Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (2 page)

Prince Edward had created an account for her with Miss Twitter. He asked her what she would like as a username. She looked at him blankly. “What do you want to be called on Twitter, Mummy?” he said with some exasperation. “Little Bit,” she said, and he’d entered that as her Twitter name and then come up with the idea of using the Buckingham Palace postcode as her username, @SW1A1AA. In fact there hadn’t been time for her to do much exploring, but she’d made a few notes on the back of a used envelope she reclaimed from the wastepaper basket as he’d talked. She gathered that she had to “follow” other people with Miss Twitter if she were to learn what everyone was talking about. She also understood that to follow people, to read what they had to say, she had to click on a little colored square at the top labeled “Who to follow.” She sat down again cautiously, grasped the mouse as if it might shock her, and then, when it didn’t, selected Twitter from among her bookmarks. She began entering the names of people it might be interesting to follow. Typing with her two index fingers, she put in “Boris Johnson,” and @MayorofLondon came up with a photo of a handsome blond, now past his prime and a little stout. “Bit of a belly he has now, Mr Johnson, didn’t used to,” The Queen thought to herself. “An amusing fellow.” She looked at the text that had been entered, and it was all PR bumpf from the mayor’s office.

Next she put in “Duchess of Cornwall” and up came a photo of Camilla next to @DuchessCornwall. Here the text was more interesting, absurd, rather funny actually. Camilla had described herself as “Future Queen of England. One does like to chat with the public . . . but from a safe distance. Lover of Horses and Gin.” All that was true enough, thought The Queen to herself, except the “Future Queen of England” bit. There were still some legal niceties to be sorted out there. She didn’t think it was very wise of Camilla to write about the gin, however. She made a mental note to have a word with her. As a Twitter novice, The Queen was so far unaware that many people posted Tweets pretending to be people they weren’t.

The Queen then entered her own name and @Queen_UK appeared. The text here, however, made her indignant. Every day, for the past several weeks it appeared, at six p.m. @Queen_UK had tweeted “It’s gin o’clock!” She wondered whether Camilla was already daring to tweet as Queen of England. The gin did seem to be a telltale motif. She’d have to ask Sir Robin to take a look at this. What annoyed her still more was that The Queen did rather like gin herself. She didn’t think she’d ever abused the green bottle of Gordon’s, however, just long ago got in the habit of having a cocktail before supper. Usually the same one. Only one. Couldn’t hurt. In fact she found it helped a great deal.

The gold clock on the chimneypiece struck a bell indicating the half hour. Late afternoon in Windsor. Monday after breakfast she’d have to go back to London. Business. The office. She had a full week of engagements ahead, she reflected with a Sunday-afternoon sigh. Before that, however, her yoga instructor was coming for her weekly lesson. Prince Edward had also introduced her to yoga. He’d also told her how much he enjoyed what he described as a combination of meditation and exercise, how Sophie Wessex had got him started, how good it felt to have one’s muscles stretched, how even an octogenarian like his mother might feel the benefit. She’d cautiously agreed to a trial. With anyone else she would have laughed and said, instantly, “No,” but she had a soft spot for her two younger sons, whom she’d managed to protect from some of the public attention she’d lived with all her life. An instructor had turned up and now The Queen had been doing her yoga practice for several months. She found it did calm her down. She always walked more slowly and deliberately afterwards. But some of the poses were more difficult than others. And the instructor expected her to remember them from week to week. There were only a few she had memorized. She decided to try out a few of them before the instructor arrived, to warm up a little.

The Queen stepped out of her patent-leather shoes. She then walked across the Turkish carpet in her nylons and stood in front of a long mirror at one side of the room. The Queen had no vanity whatsoever, so her appearance didn’t interest her in the least, but she did feel she needed the mirror to check the shape of her body while she was practicing the poses. She recalled one of her favorites, where she stood with her back foot at a right angle to her body, facing forward, front knee bent, arms outstretched before her and behind. She thought she might get into this pose and hold it, breathing steadily, to the count of sixty. She hitched up her skirt slightly and, as she assumed the pose, she heard in her mind’s ear the instructor proclaiming: “Warrior Two!”

S
hirley MacDonald was a practical woman who was nearing sixty. She lived in part of a small grace-and-favour cottage in the Home Park at Windsor. This was a flat she occupied for free by the “grace and favour” of The Queen, so long as she was employed in the Royal Household. She would be turned out when she retired. Windsor suited her, really, and she thought that when she did retire she might try to buy a large enough house so she could do bed-and-breakfast for day visitors who didn’t feel like going back into London after a day of seeing the parts of the Castle that were open to tourists. She also had a room she could use overnight in Buckingham Palace when she needed it for work. She hadn’t enough money saved to buy a place in London, and she’d miss that, as she loved everything about London, but she was philosophical and resigned to spending her retirement somewhere not too far removed from the Castle walls.

Shirley was the most senior of The Queen’s dressers. She was a ladies’ maid who served, technically, under the Mistress of the Robes; an aristocratic woman who had that title turned up only for ceremonial occasions. She was, in Shirley’s view, useless. Shirley had no time for this particular palace archaism, but she’d learned to put up with it. Shirley herself had plenty of work to do. She drew The Queen’s bath in the morning, and sometimes in the evening too. She cared for the whole of The Queen’s wardrobe, from the heavy mantle she wore for the Garter service in June to the country clothes she wore on weekends. She cleaned, catalogued, and repaired everything The Queen wore. On a daily basis she laid out her shoes and underthings, her dresses, jackets, and jewels. Usually The Queen emerged from the bath in her dressing gown about half past eight. Shirley would appear from behind a screen. “Good morning, Your Majesty.”

“Good morning, Shirley,” not unfriendly, a little perfunctory. Then they’d have a little conversation about the weather, and Shirley would give as an excuse the growing coolness of the autumn for a heavier wool skirt she’d laid out. The Queen seldom wanted something different from what Shirley had chosen for her to wear. Whatever she wore The Queen regarded as not unlike a uniform. She put on pearl earrings in the same spirit that a policeman did up his silver buttons. They were part of the job. They indicated who she was. They were not pretty things for her ears. They were her name badge. “I’m Mrs Queen.”

Shirley respected The Queen, but she was not in awe of her. Shirley’s grandmother had been a laundress at Balmoral, and she remembered her forever mending the edges of frayed sheets, even on weekends, even at home. Shirley’s mother had come south to work in the kitchen for the royal family. Shirley had seen the insides and outsides of all the royal residences since she was a girl, and that was precisely why she’d been offered a job close to The Queen. She was familiar. She wouldn’t bolt. She wouldn’t sell her story to the
Daily Mirror.

If The Queen took no particular joy in her clothes, Shirley did. She adored the weights placed in the hems of her skirts so they’d hang properly and protect her from embarrassment on a windy day. She loved the lining of the coats, usually chosen in a contrasting but complementary color. A plum-colored jacket made of raw silk had a green-apple lining that no one ever saw but the dressmaker (who was proud of her craft), The Queen (who seldom noticed), and Shirley (who liked to hold the jacket’s tart interior up to the light).

Shirley was friendly with one of the senior butlers, William de Morgan, who would sometimes stop by her room as she was at the ironing board, steaming out a few creases. His method was to come in her ironing room smiling ear to ear, surprised, and happy to see her. Then he would point to something of interest outside the window. “That’s a thunder cloud if I’m not mistaken!” When she turned to look, he whipped the purple jacket off the ironing board and before she could even turn around to protest, he’d put it on and stood proudly before the mirror, imitating some of The Queen’s well-worn sayings. “Have you come far today?” “Good morning, Shirley.” “That will be all, William.”

“Give it here, William,” Shirley said, noticing how much more proudly William wore it than The Queen did. It made him taller, more erect. He glowed in it. The Queen always put on her jacket with something of a repressed sigh, an elderly knight putting on his armor. But for William the jacket was a shaft of sunlit magnificence.

Unlike Shirley, William could not point to generations of royal service in his family. He’d grown up in a postindustrial town with no particular prospects or talents except a love of opulence and the daring to add a “de” to his name when he was in his twenties. He’d seen an exhibition of Victorian tiles by an artist of the same name. It sounded much more impressive than “Bill Morgan,” which he’d been called since he was a boy, so he went to the registry office and took it for his own. It was, after all, only a small change. He also worked hard. He’d worked for two other members of the royal family before he was taken on by The Queen. Before that he’d spent a decade working for a duke, then for a sheik, after having been a waiter at Brooks’s and sommelier at Wilton’s. He knew wine and food. He knew how to sense what someone might want in the instant before they knew it themselves. For him there was nothing humiliating or degrading about service. It was his religion. It was what he knew how to do well. He was proud of it. He left all these places with warmly satisfied employers who were sorry to see him go.

Working for the Royal Household didn’t pay as well as these other positions, but it had a prestige the other places hadn’t, and William was a connoisseur of prestige. He knew the difference between the daughter of a baron and the daughter of an earl. He knew how to address the envelope of a letter to each, a distinction that confused most people in modern Britain, when it didn’t actively annoy them. He could distinguish between a supermarket game bird and a pheasant that had been properly aged and hung. He could see at a glance whether a man’s suit was off the peg in a shop or made by a tailor.

The monarchy spurred his imagination in a way that used to be widespread in the late Middle Ages, but had now faded to a loyal few. The Queen coming into a room gave him an electric shock which he had to work hard to conceal. A photograph of Prince Harry changing his shirt in Afghanistan made his mouth dry. A view of the Royal Standard whipping in the wind above Windsor Castle caused his heart to race.

Much of this he did not share with Shirley. They both voted Labour. They were both devoted to their work, but if for William the monarchy was poetry, for Shirley it was prose. She put in long hours and was getting to the age where she noticed being on her feet more than she used to. If The Queen had a formal event in the evening that would require a change of clothes, Shirley found her chattier than in the mornings. Shirley would brush out her hair before The Queen dressed in an evening gown. She remembered very well when The Queen had first explained to her that she would be meeting a few people she didn’t know well in the evening and would Shirley mind reading out their
Who’s Who
entries so The Queen could ask in an informed way about their children or wives or parents. It was something Queen Victoria used to do, and The Queen liked to do it too.

If she were tired in the evenings, Shirley tried not to show it, as The Queen was more than twenty years older than she was, and she continued to keep up a brisk pace, or had until recently. In the last months or so, The Queen had seemed to slow down perceptibly, to be feeling not quite herself, to be a little more somber than was usual. Shirley noticed this, but it was one of the rules of her job that she would never bring it up unless The Queen brought it up herself. Shirley was quite certain that she never would, so she was surprised one evening as the autumn darkness extended that The Queen did bring it up. It was a Sunday in Windsor. Shirley would return with The Queen to Buckingham Palace on Monday after breakfast and stay in a room there, as The Queen had a busy week ahead starting on Tuesday and the other dressers were on holiday. The Queen sat in silence as Shirley brushed vigorously through her hair. After a few moments, The Queen asked Shirley whether she remembered “Miss Julie Andrews.
Dame
Julie Andrews, as she now is,” added The Queen.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I made her DBE a few years ago.”

“A good thing too. You don’t always give honors to those that deserve them.” Shirley sometimes used a little exaggeratedly rough talk with The Queen because she liked it, just as she liked rough strokes of the brush. They’d worked together long enough for Shirley to feel confident about speaking her mind on some subjects.