by William Kuhn
Among the other junior officers, few had wives or local girlfriends, so they were more or less available for constant horseplay, drinking, and messing about. Near bedtime someone would often kick a ball into the corridor. One by one they’d emerge from their rooms, some as spectators, some as players, and a rough game of football would be played. Often they would end up in rugger scrums unknown to the playing of football on a pitch. It was nice to be wrestling with several mates. The feel of their flesh and muscle was reassuring. You could see the work they were doing at the gym. You also felt you could count on a man in a foxhole whom you’d once tackled, laughing and protesting and swearing and genuinely enjoying it all underneath a veneer of simulated anger.
Working for The Queen, and seeing her on a daily basis, was a tremendous honor. He knew it was a high point of his army career, but he was still learning how to do the job and suffered from the impatient corrections of senior members of the Household. He recalled absentmindedly writing “the queen” in a memorandum about some arrangements he was making for her transport on a day when she was to be away from the palace. The private secretary had crossed it out with his fountain pen and written “The Queen,” with bold initial capitals, and Luke felt not only foolish, but wondered at the departure from practice everywhere else in the world, where he could think of few other people described in that many caps. Nor was there anything like the camaraderie of Germany in the palace. Luke had a small flat in London while he was on secondment to the Royal Household from the army, but he sometimes stayed the night in the palace if they had early travel the following day. The door to his room shut noiselessly and no one came out into the corridor, even for a chat, after eleven at night.
If there were no official dinner or other evening engagement, Luke usually stopped by The Queen’s sitting room before leaving for the evening. He would ask her if there were anything more she’d like. Most of the time her answer was a not unfriendly negative as she looked up from the news on television or a racing paper she’d spread out on the sofa next to her. If she were in an expansive mood, which was rarely, she might say, “I suppose you’re in too much of a hurry to have a drink with a granny,” her eye twinkling—it was the side of The Queen that still surprised him the most. Of course, she was not to be refused. He tried to rise to her tease with something in the same spirit. “Well, if Ma’am will take a drink from the hands of this establishment’s most junior barman, he’d be delighted.” A smile was The Queen’s assent. He didn’t have to ask her what she’d like. A potent combination of gin and Dubonnet was her usual, and, like the senior officers at whose tables he’d sometimes dined, she never acted as if she’d sipped anything stronger than lemonade.
Luke’s duties at the palace were mainly social. He often managed the local transport for what were called “awaydays,” the palace lingo, recalling an old British Rail ticket promotion, for when The Queen travelled to do duty outside London. It was harder work keeping a clear head through long luncheons with many courses and different wines. He could usually handle the light conversation if he concentrated on what he was doing, but with this lady-in-waiting it was a bit trickier, as she instantly set off over more difficult terrain and he had to follow. After a pause, Anne had begun, “My father was in both wars, First and Second. He’d never talk to anyone about them. Even in his cups. Even to me. I was his favorite.”
“Well, it’s not polite, is it? I expect he didn’t want you to know that they sat around a great deal. Were bored. Wasted time. Played with their walking sticks and neck scarves. No one wants the family to know that.”
“Ah yes. But men did fail to come back. There were horrors. We knew more than they thought we did.”
A chill went up Luke’s spine. He was not sure he could maintain his insouciance in the face of her well-aimed darts of sympathy. In Iraq there had been horrors. He had told no one about what happened to Andy.
At Paxton & Whitfield on Jermyn Street the air smelled of cowpats and straw. The shop sold the most expensive cheeses in London. It was always cool and damp there. The sales clerks were nearly all under the age of thirty. They wore wooly jumpers under their long aprons. Rajiv Laroia was an unpublished poet who worked there slicing and weighing cheese. A host of rich eccentrics who didn’t care about ingesting milk fat or cholesterol or paying London’s highest prices for cheese came into the shop. He secretly observed them, making notes about them in his journal the next morning. Sometimes odd phrases appeared in his dreams:
Ne t’inquiètes pas
Ne me quittes pas
Don’t worry, dear
Don’t leave me, dear
He wrote these down in his journal and hoped they’d later turn into poems.
His rich grandparents had come from India to live in England after the Second World War. Their money insulated them from some of the local prejudice, and many Englishmen were anyway in the habit of regarding Indian princes and high-caste Hindus as somehow related to their own homegrown nobility. Rajiv had no trouble fitting in at Eton. Outside of the metropolitan orbit, however, the Laroia family discovered that being brown could still be something of a liability. Rajiv as a boy had found out that even London wasn’t entirely safe. When he was twelve, on an afternoon he was returning home from having bought a plastic airplane kit at a hobby shop in Holborn, he’d taken a shortcut through an alley. Three boys about his age had started smashing bottles they picked up from a recycling bin uncomfortably near where he was walking. When he took off in the opposite direction, they ran after him, knocked him down, and took one of his shoes. They threw it under a delivery van just arriving at the other end of the alley. They laughed hysterically when the van stopped just on top of his shoe, called him a “Paki bastard,” and disappeared around the corner.
This incident convinced Rajiv’s parents and grandparents to send him back to India for a season. They were happy in England, but they would not have him being ashamed of his heritage. He should hold his head high. To that end, he attended an Indian boarding school, where his fellow students didn’t know what to think of him. He found Indian boys more conscious of the gradations of skin color than they were even in England. In England he was made fun of for being dark. In India they regarded him as so light-skinned that he was almost white. As his manners and accent were also more English than anyone else’s, a drama teacher at the school asked him to play Lord Mountbatten, the last English viceroy, in a school play about India’s winning independence from England in 1947.
Rajiv returned to England at the end of the year feeling as if he didn’t belong on either continent. He had been more seriously piqued by the English boys calling him a Paki bastard than by the vague humiliation of being asked to play Lord Mountbatten in the Indian school play. It was to the deeper insult that he felt drawn to return, as the well-meaning drama master hadn’t really made the same impression on him. His parents grew anxious that he should start seeing some Indian girls from good families who were near his age. He found himself more and more attracted to the sisters of his friends at Eton, whose vanilla cheeks grew strawberry when he talked to them. He couldn’t help thinking up metaphors for skin color because a girl’s skin was always the first thing he noticed about her.
He wasn’t afraid of people, so he could talk to anyone, whether it was persuading the man in the corner shop to sell him and his underaged friends a bottle of vodka, or discussing literature with the Provost’s wife at a tea party. He hadn’t studied hard, but his interest had been stirred by an English master’s asking him to read Shakespeare’s sonnets. He’d written some verse of his own that was considered good enough to get him a month’s fellowship at the Wordsworth Trust in the Lake District. While his friends were going off to gap years in places like Tanzania and Peru before university, Rajiv decided he’d spend his gap year in London, working at a cheese shop and trying to write poems.
He took several weeks’ unpaid leave from Paxton & Whitfield in London to take up
the fellowship that autumn and enjoyed fell walking in the rain, as well as the company of other poets around smoky fires. The local landowner leased some of his cottages to the Wordsworth Trust at a peppercorn rent as one of his philanthropies. The Queen happened to be staying privately with the landowner and turned up by surprise one day outside the cottage where Rajiv was staying while on a walk with the landowner. He had a new camera given to him by an indulgent aunt and picked this up to snap a picture of the sovereign. He didn’t feel as if he were doing her any harm. Her grandchildren, William and Harry, had been at Eton near enough to the same time as him, so it was just as if he were taking a snapshot of a mate’s grandmother on a school sports day. As he’d played Lord Mountbatten in the school play, he even had a feeling that he was vaguely related to her. She smiled and he snapped.
He’d shown the photo to someone at the shop who knew an editor at one of the tabloid newspapers. As something between a joke and a dare, they decided to offer it as bait and see whether the editor would bite on it. The other shop assistant acted as his agent, and to their surprise, the newspaper wanted it. The sale of the picture—The Queen standing in the rain, ankle deep in a puddle—had led to Rajiv receiving a check that was more than a month’s salary. He didn’t exactly need the money, but as the grandson of someone who’d struggled to pile up a fortune, the sum itself impressed him.
One afternoon a young woman in a scoop-necked dress came into the shop. She was wearing two strings of onyx beads. It was the first of the chillier October weather and the skin on her upper breasts was covered in goose bumps. He found this both touching and erotic. She asked if he knew Rajiv Laroia. “The one, the only, at your service,” said Rajiv, giving her at the same time a mock deferential wiggle of his head and neck. The woman rattled her onyx beads appreciatively, and as there was no one there but the two of them, opened her handbag. She handed him her card. She was from the tabloid newspaper that had bought his photo. They wondered whether they might pay him for more. “Of course,” said Rajiv. He wanted to be accommodating. “Trouble is, I don’t run into her that often.”
The newspaper had thought of that. They’d bribed one of the officers at Scotland Yard in the Royal Protection unit, an officer who’d seen the royal family living in luxury and editors of the tabloid press living in greater luxury still. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t take part. It was his job to vet the temporary staff employed for big events at the palace when extra help was needed. The newspaper paid him to pass Rajiv’s application to be hired as temporary kitchen staff. There was no question of any danger to the royal family or to their guests. It was Scotland Yard in cahoots with the press to provide the occasional scoop or surprise photograph. The paper wanted Rajiv to join the catering staff for an upcoming state banquet. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was making an official visit and the newspaper asked him to slip away from the kitchen to take more pictures of The Queen. In the immediate post-Diana generation they’d had success appealing to antimonarchical resentment in Britain, and what they required were more compromising photos. The young woman suggested one of The Queen drinking wine, or yawning, or in some other ungainly pose.
Rajiv had no particular love of the monarchy. Nor did he despise the royal family as some of the quality newspapers did. He had heard some catering gossip that the new chef at the palace was commissioning marvelous work. Working at Paxton & Whitfield had given Rajiv a new interest in cheese. The palace bought some of Paxton & Whitfield’s best cheeses: washed-rind Epoisses, Livarot, and Pont L’Evêque that expanded at room temperature and, when cut, allowed a lush wave of white to run across the cheese board. Although he had no views about the politics of the heir to the throne, he did think it was important for children to grow up knowing Shakespeare’s verse, one of Prince Charles’s public causes. The shop also sold some of the Duchy of Cornwall’s cheddar, which was the same color as an Elizabethan brick. He loved it. So perhaps going undercover in the royal kitchens would not be a bad thing. He might see what they were doing. If there was anything interesting, he’d photograph it.
The day arrived and Rajiv turned up at the side entrance of Buckingham Palace, wearing some checked trousers and a chef’s jacket he’d found in the window of a kitchen supply shop in Soho. He was met by an under chef, also smuggled in by the rogue Royal Protection officer, with a muttered message that he should try to make himself look busy as there really wasn’t a job for him to do. Having grown up in a household where suppers prepared by others appeared unceremoniously on the table, Rajiv had never taken much notice of food before. Working at the shop had given him a new behind-the-scenes look into the preparation of rare foodstuffs, so he now approached cooking as if he were an enthusiastic explorer on a new continent. Finding food well prepared and presented gave him the same pleasure as finding a poem that spoke to him. Both of them had a surprisingly evanescent magic. He circulated among the palace cooks and waiters, frankly admiring their work. He was amazed at what they’d accomplished. There were several cheese boards ready for passing that had hard and soft cheeses already breathing their uddery aroma into the late afternoon. As both a tribute and a tease to the Dutch cheese industry, someone had carved a huge round of English cheddar to look like the roofscape of the Dutch village of Gouda. Another expert carver had made a pair of Dutch wooden shoes out of a block of Stilton. These were to sit as centerpieces on tables in an anteroom where cocktails would be served before dinner. In the dining room itself, the long table was covered with a wintry scene of crystal and silver. The spectacle of it all astonished him. Seventeenth-century William and Mary vases from the Victoria and Albert Museum (so a curator told him as she rushed by with insurance forms) filled with orange autumn leaves, orange chrysanthemums, and orange roses, to mark the visiting head of the House of Orange, marched down the center of a long table. He couldn’t stop himself from snapping pictures of all this, though he knew it wasn’t his brief. Everyone assumed that if he’d got past security he was permitted to be taking pictures as official records for the Lord Steward.
His only chance at fulfilling the newspaper’s commission was when The Queen came downstairs at five in the afternoon to review the tables. She brought the Dutch Queen with her, and the two elderly ladies exclaimed and laughed delightedly at the townscape of Gouda. He photographed The Queen leaning over the cheese village, her skirt riding up over her legs to show well-shaped calves ending in leather pumps with blocky heels cut on the diagonal. “Not bad for eightysomething,” Rajiv thought to himself. The only photo he could get that was in the least compromising was a tiny chat between the two Queens on the terrace overlooking the garden. The Dutch Queen was smoking a cigarette with gusto and The Queen waved away the smoke with a grimace. After he got that, the other undercover chef, afraid that Rajiv’s picture-taking was becoming too obvious, shooed him out of the room.
Rajiv’s photos created a quandary for the staff at the tabloid newspaper. None of the pictures was in the least embarrassing. The editor with onyx beads who’d commissioned the photos had gone away on maternity leave. Her deputy knew how much they’d paid for Rajiv’s work, so he thought it would be best to run them anyway. He tried to cover for the low smear quality of the pictures by writing some sneering captions. “All this cheese for me?” he put under The Queen leaning over to admire the townscape of Gouda, and “No smoking please, we’re British” under the two Queens chatting on the terrace.
The effect was the reverse of what the newspaper intended. Instead of the post-Diana resentment of the royal family that the paper had hoped to exploit, the paper’s blogosphere lit up with questions about how to reproduce the William and Mary flower arrangements. Everyone hated smokers, and The Queen wrinkling her nose at Beatrix’s secondary smoke was a hit. Moreover, everyone was ecstatic over The Queen’s shapely calves and her beautifully made heels. A grandmother’s shoes, flexing forward on tiptoe, with the patent leather gleaming in the light, made them proud to be British. Even an American website, The
sartorialist.com, had picked up the photo, sparking a fashion furor for orthopedic footwear.
Luncheon at the remote cottage on the Balmoral estate was over. The Queen and the rest of the party had taken the dogs for a walk down by the Muick. Luke and Lady Anne remained behind, giving as their excuse that they would straighten up the table, but in fact because they wished for some minutes alone. The equerry was responsible for gathering up the bottles—those that still had anything in them—and taking them back to the big house. Lady Anne had no real responsibilities, but she was conscious that the staff had enough to do when The Queen was in residence without driving to outlying cottages to do the washing up. So she cleared the table and, with Luke’s help, got an ancient boiler in the kitchen roaring so there would be enough hot water to fill the sink. They found some Fairy Liquid and rubber gloves as well as several ironed dishtowels in one of the cupboards. Anne washed. Luke dried.
It was precisely because they had some work to do, and had no need to look at one another, that their conversation could, once again, turn confidential. Her cashmere cardigan pushed up over her elbows, her hands in the steaming water, Anne began: “How long were you in Basra?”