Read Online The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett - Free Book Online

upbringing; but more and more these days, particularly in the period following Princess Diana’s death, she was being required to go public about feelings she would have preferred to keep to herself. At that time, though, she had not yet begun to read, and it was only now that she understood that her predicament was not unique and that she shared it, among others, with Cordelia. She wrote in her notebook: ‘Though I do not always understand Shakespeare, Cordelia’s “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth” is a sentiment I can readily endorse. Her predicament is mine.’
    Though the Queen was always discreet about writing in her notebooks her equerry was not reassured. He had once or twice caught her at it and thought that this, too, pointed to potential derangement. What had Her Majesty to note down? She never used to do it and like any change of behaviour in the elderly it was readily put down to decay.
    ‘Probably Alzheimer’s,’ said another of the young men. ‘You have to write things down for them, don’t you?’ and this, taken together with Her Majesty’s growing indifference to appearances, made her attendants fear the worst.
    That the Queen might be thought to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease was shocking in the obvious way, the ‘human’ and compassionate way, but to Gerald and the other equerries it was more subtly deplorable. It seemed to him pitiable that Her Majesty, whose life had always been so sequestered, should now have to share this undignified depletion with so many of her subjects, her deterioration, he felt, deserving a royal enclosure where her behaviour (and that of monarchs generally) might be allowed a larger degree of latitude and even waywardness before it attracted the levelling denomination of Alzheimer and his all-too-common disease. It could have been a syllogism, if Gerald had known what a syllogism was: Alzheimer’s is common, the Queen is not common, therefore the Queen has not got Alzheimer’s.
    Nor had she, of course, and in fact her faculties had never been sharper and unlike her equerry she would certainly have known what a syllogism was.
    Besides, apart from writing in her notebooks and her now fairly customary lateness, what did this deterioration amount to? A brooch repeated, say, or a pair of court shoes worn on successive days: the truth was Her Majesty didn’t care, or didn’t care as much, and herself not caring, her attendants, being human, began to care less, too, cutting corners as the Queen would never previously have countenanced. The Queen had always dressed with great care. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of her wardrobe and her multiple accessories and was scrupulous in ringing the changes on her various outfits. No longer. An ordinary woman who wore the same frock twice in a fortnight would not be thought slipshod or negligent of appearances. But in the Queen, the permutations of whose wardrobe were worked out down to the last buckle, such repetitions signalled a dramatic falling away from her own self-imposed standards of decorum.
    ‘Doesn’t ma’am care?’ said the maid boldly.
    ‘Care about what?’ said the Queen, which, while being an answer of sorts, did nothing to reassure the maid, convincing her that something was deeply amiss, so that like the equerries her personal attendants began to prepare for a lengthy decline.
     
    S TILL, THOUGH he saw her every week, the occasional want of variation in the Queen’s attire and the sameness of her earrings went unnoticed by the prime minister.
    It had not always been so, and at the start of his term of office he had frequently complimented the Queen on what Her Majesty was wearing and her always discreet jewellery. He was younger then, of course, and thought of it as flirting, though it was also a form of nerves. She was younger, too, but she was not nervous and had been long enough at the game to know that this was just a phase that most prime ministers went through (the exceptions being