Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (11 page)

Then she recollected where she was and what had happened. She felt like a trapped mink that must gnaw off its paw to escape from an iron trap. She couldn’t even conceive of wanting to do ever again what they’d done a few hours before. She disengaged herself from the man as stealthily as was possible. Once free, she slipped back into her discarded clothes. She collected her backpack and crept out of the door, still under the cover of night. She walked all the way from the Elephant to Waterloo, where she still had time to catch the last train to a village near enough to her parents’ farm that she could walk there when she arrived. She was sure she would never hear from him again. She was relieved to be escaping without a trace. She forgot she’d signed his petition to ban foxhunting and written down her mobile phone number on the form for submission to Parliament.

T
o be The Queen’s senior dresser was, along with the senior butler, housekeeper, and cook, to be among the four most elevated positions anyone could reach on the royal staff. Shirley MacDonald’s grandmother and mother were proud of her, but it sometimes embarrassed her. Her granny had been a maid of all work, a kind of dogsbody, who toward the end of her career looked after linens. Her mother had worked in the royal kitchens, and though she too had served long, she never rose high in the outmoded Victorian hierarchy of servants, which still held sway at the palace. They were now all called “members of staff,” but their history of being servants was still very much just under the surface of their daily lives.

Shirley’s mother had died relatively young, overcome by smoking, long hours, and a series of husbands and boyfriends who had disappointed her. Shirley had no other siblings and her relationship to her granny was the last remaining tie she had to her family. She would occasionally go for holidays at the cottage on the Balmoral estate that her grandmother had been given as part of her retiring benefit. Although she was well into her seventies, her grandmother insisted on doing extra duty at the Castle. Shirley was aware, from staying with her granny, that she was neither as sharp nor as able as she’d once been. All the kitchen surfaces were sticky. The plastic flowers had a permanent layer of dust on them. The cotton bathroom mats in cheerful colors smelled faintly of pee. Shirley would do what she could to clean up when she went to visit, but she had to do it discreetly, because if she were discovered doing spot cleaning, her grandmother would take offense.

Shirley would also accompany her granny to the Castle to do a few hours of work, because she knew that she could not do the work she once could. Shirley had also heard via the palace grapevine that the serving full-time staff sometimes had to redo her grandmother’s work and were annoyed by it. So one summer day, in the run-up to The Queen’s arrival in mid-August, with the Castle gearing up for the longest formal residence of the year, Shirley and her grandmother drove up the South Deeside Road, parked in the staff car park, and went upstairs to complete an inventory of the bedsheets, pillow slips, and towels. Shirley was on a stepladder counting the sets of sheets that were folded into crisp, symmetrical squares on one of the top shelves in the linen cupboard. Her grandmother was standing below, making small checks on a folded piece of paper. The first Shirley knew that something was wrong was when she heard her grandmother say, “Oof,” and saw her lean back heavily on the doorjamb.

“What’s the matter, Granny?”

“Nothing’s the matter. Carry on. Where are we? Six top sheets. All Queen Victoria? Or some King George V?” The sheets had embroidered monograms in the corners and had been folded in such a way as to make the monogram easy to locate. These monograms identified the reign in which the sheets had been acquired. The staff had been trained always to preface the sovereign’s name with “King” or “Queen,” even though many of these figures were long dead. It was an instinctive sign of respect mixed with a practice that was as antique and old-fashioned as the sheets themselves.

“Look at your forehead, Granny. You’re all wet. And it’s not even hot in here.”

“Never you mind, Shirley. It’s the work. Want to get this right.”

“Let’s have a small break, shall we, Granny?”

“Break? Break! We have to get on. The Queen’s coming in two days.”

“This can wait, Granny.”

Shirley’s grandmother now began panting slightly, put down the paper and pencil that had been in her hand, and reached around to rub her shoulder. “Must have put out this joint reaching up to the third shelf just now. Ow.”

Men and women of her grandmother’s generation never admitted pain or ill health unless they had no time consciously to suppress involuntary groans. If possible, this was even truer of the women than the men, and of Scottish old ladies more than the English. So Shirley knew her grandmother was seriously unwell. “Come, now,” she said to her grandmother in a stern voice that allowed no argument, “let’s rest a moment here on this bench.” She had to be severe with her grandmother because when The Queen was in residence this was a corridor off which the upper members of the Household and guests would be staying, and the bench, strictly speaking, was for them. Ordinarily, if her grandmother had been feeling entirely well, she would have refused to sit there.

The bench had worn tartan cushions supported by deer antlers which served as arms and legs. If you didn’t sit carefully, the bench looked as if it might gore you. Shirley and her grandmother sat on the bench, with the old lady still holding her shoulder and unable to get her breath. Shirley massaged her other shoulder, feeling that the bones underneath the blouse and skin were more like those of a bird than of a human skeleton.

Suddenly, to their surprise, a lady-in-waiting appeared, coming down the corridor, wearing a brown corduroy jacket and matching skirt with unflattering cut. “Ah, taking a break, I see. Things always a bit slack here before Her Majesty arrives.” She said this as if she were trying to make pleasant conversation, but it sounded like a rebuke, with a swallowed “Tsk, tsk,” at the end of it, just barely audible. The lady-in-waiting had arrived two days early, before her waiting actually started, to go and see some friends in the neighborhood and to make use of the free accommodation she could claim from the imminent start of her duty.

“My grandmother’s not feeling well,” said Shirley, looking up from the bench with a combination of explanation and appeal.

“Ah, do you know, in
my
grandmother’s time you never saw the serv—I mean staff in the corridors. They got up and did the work so early in the morning that it was all done by the time you appeared. My God they were good.” She then turned to look at Shirley and said with a slight narrowing of her eyes, “That’s all changed now, of course.”

“Perhaps when you go downstairs, Mrs d’Arlancourt, you could send us up some help, please,” said Shirley. “I don’t think I should leave her.”

Her grandmother just looked up at the lady-in-waiting with frightened eyes, knowing that something was badly wrong, but unable to say exactly what.

“Oh, yes. Of course, I will. I’ll send someone up right away.” Then the lady-in-waiting leaned menacingly over Shirley’s grandmother and said, “Had a nip too many with your coffee this morning, did you, dear? Don’t you worry. Help’s on the way!” With that she went on down the staircase at a leisurely pace. The lady-in-waiting had the old English suspicion that most Scots were drunks and thieves, a prejudice that went back as far as Shakespeare, but which, in the circumstances, made Shirley’s heart thump with rage.

Help arrived and Shirley’s grandmother was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Aberdeen, where she died the next day. A young doctor came and told Shirley, “It was a myocardial infarction. She had hypertension. Her cholesterol was very high,” as if that explained the loss of the last living family member whom she had ever loved. Some weeks later, there was a memorial service for Shirley’s grandmother at the little Victorian church over the river from the Castle and up a slight rise. The Queen came to this service and sat in the front pew. Letitia d’Arlancourt, whose waiting had begun, sat next to The Queen. Shirley, who sat across the aisle from them as the principal mourner, did not know whether to give in to her anger, or to acknowledge the considerable honor The Queen was bestowing on her. High-colored and angry gratitude was the emotion she managed to convey when The Queen and Letitia d’Arlancourt spoke a few words to her at the door on their way to one of the black Range Rovers drawn up in front of the church.

That was the only moment, fifteen years ago, in which Shirley had ever considered leaving the Royal Household. She was furious with The Queen for tolerating someone like Letitia d’Arlancourt. She blamed not only this particular lady-in-waiting for her bad behavior, but also began to see all the upper levels of the Household as being in league with such as Letitia d’Arlancourt. Rather than take her fury and use it to find a new position, Shirley used it to redouble her efforts on behalf of The Queen. Although she would have been eminently employable elsewhere, Shirley felt a kind of inertia when it came to looking for other work. What came to her more naturally was to take her constant, seldom-abating wrath and to put it into pressing and packing The Queen’s clothes, attending her mistress early and late, in a defiant spirit illegible to The Queen herself but which would have read: “I’ll be damned if you’ll have anything but the best of me even though one of your ladies once did me wrong and I will never forget.”

A
single lamb chop with a thimble full of mint jelly. Three Brussels sprouts. A steamed carrot. A glass of burgundy. That had been The Queen’s solitary Monday lunch. The afternoon now stretched ahead of her, unusually free of engagements, but with plenty to attend to on her desk. She stood at the window, looking out on to Buckingham Palace Gardens with the light fast diminishing into the west of the wet December afternoon. She had briefing papers to read for Tuesday, but in the midst of her unusual melancholy, she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. It had occurred to her to ask the apothecary whether he might not prescribe some antidepressants. She recalled with shame how little she’d taken it seriously when Diana Wales was suffering from depression. None of them had. In her generation depression was really only something that soldiers returning from battle suffered, “shell shock,” yes, but everyone felt dejected every now and again. You didn’t take medicine for it. You pulled up your socks. You went for a walk. The whole Diana business had taught her that depression was an illness and that there were drugs that would help if it didn’t lift after a month or two of feeling unhappy. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to ask the attending physician for these pills. It would have been too humiliating, much worse than asking for more help on the computer. So she fell back on her usual tricks to try and feel better.

It was usually as simple as that old Julie Andrews song. What were her favorite things? There was a mare in the Mews born on her birthday in April. Elizabeth. The horse’s name was a bit of a joke really. But The Queen was delighted to discover that Elizabeth would eat cheddar. Not only would she take it from The Queen’s hand, but she would snort and stamp and neigh afterwards. Elizabeth adored it.

Now, what else, The Queen asked herself. Well, Scotland of course. People left her alone more there. She went on a Scottish holiday at the end of the summer, and sometimes in May as well. She’d spent some of her honeymoon there too. And the Scots, so bluff, no-nonsense, straightforward, none of the capering about and insincerity she often met with in the South. She loved the Scots, so, yes, Scotland was one of her favorite things too.

What else?
Britannia
, of course. The yacht was now permanently beside a quay in Leith, outside Edinburgh. Tourist attraction. Such a pity, really. She had loved that ship. She’d fly out to the Caribbean, meet some governors, tour the hospital wards, look at the new sewers, and then they could all retire to
Britannia
for a few days, having justified the expense of sailing her out by holding some official dinners on board. How lovely she looked, white and buff and blue, rising up out of the haze on a hot afternoon. And when she became too old, too expensive to run, well the Government absolutely refused to build another yacht. It was that word “yacht,” wasn’t it? The Queen couldn’t appear to waste public money on personal pleasure. She understood that, but she wondered if the newspapers actually knew how many boring Commonwealth suppers she’d had to sit through. If anybody had earned a bit of a treat, she had, what with the endless small talk she’d engaged in on national business. She imagined that about three-quarters of her life had been used up in idle chitchat. Had it ever done any good? And now the yacht was something she couldn’t use, or even see, anymore. Tied up for day-trippers to visit at, what, ten pounds a time? Yes,
Britannia
was a favorite thing, but she was far away.

These had been her reflections as she wondered what to do after luncheon. She glanced back at the table, which William had not yet been in to clear away. There was an apple, and yes, a small portion of the cheddar. Walk over to the Mews and take Elizabeth these leftovers. It might help. She wouldn’t take the dogs. They might worry the horses. Aside from these careful thoughts about the animals, she wasn’t quite thinking as sharply as she usually did. She took the precaution of putting on a headscarf, but she didn’t put on a coat, even though it was a wet and windy afternoon. Nor, though she pulled the terrace door to, did she pull it entirely shut so that it would stay latched. She noticed her handbag sitting on the sideboard. Yes, she would take that, and stepped briefly back into the room to hook that over her arm before stepping out again onto the terrace.

The Royal Mews were exhaust-stained buildings behind the palace, with tourist buses rushing by every five minutes, heedless of the romance behind their grey façade. There was a little-visited museum with harnesses and carriages and the big gold wedding cake on wheels that had been used in 1953 at the coronation. The real attraction was the horses, who stood in ample stalls walled with glazed tiles, their names hanging above them on wooden boards: Mossy, Puller, Buster, Elizabeth, and Lucia. These horses’ biographies were as familiar to The Queen as those of members of her own family.