Skeleton-in-Waiting by Peter Dickinson

letters the old Dowager Princess wrote, the one who had the funeral last week. They’re full of all kinds of dirt about the royals. What I was thinking is, suppose you could get a line on him …”
    2
    Choosing christmas presents was another thing that had quietly changed its nature over recent years. Inevitably, as it swelled and swelled, the Duty List had had to be standardised—so many hampers from Fortnum’s, bottles from Berry Bros, soft toys from Hamleys, all the way down to tights from Marks and Sparks. Joan took care of that, and Louise started signing the cards in September. But even choosing things for the Family, which of course she did herself, was no longer the fun it used to be; not living among them now she lacked the confidence of rightness she needed in matching present to person. For instance, a colleague of Piers had set up a three-man company in the Industrial Park attached to the university to make and market gadgets and toys he had invented as a by-product of his research. The fancy intercom Louise used in the nursery was a prototype of his, and this year he had come up with a sort of magician’s wand you could point at any light-fitting in a room and make it change intensity or colour. The toy needed special light-fittings, of course, and was about three times as expensive as Mother would have approved of, but it felt perfect for Father—or would have, two Christmases ago. It probably still was, but Louise didn’t feel the same certainty and inward satisfaction that she would have in the old days. Perhaps Father had changed, like Albert. Would Albert really be pleased with his weaver-birds? And so on. Even Aunt Bea …
    Louise had always given Aunt Bea a huge jigsaw which she took about three months to piece together and then passed on to a hospital. She was strangely puritanical about it, refusing to look at the picture on the lid but letting it gradually reveal itself as she nudged the pieces around with her pudgy white hands, trying and sighing. It was hard to say how much pleasure she got out of the task, in fact it seemed more like some sort of mystical exercise she was forced to perform as part of her duties, bringing into the world images that had hitherto existed only in a royal mind. Louise wanted the picture to be worth the trouble so, though she could easily have asked Joan to tell Hamleys to send a big puzzle while she was ordering the teddy-bears, she preferred to choose it herself. Only after doing so—it was a Lowry snowscape, with soaring factory chimneys and the usual matchstick figures—did it occur to her to wonder whether Aunt Bea would still be interested.
    Though it was still four weeks till Christmas she decided on impulse to deliver it herself, and try to guess from Aunt Bea’s response whether it was still welcome. At the same time she could see how Aunt Bea was settling in at Hampton Court, and then ring Mother that evening and report.
    Royal impulses have built-in safeguards attached, checks and balances, like the British constitution. Louise had this one half way through a speech of peculiarly embarrassing self-importance by the new Director of one of her favourite charities, Wells for the Sahel; she had been in the Sahel, looking at its work, only eight months ago, just before her pregnancy was officially announced. She remembered the pale grey dust, the flies crawling around famine-huge eyes, the hands too listless to brush them away. Now, as the ghastly man pontificated on and on, she could almost sense the water seeping back down into the aquifers leaving nothing but a slop of mud at the bottom of a hundred expensive holes, as if pulled by the same forces as the dwindling interest of the full-fed financiers round the tables. There was nothing she could do. She had already said her brief bit—she wasn’t much of a speaker—her function was to bring the punters in, a barker at the tent of charity. Now this crass