An end of the world black comedy
by William M Johnson

Sneak Preview

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2. With the Monarchy still besieged by the scandal-mongering gutter press, HRH prepares for his forthcoming visit to the Earth Summit…

"What a simply ghastly woman!" rasped HRH, terminating the image of Cha Cha Calibri with a disgusted stab at the remote control of the Royal Television. "These appalling emotional outbursts – gives conservation a bad name. Ruins everything we’re trying to achieve." The Queen, who knew better than to argue with her husband on such vexed issues as Britain’s moral decay, saving wildlife by shooting it, and whether the yapping Royal Corgis deserved survival either as individuals or a species, instead gazed wistfully at the silver framed portraits of her children. Yes, they had been foolish enough to wed and bed commoners and that, the Queen’s train of thought added with sudden asperity, most definitely included members of the Sloane Rangers who did not even seem to be on a nodding acquaintance with reality. She should have known better, put her foot down firmly when she had come across the young Princess-to-be twirling round the Palace, cooing, "It’s simply wizard!"

The Royal Fairy Tale Romance was now not so much a shattered dream as the razor-sharp shards of a nightmare. The gutter press. So unmerciful in their pillorying of her children for their affairs and infidelities. The telescopic lenses of the paparazzi lurking behind trees and bushes or concealed in the undergrowth, ready to record any possible indiscretion. Cavorting topless in St. Tropez… the most intimate and incriminating telephone conversations bugged by treacherous palace staff and bribed MI5 agents… the centuries-old nuptial ritual involving a horsehair swish and a bowl of custard, dissected in the most humiliating detail by the popular TV sex doctor… the young Princess’ desperate suicide attempt, slashing her wrists with a cheese-grater…

An electronic sweep of the Palace had found bugging devices concealed in the most bizarre locations – flowerpots, bedpans, jodhpurs, a pair of lovingly restored Victorian camiknickers, and even implanted in one of the ears of the royal corgis. The beleaguered House of Badmoral – a constant, bubbling brew of scandal. This was a subject also guaranteed to send the Duke into paroxysms of rage. "We’re going to end up like the bloody Royal Family in Monaco," he’d bellow, sending the petrified Palace servants scurrying for cover. "Reduced to a circus sideshow!"

Once the dry rot had set in, it had spread with a stubborn vengeance, an insidious creeping malaise that no amount of imaginative damage control or royal self-sacrifice could check. The announcement of another, though admittedly minor Royal wedding had hardly touched the front pages; the proclamation that the Queen would pay the same rate of income tax as any other similarly unemployed subject of the realm greeted with a gruff ‘about time’ by the sanctimonious scandal sheets. Not even the sensational outpourings of sympathy for the Queen Mother, rushed to hospital with another bear’s paw canapé lodged in her gullet, had stemmed the Royal Family’s fading fortunes.

It was almost as though the sacred fabric of the monarchy had begun to fray and tear. As if to confirm her worst fears, the Queen noticed for the first time the web of fine cracks in the portraits of her ancestors which adorned the Palace walls.

The reluctant decision to pay tax had irked the Duke most of all. It was, he reasoned, a most peculiar, illogical notion. The government department in question was Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue and it was therefore quite beyond the bounds of reason that she should be obliged to pay tax to herself.

"Mark my words," the Duke had fumed. "This is the slippery slope to Republicanism. The mind boggles!" One only had to look at the Greeks and their dethroned King and Queen. Exiled from their own country, they were virtually paupers, forced to subsist on their own meagre personal revenues that hardly exceeded five million a year. As Britain edged inexorably towards Third World status, the prospects were bleak indeed.

The once fawning media were now promoting the most facile, absurd, unjust corollary between Britain’s rabble of homeless living in cardboard boxes because they didn’t possess sufficient initiative or gumption to get a job, and the Royal Family’s palaces, castles, estates, trains, planes and yachts. Good Lord, most of these did not even belong to the family per se, but to the Crown!

"And we give so much to charity!" HRH had declared bitterly after the initial storm of outrage.

"We don’t actually give anything to charity," the Queen responded, determined now to move with the times and allow the servants to be watered twice a day.

"Well, not in hard currency, obviously," the Duke snorted with impatience. "But we give our time and our names. That’s the greatest contribution of all. If you quantify that, it’s worth millions!"

It had been one annus horribilis after another, or as the Duke himself declared in caustic mockery of the Palace speech-writers, a royal pain in the annus.

Now taking a brief sojourn at Badmoral Castle, they sat in the Bonnie Prince Charlie Chamber, a spacious room of red leather, dark oak panelling and an immense stone fireplace. The Queen cast an occasional glance at her husband, her mouth forming a firm anxious line. He sat brooding in front of the blank television screen, the latest crisis preying on his mind.

In another stinging rebuke, the press had pounced, claws unsheathed, on the Palace’s announcement that the Duke would travel to the Earth Summit on the Royal Yacht. It was simply insufferable. They knew full well that he was committed to a hectic and crushing schedule in various Caribbean colonies, attending cricket and croquet matches, delivering speeches and hosting banquets. The Duke seethed. The unmitigated gall of these people!

And to top it all, he was now expected to travel cheek by jowl with the Sloane Ranger who in her artful manipulation of the media had suddenly taken an interest in animal welfare, of all things. It was perfectly intolerable. From the very outset she had behaved like an ambitious shop-girl, the Palace resounding with her silly hysterical tantrums. No sense of decorum. No breeding. The Jezebel had brought them all to the brink of ruin. And now this spurious emotional concern for the welfare of animals, threatening to compromise the rational exploitation of species which he promoted as President of the Dodo Foundation. An involuntary memory flooded his mind, so jarring that it caused him to grind his teeth. Her mindless hysterical outburst as they shot quail, stamping her feet and shrieking at them that the hunting of animals was horrid! beastly! barbaric! And all because the Prince, having accomplished his breeding duty to ensure the succession to the throne, had vacated her bedchamber. There was no doubt about it. There was a lot to be said for Henry VIII.

A crisis at every turn. Little wonder that the press now dubbed them the world’s most famous dysfunctional family. But at least there was hope for the grandchildren. He was only ten, but little Prince Jamie had been bagging rabbits all morning. Shooting and killing the animals just for the fun of it, and learning conservation a man’s way. A chip off the old block.

"Oh, do pass the poultry tweezers," the Queen said, suddenly disrupting his train of thought. "There’s still lead shot in my pheasant sandwich."

"Damned servants. Hopelessly inadequate. Spend more time dreaming up feeble excuses than performing their duties as they should."

Just then, a rather amiable little moth fluttered innocently through the great hall of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Queen gasped, her hand rising to her chest in a gesture of dismay. Ignoring her husband’s manic discourse on incompetence, she summoned the servants and kitchen staff with a brisk, incensed tug of the bell cord. A dozen assorted members of the ‘below stairs’ household dutifully appeared, stumbling in suppressed panic from the converted dungeons. In a frantic preening effort, the normally invisible kitchen skivvies tugged at their creased aprons and licked down their unruly hair with a palmful of spittle. Looking vaguely presentable they now hovered in a guilt-ridden little huddle at the doorway. These humble individuals, strangely content with their station in life, inhabited a twilight world, as though purgatory had been installed as a household fixture. Afflicted by chronic nervous anticipation, they were rigorously trained to read aristocratic body language, able to respond to the slightest gesture that signalled an order, desire or passing whim to be fulfilled. They also lived in perpetual terror of a fumbled command or sudden inexcusable clumsiness that in their worst nightmare would tip a bottle of burgundy or a roast sucking pig into the lap of a distinguished guest.

Scientific research suggested that this strange, irrational fear was nurtured by the claustrophobic, secretive society within the Palace. Probing the Royal Household’s collective unconscious between the entrée and the dessert during a 17-course banquet, two distinguished visiting psychologists had privately attributed the condition not, as might have been expected, to a deep-seated psychological aversion to living in a cardboard box under Waterloo Bridge, but to a rare atavistic phenomenon known as serfdom.

"I’m sure it’s a moth!" the Queen gasped. "Locate it immediately!" The Duke watched with a sardonic grimace as the servants fanned out awkwardly through the chamber, wringing their hands in anxiety, their eyes scanning the ceiling, their faces dutifully set into a concern just exaggerated enough to display their loyalty to those who might be scrutinising their conduct and demeanour.

"I think it’s disappeared into the curtains!"

Moth, its little quivering antennae picking up all sorts of predatory vibrations, alighted on the immense carved mantelpiece.

"There! There!" the Queen shouted, stabbing her finger at the offending creature. A footman darted forward and trapped Moth under a whisky glass.

"Is it one of those moths that eat carpets? I’ve told you time and time again to use up the organic grains in good time. Otherwise they become a breeding ground for moths." She cast a baleful glare at the kitchen staff whose faces paled in contrition.

"I don’t think it’s one of those moths, Ma’am," the footman declared, carrying the specimen back to their Highnesses on a silver tray as though he were serving an after-dinner cocktail. "Its wings are all gold and speckly underneath. Rather attractive. Perhaps it’s an endangered species."

"It is now," the Duke declared, tilting the glass and rubbing out the life of the creature between thumb and forefinger.

When the servants had been dismissed with another stern warning to regularly monitor the food inventory, the Duke bounded out of his chair.

"Well, off to the Hunt. Just hope we have better luck today with the stags. Do you know that damned fox got away from us yesterday? Cowardly beast dived into some garden. Terrible rumpus with some old biddy in hysterics… Bleeding hearts!"

But the Queen already knew of the incident and had hidden that morning’s edition of the Daily Asteroid under the cushions. ‘HRH Claims Fox-Hunting Conserves Nature,’ the headline blared. Shaking open the offending rag with a brisk rustle, she read on:

‘Interviewed after the horrific incident, Miss Ethel Tibbs, an eighty-year-old spinster who had to be rushed to hospital in a state of shock said: "If His Royal Highness says fox-hunting is good for protecting foxes I’m sure he must be right. I’ve always been a loyal subject. But I had no idea that nature conservation was such a messy, dangerous business. I don’t think it’s suitable for my garden and porch."

As she was wheeled into the emergency examining room where doctors were standing by, she added: "I am very annoyed at the hounds galloping all over my flower beds."

The Joint Master of the Hunt, Major Edgar Higgins (Retd.), said: "We try exceptionally hard to be polite but sometimes it’s just not possible… We don’t like cruelty but occasionally it can’t be avoided. It is somewhat inevitable in the natural scheme of things. I fully share the view of His Royal Highness that hunting is good for the countryside, good for nature and good for the animals we’re hunting. It keeps them fit."

Badmoral Castle refused to comment on the incident.

Following a formal complaint by the Hunt, police arrested Miss Dorothy Pillbeam, 78, a retired nanny, who was charged with reckless endangerment as she tried to obstruct the Hunt.

Said Major Higgins, 54: "The authorities must do something to curb the antics of these hunt protesters and saboteurs. Their mindless interference in legitimate blood sports could soon result in death or serious injury."

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