I was reading one of Georgette
Heyer’s murder mysteries - yes, I know. Hands up who knew that she wrote murder
mysteries. My hand stays firmly down.
But, in any case, the story ‘No wind of
blame’ starts with the changes to a household when they are expecting a Russian
prince as a guest.
But
I have met a few princes and
princesses in my time. Tanya, the princess of Banda was an acquaintance when I lived
in Jakarta but we never made it to Banda Island . Travel there was pretty
tricky; erratic flights cancelled at a moment’s notice.
My first prince was Lorenzo
Montesini , who bore an Italian title: Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar ,
Knight of Saint Sophia, Baron Alexandroff. He was a guest at a party held by
Yvonne Swift at her terrace house in Chippendale. Now she was a fabulous
woman. She used to be a nun, and when she retired from the convent, she opened
a law firm in inner city Sydney and did criminal law. I worked at Legal Aid and
she defended a lot of our clients. She knew everyone in Sydney.
Her secretary, whose name I can’t
remember, Mavis or Mabel or something old-fashioned like that, was as old as
Yvonne and took a long time to get the hang of word processors. For example, if
she made a mistake, she retyped the entire document instead of just correcting
the mistake.
Lorenzo had just published a book
about Sydney society called Cardboard Cantata and was engaged to Primrose
Dunlop - usually referred to as PittyPat - to distinguish her from her mother.
The wedding was the talk of Sydney
society and was set to take place in Venice but it was all cancelled days before the ceremony when the best man took too much interest in the stand-in for the father of the
bride. Still not entirely sure why that caused the cancellation of the entire
ceremony, but it did.
Kid 3 assures me that this all
sounds like a script for a fanfiction, but it is true. You know the old saying
about truth being stranger than fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment