Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘We have more, sir. But already we can make certain deductions. The unlikelihood of any pecuniary motive. At first I thought, well, the DigiCam 5 is worth about three thousand pounds — they got it in, why didn’t they get it out? And this rather handily exonerates all the staff, as I realised when I was about to corral them for questioning.’

‘I don’t quite follow.’

‘The servants simply can’t have known about it or they’d have reported it or stolen it. This was rather spectacularly confirmed by Oughtred, not an hour ago. The DigiCam 5 is amazingly portable — but not this one. The camera, sir, is inlaid with gold …’

Henry eructed liverishly behind his hand. ‘How perfectly vile all this makes me feel. My tummy’s in ruins. I shall have to give my speech with my legs doublecrossed. What are they telling us, Bugger?’

‘They’re telling us that they’re rich already and that they want something else. Not money.’

‘What else have I got but money? I am a constitutional monarch and by definition I have no power. Glory, yes. But no power.’

‘Is glory power?’ asked Urquhart-Gordon. And he added to himself excitedly: is it negative power?

* * *

The next morning, as he cautiously overcame a cup of lemon tea (he would normally have a proper English breakfast: all the usual stuff plus lots of chops and pies), Henry IX received a communication from his private secretary:

FYI, sir. Copied out while hunched over the Château visitors’ book. Please forgive informalities. Present during the Princess’s stay (chronology of arrival):

Henry R; Bill and Joan Sussex; Brendan Urquhart-Gordon; Prince Alfred and Chicago Jones; Chippy and Catherine Edenderry; the Sultan and Sultana of Perak; Boy and Emma Robville; Juliet Ormonde; Lady Arabella Mont; John and Nicola Kimbolton; Joy Wilson; Prince Mohammad Faed (and wives); Hank Davis; the Emir of Qatar (and wives); He Zizhen. NB: at one point there were 47 minors at the Château, including 15 teenage boys.

Ah, He, He, He Zizhen … Just over a year after the Queen’s accident, Henry found himself dining alone with Edith Beresford-Hale. However easily explained (and graciously excused), the straining, trembling, wheezing fiasco that followed was enough to convince the King: all that was all over. Edith was still a widow, or rather a widow once more, and there had been other changes. For example, she was sixty-three. But Henry made no allowances, and was quite prepared to tiptoe from the scene with his slippers in his hand. ‘That was a last ,’ he said hurriedly to himself. ‘What’s the matter with it, Hotty?’ the Queen had asked, giving Excalibur a rough tug or two before tossing it impatiently aside. ‘Oh come on, this is hopeless!’ Well indeed. What was the matter with it?

Then came He … ‘May I tell you a secret?’ she said in her accentless English, joining him as he smoked a cigar on a balcony of the Chinese Embassy in Paris. Henry turned (and noticed the sudden absence of his escort, Captain Mate). His universe was a gallery of strangers, and here was someone doubly other: the lavish black quiff, the fractional asymmetry of her lidless eyes (one eye happy, one eye sad), the strong teeth rather carelessly stacked into their prows. He inclined his sandy head at an avuncular angle … Now, to be clear: world-historical beauties (women perpetually dogged by tearful trillionaires) had come at him fairly steadily during the past twelve months. Many talented tongues had scoured — had practically drained — the royal ear. And the King might have flinched but he always leant willingly into it, hoping for an answer in himself, which never came … He Zizhen stood on tiptoe. Then there was contact. It seemed as if a butterfly had taken up residence in his tympanum — no, make that two butterflies; and they were mating. At once his collateral heart (so torpid, so workshy, so decidedly valetudinarian) felt like a length of towel-rack.

Subliminally, in his dreams, it worried him. The sexual coincidence: himself, in the Château, with the otherness of He in his arms; and, across the lawn, the Princess surprised in the Yellow House.

First Officer Nick Chopko : If it’s designed to do it, it’ll do it. God I’m tired. How about it, Cap?

Flight Engineer Hal Ward : Guy was telling me he was so tired coming into Honolulu it was like he was drunk. Not just drunk but totally smashed.

Captain John Macmanaman : I was reading in AUN, both pilots on a commuter fell asleep about two minutes after takeoff. Now with a sealed cockpit you don’t want to …

Chopko: The attendants were screaming and banging on the door. They were practically in space when they came to.

Macmanaman: Not where you want to be today … You know what the Aztecs called comets? ‘Smoking stars.’ Because of the trail, I guess. You’ll get your nap, Nick. But you’ll have to excuse me for a second. I want to say hello to a passenger.

‘Takeoff rough enough for you?’ he said.

‘Ah I trust you, John,’ said Reynolds.

In the surplice of his uniform, hat in hand, he bent to kiss her. The man in 2A briefly ogled the Captain, but then kept wrenching his head around and staring back through the porthole to monitor the performance of the wing.

‘Welcome to widowworld. How are you bearing up, Rennie?’

‘Good. No, I feel wonderful. There’s a gap, and the end was horrible, but let’s not kid ourselves. You knew him.’

In the hold, the corpse of Royce Traynor (full of wax and formaldehyde) was waiting with its teeth bared.

‘“So-called ‘Renaissance Man’ Xan Meo, attacked and hospitalised in late October,” ‘read Russia, ‘“may have been the victim of his own past, which is mired in criminality and violence.”’

Xan listened, on this his first day home.

‘“His father, Mick Meo, was a prosperous East End gangster who served numerous jail terms for armed robbery, theft, fraud, tax-evasion, extortion with menaces, and affray.

‘“In 1978, while in his sixties, Mick Meo was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for attempted murder, and died in jail. His victim was his own son-in-law, Damon Susan, the husband of his daughter Leda. Himself an ex-convict, Susan was confined to a wheelchair after the incident. He never recovered from injuries described at the time as ‘unusually appalling’, and is now in a hospice in West Sussex.”’

‘You know all that. There’s nothing new here.’

Russia inhaled. She seemed to be sucking colour into her face …

‘“Xan Meo’s first wife, Pearl O’Daniel, a theatrical costumier” — oh, sure — “emerged from a similar background. Her father and all three of her brothers have served time for crimes of violence, and she herself has two convictions for possession of cocaine.

‘“Keeping up the family tradition of injuring close relatives, Meo himself attracted the attention of the police after an incident with Angus O’Daniel, his wife’s eldest brother, who declined to press charges. And in his youth Meo was convicted of a litany of minor offences, including Actual Bodily Harm.” What’s the difference between Actual and Grievous?’

‘Uh, extent of injury. Grievous is worse. Actual’s bullshit.’

‘“While there is nothing to suggest, as yet, that the recent attack on Meo had any direct connection with his past, we do know that violence tends to double back on itself. Violence begets violence. However lucrative Meo’s background may have been in shaping his portrayals of lowlife characters, on the screen and on the page, he may find that he is now paying for his past.”’