The Queen and I (18 page)

Your Majesty, I have put my head on the block and started a movement, it is called Bring Our Monarch Back, or B.O.M.B. for short. My wife Lobelia is quite good with words (see above for the amusing name of our house, evidence of Lobelia’s handiwork!)

You are not alone, your Majesty! Many in Upper Hangton are behind you!

Lobelia and I are going into Kettering this afternoon to recruit members for B.O.M.B. Normally we keep away from the hurly-burly of big towns, but we have overcome our reluctance. The Cause is greater than our dislike of the metropolitan whirl that is Kettering in the nineties, I fear.

Lobelia, my wife of thirty-two years, has never been one to push herself forward. She had preferred in the past to leave more confident types such as myself to bathe in the limelight. (I am the Chairman of several societies, Model Railways, Upper Hangton Residents Committee, Keep Dogs in the Parks Campaign – there are more, but enough!)

But my retiring wife is prepared to approach total and absolute strangers and talk to them about B.O.M.B. in Kettering town centre, mark you! This is a mark of her disgust at what has happened to our beloved Royal Family. Jack Barker is pandering to the appetites of the people and trying to bring us all down to the level of the animals. He won’t be content until we are all being sexually promiscuous in the fields and farmyards of our once green and pleasant land.

Pigs like Barker will not accept that some of us are born to rule and others need to be ruled, and ordered about for their own good.

Well, I must stop now. I have to call in at number thirty-one and pick up the B.O.M.B. leaflets. Mr Bond, the owner of the aforesaid thirty-one has kindly desk-top published the above-mentioned leaflets!

B.O.M.B. is yet small, but it will grow! Soon there will be branches of B.O.M.B. in every hamlet, village, town, city and urban conurbation in the land! Fear not! You will once again sit on the Throne.

I remain, your Majesty,

your most humble subject,

Eric P. Tremaine

The Queen put Tremaine’s letter on to Philip’s tray. She thought it might amuse him but when she returned twenty minutes later she saw that the breakfast had not been eaten and that the letter appeared to be unread: it was still tucked at the same angle under the bowl of cold porridge.

“I’ve had this rather amusing letter this morning, darling, shall I read it out to you?” she said brightly. The doctor had said that Prince Philip must be stimulated. “It’s from a chap called Eric P. Tremaine. I wonder if the ‘P’ stands for Philip? Quite a coincidence if it did, eh?”

The Queen knew that she was talking to her husband as though he were a simple-minded slug, but she couldn’t stop herself. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t move, wouldn’t
eat
now. It was absolutely
infuriating
. It was time to call the doctor again. She couldn’t watch him starve to death. He was so thin now that he didn’t resemble himself at all. He had white hair and a white beard and, without his tinted contact lenses, his eyes looked like the colour of the stone-washed denim that people in Hell Close seemed so fond of wearing.

He suddenly lifted his head from the pillow and shouted, “I want Helene!”

“Who’s Helene, dear?” asked the Queen.

But Philip’s head sank back. His eyes closed and he appeared to go to sleep. The Queen went downstairs and picked up the telephone receiver. It was dead. She jiggled the black knob about, but there was no reassuring purr in her ear. British Telecom had carried out their threat to cut her off because she hadn’t paid her deposit.

She put her coat on and hurried out of the house, clutching a ten pence coin and her address book. When she was inside the stinking telephone box she saw that it was flashing “999 only”. She felt like doing a little light vandalising, a bit of genteel telephone box smashing. Was Philip a 999 case? Was his life threatened? The Queen decided that it was. She rang 999. The operator answered at once.

“Hello, which service do you require?”

“Ambulance,” said the Queen.

“Putting you through,” said the operator.

The phone rang and rang and rang. Eventually a mechanical-sounding female voice said, “This is a recorded message. All ambulance service lines are busy at the moment and we are operating a stacking system. Please be patient. Thank you.”

The Queen waited. A man stood outside. The Queen opened the door and said, “Awfully sorry, it’s 999 calls only.”

She had expected the man to show a certain displeasure but was not prepared for the panic she saw on the man’s gaunt face. “But I gotta ring the ’Ousing Benefit office ’fore ten, else I get left off the computer,” he explained.

The Queen looked at the watch she had worn since she was twenty-one. It was 9.43 am. Nothing was ever
simple
in Hell Close, she thought. Nothing ran to order. Everybody seemed to be in a constant state of
crisis
, including herself, she admitted.

The Queen looked around Hell Close. Telephone wires were connected to at least half of the houses, but she knew that the wires were only symbols of communication. Somebody somewhere, whose job it was to disconnect the impecunious, had pulled the plug and severed most of the Hell Close residents from the rest of the world. Telephone bills had a low priority when money was needed for food and shoes and school trips, so the kids weren’t left out. She herself had raided the jar where she kept the phone bill money and bought washing powder, soap, tights, groceries and a birthday present for Zara. She had told herself that of course she would replace the money, but it had proved impossible on Philip’s and her combined pension and Philip wasn’t
eating
. How would they cope when he was cured of whatever it was that was ailing him and he regained his enormous appetite? The Queen was also waiting for back-dated Housing Benefit. She sympathised with the man.

“Come with me,” she said. Relations had been strained lately between her and Princess Margaret, but this was an emergency. As they crossed the road towards Number Four, the man told her that he was a skilled worker, a shop-fitter, but the work had dried up.

“Recession,” he said bitterly. “’Oo’s
opening
shops? I made ‘For Sale’ signs for a bit, then I got laid off. ’Oo’s
buying
shops?” The Queen nodded. On her rare visits to the town she had been surprised by the proliferation of “For Sale” signs. Most of the shops on the Flowers Estate were ghosts, only Food-U-R seemed to thrive. The Queen remembered the day she had bought Harris Food-U-R’s own-brand dog food for the first time. She’d had no choice, it was ten pence cheaper than his usual brand. Harris had refused it at first and gone on hunger strike, but after three days had capitulated, hungrily if not graciously.

They reached the front gate of Princess Margaret’s house. The curtains were tightly drawn. Nothing of the interior of the house could be seen. The Queen opened the gate and beckoned the man to follow her.

“May I ask your name?” she said.

“George Beresford,” he said, and they shook hands on the front doorstep.

“And I’m Mrs Windsor,” said the Queen.

“Oh, I know ’oo
you
are. You’ve ’ad a bit of trouble yourself, ’aven’t yer?”

The Queen said that she had and knocked on the door using a lion’s head knocker. Movement was heard inside, the door opened and Beverley Threadgold, now working as Princess Margaret’s cleaner, stood there, holding a drying-up cloth. She looked pleased to see the Queen.

“Is my sister there?” asked the Queen, stepping into the hall, pulling George with her.

“She’s in the bath,” said Beverley. “I’d offer you a cup of tea but I daren’t; she counts the tea bags.” Beverley looked towards the ceiling, above which her new employer was wallowing in expensive lotions. She straightened her maid’s cap and pulled a face. “Look a right prat in this, don’t I? Still it’s a job.”

“Pay well?” asked George.

Beverley snorted. “One pound, cowin’ twenty pence an hour.”

The Queen was embarrassed. She decided to change the subject quickly.

“Mr Beresford and I would like to use the telephone,” she said. “Do you think that would be possible?”

“I’ll pay,” said George, showing the collection of warm silver coins he clutched in his hand. The Queen looked at the grandfather clock that loomed over them in the narrow hall. It was 9.59.

“You go first,” she said to George. Beverley opened the door to the living room. They were about to enter when Princess Margaret appeared at the top of the steep stairs.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she called down, “but I must ask you to remove your shoes before you go into that room, the carpet shows every mark.” George Beresford blushed a dark red. He looked down at his training shoes. They were falling apart and he wasn’t wearing socks. He couldn’t possibly reveal his naked feet, not in front of these three women. His feet were ugly, he thought; he had hairy toes and split nails.

The Queen looked up at Princess Margaret, who was drying her hair with a towel and said, “I’d rather not remove my shoes. Will the cord stretch into the hall, do you think?”

Beverley brought the phone to them, the cord unfurled and stretched to its full extent as it reached the threshold of the room. But George was able to dial.

He listened intently as it rang.

The Queen watched Beverley cleaning Margaret’s windows and wondered how much the maids at Buckingham Palace had been paid. It was surely more than one pound twenty an hour.

Eventually George recognised the tone. “Engaged,” he said. The grandfather clock struck ten. George panicked.

“I’ve missed my turn on the computer.”

“Try again,” urged the Queen. “The computer’s always breaking down, isn’t it? At least that’s what they’re always telling me when I ring about my Housing Benefit.”

George tried again. No. Engaged.

George dialled a third time and on this occasion the phone was answered immediately. This threw him; he had never mastered the use of the telephone. He liked to look into the eyes of the person he was talking to. He shouted into the receiver,

“’Ello, is this the Housing Benefit? Right, right. I was told to ring before ten but … yes, I know, but … it’s George Beresford speakin’. I had this letter to ring before ten so I can get on the …” George stopped talking and listened. The sound of the hairdryer seeped down the stairs.

“Yes, but,” said George, “the thing is,” he turned slightly away from the Queen and lowered his voice. “See, I’m in a bit of trouble. I’m havin’ to pay the rent out of my redundancy and the thing is … it’s gone …” He listened again. The Queen could tell from the way that he contorted his face that he was being told things he either didn’t want to hear, had heard a dozen times before or didn’t believe.

“Hang on!” George said into the phone, then, turning to the Queen he said, “They say they’ve got none of my papers. They can’t find nowt about it.”

The Queen took the phone and said, in her authoritative Queen’s Speech tones, “Hello, Mr George Beresford’s advisor here. Unless Mr Beresford receives his Housing Benefit in tomorrow morning’s post, I’m afraid I shall have to instigate a civil action against your Head of Department.”

Beverley giggled, but George didn’t think it was funny at all. You couldn’t afford to muck about with
them
. He was surprised at the Queen’s behaviour, he really was. The Queen handed the receiver back and George heard the Housing Benefit clerk say that she would “prioritise” George’s claim. George put the phone down and asked the Queen what “prioritise” meant.

“It means,” said the Queen, “that they will miraculously find your claim, process it today and put your cheque in the post.” George sat on the stairs and listened while the Queen rang the doctor’s surgery and asked if the Australian doctor could call again at Number Nine Hell Close to see Mr Mountbatten, whose condition had deteriorated. The Queen and George Beresford said goodbye, put thirty-five pence on the hall table and left.

32 Shrinking

Dr Potter looked down at Philip and shook her head. “I’ve seen plankton with more meat on ’em,” she said. “When did he last eat?”

“He had a digestive biscuit three days ago,” said the Queen. “Shouldn’t he be in hospital?”

“Yeah,” said the doctor. “He needs an intravenous drip, get some fluids in him.”

Prince Philip was unaware that the two women were looking at his emaciated body with such concern. He was somewhere else, driving a carriage around Windsor Great Park.

“I’ll get a bag together for him, shall I?” said the Queen.

“Well, I gotta find him a bed first,” said the doctor. And she took out her personal phone and began to dial. As she waited for her call to be answered she told the Queen that three medical wards had been closed down last week, which had resulted in the loss of thirty-six beds.

“And we’re losing a children’s ward next week,” she added. “God knows what’ll happen if we get a few emergencies.”

The Queen sat on the bed and listened as hospital after hospital refused to admit her husband. Dr Potter argued, cajoled and eventually shouted, but to no avail. There wasn’t a spare bed to be had in the district.

“I’m gonna try the mental hospitals,” said Dr Potter. “He’s off his head, so it’s kinda legit.” The Queen was horrified.

“But he needs emergency
medical
care, doesn’t he?” she asked. But Doctor Potter was already talking. “Grimstone Towers? Dr Potter, Flowers Estate Practice here. I’ve gotta bloke I wanna admit. Chronic depression, food refusal, needs intubation and intravenous fluids. You gotta bed? No? Medical Unit full? Right? Yeah? Tomorrow?” she asked the Queen.