The Autobiography of The Queen (9 page)

‘What all this?' Austin began. Then he stopped. The moon had risen higher and it now showed the furthest margin of the beach, the raffia-roofed huts and the ghostly form of white plastic loungers. There was nobody there – unless you could count a black circular object poking out from under the fringe of a grass hut further up the beach. But
Austin knew the sounds of the bay and the rainforest, and what he now heard did not belong to them. He held up his hand; and Mrs Smith fell silent.

The sea lapped the shore, the moon shed an uneven light on the carefully raked beach, behind the bandstand the artificial lawns glowed green in the light of the security lamps. A kind of complicity reigned, between the bulky shadow of the Gros Piton and the two figures on their loungers, as if the stories being told were somehow guarded by the ancient, massive rock: already a part of history, the tales and reminiscences which now poured from Mrs Gloria Smith took shape against the deep darkness of the water at the Piton's base.

‘You must have wondered, Ford, why one left the United Kingdom and came here?' demanded the Queen. ‘What was the plan, what constituted so momentous a decision?'

Austin made no reply and his companion went on, as the moon appeared to grow nearer and the hair of the old lady with secrets shone on her head
like a crown of white feathers. ‘One has the duty, would you not agree, Ford, to set out the tapestry of one's life, to supply for the future a true account of one's encounters and decisions … In short, Ford, one is here to write. Yes, the autobiography of the Queen!'

Austin pulled a long-forgotten bag of toffees from his trouser pocket and popped two into his mouth, allowing the mulch of caramel and beer to swirl and form a coating on his teeth. He had an unpleasant feeling that someone was watching – or listening – and what would people think of Austin Ford if they saw him with this batty old woman on the beach? He sucked harder, causing his mumble of a reply to be indistinct; and Mrs Smith, clearly believing she heard encouragement for her newfound vocation, went piercingly on. ‘To return to Windsor Castle – where one will open the volume one was told very firmly, very firmly indeed, not to tell anyone. In case the King and Queen were … The bombing was at its most ferocious at that time and in the event of Windsor being strafed – if that was the word – and one happened to be the sole survivor …'

‘Yeah, that's for sure,' Austin said. He was aware of not having listened to the confidences granted him by Mrs Gloria Smith – but truly, she was worse than Auntie May, who at least only thought she had been on exotic journeys to the Pole or some such place. This Gloria appeared to be basing
her fantasies here: and the likelihood of Windsor Village, so Austin thought, of suffering a bombing attack was nil. They wouldn't come up from Cuba, their planes were too old, like their beaten-up old cars, and he couldn't see Hewanorra Airport granting a Cuban pilot a landing, even if they came pretending to be tourists. Anyway, why would they go for his Rum Shop and a small assortment of half-built houses, Caribbean gingerbread houses that weren't even worth blowing up? No, Gloria was a bore; and he especially disliked the way her voice changed and her eyes went bright when she talked about this imaginary airborne invasion. It was time, before the full moon gave over to a pale sun waiting its turn to rise in the sky, to organise the departure of a disappointing client, remove her from the books of the Escort Service forever, and tell that ancient English couple up at the Joli Hotel to take care of their compatriot and help her on her way home.

‘Ford!'

Now the woman was speaking in a tone which suggested she was about to issue an order. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?' Austin muttered under his breath, before saying, ‘Yes, Mrs Smith?' like a well-trained escort replying to a wealthy old lady. For God's sake, it should be he who was bossing
her
about. She'd spent two nights in the Rum Shop: what was it she expected of him now?

‘Of course, it was Uncle David who took the
emeralds. Daddy knew that; one never really knew whether Mummy did. He was made to hand them back: it all comes to one, you know, Ford, if one thinks hard enough about that dreadful time when England was in such danger …'

‘Musta been a pain,' Austin agreed lazily, but now with a touch of slyness in his voice. ‘The emeralds, eh?' he added, as if he didn't care about the answer. ‘Your old man give ‘em to you when you was a girl? And so where are they now, I wonder?'

‘Who knows?' Austin Ford's client replied crossly. ‘They were taken from the handbag' – and with a sharp look over her shoulder as if to pick out the criminal from an identity parade, Mrs Smith gazed across the beach and back to the deserted tennis court where a couple of fallen coconuts sat in a pool of water caused by the sporadic showers from the rainforest. ‘Lettice would never have left it unattended … too careless for words.'

Austin Ford tried to conceal his sudden interest in what his client was saying, by stretching out on the plastic lounger and closing his eyes. Maybe – just maybe – this Gloria Smith had seen someone, while she lay resting at the Joli Hotel, someone who came in and stole her money, her passport and the emeralds. If her memory was as great as she claimed, the details might come back to her. Then Austin could go and get them off the robber. But, as he well knew, the trouble with white people was that they thought all black people looked alike. If
only she knew that black people considered whites to be identical, interchangeable – but there was no point in trying to explain this to Mrs Smith. The thought wouldn't have crossed her mind.

‘It was always Uncle David. You wouldn't have been born then, Ford – but do you know, I wonder, who one is talking about? His Royal Highness – his wife, Wallis Simpson, not allowed to be a Royal Highness, which he did mind terribly, but what could we do? It was known – as an appalling secret, of course, and just to a handful of people – that Uncle David was on the side of Hitler in the war. He was so jealous of the King, my poor father …'

‘Nothin' you could do,' Austin said in a sympathetic tone. He'd give it a go just a bit longer, then he'd get her up to reception and find those two dinosaurs and just dump her on them. A few minutes more of this and he'd go cuckoo anyway – unless, all at once, she could solve the mystery of the missing necklace.

‘Daddy said that Uncle David had married – a French girl – when he was frightfully young. She'd had a child. A son. Yes, a son.'

Austin now yawned openly. The subject of the emeralds had vanished, just like the stones: maybe they were jinxed, like one time his employer Mr King had warned him when he took the ring from his little velvet bag out of the cupboard and insisted on Ford polishing the diamond surround. ‘They're
bad luck, Ford, especially this one from the Maharajah of Jaipur …'

‘The French … mother … died, so one heard after the War,' Mrs Smith was saying. ‘But her son – her son should have been crowned King. His existence was the secret confided by His Majesty King George the Sixth to his elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth, who is before you now, and speaking as your Queen.'

This was enough. Austin rose to his feet and made a purposeful gesture, a sign he was leaving the Joli Beach and the Rum Shop together, and indicating to Mrs Smith that she was expected to accompany him asap. But the old biddy didn't budge. What would he have to do to get her out of his hair for once and for all? Anyone could see she was crazy; and Austin blamed himself for having listened to her crap memories in the first place.

By now, however, there was no stopping the flow; and, like a spectator who must stand and watch the drama, Austin found himself rooted to the moonlit beach, unable to escape the stories and assertions, the occasional guarded tone which represented remorse or regret, the dry-ice enunciation of a woman who must always be obeyed. There had been a sister, he understood that – a sister whose heart had been broken and who had then gone on to have a son by a man then banished from the kingdom; there had been the folly of a woman, Diana, who had an inherited madness; there was a
son who had married but his marriage was not valid.

Austin lifted one leg and then another; they felt like boulders of stone. Something in the old lady had him enchanted and petrified. He couldn't move, even into the softly lapping sea.

Then what appeared at first to be help could be seen coming down the beach from the Rainforest Bar. Framed by the vast bulk of the Gros Piton, marching with resolve over the crushed coral sand, three dark-suited men and one stout, fast-walking woman also in black, bore down on the loungers and Tahitian grass huts where Austin Ford sat with the Queen.

‘Oh-oh,' Austin let out, as he saw his companion frown apprehensively at the approach of the strangers. ‘What they want here, I'm sayin' …'

But before he could say any more, Austin Ford found himself gripped firmly by his client Gloria and whisked into the Rum Shop. The sill was pulled up and then, with surprising strength for a woman of her age, Mrs Gloria Smith pulled shut and locked the door.

When the team sent to assess and bring back the Queen of England from St Lucia had toured the small compound and found no trace of her – or of a Mr Ford they had been told about by a near-hysterical Lady Bostock at the Joli Hotel – they turned and went back along the beach. A phone line had been set up to enable confidential calls from Prince Charles in the manager's room at the Rainforest Bar – and although this had been hacked into and details of the search for the Queen globally transmitted, a decision had been taken to the effect that mobile phones were even less to be trusted (as previous experience with the heir to the throne and his widely overheard reference to Tampax had demonstrated) than the line just installed. Thus it was that billions heard a distinctly testy Prince of Wales inform his team that they must find Her Majesty and that a psychiatric report on the state of
her mental health must be emailed to him directly at Highgrove. If necessary, the patient should be sedated before boarding a plane home. Disruption might follow an attempt to restrain the Queen; and for all those who had enjoyed the play and film by Alan Bennett, a vision of
The Madness of King George
rose before the eyes. Was it possible that the sensible, well-balanced woman the world had known as the monarch of Great Britain – horse-loving sportswoman, wife and mother – had actually lost her sanity? Kettles boiled but stood unused as the conversation continued. People in their baths allowed the water to go cold as they listened in on Radio Nine to the pirated conversation.

If the woman and three Scotland Yard detectives who made up the team sent out to restore the heir's mother to her rightful home in England mused on the fact that the sectioning of the Queen was tantamount to removing her from the throne, not one spoke out. They couldn't find their gracious sovereign; and one or two of the men felt a shiver of fear at the notion of imprisonment in the Tower as a result. This was a time when the veil between history and the present day seemed perilously thin: if they
did
find her, did the Queen have the powers to incarcerate them? (She did indeed have the right to arrest criminals.) All in all, it was a relief when the phone malfunctioned; and, using their mobiles, the hunters laid plans to tour the island, concentrating on the capital, Castries, where there had by
now been several sightings of the Queen. For the sake of efficiency, a speedboat was ordered, to take them up the coast. They would be picked up by the helipad at the far end of Joli Bay.

The Queen and Austin Ford left the Rum Shop when the protracted silence indicated that the team had gone some time before – and even the greckle, a noisy bird, felt free to hop about outside and let out shrill calls. How it was that the hunters had not suspected their prey to be in the shop it was impossible to say: perhaps the idea of the Queen of England in a low bar – or the fact of the psychiatrist announcing that rum was likely, due to its naval associations (the tragic death of Lord Mountbatten came to mind) to be her very least favourite – had led them to thump a few times on the ramshackle building and retrace their footsteps to the beach and the Rainforest Bar. In any case, it was with a sigh of relief that the Queen came out and stood a moment later blinking in the first rays of the rising sun. Then Austin led her to the pier, called the Rasta who was dozing in his boat, and assisted his elderly client to embark. The outboard engine spluttered and roared.

So it was that the Queen and Austin Ford disappeared into the bay of Ravissant Estate, just before Prince Charles's contingent of medical and MI6 personnel circled the bay in their speedboat and then proceeded to head off in the opposite direction.

‘You didn't, Marianne! I simply can't believe you took – you stole, all these jewels! We must go back at once. I am staggered at your having done this –'

‘Go back?' Lady Bostock repeated. ‘We can't do that, Martyn. What about our holiday?'

‘The holiday's off!' came the shouted reply. ‘Pack! Go on! Start packing!'

The Bostocks, in their cottage on the Joli Estate, sat under a rain cloud by the plunge pool, on their heads white hats already sodden from the rainforest's sharp showers. Lady Bostock's hair, grey and streaked across her forehead, gave her the look of a child's drawing of a grown-up: a schoolteacher perhaps, or a representation of a doll left out in the wet. That tears now coursed down her cheeks failed to move Sir Martyn, who was blundering towards the veranda door leading into the cottage. He cursed as he almost slipped in a new puddle, and
for a moment the bag he carried – ‘not plastic', as Lady Bostock had been proud to announce in the restaurant the night before, ‘a brown paper bag like the old days' – almost fell from his grasp into the blue chlorinated water of the pool. Both Bostocks screamed simultaneously. Then came a silence, even Sir Martyn appearing to resign himself to a state of uncertainty. A further drenching took place before the couple moved indoors: both knew the occupants of the slightly grander villa a few yards up the hill must be listening to Sir Martyn's accusations and his wife's increasingly feeble defence.