by William Kuhn
“Thank you so much, PC Mulready. It’s been quite a night for you, I expect.”
“Well, not the usual. That’s true.”
“How many injured?” asked The Queen.
“About twenty.”
“Gracious! Badly hurt?”
“Well, a broken leg or two. Quite a few suffering from shock. Several took a tumble coming down the escalator in a hurry. They had to clear the station quickly, you see?”
“Yes, I do see. But nothing too serious?”
“Well, no, Your Majesty. Crisis averted is what I’d say. We go through these training exercises for events such as these quite often. But the public, now, they don’t get to practice as often as we do.”
“Well, bless the training, then, Police Constable. May I say thank you for the tremendous work you’re doing?”
The officer was not sure what the proper reply was and began hemming and hawing, but Luke was already bent over squinting at the next man’s nameplate, while The Queen moved forward. The Queen spoke to the next two and then returned to Mulready, who had the greyest hair of all three. She took him to be the most senior officer. “Police Constable, I don’t want to hinder anyone’s work, but could you please take me to see a little of what’s going on inside before I go upstairs to see Mrs MacDonald?”
He knew the answer to that question. This was a command from an officer who outranked him. “Your Majesty,” he said, turned gravely, opened the glass door, and waved The Queen through. The accident and emergency unit was on full alert with activity going on at all stations. Although the injuries were not life-threatening, all of them had come in at the same time, so the ward was operating at full stretch. Everyone was so busy that they hardly took notice of The Queen. They were too preoccupied with the medical issues in front of them to be surprised or annoyed. In fact, many of them had seen her on television visiting the cleanup sites of previous historic emergencies, so it struck them as not unusual she was there. She spoke to several ambulance crew members, half a dozen nurses, and a group of the more junior doctors, medical students really, who seemed, for the moment, most available to talk to her. She also stopped by the beds of fourteen of the injured. “Where were you going when they cleared the station?” “And what happened when everyone headed for the exits?” “My word!” “Well, I think you’re being very brave.” “It’s dreadful, isn’t it? But you’re holding up all right, aren’t you?” “Thank you for the splendid effort you’re making.” “They can hit us, but they can’t keep us down, can they?” She had a sentence for everyone. She took off her white kid gloves and held everyone’s hand, skin to skin, for at least two shakes, longer if they looked like they needed it. Then she moved on.
After forty-five minutes, she turned to Luke, and said, “Now, Major Thomason, can you help me find Mrs MacDonald, please?”
He had inquired earlier where the room was and led her to the lift that would take her up to the eighth floor. The private secretary had telephoned when Shirley was admitted to ask that arrangements be made to give her a private room, rather than in a crowded ward, where most of the cardiac patients on the National Health Service were placed. When The Queen, Luke, and Anne arrived at the room, they all three looked in with trepidation, slightly fearing what shape they might find the patient in. They were surprised to find that William, Rajiv, and Rebecca had preceded them, all three having walked over from the Old Vic while The Queen was downstairs making her rounds. Rajiv was in the thronelike visitor’s chair, singing a Bollywood tune from the play they’d just seen. Rebecca was standing awkwardly behind him, looking embarrassed. William was bending over Shirley and trying to persuade her to have a plastic spoonful of ice shavings.
Rajiv leapt to his feet when he saw The Queen, William straightened up, with the spoon still in his hand, and Rebecca continued to look ill at ease. Shirley was awake, alert, and angry. She had an intravenous tube in her arm. She was still too weak to stand unassisted.
“Ah,” said The Queen. “Here before us to attend the patient, I see. Still in one piece, Mrs MacDonald?”
“Semi,” said Shirley, unwillingly.
“Well, you look all right. Now, gentlemen, that will be all. This ward is ladies only.”
Rajiv protested, “We’ve been here for the last fifteen minutes and it was all right with them.”
“Yes, but you’re no longer wanted. Lady Anne and Rebecca and I shall be taking over. Thank you very much, Cheddar. Thank you, Mr de Morgan. Thank you, Major Thomason.” There was nothing for the three men to do but gather their things and depart, two of the three squeezing Shirley’s hand and William kissing her cheek on the way out.
When they’d all left, and closed the door, Shirley muttered, “Now we can relax,” and all four women chuckled with relief. Anne began to put a little balm on the patient’s badly chapped lips. Even before the evening’s incident, The Queen had been hoping to circle by St Thomas’s after the play. She had packed one or two things for the patient. She took a cotton nightdress out of her handbag and said, “Now, Shirley, let’s get you out of that horrible hospital thing and into something a little more civilized. Come now, don’t be shy. You’ve seen me in my underthings often enough.”
When they’d managed to change the patient’s gown, The Queen then set to brushing Shirley’s hair with a wooden brush that also came out of her handbag. She saw Rebecca hanging about awkwardly and addressed her. “Now, Rebecca, sit down in that chair there and tell us about that young man of yours. We all want to know.” The Queen’s eye sparkled as she stood at Shirley’s side, attending her hair.
“Well, I don’t know him very well,” said Rebecca. “Just met him a little while ago. At Paxton & Whitfield. When I went over to get the cheese.”
“I see,” said The Queen. “Carry on.”
“And then when Major Thomason said he couldn’t find you, Ma’am, I followed you in the taxi from Jermyn Street to King’s Cross. He ended up on the same train.”
“He’s quite a willing young man,” said The Queen.
“Well, he is that. He sends me e-mail messages or a text every day.”
“Lucky girl.”
“It doesn’t feel that way. You see, I’m not very good at boys. They’ve never liked me. All through growing up, they didn’t want anything to do with me. And now, well, Rajiv’s not the only one. There are two more.”
“Three boys!” said Anne, brightening. This was going to be a good story. “Who are they?”
“One’s a man I met at an animal rights demo in Trafalgar Square. Liked him a lot at first, but it turns out he’s mixed up in some pretty rough company. I didn’t know about it then. Only discovered it when I went with him to a hunt, and he turned out to be a saboteur. Wanted to injure the horses.”
“Don’t like the sound of him,” said The Queen darkly.
“No. Came as a bit of a shock to me too. And that’s where the other one came in. He sort of saved me at the hunt, rescued me from a bad situation, Dickon did.”
Anne couldn’t believe her ears. The name was so old-fashioned that you didn’t hear it much nowadays. She couldn’t speak.
The Queen glanced at Anne’s distress and said calmly, “Not Dickon Bevil?”
Rebecca had never been properly introduced to Lady Anne. She didn’t know her surname. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it is,” she said with surprise. “Do you know him?”
The Queen knew all about Anne’s private tragedy, but never brought it up for fear of offending her, or opening an old wound.
“My son,” said Anne simply.
Rebecca wasn’t sure how to react. “Well, you see, he knew my parents. He was living in some trees . . .”
“I do know about that,” said Anne.
“Well, my parents were against the bypass too. They wanted to help. They used to take food to the people in the trees. Vegetables from our farm.”
“I
see. Well, I haven’t been in touch with him for some time. Don’t even know where he’s living.”
“I have his e-mail address. I could give it to you,” offered Rebecca.
“I don’t do e-mail,” said Anne coldly.
“Oh, come now, Lady Anne, we all have to learn. Even I’m learning. If I can, you can,” said The Queen.
“He hasn’t been in touch with me for some time,” said Anne. “He knows where I am. He could be in touch with me if he wanted to.”
Here, to everyone’s surprise, Shirley spoke up, though in a low voice, “You’ve got to get off your high horse, Anne. The young are different. You’ve got to give him a pass. Forgive him for not writing you. If old age is good for anything it’s good for being generous.”
Coming from someone whom they’d all seen near death, this seemed like a rare philosophical truth. The oracle had spoken.
Rebecca still remained unsure of herself among these three older women who seemed to know one another, and one another’s histories, so well. She searched her brain for some way of contributing, some way of doing something for them that they couldn’t do for themselves. She was aware too that she was a young person who sometimes resented her parents, and often steered clear of them when they would have liked to have seen more of her. Perhaps just as Dickon did with Anne. “Well, I’ve got a laptop in my backpack. I could show you how to e-mail him right here.”
“Oh yes!” said The Queen. “Show me too. I’ve been annoying the young woman from IT, and I can’t overdo my requests there. And could you do a refresher on Miss Twitter and Pastebook as well?”
Rebecca understood that The Queen was a little hazy not only on the way to use the principal social media sites but also what they were called. She got out the laptop, plugged it in, propped it on Shirley’s bed, and connected to the hospital’s Wi-Fi to give the women a little lesson.
After twenty-five minutes, the concentration of all three of the older women was beginning to dissipate. The Queen saw this and said, “Now, Shirley. What about some exercise? You’ll never get better just lying there in that bed. Let’s take a brief turn down the corridor.”
The doctor had warned Shirley that exercise was strictly forbidden, but the generations to which she and The Queen and Anne all belonged believed in exercise as a cure-all. They were not about to obey a young doctor when they’d been brought up on this folk wisdom of the ages. So she allowed Anne and The Queen to pull her out of bed, put slippers on her feet, and bring her to a standing position. They pulled along the IV stand to which Shirley was still connected. They found a hospital-issue bathrobe for her in the cupboard. When all three of the women were standing, The Queen and Anne both wobbled slightly. It had been a long day after a long night the night before and it was now nearing midnight. Here Rebecca saw that she could help again and she got to her feet on the other side of Shirley. The four of them then took small steps away from the bed, The Queen and Anne each with a hand holding on to the rolling IV stand for support, Shirley holding on to Rebecca, the four of them making slow progress into the glare of the corridor’s fluorescent lights.
Luke’s bedroom had virtually no decorations whatsoever. It had a double bed, with crisp folded corners as a nurse would make of a hospital bed. A desert photograph of his company in Basra was the room’s lone picture on the wall. Later that evening Luke and William lay on top of the bed, the sheets and covers still tucked in, their ties loosened, their shoes off, and in their stocking feet. A small distance separated them on the bed. They both were reading from the text of Henry V they’d been given at the Old Vic earlier that evening. William was lying on his back, head on two pillows, following along in the text, as Luke, lying on his side and facing William, was reading aloud. They were at the section of the play after Agincourt. Henry was wooing the French Princess Katharine after winning the battle. Henry was trying to persuade Katharine to marry him, even though he would grow old and become less attractive.
“A fair face will wither,” read Luke,
but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king. And what sayest thou then to my love?
Speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee.
William put down his copy of the text on his chest and said to the ceiling, “You’d better go and find your fair one somewhere else. Because I’m not fair and never have been.”
With an effort, Luke said, “Fair to me.”
William looked over for a moment, met Luke’s eyes, and then looked back at the ceiling.
“It would finish your career.”
“Oh, not necessarily. We have gays in the military now, I believe.”
“All right for the lower ranks. But they’re not allowing you to shack up with a boyfriend, and promoting you to colonel. It just won’t happen, Luke.”
“You never know till you give it a try.”
“And I have to sweep up the bits and pieces when it all comes crumbling apart?”
“Well, you wouldn’t want to leave the Household, would you?”
“I don’t know. Been thinking of that, actually. What if we were to have a food van? You know, sell Cornish pasties and the like from a window on the side? We could drive it round to Wembley Stadium after the football. Or to the seaside? Bournemouth in season. We wouldn’t have to pay rent. And we’d be free to drive wherever we wanted to.”
With one stockinged foot Luke reached over to kick and then caress William’s stockinged foot close by his on the bed. “We?” he said.
Anne and Shirley were alone in Shirley’s hospital room at St Thomas’s, reading the same passage from the play. The Queen had left an hour earlier, taking Rebecca with her to drop her off at her flat in the Mews. Shirley was on the hospital bed, still wearing The Queen’s nightdress, and her legs were wrapped in a hospital-issue blanket. Anne was sitting in the visitor’s chair, her shoes off, her knees bent, and her legs supported by Shirley’s bed. The two women both had on, unusually, their reading glasses, and were taking turns reading from the play. Shirley was reading a different part of Henry’s speech wooing Katharine.
Put off your maiden blushes; avouch the
thoughts of your heart with the looks of an empress;
take me by the hand, and say ‘Harry of England I am
thine:’ which word thou shalt no sooner bless mine
ear withal, but I will tell thee aloud ‘England is
thine, Ireland is thine, France is thine, and Harry
Plantagenet is thine;’ who though I speak it before
his face, if he be not fellow with the best king,
thou shalt find the best king of good fellows.
Shirley having reached the end of a sentence, it was now Anne’s turn. She now took up reading Henry’s proposal to Katharine.
Come, your answer in broken music; for thy voice is
music and thy English broken; therefore, queen of
all, Katharine, break thy mind to me in broken
English; wilt thou have me?
Shirley interrupted, “I’ll think about it.”
The two women looked down across the tops of their reading glasses at one another and laughed gently.
Shirley spoke again. “Do you suppose they could make us a cup of tea in this place? What do the nurses do all night? They haven’t looked in for the last hour and a half.”
“Shall I go and see?” said Anne, slipping on her shoes and smoothing down her skirt. As she prepared to leave the room, she glanced briefly over at Shirley in her bed to see that she was stretching out her hand, calling her back.
“Anne, thank you.”
In the R
oyal Mews the main overhead lights had long ago been extinguished. There were only one or two night lights giving faint glimmers along the glazed Victorian tiles. Rebecca and Rajiv were lying in a nest of hay adjacent to Elizabeth’s stall. The horse was standing next to them. Rebecca was playing with a tame badger. Rajiv had been reading to her from the same passage of the play that Luke and William and Anne and Shirley had also been reading. But he’d set the play aside in the hay and was trying to get her to kiss him. “Oh, come on. We’ve done it before.”
“Just because I was feeling sorry for you. On the train.”
“You weren’t feeling sorry for me, baby, I could tell. I could read your lips.”
“Well not ‘sorry,’ then, but just sort of vaguely curious.”
“And not curious still?”
“Well, Rajiv, to be honest. I don’t think it’s a good idea. What would people make of us? I don’t think I’ve decided what I want. Or what we can possibly be. There are a couple of others I haven’t entirely said no to yet. Wouldn’t be fair to you to lead you on.”
Then, from memory, Rajiv recited some of Henry’s last lines to Katharine.
O Kate, nice customs curtsey to great kings. Dear
Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak
list of a country’s fashion: we are the makers of
manners, Kate.
Rajiv then leaned in and kissed Rebecca, with her shy assent. After a moment, he pulled away, nuzzled her nose, and whispered in her ear, “You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate.”
The Queen in her bedroom was feeling as if her nerves had been jangled by all that had happened that Tuesday. Waking up in a strange bed in Edinburgh, Shirley’s heart attack, Henry V, the defused bomb at Waterloo. It was too much. She wasn’t used to being without a programme for such long periods and improvising. But she had got through it. “I went right through it. Yes, I did. I went through it,” she said to herself, as if some reassurance were necessary. Her nerves felt overly stimulated and she knew that, though she was exhausted, she would not sleep unless she took some measures to relax and calm down. She suddenly recalled the traditional last pose of her yoga practice, savasana, in which, at the end of all the hard work and stretching and holding difficult positions, she lay covered up on the floor, breathing deeply, listening to her breath, but purposely not allowing her mind to wander onto any discordant thoughts. She went and found Rebecca’s hoodie, which she had not yet returned to her, put it on, and, stepping out of her shoes, lay wrapped in the hoodie prone upon the floor on top of a yoga mat. She stretched out her arms and legs, closed her eyes, and lay for five minutes, doing nothing, thinking nothing, but breathing deeply.