Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘Angst, anxiety, concern, worry,’ said Brendan, who recognised Henry’s tactic, his voodoo of deferral: no talk of Victoria until the car was quenched of motion. ‘You are being chased by a wild beast which you already fear ,’ he went on. ‘That fear turns to terror as the chase begins. And that terror turns to horror when the chase ends. Horror is when it’s upon you, when it’s actually there. ’

But they weren’t there, and, ahead of them, the grounds swept on.

‘Continue, Bugger,’ said Henry tightly.

Almost floundering, Brendan said, ‘The bomber … To the bomber, death is not death. And life isn’t life, either, but illusion. There is something called the demographic bomb — the birth bomb. The bomb of birth, the bomb of death.’

They pulled up.

‘A form of words, Bugger.’

‘… Well, sir, I suggest you confine yourself to what we may reasonably suppose will soon be the stuff of common knowledge.’

‘Spell it out, if you please.’

Brendan did so.

‘Mm. Perfectly decent little place. I shall need you, Bugger, at ten to five.’

Between the Royal Rolls and the double doors of the Abbey lay a gauntlet of umbrellas.

Dear Princess Victoria,

Or how about, simply, ‘Victoria’? I expect you must be fed up to the back teeth with all the endless pomp and circumstance in your life. There’s none of that nonsense round here, and I cordially extend an open invitation for you to pay us a visit any time you like. Don’t stand on ceremony! We don’t subscribe to ceremony.

We usually dine at a reasonably early hour. Good plain fare, such as has been enjoyed in England for centuries. Our caravan contains two totally separate rooms. Once Mother has gone to bed, privacy is virtually guaranteed.

We will then have the leisure to relax on the divan and get to know each other over a few beers. I’ll start by kissing you oh so slowly. So gently. So tenderly. Oh so lovingly. Then when you say the moment is right and not a moment before (this is totally your ‘call’ as they say) I’ll haul out my

Brendan yawned, and stopped reading (there were many pages yet to come). He was in the lounge, with his briefcase on his knees, going through another batch of the Princess’s restricted mail: mail she never saw. To begin with he had thought that the enemy might have shown its hand at some earlier point; he no longer thought it had, and persevered merely to give himself the feeling that he was getting somewhere. But of course these letters to the Princess were not from the world of pro-action. They came from the world of onanistic longing — and coarse sentimentality, and impotent sadism. Even at their most violent, and some were very violent indeed, they seemed to moan with inertia: a humiliated stasis. Nor would such men be going to France, bearing gold …

His wristwatch was cocked up on the table in front of him. He was ready. As he crushed the letters into their file (Restrained Correspondence) he asked himself why he had spent so long on such an obvious waste of time. He admitted that he indulged in fantasies of protection, of interposing himself between the world and the Princess. Was that his job, just now: a fantasy of protection?

* * *

With a show of capped teeth in his rubbery face, Captain Mate ushered him into the Oak Gallery — closed that afternoon, of course, for the King’s use. Henry and Victoria were on a chesterfield at the far end of the room, some sixty feet away. The remains of a substantial tea were being removed by Love and his helpers. As Brendan approached, and as the scene cleared, he found himself thinking of earlier times: father and daughter would spend whole days, whole weekends, lolling on a sofa like this, watching television or merely dozing and mumbling and occasionally rousing themselves for a game of I Spy. The King hadn’t changed; but she was older now, this autumn — more erect, and more inclined, it seemed to him, to maintain a distance between herself and her father.

‘How lovely to see you, Brendan.’

‘Always a delight, ma’am. I hope the Princess has had her fill of sticky buns?’

‘Oh yes. I had masses.’

‘And were they sufficiently “greedy”?’

‘Oh yes. Very piggy indeed.’

Brendan thought: I’m always behind — not a year behind, but always half a season. He said, ‘Forgive me. I’ve interrupted you.’

‘My daughter was discoursing on Islam , if you please,’ said Henry. Of course, the King was religious, in his way: strictly non-ecumenical Prayer Book Church of England. ‘It’s like talking to a bally mullah.’

‘Oh poo. I was making Daddy cross by saying that Muslims seem to have much more feeling for each other than Christians. There’s a real bond, and I think that’s very attractive.’

‘Is the Princess’, asked Brendan lightly, ‘feeling herself “drawn” to Mecca?’

‘God no. I don’t think I’ve got any faith in me. I just find it all very riveting.’

Henry was no longer dreaming of Alabaman prisons. He had hit upon a more aristocratic excoriation: the smoking poker administered to Richard II (for crimes of ‘effeminacy’). And then the usurper Bolingbroke journeyed to the Holy Land to purge his guilt with fire and sword … Henry had at some point been informed by the Duchess of Ormonde that fifteen-year-olds were fifteen-year-olds, and that he should be pleased it was religion she was keen on, and not anorexia. Recalling this, he bafflingly volunteered,

‘You’d be better off having another round of sticky buns, my darling — and never mind about Mecca …’

Brendan turned his frown on the Princess, who wagged her head with a look of contented inanity. Then the smile she gave him: how it decanted itself upwards, from the mouth and through the frame of the nose and into the eyes, where it lingered in the folds of the orbits … Brendan was devoted to Henry; and yet Henry sometimes made him feel as if he had kissed his life away for some evanescent frippery — for a monogrammed butter-pat, in a deadly dining-room full of the ghosts of sweating placemen. But with the Princess it was love. What kind of love he didn’t know, but it was plainly love.

‘The sands of time, sir,’ he said, tapping his watch with a fingertip.

‘Yes yes, Bugger. Sorry: Brendan. What about the women then, eh, sweetheart? I expect you’d go a bit blank, my precious, if I told you to wear a uh, a black tepee for the rest of your days.’

Victoria sat forward, rubbing her hands together as if in ablution, and said, ‘But think of the agonies that Western women go through because of their looks. The constant worries and comparisons. It’s forced on you too. This stupid vanity is forced on you. What bliss it would be not to have to think about it ever again. Oh, the privacy of it!’

‘Well we can talk about that another time. My dearest, I have some rather unsettling news.’

Within a minute Brendan believed that the whole of terrestrial existence was just a breath away from cardiovascular collapse. He stared at the King, and thought: can you not feel it, man? Can you not hear it?

Though never as hurtfully as in the present case, Victoria’s integrity had of course been pierced and breached many times before; and, since childhood, she had always reacted with the same robust indignation. There was nothing regal in it — on the contrary, there was something severely republican and every-woman in her steep frown, her straight neck. It was for a version of this that Brendan had more or less unthinkingly prepared himself. And now? While her father, gazing resolutely ceiling-ward as he writhed around on his cushion, delivered the agreed preamble (‘it appears that the vultures are up to their old tricks’), Victoria did no more than sigh and stiffen. But as soon as Henry meandered in on the particular (‘the Château’, ‘the Yellow House’), she bared the teeth that were still too broad for her face, and her head dropped, by degrees, like the resilient jolts of a second-hand. Now Brendan could feel the heartbeat of the Princess, pressing in on his exterior ear. And soon the sound of her pulse — the slow, gonging throb — was entirely subsumed by his own.