Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (6 page)

He could see in an instant that it was the wrong thing to say. She gave him a practiced half smile. Clearly she got that compliment once every two days. What he’d said was unoriginal, too obvious, almost an irritant. “I mean we have some cheese rinds that color. Smelly ones.” He’d meant “smelly” as a desirable characteristic in a cheese, but she bridled, thinking he was referring to her smell. But then she saw his broad grin and immediately gave him a more natural smile, as if allowing an insult from a friend.

“Look, I need an unusual cheddar. Elizabeth likes it.”

“Who’s Elizabeth, then? Your girlfriend?” This was very bold indeed. Rajiv was aware that he wasn’t very good at talking to girls his own age, much as he wanted to please them. With boys his age, the way to their hearts was to insult them, mildly, but deliberately. Maybe this would work with a girl too.

The young woman with flame-colored hair was annoyed. She did not have a girlfriend, but she had nothing against women loving women. On top of that, his question was far too personal. “Elizabeth is a horse, actually,” she said, her face darkening and her voice cooling. “Likes cheese. Especially cheddar.”

“Never heard of a hoss like cheese before,” Rajiv said, using what he took to be a John Wayne pronunciation of “horse.” He’d seen that the girlfriend remark hadn’t worked. This was his desperate attempt to regain her favor. “But cheddar goes with apples, and I know hosses like apples.”

His struggling with a false Texas accent and all those “s” sounds made her smile again. “Well, this horse does. Likes cheese, I mean. Is a bit spoiled. Gets whatever she wants.”

“Like you?” he said, sending her a smiling glance under his eyebrows. Then, without allowing her time to react to that, he began showing her all the shop’s dizzying array of cheddars. She was in difficulties because she’d come away from the stables without adequate information. All she knew was that one afternoon a while ago The Queen had swept up some leftover cheddar from her lunch and brought it over to the Mews. She’d discovered that Elizabeth loved this cheddar and asked Rebecca to make sure the Mews bought some more to give to the horse as a treat. All Rebecca could find out from the palace kitchens was that the cheddar on The Queen’s cheese board had come from Paxton & Whitfield. So she’d walked over with instructions to buy more cheddar from Paxton & Whitfield without realizing that there would be sixteen different varieties available.

“You wouldn’t happen to know what sorts of cheddar have been sent over to the palace lately, would you?”

“Oh, my dear! You want the same cheddar that The Queen has, do you?” Rajiv saw this as rich teasing material. He put his hands on his hips and smiled at her as winningly as he knew how.

Rebecca knew very well that she could hardly disclose the nature of her errand or the eventual destination of the cheese. She was a nervous young woman, more at ease with animals than people. Talking to people, even people in shops, required an effort from her. She had never been much interested in boys before, mainly as a defensive posture because in school they had never been interested in her. Flirting with boys was certainly beyond her ability. She began to retreat. “Well, I might have to look around a bit. Thanks, anyway.” She turned to go.

“Hang on a minute. I’ve got just the thing for you. They carved up a big round of cheddar for the Dutch state visit a little while ago. Smashing pictures in the papers. I expect that’s the one you want. It’s right here. One of our best. I might slice you just a little wedge of that? Bring it back if Elizabeth doesn’t like it.”

He spoke so quickly and seemed to care so much about regaining her favor, that she couldn’t help but smile and nod her head “yes” to give her assent. When he was giving her change from her £20 note, he added, “I’m actually an amateur photographer. And I don’t suppose you’d allow me to photograph you giving Elizabeth her cheddar?”

She couldn’t tell him where she worked, or that The Queen preferred to give Elizabeth the cheese herself. On the other hand, his bad cowboy accent had made her laugh and he had her attention.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said.

“What about I photograph just you, then?”

“No,” she said again.

“What about we never see each other again as long as we live?”

She smiled, though she hadn’t intended to.

“I’m Rajiv. What about you tell me your name?”

She couldn’t say no again. “Rebecca,” and she held out her hand to shake his.

“What about we meet for a totally harmless, no-photos-allowed cup of coffee one afternoon?” he said to her.

She gave him one of her e-mail addresses, but then turned on her heel and left quickly, as if she’d already regretted what she’d done.

H
aving celebrated his forty-fifth birthday, William de Morgan decided that romantic love was pretty much out of the question for him now. He’d had his share of sex, and even love once or twice, but as he looked at himself in the mirror, he could see plainly that the passage of time was having its effect. His sagging neck began to look as if it would be better covered up with a very high Katharine Hepburn style collar. He didn’t want to complain about his fate. He’d had more than enough fun in his twenties and thirties. The number of sexual partners he could recall easily topped those of his married friends, and he believed some of these early-married husbands, straight as they were, envied him some of the sexual variety he’d experienced. Unlike them, he’d also been free to come and go, move on and move up, as he pleased. His career had prospered.

But he envied his married friends for having someone to share the events of the day with while cooking supper together. He would have given up some of his sexual variety for their mutually sustaining coupledom. He wondered whether, perhaps, something in him didn’t prevent him from settling down.

He poured more than tea into The Queen’s teacup. He poured everything he had, all of himself, and that meant there was little enough time or energy or interest at the end of the day to put into finding and keeping a lover. He knew how the cloth should look on the silver salver. He knew how to hold the cup up to the window so that the light caught its eggshell fragility. He knew how to disappear so noiselessly that The Queen hardly knew he was gone. He had no idea where to look for a man. It had been that way for many years now, and he didn’t expect it to change now that he was middle-aged.

There were attractive men in the palace, and having grown up in the provinces in a dull town, he liked upper-class men. Plenty of good-looking men fit that description where he worked, mostly army officers on loan. They came and went, often serving no more than two years or three. Of course he noticed them, from the corner of his eye, but it was his job not to let them know he was looking at them; on the whole, they were blind to people they thought of as “servants.” And these young officers in their twenties and thirties generally knew better than to call such as William that. Sometimes they got wine poured on their crotches by mistake as a way of teaching them not to use that word. “Oh dear, I
am
sorry, sir!” William never disciplined ill-mannered young men in that way, but some of his colleagues did. If a young captain didn’t know already, he quickly learned that William, or anyone else who waited at table, was “a member of staff.” After they got that right, they no more gave it a second thought than they did about having their wineglass silently refilled. They were thinking about what to say next to the person on their right and were worried about not missing the moment when the table would turn, and they must shift to the person on the left. It was a complex, choreographed performance. They were onstage. As far as they were concerned, William merely set the scenery and kept the lights on.

William had noticed Luke when he arrived, a young man in a worn but form-fitting wool suit, remarkable for his lack of confidence. He was polished enough with The Queen and her guests at luncheon, but there was something rather silent, even catatonic, about him in the moments when he thought he wasn’t being watched. He sometimes seemed to hold back, or to be slightly confused at a moment when one of the other equerries would have leapt forward, like a horse over a hedge, with a bit of whimsy, or some self-deprecating candor to put people at ease.

William discovered Luke by accident one day when he came in to lay the table for a solo luncheon The Queen was going to have that December Monday in her sitting room. Luke was on his hands and knees under her desk, wool worsted stretched across his rump, as he struggled with the computer cords and a power strip. He thumped his head as he was scooting out from under the lower drawer. “Christ!” As he came up on his knees, rubbing his head, he noticed William by the door, appraising him.

“Like the view from up there, then, William?” he said, still pained by the blow to his head.

This was a double surprise to William. He hadn’t thought this equerry even knew his name. Nor had he ever been caught out in recent history looking so unguardedly at young Guardsmen. “Well, sir, have a care for those trousers. They weren’t cut for going on maneuvers.”

“So kind of you to be looking out for my kit,” said Luke drily as he stamped one foot on the floor, and then the other, bringing himself upright. There was a pause while he looked rather fiercely at William, as if he might hit him.

Then, awkwardly, he stuck out his hand. “Name’s Luke, by the way.”

This was a minor breach of palace protocol. The Queen’s upper servants, the private secretaries and equerries and ladies-in-waiting, might call the staff by their Christian names, but they were seldom anything other than “sir” or “ma’am” in return. They might all be quietly on a first-name basis after long years of service together, but not so quickly as this, and there was seldom shaking of hands. Upper-class Englishmen had a horror of shaking hands. They abhorred it. It was one of those arcane rules with them. They only relaxed the rule for dealing with foreigners. It was completely arbitrary.

“My very great pleasure,” said William, swallowing ironically where the “sir” should have gone. “Is information technology now part of the equerry’s job description?” he asked nodding at The Queen’s computer.

“If butlers are also tailors, I don’t see why a soldier shouldn’t know how to make a flipping computer work.”

“Hmm, yes. But does she use it?”

“Well, she had it on this morning. It lost the Wi-Fi and locked up when I was showing her how to do MapQuest. I was down there powering it off to try to get it to connect again. I thought she might like a little online music during her lunch.”

“Music? During her luncheon?” said William laughing. “You must be joking.”

“Well, she might like a little Tony Bennett, now, mightn’t she? Or, let’s see, Noël Coward?”

William looked at Luke skeptically.

“Or Dusty Springfield? Eartha Kitt, now?”

William rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

Luke pushed the joke a little further: “Uh, Bronski Beat, then?”

William replied a little archly, “You seem to know all about that music.”

“Well, we had a bloke in Germany. A gay DJ. He did 1980s nights.”

“And all you big brutes danced together, did you?”

“Stood up against the bar drinking, mainly.”

“Well, it was the bonding, I expect.” There was a pause while both of them looked out the window.

“I do miss them occasionally.” It was the first serious thing either of them had said, and William’s antennae picked up the shift in tone. He’d just been told something relatively private by this young man and he thought it was as well to leave a respectful silence to acknowledge it.

“I mean,” said Luke falteringly, half wincing at what he’d said, and half impelled forward by something he couldn’t quite spell out, “not so many chums around here.”

In the midst of this, the door lock clicked. A page in red brocade, wearing eighteenth-century court shoes, put his head through the doorway, “Look sharp! Herself will be through in three minutes.” Having thoroughly interrupted their moment, he shut the door and disappeared.

William approached a small round table with a starched white cloth. He began singing just under his breath, but audibly, a Bronski Beat anthem from the 1980s that had a lyric about Jonah in the belly of a whale, as he spread out the silver and plates he took from a sideboard.

Shooting a glance at William as he left the room, Luke started humming in a falsetto another hit from the same band about a boy from a small town. His voice could still be heard outside the door as he disappeared down the corridor.

Just then The Queen walked in the door on the opposite side of the room.

“Your Majesty,” said William, quietly bowing from the neck as he caught The Queen’s eye.

“Hello, William. What’s that?” she said, referring with a motion of her head to Luke singing “Tell me
why
,” which could still be heard faintly disappearing on the other side of the opposite doorway.

“1980s disco music, Ma’am. I believe they played it on special nights in the Rhine Garrison for the Grenadier Guards.”

“I see,” said The Queen, sitting down in front of her computer, and with an arthritic hand on the mouse she selected The-racehorse.com from her bookmarks.

L
ater that same Monday afternoon Luke advanced down the corridor, still wearing the suit made for his grandfather at Huntsman. If The Queen noticed it was a bit threadbare at the cuffs, rather shiny in the seat, he could tell her it had been made for his grandfather, and she’d smile. He knew she would. She generally liked holding on to things that had worked well for previous generations. His own appointment as an equerry to Her Majesty belonged to the same category. He was only in his early thirties and had served, so far, in Britain, Germany, and Iraq, where he had been decorated for bravery in joint action with the Americans. Most of the ladies and gentlemen attached to the Royal Household were closer to The Queen’s age than to his. Queen Elizabeth, however—she was known as “The Queen Mother” outside the palace, but inside she was “Queen Elizabeth” to distinguish her from “The Queen”—had liked good-looking young men. So she always had a young equerry attached to her Household among the senior ladies and gentlemen.