Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (5 page)

His only chance at fulfilling the newspaper’s commission was when The Queen came downstairs at five in the afternoon to review the tables. She brought the Dutch Queen with her, and the two elderly ladies exclaimed and laughed delightedly at the townscape of Gouda. He photographed The Queen leaning over the cheese village, her skirt riding up over her legs to show well-shaped calves ending in leather pumps with blocky heels cut on the diagonal. “Not bad for eightysomething,” Rajiv thought to himself. The only photo he could get that was in the least compromising was a tiny chat between the two Queens on the terrace overlooking the garden. The Dutch Queen was smoking a cigarette with gusto and The Queen waved away the smoke with a grimace. After he got that, the other undercover chef, afraid that Rajiv’s picture-taking was becoming too obvious, shooed him out of the room.

Rajiv’s photos created a quandary for the staff at the tabloid newspaper. None of the pictures was in the least embarrassing. The editor with onyx beads who’d commissioned the photos had gone away on maternity leave. Her deputy knew how much they’d paid for Rajiv’s work, so he thought it would be best to run them anyway. He tried to cover for the low smear quality of the pictures by writing some sneering captions. “All this cheese for me?” he put under The Queen leaning over to admire the townscape of Gouda, and “No smoking please, we’re British” under the two Queens chatting on the terrace.

The effect was the reverse of what the newspaper intended. Instead of the post-Diana resentment of the royal family that the paper had hoped to exploit, the paper’s blogosphere lit up with questions about how to reproduce the William and Mary flower arrangements. Everyone hated smokers, and The Queen wrinkling her nose at Beatrix’s secondary smoke was a hit. Moreover, everyone was ecstatic over The Queen’s shapely calves and her beautifully made heels. A grandmother’s shoes, flexing forward on tiptoe, with the patent leather gleaming in the light, made them proud to be British. Even an American website, Thesartorialist.com, had picked up the photo, sparking a fashion furor for orthopedic footwear.

L
uncheon at the remote cottage on the Balmoral estate was over. The Queen and the rest of the party had taken the dogs for a walk down by the Muick. Luke and Lady Anne remained behind, giving as their excuse that they would straighten up the table, but in fact because they wished for some minutes alone. The equerry was responsible for gathering up the bottles—those that still had anything in them—and taking them back to the big house. Lady Anne had no real responsibilities, but she was conscious that the staff had enough to do when The Queen was in residence without driving to outlying cottages to do the washing up. So she cleared the table and, with Luke’s help, got an ancient boiler in the kitchen roaring so there would be enough hot water to fill the sink. They found some Fairy Liquid and rubber gloves as well as several ironed dishtowels in one of the cupboards. Anne washed. Luke dried.

It was precisely because they had some work to do, and had no need to look at one another, that their conversation could, once again, turn confidential. Her cashmere cardigan pushed up over her elbows, her hands in the steaming water, Anne began: “How long were you in Basra?”

“Two tours. About two years in all,” said Luke.

“The newspapers made it seem as if Basra was quite quiet and the Americans had all the fire.”

The way she had put it chilled him, as if she knew his history before he’d told her. He was determined to gloss over the complexities of what he knew of the British and American armies in the Iraqi desert. “Yeah. Well, there was plenty of time for messing about. It wasn’t all house-to-house reconnaissance with daggers drawn.”

Luke looked for a new, less serious direction to the conversation. He chuckled to himself, remembering an incident during what seemed interminable afternoons of doing nothing. “Someone took a picture, I think it was a Yank with the camera, actually. It was the lads wearing carnations and fooling about with long cigarettes. Rather foppish I’m afraid. It got into one of the papers.”

“And what were you playing at?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think we were pretending to be mad dogs and Englishmen in the noonday sun. Something like that. Showing the Americans how tough we were.”

[Mary Evans Picture Library/IDA KAR]

“And apart from imitating Noël Coward, you also went in drag for theatricals on Saturday nights to entertain the men, I imagine?”

There had been some of that, but Luke didn’t know Anne well enough to confess to it. There was a sort of military code that prevented him speaking to her too intimately about what had gone on in Iraq. “Well, now, we did have theatricals.”

“Of course you did. It’s a trademark of Englishmen serving abroad.”

“Is it?”

“Oh yes. Make a tour of our embassies, and no matter where you stop, Cairo, Dubai, the Philippines, it doesn’t matter. There will always be some sort of amateur version of a West End play being performed.”

“Well, ours weren’t West End plays, exactly.”

“Oh. What were they?”

“Um, music videos,
karaoke
. Boy George, a bit of Madonna, sometimes a Stones medley.”

“What fun. And I suppose you had cameras to film it all?”

There were cameras, and Luke wasn’t proud of everything he’d performed that the camera had captured. But she did seem to know who Madonna was, and that was a start. “Some of it filmed, yes, but in the Guards archive with a fifty-year seal on it, I’m afraid, Lady Anne.”

She laughed appreciatively. “I suppose you made some good friends out there.”

“Well, it was good times with some of them, yes. I did have mates out there. But they went away to different units. They’re all over the country now. And here I am on secondment to the Royal Household, doing Her Majesty’s washing up.”

“A very great privilege it is too, young man,” said Anne severely, but then, twinkling, she caught his eye and added, “for both of us.”

“No doubt, your ladyship.” He stretched out the last word and gave it a comic pronunciation, “lee-adie-ship.”

“And do you see some of your chums sometimes?” Anne continued.

“Not as often as I’d like. They sometimes ring up of a Friday night when they’re feeling drunken and rowdy. We have a laugh. But it’s not the same.”

“And no one in the Household appeals, do they?”

This was cutting near the bone. What did she mean by asking about his friends? How had she perceived his loneliness so distinctly?

“Well, blokes are more solitary than birds, I expect.”

She knew he meant this to be a batting away of the ball she’d tossed him, but she could also intuit his suffering about something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“Quite a few come back changed by the war, I believe. Posttraumatic stress disorder. Lots of divorce. Lots of depression. Lots of drinking. The three D’s. I do some hours on an army helpline when I’m not up here or somewhere else with the Household. Gives me something to do. Lots of my family were in the army too. In fact, I think all of them come back changed in some way by the fighting, and not always for the better.”

Luke felt the gravitational force of her compassion, the magnetic attraction of someone who understood army ways, and knew a little about Iraq without his having to tell her. “Well, when you’ve changed, if you’ve changed, you can’t always say how or why yourself. Others outside see it, but you just feel like you’re carrying on the same as ever. Still you.” He thought for a moment, and then admitted, “Maybe a lonelier you, or an angrier you, but you yourself, well, you’re not the best judge.”

“I see that. Yes.”

“As for post traumatic whatsit, I don’t think there were too many what you’d call traumas out there.”

“Yes, well, I don’t believe you.”

Luke wasn’t used to receiving such flat negatives from the Household. They usually went out of their way to make a charming apology before they said, in their silkiest manner, “No.”

In the midst of his surprised silence, Anne said, “You see, it’s just that the helpline is busy all night long with men who can’t get over what happened to them. And sometimes the worst thing that happened to them was that they had to leave their lives for a year and spend it in the desert in an air-conditioned tent, with a group of other men whom they didn’t know and didn’t choose to be with. I believe that’s trauma enough for most people.”

“It’s a volunteer armed force. They didn’t have to go. It’s what they signed up for.”

“They didn’t know what they signed up for. How could they know till they got there? And no one signs up to die. Death was close enough out there for plenty of them to see what it looked like. And that’s traumatic too.”

Luke felt as if he’d been driven into a corner, and not by some insurgent with a gun, but by an old woman from the army helpline. He wasn’t sure which was the way out to keep this talk on a polite plane. He would, after all, have to work with her again. He struggled and then admitted his failure to find a conversational exit. “Give.”

“What?”

“I give in. What do you want to know?”

“You lost someone out there, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Tell me.”

“An American. On loan to our unit. Meant to be helping us liaise with some of their units. Only with us for a few months. Didn’t understand all the regimental horseshit. I mean, excuse me. I mean . . .”

“Go on.”

“Only that most of the American units don’t have quite the same traditions, or history, or dress, or funny ways of doing things that we do in the Guards. They’re not used to it. As if having been recruited in the seventeenth century to fight for bloody Charles the Second is going to keep you alive in Iraq. And Andrew, well Andy he was, Andy didn’t understand any of it, but living with us he saw it, and the others ragged him for not getting it right. And I guess I was the first one to tell him to pay no attention and, well, we got along.” This was not the full story, but it was a true part of it.

“You gave him a hand, did you? Taught him what he needed to know to get along with these Trobriand Islanders?”

“That’s what it was. He didn’t understand the first thing about the lingo or which fork to use or how to have his gear pressed.”

“All of the first importance among the Trobriand Islanders.”

“Well, yes, as you know.”

“I do know.”

“It might have been easier for me to be friends with him, to get close to him, because he wasn’t one of us. You sometimes kind of, well, let your hair down with foreigners, don’t you? Anyway, he went out one day on a patrol. They were in a convoy of Humvees. They drove by an explosive device on the roadside. It went off. His vehicle rolled over. He’d been up top and it rolled over on top of him. Died right there. I wasn’t even with him. They brought him back to the base. He was already in a body bag when I found out. I went over. I could have taken a look. I had the right. It would have been okay for me to unzip the bag.”

“You wanted to remember him as he was.”

“Maybe that was it. He was a happy young man. Short hair. In his twenties. Already going bald, but handsome. Always making jokes. They teased him about not knowing Guards’ rules and regs, but they loved him because he was always life of the party. Kept everyone laughing.”

“And you loved him too.”

“I did.” Luke turned away with the dishtowel in his hand. He couldn’t face her, this little woman with blue veins in her forehead, no-nonsense manner, and flashing eyes. He could not now suppress half of a sob, which he tried to make resemble a clearing of the throat.

“I know you did,” and then she did something quite as shocking as having led him into this emotional thicket to begin with. She reached out with her yellow rubber gloves and pulled him toward her, turning him around, clasping him in her arms. Her head with its white hair only came two-thirds of the way up his chest, and the water and suds from her gloves rolled down the back of his tweed jacket.

A moment later the distant bark of a dog let them know that The Queen was nearby, and hearing that, he moved hastily away from her. He picked up a wineglass, which he began drying and judging against the light. “What will Her Majesty think of us, eh? I don’t think we’re meant to be liaising during our downtime, are we?”

“Well, she might be quite jealous, if she knew,” said Anne, going back to the sink with a smile.

T
he popularity of Rajiv’s photographs of the Dutch state banquet had mystified the editors at the tabloid newspaper. The tide of royal popularity seemed to be shifting back in a positive direction without their having anticipated it and they wanted to wait for more definitive indications of popular mood before publishing anything further. Rajiv was under the impression that he’d produced good work and was anxious to do more. He was in the shop a month later, in mid-November, wondering why the editors had stopped replying to his e-mails, when another young woman came in the door. He couldn’t believe the flame color of her hair or the clotted creaminess of her skin. She had on riding boots as well as a hoodie with skull and crossbones on the back. As she looked at rounds of Camembert, he thought of ways of taking her picture without her noticing. Might he just hold up his phone as if he were trying to improve the angle of light on the screen and snap her photo with the sound of the shutter clicking turned off? But then he surprised himself. “May I help you?” he said and then added in a hurry, “What amazing hair you have.”