“We’re not that old, Rebecca,” Marj said in her regular voice. “No one wants to stop you from having a shag altogether.” She cleared her throat. “But, er, Her Majesty wishes to convey that if His Royal Highness insists on spending the night, your current situation is undesirable.”
I felt backed into a corner. The Palace could not be perceived as setting up Nick’s good-time girl in a fancy flat, and nor did I want that to happen, but as a lowly greeting-card artist I couldn’t afford to satisfy the decree on my own. However, this gave my dad the leverage he’d been waiting for, because he’d been itching to move me somewhere nicer for ages, and I’d refused to accept his financial help. So on what remained of Lacey’s winter break, he sent her over with a budget and a mandate, and together we found a gorgeous place in Chelsea: the top floor of a smart redbrick building in a mews just off Old Church Street, with a cloistered back entrance and a petite front garden that set it slightly back from the road. We signed the lease and I spent the year taking gentle teasing from my father that he was spending my entire dowry but was relieved he didn’t have to give up any livestock. Lacey was so taken with my reality inching closer to her England fantasy that she insisted I needed her, and by April, she’d convinced my parents and, somehow, NYU, that she should take a short leave of absence because my unusual circumstance required her moral and emotional support. It would be our first time living together since before I went to Oxford, and I was happy about it, even if it was only for an extended summer. Everything was changing so quickly; maybe having Lacey back in my life would help things feel the same.
It was an impossible wish. That one unguarded second in Klosters marked a sea change in Nick. He stopped drinking or dancing, and started getting frustrated if he felt any of us was imbibing too much, reveling too loudly, lowering our guards. When Lacey returned for the summer and rekindled her dalliance with Freddie, Nick fretted about how careless they might be, what media stoning Lacey or I would receive—or, almost worse, what admonishments would come from Eleanor or Richard. The clouds over his head rivaled anything the British climate could conjure.
“Pipe down and untwist, Knickers,” Freddie would say, handing him a drink that would go untouched. “You’re not the king yet.”
“But this is how it starts,” Nick insisted. “You think no one is watching, so you stop being vigilant. And then they pounce.”
It bothered me that Nick was so daunted. Before, it had been easy to live like we’d begun everything together, like nothing of consequence happened to either of us before that rainy day at Pembroke. But Nick’s almost pathological fear of the headlines, larger than the headlines themselves, reminded me that there had been twenty or so mile markers before me, and I knew surprisingly little about the journey between them.
*
The paparazzi wasted no time finding my new flat, and furthermore became my regular greeting and salutation anytime I entered or exited Greetings & Salutations. The pictures landed on blogs and message boards that dissected my nose (natural?), my boobs (too small?), my taste (emphatically too boring), and even though Lacey meticulously helped track what I’d worn each week so that I didn’t look like I was living in my own laundry pile, the occasional comment would pop up from within G&S walls with precise details about how often I repeated my shirts. By June, the colleagues who were once disinterested in anything but their own professional frustrations started guiltily closing papers whenever I passed, and I couldn’t grab a Diet Coke from the fridge without hearing whispers about my clothes, or which columnist had spied Ceres at Nick’s favorite club, India at Clarence House, or Gemma Sands at Heathrow. Even the woman who read The Economist every day had swapped it for Hello!
One especially sweltering summer afternoon, the heat outside causing the industrial carpet in our office to reek even more strongly of chemicals, I was plugging away on a new line of sympathy cards with the meaningless directive “The Modern Condolence.” Two of my coworkers loudly discussed how my gray suede kicks had sold out online since being featured in heat, and even the usual din from Piccadilly Circus—a constant soundtrack of roaring buses and honking horns—wasn’t drowning them out. I couldn’t focus. I had ten cards to illustrate and no inkling whatsoever about which blossoms conveyed a hipper sense of sadness than usual. Frustrated, I pushed my chair backward to stretch my legs, and crashed into something human.
“Dangerous as ever, Killer,” a familiar voice said.
“Freddie!”
I leapt up and hugged him, as everyone within gaping or gasping distance did one or both of those things. Freddie seemed unperturbed by their curiosity, perching rakishly on my desk, a fluorescent light flickering its way to death just over his lavishly cute head. Two extremely unlikely worlds were colliding. The office grapevine would never recover.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Just passing through,” he said blithely. “Piccadilly Circus is wonderful for quiet reflection.” He caught the eye of Pandora Millstone, the old battle-ax who sat in the cube next to mine and wore an endless rotation of olive cardigans. “How are you supposed to have juicy, private conversations if everyone is out in the open, listening to each other?”
Pandora dropped the highlighter she was holding.
“Just teasing,” he said, winking at her. “I am here to discuss, er, a commission. A card for, ah, my father’s beloved manservant Barnes. He’s such a…special creature.”
“Let’s go in the conference room.”
“Right! Cheerio,” Freddie said to the people in our vicinity. “You look lovely in that cardie…Pandora,” he said, reading her nameplate. “Makes me crave a martini.”
I grabbed a notepad and all but shoved him into the conference room. It had windows, but at least we could speak privately.
“Nick is going to kill you,” I said closing the door with a firm click. “People will totally gossip about this.”
“You’d be surprised. A spot of charm goes a long way,” Freddie said smugly.
“Humble as always,” I said. “What’s up? Don’t tell me you just dropped by to give Pandora a thrill.”
“It’s a fringe benefit. I rather enjoy flummoxing people,” he said. “Mostly I just wanted to say hi. I had bits to do at Clarence House that were hopelessly dull, so I thought, why not pop by for some greeting-card intrigue?”
“I didn’t realize Frederick Wales could just ‘pop by’ anywhere,” I said.
Freddie shrugged as he took a seat at the head of the table, spinning in the chair like a child. “Don’t tell, but this area is so full of tourists that I often wander around by myself and nobody notices,” he said. “They never think to look. It’s quite relaxing.”
“I know.” I sat opposite him. “That week before the press found my office was fantastic.”
“I’m surprised they even bothered looking,” he said. “It’s much better for them to report that you’re a lazy money-grubbing shrew.”