Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘And after the lepers — then what?’

‘You should be in the air by noon, sir. There’s the ceremony at Mansion House at two: your award from the Headway people.’

Again Henry IX blinked at him.

‘The National Head Injuries Association, sir. Then you go north,’ he said, and superfluously added, ‘to see the Queen.’

‘Yes, poor thing.’

‘Sir. I have Oughtred on hold and will liaise with him tonight at St James’s. We must avoid passivity in this matter.’ He shook his head and added, ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to begin.’

‘Oh Bugger.’

Urquhart-Gordon had an impulse to reach out and smooth Henry IX’s hair from his brow. But this would surprise the King’s horror of being touched: touched by a man.

‘I feel very sorry for you, Hotty. Truly I do.’

Soon after that the King went off to bathe, and Brendan sat on in the drawing-room. He removed his hornrims; and there were the tumid, vigilant brown eyes. Brendan had a secret: he was a republican. What he did here, what he had been doing for a quarter of a century, it was for love, all for love. Love for the King, and, later, love for the Princess.

When Victoria was four … The Englands were holidaying in Italy (some castello or palazzo ), and she was brought in to say goodnight to the company — in robe, pyjamas and tasselled slippers, with her hair slicked back from the bath. She went to the cardtable and, on her easy tiptoe, kissed her parents, then exchanged particular farewells with two other members of the entourage, Chippy and Boy. Sitting somewhat apart, Brendan looked up from his book in rosy expectancy — as she wordlessly included him in the final transit of her eyes. Then she took her nanny’s hand, and turned with her head bowed. And Brendan, startling himself, nearly cried out, in grief, in utter defeat — how can I feel so much when you feel so little? All the blood within him … Brendan knew himself to be perhaps unusually fond of the Princess. Was it an aesthetic passion merely? When he looked at her face he always felt he was wearing his most powerful reading-glasses — the way her flesh pushed out at him like the contours of a coin. But this would not explain his condition in the Italian ballroom as Victoria went to bed without wishing him goodnight: for instance, the sullenly mastered temptation to weep. ‘Goodnight, Brendan,’ she had said, the following evening; and he had felt gorgeously restored. It was love, but what kind of love? These days she was fifteen, and he was forty-five. He kept expecting it to go away. But it didn’t go away.

Now Brendan looked again at the photograph of the Princess. He did so briefly and warily. He was wary for her, and wary for himself — for the information about himself it might give him. Of course the point was to serve her, to serve her always … Brendan marshalled his briefcase, preparing himself for the drive to Orly, the King’s Flight to the City of London Airport, and the working supper with John Oughtred.

Eight o’clock was on its way to the Place des Vosges. Downstairs, in the alpine vault of the kitchen, the security detail frowned over its instant coffees — and its playing-cards, with their unfamiliar symbols, swords and coins from another universe. Upstairs, Love, with a white napkin draped over his forearm, was setting the table in a distant corner of the drawing-room. He was setting it for two. Fragrant from his toilet, the King felt his way from one piece of furniture to another. In this room everything you touched was either very hard or very soft, invaluably hard, invaluably soft.

The house belonged, of course, to Henry IX’s especial friend, the Marquis de Mirabeau. Less well known was the fact that the Marquis maintained a further apartment in the Place des Vosges …

Now the clocks chimed, first in relay, then in unison.

‘If you would, Love,’ said the King.

Against the wall on the landing’s carpeted plateau stood a chiffonier the size of a medieval fireplace. This now began to turn, to slide outwards on its humming axis. And in came He Zizhen, greatgranddaughter of concubines.

Love bade her welcome.

When the clocks chimed again He began to undress. This would take her some time. The King, already naked, lay helplessly on the chaise-longue , like a child about to be changed. As she removed her clothes He caressed him with them, and then with what the clothes contained. He touched him. He touched He. He was hard. He was soft. He touched him and he touched He.

There came a ping, a vibration, from the chandelier.

‘The Duke of Clarence played Prince ChowMein last night, writes clint smoker,’ wrote Clint Smoker. ‘Yes, Prince Alf wokked out with his on-again off-again paramour, Lyn Noel, for a slap-up Chinese. But sweet turned to sour when photographers had the sauce to storm their private room. Wan tun a bit of privacy, the couple fled with the lads in hot pursuit — we’ll cashew! What happened, back at Ken Pal? Did Alf lai chee? Did he oyster into his arms and give her a crispy duck? Or did he decide, yet again, to dumpLyn (after he’d had seconds)? Sea weedn’t like that — so how about a kick in the arse, love, to szechuan your way?’

‘What’s this?’ asked Margery, who was passing.

‘Photocaption,’ said Clint pitilessly, leaning sideways so she could see.

Clint Smoker’s screen showed a tousled and grimacing Prince Alfred and a tearful and terrified Lyn Noel fighting their way through a ruck of photojournalists and policemen in steaming Soho traffic.

‘That rain’s not doing her hair much good,’ said Margery, who now took her place in the next workstation along. A ruddy sixty-year-old, Margery was pretending to be a glamour model called Donna Strange. She was also pretending to have no clothes on.

‘Yeah well it’s the drowned-cat look,’ said Clint.

An identikit modern uggy, Clint himself subscribed to the look-like-shit look (as he had seen it called), with closely shaved head (this divulging many a Smoker welt and blemish), a double nostril-ring in the shape of a pair of handcuffs (the link-chain hung over his long upper lip and was explorable by the petri-dish of the Smoker tongue), and a startlingly realistic, almost trompe-l’oeil tattoo of a frayed noose round the Smoker neck (partly obscured, it is true, by a further rope of Smoker blubber). And yet this man, with a laptop in front of him, was a very fine journalist indeed. Clint’s shoes also repaid inspection: two catamarans lashed in place by a network of cords and cleats.

‘Dear Donna: I am a nineteen-year-old heiress with a slender waist, a shapely derrière, and bouncers as big as your bonce,’ wrote Clint Smoker.

‘Actually not a lot,’ Margery was telling one of her phones. ‘Heels, ankle bracelet, and that’s it, apart from me thong.’

‘Me passion’, wrote Clint, and then went back to change that e to a y , ‘is to dress up in the shortest mini I can find and then go round all the shoeshops with no knickers on. I wait till the lad is on his little seat in front of me. You should see the way they—’

He then said in his uncontrollably loud voice, ‘Here, Marge, they do—’

‘ Donna ,’ said Marge, pressing the mouthpiece to her breast.

‘They do have blokes serving in birds’ shoeshops, don’t they?’

She shrugged a nod and said, ‘Do you darling? Well we all feel a bit fruity in the afternoons. It’s the biorhythm.’

‘… drool’, wrote Clint, ‘when I yank my—’

Supermaniam Singh poked his head round the door and said in estuary English, ‘Oi. He’s here.’

By the time Clint clumped into the conference room the Publisher, Desmond Heaf, was leaning over the cover of yesterday’s Morning Lark and sorrowfully saying,