The Uncommon Reader

study with Norman, the men drove off in their Land Rovers for another disappointing day and the prime minister and his wife were left to their own devices. Some days they trailed through the heather and over the moors to eat a wet and awkward picnic with the guns, but in the afternoon, having exhausted the area’s shopping potential by buying a tweed rug and a box of shortbread, they could be found in a distant corner of the drawing room playing a sad game of Monopoly.
    Four days of this was enough, and making an excuse (“trouble in the Middle East”) the prime minister and his lady determined to depart early. On their last evening a game of charades was hurriedly organised, the choice of each well-known phrase or saying apparently one of the lesser-known prerogatives of the monarch, and well known though they may have been to her, they were a mystery to everyone else, including the prime minister.
    The prime minister never liked to lose, even to the monarch, and it was no consolation to be told by one of the princes that no one but the Queen could hope to win, as the questions (several of them about Proust) were set by Norman and taken from their reading.
    Had Her Majesty resumed a raft of long-disused prerogatives the prime minister could not have been more put out, and on his return to London he wasted no time in getting his special adviser on to Sir Kevin, who condoled with him, while pointing out that currently Norman was a burden they all had to share. The special adviser was unimpressed. “Is this bloke Norman a nancy?”
    Sir Kevin didn’t know for certain but thought it was possible.
    “And does she know that?”
    “Her Majesty? Probably.”
    “And do the press?”
    “I think the press,” said Sir Kevin, clenching and unclenching his cheeks, “are the last thing we want.”
    “Exactly. So can I leave it with you?”
    It happened that upcoming was a state visit to Canada, a treat that Norman was not down to share, preferring to go home for his holidays to Stockton-on-Tees. However, he made all the preparations beforehand, carefully packing a case of books that would see Her Majesty fully occupied from coast to farthest coast. The Canadians were not, so far as Norman knew, a bookish people and the schedule was so tight that the chances of Her Majesty getting to browse in a bookshop were slim. She was looking forward to the trip, as much of the journey was by train, and she pictured herself in happy seclusion whisked across the continent as she turned the pages of Pepys, whom she was reading for the first time.
    In fact, though, the tour, or at least the beginning of it, turned out to be disastrous. The Queen was bored, uncooperative and glum, shortcomings all of which her equerries would readily have blamed on her reading, were it not for the fact that, on this occasion, she had no reading, the books Norman had packed for her having unaccountably gone missing. Dispatched from Heathrow with the royal party, they turned up months later in Calgary, where they were made the focus of a nice if rather eccentric exhibition at the local library. In the meantime, though, Her Majesty had nothing to occupy her mind and rather than focusing her attention on the job in hand, which had been Sir Kevin’s intention in arranging for the books’ misdirection, being at a loose end just made her bad-tempered and difficult.
    In the far north what few polar bears could be assembled hung about waiting for Her Majesty, but when she did not appear loped off to an ice floe that held more promise. Logs jammed, glaciers slid into the freezing waters, all unobserved by the royal visitor, who kept to her cabin.
    “Don’t you want to look at the St Lawrence Seaway?” said her husband.
    “I opened it fifty years ago. I don’t suppose it’s changed.”
    Even the Rockies received only a perfunctory glance and Niagara Falls was given a miss altogether (“I have seen it three times”) and the duke went alone.
    It happened, though, that at a reception for Canadian cultural notables the Queen got talking to Alice Munro and, learning that she was a novelist and short-story writer, requested one of her books, which she greatly enjoyed. Even better, it turned out there were many more where that came from and which Ms Munro readily supplied.
    “Can there be any greater pleasure,” she confided in her neighbour, the Canadian minister for overseas trade, “than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have