My Other Life (57 page)

The taxi sped me to Chelsea Embankment, where just off Swan Walk, its porch and its pillars floodlit, stood a house protected by a high wall. Then, ahead, through the flap of the taxi's windshield wipers, I saw the flashing lights, the police cars, the policemen themselves.

Sliding open the glass partition, the taxi driver called back to me, "You sure this is the right address?"

"This is it."

"Flaming circus—what's this all about?"

"The Queen's coming to dinner."

"God bless her," he said. "That'll be six pounds even." I tipped him and he was chastened. "Ta, guv. Mind how you go."

From the first it was like a'séance, but of a very classy kind. There was a tremor of nervousness in the house—everyone a little too ready to respond, no one quite listening to anything that was being said. I was greeted by a doorman, perhaps hired for the occasion, then Birdwood and his wife said their tense hellos. The others were shiny and dressed up and alert. I was handed a card. Four circles represented the four tables. A red dot indicated my place. There was an intense watchfulness, guests listening hard but too edgy to hear clearly. A mostly American gathering, it was first names and fixed smiles and bright anxious eyes.

In the mirror of the reception room I saw that I did not look the way I felt and that I could pass for a guest at a dinner party. Apart from Laird Birdwood and Charmian, there was no one in the room whom I recognized. A man standing next to me smiled. I spoke to him. Deaf with anxiety, he did not hear me. Another man began talking as I approached him, possessed by an almost hysterical garrulity, a talking jag brought on by the suspense. I could imagine all these reactions among passengers in a jammed elevator—claustrophobia, insecurity, fear. No one mentioned the Queen.

"What are you working on?" a man asked me.

I began to give him my tentative answer and was relieved to see that he too was not listening.

Birdwood was saying, "Actually very unexpected," to a woman who replied, "Perhaps better not to speculate."

Were they talking about the royal visit? If so, there was nothing more, and yet I was sure this was on every guest's mind. We were participants in a'séance that was about to begin—too jittery anticipating what was to come to mention anything so obvious as the object of the'séance, the apparition we were about to conjure into existence. The drama of the moment made for the most frenetic and banal chitchat. We were desperate to see royal ectoplasm, yet we pretended otherwise. The English guests were the most talkative:

"I think the sun was trying to come out today."

"We've been extraordinarily lucky this winter."

"The going at Goodwood was uniquely horrible."

Drinks were brought around by flunkies who, less nervous and better dressed than the guests, seemed slightly superior and almost mocking in the way they offered the wine.

A guest with a cadaverous face and a tight collar was saying in a high, insincere voice, "Made an absolute pig of myself eating and drinking."

"I say, what are you working on?" I was asked again by someone else.

The idea was that we had to remain upbeat. It showed extremely poor manners to have any bad news, with the idea of the Queen looming. We were anxious but we were also very lucky to have the privilege of meeting the Queen in a private house.

"What are you working on these days?"

We stood, the men in black, the women in pretty gowns under the chandeliers, as the time of the'séance drew on, and we were helpless, waiting for any sign that something definite was stirring. We kept our eyes averted from the large door that was the entrance to the room: no one wanted to be caught peeking.

"Not much," I said.

No one listened, no one heard me.

A man was saying, "It's always that way, isn't it?" and I had no idea what he was talking about. He was facing in my direction, still talking obscurely, still making no sense to me, nor was he looking at me.

The room had gone very quiet.

I turned to see what the man was looking at and got a glimpse of a woman being introduced to a group of guests, and I knew from her diamonds and the size of her head that she was the Queen.

"That reminds me, I must buy some stamps," I said.

It did not matter. No one heard anything that was said.

But she was not the portrait on the postage stamp; she was a small, muffin-faced woman in a blue gown of stiff gauze. She had a shy but warm smile, not the fixed grin of the politician. Diamonds were clamped to her hair in a tiara, and more diamonds around her neck. On one wrist was a diamond bracelet and on the other a diamond-studded watch. They were dazzling stones, small in size but so many of them, and in such clusters, they made you think of electric circuits. The Queen's wire-frame eyeglasses looked banal on the royal face. The room was hushed, as though no one dared speak while the Queen was present, yet she was saying little.

Behind her, the Duke of Edinburgh straightened himself. So far this royal entrance was all about silences. She was Her Highness, he was His Royal Majesty. He was taller than I had expected—taller than me—and he nodded when he was introduced, keeping his hands behind his back. No hands were extended, none were shaken, no one was touched: a'séance would progress like this too. The royal creature had been conjured out of thin air. One would never be sure whether the ectoplasm was real or imagined.

I glanced again at my diagram of the dining room and my red dot. I made sure my cuffs were tucked into my sleeves. I saw that my shoes were not visibly wet. I was an absurd and flagrant fraud, and began to dislike Birdwood for believing in me, giving himself and me the illusion that I mattered. I was a deserter and a bad husband who had used his last frequent-flyer miles to get his hand on a glass of wine here in the royal presence. I had holes in my shoes and paper clips in my cuffs and an aching heart. I had not done any work for seven months. I stayed in a hotel run by a nasty negligent couple where antagonistic conversations came out of the walls. The shouts had kept me from sleeping. I dreamed of going to New Guinea, of parting some huge plumes of greenery, curtains of palm fronds, in a place where cockatoos screamed; of walking into the darkness of the jungle; of vanishing and taking my failure with me.

"And this is Paul Theroux, the writer."

I was at last the miserable person I had always feared I might become—destitute and shallow. That was the ultimate failure—not obscurity but the paradox that I was known to the world, revealed as a selfish man who had run off, who in trying to be right had become an old bore. It was not a question of being forgiven. I had to go away, yet here I was, a faker in a drawing room in my waiter's costume. Flustered and tense, I farted, and quickly covered this bugle note by raising my voice.

"Very pleased to meet you, Your Majesty."

The Queen smiled, then seemed to murmur something. Beneath all that glitter was the muffin-faced granny, and I realized that I had nothing to say to her. It did not matter. She was being led onward, still smiling. She had a lovely smile.

There were more in the royal party—the Earl and Countess of Airlie and some others.

No drinks for the royals. They were greeted and introduced and they passed into the dining room, a slow procession of swishing gowns and murmuring men. I hid myself among the shufflers, realizing that I liked this, for everyone in the room was humbled. At any dinner party people contended to be noticed, usually the worst people. But here were no upstarts. It was not my imagination. We filed in like children, fearful of making a wrong move. Ahead of us were the Queen and the Duke, so we were obedient and deferential, showing respect, more than I had ever sensed in a room, and such reverence seemed to generate heat and light.

I consulted my dining room diagram again and saw that my dot put me at the Queen's table. She was being seated next to Laird Birdwood. There was another man on her right, and a woman on either side of me, six of us, including Her Majesty.

Our food was brought promptly. The first course was (I identified it from the menu) roulade of sea bass with a champagne and caviar sauce.

The woman on my right smiled at me.

"What are you working on?"

"Not much."

"Sounds super," she said. "I wish I could write."

"So do I," I said.

Then she turned away, to listen to Laird Birdwood talking to the Queen. What he said was inaudible, but at such close quarters it did not seem improper to stare at the Queen—in fact, this unembarrassed goggling could have passed for politeness.

After a while it seemed almost normal to be seated at the same table as the Queen. She hardly ate, she hardly drank, it was all like a ceremonial—ritual talking, ritual tasting—and so she appeared to be going through the motions, slightly bored. Standing, she had seemed the wrong shape and size; seated, she seemed slightly hemorrhoidal, but you could see that she was trustworthy.

"Quite," Her Majesty said.

Birdwood talked energetically for a minute. The subject was horses.

"Oh?" Her Majesty said.

Because she was so grand, not to say blessed with a hint of divinity, she gave the impression of foreignness, or of speaking a language that no one knew very well—not us, nor anyone in the world. Birdwood was doing his best to be understood.

"Yes," Her Majesty said.

It is said that everyone in Britain dreams of the Queen. It is another standard dream, like the desperate one about being naked in a public place or the reckless one about flying over treetops by flapping your arms. In my Queen dream, which I had used in a novel, the Queen and I were alone in a palace room, on a royal sofa. She was the young, thin-faced Queen whose profile appeared on the British stamps—a simple enough portrait to impose any fantasy upon. "You seem dreadfully unhappy," Her Majesty said. Her face was pale, as on the stamp. I was too shy to admit that I was miserable. She was wearing a stiff dress of green brocade, with deep cleavage. Her rings sparkled as, using both her hands, she pulled apart the bodice of her gown, and as her breasts tumbled out I put my head between them, feeling her cool nipples at my ears.

"Isn't that better?" said the Queen in my dream.

I was sobbing between her breasts and could not reply.

"What are you working on at the moment?" the woman on my left asked.

I propped up the menu and read from it: "Fillet of lamb, lemon thyme sauce. Fresh garden vegetables. Broccoli timbale. Gratin of potatoes."

"Yes, I imagine so," Her Majesty was saying.

I could not suppress the devilish voices in my head that were cackling and gossiping, reminding me of the scandalous stories about Prince Philip, who was said to have had a fling with Princess Margaret when the Queen was pregnant with Anne; that Prince Andrew had been fathered by one of the Queen's lovers—which was why Andrew looked physically different from all the other children; that the Queen still had a lover and that Prince Philip had had a succession of actress mistresses who regularly appeared on television, prompting viewers in the know to smile and say, "She's one of his."

Never mind, as Kevin had told me in the Fish, the Queen is holy—not godlike, but godly and quasi-divine, a descendent of the Creator. And this ancestor was not a funny-featured pagan idol from the polytheistic pantheon, but the capitalized and bearded God, the Father Himself in a white robe, the Santa Claus with a halo whom we all believed in. That was the English dilemma. Of course, the Queen was good for the tourist industry, but if you were English and believed in God, you had to believe in your monarch, who was a distant relation of God.

Her Majesty was patting her lips with a small square of lace.

"Yes, it must be so pleasant," she was saying.

She was looking straight ahead—not at me, but into the middle distance. Laird Birdwood was still speaking in a gentle yet earnest way. The man to her left was attentive, yet he had not so far succeeded in saying anything. He smiled at me. He made a scribbling motion with his hand, a gesture that was unambiguous; it meant, Are you working on anything at the moment?

I smiled hopelessly back at him as dessert was served: chocolate mousse royale with fresh raspberries. For this (again I was reading) our glasses were filled with Schramsberg Blanc de Noirs.

We smiled, we ate, we sipped. This was not an occasion for conversation; this was an experience. The idea was to get through it successfully and not be noticed, to avoid calling attention to yourself. There were so many possible pitfalls that it was better to say as little as possible. At such a dinner, with the God-Queen four feet away, no one could be faulted for saying nothing; one could commit a gaffe only by being a bore or making a blunder. My crack about seeing the Queen as a reminder that I had to buy postage stamps had been unwise. It was a good thing no one had heard me.

There was movement. The Queen was rising, and everyone in the room with her. Moments later we were milling around in the drawing room, being polite again and trying not to think about Her Majesty seated on Laird Birdwood's toilet. I needed to think of that, to be reassured that she was human.

She returned, more relaxed and cheerier, breathing more deeply, as people do after an evacuation. But she was across the room. I was talking to her lady in waiting, Lady Airlie, who had just asked me what I was working on at the moment.

"I was thinking of going to the Pacific," I said, and thought: To vanish.

"Her Majesty had a most successful visit there a few years back. I was fortunate to be included. So many fascinating places. Most amusing in New Guinea." She had a bright smile and impish eyes. "She gave a speech, almost. Ha!"

"Tell me," I said.

Across the room, the Queen was surrounded by four or five people—taller than she was, so I saw just the piercing flashes of the royal tiara.

"Her Majesty can tell the story far better than I could."

I drifted over to the Queen's group. Her Majesty was listening intently to someone speaking; she had clearly perfected the art of seeming fascinated, one of her most godly attributes. She was formal, certainly, but more than that, she was polite. Nothing improper, contentious, or untoward occurred in her presence. All was order and harmony. She was God the Mother.