The Uncommon Reader

downsizing and all the books on that shelf are free.”
    “You mean, I can have it?” She clutched the book to her. “I’m glad I came. Good afternoon, Mr Seakins. More Cecil Beaton?”
    Norman showed her the book he was looking at, in this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds.
    “Some of them,” she said, “some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite definitely smudged.”
    “I think that was his style then, ma’am,” said Norman. “He’s actually quite a good draughtsman.”
    The Queen looked at Norman again. “You work in the kitchens?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    She hadn’t really intended to take out another book, but decided that now she was here it was perhaps easier to do it than not, though, regarding what book to choose, she felt as baffled as she had done the previous week. The truth was she didn’t really want a book at all and certainly not another Ivy Compton-Burnett, which was too hard going altogether. So it was lucky that this time her eye happened to fall on a reissued volume of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love . She picked it up. “Now. Didn’t her sister marry the Mosley man?”
    Mr Hutchings said he believed she did.
    “And the mother-in-law of another sister was my mistress of the robes?”
    “I don’t know about that, ma’am.”
    “Then of course there was the rather sad sister who had the fling with Hitler. And one became a Communist. And I think there was another besides. But this is Nancy?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Good.”
    Novels seldom came as well connected as this and the Queen felt correspondingly reassured, so it was with some confidence that she gave the book to Mr Hutchings to be stamped.
    The Pursuit of Love turned out to be a fortunate choice and in its way a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work.
    As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching his hot-water bottle, the duke heard her laugh out loud. He put his head round the door. “All right, old girl?”
    “Of course. I’m reading.”
    “Again?” And he went off, shaking his head.
    The next morning she had a little sniffle and, having no engagements, stayed in bed saying she felt she might be getting flu. This was uncharacteristic and also not true; it was actually so that she could get on with her book.
    ‘The Queen has a slight cold’ was what the nation was told, but what it was not told, and what the Queen herself did not know, was that this was only the first of a series of accommodations, some of them far-reaching, that her reading was going to involve.
    The following day the Queen had one of her regular sessions with her private secretary, with as one of the items on the agenda what these days is called human resources.
    “In my day,” she had told him, “it was called personnel.” Although actually it wasn’t. It was called ‘the servants’. She mentioned this, too, knowing it would provoke a reaction.
    “That could be misconstrued, ma’am,” said Sir Kevin. “One’s aim is always to give the public no cause for offence. ‘Servants’ sends the wrong message.”
    “Human resources,” said the Queen, “sends no message at all. At least not to me. However, since we’re on the subject of human resources, there is one human resource currently working in the kitchens whom I would like promoted, or at any rate brought upstairs.”
    Sir Kevin had never heard of Seakins but on consulting several underlings Norman was eventually located.
    “I cannot understand,” said Her Majesty, “what he is doing in the kitchen in the first place. He’s obviously a young man of some intelligence.”
    “Not dolly enough,” said the equerry, though to the private secretary not to the Queen. “Thin, ginger-haired. Have a heart.”
    “Madam seems to like him,” said Sir Kevin. “She wants him on her floor.”
    Thus it was that Norman found himself emancipated from washing dishes and fitted (with some difficulty) into a page’s uniform and brought into waiting, where one of his first jobs was predictably to do with the library.
    Not free the following Wednesday