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“Yeah,” Henry says, voice rough. “We all went round the bend a bit. Philip justhadto be the man of the family, and I was an arsehole, and Mum didn’t leave her rooms. Bea just stopped seeing the point in anything. I was starting uni when she finished, and Philip was deployed halfway round the globe, and she was out every single night with all the posh London hipsters, sneaking out to play guitar at secret shows and doing mountains of cocaine. The paperslovedit.”
“Jesus,” Alex hisses. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Henry says, steadiness rising in his voice as if he’s stuck out his chin in that stubborn way he does sometimes. Alex wishes he could see it. “In any event, the speculation and paparazzi photos and the goddamn nickname got to be too much, and Philip came home for a week, and he and Gran literally put her in a car and had her driven to rehab and called it awellness retreatto the press.”
“Wait—sorry,” Alex says before he can stop himself. “Just. Where was your mom?”
“Mum hasn’t been involved in much since Dad died,” Henry says on an exhale, then stops short. “Sorry. That’s not fair. It’s… the grief has been total for her. It was paralyzing. Itisparalyzing. She was such a spitfire. I dunno. She still listens, and she tries, and she wants us to be happy. But I don’t know if she has it in her anymore to be a part of anyone’s happiness.”
“That’s… horrible.”
A pause, heavy.
“Anyway, Bea went,” Henry goes on, “against her will, and didn’t think she had a problem at all, even though you could see her bloody ribs and she’d barely spoken to me in months,when we grew up inseparable. Checked herself out after six hours. I remember her calling me that night from a club, and I lost it. I was, what, eighteen? I drove there and she was sitting on the back steps, high as a kite, and I sat down next to her and cried and told her she wasn’t allowed to kill herself because Dad was gone and I was gay and I didn’t know what the hell to do, and that was how I came out to her.
“The next day, she went back, and she’s been clean ever since, and neither of us has ever told anyone about that night. Until now, I suppose. And I’m not sure why I’ve said all this, I just, I’ve never really said any of it. I mean, Pez was there for most of it, so, and I—I don’t know.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever said this many words out loud in a row in my entire life, so please feel free to put me out of my misery any time now.”
“No, no,” Alex says, stumbling over his own tongue in a rush. “I’m glad you told me. Does it feel better at all to have said it?”
Henry goes silent, and Alex wants so badly to see the shadows of expressions moving across his face, to be able to touch them with his fingertips. Alex hears a swallow across the line, and Henry says, “I suppose so. Thank you. For listening.”
“Yeah, of course,” Alex tells him. “I mean, it’s good to have times when it’s not all about me, as tedious and exhausting as it may be.”
That earns him a groan, and he bites back a smile when Henry says, “You are awanker.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, and he takes the opportunity to ask a question he’s been wanting to ask for months. “So, um. Does anybody else know? About you?”
“Bea’s the only one in the family I’ve told, though I’m surethe rest have suspected. I was always a bit different, never quite had the stiff upper lip. I think Dad knew and never cared. But Gran sat me down the day I finished my A levels and made it abundantly clear I was not to let anyone know about any deviant desires I might be beginning to harbor that might reflect poorly upon the crown, and there were appropriate channels to maintain appearances if necessary. So.”
Alex’s stomach turns over. He pictures Henry, a teenager, back-broken with grief and told to keep it and the rest of him shut up tight.
“What the fuck. Seriously?”
“The wonders of the monarchy,” Henry says loftily.
“God.” Alex scrubs a hand across his face. “I’ve had to fake some shit for my mom, but nobody’s ever outright told me tolieabout who I am.”
“I don’t think she sees it as lying. She sees it as doing what must be done.”
“Sounds like bullshit.”
Henry sighs. “Hardly any other options, are there?”
There’s a long pause, and Alex is thinking about Henry in his palace, Henry and the years behind him, how he got here. He bites his lip.
“Hey,” Alex says. “Tell me about your dad.”
Another pause.
“Sorry?”
“I mean, if you don’t—if you want to. I was just thinking I don’t know much about him except that he was James Bond. What was he like?”
Alex paces the Solarium and listens to Henry talk, stories about a man with Henry’s same sandy hair and strong, straight nose, someone Alex has met in shadows that pass through theway Henry speaks and moves and laughs. He hears about sneaking out of the palace and joyriding around the countryside, learning to sail, being propped up in director’s chairs. The man Henry remembers is both superhuman and heartbreakingly flesh and blood, a man who encompassed Henry’s entire childhood and charmed the world but was also simply a man.
The way Henry talks about him is a physical feat, drifting up in the corners with fondness but sagging in the middle under the weight. He tells Alex in a low voice how his parents met—Princess Catherine, dead set on being the first princess with a doctorate, mid-twenties and wading through Shakespeare. How she went to seeHenry Vat the RSC and Arthur was starring, how she pushed her way backstage and shook off her security to disappear into London with him and dance all night. How the Queen forbid it, but she married him anyway.
He tells Alex about growing up in Kensington, how Bea sang and Philip clung to his grandmother, but they were happy, buttoned up in cashmere and knee socks and whisked through foreign countries in helicopters and shiny cars. A brass telescope from his father for his seventh birthday. How he realized by the time he was four that every person in the country knew his name, and how he told his mother he didn’t know if he wanted them to, and how she knelt down and told him she’d let nothing touch him, not ever.
