The Autobiography of The Queen (8 page)

The Queen had demonstrated her usual pragmatic good sense when Austin, determined to go off fishing in the deep waters beyond the Gros Piton, greeted her on her return from her visit to reception and subsequent adventures in the wilds of ‘the King's' secret land, with the information that he was leaving now and would be out all day. ‘Auntie', as he now called this strange new client, must mind the bar. Go easy with the grenadine,
put rum in the coke and say it's a Crack Baby cocktail … Austin, unaware that he addressed the woman who had granted him and all St Lucians independence when he was a child, lingered a little longer by the bar. Then, with a shout to the Rasta revving up his broken outboard engine at the end of the beach, he strode off to embark on his day's fishing.

The Queen by now realised that further visits to the Rainforest Bar were not advisable. She would either be evicted, as had happened already, or recognised – and there was no way of knowing which was worse. The memory of Lady Bostock's excited face floated before her as she assured this unusually wilful servant (no permission had been asked for him to go out in a boat all day; this surely could never happen at Balmoral) of her acquiescence to his request. But by the time she granted him leave, Ford had gone. The Queen knew it was her duty to repay the proprietor of the Rum Shop in some way, for, dimly at first and then with certainty, she realised that she depended on him to help her avoid the global outcry already seen underway on Sky News at the hotel. Austin could hide her. And, as she went firmly into the Rum Shop, fighting a wave of nausea at the sickly sweet smell of alcohol and days-old flat Coke there, she prepared to do her duty; she did not yet, but this would come along with the thirsty Canadians, give thought to the fact that she had no option other than to trust that
strangers would show her the same degree of kindness that she, in those already far-off days when she had been Head of State, had happily shown them.

By noon, when the sun had taken a new and menacing strength, the Queen decided she would leave the Rum Shop and go across to the half-finished restaurant to see if any meals were to be served today. It seemed an age since Austin had set out – the phut-phut of the engine had ceased abruptly once the boat arrived by the great dark bulk of the Gros Piton: it had broken down but she was not to know this, and it was possible that a good catch would galvanise the cook into action. This she fervently hoped: the tourists, now the worse for wear after drinking in this heat, would otherwise have to walk the length of the beach to the Rainforest Bar and there was of course no guarantee that they would get anything to eat once there. Booked into a humble boarding house where the shriek of incoming jets was their twenty-four-hour entertainment, they had clearly set out without even the
minimum breakfast – and not one looked as if the ‘inclusive' menu, ‘real seafood soup' or even Latin buffet, would be on offer to them there. The Queen was not considered to be a person who felt pity or compassion for others – she was hardly deemed to be a person, after all, she was the Queen – but she did feel strangely sorry for her elderly Canadian subjects as they huddled under a canopy on benches by the edge of the rock-strewn sea. How patient these people were! – and the Queen thought of the probable reaction of any of her children (or the Duke) to finding themselves hungry and sunburned, with no food in sight. Would they have taken such an appalling mistake on the part of the organisers (for the Queen assumed every event to be meticulously organised and did not realise that the tourists would have received merely an email ticket and a brief print-out of places to eat and drink in St Lucia) – would anyone she knew show the patience and good humour of these people?

The probable answer was that the sole member of the Windsor family capable of forbearance in trying circumstances was the Queen. She did not like the way her trip and new home had turned out – but, in all the previous catastrophes, she had shown she could put up with anything, or almost anything. It just seemed unfair that retirement appeared to herald another
annus horribilis
, this time in a most uncomfortable heat. But this was
not on a par with worrying about her grandson William and the break-up of his romance, or Harry, with his resolve to get himself shot at by a sniper in the Middle East. No, the Queen would put up with it here. If she had a desire to go home, it was only because the dogs must miss her so much. But she was not of a sentimental nature. Now she must serve a man in his thirties or forties who had just arrived at the half-finished Windsor Village on foot. This was a more prosperous-looking tourist than the rest: he had an expensive camera slung round his neck and wore shorts that were distinctly a cut above the gear worn by the others. The Queen, hot and weary as she was, went back to the Rum Shop and stood by the counter. This was her duty: it would be helpful to Ford.

‘A banana daiquiri?' the Queen asked, her precise tones causing heads to turn at the long refectory tables by the sea. The new visitor did not reply to this and the Queen went on, but with a trace of uncertainty this time in her voice: ‘A Crack Baby cocktail? A rum punch?'

But the camera had been taken from round the just-arrived customer's neck and the lens, the round black void of glass which was all the Queen had known of intimate relations with the outside world, was now trained on her, unfaltering, speeding its images for the world to see.

‘Just stand there and smile, little lady,' the man
said, laughing. (He was an American, definitely not a subject, the Queen decided). ‘That's a great shot, honey. I'll go for a beer.'

It had been a long, hot day and by the time the sun was sinking with its usual speed over the great flat blank of the sea, the Queen decided to close the Rum Shop and lie down at the back of the hut on the truckle bed. The Canadian tourists had gone some hours before, to be replaced by a contingent of American female professors and a couple of English women who demanded gin and tonics and became petulant when it was explained to them that this was a rum shop.

‘Or just neat gin,' insisted the younger of the pair of superannuated ex-debutantes (the Queen recognised them for what they were: possibly the elder was Boofy's girl, and had enjoyed drinking gin in the Royal Beach Hut at Sandringham years ago). ‘What kind of a bar
is
this, for God's sake?' And, turning to her companion, she wondered aloud whether the ‘King' in his secret estate
behind the Petit Piton, would welcome a visit at this hour.

‘Too early,' the younger agreed. The Queen saw that a Hermès headscarf circa 1961 fluttered from a shorts' pocket. Heavens! Was this … Fiona … that girl Charles had almost married, before it was clear she could never get up for early service at Crathie? Now who on earth
was
Fiona? It was one of those big Anglo-Irish families … She looked half asleep now, if you came to think of it.

‘I'll settle for a fruit punch, no point in visiting the King and being so drunk you forget to ask to see the emeralds,' Boofy's girl announced. ‘It'd pay off the mortgage, the ring he slipped on my finger a couple of years ago.'

‘Well, he slipped it off again,' Fiona joked.

The Queen felt almost nostalgic, for the talk of gin made her think of the Queen Mother and the reminders of a lost era inspired by the handsome horse, depicted in colour on the silk Hermès scarf, brought pictures of Bond Street and then of the royal jeweller's, Wartski, where that terribly nice man would drop everything if summoned to the Palace to discuss the resetting of an item in the monarch's glittering array of jewels. Then she thought of the Cambridge emeralds, and how they had disappeared almost as soon as she arrived on the island. What would Her Late Majesty Queen Mary have thought of the present Queen's carelessness – or had the scandal of Francis of Teck and his
mistress been kept from her? The truth would never be known, and the Queen felt terribly tired; serving the American women who, eyeing their British upper-class contemporaries with ill-concealed disgust, now clustered by the wooden sill of the bar, was the very last thing she wanted to do. For the Queen would find it effortless to make conversation with Boofy's girl or Fiona – but the … what were they? the Queen did not choose, like her great-grandmother Queen Victoria, to forbid the existence of lesbians; but to these unappetising and strident women she could think of nothing whatever to say. Besides, one of these monsters was speaking of ‘empowerment' and other meaningless but threatening terms were bandied about by the sisters, most of whom were unkempt in the extreme.

‘No,' – the voice the Queen refused them with was crystalline and startled both of the English visitors, so they looked hard at the woman behind the bar and then subsided again into their fruit punches, topped up with grenadine – ‘no, there is no Bourbon here.' And then, recovering from the unpleasant after-effect of pronouncing the name of the guillotined Royal Family of France, the Queen pulled up the sill and marched to the back of the hut.

‘What an odd woman,' Boofy's girl's voice sounded through the badly nailed-together planks.

‘Yes, apparently they go bushy if they stay out in
the tropics too long,' the owner of the Hermès headscarf concurred. ‘But I'm sure she wasn't here a couple of years ago when I came on Roman's yacht …'

But by the time Fiona had embarked on her reminiscences of her last trip to the island, the Queen had fallen fast asleep.

Now, darkness had come and a swelling moon climbed the sky. Austin Ford and the Queen sat in companionable silence on the beach, the Queen in a pair of new flip-flops purchased for her by Austin in Soufrière on his return from his fishing trip (he had caught a fish and had sold it to the Rainforest Bar immediately – and just as quickly it had been thrown into the deep freeze, to emerge at some future date as a creature suitable for a Latin, Italian or American buffet – or as one of the unidentifiable components of an ‘island barbecue' at an inclusive Saturday night).

‘You know, I think I take you to my village so you meet my Auntie May,' Austin was saying. ‘Tomorrow, maybe. And we go to find that Lot 75 man, that builder, and I make him build your house, Gloria.'

‘We do need to speak to him,' the Queen said.
‘We are beginning to be a little disappointed by promises made and their lack of fulfilment. We are happy to accept your offer to take us up there.'

Austin smiled and raised his can of Piton lager. The Queen had refused water from the plastic bottle and had taken a Coke: now he wondered if she had slipped a shot of rum into the glass. Who were the others who would accompany her tomorrow? Why did she speak in the plural, when she had clearly come out on her own? Not for the first time, he considered dumping his client altogether – but the takings at the bar hadn't been bad: the Canadians had been thirsty and the feminists had gone for passion fruit daiquiris in double digits. Maybe Mrs Smith would even lead him to the shiny green stones spotted by Jolene in the white handbag. And perhaps she did have an accomplice or a friend in the travel agency business who would bring luck and money to Austin Ford.

The Queen, in turn, began to realise that she must show her continuing gratitude to the man who, having given her shelter for one night, now seemed prepared to put her up tonight as well. She would not be exposed to the glare of publicity and global hysteria the disappearance of the monarch of Great Britain and her dependencies would be bound to occasion. He would help find the contractor who had failed to build No. 5 Bananaquit Drive. He might, even, know someone who knew what had happened to the necklace the Queen had
so carefully packed away in her bag. Obviously, he wanted to talk about his family – especially his Auntie May. So he must; and she was prepared to listen.

But somehow it didn't turn out like that. The Queen could not say whether her deliciously sweet concoction from the bar (Boofy's girl had left half a fruit punch and the Queen had been brought up to hate waste), plus the Coke one of the American women had abandoned on a table accounted for the manner in which she now found herself addressing her new friend. Even she could tell her voice was stilted and high, unsuitable for a private conversation, but, as Austin answered her polite questions – How old is Auntie May? Does she get out much? Does she have far to go if she visits a shop? – she also knew that a transformation had taken place and she could no longer hide her secret from him. Just like the confessing recipient of a royal visit, she knew she would be guilty of the crime of holding back if she did not speak.

It had been a long two days. The plane, the irritation of the Bostocks and the knowledge they must have recognised her earlier by the TV, the unaccustomed standing and bending as she dutifully served beer, rum and cocktails to the tourists, not to mention the disappointment at finding a comfortable villa did not await her on arrival at St Lucia – all these were probable contributors to a new, almost reckless mood.

Austin had now gone through the lives of his first and second wives and was moving on to his second family in Trinidad and his uncle in Martinique when the unpredictable Mrs Smith leaned forward, sipped her drink and said in a high voice that there was something she must tell Ford and that it concerned Windsor Castle in the War.

‘De war?' Austin cracked open his Piton lager and stared at the old lady. ‘What you goin' on about?' he added, tipping the bottle down his throat. ‘Windsor Village here, not Castle, Gloria.'

But the memory had to be told. The Queen would never know whether the constant reminder of her name in the letters proclaiming Windsor Village had triggered the sudden total recall of a winter evening, a basement in the Castle, planes and bombers overhead. ‘The King. His late Majesty King George the Sixth – he came to find me down there – we were in danger and he said he had to tell me – I was thirteen years old, he was so brave, you know – “In case anything happens to us, you need to hear there is a secret – a secret in our family, Lilibet …”'