Free Mrs Midnight and Other Stories by Reggie Oliver Page A

discussed.
    Despite his general amenability, I encountered two main difficulties in ghosting King Kyril’s autobiography. His Majesty had a touching faith in my expertise: ‘you are a writer,’ he would say, ‘you know best,’ and I began to see what he meant. The King had no feeling whatever for what might interest the ordinary reader. He had a phenomenal memory for facts and dates, but if asked to describe an event or a personage he seemed barely to understand what I meant.
    ‘What was your father like?’ I might say.
    ‘My father King Bogdan, had a moustache, I remember, which was grey, but, in photographs I have seen of him as a young man, it is black. He was born in 1885 and his mother was a Princess of Hesse, connected on her mother’s side with the Dukes of Weimar, and she often wore these little crocheted gloves—’
    ‘But do you have any special memories of him?’
    ‘He had a dog, as I remember, an Elkhound called Rolf who was black with white under the chin. . . .’ And so it went on. The notion that a human being might possess a personality which could be conveyed to the reader was quite alien to him.
    Like nearly all royalty, and most aristocrats, the King had a passion for genealogy and could recite his ancestry back to the Dark Ages, sometimes further. This was not unhelpful, as the intersecting lineages of royal houses have their own fascination and historical value. But he would often say to me something like:
    ‘Ah, Yes. My Great Great Aunt Amélie was of the Archduchy of Saxe-Meiningen-Darmstadt, and her stepmother had been married to the Grand Duke Rudolph—or was it Frederick? I am not sure. We must establish this.’
    Fortunately, he told me, he had an archive of documents and letters back at his apartment in Lausanne which could confirm such details. These, I hoped might contain more colourful information than the facts with which he daily bruised me. But here I came across a second problem. After my first few days with him I began to suggest that we adjourn to Lausanne where I could study his archive, but something always seemed to prevent it.
    Though in the mornings he was largely at my disposal, the afternoons were taken up with what he called ‘meetings’. This at first suited me because it gave me the opportunity to type up and collate the information I had received from him, but these meetings puzzled me. I knew that much of the activity of I.P.H. members was taken up with them, but tactful enquiries yielded no useful information as to their nature or purpose. I could see what the meetings looked like because in fine weather they were sometimes held out of doors on the hotel’s terraces.
    A group of about twenty men and women would sit in a rough circle, all with notepads and pens on their knees. A leader would do much of the speaking, and after he had given his address, there was much industrious note-taking. Frequently he—I saw no female group leaders apart from the Contessa—would solicit contributions from the other members. I noticed also that, when the leader spoke, his words would often be greeted by uproarious laughter, but this would never happen when anyone else said anything. More than that, I could not tell. Several times I tried, on an afternoon walk, to sidle up and hear what was being said, but invariably I would be headed off by an I.P.H. member who happened also to be wandering in the vicinity. It made me wonder if I was being shadowed.
    Several times my ‘shadow’, as I began to call them, was Hans. Once, when my attempt to eavesdrop had almost succeeded, he caught up with me and plucked me sharply by the sleeve.
    ‘This is not for you,’ he said, ‘but you are clearly interested in our meetings. If you like I will try to get you in to one of our beginners’ development seminars.’
    I shrugged to show my indifference.
    ‘I will see what I can do,’ he said.
    The King seemed to regard his meetings as something sacrosanct which took priority over all