Old Filth - Jane Gardam [90]
“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.
“Good luck, Ma’am.”
The lady-in-waiting followed her in, and Eddie and a couple of Other Ranks with rifles took up their posts.
“Hope you don’t meet Jerry, Ma’am,” said the stationmaster. “Everyone stand back from the lawns.”
“Oh, the bombing is totally over,” said Queen Mary. “I shall go to the Palace and have a look at the ruins of Marlborough House. And there is a little shopping—”
He blew the whistle and waved the flag. The Queen’s progress had cheered him up. She’d be back on the 5.15 from Paddington. She wasn’t dead yet.
“She’s got some spirit,” he told the empty platform. Even at Badminton there were no porters. “We’re better off than Poland. Or Stalingrad.”
Just before Paddington, Eddie in a different side-carriage alone, the Queen sent for him and handed him a slip of paper.
“Here are the things you ought to see. I haven’t given you too many. It is not only a first visit but you will find it confusing without signposts, and all the bomb-damage. You ought to have time for the Abbey and take a glance at St. James’s Park and No.10. And Big Ben. Here we are. It’s a pity you don’t know anyone who could show you about. Have a splendid time. Now, lunch—I really don’t know what to suggest.”
“I’ll miss lunch, Ma’am. It’s going to be a tight schedule.”
She stepped from the train. There was a bit of rather old red carpet down for her and she stood in silver grey with doves’ feathers in her toque, grey kid gloves, ebony stick. A whisper began—“It’s Queen Mary. Hey look—Queen Mary”—and a crowd gathered up like blown leaves. There were feeble hurrahs and some clapping, growing stronger, and the little crowd closed round Her Majesty and the lady-in-waiting. The two bodyguards melted away.
Eddie, all alone, made at once for the taxi-rank and the bedsit in Kensington of Isobel Ingoldby.
“I’m not sure how far it is,” he told the taxi-driver, after waiting in a long queue, tapping his leg with his military stick. His uniform helped him not at all for everyone seemed to be in uniform. “It’s Kensington. Off Church Street.”
“Twenty minutes,” he said, “unless we’re unlucky.”
“You mean an air raid?” Eddie was looking round the Paddington streets disappointedly. This was London: sandbags, shuffling people, greyness, walls hanging in space.
“Nah—air raids ain’t a trouble now. We’ve licked all that. We have him on the run, unless he starts with his secret weapon, he talks about. Not that we believe he’s got one.”
(They really do talk like the films, Eddie thought.)
“You’re here. D’you want to borrer a tin ’at?”
He was set down at the end of a narrow curving street of shabby cottages with gardens. There was no paint anywhere and grime everywhere. Nobody much about, and most windows boarded up. Isobel Ingoldby’s number must almost certainly be a mistake for it had Walt Disney lattice windows, and a shaggy evergreen plant trailing over it which would have sent Queen Mary into action before she’d even knocked at the front door. There was a squirrel made of plaster on the doorstep and a tin case full of empty milk bottles with a note saying None today. Do not ring.
It’s somebody’s who’s out. This couldn’t be hers, he thought, at the gate, as the door opened and she was standing there.
His