Spare

Still the pain didn’t let up. The medicine apparently wasn’t getting where it needed to go.

He came back, did it again.

Now things both quietened and accelerated.

Her doctor came back two hours later, slipped both hands into a pair of rubber gloves. This is it, everybody. I stationed myself at the head of the bed, holding Meg’s hand, encouraging her. Push, my love. Breathe. The doctor gave Meg a small hand mirror. I tried not to look, but I had to. I glanced, saw a reflection of the baby’s head emerging. Stuck. Tangled. Oh, no, please, no. The doctor looked up, her mouth set in a particular way. Things were getting serious.

I said to Meg: My love, I need you to push.

I didn’t tell her why. I didn’t tell her about the cord, didn’t tell her about the likelihood of an emergency C-section. I just said: Give me everything you’ve got.

And she did.

I saw the little face, the tiny neck and chest and arms, wriggling, writhing. Life, life—amazing! I thought, Wow, it really all begins with a struggle for freedom.

A nurse swept the baby into a towel and placed him on Meg’s chest and we both cried to see him, meet him. A healthy little boy, and he was here.

Our ayurvedic doctor had advised us that, in the first minute of life, a baby absorbs everything said to them. So whisper to the baby, tell the baby your wish for him, your love. Tell.

We told.

I don’t remember phoning anyone, texting them. I remember watching the nurses run tests on my hour-old son, and then we were out of there. Into the lift, into the underground car park, into the people-carrier, and gone. Within two hours of our son being born we were back at Frogmore. The sun had risen and we were behind closed doors before the official announcement was released…

Saying Meg had gone into labor?

I had a tiff with Sara about that. You know she’s not in labor anymore, I said.

She explained that the press must be given the dramatic, suspenseful story they demanded.

But it’s not true, I said.

Ah, truth didn’t matter. Keeping people tuned to the show, that was the thing.

After a few hours I was standing outside the stables at Windsor, telling the world: It’s a boy. Days later we announced the name to the world. Archie.

The papers were incensed. They said we’d pulled a fast one on them.

Indeed we had.

They felt that, in doing so, we’d been…bad partners?

Astonishing. Did they still think of us as partners? Did they really expect special consideration, preferential treatment—given how they’d treated us these last three years?

And then they showed the world what kind of “partners” they really were. A BBC radio presenter posted a photo on his social media—a man and a woman holding hands with a chimpanzee.

The caption read: Royal baby leaves hospital.

66.

I had a long tea with Granny, just before she left for Balmoral. I gave her a recap, all the latest. She knew a bit, but I was filling in important gaps.

She looked shocked.

Appalling, she said.

She vowed to send the Bee to talk to us.

I’d spent my life dealing with courtiers, scores of them, but now I dealt mostly with just three, all middle-aged white men who’d managed to consolidate power through a series of bold Machiavellian maneuvers. They had normal names, exceedingly British names, but they sort more easily into zoological categories. The Bee. The Fly. And the Wasp.

The Bee was oval-faced and fuzzy and tended to glide around with great equanimity and poise, as if he was a boon to all living things. He was so poised that people didn’t fear him. Big mistake. Sometimes their last mistake.

The Fly had spent much of his career adjacent to, and indeed drawn to, shit. The offal of government, and media, the wormy entrails, he loved it, grew fat on it, rubbed his hands in glee over it, though he pretended otherwise. He strove to give off an air of casualness, of being above the fray, coolly efficient and ever helpful.

The Wasp was lanky, charming, arrogant, a ball of jazzy energy. He was great at pretending to be polite, even servile. You’d assert a fact, something seemingly incontrovertible—I believe the sun rises in the mornings—and he’d stammer that perchance you might consider for a moment the possibility that you’d been misinformed: Well, heh-heh, I don’t know about that, Your Royal Highness, you see, it all depends what you mean by mornings, sir.

Because he seemed so weedy, so self-effacing, you might be tempted to push back, insist on your point, and that was when he’d put you on his list. A short time later, without warning, he’d give you such a stab with his outsized stinger that you’d cry out in confusion. Where the fuck did that come from?