Skeleton-in-Waiting

by Peter Dickinson

  “Hello, Sir Sam,” said Louise. “When you get sick of us you can always get a job as a juggler’s mate.”

  “I shall come to you for a reference, ma’am. Impressive little ceremony the kontakion made it, don’t you think? Life’s going to be quieter without her.”

  “Don’t you believe it. She’ll make a pretty effective ghost. Uncanny harp-twangings at the wrong moment. Where did you find Count Alex Romanov?”

  “The little shiny one? We didn’t find him. HRH left instructions that he was to be invited to the funeral. He is named in her will as literary executor—not a very onerous responsibility, one would think, with just that monograph on the harp. Presumably he has an interest in things musical.”

  “I don’t know. He says they were pen-pals. He’s still got a lot of her letters. They used to send each other family gossip.”

  Sir Savile had already been on the move with his teetering load. He stopped.

  “Our family?” he murmured.

  “Yes.”

  “Dear me.”

  “He says he doesn’t necessarily believe everything she told him.”

  “Oh, it wouldn’t need to be true. Has he any idea what he’s got there, d’you imagine?”

  Louise considered. People, especially intelligent ones, could be extraordinarily naive about what mattered once you became involved with the Family, but Count Alex had given the impression of being fully aware of the nuances around him. You wouldn’t be much good as a gossip­-relay if you weren’t.

  “Yes, probably,” she said.

  “Dear me.”

  “They’re all in Russian.”

  “I suppose that’s something. I’d better have a word with HM. How did you run into the chap? I mean, did he come beavering over to you to tell you?”

  “No. He was talking to Piers about AI, and then when I showed up he got on to the letters.”

  “AI?”

  “Artificial Intelligence.”

  “Is there any other kind?”

  “It’s Count Alex’s job too.”

  “Is it, now? Perhaps you might suggest to Lord Chandler that he keeps in touch, hm?”

  “They seemed to be getting on. Tell Father to ring me if he wants to know any more.”

  Sir Savile moved away but before Louise could do so too she felt a touch on her elbow and turned to find it was Albert.

  “Got a moment?” he said. “Not in here. Shouldn’t be anyone in the Stamp Room.”

  “I’ll just tell Piers.”

  Great-grandfather, King Victor I, had been a man of few interests. He shot and went racing, because he was expected to. He played simple card-games for large stakes, and snooker. His rumoured youthful­ enthusiasms were not permissible under the steely rule of Great-grandmama­. But somebody must have decided that a monarch ought to be publicly known to have concerns of a vaguely intellectual kind, and that in King Victor’s case philately was about the highest level he could plausibly be represented as having attained. The Royal Stamp Collection was housed in a small room off the State Apartments, not much changed since King Victor’s day, with its pair of reading-desks and its low leather arm-chairs in which a man might relax with his Hine and Havana after the effort of studying an 1866 Bolivian five-centavo mauve. Louise found Albert already in one of the chairs, in exactly the right pose, slumped back with his wine-glass in his hand. It was a mild shock; despite having thought about his new neatness at the funeral, and what Soppy had said about his having changed, Louise’s mental image of her elder brother was still that of a few years back, the hairy leftie vegetarian who harangued banquets of financiers about the vital need to preserve the habitat of the natterjack toad. Now, in his formal clothes, with his beard trimmed to a naval wedge and his hair receding sharply above the temples, he could have been the ghost of Great-grandfather, apart from the blue intelligent gaze.

  “You’ll be eating veal next,” said Louise.

  He twitched his head, puzzled. Her skirt was too tight to copy his pose so she perched on a chair-wing.

  “You’ve changed,” she said.

  “Have I? Doesn’t feel like that, from inside—I suppose it never does. You were talking to Soppy.”

  “Nice to see her.”

  “What did you think?”

  “She seemed a bit down.”

  “Understatement of the year. She’s pretty well at the end of her tether. So, if it comes to that, am I.”

  “I was just thinking how smug and kempt you look.”

  “Training.”

  “Isn’t it just the time of year? Christmases with Aunt Eloise must have been pretty good hell. Soppy says she used to get out of it by nipping off to Argentina, but I don’t think you get away from your childhood that easy.”

  “I tried to get her out there this year. I thought there might be a chance, with the FO wanting to pretend the Falklands War was only a sort of folk-myth which never really happened at all, but Mrs T. put her foot down. Don’t you long for the days when you could go buzzing around the world incognito and everyone looked the other way?”

  “The hacks would make a real meal of her, I suppose.”

  “She’s not been coping with the hacks that well, actually. I don’t know. She knew what she was in for when she took me on, I thought.”

  “You don’t. No one does. I was brooding about Granny’s marriage. No one else can imagine what it’s like, and no one can imagine what their own one’s going to be like.”

  “Anyway, it isn’t just the hacks. Did she tell you she’d sacked poor Bridget while I was in Oslo, for no reason she can explain? Just said the girl got on her nerves.”

  “It happens.”

  “Not like that. I tried to reason with her and she clammed up. She’s eating much too much.”

  Louise just stopped the burst of laughter. How could he tell? Soppy’s appetite was known to be limitless. It had been a family joke since nursery days. But she could see that Albert had taken that into account and was still bothered.

  “You saw what she had on her plate?” he said. “She’ll fill it up a couple of times, and then she’ll do her duty by three or four puddings and top off with a few slabs of cheese—and then as soon as we’re home she’ll be at the fridge for a snack.”

  “She ought to be in The Guinness Book of Records.”

  “They wouldn’t let her in. She cheats. She’s taking pills to help shove it through.”

  “Oh. I must say that doesn’t sound too good.”

  “No. Any ideas?”

  “Well … I think she’s bothered, too. I said something about how spruce you were getting to look and she started talking about how everybody was different … Do you still love her, Bert?”

  Albert protected himself from any direct display of emotion by going into his Father-imitation, poising the tips of his fingers together and giving a snort through his moustache.

  “Trick question,” he said. “When did you stop loving your wife? I love her OK, but in a different way from a few years back. Much more complex. I mean, for instance, it includes a good deal of irritation sometimes. It’s like, oh well, for instance, the shift from the intense simplicities of folk music to the interwoven diffusions of polyphony, if you follow me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Sorry. I forgot. Well, then, it’s like coming off the high moorlands where you can see for miles and there isn’t a soul in sight and the winds of heaven to breathe, to walking through close farmland with hedges and twisting lanes and business calls to make on the way.”

  “That’s more like it. Perhaps Soppy’s hankering for the hill-tops.”

  “You can’t stay there for ever, but monogamy still rules in my case, if that’s what you mean. That wasn’t why she sacked Bridget. I don’t think that’s the problem. For instance, she found an old snap of Aunt Kitty Bakewell in her twent
ies, long before she showed any sign of going off her trolley, dolled up as a man for some kind of fancy dress do in a white tie and tails and looking stunning. First glance you’d think it was Soppy herself. And she keeps dragging Kitty into conversations—not right in, just hinting and then pushing her out of sight again.”

  “Soppy’s always looked terrific in uniform. Piers is mad about her.”

  “Piers is just kinky about women in uniform. Look how he got Mother to dress up in her Irish Guards outfit last Christmas. To my mind it all goes back to his being found on that bus. His mother must have been some buxom conductress, and he’s working out his pre-natal influences.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No. Of course not. But I’m serious about Soppy. I think her problems are mostly down to Aunt Eloise.”

  “Do you really? Soppy always gives the impression of being the only one who can handle her.”

  “As she grew up, she evolved various strategies and techniques, but she wouldn’t have had them when she was a child. All it means is that everything’s deeper-buried, hidden from her conscious mind, so she has to blame her problems on things that are happening to her now, like not being allowed to go to Argentina. I don’t know what it is about some people’s mothers.”

  “At least we’ve been lucky with our own. Did you meet Alex Romanov? His was a handful too, by the sound of her. You might’ve noticed me taking him over to woo poor Aunt Bea.”

  “Oh, him … looked as if he was making a go of it, too. Where did you pick him up?”

  “He was talking to Piers about AI. He used to correspond with Granny on a regular basis, he says. He’s got a lot of her letters, long ones, full of the sort of things she used to say about everyone.”

  “Has he, by God? That’s what you were telling Sir Sam? No wonder he looked a bit haunted. What’s he going to do?”

  “Try and con them off him somehow, I should think.”

  “Why bother?”

  Louise stared. It seemed too obvious to argue about. There was no question of the Palace allowing Granny’s papers to be published as they stood. Even letting Alex Romanov get as far as trying to publish them, and then having to go to the courts to get them suppressed, would wake an absolute volcano of guesswork and rumour about what might be in them.

  “You know what I think?” said Albert. “Seriously. The best way to deal with a time-bomb like this is blow it up in the open. We should help Mr Romanov get the stuff published.”

  “Count. Or Doctor. You did say ‘Seriously’?”

  “Father writes a pious foreword. That gives the Palace a bit of a say, and Sir Sam can blue-pencil the iffy bits.”

  “It’s all going to be iffy in Sir Sam’s eyes.”

  “Time he went.”

  Albert had spoken casually, as if adding a footnote to the conversation. Louise looked at him. He shrugged. The gesture, allied to the slumped, clubland pose, had a masculine ruthlessness about it which Louise found hard to associate with the Albert she had known all her life until they had moved into their separating marriages. Sir Savile seemed a large and unchanging object in her mental landscape, single-mindedly loyal, according to his lights. Now, in Albert’s eyes, it was time that bit of landscape was cleared. Soppy was right. Albert had changed in aspects less obvious than the cut of his beard.

  “Is there anything you’d like me to do about Soppy?” she said. “I could try and get her to talk if you want. I don’t think it would be much use just telling her to cut down on the calories.”

  “No, of course not. I wanted to know what you thought, and talk about her a bit. There’s no one else, so I’m afraid you’ve got to bear with it.”

  “All I can suggest is you might try getting back up on the hill-tops a bit. Perhaps she isn’t ready for ordinary country walks all the time. I know it’s difficult—no use if you’re faking it. Couldn’t you set up some kind of escapade, something that really felt like a break-out … I don’t know, smuggle her out to Argentina in a false nose and then arrange to turn up yourself, unbeknownst to her. She canters across at the end of the second chukka and there you are holding her remount.”

  Albert laughed, then sighed.

  “You remember how we used to fantasise about what they could do to us?” said Louise. “Putting us in the Tower, and us appealing to the European Court of Human Rights? I mean, how would they physically stop you … ?”

  “You’re not helping, Lulu.”

  “Sorry. I know.”

  “My fault. I oughtn’t to have bothered you.”

  “I really want to help. I like Soppy a lot, for one thing. So does Piers. Can I talk to him?”

  “If you want to. I suppose he’s got an angle on what some of it’s like which we can’t have. What I’d like is next time she starts hinting about Aunt Kitty I’ll see if I can’t persuade her to talk to a psychiatrist, just to set her mind at rest. Then if she gets on with him …”

  “Her,” said Louise.

  “Oh. Right. I’ll ask around. Time we were getting back?”

  They rose.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You mayn’t think it, but that’s helped a bit.”

  “Any time. It matters more than most things.”

  “I know. Had I better take a squint at your Romanov friend? You never said what you made of him.”

  “He’s got a lot of charm. It’s real. It was there for Aunt Bea, too.”

  “Talked to any of the others? They strike me as a rum lot.”

  “I was thinking about Granny. You know, she wasn’t really civilised. I wouldn’t have put anything past her.”

  “Right.”

  3

  “… I thought we might be seeing him again anyway,” said Piers. “It’s not that often we bump into a chap who can get along in both our languages.”

  “Let’s have a supper in your flat. You can ask the Stokeses and Isabelle. Tracy and I can talk obstetrics while you four zoom around on the higher plane.”

  “If you like.”

  “I’ll get Joan to find a hole in the diary. Not too soon, or Alex might smell a rat.”

  “It’s you and your lot who are doing the rat-smelling, in my opinion. Alex struck me as a decent enough bloke.”

  “I thought so too, what I saw of him. You’ve got to expect us to be jumpy about Romanovs. Even leaving Granny out they’re an odd lot. There’ve been some terrific scandals.”

  “Would you say that an excessive sense of personal honour was an hereditary characteristic in them?”

  (Piers, as usual when bed-talk turned to the Family, was trying to distance himself by adopting the tone and phraseology of the sort of don who must have been pretty well extinct even in his student days.)

  “I don’t know. Granny was the only one I knew well. When it suited her, I suppose … Why?”

  “One could conceive of Alex deciding that since your grandmother entrusted him with her letters partly in the hope that he would use them to continue her various feuds after her death, he might regard it as his duty to do so.”

  “And there’d be quite a bit of money in it, too. Anyway, could he? How much is a literary executor allowed to do? If the family don’t want it, I mean?”

  “It would depend on the wording of the will, I imagine. In any case Sir Savile’s office will presumably exhume some pre-Reformation statute in Norman French which empowers your father to have any subjects disembowelled who attempt to publish his mother’s correspondence against his will.”

  “I can just see the headlines. That’s the whole point, darling. There’ll be almost more fuss if it gets out we’re trying to put the lid on things than if we let it all come out. And it doesn’t make any difference that Granny will have got it all wrong. Look at the poor old Dingwalls.”

  (When, on the announcement of Louise’s engagement to Piers, the hacks had discovered that on th
e groom’s side no family at all existed to be harried for childhood memories, incredible efforts had been made to excavate a hidden past. The search itself had become its own news. One line had been to hunt up doubles of the new celebrity, especially in the neighbourhood of Coventry. A foreman of an abattoir had been found living at Leamington Spa who had a definite resemblance, so his parents—the father had also been in the meat trade—had had to put up not only with several weeks’ ferocious scrutiny but with a series of “revelations”, all foundationless, about one or other of them having a secret in their past, once shameful but now in the eyes of the hacks glorious beyond belief.)

  “You realise that if Alex is motivated as Sir Savile seems to fear, inviting him to supper may be interpreted by him as meaning that he has hooked his fish?”

  “He has, hasn’t he? If he’s fishing. But if he is then someone’s going to have to talk to him somehow, and if he isn’t we’ll just have had a nice supper-party.”

  “Sir Savile could send some pin-striped emissary.”

  “Father’s always dead against that, if he can help it. Next thing you know is Security have got in on the act and his phone’s being tapped and someone’s faked a burglary and gone through his papers, and then you’ve got questions in the House and there’s hell to pay. Perhaps I oughtn’t to have told Sir Sam in the first place.”

  “I’d have imagined Security had enough on their plates preventing us from living our own lives the way we want to.”

  “It won’t last much longer, darling. It’s just another scare. They’ll find Gorman’s brother living it up under an assumed name in New Orleans, or something. It’ll blow over. They always do.”

  NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1987

  1

  “That you?”

  “…”

  “Now listen carefully. I’ve got something, might do. Got a pencil and paper?”

  “…”

  “There’s someone called Alex Romanov—don’t know how you spell it but it’s the same as the Russian royal family used to be. Don’t know his address. The point is, he’s got hold of a lot of letters the old Dowager Princess wrote, the one who had the funeral last week. They’re full of all kinds of dirt about the royals. What I was thinking is, suppose you could get a line on him …”