Chapter Seven
Now
The papers had been laid out as they were every morning, fanned across the breakfast table beside his place setting in the order of his preference. The Times on the left. The Telegraph next to it. Then The Guardian, the FT, and last of all, folded so that only the masthead showed, The Sun.
Today James reached for it first.
The headline ran across the front page in seventy-two point type, and beneath it, a transcript boxed in red.
He read his own words back to himself in print.
Your perfect arse, your mouth, your cock.
It looked worse on the page than it had sounded on Benton’s mobile last night.
The tabloid had thoughtfully bolded the most quotable lines and reproduced his sob in phonetic shorthand that turned the worst night of his adult life into a comic strip.
He turned the page. There, in a smaller box, was the Palace statement. Three paragraphs in his own voice, signed off in the small hours, confirming that every word of the recording was real.
He set the paper down and reached for his tea.
Between his hand finding the saucer and the cup reaching his mouth, his life cleaved in two. Before, and after. The last time he had felt the cut this cleanly had been a few years ago, in the small drawing room at Highgrove, when Cecil had said Your Majesty to him for the first time.
His hands were shaking. He noticed it because the cup was rattling against the saucer.
“More tea, Sir?”
He looked up. Walters was at his elbow with the pot, exactly as Walters had been at his elbow at this hour for the past four years.
“Please, Walters.”
Walters filled James’s cup, then withdrew a respectful pace and resumed his post by the sideboard. James lifted the cup and drank, and the tea tasted the same as it always did.
He finished his breakfast and thanked the staff.
The walk to the small staircase that led up to his dressing room was as it had been every day of his reign: bowed to at each station, greeted, met with the same steady eyes as yesterday.
Walters had not flinched. The institution had absorbed the news and adjusted nothing.
Henford was waiting in the dressing room with the day’s suit laid out, a charcoal three-piece with a pale blue shirt and the regimental tie of the Welsh Guards.
James shrugged out of his dressing gown and reached for the shirt.
He got the cuffs through and the collar settled.
Then his fingers found the first button and would not close around it.
He tried again. The button slipped out of his grip as though it were greased.
“Let me, Sir.”
Henford was already there, his hands at James’s chest, taking the placket from him without ceremony. He worked up the row of buttons, and he did not look at James’s face once.
When Henford reached the collar, he settled it, smoothed it flat, and took up the tie.
“Thank you,” James said, and his voice held steady.
“Sir.”
Henford knotted the tie. James lifted his chin and let himself be dressed.
? ? ?
Benton was already in the Bentley when James slid in beside him. His tablet sat on his knee untouched. One thumb worried at the corner of its case, and he was chewing the inside of his lower lip.
James fastened his seatbelt and watched him from the corner of his eye.
Benton, on a normal day, sat in the rear seat like a man waiting to be photographed for an institutional portrait: posture squared, tablet up, briefing already opened to the relevant page.
He looked ready to shed his own skin in the next ten minutes.
The car pulled out through the gates, and James felt his own composure begin to slip in sympathy.
He’d built his entire outlook on the upcoming day around the assumption that he could draw on Benton’s steadiness.
If Benton was coming apart, then the day was going to be considerably harder than he’d allowed himself to imagine.
“Benton.”
Benton released his lip. “Sir.”
“Out with it.”
“It’s the suit, Sir.”
James looked down at his own lap. The charcoal three-piece looked exactly as it had in the dressing-room mirror twenty minutes ago. “What about it?”
“It’s entirely inappropriate for the engagement. You’ll be in raised beds within the hour. There will be soil. There will, almost certainly, be a wheelbarrow. Henford was supplied with the day’s schedule and ought to have left the jacket off entirely. Please remove it before we arrive.”
“The Lord Mayor’s lunch is straight after, Benton. That’s why he put me in the suit.”
“Yes, Sir. But he could have sent the jacket on in a garment bag, rather than dressing you for a luncheon when you’ve a community garden appearance to get through first.”
Benton, his Private Secretary, his fixer, the man who had spent half the night on the phone to Carter-Ruck about a recording in which his King had waxed lyrical about another man’s arse in considerable detail, was on the verge of meltdown about a single-breasted jacket.
Laughter came burbling up out of his chest like champagne out of a shaken bottle, and he had to press his hand against his mouth to muffle it.
“Benton,” he said, when he could speak. “Let me see if I have the shape of this. The country has woken to a transcript of me sobbing into a stranger’s voicemail about my secret lover’s cock.
And your foremost concern, on the drive to Wandsworth, is whether I’ll arrive at the Mansion House with topsoil on my lapel. ”
“Yes, Sir.”
“You’re more troubled by the prospect of me looking rumpled at lunch than by the fact I’ve been outed to the entire world?”
“With respect, Sir.” Benton met his eye, and permitted himself a small, precise smile. “You’re the first openly gay or bisexual reigning monarch in modern history. The standards now are rather higher. We’ve got to make absolutely certain you look fabulous.”
James doubled forward over his own seatbelt. He got the jacket off while he was still laughing, and Benton received it with both hands, folded it lining-out over his forearm, and smoothed the lapel with the heel of his hand.
James leaned his head against the leather. “Thank you, Benton.”
“Sir.”
The Bentley turned off the high street and into the side road that ran along the railway embankment, and James clocked the press pack immediately.
There were too many of them. A community appearance in Wandsworth normally drew a single pool photographer, perhaps a stringer for the local paper, and a reporter from one of the broadsheets if the news desk was quiet.
Today the kerb was three-deep in long lenses, and a satellite van with a Sky News logo on its flank was double-parked across the entrance to the allotments.
“How many are there?” James asked.
“Forty-two accredited,” Benton said. “On my last count. We’re expecting a few more.”
The car pulled up to the kerb and the noise hit before the door was open.
Your Majesty! Was it Bonny Barnaby’s arse you were tearing up about?
Over here, mate, give us a pretty smile, then!
Did you manage to get it up for her, Sir? Did you?
James got out of the car and made for the gate.
The protection officers were on him at once. Normally they hung back at the edge of his vision, a loose perimeter that let the public feel they had access to him. Today they closed in tight at his shoulders, one ahead, one behind, the lead officer’s hand at his back, guiding him through the gap.
A woman in gardening gloves was waiting just inside the gate, beaming as though she had heard nothing untoward in the last few minutes.
“Your Majesty, welcome to Riverside Plots, we’re so pleased to have you with us today.”
“Mrs Begum, thank you for having me. The first buds on the roses by the gate are extraordinary.”
“Oh, those are Margaret’s. She’ll be over the moon you noticed. She’s also got the first of her polytunnel courgettes coming in that I’m sure she’d absolutely love for you to see, if you’d come this way.”
She set off at a brisk pace down the central path, and James fell in beside her with his hands clasped behind his back.
The volunteers had been arranged along the route.
Each plot-holder stood beside their bed with something for him to inspect: a tray of seedlings, a pot of mint.
Each one greeted him with determined cheerfulness.
It was, James thought, the kindest mass act of denial he had ever witnessed.
A man in his sixties presented him with a basket of courgettes that had been arranged in order of size, the smallest at the front, the largest at the back.
“They’re a Romanesco variety, Sir. Ridged, you see. Holds the sauce better than your standard courgette.”
James picked up the largest one and turned it in his hand. It was a beautiful specimen, firm and dark green, the ridges as regular as fluting on a column.
“Truly a fine courgette,” he said. “I should think it would hold a great deal of sauce.”
The basket’s owner went pink with pleasure. Behind him, beyond the chain-link, a tabloid photographer was bellowing something obscene about cocks, and James held the courgette up to the light and asked, with genuine interest, about the soil.
The rest of the day’s public engagements ran on the same script.
A photographer from one of the Sundays got past the cordon and was wrestled back behind the chain-link by Benton, who returned to James’s side without a hair out of place and resumed murmuring plot-holders’ names into his ear.
At the Mansion House, the Lord Mayor delivered a welcome speech that pointedly did not mention the day’s press coverage.
A junior alderman, three glasses of wine in, asked James whether he’d ever considered “the joys of Mykonos”.
James pretended he hadn’t heard. Benton’s lip twitched into the napkin he’d raised to his mouth.
He attended a charity reception at four, an audience with the High Commissioner of Singapore at five, then a Commonwealth summit briefing at six. By the time the Bentley swung in through the Kensington Palace gates at seven thirty, every muscle between James’s shoulder blades had set like cement.
Cecil was waiting at the door to his sitting room with a tumbler of whisky already poured.
“Your Majesty.” He pressed the glass into James’s hand. “You did very well today.”
James took a swallow and let the burn settle. “Did I?”
“You did. You acted exactly as you ought to have acted,” Cecil confirmed. “Marina is in the drawing room with an overview of the day’s coverage. She thought you might prefer to hear it tonight.”
“Thank you, Cecil.”
Marina was standing by the fireplace with her tablet, and she bobbed into a curtsy when he came in. “Your Majesty.”
“Marina. Tell me how bad it is.”
“It isn’t, Sir.” She turned the tablet to face him.
“The coverage has been overwhelmingly positive. The broadsheets have run editorials about the position the country has placed you in. The Guardian’s leader is titled ‘A King in Hiding, and the Cost of It’, and the Times has gone for something more restrained in the same key.
The Telegraph, against every expectation, is the warmest of the lot.
Sky’s lunchtime panel ran twenty minutes on what they called the quiet cruelty of a system that still required its monarch to lie about who he loved. ”
James sat down on the sofa arm. “Go on.”
“There are detractors. I won’t pretend otherwise.
The usual broadcasters have made the predictable jokes about future test-tube heirs, and there’s a piece in the Mail tomorrow asking whether the line of succession can survive what they’re calling a fundamental departure from tradition and British family values.
We’ve a response prepared if you’d like to see it. ”
“Not tonight.”
“Of course, Sir. The polling we commissioned this afternoon puts public sympathy at seventy-three per cent, with a further fourteen reserving judgement. Among the under-forties, it’s eighty-six. Better than we projected by some margin.”
James drank again. The whisky was doing its work, and his shoulders began to ease at last.
“There is, however, one item I should bring to your attention.”
“Go on.”
“The courgette, Sir.”
James lowered his glass. “I beg your pardon?”
Marina’s expression didn’t change, but the tips of her ears had gone the colour of smoked salmon.
“A photograph taken at the allotments has become the most-shared image in the country. It was uploaded by one of the volunteers, a Mr Padmore, who I’m told meant no harm by it.
And it has, in the intervening hours, gone what the digital team are calling ‘viral’. ”
“And the photograph shows?”
“You, Sir. Holding the Romanesco. The angle is from below, and the lighting has rather…” Marina looked away. “It has rather flattered the courgette.”
James looked at the screen of Marina’s tablet.
Mr Padmore had crouched low, and the angle put the courgette square in front of his fly.
His fingers were closed around the stem in a loose, proprietary grip, the ridged length of the vegetable jutting upward from his crotch into the light.
Above it, his own face wore an expression of grave horticultural interest.
“Ah,” James said.
“Yes, Sir.”
“And this is currently the most-shared image in the country?”
“By a considerable margin, Sir. It’s being circulated alongside the photograph of the Marquess of Ashworth at the kebab shop with Mr Murphy.”
The kebab photograph had been Barnaby’s particular cross to bear ever since the shot of him struggling to eat a doner, with Lex grinning beside him, had been uploaded to the internet by passers-by.
The meme had its own Wikipedia entry, and Vidal had had the worst of the variants printed onto cupcakes for Barnaby’s stag do.
“They’re being posted together?” James said.
“As a pair, Sir.” Marina paused. “The Marquess of Ashworth is of particular interest at the moment. There’s a betting pool. About who the subject of the phone call is, and he’s the favourite by some margin.”
Marina set the tablet down on the side table. “Sir. Forgive me. If there’s any truth to it, I’d rather know now so that we can work with Lord Ashworth on managing this.”
He weighed the prospect of lying outright. But Marina was paid to manage the reality of his existence, and she couldn’t do that if he hid things from her.
“There was a thing,” he said. “Very briefly, when we were in our teens and at Eton. But there’s been nothing since.”
She nodded once, picked up the tablet and tucked it under her arm. “Morning briefings will be in your inbox by six. I’ll leave you to your evening, Sir.”
The door closed behind her.
James stayed where he was, letting his body go slack at last. He was going to have to ring Barnaby at some point and apologise for bringing him into this mess, because Lex was going to take a dim view of his husband’s name being tallied against odds on a tabloid website.