The Uncommon Reader: A Novella

by Alan Bennett

  And all, though she did not say this, in paperback and so handbag-size. A postcard was immediately dispatched to Norman telling him to get those few that were out of print from the library to await her return. Oh, what treats!

  But Norman was no longer there.

  The day before he was due to depart for the delights of Stockton on Tees, Norman was called into Sir Kevin’s office. The prime minister’s special adviser had said that Norman should be sacked; Sir Kevin disliked the special adviser; he didn’t like Norman much but he disliked the special adviser more, and it was this that saved Norman’s bacon. Besides, Sir Kevin felt the sack was vulgar. Norman should not get the sack. There was a neater solution.

  ‘Her Majesty is always anxious for the betterment of her employees,’ the private secretary said benignly, ‘and though she is more than satisfied with your work she wonders if you have ever thought of university?’

  ‘University?’ said Norman, who hadn’t.

  ‘Specifically, the University of East Anglia. They have a very good English Department and indeed a School of Creative Writing. I have only to mention the names’ – Sir Kevin looked down at his pad – ‘of Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain and Kazuo Ishiguro . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Norman. ‘We’ve read those.’

  Wincing at the ‘we’, the private secretary said that he thought East Anglia would suit Norman very well.

  ‘What with?’ said Norman. ‘I’ve no money.’

  ‘That will not be a problem. Her Majesty, you see, is anxious not to hold you back.’

  ‘I think I would rather stay here,’ said Norman. ‘It’s an education in itself.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said the private secretary. ‘That will not be possible. Her Majesty has someone else in mind. Of course,’ he smiled helpfully, ‘your job in the kitchen is always open.’

  Thus it was that when the Queen returned from Canada there was no Norman perched on his usual seat in the corridor. His chair was empty, not that there was a chair anymore or that comforting pile of books she had got used to finding on her bedside table. More immediately, there was no one to whom she could discourse on the excellences of Alice Munro.

  ‘He wasn’t popular, ma’am,’ said Sir Kevin.

  ‘He was popular with me,’ said the Queen. ‘Where has he gone?’

  ‘No idea, ma’am.’

  Norman, being a sensitive boy, wrote the Queen a long, chatty letter about the courses he was taking and the reading he had to do, but when he got a reply beginning, ‘Thank you for your letter in which Her Majesty was most interested’, he knew he had been eased out, though whether by the Queen or by her private secretary he wasn’t sure.

  If Norman didn’t know who had engineered his departure, the Queen herself was in no doubt. Norman had gone the way of the travelling library and the case of books that ended up in Calgary. Like the book she had hidden behind the cushion in the state coach, he was lucky not to have been exploded. And she missed him, there was no doubt. But no letter came, no note, and there was nothing for it but grimly to go on. It wouldn’t put a stop to her reading.

  That the Queen was not more troubled by Norman’s sudden departure might seem surprising and to reflect poorly on her character. But sudden absences and abrupt departures had always been a feature of her life. She was seldom told, for instance, when anyone was ill, distress and even fellow-feeling something that being Queen entitled her to be without, or so her courtiers thought. When, as unfortunately happened, death did claim a servant or even sometimes a friend, it was often the first time that the Queen had heard that anything was amiss. ‘We mustn’t worry Her Majesty’ was a guiding principle for all her servants.

  Norman, of course, had not died, just gone to the University of East Anglia, though, as the equerries saw it, this was much the same thing, as he had gone from Her Majesty’s life and thus no longer existed, his name never mentioned by the Queen or anyone else. But the Queen should not be blamed on that score, on that the equerries agreed; the Queen should never be blamed. People died, people left and (more and more) people got into the papers. For her they were all departures of one sort or another. They left but she went on.

  Less to her credit, before Norman’s mysterious departure the Queen had begun to wonder if she was outgrowing him . . . or rather, out-reading him. Once upon a time he had been a humble and straightforward guide to the world of books. He had advised her as to what to read and had not hesitated to say when he thought she was not ready for a book yet. Beckett, for instance, he had kept from her for a long while and Nabokov and it was only gradually he had introduced her to Philip Roth (with Portnoy’s Complaint quite late on in the sequence).

  More and more, though, she had read what she fancied and Norman had done the same. They talked about what they were reading but increasingly she felt her life and experience gave her the advantage; books could only take one so far. She had learned, too, that Norman’s preferences could sometimes be suspect. Other things being equal he still tended to prefer gay authors, hence her acquaintance with Genet. Some she liked – the novels of Mary Renault, for instance, fascinated her – but others of a deviant persuasion she was less keen on; Denton Welch, for instance (a favourite of Norman’s), whom she felt was rather unhealthy; Isherwood (no time for all the meditation). As a reader she was brisk and straightforward; she didn’t want to wallow in anything.

  With no Norman to talk to, the Queen now found she was conducting lengthier discussions with herself and putting more and more of her thoughts on paper, so that her notebooks multiplied and widened in scope. ‘One recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.’

  ‘I was giving the CH once, I think it was to Anthony Powell, and we were discussing bad behaviour. Notably well-behaved himself and even conventional, he remarked that being a writer didn’t excuse one from being a human being. Whereas (one didn’t say this) being Queen does. I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.’

  In addition to thoughts such as these she found herself noting descriptions of people she met, not necessarily all of them famous: their oddities of behaviour, their turns of phrase, as well as the stories she was told, often in confidence. When some scandalous report about the royal family appeared in the newspapers, the real facts went into her notebook. When some scandal escaped public notice, that too went down, and all of them told in that sensible, down-to-earth tone of voice she was coming to recognise and even relish as her own style.

  In the absence of Norman her reading, though it did not falter, did change direction. While she still ordered books from the London Library and from booksellers, with Norman gone it was no longer their secret. Now she had to ask the lady-in-waiting, who spoke to the comptroller and then drew the petty cash. It was a wearisome process, which she would occasionally circumvent by asking one of the more peripheral grandchildren to get her books. They were happy to oblige and pleased to be taken notice of at all, the public scarcely knowing they existed. But more and more now the Queen began to take books out of her own libraries, particularly the one at Windsor where, though the choice of modern books was not unlimited, the shelves were stacked with many editions of the classic texts, some of them, of course, autographed – Balzac, Turgenev, Fielding, Hardy – books which once she would have thought beyond her but which now she sailed through, pencil always in hand – and in the process, incidentally, becoming reconciled even to Henry James, whose divagations she now took in her stride: ‘After all’, as she wrote in her notebook, ‘novels are not necessarily written as the crow flies.’ Seeing her sitting in the window to catch the last of the light, the librarian thought that a more assiduous reader these ancient shelves had not seen since the days of George III.

  The librarian at Windsor had been one of many who had urged on Her Majesty the charms of Jane Austen, but being told on all sid
es how much ma’am would like her books put ma’am off altogether. Besides, she had handicaps as a reader of Jane Austen that were peculiarly her own. The essence of Jane Austen lies in minute social distinctions, distinctions which the Queen’s unique position made it difficult for her to grasp. There was such a chasm between the monarch and even her grandest subject that the social differences beyond that were somewhat telescoped. So the social distinctions of which Jane Austen made so much seemed of even less consequence to the Queen than they did to the ordinary reader, thus making the novels much harder going. To begin with, at any rate, Jane Austen was practically a work of entomology, the characters not quite ants but seeming to the royal reader so much alike as to require a microscope. It was only as she gained in understanding of both literature and human nature that they took on individuality and charm.

  Feminism, too, got short shrift, at least to begin with and for the same reason, the separations of gender like the differences of class as nothing compared with the gulf that separated the Queen from the rest of humanity.

  But whether it was Jane Austen or feminism or even Dostoevsky, the Queen eventually got round to it and to much else besides, but never without regret. Years ago she had sat next to Lord David Cecil at a dinner in Oxford and had been at a loss for conversation. He, she found, had written books on Jane Austen and lots besides, and these days she would have relished the encounter. But Lord David was dead and so it was too late. Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.

  The household, too, went on, running as smoothly as it always did, the moves from London to Windsor to Norfolk to Scotland all achieved with no seeming effort, at any rate on her part, so that sometimes she felt almost surplus to the procedure, the same transferences and translations accomplished regardless of the person at their centre. It was a ritual of departure and arrival in which she was just a piece of luggage; the most important piece, there was no disputing that, but luggage nevertheless.

  In one respect these peregrinations went better than they had done in the past, in that the personage around whom they revolved generally had her nose in a book. She got into the car at Bucking-ham Palace and got out at Windsor without ever leaving the side of Captain Crouchback in the evacuation of Crete. She flew to Scotland happy in the (occasionally exasperating) company of Tristram Shandy, and when she got bored with him Trollope (Anthony) was never far away. It all made her a pliant and undemanding traveller. True, she wasn’t always quite as on the dot as she used to be and the motor waiting under the canopy in the courtyard was a familiar sight, the duke increasingly tetchy in the back. But when she eventually hurried into the car she was never tetchy; after all, she had her book.

  Her household, though, had no such solace, and the equerries in particular were becoming increasingly restive and critical. Urbane and exquisitely mannered though he is, the equerry is essentially only a stage manager; always aware when deference is due, he (or occasionally she) knows, too, that this is a performance and he is in charge of it, with Her Majesty playing the leading role.

  The audience or the spectators – and where the Queen is concerned everyone is a spectator – know that it is a performance, while liking to tell themselves that it isn’t, quite, and to think, performance notwithstanding, that they have occasionally caught a glimpse of behaviour that is more ‘natural’, more ‘real’ – the odd overheard remark, for instance (‘I could murder a gin and tonic’ from the late Queen Mother, ‘Bloody dogs’ from the Duke of Edinburgh), or the Queen sitting down at a garden party and thankfully kicking off her shoes. In truth, of course, these supposedly unguarded moments are just as much a performance as the royal family at its most hieratic. This show, or sideshow, might be called playing at being normal and is as contrived as the most formal public appearance, even though those who witness or overhear it think that this is the Queen at her most human and natural. Formal or informal, it is all part of that self-presentation in which the equerries collaborate and which, these apparently natural moments apart, is from the public’s point of view virtually seamless.

  It only gradually came home to the equerries that these supposedly sincere moments, glimpses of the Queen as she ‘really is’, were occurring less often. Diligently though Her Majesty might carry out all her duties, that was all she was doing, and never now pretending, as it were, to break ranks and seldom coming out with supposedly unrehearsed remarks (‘Careful,’ she might say as she pins a medal on a young man, ‘I don’t want to stab you through the heart’), remarks that could be taken home and cherished, along with the invitation card, the special car-park pass and the map of the palace precincts.

  These days she was formal, smiling and seemingly sincere but without frills and with none of the supposedly off-the-cuff asides with which she was wont to enliven the proceedings. ‘Poor show,’ thought the equerries, and that is exactly what they meant, ‘a poor show’ in which Her Majesty had turned in a dull performance. But they were not in a position to draw attention to this omission as they, too, colluded in the pretence that such moments were natural and unpremeditated, a spontaneous overflowing of Her Majesty’s sense of fun.

  It had been an investiture.

  ‘Less spontaneous this morning, ma’am,’ one of the bolder equerries ventured to say.

  ‘Was I?’ said the Queen, who would once have been most put out at even this mildest of criticisms, though these days it scarcely impinged. ‘I think I know why it is. You see, Gerald, as they kneel one looks down on the tops of people’s heads a good deal and from that perspective even the most unsympathetic personality seems touching: the beginnings of a bald patch, the hair growing over the collar. One’s feelings are almost maternal.’

  The equerry, with whom she’d never shared such confidences before and who ought to have been flattered, simply felt awkward and embarrassed. This was a truly human side to the monarch of which he’d never been previously aware and which (unlike its counterfeit versions) he did not altogether welcome. And whereas the Queen herself thought that such feelings probably arose out of her reading books, the young man felt it might be that she was beginning to show her age. Thus it was that the dawn of sensibility was mistaken for the onset of senility.

  Immune to embarrassment herself, as she was to any that she might cause, the Queen would once not have noticed the young man’s confusion. But observing it now she resolved in the future to share her thoughts less promiscuously, which was a pity in a way as it was what many in the nation longed for. Instead she determined to restrict her confidences to her notebooks, where they could do no harm.

  The Queen had never been demonstrative; it was not in her upbringing, but more and more these days, particularly in the period following Princess Diana’s death, she was being required to go public about feelings she would have preferred to keep to herself. At that time, though, she had not yet begun to read, and it was only now that she understood that her predicament was not unique and that she shared it, among others, with Cordelia. She wrote in her notebook: ‘Though I do not always understand Shakespeare, Cordelia’s “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth” is a sentiment I can readily endorse. Her predicament is mine.’

  Though the Queen was always discreet about writing in her notebooks, her equerry was not reassured. He had once or twice caught her at it and thought that this, too, pointed to potential derangement. What had Her Majesty to note down? She never used to do it, and like any change of behaviour in the elderly it was readily put down to decay.

  ‘Probably Alzheimer’s,’ said another of the young men. ‘You have to write things down for them, don’t you?’ and this, taken together with Her Majesty’s growing indifference to appearances, made her attendants fear the worst.

  That the Queen might be thought to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease was shocking in the obvious way, the ‘human’ and compassionate way, but to Gerald and the other equerries it was more subtly deplorable. It seemed to him pitiable that Her Majesty, who
se life had always been so sequestered, should now have to share this undignified depletion with so many of her subjects, her deterioration, he felt, deserving a royal enclosure where her behaviour (and that of monarchs generally) be allowed a larger degree of latitude and even waywardness before it attracted the levelling denomination of Alzheimer and his all-too-common disease. It could have been a syllogism, if Gerald had known what a syllogism was: Alzheimer’s is common; the Queen is not common; therefore the Queen has not got Alzheimer’s.

  Nor had she, of course, and in fact her faculties had never been sharper, and unlike her equerry she would certainly have known what a syllogism was.

  Besides, apart from writing in her notebooks and her 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 encyclopedic 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 Majesty’s personal attendants began to prepare for a lengthy decline.