Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

The Prince had just turned twenty-seven when Richard was blown apart on a fishing-boat off the west coast of Ireland. Also on board was the King’s cousin, who was the last Viceroy of India (and its first Governor-General); thus the murders had many claimants — Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and so on, as well as the more obvious and proximate suspects … Nevertheless, this period, with all its magnified emotion (emotion magnified by fifty million), saw Henry at his erotic apogee. England celebrated the Coronation in a mood of fierce defiance and euphoria; and the power-surge, for Henry IX, was carried over into the royal bed, with its gilt posts, its four boules bearing ducal crowns, its tester of purple satin embroidered with lilies, garters and portcullises, its valance of cloth of gold. During their second honeymoon, on the Royal Yacht, as the royal couple sat at table, serenaded by a romantic medley from a band of Royal Marines, Henry smiled sternly at Pamela when the hour of retirement drew near. Sexually, being king got him safely into his thirties (for a while, one of his many nicknames was Excalibur). But by now they were ‘trying’ for an heir…

After the birth of the Princess Victoria, Henry’s lovelife no longer looked to the calendar and the lunar cycle: now it looked to the appointment-book. This duty-roster approach became a habit. It was, of course, a bad habit. Love was by royal appointment, just like everything else. And the male, even the royal male, the most brilliant edition, cannot do this. He cannot master it: expectation — the appointment with expectation. On top of all this, Pamela, as she got older, looked more and more unmistakably like a man.

One afternoon, at five past three, the Queen Consort said, with gruff puzzlement: ‘What’s the matter with it, Hotty? Oh come on, this is hopeless!’ … And that was all it took. Not a single second of his waking life had a thing in common with anyone else’s, but Henry’s vulnerability, at least, was universal; here he came down from the mountain and took his chances among his fellow men. What was the matter with it? Good question. From this time forth, whenever the King saw a ‘3pm: Pammy’ on his schedule, he felt a force settle on his chest, like a harness; and it wouldn’t slacken until the rendezvous upstairs had somehow been survived. He searched his memory for a precursor of this apprehension, for he knew it to be there. Yes. The hours leading up to an earlier rendezvous, also by appointment: when he went to the housemaster’s study to be thrashed.

But the negative epiphany — his life’s cur moment — was waiting for him up in the Kyle of Tongue.

Brendan Urquhart-Gordon listened. The ringing stopped, and there were sounds of effort; and then — expressing no more than mildly hurt feelings — came a whimper of canine protest.

‘Pepper, get off. Bee na. Is that you, Bugger? The bally — the bally phone got stuck under Beena and General Monck. And now there are hairs all over it, and some … disgusting flux or other. General! Get … Where are you, Bugger?’

‘I am being driven north-east from the Cap to Nice airport, sir. Rather fast.’

To his right, beyond the forecourts of the supermarkets and hotels and petrol-stations, the modest lapping of the Mediterranean; to his left, not seen but sensed, the villa colours, the spotlights and crickets and sprinklers. Beside him sat compact, handsome, ageing Oughtred.

‘Well, Bugger?’

‘We have a crime-scene, sir. Much follows from this. We also have very compelling deductive evidence that the motive or the intention could not possibly—’

‘Don’t jabber your conclusions at me, Bugger. And stop sounding so pleased with yourself. I’m ill with this, Bugger, and it’s not funny.’

Brendan reproached himself: he had failed to dissimulate the pep of forensic success. He said, ‘How insensitive of me, sir. Forgive me.’

‘Forgiven. Now get on with it, Bugger. Oh a bottle of rather good red wine, if you would, Love? And one of your savoury snacks?’

‘We’re on the tarmac now, sir. Can you hear the plane? … We’re begin break up.’

‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Sir, this is need to know. The motive, intention, not possibly pecuniary. Media nor blackmail. Talk to.’

After tapping it and shaking it, Henry slid the telephone back under General Monck; and, when Love returned, he asked him for a pack of cards.

Imagine: the kings and the queens. And what are we? Tens, twos?

Celibate himself, Brendan Urquhart-Gordon was an abnormally observant friend. And Henry, in any case, presented no challenge to the imaginative powers. He was legible; he was easy to read.

On a ‘Pammy’ day — or a day featuring ‘another bally three-o’clocker’, as Brendan had heard him put it — Henry would be quite useless all morning (incapable of consecutive thought), and would start yelling for brandy at about half past twelve. At five to three, up he trudged, returning at a quarter to four … If things had gone reasonably well, then Henry would assume a put-upon but stoical air (interestingly, there seemed to be no dividend of relief). If things had gone badly, then the King’s parched face bore the skullshadow of mortality.

So one evening, in the library at the Greater House, Brendan looked up from a preselected report by the British Medical Association, and said casually,

‘A giant step forward for mankind, wouldn’t you say, sir? Potentium. The cause of so much male insecurity banished by the wand of physic. There will be no more wars.’

‘… What are you banging on about, Bugger?’

‘Sir, Potentium. A male-potency drug. Tested and patented and freely available. You take it on an ad hoc basis, sir. A single pill and Bob’s your uncle. There will be no more wars.’

Henry stared into space for a good five minutes, blinking slowly and numbly, like an owl. Then he turned away and said, ‘No no. One can’t be doing with that monkey -glends business.’

And that would be that. And who was Brendan to carp? He used to tell himself that he thrived on his own inhibitions. But perhaps that was personal propaganda; and the obverse would never be tested. The fact remained that the bed he spent so much time trying not to think about had an occupant, and that occupant was a passive male. No, there never was a case more pusillanimous than his own. Given the choice between chastity and the reification of his schoolyard nickname, Bugger chose chastity. So it was all over very early: when he was eight.

‘After four hours in the Château, sir, I was saying to myself, “Hello, this is a bit of a frost.” We’d done all twenty-seven bathrooms. No shortage of white bathtubs, and no shortage of soap. But the alignments, the background colours, wouldn’t match. Then I remembered the Yellow House, sir.’

‘Indeed, Bugger.’

‘Where the Princess often … bathed and changed after tennis before going on to the swimming-pool. And that, sir, was where the intrusion took place. A slat on the top section of the airing-cupboard facing the bath had been partly excised. On the shelf above the boiler we found a Vortex DigiCam 5000. The videodisc had of course been removed. Oughtred, who is still there, unsurprisingly reports that there are no prints and the registration numbers and so on have been scoured smooth.’

‘So are we further for’ard, Bugger? I don’t quite …’

The two men were in a security vehicle outside the Mansion House, where Henry was due to attend an anniversary dinner of the British Architectural Association (and where he would later ‘say a few words’: keep up the good work and whatnot). For a moment the King seemed to submit to the oppression of his surroundings: a mobile granny-flat littered with display screens, transmitters, earphones. Right in front of his chin there hovered a poised mike, with what seemed to be a leather condom clipped to its shaft. There was a jar of Bovril on the counter and, balanced on its lid, a smeared tablespoon.