The Autobiography of The Queen (10 page)

‘The … the handbag was open on the bed,' Marianne Bostock now said. ‘The – the green necklace was almost falling out of it …'

‘I can't believe it,' was Sir Martyn's often-stressed comment. ‘Give it all to me, for God's sake! You actually took this into dinner last night – Marianne, have you gone out of your mind?'

Lady Bostock said she had hoped one of the women dining in the Rainforest Bar would recognise the brown paper bag and claim the contents. ‘I was waiting for someone to come forward, darling.' Placatory tone clearly not working, Lady Bostock summoned the energy to glare at her husband in a manner which reminded him of his lowly origins, in comparison at least with those of his in-laws, the seventeenth Earl of St Leger (who had had no need, in order to feel superior, to find himself knighted by the Queen).

‘Don't shout,' Marianne reiterated, the second of these commands apparently successful, as Sir Martyn, sitting in the Harrods basket chair bought for the Joli Hotel by a disgraced estate agent specialising in bargains and repossessions and shipped by banana boat from Southampton, now slumped back, eyes closed, as if to show the extent of the disbelief already several times professed.

‘You see,' Lady Bostock pressed her point, ‘I was just passing the room and there was the white handbag on the bed and when I looked inside there were the – well they must be emeralds, Martyn, I ought to know when I see gems of that calibre.'

‘And nothing else?' asked Sir Martyn, his own tone now defensive and suspicious. ‘No money, no passport.' Again he assured his wife he found this hard to believe.

‘Who leaves their door open, Martyn, and goes out?'

At this, there was another silence.

‘Well, there may have been a few dollars,' came the next response. ‘And yes. There was a passport. I handed it in to the concierge at reception. They looked up the owner, at my request, but there was no sign of her in the register. So I decided to wait, and restore the jewels myself. After all, you never can tell in these places who is working for the management and who is looking out for himself.'

‘True,' Sir Martyn conceded. Both he and his wife refrained from mentioning the probable fate of
the dollars – and Sir Martyn had never been a man for noticing his wife's new silk top or sequinned pants, even if these had not been worn before on the holiday.

‘She was – she was an elderly lady, but the passport photo didn't show her at all clearly,' Lady Bostock said. ‘There was a photo slipped in, just a snap, I thought it rather sweet so I kept it.' She pulled at the brown paper bag, and after a swirl of stones with their diamond surrounds fell into her lap, she foraged for the picture.

‘Oh my God!' cried both the Bostocks; and this time the gay couple in the grander villa up the hill came out on to the veranda and stood there like weathermen, keen to discover which way the wind was blowing. There had perhaps been a break-in at the cottage below, or a body had been found in the plunge pool – or, unlikely as it might seem in this day and age, the elderly Sir with the dog-faced wife might be homophobic. (But then, nothing about the Joli Estate seemed to belong to this day and age, being marooned in the fifties or even the thirties. You never can tell.)

The photograph purloined by Lady Bostock from the unattended handbag showed a green sward, marked with small towels, and a pair of green wellies at the end of the row. Bounding into the frame was a small dog, the speed of its movement blurring its brown head and distinctive white markings.

‘This is what we have to do,' barked Sir Martyn, who had been known for his ruthless business methods and could asset strip as fast as any non-tax-paying City mogul.

‘What can we do?' wailed Lady Bostock. The couple on the veranda above exchanged embarrassed glances: were the occupants of the cottage celebrating – and finding difficulty therein – a second honeymoon? They retired into the safety of their self-contained suite.

Sir Martyn placed the green stones back in the paper bag and had packed before his wife had even opened her suitcase. ‘Come now!' thundered Sir Martyn Bostock, and for the first time in forty years of marriage, Marianne had no choice other than to obey.

‘The airport,' her husband's stentorian tones rang out in the rained-over area just outside reception, where today only one run-down taxi awaited a fare. ‘Fifty dollars if you speed up,' puffed Sir Martyn, dragging his wife in after him. And when the driver said in a slow drawl that fifty dollars was the price anyway, Marianne was able to witness for the first time in her life the acquiescence of a once-great businessman to an obviously bad deal.

As the Bostocks and the emeralds in the brown paper bag jolted their way to Vieux Fort and Hewanorra Airport, Sir Martyn rehearsed his wife on her approach to officials and customs brokers there. Lady Bostock had not found the necklace in
her luggage when she arrived three days ago from London Gatwick on a Virgin Atlantic flight. It had gone into an inner flap of her case and she had only noticed it today. There was no connection between the discovery of the jewels and her husband's decision to end their holiday so abruptly and fly home today. An illness in the family was the cause. She and Sir Martyn would show their gratitude in every way they could if the contents of the brown paper bag could be handed in to Customs and they could leave on tonight's scheduled flight …

And so, as the Bostocks climbed out of the black car (which had been driven at exactly the same speed as any other journey to the airport) – and after Sir Martyn had paid the agreed hundred dollars, they pushed their way in through the crowd awaiting check-in at the airport, to find they must wait their turn before a suitable official could be entrusted with the emeralds.

As they stood in line, paper bag clutched to Lady Bostock's bosom, a small boat with a half-conked-out engine came ear-splittingly into Vieux Fort harbour and tied up at the wharf.

A slight, small woman wearing a lavender tweed skirt, flip-flops, a T-shirt with a picture of Gros Piton across the front and ‘Love from St Lucia' printed below, stepped out of the boat on to the quay.

A battered-looking jeep drew up and the oddly-attired
lady's escort, a man in his thirties, waved to the driver; then, without needing to give details of their destination, the couple were driven to Hewanorra Airport.

The Queen may have suffered criticism – of her role as a mother, of her voice and of the extent of her fortune – but no one could say of her that she lacked pragmatism and an ability to adapt to new circumstances as they presented themselves to her.

It had been obvious, especially after the agonising discomfort of a second night at the back of the Rum Shop, that the plan to live in a modest villa by the edge of the sea in a Commonwealth country had got off to a bad start. Her house was a hole in the ground; she had been robbed and left destitute; and hearing French spoken on the beach had reminded her of her dread of the new President of France, with his own form of pragmatism, this including, in his role as President also of the EU, the introduction of new laws unfriendly to the monarchy. It would be a relief to return to the country where, despite her German ancestry, the Queen was seen
as the epitome of Englishness. Once home she could shore up the weakening realm, and rally the people who believed her to be a fixture that would last forever. She would be in Britain in time for the Opening of Parliament – and, for the first time since leaving the country, she thought of the Duke, walking beside her through the Lords assembled in their scarlet and gold robes. The Duke's finger, as so often on state occasions, would lie lightly on his sovereign's white-gloved hand. The thought was oddly comforting.

The Rasta's rickety boat with its ear-splitting engine had charged along the southern coastline of St Lucia for two hours before the conurbation that was Vieux Fort, its harbour and wharf, came into view. Austin Ford, who sat in the prow and gazed sulkily out to sea, was as deep in thought as his soon-to-be erstwhile client, Mrs Gloria Smith. It had been annoying that his employer Mr King, who Austin imagined would offer tea to the English lady and her escort, had said the meeting could not take place: Austin had set himself the task of finding the stolen Cambridge emeralds and had worked out how much he would ask Mr King to pay (in US dollars). His determination had been to demand a payment in advance from the King, who was the perfect buyer, obsessed with emeralds and, as far as Austin was concerned, a man of fabulous wealth. The payment would cover Mrs Gloria's fare back to the UK, for, as Austin knew from Jolene, her
money and passport had also been stolen from the hotel bedroom. He was desperate, now, to get the owner of the jewels off the island. Jolene had a good idea of who'd done it: Rover from Soufrière, who'd already been arrested several times for petty theft. It was just a question of getting this strange woman off his back – and taking a few pals to have a word with Rover. As it was, he'd had to dig deep into his savings to find enough for an economy seat to London. A new passport was easy – Campbell at the airport had been alerted by Austin and had ready a leather (imitation) purple passport with
Dieu et mon Droit
stamped under the lion and the unicorn and a photo of an old lady (a copy found on the floor of the booth of the Polaroid shot of a traveller). There would be no suspicions at the replication: old women, after all, and especially if they were white, all looked exactly alike.

Austin sighed as the engine cut out and the red-painted fishing boat drew up to the wharf. He had been surprised at the equanimity of Mrs Smith at the realisation she was being taken to Hewanorra Airport, by sea, and not on a touristic jaunt to the coves and cocoa plantations of the south of the island. She was a tad gone in the head, of course, but really she was behaving like this was a royal visit and the duration of it just what she had been told beforehand. Look at her now! The woman was standing in the boat waiting to be helped out on to the quay and as a bunch of children ran past and
waved to her, she was graciously waving back at them. She'd been rich and important once, that was obvious if you knew about the emeralds; or maybe she'd been married to a man like Sir Richard Branson, who might build a new resort in the hills above Soufrière and pay better money to Jolene, Jooleeta and Austin's other cousins and girlfriends than the Joli Hotel. Austin even wondered if he could ask Mrs Smith if she
was
Lady Branson in disguise.

Such musings were interrupted by the arrival of the incoming flight from London Gatwick, a jumbo with a Marilyn-imitation blonde painted on its prow and HOTLIPS written in large letters under a perky breast. The Queen stood obediently in line as passengers emerged from the transatlantic aircraft; and as they descended to the reception area and baggage hall she looked modestly down, as if avoiding both recognition and the possible necessity of recognising someone or something herself. The sight of her feet, beach-stained and streaked with dirt from the tarmac on Joli Estate roads caused her to look up again quickly – and it was then that the double shock occurred. For a passenger bearing the News section of the
Sunday Times
was now visible behind the plate glass dividing about-to-be travellers and new arrivals; and the headline QUEEN IN CARIBBEAN appeared, at least to the Queen, to dwarf almost everything else in the airport and to draw the eyes of the crowd, much as
she had on her royal tours, always done. That she was known to be in St Lucia was of little interest to her – for, like the holidays organised for the poor, one place was made to look just like another (a camp, a pool, a bar and an eatery for Her Majesty's low-paid subjects, a red carpet, a ritual ceremony by painted people and a motorcade for the Queen).

No, it was the unpleasant experience of seeing oneself after three days without so much as a royal event recorded, three days without the continual intrusion of the hungry lens, which had made the Queen unaccustomed to representations of herself, Queen and Head of State, symbol of Britain's enduring monarchy and the proud island's refusal to throw off the pomp and glory. For the woman occupying the entire front page of the newspaper seemed to bear no relation to the general perception of Elizabeth the Second. The white hair floated in all directions, a T-shirt with an image of Gros Piton with a naked woman dancing wildly below (there had been no choice: suffering from the afternoon heat while serving customers at the Rum Shop, she had pillaged Austin's meagre cupboard within) hung limply over the Queen's bust. The shot went mercilessly on down to the flip-flops, passing a terminally rumpled tweed skirt and ending with a puddle of rum on the floor of the half-finished village, this visited by a mangy-looking black cat. Who could have taken this terrible photograph? And as the indignant thought crossed her
mind, the Queen also realised she knew the answer: the American tourist of course, the man who hadn't been a part of the group visiting Austin's establishment for a shot of authenticity. He had suddenly understood who she was … and she remembered her dislike of the camera as it edged up close to her and the man smiled as it came ever closer …

The next shock was almost expected, for, just like the first time the Queen had had to put up with the rudeness of the Bostocks, the glares and stares commenced as soon as they turned to examine the amount of people behind them and were granted a sight of the Queen identical to that in the Sunday paper still clearly visible through the plate glass. No one could have believed their monarch could transform herself into the debauched, confused-looking woman in the shot – and where was the Duke? Had she been the victim of a fun outing organised by the well-meaning Fergie? But everyone, once they made the connection – its effects were now clearly visible on the faces of the Bostocks and an aristocratic-looking woman at the head of the queue had begun to stare at the Queen as if an UFO or some other unaccountable denizen of a mythical world were amongst those going Virgin Atlantic to the UK – everyone would find those perceptions ineradicably altered by this new appearance of the Queen.