Queen Camilla

Queen Camilla
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used entirely fictitiously.

Without the loving support and practical help of Colin Broadway this book could not have been written.

I thank Louise Moore, my editor, who has more confidence in me than I have in myself.

I also thank the editorial and production teams at Michael Joseph and Penguin, who I took to the wire – again.

I am grateful for the invaluable help of Shân Morley Jones, who read the final manuscript and saved me from several embarrassments.

Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, stood smoking a cheap cigarette on the back doorstep of Number Sixteen Hell Close. It was a cold afternoon in late summer. Occasionally she turned to watch her husband, Charles, the Prince of Wales, clattering the luncheon pots in the red washing-up bowl he’d bought on impulse that morning from the ‘Everything A Pound’ shop. He had borne the bowl home and presented it to her as though it were a precious religious artefact plundered from a sacked city.

As she watched him scrubbing at a Doulton gravy boat, she thought, how little it takes to make him happy, and said, ‘Happy, darling?’ Her voice was husky from years of cigarette smoking and also from sitting up half the night laughing and talking with the next-door neighbours, Beverley and Vince Threadgold.

Vince, a 55-year-old Elvis lookalike, had entertained Camilla and Charles with his terribly amusing stories about Wormwood Scrubs. Charles had said, ‘Prison sounds rather agreeable compared to Gordonstoun School, where I often woke in the night to find my narrow iron bed and rough blankets covered in a light sprinkling of snow from the open dormitory windows.’

Beverley, a big boned woman with hair the colour and texture of straw, had said, ‘You were bleedin’ lucky
to ’ave a blanket. I slept under me dad’s army greatcoat.’

Charles had looked so mournful that the laughter had died down, until Camilla had said, ‘Lighten up, darling, and pour us another glass of your delicious turnip wine.’

After a few more glasses, Charles had recovered his spirits and had slipped into his party piece, an extended Goon routine in which he became Fred and forced Camilla into being Gladys. The Threadgolds watched their guests’ improvised performance with stony faces, and were glad when their royal neighbours had staggered next door to their bed.

Camilla asked, ‘How’s the bowl performing, darling?’

‘The bowl is performing absolutely splendidly,’ said Charles.

‘Clever old you for spotting it.’

‘It was on the pavement with a stack of others. One was dazzled by the choice of colours.’

‘You did well, my darling. Red is terribly jolly.’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought. One hovered over the green.’

‘Mmm, green is good, but terribly
worthy
and a bit reminiscent of Jonathon Porritt, one imagines
he
has a green washing-up bowl, bought in some dreadful National Trust shop in the Cotswolds.’ Her laugh quickly turned into a cough.

Had she been any other person Charles would have defended his old friend Jonathon Porritt, the National Trust and the Cotswolds, but Camilla was licensed to say exactly what she thought.

She was still coughing; Charles turned worried eyes on her, ‘Are you all right, darling?’

She nodded that she was.

Somehow, the fact that he had chosen a red washing-up bowl felt significant to him. Perhaps, as Laurens Van der Post had urged, he was finally getting in touch with the ‘pagan inside’. He and the long-dead guru had trekked across the Kalahari and sat by a campfire under a vast star-filled sky and talked of what a man needed in order to feel complete in himself. A man must have a passion, they had concluded. Charles remembered the crimson ball of the sun as it sank behind the dunes. Perhaps this metaphysical experience had influenced his choice of washing-up bowl.

Camilla asked, ‘How much was your lovely red bowl, darling?’

Charles said a little tetchily, ‘I
did
say, I bought it from the “Everything A Pound” shop, darling.’ He blushed, remembering the scene when he had asked the morbidly obese shopowner, Mr Anwar, the same question.

Mr Anwar, irritable after a row with his wife about the Kit Kat wrappers she had found under his bed, said in his public school accent, ‘Tell me, sir. What is the name of my shop?’

Charles had taken a step back on the pavement and read aloud the shop sign displayed in foot-high letters. ‘Everything A Pound.’

Mr Anwar had said, ‘You do not need a degree in semiotics to interpret the signage, Mr Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Everything in my shop costs exactly, precisely,
incontrovertibly
, a pound. I repeat,
a
, that is,
one
pound.’

Charles, stung by Anwar’s sarcasm and his use of his German family name, had handed him a pound coin and hurried out of the shop.

Charles’s dog, Leo, a Frankenstein-like mixture of many canine breeds, sloped out from beneath the kitchen table and stood by the sink whining and lifting his big wolf’s head towards his master. The dog seemed to get taller every day, thought Charles: it was already, at fourteen weeks, up to his knees. Spiggy, Princess Anne’s husband, the ‘breeder’, had assured Charles that Leo would be, ‘One of them ankle-snappers, what’s good for rattin’.’

Leo whined, ‘I’m hungry.’

Charles said, ‘I know you’re ready to eat, Leo, but can’t you see I’m busy?’

The doorbell rang. Charles, still with his hands in the water, said, ‘Answer that, will you, darling?’

Camilla said, ‘I’m smoking, darling.’

Charles replied with a fixed grin, ‘I’m perfectly aware that you’re
smoking
, darling, since the smoke is drifting into the kitchen and insinuating itself down to my lungs.’

He gave a little cough and flapped a hand dripping in suds at the pall of tobacco smoke hanging over his head.

Camilla said, raising her voice over the persistent ringing of the doorbell, ‘It’s against the law of the land to carry a lit cigarette through a building, including one’s home, so perhaps
you
will answer the door.’ She turned her head away before adding, ‘Darling.’

Charles threw a little Spode milk jug into the suds
and said, through clenched teeth, ‘I have a washing-up
system
and I need to
concentrate
. Why can you not
grind
out that filthy bloody thing you’re sucking on and answer the door? Darling.’

The doorbell rang again.

Camilla said, a little tearfully, ‘Charlie, my fag time is terrifically important to me. You did agree before we married that I could smoke five fags a day and that I would not be disturbed whilst doing so.’

Charles scrubbed furiously at the perfectly clean Spode jug with the washing-up brush and said, ‘We also agreed to share the housework, but you’ve driven a coach and horses through that agreement.’ He saw the hurt on her face and said in a conciliatory tone, ‘You’re terribly lazy, darling.’

Camilla walked away down the crazy-paving path to the hen coop at the bottom of the narrow, heavily cultivated garden. She stared through the chicken wire at the hens, Eccles and Moriarty, who were pecking at each other in the casually cruel manner of siblings squashed together in the back seat of the family car.

Camilla was not fond of the hens. She disliked their wattled necks and Goon names, their cold eyes, sharp beaks and prehensile claws. She resented the time and money that Charles spent on their upkeep. In her opinion they were ungrateful feathered bastards. She was sick of having to coax Charles out of his disproportionate sense of failure every morning after he returned from the coop, with the egg-collecting basket he insisted on using completely empty.