The Autobiography of The Queen (2 page)

Dear, dear Brno! While saying his farewells, he had filled the bag with biscuits and the normal routine could be resumed. The Queen sighed with relief – really, Brno had thought of everything …

But she had to admit to a strange and utterly unfamiliar feeling when the biscuits had gone and the dogs crowded by the door to commence the morning walk which, for the first time since they had come into the care of the Queen, they would be refused before being abandoned. Like the rest of the realm, they would have to figure out their future for themselves.

The Queen couldn't say whether the feeling was fear, which she had never experienced, or sadness or excitement. She gazed down into the handbag and then snapped it shut rapidly when what appeared to be a row of green eyes glinted up at her. Of course, the Cambridge emeralds! Yet it was reassuring to see the travel folder tucked, with its air tickets and the maroon passport with her coat of arms on the cover, neatly inside.

The Queen didn't wear a watch, but at least fifty grandfather clocks in the castle boomed out the hour.

‘Heavens!' murmured the Queen. ‘It's later than I
thought …' and, tying a headscarf over her freshly-permed hair, she slipped from the French window out into the garden and then down the flight of stone steps leading to the east turret entrance to the castle. A baying and shrieking went up from the corgis in the drawing room. The Queen walked up to a battered-looking car parked by the turret door.

‘Mrs Smith?' said the driver as the Queen pulled at the car door. ‘Come round this way, love, and sit in front!'

It would be wrong to say that the departure of the reigning sovereign from her demesne was marked with a sense of history on this damp and cloudy day. No one saw the Queen – or rather, no one recognised her as she paid off the driver at Inverness station and carefully took her reserved seat on the express train to London King's Cross. Later, when the paparazzi were swarming around Balmoral – and the other royal residences as well (it was said that the Duke (a) had run off with a floozy (b) decided to drown himself off Holkham Beach near Sandringham (c) was holed up at Windsor Castle where mobile phones were famously lacking in a signal) – many people would claim to have stood behind the Queen at airport and railway stations all over the country.

But no one could give any details of the Queen's destination or of the name she had travelled under.

On the day the Queen left her realm, only the corgis knew that something momentous had
happened. And Brno, of course, but, being of a more extravagant nature than the monarch of the country that had given him the right to call himself her loyal subject, Brno was in his private jet to Transylvania before the train bearing the royal personage had even got to Crewe.

‘Did anyone give you anything to put in your suitcase?' The check-in girl at Gatwick Airport suspected the small woman with white hair who stood in front of the desk might be deaf. She had asked the question once already, and (she glanced down at the prepared ticket and boarding pass) Mrs Gloria Smith had not answered. True, it seemed unlikely that a lady of advanced years carrying an unused-looking white handbag would be approached or persuaded to pack explosives by a terrorist – but you never knew, a respectable granny could outdo the Shoe Bomber any time.

The Queen was silent because she had never been on the receiving end of such a question before. How could anyone have given her anything to put in her suitcase when she had packed it herself for the first time in her life? At any other time, any one of the royal packers might have been asked to
carry contraband by a bent footman or a naughty housemaid trying to send a gift in the protected – like a diplomatic bag – luggage which accompanied the Queen and the Duke on their tours. But today? The Queen decided it was best to tell the truth. ‘Certainly not. One packed oneself, as it so happens.'

Check-in paused – she had been about to press down on her mobile and ask a colleague to come over when Mrs Gloria Smith failed to reply; now, the reply was more baffling than the previous silence. If this was a mentally ill passenger, why had there been no forewarning from the travel agent? Why had no one even booked a wheelchair?

‘Did you ask for assistance, madam?' asked Check-in. She pressed the button on her mobile and a young security guard with a foxy expression made his way up to the desk. Luckily, this was the Upper Class check-in and most Upper Class passengers had already been provided with their hospitality vouchers for the Executive Lounge. Only two people stood impatiently behind this difficult and slightly suspicious traveller: they were a couple in their fifties or sixties who were now fidgeting and sighing with impatience.

‘Certainly not!' the Queen repeated. It was true, she had looked rather longingly at the buggies carrying disabled travellers (though most looked perfectly fit) as Check-in had informed her right at the beginning of the procedure that Gate 37 was ‘a
mile and a half's walk'. But memories of Princess Margaret in her wheelchair at that disastrous photo shoot on the lawn of Clarence House stiffened the Queen's resolve to walk – after all, Glen Bogle was at least five miles in length and she walked along it regularly, with the Duke carrying a gun for a bit of rough shooting. Now, from the whispered tones and worried glances directed at her from Security and Check-in, she might as well be carrying a gun herself, the Queen thought: this was all a tremendous waste of time; and a royal tour, planned to the last half-minute, would have been airborne in the time this nonsense had taken. (Of course, the Queen remembered being asked to approve a battalion of armoured vehicles to be stationed at Heathrow in March 2003 by Tony Blair, the assault on Iraq having just begun. Care had to be taken. But the operation had looked unnecessary on TV, when the Queen watched over tea at Sandringham, and she had wondered at the time and many times since what good the invasion had done to anyone.)

‘Thank you, madam. Here is your voucher for the Executive Lounge,' Check-in said when Security had given an invisible nod which cleared Gloria Smith of any supposed evil intentions. ‘Thank you, sir,' now came in a warmer voice as Check-in noted that her new customers were titled; they were Sir Martyn and Lady Bostock and not in a good temper after being made to queue behind a
little old lady who didn't look as if she'd ever been on a plane in her life.

‘At last,' said Lady Bostock meaningfully as they all stood for a second staring at the back view of the small figure as it made its way down towards Departures.

‘I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting, Lady Bostock,' Check-in purred. ‘Now there aren't any pods left together, if you don't mind …'

‘I do mind,' snorted Lady Bostock. She knew, somehow, that this inefficient person had given away the pods they wanted. (She knew also, from frequent trips, that these were curved chromium nests for one person: to communicate with a spouse or loved one meant adjacent pods, and these could not now be provided.)

‘I'll see what we can do,' Check-in promised. There had been something that had flustered her about the old lady and she had let down the kind of passengers that Upper Class had been created for. Glancing up again, she saw the lady in the lavender tweed vanish in a queue by the gates to Departures and she tried to rid herself of her unease by stamping the electronic air tickets of the equally flustered Bostocks.

This sense of confusion and uncertainty may have accounted for the fact that the Queen's suitcase, which had been pushed to one side of the conveyor belt while she was questioned, remained there and failed to be included in the luggage on
board the Virgin Atlantic flight to Hewanorra Airport, St Lucia. Eventually, when Check-in had completed her shift, the overnight bag was found and taken to be blown up by the authorities.

‘Poor old thing,' murmured Sir Martyn (he was kinder than his wife), when the old lady disappeared from sight and it was time for the Bostocks to make the best of the short time remaining to them in the Executive Lounge. But Lady Bostock had seen the wheels peeping coyly from the base of the bag, and she now spoke loudly so all those responsible for passengers in Upper Class could hear her.

‘I can't
think
what kind of people go out to the island these days,' Lady Bostock said. ‘It really has changed, darling, hasn't it?'

The Queen, due to her height, was invisible in the pod she had been politely but firmly moved to after pressure from the unpleasant-looking late middle-aged couple who had now been reunited in adjacent accommodation. A glance at the label on their cabin baggage rewarded her with the information that they were Sir Martyn and Lady Bostock; and a distant memory returned, of knighting Bostock and of his Lady gushing at the reception after the ceremony. The Queen, not for the first time, wished the whole process of conferring honours and titles could be reversed, and instead of ‘Arise, Sir Martyn' there could be the opposite, where the wretched recipient of a baronetcy, an OBE or a life peerage could sink instead to both knees and crawl away out of the door. The royal smile, obviously, never betrayed this hope.

Today, the Queen had to admit to herself, she
had been awarded black looks and rude stares from the intolerable Lady Bostock – and the fact that an unsmiling face was a feature never before witnessed by the sovereign (except on occasions of discussing imminent divorces and dodgy remarriages with her children) occurred to her forcibly as she pulled brochures and a grandly inscribed menu from the pocket in the leather side (this, like the seat, moved to provide a bed when required) of the pod. As she pondered the unusual sight of a frown (Sir Martyn) and a succession of withering glares (his wife), the Queen noticed in herself a feeling of acute discomfort, also previously not experienced on any public occasion. It must be indigestion, she decided; and although the Queen of England was known never to have suffered a day's illness in her life – or to have visited a sick relative in hospital, for that matter – it was known to the staff of Balmoral, Sandringham, Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle that the monarch was partial to Bisodol when certain festive occasions had provided the rich food she disliked. Now, she wished she had packed the famous remedy, in the yellow and blue tin which had remained the same since her childhood. Perhaps – if she rang and asked the stewardess – but only a leaf-shaped diamond-bright light came on when she pressed what she took to be the bell. At the same time the seat shot forward and the Queen was almost propelled into the wide central aisle of the Upper Class section of the plane. Across
the aisle, a man tapping frantically into his laptop gazed for a second at the old lady. Then a stewardess came up and asked if a choice for dinner had yet been made. ‘Bisque d'homard in a neige of calabash,' the stewardess announced in a threatening tone.

The Queen liked to think she could deal with awkward situations (people when in her presence were frequently ill at ease and needed a simple topic to take their minds off the terrifying fact of meeting royalty) and, seeing that Lady Bostock was now staring from over the pod wall which separated them, she searched her mind for the easiest and most acceptable of these. Did you have far to come? was obviously out of the question, when you were seated at 35,000 feet and travelling at five hundred miles an hour; and it would look nosy to inquire whereabouts in London the Bostocks lived. Even the Queen's trained memory could not provide a postal code for them; but she had an inkling it was Belgravia.

Help came in the shape of the glossy brochure the Queen had pulled from the pouch a short while before. Here – and replicated she knew in a smaller form in the folder that Brno's friend at the Westminster Travel had prepared for her and which now lay at her feet in the white leather handbag – was the destination the Queen had chosen for her retirement from the stresses and strains of life as the Nation's Head. It was possible, indeed,
probable, that the Bostocks were also headed for the acres of lush rainforest sloping down to the sea on the Joli Estate – she hoped not but at least they would have something in common if this turned out to be the case. But ‘Do you plan to stay long?' somehow came out all mangled, in the face of Lady Bostock's contempt and Sir Martyn's embarrassment. It reminded her of the time, in a cramped East End flat, on a tour of the then new high-rise block, when the Duke had spotted a suitcase on top of the bedroom cupboard and had asked if a holiday was planned. The answer, once the bafflement of the tenants was safely avoided, with ‘Do you have far to go to work?' turned out to be simple: there was nowhere else in the flat for storage. But with the Bostocks – and the Queen had a feeling now that their house in Chester Square had been the venue for a reception (the Countess of Wessex had probably attended it) for a visiting Saudi billionaire – it was going to be quite different. The Bostocks were rich and upper class and clearly felt no need to disclose their address while on the island.

‘One is so looking forward to seeing one's house at Joli Estate,' the Queen ended rather lamely.

But she had seen – and she refused the lobster and the medallions of lamb and nibbled at the cheese and biscuits in order to calm her stomach – that when Lady Bostock opened her vanity case and pulled out a brochure, it displayed a picture of a
large hotel, with ‘Joli Hilton' written in gold lettering across the page. Lady Bostock settled down (in a most familiar way, the Queen thought: she had never been subjected to public displays of affection and had had to ask a grand-daughter the meaning of ‘snogging' a while back) and nibbled Sir Martyn's ear in a manner considered by the Queen to be very vulgar.

The Queen saw this display because she had risen to her feet prior to visiting the Upper Class lavatory, and had inadvertently looked over the rim of her pod.

What struck the monarch later as she emerged from the WC and made her way, eyes down, to her newly made-up bed, was the fact that she had risen to her feet and the Bostocks, not to mention the other passengers, had remained firmly seated.