The Uncommon Reader

“I don’t want to stab you through the heart”), remarks that could be taken home and cherished, along with the invitation card, the special car-park pass and the map of the palace precincts.
    These days she was formal, smiling and seemingly sincere but without frills and with none of the supposedly off-the-cuff asides with which she was wont to enliven the proceedings. “Poor show,” thought the equerries and that is exactly what they meant, “a poor show” in which Her Majesty had turned in a dull performance. But they were not in a position to draw attention to this omission as they, too, colluded in the pretence that such moments were natural and unpremeditated, a genuine overflowing of Her Majesty’s sense of fun.
    It had been an investiture.
    “Less spontaneous this morning, ma’am ,” one of the bolder equerries ventured to say.
    “Was I?” said the Queen, who would once have been most put out at even this mildest of criticisms, though these days it scarcely impinged. “I think I know why it is. You see, Gerald, as they kneel one looks down on the tops of people’s heads a good deal and from that perspective even the most unsympathetic personality seems touching: the beginnings of a bald patch, the hair growing over the collar. One’s feelings are almost maternal.”
    The equerry, with whom she’d never shared such confidences before and who ought to have been flattered, simply felt awkward and embarrassed. This was a truly human side to the monarch of which he’d never been previously aware and which (unlike its counterfeit versions) he did not altogether welcome. And whereas the Queen herself thought that such feelings probably arose out of her reading books, the young man felt it might be that she was beginning to show her age. Thus it was that the dawn of sensibility was mistaken for the onset of senility.
    Immune to embarrassment herself, as she was to any that she might cause, the Queen would once not have noticed the young man’s confusion. But observing it now she resolved in the future to share her thoughts less promiscuously, which was a pity in a way as it was what many in the nation longed for. Instead she determined to restrict her confidences to her notebooks, where they could do no harm.
    The Queen had never been demonstrative; it was not in her upbringing; but more and more these days, particularly in the period following Princess Diana’s death, she was being required to go public about feelings she would have preferred to keep to herself. At that time, though, she had not yet begun to read, and it was only now that she understood that her predicament was not unique and that she shared it, among others, with Cordelia. She wrote in her notebook: “Though I do not always understand Shakespeare, Cordelia’s ‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth’ is a sentiment I can readily endorse. Her predicament is mine.”
    Though the Queen was always discreet about writing in her notebooks her equerry was not reassured. He had once or twice caught her at it and thought that this, too, pointed to potential derangement. What had Her Majesty to note down? She never used to do it and like any change of behaviour in the elderly it was readily put down to decay.
    “Probably Alzheimer’s ,” said another of the young men. “You have to write things down for them, don’t you?” and this, taken together with Her Majesty’s growing indifference to appearances, made her attendants fear the worst.
    That the Queen might be thought to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease was shocking in the obvious way, the ‘human’ and compassionate way, but to Gerald and the other equerries it was more subtly deplorable. It seemed to him pitiable that Her Majesty, whose life had always been so sequestered, should now have to share this undignified depletion with so many of her subjects, her deterioration, he felt, deserving a royal enclosure where her behaviour (and that of monarchs generally) might be allowed a larger degree of latitude and even waywardness before it attracted the levelling denomination of Alzheimer and his all-too-common disease. It could have been a syllogism, if Gerald had known what a syllogism was: Alzheimer’s is common, the Queen is not common, therefore the Queen has not got Alzheimer’s.
    Nor had she, of course, and in fact her faculties had never been sharper and unlike her equerry she would certainly have known what a syllogism was.
    Besides, apart from writing in