Old Filth - Jane Gardam [84]
“Your gran sounds a very perceptive woman.”
“She is. My mother sang for Queen Mary, you know.”
“Sang?”
“In the village school. Queen Mary used to turn up there unexpected and sit at the back. She had a turned-up nose.”
“Oh. I never noticed that.”
“Yes. Look at the stamps. She was embarrassed by it, my gran thinks. She had never been thought a beauty. But she was a beauty, my gran says. And all that about being a kleptomaniac was wicked lies. And she never forgot a birthday.”
“That’s true.”
“And she fancied some of the subalterns. She liked them with a stammer, did you know that? My uncle had a stammer. He was one of her four motorbike bodyguards and she chose him for his stammer. She said, ‘I have a son like you.’ She meant the King.”
“D’you know, I never knew that,” said Filth. “I didn’t make the connection.”
“Won’t you go out now and sit in the sun? I’ll help you. My gran has a terrible leg. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was gangrene. What’s the matter? Have I upset you? Now then, you know the doctor said yours is but a bad sprain. You’ll be fit in a week. Shall I ask my gran to come up here? She’d love a talk.”
“Do you want to talk with my gran?” the girl asked the next day, bringing him a breakfast tray and no refusals. “It’d be a breath of life to her. Maybe she’d remember you.”
“I hardly remember myself.”
“She said there was one always reading. Law books. She got them for him, Queen Mary. And chocolate. He used to hold her wool for her. He’d been through it, she said. Very good-looking. Oh yes, and he had a stammer, She found him—now what was it?—very personable. That’s what we heard her tell her lady-in-waiting. ‘The Captain’s very personable, isn’t he?’ She took up very close to him after her son got killed, the Duke of Kent. He was nearest to her, that one, they said. She never cried though. She and this soldier—he was a junior Platoon Commander—I asked gran when I got home last night—this soldier used to sit with her by the hour. She even used to pass through the library when he was reading in there, not looking up. Deep in his books. He was invited to stay in the house you know. Dine with them all. The Duke and Duchess—and my, there were some sparks flying there—them being kicked upstairs in their own home and all the best rooms taken over by Queen Mary and her fifty servants.”
“This all sounds very credible.”
“He refused though, the young Captain. He said he had to be with his men in the billets in the stables and Queen Mary couldn’t but say he was right. I believe now and then she was poking about the stables too, searching out ivy. And maybe—” she had his tie straight now and his socks on and his polished shoes ready for him. “He was very good-looking, my gran said.” She thoughtfully looked Filth over. “And very young and nice.”
“I was young but far from nice,” said Filth. “I don’t think I’d better meet your gran.”
“I’d like a look round the stables, though,” he said, the next day. “When I’m walking again.”
“I can get you a wheelchair.”
“No. No thanks.”
“Queen Mary used to go round in a horse and cart to save petrol. No side to her. They used to put a couple of basket chairs in the cart and hoist her and the lady’s maid up into it and one of the bike boys shouted up, ‘You look as if you’re in a tumbril, Ma’am,’ and she said, ‘Well, it might come to that.’ So she can’t have been altogether no fun.”
“I think she wasn’t much fun. She hadn’t had much fun,” said Filth.
“Oh that terrible King!” said the girl. “All those pheasants. All he ever thought about, my gran said. Where the children came from, we’ll never know, my gran said.”
“Yes, that’s often a puzzle,” said Filth.
He was in a private room. It might be a cabin of some sort. Outside the window there were trees but trees do not grow in the sea and the sea still moved beneath him, up and down, up and down, lift and drop. Seven months at sea. But the clouds above the window sailed along without the elf-light from the sea beneath them. And these tree tops? A woman ran by him and her hat was a plume of white starch. Her dress was