Chapter Ten 2009
CHAPTER TEN
It was March Equinox and everyone at Astley was getting ready for the end of Lent Term. We always celebrated the arrival of spring holiday with a school dance. The next day, our parents came to watch the cadets parade through campus, and then we all went home for Easter break.
But first, I had to get through ballet class.
I was up at dawn, trudging through grass that crackled underfoot as I made my way to the dance studio.
My ears hurt in the cold. My nose streamed.
The sun seemed as sleepy as I was, only deigning to rise at seven-thirty.
I was fifteen, no longer a “Shell” in boarding school parlance, but a “Remove.” Breasts and hips had bloomed seemingly out of nowhere.
My period had arrived a year earlier, bringing with it an onslaught of furious, fiery acne.
To my great shame, a crisis meeting had been held at the palace to discuss my face.
A doctor I’d never met prescribed me a contraceptive pill that is now banned in France for causing an inordinate number of strokes in young women.
The little tablets, as sugary and delicate as silver cachous on a Christmas biscuit, were decanted into a vitamin bottle and sent to Astley in bulk to conceal the fact that I was a child on birth control.
But there was no cure for my unwieldy figure.
I had always been a tiny, beautiful child, with black curls cascading down my narrow shoulders.
It was assumed that I would grow to be like my mother who, by then, was divorced from Papa and clambering out of Rolls-Royces with her collarbones protruding and her thigh gap on display.
No one ever mentioned that her elegant body was achieved with a bony finger thrust to the back of her gullet.
The courtiers who ran our lives never had much command of hereditary genetics.
The classic Villiers hips and arse that suddenly sprouted from my teenage body were met with grave disappointment.
Dancing was my idea. I had seen an interview on television with a famous actress who seemed to be celebrated mostly for her childlike body.
She looked like a twelve-year-old boy with B-cup breasts, a prominent sternum and veins that roped around her spindly arms. When the journalist asked how she maintained such an enviable figure, she tittered and claimed she ate nothing but burgers and ice cream.
“But I used to dance and that kind of changed my physicality,” she said. “I started ballet as a child and I danced every day for four hours until I was nineteen when I became an actress.”
It was 2009, and this seemed like a pretty good deal to me.
I signed up for ballet classes through Astley’s dance program, and convinced Mum I should be allowed to do additional training in town on the weekends.
The burgers and ice cream would have to wait until dancing successfully scrambled my genetic code.
There were many days when I consumed nothing but watermelon.
On the morning of the end-of-term dance, I was walking past The Mound, a strange little hill on school grounds that may have been a neolithic structure for ancient rituals.
Now it served as a convenient location for Astley kids to smoke and pash, away from the prying eyes of housemasters.
I had put myself on a “Diet Coke cleanse” that week and my heart was racing from the combination of caffeine and roaring hunger.
When I felt myself lift off the ground, I wasn’t sure if I’d finally pushed it too far and this was what fainting felt like.
“Creeping back to your suite after a wild night on the town?” Kris crooned in my ear.
Slung over his shoulder, I looked upside down to see Louis wandering up the path in his camo fatigues with two rifle bags under his arm.
“Put her down, mate,” my brother said.
Louis was already six feet tall and well muscled for a fifteen-year-old.
His skin was clear and his braces had recently been unhooked from his teeth.
As he ascended towards manhood, I wondered if the conditions on his side of the womb were fairer than mine.
Was the amniotic fluid warmer? Did his cord deliver him an extra flush of oestrogen to create those big eyes that made him look like a Disney forest creature?
“I’ve got ballet,” I said. “What are you two doing?”
“We’ve got cadets,” Kris said as he placed me back on the ground. “We’re learning to be men.”
Cadets was introduced to a handful of schools in the nineteenth century to give boys basic military training in case France ever invaded. In the intervening decades, it was decoupled from the British military and touted to parents as a program that taught teenagers discipline and wilderness skills.
“You joining us for a drink on The Mound before the dance?” Kris asked. “It’s Removes only—no Shells allowed.”
“Yep, we’ll be there,” I said.
Louis nudged me with his rifle bag. “Don’t forget they’ll be here tomorrow. Both of them.”
Since the divorce, Mum and Papa had studiously avoided each other, letting their aides manage the drudgery of parenting (permission slips, broken eyeglasses, poor exam results) on their behalf.
But Louis was leading the Removes class cadets in tomorrow’s parade.
In increasingly passive-aggressive messages sent via their courtiers, neither Mum nor Papa would back down.
In the end, there was no other option but for both to attend.
For regular divorced couples, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Astley’s immense quadrangle provided plenty of space to avoid contact while still being able to glower at one another over a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers.
But a royal rota photographer was also being sent to capture Louis’s display of masculinity and natural leadership in his military dress uniform.
The Prince and Princess of Scotland simply had to stand together, or the tabloids would have their front-page story sorted for the next week.
A compromise was struck: I would stand between them as a visual and emotional buffer.
“How could I forget?” I said, smirking.
Louis gave me his perfect smile. “We’ll see you at breakfast.”
I, of course, would not be at breakfast. I had a knack for disappearing at mealtimes, insisting to my boarding master that I simply had to spend all of lunch searching for a missing library book in my suite.
Dinner, however, was inescapable, so I crowded out my plate with vegetables and hoped no one noticed.
Half the residents in my boarding house were edging towards the same precipice as me.
The hardcore girls ate nothing but carrot sticks and then had to hide their telltale tawny hands in their pockets.
But I knew Louis saw everything, and I could sense he had been weighing up the consequences of reporting me to Mum or a school counsellor.
So far, he hadn’t said a word to anyone and was trying to coax me back from the brink by pressing a muffin or a latte into my hands.
The impending dance was causing me alarm because almost every other girl would be wearing a Hervé Léger bandage dress and I would not.
Greater than my fear of being photographed in a tight dress on the front page of the Daily Post was looking bad in a tight dress on the front page of the Daily Post. I scrolled through the expensive sausage casings online and knew that if I attempted to wear one, I would only resemble one of those pythons that eats a whole deer and lolls on the side of the road, immobile and trapped in digestive hell.
So I used the credit card given to me for emergencies to order a one-shouldered Jason Wu flowy mini dress in an ice-blue chiffon instead.
I would look like the rich virgin I was, but I supposed there was power in that.
As we got ready that evening, Amira regarded the dress. “You look so gorgeous,” she insisted.
We kept our suite door open, the custom before all dances and balls. Rihanna songs wafted down the halls on a cloud of Miss Dior. Amira was wearing a red bandage dress with a keyhole front that put curves on her where none existed. I was intensely jealous.
“No, you look amazing,” I said.
We zipped up our coats and hid our black cherry VKs in our pockets. Then we set off for The Mound, teetering on the matching black Christian Louboutin peeptoe platforms that Vikki had bought for us.
“I’m going to kiss Rafe tonight,” Amira declared.
Rafe Fernsby was Amira’s current obsession, a boy whose father was caught up in Ireland’s financial crash and currently dodging creditors in Turks and Caicos.
The fact that Rafe continued to show up each term suggested the family’s accounts had not yet been frozen—or that a wealthy grandparent had stepped in to keep him enrolled.
“Isn’t Rafe’s father going to jail?” I asked.
“His father is a baron,” she said. “They’ll never do it.”
I rolled my eyes, but said nothing. When I first met Amira, I avoided her.
I had no time for those who were obsessed with rank, a stance that was easy for me to hold given that when it came to rankings, I was mere inches from the top.
Amira’s mother had been telling her since she was a toddler that she must see marriage as a ladder into the aristocracy.
Consequently, she was like a walking copy of Burke’s Peerage.
The book, which lists in excruciating detail every duke, marquess and earl in Britain, is better known as the “snob’s Bible,” and Amira was its greatest devotee.
We might never have been friends, but a few months into our Shell year, she spotted a photographer hiding in the elderflower shrubs that grew along Astley’s hockey fields.
She stopped our game, lined up a row of balls and then smacked each one in his direction.
When he finally ran, she chased after him with her hockey stick in hand, unleashing a barrage of insults and threats.