Hotel de Dream (3 page)

The hooves died away and the singing stopped. Jeannette turned in her bed and reached out a thin, white arm to the pile of school books on the bedside table. Next door, she heard Mr Poynter shuffle on to his lino mat and turn on the tap in his basin. She got out of bed and pulled her thin flannel dressing gown over her shoulders.

Miss Briggs dreamed she was at the Royal Garden Party. As always the Queen was quick to notice her in the crowd and, pushing past the officious and over-protective equerries, made her way through the throng of eagerly waiting subjects to reach Miss Briggs's side.

“The one person I wanted to see.” Her voice was so clear and distinctive that Miss Briggs often woke with a headache. “We would like you to meet famous personalities today, concentrating on stars of screen and stage. Does that meet with your approval?”

Miss Briggs said it did. Last week, when Prince Philip had explained the workings of the internal combustion engine, and she had then been introduced to Crick and Watson, entertained by scandalous tales of the discovery of the Double Helix and chilled by the prognostications of futurologists, Miss Briggs had felt herself distinctly out of her depth. At tea later with Mrs Routledge in the lounge of the Westringham, she had thrown the topic of immunology casually into the conversation, only to be rewarded by a glassy stare from the other residents. Today she would be able to repeat the sayings of Sir John Gielgud, and with luck an amusing description of the two Hermiones. She smiled and bridled, and permitted herself to be taken by the hand and led to a marquee clearly reserved for the most important people. Red carpet was laid on the grass in front of it, and the entrance was done up to look like a theatre; from between the gold-fringed curtains actors and actresses
could dimly be glimpsed sipping at glasses of champagne and raising canapés to their mouths.

“Lord Olivier,” the Queen said. “Laurence, say hullo to Miss Briggs please.”

As the venerable actor bowed over her hand, Miss Briggs felt the familiar thrill. She waited for the Queen's next words—unaltered from dream to dream, summing up perennially her raison d'être—and simpered at the stooped head.

“A woman who is a true member of the human race. A woman who understands the pitfalls and evasions of life and has strived to overcome them. For this we have decorated her.”

The Queen's speech was done, and Lord Olivier looked up, his eyes moist with admiration. Last week the scientists had appeared bored with the reasons for Miss Briggs's elevated status in the land, and his response—but how could one expect anything else from a man who was the living embodiment of Shakespeare, the greatest of humanists—came as a relief. Sometimes, towards the end of the Garden Party when the Queen and Miss Briggs had done their duty, they discussed together in a whisper the unpleasantness of the world today: the relentless belief in growth and science and the fading away of all the traditional values. Secretly they planned to restore a sense of meaning to life, a world where promises were kept and God was worshipped. They both knew that a hard task lay ahead of them. But the Queen would have been unable to achieve anything without Miss Briggs, who was her adviser from the common people, and Miss Briggs would certainly have found her self-appointed mission harder without the Queen.

“You'll find none of the new young playwrights in there,” the Queen assured Miss Briggs as she seemed to falter at the entrance to the tent. “I didn't invite them. I hope I did right?”

Miss Briggs nodded approval, although she felt a slight sense of disappointment. Often she had constructed the
speech of admonition she would deal out to those who showed an England where defeat, poverty and apathy reigned.

“I'd love to meet the actress who was so brilliant in the Ibsen season,” she said graciously. “I did find that most enjoyable, your Majesty.” (At the same time, she had to admit that Ibsen could be grim; but he had been dead a long time and was therefore respectable. If he were writing now, she very much doubted that she would advise the Royal Family to have him at their parties.)

“Of course you shall. We'll save the musicals to the last as a special treat, I thought.” The Queen gave a girlish laugh and Miss Briggs turned a benevolent smile on her. Many times, if the dream went on long enough, she and her monarch sat down in the private viewing theatre in the Palace and watched “The Sound of Music” just one more time. But now, with the rows of anxious thespian faces peering out from inside the tent, there were reassuring words to murmur and the message of the Silent Revolution to pass on. Miss Briggs stepped in, and a line was quickly formed.

“This is Miss Briggs.” The famous names bowed and curtsied with reverence and Miss Briggs's smile went unchanging from one to the other.

“We can count on you, I have no doubt, to stand firm by your country and your monarch when the troubles come?”

The actors muttered their assent. The Queen fluttered behind Miss Briggs, opening and shutting her handbag and pulling out from time to time a diamond star which was then pinned by an attendant equerry to the lapel of a particularly deserving guest. Miss Briggs thought of the occasion of her own decoration: the magnificent stateroom, the fanfare of trumpets, the Queen's children arranged on the dais beneath her; and was glad to see that today's ceremony would be relatively minor. There had been a stab of jealousy a couple of weeks ago, when an eminent biographer had
received the full treatment in the stateroom, and the Queen had been punished for it afterwards, submitting to sulks and coldness from Miss Briggs. There had been mention of an even higher order as compensation for this disappointing event: Miss Briggs wondered, as she gave her low, thrilled laugh in response to Miss Gingold's jest, whether it might not possibly be later this afternoon. The Queen seemed definitely casual in the way she was handing out the diamond stars, as if something more important lay ahead. Miss Briggs determined to stay asleep right through morning tea if necessary, to find out—it would be too cruel to have to wait until tomorrow night for this.

“Only to say how much I have enjoyed meeting you all,” Miss Briggs concluded as she relinquished Miss Gingold's hand and shot one of her special smiles into the eyes of Sir John. His diamond star glittered back at her and she lifted a token glass of champagne. Alcohol had never agreed with her, and one morning, after a Ball to celebrate the engagement of Princess Anne, she had been hung over all day, Mrs Routledge suspicious and coming into her room at odd times to check on hidden bottles.

“The Queen and I will now go and meet some of the other—and I'm sure you'll agree just as interesting—visitors to this lovely Garden Party. No doubt I will see you all soon on the stage, though whether I shall recognise you or not is another matter!”

Polite laughter rippled round the tent, and Miss Briggs went out smoothly into the mixture of rain and sun which always seemed to prevail at these occasions, so that one half of the guests were permanently under black umbrellas and the other half, in floral dresses and hats, strolled on the bright paths without need of protection. The Queen followed; and engulfed by the sudden shower her presence invariably made manifest, they ran through the crowd to the little pavilion to which the less important visitors were brought.

“I've something I want to tell you,” the Queen said as they
ran. They reached the pavilion, and sank down on gilt chairs under the domed roof, which was made of shells and designed by Miss Briggs herself. “I want you to come to the stateroom when this is all over. I think you may be a little surprised.”

Miss Briggs dabbed the rain from her face with a lace handkerchief. Gratitude and a sense of the proper esteem in which she was held made her cheeks wet again and she blew her nose loudly.

“In fact,” the Queen whispered as she looked out on the line of shuffling guests, the bobbing umbrellas going off down the path as far as the eye could see, “I think we might make a run for it now, don't you?”

Miss Briggs experienced that sense of near-ecstasy which came to her when the divine, magical powers of her monarch were put into operation. The formal gardens and queuing, hopeful subjects became a blur, a pink dissolve; her heart fluttered and then calmed itself, and when the rushing sound in her ears had abated she was smiling still, sitting bolt upright as she had been in the pavilion, except that she and the Queen were seated in the stateroom and she was on the great throne, a purple canopy above her head and an orb and sceptre in either hand.

“My intention is to hand the kingdom over to you, Miss Briggs.”

The Queen was at her feet, on the steps of the throne. She had removed her hat and looked small and vulnerable; Miss Briggs suppressed another wave of emotion and touched her lightly on the shoulder with the sceptre.

“But where will you go, my dear? I had thought to be a Dame, I must admit, but this—”

“We are emigrating.” The Queen's voice was soft and full of sadness. Miss Briggs sighed in sympathy.

“I believe the Australian landscape is most interesting,” she remarked by way of encouragement to the stooped figure beneath her. “And the lyre bird can make a most rewarding pet.”

“We're not going to Australia. It's—it's Connecticut, as a matter of fact.”

“Connecticut?”

“A little village at the foot of the nuclear power station. You see, Miss Briggs, when the world goes we want to be the first. You would appreciate that, of course.”

“Of course.” Miss Briggs frowned as she murmured her assent. “But—is the world going, your Majesty?”

“A small villa, but quite charming I believe.” The Queen swivelled on the richly carpeted step. She waved vaguely at the walls of the stateroom, where the prize pieces from her famous art collection shone dimly under gold-shaded lights. “Look what's happened, Miss Briggs. Overnight. When we woke this morning … we will take some of the pictures with us, naturally, but there is no time to lose.”

Miss Briggs rummaged for her glasses under the ermine cape which had sprouted round her shoulders as the Queen spoke. She gazed at the great oils, the Van Dycks and the Turners and the Titians which she had so often revered on her previous visits to the stateroom. Then she let out a low moan of fear and surprise. The Queen nodded her head and leaned back against the dais, her eyes closed.

Each picture had undergone an unmistakable change. Some had suffered crude alterations, others—and this was even more ghastly—showed only subtle traces of the subject which someone (some practical joker presumably, in the worst of taste) had insisted on depicting in every canvas. Rubens beauties ascended to the heavens on a mushroom cloud of palest, poisonous blue. The kings and dukes of the past, still astride their proud mounts, were in the most part faceless, though some, and at these Miss Briggs had to look away, gripped by nausea, had long aristocratic noses deformed by radioactivity and tapering fingers bunched into crude, mutant parodies of hands. The Turners, only yesterday the gems of the Royal collection, fine wild sprays of steam and mist and water seen through a haze of sun, showed only the
final disaster in its various forms. Black, destroying clouds raged over grey skies. Transformed by nuclear gases, quiet Sussex parklands stood defoliated and bare, dead and dying deer grouped about the edge of a metallic lake. The Gainsborough ladies, stripped of their fine gowns in the holocaust, sat naked and shrivelled in their bowers and drawing rooms. Miss Briggs shuddered and covered her eyes.

“There won't be enough room to take many with us,” the Queen said. Her tone was flat and dry, as if she had already prepared for her end in the little chalet by the power station. “But at least they'll be in place there. Don't you agree?”

For the first time, Miss Briggs felt a surge of rebellion against her monarch rise up inside her. She rose, adjusting the heavy crown on her head with a shaking hand.

“And I am to be left to reign here,” she said coldly.

The Queen gave an uncharacteristic giggle. It crossed Miss Briggs's mind that she, too, might have been affected by the wicked and anonymous night-artist.

“Let the hard reign fall!” Serious again after her pun, the Queen rose and climbed the steps to kiss Miss Briggs on the cheek.

“Who can say how long you will have, my dear Miss Briggs? Enjoy it while you can!” Her face grew indistinct, and the stateroom began to swim in front of Miss Briggs's eyes.

“Why don't we go in to tea now. What do you say?”

“Tea,” Miss Briggs repeated. Her voice sounded muffled and far off, as if a pillow had been placed over her mouth. She stepped down from the throne, her legs unsteady under her. The stripes of the nylon pillow-case made bars against the fading throne room.

“Yes Mrs Routledge,” she called hoarsely. “Thank you.”

Next door she could hear Jeannette Scranton singing as she prepared for the morning ritual downstairs. It was a song she had never heard before, with a sad, almost Oriental lilt,
and foreign-sounding words. Miss Briggs gritted her teeth with irritation. One of these days—no, today—she would tell Miss Scranton to pipe down with that awful sound.

“It's not what we're used to,” Cecilia Houghton said, “But I suppose it will have to do for the time being.”

She unzipped the case of the portable and placed the machine briskly on the table—too low, she could see that already, and the chair, with its curved back and wooden seat an agony for the writer—and laid the thick manuscript down beside it before going over to the bed to unpack her clothes. Mrs Routledge had placed the novelist in Room 24, next to Miss Briggs, and on opening the cupboard that stood up against the adjoining wall she heard the sound of water running and then a soft crash, as if someone had fallen to the floor and was failing to try to get up. Mrs Houghton paused, her eyebrows rising as she stood, cocktail dress in one hand and hanger in the other, the little silver sequins on the shoulder of the gown winking at her like knowing eyes. It was early, not nine yet, and the sound was surprising for the morning, for there was something drunken and abandoned about it, the last thing she had hoped to hear in the Westringham Hotel at this hour. She had checked in (if Mrs Routledge's rough welcome could be described as checking in) as early as this in order to be able to do a full day's work undisturbed. Mrs Routledge had just announced that tea was ready downstairs. She stood by the cupboard door, unsure as to whether it was her duty to go into Room 23 and see what the matter was. Then shrugged, and slotted a fox stole on top of the cocktail dress, pushed the laden hanger on to the rod within. The trilogy would hardly be able to get under way if she became too interested in the behaviour of the characters in the hotel.