Crowned Heads (35 page)

Three days later there was a brief note from the Dorchester Hotel in London, explaining that Robin was there with Lady Ransome, looking after her affairs. There followed another note, this time from the Prince de Galles Hotel in Paris, where he and Rose had gone for a brief stay to meet with the Rothschilds, and though Nellie was not good at reading between the few lines, she thought they indicated that some sort of financial transactions were taking place.

At the beginning of the following week another letter arrived, postmarked Galway, with the family crest. It read:

Darling Missy Priss,

Here I am back home again, and will be glad of the rest. London, Paris most hectic. Kitty is out of hospital and has gone to stay with her family in Cork, where she says she wants to remain until the fall. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to deal with Father and Rose. I told you there were financial problems, but they now appear far worse than I’d imagined. Rose is talking of turning the castle into a guest inn (really!) and renting out rooms to weekenders. I told her we weren’t three-in-a-bed Irish yet, and obviously the thing to do was to sell the Ballymore, hence our trip to Paris. One of the Rothschilds has coveted it for a long time, so I think it will end up in their hands, rather than going on the block, which was Father’s suggestion. Never mind, Rose has plenty of other necklaces; though I must admit we shall all miss the Ballymore—in the family for over three hundred years. Please don’t worry about me, I’m all right, will be popping up on your doorstep to surprise you one of these days.

Lovingly,

Your Bobbitt

P.S. Reading that, I just saw how funny it sounds. Your Bobbitt. Alas, there is only one again, isn’t there?

Loving you, thinking of you. B.

Nellie reread the letter and cried a little, and when the girls gathered at Phyllis’s she brought it along to share with them. Sad, it was just sad, that’s all. Partway through the reading, Phyllis, who had her drink in her hand, spilled some of it on the rug; something seemed to have taken her aback. She rose hurriedly and made herself another drink, and later, when Nellie asked her what was wrong, she patted her shoulder and said nothing, nothing….

Then, as she was seeing the girls out, she took Nellie aside and asked plaintively, “Nell, do you really think we’re going? To the race?”

Nellie couldn’t tell, they must wait and see. But: “Why?” she asked Phyllis, who only smiled and kissed her cheek. “Nothing,” she said. “I was just wondering.”

Nellie rested uneasily that night, lying awake and thinking about Robin, then about the letter, then about Phyllis. In her mind she went over the letter paragraph by paragraph. Finally she went to sleep. It wasn’t until the next morning, reading the
Times
at the breakfast table, that the thought struck her. There were pictures of the jewelry collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum. She had seen them many times, and suddenly—quite impossible not to have realized it, but she had not—a light went on. She put the paper down, still staring at the pictures, but her mind was elsewhere. She let her coffee get cold, thinking, then she went into the living room, pacing and thinking. From time to time her mind was elsewhere. She let her coffee get cold, thinking, then she went into the living room, pacing and thinking. From time to time her mind flitted back to the jewels, but that was only absurd and served to irritate her. Her irritation turned to distress, her distress to agitation, and finally her agitation to fear. She tried to think it out, piece by piece, wishing there were somebody she could talk to about it, but there seemed no one. She went back to the kitchen and there were the pictures. She poured more coffee, and while she was stirring in her cream the answer—or part of it—came to her. She went to the telephone and called the New York Public Library information service, feeling a creeping dread as she posed her question and waited for the answer, which, coming, caused her infinitely greater distress. She sat and thought some more, and when Hilda telephoned she said she couldn’t talk and hung up quickly. She got out her telephone directory and looked up a name. When she found it she made another call and asked for an appointment, which was given her for later that afternoon. She took a good deal of trouble getting ready, and spent the remaining time pacing the room, waiting for four o’clock. At a quarter to, she called down to the doorman and asked for a taxi, and then she set out to visit Madame Potekka.

Robin’s friend was waiting for her and quickly invited Nellie to be seated. She appeared warm and friendly, though obviously she didn’t remember having met Nellie before. Her living quarters were small, hardly the grandeur Robin had described, and her easel was crammed in a corner by the window. “As you see,” she said, sweeping a bangled arm to a half-finished canvas, “I am working.”

Nellie apologized for taking up her time, mentioning that she owned one of the artist’s works. The artist’s brows shot up.

“Ah, which is that?” The violets, Nellie explained. Madame’s look of surprise was adroitly covered as she seemed to arrive at some private understanding concerning the painting. “Ah, yes,” she said, “the little violets. Very pretty. Bobby … gave it to you?”

“Yes. A most generous present. He is so kind-hearted, isn’t he. And generous. You are quite … recovered?”

“Recovered?” Madame was surprised, as Nellie had feared she might be. “Have I been ill, then?”

“Haven’t you?”

“I had a cold last winter, nothing more.”

“Yes. I see. Colds are to be guarded against.”

“Surely it is not my state of health that brings you here. Something about Bobby, is it?” she asked, lighting a long cigarette, which she inserted into a longer holder. “How can I help you?”

Nellie took a breath and plunged in. “Madame, are you acquainted with the Ballymore emerald?”

“I have heard of it, naturally.” She blew smoke in the air, but discreetly, in the direction of the electric fan that cooled the room. “It is very famous.”

“Yes. Bobby—Robin—tells me it is an old family heirloom, and that his mother has been reduced by circumstances to selling it.”

“Oh?” Again a look of surprise which was quickly disguised by a smile. “And … ?”

“I wondered, since you are so closely connected with Robin, if you could tell me if you believe this to be true.”

“Offhand, I should say that I doubted it,” Madame returned easily.

“So should I,” said Nellie, “considering that the Ballymore emerald is in the British Museum, and has been since thirty-five years ago, when it was given by the Farquahar family. Yet I have been led to believe that it belonged to Lady Ransome and that she has sold it to the Rothschilds, and that she may have to turn the Castle Baughclammain into a sort of weekend hostelry.”

Madame Potekka could no longer control her surprised expression. Her mouth dropped open, then she covered her face with her hands. In a moment she spread her fingers and peered through them, her little black eyes wide with either mirth or astonishment. “Oh, my dear,” she said, shaking her head, “you don’t mean it.”

“Mean what?”

“Bobby is doing it again, yes?”

“Doing what?”

“Telling little stories.”

“Little … stories? Yes, so it appears. I called the library and they assured me that that is where the emerald is.”

Madame Potekka had plucked up a painted Japanese fan from the table and was stirring the air around her with gusto. “A charming boy, Robin, is he not? Charming. Such a love. Who is more enchanting than Robin?—though I call him Bobby.”

“Have you recently seen or heard from him?” Nellie asked.

“Let me think.” She struck a thoughtful pose, then sprang out with, “Yes, to be sure, I heard from him just two weeks ago. A small financial matter …”

“Financial?”

Madame employed her hands in a European gesture of
laissez faire.
“With Bobby things are always financial, are they not? You know….” She gave Nellie a broad wink. “I was only helping him out of a jam, anyways.”

Nellie cleaved to the word. “A jam?”

“It is nothing new. Bobby is always in some sort of jam…. But why do you look so worried, if I may ask? If it is that you have not heard from him, oh, my dear, let me assure you there is nothing to fear, nothing whatever. He often disappears—
pfft.
” She made him disappear again. “That is his way, Bobby’s. A part of his charm, I think, for who is there one wants to see constantly? Fish and guests, you know, they all stink after three days.”

“Madame, I beg you, it is no joking matter. Do you know of the tragedy that has happened to him? …”

Madame, it appeared, did not. Nellie related as quickly as she could the details: the planned arrival of the child, the surprise party, Robin’s return from the airport, the fatal call to Galway….

“The child was killed in a bomb explosion, you see.”

“Ah, this is surely a tragedy,” Madame Potekka agreed dolorously, though she seemed bewildered by the account. “But what child is this?”

“Little Bobby. Bobbitt, they call him. Robin’s son.”

Madame’s eyes widened over the rim of her fan. “Oh, dear, oh, dear … I see.” She fanned herself rapidly and blew out her cheeks. “I agree, this is no joking matter. You must tell me all, then.”

“You have met him, little Bobbitt?”

“I have … heard of him from time to time.” She waited while Nellie brought out the facts she had discovered during Robin’s tempestuous scene after the phone call, and the terrifying period he had spent out on the ledge. Madame listened without interrupting while Nellie elaborated on Kitty’s injury and the funeral arrangements. Then she pressed Nellie’s hand with a reassuring gesture. “My dear, my dear Miss Nellie,” she began quietly, “I must tell you something. You will not believe me when I say it, you will think me cruel and heartless, but if Bobby has told you the little boy is dead, then it is better so.”

“Better?” Nellie snatched her hand away as if it had been burned, and straightened herself against the chair back. “How can you talk that way? How could he be better off dead?”

Potekka heaved a sigh and resumed fanning. “I can only repeat what I said: the child is better off dead. That is to say,
Bobby
is better off having him dead.”

“Was he some sort of monster?”

Potekka nodded slowly. “In a way. In any case, it is no problem for the child, you see.”

Nellie was aghast. “Do you understand that he was blown up in an explosion? The IRA … ?”

“Yes, yes, the IRA. Of course it would be the IRA, or the Mafia, or an abduction by Turkish Janissaries.”

“What
are
you talking about?” Nellie cried in alarm.

Madame Potekka held a quick, silent consultation with herself, tapping the fan against her lips, then, with a helpless shrug, said, “My dear Miss Nellie, I hope you will not mistake what I am going to say to you, but I say it for our friend, Robin. We are agreed between us, I think, that we both love him. Then I say to you that we must go on loving him, no matter what. I say to you that if he admits the child is dead, then he is better off, by far.
He
is better off,
I
am better off, even
you
are better off. Anyone who knows him is better off.” She peered across her fan to see what effect her words were having. “I tell you also this,” she added, “the child was not killed.”

“Not?” Nellie drew back in surprise. “You mean he’s alive?”

“I mean he never existed.” She tapped her temple. “Have you not found in your experience with Bobby that he is an imaginative young man? Full of fancies, dreams, enchantments? The child is merely one of them.”

“You mean there isn’t any Bobbitt?”

“I did not say that.”

“You said—”

“I said Bobby had no son. As for Bobbitt, yes, there is one of those. You know him as Robin. He is the only Bobbitt there is. The child is something he made up. A fiction. And if he now tells you the child—this Bobbitt—is dead, why, then, I say to you our Robin is better off. And therefore, if you are truly his friend, so you will be also. As we are agreed, our Bobby is a charming fellow. He is nice to have around, he is gay and witty, and fun. He sings, he tells amusing stories, he dances, does tricks; but a trained monkey can do some of those things. I know no one I enjoy being with more, but I say to myself I must always have some salt with me, and I must take him with a grain of it. You see, he is—” Again she tapped her temple.

“Please stop doing that.” Already distraught, Nellie was becoming angry. “Is he crazy?”

“How shall I say what I mean? What is crazy? Perhaps I am crazy, perhaps you are crazy, perhaps we all are crazy—and he is sane. He is not crazy; he certainly is not dangerous, not even to himself, I think. But it is his imagination, you see. That is what happened to him out there, in Hollywood. Anyone can remember what it is like to be a child, but how many people remember or ever knew what it is like to have been Bobby Ransome? It is not easy, I should think, to be that famous, and to be a child as well. You are way up there”—pointing her cigarette at the ceiling—“then suddenly one day,
pfft,
you are not, you are down there”—pointing at the floor. “He was a very big somebody, then one day he was a nobody again. That is the way it happens out there. It is enough to break the heart or turn you bitter. But not Bobby; he has no bitterness. He is kind and loving and generous. But I will tell you what happens to him. They tried to keep him a child, so he has stayed a child, here”—touching her head again—“and here”—touching her breast. “Sometimes that is not such a bad thing, but in Bobby’s case I am not so sure. He lived in a make-believe world for so long, and he has clung to that make-believe. He will not give it up. For everybody he was Bobbitt, then for nobody was he Bobbitt any longer, if you see what I mean. So he made up another Bobbitt, for himself. You are not a stupid person, Miss Nellie, obviously, yet he has fooled you. He has fooled so many, for so long. He has dragged those borrowed snapshots with him to every cocktail and dinner party from here to the North Pole. He dines out on the little fellow, and his great romance with this Kitty Kelly. He has not seen her in years but in his mind they are the world’s greatest tragic lovers since Romeo and Juliet. The little fellow, he is a source of amusement, of wonder, and of income. ‘I’m a little short,’ Bobby will say, ‘and it’s the little tyke’s birthday. Can you lend me fifty till next week?’ You lend him, next week comes, he has forgotten the money. He has borrowed from you, has he not? Yes, I see he has. Me, too. You are sick, I loaned him money for your recovery.”