World of Wonders Read online

  “ ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  “He looked at me very queerly. ‘The Prince of Wales,’ he said; ‘he was my friend, you know. Or rather, you don’t know. But many years ago, when he toured this country, I was his aide, and he had a profound effect on me. I learned a great deal from him. He was special, you know; he was truly a remarkable man. He showed it at the time of the Abdication. That took guts.’

  “ ‘Called for guts from several of his relatives, too,’ I said. ‘Do you think he lived happily ever after?’

  “ ‘I hope so,’ said he. ‘But he was younger.’

  “ ‘I’ve said you were old,’ said I, ‘but I didn’t mean life had nothing for you. You are in superb condition. You can expect another fifteen years, at least, and think of all the things you can do.’

  “ ‘And think of all the things I can’t do,’ he said, and in a tone that told me what I had suspected, because with all the fine surface, and bonhomie, and his careful wooing of me I had sensed something like despair in him.

  “ ‘I suppose you mean sex,’ I said.

  “ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Not that I’m through, you know; by no means. But it isn’t the same. Now it’s more reassurance than pleasure. And young women—they have to be younger and younger—they’re flattered because of what I am and who I am, but there’s always a look you surprise when they don’t think you’re watching: He’s-amazing-forhis-age-I-wonder-what-I’d-do-if-he-had-a-heart-attack-would-Ihave-to-drag-him-out-into-the-hall-and-leave-him-by-the-elevatorand-how-would-I-get-his-clothes-on? However well I perform—and I’m still good, you know—there’s an element of humiliation about it.’

  “Humiliation was much on his mind. The humiliation of age, which you and I mustn’t underestimate, Dunny, just because we’ve grown old and made our age serve us; it’s a different matter if you’ve devoted your best efforts to setting up an image of a wondrous Boy; there comes a time when the pretty girls think of you not as a Boy but as an Old Boy. The humiliation of discovering you’ve been a mug, and that the gorgeous office you’ve been given under the Crown is in fact a tyranny of duty, like the Crown itself. And the humiliation of discovering that a man you’ve thought of as a friend—rather a humble, eccentric friend from your point of view, but nevertheless a friend—has been harbouring evidence of a mean action you did when you were ten, and still sees you, at least in part, as a mean kid.

  “That last was a really tough one—disproportionately so—but Boy was the kind of man who truly believes you can wipe out the past simply by forgetting it yourself. I’m sure he’d met humiliations in his life. Who hasn’t? But he’d been able to rise above them. These were humiliations nothing could lift from his heart.

  “ ‘What are you going to do with the stone?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘You saw me take it?’ he said. ‘I’ll get rid of it. Throw it away.’

  “ ‘I wouldn’t throw it a second time,’ I said.

  “ ‘What else?’ said he.

  “ ‘If it really bothers you, you must come to terms with it,’ I said. ‘In your place I’d do something symbolic: hold it in your hand, re-live the moment when you threw it at Ramsay and hit my mother, and this time don’t throw it. Give yourself a good sharp knock on the head with it.’

  “ ‘That’s a damned silly game to play,’ he said. And would you believe it, he was pouting—the glorious Boy was pouting.

  “ ‘Not at all. Consider it as a ritual. An admission of wrongdoing and penitence.’

  “ ‘Oh, balls to that,’ he said.

  “I had become uncomfortable company: I wouldn’t be eaten, and I made peculiar and humiliating suggestions. Also, I could tell that something was on his mind, and he wanted to be alone with it. He started the car and very shortly we were at my hotel—the Royal York, you know, which is quite near the docks. He shook hands with the warmth that I suppose had marked him all his life. ‘Glad to have met you: thanks for the advice,’ said he.

  “ ‘It’s only what I would do myself, in the circumstances,’ I said. ‘I’d do my best to swallow that stone.’ Now I swear to you that I only meant what I said symbolically—meaning to come to terms with what the stone signified. And he seemed not to notice.

  “ ‘I meant your advice about the Abdication,’ he said. ‘It was stupid of me not to have thought of that myself.’

  “I suddenly realized what he meant. He was going to abdicate, like his hero before him. But unlike his Prince of Wales he didn’t mean to live to face the world afterward. There it is, Dunny: Liesl and I are convinced that the man who truly granted his inmost wish, though only by example, was the man who decided not to live as Edward VIII.

  “What should I have done? Insisted that he come to my room, and plied him with hot coffee and sweet reasonableness? Not quite my line, eh? Hardly what one expects of a brother wolf, quonk?”

  “You let him leave you in that frame of mind?”

  “Liesl likes to talk about what she calls my Magian World View. She makes it sound splendid and like the Arabian Nights and dolls it up with fine phrases from Spengler—”

  “Phantasmagoria and dream-grotto,” said Liesl, taking a swig of her cognac; “only that’s not Spengler—that’s Carlyle.”

  “Phantasmagoria and dream-grotto if you like,” said Magnus, “but—and it is a vital but—combined with a clear-eyed, undeluded observation of what lies right under your nose. Therefore—no self-deceiving folly and no meddlesome compassion, but a humble awareness of the Great Justice and the Great Mercy whenever they choose to make themselves known. I don’t talk about a Magian World View; I’ve no touch with that sort of thing. In so far as it concerns me, I live it. It’s just the way things strike me, after the life I’ve lived, which looks pretty much like a World of Wonders when I spread it out before me, as I’ve been doing. Everything has its astonishing, wondrous aspect, if you bring a mind to it that’s really your own—a mind that hasn’t been smeared and blurred with half-understood muck from schools, or the daily papers, or any other ragbag of reach-me-down notions. I try not to judge people, though when I meet an enemy and he’s within arm’s length, I’m not above giving him a smart clout, just to larn him. As I did with Roly. But I don’t monkey with what I think of as the Great Justice—”

  “Poetic justice,” said Liesl.

  “What you please. Though it doesn’t look poetic in action; it’s rough and tough and deeply satisfying. And I don’t administer it. Something else—something I don’t understand, but feel and serve and fear—does that. It’s sometimes horrible to watch, as it was when my poor, dear old master, Sir John, was brought down by his own vanity, and Milady went with him, though I think she knew what the truth was. But part of the glory and terror of our life is that somehow, at some time, we get all that’s coming to us. Everybody gets their lumps and their bouquets and it goes on for quite a while after death.

  “So—here was a situation when it was clear to me that the Great Justice had called the name of Boy Staunton. Was it for me to hold him back?

  “And to be frank why would I? You remember what was said in your room that night, Dunny. You’re the historian: surely you remember everything important? What did I say to Boy when he offered me a lift in his car?”

  I couldn’t remember. That night I had been too overwrought myself by the memories of Mary Dempster to take note of social conversation.

  “You don’t remember? I do: I said—‘What Ramsay tells me puts you in my debt for eighty days in Paradise, if for nothing in this life. We shall call it quits if you will drive me to my hotel.”

  “Eighty days in Paradise?”

  “I was born eighty days before my time. Poor little Paul. Popular opinion is very rough on foetuses these days. Horrid little nuisances. Rip ’em out and throw them in the trash pail. But who knows what they feel about it? The depth psychologists Liesl is so fond of think they have a very jolly time in the womb. Warm, protected, bouncing gently in their beautiful grotto light. Perhaps it is the best exist
ence we ever know, unless there is something equally splendid for us after death—and why not? That earliest life is what every humanitarian movement and Welfare State seeks to restore, without a hope of success. And Boy Staunton, by a single mean-spirited action, robbed me of eighty days of that princely splendour. Was I the man to fret about the end of his life when he had been so cavalier about the beginning of mine?”

  “Oh, Magnus, that’s terribly unjust.”

  “As this world’s justice goes, perhaps. But what about the Greater Justice?”

  “I see. Yes, I really do see. So you let him dree his weird?”

  “You’re getting really old, Dunny. You’re beginning to dredge up expressions from your Scotch childhood. But it says it all. Yes, I let him dree his weird.”

  “I can very well understand,” I said, “that you wouldn’t have got far explaining that to the police.”

  Liesl laughed, and threw her empty brandy balloon against the farthest wall. It made a fine costly crash.

  (2)

  “Ramsay.”

  “Liesl! How kind of you to come to see me.”

  “Magnus has been asleep for hours. But I have been worrying about you. I hope you didn’t take it too badly—his suggestion that you played rather a crucial part in Staunton’s death.”

  “No, no; I faced that, and swallowed it even before I joined you in Switzerland. While I was recovering from my heart attack, indeed. In an old Calvinist like me the voice of conscience has always spoken long before any mortal accuser.”

  “I’m glad. Glad that you’re not grieving and worrying, that’s to say.”

  “Boy died as he lived: self-determined and daring, but not really imaginative. Always with a well-disguised streak of petulance that sometimes looked like malice. The stone in the snowball: the stone in the corpse’s mouth—always a nasty surprise for somebody.”

  “You think he gobbled the stone to spite you?”

  “Unquestionably. Magnus thinks I kept the stone for spite, and I suppose there was something of that in it. But I also kept it to be a continual reminder of the consequences that can follow a single action. It might have come out that it was my paperweight, but even if it didn’t, he knew I would know what it was, and Boy reckoned on having the last word in our lifelong argument that way.”

  “What a detestable man!”

  “Not really. But it’s always a good idea to keep your eye on the genial, smiling ones, and especially on those who seem to be eternally young.”

  “Jealousy, Ramsay, you battered antique.”

  “A little jealousy, perhaps. But the principle holds.”

  “Is that what you are making notes about, on all that excellent Savoy notepaper?”

  “Notes for a work I have in mind. But it’s about Magnus; he told me, you know, that the Devil once intervened decisively in his life.”

  “He likes to talk that way, and I am sure it is true. But life is a succession of decisive interventions. Magnus himself intervened in my life, and illuminated it, at a time when I needed an understanding friend even more than I needed a lover. It wasn’t the Devil that sent him.”

  “Why should it be? God wants to intervene in the world, and how is he to do it except through man? I think the Devil is in the same predicament. It would be queer, wouldn’t it, if the Devil had only made use of Magnus that one time? And God, too: yes, certainly God as well. It’s the moment of decision—of will—when those Two nab us, and as they both speak so compellingly it’s tricky work to know who’s talking. Where there’s a will, there are always two ways.”

  “That’s what you’re making notes about? And you hope to untangle it? What vanity!”

  “I’m not expecting to untangle anything. But I’m making a record—a document. I’ve often talked to you about it. When we’re all gone—you dear Liesl, though you’re much the youngest, and Magnus—there may be a few who will still prove a point with ‘Ramsay says …’ ”

  “Egoist!”