The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (45 page)

‘Really?’ giggled the Princess. ‘I must tell Mummy, she’ll be fascinated.’

Nicholas burst out laughing. ‘But seriously, ma’am, the thing that worries me isn’t all this child abuse, but the appalling way that people spoil their children these days.’

‘Isn’t it dreadful?’ gasped the Princess. ‘I see more and more children with absolutely no discipline at all. It’s frightening.’

‘Terrifying,’ Nicholas confirmed.

‘But I don’t think that the NSPCC were talking about
our
world,’ said the Princess, generously extending to Nicholas the circle of light that radiated from her presence. ‘What it really shows is the emptiness of the socialist dream. They thought that every problem could be solved by throwing money at it, but it simply isn’t true. People may have been poor, but they were happy because they lived in real communities. My mother says that when she visited the East End during the Blitz she met more people there with real dignity than you could hope to find in the entire corps diplomatique.’

*   *   *

‘What I find with beautiful women,’ said Peter Porlock to Robin Parker as they drifted towards the dining room, ‘is that, after one’s waited around for ages, they all arrive at once, as buses are supposed to do. Not that I’ve ever waited around for a bus, except at that British Heritage thing in Washington. Do you remember?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin Parker, his eyes swimming in and out of focus, like pale blue goldfish, behind the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘They hired a double-decker London bus for us.’

‘Some people said “coals to Newcastle”,’ said Peter, ‘but I was jolly pleased to see what I’d been missing all these years.’

*   *   *

Tony Fowles was full of amusing and frivolous ideas. Just as there were boxes at the opera where you could hear the music but not see the action, he said that there should be soundproof boxes where you could neither hear the music nor see the action, but just look at the other people with very powerful binoculars.

The Princess laughed merrily. Something about Tony’s effete silliness made her feel relaxed, but all too soon she was separated from him and placed next to Sonny at the far end of the table.

*   *   *

‘Ideally, the number of guests at a private dinner party,’ said Jacques d’Alantour, raising a judicious index finger, ‘should be more than the graces and less than the muses! But this,’ he said, spreading his hands out and closing his eyes as if words were about to fail him, ‘this is something absolutely extraordinary.’

Few people were more used than the ambassador to looking at a dinner table set for forty, but Bridget smiled radiantly at him, while trying to remember how many muses there were supposed to be.

*   *   *

‘Do you have any politics?’ Princess Margaret asked Sonny.

‘Conservative, ma’am,’ said Sonny proudly.

‘So I assumed. But are you
involved
in politics? For myself I don’t mind who’s in government so long as they’re good at governing. What we must avoid at all costs is these windscreen wipers: left, right, left, right.’

Sonny laughed immoderately at the thought of political windscreen wipers.

‘I’m afraid I’m only involved at a very local level, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘The Little Soddington bypass, that sort of thing. Trying to make sure that footpaths don’t spring up all over the place. People seem to think that the countryside is just an enormous park for factory workers to drop their sweet papers in. Well, those of us who live here feel rather differently about it.’

‘One needs someone responsible keeping an eye on things at a local level,’ said Princess Margaret reassuringly. ‘So many of the things that get ruined are little out-of-the-way places that one only notices once they’ve already been ruined. One drives past thinking how nice they must have once been.’

‘You’re absolutely right, ma’am,’ agreed Sonny.

‘Is it venison?’ asked the Princess. ‘It’s hard to tell under this murky sauce.’

‘Yes, it is venison,’ said Sonny nervously. ‘I’m awfully sorry about the sauce. As you say, it’s perfectly disgusting.’ He could remember checking with her private secretary that the Princess liked venison.

She pushed her plate away and picked up her cigarette lighter. ‘I get sent fallow deer from Richmond Park,’ she said smugly. ‘You have to be on the list. The Queen said to me, “Put yourself on the list,” so I did.’

‘How very sensible, ma’am,’ simpered Sonny.

*   *   *

‘Venison is the one meat I rr-eally don’t like,’ Jacques d’Alantour admitted to Caroline Porlock, ‘but I don’t want to create a diplomatic incident, and so…’ He popped a piece of meat into his mouth, wearing a theatrically martyred expression which Caroline later described as being ‘a bit much’.

‘Do you like it? It’s venison,’ said Princess Margaret leaning over slightly towards Monsieur d’Alantour, who was sitting on her right.

‘Really, it is something absolutely mar-vellous, ma’am,’ said the ambassador. ‘I did not know one could find such cooking in your country. The sauce is extremely subtle.’ He narrowed his eyes to give an impression of subtlety.

The Princess allowed her views about the sauce to be eclipsed by the gratification of hearing England described as ‘your country’, which she took to be an acknowledgement of her own feeling that it belonged, if not legally, then in some much more profound sense, to her own family.

In his anxiety to show his love for the venison of merry old England, the ambassador raised his fork with such an extravagant gesture of appreciation that he flicked glistening brown globules over the front of the Princess’s blue tulle dress.

‘I am prostrated with horr-rror!’ he exclaimed, feeling that he was on the verge of a diplomatic incident.

The Princess compressed her lips and turned down the corners of her mouth, but said nothing. Putting down the cigarette holder into which she had been screwing a cigarette, she pinched her napkin between her fingers and handed it over to Monsieur d’Alantour.

‘Wipe!’ she said with terrifying simplicity.

The ambassador pushed back his chair and sank to his knees obediently, first dipping the corner of the napkin in a glass of water. While he rubbed at the spots of sauce on her dress, the Princess lit her cigarette and turned to Sonny.

‘I thought I couldn’t dislike the sauce more when it was on my plate,’ she said archly.

‘The sauce has been a disaster,’ said Sonny, whose face was now maroon with extra blood. ‘I can’t apologize enough, ma’am.’

‘There’s no need for
you
to apologize,’ she said.

Jacqueline d’Alantour, fearing that her husband might be performing an act inconsistent with the dignity of France, had risen and walked around the table. Half the guests were pretending not to have noticed what was going on and the other half were not bothering to pretend.

‘What I admire about P.M.,’ said Nicholas Pratt, who sat on Bridget’s left at the other end of the table, ‘is the way she puts everyone at their ease.’

George Watford, who sat on Bridget’s other side, decided to ignore Pratt’s interruption and to carry on trying to explain to his hostess the purpose of the Commonwealth.

‘I’m afraid the Commonwealth is completely ineffectual,’ he said sadly. ‘We have nothing in common, except our poverty. Still, it gives the Queen some pleasure,’ he added, glancing down the table at Princess Margaret, ‘and that is reason enough to keep it.’

Jacqueline, still unclear about what had happened, was amazed to find that her husband had sunk even deeper under the table and was rubbing furiously at the Princess’s dress.

‘
Mais tu es complètement cinglé
,’ hissed Jacqueline. The sweating ambassador, like a groom in the Augean stables, had no time to look up.

‘I have done something unpardonable!’ he declared. ‘I have splashed this wonder-fool sauce on Her Royal Highness’s dress.’

‘Ah, ma’am,’ said Jacqueline to the Princess, girl to girl, ‘he’s so clumsy! Let me help you.’

‘I’m quite happy to have your husband do it,’ said the Princess. ‘He spilled it, he should wipe it up! In fact, one feels he might have had a great career in dry cleaning if he hadn’t been blown off course,’ she said nastily.

‘You must allow us to give you a new dress, ma’am,’ purred Jacqueline, who could feel claws sprouting from her fingertips. ‘
Allez
, Jacques, it’s enough!’ She laughed.

‘There’s still a spot here,’ said Princess Margaret bossily, pointing to a small stain on the upper edge of her lap.

The ambassador hesitated.

‘Go on, wipe it up!’

Jacques dipped the corner of the napkin back into his glass of water, and attacked the spot with rapid little strokes.

‘
Ah, non, mais c’est vraiment insupportable
,’ snapped Jacqueline.

‘What is “
insupportable
”,’ said the Princess in a nasal French accent, ‘is to be showered in this revolting sauce. I needn’t remind you that your husband is Ambassador to the Court of St James’s,’ she said as if this were somehow equivalent to being her personal maid.

Jacqueline bobbed briefly and walked back to her place, but only to grab her bag and stride out of the room.

By this time the table had fallen silent.

‘Oh, a silence,’ declared Princess Margaret. ‘I don’t approve of silences. If Noël were here,’ she said, turning to Sonny, ‘he’d have us all in stitches.’

‘Nole, ma’am?’ asked Sonny, too paralysed with terror to think clearly.

‘Coward, you silly,’ replied the Princess. ‘He could make one laugh for hours on end. It’s the people who could make one laugh,’ she said, puffing sensitively on her cigarette, ‘whom one really misses.’

Sonny, already mortified by the presence of venison at his table, was now exasperated by the absence of Noël. The fact that Noël was long dead did nothing to mitigate Sonny’s sense of failure, and he would have sunk into speechless gloom had he not been saved by the Princess, who found herself in a thoroughly good mood after asserting her dignity and establishing in such a spectacular fashion that she was the most important person in the room.

‘Remind me, Sonny,’ she said chattily, ‘do you have any children?’

‘Yes, indeed, ma’am, I have a daughter.’

‘How old is she?’ asked the Princess brightly.

‘It’s hard to believe,’ said Sonny, ‘but she must be seven by now. It won’t be long before she’s at the blue-jean stage,’ he added ominously.

‘Oh,’ groaned the Princess, making a disagreeable face, a muscular contraction that cost her little effort, ‘aren’t they dreadful? They’re a sort of uniform. And so scratchy. I can’t imagine why one would want to look like everyone else. I know I don’t.’

‘Absolutely, ma’am,’ said Sonny.

‘When my children got to that stage,’ confided the Princess, ‘I said, “For goodness’ sake, don’t get those dreadful blue jeans,” and they very sensibly went out and bought themselves some green trousers.’

‘Very sensible,’ echoed Sonny, who was hysterically grateful that the Princess had decided to be so friendly.

Jacqueline returned after five minutes, hoping to give the impression that she had only absented herself because, as one mistress of modern manners has put it, ‘certain bodily functions are best performed in private’. In fact she had paced about her bedroom furiously until she came to the reluctant conclusion that a show of levity would in the end be less humiliating than a show of indignation. Knowing also that what her husband feared most, and had spent his career nimbly avoiding, was a diplomatic incident, she hastily applied some fresh lipstick and breezed back into the dining room.

Seeing Jacqueline return, Sonny experienced a fresh wave of anxiety, but the Princess ignored her completely and started telling him one of her stories about ‘the ordinary people of this country’ in whom she had ‘enormous faith’ based on a combination of complete ignorance about their lives and complete confidence in their royalist sympathies.

‘I was in a taxi once,’ she began in a tone that invited Sonny to marvel at her audacity. He duly raised his eyebrows with what he hoped was a tactful combination of surprise and admiration. ‘And Tony said to the driver, “Take us to the Royal Garden Hotel,” which, as you know, is at the bottom of our drive. And the driver said – ’ the Princess leaned forward to deliver the punch line with a rough little jerk of her head, in what might have been mistaken by a Chinaman for a Cockney accent – ‘“I know where
she
lives.”’ She grinned at Sonny. ‘Aren’t they wonderful people?’ she squawked. ‘Aren’t they marvellous people?’

Sonny threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘What a splendid story, ma’am,’ he gasped. ‘What wonderful people.’

The Princess sat back in her chair well satisfied; she had charmed her host and lent a golden touch to the evening. As to the clumsy Frenchman on her other side, she wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily. After all, it was no small matter to make a mistake in the presence of the Queen’s sister. The constitution itself rested on respect for the Crown, and it was her duty (oh, how she sometimes wished she could lay it all aside! How, in fact, she sometimes did, only to scold more severely those who thought she was serious), yes, it was her
duty
to maintain that respect. It was the price she had to pay for what other people foolishly regarded as her great privileges.

Next to her the ambassador appeared to be in a kind of trance, but under his dumb surface he was composing, with the fluency of an habitual dispatch writer, his report for the Quai d’Orsay. The glory of France had not been diminished by his little gaffe. Indeed, he had turned what might have been an awkward incident into a triumphant display of gallantry and wit. It was here that the ambassador paused for a while to think of something clever he might have said at the time.

While Alantour pondered, the door of the dining room opened slowly, and Belinda, barefooted, in a white nightdress, peered around the edge of the door.

‘Oh, look, it’s a little person who can’t sleep,’ boomed Nicholas.

Bridget swivelled around and saw her daughter looking pleadingly into the room.