Chapter Two #3
forced to such a living, and to all intents and purposes he was.
But underneath his dismay, like a vein of hot lava… “Yes!” he said.
“I mean…it doesn’t matter to me. You don’t have to be afraid of the
police, is all. Not while you’re with me.”
Sasha gazed down at him. The pain in his dark eyes dissolved
to a bright amusement. “Oh, my God. You are Prince Harry.”
“No. He’s a nice enough bloke, but they’d never let him roam
around down here. My father, though…” He trailed off. The esplanade
policeman, still far enough off for Sasha to make good his escape,
was indeed turning his stately steps toward them.
My father’s high up on the Metropolitan Police
commissioners’ board. Oh, yes. And what
would he do to help Sasha or anyone else not white, rich,
Protestant, and provably British since the time of the Norman
invasion? He’d help him by arranging for his deportation on the
next boat out. “Never mind. Okay, go. But I’ll see you
again.”
“No, you won’t. It’s better, Laurie. Trust me.”
“I’ll see you again. Will you let me give you some cash? To”—he
paused, grinning—“to buy your friend Len a pint, show there’s no
hard feelings?”
“No.” Sasha was smiling back, his expression oddly gentle. “I
don’t want it. Not from you.”
“At least keep the change from the twenty. Otherwise…” Laurie
paused, then once more surprised himself with his own guile.
“Otherwise, how can you say you bought me lunch?”
I’ll see you again. Laurie sent the
thought after Sasha’s retreating back. He didn’t have long in which
to do so. Between one glance and the next, Sasha was gone, melting
into the crowd and the dazzling winter sun. His disappearance set a
dry knot of pain in Laurie’s throat. He’d read somewhere that
twenty thousand people went missing each year in Britain alone,
just dropped off the radar and were never seen again. He had
wondered at the statistic, wondered how it could happen. Well, he
had just seen it. It happened like that.
The
policeman was still making his steady track through the park toward
him. Laurie turned to look at him. This time he let the cold,
forbidding mask come down deliberately, got to his feet on the
fountain steps, and stood, hands on his hips, against the rainbowed
backdrop of Neptune and his mermaids. The policeman paused for a
second, then as if on purpose, swung around and pursued his beat
along the Embankment.
* *
*
Laurie’s
tutor arrived the next day, and from then on he scarcely had an
hour to call his own. Sanderson, a thin, bespectacled young man who
had obviously been told by Sir William to educate his son or die
trying, threw himself with nervous energy into the task. He set up
shop on the top floor. It made sense; there was an old schoolroom
up there, complete with massive dark oak desks and blackboard, and
maybe Sanderson shared his student’s instinct to put as much space
as he could between himself and Sir William. But it gave Laurie the
chills to be back on the scene of so many grim childhood hours.
Homework, extra tuition during holidays, when the happy shouts of
other kids would rise up to taunt him from the square. At least, he
thought, settling into a chair and giving Sanderson his best look
of respectful attention, he now more or less fitted the furniture.
Could see over the desk’s top. He patted his algebra textbook, to
all appearances businesslike and ready.
The sole alleviation to Laurie’s misery during the grim
battles that ensued was Clara’s presence. She turned up for every
class with a view, as she put it, of bettering herself, though she spent
her time discreetly reading Charmed
novels behind the cover of one of Laurie’s
mathematics texts. Laurie wanted to tell her the deception would go
down better if she put McKay’s Algorithms the right way up, but he
didn’t want to tease her. He appreciated her loyalty too much for
that, though he could have wished she was not seeing her elder
brother daily revealed as such a dunce. He crawled off to his attic
afterward, too numbed out for a while to do anything more than sit
on the windowsill watching the traffic come and go in the slice of
the real, living world he could see between two imprisoning Regency
facades. He even experienced a brief envy for the pigeons, who
might be dying of cold out there but at least could fly, feed, and
cheerfully shag one another as they chose.
Except he was not stupid, was he? Laurie had once known some of the things
Sanderson was trying to teach him, or he would not have scraped
through his A levels and into Oxford, no matter how many strings
Sir William had had to pull to help effect this. Although the
shadowy unknown scope of his father’s influence sometimes made
Laurie shudder, he did remember slowly picking up enough of the
methods and equations he needed to get by and amassing, albeit
without much comprehension, enough dry facts and data to make
himself sound intelligent on the subject of politics, at least
until he met someone who actually was.
That was
the problem. Enrolled as an undergrad at Oxford, Laurie was
constantly surrounded by people for whom these matters were daily
meat and drink, their lives’ work, not a schoolboy game for sliding
your way through exams. Laurie could recite chapter and verse on
every English government that had held sway since the system was
invented, giving the information as lines to an imaginary character
in a history play; he could sing, for Clara’s entertainment, the
value of pi to a hundred decimal places. But these tricks would cut
no ice with Oxford dons. His cover, over the course of his first
university year, was slowly and systematically being blown apart.
He felt as if the walls were closing, his mind clouding over. A
kind of low-level panic ran always in the background of his
days.
Had he ever been really good at anything? Yes. His faltering self-esteem tried
to defend him. He’d loved English lit at school, mostly for its
drama component but devouring poetry and novels too. That had been
all right with his father. Reading was a gentlemanly hobby; a
knowledge of literature was a gentlemanly acquisition. When it came
to drama, however, Laurie had excelled, learning lines overnight
that should have taken weeks, transforming effortlessly into anyone
from Hamlet to Hermione, his unself-conscious gender-swapping a
boon to those entrusted with the task of teaching drama in an
all-male school—frustrating those teachers in equal measure with
his absolute refusal to take part in any play that might receive a
public airing, especially on parents’ evenings. Knowing Sir
William’s prejudices, they had not tried to force the boy, and on
those nights he had been their most talented nonperformer,
tirelessly prompting from his secure hidden place in the
wings.
Except
at Christmas, when he came blazing forth as Cinderella’s
stepmother, the Widow Twanky, or a disturbingly handsome Ugly
Sister. Pantomime was British, traditional, and his son a jolly
good sport for taking part in the fun. If it ever occurred to Sir
William that the pantomime dame was Britain’s last remaining trace
of revered, societally condoned transvestitism, he gave no
sign.
Laurie
hadn’t tried to join any of the dozens of drama societies looking
for members at Oxford. He had felt as if he would be exposed as a
fraud there, as he was afraid he was every day in the lecture halls
and his tutors’ studies. He let himself think less and less about
the theatre. It had been okay for a schoolboy to mess around there,
but now he was working toward a career—which, however little he had
had to do with its choosing, must someday lead him out of his
father’s house and into a life of his own. Mustn’t it…?
So he
tried. He set aside his disinclination and did his very best to
learn from poor young Sanderson, who, if nervous, was sincere and
not unkind. By the end of each day, tutor and student were
invariably in such a state of frustration with themselves and one
another that the sound of the clock ringing four in the hall
downstairs came like a clarion of freedom.