Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (22 page)

After the tackle and the first night’s dinner, there were many work assignments Luke and Andy had to do together. Andy didn’t feel like it was his job to make friends with all the other British officers too. He had enough to do as it was. So he was happy sticking near Luke on his downtime as well. They grew accustomed to one another, and, without putting it into words, their being comfortable with one another was one of their principal pleasures for both young men. When they were sent out into the desert to camp with some of the men for a week and to do some observation of suspicious Bedouin activity, they spent hot afternoons under an open-sided awning secured to the side of a Humvee. They’d lie on air mattresses and compare their favorite foods.

“Blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream,” said Andy.

“Sticky toffee pudding,” said Luke.

“I bet you’ve never had steak on a Weber grill,” said Andy. “Too foggy to light the charcoal.”

“Oh, no, we do have that kind of thing. I believe delivery van drivers dine on it by the side of the road.”

“Man, if you weren’t such big snobs about truck drivers, you could get rid of The Queen and have a free country.”

“Um, could we leave Her Majesty out of this, please? Unless you’d like me to bring up your absurd, flag-waving traditions. I mean flying the stars and stripes you’re wearing on your shoulder right now at used-car dealerships . . .”

“Hey! Brits aren’t allowed to criticize Old Glory,” said Andy, laughing and slugging Luke sharply on the shoulder. Luke returned the blow, but it was too hot really to have a proper fight so they both lay back on their air mattresses and wheezed.

In the desert night it grew very cold. Although they both had good sleeping bags, they instinctively lay close to one another for warmth, curled into similar fetal positions, though zipped into separate sacks. Sometimes, too, during the day, when they were looking at a map together, their elbows and upper arms brushed against each other and neither one would pull away. Neither one would have mentioned this, but the truth was that in a place where death was not far away, and neighboring units lost men on a regular basis, the human contact was as necessary to keep up their courage as food or water.

A more difficult situation to explain away occurred one weekend when the men in the Guards regiment arranged a night of music and skits. They invited the officers to put on one of the acts. Luke was having nothing to do with this, but some of the other British officers persuaded Andy that he should join them doing a lip-synch song-and-dance routine of one of Lady Gaga’s more famous dance tracks. Several of their number planned to gyrate and mouth the backup part of the song around him. He would take the lead, because since he’d tackled Luke, he was famous for being fearlessly immune to embarrassment. Andy was pretty confident this would be good for laughs, and the men had roused his competitive spirit. The best skit was to be awarded a prize. He wanted to win.

Luke stayed away from the rehearsals for the weekend performance. He generally tried to protect Andy from the merry-making traps of the other lads, but Andy had agreed to do the show so enthusiastically, and entered right away into the fun of it, that Luke felt a bit left out. So he went to his corner of the tent and sulked. On the Saturday night, after a dinner in which both officers and men had been drinking freely, the performances were fairly predictable until Andy and the other officers came on. They’d actually put together an excellent dance sequence along with the karaoke. The combined audience of British and American soldiers whooped to see the officers making fools of themselves, but then grew quiet when their synchronized movements aligned with the thud of the beat. When it was over a huge cheer went up, and it was clear before the judges announced their decision who’d won. When Luke went backstage afterwards to congratulate him, some barrier between them seemed to be lifted. Luke gave Andy a bear hug while everyone watched and laughed.

“That was amazing. Already more than a hundred hits on YouTube and it’s only just been posted!” said Luke.

“Did you send me those roses?” said Andy, gesturing to an imaginary vase on an imaginary dressing table.

After that they became a settled item, “buddies” to the Americans and “mates” to the British. Luke’s fellow officers had, many of them, like him, been to public schools where idealized boy-boy romances were common. The possible erotic element in the mix didn’t interest them as much as the potential social awkwardness of Luke bringing Andy home to meet his parents, minor land-owning gentry in Rutland. Social embarrassment was much more amusing to them than homosexuality. “Gosh, what’ll you tell them when you want to bring Minnesota home for Christmas—eh, Thomason?” asked one, when Andy wasn’t around.

“Make sure he doesn’t get up and leave with the ladies when the port is passed,” said another.

“Oh, tell him not to douse the flame on the plum pudding with his water glass. Yanks aren’t so keen about fires at the dinner table,” said the first one, giggling.

As Andy was the only officer among the Americans, he had no equals who could tease him about his friendship with Luke, but the American men observed the friendship and muttered darkly about it. They were more worried about the sexual angle. “I hate fags,” began to be scrawled on the plywood walls in the men’s latrines.

The week after the musical performance a small detachment made up of both British and American soldiers, commanded by the American sergeant, was going out on a routine patrol in two armored vehicles.

“I think we’d better go too,” said Andy to Luke as the day’s orders were being reviewed early in the morning.

“No. We have other things to do here. Leave this to the staff sergeant. We’d only be in his way.”

“Look, if the men are going out, and might be shot at, we have to go too.”

“It’s a routine patrol, Andrew,” said Luke, using the long version of Andy’s name to emphasize the fact that he thought his friend was being childish. “They don’t need us.”

“If the men have to do it, we have to show we can do it too.”

“We’ve both been out on patrols before. We don’t need to go every time.”

“If you don’t lead from the front, you get left behind. I’m going.”

“Show-off.”

“What?”

“That performance Saturday has gone to your head. You’re showing off.”

Andy looked at Luke and glared at him. He was a soldier before he was a friend. He was a can-do young man from the Midwest before he was an international diplomat. To be told that going out to do his job was actually just being cocky, well, that was about as low a blow as he’d ever been dealt. It briefly occurred to him to say, “You fucking take that back,” but he knew that would make them both laugh. They’d be friends again. The men would go out without him. That seemed like cowardice, so he looked at Luke and said nothing. Then he strode out of the tent and toward the waiting armored vehicles.

Before he walked out, Luke saw the line cross Andy’s mind. He willed him to say it. Say it, please just say it. Standing by himself, watching Andy go, Luke murmured, under his breath, “Goodness me, calm down, my dear.”

T
he Queen was sitting at a table in the last carriage of the 1700 from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverley. It was already occupied by a blind man and his Seeing Eye dog, a German shepherd lying underneath the table, the blind man’s companion, who, by the look of her thick spectacles might have been nearly blind herself, and a young man with several piercings through his nose, as well as large disks that stretched out his earlobes. After Rajiv left, the young man took a can of lager from a plastic bag and put it in front of him on the table.

The Queen looked at him with interest. He was unlike anyone she’d met before. She wondered if he were a football hooligan. Before she could think what to say to him, he gave her a friendly wink and said, “Like the skull and crossbones.” He could tell she was an old lady with an unusual sense of style, but the scarf under her hood created a shadow that effectively obscured much of her face.

The Queen had no idea what he was talking about and looked confused.

“On the back of your hoodie. Seriously piratical,” said he, lifting his can of lager and toasting her.

Though The Queen still did not understand what he was talking about, she smiled back as she understood he was paying her a compliment. “And what are those rings through the nose for?” she said to him as a way of sustaining the conversation. She’d only seen them before as a way of leading oxen, but she thought it tactful not to say so.

“Not
for
anything, love. Just decoration.”

“Ah, rather like me,” The Queen instantly replied. Seized as she was by unusual melancholy, his not making a fuss about her lulled her into a sense of complacency about what she was doing. She rather thought that, like the young man from Paxton & Whitfield, he must know who she was, and would appreciate a little self-deprecation on her part. People generally did. It was one of her little tricks to make them more comfortable with her.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” said The Queen, “only a bit of a joke really.”

“Sorry it’s so crowded here with my dog,” began the blind man.

“Nonsense,” said The Queen. “Plenty of room. Isn’t there, darling?” she said as she offered her hand to the dog, who licked it.

“The fact is, the dog belongs to both of us,” the blind man’s companion, a shapeless matron in an old tweed coat, put in. “I’m legally blind myself, though I can catch some light and some shapes through these spectacles.”

“How brave you both are,” said The Queen. She’d found that it was better to address people’s disabilities straightforwardly, rather than to avoid speaking of them, or to make light of them. “And have you both been blind for a long time?” It was a slight variation on her standard “Have you lived here a long time?” She had no trouble making the adjustment as the circumstances required.

“Well,” began the man, assuming the question was addressed to him, “since I was born. So I’m quite used to it.”

The lady in the tweed coat was used to the blind man going first in whatever they did. Some sort of male prerogative. After he finished, she added, “My vision’s always been poor, but it’s been getting worse and worse. Soon I’ll be just as bad as him,” she said, nodding her head at the man on the other side of the table, and she gave a little laugh.

The Queen looked at her steadily as she said this, even though the words of the couple were addressed only vaguely in her direction. She allowed a small interval in the conversation to let them know she’d heard them, and that they’d told her something solemn. Then she said, “And the name of this very intelligent dog, who helps you both?”

“Hohenzollern,” answered the blind man. “But born in England, and eats British beef.”

“Of course you do, darling,” said The Queen, rubbing the dog’s ear. “Like British beef, don’t you, Hohenzollern?” Her pronunciation of the dog’s name was somewhat different from the blind man’s. She took every syllable and said it separately, though quickly. Her diction suggested she’d met a few of them in her lifetime and heard the way they actually said it. “Of course, the Hohenzollerns themselves used to come here often a hundred years ago, didn’t they? Queen Victoria was always complaining about the cost of entertaining Kaiser Wilhelm. Said he could come to Windsor for a cup of tea, and that was all!” said The Queen with a gay laugh. “But then he’d go to the Isle of Wight and race his boat with the Prince of Wales. The dinners afterwards cost a good deal, I’m sure of it.”

“Sounds as if we’re on the way to Scotland with someone who knows history,” said the blind man, relishing the prospect of showing her how much he knew on the same subject. “You must have seen that documentary on the Kaiser. BBC 2. Someone pointed it out to me in
Radio Times
, but we missed it.”

“Oh, was there a documentary? Just recently?” said The Queen with some disappointment. “I must have missed it too. No, no, I didn’t see it. Would have liked to.”

“I hated history in school. So boring. Memorizing names and dates. Who cares when Agincourt was?” This was the first the man with the piercings had said to the table.

“1415, wasn’t it?” said the blind man to The Queen, attempting to be courtly to this stranger who might allow him to display his knowledge.

“Why, yes, I think it was,” said The Queen, who wasn’t entirely sure of the date herself. She liked Victorian history and Victorian medievalism, yes, loved all the imitation battlements at Balmoral. The real Middle Ages left her a bit cold, though she seemed to recall some of the grandchildren going through a Dungeons & Dragons phase, and had bought them some games for their computers at Christmastime.

The Queen turned to the young man. “I suppose to like history you must have a good teacher, mustn’t you?” As the blind wished to talk about their blindness, she sensed that the young man’s disability had something to do with not being noticed by his teachers.

“I had crap teachers.”

“Tell me,” said The Queen, looking into his eyes.

“Well, they never had much time for me, did they? I suppose I wasn’t the brightest in the bunch. But they usually didn’t learn my name until the third week. Didn’t even notice I was there. They saw my marks and decided, ‘Well, what’s the use?’ so they didn’t bother. They were always droning on about Winston bloody Churchill, or the Industrial Revolution, or imperialism. You know, oppressing the nonwhite races?”

He looked over at The Queen for her reaction and saw her dismay. “Oh, sorry, that was a Paki bloke who put you on the train, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, a very nice young man. Perhaps about your age. ‘Paki’ isn’t what he’d like to be called. An insult, you know? He’s quite English. Born here, and parents born here too. Winston, now, you would have liked him.”

The young man with the piercings looked back at her as if she were crazy. She was an old lady. It was true that the lager in front of him was not his first, so he wasn’t seeing entirely clearly. But there was no way in the wide world that she had known Winston Churchill. She was barmy. The old often were.