But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital, but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find . . .
Xan Meo went to Hollywood. And, minutes later, with urgent speed, and accompanied by choric howls of electrified distress, Xan Meo went to hospital. Male violence did it.
‘I’m off out, me,’ he told his American wife Russia.
‘Ooh,’ she said, pronouncing it like the French for where.
‘Won’t be long. I’ll bath them. And I’ll read to them too. Then I’ll make dinner. Then I’ll load the dishwasher. Then I’ll give you a long backrub. Okay?’
‘Can I come?’ said Russia.
‘I sort of wanted to be alone.’
‘You mean you sort of wanted to be alone with your girlfriend.’
Xan knew that this was not a serious accusation. But he adopted an ill-used expression (a thickening of the forehead), and said, not for the first time, and truthfully so far as he knew, ‘I’ve got no secrets from you, kid.’
‘. . . Mm,’ she said, and offered him her cheek.
‘Don’t you know the date?’
‘Oh. Of course.’
The couple stood embracing in a high-ceilinged hallway. Now the husband with a movement of the arm caused his keys to sound in their pocket. His half-conscious intention was to signal an impatience to be out. Xan would not publicly agree, but women naturally like to prolong routine departures. It is the obverse of their fondness for keeping people waiting. Men shouldn’t mind this. Being kept waiting is a moderate reparation for their five million years in power . . . Now Xan sighed softly as the stairs above him softly creaked. A complex figure was descending, normal up to the waist, but two-headed and four-armed: Meo’s baby daughter, Sophie, cleaving to the side of her Brazilian nanny, Imaculada. Behind them, at a distance both dreamy and self-sufficient, loomed the four-year-old: Billie.
Russia took the baby and said, ‘Would you like a lovely yoghurt for your tea?’
‘No!’ said the baby.
‘Would you like a bath with all your floaty toys?’
‘No!’ said the baby, and yawned: the first lower teeth like twin grains of rice.
‘Billie. Do the monkeys for Daddy.’
‘There were too many monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke his head. They took him to the doctor and the doctor said: No more monkeys jumping on the BED.’
Xan Meo gave his elder daughter due praise.
‘Daddy’ll read to you when he comes back,’ said Russia.
‘I was reading to her earlier,’ he said. He had the front door open now. ‘She made me read the same book five times.’
‘Which book?’
‘Which book? Christ. The one about those stupid chickens who think the sky is falling. Cocky Locky. Goosey Lucy. And they all copped it from the fox, didn’t they, Billie.’
‘Like the frogs,’ said the girl, alluding to some other tale. ‘The whole family died. The mummy. The daddy. The nanny. And all the trildren.’
‘I’m off out.’ He kissed Sophie’s head (a faint circus smell); she responded by skidding a wet thumb across her cheek and into her mouth. And then he crouched to kiss Billie.
‘It’s Daddy’s anniversary,’ Russia explained. ‘Where are you going,’ she asked him finally, ‘for your lost weekend?’
‘That bar-type place on the canal. What’s its name. Hollywood.’
‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ Billie called.
Leaving the house, he turned briefly to assess it – a customary means of assessing himself, assessing where he was positioned, where he was placed. It wasn’t his style (we shall come to his style), but he might have put it this way:
If fine materials are what you like, then have a feel of that fleece there, on the extravagandy deep armchair (take as long as you like: don’t stint yourself). In fact, if you have an interest in real estate or fine living generally, you could do worse than take a tour of the whole house. If, alternatively, German technology is your thing, then get you to my garage, just around the side there. And so on. But it wasn’t the money. If you harbour an admiration for extreme womanly beauty, then feast your eyes on my wife – the mouth, the eyes, the aerodynamic cheekbones (and the light of high intelligence: he was very proud of her intelligence). Or, if your soul melts to the vivid ardour of unusually cute, healthy and well-behaved children, you would envy us our . . . And so on. And he might have continued: But then I am the dream husband: a fifty-fifty parent, a tender and punctual lover, a fine provider, an amusing companion, a versatile and unsqueamish handyman, a subtle and accurate cook, and a gifted masseur who, moreover (and despite opportunities best described as ‘ample’), never fools around . . . The truth was that he knew what it was like, being a bad husband, a nightmare husband; he had tried it the first time; and it was murder.
Xan Meo walked down St George’s Avenue and came to the main road (this was London, near the Zoo). In so doing he passed the garden flat, opposite, which he now seldom used. Were there any secrets there? he wondered. An old letter, maybe; an old photograph; vestiges of vanished women . . . Xan paused. If he turned right he would be heading for pram-torn Primrose Hill – itself pramlike, stately, Vicwardian, arching itself upwards in a posture of mild indignation. That route would have got him to Hollywood the long way round. If he turned left he would get there sooner and could stay there later. So he had a choice between the garden and the city. He chose the city. He turned left, and headed for Camden Town.
It was late afternoon, and late October. On this day, four years earlier, his decree nisi had been made absolute, and he had also given up smoking and drinking (and dope and coke. American pimps, he had recently learnt, called coke girl; and heroin boy). It had become Meo’s habit to celebrate this date with two cocktails and four cigarettes and half an hour of writhing reminiscence. He was happy now – a delicate state: you could feel the tingle of its stress-equations. And he was steadily recuperating from his first marriage. But he knew he would never be over his divorce.
The rink of Britannia Junction: Parkway and Camden Lock and Camden High Street, the dozen black frames of the traffic lights, the slum of cars. Certain sights had to be got out of the way: that heap – no, that stack – of dogshit; that avalanche of vomit; that drunk on the pavement with a face like a baboon’s rear; that old chancer who had clearly been incredibly beaten up in the last five or six hours – and, just as incredibly, the eyes that lurked among those knucklestamps and bootprints harboured no grievance, sought no redress . . .
Xan Meo looked at the women, or more particularly the girls, the young girls. Typically she wore nine-inch bricks and wigwam flares; her midriff revealed a band of offwhite underpants and a navel traumatised by bijouterie; she had her car-keys in one cheek and her door-keys in the other, a plough in her nose and an anchor in her chin; and her earwax was all over her hair, as if via some inner conduit. But aside from that – what? The secret purpose of fashion, on the street, the harlequinade, fashion in its anarcho-bohemian form, is to thwart the lust of your elders. Well, it’s worked, thought Meo. I don’t dig you. He thought too of the menpleasers of twenty-five years ago, their stockings, garterbelts, cleavages, perfumes. Girls were now breaking with all that. (And maybe it went further, and they were signalling the retirement of physical beauty in the interests of the egalitarian.) Meo would not say that he disapproved of what he saw, though he found it alien. And when he saw two teenagers vigorously kissing – an unimaginable mesh of lip-rings and tongue-studs – he felt himself assent to it. See the young kissing and run it by your heart; if your heart rejects it, retreats from it, then that’s age, that’s time – fucking with you.
As he joined the long queue at the service store, for cigarettes, Meo recalled his penultimate infidelity (the ultimate infidelity, of course, had been with Russia). In a hotel room in Manchester he methodically undressed a twenty-year-old continuity girl. ‘Let me help you out of those nasty hot clothes,’ he said. Which was a line of his. But the line felt accurate: the damp-dog sloppy joe, the woollen tights, the rubber boots. He was seated on the armchair when she finally straightened up in front of him. There was her body, with its familar circles and half-circles, its divine symmetries, but it included something he had never seen before. He was face to face with a pubic buzzcut. Also: ‘What’s that doing there?’ he asked. And she answered: ‘It helps me have an orgasm’ . . . Well, it didn’t help him have an orgasm. Something else was hard where everything was meant to be soft: he seemed to be pestling himself – against a steel ingot. Plus a nice telltale welt (with her name and phone number on it) to take home to a wife who was, in any case, and with good reason, psychopathically jealous (as was he). The continuity girl, then, had not been a continuity girl. Discontinuity, radical discontinuity, was what she had signalled. How clear did it need to be? No more monkeys jumping on the bed. He had been sleeping with Russia for four and a half years. Passion survived, but he knew it would dwindle; and he was prepared for that. Xan Meo was on his way to realising that, after a while, marriage is a sibling relationship – marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.
Dusk was now falling; but the firmament was majestically bright; and the contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilise the universe . . . On the street Meo stopped looking at the girls, and the girls, naturally, went on not looking at him. He had reached the age (he was forty-seven) where young women looked through you, beyond you, they looked through your ghost: a trite misfortune, perhaps, but definitely a point in your leavetaking, your journey to ghostdom. You whisper goodbye, goodbye – God be with you (because I won’t be. I can’t protect you). And yet this was not quite fully Meo’s case, for he was a conspicuous man, and knew it, and liked it, on the whole. He owned a lot of physical space, tall, broad, full; his dark brown hair was no longer thick and wavy but it still covered a fair part of his head (the unguent that lent it extra mass and fixity was called Urban Therapeutic); and his eyes had rather more twinkle in them than you necessarily want to see. His face held a glow to it – a talented glow, certainly, but what kind of talent? At its weakest, its most ingratiating, Meo’s face was that of a man who might step up to a microphone and give you a competently leering rendition of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. His air seemed likely: plausible for the purpose at hand.
And, more than this, he was famous, and therefore in himself there was something specious and inflationary, something bigged-up. He was, however, quietly famous, as so many are now: many are famous (and even Meo could remember a time when hardly anybody was famous). Fame had so democratised itself that obscurity was felt as a deprivation or even a punishment. And people who weren’t famous behaved famous. Indeed, in certain mental atmospheres it was possible to believe that the island he lived on contained sixty million superstars . . . Meo was, in fact, an actor, an actor who had gained sudden repute by warily diversifying into another field. And the world has a name for these people who can do more than one thing at the same time, these heroic multitaskers: it calls them Renaissance Men. The quiet glow of quiet fame, then, further illumined Xan Meo. Every five minutes someone would smile his way – because they thought they knew him. He returned such smiles.
The stroll to Hollywood continued – and we will stay with Meo’s stroll, because it will be his last for some time. He stuck his head round the door of the High Street bookshop and complacently ascertained that his paperback (a debut collection of short stories entitled Lucozade) was still on the table marked Our Staff Recommends. Then, turning right up Delancey Street, he passed the café where Renaissance Man played rhythm guitar every second Wednesday with four old hippies who called themselves the Original Hard Edge. He cut left down Mornington Terrace – rather poorer, very much quieter: he could hear his own footfalls despite the thrashing trees he walked beneath and the submerged clangour of the rolling-stock deep down over the wall to his right. The weather was of the type that was still politely described as blustery. A ragged and bestial turbulence, in fact, a rodeo of wind – the earth trying to throw its riders. And in the street: garden furniture, twirling dustbins, bicycles and (increasingly) car doors thrown open into the path of the boost. Xan was too old for fashion, for cuts and styles; but his trousers, now, were alternately flared and drainpiped by the wind.
Up ahead he picked out a figure that reminded him, or reminded his body, of his first wife – his first wife as she was ten years ago. Pearl would not have had a cigarette in her mouth and a tabloid in her armpit, and nor would her clothes have been quite so brief, so taut, so woman-crammed; but the aggressive or at least sharply defiant stance, the arms disaffectedly folded, the lift of the chin that said that all excuses had now been considered and dismissed . . . She stood, waiting, in the shadow of a dun-coloured mediumrise. Behind her a male infant lingered, wiggling a stick among the exposed innards of a black plastic bag. As Meo turned to cross over the railtracks he heard her say,
‘Harrison! Move your fucking arse!’
Yes, most regrettable, no doubt; but with his back safely turned Meo did not deny himself a wince of laughter. He was a good modern person; was a liberal, a feminist (indeed a gynocrat: ‘Give the girls a go,’ he’d say. ‘I know it’s asking the earth. Still, we’re no good. Give the girls a go’). But he still found things funny. The woman, after all, had made her meaning plain; and it couldn’t be said that she had minced her words. No: Pearl would have put it differently . . . He could see the building now, with its variegated Christmas lights, its squirming barber’s pole. Sometimes a descending aeroplane can sound a warning note: one did so, up above – an organ-chord, signalling its own doom.
He stopped and thought: that feeling again. And he sniffed the essential wrongness of the air, with its fucked-up undertaste, as if all the sequiturs had been vacuumed out of it. A yellowworld of faith and fear, and paltry ingenuity. And all of us just flying blind. Then he stepped forward.
Xan Meo went to Hollywood.
‘Good evening.’
‘All right?’ said the barman, as if querying the mental health of someone who still said that: good evening.
‘Yeah mate,’ said Meo comfortably. ‘And yourself?’ This was the thing about him: he was big, he was calm, he was comfortable. ‘Where is everyone?’
‘Football. England. They’ll come steaming in here around eight.’
Meo, who would not be around for that, said, ‘You want to get those uh, plasma screens in. They can watch it in here.’
‘We don’t want em to watch it here. They can watch it in the Worm and Apple. Or the Turk’s Head. And trash that when they lose.’
The cocktail menu had been chalked up on a blackboard above a display of bottles and siphons arranged and set-dressed to resemble downtown Los Angeles. Out-of-scale mannequins of selected moviestars lurched through its streets.
‘I’ll have a . . .’ There was a drink called a Blowjob. There was a drink called a Boobjob. He thought: it’s like those companies called FCUK and TUNC. Meo shrugged. It was not his intention, now, to ponder the obscenification of everyday life. He said, ‘I’ll have a Shithead. No, a Dickhead. No. Two Dickheads.’
Holding a glass in either hand Xan went out into the paved garden overlooking the canal where, in recent months, on a west-facing bench, usually with Russia at his side, he had consumed many a pensive Club Soda, many a philosophical Virgin Mary. And how much more solemn – how much more august and royal – his thoughts would be, pondering Pearl, alone with his cigarettes and his Dickheads . . . Meo’s first glance at the motionless green channel rather too studiously confronted him with a dead duck, head down with its feet sticking up like the arms of a pair of spectacles. Dead in the water, abjectly dead: he imagined he could smell it, over and above the elderly medicine of the canal. Like Lucky Ducky or Drakey Lakey, after Foxy Loxy was done.
Xan seemed to be alone in his garden. But then a dapper young man emerged from a Hollywood side-exit, with a mobile phone held to his ear; he seemed briskly bound for the street until he stopped dead and then seemed to grope his way sidewise and steady himself against the canal fencing a few feet away. He acknowledged Xan’s nod with a flicker of his brow and then said clearly, ‘So everything we said, all the vows we exchanged, now mean nothing. Because of Garth. And we both know that’s just an infatuation . . . You say you love me but I think we have different conceptions of what love really means. To me, love is something sacred, almost ineffable. And now you’re saying that all that, all that . . .’ He moved off, and his voice was soon lost in the hum of the city. Yes, and that was part of it, the obscenification: loss of pudeur.
Like the dead duck, the worldline of Xan’s first marriage, that attempted universe – dead also. His divorce had been so vicious that even the lawyers had panicked. It was as if the two of them had been trussed together with barbed wire, naked and face-to-face, and then thrown overboard. Your flailings down there, your kicking and clawing: there could be no morality. When Pearl had him arrested for the third time, and he stood at the door of his service flat listening to the charges, Xan knew that he had reached the end of a journey. He had reached the polar opposite of love – a condition far more intense than mere hatred. You want the loved one dead; you want her plane to come down, and never mind about the others on board – those four hundred saps and losers . . .
But they’d survived; they lived, didn’t they? Xan reckoned that he and Pearl came out pretty well even. And, fantastically, they came out richer than they went in. It was the boys, the two sons, who lost, and it was to them that Xan Meo now raised his glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said out loud. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ As if in recompense for the waterbird upended in the green canal, a sparrow, a feathered creature of the middle air, hopped on to the bench beside him and, with eerie docility, began to ventilate itself, allowing its wings to thrum and purr, six inches away.
The wind had departed – fled elsewhere. In the west a garish, indeed a porno sunset had established itself. It resembled a titanic firefighting operation, with ethereal engines, cranes, ladders, the spray and foam of hose and standpipe, and the genies of the firemen about their massive work of hell-containment, hell-control.
‘Is that your “bird”?’ said a voice.
Meo acknowledged the passing of his solitude. He looked to his right: the sparrow was still agitating on the arm of the bench, testingly close to his second Dickhead. He looked up: his smiling questioner, a square-looking, almost cubic individual, stood about ten feet away in the weak dusk.
‘Yeah, well it’s all I can pull these days,’ he answered.
The man took a step forward, his thumbs erect on either side of his navel. Recognised, thought Meo. Made.
‘Are you the?’
Expecting that he would soon have a hand to shake, Xan got to his feet. The sparrow did not yet absent itself.
‘Yes. I’m the.’
‘Well I’m Mal.’
‘. . . Hello there,’ said Xan.
‘Why’d you do it, son?’
At this point it became clear that Mal, despite his air of humorous regret, was a violent man.
Far more surprisingly, it became clear that Xan was a violent man too. That is to say, he suffered from no great deficit of familiarity as the changed forcefield took hold. Violence, triumphally outlandish and unreal, is an ancient category-error – except to the violent. The error having been made, both men would know that from here on in it was endocrinological: a question of gland-management.
‘Why’d I do what?’ said Meo, and took a step forward. He hoped still to avert it; but he would not be going second.
‘Ooh.’
He pronounced it où, as Russia Meo had, so long ago. He went on, ‘I heard you was a bit tasty.’
‘Then you know what to expect,’ he said as levelly as he could (there was an acidic presence in his mouth). ‘If you have it with me.’
‘You went and named him! And I mean that, to me, that is totally, to me –’
‘Named who?’
Mal breathed in and bulged his eyes and loudly whispered, ‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy. J-o-s-e-p-h A-n-d-r-e-w-s.’
‘Joseph Andrews?’
‘Don’t say it. You don’t say it. You named him. You put him there – you placed him. In black and white.’
For the first time Meo thought that something else was wrong. The calculations going on inside him might be given as follows: my five inches equals his two stone, and zero real difference in the other thing (time lived). So: it would be close. And the guy seemed too blithe and hammy for close. He couldn’t be that good: look at his suit, his shoes, his hair.
‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy.’
But there is another actor on our stage. But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital. A man (for it is he, it is he, it is always he), a sinner, shitter, eater, breather, coming up fast on him from behind. Mal is violent, and Xan is violent, but in this third player’s scowl and its nimbus you see an absence of everything that human beings have ever agreed about: all treaties, concordats, all understandings. He is palely and coarsely bald. His eyebrows and eyelashes seem to have been lasered or even blowtorched off his face. And the steam pouring from his mouth as if from a spraycan, on this not intemperate evening, reached out to arm’s length.
Xan heard no footsteps; what he heard was the swish, the shingly soft-shoe, of the hefted cosh. Then the sharp two-finger prod on his shoulder. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. They expected him to turn, and he didn’t turn – he half-turned, then veered and ducked. So the blow intended merely to break his cheekbone or his jawbone was instead received by the cranium, that spacey bulge (in this instance still quite marriageably forested) where so many noble and delicate powers are so trustingly encased.
He crashed, he crunched to his knees, in obliterating defeat: his womanblood, his childblood, taken by his enemy. The physics of it sent his Dickhead twisting up and away. He heard the wet crack, the wet crack of his knees followed by the wet crack of the sliced glass. The world stopped turning, and started turning again – but the other way. Only now after a heartbeat did the sparrow rear up with the whirling of its wings: the little paparazzo of the sparrow.
The sky is falling!
Then the words ‘Get down’ and a second, fervent blow.
The sky is falling, and I’m off to tell the . . .
Seemingly rigid now, like the statue of a fallen tyrant, he crashed sideways into the damp paving, and lay still.
The King was not in his counting-house, counting out his money. He was in a drawing-room in the Place des Vosges, absorbing some very bad news. The equerry on the armchair opposite was called Brendan Urquhart-Gordon. Between them, lying on the low glass table, was a photograph, face-down, and a pair of tweezers. And the room was like a photograph: for several minutes now neither man had moved or spoken.
A vibration was needed to animate the scene, and it came: the ping of a tuning-fork, as one of the thousand facets in the icy chandelier minutely rearranged itself within that ton of glass.
Henry IX said, ‘What a dreadful world we’re living in, Bugger. I mean, it’s such a ghastly, dreadful . . . world.’
‘It is indeed, sir. May I suggest a brandy, sir.’
The King nodded. Urquhart-Gordon wielded the handbell. More vibrations: scandalously shrill. The servant, Love, appeared in the distant doorway. Urquhart-Gordon had nothing against Love, but he found it awkward using his name. Who would want a servant called Love?
‘Two large Remy reserve, if you would, Love,’ he called.
The Defender of the Faith – he actually headed the Church of England (Episcopalian) and the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) – went on: ‘You know, Bugger, this shakes my personal belief. Doesn’t it shake yours?’
‘My personal belief was ever but a slender reed, sir.’
An unlikely expression, perhaps, coming from a man shaped like a cummerbund. Bald, dark, rosy, with Jewish brains (some said) from the mother’s side.
‘Shakes it to the core. These people really are the limit. No. Worse. I suppose it’s all part of some ghastly “ring”?’
‘That is possible, sir.’
‘Why did . . . How could it be so arranged that such creatures play a part in God’s plen?’
Love reentered and, as he approached, perhaps a dozen clocks, one after the other, began to chime the hour. An instinctively practical man, Urquhart-Gordon reflected that more work would have to be done on the modernisation of the King’s short ‘a’. In times of crisis, especially, it sounded almost prewar. Brendan’s rosy cheeks were for a moment all the rosier as he recalled Henry’s visit, as Prince of Wales, to the trade-union rest-house in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, and the Prince at the piano singing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’: ‘My old men’s a dustman, He wears a dustman’s het, He wears cor-blimey trousers, And he lives in a council flet!’ The Fourth Estate had not been slow to point out that the truth was otherwise: Henry’s old man was Richard IV, and he lived in Buckingham Palace.
Feebly averting his face from the humours of the brandy balloons, Love continued towards them, and still had a fair way to go. It was five past six by the time he left the room.
‘Forgive me, Bugger. My mind’s a blenk. Delivered . . . ?’
‘The photograph was hand-delivered to my rooms in St James’s. In a plain white envelope.’ This envelope Urquhart-Gordon now produced from his case. He handed the transparent zipper-wallet to Henry IX, who gave it a more than averagely puzzled squint. MR BRENDAN URQUHART-GORDON ESQUIRE, and, in the top right-hand corner, Private and Confidential. ‘No accompanying note. Calligraphy and the redundant “Esquire” suggest an uncouth or foreign hand, or an attempt to have us believe as much. Protection will conceivably tell us more.’
Urquhart-Gordon studied the King’s frown. Henry IX normally wore his thick fair hair swiped sideways across his brow. But now in the royal disarray his quiff had collapsed into a baffled fringe, making his eyes look even more beleaguered and inflamed. Henry IX frowned on at him, and in response to this Urquhart-Gordon shrugged and said,
‘We await further communication.’
‘Blickmail?’
‘Well. I would say extortion. It seems reasonably clear that this is not the work of the media, in the usual sense. If it were, then we would be looking at that photograph in some German magazine.’
‘Bugger!’
‘I’m sorry, sir. Or on the Internet.’
With a bedraggled gesture Henry IX reached for the thing on the table. His hand wavered.
‘Use the tweezers, sir, if you would. Turn it with the tweezers, sir.’
The King did so.
He had not seen his daughter naked for perhaps three or four years, and, over and above everything else, he was harrowed, he was bitterly moved, by how much woman was already in her, in his girlchild who still played with her dolls. This, together with the dreaminess, the harmlessness, of the face, caused her father to cover his eyes with his sleeve.
‘Oh Bugger.’
‘Oh Hotty.’
Urquhart-Gordon looked on. A fifteen-year-old girl in what was evidently a white bathtub, with her arms up on the side, her legs folded at an angle in six inches of water: Princess Victoria, in her costume of nudity, her catsuit of nudity, adumbrating womanhood. The conspicuous tan-lines – she seemed, furthermore, to be wearing a spectral bikini – suggested summer. Urquhart-Gordon had checked the scrolled itineraries: all the Princess ever did, apparently, was go on holiday. But she had been back at boarding-school for six weeks and it was now almost November. Why, he wondered, had they waited? There was something about the Princess’s expression that worried him, that additionally disquieted him: the elevation of the pupils . . . Brendan Urquhart-Gordon’s nickname, by the way, derived from his initials, Henry IX’s from his performance as Hotspur in a school production of Henry IV, Part One.
‘Do you think,’ the King said miserably, ‘that the Princess and a uh, girlfriend might have been messing about with a camera, and uh . . .’
‘No, sir. And I’m afraid it is highly unlikely that this is the extent of it.’
The King blinked at him. The King always made you spell it out.
‘There must be more photographs of the Princess. In other . . . poses.’
‘Bugger!’
‘Forgive me, sir. That was unfortunate. The point is: look at the Princess’s face, sir. That is the face of someone who thinks she’s alone. We must take comfort from the fact that the Princess was and is quite unaware of this really unprecedented intrusion. Quite innocent of it.’
‘Yes. Innocent of it. Innocent of it.’
‘Sir, do I have your permission to activate John Oughtred?’
‘You do. Not another soul, of course.’
Henry IX got to his feet, and so, therefore, did Urquhart-Gordon. They fell into step together, the one so sleek, the other so lean. When the great embrasure of the central window had at last been reached, the two men looked out through the lace, through its weft and warp. Floodlights, cranes, gantries, retractable ladders: the firefighters of the Fourth Estate. It was the eve of the second anniversary of the Queen’s accident. The King was expected to make a statement in the morning before flying back to England and then on to his wife’s bedside. For the Queen was not in the garden, eating bread and honey. She was attached to certain machines, in the Royal Inverness.
‘Well, sir. The family motto.’
The family motto, impressed upon Henry IX by his father, Richard IV, and his grandfather, John II, was unofficial. In Latin it might perhaps have been Prosequare. In English it ran as follows: Get On With It.
‘What have I got tomorrow? The Aids people or the cancer people?’
‘Neither, sir. The lepers.’
‘The lepers? . . . Oh yes of course.’
‘It could be postponed, sir. I don’t see how it was arranged in the first place, given the significance of the date.’ And he invitingly added, ‘With your permission, sir, I will be availing myself of the King’s Flight in – two hours.’
‘No, I’d better go ahead and do the lepers, now I’m here. Get on with it.’
Urquhart-Gordon knew the real purpose of Henry IX’s visit to Paris. He was obliged to conceal his astonishment that, despite the nature of the current crise, the King evidently meant to go ahead with it (and despite the atrocious timing, the atrocious risk). Now his eyebrows arched as he made a series of fascinated deductions.
‘And after the lepers – then what?’
‘You should be in the air by noon, sir. There’s the ceremony at Mansion House at two: your award from the Headway people.’
Again Henry IX blinked at him.
‘The National Head Injuries Association, sir. Then you go north,’ he said, and superfluously added, ‘to see the Queen.’
‘Yes, poor thing.’
‘Sir. I have Oughtred on hold and will liaise with him tonight at St James’s. We must avoid passivity in this matter.’ He shook his head and added, ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to begin.’
‘Oh Bugger.’
Urquhart-Gordon had an impulse to reach out and smooth Henry IX’s hair from his brow. But this would surprise the King’s horror of being touched: touched by a man.
‘I feel very sorry for you, Hotty. Truly I do.’
Soon after that the King went off to bathe, and Brendan sat on in the drawing-room. He removed his hornrims; and there were the tumid, vigilant brown eyes. Brendan had a secret: he was a republican. What he did here, what he had been doing for a quarter of a century, it was for love, all for love. Love for the King, and, later, love for the Princess.
When Victoria was four . . . The Englands were holidaying in Italy (some castello or palazzo), and she was brought in to say goodnight to the company – in robe, pyjamas and tasselled slippers, with her hair slicked back from the bath. She went to the cardtable and, on her easy tiptoe, kissed her parents, then exchanged particular farewells with two other members of the entourage, Chippy and Boy. Sitting somewhat apart, Brendan looked up from his book in rosy expectancy – as she wordlessly included him in the final transit of her eyes. Then she took her nanny’s hand, and turned with her head bowed. And Brendan, startling himself, nearly cried out, in grief, in utter defeat – how can I feel so much when you feel so little? All the blood within him . . . Brendan knew himself to be perhaps unusually fond of the Princess. Was it an aesthetic passion merely? When he looked at her face he always felt he was wearing his most powerful reading-glasses – the way her flesh pushed out at him like the contours of a coin. But this would not explain his condition in the Italian ballroom as Victoria went to bed without wishing him goodnight: for instance, the sullenly mastered temptation to weep. ‘Goodnight, Brendan,’ she had said, the following evening; and he had felt gorgeously restored. It was love, but what kind of love? These days she was fifteen, and he was forty-five. He kept expecting it to go away. But it didn’t go away.
Now Brendan looked again at the photograph of the Princess. He did so briefly and warily. He was wary for her, and wary for himself – for the information about himself it might give him. Of course the point was to serve her, to serve her always . . . Brendan marshalled his briefcase, preparing himself for the drive to Orly, the King’s Flight to the City of London Airport, and the working supper with John Oughtred.
Eight o’clock was on its way to the Place des Vosges. Downstairs, in the alpine vault of the kitchen, the security detail frowned over its instant coffees – and its playing-cards, with their unfamiliar symbols, swords and coins from another universe. Upstairs, Love, with a white napkin draped over his forearm, was setting the table in a distant corner of the drawing-room. He was setting it for two. Fragrant from his toilet, the King felt his way from one piece of furniture to another. In this room everything you touched was either very hard or very soft, invaluably hard, invaluably soft.
The house belonged, of course, to Henry IX’s especial friend, the Marquis de Mirabeau. Less well known was the fact that the Marquis maintained a further apartment in the Place des Vosges . . .
Now the clocks chimed, first in relay, then in unison.
‘If you would, Love,’ said the King.
Against the wall on the landing’s carpeted plateau stood a chiffonier the size of a medieval fireplace. This now began to turn, to slide outwards on its humming axis. And in came He Zizhen, greatgranddaughter of concubines.
Love bade her welcome.
When the clocks chimed again He began to undress. This would take her some time. The King, already naked, lay helplessly on the chaise-longue, like a child about to be changed. As she removed her clothes He caressed him with them, and then with what the clothes contained. He touched him. He touched He. He was hard. He was soft. He touched him and he touched He.
There came a ping, a vibration, from the chandelier.
‘The Duke of Clarence played Prince ChowMein last night, writes CLINT SMOKER,’ wrote Clint Smoker. ‘Yes, Prince Alf wokked out with his on-again off-again paramour, Lyn Noel, for a slap-up Chinese. But sweet turned to sour when photographers had the sauce to storm their private room. Wan tun a bit of privacy, the couple fled with the lads in hot pursuit – we’ll cashew! What happened, back at Ken Pal? Did Alf lai chee? Did he oyster into his arms and give her a crispy duck? Or did he decide, yet again, to dumpLyn (after he’d had seconds)? Sea weedn’t like that – so how about a kick in the arse, love, to szechuan your way?’
‘What’s this?’ asked Margery, who was passing.
‘Photocaption,’ said Clint pitilessly, leaning sideways so she could see.
Clint Smoker’s screen showed a tousled and grimacing Prince Alfred and a tearful and terrified Lyn Noel fighting their way through a ruck of photojournalists and policemen in steaming Soho traffic.
‘That rain’s not doing her hair much good,’ said Margery, who now took her place in the next workstation along. A ruddy sixty-year-old, Margery was pretending to be a glamour model called Donna Strange. She was also pretending to have no clothes on.
‘Yeah well it’s the drowned-cat look,’ said Clint.
An identikit modern uggy, Clint himself subscribed to the look-like-shit look (as he had seen it called), with closely shaved head (this divulging many a Smoker welt and blemish), a double nostril-ring in the shape of a pair of handcuffs (the link-chain hung over his long upper lip and was explorable by the petri-dish of the Smoker tongue), and a startlingly realistic, almost trompe-l’oeil tattoo of a frayed noose round the Smoker neck (partly obscured, it is true, by a further rope of Smoker blubber). And yet this man, with a laptop in front of him, was a very fine journalist indeed. Clint’s shoes also repaid inspection: two catamarans lashed in place by a network of cords and cleats.
‘Dear Donna: I am a nineteen-year-old heiress with a slender waist, a shapely derrière, and bouncers as big as your bonce,’ wrote Clint Smoker.
‘Actually not a lot,’ Margery was telling one of her phones. ‘Heels, ankle bracelet, and that’s it, apart from me thong.’
‘Me passion’, wrote Clint, and then went back to change that e to a y, ‘is to dress up in the shortest mini I can find and then go round all the shoeshops with no knickers on. I wait till the lad is on his little seat in front of me. You should see the way they –’
He then said in his uncontrollably loud voice, ‘Here, Marge, they do –’
‘Donna,’ said Marge, pressing the mouthpiece to her breast.
‘They do have blokes serving in birds’ shoeshops, don’t they?’
She shrugged a nod and said, ‘Do you darling? Well we all feel a bit fruity in the afternoons. It’s the biorhythm.’
‘. . . drool’, wrote Clint, ‘when I yank my –’
Supermaniam Singh poked his head round the door and said in estuary English, ‘Oi. He’s here.’
By the time Clint clumped into the conference room the publisher, Desmond Heaf, was leaning over the cover of yesterday’s Morning Lark and sorrowfully saying,
‘I mean, look at her. Clint: nice to see you, son. I mean, look at her. That’s deformity, that is. Or obsessive surgery: Munchausen’s. They’re very unhappy people and they look it. See her eyes. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times. Keep the bosoms within reasonable bounds: forty-four triple-F would do as a benchmark. I say it and I say it. They go down for a while but then they always creep back up again. And then we get this.’
‘More centrally, Chief,’ said Clint, ‘it makes the paper too embarrassing to buy. I bet we’re losing wankers.’
Even before the first issue had hit the streets, it was universal practice, at the Morning Lark, to refer to readers as wankers. This applied not only to specific features (Wankers’ Letters, Our Wankers Ask the Questions, and so on), but also in phrases common to any newspapering concern, such as ‘the wanker comes first’ and ‘the wanker’s what it’s all about’ and ‘is this of genuine interest to our wankers?’ The staff had long stopped smiling when anybody said it.
‘Well said, Clint,’ said Heaf.
‘We wouldn’t be losing wankers,’ said Supermaniam. ‘You might find a blip on the rate of increase but we’re not actually losing wankers.’
‘Red herring,’ boomed Clint. ‘We’re losing potential wankers.’
‘I’ll have Mackelyne track the figures,’ said Heaf. ‘Who keeps putting these bleeding great . . . dugongs in the paper anyway?’
No one spoke. For the Lark was run along cooperative lines. The selection of the scores of near-naked women who appeared daily in its pages was a matter of cheerfully generalised improvisation. Naturally the editorial staff was all-male. The only women to be found in the Lark’s offices were its tutelary glamour girls and the retirees who impersonated them on the hotlines.
‘I don’t know, Boss,’ said Jeff Strite – Clint Smoker’s only serious rival as the paper’s star reporter. ‘You get in a sort of daze after a bit. You go, you know, “Sling her in” without really thinking about it.’
Clint said judiciously (and loudly), ‘Some blokes do think you can’t have too much of a good thing, so there’s an argument for the occasional bigger bird. We’ve got to attract the more specialised wanker without grossing out the rank and file. It’s this simple: keep the dugongs off the front page.’
‘Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘Anyway, who are we to complain?’ said Heaf. Normally the Publisher had the air of a small-town headmaster – and one harassed by logistical cares to the point of personal neglect (so frayed, so meagre). But now he freshened, and said in a gurgling voice, ‘Gregory, be a good lad and make a start on the beverages, would you?’
Mackelyne had entered and taken his seat. They listened as he talked about the latest sales figures, the multimillion hits on the hardcore websites, the fact that the new sexlines had caused the collapse of the local telephone network, and the inevitability of the 192-page daily format. Then came the money numbers . . . At the Lark, all profits were shared, with certain steep differentials. But even young Gregory, who was little more than an office boy, had plans to buy a racehorse.
‘Now,’ said Heaf, a while later. ‘What have we got for tomorrow? Clint.’
There always came this moment (and by now the empty bottles of champagne were ranked on the Publisher’s desk, and the dusty air looked gaseous in the low sun, as if everyone had joined in one cooperative sneeze), this moment when the men of the Morning Lark tried to feel like journalists. There was of course hardly any news in the Lark, and no global cataclysm had yet had the power to push the pinup off the front page. Even the vast sports section did little more than print the main results; the rest consisted of girls climbing in and out of the kit of famous football clubs, girls chronicling their one-night stands with famous footballers, early and reckless photographs of models who were married to or living with famous footballers, and so on, plus a few odds and ends about adulterous golfers, satyromaniac jockeys, and rapist boxers. But current events of a certain kind were covered, usually on the lower half of pages two and four.
It was Jeff Strite who spoke. ‘The Case of the Walthamstow Wanker,’ he intoned. ‘And I don’t mean the Walthamstow Reader. It’s an interesting story. And it ties in with our Death to Paedophiles campaign. There’s this public swimming-pool, right? With a gallery? He’s up there alone watching a school party of nine-year-olds. Then this old dear, you know, Mrs Mop appears. The geezer does a runner, falls down the stairs and smashes his head in. For why? His trousers are down around his ankles.’
‘Because he was having a . . .?’
‘Exactly. Good headline too: Pervs Him Right.’
‘Excellent. And I see we’ve decided to go ahead,’ said Desmond Heaf, ‘with Wankers’ Wives.’
Back at his laptop Clint resumed work on the heiress with a passion for visiting shoeshops in short skirts. This contribution posed as a letter to the paper’s agony aunt, or ‘Ecstasy Aunt’, whose daily double-page spread was pretty well entirely composed by staff writers. Long narratives of an exclusively and graphically sexual nature were followed by three or four words of encouragement or ridicule, supposedly from the pen of Donna Strange. Readers did write in; and once in a blue moon their letters received the hospitality of the Lark’s correspondence columns. These letters dramatised the eternal predicament of erotic prose. It wasn’t that they were insufficiently salacious; rather, they were insufficiently universal – were, in fact, impenetrably solitary. And they were never from women . . . Then, with a heavy heart, Smoker flagged the new photo-section alluded to by Desmond Heaf. It was to be called Readers’ Richards, ‘Richard’ being rhyming-slang (via Richard the Third) for bird, just as ‘Bristols’ (via Bristol City) was rhyming-slang for –
‘Why’d you want those bloody handcuffs in your conk?’ asked Margery, who was packing up. She was sixty; he was thirty: these facts had suddenly to be acknowledged.
‘Reminds me I’ve got a nose.’
‘Congratulations. Why’d you want reminding you’ve got a nose?’ Especially that nose, she felt moved to add (Clint’s nose was a considerable accumulation of flesh, but one uninfluenced by cartilage). ‘And what’s that rope in aid of?’
‘I’ll swing for you, Marge,’ said Clint in a softer voice than usual. ‘It’s my identity. Now shut it.’
He was still muttering viciously to himself when five minutes later his mobile sounded: the knock of a truncheon on a cell door.
‘Clint? And.’
And was Andrew New, one of the sempiternal figures in the Smoker universe, someone with whom he had formed the stoutest of bonds. And was Clint’s pusher. And this call was out of the ordinary. And hardly ever rang Clint. Clint rang And.
‘And, boy. Jesus, what’s that racket? She having another go then?’
‘Gaw, hark at this. “Harrison! Will you get your fucking arse into that bath!” Terrible it’s been. “And! And! Come and it im!” You fucking it im! I hit im the last time. Sorry, mate. It’s calming down a bit now. It’s not as bad as what it sounds . . . Uh, Clint mate. I think I’ve got a news story.’
‘Well you’ve come to the wrong place.’
‘Yeah, but you must have contacts.’
‘I’m tolerably well connected,’ said Clint untruthfully (and loudly. People placed near him in restaurants used to ask for relocation. That was when he still went to restaurants with other people). ‘Come on then. What is it?’
‘You know that bloke got done last night. Xan Meo. The actor that plays the banjo or whatever the fuck it is. What do they call him.’
‘Renaissance Man.’
‘I was there, mate. Fact. I saw them do im! By the canal. I was down on the path where I keep me stash. He’s just sitting out there having a drink and there’s this two blokes on him. They didn’t half fucking give him one. No. They give him two. I thought: that’s him fucking telt. Then they give him another.’
Clint, at stool, had read about the attack in the Evening Standard. His interest was only mildly piqued.
And went on: ‘Seemed it was like, you know, payback time. Seemed like he’d grassed someone up and it was payback time. They’ve give the name. Said he grassed up Joseph Andrews . . .’
‘Well it’s no use to me, mate. Unless there was any topless skirt involved. Are you going to the Old Bill with it?’
‘That’s no fucking use to me, is it? There ain’t any reward or anything. No. I was going to flog it round the newspapers.’
‘Uh, don’t do that, mate.’ Clint considered. ‘It’s not that big of a story. And you might get yourself . . . Let me put out a groper and I’ll give you a call. What was the bloke’s name again – the one that got grassed up?’
‘“Harrison! And! And!’” And And said, ‘Gaw, Jesus. Here we go. Joseph Andrews.’
Lark