Van Gogh's Room at Arles (23 page)

Whatever the public’s speculations about Alec’s and my behavior, I was too caught up in the genuinely hard work— harder work, oh
much
harder, than when I was in California running the vacuum, cleaning washrooms, scouring toilets, turning mattresses, making up beds; harder even than the hours I put in out in the Pacific rubbing my hands raw, raising blood, and doing without the benefit of appliances to entire wicky-ups what I’d been obliged to do to only a handful of guest rooms in the Los Angeles hotel—of our official engagement and ceremonial but backbreaking courtship to take all that much notice of what I knew to be vicious, baseless rumor, no matter what I, or Denise either, may have said to Alec when we confronted him. Perhaps Lawrence’s own phlegmatic response lulled me into an unrealistic appraisal of my danger. (Or perhaps—do you gather my meaning, Lord Sidney?—I had not yet come to appreciate the subtler, almost chemical properties, exchanges, and reactions of families.) So, much was lost on me. Though I’ll be frank, I didn’t blame myself then and don’t blame myself now.

Who would in my position? New to fame? I mean
fame
, my friends. And if, today, I can write myself off as a simple celebrity, in those days—I hadn’t realized until I put down that last phrase how very long ago they now seem though it can’t have been more than four or five months back that all this took place—I was an historical figure, a matrix for monarchy, the potential breeder of queens and kings. It’s no wonder I was under such close, if misdirected, scrutiny.

As I was saying.

New to fame. New, though at twenty-eight I was perhaps a few years past the right age for it, to a whirlwind tour— indeed, there were times when I actually thought of myself as living in a kind of montage—of social geography I’d seen depicted in films—bars of crayon light spelling the names of nightclubs in flashing pulses of neon like a kind of urban code; wheels spinning on roulette tables with colored chips on special numbers like canted stacks of denomination; dice on green baize; corks popping out of champagne bottles; dance halls and dance bands, the musicians sitting primly on chairs behind music stands whose vaguely scrolled shapes were like the fronts of sleighs; couples barely moving to slow, easy music from some universal time zone of romance; sleek cars on streets still shiny from recent rain—— all the world that did
too
love a lover wrapped in creamy layers of early
A.M.
cliché—but never really believed existed.

Oddly, it was at these times I most had Larry to myself. It was as if the paparazzi had been bought off, or as if we’d somehow managed to give the Prince’s family the slip. Maybe this was only a professional courtesy—another tradition—paid to princes during certain of the more tender phases of their courtships. And odd, too, how strangely returned to myself I felt, and to a time when I was not yet the toast of Western and Mediterranean Europe, shy, almost defensive.

There was, for example, the incident at The Springfield, one of Britain’s, indeed the Continent’s, most important but—because of its relative inaccessibility and the steepness of the stakes risked there—least frequented gambling casinos. The Springfield is in Llanelli, an unattractive borough and port town of under twenty-five thousand in County Dyfed, South Wales. Lawrence, who wasn’t much of a gambler—“More Denise’s, Mary’s, and Alec’s line of country,” he’d said both times we’d been to London clubs, quickly adding that craps, cards, roulette, and offtrack betting were some of the nation’s principal industries and, as such, required his attention during our engagement, as, once we were married, our presence would be expected at foundries, coal mines, and shipyards; it was good, he said, for tourism—drove us down as much, or so I was told, to see his old boyhood chum, Macreed Dressel, the casino’s owner, as to show the flag.

In London, no matter I was no more gambler than Lawrence, I rather enjoyed the glamorous ambience of these places, enjoyed the exotic liquors they passed round, enjoyed the au courant fashions of the women, the striking black-tie presence of the men, was enchanted by the sourceless background of classical chamber music played by live, but hidden, musicians, so at odds with the ostensible activities in the big rooms, but so fitting, too, suggesting as it did an earlier age, some fastidious buck-and-wing of cotillions and quadrilles, of silk breeches and linen petticoats, great fortunes won and lost, love tragedies and suicides and young men killed in duels.

The Springfield, however, was a different story.

For one thing, after what Larry had told me about the club, about its being a kind of Lourdes or Mecca for people of serious fortunes, a place so remote it was almost as convenient to approach by ship as by rail or airplane, I had imagined a sort of Monte Carlo for the rich, even picturing those freaky, out-of-the-way palm trees you sometimes get in Great Britain here and there along this or that ocean current, my mind actually conjuring a ruined castle (brilliantly restored, of course), the chamber musicians of the London clubs augmented by a full-fledged orchestra, gaming tables like an incredible furniture, fine Oriental scrim displacing the ordinary baize beneath the dice, gracious suites where guests refreshed themselves after an evening’s play, magical fountains and gardens where wild animals, odorless, disported, their killing teeth and dangerous claws removed. …

In the event, of course, The Springfield was as plain as its name.

And stranger, too, than anything I had yet conceived under the spell of my touched, teched, chosen, prenuptial fairytale life.

It was as drab as anything else in that drab port town and, in lieu of the safe lions, gardens, and tigers of my overheated imagination, hadn’t even the advantage of a view of the sea. And rather than the cunningly restored castle I’d imagined, the structure itself was nothing more stately than both sides of an ordinary semidetached. Nor was there anywhere to be seen the extravagant, requisite fashions of the London clubs. Here, the men’s suits and ladies’ dresses could have been seen between five and seven
P.M.
on the station platforms, or staked out along the steep ascending and descending escalators, and in every car on the London Underground.

Here the unadorned men and prosaically clothed women—many more men than women—not only hadn’t arrived as couples but, one understood, if they recognized each other at all it was only what they had observed of one another’s habits at the gaming tables. One understood—and this was
not
my overheated imagination rekindled—that one was in the presence if not of disease then at least of obsession. The Springfield, like some sanitarium-in-reverse, was given over to the practice of gaming as sanitariums were once given over to a cure for tuberculosis, or, nowadays, to losing weight, say, or weaning people off drugs.

Macreed Dressel, Larry’s old pal (though it was never clear to me how Larry had met him, he proved so entirely strange I never pressed the Prince on the subject), was standing in the doorway when we arrived. Unlike anyone else I was to see there that evening, Mr. Dressel was got up, in a sort of costume like Rick’s in
Casablanca,
as if the white dinner jacket and the carnation in his lapel were meant to identify him as the owner/manager of the place.

“Larry!” he shouted as we stepped out of the car.

“How are you, Macreed?”

“Is this she? Oh, it is! It is indeed, but take my advice, my dear,” Dressel said while we were still several yards off, “what those photographers have done to you is actionable! Were I your solicitor I’d advise you to haul them up on charges! The most beautiful woman in Europe and they shoot you as if you were some common starlet!”

“What’s an old poof like you know about beauty in women?” Larry said.

“Oh nothing, nothing at all. You’ve quite found me out, yes you have.”

“Have you seen my brothers and sisters?” Larry asked.

“What do you take me for?” said Macreed Dressel as if he’d been insulted.

“Have you?”

“No, of course not! Certainly not! I should say not! Not in ages!”

“You’re quite certain?”

“Quite certain! Absolutely! I’d take my oath on it! You have my word!”

(Oh, I
should
have been a queen, I really
should.
I have the temperament, I mean, certain passive instincts. I am, I mean, occasionally visited, as women are supposed to be, by great illuminating flashes of knowledge, received as Sinai conviction. Because I knew what this was all about. The Prince, who
was
no gambler, in exchange for Macreed’s promise never to admit his siblings into the casino—that fast crowd, those ne’er-do-wells, the fortunes they owed in gambling debts—had undertaken to come to Llanelli in their place, volunteering to dip into his own Royal-Duke- of-Wilshire-Heir-Apparent’s funds rather than have them, though more experienced in these matters than he, venture from their smaller reserves and diminished reputations one solitary pound. I asked myself, Louise, say what you will about him, is not this Lawrence the Steady one hell of an honorable man? Then thought to myself—— Whoops, Louise, whoops there, what about Alec and Denise and company, aren’t they not only the fastest runners in that pack of ne’er-do-wells and compulsive gamblers, but Princes and Princesses of the Realm in their own right as much as Lawrence himself? What’s to prevent a three-star bully and photo hog like Prince Alec who doesn’t lack for the temerity to enter any low pub in the kingdom to demand of the locals that they stand him drinks, or to provoke dust-ups with no thought to his victims’ safety and well- being, no matter what he may have for his own, and then come away, barreling his Quantra at one hundred, one hundred twenty-five, and one hundred seventy mph with a souped-up, one thousand hp Rolls-Royce engine under its bonnet through the narrowest passageways in Bond Street, from going into any damn gambling den he thinks to take it in his head to go into and not only playing
for
, but actually determining
what
the table stakes will be? And, Sid, because it’s you I’m talking to in case you didn’t catch on, I knew the answer to that one, too. It was because, even though they were Princes and Princesses in their own right, they were
never
as much so as Lawrence. Who was Heir Apparent, practically as good as King already. By virtue of which, at least to pledged professionals like Mary and Robin and Alec and Denise, oathed to primogeniture, to the simple principles of fealty and liegeship and obligation, were servants to Order, to some pure, attainable ideal of Succession, wouldn’t their brother have loyalty and compliance, if not actual out-and-out faith, practically coming to him? An Heir Apparent who stood above those mere Heirs Presumptive as confidently as Alec, who not only felt at ease in those low pubs and on those only just civic lanes and roads and motorways, and who, the Heir Apparent, were he of a mind to, could have commanded of the younger brother that he stand him to the same stout that the younger brother had just expropriated from the day laborer in the low pub. So that all he ever had to say to any of them was, “Steer clear, no little romps at the gaming tables for you kids, but,
whatever
you do, stay the hell away from The Springfield!”)

“Will you be purchasing any chips this evening?” Macreed Dressel asked me after we’d freshened up.

“I’m not much of a gambler.”

“Oh,” said Macreed, “but it’s so
boring
to stand by watching someone else hazard. I don’t care how much in love two people are, it makes for a damned tedious evening. No, surely you ought to put yourself at some risk.”

“No, really, thank you, I’m fine. I’ll try to bring Larry some luck.”

“I can’t sell you a few chips? Two or three thousand pounds?”

“Louise?” said Larry, turning to me.

Well, I’m not much of a gambler, and Dressel was right, it is tedious to watch other people make bets. When I was in America, I noticed that every local television news program would run the winning lottery numbers across the screen. What could have been of interest to no one except the three or four people out of the several hundred thousand who’d purchased tickets seemed to take up an immense amount of time as the numbers went by. Then they’d put the numbers up a second time. (I have the same reaction watching the weather report or listening to the scores of games.) Actually, when the only thing at stake is money and depends on chance—oh, I know there’s a certain skill, and even bits and pieces of character involved in understanding house odds, in knowing when to risk and when to stand pat—I have trouble developing a rooting interest. I’d have to know all the gambler’s circumstances before I could get involved. The kick I got in those London clubs had more to do with watching how people behaved, what winning or losing meant to them and, well, quite frankly, the clichés about English character are quite accurate. We’re too stiff- upper-lip to give much away.

But this is what I meant before when I said that at these times—when the Prince and I were off on our own and, well, dating—I felt most returned to myself. Because the truth was, I hadn’t any money. Denise had taken me shopping. What I wore in Llanelli Denise had put on my back. Even my shoes and undergarments had been billed to the Princess’s wardrobe allowance. I took my meals at one palace or stately home or another, or dined in England’s finest restaurants and it hadn’t cost me a cent. (Indeed, I never even once saw a bill presented.) I slept each night in a spectacular room between gloriously smooth sheets on wonderfully stuffed pillows in beautifully embroidered pillow slips on a marvelous turned-down bed, and not only was everything free but I never even thought to bring my hosts a gift.

Only when Macreed Dressel had offered to sell me chips, and only when Larry had turned to me and spoken my name, “Louise?” did it occur to me that I had no money. That it’s all right to accept every hospitality—even the hospitality of the gift of the clothes on one’s back—except the hospitality of money. And, as I had no money, and would take none from Larry—even though it would have been disguised as Macreed Dressel’s chips—I did, I felt returned to myself.

“Let’s get on with it then, shall we?” Lawrence said, and Mr. Dressel opened an ordinary door and led us through it and into his graceless, charmless gambling parlor, which would, had not the common wall in the ordinary semidetached been knocked through, have been two quite ordinary lounges.