The Uncommon Reader

but it would help if we were able to put out a press release saying that, apart from English literature, Your Majesty was also reading ethnic classics.”
    “Which ethnic classics did you have in mind, Sir Kevin? The Kama Sutra?”
    Sir Kevin sighed.
    “I am reading Vikram Seth at the moment. Would he count?”
    Though the private secretary had never heard of him he thought he sounded right.
    “Salman Rushdie?”
    “Probably not, ma’am.”
    “I don’t see,” said the Queen, “why there is any need for a press release at all. Why should the public care what I am reading? The Queen reads. That is all they need to know. “So what?” I imagine the general response.”
    “To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it,” said Sir Kevin, “if the pursuit itself were less…selfish.”
    “Selfish?”
    “Perhaps I should say solipsistic.”
    “Perhaps you should.”
    Sir Kevin plunged on. “Were we able to harness your reading to some larger purpose — the literacy of the nation as a whole, for instance, the improvement of reading standards among the young…”
    “One reads for pleasure,” said the Queen. “It is not a public duty.”
    “Perhaps,” said Sir Kevin, “it should be.”
    “Bloody cheek,” said the duke when she told him that night.

    APROPOS THE duke, what of the family in all this? How did the Queen’s reading impinge on them? Had it been Her Majesty’s responsibility to prepare meals, to shop or, unimaginably, to dust and hoover the house(s), standards would straightaway have been perceived to have fallen. But, of course, she had to do none of these things. That she did her boxes with less assiduity is true, but this didn’t affect her husband or her children. What it did affect (or ‘impact upon’, as Sir Kevin put it) was the public sphere, where she had begun to perform her duties with a perceived reluctance: she laid foundation stones with less elan and what few ships there were to launch she sent down the slipway with no more ceremony than a toy boat on a pond, her book always waiting.
    While this might concern her staff, her family were actually rather relieved. She had always kept them up to the mark and age had not made her more indulgent. Reading, though, had. She left the family more to themselves, chivvied them hardly at all and they had an easier time altogether. Hurray for books was their feeling, except when they were required to read them or when grandmama insisted on talking about them, quizzing them about their own reading habits or, worst of all, pressing books into their hands and checking later to see if they had been read.
    As it was, they would often come upon her in odd unfrequented corners of her various dwellings, spectacles on the end of her nose, notebook and pencil beside her. She would glance up briefly and raise a vague, acknowledging hand. “Well, I’m glad somebody’s happy,” said the duke as he shuffled off down the corridor. And it was true; she was. She enjoyed reading like nothing else and devoured books at an astonishing rate, not that, Norman apart, there was anyone to be astonished.
    Nor initially did she discuss her reading with anyone, least of all in public, knowing that such a late-flowering enthusiasm, however worthwhile, might expose her to ridicule. It would be the same, she thought, if she had developed a passion for God, or dahlias. At her age, people thought, why bother? To her, though, nothing could have been more serious, and she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing, that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
    To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time. The next stage had been when she started to make notes, after which she always read with a pencil in hand, not summarising what she read but simply transcribing passages that struck her. It was only after a year or so of reading and making notes that she tentatively ventured on the occasional thought of her own. “I think of literature,” she wrote, “as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.”