“Excuse me?” came the polite response, accompanied by a cautiously puzzled frown. It wouldn’t do to let on too heavily that he wasn’t completely up on all the doings of every single M.P. that they had in that Parliament of theirs.
“About your wardrobe?” the newest advisor advised. “You see, I have this pet theory? Everybody in the world has one sense that they’re better at than all of their others, and that they’re better at than, oh, say, other people who are better at other senses.” And here, she bent her head conspiratorially to whisper. “Personally, since I did vote for you, I’m hoping that with you it’s vision, and not smell. Otherwise, we’re all screwed.” Then she straightened in her chair, rising to her full height and arranging the folds of her red gown around her, as she finished up in a normal voice. “Well, see, with Sturgess, it’s a matter of taste. The man has just got the most impeccable taste. Any questions?”
Oh, my gosh! she thought, clamping a gloved hand over her own mouth. Had all of that just been said in a way in which… other people could actually hear it? Were the Voices beginning to come out now?
• • •
“… Yes, I do agree… But, don’t you find, that it is a great difficulty at times, the reconciliation of a traditional nature with an environmentally conscious one? Why, just the other day, I was suggesting to Mother that we really should try out one of those artificial trees here, sort of set an example, start the kingdom moving in the right direction. Oh, of course I have heard the arguments all about how the trees are planted for that purpose. But isn’t that a little bit like saying that baby seals are bred to be clubbed to death for fur, so that it makes no never mind? Why, then, you might as well make the leap and go the whole route and say that you can do the same thing with people… So, what do you think? Perhaps you and Bill might consider one of those lovely synthetic trees—perhaps one of those silver ones with the blue balls, thereby taking care of the old Hanukah quadrant as well, hmm?—for the White House next year…?”
Daisy was gazing raptly across the table at Charles who, catching her eye, gave a smile and raised his glass in salute, before continuing his most engrossing discussion with Mrs. Clinton.
A few place settings down from Charles, Jodie listened with intent, while Packey pitched an idea for a new sitcom that would involve two identical cousins who just happened to be gay, and which was tentatively to be titled The Packey Dick Show. And while Jodie’s initial reaction seemed to be that the idea was maybe too derivative, a quick conversational insert by Packey concerning the critical and popular success of The Brady Bunch movies served as a reminder of just how lucrative derivative could be. America loved derivative. Why try something new when you could have more of the same? Why take the chance on the potentially more interesting, but risky, caramel turtle ice cream, when you could play it safe with vanilla? The Packey Dick Show, Packey was saying, would simply be yet more vanilla—of a slightly different flavor, of course.
To the left of Daisy, the Queen and the President were still quite busily telling one another how good it was to have the other there and how good it was to be there, respectively.
And to Daisy’s right, just on the other side of the bulk of the Archbishop, Anne had drawn Andrew into a heated debate of whose childhood had been worse, to which Charles—leaving his new friend, Hillary, hanging in mid-sentence—decided to jump into feet first, just for the fun of it. Of course, when Edward tried to join in he was quickly shouted down. Why, all he had ever had to do was show up when the pictures were being taken.
Daisy listened to the conversations that were swirling all about her. Then she looked at Charles, seated across the table from her. He looked so relaxed, and getting more so every day. Why then did she feel like such a pretentious ass of late?
She was, of course, still reeling from The Exposure of The Bag. She was torn between her love of Charles, her wish to remain the dazzling woman that she had become, and her dawning realization that there was a lot more around here that was empty than just The Bag. Section off one more piece of her, and she’d be a Picasso.
Following the exemplary behavior of the Queen Mother, Daisy took another slug from the excellent wine, wiping the excess from the corner of her mouth, using the back of her hand. (Too bad the gloves went better with the fish dish.) Seeing heads swerving to the right, all the way down the table, as dessert was served, Daisy went with the conversational flow. And so, turning the full force of her own considerable attentions to the right and thus to the Archbishop, she formed a resolution to take matters into her own hands.
• • •
Daisy had frequently thought that it was a good thing that she didn’t believe in heaven, a concept that she thought of as The Promising Lure of the Ultimate Carrot. This way, she figured, she could expend her abundant endowment of energy on simply “getting it right” this time.
Too bad then, that—lately, at least—she had been getting it all wrong. Although, perhaps, from her clinically theoretical standpoint, her own batting average was neither here nor there.
True, there were some people who claimed that if you only lived for and in the present, that it necessarily implied a selfish nature. But, the way she figured it, if she was ever going to do something for the poor of the world, then she was going to do it now or shut up about it, as opposed to relying on some other being to attend to things at some unspecified later date.
And, of course, The Promising Lure of the Ultimate Carrot flowed rather neatly into The Doctrine of the Barest Minimum.
It seemed to Daisy that there were an awful lot of people these days, who were just gliding through their lives, operating under the absurd notion that it was okay to spend seventy-two years playing video games and surfing the Internet, because something much more important was going to be happening to them in the future, and that the real fun show was going to start… in another life. She, on the other hand, preferred to believe that this life—for what it was worth—was all she was ever going to get. You couldn’t spend all of your life waiting for something big to happen later. Well, actually, she thought, you could. But what was the point?
Sometimes it seemed as though, all around her, people were treating God as though He/She were the greatest enabler of all time, and that most people’s personal relationship with what they all liked to refer to as “their” God (as though there could, quite possibly, be billions of different ones) was, if not the most fulfilling, then certainly the single most co-dependent relationship in their lives.
When you began life with the erroneous—to her—premise that someone else had already died for your sins, there was not a whole lot of incentive left to do more than just scrape by. You kind of grew up with the misguided inkling that, surely, someone else would always have to pay, your own fare being the responsibility of some other—possibly nebulous—being.
“What is this ‘heaven’ stuff that you people are always going on about?” she could distinctly hear herself asking the Archbishop now, as she started the motor running and listened to the engine rev, gearing up towards pontificating like a pontiff. She reached for the dessert wine, hoping the nervous tremor in her hand were not as obvious to others.
Oh, God, she groaned inwardly, how much of what she thought that she had only thought had she actually said? For, now not only was she thinking these dreadful things, but she was actually saying them out loud.
• • •
No need to go into all of the gories; suffice to say that, from the crème brulee onwards, matters went from bad to worse, the Voices just popping out of Daisy right and left, like a popcorn air popper run amok, gone kompletely kaplooie; and that, by the time the Queen had led the after-dinner procession through the East Gallery, Silk Tapestry Room and Picture Gallery, and into the sitting-rooms beyond—there to enjoy coffee and after-dinner drinks, with the Queen’s favorite bagpipers providing a subtle musical backdrop—Daisy had pretty much well been a success in saying something that she would later regret, something that she herself w
ould think of as offensive, to everybody who was anybody and everybody who wasn’t. She really was very equal-opportunity-minded, our girl.
The Royal Family—mercifully—exited first, thus freeing up the rest of their guests to draw the evening to a relatively early close. Which worked just as well for just about everybody, but especially for the poor Archbishop, who just might be in need of some medical attention.
Having overheard a conversation between a Miss Ruby Plyte-Twyse and a Ms. Hortense Spengle-Splyce, he had choked on his wine when he learned that Daisy Sills was to be Charles’s next wife. This—the news, not the spewing up of Chateau Lafitte—made him regret, for all time, the haste of his predecessor in declaring that the Prince might marry again. Better that the previous A. of C. had bitten off his own tongue, the present A. of C. thought—as he bit stoically down on his own, thereby creating the minor medical emergency that would later require care—than to have ever uttered such words aloud.
And it was a pretty safe bet to make, that if Miss Ruby Plyte-Twyse, Ms. Hortense Spengle-Splyce, and the A. of C. all knew a thing, then, chances were that the Royal Family—if they did not know already—would very soon as well. And before long, so would the world. Daisy had finally opened up her own personal bag of tricks and, with The Bag part deux now gaping wide open, all kinds of pussies had popped out, soon to be scampering freely all over the palace.
Just about everybody else having been put to sleep, there was not much left but the crying, the last to go to bed being the cleanup staff whose bedrooms were in the east wing attic and who all thought that they either smelled something fishy or saw something that was not quite right.
Which was really neither here nor there either since, by this point, nobody’s senses were working right anymore.
• • •
At every slumber party, at every summer camp, at every boarding school, there are always at least one or two dirty stay-ups that refuse to go to sleep when the last call is made for lights out. And, having already established that things at the palace were run pretty much like a Jewish Seder, there was really no reason why things here should be any different.
Long after the last maid had climbed the staircase to the attic, there was still one home fire burning, still one golden light that could be seen blazing, if one were to peer in at the right squint.
“I still canna’ put my finger on what it is about that wig that excites me so. Maybe, it’s just that, seein’ as ye’re always such a dominatrix, it makes for something’ of a wee change, havin’ ya looking’ more like ya might be good at takin’ orders. There’s a certain air of servitude about—”
“Shut up and pass that cold quail… Starving. Criminal for people to have to stand around for hours and hours just watching other people eating. Like being a waiter, but with no action and no tips.”
Sturgess inhaled deeply. Mm. Tonight she smelled like 100-percent cotton. So maybe it wasn’t a smell that you could eat but, still, there was something reassuring about…
“There were quite a few glitches tonight, weren’t there, Boni?”
“Mustn’t talk with such a full mouth… Ooh!… So much for the wig… Mm… Maybe things have gone on long enough.”
17
It was the morning after the night before, and the Queen was thinking that it was a pretty good thing that she wasn’t one of these silly fools—like The Other One, for example—who bought into her own press. The New York Times—having stringers all over the world, of course—had quoted the President as saying that Her Majesty was “lovely” and “gracious” in every way. The Queen had survived the presidencies of nine Americans, and these were the two adjectives that they had all invariably and unimaginatively used. Was this a surprising coincidence to anyone? After all, they could hardly report that they had found the Monarch to be a colossal bitch, now, could they?
She patted her dogs, listening to her own personal bagpiper playing underneath her window. It really was a lucky thing for him that he seemed to be so impervious to the cold, for it was turning out to be quite a chilly December.
Fifteen minutes later, her private musical entertainment complete for another day, she summoned her personal Footman. She had written a message for Daisy, demanding that the younger woman join her for lunch. Cocktails in the Orleans Room at 12:30. Lunch in the Bow Room at 1:00 sharp. Be there. Aloha.
18
Elsewhere on the Principal Floor, diagonally across from the Queen’s apartments, somebody else was stirring. The only problem was, that this person—the current resident of the Yellow Suite—was not feeling quite as chipper as the Queen.
Daisy groaned, clutching her head as though it might help matters. What had she done?
She had a vague recollection of not being able to keep her mouth closed but, outside of that, there was no way that she could say with absolute certainty just what exactly she had said, or to whom. So, just to be on the safe side, she formed the blanket assumption that she had offended everybody. The way she figured it, there was a good reason why the same phoneme was used for the word “dumb,” and for the horror movie sound, as in “Dum ta dum dum… Dum!!!”
All of this theorizing was confirmed when—as she sat on the floor of the jasmine bathroom, her head hanging over the toilet—Footmen came, bearing notes on silver salvers. The Queen was demanding her presence later at lunch but, first, the Queen Mother wished for Daisy to join her for breakfast. So, she was being called on the carpet by all of the biggies. She was right: she had been insulting and she had been dumb and now she would probably be booted out on her keester, tossed like Dino the Dog on the Flintstones. She really had made a pathetic mess of things, and there was just no way that she was ever going to get out of this one.
“I should have just stayed in last night with a good book,” she declared to the empty room at large.
Charles, of course, had also sent a note, a cheerful missive requesting her presence at dinner, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He was always cheerfully oblivious these days.
And, anyway, where in the world was she going to find the stamina or the antacid necessary to complete all of the food consumption that others expected of her on this dark day?
19
“Believe it or not,” the Queen Mother was saying, as she banged on the heel end of the bottle, finally managing to shoot a stream of Louisiana hot sauce across her plate of fried eggs. “Now what was I saying? Ah, yes. Believe it or not, people are supposed to enjoy parties. You must try not to beat yourself up so much, dear.”
So far, except for having to watch another human being eating kippers, breakfast was not going as badly as Daisy had envisioned. So far, she hadn’t had to actually eat anything, and speaking didn’t appear to be required either.
“In fact, people are supposed to enjoy life. Oh, I know it’s not considered the ‘done’ thing these days, for people to have a good time with drink anymore,” the Q.M. went on, taking a healthy swig from her glass of tomato juice. “People all over the world go home at the end of the evening, congratulating themselves on their own scintillating sobriety, patting themselves on the backs for how little fun they had. But, take it from me: life is just the merest of blinks…” and here the Q.M. performed a demonstration, going slightly cross-eyed for a second, behind the cerulean netting of her hat’s veil, “And then you die. Mind you, I do know from whence I speak. I did, after all, survive the Blitz. And I say, to borrow some words from that late young Beatle boy, ‘whatever gets you through the night.’”
She paused for a long moment, considering, her face lost in the philosophical contemplation of some elusive and profound thought. “Ye-es, John always was the most intelligent, but it was George that I never would have been able to kick out of bed for eating chips. And of course, Ringo was the most fun. As for Paul, well… one does not like to be nasty, but… what does he have to whine about all the time? After all, the man owns more of Scotland than we do.”
The Q.M. retrieved her cane from where it had
been leaning against a chair and, banging it resoundingly on the floor for emphasis, managed to bring her companion—who had been beginning to doze off in her chair—back to a blinking state of wakefulness.
“I think that you are absolutely right, Daisy,” came the pronouncement. “I think that Paul should just get over it.” She helped herself to some more tomato juice. “Besides, dear, I think they all rather liked you.”
• • •
Now, Daisy thought, closing the door gently on the breakfast room, all I have to do is get through a measly old lunch, without getting myself beheaded, and I should be home free.
20
For the very first time in her life, the Queen found herself nervously fingering the double row of pearls around her neck, as she waited in the Orleans Room for Daisy. Thankfully, the younger woman did not keep her waiting, and, after a brief discussion, in which it was stated that nobody would be requiring anything alcoholic for quite some time, they adjourned to the Bow Room. It was in this room that the Queen and Philip hosted four or five luncheons over the course of the year, each for six to eight lucky men and women. Compared to the Garden Parties, it was a unique way of bestowing recognition on people for jobs well done, sort of like the difference between the Last Supper grouping and the loaves and fishes mob scene. Although, somehow, neither metaphor seemed apt for Daisy’s predicament, unless, of course, one were to point out that she was about to be fed, or that she had been—like Judas, perhaps—talking too much among the wrong circles.
Once inside the Bow Room, Daisy found herself squidgeeing around in her seat, involuntarily wincing as she waited for the axe to fall. She guessed that it was kind of nice for the Queen to want to feed her before killing her.
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