Read Online The Autobiography of The Queen by Emma Tennant - Free Book Online

stones belonged to the State or to her: this was a common confusionwhen it came to real estate, Old Masters, jewellery and the rest, and was one of the reasons for the demand that royal ownership of treasures and palaces be clarified).
    The Queen wondered how she could persuade Austin Ford to search for the missing stones. It did not occur to her that her new escort would need little persuading. But now he was talking – telling her about his family, it seemed, with words of a wife and a former wife and their children up in the village, and the trip they planned to take in a private plane to Mustique (when he had found the emeralds, Austin did not add).
    The Queen was an expert listener. Of all the hundreds and thousands of family confidences she had received in her long years on the throne she remembered in particular one point: there was always a moment when the teller, over-emotional at being granted a royal audience, mentioned the one grudge – or crime – or stain of illegitimacy, which continued to haunt them and would do so for the rest of their days. Obviously, Ford couldn’t know that his client Mrs Smith was the Queen of England – but she had perfected the art of listening to a stage where not coming out with some kind of confession seemed to the teller to be a crime in itself. ‘So the rest of your family went to live in Australia,’ the Queen said, and an image of cheering crowds came to her so she smiled gently. ‘And I suppose you must miss them terribly, Ford?’
    But Ford as well was proficient in the art of extracting information from unwary speakers.
‘You
tell me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where you from, Gloria!’ And he felt for some reason ashamed of his sudden familiarity with the old lady.
    But the Queen knew the mechanics of the snub as well as encouragement and apparent interest. ‘One has come a long way and one has had a tiring day,’ came the answer. ‘But one
is
rather intrigued by that, that man in the sea this evening. An expatriate, one imagines. How long has he lived here? You said, if I remember correctly, that he is a Mr King …’
    â€˜No,’ said Ford, who saw now that intimacies would not be forthcoming. ‘He the King, that what I say.’ These were Austin’s last words, for he saw his guest, on hearing this, shake her head and smile. Then her eyes closed and she sank down on to the hard bed.

A Cup of Tea
    When morning finally came, the Queen woke from a dream of two of her corgis, Whisky and Sherry, jumping on her bed as in the morning they always did; and then, surfacing further from a patchy sleep, she could have sworn she heard the precise tones of her maid Ivy, bringing in tea, saying good morning before setting down the Tupperware box containing scones and fancy biscuits, which the sovereign and her dogs invariably shared.
    But the heavy weight that descended on the Queen turned out to be a large, unappetising fruit in a cardboard box. A rusty knife lay beside it. Austin Ford had clearly thought of breakfast for his client; but the sight of the custard-yellow collapsed football (as in the perception of the Queen this tropical fruit resembled) brought an even stronger urge for tea and she rose resolutely and walked out of the small shack into bright sunlight. There wasno Miss Struthers standing in the half-built village (she was the Queen’s private secretary at Balmoral) to discuss the day’s events; there was, the Queen knew perfectly well, no schedule set out for her for the rest of her days. But it was hard to do without one, and she determined to start the morning with a visit to the site of No. 5 Bananaquit Drive high in the Joli valley above the hotel and guest cottages. There would be a contractor waiting for her on site, surely; maybe even the architect of the Joli development would make a point of coming down from the capital, Castries, to discuss the construction of the