Page 17 of The Heir Apparent
She said nothing but sighed smoke into the frosty London air. She had unpinned the bun from her head and her hair cascaded around her shoulders.
“I wouldn’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything,” I added. “It’s just Richard being a twat as usual.”
She took another drag of her cigarette. We used to smoke in our suite at Astley, sitting side by side in the alcove where we wouldn’t be spotted from the grounds below. I don’t know if we took much pleasure in the act itself, but it was forbidden and therefore appealing. A photo of me with a fag between my teenaged lips would have been worth £10,000 at least, which had only added to the allure.
“I was meant to have my egg retrieval next week,” she said quietly.
I lay on the bed propped on my elbows and stared at her. As the plane was cruising somewhere over Turkmenistan, I’d had a vivid fantasy that as soon as I arrived in London, Amira would tell me she and Louis had a few embryos on ice. We would have to act fast: the procedure would need to happen in a matter of days. But a nice big donation from Vikki’s chequebook in exchange for the surgeon’s silence would seal the deal. Vikki would do it—I was certain of it.
An ancestor of mine was nicknamed The Old Pretender because his rivals were utterly convinced the true heir to the throne had been stillborn, and a living infant procured and smuggled into the Queen’s chambers inside a bed warmer. Was thawing out a speck of Villiers tissue and inserting it into the line of succession worse than what The Old Pretender’s parents did? They would have done the same if the science were available to them. The line was a thousand years old, and it had rarely been straight and true.
I joined Amira by the window. We could see the red asphalt courtyard below. The cigarette switched hands between us.
“I’m sorry,” I said and inhaled. “I didn’t know you were trying.”
“I haven’t drunk alcohol or coffee or smoked for three months in preparation for this week. Instead I’m going to his funeral.”
We stayed by the window for a long time. I hadn’t smoked since secondary school and my head was swimming. I handed her the cigarette.
“Would you like to go get drunk at your apartment?”
Cumberland is a royal residence at the opposite end of Hyde Park from the sovereign’s palace. Once a lavish gift to an old queen’s favourite, it has since been converted into apartments for the monarch’s relatives. Now it’s sort of like an exhibit forendangered animals at the zoo: a safe place for these useless but fascinating creatures to loll about. Beyond its gilded wrought-iron gates, they had no chance of survival.
All the apartments looked inward to a central courtyard so that the inhabitants spent their days peering through their curtains to spy on each other. Mum caused an uproar in 1997 when she had wooden shutters fitted to finally grant herself some privacy.
“A middle-class monstrosity,” Granny’s mean sister Beatrix had declared. But she’d always been resentful that Mum and Papa got Cumberland 1, the largest apartment, while she languished in the slightly smaller Cumberland 2.
I begged Stewart to let Amira and me walk across Hyde Park with hats and sunglasses to disguise ourselves.
“She needs the fresh air, Stewart,” I whispered at the entrance to the palace.
“Absolutely not,” he said and walked me to the waiting Range Rover. “Now, ma’am, you understand that after the funeral there will be much to discuss. Prince Frederick’s will… among other things.”
“Fine,” I said, relieved to hear I had four whole days during which no one would corner me and force me to decide everything at once.
When we got to the apartment, Amira disappeared to change her clothes and left me standing in the drawing room where I had grown up. I hadn’t been inside Cumberland 1 since Granny gave it to Louis as an engagement gift. They’d had the place gutted and remodelled, the echoes of my childhood now almost imperceptible. The shutters were gone, replaced with chic linen curtains. A Hermès blanket was artfully draped across a white boucle couch. On top of a terrazzo coffee table were ruthlessly neat stacks of Tom Ford books and Diptyque candles the size of buckets.
I lit the enormous candles, deciphered the sleek and powerful bluetooth speakers to put on a Spotify playlist of 2010s throwback hits, and went into the kitchen in search of provisions. Theabrupt end to their Zermatt ski trip and our decampment from the main palace meant no staff had yet had the chance to stock the fridge. But there was butter, half an onion, parmesan cheese and a shrivelling lemon. I went into the pantry and dug through packets of konjac noodles, bags of buckwheat flour, sugar-free chocolate, monk fruit sweeteners, powders and protein bars until I found an old box of orzo. Then I went looking for the gin.
By the time Amira emerged from her room dressed in an Olivia von Halle tracksuit, I had orzo al limone bubbling on the stovetop. She sat down at the kitchen island and eyed me suspiciously.
“Ready for your martini?” I asked and she shrugged. I took the shaker from the freezer and poured her an ice-cold dirty martini with three olives. As teenagers we’d split a VK mixed pack. But after lurking at the periphery of a few frosty family Christmases in the last decade, I knew that this was her drink.
“Cheers,” she muttered, took a gulp and closed her eyes. “Goddamn it, that’s good.”
I laughed.
“We shouldn’t get too drunk though,” she added. “I think they want us to inspect the flowers tomorrow.”
I took a sip. “We don’t have to do that, you know. It’s a lot to ask of you. It’s been, what? Four days?”
She gave me that strange look again. “Your pot sounds like it’s boiling.”
I gave the orzo a stir and sipped my drink. Jack’s mum, Paula, horrified by my inability to do anything for myself, had taught me to cook a few years earlier. Until I was eighteen and out on my own, I had been unable to walk into a kitchen without a maid asking me how they could be of assistance. At boarding school, dinner was slopped onto a plate from a row of bains-marie. Through uni, I avoided the issue altogether with microwave meals and Thai takeaway.
Paula, who seemed to notice everything, had quietly taken me on as her project when I first moved onto the vineyard.She and Jack’s father, the first Jack Jennings, were a big deal in Tasmania. In the eighties, they were arrested for blockading the Franklin River to prevent it being dammed. In the nineties, Paula led the state’s Yes Campaign to make Australia a republic and was devastated when they lost. She probably would have ended up in parliament, but Jack’s father had died, and she took over his family’s vineyard instead. She had still kept her hand in, though, risking arrest to stand in the path of a dozen bulldozers that were supposed to be razing an old-growth forest, and door-knocking for marriage equality in 2017.
I was not exactly the housemate she had in mind for her son. But, she’d concluded, if I was going to have a stab at life in the real world, the least I could do was learn how to handle a kitchen knife. First Paula had asked me to read out steps from the recipe while she cooked. I’d watched as she calmly moved about her space. Somehow she knew that Japanese noodles needed to be plunged in cold water after boiling so they didn’t stick. She removed basil stems to keep the pesto from going brown and bitter. She knew that too much kale caused a stomach ache, but you could massage the leaves with oil to soften them. Eventually, she had placed a cutting board, a pile of vegetables and a knife before me. I was later mortified to find out it was a child’s safety knife purchased specifically for me.
