by Mark Helprin
“Imagine that in Vogue,” she said. “I’d be so embarrassed.”
“You survive embarrassment in regard to your father’s house, which, in case you have forgotten, is called Feta.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s a cheese.”
“It’s a delicious cheese, Freddy. And Moocock is such a beautiful, magnificent house, why call it Moocock or Mohoohoo? What about something more conventional?”
“Such as?”
“Edam, or Gorgonzola.”
For a moment, Freddy was speechless. “Those are cheeses,” he said.
“So?”
“You can’t name an estate after a cheese.”
“Of course you can,” she said, as if she were speaking to a child. “Why not? What about Sapsago Hall, or Mozzarella? I know: ‘The Princess of Wales at home at her country estate, Camembert.’ ”
To Freddy’s astonishment, this dispute would drag on for a number of years. Although he loved Moocock in every way, she hated the name and was determined to follow her family’s tradition and call it after a cheese. It is said that marriage is a long war between ancient families trapped in close proximity by lust. That’s not the half of it. The next morning, Freddy stood fully clothed and forlornly looking at the dead Champagne bottle at the bottom of the pool. He was about to dive in after it—soldiers are used to swimming in their clothes—when Fredericka appeared. Dressed only in a short silk robe, she was as beguiling as ever she had been. He felt that Eden, or, perhaps Edam, might yet be restored, for the wind still carried the scent of flowers, the sun was hot, the sound of a nearby fountain was hypnotic, and there they were, the two of them, a study in the statuesque. Horses had never been bred better. Bread had never been buttered better. Batter had never been better beaten.
“Were you in my bathroom last night?” she asked, breaking the spell and seething for a fight.
“I was,” he said, innocently.
“When I was sleeping?”
“Yes, just making sure everything was safe.”
“Safe?”
“Secure.”
“Was it you who turned around the paper roll in the WC?”
“It was.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Someone put it in the wrong way. It was coming from behind and off the roll like a scoop rather than from off the top and hanging down like a beef tongue.”
“Who says?”
“Says Frederick, the Prince of Wales.”
“That’s wrong. It should come from the bottom.”
“Certainly not. If it comes from the bottom, when you rip it off you can’t control it and it might not tear evenly.”
“Who cares if it tears evenly?”
“Fredericka, there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way. At Moocock, and everywhere else I live, it must come off the top of the roll.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Yours can come off the top of the roll. Mine comes off the bottom.”
“I won’t be able to sleep, and you know it.”
“Then at night I’ll remove the roll from the holder and lock it in my suitcase so you can sleep like a badger.”
“Good idea,” he said, “a good compromise.”
“If you’ll do the same.”
“Why would I have to, when mine is inserted properly?”
“So I can sleep.”
“All right.”
This was, more or less, what their lives together had become. But such things as they disputed are not important, and can easily be overridden by mutual passions and compulsions, deep spiritual sympathy, and intellectual compatibility. As Freddy was by inheritance and constant physical training a spectacular physical specimen, and Fredericka was by inheritance and constant physical training an even more spectacular physical specimen, he assumed that she, parallelling him, would be content to spend the rest of their days absorbed in the challenge of sport, the contemplation of history, the mystery of fate, and the beauty of nature. All his life he had been either engaged in explosive and exhaustive physical pursuits or lost in thought. Everything in between—sociality, ceremony, conviviality, petty cares, and display—he thought witless.
Naturally, he understood how such things might be of interest or attraction to people who had to work their way up the ladder. But to him and to his family they seemed pointless. Having no place higher to go, why would he waste time flapping his wings? Though he had to cut ribbons and banter with tense Melanesians, on his own time he had Shakespeare, Liddell Hart, Newton, Mozart, and history. He loved history. The history just of his family was a field unto itself. He never had enough time left in the day to read. How could Fredericka, born to a high family and destined to be the queen of England, be unlike him?
ONCE, IN LONDON, when they had not been married long, the first cold evening of autumn came suddenly from the death of a lingering summer. Autumnal winds lifted in their wake the bat-like leaves that roar through darkened parks, and the lights of the city glittered from countless placid windows. Poised to strike, rested and intense, in excellent health and perfectly dressed, Freddy and Fredericka stood in a long gallery of Buckingham Palace, looking out at the night.
He could not decide what to do, but there were many possibilities: a private tour of the Tate, or, better yet, just wandering alone through the National Gallery; a visit to the prime minister or Stephen Hawking; a helicopter flight over London, which would flicker like a galaxy clouded with smoke and stars; a walk through Hyde Park as the wind swept it empty; an opera or a play; or perhaps just sitting by the fire, with a book. And that was hardly exhaustive, for here was the greatest, most civilised city in the world, and within and without his palace of six hundred rooms the heir to the throne had many options.
Then came ten piercing words that shattered his peace of mind like a dagger clattering upon a marble floor: “Freddy,” she asked, “you know what I’ve got? I’ve got disco fever!”
“What?”
“Let’s go to a disco. We’ll just pick one and walk in. The excitement will be awesome, and it will make all the papers.”
Freddy stepped toward the wall. Staring at the elaborate silk wallpaper as if he were deeply hurt, he ran his eyes along the patterns as he spoke. “First of all, Fredericka, please don’t say ‘awesome.’ Secondly, we don’t want to be in the papers other than on controlled, appropriate, and dignified occasions. Generally, it is good to avoid the papers.” She hadn’t moved from the centre of the red runner, and was resplendent in gown and tiara. Her savagely blue eyes outshone the great weight of jewellery on her, and her golden hair outshone the tiara.
“Discos,” Freddy went on, “are for people whose empty heads require a filling of drugs, achingly bad music, and hideous lights. I never have been to them, I never will go to them, and I hope that if you have been to them you will from now on leave them behind.”
“But they’re fun.”
“We’ve discussed this.”
“We have?”
“Before we married, I told you, and you agreed, that though there are many things we can do that most people cannot even dream of doing, there are many more things we cannot do that most people could not dream of doing without.”
“Like going to a disco?”
“And walking through Chelsea in daylight, having tea in a hotel, sitting in a park while reading the paper, holding regular employment, being unnoticed, not bearing the weight of a thousand years of tradition, et cetera. It is indeed awful in the modern sense of the word, and it is why, if I had a choice, I would not be king.”
“You’re just saying that,” Fredericka told him nervously.
“I am saying it, but I’m not just saying it. I mean it. I’ve considered it all my life. Given the choice, I would not be king.”
A look of misery and panic crept over her. “It’s that bloody bird. What has he done to you? He’s made you this way. Why don’t you just have him killed?”
“He comes from a royal line man
y hundreds of years old. My patience with him is the patience that I myself am granted by others, and to break such a line would be a sin such as I would never commit.”
“But he’ll stop you from being king.”
“And if he does?”
“What will we do then? We’ll have to live in Paris, like your great-uncle, or in a little village somewhere, and no one will care about us.”
“Fredericka, no one cares about us now.”
“Oh, no, Freddy, the whole world cares about us.”
“Not a bit. We’re merely an amusement, a distraction. As the whole world does not really know us, cannot be close to us, and has no real need of us, nor does it love us, it merely uses us to fulfil certain of its needs. Anyone in our position would do. A thousand million people saw our wedding, to be sure, but you cannot count on a single one of them any more than they can count on you.”
“That’s nonsense. I feel adoration now more than ever in my life.”
“Adoration is for God, saints, and babies, Fredericka. It has only one direction. Even if you contrive somehow to return it, accepting it is a sin.”
“A sin?” She was astounded.
“Adoration will betray and ruin you, take the life from you, and leave you a charred shell.”
“All I want to do, Freddy, for God’s sake, is go to a disco.”
“You’ve touched upon things that have taken the deaths of kings and princes to be learnt. I never expected you to come into this immediately or to learn all you must in an instant. It will take time to clarify, but then you’ll understand.”
“Understand what?”
Freddy sat down on the floor and leant against the wall. Still hopeful that they would go out into London, Fredericka sank like a flower and knelt in the centre of the red runner. Soon she lay down on her side and was as relaxed as he, her right hand cradling her head, her elbow on the floor.
“You’ll understand in time that all the things that we have—the palaces, properties, and farms, the paintings, uniforms, fame, and jewels—are a burden, a trial, and a test. Most people are lucky in that they spend their lives working constructively for such things, though they may never get them. Our bad luck is that we need not work and we have them. When you do get them, the process of destruction begins. It is inevitable. These things rot and corrode not only the souls of men but the spirit of dynasties, and it has been that way since the beginning of time.”
“Why?” Fredericka asked, not because she wanted to know, but be-cause she knew he loved it when anyone asked him why.
“Because they are things, and when things are the end of the road they must be vested with a significance they cannot support. The enterprise, which is often a life, is then bankrupt. There is only one solution.”
“And what is that?”
“To do without them.”
“You don’t do without them, no one in your family does without them.”
“Ah,” said Freddy, “that’s where you’re wrong. It’s one of our secrets, and it goes back quite far. We find these things repulsive. All this stuff is the enemy, foisted upon us by our inherited position. The world dreams of it and imagines that we are enjoying it, for the world wants what we have. Our job is to pretend that we want it, too.”
“You don’t?”
“We detest it.”
“I must say, you fooled me. You have the best of everything and you’re very critical of everything else. You made me throw out my boots.”
“White patent-leather boots are for chorus girls, prostitutes, and circus ladies, not princesses of Wales.”
“You’re always sending things back, saying they’re not good enough.”
“One gets addicted to that kind of behaviour. And nothing I’ve said means that I think smoked salmon and caviar are inferior to cheese puffs, or that a Mini Morris is superior to an Aston-Martin. Given a choice, I’ll choose the best, naturally, based purely on objective criteria. You can feel it in the wood, see it in the cut, smell it in the leather, hear it in the way the car door closes, and, of course, you can taste it. What would you rather have, a cooked pig’s foot . . . or a burgundied cutlet of venison? That choice, which, when you get down to its elements, is physics, has nothing to do with what I’m saying.”
“Freddy, can’t we just go to the disco and talk about this tomorrow? Life is slipping away.”
“No. Life is right here. We don’t have to go anywhere. Kafka never left Prague.”
“There are a lot of discos in Prague. I’ve been to them. I may have danced with Kafka.”
“Probably not: he was a bit of a bug.”
“And so are you. All I want is to go out into the air.”
“We’ll walk in the garden.”
“Where you’ll talk, and tell me how your family, which has more things than anyone in the world, doesn’t like things at all. That makes me nervous. I want lights, people, and busy streets.”
“Very well. I’ll tell you not in the garden but here, and if at the end you still want to go out, we’ll go out.”
“How long will it take?” Fredericka asked, gathering herself more happily.
“Not long.”
“And can we go anywhere I’d like?”
“Yes. Where shall I begin?” Freddy asked, in a hall in which two dozen kings, staring silently over the years at sons and daughters, rivals, ancestors, fathers, mothers, old friends, and descendants and heirs they had never known, were imprisoned in their portraits, without words and largely forgotten in their lively particulars.
“Begin with yourself.”
“That’s the fashion, but I’d rather go back to Richard the Second, though he is hardly the beginning. He was, however, the first sumptuary king. In times when most people lived on earthen floors, ate gruel, and broke the spell of darkness only briefly with smoky tallow, his court was brilliant with light, he flew falcons, and he had ten thousand retainers. It took three hundred kitchen servants just to cook the food, and three hundred others, all in silk, just to keep house.”
“What’s so terrible about that?” Fredericka asked. “This palace has six hundred rooms, and grooms, postillions, pages of honour, pages of the back stairs, pages of the presence, yeomen of the plate, under-butlers, yeomen of the glass and china, footmen, polishers, sweepers, gardeners, mechanics, soldiers, and God knows what else. You know better than I. No one can keep track of them.”
“I know,” Freddy said, “and you forgot the bargemaster, the swan warden, the armourer, the deputy clerk of the closet, the hereditary carver, the apothecaries, the astronomer, the extra and temporary equerries, the heralds and pursuivants, the extra women of the bedchamber, and diddle diddle diddle all the way home. It’s a disease that’s been festering for a millennium, and we are supposed to be enthralled by it. The public pretends to want to take it away from us, and we pretend to fear. If a Labour government had the courage, and did, it would be like cutting Prometheus from the rock.”
“Who?”
“Think of it. When Edward the Seventh, as Prince of Wales, was roughing it on the Nile, he went in six blue-and-gold steamers and six barges, and took four thousand bottles of red wine, three thousand of Champagne, four French chefs, four riding horses, and a laundry. If you build a whole house around your picnic, it’s no longer a picnic, and that’s what these people did with everything.
“But then there was my great-great-great-great-grandmother, Drina—that is, Victoria. After the death of Albert, she understood that her choice was between futility and simplicity, and she chose the latter, rejecting the burden of nonsense out of hand. She came on her visits in a carriage pulled by one horse, and in a bonnet such as a shopgirl might wear. She saw right through it.”
“The bonnet?”
“No, the things that still excite you. And why shouldn’t they? You’re new to them and they to you. We have a different view. George the Fifth, the first Finney, preferred to live modestly in York Cottage, and for good reason. George the Third, the most misund
erstood of my ancestors and a great and good man (although the Americans refuse to look into the question), was much the same. They called him Farmer George, and he took as much real life as he was allowed. His routine and dress were by preference like those of a dairyman. He was modest. He refused to be captured by things. We try to follow his example.”
“It doesn’t look like it from a distance, does it?” Fredericka asked archly, for Fredericka.
“Granted, not a bit, but of that which surrounds us, in masses of things and masses of ceremony, a vast proportion belongs to the state. Much that is left belongs to the monarchy as an institution and is no more ours than we can claim history. It does not belong to us; we belong to it. Of what remains, which year by year becomes less and less, much is in a ‘museum state,’ and untouchable. We are curators who cannot use what merely weighs upon us. And then, and only then, have we our personal possessions, and if you sift them from the mass of all else they are surprisingly little, at least from my perspective.
“Despite appearances, we have learned not to need, not to want, not to succumb to fame, flattery, and the material. It is our only chance of survival. And no good Prince of Wales in the modern day would want to be king. I would rather be a normal man, for then I could have a life with”—he hesitated—“texture. What is brittle fame compared to the peace of anonymity? What is adoration compared to love?”
“But you won’t abdicate.”
“Of course not. It’s my duty to go on, to maintain the line. I can’t possibly fail in that. It’s as if you and I were throwing a ball back and forth to establish a record, and had been doing so for a millennium. You cannot drop a ball that has remained airborne through good effort for most of a thousand years. You cannot stop an unlikely heart that has been beating for so long. I would rather die than betray continuity, for its own sake if for nothing else. And Britain needs a king, just as it needs motormen and cooks and a prime minister. Just as it needs soldiers who will die for it if they must. It’s my job, or it will be, but you should know that I’ve never wanted it. I was only born to it, as if with a deformity, to which I hope I can respond with grace.”