Queen Camilla (17 page)

Camilla was trying to love Shakespeare as Charles did, but she simply could not make sense of the old-fashioned language. Why didn’t the people in his plays simply say what they meant, instead of beating around the bush? And honestly, did Shakespeare think his audiences were stupid or something? She had been to see
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at Stratford as a child and the costumes were lovely, but it was terribly far-fetched.
How did Shakespeare expect his audiences to believe that a sleeping girl would wake up and fall in love with a donkey? I mean, she adored her pony, but not
romantically
. That was bestiality, wasn’t it? Similar to what Prince Philip had told her that the Welsh did with sheep.

Charles swirled the silk scarf and began the final scene. Camilla was longing for
Macbeth
to come to an end, but she sat as though enraptured, as she had done so many times at cocktail parties when trapped by some dreadful bore droning on about a third party she did not know. She heard letters drop through the letterbox and said to Charles, who was halfway through a long speech, ‘I’ll pick the letters up before the dogs get to them.’

As it was, she was only just in time. Freddie and Tosca were playing at tug of war with one letter and Leo had slobbered over the other. Charles had draped the silk scarf over his head as one of the witches and was eagerly awaiting her return. She resumed her seat on the sofa and the performance continued. At the end she applauded until her hands smarted. Charles took several bows and allowed himself to laugh with pleasure. Perhaps the demons associated with Gordonstoun School’s production of
Macbeth
would finally leave him.

When he was a boy he had played Macduff and had been directed to fall to the floor and wriggle around the stage in his death agonies. There had been a deathly silence in the school auditorium, apart from the sound of one person laughing very loudly. That person was
his father, The Duke of Edinburgh. In the dressing room later, the English teacher who had directed the play congratulated the other boys on their performances but said to Charles, ‘Well, Wales, I’m glad your father found your portrayal in our tragedy so amusing. Perhaps we should forget Shakespeare and do
Charlie’s Aunt
next time.’ Charles had taken this to be not only a rebuke to himself but also a reference to his louche aunt, Princess Margaret. His cheeks had burned with shame.

His mother had been kind, saying, ‘I think you did awfully well to have learnt all those lines. However did you do it?’

His father had cuffed him on the side of the head, in what was probably meant to be an affectionate gesture, and said, ‘Why didn’t you play Macbeth, eh? Not good enough?’

Charles opened Lawrence Krill’s letter first, then threw it over to Camilla saying, ‘Another poor devil with mental health problems.’

Charles then opened Graham’s letter, scanned it quickly and said, ‘Extraordinary the lengths that some of these poor lunatics will go to. This one claims to be our love child.’ He laughed. ‘Graham from Ruislip.’

Camilla reached for her cigarettes, then remembered she was forbidden to light up in the house. Nevertheless, she took one out of the packet and held it in her right hand. ‘What else does he say?’ she asked quietly.

Charles was looking through the three enclosures he’d pulled out of the envelope with the Ruislip postmark.
‘It all looks terribly authentic,’ said Charles. ‘He’s been to enormous trouble: there’s a DNA certificate, a codicil letter and a copy of a birth certificate. It seems that Graham was born in Zurich. You were at finishing school in Zurich, weren’t you, darling?’

‘Yes, in 1965,’ she said.

‘Graham was born in 1965, on July 21st,’ said Charles.

There was a long pause. Charles felt like a character in a Pinter play.

‘Yes,’ said Camilla. ‘It was awfully hot that July, all the windows were open in the delivery room, but it was still stifling. I could hear the cowbells ringing outside.’

Charles said, ‘Delivery room? Were you on a school visit? Was it part of your conversational French course?’

‘No,’ said Camilla. ‘I was definitely screaming in English.’ She began to weep. ‘
I
didn’t call him Graham, I called him Rory. Rory George Windsor.’

Charles looked at the letter and the papers in his hand and said, ‘So are you telling me, darling, that this
Graham
is our
son
?’

Camilla nodded.

Charles asked, ‘How did it happen?’

Camilla said, ‘You remember, darling. We got carried away after that food fight at Nicky’s place.’

‘No!’ said Charles, irritably. ‘What I mean is, why didn’t you have the, er… operation? The, er… procedure. You must have been desperate to get rid of the, er… er… foetus… Why didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t get round to it in time,’ she replied.

‘You are a dreadful procrastinator, darling,’ he said. ‘But you really should have told me.’

‘Once I was back in England it sort of slipped my mind,’ she said. She put her arms around his neck and said, ‘Are you frightfully angry with me, my little prince?’

Charles thought, I’m a character in Shakespeare. Charles said, ‘Allow me to read the letter again in the sure knowledge that my son be the scribe and not some gibbering fool whose jest it be to claim false kinship.’

Camilla absented herself. She hated it when Charles slipped into what she called his pompous language. She went outside and sat on the back doorstep and lit the cigarette she’d been longing for. It was not that Camilla had completely forgotten about the baby she had given birth to in Zurich. She certainly remembered the event; it was just that she wasn’t a woman who dwelt on things that could not be changed. What was the point of crying on the unknown child’s birthday? She occasionally thought about the boy, wondered about him, but when she did so, she imagined him happy, strong, living in Ruislip where she understood his adoptive parents had a socially prominent position. She had not enquired any further. She wasn’t the only girl at her finishing school to ‘fall from grace’, as the nuns in the nursing home called it. But she was the least neurotic about it. Camilla simply couldn’t understand why people beat themselves up about the beastly things that happened in life.

When she went back to the sitting room, Charles said, ‘Graham wants to come and see us.’

‘Oh, does he?’ said Camilla unenthusiastically.

‘We must see him, darling,’ said Charles. ‘He is
our
son, our only child. And he’s older than William, which makes him second in line to the throne.’

‘But bastards don’t count, they can’t inherit,’ said Camilla.

‘Those old laws were thrown out with the Dissolution of the Monarchy Act,’ said Charles.

Freddie and Tosca were pretending to be asleep on the rag rug that Charles had made out of old cardigans using a clothes peg and an old sack for the base. They had heard the conversation between their mistress and master.

Freddie growled to Tosca, ‘As if
Macbeth
wasn’t bad enough, now we’re into melodrama.’

Leo came into the room panting, after running away from Spike. ‘What you laughing at?’ he barked.

Freddie growled, ‘It’s a private pedigree joke.’

‘Right,’ yapped Leo, who never questioned the implicit suggestion that he was in every respect inferior to Freddie and Tosca. He always allowed them to feed first and get nearer to the fire.

When Charles had finished writing to Graham he read the letter aloud:

My dear Graham,

First allow me to commiserate with you on the loss of Mr and Mrs Cracknall, your adoptive parents. You must be simply devastated by their deaths. Then to discover that you were not their flesh and blood must have caused you enormous anguish.

Camilla, your mother, and i would terribly like to see you.

‘Terribly like to see you?’ queried Camilla.

‘Well, I
would
terribly like to see my son,’ said Charles with a flash of anger.

Camilla said tearfully, ‘I’m not questioning your sentiment, darling, just your way of expressing it. “Terribly” sounds wrong, couldn’t you drop the “terribly”?’

Charles said, ‘You’re quibbling over syntax because you’re trying to deflect me from the beastly fact that you kept Graham’s existence a secret for forty-one years. Forty-one years of deceit!’

Leo crept up to Camilla and laid his big head across her knees. Camilla automatically started to check Leo’s thick coat for fleas.

‘Carry on with the letter,’ she said. ‘I promise not to interrupt.’

But Charles was still angry. ‘I love you desperately,’ he said, ‘but I will not take lessons in the use of the English language from somebody who managed to pass only one “O” level.’

‘It’s more than your first wife got,’ she shouted. ‘The most
she
managed at school was a prize for Best Kept Guinea Pig.’

Vince Threadgold shouted through the wall, ‘Guinea pigs are filthy little bleeders, it takes a lot to keep ’em clean.’

Charles and Camilla continued the row with lowered voices. ‘I was at
Cambridge
,’ said Charles. ‘I got a
degree
.’

Camilla blew her nose on a piece of kitchen towel and said, ‘You’re writing to
our
son. I ought to have an input.’

‘What do you want to say?’ asked Charles with his pen poised over a new piece of writing paper.

‘Dear Graham,’ Camilla dictated. ‘We were terribly sorry to hear about the loss of your adoptive parents. It would be lovely to see you at your convenience.’

‘At your
convenience
,’ scoffed Charles. ‘You make him sound like a bloody lavatory attendant.’

‘He could be, for all we know about him,’ said Camilla, who was still smarting from the ‘O’ level jibe earlier. She thought, if I’d put my mind to it I could easily have gone to university. But hanging out with a bunch of boffo students was not her style. As far as she knew, neither Oxford nor Cambridge hunted or had stabling facilities.

‘Oh, just write to him and tell him to apply for a visiting order,’ said Camilla. ‘I’m going to bed. Come, Tosca; come, Freddie.’

She went out of the room without kissing Charles, but he caught up with her and the dogs on the stairs and said, ‘We mustn’t quarrel, darling. We mustn’t let Graham come between us.’ Charles followed Camilla into the bedroom and they began to walk down the well-worn path of forgiveness and reconciliation.

When their strenuous lovemaking was over and Camilla and Charles were lying in a post-coital daze, the dogs crept out from under the bed.

Freddie growled, ‘I thought he was never going to stop.’

Tosca yelped, ‘It’s so
embarrassing
.’

Freddie growled, ‘Er… talking about sex, er…
Zsa-Zsa is coming on heat soon. Would you mind if I…’

‘No,’ snapped Tosca. ‘Mount the bitch, see if I care.’

Freddie said, ‘I’m not a one-bitch dog, Tosca. At least I’m being honest.’

Tosca turned her back on him and scratched at the bedroom door. Camilla disentangled herself from Charles and got out of bed to open the door. Tosca ran down the stairs and went to lie alongside Leo under the kitchen table. ‘I’ve left him,’ she whimpered.

Leo licked her face. ‘Are you sure, babe? We’re all a bit jumpy with this Graham doodah.’

Tosca said, ‘No, I’m sure, Leo. Freddie’s rubbing his philandering nose in my face a little too often now.’

Leo pressed his nose against hers, and panted, ‘Don’t you mind that I’m a mongrel?’

Tosca thought, Ugh! He’s got dreadful dog breath; we’ll have to do something about that. Their relationship was less than a minute old and she was already trying to change him.

In the morning Camilla was surprised to find Tosca and Leo entwined on the kitchen floor. Stepping over them, she said, ‘How long have you two been such good pals?’

Leo barked, ‘We’re not pals, we’re lovers.’

When Freddie came downstairs for breakfast, he saw the two dogs together and went for Leo’s throat, snarling, ‘She’s my bitch, you flea-bitten mongrel!’

When Charles came down to find the cause of the uproar, he took Leo’s side in the argument and called Camilla’s beloved Freddie, ‘A beastly little dog.’

Camilla had shouted, ‘Poor Freddie has been given the cold shoulder. He’s terribly upset.’

King, the Threadgolds’ Alsatian, barked through the wall, ‘Good luck to you, Leo. Give her one for me.’

Before leaving the Control Centre, Dwayne tampered with the surveillance cameras trained on Charles and Camilla’s house. He wanted to be able to talk to Charles about
The Heart of the Hunter
, without having his colleagues sniggering and calling him a fucking boff.

As he walked through the estate, he viewed the inhabitants with a Kalahari Bushman’s eye. Some of them were savage, capable of pouncing on a man and pulling him down to the desert floor, others were merely pariah dogs that slunk away as they saw him approaching. Once again, he found himself outside Paris Butter-worth’s house. He could see her through the living-room window, watching
Balamory
with Fifty-cents.

She was surprised to see him at the door. She said, ‘Has owt ’appened to me mam?’

Dwayne said, more gruffly than he intended, ‘I dunno. I’ve come to check your tag.’

‘It’s still on. What more do you want to know?’ she asked.

He wanted to kiss her sulky mouth and unfasten her piled-up black hair. His forearms were thicker than her thighs, he noticed.

‘I need to check it’s not been tampered with,’ he said.

She said, ‘Come in, but you’ll ’ave to take your shoes off. I’ve got a pale carpet.’

She was wearing disconcertingly realistic-looking cat’s head slippers. The glass eyes sparkled and the whiskers vibrated as she padded across an expanse of pale carpet in the hallway and living room. He left his boots on the doorstep and followed her in.

Fifty-cents was sitting strapped in his baby buggy, watching the television with a glazed expression as PC Plum cycled up a hill. The room was clean and uncomfortably tidy; Fifty-cents’ toys were stored in their original boxes, on a shelf in one of the alcoves. Paris and Dwayne sat on the sofa and faced each other.