Old Filth - Jane Gardam [89]
“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.”
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