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.
“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.”