Spare Me

Chapter 5

“ C ome in!” Alex called, responding to the light knock on the door of his office at Kensington Palace. Prior to this trip home, he had rarely been given any official duties, so there were absolutely no personal touches in this space—yet it had somehow been decorated to the gills. A strangely imposing portrait of his parents hung on the wall next to the door, framed photos of him and his brother posing stiffly arrayed across the mantle, and a shelf crammed full of books that he’d never seen before.

Eric stuck his head around the door, and Alex smiled in relief that someone had come to disrupt the stultifying briefing he was reading. Eric Okonkwo had been one of Alex’s first friends at Cambridge. They’d bonded over finding the best quiet sunny corner of the library during marathon studying sessions for their first-year literature seminar and had become fast friends when Alex realized that Eric didn’t give two shits about who his family was and Eric realized that Alex was deeply conflicted about his family’s wealth and the way they’d acquired most of it: namely, off the back of Eric’s enslaved ancestors. He was absurdly smart, took no bullshit from anyone, and was one of the most organized and efficient people Alex had ever met, so when Alex had been summoned home from New Zealand, Eric had been his first call.

“Thank god,” Alex said, leaning back in the leather desk chair and shoving his reading glasses up into his hair. Alex truly wanted to be involved in the family business, but having missed out on all the “memo reading” lessons that Ben had had as a child, he was going to have to insist that someone start sending him things that were less incomprehensible if they actually wanted him to be of any real use. “If I have to try to read this for any longer, I think my eyeballs might actually fall out.”

Eric cracked a smile, but it didn’t go all the way to his eyes. “Do you have a minute?” he asked, the serious tone in his voice reinforcing what Alex had already deduced. Something was wrong.

“Of course, mate, come in.” Alex gestured to one of the leather club chairs in front of the fireplace and stood to join his friend in the opposite chair. Eric took the seat Alex had indicated. His hands were grasped in his lap, fidgeting in a way that Alex hadn’t seen since the moments before their last finals at Cambridge. His dark eyes were focused on his hands, avoiding looking Alex in the face. “Eric,” Alex said gently, trying to tamp down the alarm that was rapidly causing his chest to feel like it was being filled with lead. “What’s wrong? Is it Marco? One of the kids?”

Eric’s eyes flew up. “No, no, it’s nothing like that. They’re fine.” He took a deep breath, pressed his lips together, and leveled Alex with A Look. “But I don’t think I can keep working here.”

Relief coursed through him at the news that nobody was seriously ill or dying, followed immediately by the emotional whiplash of sheer panic of the knowledge that there was no way he could be a working royal without Eric’s brilliant mind and even-keeled competence on his team. He opened his mouth to speak, but Eric barged onward, clearly trying to get through what he had come to say as quickly as possible.

“You know I love you like a brother,” Eric said, “and I know you don’t stand for everything that this… this institution stands for. But I just can’t continue working somewhere where the priority is so clearly on maintaining this obscene wealth that was built on generations of oppression without any acknowledgement of that. Not even an indication that anyone other than you recognizes that. I can’t do it, Alex.”

Alex swallowed, his heart sinking, as he tried to process what Eric was saying. He knew the next thing he said had the potential to dramatically impact the way the rest of the conversation went, so he took a deep breath and tried to curb his immediate instinct: to beg his friend not to leave. “ Thank you for telling me. That can’t have been easy to say to my face, even after a decade of friendship.”

Eric’s face was inscrutable, a combination of resignation, confusion, and maybe even fear. He nodded awkwardly, muttering, “You’re welcome.”

Alex took another deep breath, wracking his brains for how to proceed in the conversation. He desperately wanted Eric to stay. He needed him, not only for his competence and smarts, but also for the exact perspective he was bringing to this conversation that was so sorely lacking in every other corner of Kensington Palace. And Alex needed Eric to know that he deeply valued that perspective without tokenizing him.

“If it’s truly what you want, I will—extremely begrudgingly—accept your resignation,” Alex began, and he saw some of the tension leave Eric’s shoulders. “I recognize I have no right to ask this, but I have to ask… what would it take to co nvince you to stay?” He saw the surprise register on his friend’s dark features, but when an immediate rejection wasn’t forthcoming, he pushed forward. “Because you’re absolutely right, it’s disgraceful that there hasn’t been more acknowledgement of my family’s history. Inexcusable, really. It should have been among the first things I tried to make happen when I came back.” He paused for breath, and when Eric still didn’t say anything, he dove back in. “But the thing is, I think we could do it. I think I could make it one of my patronages. But I can’t do it alone. There’s no way a privileged white bloke should be leading this charge. Even I know that. So if you’d be willing to stay, I think we could at least start to dismantle some of the bullshit from within.” He paused again, suddenly worried he might be pushing too far or could have said the wrong thing. “If that’s of any interest to you, of course.”

Eric sat back in his chair, looking into the empty fireplace pensively. He sighed. “I don’t know, Alex.”

“And that’s okay!” Alex rushed to reassure him. “You clearly thought a lot about this before coming here to talk to me. I don’t expect you to reverse course without giving it similarly serious thought. How about this: what if I start by talking to my parents about how much we might be able to get from crown funds for this, and take their temperature on the idea of it as a project? While I do that, you take some time to think about it. Decide if it would change your mind about leaving. Do some dreaming about what you might want it to look like. And then we can talk again in a few days. And if you tell me then that you still want to leave, I’ll accept it, no questions asked, and we go back to being just friends.”

Eric took a breath and then gave a brisk nod, a decision clearly made. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good,” Alex said with a relieved smile. “And Eric?”

“Yeah? ”

“Really, thank you for talking to me about this. I hope I won’t let you down.”

Eric didn’t say anything, but gave him a small smile as he walked out of Alex’s office.

That Sunday Alex, Ben, his fiancée Hannah, and the king and queen sat around the table in the private dining room at Buckingham Palace. As usual, it was a boisterous gathering with Ben and his father arguing jovially about something or other—Alex had lost track of what—Hannah and his mother having an earnest discussion about the wedding, and Alex just sitting back, the quiet one, as ever. He’d been trying to figure out how to bring up his conversation with Eric for the whole evening. Cocktails had started with Ben and Hannah bursting in with an ebullient story about something they’d seen on their drive back from visiting Hannah’s parents in the Cotswolds for the weekend. Then, as that conversation had died down, they’d been called to the table. And then, and then, and then… the dessert dishes were being cleared and Alex still hadn’t managed to force his way into the conversation. He’d wanted to be graceful about it. But he was starting to see that, as usual, the only way he was going to be able to make his voice heard was to bulldoze into the maelstrom of extroverts.

“So Eric threatened to quit this week,” he interjected loudly, apropos of exactly nothing.

The startling revelation had the intended result—the rest of his family all stopped what they were saying and turned to look at Alex with total shock on each of their faces. Even his mother’s cat, Anne of Cleves, stopped attempting to demolish a stuffed mouse on the carpet between the antique sideboard and the door to look at the humans.

“Why in God’s name would he do that?” Alex’s father finally asked.

“Did you two have a falling-out, dear?” His mother looked concerned. She loved Eric, and Alex wasn’t actually sure that if they had had a falling-out that she would have sided with him, her own flesh and blood.

“No,” Alex said, taking a deep breath before launching into his prepared speech. This must have been how Eric felt before he talked to me. Bloody awful. “He feels like he can’t keep working for an institution that isn’t willing to own up to the significant role it played and continues to play in upholding white supremacy.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw Ben’s eyebrows shoot up and noticed a look crossing Hannah’s face that seemed to be saying, Right on, mate.

“And I certainly can’t fault him,” Alex said, in a voice that he hoped sounded more self-assured than he felt. “So both because I don’t want to lose the most important—and really, only—member of my staff, and because he’s exactly right, I think we need to do something about it.”

His father rested his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers under his chin. “What are you proposing, son?” he asked, his thoughts on the matter wholly inscrutable. Damn decades of diplomatic training .

“I think we start a reparations fund,” Alex said simply.

“Well, we certainly can’t call it that,” his father responded, as if on reflex.

“Why the hell not?” Alex asked, trying not to get defensive.

“I, it, we…” He’d rarely seen the king stumble over words like this, which was how Alex could tell he’d really stymied him. “We just… we can put some money toward it. But we can’t call it reparations. That’s like admitting we committed a crime!”

“I mean, we didn’t, but our ancestors did, and we certainly haven’t done anything to make it right,” Alex volleyed back, hackles rising.

“I think what your father is trying to say, dear,” his mother broke in, clearly donning her peacemaker hat, “is that it’s a very worthy idea. I think we just need to workshop some of the language.”

Alex pursed his lips. He knew he couldn’t expect to get absolutely everything he wanted on the first shot, but he wasn’t going down without a fight.

“I mean, frankly, what we think doesn’t really matter that much.”

“It’s our money,” his father replied.

“Yes, but the other important part of this is that we’re going to give the money, we’re going to use our positionality to bring awareness, and we’re going to give Eric a staff to do the actual work here. They’ll be the ones setting the parameters, figuring out what’s appropriate.”

“Now, son, Eric is wonderful?—”

“Dad, that part is nonnegotiable.”

“He’s actually right,” Ben spoke up for the first time. “If nothing else, think of the optics of an old white chap telling a bunch of people his family had oppressed for years how to spend the money he was giving them.”

“Exactly,” Hannah added. “And you should make sure it’s not just crown funds. I mean, it should be that too. But since a lot of that comes from taxpayer dollars—including the people who will be receiving this funding—it means they’d just be getting back money they already paid. You’re going to have to open up your own pockets.”

Alex beamed at her, attempting to telegraph his gratitude with his eyes. “That’s a brilliant idea.”

The king shifted in his seat. “I… you may be right,” he conceded. “Why don’t you get a meeting on the calendar with me and my chief of finance, and we can start to think about it?”

“I want Eric there too,” Alex insisted.

“Eric too,” his father agreed.

“Done.”

Alex relaxed back into his seat, satisfied and relieved. It wasn’t often that he burst into the family scene, and for once, he was doing it to help someone else.