The Uncommon Reader

but it wasn’t what it was. “Oh. Cecil Beaton. Did you know him?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “No, of course not. You’d be too young. He always used to be round here, snapping away. And a bit of a tartar. Stand here, stand there. Snap, snap. So there’s a book about him now?”
    “Several, ma’am.”
    “Really? I suppose everyone gets written about sooner or later.”
    She riffled through it. “There’s probably a picture of me in it somewhere. Oh yes. That one. Of course, he wasn’t just a photographer. He designed, too. Oklahoma , things like that.”
    “I think it was My Fair Lady , ma’am.”
    “Oh, was it?” said the Queen, unused to being contradicted.
    “Where did you say you worked?” She put the book back in the boy’s big red hands.
    “In the kitchens, ma’am.”
    She had still not solved her problem, knowing that if she left without a book it would seem to Mr Hutchings that the library was somehow lacking. Then on a shelf of rather worn-looking volumes she saw a name she remembered. “Ivy Compton-Burnett! I can read that.” She took the book out and gave it to Mr Hutchings to stamp.
    “What a treat!” She hugged it unconvincingly before opening it. “Oh. The last time it was taken out was in 1989.”
    “She’s not a popular author, ma’am.”
    “Why, I wonder? I made her a dame.”
    Mr Hutchings refrained from saying that this wasn’t necessarily the road to the public’s heart.
    The Queen looked at the photograph on the back of the jacket. “Yes. I remember that hair, a roll like a pie-crust that went right round her head.” She smiled and Mr Hutchings knew that the visit was over. “Goodbye.”
    He inclined his head as they had told him at the library to do should this eventuality ever arise, and the Queen went off in the direction of the garden with the dogs madly barking again, while Norman, bearing his Cecil Beaton, skirted a chef lounging by the bins having a cigarette and went back to the kitchens.
    Shutting up the van and driving away, Mr Hutchings reflected that a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett would take some reading. He had never got very far with her himself and thought, rightly, that borrowing the book had just been a polite gesture. Still, it was one that he appreciated and as more than a courtesy. The council was always threatening to cut back on the library and the patronage of so distinguished a borrower (or customer as the council preferred to call it) would do him no harm.
    “We have a travelling library ,” the Queen said to her husband that evening. “Comes every Wednesday.”
    “Jolly good. Wonders never cease.”
    “You remember Oklahoma? ”
    “Yes. We saw it when we were engaged.” Extraordinary to think of it, the dashing blond boy he had been.
    “Was that Cecil Beaton?” said the Queen. “No idea. Never liked the fellow. Green shoes.”
    “Smelled delicious.”
    “What’s that?”
    “A book. I borrowed it.”
    “Dead, I suppose.”
    “Who?”
    “The Beaton fellow.”
    “Oh yes. Everybody’s dead.”
    “Good show, though.”
    And he went off to bed glumly singing ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning’ as the Queen opened her book.
    THE FOLLOWING week she had intended to give the book to a lady-in-waiting to return, but finding herself taken captive by her private secretary and forced to go through the diary in far greater detail than she thought necessary, she was able to cut off discussion of a tour round a road-research laboratory by suddenly declaring that it was Wednesday and she had to go to change her book at the travelling library. Her private secretary, Sir Kevin Scatchard, an over-conscientious New Zealander of whom great things were expected, was left to gather up his papers and wonder why ma’am needed a travelling library when she had several of the stationary kind of her own.
    Minus the dogs this visit was somewhat calmer, though once again Norman was the only borrower.
    “How did you find it, ma’am?” asked Mr Hutchings.
    “Dame Ivy? A little dry. And everybody talks the same way, did you notice that?”
    “To tell you the truth, ma’am, I never got through more than a few pages. How far did Your Majesty get?”
    “Oh, to the end. Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato — one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.”
    “There was actually no need to have brought the book back, ma’am. We’re downsizing and