“We’re in this together,” I said. “And don’t stress. Between your guys and all our PPOs, we’re in good hands here. You and I are gonna nail this.”
I held out my fist, and she paused for a second before bumping it, awkwardly, as if it were the first time she’d done that.
“We are going to be friends, I hope,” she said.
“Too late. We already are,” I said. “The last time I made a new friend was in college. I’m glad to have you.”
The rest of the morning was a well-choreographed blur. Daphne and I were near the end of the procession, so photographs were already underway when we arrived. Richard, in a gray suit with a dapper tie and pocket square, stood with Hax on one side—as fair as Richard was dark, and a head shorter—and Nick and Freddie on the other in their usual dueling blues. Nick had a stripe in his tie that coordinated with my deep berry coatdress and shoes, painstakingly crafted by the team at Alexander McQueen. We certainly looked the part, if nothing else.
“How did it go?” I whispered when I caught up to him.
“Quite well,” he said. “The king told Richard I was very well informed during the inspection.” His lips twitched. “Freddie didn’t get a word in, for once.”
“It’s not a contest,” I said through a smile.
“Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it,” was his response.
Daphne, aware as she was that her home country’s papers would make a huge deal out of her traveling for this, stayed admirably steady. But I could already see how her mother would be an impossible act to follow, both as a human and as a queen. Her dress was the color of sunshine; her hat, like nothing so much as a feathered pineapple. The photos of her carriage ride with Nick and Freddie were practically dental porn, so wide and open were their mouths from laughing together. She loved the exhibit of memorabilia from the UK and the Netherlands’ long relationship. She sympathized expertly with the prime minister, a bucktoothed septuagenarian named Doris Tuesday, on a matter that had bedeviled the House of Commons recently. And she gushed over the official gift from Richard: a framed photograph of Eleanor meeting a seven-year-old Hax in Holland sometime in the mid ’60s, in which he wore an ear-to-ear grin and Eleanor wore a hat that looked like a sea urchin. When Lax learned the photo had been Nick’s idea, she had taken his face in her hands and announced he was doing great credit to Eleanor. And she did all of this with vibrant sincerity, altogether projecting a wildly different vibe than the more proper and restrained Eleanor would have.
Well, Britain and the Netherlands are wildly different countries, I imagined Eleanor saying with a haughty sniff.
The dinner was to take place in the same Buckingham Palace ballroom where Nick had his twenty-fifth birthday celebration. Back then I had to pretend I didn’t love him, as we were dating in secret, but at least got to do so in a dress that I’d liked. This time, I was publicly his lawful wife, but we were barely speaking in private, and my outfit would live in infamy.
“This…is…” Donna’s voice had shot up two octaves as she yanked my ball gown out of the dress bag. “A bubblegum nightmare.”
The dress was a pink fabric, shot through with subtle gold swirls, like a brocade you’d use to upholster an expensive chair in a child’s nursery. I poked at the leg-of-mutton sleeves, hoping they would deflate. They did not. It was like Molly Ringwald’s dress at the end of Pretty in Pink, crossed with Nick’s mother’s wedding gown, with a dash of a hot-air balloon.
“Is it too late to call Harrods?” I asked.
“You can’t wear off-the-rack to a state dinner!” Donna collapsed into a silk-upholstered chair in the back bedroom that we’d turned into my dressing area. “They told me they were on it. They told me they had a fresh concept. It’s Alexander bloody McQueen and they’ve never steered me wrong before so I trusted them. Did someone over there have a stroke?” She put her forehead in her hands. “Am I having a stroke?”
“I mean, it’s…directional?” I offered. “Isn’t that the word Vogue is always using?”
Donna pulled the same face she’d made the time we tried to see if I could carry off culottes.
“The American’t is always squawking that I’m too boring. Besides, the press pool won’t be there,” I