Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (8 page)

“The monarchy does not exist to be modern, Prime Minister,” said The Queen acidly. She directed the pony along a gravel shortcut which had the Prime Minister bouncing up and down on his wooden seat. She could see with satisfaction that he had gripped the side of the cart to hang on.

She thought it was best to control herself, and the cart, before things got out of hand. She’d found that yoga helped her contain her emotions and modulate her anger. Her yoga instructor had even given her a pamphlet which, unusually, she’d read from cover to cover, on Swami Vivekananda. He had been responsible for the spread of yoga as a philosophical ideal as well as a physical practice in the nineteenth century. The Queen had been surprised to read that Vivekananda believed that all religions were true and that by serving man one could also serve God. She was aware that modern Britain was peopled with believers in many more different religions than it used to be. Vivekananda’s teachings appealed to her mostly inarticulate Church of England sense of how it was right to behave, and thus offered a possible way forward with other religions too. So she at once began to take her yoga practice more seriously. But she’d have to learn a lot more patience from Swami Vivekananda if she were to deal calmly with prime ministers, like this one, who seemed always to want to chip away at the foundations of the monarchy.

“Popular opinion is against excessive spending on the monarchy,” the Prime Minister continued, raising his voice above the rattle of the wheels on the rough road, and looking worriedly at the ruts up ahead. “As you know, the approval ratings of the entire royal family dropped dramatically during the days of the troubles in the Wales marriage, and of course at the Princess of Wales’s death. Although the numbers have begun to recover somewhat, certainly since the Jubilee of ’02, the Government cannot advise your continuing to travel by private train in the light of adverse public opinion.”

“Public opinion is fickle, Prime Minister. It changes weekly, monthly, annually. Why, in three years it will have altered altogether. Beyond recognition. The public will demand a new train to be built, and at vast new expense. It will be impossible then. Unaffordable. And I’ll be stuck on my way to Doncaster in a pony cart.” Then, taking aim at what she took to be his most vulnerable side, she added, “You’ll be out by then.”

Surrounded as all recently arrived prime ministers are by public relations advisers with the ability to say yes in the most charming way, it was the first time anyone had dared suggest to him that he might be out of office in so little a time as three years. He turned to look at The Queen in shock.

O
nly months after he’d arrived in Basra to serve with British forces in the Iraq War, Luke Thomason’s commanding officer had asked him to coordinate the visit of an American unit from Karbala. The high commands of the two armies had thought it a good idea that there should be some small-scale exchanges between the two forces to learn some of the differences in one another’s methods for dealing with the insurgency. Luke came out to meet the arriving Americans, who turned up in two Humvees, with twelve men, a staff sergeant, and one very junior commanding officer, Captain Andrew Brainard. Andy had joined the army in a kind of blind fury after 9/11. It was his senior year in college in St Cloud, Minnesota. He had no idea what he was going to do with an English degree, so 9/11 hit him as if it were his destiny. He’d joined the army, gone quickly through an officer-training program, ended up in Iraq as a newly minted second lieutenant, and been promoted quickly to captain for having—more through reckless enthusiasm than through skill—routed a cell of insurgents responsible for having killed several Americans. He was still in his twenties, but already his unit had lost a significant number of Minnesotan farm kids, and he regarded this diplomatic visit to the Brits as a distraction from the real war. He was shocked by the slackness of Luke’s salute when he came out to greet them, as well as by the British officer’s drawling “Hello, Yanks!” which came nevertheless with a warm smile.

In the Grenadier Guards, teasing nicknames and slack salutes were all signs of friendliness and good form, so Luke was a bit put out by the American officer’s humorless rigidity. They were allies, after all, weren’t they? After the initial introductions were made, Luke had suggested, ironically, that perhaps Captain Brainard would like a tour of the British camp, as it was midday and very temperate, he’d just go and call his mad dog so they could be off.

Andy didn’t realize that this was a self-deprecating reference to a 1930s cabaret tune. He’d never heard of Noël Coward. He said to Luke incredulously, “How about waiting until sundown, Captain? It’s over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I’d like to get the men under canvas first, please.”

Luke saw immediately that the American officer hadn’t caught his musical reference and was inclined to think he was being too clever anyway. The Americans had a reputation in the British forces for being tough, straight-shooting, and also a little slow. Luke was miffed, however, by Andy’s implication that he wasn’t interested in the welfare of the men.

“Oh, in that case, perhaps you’d like to move your vehicles off our parade ground first, Captain,” said Luke. This was another slight joke, as the parade ground was in fact a rocky patch of desert inside the encampment, with earthen walls bulldozed up around the perimeter.

Once again Andy did not understand. “Parade ground? What do you think this war is, Captain, a Fourth of July parade?” Since he was getting hot, and had not received the respectful and formal welcome he was expecting, he decided on some sarcasm with his opposite number. “Are you Brits going to put crepe paper in between the spokes of your Sting-Rays and give us a show?”

Luke had no idea what was entailed in an American Fourth of July parade, but he had heard what he guessed was a slight sneer at “Brits,” and a definite slur at “Sting-Rays,” whatever those were. Bicycles? Sunglasses? His response was to become icy and more cutting. “No doubt the traditions of the Grenadier Guards, which go back some years before the settling of the American colonies, are somewhat confusing to strangers. What people do in America during July is entirely up to them. We take no notice.”

“Oh, sorry, I guess you don’t celebrate the Fourth of July. Wasn’t a big win for your side, was it?” countered Andy. He did not like being called a “stranger.”

“Well, if what we hear from Baghdad is correct, I don’t think the current American approach to the insurgency will produce a very big win for your side here. You behave like cowboys with the locals. Round ’em up and shoot ’em up.
Yee haw
.” Luke tried saying this with his notion of how cowboys might sound at a cattle roundup. To Andy’s ears it sounded like “
Ye whore.
” “They won’t thank you for it in the long run,” Luke finished, laughing at this because he quite intended Andy to understand the insult.

Andy did understand the insult. Because he’d already witnessed the bloodshed firsthand, lost men in his unit, and had to write letters home to grieving parents, he was not for a second going to accept this from some Brit with a bad salute who appeared to him to be dishonoring the dead. He looked Luke in the eye a second and said in a whisper, “You fucking take that back.”

Luke was surprised that the American had so quickly lost his temper during their verbal sparring. In his regiment, coolness was all. “Goodness me, calm down, my dear.”

“My dear” in the Grenadier Guards counted as the silliest of
Monty Python
style insults. It was, if anything, faintly self-mocking and wasn’t an attack on Andy’s manhood, which was, however, precisely how Andy understood it. He thought Luke was saying that he was gay. It was enough of a trigger for him, who no longer had the words to deal with this superior-sounding Englishman, to tackle Luke at the knees. Luke fell with a hard thump and a cloud of dust in the sand. Luke was so surprised to be physically assaulted that at first he didn’t know what was happening as Andy started pummeling him in the ribs. He managed to roll over and bring his arms up to protect his head. Unlike the play fights he’d had in the barrack hallways in Germany, this fight was real. Andy rolled with him and kept searching for a way of giving him painful blows to the body. He didn’t intend to harm the head.

As the two men rolled on the ground and kicked up dust, Andy’s men came pouring out of the Humvees and gathering round, though at a safe distance, as they knew there might be hell to pay for witnessing a fight between two officers. “Fight! Fight!” they yelled delightedly. “Kick his ass.” “Get him, Brainard!” The American sergeant began corraling the men, inwardly amazed that the junior officer could have been so stupid as to make such a display in front of the men, which was about the worst thing possible for keeping them in line.

After several minutes of tussling, Luke’s commanding officer came up to the two men struggling on the ground. “Captain Thomason!” he said, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the fight. It was enough to make Luke stop resisting and to accept Andy’s final blow, before Andy realized what had happened and stopped fighting. He looked up to find a British major saluting him with the kind of formal, angular gesture of his hand and elbow he’d been expecting all along. He was briefly torn between helping Luke back to his feet and jumping up to return the salute. He stood up, leaned over to give Luke his hand, pulled him up, and then turned smartly to salute the British major.

After that, Luke and Andy became friends. They planned maneuvers together. They listened to lectures together. They deciphered maps together. They tried to figure out computer software for the weapons systems that often malfunctioned together. Outside of duty hours, they spotted one another lifting weights in the gym. They got on the cardio equipment and ran in place until their T-shirts were soaked with sweat. They exchanged playlists of their favorite music to listen to on their iPods. Their favorite thing to do was to play video games. They had each taught the other the rules of their national sport: “Football,” Luke said. “Soccer,” said Andy, refusing to retreat. “Better than American football,” said Luke. “No, it’s just ‘football,’ not ‘American football,’ ” said Andy, standing his ground. They saved their best jabs for when the video games grew heated. “You fucking take that back,” Luke would say in an accent that was part Arnold Schwarzenegger and part Bruce Willis. Andy replied in a voice drawn from somewhere between Austin Powers and Harry Potter, “Goodness me, calm down, my dear.”

L
ady Anne Bevil was amazed by the multiplication of coffee shops all over London in a short period of time. The clever, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer Americans had been first with what she called “the Starbucks,” because she thought it had something to do with a species of deer in the Pacific Northwest. She thought they must be different from the variety she saw often in Aberdeenshire. After the Starbucks got their foothold, Costa Coffee, Caffé Nero, and Prêt à Manger had rapidly followed. Now these coffee shops, and half a dozen more just like them, could be found all up and down the King’s Road, not far from her flat in Tite Street. She had first stopped in one of them out of idle curiosity, and found the shop populated by the young, tapping away on their laptop computers, listening to music on earphones, and reading from a stack of used, but current, newspapers kept in a central bin. No waitresses. She walked in prepared to command attention, as she had been taught by her parents to enter all retail establishments. She approached a scruffy young man behind the counter. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please.” She looked around doubtfully and wondered whether she’d be allowed to stay if she hadn’t brought her computer. “How does it work?” she asked him, a little more fiercely than was necessary.

The young man examined his customer with a glance, and quickly saw that this white-haired woman with the imperious manner didn’t want questions about soy or skinny or grande or latté. “Is it a filter coffee you want, then?”

“Yes,” said Anne, feeling that there was no other kind, but aware that in this foreign territory there probably were many other kinds. “With a little warm milk on the side, please.”

“Won’t be two secs,” said the young man.

Anne was surprised that he was not only friendly but prompt. It was a vast change from London coffee bars of, say, not more than twenty years ago, when the service had usually been sullen, unwilling, and female. She paid for the coffee, took a used newspaper out of the bin, and sat in a comfortable leather armchair. She was shocked to see that people didn’t move on after twenty minutes. Apparently, the price of one cup of coffee brought you the rental of an armchair and a free newspaper for as long as you liked, the whole morning if you wished.

She got in the habit of coming in at mid-morning when she wasn’t “in waiting” at the palace and staying for two hours at a time. She stopped taking in the morning newspaper, as she could read one without paying for it at the coffee shop. She was always looking for economies, and discontinuing
The Times
was a pleasure, as it read more and more like one of the tabloid newspapers anyway. She liked being surrounded by the young, who were usually transfixed by what was taking place on their computer screens. One or two of the regulars began to recognize the old lady who came in wearing an indestructible tweed skirt and sturdy shoes. They’d smile at her in a glazed way, and she’d smile back, happy enough to be in their company without any conversation.