The Uncommon Reader

appreciating something the Queen had just said.
    “How are your memoirs?” said the Queen. Sir Claude’s memoirs had been on the go for so long they had become a joke in the household. “How far have you got?”
    “Oh, they’re not consecutive, ma’am. One does a little every day.”
    He didn’t, of course, and it was really only to forestall yet another probing royal question that he now said what he did. “Has Your Majesty ever considered writing?”
    “No,” said the Queen, though this was a lie. “Where would one find the time?”
    “Ma’am has found time for reading.”
    This was a rebuke and the Queen did not take kindly to rebukes, but for the moment she overlooked it.
    “What should one write?”
    “Your Majesty has had an interesting life.”
    “Yes,” said the Queen. “One has.”
    The truth was Sir Claude had no notion of what the Queen should write or whether she should write at all, and he had only suggested writing in order to get her off reading and because in his experience writing seldom got done. It was a cul-de-sac. He had been writing his memoirs for twenty years and hadn’t even written fifty pages.
    “Yes,” he said firmly. “Ma’am must write. But can I give Your Majesty a tip? Don’t start at the beginning. That’s the mistake I made. Start off in the middle. Chronology is a great deterrent.”
    “Was there anything else, Sir Claude?”
    The Queen gave her wide smile. The interview was over. How the Queen conveyed this information had always been a mystery to Sir Claude, but it was as plain as if a bell had rung. He struggled to his feet as the equerry opened the door, bowed his head, then when he reached the door turned and bowed his head again, then slowly stumped down the corridor on his two sticks, one of them a present from the Queen Mother.
    Back in the room the Queen opened the window wider and let the breeze blow in from the garden. The equerry returned, and raising her eyebrows the Queen indicated the chair on which Sir Claude had been sitting, now with a damp patch staining the satin. Silently the young man bore the chair away, while the Queen gathered up her book and her cardigan preparatory to going into the garden.
    By the time the equerry returned with another chair she had stepped out onto the terrace. He put it down and with the skill of long practice quickly set the room to rights, spotting as he did so the Queen’s notebook lying on the floor. He picked it up and before replacing it on the desk stood for a moment wondering in the Queen’s absence if he might take a peep at the contents. Except at that moment Her Majesty reappeared in the doorway.
    “Thank you, Gerald,” she said and held out her hand.
    He gave her the book and she went out.
    “Shit,” said Gerald. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
    This note of self-reproach was not inappropriate as within days Gerald was no longer in attendance on Her Majesty and indeed no longer in the household at all, but back with his scarcely remembered regiment yomping in the rain over the moors of Northumberland. The speed and ruthlessness of his almost Tudor dispatch sent, as Sir Kevin would have put it, the right message and at least put paid to any further rumours of senile decay. Her Majesty was herself again.

    NOTHING Sir Claude had said carried any weight, but still she found herself thinking about it that evening at the Royal Albert Hall, where there was a special promenade concert in her honour. In the past music had never been much of a solace and had always been tinged with obligation, the repertoire familiar largely from concerts like this she had had to attend. Tonight, though, the music seemed more relevant.
    This was a voice, she thought, as a boy played the clarinet: Mozart, a voice everybody in the hall knew and recognised though Mozart had been dead two hundred years. And she remembered Helen Schlegel in Howards End putting pictures to Beethoven at the concert in the Queen’s Hall that Forster describes, Beethoven’s another voice that everyone knew.
    The boy finished, the audience applauded and, clapping too, she leaned over towards another of the party as if sharing her appreciation. But what she wanted to say was that, old as she was, renowned as she was, no one knew her voice. And in the car taking them back she suddenly said: “I have no voice.”
    “Not surprised,” said the duke. “Too damned hot. Throat, is it?”
    It was a sultry night and unusually for her she woke in the early