The Autobiography of The Queen (11 page)

As Austin Ford sighed, lit another Marlboro
Light and stamped his feet on the ground in time with his iPod selection, the Bostocks made their assault.

‘It is,' Lady Bostock said shrilly. ‘Of course it is, Martyn!'

‘It can't be.'

‘It
is.
Keep my place in the queue. I'm going – going down to – to …'

‘Watch out,' Sir Martyn boomed. ‘What if she's not the Queen? For God's sake, it's very unlikely. Stay here, Marianne!'

‘I'm going,' Lady Bostock announced in a whisper that came out with the force of a shriek.

And this was how, rebutting Austin as he attempted to stand between his client Mrs Smith and the mad woman from the Joli Hotel, Lady Bostock treated the travellers at Hewanorra Airport to a display of home-grown ritual never seen before in St Lucia and remembered even in England only by those presented at Court half a century ago.

Lady Bostock was far taller than the Queen (especially in the beach shoes which gave no extra height) but it was with a certain grace that she sank into a curtsey and remained, bent low with head almost touching the floor of the airport hall, for several minutes.

‘What she do, Gloria?' Austin asked his client.

Then, everything seemed to happen at once. The passenger holding the
Sunday Times
collected her baggage and came back into the hall to find a friend
– and, as Austin saw the image of Mrs Smith on the front page of the paper she carried, he let out a cry and stamped his feet harder to the beat from his iPod. As Lady Bostock rose, wobbling a little by now, from the deep obeisance to her monarch, the brown paper bag containing the emeralds burst from inside her blouse and scattered over the floor.

The Queen and Lady Bostock stood and stared at the jewels as they coiled amongst the cigarette stubs, discarded hot dogs and other rubbish in the hall.

Austin Ford later complained to his friend Rover at the Sunset Bar in Soufrière that he'd had a hard time, caught between those two women – but he was happy, if this was what they wanted, that his client had accepted the necklace from the crazy lady – and, when a cache of US dollars had also been found to be lurking in the brown paper bag, she had repaid Austin for her ticket (Economy it must remain: the Queen hated extravagance) and had added an extremely modest tip for his services over the past days.

‘I say God save the Queen,' Austin said piously to his friend.

As the huge Boeing thundered down the runway, the Queen sat forward in her seat (she was in the central block in Economy and it was virtually impossible to see out of a window) and peered at the rain drips accumulating on the aircraft's wing. They reminded her of Balmoral, her threatened castle and estate, where rambling over cleuch and moor would no longer be her prerogative: where the rain, coming down democratically from heaven, would pour on commoners and princes alike.

It was a shame; but she was glad to be on her way home. She was needed there – and even if Charles had acted too precipitately by sending a team out to look for her on the island, it was proof that the sovereign's powers still held: without Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second Parliament could not open, and the country would fall into uncertainty and, worse, anarchy. Some upstart
would come along and claim the throne; and the Queen shuddered as she imagined Princess Michael of Kent in the Crown Jewels and reading from a speech prepared by some interior decorator chosen for his designs of a new Buckingham Palace.

No! It was unthinkable. If the Queen wondered why she had left in the first place, the thought did not haunt her for long: there were certain things one did and no one expected one to feel remorseful. There just wasn't time in the packed schedule of a reigning monarch to look back with guilt or speculation at how things could have turned out. For the Queen there could never be a ‘road not taken': there was no alternative to being the Queen.

The same went for people, what the newspapers called relationships. They could only be measured against the powers of the Head of State, and because of this must always take second place to familial or conjugal ties (the dogs, who did not know the position of their mistress at the pinnacle of the country's aristocracy and greater in stature than Archbishop or Prime Minister, were exempted from this hierarchical arrangement, and because of this the Queen loved them more than all her subjects).

A stewardess was doing the rounds with a drinks trolley and the Queen suffered the discomfort of an enormous paunched man leaning right across her to trumpet his multiple order of lager. His wife followed suit by ordering gin and tonic (the Queen
invariably assumed the matrimonial state to prevail when confronted by adult strangers: it was easier that way to get through an arduous royal tour, which would have undergone delays if ‘partners' – the Queen was not yet quite sure what these could be – or people who had separated, had to be distinguished from the rest. After all, it wasn't so long ago that divorcees had been refused admission to the garden parties and balls at the Palace).

‘And two Pringles,' the woman went on. Two tins were handed to her and a thin biscuit-like object slid out, followed by a good many more. The tonic water teetered dangerously on the edge of the woman's tray as a slight turbulence teased the plane, and one of the miniature bottles of gin fell to the floor, letting out a strong smell.

‘You OK love?' the fat man's wife said to the Queen as a wetness crept into the uncomfortable rubber flip-flops and the Queen shifted away from her neighbours. ‘Sorry about that!' But, as the Queen knew and this woman would never be able to understand, these people were infinitely preferable to the Bostocks, the latter safely ensconced in Upper Class.

By the time the plane had risen above the mountainous, forested shores of St Lucia and the seatbelt sign was off, the Queen decided she would make for the toilets at the back of Economy and try to wash the all-pervasive smell of gin from her feet. It brought memories of rainy days at Sandringham
and gin-and-tonics partaken of by Lady Lettice Farquhar in the kitchen of their farmhouse, while the dogs rushed in and out, shaking wet coats on to the Queen's tweed skirt. It made her sad – but she couldn't say why – she was going back, was she not? Lady Lettice would be expected to be in waiting and they would exchange little anecdotes about the corgis and the weather as they always did. (Mrs McDuff would have looked after the dogs, of course, while Her Majesty was ‘on leave', an expression which came to the Queen as she edged her way up the aisle: she had been on leave like a member of her own armed forces, and now she was returning to her country to do her duty.) It did not occur to her that her son Charles might have organised another team, to interrogate the monarch and examine the extent of her insanity: he had accepted by now, surely, that his mother would for a long time yet hold the reins. Why, the people he'd sent hadn't even been able to find her! Charles would be an old man before he came to the throne.

The Queen, unable to pass a trolley from which the stewardess extricated plastic trays and proceeded to distribute them to the couples and children in the packed plane, had never before found her passage blocked; there had never been an impediment on the well-planned circulatory tours of the Palace gardens to the sovereign's progress over well-mown lawns; doors opened magically on every tour of inspection. She coughed delicately –
as Lady Lettice might have done, to announce her presence to royalty – but no one budged, indeed she had to step backwards as the trolley grazed her stomach in its onward crawl down the plane.

‘Are you in need of the toilet, madam?' An officious-looking man (lower middle-class, the Queen thought, but it was so hard nowadays to place people) had risen from his aisle seat and was waving to the stewardess, whose apparent inability to see the Queen had contributed to her first-and-only experience of what it was like to be invisible. ‘Can you let this lady pass?' the officious man added, and he now came out to stand in the aisle himself, just above the trolley, as if to arrest all movement until his command was obeyed.

The Queen found herself permitted a small slice of space between the meal wagon and the blocks of economy seats, and with an appreciative murmur (again, how did one address someone in these circumstance? Where are you from, as had been learned with the Bostocks, was inappropriate; and anyway, he looked like a man who would reply with something like ‘Row Fourteen Seat Six' to a royal query or show of interest). Definitely, she must push on: the occupants of the row behind had now noticed the smell of alcohol and were looking suspiciously at the frail-looking woman with dishevelled white hair, a loud T-shirt and (once these came into view several passengers shrugged or giggled) the offending gin-soaked flip-flops. The
toilets, still seemingly miles away at the rear of the aircraft, must be reached as soon as possible and order restored.

A queue had formed outside both port and starboard toilets by the time the Queen reached the end of the aisle. People – mainly women – went in and an extraordinary length of time passed before they emerged made-up, cologne-scented or whatever. Clearly they had not given a thought for the convenience of others; and the Queen was mildly shocked, having adhered during all the long (and frequently exhausting) half-century and more of her reign to the belief that oneself must always come last. That she was not enjoying this example of her oft-repeated dictum was an unfortunate truth; but, like the queues in blitzed London which the Queen Mother had on occasion visited, these recorded by Pathe News, she saw they were just something that had to be put up with. So it was as a housewife in the War that the Queen consoled herself for her long wait.

Edging forward, it was possible to see a young man, slickly dressed in Paul Smith and sporting handmade leather shoes, who sat hunched over his laptop in the penultimate row of Economy. The seat beside him was empty, a mohair coat, ready for the exigencies of British weather, thrown across it – and the impression was given of privileges conferred, of this man's being a part of a new wealthy class the Queen would not know or recognise.
Despite her eyes being now fixed on his screen, the young banker – or hedge-fund manager or financial adviser, did not look up or choose to exchange any kind of human signal with the old lady who now peered at the Channel Four news showing on the young man's mobile phone, this strapped to his wrist

The laptop and the phone both carried the same message, but the Queen, accustomed to the voice and manner of the presenter Jon Snow, chose Channel Four news as the medium now informing her – and the rest of the world – that a story had just broken of a true heir to the throne for the British Isles and of a ‘triumph' for the genealogist who had worked so long on uncovering him. This ‘heir', by profession a traffic warden, had been found, so the news presenter Jon Snow announced, after years of painstaking research and – slipped in as if of little importance by the presenter – the conclusive proof of a DNA test. The news had only just come from the genealogist's home in the Channel Islands.

Then came shots of people – most of them irritatingly foreign tourists when the TV station desperately needed the reaction of true Brits – giving their opinion on this astounding discovery. Some were bored, others had no idea, apart from the existence of the Queen, of anyone being expected to inherit the crown. An old lady, probably a contemporary of the monarch, started on a long and
passionate speech on the subject of the British Constitution and the need for there to be a written constitution – but the cameras dodged away before the words European Union could be mentioned and a blonde girl, Swedish and only in her first week on an English language course, was found by the railings at Buckingham Palace, giving ‘I very like William' as her response to all questions.

‘Sorry, can I get past?' A bad-tempered-looking woman in her forties shoved the Queen rudely in the ribs; and it was only then that it became clear to her that the queue was at last stretching behind her and not ahead. A friend of the bad-tempered woman now queue-jumped to the head of the line, laughing as she went past, ‘A pretender? It's like the history books!' And the door of the WC was wrenched open before anyone could complain. ‘Time for a republic is what I say,' came with another roar of laughter. ‘Kings, Queens – who cares?' And with that and a deafening flush from the lavatory behind the still-open door, the subject of inheritance was dismissed.

The Queen sat upright in a superannuated minicab as it wove its way through dense traffic on the M25 from Gatwick to London. No one in any of the cars bad-temperedly driven by men late for meetings or women determined on a shopping trip in the city, recognised the slight, white-haired figure – though one group of children perched in the back of a people carrier laughed and pointed at the old lady in the T-shirt with bright, tropical colours. Rain was falling and the skies made a lid which appeared to seal off the landscape, so it lay like a grey blanket in all directions. It was warm, even hot; and the contrast with the rainforest conditions recently enjoyed by Mr Santander's passenger was not great: here, as in St Lucia, the weather conditions brought a longing for Balmoral, the cool of the hills there and a rain sweeter than the metallic drops falling on the motorway.

The fact of being in a minicab (another unknown experience for the Queen) brought her recent arrival on the Caribbean island to mind, and Alvyne with his plastic Christmas tree appeared before the Queen's eyes, alongside her present driver's postcard of palms and blue sea pinned just above the dashboard. Did people always dream of being where they were not, the Queen wondered; if in a cold climate did they yearn for the equator, if in a banana plantation did they pine for snow? It seemed that no one could live without the secret hope of an opposite to what they had been dealt in life.