The Uncommon Reader

travelled. Who’s that?”
    “Who, ma’am?”
    “The road not travelled. Look it up.”
    Norman looked it up in the Dictionary of Quotations to find that it was Robert Frost.
    “I know the word for you ,” said the Queen.
    “Ma’am?”
    “You run errands, you change my library books, you look up awkward words in the dictionary and find me quotations. Do you know what you are?”
    “I used to be a skivvy, ma’am.”
    “Well, you’re not a skivvy now. You’re my amanuensis.”
    Norman looked it up in the dictionary the Queen now kept always on her desk. “One who writes from dictation, copies manuscripts. A literary assistant.”
    The new amanuensis had a chair in the corridor, handy for the Queen’s office, on which, when he was not on call or running errands, he would spend his time reading. This did him no good at all with the other pages, who thought he was on a cushy number and not comely enough to deserve it. Occasionally a passing equerry would stop and ask him if he had nothing better to do than read, and to begin with he had been stuck for a reply. Nowadays, though, he said he was reading something for Her Majesty, which was often true but was also satisfactorily irritating and so sent the equerry away in a bad temper.
    READING MORE and more, the Queen now drew her books from various libraries, including some of her own, but for sentimental reasons and because she liked Mr Hutchings, she still occasionally made a trip down to the kitchen yard to patronise the travelling library.
    One Wednesday afternoon, though, it wasn’t there, nor the following week either. Norman was straightaway on the case, only to be told that the visit to the palace had been cancelled due to all-round cutbacks. Undeterred, Norman eventually tracked the library down to Pimlico, where in a schoolyard he found Mr Hutchings still doggedly at the wheel, sticking labels on the books. Mr Hutchings told him that though he had pointed out to the Libraries Outreach Department that Her Majesty was one of their borrowers this cut no ice with the council, which, prior to axing the visits, said that inquiries had been made at the palace and it had disclaimed any interest in the matter.
    Told this by the outraged Norman, the Queen seemed unsurprised, but though she said nothing to him it confirmed what she had suspected, namely that in royal circles reading, or at any rate her reading, was not well looked on.
    Small setback though the loss of the travelling library was, there was one happy outcome, as Mr Mulchings found himself figuring on the next honours list; it was, admittedly, in quite a lowly capacity, but numbered among those who had done Her Majesty some special and personal service. This was not well looked on either, particularly by Sir Kevin.
    Since he was from New Zealand and something of a departure when he was appointed, Sir Kevin Scatchard had inevitably been hailed in the press as a new broom, a young(ish) man who would sweep away some of the redundant deference and more flagrant flummeries that were monarchy’s customary accretions, the Crown in this version pictured as not unlike Miss Havisham’s wedding feast — the cob-webbed chandeliers, the mice-infested cake and Sir Kevin as Mr Pip tearing down the rotting curtains to let in the light. The Queen, who had the advantage of having once been a breath of fresh air herself, was unconvinced by this scenario, suspecting that this brisk Antipodean wind would in due course blow itself out. Private secretaries, like prime ministers, came and went, and in Sir Kevin’s case the Queen felt she might simply be a stepping stone to those corporate heights for which he was undoubtedly headed. He was a graduate of the Harvard Business School and one of his publicly stated aims (‘setting out our stall’, as he put it) was to make the monarchy more accessible. The opening of Buckingham Palace to visitors had been a step down this road, as was the use of the garden for occasional concerts, pop and otherwise. The reading, though, made him uneasy.
    “I feel, ma’am, that while not exactly elitist it sends the wrong message. It tends to exclude.”
    “Exclude? Surely most people can read?”
    “They can read, ma’am, but I’m not sure that they do.”
    “Then, Sir Kevin, I am setting them a good example.”
    She smiled sweetly, while noting that these days Sir Kevin was much less of a New Zealander than when he had first been appointed, his accent now with only a tincture