The Uncommon Reader (9 page)

Nobody was told to dress up, though Her Majesty was as groomed and immaculate as she had been in the old days. But what a lot of advice she had had over the years, she thought, as she surveyed the crowded assembly; there were so many who had tendered it that they could only be accommodated in one of the grandest rooms in the palace, with the sumptuous tea laid out in two adjoining salons. She moved happily among her guests, unsupported by any other member of the royal family, who, though many of them were privy councillors, had not been invited. ‘I see quite enough of them as it is,’ she said, ‘whereas I never see all of you and, short of my dying, there’s no occasion when you’re all likely to see each other. Do try the trifle. It’s wicked.’ Seldom had she been in such good spirits.

The prospect of a proper tea had fetched the privy councillors out in greater numbers than had been anticipated: dinner would have been a chore, whereas tea was a treat. There was such a crowd that chairs were in short supply, and there was a lot of running to and fro by the staff in order to get everybody seated, though this turned out to be part of the fun. Some sat on the usual gilt party chairs, but others found themselves ensconced on a priceless Louis XV bergère or a monogrammed hall chair brought in from the vestibule, with one former lord chancellor ending up perched on a little cork-topped stool brought down from a bathroom.

The Queen placidly surveyed all these goings-on, not quite on a throne but certainly on a chair larger than anyone else’s. She had brought her tea in with her and sipped and chatted until at last everyone had made themselves comfortable.

‘I know that I’ve been well advised over the years but I hadn’t realised quite how numerously. What a crowd!’

‘Perhaps, ma’am, we should all sing “Happy Birthday”!’ said the prime minister, who was naturally sitting in the front row.

‘Don’t let’s get carried away,’ said Her Majesty. ‘Though it is true one is eighty and this is a sort of birthday party. But quite what there is to celebrate I’m not sure. I suppose one of the few things to be said for it is that one has at least achieved an age at which one can die without people being shocked.’

There was polite laughter at this and the Queen herself smiled. ‘I think’, she said, ‘that more shouts of “No, No” might be appropriate.’

So somebody obliged and there was more complacent laughter as the nation’s most distinguished tasted the joys of being teased by the nation’s most eminent.

‘One has had, as you all know, a long reign. In fifty years and more I have gone through, I do not say seen off’ – (laughter) – ‘ten prime ministers, six archbishops of Canterbury, eight speakers and, though you may not consider this a comparable statistic, fifty-three corgis – a life, as Lady Bracknell says, crowded with incident.’

The audience smiled comfortably, chuckling now and again. This was a bit like school, primary school anyway.

‘And of course,’ said the Queen, ‘it goes on, not a week passing without something of interest, a scandal, a cover-up or even a war. And since this is one’s birthday you must not even think of looking peeved’ – (the prime minister was studying the ceiling and the home secretary the carpet) – ‘for one has a long perspective and it was ever thus. At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

‘However, as some of you may know, I have always disliked waste. One not wholly mythical version of my character has me going round Buckingham Palace switching off the lights, the implication being that one is mean, though these days it could better be put down to an awareness of global warming. But disliking waste as I do puts me in mind of all the experiences I have had, many of them unique to me, the fruit of a lifetime in which one has been, if only as a spectator, very close to events. Most of that experience’ – and Her Majesty tapped her immaculately coiffed head – ‘most of it is up here. And one wouldn’t want it to go to waste. So the question is, what happens to it?’

The prime minister opened his mouth as if to speak and indeed half rose from his chair.

‘The question’, said the Queen, ‘was rhetorical.’

He sank back.

‘As some of you may know, over the last few years I have become an avid reader. Books have enriched my life in a way that one could never have expected. But books can only take one so far and now I think it is time that from being a reader I become, or try to become, a writer.’

The prime minister was bobbing again and the Queen, reflecting that this was what generally happened to her with prime ministers, graciously yielded the floor.

‘A book, Your Majesty. Oh yes, yes. Reminiscences of your childhood, ma’am, and the war, the bombing of the palace, your time in the WAAF.’

‘The ATS,’ corrected the Queen.

‘The armed forces, whatever,’ the prime minister galloped on. ‘Then your marriage, the dramatic circumstances in which you learned you were Queen. It will be sensational. And’, he chortled, ‘there’s not much doubt that it will be a bestseller.’

‘
The
bestseller,’ trumped the home secretary. ‘All over the world.’

‘Ye-es,’ said the Queen, ‘only’ – and she relished the moment – ‘that isn’t quite the kind of book one had in mind. That is a book, after all, that anyone can write and several people have – all of them, to my mind, tedious in the extreme. No, I was envisaging a book of a different sort.’

The prime minister, unsquashed, raised his eyebrows in polite interest. Maybe the old girl meant a travel book. They always sold well.

The Queen settled herself down. ‘I was thinking of something more radical. More … challenging.’

‘Radical’ and ‘challenging’ both being words that often tripped off the prime minister’s tongue, he still felt no alarm.

‘Have any of you read Proust?’ asked the Queen of the room.

Somebody deaf whispered ‘Who?’ and a few hands went up, the prime minister’s not among them, and seeing this, one young member of the cabinet who had read Proust and was about to put his hand up didn’t, because he thought it would do him no good at all to say so.

The Queen counted. ‘Eight, nine – ten’ – most of them, she noted, relics of much older cabinets. ‘Well, that’s something, though I’m hardly surprised. Had I asked Mr Macmillan’s cabinet that question I’m sure a dozen hands would have gone up, including his. However that’s hardly fair, as I hadn’t read Proust at that time either.’

‘I’ve read Trollope,’ said a former foreign secretary.

‘One is glad to hear it,’ said the Queen, ‘but Trollope is not Proust.’ The home secretary, who had read neither, nodded sagely.

‘Proust’s is a long book, though, water-skiing permitting, you could get through it in the summer recess. At the end of the novel Marcel, who narrates it, looks back on a life that hasn’t really amounted to much and resolves to redeem it by writing the novel which we have just in fact read, in the process unlocking some of the secrets of memory and remembrance.

‘Now one’s life, though one says it oneself, has, unlike Marcel’s, amounted to a great deal, but like him I feel nevertheless that it needs redeeming by analysis and reflection.’

‘Analysis?’ said the prime minister.

‘And reflection,’ said the Queen.

Having thought of a joke that he knew would go down well in the House of Commons, the home secretary ventured on it here. ‘Are we to assume that Your Majesty has decided to write this account because of something you read in a book, and a French book at that? Haw haw.’

There were one or two answering sniggers, but the Queen did not appear to notice that a joke had actually been made (as indeed it scarcely had). ‘No, Home Secretary. But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.’

Some of the councillors, long since out of government, were thinking that this was not the woman they remembered serving and were fascinated accordingly. But for the most part the gathering sat in uneasy silence, few of them having any idea what she was talking about. And the Queen knew it. ‘You’re puzzled,’ she said, unperturbed, ‘but I promise you, you do know this in your own sphere.’

Once again they were in school and she was their teacher. ‘To inquire into the evidence for something on which you have already decided is the unacknowledged premise of every public inquiry, surely?’

The youngest minister laughed, then wished he hadn’t. The prime minister wasn’t laughing. If this was to be the tone of what the Queen was planning to write there was no telling what she was going to say. ‘I still think you would do better just to tell your story, ma’am,’ he said weakly.

‘No,’ said the Queen. ‘I am not interested in facile reminiscence. It will, I hope, be something more thoughtful. Though when I say thoughtful I don’t mean considerate. Joke.’

Nobody laughed and the smile on the prime minister’s face had become a ghastly grin.

‘Who knows,’ said the Queen cheerfully, ‘it might stray into literature.’

‘I would have thought’, said the prime minister, ‘that Your Majesty was above literature.’

‘Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity. But, as I say, my purpose is not primarily literary: analysis and reflection. What about those ten prime ministers?’ She smiled brightly. ‘There is much to reflect on there. One has seen the country go to war more times than I like to recall. That, too, bears thinking about.’

Still she smiled, though if anyone followed suit, it was the oldest ones who had the least to worry about.

‘One has met and indeed entertained many visiting heads of state, some of them unspeakable crooks and blackguards and their wives not much better.’ This at least raised some rueful nods.

‘One has given one’s white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore; to be Queen, I have often thought the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length boots.

‘One is often said to have a fund of common sense but that’s another way of saying that one doesn’t have much else and accordingly, perhaps, I have at the instance of my various governments been forced to participate if only passively in decisions I consider ill-advised and often shameful. Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume a regime, or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deodorant.

‘I am the Queen and head of the Commonwealth, but there have been many times in the last fifty years when that has made me feel not pride but shame. However’ – and here she stood up – ‘we must not lose our sense of priorities and this is a party after all, so before I continue shall we now have some champagne?’

The champagne was superb but, seeing that one of the pages doing the serving was Norman, the prime minister lost all taste for it and slipped along the corridor to the toilet, where he got on his mobile to the attorney general. The lawyer did much to reassure him, and fortified by his legal advice the prime minister was able to pass the message round the members of the cabinet, so that when in due course Her Majesty came back into the room it was a more resilient group that awaited her.

‘We’ve been talking about what you said, ma’am,’ began the prime minister.

‘All in good time,’ said the Queen. ‘One hasn’t quite finished. I wouldn’t want you to think that what I am planning to write and indeed have already started writing is some cheap, tell-tale life-in-the-palace nonsense beloved of the tabloids. No. One has never written a book before but one hopes that it will’ – she paused – ‘transcend its circumstances and stand on its own, a tangential history of its times and, you’ll perhaps be reassured to learn, far from exclusively to do with politics or the events of one’s life. I’d like to talk about books, too, and people. But not gossip. I don’t care for gossip. A roundabout book. I think it was E. M. Forster who said: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant, success in circuit lies.” Or was it’, she asked the room, ‘Emily Dickinson?’

Unsurprisingly, the room did not answer.

‘But one mustn’t talk about it or it will never get written.’

It was no comfort to the prime minister to reflect that whereas most people when claiming to want to write a book would never get it written, with the Queen and her terrible sense of duty it could be guaranteed that she would.

‘Now, Prime Minister,’ she turned to him gaily, ‘you were saying?’

The prime minister rose. ‘Respectful as we are of your intentions, ma’am’ – the prime minister’s tone was casual and friendly – ‘I think I have to remind you that you are in a unique position.’

‘I seldom forget it,’ said the Queen. ‘Go on.’

‘The monarch has, I think I’m right in saying, never published a book.’

The Queen shook her finger at him, a gesture she remembered in the moment of making it that was a mannerism of Noël Coward’s. ‘That isn’t quite true, Prime Minister. My ancestor Henry VIII, for instance, wrote a book. Against heresy. That is why one is still called Defender of the Faith. So, too, did my namesake Elizabeth I.’

The prime minister was about to protest.

‘No, one knows it isn’t the same, but my great-grandmother Queen Victoria, she wrote a book also,
Leaves from a Highland Journal
, and a pretty tedious book it is, too, and so utterly without offence as to be almost unreadable. It’s not a model one would want to follow. And then of course’ – and the Queen looked hard at her first minister – ‘there was my uncle the Duke of Windsor. He wrote a book,
A King’s
Story
, the history of his marriage and subsequent adventures. If nothing else, that surely counts as a precedent?’

Furnished with the advice of the attorney general on this very point, the prime minister smiled and almost apologetically made his objection. ‘Yes, ma’am, I agree, but the difference, surely, is that His Royal Highness wrote the book as Duke of Windsor. He could only write it because he had abdicated.’

‘Oh, did I not say that?’ said the Queen. ‘But … why do you think you’re all here?’