Queen Camilla (36 page)

When the landlord shouted across, ‘Are you two going to sit there nursing that orange juice all bloody day?’ Miranda picked up her coat and said, ‘Perhaps we’d better go.’

By the time Graham walked out of the pub with Miranda on his arm, he felt two inches taller. Had he been a stag, he would have challenged any man in the pub to an antler fight. Now, at last, he understood about women. It was why Napoleon tried to conquer Europe – he wanted to impress Josephine. It was the same for Hitler – he lost his way over Eva Braun. There was no still, quiet voice inside Graham’s head asking why a stunningly beautiful girl like Miranda needed to search on a website for a partner.

When Graham mentioned that he would have to go
home soon to let the dogs out, Miranda gushed, ‘I
love
dogs.’

Gin and Tonic were in the kitchen listening to
Gardeners’ Question Time
, when they heard Graham’s voice outside the house. The dogs pricked up their ears and Gin said, ‘We’d better go to the door and greet him, show a bit of enthusiasm.’

Tonic yapped, ‘You go, I’m waiting for Bob Flower-dew’s tip of the week.’

Gin whimpered, ‘Come with me, Tonic. You need to earn some brownie points.’

Tonic growled, ‘Look, I don’t like Graham. Graham doesn’t like me. End of.’

They heard Graham’s key scratching in the lock and a female voice saying, ‘Orphaned, by a runaway hover mower! How awful, Graham.’

Tonic barked, ‘He’s brought a woman home! This I must see. I bet she’s a reject from the Argos queue!’

The dogs ran into the hallway, barking excitedly, and saw Graham helping a dark-haired woman off with her coat.

Tonic yapped, ‘Beauty and the Beast.’

Gin yelped, ‘I expected a gruesome twosome.’

They frisked about at Graham’s feet and Miranda said, ‘Oh, Graham, Skye terriers! They’re adorable.’

Gin sat up on his hind legs and held out a paw to Miranda.

‘Gin wants you to shake his hand,’ said Graham.

Miranda bent down and held Gin’s small paw. She laughed, ‘I’m very pweezed to meet you, ickle sir.’

Tonic growled, ‘Jesus Christ! Ickle sir? Pweezed!’

Graham frowned down and said, ‘Be careful of Tonic,
he’s a very nasty piece of work. He’s diabetic so he’s prone to irrational mood swings.’

‘Does he bite?’ asked Miranda, taking a step backwards.

‘When his blood sugar’s low,’ said Graham.

He shepherded Miranda through into the living room and opened the French doors to the garden. The dogs ran out for a pee. When they returned, Graham and Miranda were sitting on the sofa holding hands. There was a soppy expression on Graham’s face that they had never seen before.

Miranda was saying, ‘When was the last time you bought any new clothes for yourself, Graham?’

The transformation of Graham Cracknall had begun.

Miranda’s sexual seduction of Graham started an hour and a half later, after a Sunday tea of salmon-paste sandwiches, and a tin of fruit cocktail with evaporated milk. It was a tricky one for Miranda, who had to make an apparent journey from shy virgin to willing sexual partner. She started by toying with the half cherry from the fruit cocktail, holding it on the tip of her tongue and trying to tease Graham into taking it from her with his own tongue.

They were soon exchanging small pieces of fruit from mouth to mouth. Then, as though maddened by desire, Miranda dipped her fingers into the fruit syrup in her glass dish and asked Graham to lick them clean. She then undid the buttons under the Peter Pan collar and smeared some of the evaporated milk across the rise of her breasts.

Tonic was disgusted. ‘What a waste of good food,’ he snapped.

Both dogs were relieved when Miranda murmured in Graham’s ear, ‘God forgive me, Sister Anastasia, but who could resist such a man?’ and took Graham into his bedroom.

A few minutes later, Miranda lay underneath Graham as he huffed and puffed on top of her, and thought, the things I do for the party!

She had known from the way that he tapped out of time to the Glenn Miller record playing in The Mouse and Cheese that he had no sense of rhythm, and so it proved in bed. He was like an impatient man driving in slow traffic. He appeared to take no notice of her at all, let alone any sexual needs she might have.

Graham’s bedroom could have belonged to a ten-year-old boy. There was a shelf full of battered soft toys, including a pig. Graham’s one endearment so far to her had been, ‘You’re a silly little piglet, aren’t you?’

On Monday morning Miranda reported back to Boy and his election strategy team. First she projected the photographs she had taken of Graham in the garden of the bungalow, in the time between the salmon-paste sandwiches and the sex.

Miranda was relieved of her usual media duties, and for the following week she concentrated on her preparations for capturing Graham Cracknall’s heart. An aide was sent to Hamleys to buy a luxury games compendium; she was a fast learner and was soon conversant with the basic rules of ludo, dominoes, backgammon,
snakes and ladders, and Cluedo. More difficult to her was injecting a measure of bubbliness into her depressive personality. She practised girlish giggles, hair flicking and tried to adopt a remorselessly cheerful outlook, and, although normally fiercely competitive, she allowed Graham to beat her at the games they played, before ‘getting down to business’, as Graham called it.

On the nights she didn’t see him, she drank and drugged herself into a state of insensibility.

The Chancellor and the Prime Minister were co-hosting a reception at Number Ten for the Chinese Minister of Trade. The Chancellor took an opportunity, when Jack was between introductions, to draw him away to a corner of the room. After checking that they were out of earshot, the Chancellor asked, ‘Have you read about Mao Tse-tung’s eradication of the four pests?’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘What were they?’

‘The extermination of rats, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows. The point is,’ said the Chancellor, ‘he wanted to add a fifth, but was persuaded out of it by his advisers.’

Jack said irritably, ‘For fuck’s sake, get to the fucking point.’

‘The fifth was
dogs
,’ said the Chancellor. ‘If it was unwise for Mao Tse-tung to try to eradicate dogs, then it’s wrong for you. Prime Minister, this is England.’

Violet Toby and the Queen were looking into the open door of the Queen’s wardrobe, trying to select an out-fit that the Queen could wear to Grice’s investiture. The Queen was in her underslip and stockinged feet; Beverley Threadgold had been round first thing to wash the Queen’s hair and set it, into fat pink plastic rollers. Violet felt that she would swoon with delight as each beautiful silken outfit was taken out of its plastic cover and laid on the bed to be examined.

She asked, ‘Why don’t you wear any of this lovely stuff, Liz?’

The Queen said, ‘Silk clothes like these need a good foundation, Vi, and I simply can’t be bothered to struggle into a corset every morning.’

‘Nor me,’ said Violet, looking mournfully at her lumpy un-corseted bum in the glass. ‘You wouldn’t believe I once ’ad a eighteen-inch waist, would you?’

‘No,’ said the Queen, ‘I would not!’

Eventually, after a long deliberation, they chose a coat and dress in duck-egg blue silk which had a matching hat and shoes for the Queen. Violet squeezed herself into a frock and jacket in emerald green, which the Queen had worn only weeks after Prince Edward’s birth, before she had quite recovered her figure.

Violet marvelled at the tiny hand-stitching on the
hem and cuffs, and said, ‘It’s the most loveliest thing I’ve ever ’ad on my back.’

The Queen persuaded Violet to try on a wide-brimmed hat, covered in peacock feathers, saying, ‘I always felt a little intimidated by it, but it will suit your… bolder personality perfectly.’

Violet smiled when she saw her reflection in the looking glass. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘this hat don’t scare me.’

After titivating their faces with the stash of Estée Lauder cosmetics the Queen had kept unused in a drawer for a special occasion, the two women left the house, treading carefully on the broken pavements in their court shoes, and headed towards the One-Stop Centre. The invitations to the ceremony had said, ‘Dress smart: no jeans, no trainers, no Burberry, no horses.’ The Queen had puzzled over the ‘no horses’, before being informed by Harry that ‘no horses’ was code for ‘no Ralph Lauren’.

All over the Flowers Estate similar scenes were taking place, as people pulled their smartest clothes out of cupboards and wardrobes. A mellow golden sun warmed the Flowers Exclusion Zone, for which both the Reverend Edmund-Harvey and the Imam Mohammed Akbar took credit. Both men had been asked by Sandra Grice if they would pray for good weather.

Sandra had spared none of Arthur’s expense; she had hired a job lot of entertainers from an agency calling itself Joviality Incorporated. She had not had her pick of agencies; most of them carried a warning on their advertising literature: ‘No Exclusion Zones’. A small
orchestra had been engaged to play Arthur’s favourite music, before, during and after the ceremony. Arthur’s taste had not changed since he was a young teenager, and when Sandra had asked him what the orchestra should play, he’d replied, ‘Motown, there’s
bin
no music since 1965.’

The One-Stop Centre had been draped in English flags and bunting. Balloons had been tied, perhaps unwisely, to the razor wire that ran around the perimeter of the roof. Inside the main hall, floral displays of carnations and chrysanthemums spelt out S.A.G., Arthur’s soon-to-be initials. Round the back of the building, inside a hired freezer, was an ice statue of Arthur, depicting him as a purposeful visionary with one hand shielding his clear-sighted eyes from the sun.

A magnificent six-tiered cake, each tier supported by eight icing-sugar faux scaffolding poles, stood in the middle of a room-sized buffet table. The food was a hymn to saturated fat. There were mounds of Turkey Twizzlers, stacks of mini pork pies, piled wedges of glutinous pizza, a small mountain of suppurating cheese cubes on sticks, deep bowls of potato crisps and platters of slimy chicken thighs. Sandra had crossed ‘salad’ off the suggested menu: Arthur never touched rabbit food and considered those that did to be communists and cranks.

At ten o’clock the Queen and Violet arrived at the One-Stop Centre. After passing through various security checks, they were shown by a policeman in a bullet-proof vest into the main hall where the caterers, two bickering bald men, were putting the final touches to
the food by decorating it with plastic watercress. There was a raised dais at the end of the hall on which stood a semicircle of gold-painted chairs. Each chair had a card Sellotaped to the seat: ‘Reserved for Royal Family’.

Violet said, with an aristocratic hauteur, ‘And where exactly do I put
my
arse?’

The Queen tore off one of the Sellotaped cards and said, ‘Princess Michael will have to sit in the audience.’

Violet nodded and took her place next to the Queen.

The small orchestra gathered around the piano and frowned over their sheet music. More used to Salzburg than Motown, they nevertheless started up gallantly with a somewhat staid rendition of ‘I Heard it through the Grapevine’.

At ten fifteen, the Queen, Violet and the rest of the Royal Family were escorted to a side room while the dais was prepared with a velvet footstool and the ceremonial sword. At half past ten a procession of cars and flatbed lorries assembled at the security checkpoint at the entrance to the Exclusion Zone. Arthur and Sandra were sitting in the back of an open-topped carriage, drawn by two white horses whose manes had been plaited with purple ribbons to match Sandra’s purple velvet ermine-trimmed dress and cloak. Arthur was an imposing figure in his top hat and tailored morning suit.

Sandra had told her dressmaker to run her up something ‘sexy but tasteful. Tits, but no nipples. Bum, but no crack. Legs, but no fanny.’ The dressmaker had dropped her other work to concentrate on Sandra’s outfit and had produced a frock that Camilla later described as a hybrid of flamenco dancer and Ruritanian princess.

Rocky sat between Arthur and Sandra, wearing a new purple rhinestone collar. He was dreading the mockery of the dogs on the estate. He had refused to jump into the carriage, until Arthur threatened him with ‘a good kickin’, if you don’t get your arse in sharpish’, so Rocky had been given no choice but to do as his master commanded.

Columns of security police, including Dwayne Lockhart and Inspector Lancer, walked alongside Grice’s carriage. The carriage driver, a melancholic man who owned a riding school near to the Old Mill, had been bribed by Sandra into wearing an eighteenth-century costume, including a powdered wig and tricorne hat. After they had been trotting along for only a few moments, Arthur tapped the driver on his back and said, ‘Alter your face, sunshine, you look like you’re on your way to the bleedin’ gallows.’

The entertainers walked at the rear of the procession, behind a small brass band that played hits from the Eurovision Song Contest, including ‘Congratulations’ and ‘Boom-Bang-A-Bang’. The residents of the Exclusion Zone lined the streets in their thousands, lured out of their houses by the banging drums, clashing cymbals and oom-pah-pah of the trumpets and trombones. Their numbers were reinforced by Grice’s scaffolders, who had been given a day’s holiday – without pay – so that they could celebrate his social elevation.

The night before, Dwayne Lockhart had spent several fraught hours reading Dostoevsky’s harrowing account of his incarceration in a Siberian Gulag. Dwayne had been moved to tears by the great writer’s description
of a Christmas Day treat, when some of the prisoners had performed a melodramatic play for the other convicts. The brutalized men – some of whom had raped and murdered, and had been sent mad by the horrific conditions – were transfixed by the clumsy acting and brightly lit stage. The brutality had left their faces, and for an hour or so they became better men. Dwayne fancied he saw the same redemptive expression on the faces of those watching Grice’s parade (though, it has to be said, nobody else he conferred with afterwards witnessed such a transformation).