‘It was Louis XIV who said it. I like clever maxims,’ Stella said. ‘I have a notebook full of maxims-’
‘And I have extremely fond memories of Maxim’s.’ Melisande raised her cocktail glass. ‘Shall we drink to it? To Maxim’s! I mean the one in Paris. The one and only.’
‘This must be the very first time the Sun King of France has been quoted under this roof,’ Winifred whispered to Antonia.
It was all perfectly absurd and rather droll, yet, for some reason, Antonia was filled with a curious apprehension.
Stella’s preoccupations with poetry and the monarchy had converged in a poem she had written entitled ‘The Return of the King’. She had composed it in a state of quiet exaltation, she said, but by the time she had finished writing it, she had been in floods of tears.
‘Won’t you recite it for us?’ Payne urged.
‘No, no.’ Stella shook her head. She had written the poem in Bulgarian. A spur-of-the-moment English translation would destroy any beauty, significance or deeper meaning the poem might possess. Sometimes translations changed poems beyond recognition.
They were familiar of course with the famous experiment? When a poem was translated from Finnish into English into French into Russian into German into Mandarin Chinese into Swahili into Danish – and then back into Finnish? No? The author of the poem – a Finnish poet of some distinction – had been unable to recognize it! He had written a light-hearted allegory about a lonely clown at a circus who falls in love with one of the two performing bears, not about a divorced woman contemplating suicide in a Tunbridge Wells antique shop.
In the silence that followed, Moon asked if there was any Red Bull.
‘What is “red bull”?’ Morland asked amiably.
‘I am not talking to you,’ Moon said. ‘You didn’t let me take a puff at your cigar, so I am not talking to you.’
‘Would you care for a glass of Coke?’ Winifred might have been referring to some outlandish concoction.
The front door bell rang again and Melisande flounced out of the room.
‘Why can’t I have vodka?’ Moon was heard asking her mother.
‘Because it contains alcohol.’
‘What a dumb thing to say. Vodka is alcohol.’ Moon sighed. She turned to Payne. ‘If you ever want a quick buzz, pour some neat vodka over your eyes. It’s called “drinking through the eyes”.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said with a curt nod.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Arthur, my agent!’ Melisande had reappeared with a small grey-haired man, dressed in a bookmaker’s checked, three-piece suit, who raised her hand to his lips and declared he had been hopelessly in love with her for most of his life.
‘Why hopelessly?’ Moon asked.
‘How are you, Win?’ Arthur waved his hands in the air. ‘Have you read any good books lately?’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t.’
‘Why do people bother to write books? Has it ever occurred to you to wonder?’
‘Frequently,’ Winifred said with a rueful smile.
‘Arturo, darlink, do help yourself to a leetle drinkie,’ Melisande said in a Ruritanian accent.
‘Shame you never did Zsa-Zsa! I can’t remember the exact reason, what was it? You were born to play Zsa- Zsa! What happened?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s all lost now in the mists of time. I believe you persuaded me not to, you faithless man.’
‘No! I always said you were born to play Zsa-Zsa!’
‘I dain’t knair,’ Moon said in Melisande’s voice. She had sidled up to Payne. ‘You faithliss min.’
‘It’s very rude to mimic,’ he pointed out.
‘Arturo looks very camp. Don’t you think he looks camp? He sounds very camp. I don’t like camp men.’
‘There are some things you can think but not say,’ Payne said didactically. Moon laughed.
The front door bell rang again.
3
Wild Thing
‘The Return… of the King!’ Melisande delivered in mock-heroic tones. She mimed the placing of a crown on her head, assumed a solemn expression, then made a neighing sound and pretended to ride a horse. Her mood seemed to have improved considerably. Well, Antonia reflected, she was starting on her third Tomb Raider.
‘Shades of Tolkien… Does King Simeon ride? I suppose all kings ride. At one time it was considered a sine qua non in regal circles.’ Payne was getting bored. Perhaps they could bowl off soon? He stole a glance at his watch, then tried to catch Antonia’s eye.
‘Bravo!’ Arthur clapped his hands. ‘Bravo! How about an encore?’
They had been joined by a morose-faced man – Stanley Lennox, the playwright and author of Tallulah. He was accompanied by an anonymous blonde in tinted glasses.
‘Is there any water? I can’t drink anything but water,’ the blonde in the tinted glasses said.
‘I have a big surprise for Melisande tonight,’ Arthur whispered in Antonia’s ear.
‘You’ve got her a part?’
‘Yes! Coward. Don’t breathe a word. Not yet. She’ll be delighted. She’s been resting for – um – quite a bit. You aren’t an actress too, by any chance?’
‘I am not.’
‘Are you sure? You possess a certain indefinable something.’
Antonia smiled. ‘You don’t really mean that, do you?’
‘I do mean it.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I don’t say these things lightly.’
‘But the King is already in Bulgaria!’ Stella was heard crying triumphantly. ‘He was our Prime Minister, now he leads his own party.’
‘What’s the party called?’ Payne asked.
‘The King’s Party.’
‘How intoxicatingly witty,’ Melisande said. ‘How inordinately original. We must drink to the King’s Party.’
‘I believe the King styles himself Mr Saxe-something-or-other, doesn’t he?’ Morland said. He was smoking a cigar. ‘Quite a mouthful.’
‘Saxcoburggotski,’ Stella said. ‘His advisers persuaded him to take on a name that was the closest to a Bulgarian name. His family name is Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.’
‘Sexcoburggotski,’ Moon said, casting a meaningful glance at her mother, then at Morland.
‘Pleasant sort of chap,’ Morland said. ‘Or so everybody says. Unassuming, though of course he never lets anyone forget who he is. Not particularly effectual, perhaps. Too much of a gentleman. Bulgarians don’t seem to understand him.’
‘They used to execute kings.’ Moon squashed her empty Coke can, producing a crack that might have been a gunshot. ‘My mother used to believe all kings and queens were parasites. My mother was brainwashed by the Communists. She became a “pioneer” and kissed the red flag and then she became a Communist. And she married a Communist. My father was a Communist.’
‘We didn’t have much choice, Moon!’ Stella protested.
‘Now my mother is a Monarchist. My mother is a turncoat. Turncoats should be executed.’
‘Those were such difficult years. My parents struggled, how they struggled. If you wanted to have a successful career, a happy home life or travel abroad, you had to be a Communist. We had no choice! We had to do what we were told. We had to spy on our neighbours.’
‘So that’s where you learnt how to spy.’ Moon nodded. ‘My mother spies on me all the time.’
Moon’s American accent was explained by the fact that she had been attending high school in America, in the state of Pennsylvania. She had had to give it up because her mother’s funds had run out. ‘Stolen money goes fast
