Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (7 page)

The Queen did not share all her mother’s tastes. She was less partial to champagne, the theatre, and bachelors than her mother had been. Nevertheless, The Queen liked keeping up traditions started by her mother, so she too would have a younger equerry appointed to her Household, usually for two or three years at a time. The equerry’s duties involved being an extra man at luncheon or the dinner table, entertaining her guests, as well as arranging some of the transport on The Queen’s days away from the palace. He also steered unschooled visitors through the ritual minefield of bows and curtseys necessary for first meetings with The Queen. It was not hard work. It was an acknowledgment of hard work elsewhere. Few people knew how much The Queen’s court was still a military court, and how many of the male duties in the Household were undertaken by officers whose more ordinary experience was of unglamorous, uncomfortable postings in remote corners where they had often served with distinction.

Luke approached The Queen’s sitting room. It was a smallish room at the rear of the building with a view on to Buckingham Palace Gardens. The palace had miles of state rooms with painted ceilings and gilded furniture, but when she was on her own, The Queen preferred sitting in this ordinary room at the back, furnished only with a television, a comfy chair, a worn sofa, and a desk. There was also a computer, in which she took only an intermittent interest. The room was no more than a biggish-sized closet, really. Discovering The Queen’s pleasure in sitting alone in such an unqueenly setting was the first of Luke’s surprises when he’d started working at the palace. Now he was used to it, and he expected her to be equally unconcerned about the request he was about to make of her. Usually, on days when he didn’t travel with The Queen, or when there were no engagements in the evening, he was in the palace from about ten in the morning until six at night, but this afternoon, he’d received a pressing letter from Andy’s mother. He wanted a few hours at home in his flat to reply to it properly. As The Queen had just returned that Monday morning from her weekend in Windsor, and there was nothing official on her program until Tuesday, he didn’t expect her to object to his leaving a few hours early. She was easy about things like that.

The door to her sitting room was closed. It always was. Doors were seldom left open in the palace, another of his early discoveries. He stopped in the corridor, listened briefly at the door to see whether he could hear her talking to anyone on the telephone. He wouldn’t interrupt if she were, but there was nothing, not even the sound of the television. He fully expected to find her reading briefing papers at the desk while the dogs slept on the carpet. He tapped gently with his knuckle and waited for her reply.

Instead of The Queen’s voice what he heard was a strange noise from the dogs. It was not unusual for his knock to make the dogs bark, but then he would hear her shushing them. Now they did not bark. They whined. He knocked again, which prompted somewhat louder whining from the dogs, and an isolated howl. He opened the door a crack to see the door to the garden terrace ajar, a December shower wetting the rug and blowing the curtains into the room. He walked in and shut the door into the garden. She’d clearly been here and was gone. Stepped outside for a moment? Gone for a walk in this weather? If she had, she would have taken the dogs with her. Instead, they waddled back and forth between the door and the center of the room, as if they were children shocked at their abandonment.

Luke went to the telephone, dialed the number of palace security and asked where The Queen had gone. “In her sitting room,” came the reply down the line. Luke was impatient with the palace’s old-fashioned communication system. The man clearly could not see that he was already telephoning from The Queen’s sitting room. “No, I’m in her sitting room, and she’s not here,” said Luke with grim determination.

“Oh, probably out walking the dogs,” came the careless reply from security.

“No,” said Luke, “the dogs are here.”

“Wouldn’t worry. She won’t have gone far.” The man rang off.

Luke was fairly familiar with The Queen’s routine, and her aversion to deviating from it in the smallest way. She wouldn’t be anywhere else in the palace at this hour. The open outer door left only one possibility: she must have stepped outside. His current job was a desk job, but he could still summon up some strength from years of doing very little in his spare time but working out in an army gym. He went back and reopened the door. Buckingham Palace Gardens was itself the size of a small London park, but he thought he could jog around the perimeter quickly enough to satisfy himself that if The Queen had gone out, and for some reason not come back in, she was all right and needed no assistance. He sprinted down the stairs on to the wet gravel and jogged first around the edge of the gardens, and then down several of the central paths in twenty minutes, sleet mixed with rain stinging his face. With a rising sense of panic, he found nothing.

He came back inside, winded, wet, and breathing hard. He knew rationally that now was the time to raise the alarm, but he did not trust palace security. It was not only that they were often lazy and inattentive, that they’d ignored The Queen herself when she’d sounded a buzzer to summon help some years ago after a lunatic broke into her bedroom before breakfast. It was Luke himself. Since he’d been back from Iraq, he trusted people less, and men in uniform not at all. He also imagined that somehow the newspapers would find out if he told security, and when it was discovered that The Queen was out somewhere on the London streets by herself, unattended, Lear in a winter’s storm, the papers would say she’d lost her mind. Or, she’d be approached by strangers in some unspeakable way. And he was responsible. He went miserably to The Queen’s desk chair. He sat down and put his elbows on the desk. He had no idea what to do next.

At that moment Luke heard the latch of an interior door and leapt from the chair, assuming that now, at last, The Queen was returning from God knows where. He felt relief, mingled with terror lest she catch him sitting in her chair. Instead, it was William, who sailed through the doorway, saying, “All right, young fellow, what have you done with her? Very odd for her not to be here at this hour.”

“Gone.”

“The Queen does not just get up and walk away. Tell me where she is. And don’t you look as if you’re in a state? Do you realize that’s an Aubusson carpet you’re dripping all over?”

Luke just looked at him, terrified, wordless.

The dogs looked back and forth at the two men, first at the one, then the other.

W
hen she’d turned eighty in 2006 The Queen had reluctantly decided to give up riding on horseback. The royal physician, whom she persisted in calling “the apothecary,” as if he were someone who merely dispensed pills from green vials, had begun hinting some years earlier that it was dangerous exercise “for we old-age pensioners, Ma’am.” He was quite as old as she was. Because he was familiar, she hated switching to some newer younger man. That didn’t mean she liked his advice. Riding on horseback was about the only exercise she took, and, besides walking the dogs, the only exercise she enjoyed. She hadn’t fallen off in recent history, she was proud to say, but she did feel a disabling stiffness in her hips that made walking difficult after an afternoon’s gentle amble on one of the horses at Windsor or Sandringham. This did leave rather a hole in her weekend afternoons, and she’d consulted Queen Victoria’s diaries to see what the alternatives might be. It turned out that in old age The Queen had a two-seat pony cart which she used for outings on the estates at Osborne and Balmoral. She asked the private secretary to see whether he couldn’t find out what had happened to it. By some miracle the wooden cart was found disassembled into fourteen pieces in an outbuilding next to the Glassalt Shiel, a small house the old Queen had built on Loch Muick in 1868.

[© English Heritage Photo Library]

The Queen remembered first reading about the Glassalt Shiel with a wry smile. It was considered something of a joke in royal history. Queen Victoria had built the house up on the loch, a few miles from the Castle at Balmoral, as a sort of “getaway,” but as the Scottish Castle itself had been built as a holiday escape from London, the Glassalt was actually a getaway from a getaway. One of the old Queen’s minor self-indulgences, it was felt. The Queen didn’t look at it that way anymore. She understood precisely what Queen Victoria had been feeling because she felt more and more that she wanted to get away herself. Although she was happier in Scotland than anywhere else, even there the Prime Minister made an annual visit, and he often brought unwelcome news or tendered disagreeable advice.

She’d been looking forward to the new man coming to visit as he was the first one in a long time who actually behaved like a Scotsman, and she anticipated getting along better with him than with his recent predecessors. Of course, she already knew him from his previous posts in other departments, but as he was now in Number 10, she’d be seeing more of him. There was something dour, humorless, and unhappy about him that suited her present mood. He’d arrived at Balmoral with his wife for a weekend stay in early September. She’d detailed Lady Anne to take care of the wife. “Go and have a look around the cutting garden, perhaps.” The Prime Minister she’d take care of herself. She thought he might like to see her new, reassembled pony cart, and go for a trot up to the distillery. The distillery didn’t belong to her, but always welcomed a royal visit and didn’t mind shutting down to the public during a little informal call from her. She loved looking at the enormous brass vats and all the Victorian plumbing. The whiskey she cared about less. Wasn’t her drink really, but she’d accept a small tumbler to keep off the damp, and then off they could go back to the Castle. Shouldn’t take more than an hour there and back.

She came down the tartan-covered steps to the portico to find the Prime Minister hanging about awkwardly in a tweed coat that looked as if he’d bought it especially for the occasion. A ghillie held the reins of the pony that was harnessed to the cart. A footman stood by with cushions and two rugs to put over their knees once they got in. The footman put in one cushion for her, and arranged the rug over her knees as the ghillie handed her the reins. The footman was about to put in the second cushion for the Prime Minister when he said, “No thank you. I won’t need that.”

“I advise you to take it, Prime Minister. Roads can be a bit rough up here. Wouldn’t want you jostled.”

The Prime Minister was already getting in and waving the footman away. “Oh no, Your Majesty, you see I have so much natural padding in that area that I won’t need it. My wife is always saying I must exercise more.”

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The Queen clicked her tongue, and called to the pony, “Come on, Smoky!” The cart pulled away from the portico with an unusually hard jolt to the back of the Prime Minister’s neck. He hadn’t been expecting anything to happen so quickly.

They rode down the long drive to the main gate surrounded by gloomy pines still dripping from that morning’s rain shower. The police had blocked off the road to the distillery so they’d meet no traffic, and The Queen turned the cart up that way, keeping the pony at a trot as the animal pulled uphill, but allowing him to walk at the top. As the cart went more slowly, the Prime Minister was suddenly more aware of the silence and birdsong, and having nothing in particular in the way of small talk to share with the cart’s driver, he decided to go straight to business. “Ma’am, there are one or two matters which I have to discuss with you.”

“Oh yes?” said The Queen. She was mildly surprised. Usually the business part of a Prime Minister’s visit took place around the drinks hour before supper on the Saturday night. Then they could both sit down comfortably in front of the coal fire and discuss whatever matters he’d brought along in the dispatch boxes. However, this one was new and didn’t know the form yet. She was prepared to talk now, however, and she bid him continue with a nod of her head.

“Well, Ma’am, it’s the royal train. The upkeep is considerable. I’m afraid we’re going to have to consider decommissioning it.”

With a sudden unexpected surge of anger, The Queen remembered the private secretary had warned her that the Prime Minister might bring this up. It was part of her recent forgetfulness that this had taken her by surprise. She was grumpy with herself, and furious with him at this new attack on her dignity.

“What do you mean?” she said angrily.

“Ma’am, the Government can no longer advise your continuing to use such an expensive, and, may I say, unusually luxurious, form of transport.”

“But the Privy Purse already pays for part of it. The Government only subsidizes those journeys on which I go on public business. Most of those journeys are advised and approved by you! If you want me to run up to Doncaster at nine in the morning to open a new hospital, no picnic, may I add, how am I to get there?”

“Other forms of transport will have to be found, Ma’am. It’s too expensive for a modern monarchy.”