Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Now into the tub for a thoroughly good soak. Henry was near-brahminical in his hygiene, and this was unusual for an England: luxury, in the royal houses, never extended to the bathrooms, which were cold and huge and littered with washing-machines and badminton nets and basketfuls of kittens. He was his own man in other ways too, of course. Among the toiletries lined up on the slab beneath the mirror, for example, one would not find the fierce little gadget, like a pewter knuckleduster, with which Richard IV had tormented his tubes of toothpaste. Henry was an enemy of thrift: he was one of nature’s overtippers. Retiring domestics, after half a century of service, used to receive a monogrammed tea-towel, or a bathmat, or a free-visit coupon to the Rubens Room at Windsor. After Henry’s accession they got twenty cases of vintage champagne, or a nice new car. He also doubled all salaries — and then shruggingly halved them again, after the public revelation of his astronomical overdraft. The treats and bonuses he still hurled about were now being financed by secret sales from the Englands’ private Prado — a Titian here, a Delacroix there. Brendan Urquhart-Gordon could almost hear the creak of the tumbrels and the gnashing of the ringside knitting-needles when Henry said, with a pout, that ‘Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas’ if his gift-budget was confined to six figures.

When the King was at stool, it could be argued, he was mingling with his people. He was coming down from his castle and doing what everyone else did. First he mingled. Now he slummed, applying Lord Fletcher’s ferocious lotion by means of a disposable glove. As he did so he was ambushed by an unmanageable thought: he could hardly ask Victoria — his ministering angel, the faith-healer of every little scrape and scratch and ache and pain — to kiss it better.

The recent days had passed with fell velocity. Now he had three clear hours before they came for him — a stretch of time that suddenly seemed almost geologically vast. Seated at his desk, drinking China tea, he played patience, and solitaire. Eleven o’clock came and went without making the slightest impression on his complacency, and so did eleven-thirty and eleven-forty-five — though it was ‘a slight blow’, he had to admit, when the minute-hand gave its tic-like tick and dourly advanced beyond noon. Still, fifty-nine minutes: an eternity. At about ten to three Henry was beginning his twenty-seventh game of solo. Ten minutes — no, eleven! Donkey’s years. The red queen, the black king, the red king, the black queen. Six minutes; five … He came close to protesting that he still had thirty seconds left when there was the knock on the door, and Love loomed.

Brendan was keeping his counsel. The Royal Rolls had barely taken its place in the convoy, and the King (after a curt good-day) emphatically produced from his side pocket a paperback booklet called Pastime Puzzles—24. He was now immersed in a cryptic crossword … It always filled Brendan with affectionate amazement: the amount of time his employer was capable of devoting — around blue Caribbean poolsides, on Alpine terraces — to the same edition of Pastime Puzzles. Over the course of one long summer (New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Micronesia) Brendan had reread the complete works of Henry James while Henry frowned at, doodled in, and frequently gummed back together his copy of Pastime Puzzles—19. An intensely ticklish moment had arisen from this, when, in some Kenyan treehouse, as they sipped their gimlets, Henry said,

‘Quite a good joke in that book of mine … Uh, there’s a young chap who goes to prison for a very long time. And he’s a bit worried about how he’s going to kill all that … time. Someone tells him there are jigsaws in the book trolley they wheel round. He gets a jigsaw. It’s the sort of jigsaw Tori had when she was — hang on, I’m giving it away. You know, wooden, with about twelve pieces. He uh, he finishes the jigsaw and says to his cellmate, “I’ve finished!” And his cellmate says, “Yes, you ass, but it took you ten months.” And our man says, “Ah, but it says on the packet ‘Three to Five Years’.”’

They both reached for their drinks at the same moment. They both looked down at the same moment: on the table between them, Pastime Puzzles—19 , next to the soft pigskin of The Princess Casamassima.

‘What an extraordinary colour you’ve gone, Bugger.’

And there was Henry on the veranda the next day, flexing himself into a copy of Pastime Puzzles—20 …

Now Brendan attended to the two necks, glassed off like exhibits, in the front seat, one long and thin (Rhodes, the most senior chauffeur), the other short and fat (Captain Mate). Mate’s neck was also tanned and pocked; barely a pore had escaped corruption — it looked like sand after rain.

‘Oh I say, how fearfully clever ,’ crowed Henry, filling in a four-letter vertical answer in the bottom right-hand corner of the grid. He had been applying himself to his crossword for over an hour. After another ten minutes he put it aside. ‘Can’t seem to get going’, he said, ‘on these bally cryptics. Let’s watch the news.’

Rhodes’s neck and Mate’s neck were now erased from sight, as the King, by the deft use of a dial, interposed a drape of black felt. He then took the clicker from the arm-rest and poked it towards the television screen while also skilfully engaging the power button — as if he was involved (thought Brendan) in a battle of wits. The screen fizzed, and awakened.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Now I have a notion that I deserve a drink.’

Henry sat back with it, his brandy, raising the balloon in both palms like a woman with a cup of something hot. For outside, beyond the treated windows, the blue morning had collapsed utterly, and the southbound motorway was a seething, sizzling mess of drenched metal and rubber, under skies the colour of dogs’ lips … When Henry came to the throne, about a quarter of the population still believed that he had been personally appointed by God; well, stress eczema, where he had it, surely exploded the Divine Right of Kings. It had first seized him, this condition, in the week after Pamela’s accident. Lord Fletcher drew the obvious conclusion; but Henry, still writhing from his epiphanic cur moment (‘Oh no , Pemmy. But at least this means … At least this means …’), suspected otherwise. It was not the accident so much as the inconceivably onerous task of breaking the news to the Princess. Henry, who could barely bring himself to be the author of the most trifling disappointment, who suffered for weeks if he denied her a final swim, a third lollipop, an eleventh bedtime story … There was a two-day hiatus (and news embargo) while she was spirited off a cruise ship in the Aleutians. Meanwhile, with tweezers and blowtorch, stress eczema was exposing the nerve ends of his nethermost fissures and faults. And when he told her, in the library at the Greater House, he additionally squirmed on his confidential nettlebed. Now welcoming the pain, now fully accepting it, he took her outside and walked her up and down the length of the stream for hours and hours and talked and talked and talked to her.

Brendan said: ‘By Christ, did you see that?’

‘He … disappeared.’

‘Hoo! They won’t be showing that again.’

‘He disappeared.’

On the television: a street scene, a loose group of shoppers, hurriers. And then one of them disappeared, leaving a hole in the world, with death tearing out of it.

After some moments Brendan said, ‘Horrorism. That’s what we’ve just witnessed, sir. An act of horrorism.’

Henry looked at him promptingly. The Royal Rolls, with its convoy of peoplecarriers, left the main road and entered the scalloped grounds of the Abbey.