the information she passed on to him. Tucking herself close to him on the sofa, the not unpleasant smell of chocolate suddenly released into the air, she would lay her hand on his knee before hissing, “Glad to find a moment when we can be alone. I have something to tell you.”
The detailed gossip that she delivered about life at Fort Belvedere, even down to the menus, interested him less than her inadvertent revelations about the hypocrisy of the king. The impression that he gave to the majority of the British people of minding more about their welfare than he did about his own was a falsehood that enraged Julian. The king appeared to care about one thing only, and she was not even British. Voltaire’s two-hundred-year-old assessment of Louis XV that kings always deceive their peoples described Britain’s new monarch perfectly, he thought.
Socialism was the dominant aphrodisiac in Julian’s life, he concluded as he shifted his weight on the dirty Wigan mattress. Friendships with men, women, and even potential lovers, especially Lottie, took second place. At times he questioned whether he had ever properly loved anyone at all. Last week he had endured yet another uncomfortable lunch at his mother’s London flat. The reheated beef stew and a spoonful of tepid lumpy mashed potatoes made him swear for the thousandth time that he would never repeat the experience. The absurd grandeur of Mrs. Richardson’s dining table with its white lace cloth, thick linen napkins and ebony blackamoors holding little saucers of salt aloft clashed with the standard of the food placed upon it. Yesterday, Julian had noted the absence of the usual jellied potted meat with relief. Going on past practice he had expected his mother to offer him a slice of what was almost certainly cat food, in her predictable attempts at economising for her son’s visits.
“A little pâté, darling?” she would enquire as they sat down to the hideous meal, a lit cigarette in the holder that was as familiar to her mouth as cheddar to a mousetrap.
The atmosphere in the sitting room was, if anything, worse than the dining room. The affectations of his mother’s crocheted antimacassar on the back of the armchair; her Du Maurier in its little holder, which she puffed at distastefully, as if blowing into some sort of respiratory device; and her anti-Semitic, class-obsessing topics of conversation all coalesced to make Julian feel like screaming.
The phrase “airs above her station” was one he had occasionally heard Cooky utter under her breath when Mrs. Cage had left the room. The same phrase might have been invented for his mother, who had inherited her few fancy possessions from a distant cousin who had lived his life as an heirless bachelor.
The conversation between Julian and his mother rarely deviated from three topics: how she never saw enough of her only son, how difficult it was to make ends meet, and the royal family. Extinguishing her cigarette before immediately lighting another, Mrs. Richardson would mention the same long-dead cousin who had worked briefly as junior equerry for the last king, the connection apparently giving her licence to make judgements as if she were an intimate of the ruling family.
“I do think it is a pity that the king must wait so long for the actual coronation. He must feel quite in limbo. I am convinced he is dying to walk around with that crown on his head!” she had observed last week.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” Julian snapped but on she went, lighting another cigarette and positioning it securely in the dainty holder.
“You may think I am ridiculous but someone in my position has a good idea of how he must feel.”
And with that she got up to fetch an ashtray, a mist of Chanel No. 5 following her into the kitchen, the Duchess of York’s favourite scent so her cousin had once divulged in the strictest of confidence. Julian remained at the table, trying not to react to his mother’s habit of walking away whenever she heard something she did not like but knew to be true. Even if Philip had not asked him to keep the account of Mrs. Simpson’s dinner to himself, Julian would never have given his mother the satisfaction of hearing it. His mother’s irritability was based partly on her suspicion that Julian concealed from her the details of a life that she would have given her eyeteeth to hear about.
Julian never spoke to Mrs. Richardson about his father either. When the