“I suppose we have to go,” said the Baroness Sieben-Kuchen-Bäcker.
“If we want to have any dinner, yes,” said her husband. “It’s not as if we can send out for pizza.”
She sighed extravagantly. The baroness did most things extravagantly. “It’s the singing for one’s supper part that does get one down.”
“Yes, dear,” said the baron. “But we must play the hand we’ve been dealt awhile longer. It would be rather ungrateful of us not to acknowledge how lucky we’ve been.”
Early for the party, they stood waiting on the deck for the others to gather. She turned from checking her makeup in her purse mirror and looked at her husband. Such philosophical sentiment was unlike him. He read an awful lot of rubbish lately, it seemed to her. Alongside self-help books, he liked reading memoirs by obscure members of the royal family, the sort of people it was easy to forget had ever been born. He also liked biographies of Churchill and books about the Third Reich. It was amazing how many of those there were in the world. She supposed he could have chosen worse things to read, but the thing with history, it seemed to her, was that you only had to read it once. Reading a dozen books about World War II was not going to change the outcome, was it?
She suspected it all had something to do with his family’s fallen fortunes. Perhaps he was hoping for a book where the aristocracy was restored and landed gentry again roamed the countryside, horsewhipping its servants. If so he should switch to science fiction.
“Luck had a lot to do with bringing us here,” she admitted grudgingly.
“You mean, running into Romero in Monte? Yes, although we’d have come across him eventually; he does tend to frequent our sort of place when he’s in Europe. And of course simply everyone was there for the Grand Prix de Monaco. But that was a spot of luck.”
“Yes. And it was so easy to wangle an invitation,” she said. “He’s besotted with the upper classes—quite pathetic, really. But I was in the mood for a private cruise, anyway. Public transport is so distasteful. Even the Queen Mary is full of nothing but parvenus these days.”
Recalled to the memory of their last voyage aboard the luxury cruise liner, her husband allowed himself a delicate shudder. They had been guests of the von Rother-Magnums, who would meet them when they docked in Hamburg, but through some sort of confused misunderstanding he and the baroness had been forced on the first night to share a table with three couples from Liverpool. The men had been something in the building trades; the women had spent the whole time complaining that “their dogs were barking,” whatever that meant. After such a shocking experience—really, it had been quite intolerable—he and the baroness had ordered their meals brought to their cabin for the remainder of the voyage. The von Rother-Magnums could jolly well afford it. “Yes, but darling, having met that group of electricians or whatever they were we can thank our lucky stars we don’t have actually to work for a living.”
“I think if people knew what it took to keep up the façade, they might call it work. Which reminds me, I will need a new frock or two soon. Everyone’s seen simply everything in my wardrobe several times over now.”
She wore a tight-fitting sheath dress and an Italian chiffon scarf wrapped about her head, the ends crossed at the front of her neck and tied at the back. It was the way film stars of the fifties had worn their scarves as they tootled around Rome in sports cars with Gregory Peck. She supposed she was being subtly influenced by the Hollywood-style company she was keeping on this trip. The scarf was a good look on her—Audrey Hepburn was such a paragon—but right now, it was practical as well. It was windy on deck, and sometimes when they hit a wave head on water splashed about like they were in the middle of a monsoon. Why didn’t the captain watch where he was going? They were lucky not to have run into serious trouble with the weather. It was too early in the season for this sort of carry-on.
Although they were sailing in the lap of luxury, the baroness felt she would be glad to walk on dry land again. Or rather, to let her horse carry her over fields and fences, and then back to the manor for a nice hot drink before a raging fire, rounding off the stirrup cup of port that would have begun the day. That was her true milieu. She longed for the sound of gravel crunching underfoot, and dreaded another day of wobbling about the watery deck pining for entertainment with her own kind. For while she liked lounging about the beaches of the Riviera as well as the next person, she avoided the water, mostly. She didn’t like thinking about what was in there. What monsters lay beneath. What fights to the bitter death were hidden under those dark blue waves. Her instincts were those of the huntress—her middle name was Diana, after all—but in addition to the thrill of the chase, there was something noble, she thought, in the traditions of the sport. And then there were the lovely dinners and dances afterward, when people of her class gathered to relive the day’s hunt. How she longed to enjoy it all again.
She and the baron stood beneath an overhanging balcony, out of the wind for the most part. But her blond hair was so shellacked the wind couldn’t much ruffle it, anyway, with or without the scarf. And very little else ruffled her composure, a composure that came from years of being invincible, above it all, above them all. It was how she had been raised; it was how her own parents had been raised, and their parents before them. Her husband was likewise smooth and dapper to the point of oiliness. It was a façade he cultivated, and it had served them both well. People expected certain things of aristocracy—even minor aristocracy. It would be wrong to disappoint. Selfish, really.
It was all, if she stopped to think about it, not unlike being in show business. The show must go on and all that. She wondered briefly how the Duchess of Cambridge coped, with everyone scrutinizing every new frock she wore, and every snip of the hairdresser’s shears calling forth rapture from even the staidest publications. Those babies of hers had better turn out to be flawless human beings, too. The baroness could almost sympathize—the constant pressure!—but at the same time she wouldn’t mind trading places. After all, she was much the same age as Kate, and she had traveled in much the same circles as the now-duke, back in the day when he was single and the world’s most eligible polo-playing prince. There had been a time when she had been in the running for his favor, right alongside Kate. Everyone said, Oh, that Kate: she was so nice to him, and that is how she won the heart of a prince.
Nice. Bugger nice. Not a drop of royal blood ran in Kate’s veins, unless you count that tenuous connection to the 1st Marquess of Lansdowne. Really, it was enough to make one sick. She was nice, too, and a born blueblood, and it had only landed her Axelrod. Some people had all the ruddy luck.
“I know, darling,” her husband said now. “We won’t have to stay with the ship once it’s docked in Weymouth. That’s Monkslip-super-Mare in the distance, so we’ve not far to go now. I believe the ship is headed for Amsterdam after Weymouth, and I really can’t abide Amsterdam. All those people riding their bicycles in such a suicidal manner, medicated out of their minds. It’s irresponsible, that sort of thing.”
“The king of the Netherlands is rather dashing, I’ve always thought,” she murmured. “I wonder if he rides?”
“A bicycle? Oh, to hounds, you mean. I’ve no idea, darling. Anyway, I’ve mentioned our leaving to Romero and he’s fine with it, of course. Soon we’ll be free to go.”
“Fine,” she said. “Just do please keep the Margot person away from me. Keep them all away from me, for that matter.”
“Not much longer now, darling. Do be patient.”
“Ya-a-as,” she drawled, bored. One couldn’t smoke out here on deck, the wind just blew everything about and back in one’s face, and the captain went mental if he caught people at it. They’d planned to drop into the lounge and have a quick drink and a smoke, but they’d seen Maurice through the etched glass and decided not to engage. Maurice was all right but well and truly, she’d had enough of show business types for now.
The pair stood staring at the lights twinkling in the distance; they exerted a hypnotic, soothing effect. After a moment the baron, finishing off his drink, said, “I can’t imagine what our little author Addison could find to write about her that wouldn’t be actionable, can you?”
“About Margot? No. No, that’s hard to imagine. Much better to drop the whole project.”
“Perhaps his real problem will be to find something that hasn’t already been written. I mean, the woman has lived her life on the public stage, everything exposed for the world to see, in a manner of speaking.”
“I think Addison’s going on the theory that she can’t last much longer, if you want my opinion. And that will allow him to write what he likes. He told me a biography has a short shelf life, but if it’s going to sell, it will sell quickest in the month of the person’s death.”
Her husband looked at her, astonished. “I say. How perfectly ghoulish of him to think of it. And she’s not so very old as all that.”
She shrugged. “Perhaps he was joking. But I told you: show business types are simply the worst. So grubby, so tacky. I can’t wait to get to the country, back to the hounds and horses. Back to real life, and real people.”
“Here, here,” said her husband. “There are few things more civilized than a well-run fox hunt.”