The Uncommon Reader

him…or rather, out-reading him. Once upon a time he had been a humble and straightforward guide to the world of books. He had advised her as to what to read and had not hesitated to say when he thought she was not ready for a book yet. Beckett, for instance, he had kept from her for a long while, and Nabokov, and it was only gradually he had introduced her to Philip Roth (with Portnoy’s Complaint quite late on in the sequence).
    More and more, though, she had read what she fancied and Norman had done the same. They talked about what they were reading but increasingly she felt her life and experience gave her the advantage; books could only take one so far. She had learned, too, that Norman’s preferences could sometimes be suspect. Other things being equal he still tended to prefer gay authors, hence her acquaintance with Genet. Some she liked — the novels of Mary Renault, for instance, fascinated her — but others of a deviant persuasion she was less keen on: Denton Welch, for instance (a favourite of Norman’s), whom she felt was rather unhealthy; Isherwood (no time for all the meditation). As a reader she was brisk and straightforward; she didn’t want to wallow in anything.
    With no Norman to talk to, the Queen now found she was conducting lengthier discussions with herself and putting more and more of her thoughts on paper, so that her notebooks multiplied and widened in scope. “One recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement.” To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: “This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.”
    “I was giving the CH once, I think it was to Anthony Powell, and we were discussing bad behaviour. Notably well behaved himself and even conventional, he remarked that being a writer didn’t excuse one from being a human being. Whereas (one didn’t say this) being Queen does. I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.”
    In addition to thoughts such as these she found herself noting descriptions of people she met, not necessarily all of them famous: their oddities of behaviour, their turns of phrase, as well as the stories she was told, often in confidence. When some scandalous report about the royal family appeared in the newspapers the real facts went into her notebook. When some scandal escaped public notice, that too went down, and all of them told in that sensible, down-to-earth tone of voice she was coming to recognise and even relish as her own style.
    In the absence of Norman her reading, though it did not falter, did change direction. While she still ordered books from the London Library and from booksellers, with Norman gone it was no longer their secret. Now she had to ask the lady-in-waiting, who spoke to the comptroller before drawing the petty cash. It was a wearisome process, which she would occasionally circumvent by asking one of the more peripheral grandchildren to get her books. They were happy to oblige and pleased to be taken notice of at all, the public scarcely knowing they existed. But more and more now the Queen began to take books out of her own libraries, particularly the one at Windsor, where, though the choice of modern books was not unlimited, the shelves were stacked with many editions of the classic texts, some of them, of course, autographed — Balzac, Turgenev, Fielding, Conrad, books which once she would have thought beyond her but which now she sailed through, pencil always in hand, and in the process, incidentally, becoming reconciled even to Henry James, whose divagations she now took in her stride: “After all,” as she wrote in her notebook, “novels are not necessarily written as the crow flies.” Seeing her sitting at the window to catch the last of the light, the librarian thought that a more assiduous reader these ancient shelves had not seen since the days of George III.
    The librarian at Windsor had been one of many who had urged on Her Majesty the charms of Jane Austen, but being told on all sides how much ma’am would like her put ma’am off altogether. Besides she had handicaps as a reader of Jane Austen that were peculiarly her own. The essence of Jane Austen lies in minute social distinctions, distinctions which the Queen’s unique position made it difficult for her to grasp. There was such a chasm between the monarch and even her grandest subject that the social differences beyond that were somewhat