The Uncommon Reader (4 page)

At this most people looked blank (and sometimes panic-stricken) but, nothing daunted, the equerries came up with a list of suggestions. Though this meant that the Queen came away with a disproportionate notion of the popularity of Andy McNab and the near universal affection for Joanna Trollope, no matter; at least embarrassment had been avoided. And once the answers had been supplied the audiences were back on track and finished on the dot as they used to do, the only hold-ups when, as seldom, one of her subjects confessed to a fondness for Virginia Woolf or Dickens, both of which provoked a lively (and lengthy) discussion. There were many who hoped for a similar meeting of minds by saying they were reading Harry Potter, but to this the Queen (who had no time for fantasy) invariably said briskly, ‘Yes. One is saving that for a rainy day,’ and passed swiftly on.

Seeing her almost daily meant that Sir Kevin was able to nag the Queen about what was now almost an obsession and to devise different approaches. ‘I was wondering, ma’am, if we could somehow factor in your reading.’ Once she would have let this pass, but one effect of reading had been to diminish the Queen’s tolerance for jargon (which had always been low).

‘Factor it in? What does that mean?’

‘I’m just kicking the tyres on this one, ma’am, but it would help if we were able to put out a press release saying that, apart from English literature, Your Majesty was also reading ethnic classics.’

‘Which ethnic classics did you have in mind, Sir Kevin? The Kama Sutra?’

Sir Kevin sighed.

‘I am reading Vikram Seth at the moment. Would he count?’

Though the private secretary had never heard of him he thought he sounded right.

‘Salman Rushdie?’

‘Probably not, ma’am.’

‘I don’t see’, said the Queen, ‘why there is any need for a press release at all. Why should the public care what I am reading? The Queen reads. That is all they need to know. “So what?” I imagine the general response.’

‘To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it’, said Sir Kevin, ‘if the pursuit itself were less … selfish.’

‘Selfish?’

‘Perhaps I should say solipsistic.’

‘Perhaps you should.’

Sir Kevin plunged on. ‘Were we able to harness your reading to some larger purpose – the literacy of the nation as a whole, for instance, the improvement of reading standards among the young …’

‘One reads for pleasure,’ said the Queen. ‘It is not a public duty.’

‘Perhaps’, said Sir Kevin, ‘it should be.’

‘Bloody cheek,’ said the duke when she told him that night.

A
PROPOS THE
duke, what of the family in all this? How did the Queen’s reading impinge on them?

Had it been Her Majesty’s responsibility to prepare meals, to shop or, unimaginably, to dust and hoover the house (s), standards would straightaway have been perceived to have fallen. But, of course, she had to do none of these things. That she did her boxes with less assiduity is true, but this didn’t affect her husband or her children. What it did affect (or ‘impact upon’, as Sir Kevin put it) was the public sphere, where she had begun to perform her duties with a perceived reluctance: she laid foundation stones with less élan and what few ships there were to launch she sent down the slipway with no more ceremony than a toy boat on a pond, her book always waiting.

While this might concern her staff, her family were actually rather relieved. She had always kept them up to the mark and age had not made her more indulgent. Reading, though, had. She left the family more to themselves, chivvied them hardly at all and they had an easier time altogether. Hurray for books was their feeling, except when they were required to read them or when grandmama insisted on talking about them, quizzing them about their own reading habits or, worst of all, pressing books into their hands and checking later to see if they had been read.

As it was, they would often come upon her in odd unfrequented corners of her various dwellings, spectacles on the end of her nose, notebook and pencil beside her. She would glance up briefly and raise a vague, acknowledging hand. ‘Well, I’m glad somebody’s happy,’ said the duke as he shuffled off down the corridor. And it was true; she was. She enjoyed reading like nothing else and devoured books at an astonishing rate, not that, Norman apart, there was anyone to be astonished.

Nor initially did she discuss her reading with anyone, least of all in public, knowing that such a late-flowering enthusiasm, however worthwhile, might expose her to ridicule. It would be the same, she thought, if she had developed a passion for God, or dahlias. At her age, people thought, why bother? To her, though, nothing could have been more serious, and she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing, that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time. The next stage had been when she started to make notes, after which she always read with a pencil in hand, not summarising what she read but simply transcribing passages that struck her. It was only after a year or so of reading and making notes that she tentatively ventured on the occasional thought of her own. ‘I think of literature’, she wrote, ‘as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.’ Then (an unrelated thought): ‘Etiquette may be bad but embarrassment is worse.’

There was sadness to her reading, too, and for the first time in her life she felt there was a good deal she had missed. She had been reading one of the several lives of Sylvia Plath and was actually quite happy to have missed most of that, but reading the memoirs of Lauren Bacall she could not help feeling that Ms Bacall had had a much better bite at the carrot and, slightly to her surprise, found herself envying her for it.

That the Queen could readily switch from showbiz autobiography to the last days of a suicidal poet might seem both incongruous and wanting in perception. But, certainly in her early days, to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice. For her, there was no such thing as an improving book. Books were uncharted country and, to begin with at any rate, she made no distinction between them. With time came discrimination, but apart from the occasional word from Norman, nobody told her what to read, and what not. Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath – who were they? Only by reading could she find out.

It was a few weeks later that she looked up from her book and said to Norman: ‘Do you know that I said you were my amanuensis? Well, I’ve discovered what I am. I am an opsimath.’

With the dictionary always to hand, Norman read out: ‘Opsimath: one who learns only late in life.’

It was this sense of making up for lost time that made her read with such rapidity and in the process now adding more frequent (and more confident) comments of her own, bringing to what was in effect literary criticism the same forthrightness with which she tackled other departments of her life. She was not a gentle reader and often wished authors were around so that she could take them to task.

‘Am I alone’, she wrote, ‘in wanting to give Henry James a good talking-to?’

‘I can see why Dr Johnson is well thought of, but surely, much of it is opinionated rubbish?’

It was Henry James she was reading one teatime when she said out loud, ‘Oh, do get on.’

The maid, who was just taking away the tea trolley, said, ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ and shot out of the room in two seconds flat.

‘Not you, Alice,’ the Queen called after her, even going to the door. ‘Not you.’

Previously she wouldn’t have cared what the maid thought or that she might have hurt her feelings, only now she did and coming back to the chair she wondered why. That this access of consideration might have something to do with books and even with the perpetually irritating Henry James did not at that moment occur to her.

Though the awareness of all the catching up she had to do never left her, her other regret was to do with all the famous authors she could have met but hadn’t. In this respect at least she could mend her ways and she decided, partly at Norman’s urging, that it would be interesting and even fun to meet some of the authors they had both been reading. Accordingly a reception was arranged, or a soirée, as Norman insisted on calling it.

The equerries naturally expected that the same form would apply as at the garden parties and other large receptions, with the tipping off of guests to whom Her Majesty was likely to stop and talk. The Queen, though, thought that on this occasion such formality was misplaced (these were artists after all) and decided to take pot luck. This turned out not to be a good idea.

Shy and even timid though authors had generally seemed to be when she had met them individually, taken together they were loud, gossipy and, though they laughed a good deal, not, so far as she could tell, particularly funny. She found herself hovering on the edge of groups, with no one making much effort to include her, so that she felt like a guest at her own party. And when she did speak she either killed conversation and plunged it into an awful pause or the authors, presumably to demonstrate their independence and sophistication, took no notice at all of what she said and just went on talking.

It was exciting to be with writers she had come to think of as her friends and whom she longed to know. But now, when she was aching to declare her fellow feeling with those whose books she had read and admired, she found she had nothing to say. She, who had seldom in her life been intimidated by anyone, now found herself tongue-tied and awkward. ‘I adored your book,’ would have said it all, but fifty years of composure and self-possession plus half a century of understatement stood in the way. Hard put for conversation, she found herself falling back on some of her stock stand-bys. It wasn’t quite ‘How far did you have to come?’ but their literary equivalent. ‘How do you think of your characters? Do you work regular hours? Do you use a word-processor?’ – questions which she knew were clichés and were embarrassing to inflict had the awkward silence not been worse.

One Scottish author was particularly alarming. Asked where his inspiration came from, he said fiercely: ‘It doesn’t come, Your Majesty. You have to go out and fetch it.’

When she did manage to express – and almost stammer – her admiration, hoping the author would tell her how he (the men, she decided, much worse than the women) had come to write the book in question, she found her enthusiasm brushed aside, as he insisted on talking not about the bestseller he had just written but about the one on which he was currently at work and how slowly it was going and how in consequence, as he sipped his champagne, he was the most miserable of creatures.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met with in the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

To begin with she had thought she might hold such gatherings on a regular basis, but this soirée was enough to disabuse her of that. Once was enough. This came as a relief to Sir Kevin, who had not been enthusiastic, pointing out that if ma’am held an evening for the writers she would then have to hold a similar evening for the artists, and having held evenings for writers and artists the scientists would then expect to be entertained, too.

‘Ma’am must not be seen to be partial.’

Well, there was now no danger of that.

With some justification, Sir Kevin blamed Norman for this evening of literary lacklustre, as he had encouraged the Queen when she had tentatively mentioned the idea. It wasn’t as if Norman had had much of a time either. Literature being what it is the gay quotient among the guests was quite high, some of them asked along at Norman’s specific suggestion. Not that that did him any good at all. Though like the other pages he was just taking round the drinks and the nibbles that went with them, Norman knew, as the others didn’t, the reputation and standing of those whom he was bobbing up to with his tray. He had even read their books. But it was not Norman around whom they clustered, but the dolly pages and the loftier equerries who, as Norman said bitterly (though not to the Queen), wouldn’t know a literary reputation if they stepped in it.

Still, if the whole experience of entertaining the Living Word was unfortunate, it did not (as Sir Kevin had hoped) put Her Majesty off reading. It turned her off wanting to meet authors, and to some extent off living authors altogether. But this just meant that she had more time for the classics, for Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and the Brontës.

E
VERY TUESDAY evening the Queen saw her prime minister, who briefed her on what he felt she ought to know. The press were fond of picturing these meetings as those of a wise and experienced monarch guiding her first minister past possible pitfalls and drawing on her unique repository of political experience accumulated over the fifty-odd years she had been on the throne in order to give him advice. This was a myth, though one in which the palace itself collaborated, the truth being the longer they were in office the less the prime ministers listened and the more they talked, the Queen nodding assent though not always agreement.

To begin with prime ministers wanted the Queen to hold their hand, and when they came to see her it was to be stroked and given an approving pat in the spirit of a child wanting to show its mother what it has done. And, as so often with her, it was really a show that was required, a show of interest, a show of concern. Men (and this included Mrs Thatcher) wanted show. At this stage, though, they still listened and even asked her advice, but as time passed all her prime ministers modulated with disturbing similarity into lecturing mode, when they ceased to require encouragement from the Queen but treated her like an audience, listening to her no longer on the agenda.