Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (21 page)

Helping Anne, who leaned on him more than women usually did when they took your arm, made the Andy moment pass. They took some paces together, saying nothing. Then Luke said, “You might write him.”

“Don’t have his address. Don’t know where he is. Haven’t heard from him in more than a year now.”

Luke heard her quiet wail underneath what she’d said so calmly. I’ve been a failure as a mother. “What’s his name?”

“Dickon.”

“Well, that’s it, then. Write him at ‘Dickon Bevil, Greenpeace,’ and hand it to the Royal Protection. They’ll give it to MI5, and MI5 knows where everyone is.”

“And what do you propose I should say?” said Anne a little hopelessly, remembering her earlier faltering attempt to find the right words.

“Oh, that you’ve seen his picture. That you talked about him to a strange soldier you met in waiting, who thought he must be quite a courageous sort of man. That you’re thinking of him.” Pause. “Just be with him like you are with me.”

Anne squeezed his arm and they walked on. After a hundred yards more, they came out of the pine forest and had a fantastic view of a white suspension bridge over a wide spot in the river, with open fields, and a range of the green Grampian hills in the distance. The sun was making it as warm as summer, and some local teenaged boys were paddling in the water with their jeans rolled up and their shirts off. Anne and Luke walked up onto the bridge and stopped to watch the boys skimming flat stones across the water.

“How pale those boys are.” She could sense his interest in them even as he pretended to be bored at her stopping. “They remind me of those pictures of soldiers bathing in France during the First World War. How white they looked. How vulnerable.”

[© The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland]

Luke said nothing.

“Of course that was the war where they first discovered that the real trauma might come after the war was over. Psychological. Do you know? They tried to treat it with electric shocks?” She breathed for a moment indignantly. “Didn’t work. But then that man Rivers had some success treating Siegfried Sassoon with a talking therapy. At a hospital somewhere up here, as a matter of fact. Near Edinburgh, I believe.”

Luke sighed and pulled on her arm gently to show that it was time they started moving along. Anne followed Luke’s lead, but carried on: “Sassoon would have taken an interest in those boys, of course. He wrote quite a good book about it. The war, the men friends, the uneasiness. Anyone can read it and understand. I did.
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
, and then the whole Sherston trilogy.”

Again, Luke said nothing, but he made a mental note to look for the book, just as she’d intended him to.

S
hirley had a secret addiction to cheese. She found that it calmed her down. She had secret stashes in The Queen’s clothes closets: wedges of aged Stilton so old that it didn’t hurt them to be kept wrapped in clingfilm at room temperature, and foil-wrapped portions of cream cheese with a laughing cow on the label. When the anger that kept her going got to be a little too much for her, she’d steal away to the cupboards and nibble something from her supplies. She’d heard her contemporaries complain about their doctors’ orders. “Oh, I’ve got the cholesterol, darling. ‘No more cheese,’ he said. High blood pressure too. No more salt. Said I’ve got to use the hot sauce instead.” Shirley solved this problem by not going to the doctors. She received regular notices from the National Health Service in Windsor Castle that she was due for a checkup, but she ignored them. The Castle had a large enough population to have its own NHS medical unit, and the waiting time was much less than outside the Castle walls. Still Shirley refused to go.

The Queen gave her little natural remedies in tiny green bottles. Both The Queen and her mother were great believers in homeopathy. When once Shirley complained of lacking energy, The Queen had said, “I have just the thing for it.” She unlatched the powerful snap on her boxy handbag and brought out a little vial of lavender oil. “Wonderful for tiredness. I take it. It works.” Shirley accepted the bottle and tried the lavender oil. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it helped a little.

She and William one night in Buckingham Palace, when The Queen was out late and they had to stay up to welcome her back and put her to bed, sat in a room with The Queen’s shoe cupboards. They watched an old American Western on television. At one point John Wayne had said with contempt of a gun-toting opponent, “Why, he’s nuthin but a snake-oil salesman.” They’d both laughed out loud, as The Queen’s latest enthusiasm was snake oil, and she’d given them both small bottles as a topical remedy for aching joints.

Still, Shirley had her own tonics and cure-alls as well as The Queen’s. In addition to the cheese, she kept airline-sized bottles of scotch in the pockets of her apron. She also went and smoked a quick cigarette five or six times a day. She didn’t think of this as a serious vice. Her grandmother and mother had both smoked, and though her mother died young, it wasn’t from lung cancer. Her grandmother had, after all, lived into her late seventies, which Shirley thought, taking as she did a rather pessimistic view of life, quite long enough.

Shirley and William often found themselves together late in the evening when their devotion to their jobs kept them on call after the rest of the staff had long ago gone home.

Those closest to The Queen mirrored her work habits. As she didn’t like giving up duties and was used to standing on her feet for long hours of the day, the senior members of staff all did too. This didn’t mean that Shirley and William couldn’t fit in a drink and a film while they were waiting for the silver polish to dry or the washing machine to finish its cycle. William had a source for an endless variety of videotapes and DVDs. He’d bring in three at a time and ask for Shirley’s help in deciding which one they’d sit down to watch.

That evening he proposed her a film she’d rejected before. He did it with a sense of mischief and malice. He knew it would make her feel uncomfortable, and he thought he might just introduce the showdown he suspected they had to have in their friendship in the guise of a tease. “Look at this, Shirlers,” his pet name for her that rhymed with curlers, one of the tools of her trade, as she often dressed The Queen’s hair as well. “
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
! It looks like great fun. It’s all about these wonderful Australian queens getting into drag. Doing their hair. Zipping themselves into these amazing dresses. You could get a few clues for Mrs Thing. You know, add in a bit of sparkly eye shadow. Might make a world of difference.”

Shirley bridled. She did not like the comparison of Australian transvestites to the sovereign, and was a little shocked at having them mentioned in the same sentence, and by using the same word. “No. I’m not having Danny La Rue now,” she said, mentioning a 1960s female impersonator who once had a successful West End revue. “I told you that before. What else have you got?”

He was annoyed and upped the ante a little more aggressively than he was used to doing. It was his way of retaliating. “Oh my, Mrs Prude doesn’t approve of drag queens, does she?”

There were more gay men than straight men in royal service, and Shirley early on had got to be completely unshocked by reckless chatter about picking up younger men, wearing women’s clothes, and visiting gay saunas. The predominance of gay men on the palace staff also meant that, like the theatre, the ballet, and the art world, the palace had suffered more severely from the AIDS crisis than had other places. Shirley had lost colleagues whom she respected and attended more funerals than she liked to remember. She understood that the peak of the crisis had now passed, and that there were drugs that allowed men who were HIV positive to live with the condition. But because she didn’t believe in doctors or conventional medicine, she also didn’t really believe the crisis was over. She thought of it as just a lull and expected it to come back with redoubled force. She’d been brought up to believe in the apocalypse, and it informed her thinking on many unrelated topics.

She loved William. He was her most reliable companion. He was as fanatical about his work as she was. She felt protective toward him, almost as if he were the younger brother she never had. He never talked to her about his love life, but she was convinced that in off hours, when she wasn’t around, he was off visiting some of London’s sinks and cesspools. She couldn’t think of them any other way. This was in fact the language that had been used in the Scottish evangelical chapels her grandmother had taken her to as a little girl. Although she was broad-minded about homosexuality in general, and could joke about it with the rest of them, she was still convinced that it was a terrible sin, a sin that could be forgiven, a sin that could be lived with, but a sin nonetheless. She didn’t condemn William for his sin. The bottles of scotch in her apron were also sinful, as the chapel condemned all consumption of alcohol. But she did worry about him. She wasn’t convinced that even if he looked after his health, he wouldn’t be beaten up by skinheads and hooligans as he crawled home late some evening. So for her to watch
Priscilla
would have represented looking the other way, or even looking with approval, at all the danger William considered fun.

“I’m not a prude. You know that.”

“But they do song and dance. Come on, it’s fun.”

Shirley wheeled around in her chair to look at him over her bifocals. “William, I want you to look after yourself.”

In a moment he saw that the tease wasn’t right. Her main worry was his safety, which overcame her nagging moral disapproval of going out to dives to watch drag divas. “Don’t you worry, my darling. I don’t do half the things you imagine I do. Lead a very dull life, in fact. Look at the two of us! Here we are shut up in The Queen’s shoe cupboard when just beyond that wall London is heaving and throbbing and singing and dancing and dressing up.”

He was right, of course.

“It’s a school night. We’re not going anywhere.”

And she was right too.

In a conciliatory spirit, she swiveled in her armchair so that she could reach into a cupboard. She pulled out some of the wrapped cream cheese and offered him a packet. “
Vache qui rit
?”

“Shirley, you are dreadful. You mustn’t eat that stuff. It’s applied right to the arteries.” Then he bent over and took some of the cheese. “Don’t mind if I do.”

“William, we still haven’t anything to watch. Did you already send back
High Noon
? Haven’t we any Clint?”

“Yes, I know you’ve got a
petit faible
for Mr Eastwood.”

“He’s no fable, William. He’s the real stuff.”

“I know your tastes, darling. The secret is safe with me,” said William as he slid a copy of
Dirty Harry
into the tape player.

O
n the very first night that Andy visited the British regiment, they put on a special dress dinner to welcome him in the officers’ mess. Among the American units serving in Iraq, formal dinners were rare and dress uniforms almost never worn. Andy found that among the British, any occasion for a dress-up party and the bringing out of regimental silver was seized upon with alacrity. Andy hadn’t even brought his dress uniform along, so all he could do was change into some clean camouflage gear, while the British officers had all their polished buttons on. They were disposed to like him, having seen him tackle Luke and wrestle in the sand. For them it was so appallingly the wrong thing to do that it was grand.

When Andy entered the tent they used as a mess, he was surprised not only that he was dressed wrong, but that the table was covered with glasses and silverware. Where had all this stuff come from? Luke’s colleagues caught him staring at the table.

“Not used to dining at tables in the States, I expect?” one joshed him.

“Oh yeah, we eat at tables,” said Andy, “but we don’t steal silverware from the Hilton.”

This was considered quick-witted and good-humored. Everyone laughed. Another of the British officers tried a different angle of attack.

“You look so nice in your camouflage fatigues, Captain Brainard.” This brought another round of laughter. “The enemy will never find you in here. You blend in so.” More guffaws.

“Actually, I’m surprised you guys still wear those red coats. You look kinda like my high school marching band.” He pronounced this “hah skewl” even though he hadn’t anything remotely like a country accent ordinarily. This produced more hilarity, as the accent was exactly what the British expected all Americans to sound like.

When they sat down, Luke saw with a repressed thrill that his commanding officer had placed him next to Andy. He also saw Andy looking in confusion at his place setting. There were three forks and three knives on either side of his plate, as well as a spoon and a fork placed across the top of the plate. Which to use? They were having smoked cod for the first course, sent out from Britain in vacuum-sealed plastic packs that didn’t have to be refrigerated. Luke picked up the outermost fork and a knife that was flatter than the others, elbowed Andy, and made a silly face as he waved his utensils in the air. Andy saw that Luke was trying to help him and was grateful. He did feel a bit ganged up on, as he had to think of replies to all the different jokes that were sent his way. He was relieved to find that Luke was not only by his side, but also on his side.