And the woman (the Whore of Babylon) was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.
– Revelations 17
As a young man, the more I conquered those European peaks, the more I wanted to dominate the Himalayas. I shall miss this enveloped paradise. I read out loud a chiselled transcription on the whitest block of stone, with the most marvellous calligraphy that soothes the mind and convinces one that it is the whole truth. The words are credited to Father Perot, that transcendent pioneering priest, who became the High Lama here.
Our general belief is in moderation. We preach the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kind, even including excess of virtue itself. We find in the valley it leads to great happiness. We rule with moderate strictness and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience. And so our people are moderately honest, moderately chaste, and somewhat more than moderately happy.
There can be no crime where there is a sufficiency of everything. A little courtesy all around can solve almost all problems.122
I now walk between the large stone white temples, symmetrical, both simple and ornate, and then along the lordly lawns and simple pathways.
Why is the world beyond here called civilisation? It seems ridiculously obvious to point out that this is as civilised as the human race has attained.
No more time to go.
10 December 1948
As the SS Manchuria sailed south between Mecca and Medina on our eastern flank, and as we crossed from Egypt into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan on our western banks, I sat in the early morning on the portside deck with my children. Edward embodied much of his mother and the influential Zealand. He was calm, serene and keen to listen. He comported himself like a young librarian, but was also lithe, handsome and athletic enough to be a tennis professional or a film noir extra. Violet, who might have doubled as the teenage Elizabeth Taylor, twitched with the impatience of her paternal line. Of course, it was not long before she sprang up to run off to flirt with the touring cricket team of schoolboys on board, en route to the finest colleges of Delhi, Madras and Bombay.
*
I was protective in the sense that I wanted her near and I wished also to learn from the horrors of having lost two daughters already, but I allowed her full range to blossom and provoke mischief. Anything else would have been rank hypocrisy on my part.
Edward and Violet were now spending a lot of time together. Violet knew that her conception had been unorthodox, just as Edward recognised his birth and upbringing to be somewhat unusual. They were the happiest pair of runts around, lauding and celebrating in this status and bonding firmly through it.
I was adequately self-centred still to have started to tell Edward much of my life story to this point, but as Violet flounced off to spread gloriously her bouquet, to quarter-gyrate her hips at and to share her comely eye-flutterings with the drooling schoolboys, Edward asked to know more of his half-sister.
I chuckled.
‘Violet has always been turquoise and fire, and is now a magnificent parvenue of bubbling oestrogen and poisonous lip gloss. She used to collect knives, you know. As a five-year-old. This is one of her first precious memories. Her second was her obsession with her teeth and her breath. She now rinses and gargles with hydrogen peroxide and brushes her teeth at least a dozen times a day. She will then pick between them with needles until her morning, afternoon and evening milk is laced with swirling ribbons of blood. Blanche then rouge. Purity and virginity followed by sex and death. The chance of having her breath questioned in one of her plentiful rows is simply not worth the risk, for proximity in these duels is one of her effective strategies. Her eyes seem to focus several yards behind the head of her opponent. My darling daughter, the merciless, gaudy crackpot, is, by this time, already ahead.’
Edward nodded. I sensed he had witnessed this already.
I went on, ‘Those who relish such minor scraps are rarely active on a larger stage, but for her, all conflict is welcome. She grazes on insignificant brouhaha, and still maintains a ravishing hunger for the evening banquet of a major brawl. I have always been the kind not to really bother with insignificant, low grade conflict, but I was always an exception. She has learned the skill of high-end battle and lofty quarrel from me, but her appetite has surely gone further.’
I turned to look my son in the eyes.
‘I once told her, when she was perhaps eleven, about the old bull who told the young bull not to rush down into the valley to ignite passion with a particularly astonishing cow. The old guy said, “We will stroll down, take our time and service them all.” Well, Vi’s spiky and youthful viciousness cannot be quelled by such a patient approach, though she does already appreciate, like her dad, the proclivity towards pansexuality.’
Edward’s was a comfortable laugh.
‘Son, I am quite proud that I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me – and now for her and for us all – to suck.’
‘Violet is able to read the heart of a man upon first encounter. For years, they say, I had cast spells of an emetically deviant nature from my ancient Scottish castle in the direction of some pious nemesis in Northern France or Tunisia or Mexico, hitting my jack-knifeable target with regularity and preternatural force.
‘They claimed that only I would hear the response of a pained “Oooooof” roll around the valley like my favoured Scotch in an archaic tumbler. Apparently, I chuckled at the precise time I knew my enchantments would be landing for this might have been six or twelve hours after the dark magic had been sparked. I had, they misguidedly claimed, defined twentieth-century Satanism in the uplands of our heathen antecedents. “Fucking sick bastard,” is how Violet always far more accurately described me with an excitable lustre and worrying vigour, and far closer to the truth. She is a great judge of character, lad. Always trust her.’
‘I shall,’ said Edward.
‘Despite having spent several years away from each other, we are remarkably close. We are so similar in our desire for groins of any kind. They say that such delectations are able to skip heartbeats, but less so generations. Claims that the youths at Boleskine were strapped down and borrowed for a few hours by Vi or by me are just wrong. They were always consenting, and this is verified by the fact that they always came back for more. Bless them. Some came just for supper. I would fall on them between courses and begin humping them right on the floor.’
We looked at each other as the ship’s chaplain passed us. We paused, maintained our gaze and then broke into what must have appeared to be the most false theatrical, synchronised and melodramatic laughter. It was the precise pitch and timing that Dandylyon, Prudence and I had executed a thousand times. And there was nothing fraudulent about it.
‘Son, there is one thing you really need to know about her. Between her and me, we kept the King in England during the Blitz. I think with very sound reason that this might have saved the war and, therefore, the world for us in the darkest days.’
‘How?’ he said. ‘How on earth could you both have done it? You, perhaps. But Violet too?’
‘Sit back, lad. I will tell you.’
He sat back. And I explained.
‘Violet met her nemesis, Princess Margaret, at a reasonably early age. They had been born on the same day, and both in Scottish castles. Both of their families were flirting with Nazis. The girls attended the same Brownie camp, and it was here when the bother began, at least the physical manifestation of it.
‘All week, the Princess had been detracting attention from the precocious Violet, which was only understandable in the circumstances. Margaret was second in line to the British throne, after all. And so Violet approached her from behind on the stage of the camp hall and lifted her petticoat for all to see the regal unmentionables and administered a sharp boot to the revealed nethers. Margaret’s vengeful attack, a sharp push from behind during rehearsals of the annual show, had not been well measured, for the high drop from the stage was a considerable one. It was, however, perfectly timed for those of a crimson humour, for the end of verse one of the Brownie anthem was really a time for a concentrated team ethic, love and hope.’
I sat forward, and theatrically spoke the words.
‘On the African plain,
I was camping with a lion called Adam
And he told me about a gent he’d eaten and his poisoned madam’
I sat back. ‘Then there was an impromptu girl-shout of “Up yours!” followed by a soft kick, a half-second pause and sickening bone-on-hardwood thud.’
I finished the lyrics of the song for Edward.
‘Team leaders such as I, full of chat and merriment
What we could gather – what we might do
These heroes of tomorrow, just like you.’
‘Violet, who refused to cry of course, was lucky to escape with three broken ribs and a cracked kneecap. Her attempts to exact immediate revenge were prevented by her injuries and a trio of corpulent and commensurately salty and duly perspiring dinner ladies of stunning dimensions and turgid odour. Hostilities had so begun on August the twenty-first, 1937. It was their seventh birthdays.
‘“She stinks,” Vi had noted before pasting a pound note to the camp noticeboard with the words Verfickter Deutscher Furz123 over the King’s profile.’
‘For each birthday after the physical assaults of 1937, their greatest annual gift was the inflicting of the severest pain, physical or emotional, upon the other. Strategically leaked and supposed secrets of head lice, allegations of lesbic (this was Vi’s word) inclinations, and rumours of disturbed and disturbing methods of masturbation were their touchés.
‘Old Miss Trubshaw, their pugilist martinet of a Brownie Brown Owl, noted that their intertwined paths and mirrored lofty and lordly family backgrounds might have been one reason for the hostility. Opposites attract, and all that.
‘Supposedly, Margaret and Violet’s clans were both of Teutonic root, and given the fulcrum of the twentieth century that the Germans inhabited, mumbles, whispers and innuendo followed. It would soon be suspected by the well informed that both girls had Nazi sympathisers within their familial grasp; King Edward’s dubious leanings were founded in the Saxe-Coburg bloodlust and ravenous military stance. It had already been widely written by the mealy of mouth that I had been accused of spying for Germany.’
Edward nodded, and smiled to himself.
‘Well, on the warring girls’ tenth birthdays, Margaret had had a Balmoral servant purchase a classified advertisement in The Times.
Violet Fagg ist der faulige Produkt von einer Orgie des Satans. Ihr Atem ist der Beweis dafür.124
‘Princess Margaret had then mysteriously contracted a procession of illnesses, one after the other: whooping cough, mumps, influenza, common colds, tonsillitis, chickenpox, pneumonia, foot-and-mouth and measles. She had remained seriously ill for a full year, too unwell to travel to Canada to take refuge from the war, as had been planned in secret. Her father, who was now king, had allowed The Times and the BBC to lead with a story about how they would never abandon Britain. The truth had been actually quite different, for the Duchess of York refused to go without their children, and he would, in turn, not go without her. Margaret’s illness thus had kept the King at home.
‘Their pretence of courage and fortitude had been largely a façade, for I had had the idea125 to bring Margaret down with her ailments, and had kept the Royals in Britain. This plan was instrumental in propping up morale and therefore winning the war. If the Royals had gone in those flimsy days, the country might likely have folded. Keep that Margaret girl in England, and we might even win the war; this was my perversely simplified formula.’
I looked for my son’s reaction, and he seemed only mildly impressed.
‘I tell you, I was an oracle and a genius; a towering and magisterial orcneas to shame Beowulf, the Greek gods and all of their second-rate illegitimii.
‘Vi and I had saved the world, and it was a habit that would become tough to break, for any drug addict worth his salt shall insist with absoluteness upon chasing that elusive dragon. I had become hooked on righteousness. I wanted more.’
He remained impassive again. We stared at each other, before once more synchronising that loud and (possibly) annoying laugh from that same old third-rate play and tired director, whom, by now, I simply adored.
We sat on the decks for days. He spoke for hours on end too. Sometimes Violet even deigned to join us and listen, though I knew the proximity of the schoolboys meant that she was driving them to distraction, and we were nothing more than handy bodyguards right now. As we neared Ceylon, I thought of how marvellous it would be to anchor there, hitch a ride to the ambassador’s and march into the jungles to find the monastery and the resin. How ironic that a vicious civil war prevented us from reaching the second-most pacific spot on Earth. Instead, she passed us on our left one evening, as I spoke to Edward on the subject of British royalty.
‘The Third Reich had fallen by the time the girls had turned fifteen; Japan had surrendered just days before their birthdays. Violet had developed an impressively burgeoning taste for laudanum, opium and cannabis. I had encouraged and then fed this hunger, while I successfully implicated Edward and that horror Wallis Simpson in many Nazi sideshows. Thanks to me, we all know now about the abdicator and his apologist stance towards Berlin and rampant homoerotic fondness for the Führer.
‘Just after the war, at Royal Ascot, I approached Wallis in a false beard and my hooded cloak, which I wore as a metaphor as well as the obvious and perverse joy I took in being a mere cliché. “People are so unimaginative, Vi darling” I used to tell her.
‘The usually officious clerk on the Royal Enclosure’s gate allowed me to pass (of course he did) and the timing of my arrival, upon which I prided myself, was impeccable. Wallis and Edward were in the throes of one of their usual and very public spats, which she invariably dominated. She was just lifting her chin and peering down at the former king with a rank anger, when she said within earshot of all, ‘I am a very large fish in a very small pond. You goddamned English think you are so superior.”
‘There was an embarrassed and awkward hush. Edward, the servile slug, cowered, as did most of English society present, though their reason was a silent politeness; his was either fear or tipsiness. I, the corpulent, heavily bearded stranger with the shifted shape in the sack cloth threw back the deep hessian hood to reveal a head of Scandinavian blond mop, pinkened and skewed eyes, and the obligatory fat neck, for this is harder to hide.
‘As our noses almost touched, I said to her in the well-educated and Slavic accent of a St Petersburg count as she began to quiver, “Oh! I simply must disagree. Your gamy pond has long ago dried up, ma’am and you are sadly a fish which has irreversibly curdled and turned. You might go on with your little dinner parties and dances with people who don’t count and who are doomed anyway to perish in their own stupidity. You are a feculent and noxious strumpet and would be vastly improved by sudden death, which I should be most pleased to arrange with either one amateur spell or a sharp blow to your wattled and brittle neck. Which should it be?”
‘The regent-unelect whispered an almost inaudible hurrah as Mrs Simpson’s head rouged to scarlet and her chiselled and famous fury gave her the mien of a well-carved beetroot, as mauve as my stratagem. There was no answer, and if there had have been, I would have vanquished regardless. Society chuckled over the scene for months with the vocal Lord Mountbatten most chuffed at this intriguing intruder’s appearance and audacity. His Find the Stranger campaign in the London Evening Standard came to naught. Of course it did.
‘Violet would borrow this quip of the putrid fish for Margaret, when, on my behalf, I had Dandylyon and Prudence induce a premature (yet temporary) menopause in the Princess for her seventeenth birthday. For a few months, they replaced her productive ovaries with a penchant for cheap-ish sherry. Such choice and ill-lit behaviour brought Violet such joy, when she was quoted, via an accomplice of an editor, in a weekend rag that Margaret was “rarely anything but diaphragm-deep in booze and syphilitic man phlegm”. That Violet was behind both the dependency on grog and a lack of a need for a diaphragm forced the Princess to weep for the first time because of her nemesis. When the journalist had spluttered at her use of the term man phlegm, Vi had cruelly added. “Yes. She gargles it almost incessantly, in an attempt to be loved by some sentient creature; you know, a sailor … or someone.” When pressed to continue, Vi mumbled, “That Prussian cowbag has never worn the same pair of knickers once.”’
The confidence rattling around inside Violet was a torrid beast, which required harnessing, but once allied might be such an ebullient and vanquishing force …
Edward, it seemed, was quite pleased to watch Violet flourish in this vein, with not a hint of a sibling competition, while he sat back, studied and measured, breathed deeply, smiled at strangers and avoided conflict at almost any cost.
We arrived in the port of Chittagong and then travelled on by small plane.
As my old foes likely imagined, with glee, my rotting and boxed corpse under some Hastings muck, we landed in Yunnan Province at night-time. We were told to rest for several hours there in the cabin, so we dutifully slept, and woke in the aircraft at dawn. Our troop of eleven (Violet, Edward, Zealand, seven Sherpas and I) then took a small truck for fifty miles over increasingly rough lands until we were told that the walking would begin. We stopped by a small clearing, where a sedan chair to be carried by four of the Sherpas was tilted against a white-bark pine, a spectacular plant made all the more alluring for her ability to thrive above the tree-line where most trees cannot. Perhaps the white-bark pine trees and I were kindred spirits. Was this chair for me? Not bloody likely, as I told them to ‘Eff awwf.’
I even offered to carry the Sherpas. I knew their language well from the Scottish Mountaineering Club expeditions here, when, according to the English press, I was supposed to have buggered, murdered and then eaten those two coolies. And so our march to Shangri-La began. It took three days at a fair pace. There were moments when a lesser kind might have questioned the wisdom had one not been armed with a full assurance from the coolies that we were close, this next slope would be as tough as it got, and we would be quite thrilled with the destination.
Shortly after dawn on the third day, the first truly calm one of the three, we passed through a narrow hole in the ice, away from the cliff that dropped perhaps three thousand feet. It was barely five feet high and not easy for a chap with my bay-window girth, but this was the final barrier to our nirvana, for then we walked onto a high lea side that was temperate and green. We were greeted by a distant birdsong, and the whiff of fledged wheat.
And as I meditated out in the meadow before we reached the citadel, I again felt a presence nearby; one that entered my world as had a stinking Grigori in St Petersburg and a soaked Mowgli by Loch Ness. This sensation was far different to the hum of the Holy Man. It was the glowing aura of Orr. He was now slightly crooked, and he smiled at me from that perpetual wellspring of benevolence that may well have been a prerequisite to fire and fuel that quite enormous frame of his. When I had wiped a tear from my eye, he held me and said, ‘Welcome, my friend. Come, I know where your Leah and your La Gitana shall be at this time of day. They are quite inseparable, you’ll be thrilled to see.’
And then time would lose all meaning. I thought of the future. If I had been truly prescient and clairvoyant, I would have seen myself recounting the future tale of Margaret. It is a tale called LOVE.
In early April 1953, a message, passed by hand on the wet cobbles of Albemarle Street, was hand-delivered to Buckingham Palace. It read,
M.
It was Easter Sunday in the plumb line of that momentous and cardinal afternoon.
I saw you dancing at the Savoy.
You imposing and abstract marvel, I have to have you.
I shall molest you.
The note was unsigned, but held an aroma of a man in his prime. In her chambers, Margaret rouged and moved in her seat, as she peered with an adolescent thrill out over Green Park. The nefarious and wilful missives continued, always in the same assured and assuring hand, always addressed to M., always unsigned. Their tone remained polite-ish and complimentary, yet somewhat sexually unleashable and demanding, sparkish, capable and potent. They would come in violent and inflamed spurts. Then nothing for weeks. Then they would begin again. They followed the highly charged distribution of an aroused and kindled serial killer. On Christmas Day, 1953, hundreds of the most fragrant white Persian tuberoses, a gradient of zero at their true zenith of potency, were flung over the Palace garden walls, an envelope taped to the brick wall at the Hyde Park Corner end of Constitution Hill. Inside there was a note,
M.
Think of me always.
I have to go away, for there are wars to be fought, and I am a soldier of twisted and perverse fortune.
A thousand and one nights should, if I control my and our future as I believe I do, see my return.
I intend to appear and make myself known to you, for this to date has been forbidden by them.
I intend to love you and maul you, in a way that princesses desire but never experience, due to vicious custom.
You shall rise high above this, for ours shall be an ancient and bestial custom. You are my transcendante.
You should indeed be worried, for the fall from our love shall not be recoverable.
There are no security measures in such precipitous elevation.
This cannot be avoided. It is written. Here and by me, and my tenacious word is the Truth.
We shall however be the happiest of people, my exalted darling.
Three years were to pass and Margaret heard and received nothing. Her womanliness had been stirred by a non-conductor, for such motion had not prevented rampant simmering and brimming. Her appetite for men became well known to the plebs most Sundays it seemed, over deadly cooked breakfasts and full ashtrays and through steamed, rain-splattered café windows via seemingly endless exposés in the News of the World and the Sunday Mirror.
MAGS IN PARK SEX SCANDAL (August 1954)
ROYAL BOOZE BUNK-UP ORGY (November 1954)
THE PRINCESS AND THE PEE (January 1955)
The Palace had fought back, let’s not kid ourselves. Theirs is a brutal and unforgiving propaganda mangle, which labelled me, yes me, as ‘the wickedest man in world’. If only they had the nous to realise this tag would regularly crease me around my girthy centre until I could laugh no more, for sometimes I was (in which case, thanks for the nod) and sometimes I wasn’t (in which case, they really were just exposing themselves as the viciously inbred mongoloids they really were/are). I love myself for many things, but my ability to stick my chest out, my chin up and my shoulders back, and to tell the god-damned world that it is not fit to sit in judgement on my preternatural exquisiteness shall stick with me to my dying day.
Then in the first week of 1957, the thaw in her iced romance finally arrived. In public, Margaret held back the instincts of an awakened and animated beast. In private, one might only guess at the bubbling agitation. The simple note read:
M.
Meet me at the Savoy in suite 346.126 At 9 p.m. Saturday. I shall be yours.
There was never any doubt in Margaret’s mind that she would be there and at that time. Precisely and as requested, submission was inevitable. She left the Palace an hour early and drove herself to The Strand, already half-cut on sherry. She wore a headscarf and dark glasses, for, like the brazen runaways checking in as Mr and Mrs Smith, and I in my hooded cloth at the races, Margaret too knew the benefit of overt cliché. The car keys to her white Bentley were handed to the stunningly bored bell captain at the hotel who, smelling the booze on her breath, took it for a lengthy spin around the Royal parks, blaring its horn outside Knightsbridge mews houses and Kensington mansions of several easily pleased lasses he had recently explored. By the time he planned to pull back in to The Strand, Margaret ought to be about to meet her deviant tormentor. But for now, she listened to the pianist in the ballroom play Rachmaninov’s tricky third with remarkable aplomb on a white grand, a Grotrian-Steinweg, and she stroked the deep aqua-blue velvet twirls on the cerulean flock wallpaper by the bar. Was that Monroe in the lobby? Margaret lit another cigarette, and nodded her head to the barman to serve her one last sherry.
Who was up there? What was he doing at this very moment? What were his scarlet intentions? Was her life about to change? Would they soon instead be writing of the torridity of the love affair of the century in those tawdry and vulgar Sunday gimcrack rags? Such sweet and chilled revenge.
Her hands were steady, but she felt that her left knee may buckle when she began to walk towards the lobby and then the lift at 8:58 p.m. She clipped over the fairy-lit oak parquet flooring that, according to hotel lore, had been made famous by Dietrich having made love on it five times. Margaret had been well groomed in betraying no nerves in public, but this shadowy admirer of vast compulsion had exposed, to her own surprise, one or two viciously fragile and rankly irresolute links in her supposedly robust regal chains.
Margaret recalled her old music teacher’s words on Rachmaninov’s masterpiece, ‘The second movement is opened by the orchestra and it consists of a number of variations around a single lush, heavily romantic melody following one another without a rigid scheme.’ She now restructured his repeated instruction in her mind, and chuckled to herself, allowing her and her sherry to overrule the wobble in her knee. ‘Around a single lush’, ‘heavily romantic’, ‘without a rigid scheme’.
The lights on the digits above the lift door indicated that it was stuck up on the sixth floor, and remained there longer than any normal or selfless person would require to pass through an open door. It eventually departed the sixth, stopped on the fifth for thirty more seconds of semi-pleasurable anticipation and semi-painful consternation, and then the third for a regulation stop. Were her bowels on edge? Oh Margaret, get a grip, girl.
The Princess concentrated instead on the concerto’s third movement: its overt digression, its willing recapitulation and its astonishingly triumphant crescendo to an unrivalled visceral-rattling toccata climax. Her highly conductive centre stirred now for other reasons, and she felt a chilled bead of sweat squeeze through onto her inflamed temple.
Margaret welcomed the lift on the ground floor and stepped inside. She thought she could smell white Persian tuberoses, and indeed she could. Her watch showed a minute past the hour, as a young bellhop first looked shocked to be seeing a princess, and then asked, ‘Which floor please, ma’am?’ She told him. He pressed three, and as the elevator moved, the knee twinged once more. Her eye muscle twitched, her mouth dried. She bit the side of her mouth to create saliva, a trick once taught to her father when he had had trouble making speeches during the war. She thought she could smell the young boy’s body odour now, and indeed she could. The frisky sapphire-blooded mare was highly and finely tuned that brisk January night in 1957. She was now third in line to the throne, but remained as bawdy and as thrummable as any young fox of her flowered age. Her doctors had even noted an increase in her gourmande libido, as her proximity to the real milieu of power allowed her to inhale its unmistakeable musk.
She did not knock.
She walked in to the room. And she stood. Caught in time. Processing each word of every penned letter she had received over the Palace walls for three years, computing the significance of each bellowed threat to love, while sniffing at the heavy scent of tuberoses, as the tic in her cheek abated and the tight gripped fist loosened, allowing whitened fingers to softly pinken, and her spine to relax, as rapture and joy neared. After several seconds that seemed like an age to her, she spoke, quite involuntarily, relieved to know of her immediate and passionate nights.
‘Oh, it’s you!’
There she sat, beneath a pair of twenty-four-light chandeliers. Behind her, an open fire waned, but still launched and spat out, with a comforting rhythm, potent embers of peril.
(Did the room hold an essence of brioche and green apples? And was a door to a connecting room just being pulled to?)
Her surprise at seeing Violet was drawn and coaxed from her, sucked out like a snake’s toxin. It was not mesmerism as such, but it was a close relative.
Margaret lost all signs of nervousness in her eye and knee, and stood relieved by the side of the large bed.
She smiled, as if she had always known. Violet, too, smiled. There was a whiff of opium she thought, and the sound of a roaring Bentley through the open doors and windows which looked out onto Savoy Place, the Embankment and the Thames. The driver, who might have glanced up and into the palatial rooms of the Savoy, might have thought he saw two womanly shapes move towards each other, stroking the exposed skin on each other’s neck, and embrace as if under a guiding and generous spell. The vast panes reached from the scarlet shag to the electric white ceiling via velvet curtains of wicked crimson, which moved in the evening chill, but the room remained warm. Of course it did.
My spies had noticed two old Royal Bedfordshires, as they slumped after dinner into two solid armchairs of teal in the deep blueness of the bar of the Savoy. One had commented on the tenderness of the beef, as the other shocked himself with the ferocity of his belch and looked embarrassed, but just for a second. They then discussed a Christmas Day just over forty-two years before, when the hard, hard men of the German Wehrmacht and the British Expeditionary Force had stepped out of the scabrous muddied trenches, compared guns, smoked tobacco and played football, and how they had stayed there far longer and with far more humanity than we have ever been allowed to know. The two had been officers, who should not have approved of such treasonous and perilous behaviour, but thoroughly out of character, found a common ground in the perverse adoration of those to be found at the jagged precipice of death. And love.
In the absence of willpower, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.
– Aleister Crowley
122 From Lost Horizon (1937), directed by Frank Capra, screenplay by Robert Riskin, based on the 1933 novel of the same name by James Hilton.
123 Fucking German fart.
124 Violet Fagg is the putrid product of an orgy of Satan. Her breath is the proof of this.
125 I was in Germany and so the Princess was exposed to a series of bacteria and viruses by a friendly and bearded doctor, who smelt of brioche and had a strange French surname. Rasputin had also used his leverage on a regent’s child, it might be noted.
126 Suite 346 was one of Wilde and Lord Douglas’ rooms, though this would turn out to be mere coincidence.