Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (3 page)

“Well, it’s the Government, of course. I don’t choose most of them myself.”

“The Order of the British Empire for David Beckham. What did that young man do to deserve it?”

“He’s a very good footballer, Shirley.”

“He may be, but I don’t think he deserves the OBE for kicking a ball about.”

The Queen changed the subject. “Julie Andrews, now. Do you remember that song of hers? From a film? I believe she played an excellent nanny.” The Queen’s voice grew warmer on the word “nanny.”

“
Mary Poppins
, Ma’am?”

“Not that one. The other one.”

“
The Sound of Music
?”

“That’s it! It was a song about her favorite things.” The Queen could still command a surprising soprano, and she sang out tentatively, “When the dog bites . . .”

Shirley replied in a voice that was closer to a throaty baritone, “When the bee stings.”

“When I’m feeling sad,” sang The Queen, her voice cracking slightly on “sad.”

“I simply remember my favorite things,” answered Shirley.

“And then I don’t feel so bad,” the two women ended in unison. They made eye contact and giggled lightly.

“And what are your favorite things, Mrs MacDonald?” continued The Queen after a pause.

Shirley was wary of replying to this. She was unmarried, having given her whole life to royal service, but the palace preserved the antique custom whereby the most senior members of the female staff were all called “Mrs.” It was an old-fashioned way of showing respect, even though it was very much out of step with the age of women’s liberation. The palace pretended not to know that the title “Ms” had even been invented. When The Queen called Shirley “Mrs MacDonald,” it was a kind of diminutive. It was affectionate. But she almost never asked for personal information, and to ask Shirley to name her favorite things was very unusual indeed. Shirley guessed that The Queen was looking for some way of speaking about what was bothering her. She also could list with confidence some of The Queen’s favorite things, so she decided to answer with something that might plausibly be on her list of favorite things, but which was certainly on The Queen’s list too.

“Well, Ma’am, I did enjoy working on
Britannia
.”

“Oh yes,” answered The Queen, as if an invisible bell had just been rung. “Have you been to visit her?”

“No, Ma’am, I haven’t.”

“Moored at Leith, I believe.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“A pity.”

[Tim Graham/Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty Images]

Shirley thought it best not to reply to this. She’d seen the pictures of all the royal family on the verge of tears at the yacht’s decommissioning in 1997.

“Not a tear for Diana,” one of the tabloid newspapers had put in a rude caption beneath the photo, “but we all blubbed buckets for
Britannia
.” “To blub” was a verb Shirley had heard The Queen use before. It was one of those unusual words, not unlike her monogrammed drawers, that had an Old World feel to them.

“How do you suppose one gets there?”

This took Shirley by surprise. The Queen never in her recollection asked for directions. “Edinburgh, Ma’am?” said Shirley incredulously.

“No, no. Not Edinburgh. I know how to get
there
. I mean to Leith.”

“Well, there must be a bus, or a local train from the railway station, Edinburgh Waverley.”

“A bus. What number?” The Queen replied instantly. She was said to be a very rich woman, but The Queen, in Shirley’s experience, hated spending money. She always wanted her clothing repaired, or cut up for other uses, before she’d give in to the proposal that something new should be bought. She particularly hated spending money on new clothes. She insisted on wearing certain Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies outfits she’d worn since the 1970s, though they were several times repaired and beginning to show signs of their age. Shirley had successfully managed to confine The Queen’s wearing them to the days she wouldn’t be in the public eye.

Shirley replied, “I don’t know what number. Shall I inquire?”

“No, don’t do that,” said The Queen with some energy and shifted the subject to the weather. In three minutes, however, she returned to it. “And what is the fare nowadays on an Edinburgh bus?”

Shirley was so surprised that she hadn’t time to reply “I have no idea,” before The Queen rushed forward with “You see, some men from the Edinburgh Council are coming to the investiture on Thursday. I’ll need something to speak to them about.” And with that The Queen signaled an end to their chat by taking a dog biscuit out of her pocket and holding it in the air until it caused a small riot among the sleeping dogs, who all woke up and began yapping.

S
everal months earlier, at the very beginning of that autumn, The Queen had still been in Scotland, delaying her return to London as long as possible. A late Scottish September next to the river Dee can be unusually sunny and warm. The Queen liked to order a “picnic” luncheon at one of the outlying cottages on the Balmoral estate. These were often damp, uninhabited little places with long views of barren hillsides. Though uncomfortable, they had a kind of stark glamour. Some members of the Household regarded lunching there as a dubious treat. An equerry would go out early, taking bottles of spirits and wine. He would build a fire in order to warm the place up. If it were an unusually sunny day, he would move a table outdoors for luncheon. A butler would follow to lay the table and bring along wicker baskets of cold poached salmon and grouse pie. Ultimately, The Queen herself would turn up around one or half past one in the afternoon, with a lady-in-waiting, whatever private secretary was on duty, whoever happened to be staying in the Castle, and the occasional invited neighbor. They had a drink standing up in groups and then sat down at the table, six, or eight, or sometimes even ten.

“Oh, Anne, I’ve left behind my headscarf. Now it’s sure to start pouring down.”

Lady Anne Bevil was in the backseat of a black Range Rover with The Queen, bouncing along over a rutted road twenty minutes from Balmoral. The security man was sitting in front and the deputy private secretary was at the wheel. They were driving to a remote cottage. Anne was fuming. The Queen’s remark was no passing observation, but a command that when they got there Anne should get in the car and drive back to the house to fetch the missing headscarf.

“Ma’am, I’ll go get it. I have left behind my pills, and I must have them with me.”

“Oh, Anne, such trouble. But I’d be very grateful. Not a good time for either of us to be getting wet,” said The Queen, making a little joke about their age.

Lady Anne came from one of the country’s richest and most aristocratic families. Her ancestors on her father’s side had been made earls in the eighteenth century. They agreed to vote with Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons. Walpole had rewarded their loyalty not only with a peerage but several commissions to sell the army cotton breeches for soldiers. This quickly built their minor fortune into one of epic proportions. Under Queen Victoria the Bevils had been promoted in the peerage and become marquesses of Thyonville. The money on her mother’s side was newer but greater. A Canadian newspaper tycoon had acquired shares in several tabloid newspapers during the early twentieth century. Soon members of every government, of whatever political shade, accepted the tycoon’s invitations to dinner, and his daughter married a Bevil, eventually becoming Marchioness of Thyonville. Anne was born in 1936, the youngest child of the union between the Canadians and the Bevils. She was ten years younger than The Queen. Her eldest brother, who was due to inherit the family title, had once been talked of as a potential husband for The Queen. Instead, Lord Mountbatten had produced Philip of Greece for The Queen to marry before the Bevils and the rest of the aristocracy quite realized what was happening. So Philip married the woman who would one day be queen and, as it turned out, Anne’s elder brother had died young. The title had gone to his son, Anne’s nephew.

Anne herself had married a man who took her not inconsiderable dowry from the Thyonville estate and lost it in the City. Mortified by what he’d done with his wife’s money, he then died of a stroke. Anne found herself a widow in her forties. She had a son, with whom she was not on speaking terms, and a small pension left to her by her husband. She had a large flat in Chelsea on Tite Street, but that was hardly enough to keep her fed and clothed in her old age. She clung to the shreds of her former glory by giving up her married name and returning to her Bevil maiden name for both herself and her son. She also retained her courtesy title, “Lady Anne,” as the daughter of a marquess. She insisted on its being used more often than was common among other British women in her position in the first years of the second millennium.

She struggled on with the pension and some small investments left to her by the death of maiden aunts. The Queen sometimes chose for her ladies-in-waiting women from good families who were financially down on their luck. They usually welcomed the small stipend from the Royal Household and had manners suitable for making royal social life run smoothly. The job was really about being a companion to The Queen in her formal duties outside the palace: collecting bouquets from children, replying to letters on behalf of The Queen, making conversation with politicians in the twenty minutes before The Queen was ready for their audience with her.

It didn’t mean that Anne was particularly happy with routine chores, no matter how light. She drove back to the Castle and then returned to the cottage to find that drinks were already over. The party was about to sit down to some soggy fish as a first course for luncheon. Hardly the thing one wanted when one had been driving down poor roads and steering around large chunks of granite in—The Queen had been right about the weather—heavy rain.

Anne put The Queen’s headscarf quietly next to her handbag and made her way to the table, noting from a sheet of paper with the
placement
on a sideboard that she was sitting next to the young Guardsman who had just come on duty as equerry, Major Thomason.

To her surprise, she heard The Queen say, “Darling, thank you.” Anne and The Queen had known each other for years, and The Queen always thanked for the smallest of services, but this was the first time The Queen had ever uttered anything remotely affectionate to her. She began to murmur with embarrassment that it was nothing when she noticed that The Queen had actually been speaking to a black Labrador that had put a bone into her hand. Anne saved herself from speaking just in time by turning “Think nothing of it, Ma’am” to “What a loyal dog, Ma’am.”

Anne made her way to her place at the table. She smiled at the deputy private secretary on her left, and then turned to introduce herself to the young man in a tweed coat on her right. “I don’t think we’ve met. Anne Bevil.” The equerry turned to her and first mouthed silently, “Darling, thank you.” She shut her eyes and permitted herself a little laughing shake of the shoulders. When she opened her eyes, he was smiling broadly at her and saying, “Luke Thomason.”

“You’re a very young man to be in such august surroundings,” said Lady Anne, glancing up at the damp spot streaming down the cottage wall and expertly flicking away a few bones from her salmon. How she wished for the boneless fillets you could have from Sainsbury’s rather than these skeletal fish gutted in haste by ghillies next to a peat fire.

Luke caught Lady Anne’s ironic feint in his direction and answered in kind. “Well, I was in Iraq, love, I expect that’s it.” Anne laughed delightedly. A young man who didn’t mind flirting with a woman his mother’s age—how rarely one ran across that.

“Iraq, now? That took some courage if I’m not mistaken.” She paused for a moment to allow him to see that she was partly making fun of him, but not entirely. “I don’t expect you’ll tell me about it. Your friends, perhaps, but not some strange woman at a sumptuous luncheon.”

He pretended not to have heard her properly. “Strange women at scrumptious lunches are okay by me,” he said, flashing a corner of a smile. He always expected to like people that were a bit older than him, something about the way he was put together, and he liked this lady-in-waiting. He’d heard of her, but as he was still newish, and she’d just arrived in Scotland to replace one of the other ladies, this was the first they’d met. He’d found the Household could be a chilly place. It was good to have friends, as the others on duty didn’t, in his experience, warm up very quickly. Prior to becoming The Queen’s equerry, Luke had been at a public school and trained for his commission at Sandhurst. As his father and grandfather had both been in the Grenadier Guards, the army as a career came naturally to him. He’d especially liked Germany. The officers’ barracks were nondescript 1960s bunkers, but the feeling was a good deal more matey than Sandhurst. There were fewer full-dress occasions. The men under his command were happy to have light work and regular pay, and for many of them it was a change just to have a reliable roof over their heads. They regarded it as somewhat better than jail.