by Trevor Veale
The duchess, her rouged cheeks flaming, was wishing she hadn’t rushed into the queen’s bedchamber that morning, brandishing the Bugle to let the queen know that a dreadful bombing and robbery had taken place at the National Bank. She had naively thought the queen ought to be informed, but all she had said was: “It’s private money – it won’t affect the royal purse, will it? I presume the bank is insured against loss. It looks as if a Robin Hood is at work, robbing the rich to give to the poor – or to himself.” Letitia had chortled at her own wit, snatched the paper and her tea, then almost had an apoplectic fit when she saw the offending pictures.
The incident which had caused the queen’s apoplexy had begun when the princess attended a ball held to celebrate the engagement of her sister, Princess Hernia to Prince Anton. There she had met an American actor, twenty years older than herself, whom she found scrumptious. They had agreed to meet for lunch and, while sitting and chatting over their ahi salads with ginger and crispy noodles at an upscale café on King Egbert Avenue, Melloria’s most fashionable street, were ambushed by a paparazzo who got some excellent shots of the enraptured pair.
After breakfasting alone, which he usually did as his wife was such a late riser, Godfrey repaired to his study to deal with his correspondence. The pile of begging letters had swollen due to the extreme weather and took longer than usual to dispense with. His gloomy task accomplished, he sat at his desk with a large brandy. He gazed at a painting of a bloody battle scene displayed above the fireplace while he sipped. At that moment the ancient study door squeaked open and Letitia’s head appeared. Godfrey craned around on his chair.
“To whom do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” he drawled.
She shut the door hard. “Listen, we have to do something about these scandals and we have to do it quickly. I presume you saw those ghastly pictures in the paper – well, just read this!” She thrust a computer print-out into his free hand and watched while he read it. It was a blog written by Arabella Scott-Natterson and hinted that Dawna and her new beau, the actor Jamie Dipp, were fast becoming an item on the dinner party and nightclub scene. At a film producer’s party the previous evening, after their fateful lunch together, Dawna and Dipp had caused a commotion when, to catch his attention the six-months pregnant princess had pushed a lit candelabra closer to an ice sculpture on their table. This succeeded in melting its base and the whole thing crashed onto their plates. Hearty laughter ensued, and her goal was attained when she and Dipp were observed leaving together and disappearing into the night.
“Well,” Letitia said when Godfrey had finished reading. “Don’t you think we ought to send her out of the country just as soon as we can?”
“Into exile?” Godfrey stuttered, temporarily confused.
“No, stupid – just for a few months, to let her cool her heels.”
As Godfrey struggled to form an opinion, a brief exploratory knock on the door announced the arrival of the king’s secretary.
“I’ll tell you what I think later,” he whispered to Letitia, then he bellowed: “Enter!”
Rebuffed but not defeated, Letitia retired to her bedchamber and snatched up her own pile of correspondence. Angling her pillow to prop up her head, she began leafing through the letters her secretary had left for her attention. Unlike Godfrey, she received no letters asking for money. Each of her missives begged only for the pleasure of her attendance at balls, dinners and concerts, and deciding which to say yes to involved very little heart searching.
One invitation she opened was to a charity performance at the opera house of Verdi’s Macbeth which she decided to decline, judging that the combination of Shakespeare and Italian opera singing would bore her to tears. Another fundraising concert, this time at the sports stadium, featured Melloria’s most notorious rock band, FreeksHoh, which she knew would render her migrainous for at least three days. She had only ever heard the sounds emitted by the band once, when she unwisely opened the door to Anton’s room to complain about the noise. The amplified wailing she likened to chickens being throttled in a wind tunnel.
None of the other epistles on her bed interested her, so she pushed them onto the floor. A maid would return them to her secretary by and by. She frowned restively and wondered whether a Barcardi and bitter lemon might prove a better restorative than her usual gin and IT. She pulled her bell cord and, while awaiting the servant, her thoughts wandered to the shenanigans of her cavorting daughter-in-law. She had never fully approved of Catheter marrying the girl and had made her views well known. Her reasoning was that while her son’s quirks were familiar and manageable, even his protracted fling with that damn stable girl, Dawna was an unknown quantity. She appeared to be a loose cannon, and to allow such a questionable entity into the tightly-knit Gorm clan was to invite the possibility of disaster.
Events were proving her correct, though she took no satisfaction in that, and now that Dawna’s frightful sister Hernia was being lined up as Anton’s bride, she feared more disaster was looming. Anton was at the age when he should be decently married, but there was nothing decent about Hernia. She wore inky black rags with holes in them and had a metal stud through her tongue. All the better to lead her to the pigpen, Leticia decided. Dawna presented a more pressing problem, and it was clear she and Catheter were totally incompatible. In other circumstances divorce would be the solution, but the future king of Melloria could never divorce. Letitia considered Catheter’s conduct in the performance of his duties adequate, if a little stodgy. He didn’t dash around in a BMW at breakneck speed, he let himself be driven by a chauffeur while he sat in the back, decently occupied. His only flaw was his infatuation with that awful Lucinda, a more manipulating minx she couldn’t imagine. The girl was obviously trying to get her hooks into him and she was succeeding. The fact that she had no breeding or class had no effect on him, and all she could hope for was that he kept his meetings with the slut as discrete as possible. The fact that Lucinda had a passion for horses was a point in her favor, and Letitia had read in the Bugle – a newspaper she devoured – that she had set her heart on running a riding stable to provide work for young people who would otherwise be idling. The stable would train thoroughbreds, some of them owned by the Gorms. That was the kind of enterprise she found wholly commendable.
Chapter 26
The Ferocious Winter
In January the winds that swept down from the Slobodian plains brought storms and blizzards. The blizzards continued into February until the weather became too cold for snow.
Then a hard frost descended and the country became quiet and crystalline. In the white silence few ventured out unless dire necessity compelled them. King Godfrey abandoned hunting when the snow became too deep for the beagles. He went out on skis with Catheter and Anton, using deer shot to bring down whatever game he could find, but fetching the carcasses home became too difficult as servants lost their way in the snow. Poor people waited until dusk, when starving deer came out of the woods to look for scraps of food other animals might have left. They picked off their prey with rusty shotguns or homemade crossbows, defying the law which prohibited commoners shooting deer. Some hunters were arrested. At night people lay shivering in their beds, listening to the baying of hungry wolves running down the deer in the moonlight.
Throughout January black-coated People’s Party workers struggled through knee-deep snow to bring blankets and kindling wood, and were greeted with thankfulness. They were also admired for stoically refusing gratuities of Saint or the crude liquor the poor people made from potato peelings. However, they occasionally accepted a plate of vinegar cabbage in a frozen kitchen to keep up their morale. This continued into February, when a great snowstorm blew relentlessly for days on end, smothering everything in its way. Entire farms of cattle, pigs and chickens were buried overnight, and whole villages were lost up to their rooftops. People who went out became marooned in a vast whiteness and disappeared. In downtown Melloria City people died slumped against lampposts, their heads and shoulde
rs protruding from the banks of snow. In country areas bodies of people frozen against barbed wire fences they were trying to cross stood in deep snow, their heads visible like raisins in frozen milk. Further storms followed well into March and the snow created eddies and dunes until Melloria looked like a white beach under which drowned bodies remained until the snow sank away in April.
The weather took on a hateful malevolence that changed without warning from screaming gales and snowstorms to the bitterest frost, when the temperature sank low enough to snip ears, toes and fingers like wire cutters. Among the poor, the ony remedy for frozen hands and feet was for people to dip them in buckets of warm fresh urine, and children whimpered in their sleep even under blankets supplied by the People’s Party. The difference between having toes or not, between staying alive overnight or not, was often economic. Those who could afford thermal underwear or snowshoes were able to move about, but even among the middle-classes, people in snowshoes took several hours to walk half a kilometer, and reached their destinations with faces as hard as plywood. Animals died in their stalls, and many livestock farmers lost all they had. The shortage of snowplows made many town dwellers resentful, and everyone complained about the inaction of a government they couldn’t vote out of office.
One morning in early February Godfrey almost froze to death when he tried to mount his horse on the worst day of the frost. Ignoring the way the horses in the stalls were acting up, nipping each other and rearing up in their stalls, he led his chestnut cob outside and was almost welded to his pommel and reins, one boot jammed inside the iced-up stirrup, the other stuck to the cobblestones. He was quickly freed by a groom, but the incident jangled Letitia’s nerves so badly, that she cancelled all her appointments and took to her bed for the rest of the winter, snuggling up first with Country Life, then with Island Life, a Caribbean retirement homeowner’s magazine. Her action caused the court to grind almost to a standstill, and the propriety of her behavior was the subject of much discussion. She did not waver in her determination to hibernate, however. “Inaction leads to insights,” she told Agatha one morning. “Let my battlecry be: Life, liberty and the pursuit of idleness!”
The slowing down of court life gave Catheter the impetus to escape his duties. He enjoyed skiing more than the other members of his family and went out every morning for a brisk glide along trails in the royal park that no one else knew about. He skied well and always took his minidisc recorder to capture sounds that fascinated him. If in the course of his rambles he encountered a skier – a rarity in a country as poor as Melloria – his shyness and self-consciousness would cause him to choke and cough, indicating his displeasure. If the skier approached him from behind and the trail was narrow, he would assert his royal right of way and decline to let him pass.
Returning from one such outing he arrived at the back door of the palace and stopped to unclip his skis. On impulse he looked up and saw his wife at her bedchamber window, standing perfectly still, the sun gilding her heavily-pregnant nakedness. Had she come to the window at the sound of his knocking the snow off his boots? What did she expect to see? Was she relieved or disappointed? He thought he could feel his wife trembling at the window. She was hugging herself, her hands clasping her sides above the swollen belly. He took off his snow goggles and shaded his eyes with a hand. How beautiful she is, he thought. The effect was striking. The window was so clear, the female body so voluptuous.
Catheter began to generate hope that his problems might be resolved, that reconciliation, even forgiveness was possible. He shrugged off the sound equipment he was carrying and raised his hand to wave at his wife. Show a hand, he pleaded. Please show a hand. He wanted no more than for her to give him a wave, like the one she gave to thousands of people at every public event. Just that - a simple gesture of acknowledgment. He felt he could build a whole life on it. He raised his hand higher and waited.
Eventually she noticed him, gave a shocked glance and turned away, vanishing from sight. At least she didn’t flip me the bird, he thought.
During the remainder of the winter (the worst on record, the Bugle proclaimed), Catheter made several more skiing trips, sneaking out while the rest of the palace barely stirred. He made sound recordings of the wildlife he encountered, but never saw any of the desperate struggles of poor people trying to cope with the winter horrors. The rest of the time he continued a schedule of light duties, attending Government house debates whenever the weather allowed, and secretly communicating with Lucinda by text and cellphone. Dawna remained indoors due to her advanced pregnancy and a nasty encounter with a snowplow that damaged her BMW (a car ill-equipped to deal with the Mellorian winter), and ventured no further than the end of the corridor, except at mealtimes.
In late February and March screaming winds that hit people as hard as revolving doors and tumbling snow flying in their faces battered the Mellorian population. April brought a breathing space, in which farmers calculated the aftermath – cattle stalls, pigpens and chicken coops blown away with their occupants – and grieving next-of-kin made grim discoveries as the snow melted: Bodies were raised up from bizarre resting places. King Godfrey and Queen Letitia sent letters of condolence and sympathy, as tradition required, to all Mellorians who had lost loved ones in the ferocious winter. They also attended a memorial service at the cathedral. It was Letitia’s first appearance after her hibernation. She continued languishing in bed nevertheless, enjoying a laziness that was so pleasant that she wished she could extend it to the rest of the year. She reluctantly began carrying out royal duties at Godfrey’s insistence, consoling herself with forays into her newly-thawed garden. Godfrey resumed his regular activities, only shooting clay pigeons instead of pheasants, and court life recommenced, with seven-course dinners, state banquets and costume balls. A gala ball to celebrate the arrival of spring drew four hundred guests, who arrived in limousines and horse-drawn carriages, to join in the champagne toasts, cheers and yahooing that went on far into the night.
On the First of April Princess Dawna gave birth to a son, amid much rejoicing, and after the christening ceremony at the cathedral, Prince Angus was brought out by his mother onto the palace balcony and shown to the people. A huge throng in Constitution Square cheered and made merry, and Mellorians of all stripes celebrated until the early hours.
Chapter 27
Sharon’s Affair Revisited
Craig was having a wicked tantrum and Sharon inwardly cursed him. She cursed Simpkins as well for putting the idea into the boy’s head that he could come with them to Simpkins’s place. She knew what Simpkins had in mind when they got there, and she didn’t want Craig tagging along. Craig was howling hard, screaming so loudly that she wondered whether his body could take it. He tried to rip his T-shirt in his rage, but couldn’t get a grip on the fabric. His face was wet and mucous ran out of his nose. His whole body was shaking and he began scratching his face, so she decided shock treatment was called for.
She gave him a slap and he stopped screaming. He gave her a look of such malevolence that she shrank back. The he kicked out at her but couldn’t reach her.
“I hate you!” he yelled. “I hope you get AIDS!”
He turned and ran up the alley beside the house. He skidded around the corner, just as Simpkins pulled up in the merc, and ran helter-skelter down the street.
Simpkins looked at Sharon nonplussed.
“Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s just pissed because he can’t come with us.”
“Oh-oh, looks like there’s been a change of plan!”
She looked at him, wondering how much he realized the impact he was making on her life and that of her son. After their first meeting they had begun a tentative courtship, seeing each other at a certain bench in a little park near her home. But Sharon felt it was more a restart of their earlier fling than anything more serious, although he told her he was a free agent now. He’d also found her some part-time work for the lah-dee-dahs who lived just outside West City, but because of the lous
y bus service and her other commitments she could only do one day a week. Still, she owed him one and was willing to go to his place and see what happened.
“It’s okay,” she said, “he’d only be whining if we brought him along. He’s better off playing with the other ragamuffins.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Simpkins conceded. The he took her hand and led her to the car. When he told her he rented a small apartment in North City he didn’t mention that it was in a seedy hotel, two stories up, its balcony wrapped in ugly black railings. Sharon took an instant dislike to the hotel and trudged up the stairs feeling like a cop entering a suspect’s lair.
Her misgivings were confirmed when Simpkins began boasting about the money he left in the place the moment they were inside the door. He took off his boots and five hundred moons fell out. The pictures of his three kids on the dresser all had hundred moon bills behind them and there were a thousand moons in a bureau drawer.
He laid the money out on a round glass coffee table and beamed with pride.
“There you are, my girl – enough to buy Craig some ace computer games.”
What do you think I am, a prostitute? She felt like saying, but instead said: “Oh my.”
“You’re a bit quiet today, Shaz – everything all right?”
“Yeah, fine.”
He sat down on the couch, lit a cigarette with his silver lighter and picked up the remote.