Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (26 page)

She was saved from having to reply immediately by the young man with piercings. “If you’ll pardon my asking,” he said, clearing his throat, “how do blind people see films?”

“We hear them, don’t we? And I can see a little bit if it’s on a big screen and I turn my head like this. But him, no, he’s never been able to see them.”

The blind man nodded his assent. Films were all right, but he wanted to get back to history.

His wife continued, “And perhaps because we only hear them, we catch things that often other people don’t. They get distracted by the pictures. That’s why we’re called ‘differently sighted’ sometimes, because our other senses are more developed than they would have been if our vision weren’t impaired.”

Her husband harrumphed at this. “Politically correct. ‘Differently sighted.’ ” He said the words with a sneer. “Blind is what I am. Always have been. Don’t need to dress it up with polite words.”

“Well,” his wife started in again, used to being corrected by her husband but anxious nonetheless to show that she had understood the film at a deeper level, “blindness, that’s what the film was about, wasn’t it?”

“What?” said the young man with piercings, almost as dismissively as the blind man had spoken the words “differently sighted.” “No, it was about Lady Di and her crash, weren’t it?”

“Yes, of course, it was,” persisted the woman with spectacles, “but it was also about how blind The Queen was to how much we all loved Diana. How the palace abused the poor girl. Wasn’t it?”

For the first time that afternoon, The Queen felt stung. She knew she was struggling with some kind of indefinable grief, but she had been only half conscious of what she was doing up to now. She felt so unhappy that a bit of cheese and a visit to
Britannia
had seemed like good ideas. She’d not anticipated being at a table discussing a film that troubled her, no matter how sympathetic its portrayal of her had been. With three members of the public, no less. She now became vaguely aware that she had to tread lightly, that discovery of her little unofficial visit to
Britannia
might have consequences.

The Queen steeled herself to take part in it. She recalled the first time her yoga instructor had shown her how to do the plank position. It was really a sort of press-up that you held in place, and it was very hard to do, especially if you’d lost the strength in your upper arms, as The Queen seemed to have done. But the yoga instructor had been very patient with her. She’d counseled her to begin by taking the position on her knees, and that was much easier. Over a month or so The Queen had gradually built up to it where, now, for a few moments, she could actually do a proper plank with her knees off the floor. She thought to herself, if I can do that, I can also handle this.

The Queen also felt some sympathy for the woman in thick spectacles. She’d now been spoken to with scant respect by both men at the table. The Queen didn’t like being characterized as blind, but she saw that if she were to avoid speaking, she was going to have to draw out the others a bit more.

“How much Diana was loved,” repeated The Queen. “Yes, do go on.”

“Well,” said the woman in spectacles, happy to have been asked to speak a bit more, “the palace didn’t understand Diana or how much she meant to people, did they? That’s why they wouldn’t lower the flag. That’s why they wouldn’t bring the boys down for the funeral. That’s why they couldn’t believe all the flowers. But it didn’t surprise me one bit.”

“The boys had just lost their mother,” said the blind man. “Why should they come down to London and listen to Elton bloody John?”

“Right,” put in the man with piercings. “Elton
bloody
John! What a wanker.”

On some level The Queen agreed with the blind man and the pierced man, but she didn’t approve of the swearing. She thought it might be better to get the subject out of this contemptuous vein and into something the two men could speak of admiringly. “And what music would you have had in the Abbey?”

“Guns N’ Roses,” said the pierced man without hesitating.

“Tchaikovsky’s
Pathétique
,” said the blind man with equal conviction.

“So difficult to please so many different tastes, isn’t it?” The Queen asked the table. No one could possibly disagree with that. She didn’t expect to be disagreed with, but again the woman with spectacles joined in: “But you see, Elton John was Diana’s friend. That’s why it made sense for him to play.”

“We have a tradition of choral music in this country that is centuries old, my dear,” the blind man said with some condescension. “Choral music at the Abbey stretches back long before the Reformation.”

“Who wants your ancient history?” shot back the woman with spectacles, finally provoked into a display of impatience with her husband. “Diana didn’t read
History Today
or any of those dull magazines you like. She liked a bit of
Tatler
and
Vanity Fair
. Just like the rest of us. That’s why people loved her.”

“I didn’t love her,” said the young man with piercings. “She was just more bread and circuses to keep the proles quiet, weren’t she? Smoke and mirrors. Magic tricks so the rich stay rich and the rest of us work for a living.”

“I quite agree with you,” said the blind man. “She was just one of those images displayed on the wall of the cave for the imprisoned. It keeps the cave dwellers happy so they forget their chains. Plato wrote about it in the fifth century BCE.”

The Queen didn’t feel she could follow either of the men here. Nor was she entirely pleased with the tack the woman with spectacles had taken, either. The Queen reflected to herself that, in her own way, she had loved Diana as much as she had loved the other people her children had married. Mark Phillips, now, she loved him too. What she objected to in the Diana hysteria, for it was that and she had no doubt of it, was the way all the traditions she valued had been rejected. All the public mourning struck her as positively Neapolitan, certainly not British. Where was the stiff upper lip? Plenty of young men Diana’s age whom she’d known personally had died horribly in the war. It was a mark of respect and toughness and grit not to give in, to maintain emotional control in those conditions. It was important
not
to break down. But now, if one didn’t break down, one was considered cold.

She recalled sitting in the Abbey and hearing the crowd’s roared approval outside. It was when Spencer had referred to the palace treating Diana badly. She herself could remember holding Spencer in her arms when he was a baby with a fouled diaper. She was letting his parents their house on the estate at Sandringham, and at a reduced rental too. Now he’d inherited the earldom and was old enough to stand in the pulpit, he thought he could give
her
a lecture in how to behave. That was gratitude for you. Had she the power, she certainly would have thrown him in the Tower at that moment. But, no, she was quite powerless, she had to do as she was told. She had to sit there and listen to the impudent boy as the public cheered, rather as if they were at a football match or the Roman Colosseum, instead of a young woman’s funeral.

Moments later, after saying good-bye to the clergy at the west door of the Abbey, she stood there with her mother, waiting for the car to come around. The old lady had teased her. “A revolutionary moment, eh, Lilibet? I fancy they’ll be rolling out the gallows for you soon, my darling.” Very much like her mother, to choose a moment when she was feeling quite miserable and make it worse with a few slyly chosen words. The Duke of Edinburgh was no help either. He just raged and railed at Spencer’s effrontery. She preferred to sit by herself in a room, brooding over what had happened, silently asking what she had done wrong.

[Anwar Hussein/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images]

The Queen was unaware that she had drifted off into this reverie. The blind man, kindly thinking this elderly woman was embarrassed that she didn’t know what he was speaking of and needed a little instruction, put in helpfully, “The allegory of the cave, from Plato’s
Republic
, of course.”

“Of course,” said The Queen vaguely. What did Plato have to do with anything? But she also saw that if she didn’t reassert some control, the conversation might go anywhere. “And the stag? Was The Queen supposed to be the stag? In that film they killed the deer, and so they’d killed The Queen? Was that it?” This had been the part of the film to which The Queen objected the most. She hadn’t minded that actress, Miss Mirren. The Queen knew that Miss Mirren looked much better on the screen than she did. It was really rather flattering, but she did hate all that animal-rights sentimentality about the stag. It was as if the whole film had been shot by hunt
saboteurs
.

“Oh, well, I don’t think it was meant to be a one-to-one correspondence. The stag was a noble animal, captured by the hunters. They shot it. The Queen is noble too, no one doubts it, but the hunters didn’t get her. At the end of the film, she lives on. She’s still there,” added the woman with thick spectacles.

“But you see, this is why it doesn’t work. Those deer are pests. They eat all the roses. They eat the kitchen gardens. They’ll eat any variety of sapling if you don’t protect it with a wire cage. They
have
to be put down or the Highlands would be one bald hillside after another. Creates erosion too. No good for cultivating the pine forests. And a good deal of whatever income you can squeeze out of those granite hillsides comes from the pine, of course. The deer also multiply so quickly that they overpopulate. Not enough heather to go around. Watching deer starve is dreadful. That’s why they’re culled.”

The Queen’s three travelling companions were amazed that she knew so much about the economics of Scottish forestry and animal husbandry. It stopped the conversation, as none of them felt they could contribute anything on those subjects. Just then the chief steward made a crackling announcement on the train’s public address system. “The buffy car is open for snacks and light refreshments.” He added that those wishing to have supper should take a seat in the restaurant adjacent to the buffet. At this the blind man, feeling generous about a table that had been willing to listen to him on the subject of both Tchaikovsky and Plato, offered to stand his companions at the table a round of drinks before dinner, “if everyone would join me in the
carozza ristorante
.” This met with universal approval. Led by Hohenzollern the Seeing Eye dog, the blind man, the woman with thick spectacles, the man with piercings, and The Queen got up and paraded single file down the carriage’s central aisle. All eyes were fixed upon the dog. So the old woman in the hoodie and headscarf once again escaped recognition.

R
ebecca was furious. “I didn’t say you could take my picture.”

“Well, let’s take a look at it first, shall we? And then we can just delete it.” Rajiv brought the screen of the phone up and displayed the picture of her he’d just taken. She was livid, it was clear from the photo. But there was something about her red hair in the passing glare of light from outside the train that made the picture surreal, otherworldly. The flush in her cheeks also made it undeniably an attractive image—even Rebecca, angry as she still was, could see that. “Oh, come on. We can’t delete that. It’s beautiful.” Rajiv looked up at her. “You’re beautiful.”

“That’s not me.”

“Oh yeah? Who is it, then?”

“Someone in your imagination.”

“Do you think I just pressed the ‘imagine’ button on the phone?”

“No, but you’re just making up some fantasy. You don’t even know me. ‘Girl with red hair.’ Or ‘Someone I just met.’ Or ‘I want to sleep with her.’ It’s all to do with your mixing up the picture with your own dream of what the woman in the photo is going to do for you. How she’s going to be a mirror for your great accomplishments. Or, how she’s going to do everything you want in bed. That sort of thing.”

“Hang on. Just because you walked in the shop and I thought you were hot, that doesn’t mean you can make me into some sort of ogre.”