You rise with the sun in Thulahn. The same as any place where artificial light is still a novelty, I suppose. I woke to find a little fat quilted lady bustling around my room, slamming open the window shutters to let in some eye-wateringly bright light, talking away either to herself or possibly to me and pointing at the washstand, where a large, gently steaming pitcher now stood beside the inset bowl. I was still rubbing my eyes and trying to think of something rude to say, like, When were your people thinking of inventing the Door Lock, or even the Knock? when she just bustled straight out again and left me alone and grumpy.
I washed with the warm water in the bowl. There was a bathroom down the end of the hall with a large fireplace in one corner and a rather grand scroll-topped bath on a platform in the middle of the room, but it took a lot of water-pitchers to fill it and the palace servants clearly required advance notice to organise both the fire and the water.
Technically my room was en suite, if a cubicle the size of a telephone box with the end of a pipe sticking up between two shoe-shaped tiles counts as en suite. There was real toilet paper, but it was miniaturised and unhelpfully shiny. I flushed with the water out of the washing bowl.
Breakfast was served in the room by my little fat quilted lady, who arrived talking, talked as she plonked down the plates and jugs and kept talking as she nodded to me and left. I could hear her talking all the way down the hall. Maybe it was a religious thing, I thought; the opposite of a vow of silence.
Breakfast consisted of stiff fried pancakes and a bowl of watery porridge. I tried a little of each, recalled the variety of mono-taste beige food from the evening before and was reminded that managing my weight, and indeed even losing quite a few pounds in a matter of days, had proved remarkably easy the last time I'd visited Thulahn.
'Her Royal Highness is looking forward to meeting you.'
'Is she? That's nice.' I grabbed a strap and hung on.
Thulahn had cars before it had roads. Somehow, this came as no surprise. Well, it had a car, if not in the plural: a 1919 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith purchased in India by the Prince's great-grandfather when he was King. It had been dismantled and carried across the mountain paths by teams of sherpas and eventually reassembled in Thulahn the following summer.
There was, however, nowhere to drive it, a point which had perhaps escaped the then King when he'd made the purchase. At the time a main road in Thulahn consisted of a boulder-strewn pathlet wandering along the side of a steep hill with broader bits every now and again where two heavily laden porters or yaks could pass without one knocking the other off the cliff, while a principal street in Thuhn was basically a shallow V between the randomly sized and sited buildings with a stream-cum-sewer in the bottom and lots of little paths strung out along the sides.
As a result, the Roller sat within the main courtyard of the palace for five years, where it was just about possible to run it in a figure of eight providing the wheel was kept at full lock the whole time and the transition from left to right or vice versa was accomplished without undue delay. Hours of fun for the royal children. Meanwhile a road, of sorts, was constructed, from the floor of the valley where most of the farms were, through Thuhn and on up to the glacier foot, where the old palace and the more important monasteries clung like particularly determined limpets to the cliffs.
I was in that car, on that road, now. My driver was Langtuhn Hemblu, the man who'd greeted me at the airstrip the day before and given me the rapid guided walking tour of the city and palace before abandoning me to the colourful monks.
'You mustn't worry,' Langtuhn shouted.
'About what?'
'Why, about meeting Her Royal Highness.'
'Oh, all right, then.' Well, I hadn't been. Langtuhn caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and smiled in what was probably meant to be an encouraging manner.
As far as I could tell his title was Important Steward. I strongly suspected he'd never taken a driving test. It wasn't even as though there was no other motorised traffic around any more: registered in Thuhn alone there were now at least seventeen other cars, buses, vans and trucks to have collisions with, most brought in during the heady days of Thulahn's motoring Golden Age, between the summer of 1989, when a supposedly permanent road had been completed direct from Thuhn to the outside world, and the spring of 1991, when a series of landslides and floods had swept it away again.
There were a few more roads within the kingdom nowadays, and except in the depths of winter (when they were blocked by snow), or during the monsoon (when they tended to get washed away) you could drive from Thuhn down the valley through various other, lower towns, then on down the course of the Kamalahn river and into Sikkim where, season permitting, you actually had a choice: turn left for Darjeeling and India, or right for Lhasa and Tibet. There was, still, a track direct from Thuhn back over the mountains that almost encircled the capital and which allowed a very determined driver to bring a four-wheel drive in over the passes from India, but even that meant sliding the vehicle across in a cradle slung under a wire hawser over the river Khunde.
The Roller bounced and lurched. I clung on. It felt very strange to sit in a car with no seat-belts. Grab-handles and straps didn't give even the illusion of safety.
I'd dressed in as many layers of the clothes I'd brought with me as I could. Even so, I was glad of the little wood-burning stove in one corner of the car's rear compartment. This looked like an after-market accessory and I doubted the boys at RR would have approved, but it helped stop my breath freezing on the windows. I made a mental note to buy some warmer clothes in the afternoon, assuming I survived that long.
The road which wound up through the capital consisted of big flat stones laid across one of the main V-shaped streets-cum-streams-cum-sewers. Langtuhn had explained that as there was just the one main road, it had been designed to take in as many important buildings as possible en route, hence the tortuous nature of the course it took, which often involved doubling back on itself and heading downhill again to take in buildings of particular consequence, such as the Foreign Ministry, the important consulates (this seemed to mean the Indian and Pakistani compounds), an especially popular temple or a much-loved tea house.
Most of the buildings in Thuhn were constructed, for the first one or two storeys at least, from large, dark blocks of rough stone. The walls were almost vertical but not quite, spreading out at the base as though they'd started to melt at some point in the past.
They generally looked worn but tended, and most had fresh-looking two-tone paint jobs, though a few sported patches and friezes of brightly painted plaster depicting scenes from the Thulahnese version of Hinduism's idea of the spirit world, which — from the gleeful illustrations of people being impaled on giant stakes, eaten by demons, torn to pieces by giant birds, sodomised by leering, prodigiously endowed yak-minotaurs and skinned alive by grinning dragons wielding giant adzes — looked like the sort of place the Marquis de Sade would have felt thoroughly at home in.
The top storeys were made of wood, pierced by small windows, painted in bright primary colours and strewn with long prayer flags twisting sinuously in the wind.
We skidded round a corner and the Wraith's engine laboured to propel us up the steep slope. People ambled or jumped out of the way — depending on how soon they heard us coming — as we rumbled and bounced across the uneven flagstones.
'Oh, I have your book!' Langtuhn said. 'Please. Here.'
'What book?' I reached out to the opening in the glass partition and accepted a small dog-eared paperback with a two-colour cover.
'The book you left on your last visit.'
'Oh, yes.' A Guide To Thulahn, the cover said. I'd picked it up in Dacca airport four years earlier and vaguely recalled leaving it in my room in the Grand Imperial Tea Room and Resting House — a sort of de-glorified youth hostel — which had been my base the last time I'd been here. I remembered thinking at the time that I had never encountered a book with so many misprints, mistakes and misspellings. As quickly as I could without taking my gloves off I flicked to the work's notoriously unreliable 'Top Tips and Handey Phrases' section and looked up the Thulahnese for Thank you. 'Khumtal,' I said.
'Gumpo,' Langtuhn said with a big smile. I had the worrying feeling that this was the sixth Marx Brother, but it turned out to mean 'You're welcome'.
We cleared the city; the road stopped twisting wildly at random and started twisting wildly at regular intervals, zigzagging steeply up the boulder-littered side of the mountain. Dotted along the roadside amongst the houses were more tall masts, prayer flags, squat stone bell-shaped stupas and thin wooden prayer windmills, their sails painted with dense passages of holy script. The houses themselves were sporadically spaced, turf-roofed and, from a distance, easily mistaken for piles of stones. People walking downhill under dripping, small but heavy-looking packs, or trudging uphill under huge and heavy-looking bundles of wood or dung, stopped and waved at us. I waved back cheerfully.
'Do you yet know how long you will be staying with us, Ms Telman?' Langtuhn shouted back.
'I'm still not sure. Probably just a few days.'
'Only a few days?'
'Yes.'
'Oh dear! But then you might not meet the Prince.'
'Really? Oh, what a shame. Why? When is he due back?'
'Not for a week or thereabouts, I am told.'
'Oh, well, not to worry, eh?'
'He will be most disappointed, I'm sure.'
'Really.'
'You cannot stay any longer?'
'I doubt it.'
'That is a shame. I suspect he cannot come home any earlier. He has been away on business, looking after all our interests.'
'Has he, now?'
'Yes. I understand he has said that soon we may all start to benefit from greater outside investment. That will be good, will it not?'
'I dare say.'
'Though of course, he is in Paris, or some such French place. We must hope he does not gamble it all away!'
'Is the Prince a gambler?' I asked. I'd watched him at the blackjack table in Blysecrag; if he was a gambler he wasn't a very good one.
'Oh, no,' Langtuhn said, and took both hands off the steering wheel to wave them as he looked back at me. 'I was making a joke. Our Prince enjoys himself, but he is most responsible.'
'Yes. Good.'
I sat back in my seat. Well, not a despot, then.
The road grew tired with making wild zigzags up an increasingly steep slope and struck out ambitiously along a notch cut in a vertical cliff. A hundred metres below, the river lay frozen in the bottom of the gorge like a giant icicle fallen and shattered amongst the sharp black rocks.
Langtuhn didn't seem to have noticed the transition from a steep-but-ordinary road to a slot-in-a-cliff. He kept trying to catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. 'We have been hoping that one day the Prince would come back from Paris with a lady who might become his new wife,' he told me.
'No luck yet?' I looked away, hoping this might encourage him to return his attention to the business of keeping the car on the narrow road. The view down into the chasm was not an encouraging one.
'None whatsoever. There was a princess from Bhutan he seemed most sweet upon a few years ago, they say, but she married a tax-consulting gentleman from Los Angeles, USA.'
'Smart girl.'
'Oh, I do not think so. She could have been a queen.'
'Hmm.' I rubbed the red tip of my nose with one gloved hand. and looked in my guidebook for the word for frostbite.
The old palace canted out over a deep, ice-choked gorge a mile down from the glacier foot, its haphazard jumble of off-white, black-windowed buildings supported from beneath by a half-dozen enormous charcoal-dark timbers, each the size of a giant redwood. Together they splayed out from a single jagged spur of rock far below, so that the whole ramshackle edifice looked like a pile of ivory dice clutched in a gigantic ebony hand.
This was where the dowager Queen lived, the Prince's mother. Even higher up the mountainside, at the head of tumultuously zigzag paths, monasteries lay straggled across the precipitous slopes in long, encrusted lines of brightly painted buildings. We passed a few groups of saffron-robed monks on the road; they stopped and looked at the car. Some bowed, and I bowed back.
Langtuhn parked the car in a dusty courtyard; a couple of small Thulahnese ladies-in-waiting in dramatic carmine robes met us at the doors and led us into the dark spaces of the palace, through clouds of incense, to the old throne room.
'You will remember to address the Queen as ma'am, or Your Royal Highness, won't you?' Langtuhn whispered to me, as we approached.
'Don't worry.'
Guarding the doors was a massively rotund Chinese man, who wore camouflaged black/grey/white army fatigues and a jacket made of what looked like yak fur. He was sitting in a chair reading a manga comic when we approached. He looked up and rose carefully, taking a pair of minuscule glasses off his nose and leaving the comic open on his seat.
'This is Mihu,' Langtuhn whispered to me, 'the Queen's manservant. Chinese. Very devoted.'
Mihu moved in front of the double doors, barring the way to the Queen's chamber. The two ladies-in-waiting bowed and spoke to him in slower-than-normal Thulahnese while gesturing at me. He nodded and opened the doors.
Langtuhn had to stay in the antechamber with the two ladies. Mihu came into the room with me and stood with his back to the door. I looked around.
I hadn't really believed that the dowager Queen had stayed in bed for the last two and a half decades, since the death of her husband but, then, I hadn't seen the bed.
The ceiling of the huge state room was painted like the night sky. Its two longer walls were lined by bizarrely proportioned sculptures of snarling warriors, two storeys tall. These were covered in gold leaf, which had started to peel so that the soot-black wood underneath showed through like dense sable skin under flimsy gold armour. Tissue-light, the strips and tatters of glittering leaf waved in the faint draughts that swirled through the vast room, setting up a strange, half-heard rustling, as though hidden legions of mice were all crumpling Lilliputian sweet-wrappers at once. Snow-white daylight spilled in from the wall of windows, which looked across a terrace to the valley; its glare glittered back from the rustling scraps of gold like ten thousand cold and tiny flames spread out across the walls.
The bed sat in the centre; a painted wooden construction for which the term four-poster was entirely inadequate. I had seen houses smaller than this. It took three tall steps just to get level with the base. From there more steps led up through lush velvet drapes and heavy brocade hangings to the surface of the bed, while from the cantilevered canopy a network of dyed ropes and loops of printed silk hung like a profusion of jungle creepers. Big bed, big bedspread: a vast embroidered purple cover stretched from each corner and edge of the bed, rising like a perfect Mount Fuji of lilac to its central summit, where the Queen Mother's head — pale and surrounded by ringlets of white hair — stuck out of a hole in the middle like a snowy summit. From the angle of her head it was hard to tell whether she was lying, sitting or standing. I imagined it was perfectly possible to do all three in there.
According to Langtuhn the Queen Mother didn't even have to stay inside if she didn't want to, The whole bed was mounted on trolley wheels running on rails leading to the tall, wide set of double doors set in the west-facing wall of windows, beyond which lay the wide balcony with the view over the valley below. Trundling the whole apparatus out to the sunlight would be a task for Mihu, I imagined. With the bed out there and the bed's canopy rolled back, the old lady could get a breath of fresh air and take the sun.
There was nowhere to sit, so I stood facing the foot of the bed.
The little snowball head, about a metre higher than me in the centre of the bed, spoke. 'Miss Telman?' Her voice was thin but still strong. The Queen Mother spoke excellent English, because she was. She had been the Honourable Lady Audrey Illsey until she'd married the late King in 1949.
'Ms, yes, ma'am.'
'What?'
'I prefer the title Ms rather than Miss, Your Highness.'
'Are you married?'
'No, ma—'
'Then you are a Miss, I think.'
'Well,' I said, wishing now that for once I had shut the hell up about the Ms/Miss thing, 'there's been a change in the way people relate to each other, Your Highness. In my generation, some of us decided to take the title Ms, as a direct equivalent of Mr, to —'
'I don't need lessons in recent history, young woman! I'm not stupid, or senile. I have heard of feminism, you know.'
'Oh. Have you? I thought perhaps…'
There was a commotion in one side of the slope of the mauve hillside of bedcover, just down from where the dowager Queen's right shoulder must be, as though a volcanic side-vent was about to erupt. After some flapping and muttering, a small white hand appeared from an embroidered slit in the cover clutching a rolled-up magazine. A thin arm clad in lacy white waved hand and magazine. 'I can read, Miss Telman,' she told me. 'The post may take a while but subscriptions do arrive eventually. I am rarely more than a month behind the times.' Another thin white arm appeared from the bedclothes; she opened the magazine out. 'There you are; last month's Country Life. I don't suppose you take it, do you? You sound rather American.'
'I have met one or two US citizens who subscribe to the magazine, ma'am, however I am not one of them.'
'So you are American?'
'I'm British — Scottish — by birth. I have dual British-US nationality.'
'I see. Well, I don't see, really. I don't see how one can be of dual nationality, apart from purely legally.' Both arms and the magazine disappeared under the covers again. 'I mean to say, who are you loyal to?'
'Loyal to, Your Highness?'
'Yes. Are you loyal to the Queen, or to…the American flag? Or are you one of these absurd Scottish Nationalists?'
'I'm more of an internationalist, ma'am.'
'And what's that supposed to mean?'
'It means my loyalties are contingent, Your Highness.'
'Contingent?' She blinked rapidly, looking confused. 'Upon what?'
'Behaviour, ma'am. I have always thought that believing in one's country right or wrong was, at best, sadly misguided.'
'Oh, you have, have you? I must say you are a very opinionated young woman.'
'Thank you, ma'am.'
I watched her eyes narrow. One arm reappeared with a pair of glasses, through which she surveyed me. 'Come closer,' she said. Then added, 'If you please.'
I stepped up to the base of the giant bed. There was a strong smell of incense and mothballs. The fluttering scraps of gold leaf on the walls set up a distracting shimmer on either side.
The Queen brought out a white handkerchief and polished her glasses with it. 'You have met my son.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'What do you think of him?'
'I think he is a credit to you, Your Highness. He is charming and…responsible.'
'Responsible? Ha! Either you know nothing or you're one of the useless ones. One of the lying ones. The ones who say what they think I want to hear.'
'Perhaps you're confusing lying with politeness, ma'am.'
'What?'
'Well, I don't really know your son all that well, Your Highness. As far as I can tell he seems a gentleman. Well-bred, polite…Oh, and a very good dancer, great poise and extremely light on his feet.' (The Queen's brows furrowed at this, so I didn't continue with the topic.) 'Ah, he seems sad, sometimes, and he is a little flirtatious, perhaps, but not rudely or aggressively so.' I thought back to what Langtuhn had said in the car. 'He doesn't seem to be too extravagant, which is always a good thing in a prince, I think, especially when they are away from home. Ah,' I said, struggling to end on a positive note, and failing, 'I suspect the responsibilities of his inheritance lie heavily on him.'
The old Queen shook her head as though to dismiss all this. 'When is he going to get married? That's what I want to know.'
'I'm afraid I can't help you there, ma'am.'
'Not many can, young lady. Do you have any idea how few princesses there are in the world these days? Or even duchesses? Or ladies?'
'I have no idea, ma'am.'
'Of course you wouldn't. You're just a commoner. You are just a commoner, aren't you?'
'I have to confess that any position I've achieved has been attained through merit and hard work, ma'am, so, yes, I'm afraid so.'
'Don't flaunt your inverted snobbery at me, young woman!'
'I'm not usually given to flaunting, ma'am. Perhaps it's the altitude.'
'And don't be downright cheeky either!'
'I can't imagine what's come over me, ma'am.'
'You are a very disrespectful and impertinent girl.'
'I did not mean to be disrespectful, Your Highness.'
'Is it so terrible for a mother to worry about her son?'
'Not at all, ma'am.'
'It would be terrible not to, I think.'
'It would indeed.'
'Hmm. Do you think he's marriageable material?'
'Well, of course, Your Highness. I'm sure he will make some lucky princess, or lady, a wonderful husband.'
'Platitudes, Miss Telman. That is the sort of thing my courtiers tell me.'
I wondered if Mihu and the two little red-clad ladies counted as her courtiers. The palace had seemed quite empty apart from them. I cleared my throat and said, 'He is your son, ma'am. Even if I thought he'd make an absolutely awful husband I'd be unlikely to say so right out without at least softening the blow a little.'
The Queen Mother sounded exasperated. 'Then just tell me what you feel! ,
'He'll probably be fine, ma'am. If he marries the right person. Isn't that all one can say of anybody?'
'He is not just anybody!'
'Any mother would say the same, ma'am.'
'Yes, and it would be sentimentality! Motherly instinct or whatever you want to call it! Suvinder is heir to a throne.'
'Your Highness, I'm not sure how much help I can really be to you in this. I'm not married, I don't expect to marry, and so I don't tend to think in those terms, plus I don't know your son or the international royal-matrimony circuit well enough to comment.'
'Hmm.' The Queen put her glasses away again. 'Why are you here, Miss Telman?'
'I thought I had been summoned, Your Highness.'
'I meant here in Thulahn, you idiot!' Then she sighed and her eyelids fluttered closed for a moment. 'I beg your pardon, Miss Telman. I should not have called you an idiot. Do forgive me.'
'Of course, ma'am. I am here in Thulahn to decide whether I ought to accept a post which will mean coming here to live.'
'Yes, you are one of these mysterious business people my son talks about in such admiring tones. Who are you really? Are you the Mafia?'
I smiled. 'No, ma'am. We are a commercial concern, not a criminal one.'
'My son says that you want to invest what sound to me like most unlikely amounts of money in our country. What's in it for you?'
'We'd like to use Thulahn as a sort of base, Your Highness,' I said, trying to choose my words with care. 'We'd hope that we might be welcomed by your people and that some of us might become citizens. There would be more trade and more dealings in general with other countries, thanks to the improvements and investments we'd like to offer, and so we hope, and we think, it would be appropriate that some us might be allowed certain diplomatic posts so that we could represent Thulahn abroad.'
'You're not backed by those bloody Chinese, are you?'
I wondered if Mihu, still standing by the door, understood English. 'No, ma'am. We're not backed by anybody, in the way I think you mean.' If anything, I thought, we were the ones who tended to do the backing.
'Hmm. Well, it all sounds jolly fishy to me.'
'We mean only to help Thulahn, Your Highness. The improvements to the infrastructure and so on would be offered, not —'
'Family, faith, farms and fealty,' the dowager Queen said, releasing one arm to wag a finger at me.
'I beg your pardon, ma'am?'
'You heard. That's what matters to these people. Those four things. Nothing else. Everything else is irrelevant.'
'Well, perhaps better water supplies, a few more primary schools, more primary health care, too, and —'
'They have water. No one dies of thirst. They have all the education they need. Do you need a degree to walk behind a plough? No. And health? It will always be hard to live here. It's no place for the weak. We all have to die, young woman. Better to work hard, accept the consolation of one's faith and then go quickly. All this hanging around's just vulgar. People are so greedy these days. Accept your lot and don't insist on extending the misery of those who'd be better off dead. There. That's what I believe. Oh, and you needn't try to hide your feelings. I know what you're thinking. Well, for your information, I have not seen a doctor since I took to my bed, and I will not in the future, no matter what. I've been waiting to die for a quarter of a century, Miss Telman. I believe the good Lord is keeping me alive for his own good reasons and so I shan't hasten the process of dying, but I shan't do anything to delay it, either, once it begins.'
I nodded. 'That's very stoic of you, ma'am. I hope anybody would respect your choice.'
'Yes?' she said slowly, suspiciously. 'But?'
'I…think it would only be right to offer the Thulahnese people a choice as well.'
'A choice of what? Will they want television? Burger bars? Jobs in factories and supermarkets? Salaries in offices? Motor cars? They will doubtless choose all that, if they're offered it. And before you know it we will be just the same as everywhere else and we'll have homosexuals, AIDS, socialists, drug-dealers, prostitutes and muggers. That will be progress, won't it, Miss Telman?'
By now even I was beginning to suspect that there was no point in continuing this argument. I said, 'I'm sorry you feel that way, Your Highness.'
'Are you? Are you really? Try telling the truth.'
'I am. Truly.'
The Queen looked down at me for a while. Then she nodded. She leaned fractionally towards me. 'It is a hateful thing to grow old, Miss Telman. It is not an enjoyable process, and it will come to you one day. I don't doubt you think me an appalling old reactionary, but there is this consolation for me that there may not be for you: I will be glad to leave this stupid, hurtful, degrading world.' She straightened again. 'Thank you for coming to see me. I am tired now. Goodbye. Mihu?'
I turned round to see the big Chinese man silently opening the doors for me. I looked back to say goodbye to the Queen, but she had closed her eyes and her head had drooped, as though she had been a marionette in a fairground booth all the time and now my money had run out. I took a last look round the strange room with its glittering, whispering walls of flaking leaf over black wooden flesh, then turned and left.
Langtuhn Hemblu almost had to run to keep up with me as I strode back to the car.
'My, you had quite a long time with the Queen Mother!'
'Did I?'
'Yes! You are very privileged. Isn't she a treasure?'
'Oh, yes, a treasure,' I said. Pity she's not buried, I thought.
When I got back to my room in the palace at Thuhn, all my stuff had gone.
I stood in the doorway and looked around. The little cot bed in the alcove had been made up. The cupboard where I'd hung my suit carrier and clothes was open and empty. The satellite phone, my computer, my toiletries; all gone. The little table by the bed had been cleared too; my netsuke monkey had disappeared with everything else.
A swimmy sort of feeling came over me. No phone, no contact. Just what I stood up in. In my pockets, a billfold and two shiny discs.
Had I been robbed? I'd assumed this was one of those places where you didn't need to lock anything, and that was why there was no way of securing the room door. But, then, how much were the satellite phone and the ThinkPad worth, compared to what the average person here made in a year? Maybe somebody had been just too tempted, and I too careless.
Or had I made that bad an impression on the Queen Mother? Was this some sort of instant revenge of hers for speaking back to her? I turned to try and find somebody to help, and heard a voice in the distance coming closer. The little quilted lady who didn't stop talking appeared at the end of the corridor. She came up, took my hand and, still talking, led me off to another part of the palace.
The door had a lock. The floor was carpeted. My suit carrier hung in a wardrobe that could have come out of a Holiday Inn. The window was a triple-glazed sealed unit. Under the window was a radiator, plumbed into pipes which disappeared discreetly through the carpet. The bed was a standard double with ordinary pillows. The netsuke monkey had been placed alongside my flashlight on the bedside table. The computer and satellite phone sat on a little writing table with a mirror over it. Through an open door I could see a tiled bathroom with a shower and — glory be — a bidet. Still no TV , mind you.
The little quilted lady bowed and left, talking.
There was a business card on the writing table beside the sat. phone. Joshua Levitsen, honorary US consul, would like to meet me tomorrow; he suggested breakfasting at the Heavenly Luck Tea House at eight.
I went to the window. Same view, a storey higher. The room was warm; a faint thermal was drifting up from the radiator. I turned it off and tilted the heavy window open.
My e-mail included a plaintive note from Dwight Litton reminding me that I was missing the première of his Broadway play. I didn't bother to reply.
How you doin?
That line work on all the girls?
So they say. I wouldn't know.
No, of course not, Stephen.
So how is Shangri-La?
Cool.
Think you might want to stay?
Too early to tell yet. Saw the Queen today; a character. I'll tell you about it later; you won't believe. I've been moved within the palace from a rather spartan but characterful room to something that looks like it's been filched wholesale from the nearest Ramada. How's things with you?
Fine. Working on a big restructuring exercise for two of the biochemical multis. Also taking part in (mostly e-mail) discussions about MAI fall-out. Domestically, looking after bambinos while Emma visits old girlfriend in Boston...Hello? Kate? You still there?
Sorry. Sorry for the hiatus. Some sort of glitch at this end. Had to reconnect.
I awoke, breathless again.
Where was I? Where had I been?
I couldn't even remember what the original problem had been, what slight or remark, what insult or minor injury had occasioned the incident. All I remembered was that I had gone to Mrs Telman for comfort, and received a strange sort of it.
She held me. I sobbed into her bosom. It was probably a very expensive blouse I was soaking with my tears, but at least I was too young to be allowed to wear mascara; the marks of my fury and despair would soon dry and leave no mark.
We were in the hotel in Vevey where Mrs Telman stayed whenever she came to visit me at the International School. Lac Léman was a dark presence in the night, its white-flecked surface visible by moonlight between the wintry showers that fell upon the waters from the mountains. I was fourteen or fifteen. Young enough still to need to be held sometimes, old enough to be troubled by, even ashamed of such a need. She smelled of the exotic perfumes I remembered from her car, six years earlier.
'But it's not fair!'
'Life is not, Kathryn.'
'You're always saying that.'
'When it stops being true, I'll stop saying it.'
'But it should be fair!'
'Of course it should.'
'Well, then, why can't it be?'
'Why can't we all live in palaces and never have to work? Why can't we all be happy and never have to cry?'
'I don't know,' I said defiantly (I'd begun to get used to this sort of rhetorical defence). 'Why can't we?'
Mrs Telman smiled and offered me her handkerchief. 'There are two schools of thought.'
I rolled my eyes dramatically. She ignored me and went on. 'Some people will tell you that we can never have true fairness, or justice, or happiness, or freedom from having to work. We are sinners and we deserve no better anyway. However, if we do as we're told, we may achieve perfect happiness for ever after our own death. That is one point of view. Another is that we may begin to attain all those goals in this world if we apply ourselves, even if the final fulfilment of those dreams will certainly take place after our own death.
'I prefer the second outlook, though I accept I could be wrong. But, Kathryn, in the meantime, you must understand that the world is not fair, that it does not owe you a living or even an apology, that you have no right to expect happiness, and that all too often the world can seem like a mad, bad place to be.
'When people behave rationally, kindly, generously and lovingly towards you or those you care about, be grateful; appreciate it and make the most of it at the time, because it is not necessarily the normal way of things at all. Reason, kindness, generosity and love can seem like very rare resources indeed, so make the most of them while they are around.'
'I just don't know why people have to be horrible to other people.'
'Kathryn, unless you are a saint, you must know.'
'But I don't!'
'You mean you've never been horrible to anyone? Never teased other girls, never been unkind, never been secretly delighted when something bad happened to somebody you don't like? Or are you going to tell me there's nobody you don't like?'
'But they were horrible to me first!'
'And they probably thought they had their reasons. You're very clever. Some people resent clever people; they think they're showing off.'
'What's wrong with being clever?' I asked indignantly.
'A lot, if you're not a very clever person yourself and you feel that a clever person is showing off or trying to make you look stupid. It's like a strong person showing off how strong they are.'
'But I don't care if people are strong! They can show off how strong they are as much as they like; I won't care.'
'Ah, yes, but then you're clever.'
'But that's not— !' I did not say the word 'fair'. I balled the handkerchief she had given me in my hand and thudded my head against her chest again. 'That's not right,' I said lamely.
'It's right to them.' She held me and patted me on the back. 'And that's all that matters. To themselves, people are usually right.'
I felt for the bedside table. I was in Thulahn, in Thuhn, in the royal palace. I found the little monkey and rubbed it between my fingers.
In my dream the old Queen had been a cross between one of the demon-warriors that guarded her bedchamber, and the netsuke monkey that guarded my bedside. There was some sort of fading thing about monkey guards my subconscious had probably filched from The Wizard of Oz, but it was all already pretty vague and strange and just not of this world. In my dream I had been trapped inside a dark, cold palace carved within a mountain. It was full of smoke and I had been stumbling around trying to find the Queen but then I'd been chased through the fume-filled halls by…something. Or a lot of somethings. I could hear them whispering but I couldn't make out what they were saying, because somebody had pulled out half their teeth. They kept the removed teeth in little pouches on their belts, where the teeth clicked and rattled in a jittery accompaniment to their lisping voices.
Whatever they were, I knew that if they touched me there was something in their touch, in their sweat, that would burn and burrow down to my bones and poison me and make me one of them; dark wraiths of pain consigned to wander the hollowed-out palace for ever.
They could run faster than me, but there was some sort of rule — or some sort of effect or gift that I had — that meant they couldn't bear the gaze of my eyes, and so I had to run backwards, keeping them always one corner or room or corridor or door behind, and running backwards had been slow and difficult and scary, because I couldn't be sure that there weren't any of them behind me too, lying in wait for me to run backwards into them, and so I had to keep glancing over my shoulder to make certain, and that gave the ones I was running away from in the first place a chance to catch up. All the time I kept shouting, 'It's not fair! It's not fair! It's not fair!' while my feet clattered in the silence of the shadowy halls.
The dream ended unresolved, before they could catch me or I could finally make my escape to the world outside. I awoke remembering my meeting with the Queen and the words of Mrs Telman, and needing to touch the little monkey, which was my guardian, just to know that it was what it was; something inanimate and fixed and incapable of malice or love, but, if anything, something on my side as well as by it, something made reassuring just by its familiarity, and talismanic by the illusory fidelity gained through the long continuity of its presence.