The Autobiography of The Queen (3 page)

‘Where to, ma'am?' The driver of the battered bus in which the Queen found herself was a big, burly black man in shorts and a green vest which had seen better days. His radio was on and from here, the first disappointment for the Queen, a stream of incomprehensible sentences emanated. Some words were in French. She had hoped, after recent banquets at Buckingham Palace with the impossibly arrogant French President of the European Union seated next to her, not to hear the language again once she was safely ensconced on territory she knew to be a part of her beloved Commonwealth. The words, most of them, sadly, impossible to understand at all, were clearly some kind of debased tongue, a patois that was most unacceptable to the Queen. That ‘Where to, ma'am?' summed up his repertoire in English – and this in an American accent – quickly became apparent and this caused
some anxiety for the Queen, especially as the muddled-sounding slang was in use when speaking into his mobile, while at the same time he used his knees for both steering the van and changing gear. But there had been hitches on previous royal tours and recalcitrant or dangerous drivers had been weeded out and replaced with an equerry – sometimes even the Duke himself. There was nothing to worry about – this, the Queen reminded herself, was an adage of the late Queen Mother and had proved on every occasion to be right, since even wartime visits to bomb sites had produced, with the help of a dry martini, a supremely unworried expression on the face of the King's consort.

‘Number Five, Bananaquit Drive,' the Queen instructed the man who was to ferry her to a new life amongst her erstwhile (but surely still grateful) subjects. Independence had been granted in 1979. There must be many who wished they were still under the protection of their Queen.

The driver glanced over his shoulder at his elderly female fare with some surprise. His card said Alvyne Smith. It dangled along with a plastic Christmas tree above the steering wheel, so the Queen for a moment wished that Brno had come up with a more inventive surname for a departing monarch than the ubiquitous Smith.

‘Où ça?' bellowed Alvyne as a jumbo shrieked overhead, the very plane, as the Queen saw, which had brought her here a couple of hours before. A
pang (the Queen had never felt homesick, even on trips to safaris, African kingdoms, Australian garden parties and the rest, so she was at first, as with the open hostility of the Bostocks, able only to envisage indigestion as the enemy within) brought her sharply to the side window of the van: one always rid oneself of these tiresome complaints by concentrating on one's subjects. Who she would meet – and vitally, indeed more frequently now the globe had shrunk over the years to accommodate the royal tours and their inevitable repetition – the names and details of those she had met on earlier occasions were provided by a lady-in-waiting on a printed sheet. It would be bad form to ask of a person whether they had come far to meet their reigning sovereign if they'd given the answer before. Of course, people moved house all the time these days, so that particular ploy was fairly foolproof, but the occasion when Lady Emily had been down with flu and the startled pensioner had had to remind the Queen that she and her family had famously come over from Ireland just before the last walkabout and Her Majesty must surely remember this, had made the Queen wary. And today, of course, there was no lady-in-waiting, and there never would be again.

The delay in the emergence of the Head of the British Nation on to the tarmac outside Hewanorra Airport had been due to a combination of circumstances, most of these in one way or another connected to the Queen.

First, there had been the oddity of the US hundred-dollar notes distributed by an old lady to some of the roughest-looking porters, men from Vieux Fort with a history of crime – and the equally astonishing fact that not one of these men appeared prepared to accept the bounty so generously offered. Pouncing on the neat, lavender-tweed-suited figure as she emerged from Customs (where she had been arrested for failing to fill in a form: this was eventually supplied by a customs broker who wrote down the name and address of a Mrs Gloria Smith, Joli Estate) a gaggle of porters had demanded of the Queen that she indicate her luggage so they could wheel it out into the arrival bay and call her a cab.

But the Queen, who had now taught herself to ask the cost of things, demanded to know how much this service would be – and it was this which caused an uproar, as different currencies such as EC (Caribbean dollars) and even sterling and francs (Martinique, only twenty miles across the sea, was regularly visited by those who could afford the trip) were shouted out in the baggage hall. The Queen, flustered by the chaos caused by her simple question, had pulled her travel folder from the white handbag; and seeing ONE printed next to an unfamiliar (presumably American) face, she had removed a bill and then another, until a gust of wind from the open doors on to the concourse removed and distributed the rest. The honesty of
the customs broker (the Queen, forgetting she had, at least nominally, abdicated, promised silently to award the man at least a CBE in the New Year honours) and the swift realisation that these were hundred-dollar notes, brought a moment of indecision to the swarming porters. Finally, threatened by the customs broker, they handed over the money, although at least half was missing when the Queen arrived at her final destination and with the dogged sense of order which had characterised her reign as sovereign, counted out the greenbacks and compared the sum to the neatly-written note accompanying the documents.

But where the Queen would spend the remainder of her years now occupied her thoughts more than any other. So far, the landscape of the southern part of St Lucia was similar to the brochure: lush, with flamboyant trees and coconut palms and banana plants poking up in dense undergrowth. There were few houses, but those that stood by the road appeared generally well maintained. They were made of wood and they had red roofs and sometimes people sitting on a veranda or out the back, under the shady tree in the garden. At a small, dusty place above the village of Choiseul, Alvyne stopped the van and went into a barn-like building, emerging with a crate of bottles marked Piton Lager; and here the Queen was able to glance past him as he emerged, and saw a dusty billiards table and a gaggle of youths. The Queen approved of youth hostels,
and of efforts made to keep occupied those who would otherwise be liable to turn to crime – and for a moment, as Alvyne tried to force the ancient van back to life, the young of the hamlet above Choiseul saw an old lady with white hair smiling at them from the back seat. Then the door of the hall was kicked shut and the van shuddered, roared and moved on. But by this time, the Queen of England and Head of the Commonwealth – the woman to whose recent Jubilee the people of Britain and her past dependencies had flocked with love and joy – had turned to look from the window at the sheer impossibility of the Gros and Petit Pitons, rising, as they did, two thousand feet out of the sea.

‘Heavens!' the Queen said.

‘Pitons!' Alvyne said. He could glimpse his passenger's excitement at the sight of these giant needles, volcanic fossils clad with green tropical vegetation. (He had also noted the hundred-dollar bills so freely dispensed by his passenger at the airport and had agreed with himself that doubling the usual tariff of fifty bucks was only fair, given the problems that lay ahead when they arrived.)

‘Are we nearly there?' asked the Queen. Alvyne thought he had seldom seen anyone so excited – not of that age, at least

‘Non Bananaquit,' Alvyne replied, for he had not fully understood the query. Also, it did seem kinder to warn the Queen what she was likely to find. ‘Non Joli,' Alvyne repeated several times.

But, ‘Je pense qu'ils sont très jolis,' said the Queen. If the people here could only communicate in French, then she must address them in that language. ‘Numéro cinq, Bananaquit Drive,' she added with the piercing clarity familiar to those at home who still listened to the Queen's Christmas broadcast. ‘Combien de kilomètres encore?'

Alvyne ignored this question and made a play of concentrating ferociously on the road – which dipped down, lost its new-tarmac appearance and entered a series of ill-constructed hairpin bends. He reached for a beer from the crate on the front passenger seat and placed it between his knees. Looking into the rear-view mirror, he noted a serene expression on the face of the elderly lady, and attacked the beer-top with his teeth. The van swerved, and the Queen, hanging from a strap, narrowly missed being thrown first on to the floor and then out through the open van door and on to the road.

‘Où sommes nous maintenant?' the old lady demanded, as the road now ran through open country and a small town could be seen in front of a blue stripe that was the sea.

‘Soufrière,' Alvyne yelled, as he accelerated down the hill past a group of backpackers gathered round a large noticeboard, announcing the entrance to the Botanical Gardens. Large letters gave this as the birthplace of a royal personage, I'Impératrice Joséphine.

But to this piece of information the Queen did not respond. Slightly worried – had the old lady suffered a stroke, had he offended her in some way? – Alvyne could not have known that the second of these possibilities was in fact the correct one.

‘One didn't come all this way,' said the Queen grimly in an undertone (and in English: she had no wish to offend the driver, after all), ‘one simply didn't expect to have to take in Napoleon!'

From Soufrière – where, as was reported on the local radio in the ever-present patois of the island, a van had been implicated in a brawl in the main street and two eighteen-year-old men arrested – the road climbed steeply once more, this time through green lawns bearing shop-window arrangements of bougainvillea and hibiscus and coconut palms waving in a faint breeze from the sea. Joli Estate, said a large notice, as the van, spluttering at the effort in first gear, heaved its way above the Joli Hilton Hotel, the main reception and the high-up cottages, each with its plunge pool, allotted to the second rank of visitors. Seventy-five lots, Joli Estate, more boards insisted, as the road curved higher and the Pitons, like dinosaurs frozen on their deep base in the waters of the Caribbean, pushed in and then disappeared again from view as the Queen stared from the window and hung on to the strap.

One had been held up, of course, by the activity – so the Queen had chosen to label the brawl in the run-down and pitted streets of Soufrière. A gun had gone off, and it was perhaps this that had jolted her into realising she was not witness – as she and the Duke had been countless times in all the far-flung previous colonies they had visited and revisited in fifty years of the Queen's place on the throne of Great Britain – to a ritual dance or ceremony. This had been the real thing. Nevertheless, there had been something theatrical about it all; and yawns had to be concealed, as they had so regularly been in past days.

Alvyne jammed on the brakes at the point, high above the valley, where the words Bananaquit Drive were prominently displayed on a white board. The paint on the board was peeling; and the Queen, met invariably on official visits by coats of fresh emulsion or shining white gloss, assumed that the new distressed look, of which her younger relatives had informed her, was the intention of the decorators responsible for the development of Joli Estate.

That none of the lots had a house – or pool or anything else, for that matter – became clear once the Queen, refusing a helping hand from the driver (royals, especially the monarch, cannot be touched; a hand in the back or, worse, a familiar nudge is disallowed on all occasions), had descended from the van and looked around her. Banana plants were plentiful up here, certainly – but of Bananaquit
Drive, or any other signs of development, there were none. Here and there it appeared that an effort had been made, before the project had been abandoned; and it was by a hole in the ground at what could have been designated as No. 5 that the Queen stood for a while, until the heat drove her back to the van.

Alvyne was sorry for the old lady. He had tried to tell her what she would find here, but she hadn't understood.

It was downhill all the way to the stopping-place of the shuttle bus which would convey the Queen to the reception of the Joli Hilton, and Alvyne, aware that his fare had a wallet stuffed with American dollars, felt proud of himself later for taking only the routine fifty before driving off. There had been something about the small, upright figure with white hair and a large, old-fashioned-looking handbag, which had reminded him of his childhood – though he would not consider that this might have been inspired by a memory of pictures of the sovereign at the time of St Lucian independence. All the way back to Vieux Fort, the driver of the battered van puzzled over what would happen to his recent fare. There was something odd and unworldly about her – what if the hotel was full up and she had nowhere to go?

But she had money, of course, and he was glad he hadn't ripped her off. She'd be fine.

Reception at the Joli Hilton had found it difficult to place the Queen when the shuttle bus from higher up the Joli Estate valley brought her – and a handful of American tourists in identical T-shirts and shorts – down to the main desk in the building. The old lady had no luggage and had appeared surprised when they pointed this out – though where she thought her suitcase could be it would be impossible to say – but she carried an expensive, if out-of-date handbag, and soon opened this to reveal a travel folder containing a reassuring amount of US dollars. Jolene, the girl whose task it was to settle guests into their accommodation, reported later that, on catching a glimpse of the interior of the bag, she had thought she had seen something shiny; but women often tucked jewellery into their handbags, so nothing more was thought of it.