“Oh, Louise,” she said, “you look quite fabulous in that!”
She was enjoying herself and, to be frank, I was too. Despite the public character of our performance, I felt comfortable, somnolent, spoiled and at ease as a teen having a makeover.
In the end, however, she discarded almost all of it, dropping stuff on the floor, kicking it away, a bit disappointed in both of us because we’d both failed to live up to some vague, preconceived image she had of me which her gifts represented, but pleased, too, because now we could go shopping for new things, just, as she put it, “us two girls.”
She paused a moment, then retrieving a sort of turban, held it out toward my head. “Never mind,” she said. Carelessly, she dropped it again. “Of course,” she said, “we won’t really know until we do something about that hair.”
She began to bat at my hair rather as if it were on fire.
When I continued to flinch Charlotte at last intervened. “Oh do stop, Denise, you’re alarming her.”
“I’m only trying to help, Mother! I’m only seeing if it can be fixed. If you’d only stand still, Louise! So I know what to tell the hairdresser before us two girls go shopping again.”
“For goodness’ sake, Denise,” said Prince Lawrence, “stop carrying on about ‘us two girls,’ why don’t you? It’s ‘us two girls’ this and ‘us two girls’ that. ‘Us two girls,’ indeed. How can you speak so? You’re a Princess of England.”
“I was putting her at ease.”
“Oh please,” the Prince said. “Louise is my fiancée. One day she’ll outrank you.”
“Oh, Lawrence,” said the Princess, “we’re all of us only these accidents of birth, so why must you be so stuffy all the time? It really is too boring. Anyway, it isn’t even true. Dear, adorable, brilliant, fabulous, and absolutely stunnin’, charmin’, smashin’, and perfect for you as she quite so most obviously is, I am the daughter of royalty, after all, and darlin’ Louise here is only a common commoner. So what do you mean she’ll outrank me? She never will, will she, Royal Peerager?”
“Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors,” the Royal Peerager said.
“What do you mean?” Charlotte said. “I never understand what you mean when you say that.”
“Me t’ know … you t’ fin’ out,” he muttered, sulking.
“Really, George,” Charlotte objected, “listen how he speaks to me. Do I have to put up with that? A proper king wouldn’t stand for it. I daresay a proper husband wouldn’t.”
“It was a joke, Your Royal Highness,” the Peerager said. He turned to my mother-in-law manqué. “It’s a joke, Your Highness.”
King George sighed. “Well,” he said, “I suppose she is dear and adorable and brilliant and all the bloody darlin’ rest of it. I only wish Their Royal Caterers and all the Holy British Empire’s Florists and Band Leaders would just get on with it so we could have the damned wedding and retire. If she’s all right with you, she’s all right with us. Your friend passes muster, Prince,” he said as though I really didn’t.
“Where’s Alec?” the Princess broke in. “I thought Alec was coming. He promised he would. He should have been here by now.”
“I told him to come, I spoke with him just this morning. Oh my,” Charlotte said, as if remembering something she’d forgotten. Troubled, flesh-is-heir-to things played across her features, plain, ordinary as a sneeze, and, quite suddenly, she ceased to look regal, bereft of even those vestiges of bearing left to her in even only her theatrical ways. “Oh my,” she said again, worriedly. “Today’s the seventeenth.”
“That’s right,” Denise put in, “tomorrow’s the time trials.”
And now Charlotte was possessed of a flustered, lashing, unfocused anger, her rage oddly, ineptly maternal, like the helpless, confused rage of a woman just back from hospital with her first child. Even before I understood the reference of her anger I understood the reference of her anger. “He collected his new Quantra today!” she cried. “He’s off testing his damned limits, isn’t he, George! He’s off pushing his damned envelope!”
“He’s a perfectly capable young man, Charlotte, You mustn’t coddle him. The boy knows what he’s doing.”
“Oh, George,” she said, “if only he did. I wish he did.”
“It’s just an automobile. He’s been driving a car since his eighth birthday.”
“Too right,” she said, “the day he swerved to hit the gillie to avoid hitting the gillie’s dog.”
“That was an accident, Charlotte.”
“The man will never walk again, George.”
The King nodded. “I know,” he said, and for the first time that evening neglected his posture. “Look here, Ropes,” he said. “Look here, London Intentioner, Royal Peerager. Look here, Royal Taster, look here all. I’m sorry,” he said. “I am so really very sorry, but the Queen, worried as she is regarding our Alec, is a bit out of sorts this evening. Now our revels all are ended, thank you very much for coming.
I started to move off with the rest but Prince Lawrence motioned me to stay. Princess Denise, patting the broad piano bench on which she was seated, indicated I should join her.
“He’s crashed the car,” Queen Charlotte said. “I know it, he’s crashed the car.” Unexpectedly, she turned to address me. Denise, very softly, was picking out a tune on the piano, providing a sort of quiet background music behind her mother’s speech. She was very good. “He’s probably had one too many. He’s fond of surprising people in their local, Prince Alec is. He loves it when they fall all over themselves to buy him drinks. And him a prince,” she said, giggling, taking up another role. “Not once has he ever volunteered to return the favor, Louise. He brags on this as if the most wonderful service he can render them as a Prince of the Realm is to let them stand him drinks.”
“It is,” the King said wistfully.
“He’s so charming,” Charlotte said.
“Very charming,” said his sister, never breaking the rhythm of her sad, bluesy tune.
“But too much of a drinker,” his mother said. “George dearest, what’s the horsepower on the new Quantra?”
“It has a Rolls-Royce engine,” my Larry said, “I heard it can be pushed up to a thousand horses.”
“A thousand horses. A veritable cavalry,” the King said, interrupting his own husky, hummed accompaniment to Denise’s accompaniment.
“Should he be driving it through the streets?” wondered the Queen.
(Did you know, Sid, they may not be brought up on charges? I didn’t know that. I don’t think most people know. I daresay you yourself don’t absolutely know. Oh we’ve all heard rumors from time to time, and many of us have known of someone of whom it is said that once she’d known someone who was supposed to have known someone else who had had it on good authority from a friend with a pal who had connections with a person who used to be in a position of authority, but all of it is just so much blown smoke or, rather, smoke wrapped in time, or mist. Smoke wrapped in mists wrapped in time lost in legend, like the identity of Robin Hood, say, or who Christ’s cousins were.
(It isn’t even a question of influence. Of course they have influence. Everyone has influence. I have influence. And for darn damn sure it certainly isn’t written down anywhere. I mean, you could search in all the books and charters, pamphlets and whatnot in the British Museum and never come across it, and of all the controversial things I’ve set down here—the King’s Pinch, how Larry was a virgin when he done me, how Royals behave at home when they let down their hair—surely this is the most controversial. That they can’t be brought up on charges, that that gillie who was sacrificed to his own dog and was run over when Alec was eight and out on a joyride and who’ll never walk again while Alec, eight-year-old or no eight-year-old, but simply because he was a Royal and not only couldn’t be hauled into court but wasn’t even grounded, for God’s sake, and who to this day drives a souped-up thousand hp Quantra capable of whipping down the narrowest, twistiest
country lane in all of England, never mind powering about Trafalgar Square or Piccadilly Circus pressing the pedal to the metal!
(This isn’t rage, Sid, so don’t mistake me. It isn’t rage but merely the gentlest indication to my gentle readers to let them know how badly I feel to have lost out on so much, because if only a pipsqueak younger brother at a two or three times remove from the throne can have so much freedom and latitude, then how much more free and how much more wide would the latitude be for the bona fide royal- wedding-related bride of the out-and-out King! Sid, I mean, they’re not even licensed! All that hocus-pocus and rigmarole and long, winding trail and trial by blood descent they have to go through just in order to get to be considered to be in the just royal aristocratic running, and then they’re permitted to skip and finesse entirely the simple red tape of filling out a form to apply for a driver’s license! I mean, once in a while you can depose them, or maybe actually even kill them, but you can’t sue them for damages if you slip and fall on their walk if they haven’t shoveled their snow or they blindside you for life on the clearest day in the world when they drive home drunk from the pub where you’ve bought all their drinks!)
Denise, sighing, said, “Please, Mother. Mother, please don’t,” and shut the lid over the piano keys as if she’d finished the evening’s last set. “No use to fret, darling,” she said, and took up the Queen’s hands in her own. “Mustn’t be anxious. Alec’s all right. You’ll see. He’s much too fond of his life to give it up stupidly. There,” she said, “that’s better. You look so much better. Doesn’t she look so much better, Father?”
“A dainty dish to set before the King,” the King said.
“Oh,” she said, “you two!” And she might have been some cosseted Midlands farm wife dismissing a compliment and not the sophisticated lady of an hour or so earlier. She’d been smoking all evening but her long silver cigarette holder was nowhere to be seen. Denise for that matter had ceased to appear girlish, had as effectively suppressed that side of her personality as she had seemed to make the piano disappear by closing its lid. Only the King remained in character, and it occurred to me to wonder whether that wasn’t what differentiated him finally, that what made a king a king was the power of his concentration, that what may, as Denise put it, have started as an accident of birth wasn’t maintained by some absolute act of the will. How else account for the staying power of a reign, our image of kings—and queens too—as persons, whatever their age, continuing in their primes, long enough at any rate to put their stamp upon an era?
(I don’t want my readers to think I was that objective, already this journalist of a princess manqué taking notes, recording her impressions. Not a bit of it! I was swept up, I was plenty swept up. So swept up, in fact, I never took Lawrence up on his offer to run off to the Tower with him to have for engagement ring the Crown Jewel of my choice, but kept instead the fussy costume-jewelry ring I had bought for myself on the ground floor of a Los Angeles department store and had shown to the reporters back in Cape Henry. So I was swept up all right, plenty shook by these people, as much taken by them as any who pay their good money to read this stuff. Still, a girl will have her instincts, won’t she, Sir Sidney?)
Having pumped Charlotte up with her reassurances, Denise now made an effort to reinforce her original entrance, displaying her earlier, larkier pedigree. Turning back the clock, she mimed an excited, jumpy applause, impaling herself, whatever her reasons, on some sort of dismal, faked enthusiasm.
She seized on me as if I were someone from the audience pressed into service to assist her.
“Never mind, dear,” she assured me, “rudeness is just Alec’s way. It isn’t as if he means anything by it. It’s only his way of getting attention without actually having to try to kill anyone. His bark is way worse than his bite, though, once you get to know him, that is. It’s really too devastating he’s not here though. I shall never forgive him. No. I shall never forgive him. We’d planned to take you round Knightsbridge to show you to all our mates. Have you your card with you? Not to worry, we can have one made up in the morning. Did you know, incidentally, it was Alec’s idea to reintroduce the calling card back into society? If there’s nothing to do, sometimes we’ll both take up a bunch of them and drive out in my Jag to Croyden or Putney or Willesden Green and pop them through the postal slots of some of the ratepayers. Can you imagine the looks on their faces? Such fun!
“I know,” she said, “we can call on some of the cousins. We can call on Cousin Nancy, we can call on cousins Heide and Jeanne and Alice and Anne—— Cousin Anne is in town, isn’t she, Lawrence? I say, Lawrence—oh look, he’s blushing—is Cousin Anne in town?”
“Leave off, will you, Denise!” my intended yelled at her.
“Pa,” she appealed, “make him stop. Show him who’s King.”
“The both of you stop.”
“Oh all right,” she said, “I won’t show you Nanc—I mean Anne.”
“Denise!”
“Anyway,” the Princess confided, “often—well, sometimes—Alec and I—— Oh, speak of the devil.”
And, suddenly, someone who could, in accordance with all his advance notices, only have been Alec, blustered into the room. He was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk. His clothes were torn. Alec the Rude, glancing once about him, at Charlotte and George, at his sister Denise, at his brother Lawrence, the King-in-waiting who’d been off working the world and whom he couldn’t have seen in at least two months, looked in my direction, came toward me, bowed deeply, and kissed my hand loud as you please, quite solidly, and dead center on its costume-jewelry ring finger.
Sunday, February 2, 1992
How He Courted Me
It wasn’t jealousy as you and I know it. Well, it wasn’t jealousy at all, really. No matter what you’ve read in the press, the truth is I was never attracted to Alec. I don’t really think he was attracted to me. I’m not telling any tales out of school if I remind the public that Prince Alec is not highly sexed, only heavily hormoned. His skin, if you look closely, is actually rather fair and only appears swarthy because of the dense stubble of five-o’clock shadow that covers it. I don’t know why he doesn’t grow a beard. Unless of course the vaguely tough-guy look on his handsome, somewhat disheveled face is something he deliberately cultivates. Like the dust-up (rather than car crash) it turns out he provoked on the evening of my first visit to the palace. Which is why, really, I was never attracted to Alec.
Well, put yourself in my place. Knowing, I mean, what I knew. About, I mean, that business of their never being brought up on charges. Mere Figureheads? Symbolic power? I should think not. No, they can’t take us into foreign wars and don’t even have all that much say-so in domestic matters. They couldn’t, I daresay, fix a ticket for anyone below the rank of a marquess. But forget about not being allowed to make laws or fix tickets. But not ever having to answer to anyone? Symbolic power? Power like theirs, the power, I mean, to run amok with impunity, is the most seductive and dangerous power there is. So so much, I say, for the pretty myth of their Figureheadhood!
Yet there’s no denying it. It is seductive. All that force, all that dash and fire, all that vim and verve. To wink at precept and live in some perpetual state of willful disregard the indulged, insouciant life is a temptation indeed. I was not tempted.
I am, I think at least as much a woman as Prince Alec is a man. Where he is testosteronagenous and aggressive, I am largely progesterogenic and nurturing. And I never forgot that Alec is a bully—is this libelous? let them go prove it— and that too much of his bravura is vouchsafed by his princely immunities. If he was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk, if his clothes were torn, what had he to lose in a dust-up? He’s on the National Health, his clothing allowance is seventy-five thousand pounds a year. You should see the other guy.
To his credit, Lawrence was not jealous. To mine, I never gave him reason to be.
(Sid, let them bring me up on charges. Let them just try! In this La Lulu-Tells-All enterpris
e we’re supposed to be engaged in here, let me remind them that I haven’t done, I haven’t told all, not yet I haven’t. Only what relates to me. And this isn’t blackmail. I haven’t asked for a penny of their money. I wouldn’t, I won’t. And if they try to put me under a gag order, I’ll just take my story somewhere else. I’ll get in with the Yanks and give it away free to the paper with the highest circulation!)
So.
On then to my whirlwind courtship, my introduction to the British press, my background, who my people are, what I did for love, et cetera, et cetera.
The public’s up to here with most of this anyway, so I’ll simply synopsize what they already know, or think they know, throwing in where warranted one or two of my theories.
Of course it really isn’t enough for me to state that Alec and I were not attracted to each other. Who would believe me? In light of all that photographic evidence? It’s only natural the public would want some proof to counter the claims that we were up to something. In a civilization like ours, where each new dawn brings with it a fresh breath of scandal, in our Where-There’s-Smoke-There’s-Fire world, in this brave new age of nolo contendere and out-of-court settlements, the tendency is to believe in the failure of human character. Well. Unfortunately I can offer no proof. However, I think I can supply the reader with a context, what proper journalists call a backgrounder.
Consider England’s circumstances, the sociology of our times. Despite anything I may have said, or, rather, because everything I’ve said about the deeply cynical nature of the Zeitgeist is true, our sudden appearance in the social sky was welcomed, even applauded. It is simply in the nature of things when they are at their worst to hope for the best. What better time to hope for the best? Very well then, I come along, or Prince Lawrence does and I come along with him. It’s announced we’re engaged, that your future King has chosen his future Consort. We are both an item and a distraction, something like a hopeful leitmotif in an otherwise dreary composition. We not only know we’re a field day for the press, we positively count on it. Because it’s true, all the world does too love a lover. They size me up, they eye my breasts, they look at my legs.
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