Jane Gardam - Old Filth

Queen Mary continued with her blanket stitch. The lady-in- waiting looked exhausted and the fat woman came up alongside Eddie Feathers as the twelve-foot high doors to the salon were being held open by footmen in scarlet.

“She’s impossible. I’m the Duchess of Beaufort. I know I look like somebody’s cook, but that’s who I am, and this is my house. She’s only an evacuee,” she spat as she blew past, the doors being silently closed behind her.

Queen Mary looked across at Eddie and smiled.

After the tray had been put down (margarine on the bread, pineapple jam but really made from turnips, a terrible seed cake and some oatcakes) Queen Mary passed him an almost transparent cup half-full of pale water.

“Cream?” she asked.

“No, thank you.”

She nodded. There was no cream, anyway, and the milk looked blue.

The lady-in-waiting brought out a box of pills and dropped one in the Queen’s cup and one in her own. “Saccharine?” she said.

“Oh, no, thank you.”

“It is quite true. What my niece says is perfectly true. I am only an evacuee. A very unwilling evacuee.”

Eddie wondered what to say. “I was once an evacuee,” he said. “And very unwilling. And far too old.”

“I am far too old,” said the Queen. “How old were you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Good gracious. How humiliating for you.”

“Yes. It was. My father sent for me to Malaya, to escape the War.”

“How disgraceful of him.”

“He had had a very bad time in 1914.”

“Yes. I see. But you escaped? To tell you the truth I don’t altogether feel ashamed to have escaped. It was the Govern- ment’s decision I should come here. They told me I would be much more trouble in London. In case of kidnap. Personally I think that a plane might come and bundle me off more easily from here. That of course is why you’re all here. A hundred and fifty of you. Quite ridiculous.”

“Yes, your Maj—”

“Call me Ma’am.”

“You must miss being at the heart of things — Ma’am?”

“I don’t, now. I’ll tell you more another time.”

She looked pointedly at the lady-in-waiting who gathered up a skein of mud-coloured wool and passed it to Eddie who was having trouble with the turnip jam. “Hold Her Majesty’s wool, please.”

Eddie held out his hands and the wool was arranged upon them in a figure of eight. The lady-in-waiting began to roll it up into a ball. He felt a ninny.

“Do you think you will enjoy soldiering?” asked the Queen, looking hard at him.

He blushed and began to stammer.

“Ah yes. I see. You’ll get over it. I know a boy like you.”

He walked in the park with her through the next hard winter. The ground was black, the trees sticks of opaline ice.

“We shall just walk up and down,” said Queen Mary. “For an hour or so. We must get exercise at all costs. D’you see how the wretched ivy is coming back?”

“Did you walk like this, Ma’am, before you came here?”

“I’ve always tried to walk a great deal. You see my family runs to fat. They eat too much. My dear mother would eat half a bird and then a great sirloin for dinner, and she loved cream. And the Duchess — I used to walk in Teck but only round and round the box-beds. Sandringham was the place to walk, but somehow one didn’t. One went about in little carts to watch them shooting. And one didn’t walk in London of course. I luckily have magnificent Guelph health.”

“I have never been to London.”

She stood still with amazement. “You have never been to London? Everybody has been to London.”

“Most of Badminton village has never been to London.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the village. I mean that a gentleman, surely, has always been to London?”

“No, Ma’am. I’ve been in Wales and in the North—”

“You haven’t seen the galleries? The museums? The theatre?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“That is a personable young man,” she said that evening, hard at work arranging family photographs in an album before getting down to the red despatch boxes the King sent her daily. She read them in private, and nobody was quite sure how many, but probably all.

“Very good-looking indeed,” said Mary Beaufort. “He’ll be useful at dinner parties.”

“We don’t give dinner parties,” said the Queen. “It would be out of kilter with the War effort. But we could ask a few of the Subalterns.”

“We could.”

“In fact it seems quite ridiculous that a boy like that should be billeted down in the stables. Why can’t he come and live in the house, Mary? Do you know, he has never been to London?”

Eddie refused to live in Badminton House. He said he must stay with his platoon. He began to find the tea parties rather trying. The mud-coloured wool had been overtaken by a cloud of unravelled powder-blue which clung to his uniform in tufts. He let it be known that he had to work hard, and he settled to his Law in the stables.

But the tall shadow would fall across his book and he would have to find a garden chair and she would sit with him among the dying dahlias in the remains of the cutting garden — every foot of land, she had instructed, to be used for vegetables. The Duchess fumed, and one day came thumping down to look for Eddie and complain.

“She brought fifty-five servants,” she said. “She’s stopped them wearing livery because of the War and Churchill in that awful siren-suit. Six of them are leaving. They’ve worn scarlet since they were under-footmen and they’re old and say they can’t change. Can you do nothing with her?”

“What — me? No, your Grace. Couldn’t; c-c-couldn’t.”

“Well, you’ll have to think of something. Distract her.”

“I’ve stopped the tree. Well, I hope s-s-so.”

“Oh, good boy. But listen, she’s determined to take you to London. Her chauffeur, old Humphries, is half-blind and not safe. Once he lost Her Majesty for over an hour in Ashdown Forest. She won’t sack him. And she makes him stop and pick up any member of the forces walking on the road. Once she picked up a couple who were walking the other way and once it was an onion seller. She’ll be murdered, and then we’ll all be blamed.”

“Eddie,” said the Queen, a little later. “I am determined to get you to London. When I first came here I went back every week, you know, on the train. Then it became painful because of the bombing. The Guildhall. The City churches. All gone. And of course the antique shops are all closed or gone to Bath (you and I might perhaps go to Bath one day). But I have a great desire to see London again. It might not be patriotic to insist that the Royal coach be put back on the train, but I have plenty of my petrol ration untouched, and you could do the driving, on the main roads, Eddie, if it is too much for Humphries. We shall of course need two outriders.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t drive, Ma’am.”

The expedition was put off until Eddie had learned to drive, instruction being given in a tank on the estate.

“I can only drive a tank, Ma’am,” he said when a London visit was again suggested.

“The principle must be the same,” said the Queen.

“We must clear it with Security.”

She looked imperious. The ex-Empress of India. “Well, we’ll go out wooding, Eddie. Get my bodyguards and my axe. No, I’ll keep my hat on. I’m determined to take you to London.”

It was fixed at last that Queen Mary should make the journey to London by the train, the Royal coach still being rested in a siding near Gloucester. Some of the Badminton staff were sent to wash it down and the stationmaster of Badminton railway station had to look out for the white gloves he had worn to haul the Queen aboard the 6.15 a.m. in 1939 at the beginning of her evacuee life.