Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (23 page)

She could see by watching his eyes that he had no interest in Winston Churchill, so she changed tack. “But perhaps you had Dungeons & Dragons when you were a boy?”

“I
loved
Dungeons & Dragons!” he said, warming up with real enthusiasm.

“I thought you might.”

“Monsters that would eat you up if you weren’t careful. Wizards. Magic. Scary castles. It was a game too, that made it fun.”

“I suppose more history teaching should be like that, shouldn’t it?” said The Queen smoothly, playing to the passion that the young man had just revealed.

“If we’d played that in school, well, I would’ve come top.”

“I’m sure you would.” She then turned to the dog so he wouldn’t feel left out of the conversation. “He would, Hohenzollern, wouldn’t he? Have come top?”

The dog was already her firm friend and gave a brief yelp as his affirmative.

“Now, Hohenzollern,” said the blind man, looking under the table, “we’ve a long way to go. And no barking, please.”

The dog whined as if to protest that he’d been spoken to and it was polite to reply.

Having looked at her carefully now that they’d talked, the young man said to The Queen, “You look familiar.”

For the first time, The Queen felt a little alarm. No one had recognized her walking to Paxton & Whitfield. As the shop had a royal warrant, they were nearly family. The young man there had spoken to her so respectfully, and gone out of his way to look after her, that she’d forgotten that she’d boarded something other than the royal train. It suddenly occurred to her that the people on the train might start making trouble, wanting to know what she was going to do in Edinburgh if they knew that she was outside the palace cordon. She’d done it so few times before. How could she possibly tell them about the Prime Minister wanting to abolish the royal train?

“Tell me about your earrings,” said The Queen, firmly changing the subject.

He had large skull-and-crossbones insignia in the lobes underneath his ears. “It’s not an earring,” he said crossly. “It’s a plug. You get it pierced first. Then you gradually stretch it out. Then you get a plug fitted. It stretches out the earlobe and then you can wear all sorts of things.”

“Sounds painful,” said the matron in the thick glasses, turning her head to try and see the young man’s ears from the only oblique angle she could see anything at all.

“No, it doesn’t hurt.”

“You see, mine are stretched out too,” said The Queen, fingering her earlobe beneath her scarf. She untied the scarf so the young man could see her ears. Seven decades of heavy jewels had stretched out The Queen’s earlobes, though her ears hadn’t the same sort of tribal look his had. Still, the deformation was noticeable.

The young man looked at the pearls in her ears and said, “That’s it! I’ve got it. Helen Mirren, that’s who you are!”

“Oh, wasn’t she lovely in
The Queen
? We liked that one!” said the woman in thick spectacles.

“What would Helen Mirren be doing travelling second class to Scotland?” said the blind man with a dismissive snort.

“Helen Mirren, now, she’s a beauty. Much more
svelte
than me,” said The Queen, patting her tummy.

“Well, you do look like her,” said the young man defensively.

“Tickets, please! Tickets, ladies and gentlemen.” Suddenly the guard was upon them. The blind man handed over two tickets for himself and his wife. The young man took a crumpled document from his jeans pocket. The guard inspected them briefly and then wordlessly validated them. Then he turned to The Queen. “And your ticket, young lady?” he said cheerfully.

This caused The Queen some momentary confusion. But she reached into the pocket of her hoodie and came out with a £20 banknote. “There you are,” she said, handing the banknote to the guard, and making a mental note that she must reimburse Rebecca from the Mews.

The guard laughed. “That’ll cover part of the penalty for paying on board, my love, but it won’t cover the fare.”

“It won’t?” said The Queen, shocked. “Fares have gone up.”

“That they have, milady.”

“Well, how much, then?

“Where to?”

“Edinburgh Waverley,” said The Queen precisely so he’d know she didn’t want to get down at any of the suburban stations.

He punched some codes into his electronic machine before he answered briefly, “£276.70.”

The Queen gasped. “That much? It’s highway robbery. I haven’t got it. Is that what you paid?” she asked the blind man, turning to him incredulously.

“Well, no. We have railcards. So should you. And we paid in advance. That saves you some too.”

“I see,” said The Queen. “Well, what’s the first stop?”

“York!” said the guard.

The Queen briefly considered getting off at York. She had made a considerable contribution to the roof’s reconstruction at York Minster after the fire there in 1984. Perhaps the Dean would house her for an evening. No doubt he would, but her showing up at his door would worry him. She knew the man. No, it was not possible. She must carry on to Scotland.

“Perhaps I could advance you a small loan, Miss Mirren?” said the blind man
sotto voce
. “Would that help?”

“No, no I couldn’t let you pay so vast a sum,” said The Queen. “Let me see what I have here.” The Queen pulled her black patent handbag up onto the table from the seat, where it had been sitting beside her. As the guard and the man with piercings watched with amazement, item by item she slowly emptied its contents onto the table. A starched handkerchief. A lipstick. A pair of white kid gloves. A fountain pen. A small box of wooden safety matches. A compact mirror. A laminated miniature calendar from the
Racing Post
listing the year’s Bank Holidays. A small bottle of perfume. And a rabbit’s foot. At length, she unzipped one of the side pockets and counted six crisp £50 notes onto the table. “There you are,” she said to the guard triumphantly, though still in a bad humor. The guard took her bills, produced a ticket from his machine, and handed her the change.

“Ah, Miss Mirren has some resources after all. I thought so,” said the blind man, a deft hand at flirting with people he couldn’t see. Had he been able to see them, he would have been terrified.

“He’s quite a tease, isn’t he, Hohenzollern?” said The Queen to the dog and she silently fed him a bit of cheese she worked off the lump inside the parcel Rajiv had handed her. The dog took the cheese and lifted his snout in the air as he chomped on it with relish.

The Queen addressed the guard just as he was turning to go. “Would it be possible to have a timetable, please? I would like to check our progress.”

The guard disappeared to the end of the carriage for a moment, and returned with a timetable he took off a plastic holder on the wall. “Here you are, love.”

“And a pencil, please.”

The guard was somewhat taken aback, but he was used to difficult old ladies, and since the railway had been privatized under John Major, they were under strict instructions to cater to all passenger whims. This was called “customer service,” and it was difficult to keep a smiling face in the midst of the most unreasonable demands. However, he dipped into his jacket pocket, brought out a stub of a pencil, and handed it to the elderly woman in the hoodie.

The Queen thanked the guard, took the timetable, and consulted it. “I see. York at 1850.”

“That’s the one,” replied the guard.

“That’s only one hour and ten minutes from now,” said The Queen, pointing at the figures with the pencil stub. “Tell the driver. I shall be attending. Let him know, please.”

This was a bit too much, as far as the guard was concerned, but he gave her a nod of his head and relished what he’d tell the driver on the intercom when he got back to his post. “Old lady in the last carriage keeping tabs on you. Gave her a timetable. Try and keep it on time tonight, will you?” The driver answered down the crackling telephone line with a series of spluttering, laughing, four-letter words as the train reached 125 miles per hour within sight of Alexandra Palace.

“C
ome to Scotland with me?” asked Rajiv as Rebecca turned away from the window of the doorway to the railway carriage.

A sudden gasp was all she gave him. The taxi ride, the vaulting over the barrier, and now jumping headlong onto an intercity train without a ticket, all these were so far beyond her ordinary experience that she couldn’t speak, only look at him, as if she were trapped by someone whose intentions she wasn’t entirely sure of. They were immediately in the midst of a tunnel and as the vestibule light had burned out, they were in the darkness together. He went up to her instinctively and gave her a hug, not a romantic embrace, but an everything-will-be-all-right wrapping of his arms around her.

She allowed herself to be held in the darkness. The carriage rocked, and the tunnel produced a sucking vacuum of the air as the train accelerated.

They were soon out of the tunnel and the London lights illuminated the vestibule again. “Well, we might as well sit down here. No stops until York. No seats in that way, either. Oh, and your boss is in there, by the way. At a four-top. If that’s who you’re after.”

They slid down with their backs against the vestibule wall, their legs spread out in front of them. There was little enough space so they both had to sit with their knees up.

“She’s not my boss.”

“That’s funny. She told me she was.”

Rebecca looked at him incredulously.

“Well, she came in after some cheese for Elizabeth. I put two and two together.”

“I thought that must have been where she got off to.”

“Does she do that a lot? Go off on her own? Seemed a bit odd to me.”

Rebecca didn’t answer. She’d met Rajiv twice. They’d never been introduced by mutual friends. She didn’t know him, really. Now there was the prospect of a railway journey of several hours with him, and he was asking about The Queen’s habits. She said nothing.

A wordless, and not infrequently a defiant, silence appeared to be her default setting. It didn’t disturb Rajiv. “What about you, then? You’re panting. All out of breath. And your cheeks, they’re red,” he said, stretching out a knuckle to stroke the cheek nearest him.

“Get off!” she said angrily, stretching away from him.

Rajiv smiled to himself. There was something in her anger that he took as a compliment. It was a lot better than his friends’ sisters, who just passively looked the other way when he spoke to them. Why else get so upset at every small meaningless gesture of his? “Had to run for the train, did you?”

She said nothing.

“We just barely got on ourselves. She told me to disembark and go back to the shop.”

She heard him using “disembark,” a strange word, as if he were imitating The Queen’s speech. “You shouldn’t have been with her at all.”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have. And how did that come about?”

Again, Rebecca did not answer.

“Did you know that she was going to Scotland? On her own?”

Rebecca looked out the window. She felt for the first time she might need some sort of help. The equerry had told her it was a crisis. If the papers found out, he’d told her, they’d injure her. Now here she was, alone, with a boy, practically a stranger, and the only person, quite possibly, besides her who knew The Queen was alone, with no security, on a train to Scotland. She knew animals. She didn’t know newspapers or how to look after an old lady, whom she only knew how to serve by caring for horses. “I saw you in Jermyn Street, handing her into a cab.”

“Came back to see me, did you?” Rajiv said brightly.

“Not you. No. The equerry called me after we had coffee at St James’s. When I got there, he told me The Queen had disappeared. Nobody knew where. Asked me if I knew. I didn’t. He thought she might get into trouble. And if the newspapers found out, well, they might accuse her of being, well, not quite right.” She couldn’t go further. She’d said more than she intended.

“I wouldn’t say ‘irrational,’ now. And ‘mad’ isn’t right either,” said Rajiv staring up at the ceiling of the rocking carriage. “
Distrait
was more like it. A touch unhappy perhaps. Looking for something to cheer herself up with, maybe.” He laughed to himself. “She knew that cheddar pleased Elizabeth. The cheese she came in to buy wasn’t for the horse.” His shoulders started shaking. He found this very funny.

Rebecca didn’t like it. “Stop it,” she said shortly.

“Okay, all right. I didn’t mean anything bad, did I?”

“Stop it. Now.”

“So she came in,” Rajiv continued. “She bought the cheese. Took the parcel and put it into her hoodie. Where’d she get that, by the way? Brilliant disguise. I have to give it to her.”

“No, I gave it to her. She came over to the Mews after lunch. Didn’t have a coat on. It was sleeting. I said she should put my hoodie on. She did. I guess she’s still wearing it.”

“That she is. The Pirate Queen.”

“She took the cheese, and then what?”

“Well, she wanted to know the best way to King’s Cross. She said bus. I said Tube. So we compromised and took a taxi!”

“What else?”

“We talked about the ‘dark races,’ ” he said, imitating a comic Indian accent. “She wants me to be her
munshi
.”

“What’s
munshi
? Breakfast cereal?”

“No!” He pretended to be offended. “Her Indian secretary. Servant
rajah
. Gentleman
wallah
.”

“Best evidence so far that she’s not herself.”

“She was perfectly sane,” said Rajiv reasonably. “Queen Victoria had one. She wants one too. Told me she’d ‘be in touch’ with me later. She did. Go up there and ask her yourself,” he said, cocking his head toward the interior of the carriage where he’d said The Queen was sitting.

“Are you sure she’s okay in there? Who’s she sitting with?”

“They looked harmless enough. And I didn’t hurt her when she came into the shop. Why should they?”

“God! Rajiv, don’t you realize? She doesn’t do this sort of thing every day.”

“What? Don’t worry. She knows how. Meets strangers every day. She presses the flesh three hundred days in the year. Probably more.”