For All Nails #129: The Language of Love
by Johnny Pez
(Special thanks to Princess Sophia's real-life model for her comments on this vignette, and especially for the note on FANTL vindaloo. She is not, however, responsible for the cruel fate of crepes suzette.)
- London, Great Britain
- 6 September 1974
"Como esta usted?" Princess Sophia mumbled to herself as she crawled out of bed. "Esta bien." For the past six weeks she had been spending four hours a day speed-learning Spanish in anticipation of her upcoming marriage to King Fernando of New Granada. "Como se dice en español 'sodding knackered'?" The process had been aided by the French and Latin she had learned in school; without them, she was sure it would have taken her a year to reach her current level of competence. Sophia was certain she would be fluent enough by the time of her marriage to make her way in New Granadan society, provided that all those irregular Spanish verbs didn't kill her first.
"No entiendo, por favor." By now, Sophia was starting to wonder whether she wouldn't have been better off marrying the Earl of Doncaster after all. There were worse things in life than pushing an old man around in a wheelchair, and at the moment, trying to memorize lists of verb tenses felt like one of them. With visions of adverbs dancing in her head, Sophia went through her morning routine. She crossed another day off of her calendar, bringing her one day closer to the moment she would board the airmobile at Perivale Airpark and fly away from Buckingham Palace forever.
She rang up the kitchen and asked the cook to fix her breakfast, telling her she'd be eating in the small upstairs dining room. Then she rang up Daisy to let her know she was up. In less than a minute, there was a knock on her door, and Sophia opened it.
One week after the official announcement of Sophia's betrothal had been made, three people had arrived at the palace from New Granada. The first was Dr. Alvarez, who would be tutoring Sophia in the language and culture of her new country. The second was Brother Francisco, the Spanish monk who would be overseeing her conversion to Catholicism. And the third was the improbably named Daisy Fuentes, who would be Sophia's lady-in-waiting.
Sophia had always tried to minimise her reliance on the servants in Buckingham Palace, knowing as she did that their main job was to spy on her for her parents. She had meant to keep Daisy at arm's length as well, but it hadn't worked out that way. As far as Daisy was concerned, Sophia was already her Queen, and a queen did not brush her own hair or fetch her own clothing from the wardrobe. Sophia had finally resigned herself to the inevitable, and allowed Daisy to act the part of a full time servant.
In addition to her other skills, Daisy spoke fluent English, so when she entered the room it was with a cheerful, "Good morning, Your Highness. Did you sleep well?"
Sophia sighed as Daisy went to the wardrobe and began to sort through the clothing within. "As well as can be expected when I've got a million verb endings clamoring in my brain."
Daisy proceeded to lay out various items of clothing: black skirt, black pullover, black boots and black jacket. "Why black, Your Highness?" she asked.
"It's only till I find something darker," Sophia answered with a wink.
"You do understand, Your Highness," Daisy answered with a raised eyebrow, "that when you become Queen you're going to have to start wearing at least some colours. Your subjects will expect it."
With Daisy's assistance, Sophia attired herself for the day, saying, "I thought it was supposed to be the other way round? Whatever the Queen wears is the height of fashion? It always worked that way for Queen Elizabeth."
Daisy clicked her tongue in disapproval. "They didn't have Maria Alonso FN1 in the sixteenth century. If they had, Queen Elizabeth would have known that you don't wear pearls with floral designs."
As she brushed Sophia's hair, Daisy rattled on about what the other servants were up to. Sophia knew she shouldn't listen to such things, but she found the irony of her spying on the servants rather than vice versa irresistible. Daisy's gossip was always so detailed that one day Sophia had finally broken down and asked how she managed to learn so much.
"It's easy," Daisy said with a grin. "Around the other servants I always speak nothing but Spanish, so they all assume I don't understand English."
After Daisy left with a cheerful "Adios, mi princesa," Sophia rose from her dresser. As she had every day since she was eight, she drew back the curtains from a set of French windows, opened them, and stepped onto a balcony looking out onto St. James's Park. She stood and watched the people who wandered among its green spaces.
Sophia didn't tell herself that their lives were better than hers; she knew well enough that it wasn't so. She didn't have to work for a living, and she never worried about bills or where her next meal was coming from. She was also perfectly well aware that there were plenty of men out there who made her father look like a saint.
Still, those people, most of them at any rate, were able to decide for themselves how to shape their lives: which jobs to pursue, which people to marry. They could do or say what they wished without causing a national scandal. The outlines of her own life had been determined from the moment of her birth.
After a time, Sophia turned away and stepped back inside her room, closing the windows and drawing the curtains shut. Her breakfast would be waiting for her, and after that, her first set of language lessons with Dr. Alvarez.
As always, Dr. Alvarez was waiting for her in the library. This in itself was a measure of the shifting balance of power within the palace. The library had always been her father's domain, from which other members of the royal family were excluded. He had no particular use for books, preferring more violent and disreputable pursuits, but his possessiveness made him loathe the thought of others making any use of them. Privately, Sophia thought that her father's policy was directed as much against the books themselves as it was against his despised family -- it suited his spiteful nature to render their collective wisdom useless.
But the day Dr. Alvarez had arrived, he had asked her where she would like their lessons to be held, and she had immediately answered the library. Now that she was a key component of Sir Geoffrey Gold's foreign policy initiative, his "Grand Alliance", she had the power to override her father's objections, and she did so. In the endless war that was family life in Buckingham Palace, she had scored a major victory and driven her father in rout from one of his most heavily fortified redoubts. The library was the spoils of victory, and she always felt like a conquering general when she entered.
Which was all to the good, given the struggle she faced there every day. "Good day, Your Highness," Dr. Alvarez greeted her in Spanish, bowing his head.
"Good day, Dr. Alvarez," Sophia replied, seating herself at the table where their lessons took place.
Joining her at the table, the Doctor continued, "How is your translation of the life of Admiral Rodriguez proceeding?"
"It is proceeding well, Doctor. I have reached the Admiral's circumnavigation of South America." The Doctor was a great believer in integrating Sophia's various lessons. Her readings in New Granadan history had reached the Carlist Wars, the Neogranadan component of the Trans-Oceanic War. Naturally, then, the language lesson ought to serve the dual purpose of teaching her about that war's most prominent naval hero as well as expanding her vocabulary to include the word "circumnavigadar".
In this way, the language lesson shaded imperceptibly into a history lesson on the military maneuvering that led to New Granada being recognised as an autonomous unit of the Spanish Empire by King Ferdinand VII in 1805. By then, it was getting on for 11:30, and Sophia and the Doctor left the library for their daily lunch break.
The lunch break was another victory by Sophia against her formerly circumscribed life. It had become the custom for Sophia, Dr. Alvarez, Brother Francisco and Daisy to go out together for lunch. The four of them would meet in the palace's underground loke park and take a trip out into the city for lunch at one of London's multitudinous restaurants. Sophia had never learned to drive a loke, and she didn't want to rely on the palace driving staff, so Dr. Alvarez took the wheel while she provided directions from the passenger seat.
Large sections of London had been reduced to rubble in the course of the various German invasion attempts of the 1940s, and the postwar Whig government had decided to take advantage of the situation to lay out a new street grid in the rebuilt areas. FN2 Once they left the area around the palace, which had been restored to its original configuration, a ten minute drive along New Bayswater Road brought Dr. Alvarez and his passengers to Portobello Road. At this point, of course, their progress slowed to a crawl as the road narrowed to a single lane in the nonrevised Notting Hill neighborhood.
There had been considerable opposition to the Whigs' street revision programme, and sometimes Sophia could sympathise with it; when she was in a loke, though, she found herself wishing the government would revise the whole city. FN3 After half an hour's driving they managed to locate a parking space within three blocks of their destination. Dr. Alvarez fed the meter enough New Pound coins FN4 to ensure them two hours' parking time, and Sophia led them to the restaurant.
Sophia had found that walking the streets of London gave you an appreciation of the NRP's omnipresence that you couldn't get from the palace. It seemed as though every vertical surface had been plastered with a poster bearing some variation of the Party's standard iconography: the Union Jack, the Party's crossed-hammer symbol, the raised index finger salute, FN5 and of course the face of the Party's late unlamented founder, Sir Mosely H. Leigh-Oswald. FN6 It also seemed like every third man was wearing either a lapel pin, an armband or the full Party uniform.
It was a relief to Sophia when they finally reached their destination, an Indian restaurant with the (to her) ironic name of Curry Palace. There were still traces of NRP imagery inside, but for the most part it had been displaced by Vedic gods, Bombay cityscapes and Indian film stars.
The restaurant's owner, Mr. Chowdurry, gave her a short, brief bow and said, "It is wonderful to see you again, Your Highness."
"Thank you, Mr. Chowdurry," Sophia replied. "Have you a table for four available?"
"Certainly, Your Highness." Mr. Chowdurry led them to a table by the far wall, then left them to ponder their orders.
"You've been here before?" Daisy asked.
"Once or twice. It's been over a year since I was here last." Before Harry FN7 had been shanghaied into the Royal Navy back in April, FN8 the palace staff had been so busy keeping tabs on him and his brother FN9 that she had been able to slip out from time to time.
"You seem to know the location of every restaurant in London," Dr. Alvarez remarked.
Sophia winked at him. "My spies are everywhere."
That set off Daisy's high-pitched giggle, and Brother Francisco sighed at the sound, as he always did.
"Seriously," Sophia continued, "here we are, in the centre of what used to be the largest empire on earth. People from all over the world have come here to live, and they've brought all their favourite foods with them. It's an unparalleled opportunity, so why not take advantage of it?"
"Because soon your waistline will also be the largest on earth," Daisy answered. "How you've managed to stay so thin is beyond me."
"I owe it all to clean living and healthy exercise," Sophia solemnly declared.
"I haven't seen you exercise once since I've been here," Daisy insisted, "and as for clean living -- "
"Shhh! Not in front of Brother Francisco," Sophia stage whispered, which elicited another giggle and another sigh.
Mr. Chowdurry returned then and the four of them ordered. "You're going to find the food in Bogotá very boring compared to this," said Daisy.
"No cuisine is boring, except England's of course," Sophia replied.
"I don't find it boring," said Daisy. "Nauseating, perhaps, but not boring. Was it really necessary to invent a dish such as liver and prunes?"
"I'm afraid there's not much else to eat on this island," said Sophia. "If you'd like, I can also explain to you what Brown Windsor Soup's made from."
"A word to the wise, Miss Fuentes," Dr. Alvarez interjected. "On no account ask about Brown Windsor Soup. You're better off not knowing."
"I am firmly convinced," said Sophia, "that the real object of the British Empire was to find something to eat that wasn't made from animals' entrails."
"A fascinating hypothesis," said Dr. Alvarez. "So, whereas the Romans built an empire out of reading entrails, the British built an empire out of eating them. Or rather, out of avoiding eating them."
"As good a reason as any," Brother Francisco remarked, "and better than most."
The prawn vindaloo at the Curry Palace proved to be just as delicious as Sophia remembered. FN10 As they still had half an hour on the meter as they left, Sophia suggested they do some window shopping before returning to the palace.
"It is good to see that the English at least are not as consumed by commercialism as the North Americans," Brother Francisco said as they passed by a bakery displaying a small assortment of cakes and pastries in the window. "If this were New Orleans, this bakery would have every square centimeter of shelf space crowded with goods for sale."
"I'm afraid that's not moderation," Dr. Alvarez corrected him. "That's poverty. If the English had more goods available to display, I'm certain they would do so."
Sophia, who had never been outside the British Isles apart from her recent visit to Fernando's coronation, wasn't certain whether to believe the two men. "I'm sure the disparity isn't as great as all that, is it?"
"If anything," Brother Francisco assured her. "I was understating the difference. The North Americans tend to place a high premium on quality as well. That is why rapivends FN11 are not as popular there as they are in Mexico."
Even though it was a Franciscan monk saying so, Sophia still didn't quite believe him. No place could be that rich, surely.
The question of relative scarcity vanished from her mind, though, as they passed a pet shop. There was a litter of kittens on display in the window. Most of them were asleep, but one orange tabby was busy trying to capture his own tail. Sophia tapped on the window and called out, "Hello, puss puss puss." The tabby halted his chase and looked up at her for a moment, then decided to start chasing one of his sleeping littermates' tails.
"Shall we buy one?" Daisy asked.
Sophia shook her head. "No point."
"Don't they let you have pets?"
"Oh, it's not that," said Sophia. "It's just that whenever I got a cat, mother's dogs would kill it. After the third time, I gave up."
Glancing at his watch, the Doctor said, "Time's running out. Back to the palace for us."
Sophia sighed and followed him back to the loke.
Forward to FAN# 130: There She Is.
Forward to 6 September 1974: Confido in Fabulositate.
Return to For All Nails.