Red, White, page 30
Henry blinks. “Sorry—what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I’ve come to fight,” she says, straightforward and plain. “You want to tell the truth, don’t you?”
“I—yeah, Mum.” A light of hope has switched on behind his eyes. “Yes, I do.”
“Then we can try.”
They take their seats around the long, ornately carved table in the meeting room, awaiting the queen’s arrival in nervous silence. Philip is there, looking like he’s about to chew through his tongue, and Henry can’t stop fidgeting with his tie.
Queen Mary glides in wearing slate-gray separates and a stony expression, her gray bob arranged with razor precision around the edges of her face. Alex is struck by how tall she is, straight-backed and fine-jawed even in her early eighties. She’s not exactly beautiful, but there’s a definite story in her shrewd blue eyes and angular features, the heavy creases of frowns around her mouth.
The temperature in the room drops as she takes her seat at the head of the table. A royal attendant fetches the teapot from the center of the table and pours into the pristine china, and the quiet hangs as she fixes her tea at a glacial pace, making them wait. The milk, poured with one gently tremoring, ancient hand. One cube of sugar, picked up with deliberate care with the tiny silver tongs. A second cube.
Alex coughs. Shaan shoots him a look. Bea presses her lips together.
“I had a visit earlier this year,” the queen says at last. She takes up her teaspoon and begins to stir slowly. “The President of China. You’ll forgive me if the name escapes me. But he told me the most fascinating story about how technology has advanced in different parts of the world for these modern times. Did you know, one can manipulate a photograph to make it appear as if the most outlandish things are real? Just a simple . . . program, is it? A computer. And any manner of unbelievable falsehood could be made actual. One’s eyes could hardly detect a difference.”
The silence in the room is total, except for the sound of the queen’s teaspoon scraping circular motions in the bottom of her teacup.
“I’m afraid I am too old to understand how things are filed away in space,” she goes on, “but I have been told any number of lies can be manufactured and disseminated. One could . . . create files that never existed and plant them somewhere easy to find. None of it real. The most flagrant of evidence can be discredited and dismissed, just like that.”
With the delicate tinkling of silver on porcelain, she rests her spoon on the saucer and finally looks at Henry.
“I wonder, Henry. I wonder if you think any of this had to do with these unseemly reports.”
It’s right on the table between them: an offer. Keep ignoring it. Pretend it was a lie. Make it all go away.
Henry grits his teeth.
“It’s real,” he says. “All of it.”
The queen’s face moves through a series of expressions, settling on a terse frown as if she’s found something unsightly on the bottom of one of her kitten heels.
“Very well. In that case.” Her gaze shifts to Alex. “Alexander. Had I known you were involved with my grandson, I would have insisted upon a more formal first meeting.”
“Gran—”
“Do be quiet, Henry, dear.”
Catherine speaks up, then. “Mum—”
The queen holds up one wizened hand to silence her. “I thought we had been humiliated enough in the papers when Beatrice had her little problem. And I made myself clear, Henry, years ago, that if you were drawn in unnatural directions, appropriate measures could be taken. Why you have chosen to undermine the hard work I’ve done to maintain the crown’s standing is beyond me, and why you seem set on disrupting my efforts to restore it by demanding I summit with some . . . boy—” here, a nasty lilt to her polite tone, under which Alex can hear epithets for everything from his race to his sexuality, “when you were told to await orders, is truly a mystery. Clearly you have taken leave of your senses. My position is unchanged, dear: Your role in this family is to perpetuate our bloodline and maintain the appearance of the monarchy as the ideal of British excellence, and I simply cannot allow anything less.”
Henry is looking down, eyes distant and cast toward the grain of the table, and Alex can practically feel the energy roiling up from Catherine across from him. An answer to the fury tight in his own chest. The princess who ran away with James Bond, who told her children to give back what their country stole, making a choice.
“Mum,” she says evenly. “Don’t you think we ought to at least have a conversation about other options?”
The queen’s head turns slowly. “And what options might those be, Catherine?”
“Well, I think there’s something to be said for coming clean. It could save us a great deal of face to treat it not as a scandal, but as an intrusion upon the privacy of the family and the victimization of a young man in love.”
“Which is what it was,” Bea chimes in.
“We could integrate this into our narrative,” Catherine says, choosing her words with extreme precision. “Reclaim the dignity of it. Make Alex an official suitor.”
“I see. So your plan is to allow him to choose this life?”
Here, a slight tell. “It’s the only life for him that’s honest, Mum.”
The queen purses her lips. “Henry,” she says, returning to him, “wouldn’t you have a more pleasant go of it without all these unnecessary complications? You know we have the resources to find a wife for you and compensate her handsomely. You understand, I’m only trying to protect you. I know it seems important to you in this moment, but you really must think of the future. You do realize this would mean years of reporters hounding you, all sorts of allegations? I can’t imagine people would be as eager to welcome you into children’s hospitals—”
“Stop it!” Henry bursts out. All the eyes in the room swivel to him, and he looks pale and shocked at the sound of his own voice, but he goes on. “You can’t—you can’t intimidate me into submission forever!”
Alex’s hand gropes across the space between them under the table, and the minute his fingertips catch on the back of Henry’s wrist, Henry’s hand is gripping his, hard.
“I know it will be difficult,” Henry says. “I . . . It’s terrifying. And if you’d asked me a year ago, I probably would have said it was fine, that nobody needs to know. But . . . I’m as much a person and a part of this family as you. I deserve to be happy as much as any of you do. And I don’t think I ever will be if I have to spend my whole life pretending.”
“Nobody’s saying you don’t deserve to be happy,” Philip cuts in. “First love makes everyone mad—it’s foolish to throw away your future because of one hormonal decision based on less than a year of your life when you were barely in your twenties.”
Henry looks Philip square in the face and says, “I’ve been gay as a maypole since the day I came out of Mum, Philip.”
In the silence that follows, Alex has to bite down very hard on his tongue to suppress the urge to laugh hysterically.
“Well.” the queen eventually says. She’s holding her teacup daintily in the air, eyeing Henry over it. “Even if you’re willing to submit to the flogging in the papers, it doesn’t erase the stipulations of your birthright: You are to produce heirs.”
And Alex apparently hasn’t been biting his tongue hard enough, because he blurts out, “We could still do that.”
Even Henry’s head whips around at that.
“I don’t recall giving you permission to speak in my presence,” Queen Mary says.
“Mum—”
“That raises the issue of surrogates, or donors,” Philip jumps back in, “and rights to the throne—”
“Are those details pertinent right now, Philip?” Catherine interrupts.
“Someone has to bear the stewardship for the royal legacy, Mum.”
“I don’t care for that tone at all.”
“We can entertain hypotheticals, but the fact of the matter is that anything but maintaining the royal image is out of the question,” the queen says, setting down her teacup. “The country simply will not accept a prince of his proclivities. I am sorry, dear, but to them, it’s perverse.”
“Perverse to them or perverse to you?” Catherine asks her.
“That isn’t fair—” Philip says.
“It’s my life—” Henry interjects.
“We haven’t even gotten a chance yet to see how people will react.”
“I have been ruling this country for forty-seven years, Catherine. I believe I know its heart by now. As I have told you since you were a little girl, you must remove your head from the clouds—”
“Oh, will you all shut up for a second?” Bea says. She’s standing now, brandishing her tablet in one hand. “Look.”
She thunks it down on the table so Queen Mary and Philip can see it, and the rest of them stand to look too.
It’s a news report from the BBC, and the sound is off, but Alex reads the scroll at the bottom of the screen: WORLDWIDE SUPPORT POURS IN FOR PRINCE HENRY AND FIRST SON OF US.
The room falls silent at the images on the screen. A rally in New York outside the Beekman, decked out in rainbows, waving signs that say things like: FIRST SON OF OUR HEARTS. A banner on the side of a bridge in Paris that reads: HENRY + ALEX WERE HERE. A hasty mural on a wall in Mexico City of Alex’s face in blue, purple, and pink, a crown on his head. A herd of people in Hyde Park with rainbow Union Jacks and Henry’s face ripped out of magazines and pasted onto poster boards reading: FREE HENRY. A young woman with a buzz cut throwing two fingers up at the windows of the Daily Mail. A crowd of teenagers in front of the White House, wearing homemade T-shirts that all say the same thing in crooked Sharpie letters, a phrase he recognizes from one of his own emails: HISTORY, HUH?
Alex tries to swallow, but he can’t. He looks up, and Henry is looking back at him, mouth open, eyes wet.
Princess Catherine turns and crosses the room slowly, toward the tall windows on the east side of the room.
“Catherine, don’t—” the queen says, but Catherine grabs the heavy curtains with both hands and throws them open.
A burst of sunlight and color pushes the air out of the room. Down on the mall in front of Buckingham Palace, there’s a mass of people with banners, signs, American flags, Union Jacks, pride pennants streaming over their heads. It’s not as big as the royal wedding crowd, but it’s huge, filling up the pavement and pressed up to the gates. Alex and Henry were told to come in through the back of the palace—they never saw it.
Henry has carefully approached the window, and Alex watches from across the room as he reaches out and grazes his fingertips against the glass.
Catherine turns to him and says on a shaky sigh, “Oh, my love,” and pulls him into her chest somehow, even though he’s nearly a foot taller. Alex has to look away—even after everything, this feels too private for him to witness.
The queen clears her throat.
“This is . . . hardly representative of how the country as a whole will respond,” she says.
“Jesus Christ, Mum,” Catherine says, releasing Henry and nudging him behind her on protective reflex.
“This is precisely why I didn’t want you to see. You’re too soft-hearted to accept the truth, Catherine, given any other option. The majority of this country still wants the ways of old.”
Catherine draws herself up, her posture ramrod straight as she approaches the table again. It’s a product of royal breeding, but it comes off more like a bow being drawn. “Of course they do, Mum. Of course the bloody Tories in Kensington and the Brexit fools don’t want it. That’s not the point. Are you so determined to believe nothing could change? That nothing should change? We can have a real legacy here, of hope, and love, and change. Not the same tepid shite and drudgery we’ve been selling since World War II—”
“You will not speak to me this way,” Queen Mary says icily, one tremulous, ancient hand still resting on her teaspoon.
“I’m sixty years old, Mum,” Catherine says. “Can’t we eschew decorum at this point?”
“No respect. Never an ounce of respect for the sanctity—”
“Or, perhaps I should bring some of my concerns to Parliament?” Catherine says, leaning in to lower her voice right in Queen Mary’s face. Alex recognizes the glint in her eyes. He never knew—he always assumed Henry got it from his dad. “You know, I do think Labour is rather finished with the old guard. I wonder, if I were to mention those meetings you keep forgetting about, or the names of countries you can’t quite keep straight, if they might decide that eighty-five is perhaps enough years for the people of Britain to expect you to serve?”
The tremor in the queen’s hand has doubled, but her jaw is steely. The room is deadly silent. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Wouldn’t I, Mum? Would you like to find out?”
She turns to face Henry, and Alex is surprised to see tears on her face.
“I’m sorry, Henry,” she says. “I’ve failed you. I’ve failed all of you. You needed your mum, and I wasn’t there. And I was so frightened that I started to think maybe it was for the best, to let you all be kept behind glass.” She turns back to her mother. “Look at them, Mum. They’re not props of a legacy. They’re my children. And I swear on my life, and Arthur’s, I will take you off the throne before I will let them feel the things you made me feel.”
The room hangs in suspense for a few agonizing seconds, then:
“I still don’t think—” Philip begins, but Bea seizes the pot of tea from the center of the table and dumps it into his lap.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Pip!” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders and shoving him, sputtering and yelping, toward the door. “So dreadfully clumsy. You know, I think all that cocaine I did must have really done a job on my reflexes! Let’s go get you cleaned up, shall we?”
She heaves him out, throwing Henry a thumbs-up over her shoulder, and shuts the door behind them.
The queen looks over at Alex and Henry, and Alex sees it in her eyes at last: She’s afraid of them. She’s afraid of the threat they pose to the perfect Faberge veneer she’s spent her whole life maintaining. They terrify her.
And Catherine isn’t backing down.
“Well,” Queen Mary says. “I suppose. I suppose you don’t leave me much choice, do you?”
“Oh, you have a choice, Mum,” Catherine says. “You’ve always had a choice. Perhaps today you’ll make the right one.”
In the corridor of Buckingham Palace, as soon as the door has shut behind them, they fall sideways into a tapestry on a wall, breathless and delirious and laughing, cheeks wet. Henry pulls Alex close and kisses him, whispers, “I love you I love you I love you,” and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if anyone sees.
He’s on the way back to the airstrip when he sees it, emblazoned onto the side of a brick building, a shock of color against a gray street.
“Wait!” Alex yells up to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!”
Up close, it’s beautiful. Two stories tall. He can’t imagine how somebody was able to put together something like this so fast.
It’s a mural of himself and Henry, facing each other, haloed by a bright yellow sun, depicted as Han and Leia. Henry in all white, starlight in his hair. Alex dressed as a scruffy smuggler, a blaster at his hip. A royal and a rebel, arms around each other.
He snaps a photo on his phone, and fingers shaking, types out a tweet: Never tell me the odds.
He calls June from the air over the Atlantic.
“I need your help,” he says.
He hears the click of her pen cocking on the other end of the line. “Whatcha got?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jezebel @Jezebel
WATCH: DC Dykes on Bikes chase protesters from Westboro Baptist Church down Pennsylvania Avenue, and yes, it’s as amazing as it sounds. bit.ly/2ySPCRj
9:15 PM · 29 Sept 2020
The very first time Alex pulled up to Pennsylvania Avenue as the First Son of the United States, he almost fell into a bush.
He can remember it vividly, even though the whole day was surreal. He remembers the interior of the limo, how he was still unused to the way the leather felt under his clammy palms, still green and jittery and pressed too close to the window to look at all the crowds.
He remembers his mother, her long hair pulled back from her face in an elegant, no-nonsense twist at the back of her head. She’d worn it down for her first day as mayor, her first day in the House, her first day as Speaker, but that day it was up. She said she didn’t want any distractions. He thought it made her look tough, like she was ready for a brawl if it came down to it, as if she might have a razor in her shoe. She sat there across from him, going over the notes for her speech, a twenty-four-karat gold American flag on her lapel, and Alex was so proud he thought he’d throw up.
There was a changeover at some point—Ellen and Leo escorted to the north entrance and Alex and June shuffled off in another direction. He remembers, very specifically, a handful of things. His cufflinks, custom sterling silver X-wings. A tiny scuff in the plaster on a western wall of the White House, which he was seeing up close for the first time. His own shoelace, untied. And he remembers bending over to tie his shoe, losing his balance because of nerves, and June grabbing the back of his jacket to keep him from plunging face-first into a thorny rosebush in front of seventy-five cameras.
That was the moment he decided he wasn’t going to allow himself nerves ever again. Not as Alex Claremont-Diaz, First Son of the United States, and not as Alex Claremont-Diaz, rising political star.
Now, he’s Alex Claremont-Diaz, center of an international political sex scandal and boyfriend of the Prince of England, and he’s back in a limo on Pennsylvania Avenue, and there’s another crowd, and the imminent barf feeling is back.
When the car door opens, it’s June, standing there in a bright yellow T-shirt that says: HISTORY, HUH?
“You like it?” she says. “There’s a guy selling them down the block. I got his card. Gonna put it in my next column for Vogue.”
