Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (10 page)

Princess Margaret had detected right away in William’s interview with her a prissy earnestness that she might have fun playing with, as a cat plays with a vole before killing it. Of course he came well recommended from all the best places. His excellence as a butler was not in question. Her own ability to live with him in her private rooms was what she wanted to know about, because, frankly, the servants knew everything. Hiring a man to be in and out of all the rooms in your house at all hours of the day was a little like sleeping with him. She first met him at the cocktail hour in her sitting room in Kensington Palace. She sat and didn’t ask him to join her, so he stood, not exactly at attention, but at a respectful distance from her. “And what was it like working for the sheik?” she said, fishing for some gossip she might retail at a dinner party later on.

“Well . . .” William replied, aware that what he said would be repeated, and not wishing to compromise his former employer in any serious way, “ . . . they had quite a lot of gold leaf on the ceiling.”

“Have you seen the new state rooms at Windsor? The ones done up since the fire? Acres and acres of gold leaf. If you walk in on a sunny day you’ve got to wear your dark glasses. It might be Miami Beach.”

William gave this a small quarter smile. To laugh at it too openly would only have been all right if he had been sitting down and he were an HRH at the least.

Princess Margaret allowed a pause to fall. She swirled the ice cubes around down at the bottom of her glass, ruminating.

Giving her a warmer, and slightly more conspiratorial, smile than he’d given her before, William said, “I daresay Your Royal Highness could use a top-up as this important decision is considered.”

At this she smiled more naturally, and held out her glass. He took it from her and went to the bar at the side of the room to fill it up. As he was making her drink, she called out to his back, “Nothing to decide. You’re engaged.” Then she paused to consider. She did like to drink, it was true, but she wasn’t entirely happy with the fact that William had worked this out so quickly. “Oh, and by the way, don’t let me catch you in the closet trying on my shoes.”

William was glad he had his back to her when she said this, because it took him by surprise, and he needed a moment to clear the stricken look from his face. As a boy, he had adored sneaking into his mother’s closet to put on her high-heeled shoes and to pose in front of the long mirror wearing them. They made him feel taller, more elegant, more desirable in his own eyes. No one had ever caught him at it, nor had he gone in for dressing up in ladies’ clothes much beyond his boyhood. For most of his career he’d been working, and he hadn’t had the time.

He turned to bring her the drink with his face a mask of clear unconcern. “No, Ma’am.”

“Nor my frocks,” she said, still hoping with patient malice to get a rise from him.

“No, indeed.”

“There are one or two furs of course.”

“Are there, Ma’am?”

“You mustn’t try them on either.”

“No.”

“Nor the
parfum
.” She thought she might get him with the odd surprise word in French.

“I promise.”

“I see,” she said with a reluctant sigh. “That will be all.”

William withdrew to the double doors, and just as he was about to reverse through them, closing them with a small bow, he came back into the room as if he’d forgotten something. “What size did you say you were, Ma’am?” Then he closed the doors and she let out a delighted whoop, slapping the velvet pillow at her side.

When, several years later, one of Queen Elizabeth’s butlers died, William was recruited to fill the spot. She had a reputation for being sweet as a sugar plum, but in fact the old Queen was tough and didn’t mind stealing away the best staff from her younger daughter, if need be. Princess Margaret had grown used to this kind of behavior from her mother, so when William came in to make his farewell, she said simply, “Rat,” and dismissed him with a wave of her hand that might have been either angry or affectionate.

The Queen Mother’s parties were often as gay as her younger daughter’s had been. Among the regular guests were bachelor biographers, gossip columnists for the highbrow newspapers, and disgraced curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The staff was gayer still. William enjoyed working in Clarence House for Queen Elizabeth, but it hadn’t been an easy posting. She liked anything that was an extreme statement of style, so large luncheons on warm days were often moved impromptu to underneath a large spreading shade tree in the garden. Beautiful to look at from the terrace windows, but it was a lot of work at the last minute to get the table on a level out there on the uneven turf. She was a demanding but also a charming boss, referring to “this intolerable honour” if anyone happened to refer to her position. Usually only the unschooled did this, as her staff knew the topics to avoid. Working with a cadre of high-strung and extremely touchy gay men had been one of the biggest challenges of his career. Even though he was gay himself, it was hard to know what stray comment would set his colleagues off. They tended to be harsher and more judgmental about gay staff than about the occasional straight waiter who was brought in as a temporary for a big occasion. All of these colleagues were talented, and some were good-looking, but William wasn’t in the least attracted to them. Something about their love of drama entirely put him off them as romantic partners.

When Queen Elizabeth died, in 2002, The Queen cherry-picked the youngest of her mother’s staff to come over to Buckingham Palace. The older ones were pensioned off. When William arrived in the big house, he looked about him with a sense of pride. He’d now reached the top of his profession. With any luck, he’d be allowed to stay, and possibly to reach retiring age himself working for The Queen. There was no question that the work would be a challenge, but he was also confident he could do it. What he now hoped to do was to look about himself and to find some real friends at work, to fill some of the emotional need he’d sometimes repressed when working at his other posts. Almost immediately he met Shirley MacDonald, and although she was fifteen years older than him, she was just like him in having given her life to the job and her caring every day about doing it well. Most afternoons he made an excuse to stop by the room where she was pressing clothes with a steam iron. They’d have a little gossip about what was going on. Who on the staff was in trouble, who was in favor, and who was out? This progressed to their having a regular Saturday evening on their calendar whenever they were both in London. They’d go to an Indian restaurant off Victoria Street for a curry early in the evening and then often afterwards see a film. The films they enjoyed most had something to do with their jobs, so they’d loved seeing Judi Dench playing Queen Victoria in
Mrs Brown
, and Cate Blanchett playing the first Queen Elizabeth. They’d also seen a kind of pseudo-documentary about life in a Russian palace called
The Russian Ark
, which confused and stimulated them at the same time. Their all-time favorite was the film where a butler and a housekeeper of an aristocratic house before the war fell in love, but didn’t ultimately get together,
The Remains of the Day
. They liked it not because they thought it referred to their relationship with one another, although they pretended as if it did, but because it captured the dedication and self-denial that both of them felt in their work together at the palace. Their interpretation was exactly the reverse of the disapproval the filmmakers had intended.

Their being entirely of one mind about most of the films they saw together was what brought William up short one day when he proposed their seeing another together one Saturday. It was called
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
. It was about three drag queens in the Australian outback, and the elaborate rituals of makeup and dressing-up that went into their performances. William never talked about being gay with Shirley. He assumed she knew. Nor did he discuss his dressing up as a boy in front of his mother’s mirror. He’d had reason to believe she wouldn’t be shocked. That’s why he was surprised that when he proposed it, Shirley had said abruptly, “No.”

“But why not? It sounds fun.”

“No, definitely not. Horrid. Disgusting. I’m not seeing it,” said Shirley in a voice that brooked no further discussion.

It was as if his closest friend had just slapped him in the face.

R
ebecca Rinaldi grew up in the country and went to a comprehensive school that had no claim to distinction whatsoever. Few of its students went on to university, and Rebecca herself knew from an early age that her own talents lay elsewhere than in reading books or studying for research degrees. She brought up bantams that lived under the iron roof of a dilapidated shed on her parents’ farm. There were no fences, and the whole property was easily accessible to foxes, which quite regularly made off with one of the birds. Suffering this loss, even though it happened often, was like losing a member of her family for the first twenty-four hours, but then she was fascinated to see how the loss of one hen or cock led to a rearrangement of the pecking order of the entire roost. She also looked after a flock of geese, a group of nearly feral cats, a pony, and a thoroughbred horse that had been retired and put out in the Rinaldis’ pasture for a small rental fee by their much richer racing neighbors. Each one of these animals inspired greater respect and affection in Rebecca than any human being she’d ever met outside her mother and father.

Even her parents were a trial sometimes. They were vegetable farmers who considered themselves above the law. They discovered early on the value of fresh manure in increasing the yield of their small holdings of carrots, onions, turnips, and beets. So they took their rusting van to the stables at the racecourse, to the neighboring pig farm, and even to the man who provided port-a-loos to the outdoor concerts at Glastonbury, collected the fragrant soil in plastic tubs and stacked the tubs in the back of their van. This was completely against the health and safety regulations which governed the fertilization of foods raised for human consumption, but Rebecca’s parents gloried in their flouting of the law and in their embrace of what they saw as the most natural, sustainable, and organic way possible of raising root vegetables.

One by-product of this carting of so much manure was that the family van, in which Rebecca was also driven to school, smelled pungently of dung and, downwind, could be scented coming a hundred yards away. This led to merciless teasing of Rebecca by her schoolmates, who, with adolescent lack of imagination and infant fascination with feces, called her “Poo.” In school she was as untouchable as the member of a leper colony. Even the kindest of her fellow students hesitated to reach out to her. If they had, her fierce pride would have made her issue a rebuff.

When she finished school, she had no idea what she would do next. Because her parents were active proponents of organic farming, they’d happened to meet the Prince of Wales who, like them, cared about sustainable agriculture. They mentioned Rebecca’s love of riding and her excellence at taking care of the retired thoroughbred, whose owners the Prince also knew. There happened to be a vacancy at the Royal Mews and Rebecca was appointed via the influence of the heir to the throne. She got on well there. There was a tiny studio flat, what used to be called a bedsitter, with a sink, a small fridge in the corner, and a shared shower down the hall that went with the job. No one in the Mews cared or remarked upon her smell, as the care and disposal of horse manure was a pretty constant part of the job. She didn’t have friends in the Mews, nor did she keep everyone there at such angry arm’s length as she had in school. It was one of the contrasts of her young life, too young for her to remark on it even, that although no one had addressed more than three or four friendly words to her at school, she now occasionally had casual conversations with The Queen. Her only threatened humiliation was that her parents were convinced that manure from the royal stables was likely to be even richer than what they currently collected, and they were always devising schemes, which Rebecca had to thwart, of taking it away with them when they visited her.

Although she had lost many of her bantams to foxes, she was not a friend to foxhunting, which she thought of as giving license to privileged people to engage in cruelty to animals. Three years before she began working at the Mews, while she was still in school, she had attended an antihunting demonstration in Trafalgar Square, where she happened to meet one of the speakers. He denounced the methods used by those who facilitated foxhunting by killing badgers. The badgers themselves sometimes killed fox cubs, so they were considered enemies by friends of the hunt. He was a passionate speaker. He had a young badger which got the crowd’s attention, and Rebecca met him when he came off the platform after his speech. Or, rather, she got over her fear of him and slight attraction to his passionate way of denouncing the slaughter of badgers, by wanting to meet the badger he had in his arms. The young man with the badger thought Rebecca was beautiful. Her red hair and shyness and unconcealed delight at holding the animal made it difficult for him to ignore her.

Rebecca knew how to hold the badger, but she had no idea how to handle the young man. He was ten years older than her, and he was the first man who’d ever paid her any attention. Some kind of instinct, which she thought it was better to obey, made her curious about why he found her so fascinating. She was more than a little wary of him, but she could answer the questions he put to her by dwelling on the animal in her arms. He had an alert way of looking at her that she half suspected, from watching the mating behavior of cocks and hens, would lead to his trying to mount her. They’d gone to his flat. He’d served her wine with supper. She saw by the way he started touching her, more than was strictly necessary, that he wanted to have sex. A better-socialized young woman might have resisted more. Rebecca gave in easily because she was unsure of the rules that governed human romantic interaction. She’d been told by her mother that her extensive experience on horseback would make her first sexual experience easy, but the encounter was physically painful, made more unpleasant because she hadn’t expected it. He could see she was in distress and was gentle with her, but the damage was done, and she drew away from him to the edge of the bed. This was something he would not allow. He murmured apologies and encouragement into her ear, wrapped her in a white sheet and put his arm around her middle, spooning her protectively from behind, until he could hear her breathing become less frightened and more regular. She awoke a few hours later and briefly forgot his brutality at this first feeling she’d ever had of human intimacy with a man who was not of her own family. It was nearly like being returned to the warmth and security of the cradle. It was marvelous.