In Royal Service to the Queen

by Tessa Arlen

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  • • •

  “Crawfie!” Margaret swanned through the schoolroom door, pulling Susan on a leash behind her. “You are back—finally! We have missed you so much.” Susan dug her back paws into the carpet, her head down. “Susan was behaving like a little animal—she bit Dookie again—so Mummy says it’s leash time.

  “Thank you for your birthday card, by the way. It would have been so much better if we could have celebrated here, instead of hateful old Balmoral.” She tossed Susan’s leash on the floor and sat down in a chair: her head thrown back and her eyes closed, with the world-weary air of a woman who had been tried beyond her endurance. “You would never believe how boring Balmoral can be.” She raised her head to look at me. “You are so lucky not to have to go: all that endless heather; all those detestable craggy views. It just goes on and on.” Her glance flicked around my room. “That’s a pretty hat; where on earth did you get it?”

  “Edin—”

  “Of course, Lilibet spent every day with Papa, stalking deer! Such a pointless waste of time.” She raised her arms in a languorous stretch. “Crawfie, it’s wonderful to be back in London.” A delicate yawn of boredom. “I just came to say hullo. Now, I can’t stop for long. I must have my hair washed, because Mummy’s invited Johnny Dalkeith and Sunny Blandford for dinner. Do you think, if I twist her arm, she’ll let me go out dancing at the 400 with them?”

  “I shouldn’t bank . . .”

  Margaret rolled her eyes at the irritating habits of parents, and I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to stop myself from laughing. Was this gorgeous sophisticate the Margaret Rose of the tantrum years? She had left for Scotland an untidy girl and had come back a woman of the world—or at least an elegant parody of one.

  “My goodness, Margaret, how you have come along. You have grown, surely?”

  “Not in inches, though, unfortunately.” She held out a slender foot clad in a high-heeled peep-toe shoe.

  “Aha!” I said.

  “Yes, no stuffy old Norman Hartnell for me—the dress and the shoes came from Paris, but don’t tell Mummy or Papa. I saved all my coupons for them. Alah thought I was buying underwear; that’s why I’m here, because she was so furious with me when this dress arrived!” The gleam of delight in her eyes was alluringly softened by long, sooty lashes. Is she wearing mascara? I peered into her face. She was certainly wearing lipstick. She laughed as I stepped back to take in the whole effect of her new wardrobe and obligingly undraped herself from the chair. The hemline of her silk voile dress floated a hair above her knees, revealing the curve of pretty legs sheathed in sheer nylon; the wide belt emphasized a tiny waist and the rounded curve of her hips. “Can’t stay, Crawfie . . .” She undulated across the room in a perfect imitation of Betty Grable in The Dolly Sisters, high-stepping over Susan and looking at me over her shoulder.

  As she reached the door, it opened again for Lilibet’s entrance. Her lightly tanned face and glossy hair shouted, “I’ve spent every single day in northern country air.”

  “Crawfie, welcome home; we have missed you so much.” Her sincerity was absolute.

  I gazed at the two sisters standing in front of me, Margaret in her elegant postwar French finery and Lilibet in a skirt with an uneven hem and a faded blue blouse. My girls! Both utterly different and at the same time so very alike. I held out my arms, and when they leant their pretty heads on my shoulders, all my homesickness and regret at leaving George began to slowly ebb from pain to acceptance. I am needed here: this is the job.

  “How bonny you look: the Scottish air has done you both the power of good. And Their Majesties?”

  “You will find out at teatime.” Margaret was off toward the door. “Simply must dash.” And she was gone, leaving a whiff of an expensive scent in the air and the sense that an entire world was waiting for her: a world of debonair men in superbly cut suits who drove long, shiny, low-slung cars to take her to dimly lit clubs where dance bands played until dawn.

  Lilibet watched her sister leave and then glanced at me. “She shut herself away in a small sitting room for hours at Balmoral, reading stacks of fashion magazines, listening to her record player, and existing on tiny little meals served to her on a tray. She even practiced smoking—I thought Alah was going to have a heart attack. She ate oranges to disguise the smoke on her breath. You have to talk to her, Crawfie.” Lilibet frowned. “She was absolutely impossible. And it’s all because I have Bobo as my dresser and my own apartment in the palace.” She took up her habitual perch on the window seat, with a grateful Susan on her lap. “Terrible about Japan, isn’t it? I can’t see how they will ever recover.”

  While the Japanese people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been dying under a blow so formidable, so profoundly total in its destruction, I had been strolling through pine woods, full of egg-and-cress sandwiches, hand in hand with George.

  “Thousands upon thousands died—just like that. And Britain had to agree to it, the bombing, because of the Quebec Agreement. Papa was devastated.”

  I nodded. That morning, when I had read every horrifying news report on the consequence of ignoring a new world power and seen the photograph of the gigantic mushroom cloud sixty thousand feet high, I had heard that split second of fear and terror as mothers, children, babies, and frail elderly people were thrown upward to die in a collision of fire, smoke, and the remnants of their world. I had combed newspapers for accounts and had worried over reports that had justified the use of this terrifying new bomb. I wondered how we could live with an act so amoral, so cruel.

  “I am struggling, Lilibet—desperately trying to come to terms with what America believed it was right to do.”

  Felt it was right to do? I know my face showed my horror as she lifted her eyes to gaze serenely at me, as if we were discussing the weather.

  She faltered. “But the American government did warn them, though, didn’t they? They asked for an unconditional surrender, and the Japanese emperor didn’t even respond. I suppose the Americans felt it was the only solution.”

  I realized with a bolt of chilling clarity that this sort of conversation with Lilibet was a huge mistake. She had been trained not to express her political views, and here she was displaying the sort of detachment that appalled me. And I didn’t want to be appalled by Lilibet, not when I was giving up so much for her.

  “It is an awful thing, this new A-bomb,” she observed pacifically.

  “An awful thing?” I simply couldn’t help myself. “It is a . . . a moral disaster . . . a world disaster! Whoever thought of, and then made . . . a thing that could do so much wicked damage is a demon. A godforsaken demon! Don’t you remember how devastated you were, Lilibet, when we drove in from Windsor on the morning after the war in Europe ended? Don’t you remember how shocked you were at the chaos, the upheaval, and the terrible waste caused by the Blitz and the V-2 bombs? Not to mention what we did to cities like Dresden?”

  “Dresden?” Her eyes were wide with astonishment at my anger. I knew that the last thing I should do was even touch on the horrors of Dresden.

  “What happened to us all in Europe was outrageous: a horror against humanity, but nothing to what those poor souls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki experienced in the last moment of their lives. What happened to their world was . . . unconscionable.” I stumbled to the window and threw it open. I leaned out, hands on the stone sill, to cool my hot face and breathe the mercifully uncontaminated clear air lifting in cool drafts from a garden so exquisite in its late-summer glory that it made my heart ache for the wreckage of Japan.

  I looked over my shoulder at Lilibet; her face was flushed with bewilderment. I was quite sure that she had never seen her solid, dependable governess quite so beside herself before. I had broken one of the queen’s rules. I was not playing the Windsor game: if you find something upsetting or distressing, the best thing to do is ignore it. Better that than to overreact.


  And if you can’t ignore it, I fumed, push your head down underneath the silk cushions on the sofa, stay there, and count to ten, until the ugliness passes. And when you emerge, do so with composure, dignity, and a gracious smile.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t talk about it,” Lilibet suggested.

  “Most certainly we should not!” I responded with more asperity than she could have possibly wished for.

  A pause from Her Royal Highness before she said, “I heard from Philip the other day. Unfortunately, he will not be coming home for a few months.” Her tone was flat and unemotional. “Now that we have liberated Singapore, he has to stay and help bring home all our prisoners of war.”

  I struggled to subdue my trembling voice when I answered. “Prisoners of war in Singapore?” How many more hideous facts about the war in Asia were still to come? I cleared the emotion out of my throat. “Are there many?”

  She darted a quick glance at me and licked her lips, wearing a slightly worried frown as she tried to decide how much of this catastrophe she should reveal. I tried to imagine cool mountain brooks and lambs in springtime to steady my voice. “It’s all right, Lilibet, you can tell me. I won’t explode.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” But her gaze was still uneasy. “Yes, Crawfie, there are many prisoners: thousands, in fact. Philip says mostly British, New Zealand, and Australian POWs. The Japanese made their prisoners of war build a railroad all the way up through Malaya, Burma, and into Thailand so they could invade India. Countless died building it: Asians mostly, and . . . Europeans. He says Singapore is in chaos, with trainloads of POWs coming down from the peninsula, and there are not enough hospitals for them. It will be some time before we see Philip again.”

  I nodded, trying to keep an impassive shop front, but I could hear my breath still ragged with outrage: one man and a handful of psychopaths, greedy for power, had started this horrifying mess six years ago.

  I bit down on words I would regret. I would not say that even if the Japanese military had annihilated half the world and enslaved thousands, we were surely sinking to their grotesque level of inhumanity by using the atom bomb.

  “Crawfie?”

  “Yes, Lilibet?”

  “I agree with you, you know.”

  I borrowed an expression from George: eyebrows raised; corners of the mouth turned down.

  “I mean I really agree with you. It is barbaric what happened . . .” I noticed she did not mention who the barbarians were. “But you know how it is, don’t you?”

  I took out a handkerchief, blew my nose, and stowed it away back in my pocket. “Yes, of course I do. And there’s no need to explain anything, Lilibet. I must be on edge to be so . . . so emotional.” My outburst had probably been considered ill-bred, my lack of restraint vulgar. I knew who had brought up this kind, well-meaning, and compassionate young woman to be so terribly repressed. It is your fault, I said to Alah and the queen, standing shoulder to shoulder in my mind, not Lilibet’s.

  “Won’t you tell me how Their Majesties are, after their break in Balmoral? Are they reconciled to Philip?” I struggled with my still burning anger. Struggled to inquire with polite interest, and not like some out-of-control hoyden who could only embarrass and cause more pain.

  She straightened her back, and her mother’s tone was so clear in her voice I had to stop myself from laughing. “No rill chenge on thet front, Crawfee. We have reached a stellmate: Mummy, Papa, and I.” She smiled at my palpable relief. “But I worked on Papa when we were alone together, and he says that when Philip comes home I may invite him to the palace so that he and Mummy can get to know him better.” Her gaze was earnest. “And we are good at waiting, aren’t we? The war taught us how to do that very well.” She was appealing to me to not be angry with her for things she had no control over, and I rushed to reassure her.

  “The time will simply fly by now that you are taking on more official engagements, Lilibet. There’s nothing like being busy to get through the day.”

  She smiled her princess smile, and lifting her chin, she said with the immense pride of a young woman who had led an overprotected life with emphasis only on doing the expected, “I’m going to Belfast early next spring to launch HMS Eagle, Crawfie. It is an absolutely massive aircraft carrier. Mummy was going to go, but Papa and Tommy Lascelles said that I should, that it was time for me to do something more than just visit hospitals.” She’s been launched, I thought. The dress rehearsals are over; from now on it will just be Margaret and me.

  She got up from our window seat. “I’m here”—her smile glowed in her healthy face—“with an official invitation. To invite you to tea with Papa, Mummy, Margaret, and me.” I was touched by her desire to include me; it was as if she was reassuring me that even though she would be off christening aircraft carriers and inspecting hospitals and factories, she still had time for me.

  “Thank you, Lilibet. It will be very nice to say hullo to the family.” And, I thought, to see how your papa is doing. It was important for me to gauge the mood of the entire royal family, the “we four” of the Windsors, before I broached the subject of my engagement to the queen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  October 1945

  Buckingham Palace, London

  I had no idea you had such a sweet tooth, Crawfie.” The queen’s appraising stare when I joined the family for tea had unnerved me into taking a large slice of chocolate biscuit cake. The king, as if accurately assessing his wife’s mood, lit a cigarette, looked at his watch, and said, “Have to be off in a minute; Townsend’s waiting for me.”

  “You should have asked him to join us, Papa.” For all her newfound chic, Margaret pouted like a six-year-old denied a treat.

  “We can’t bore Peter with schoolroom chitchat.” The queen turned to her youngest daughter in a dazzle of shining teeth.

  “We’ll ask him next time, Margaret.” The king blew a stream of smoke down his long nose: an aging dragon whose inner cauldron had long since ceased to boil. He stared down at his plate at a diminutive crustless sandwich with one tiny corner missing before he looked up, and I averted my eyes. He had drunk half a cup of tea, forced down a quarter of an inch of sandwich, and smoked four or five cigarettes in quick succession as we women nibbled and sipped our way through a spread that could have fed a large family for a week. I thought of my mother existing on eggs from her hens and vegetables from her garden—it would be a struggle for her this winter when they stopped laying and she had eaten her last winter cabbage.

  “My greatest concern is that although Margaret’s French appears to be fluent, her grammar is faulty. So, let’s have more French, Crawfie, please, and less history. Margaret only seems to be able to converse in the present tense—I can’t imagine why!”

  Why is she doing this now, in front of the family? I sat in my chair, a chastised child, as the queen pecked holes in my curriculum for the autumn. Her voice was reasonable in tone, but her eyes were gray frost as she tore a slice of bread and butter into pieces and tossed them to her pack of snapping corgis. No wonder, I fumed in hot-faced silence, her dogs are so fat; that’s pure blasted butter she is throwing at them.

  I could feel resentment and anger burning up inside me and swallowed down the defensive replies that threatened to burst out of me. After all, it was she who had done away with Mademoiselle, insisting that I was more than capable of teaching the girls French—and now this? I squashed down my offended feelings, refusing to acknowledge my hurt. You are doing this woman a favor, I reminded myself. Putting your life with George on hold to ensure a smooth transition as the girls take up their royal duties, and helping them back into the swim of things at Buckingham Palace.

  “Mon français parlé est parfait, et au moins mon accent est meilleur que le vôtre, Maman.” Margaret tripped perfect French off her tongue, her hands folded in her lap, her mouth a moue of disapproval.

  “Mais non, ma
petite. Ce n’est pas vrai! Pas du tout, eh, Crawfee?” the queen cooed as she invited me with an icy glare to join them. If I weren’t so disconcerted by her determination to correct me in front of her family, I would have shrugged off her cold stare and launched in. The queen returned to her French conversation sounding like a plump and frazzled English tourist with a phrase book in her hand, with her daughter a fierce little Parisienne with her eloquent, rapid French.

  The queen threw a challenging look at me. “Et vous, Crawfee,” she challenged in her schoolgirl French. “Qu’est que vous pensez?”

  Do not ask me what I think when I am this upset, was my unspoken reply. How I managed to say in such a cool voice, “Je pense que le vocabulaire française de Margaret s’est considerablement developpe,” I have no idea. But it was a response that went unheard, as the queen and her youngest daughter fought a battle of French verbs in shrill voices.

  A polite voice that betrayed only the slightest tension asked, “C-C-C-Crawfie, you are from Scotland. Does your family enjoy stalking?”

  Hysterical laughter boiled up in my throat, and I gulped it down. Stalking? What is wrong with them all today? Where did he think the Crawford family would stalk deer? Down Limekiln’s short High Street to the butcher to join the queue for the last wild rabbit?

  “No, Your Majesty, not in the last two hundred years.”

  He nodded at me through a haze of smoke. “Relaxing way to spend a day,” he said. “You should come up to Balmoral with us—you like walking in the open air, d-do-don’t you?”

  “I do, sir, very much,” I said, taking the opportunity of a quiet aside with him to consider the state of his health. He looked a lot better than he had eight weeks ago. There was more color in his face, the tick that had made his left eyelid jump uncontrollably had almost disappeared, but he was still too thin, too hollow-eyed. He nodded, stubbed out his cigarette, and lit another almost immediately. Inhaling smoke deep into his lungs, he turned to join in the French conversation as he exhaled. But he wasn’t quick enough to keep up with Margaret. The fingers of his left hand beat a light tattoo on the arm of his chair, and I noticed that his long, thin legs were crossed tightly at the ankle. Such tension! He dropped out of the French argument and returned to his inner preoccupation as if it demanded his complete attention. No wonder his favorite occupation is shooting, I decided. He can bang away with his guns for hours, effectively blocking out all conversation and obliterating his anxieties with each fallen creature.