Saving the Queen (19 page)

“Here,” he said, clipping off the page. “Do what you want tomorrow before your plane. These are my suggestions, given the time you have. Get a driver in the morning and have him take you to Chartres, about forty miles, and—let me see how I can put this simply—it is the most beautiful man-made creation in the world. Then, on the way back, stop at Versailles. It's being rebuilt by Rockefeller money, and you can't see many of the apartments, but you can see the most splendid palace in Europe this side of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, I mean Leningrad. Then take a look at Napoleon's tomb, and think what that little man did to Europe; and yet even he was a flop, alongside Alexander. Caesar wept, on viewing the bust of Alexander and meditating what it was that Alexander had accomplished by the time he was half Caesar's age. Maybe Alexander wept, too, foreseeing how quickly the wops would take advantage of his great geopolitical consolidations. Then on the way back to the hotel, stop in at the Jeu de Paume, the old tennis court of the last emperor, where one hundred French Impressionist paintings are exhibited. It is a jewel house, dizzying, but it's maybe one one-thousandths of the Louvre. Then tell your driver you'll give him an extra thousand francs if he catches your flight, because you'll be late. And here, in case you find yourself unsated, and with time to spare”—he retrieved the note paper and wrote down some figures—“is Mme. Pensaud's telephone number. You might want to try it without symbiosis.”

“Thanks,” said Blackford standing up and clasping Anthony warmly by the hand.

“Be good, Blacky. And—oh, yes: If by any chance you ever get to meet the Queen, Blackford, don't forget to call her ma'am.” Black smiled at him and wondered whether he should bother to tell Anthony that it had not been all play and no work. By now, he knew as much about British protocol and British manners and British pecking order as the Lord Chamberlain.

Who, as it happened, was the first person presented to him at Buckingham Palace. The men preceded their ladies down the receiving line. The Lord Chamberlain had had a long day, having previously assisted in preparing the Duke's trip, representing his wife the Queen, on a sudden trip to Oslo, to attend the funeral of Queen Benedicta.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Richard,” the Queen had said the preceding Friday when the news was brought of her second cousin's death and word requested whether Her Majesty would attend the funeral on Tuesday morning or would dispatch someone else, “that the favorite occupation of royalty in Scandinavia is dying? I am seriously considering buying a little castle in the area, as a convenient base of operations for attending state funerals. And the papers are
always
talking about the high life expectancy of Scandinavians. Not if they go into the royalty business. Or—do you suppose?—perhaps Benedicta committed suicide? If I were married to Kaspar,
I
wouldn't have lasted sixty years. Well anyway, Richard, I am
not going
this time. I cannot go to a ten o'clock funeral in Oslo and begin a state party for Margaret Truman at ten o'clock the evening before, not even if the air force—pardon me, my air force—jets me there in one of its two million guinea fighter planes. You go, and take Lord Stanley—he'll keep you out of trouble. And remember, Richard, churches and funeral receptions aren't ideal places to bemoan the slow rate of decolonization. Tell King Kaspar that Queen Caroline sends her deepest regrets, and cannot imagine that Benedicta is at this moment anything less than wild with liberty.” Richard, who always looked slightly pained when with Caroline, managed to look slightly more pained—they were driving to Westminster Abbey for the baptism of a niece—and stared, unsmiling, out the left window at the motorcyclists who wedged the way of the royal limousine. Caroline noticed he had a fresh decoration.

“What's that one?” she pointed.

“The Order of the Full Moon, the highest award of the Paramount Chiefs of the Gold Coast.”

“What is their lowest award, the Order of the New Moon?”

“Really, Caroline, you are a dreadful snob.”

“I am nothing of the sort, really. But if it pleases you to think so, Richard, then I'll just say, very well, I am.” Caroline was uttering these words through a fixed smile as she greeted her subjects with the royal hand-wave, which she had practiced in her bathroom the day after the Prime Minister came to Scotland to announce her accession to the throne (after giving the prescribed oath that she was not a hidden member of the Roman Catholic Church). “Try it as if you were slowly unwinding a large bottle top,” her aunt said. The wave worked.

The Duke of Norfolk, whose aide was discreetly behind him whispering the name of the next in line, intoned the next presentation:

“Your Majesty, I present Mr. Blackford Oakes.” Directly in front of him, the American ambassador's wife was being embraced by Margaret Truman, thereby holding up the procession and requiring, between Blackford and the Queen, an extension of their minimal exchange. (“Good evening, Mr. Oakes.” “Good evening, ma'am.”)

“… Are you living in London?” the Queen inquired.

“Yes, ma'am. In fact right now I'm living it up in London.”

The Queen smiled and suddenly her eyes deglazed and she actually looked at the person she was addressing. She found herself most agreeably surprised by a young man of poise, with quite extraordinarily attractive features, blue eyes, dark blond hair, and an ever-so-slightly mischievous expression. She guessed his age, incorrectly, at twenty-three, and wondered whether he would guess her age at less than her thirty-one years. What she didn't know was that he knew exactly how old she was, where she was born, who her godparents were, where she had schooled, what were her talents, hobbies, passions—and he knew that she was impetuous and could be witheringly sarcastic. Yet he hadn't known for all that he had seen ten thousand pictures of her that she was a generator of power and sex. He sensed that she could, without serious emotional turmoil, order him shot, if she had the power, which she did not, or order him to her bed, which she had the power to do but would not.

“Whom are you escorting, Mr. Oakes?”

“Miss Helen Hanks, ma'am.”

The Queen turned her heavily bejeweled head to the next person in line, who had been engaged in make-talk with the Duke of Norfolk.

“Helen,” she said amiably. Helen Hanks curtsied. “Perhaps you and Mr. Oakes can join us at our table at dinnertime? We shall sit down exactly at midnight.” Her finger had lifted, unnoticed to either Blackford or Helen Hanks, but it might as well have been a rocket for the Lord Chamberlain, who appeared from nowhere and to whom she whispered in a voice audible to the two guests in front of her. “Change my table. Remove … the Turkish ambassador and his wife and place them somewhere exalted. Put Miss Hanks and Mr. Oakes in their place.” The line had begun to move, and the Queen smiled, evenly, at Blackford, and at Helen, and then greeted Viscount Kirk, who bowed, took her extended hand, and managed discreetly to tickle her palm.

“How are you tonight, Perry?”

“I'm fine, ma'am, and if I may, you look dazzling.”

“You don't look mistreated yourself, Perry. When shall we ride together again?”

“I am, in this as in all other matters, at Your Majesty's service,” said Kirk, with that exaggerated deference used only by flunkies and very old friends.

“Not tomorrow,” said Caroline. “Wouldn't do for me to gambol about the woods on my horse while they are lowering Queen Benedicta into the sod. And Wednesday I must see the Duke off. I shall set out for Windsor from the airport. Join me there for a late family supper, eight o'clock.”

“With great pleasure, ma'am.”

Blackford found himself exchanging greetings with nearly one half of the two hundred guests at the party. He knew everyone by name, and Helen had long since become accustomed to Blackford's desire to meet everyone, which she attributed to natural gregariousness, a galloping Anglophilia, and an unconcealed desire to advance his engineering projects—the details of which Helen had never completely understood. He seemed to want to be in touch with influential Englishmen with contacts in the academies, in the business world, and in the great postwar construction enterprises. The orchestra played 1930s jazz. There was a vocalist, and the white-tied men, half of them in their twenties, half of them portly ministers and ambassadors, danced with their starched ladies, and retreated, from time to time, to their tables where their champagne glasses and smiles were refilled. Helen was a moderately attractive girl, and her father greatly influential, so that Blackford was left without a partner much of the time, and after dancing spiritedly with (a) the flighty daughter of a duke, (b) Margaret Truman, and (c) Helen's mother, he set out for his table to drink a glass of champagne. The Queen, who until then had sat up at balcony level, a miniature proscenium of sorts on which was the throne from which on other occasions she rose officially to greet ambassadors and gartered commoners, descended toward the ballroom stepping down two large, circular steps, led by the Duke of Gloucester, toward the same table. Blackford was seated, looking out at the dance floor, and did not notice the Queen's arrival behind him, at the head of the table. He was startled, on turning to fill his glass, to look up and find that the Queen, the Duke of Gloucester, and he, were quite alone at a table that seated eight. He wondered whether he should leave, but this would have appeared unnatural—he had just filled his glass with champagne—and by instinct, Blackford could not be awkward. So, without showing surprise, he looked up.

“Champagne, ma'am?”

“Yes,” she said, “thank you,” and turning to her companion, “and you, Uncle Harry?”

“Yes, dear,” the Duke of Gloucester said absent-mindedly, stretching his glass toward Black. “Caroline, you will excuse me a moment? I shall be right back, but Madeleine is waving to me, and I fear I know what she has on her mind, and what's worse, she's right—I must dance with her sister—this is her first time out since Alan's death.”

“Go right ahead, Uncle Harry. I shall talk with Mr. Oakes.” The Duke of Gloucester, bowing almost imperceptibly, rose and left, and the Queen motioned Blackford to bring his glass and sit next to her.

“What are you doing, exactly, in London?”

“I guess the best way to put it, ma'am, is that American engineers have something of an inferiority complex. We build the biggest everything in the world …”

“You do not. The
Queen Elizabeth
is still the biggest passenger liner afloat.”

“Well, yes, though our
United States
will be faster, and, though only a hundred feet shorter, much, much lighter.”

“It is a new ship. What makes you think when we launch a new one it won't be even lighter, with respect to speed and size?”

“I don't know. But I hope to know all this by the time I return to America.”

“What were you saying about an inferiority complex? If so, it would be very good news. Most of the Americans I know could use large transfusions of inferiority complex and still be pretty unbearable.”

“Are you referring, ma'am, to all the Americans you met when they came over to give you the tools so that you could do the job? Perhaps they were just homesick.”

Queen Caroline paused for the slightest moment; and then smiled. She wished her Prime Minister were a bit more that way—she would enjoy herself more. She wondered if she could ever say anything that would provoke him into speaking to her with the same ease as the young American. She had never traveled to America, but had read a great deal about it, had known many Americans, and read their journals. In some Americans, she reflected, the republican experience was truly profound. They accepted the paraphernalia and rituals of the monarchy with wholly good nature, but they would exhibit the same good nature in the court of the Paramount Chiefs who gave Richard that preposterous medal. It wasn't condescension—there hadn't been a trace of that in Blackford's manner. It was, really, an assured sense of metaphysical equality. She liked it very much. She wondered whether she was too spoiled to like such a style if she ever felt that she could not, with a wave of her hand, cause it to go away, or, through the use of her station, deliver an overwhelming rebuke—the force of which, however, would express not her linguistic resourcefulness, but her temporal rank. She thought it would be amusing to test herself with this young man, to whom she was greatly attracted. She found it increasingly easy to achieve informality—to the dismay of the more formal members of her household, in particular her impossibly punctilious husband who desired ochlocracy abroad but, at home, to be paid homage by the baboons at the zoo. Or, as he would insist on putting it, the Royal Zoo. After the funeral, he would be back for only one day, and then at noon on Wednesday he would depart for a blessedly long and detailed tour of Australia. She would not antagonize him during his last day here.

“Mr. Oakes, are you aware of the archives at Windsor Castle, which collect eight hundred years of engineers' drawings, specifications, and insights into the problems of constructing not only Windsor Castle but also some of the great cathedrals in England?”

“Yes, ma'am. I'm aware of that library—but not familiar with it.”

“Would you care to examine it?”

“I would be very, very, very glad to examine it.”

“You may do so. Call my lady in waiting Lady Lunford at the palace tomorrow, and she will make the arrangements.”

“Does the palace have a listed number?”

The Queen laughed. “Over here, Mr. Oakes, we say: ‘Is the palace's number ex-directory?'”

Backford knew that, but knew also that idiomatic American solecisms carried one further, in certain circumstances, than total acclimatization. He smiled. “I'm glad you're in the book.”