by William Kuhn
It was usually as simple as that old Julie Andrews song. What were her favorite things? There was a mare in the Mews born on her birthday in April. Elizabeth. The horse’s name was a bit of a joke really. But The Queen was delighted to discover that Elizabeth would eat cheddar. Not only would she take it from The Queen’s hand, but she would snort and stamp and neigh afterwards. Elizabeth adored it.
Now, what else, The Queen asked herself. Well, Scotland of course. People left her alone more there. She went on a Scottish holiday at the end of the summer, and sometimes in May as well. She’d spent some of her honeymoon there too. And the Scots, so bluff, no-nonsense, straightforward, none of the capering about and insincerity she often met with in the South. She loved the Scots, so, yes, Scotland was one of her favorite things too.
What else? Britannia, of course. The yacht was now permanently beside a quay in Leith, outside Edinburgh. Tourist attraction. Such a pity, really. She had loved that ship. She’d fly out to the Caribbean, meet some governors, tour the hospital wards, look at the new sewers, and then they could all retire to Britannia for a few days, having justified the expense of sailing her out by holding some official dinners on board. How lovely she looked, white and buff and blue, rising up out of the haze on a hot afternoon. And when she became too old, too expensive to run, well the Government absolutely refused to build another yacht. It was that word “yacht,” wasn’t it? The Queen couldn’t appear to waste public money on personal pleasure. She understood that, but she wondered if the newspapers actually knew how many boring Commonwealth suppers she’d had to sit through. If anybody had earned a bit of a treat, she had, what with the endless small talk she’d engaged in on national business. She imagined that about three-quarters of her life had been used up in idle chitchat. Had it ever done any good? And now the yacht was something she couldn’t use, or even see, anymore. Tied up for day-trippers to visit at, what, ten pounds a time? Yes, Britannia was a favorite thing, but she was far away.
These had been her reflections as she wondered what to do after luncheon. She glanced back at the table, which William had not yet been in to clear away. There was an apple, and yes, a small portion of the cheddar. Walk over to the Mews and take Elizabeth these leftovers. It might help. She wouldn’t take the dogs. They might worry the horses. Aside from these careful thoughts about the animals, she wasn’t quite thinking as sharply as she usually did. She took the precaution of putting on a headscarf, but she didn’t put on a coat, even though it was a wet and windy afternoon. Nor, though she pulled the terrace door to, did she pull it entirely shut so that it would stay latched. She noticed her handbag sitting on the sideboard. Yes, she would take that, and stepped briefly back into the room to hook that over her arm before stepping out again onto the terrace.
The Royal Mews were exhaust-stained buildings behind the palace, with tourist buses rushing by every five minutes, heedless of the romance behind their grey façade. There was a little-visited museum with harnesses and carriages and the big gold wedding cake on wheels that had been used in 1953 at the coronation. The real attraction was the horses, who stood in ample stalls walled with glazed tiles, their names hanging above them on wooden boards: Mossy, Puller, Buster, Elizabeth, and Lucia. These horses’ biographies were as familiar to The Queen as those of members of her own family.
The Queen had put the apple and cheddar into her pocket, and when she turned up at the door, wearing only some muddied pumps, from having taken a shortcut through a hedge, and a headscarf, Rebecca, who was hosing down the floor, was a little worried. Not to see The Queen. She often turned up at unexpected times to give the horses treats and to stroke their velvet noses. But it was cold for early December, and other than the scarf over her head, The Queen was not dressed for the weather. That was unusual.
Rebecca coiled the hose and pretended as if the woman who’d just wandered in among Elizabeth’s straw and was feeding her cheese was of no particular importance. She briefly considered asking The Queen whether she’d like some of the mud hosed off her shoes, but then thought better of it. As she wound up the hose she heard The Queen remark, “Elizabeth’s very well, I see.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” She did not go in for the “Your Majesty” first, as she’d been taught, nor did curtseying seem necessary in a stable, so she kept her response to a simple affirmative. The Mews were a good deal more informal than the palace, and Rebecca was herself awkward when it came to dealing with beings on two legs instead of four. She did not and could not make an exception for The Queen.
“Are horses ever sad, do you think?” asked The Queen.
Rebecca considered this a strange, but not an uninteresting, question. “Well, Ma’am, they’re sometimes out of sorts. Sometimes they won’t feed. Or they’re not friendly to the brush.”
“But they always pull, don’t they? They always pull when they’re in harness?”
“The young ones don’t always, no. But, yes, the older ones don’t usually shirk. Something about the bit and the harness wakes them up. It’s as if they’ve a job to do and they’re tired of standing about.”
“Yes, I know,” said The Queen.
Rebecca wasn’t sure whether The Queen meant that she’d seen older horses take the bit and harness that way, or that she felt like an old horse in harness herself sometimes. She suspected the latter.
The Queen gave an involuntary shudder, as if she’d just noticed the cold. Elizabeth gave a sympathetic snort. Rebecca suggested, “I’ve got a hoodie over there. Hanging on that peg. You could wear it back and then have it sent over to me here. You’ll need it,” she said as a blast of sleet peppered the windows.
The Queen accepted the hooded jacket without protest, instinctively sticking out her hands to have it slipped on her from behind. Rebecca hadn’t offered to put the jacket on. She expected The Queen could manage that herself, but when she saw the older woman with her hands outstretched, Rebecca picked up the hoodie and helped The Queen into the sleeves. It had a zippered front with two pockets. She slipped up the hood over her headscarf without The Queen’s protesting. Then The Queen turned around as if she were an obedient child, and Rebecca saw that she was meant to zip it up as well.
Instantly The Queen felt as if returned to some darkened cotton womb. Protected. Anonymous. Warm. She murmured, “Thank you,” giving it two percussive syllables, and wandered off, noticing that the pockets contained a pack of cigarettes, a folded £20 note, and a Swiss army knife.
Rebecca watched The Queen walk off toward the open courtyard in her still muddy shoes, carrying her handbag over the crook of her arm, and wearing her hoodie, which, until now, she’d forgotten had that skull stenciled on the navy material at the back.
Earlier that same afternoon, Rajiv and Rebecca had planned on meeting for coffee. She replied only to one out of every two e-mails he sent her, and still he persisted. Why wouldn’t she meet him some afternoon for just twenty minutes? That was the sense of his latest, and she didn’t see the point of continuing to ignore so much energy and certainty. Men were so urgent, so unremitting when you gave them the least encouragement. She didn’t understand why. She wasn’t built that way herself.
She agreed to twenty minutes on a weekday afternoon. He was working at Paxton & Whitfield that Monday. As he couldn’t go far, he suggested a coffee place across the street that operated out of an annex of a church, St James’s, Piccadilly. He said he’d meet her there. She got there a bit early and looked around the churchyard outside, the wet slate underfoot feeling slippery. She wondered if there were tombs underneath the lettered paving stones. Were people actually buried there or were they just memorials? There were rusting outdoor tables stacked in the corner, waiting for summer. Would people in July have their lattés sitting on someone’s grave? Then she looked up to inspect the soot-stained wall of the church. There was a plaque.
[Courtesy of David Gelber]
The church had been built in 1684. It had been d
amaged by what was called “enemy action”—funny phrase—in 1940. She guessed a German plane had dropped a bomb. They rebuilt it and a bishop came to reconsecrate the church in 1954.
It was strange to think of London in the 1940s as a battlefield, the bombs raining down night after night, people sleeping in the Tube, then climbing upstairs in the morning to go about their ordinary lives. Here she was, walking in a churchyard, looking up on a dark afternoon to imagine the roof of a church in flames during the Second World War. London was occasionally a battlefield now too. She had tried to go down into the Piccadilly Line at King’s Cross on July 7th of 2007 just after a suicide bomber had let off his explosive in one of the trains, killing many people. The police were just arriving to string yellow tape over the entrances and to send people away. She recalled the ambulances pulling in at odd angles to block off the traffic in front of the station.
Rebecca wasn’t afraid of terrorists, even though the Metropolitan Police was forever warning people to be on the alert against bombers of all sorts. In the days after the 7/7/07 bombs, Ken Livingstone, the mayor then, had run an advertisement in the Tube stations about how international the victims had been: Australians, Americans, Africans, New Zealanders, people from Europe, in fact a typical cross section of London. It made her proud to be one of them. She sometimes saw that same “spirit of the war” feeling in really old people who recollected what the 1940s were like in London. The outdoor churchyard, the plaque on the wall, the paving stones with nearly illegible lettering that might once have covered coffins in the clay, all this made the spot feel holy.
Just then Rajiv appeared at the glass door of the café in the annex. His amused brown eyes and evident tail-wagging pleasure to see her all wrung a warmer smile for him than she’d quite meant to give him. She thought better of it, and immediately resumed her more neutral expression, looking away from him.
“Don’t panic,” he said, opening the door for her. “It’s only coffee. Come inside.”
She smiled again. He had a way of intuiting what she was thinking. She found it disconcerting. “I imagine you’re busy at work and will have to get back before too long.”
“Hang on a minute, I just got here,” said Rajiv as he scraped a chair back along the floor.
“Yes, well, don’t get too comfortable.”
Rajiv had been a much-loved child. Both his father and mother had shown him unreserved and uncomplicated affection. It was what he had come to expect from the world, so this beautiful young woman’s coolness did not deter him. “My God, those boots,” he said, for the first time noticing her leather riding boots that came all the way to her knee.
She hadn’t thought about dressing to attract him. It was just what she happened to be wearing. Perhaps he thought she’d worn the boots to encourage him, which was the reverse of what she’d intended. She was just there really to see whether there was anything in this young man’s persistence. She wasn’t attracted to him. She wasn’t attracted to anyone much. But she thought that someone who was as interested in her as he was ought to be investigated. “They’re not for you,” she said defensively. “I’ve got to take Elizabeth for some exercise after this.”
“You’re going to ride Elizabeth, then,” he said with an arched eyebrow.
She caught the slyness of his remark, looked the other way, and said nothing. She thought it probably wasn’t the sort of thing a boy was supposed to say to a girl when they first met, but she wasn’t sure.
“Elizabeth for whom you bought the cheddar?” asked Rajiv in his most cheerful voice.
“Mmmm,” she assented.
“What is it about young misses and riding?”
She didn’t like the direction he was taking and, picking up a paper coffee cup he’d brought to the table for her, said, “If you think I came here to listen to smut, you’re wrong.”
“Hang on, hang on. I’m sorry for the suggestion. But, you know, it is an interesting question. A young woman breaks her hymen while horseback riding. She never loves men quite as well as she loved her first horse. Is that right? Why is it?”
Something about his use of the word “hymen” indicated to her that he wasn’t entirely interested in the erotic dimension of this. As she’d had a hard time being sexually interested in human beings herself, she did stop and reconsider and sit back in her chair. “Well, it has something to do with this enormous animal that will let you climb on her back. And take you all sorts of places. And go at a trot. This big strong thing, twice as tall as you are, which will eat an apple or a sugar cube out of your hand without biting you. Could even kill you with a kick. To be with an animal like that. Well, there’s some awe in it, isn’t there? And when you see a horse jumping over a fence, all that thousand pounds of grace and point and muscle, well, that’s close to some kind of miracle. Afterwards she’ll let you come near, sometimes, and put your hand on her neck.”
Rebecca surprised him. She didn’t speak much. She didn’t reply to most of his e-mail messages. Within the first three minutes of his showing up, he had to persuade her to stay. Now, she’d just given him an essay on love and horses. He sensed an opening in her saying “she’ll let you.” That was the nub of some incipient feeling, which he knew was not shown to everyone. “And people, boys and girls, won’t let you do that to them? Stroke their necks?”
Rebecca set her jaw against Rajiv. This was twice he’d wrong-footed her. She’d said much more than she wanted to straightaway. It came from being around animals too much and around people her own age too little. She didn’t know how to talk to them. Hitting out at Rajiv with the kind of fear and rage she usually kept veiled, she said, “Look. I’m not for you, all right? I shouldn’t have come. I already have a boyfriend.” Both her anger and her confession were out of proportion with what he’d just said. Nor was the confession strictly true.
The color rose hot into her cheeks and Rajiv thought she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, like the models for CoverGirl makeup in magazines. He’d once swooned over them as an adolescent boy. He’d even tried kissing one of these beautiful women on the slippery paper in order to practice for the real thing. Her declaration, intended to shove him roughly away, didn’t dismay him in the least. “Come on, it’s okay,” he spoke to her as if she were a frightened pet. He tried to calm her with the sound of his most comforting words. “It’s fine. Really it is. Boys and girls can talk without stroking necks. It’s all good.” He beamed benevolence and good will in her direction.
She gave a brief glance at the wattage emanating from his eyes, and decided she couldn’t look there for long. It was too bright.
“Well, I’m not telling you any more about that.”
“Don’t have to. We can talk about anything you like.”
“You talk, then.”
“Well, let’s see. How did Elizabeth like the cheddar I sent over with you?”
Just then, Rebecca’s mobile phone vibrated. She tugged it out of her pocket to see that it was a phone call from the man she’d met three years ago at the animal rights demonstration. “Could you excuse me, please?” she said to Rajiv, a little more harshly than was necessary, but he could see that was her way.
“Don’t worry, I’m just going to put some more sugar in my coffee,” he said as he stepped away from the table.
Rebecca went back to the phone. She hadn’t seen him often. She didn’t know him well. When he first called her back, she was shocked that he even had her number. He pointed out with a laugh that she’d put it down on his petition against foxhunting. She thought that was unfair. She hadn’t given him her number because she wanted to be his girlfriend. They met again a few weeks later to go to another demo, this one in the country. The disaster that had resulted from that was what really made her uninterested in seeing him again. He’d been in touch occasionally over the years. She’d sometimes agreed to talk to him, but never to see him again. It was not that she couldn’t
recall some of the promise of sleeping with him in white sheets. It was just that ever since her two jarring experiences with him, she’d distrusted men with easy words. The time with him had also undermined her satisfaction with her life up to now, based as it was on solitary self-sufficiency. She was worried about how she felt and doubted herself. She looked at the name and number vibrating on her phone and then pressed a button to send the call to her answerphone.
Rajiv came back to the table.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to go,” she said.
“Now? We only just got here.”
“Something unusual’s come up.” She knew she was being irrational, but she couldn’t stop herself.
Rajiv could see from her face that she was rattled.
“Want some help?”
“No, thank you.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Okay,” said Rajiv evenly, trying to hit upon some formula that might calm her down. “Maybe I could come watch you ride sometime? I bet you’re amazing on horseback.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, come on. Really I’m harmless.”
“Strict security around where I work.”