Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (9 page)

She’d not only married late, but also had a child late, a single son, whom she brought up when she was already in her late thirties and early forties. His name was Dickon, an old-fashioned shortening of Richard, sometimes found in the Middle Ages in references to King Richard III. As her marriage hadn’t been wonderful, the boy Dickon was in many ways the best thing that had ever happened to her. Born to a life of historic country houses and ample flats in London, she’d never known any ambition to improve her physical surroundings or her social set. With the birth of her boy came ambition for the first time. She wanted this little boy to be happy, successful in the world, and admired by all eyes. She adored him.

Dickon had first prospered in the glow of all this maternal attention, and then gradually come to find it suffocating. She supervised playtimes with his friends from school more than other mothers, and was quick to censure interests or pastimes that didn’t fit with her ideas of what a boy from one of the country’s first families should do with his life. Every male on her father’s side of the family had had some sort of military career before going on either to farming or local government. On her mother’s side, they were journalists and businessmen before entering national politics. She thought a brief spell in the army was what was best for Dickon after he finished school and began steering him in that direction well before he was twelve. Dickon at first didn’t mind dressing up in uniforms, marching in step, and visiting museums which showed the vermin at the bottom of the trenches during the First World War. He also liked the outdoors, and was quite happy building forts in the woods when they visited country relations, collecting caterpillars and taking samples of odd varieties of tree bark. “Botanizing,” was what his mother called this, and he could hear the faintly amused contempt somewhere in the back of her voice. It was the first of the really difficult, warring times between them. He began to be interested in environmental politics, which she associated with unshaven anarchists. There were terrible arguments as he entered his teens and fought for his independence.

Anne fought back with the only weapon she’d ever acquired for warfare within her family, the slashing tease that she’d experienced herself growing up in an aristocratic household. She recalled vividly when she’d been allowed to come down from the nursery for the first time to dine with the adults. She had on a long sparkling dress which she was proud of and had spent days admiring in front of the mirror. She walked into the dining room to a chorus of murmured approval from her parents’ guests, only to hear the woman to her father’s right say, “She
is
a beauty, but that dress is a bit Hollywood, don’t you think?” The table had chortled mildly, but Anne rouged to her eardrums. Now she directed the same thing at Dickon, with a mixture of love and cruelty. He’d bought a pair of American denim overalls to attend his first rock concert outdoors during a weekend at Glastonbury. “Are you planning on baling hay, darling, or listening to the music?” Anne had asked with an air of unconcern as he presented himself to his mother for her approval before going off with his friends.

Soon Dickon was going absent without leave from his public school to join demonstrations in London against genetically modified corn, and in favor of sustainable, small-scale agriculture. She read him the riot act and told him he must finish school. This decided him against it, and he disappeared from the school to join a group of activists who were living in makeshift tree houses to block the construction of a highway bypass. The headmaster got wind of where Dickon had gone, but the school soon lost touch with him altogether, and so did Anne. He didn’t respond to the phone calls she made to the mothers of his friends. He had no mailing address. He no longer came home. He had the income from a small trust fund that had become his at age eighteen. He was gone.

Anne did her best to conceal this grief from everyone she knew, keeping her answers vague when people asked about Dickon. It was about this same time that the doctors had diagnosed her rheumatoid arthritis, and she was convinced that the emotional and the physical malaises were connected. The coffee shop soothed her because the scruffy young man at the counter reminded her of Dickon the last time she’d seen him. The other young people seemed to tolerate and accept and even to acknowledge her presence in a way that her son had increasingly refused to do in their last years together. She liked that too.

Then one morning as she was nursing her lukewarm coffee and reading the paper she came across an article about Greenpeace. Activists in pontoon boats had been harassing Japanese whaling vessels to protest their killing endangered species of whales. A photograph showed a daring pass by one of these pontoon boats, which was dashing just in front of the prow of the much larger whaling ship. The larger vessel would have cut the pontoon boat in two had they collided. The caption to this photo read: “Dickon Bevil commanded the Greenpeace protest against the Japanese whaling ships Wednesday.”

She was seized by a moment of terror that slowly became a moment of pride. What he’d done reminded her of the feats of courage that had often been spoken of when she was growing up. Charging machine guns, parachuting behind enemy lines, escaping from the German prison at Colditz: these were all daring acts that had been performed by family members in the last century in the two World Wars, and they were part of Bevil family lore. Here was Dickon taking his place in that story. She took out a used envelope from her handbag and began drafting a letter to him. “My darling Dickon,” she wrote, using the same legible hand she used in The Queen’s correspondence. No, that wasn’t right. It ignored too much of the ill feeling that had grown up between them. “Dear Dickon,” she started again, but that was too heartbreakingly common for the beginning of a letter to an only son. How could she be friendlier? She’d once had a cleaner who’d sometimes left her cheerful notes that began “Hi Lady Anne!” so she tried that, “Hi Dickon,” but, no, it was hopeless. Didn’t sound like her at all. She crumpled up the envelope, gathered her things together, and walked unseeingly out of the shop and onto the street.

E
ton had the unusual distinction at the turn of the twenty-first century of being one of Britain’s most famous public schools, not because it was public, because it wasn’t; nor for sending more of its boys on to Oxford and Cambridge than any other school, which it didn’t. It was still costly to send a boy there for the usual five years between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, but there were many more boys there on scholarship than ever before in its history. It was also more diverse than at any other time in its history, but that wasn’t the reason most parents tried to get their boys in. It was because more future prime ministers had gone there than to any other school in Britain. It was because the Duke of Wellington once offhandedly remarked, nearly two hundred years ago, that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. It was because many were under the impression that the boys still wore top hats.

The school was laid out along an eighteenth-century high street down the hill and across the river from Windsor Castle. Tourists poured out of buses and trains twelve months a year to go through the public rooms of the Castle, but they almost never took notice of the school not more than a few hundred yards away. Eton had a gothic chapel that was the equal of St George’s Chapel within the Castle walls. It had boys walking up and down in white tie, tail coats, and square-toed motorcycle boots, which they were allowed to wear under their striped trousers. It had playing fields laid out along the towpath bordering the river. Although there were no rules to prevent outsiders coming to see it, outsiders almost never did. The boys themselves sloped around Windsor in semi-disguise after hours, wearing the same low-hanging jeans, trainers, and baseball caps akimbo that other boys their age also wore. After four in the afternoon, when the dress rules were relaxed, an Eton boy who happened to be in Windsor trying to buy a sticky bun or a forbidden can of lager was as hard to pick out as a leopard in the jungle with his spots.

It was to this school and this society that Rajiv’s parents and grandparents were thrilled to learn that he had been admitted. This was Britain’s
ne plus ultra
. Now the family had indisputably arrived. When he got there, Rajiv found otherwise. First, all his new acquaintances started calling him “Paki bastard.” It was affectionate, he knew that. Their method was to use the most appalling invective they could imagine as a way of being friends with him, but it revived memories every time they did it of the bad incident when he was younger in a Holborn alley. He told no one about that. It would have been against the boys’ unspoken code to bring up any real racial grievance.

Second, when he was included in a group of boys invited up the hill to visit the Castle and dine in the private apartments of one of The Queen’s senior courtiers (his grandson was the same year and in the same house as Rajiv), he found that Eton didn’t protect him from the ignorance or the narrow nationalism of the older generation. The courtier had begun by assuming that Rajiv would know the geography of postcolonial Simla, where the courtier had spent many happy summers while working with the Indian army. “Haven’t been there, sir,” said Rajiv politely.

“Not been there?” said the courtier. “Why, it’s the most beautiful mountaintop spot in all the world.”

“Ah yes, sir, no doubt. But, you see, I was born here.” All the boys addressed men older than themselves, their teachers of course, but all others too, as “sir.”

“Mother came to Blighty to find a decent hospital and have you, I bet.”

“No, sir. She was born here too.”

“What?”

“Both of my parents were, sir. We’re British.”

“But you’re Indian, surely?” he said, looking confusedly over Rajiv’s head.

“Well, my passport is British. My grandparents on both sides came here from India after the Second World War, but my parents were born here.”

The courtier said to himself, “But you’re still foreign,” at the same time as he said genially to Rajiv, “Have some more of this Côtes du Rhône, boy. It’s delicious.”

Rajiv could read both the spoken and the unspoken messages on the man’s face. He also knew the Côtes du Rhône was not the best wine in the courtier’s cellar. He’d been pawning his second-rate stuff off on the visiting boys. Rajiv knew a thing or two about throwing parties, as he was one of the most popular boys of his year. He kept a constant supply of Diet Coke, beef jerky, Mars bars, and fizzy water in fruity flavors in his bedroom. It made his small room, with its narrow bed and wooden desk, the place of first resort for most of the boys in his house, who preferred to be crowded there in a warm fug, laced with constant ribaldry and laughter, than in the unheated and lonely quarters assigned to them. Rajiv did not forget what the courtier had said to him, and repeated it in an elaborately posh accent to his friends, complete with exaggerated facial expressions. It became one of the boys’ favorite stories. It sometimes rankled, nonetheless, and he did not dare tell his parents or his grandparents, because it would have upset them.

Rajiv was completely immune to the passions and romances that went on among the adolescent boys. They teased him about being from the “Sotadic Zone,” as India lay in a geographic region, so they’d been taught in a course on global history, where homosexuality was relatively tolerated, especially as compared to the Christian West. But in fact he didn’t find the boys at school remotely appealing. Their sisters were different. He was wild for them, and though he knew exactly what jokes and insults to use in speaking to their brothers, he constantly said the wrong thing when he was introduced to girls his own age. “You’re
so
sexy!” he said to one demure sister, and her brother cringed at how badly Rajiv had put his foot wrong. He’d been made fun of by the boys, and told not to do it again, but his next outing was just as bad. On the Fourth of June, an annual school festival that celebrated the birthday of the school’s most famous patron, King George III, a whole commuter train full of sisters and female cousins and girl friends of friends took the line down from London Waterloo to the Windsor & Eton Riverside railway station. The girls were all dressed in the slatternly fashion of the times and vied to show as much breast and thigh as was possible within the bounds of decency, which shocked most of the adults present as entirely indecent. Here Rajiv would have been well within the bounds of reason and frank assessment if he’d said to any number of girls, “You look
so
sexy!” Instead, he tried “You’re so beautiful,” and “You look incredible.” Neither of these worked any better. The male verbal style the girls were willing to reply to was ironic, yawning, and laconic. Dozy was the thing. Although the girls had tried hard to put their clothes together, it was not done for the boys to comment on what they looked like. At Rajiv’s overly serious compliments they just giggled and turned away. He hadn’t understood, and he couldn’t imitate the correct form. He was too keen.

W
illiam de Morgan had entered the Royal Household by working first for The Queen’s sister and then for her mother before arriving at the pinnacle of royal service, working for the sovereign herself. It was the palace version of trying out a show in Boston or Philadelphia before putting it on Broadway. To have survived working some years for Princess Margaret or Queen Elizabeth, demanding engagements in their own right, established pretty clearly a member of staff’s discretion, talent, and staying power in the face of many provocations.

Among her friends, Princess Margaret was legendary for being an impossible houseguest. If she didn’t have a whiskey and water in her hand by half past six of an afternoon, there might be several ugly incidents at the supper that followed. She had to have a canopied bed, and she had to have guest lists well in advance, from which she often crossed off people whom she didn’t like. She’d never had proper work to do. She’d been happier among the stylish and the hedonistic than among the dutiful and the self-sacrificing set that surrounded her sister. She was her sister’s exact opposite. She was covertly jealous of her elder sister’s position, while pretending all the time that she was assisting in keeping it up.