions and worst of all self-deception on the part of those who should have known better - the educated classes of the western democracies! Whole generations of young people like yourself betrayed by the false doctrines of their parents and teachers! Fortunately they failed in their attempt to suppress all those who still carried memories of the former times. A few of us survived - enough to keep the flame alight and rekindle the ardour of a new generation for a world whose values are not those of greed, envy and materialism.’
It was a Thatcherite sort of outburst. I didn’t like to say that it was in Thatcher’s heyday that I’d first discovered the joys of materialism, so I just watched the passers-by - most of them walking models of greed and envy - until he calmed down.
When he did he told me the rest of the story. My great-grandfather, who was a bumptious layabout like me, but with the big difference that he had a private income, was the first Rassendyll to visit Ruritania. He went there for a holiday and to see the Coronation of King Rudolf V, but imm
ediately got mixed up in a plot by the King’s half-brother, Duke Michael, to grab the throne for himself. This black-haired, black-hearted villain intended to kill the King and marry the next legitimate heir to the throne, the King’s delicious red-headed cousin, Princess Flavia. The plot was foiled by a group of loyal courtiers and the lucky chance that Rudolf Rassendyll spoke perfect German - the main language of Ruritania - and was able to stand in for the real king at the Coronation and even propose to Princess Flavia without her knowing the difference. At least she did detect a difference but thought it much for the better.
Imagine her distress when she finally discovered, after Rassendyll had rescued the King from his dungeon in the Castle of Zenda and restored him to his throne, that she had to marry the boring and traumatised genuine King instead of the romantic substitute she’d fallen in love with. She gritted her teeth, said goodbye to Rudolf Rassendyll and became Queen, but that only led to more trouble. The end result was that although black Duke Michael was eliminated, his most vicious henchman, Count Rupert of Hentzau, did succeed in murdering the King before himself being killed in a duel with Rudolf Rassendyll.
You might have thought this was a happy ending. The real King’s corpse had already been consumed in a fire in his hunting-lodge near Zenda and the unrecognisable remains buried in a local cemetery as those of the visiting Englishman, Rudolf Rassendyll, whose family were regretfully informed of his accidental death. So Rassendyll could now go on posing indefinitely as Rudolf V and Queen Flavia would have the husband she really loved. What nobody allowed for was Rassendyll’s peculiar sense of honour.
‘Your great-grandfather was a true English gentleman,’ said the Colonel.
‘In what sense?’
‘In every sense. He could not betray the truth.’
‘But he’d been telling lies all along by pretending to be the King.’
‘Only for the benefit of the true royal line of Ruritania. His conduct was always in accordance with the family motto.’
‘What motto is that?’
After Zenda Page 1