The Heir Affair

Gaz, from inside their sliding door. “Tiresome was my only move, and it got me a goddess.”
“It’s wearing out its welcome,” Cilla said, but as usual, she was smiling. “Either come to tea or don’t, Gaz, but hovering makes you look like a nutter.”
In a flash—I have never seen Gaz move so fast—he came out and plopped into the fourth chair. It didn’t jiggle.
“I thought you said they were all wonky,” I said.
“They are,” Gaz said. “But so is my bum, so it evens things out.” He handed me a petit four with a pink flower on top. “Food for thought.”
I bit it. “Tuna casserole?”
Gaz’s face fell. “Beef Wellington,” he said. “Apparently, we’ve both got some work to do.”
*  *  *
Cilla’s and Bea’s logic was solid, and the Queen had made it clear that she was sick of the status quo, so during the next few weeks—while Gaz tried to conquer the art of artificial beef Wellington flavoring—I searched for middle ground between “passive” and “aggressive.” I’d run over to Freddie’s apartments to drop off boxes of whatever Gaz had baked, making brief small talk if he answered the door but always leaving before I was shooed away. I saw his new girlfriend coming and going, but never prodded. When Nick and Freddie and I were called up again for two more events, I drew deep on the well of Lady Bollocks’s duchess training about chatting with strangers—Freddie, sadly, increasingly qualified—and began innocuous conversations about subjects I knew they both enjoyed: British craft beers, how Agatha’s ex Awful Julian had opened a hookah bar, the likelihood of Roger Federer avenging his Wimbledon loss. Neither of them told me to cut it out, so this peaceful coexistence started to feel only a few steps away from friendship. As we rolled into Nick’s birthday near the end of August, I was hopeful.
Prince Dick, in a show of the exact sensitive parenting he’d performed their whole lives, marked his son’s birthday with a party for something unrelated. The Royal Geographical Society, to celebrate its twentieth anniversary as the largest group of its kind, had spent all year drumming up cash for a study in Antarctica about the effect of climate change on its ice sheets; with a third of the year to go, the chairman thought a cocktail party with his patron the Prince of Wales would be the best push to loosen some pocketbooks. Nick’s birthday took a back seat—both to global warming, and to The Firm’s ongoing desire to prove to the posh guests that Freddie and I were not secretly banging in the coat closet. The toffs had a formidable grapevine, and I sensed Richard and Eleanor felt their good opinion could spread farther and wider than that of the average Mail reader. One afternoon, she ordered me to bring over pictures of Donna’s pulls for Richard’s party—actual tangible photographs—and studied them with a magnifying glass.
“The purple one,” she said, tapping a sculptural cap-sleeve Roland Mouret. “It’s slim cut enough to prevent anyone deciding you’re pregnant with Frederick’s love child. Which I assume you are not.”
“Not unless it was immaculately conceived,” I said. “But I think the green one gives me more room to eat the passed apps.”
“Which you will not do in any dress,” Eleanor said. “Your public mastication still needs work.” She looked down at the photo again and added, “You will wear my River Bend brooch. It was given to me in the 1970s by the Spanish king, and the diamonds mimic the curves of the Thames.”
“Thank you! What a brilliant idea,” I said.
“Of course it is,” Eleanor said. “Loaning you jewels will make them think I like you.”
The party was on the seventy-second floor of The Shard, a massive glass skyscraper designed to look like its name—as if a huge piece of debris had dropped out of the sky and embedded itself in the South Bank. It was the tallest building in London, and the open-air venue at the top boasted spectacular panoramic views of the city, making it a particularly apt choice for an organization devoted to, in its simplest terms, the layout of the world. The planners had chosen to let said view speak for itself, decorating only with well-placed antique maps of whichever part of the city we happened to be overlooking, all of which were part of the silent auction. We’d given everyone about an hour and a half to get buzzed at the open bar and overbid on a few things before we arrived and did our part: Each of us had a designated area to glad-hand as many would-be donors and society staples as possible in that radius—like zone defense, but for fundraising—and then otherwise pretend we didn’t know we were the subject of a mass gawking. Nick always said he felt like a zoo animal at these things, but I didn’t realize how dead-on the analogy was until I was in the cage with him. As I talked to each potential donor, it took all my concentration not to get distracted by the people around us craning their necks, leaning toward each other in what looked like a gossipy whisper, or, in one case, snickering in my direction at something that I had to hope wasn’t a piece of food in my teeth.
When I finally saw Richard veer from his zone to greet a cluster of his old pals, I recognized my cue to stop mingling with the toffs and start making our family circle look whole. Nick and I found each other near a north-facing window. That high up, London looked tiny and perfect, like a toy. I could have stood there for hours, looking for all the signposts of my life—the spire of Westminster Abbey, the Tower that I kept joking I’d be tossed into, and if I squinted, the part of Chelsea where my flat had been. But instead I let Nick steer me toward our friends, the touch of his hand on my back pointedly visible, and