Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (19 page)

The Queen heard her distinctly. “Too dressy!” she said irritably. “What do you think this is?” If she hadn’t been firmly moored in place by the heavy train of the Garter robes, she would have stood up and walked out. The Order of the Garter went back to 1348. It was the oldest and most valuable honor in her gift. It coincided with the birth of the medieval monarchy itself. It was not a costume for charades.

Leibovitz looked at The Queen. She was used to catering to the whims of Hollywood celebrities, but she wasn’t quite sure how to handle an angry monarch. Was she being ironic? Was she joking? An instant’s examination of The Queen’s face, with Shirley speeding in to try and make things better, and Lady Anne hovering in the background with a worried expression, suggested to her that The Queen was not joking. She began trying to explain what she meant, using the tone of voice she used with her daughter during a tantrum.

The Queen, for her part, boiling hot from the robes to begin with, upset about the timing, feeling as if Miss Annie Leibovitz was just abusing her as everyone else had started to do in the wake of 1992, suddenly remembered something. Her yoga instructor had spent several whole sessions just breathing with her. “The breath, Your Majesty, the breath!
Pranayama
.” It was the key to what she called “mindfulness,” to calming down. Breathing did help. So, ignoring the pleas of photographer and photographer’s assistants and press secretary and dresser and lady-in-waiting, all of whom were buzzing and clucking their tongues encouragingly around her, she began breathing deeply and clearing her mind.

A
t Eton, teachers were “masters,” and for English literature Rajiv had a teacher who was a master. The boys thought of him as ancient and decrepit. They liked to make fun of the dandruff that covered his shoulders like a fall of snow. This English master had no use for impertinent boys. He ignored them. To bright boys, though, he gave all his energy and attention. He beamed upon them, chivvied them, chastised them, encouraged them, and praised them inordinately. Like small seedlings in a pot, they warmed to the glow of his sunshine. Their leaves increased and they grew. As he observed them growing, his own soul, deep in his withering body, also prospered and grew.

Rajiv was one of these boys. The English master had noticed him right away because his eyes were always wide open, while most of the others always looked half asleep. The text which especially stirred Rajiv was Shakespeare’s
Henry V
. A young English king takes an English army to France, where, though badly outnumbered, he wins a great victory and takes away a French wife as his prize. Why should a teenaged boy be interested in that? The English master sat at night by himself in his study wondering what he could do with the boys that would appeal to them, shatter the hard carapace of their indifference, persuade them to love what he loved.

The next morning, he showed the boys the cover of the famous “bad quarto” of the play, reconstructed from an early performance and only a fraction of the length of the standard edition. He pointed to “The
Cronicle
History of Henry
fift
” and remarked dryly, “The publisher spelled as well as you lot do.” He then turned to video games. As he suspected, their favorites were those that involved killing opponents with instruments of medieval torture. They enjoyed any gothic fantasy that included a frightening beast, a haunted castle, or a zombie returned from the dead. The boys also relished heroic feats required to destroy any of these three. This was his start. One group of boys he assigned to assemble all the ghost stories associated with Windsor Castle they could find. Another group he asked to design a video game involving armies assailing one another with longbows, the instruments Henry V had used at the Battle of Agincourt. A third he asked to find the most gruesome images they could discover online of injuries sustained during medieval warfare. The boys, even the sleepiest ones, all woke up and began to enjoy themselves.

Next the English master brought in a video of Kenneth Branagh’s
Henry V
. He asked them to watch the opening scene several times. Derek Jacobi, wearing a naval cloak and standing on an empty soundstage, recited Shakespeare’s lines. Jacobi plays “Chorus,” a single character, who tells members of the audience that they are going to have to use their imaginations if they are going to succeed in recreating a big battlefield inside a small theatre. The English master took the boys outside and made them look up at the high walls of the Castle dominating Eton and the river.

He asked them to take turns reciting Chorus’s lines,

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.

“What is ‘girdle of these walls’?” he asked one boy.

“Um, not sure, sir.”

Rajiv’s hand went up.

“Laroia?”

“The theatre, sir?”

“Yes, boy,” the master said wearily, though he was secretly delighted. “And what are the ‘two mighty monarchies’?” he asked another.

“Is one of them The Queen, sir?”

“No!” thundered the English master.

Rajiv’s hand was up again.

“Well, isn’t it the English monarchy, sir, but in 1415, at the time of Agincourt? Then the other monarchy would be France, wouldn’t it?”

The English master nodded his head yes while rolling his eyes in mock exhaustion. Some of the boys understood that he was playing with them, and tittered. “And so, Laroia. You seem to know everything.” He had saved his hardest question for last. “Will you tell us, please, what ‘high upreared and abutting fronts’ are?”

“Well, um, that’s poetry, sir.”

The English master couldn’t help smiling at that. Nothing better than being surprised by an intelligent boy. The other boys would have hated Rajiv for being a know-all, but he had such a reliable supply of sweets and snacks that they always had fun in his room, so they gave him a pass.

For his part, Rajiv was absolutely bowled over by the play. He got his own copy of Branagh’s
Henry V
and played it over and over on his laptop. When he had his housemates in his room late in the evening he would also do burlesque send-ups of the play, modeled on the film, for their amusement. One of his favorite gags was to take the blanket off his bed, drape it over his shoulders as if it were a naval cloak, and pretend to be Derek Jacobi playing the part of Chorus. In the film, Jacobi suddenly raises his voice at the end of the prologue where he asks the patience of the audience, “Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.” Rajiv had memorized these lines and liked saying them with ascending loudness until he was shouting “OUR PLAY!” with a bullfighting flourish of his blanket. The boys thought this was hilarious. If he put the wicker wastebasket on his head at the same time, they wriggled as if they might wet the bed.

He enjoyed the laughter and took it as his applause. It was a lot better than playing Lord Mountbatten in India, anyway. In fact, the history of Indian independence inspired him a good deal less than what he’d read of princely India, with its elaborate courts, where legend had it that maharajahs made love to beautiful maidens next to splashing fountains and were served sherbet afterwards. This was a great deal more attractive to Rajiv than modern India, with its cowboy capitalism. The counterpart of princely India, in his mind, was medieval England. He loved the legend of St George, who killed a dragon that was about to eat a princess. St George got the princess instead. This appealed to Rajiv’s deeply chivalric instincts. He also loved the part of
Henry V
where Henry, leading a charge of his men on the besieged town of Harfleur, cries out to them,

For there is none of you so mean and base,

That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:

Follow your spirit, and upon this charge

Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

He recalled the attitude of the boys in the alley, and of the senior courtier who’d said he wasn’t English. He knew that they all thought of him as “mean and base.” What he loved about King Henry was that he seemed always to manage to bring his men together despite what the English master had told them about vast social differences that separated different sorts of men in medieval England. Henry brought the men together, not by giving them chocolates, but by using his language, his poetry, his skills as an orator, his words, and it was in this discovery that Rajiv’s desire to be a poet was born. The English master had shown Rajiv Shelley’s
Defense of Poetry
from 1821 in which he said that poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This proposition was on the face of it so impossible, so absurd, that Rajiv devoted all his adolescent idealism to wondering how it might be made to come true.

T
he young man from the demo had started calling Rebecca almost right away after the night they spent together. He was attracted to her, and her being younger than him seemed to make her more pliable than girls his own age. He was not put off by her disappearing in the middle of the night after they slept together, and he wanted to do it again. He had no idea how awful it had been for her. For her part, she was surprised to see a number she didn’t recognize popping up on her mobile telephone the next day when she was back in school. When she answered, curiously, there he was, chattering away about going to another antihunt demonstration. Did she want to come along? She managed to put him off without giving an excuse, but then he called again a week later and asked again. This time the demo was not in town but somewhere out in the country. He’d stop by and pick her up. The badger was going, he told her winningly, and wanted to see her again. She did, frankly, want to see the badger. She also thought she could avoid returning with him to the Elephant by asking him to drop her off somewhere near Waterloo, where she could catch the train home without alerting her parents to where she’d been.

So one Saturday in the autumn, she found herself booming along the motorway in his rusty Austin Cooper, the pavement of the roadway racing dangerously near the bottom of the car and each bump they hit feeling as if it might send both of them flying toward the ditch. He told her excitedly about the demo. It was an actual meeting of the hounds, a real foxhunt. A group of protesters was collecting to disrupt it, if they could. He talked about all the groups that were coming, “sending delegations,” as he put it. Not only were the antihunt people, the organizers, going to be there, he said there would be a “whole damned Iraq War coalition” of forces. There were also the Greenham Common women, who’d been camped outside the American airbase for years to protest the nuclear weaponry housed there, a crew of anarchists, and some radical vegans, as well as many others. Rebecca only half listened to this narrative as she had the badger, which usually travelled in a wooden cage that sat on the backseat, out of his cage and in her lap before the young man could protest.

When they left the motorway and pulled onto a small two-lane affair, she briefly felt a stab of love for the country. You could be more alone in the country, and although London had many parks and trees, they didn’t compare with actually living on her parents’ vegetable farm. She longed for independence from her parents, but she also loved the rural landscape of her childhood. They drove through newly harvested fields shaved gold, and not yet plowed under for the winter, next to coppices, the tree leaves having already turned brown. Soon they came to a halt when they came over a rise and found the highway blocked by police cars with flashing blue lights. Along the verges of the road several dozen cars and vans had been parked. A group of protesters were milling about on one side of the police blockade, with uniformed officers holding the people back. They parked the car and approached the group along the barrier. The young man knew many of the people in the crowd and started talking with them, in what Rebecca thought of as a slightly conspiratorial way. She didn’t want to be introduced, she was too shy for introductions, so she hung back with the badger. She noticed that quite a few of the protesters had ski masks, either rolled up on their heads or bulging in their pockets. She wondered why they had them, for although it was chilly, it wasn’t cold enough for gloves or skiwear. A lot of the men were wearing military-style flak jackets, as if they were on an armed operation somewhere. It seemed to be the fashion.

As she milled about on the edges of the crowd, observing, she could see in the distance that on the rise of one of the plowed fields, a group of people on horseback were following at a walking pace behind a huntsman who was with a group of dogs. She couldn’t make out how many there were, but a good many were wearing red—“pink” was the proper term—and many of the others were in tight-fitting black jackets. She could see ladies who had their hair rolled in buns underneath their black caps.

Rebecca hated the arrogance of foxhunters, posh people who swanned about in their fast cars, raised their voices in country pubs, and watched idly as dogs ripped foxes from end to end, but she did admire the spectacle of foxhunting, and was secretly proud of it as something that English people did. Foxes had killed some of her most cherished hens, and she thought of them as vermin; but, on the other hand, foxes were only acting on instinct. She wanted foxhunting banned. She was sure of that. But she would have preferred to keep the spectacle while somehow preserving the lives of both foxes and hens.