The Uncommon Reader

now fairly customary lateness, what did this deterioration amount to? A brooch repeated, say, or a pair of court shoes worn on successive days: the truth was Her Majesty didn’t care, or didn’t care as much, and herself not caring, her attendants, being human, began to care less, too, cutting corners as the Queen would never previously have countenanced. The Queen had always dressed with great care. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of her wardrobe and her multiple accessories and was scrupulous in ringing the changes on her various outfits. No longer. An ordinary woman who wore the same frock twice in a fortnight would not be thought slipshod or negligent of appearances. But in the Queen, the permutations of whose wardrobe were worked out down to the last buckle, such repetitions signalled a dramatic falling away from her own self-imposed standards of decorum.
    “Doesn’t ma’am care?” said the maid boldly.
    “Care about what?” said the Queen, which, while being an answer of sorts, did nothing to reassure the maid, convincing her that something was deeply amiss, so that like the equerries her personal attendants began to prepare for a lengthy decline.

    STILL, THOUGH he saw her every week, the occasional want of variation in the Queen’s attire and the sameness of her earrings went unnoticed by the prime minister.
    It had not always been so, and at the start of his term of office he had frequently complimented the Queen on what Her Majesty was wearing and her always discreet jewellery. He was younger then, of course, and thought of it as flirting, though it was also a form of nerves. She was younger, too, but she was not nervous and had been long enough at the game to know that this was just a phase that most prime ministers went through (the exceptions being Mr Heath and Mrs Thatcher) and that as the novelty of their weekly interviews diminished so, too, did the flirting.
    It was another aspect of the myth of the Queen and her prime minister, the decline of the prime minister’s attention to her personal appearance coinciding with his dwindling concern with what Her Majesty had to say, how the Queen looked and how the Queen thought, both of diminishing importance, so that, earrings or no earrings, making her occasional comments she felt not unlike an air hostess going through the safety procedures, the look on the prime minister’s face that of benevolent and minimal attention from a passenger who has heard it all before.
    The inattention, though, and the boredom were not all his, and as she had begun to read more, she resented the time these meetings took up and so thought to enliven the process by relating them to her studies and what she was learning about history.
    This was not a good idea. The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it. One evening he was addressing her on the subject of the Middle East when she ventured to say, “It is the cradle of civilisation, you know.”
    “And shall be again, ma’am,” said the prime minister, “provided we are allowed to persist,” and then bolted off down a side alley about the mileage of new sewage pipes that had been laid and the provision of electricity substations.
    She interrupted again. “One hopes this isn’t to the detriment of the archaeological remains. Do you know about Ur?”
    He didn’t. So as he was going she found him a couple of books that might help. The following week she asked him if he had read them (which he hadn’t).
    “They were most interesting, ma’am.”
    “Well, in that case we must find you some more. I find it fascinating.”
    This time Iran came up and she asked him if he knew of the history of Persia, or Iran (he had scarcely even connected the two), and gave him a book on that besides, and generally began to take such an interest that after two or three sessions like this, Tuesday evenings, which he had hitherto looked forward to as a restful oasis in his week, now became fraught with apprehension. She even questioned him about the books as if they were homework. Finding he hadn’t read them she smiled tolerantly.
    “My experience of prime ministers, Prime Minister, is that, with Mr Macmillan the exception, they prefer to have their reading done for them.”
    “One is busy, ma’am,” said the prime minister.
    “One is busy,” she agreed and reached for her book. “We will see you next week.”
    Eventually Sir Kevin got a call from the special