King and Joker

by Peter Dickinson

  But only the Family went to Durdy’s funeral, the service in Balmoral kirk and the burial in the grounds of Abergeldie Castle. Father, supposing he’d wanted it, would never have dreamed of asking the owners of Abergeldie whether they would allow him to be buried in their garden; but he had no hesitation in insisting that they should let his old nanny have the resting-place of her choice. Nobody knew why she’d chosen it. Edward VII when Prince of Wales had merely rented the castle so that he could be within range of his mother but out of the immediate draughts and disapprovals of Balmoral. But chosen it she had, taking Father ten years ago to show him the spot.

  So they buried her there on a drenching October morning, with streamlets runnelling off the stacked turves beside the grave and falling in continuous lines from the rib-points of the umbrellas. The minister had a bad cough. Louise saw Father looking at him, clearly wondering whether he ought to prescribe something.

  It was a dismal little ceremony, but it felt right. Durdy was going to have a memorial tablet in the kirk, but here there would be smooth lawn, smooth snow in winter, under which she would lie as secret as the secret of why she wanted to be buried here at all, Louise thought it was something to do with Kitten. You couldn’t call a young man Kitten, and tell him not to cry; and it wasn’t the voice in which Durdy ever spoke to children. No one would ever know. But I shan’t carry my secret to the grave, Louise thought. I’m not as strong as she was.

  On the plane south everybody was tired and silent. Father read despatches and Albert a zoology text-book while Mother and Nonny played one of their endless games of six-pack bezique. Louise looked out of the window at the last light fading pinkly from the cloud-banks below. When it was dark, somewhere over Manchester, she got up and crossed to Father’s chair.

  “I want to talk to you,” she whispered.

  He nodded, rose and led her farther forward to the compartment off the main saloon which he used as an office for work on longer flights. Two chairs, a bleak desk, the radio telephone extension. They sat down and he looked at her with a question on his face.

  “I’m not going to get over it,” she said. “I can cope with it, but I can’t go back to what it was like before.”

  “Sorry about that. That was a good time.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want me to say, more than that I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t know. What did you say to Mother?”

  “How did you know I’d told her?”

  “The day after Pilfer … she was sitting in my room. I knew something else had happened. I didn’t know what till I heard Durdy telling Theale that he’d killed McGivan, so it wasn’t McGivan I saw.”

  “All right. Yes. I told Bella just what happened. You want me to tell you?”

  “Will it be any use?”

  “Perhaps—if you think I’d gone up there, dressed up as McGivan, so as to get a chance of screwing Kinunu. Is that what you thought, Lulu?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’re wrong, my girl. Bella trusted me better than that. I suppose I’ll have to go through it all again. Look, I was pretty well certain that McGivan was the joker, but I wanted to be dead sure. I’d made the same guess as you about him listening to the monitor. It was going to be tricky enough tackling him about what he knew without having to cope with not being quite certain whether he did know it. So I chose a point when I thought he’d be helping with the security check before the reception, waxed my moustache and trotted up to see Kinunu. You’ll remember I asked you to go and have tea with Durdy. My idea was that McGivan had simply persuaded Kinunu to let him turn on the monitor in the Night Nursery and see what we were talking about, and I wanted to check how she reacted when I tried it. But I’d hardly put my face round the door before she was all over me, tugging me into her bedroom as though she couldn’t wait for an instant. That’s when I should have put a stop to things—then—soon as they started. But I didn’t want to let on I wasn’t McGivan and I did want to check about the monitor. Besides that, I was … well … inquisitive. McGivan of all people! I won’t pretend, Lulu, that the sex urge wasn’t there too, but at my age … after all, I spent a lot of my early manhood fending off women who threw themselves at me … it still happens quite a bit … you’d be surprised …”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t want to be unfair to the girl. She was very good to Durdy. But it was a bit outside my experience. One moment I was sitting on the edge of the bed and she was switching that monitor on for me—so far, so good, I thought and the next she was all over me, tumbling together, all our clothes on, she didn’t even give me a chance to kick my shoes off, with me thinking of McGivanish things to say to get me out of this, and then, just as suddenly, she’d manoeuvred me to the edge of the bed, given a quick wriggle and heaved me off. That was fine by me. I got up, ready to go, when I saw her lying there, giggling and looking sideways at me. I saw it was a game, a game she always played. She never let McGivan get anywhere with her, and never would. She’d spotted that he’d never quite have the confidence … he had the most frightful mother, my grandfather’s half-sister.”

  “I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”

  Father shrugged.

  “A bit,” he said. “And quite a bit with what he did to your room. In fact I’d bet that if Kinunu hadn’t been leading him up the garden path and then slamming the door in his face, he wouldn’t have exploded like that. Still … I won’t pretend I thought about any of that at the time. All I thought about was old McGivan, never being given a chance by anyone, everybody’s butt—oh, I know it was all my fault bringing him down to London in the first place—but here he was, and this cunning little bint … I blew my top. I’ll teach her, I thought. I suppose I also thought that if I got her over the first hurdle then she might let McGivan have what he wanted and that’d make him easier to cope with. No, that’s only a rationalisation. I was pretty blind with fury for old McGivan …”

  “So you raped her?”

  Father stared, looking for an instant as though he was going to yell at her. Then he smiled and pulled at his moustache.

  “You saw her, Lulu. Did she look like a girl who’d just been raped?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “So I should bloody well think. The trouble with you, Lulu, is that you’ve become so grown-up of a sudden that one forgets that there are areas in which you haven’t the experience to evolve an adult judgment. Look at it this way—what good would I be doing old McGivan if she hadn’t enjoyed herself? Make her more of a tease, if anything. I suppose a text-book would say something like I aroused her sexual urge sufficiently to overcome a superficial neurosis … You want me to go into details?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s what happened. Bloody good thing you didn’t start shouting halfway through.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you can imagine I’d rather forgotten the original object of the expedition while all this was going on, but the monitor was there with you and Durdy burbling away about something, and I was just about coming up for air when I noticed Durdy was sounding a bit odd. She was telling you about some man—Edward the Seventh I think it must have been—and how women reacted to him.”

  “That’s right. She said she didn’t know whether he was attractive. She said you’d have to be ‘a rich lady’ to know that. She thought that with servants he was more like a hunter. And then she said something very unDurdyish about a wee bird in the heather.”

  “Yes, I heard that. It made me feel a bit rum, I can tell you, but not half as bad as when you yelled out you were glad I wasn’t like that and it would spoil everything.”

  “I’d forgotten. I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Everything, Lulu?”

  “No, I suppose not. No, not everything.”

  “Is what I’ve told you any use to you?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t know yet. I expect so. Yes. That foul clock …”

  “I made a mess of that. I didn’t realise how critical McGivan’s time of death was going to be—I just put it forward as far as I dared—I’d made a guess at his body temperature. The first pathologist’s report said he’d been dead longer, but there were a couple of discrepancies in it and they had it all re-checked—do you remember d’Arcy talking about that?—so I thought I could afford to hang on and see. Perhaps I was over-influenced by what I’d heard you saying about spoiling everything. Meanwhile Durdy guessed what had happened and got Kinunu to keep fiddling the clock, which only made it harder to back out of the mess. While there was still a good chance that McGivan had been killed by terrorists I didn’t think the time of death would be absolutely crucial. But the mayhem in Bert’s zoo shook me up … and then Pilfer … it took me a day or so to realise that in spite of the evidence I couldn’t swallow the idea of Pilfer going off the rails like that. And then there was the fact that d’Arcy was the hell of a chap to persuade to look at things any other way than his own … But that very morning when Kinunu brought me your SOS from the nursery I’d made up my mind that as soon as I’d sat on my bog I’d go and tell d’Arcy that it wasn’t McGivan you’d seen up there.”

  He stopped at the sound of a light tap on the door, just audible through the engine-boom. At Father’s call Captain Tabard’s head poked into the office.

  “Message from Heathrow, Your Majesty. We’re landing in about ten minutes, and apparently there’s quite a crowd waiting for you.”

  “Oh Lord. How big?”

  “About half what the Osmonds had last time they flew in. I saw that. Even half of it’s a lot of people.”

  “Hell,” said Father. “Can’t divert, I suppose—not fair on the poor sods, anyway. Thanks, Captain. Will you tell Her Majesty?”

  “Will do, Sir.”

  The head withdrew. Father stretched and sighed.

  “Well, I think that’s all I can usefully tell you,” he said. “We’ll just have to try to build things up, best we can.”

  “There’s something else,” said Louise. “You don’t have to do this at once, and you’ll have to get Nonny to agree—and Mother too, I suppose—but as soon as you can manage it I want people to know that I’m a bastard.”

  He had started to get up, but dropped back into his chair and stared at her, very tense.

  “We’ve only got ten minutes,” he said at last.

  “I know. We can talk about it properly later. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’ve found I still love you—all three of you. But don’t you see, if we hadn’t had to keep it secret none of this would have happened? I suppose McGivan would have played his jokes, but they wouldn’t have done any harm. But now he’s dead, and Pilfer’s dead, and Theale, and you went and made love to Kinunu, all because we thought we had to go on lying about me. I want to stop being a lie—provided Nonny agrees, I mean. That’s important.”

  “I’m glad you think so. But she’s not the only one, Lulu. For instance, have you thought about Derek Oliphant?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The obstetrician who went along with us in pretending that Bella was pregnant when she wasn’t I had to put a lot of pressure on him about that. He’d be ruined if it came out.”

  “If it was wrong in the first place he needn’t have agreed.”

  “But don’t you see, Lulu, I picked him because I thought he would give in to pressure? And he’s only an example: the effects would be far wider than you can imagine. Put it this way—supposing it would involve my abdication, would you still insist on the truth coming out?”

  “No. No, of course not. Would it?”

  “About fifty-fifty, I’d say.”

  “Oh … there isn’t time, now … look, if you’ll promise to see if you can find a way of doing it … it doesn’t have to be at once … by my eighteenth birthday, for instance. But the other thing is I want to stop princessing and start living more like Nonny—I know I can’t get out of everything, but … look, even if I’ve got to go on being a lie, I don’t have to live like a lie all the time, do I? I won’t let you down, but do you see …”

  “I see very well, darling. It’s my argument with Nonny all over again. But I’m glad you think her feelings are important. She doesn’t show them, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them. You ought to know that if anyone.”

  “Because I’m a bit like her it doesn’t mean I’m like her all through. I’m myself?”

  “Of course you are; But listen. I told her about me and Kinunu …”

  “I expect she thought it was funny,” said Louise sourly.

  “She laughed. But there are laughs and laughs. It was Nonny who made me tell Bella.”

  “Oh. I meant …”

  He snorted and rose as the jet-boom changed its note. They went back into the saloon, settled into arm-chairs, swung them to face aft and worked the cunning seat-belts that locked them in that position for the landing. Do I believe him? thought Louise. Half and half. I bet he didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. But I bet he enjoyed himself with Kinunu. And I bet there’s been things like that before—in fact I can remember Mother having that sad old face once when I was quite small. And he’d get away without her knowing most times. It’s my fault, my minding so much. I wanted them to be a Paradise Island, but they’re people. I expect Mother’s done things she’s ashamed of, by being careless or blind or angry. She can be almost mad when she’s angry. I’ll hurt people too, I expect, quite often. Granny’s right about that. I must have hurt them horribly when I was hanging out on the window-sill, making up my mind to drop, thinking only about me and how I felt. I was even sort of glad I was hurting them. That’s horrible … I was trying to make Story Parents out of them, and when they spoilt the story.

  She yawned with the pressure-change. The plane bumped, once, and she let the deceleration down the runway sink her into the upholstery while she listened to the strangely satisfying well-that’s-over note of the reversed jets. I wonder if Nonny’s been faithful to him all the time, either, she thought. Mother has, of course. I mightn’t even be his daughter … No, that’s nonsense, that’s starting another sort of story. They love me. He loves me. That isn’t half-and-half. I love them too—not Paradise Island, but people … and I’m free now. He’ll find a way of letting me go. I think Nonny might be glad to stop the lie, too—it must have been a frightful strain on her, sometimes. And when Mother sees it’s right … And I’ll never need to remind him that I’ve seen him standing to attention by Kinunu’s bed, with his trousers round his ankles, snuffling …

  As the plane swung to its bay Father twisted to peer through the rain-streaked window.

  “I’ll never understand the GBP,” he said. “Not if I live till I’m as old as Durdy. Here we are, an expensive luxury, time of crisis, pound at two dollars—we let the Family get itself into a godawful mess, mostly my fault—bombs and murders and other unbecoming mayhem—and then more by luck than judgment we get ourselves out again and they turn up in thousands to cheer us as if we’d just flown in from winning a war single-handed.

  “God, it’s absolutely pissing down. At least somebody’s managed to find the steps this time. No thank you, Turner, we’ll have to do without brollies and brave the elements—there’s a lot of them on the roof up there and they won’t see a thing otherwise. Will you go first, darling? I’ll come slap behind you. Leave a bit of a gap, Lulu—you’re the one they want to see—sure you can face that?—then Bert. OK, Turner, tell them to open up.”

  The rain was streaks of diamond under the floodlights and made a rattly drumming on the metal of wings and fuselage. A big jet was taking off, but both sounds were drowned by the crash of cheers as Mother stepped out into the rain. When Father followed her the noise screwed itself up a pitch. Louise saw Nonny smugly getting her umbrella ready to open. She squeezed her ha
nd, got a squeeze back, put on her public face—the one for use at funerals—and walked to the door. The white, lit faces were banked shingle, the rain was spume, the cheers were roaring surf. She paused on the top step, as though waiting for Albert. Flashlights sparkled like fireworks at a royal birth. As she came down the steps she thought I hope Durdy’s watching. This is just her cup of tea.

  About the Author

  Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England­. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.

  The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: Skin Deep (1968) and A Pride of Heroes (1969).

  A collection of Dickinson’s poetry, The Weir, was published in 2007. His latest book, In the Palace of the Khans, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

  Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.