Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (18 page)

“Good for you, Ma’am.”

“I think so.”

They were soon at King’s Cross and standing beneath the digital screen listing the impending departures of intercity trains. The Queen pointed up to one that said Edinburgh Waverley departing at 1700. “That one, five o’clock,” she said. “Now, we haven’t much time, perhaps you could help me find the platform.” He found the platform, but they were stopped at the closed ticket barrier. He thought it was beneath her dignity to have a train ticket, so he brought her to where the guard was standing. The guard looked at this young man helping a pensioner in a scarf under her blue hoodie, smiled at them, and then pressed a button releasing the barrier. She gave him her usual percussive “Thank you” as she walked slowly past him on Rajiv’s arm. It sounded familiar to him. He looked at her curiously, but he could not place her.

It was already just minutes before the hour as Rajiv helped The Queen into the last carriage and found a seat for her at a table for four where there was one space free. The carriage was crowded, as everyone who was boarding the train at the last minute had been finding their seats in this carriage closest to the barrier. The Queen settled down into her seat and then turned up to him an appealing face. “Now, you’ve done more than enough. You’ve got to get back to the shop or they’ll give away your post, you know?” There was something slightly hectoring about her concern, as if she were his nanny, but he appreciated the fact that she was thinking of him rather than herself. “You must get off the train before it goes. We’ll be in touch,” said The Queen, turning to survey the three people sitting at her table. He knew that he’d been dismissed. The other passengers at her table seemed relatively harmless. She’d ordered him to go, so Rajiv turned on his heel to get off the train. Just as he arrived back at the doorway from the carriage to the platform, he heard the electronic signal sounding. The door was flung open. Rebecca jumped onto the train, slammed the door, and looked back out the window at an angry guard who was blowing his whistle at her. Then the signal stopped sounding and the door locked.

T
he Queen came back from her drive in the pony cart with the Prime Minister. She mulled over the loss of the royal train. First it had been the dedicated aeroplanes, then
Britannia
, and now this. She looked back ten or fifteen years earlier and recalled 1992, her
annus horribilis
. It was a bad year for a number of reasons, really the crisis of the modern monarchy in her recollection, and she thought, quite secretly, for she wouldn’t admit this even to the Duke of Edinburgh, that it was her fault. Above all she believed she’d been a failure because she couldn’t find the right words. Everything that she was now suffering through, not just this proposal to get rid of the royal train, but even the sadness she could see around her eyes when she looked at herself in the mirror in the morning, followed from that year, and from what had happened then.

The marriages of all three of her married children had broken apart. Anne had been divorced from Mark Phillips. Andrew had separated from Sarah Ferguson. Most spectacularly of all, the Morton book about Diana had led to her separation from the Prince of Wales. How had this happened, all in a matter of months? The monarchy seemed to do well when the marriages were rubbing along all right. It was when marriages went foul, when divorce, and
divorcées
, came into the picture, that the throne wobbled, as in 1936, when her Uncle David caused so much trouble by wanting to marry Mrs Simpson. And what was the secret to a happy marriage? She didn’t know. Her own marriage was based on putting up with a cantankerous old man who shouted and blustered and bullied, who disappeared for months at a time to Australia or New Zealand just when she wanted him most, who made her laugh during the Braemar Games by muttering
sotto voce
on a windy day, “Keep your kilts down, lads. The Sovereign’s watching.”

No, the success of her marriage, if you could call it that, was based on having gone through the Second World War, taken tepid baths, sat down to dry teacakes that hadn’t enough butter or sugar, interrupted her riding life to try her hand at being a truck mechanic in a regiment for women. She didn’t do all these things willingly. She put up with them because it was the war. Her children hadn’t that spirit-of-the-war endurance or sense of self-sacrifice or ability to resign themselves to a less-than-ideal daily life. They wanted to be happy. All their generation did. Of course she loved the Duke. Loved him very much in fact. They’d been through so much together. He knew her better than anyone, wasn’t afraid of her as so many others were. But it wasn’t a sentimental romance. It was more like a battered estate wagon in which they bounced along together, sometimes cheerfully amused by the same joke, other times grimly tolerating one another and determined to get where they were going.

She had a formula when any critical decision was in contemplation. Give it a trial of six months. Don’t do anything hasty. Whenever she brought on a new private secretary, she’d say, “Shall we give it six months? Let’s have a trial period.” Or if any minister complained to her in an audience that he couldn’t decide about an important policy, her advice was always, “Can you give it six months? Mull it over and decide then?” So in June of 1992, when the Morton book had come out, and there was pretty authentic information all over the press, the broadsheets as well as the tabloids, that the marriage had come unstuck, she knew what she was going to say. The Prince and Princess of Wales happened to be on the spot, staying in Windsor for the annual house party that accompanied the races at Ascot. It was the Duke of Edinburgh’s idea to shanghai them into a surprise audience, confront them with the Morton book, and get them to make up or break up. She wasn’t so sure this was a good idea, but in family matters the Duke was King and all she could do was try to be helpful.

All four of them were in the sitting room overlooking the Long Walk. It was before luncheon, and soon they’d have to go down and join the others, for the hour they were to be off to the races was two pm sharp and they mustn’t miss that. The Queen checked her wristwatch. Charles stood at one end of the room and hung his head miserably. Diana stood at the other end and hung her head too, not in misery but in disguised defiance. The Duke paced back and forth, giving a naval rant as if to his most junior ratings. “What in the devil’s name do you two think you’re doing? Everyone in this damnable country just wants you to be happy. Why can’t you put on a good show and then go off and have your own things on the side?”

The Queen wasn’t sure she liked this. Was that what he’d done with her? Put on a good show? Was that
all
? The Prince and Princess of Wales said nothing.

“If you won’t bloody listen to me, then think of The Queen. What are you putting her through? Her father shoved into the job in 1936 when he wasn’t ready for it and then came all through the war. Died a young man. It killed him. Now The Queen’s been doing it since she was in her twenties. You’d think she’d be entitled to a little rest after, what? Nearly sixty years! Instead of which you bloody fools are going to bring the whole ceiling crashing down on all of us.” The Duke then turned to The Queen and roared at her, “Talk to them! They’re not having it from me.”

For the first time both Charles and Diana looked up. They both wanted to obey her, she could see that. Even for them, at war as they were, she personified something bigger than themselves, something to which they both hoped to remain loyal. They were both willing to listen to her if she could put it eloquently and reasonably, if she could say it the right way.

“What if you were to jog along together for six months? Give it one last try and then decide?” said The Queen weakly. She could see as soon as she said it that it wasn’t enough. Charles was tongue-tied in the face of his two parents. Diana looked down again and fiddled with the blue sash of her Ascot frock.

They’d both agreed to try to repair their marriage, but then it emerged that Diana had given her full cooperation to the Morton book, which they hadn’t known before. Secret tapes of their conversations with lovers were broadcast and transcripts published. Windsor burned. The Government refused to pay for its repair after a media storm of abuse, which blamed her. Questions about royal payment of income tax had made things worse. The Prime Minister announced the official separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales in Parliament. On the night she’d watched the Castle go up in flames, on the verge of public tears for the first time in her life, The Queen had told her mother that she was so distraught that she feared for her sanity. All that happened that year was the beginning of where she was now, the dull, aching sadness that wouldn’t go away.

Then Diana had died in Paris and the little boys had been pulled, against The Queen’s will, by public demand, into the midst of a media circus. The orgy of public grief was, in The Queen’s eyes, not Britain’s finest hour. If she’d only wept then, perhaps everything would have been all right. But The Queen’s tears were internal. The great mountains of flowers reminded her of the plastic bouquets and wooden crosses sometimes found on Italian roadsides to mark automobile smashes and in perpetual memory of someone who died. When had Britain become so Mediterranean?

No, Britain had changed, and against her will the monarchy changed too, under the influence of marketing experts at Number 10. She was sent out more rarely to lunch with the Grenadier Guards, and made to go instead to visit a new McDonald’s. She wanted to face the cameras less often than before, but now every time she looked at a briefing paper from the private secretary it seemed that a new television crew was inside the palace walls, filming something. She didn’t mind the old school of photographers, Tony Snowdon and Cecil Beaton, but now they wanted to invite in the Americans and
Vanity Fair
. Miss Annie Leibovitz had been telephoned for, and she was flying over from the States, bringing eleven people, and her daughter, to do a snapshot, as if it might save the day and repair the soundness of something she’d worked all her life to keep running smoothly. It made The Queen angry, but she felt there was nothing she could do. She’d been taught by her father that she had to accept the advice of Number 10, and nowadays her own private office and Number 10 appeared to be in cahoots to humiliate her in one way or another.

Leibovitz’s crew had been in touch in advance of their arrival. They wanted to photograph The Queen in the saddle, mounted on a horse—in the sitting room, of all places! She put her foot down at that. “Absolutely not,” she told Shirley, who’d been deputized by the private secretary to tell The Queen, as he was afraid of her reaction if he told her himself. Shirley had dutifully returned to the private secretary and told him The Queen didn’t think it was a good idea.

[Fred W. McDarrah/Premium Archive/Getty Images]

Next they’d heard from the Americans that they thought of recreating a famous Cecil Beaton photo in which she’d stood wearing a naval cloak for him. Cecil was charming. She’d been younger then. No grey in her hair. She remembered the session vividly, “You won’t need your crown for this session, Ma’am,” he’d said, “but I shall need mine. I’ve grown so bald that I need something to cover it up.” She’d given her laughing assent to his wearing his hat indoors. But why try to imitate what he’d already done so perfectly? Hadn’t Miss Leibovitz any ideas of her own? Still, she was conscious of having turned down one request, so she agreed to the naval cloak. She and Shirley were upstairs, arranging the cloak, when they got word from the photographer’s crew downstairs. Could she put on the Garter robes first? They’d do the naval cloak later? The Queen was indignant. Putting on the Garter robes was serious work. It meant a different floor-length gown underneath and being strapped by several dozen internal ties into the long velvet cape that went on top. And a tiara too, which meant a special arrangement of hair.

“Really! This is the last straw,” said The Queen to Shirley, who thought it better to remain silent as the sovereign vented. As Shirley worked on the ties inside the mantle, The Queen checked the clock on the chimneypiece. “This will make us late!” She was aware that the photography session would now delay her engagements for the rest of the day. The ambassadors would have to wait, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer too. She might not even be free at the dogs’ teatime to feed them herself, the one part of the day that always cheered her up.

Shirley and a page gathered up The Queen’s Garter robes as she streamed down the corridor toward the elevator, still grumbling. When they arrived in the Bow Room of Buckingham Palace, where Miss Leibovitz had set up her equipment, The Queen had recovered a modicum of civility. The press secretary knew the sovereign was angry and gave her an especially low curtsey, the young woman’s gym-toned left leg shooting out from her short skirt and bending around behind her for support as she bent the right knee deeply. She then introduced The Queen to Annie Leibovitz, who introduced her to members of the camera crew and to her daughter. The little girl gave The Queen a large chrysanthemum. The Queen passed this to Lady Anne, who stood unobtrusively behind her, and sat down on the seat which Miss Leibovitz had indicated in front of the window. Shirley expertly arranged the Garter robes behind her so as not to pull The Queen over. Leibovitz began clicking her camera shutter. After a dozen clicks, she turned around to her assistant and said, “Could we try something a little less dressy? What about taking off the tiara?”