This time, the royal yacht sailed back without incident and the men in moustaches crawled into the office a day later, somewhat grey after a choppy North Sea crossing. Not all of them enjoyed travel as much as Her Majesty.
After several cups of coffee and talk of minor triumphs, Miles Urquhart was forced to admit that Joan’s assistance in setting up this visit ‘hadn’t been as bad as I feared’.
‘Did everything go to plan?’ she asked.
‘More or less.’ He digressed for several minutes about the set-up of the bottling factory, and the difficulty of declaring all the beer they were presented with at customs.
‘There was nothing embarrassing? No slip-ups?’
‘No, of course not!’ he said. ‘What do you take us for? We manage these visits with military precision. You’ll see for yourself one day. Possibly.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Well, there was one embarrassment, I suppose,’ he admitted. ‘Poor Bobo Macdonald. She came down on the second day looking red as a tomato. Her cheeks and chin were itching like billy-o, poor creature. Coming up in hives. Her Majesty sweetly told her to go and rest, but of course Bobo was having none of it. “She needs me, and I’ll be there. There’s too much to do.” She’s made of Scottish granite, that woman. Sterling individual. She slapped on some calamine and carried on as usual with the frocks and furbelows. Reminds me of my own nanny. I think they manufacture them that way north of the border.’
‘Was she ill?’ Joan asked.
‘I did wonder,’ he said, ‘but it went away after a day or two. It nearly caused an international incident because the housekeeper was convinced it was measles. She wanted us all quarantined. But Bobo seemed to think it was Her Majesty’s makeup ointments. She’d been trying it out because it “smelled funny”, if you can believe it. Obviously, she had some sort of sensitivity, or it might have been an allergy, I suppose. Jeremy suggested wearing a yashmak for as long as it lasted. Very funny. Anyway, she’s all right now.’
‘It wasn’t an allergy, was it?’ Joan asked the Queen.
They were walking in the gardens of Windsor Castle together, while five corgis – all related – snuffled near the rose bushes.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ the Queen said grimly. ‘Bobo’s face cream ran out, so I said she could use mine. She said it wasn’t the smell that worried her, so much as the fact that it didn’t have a smell. She knows Elizabeth Arden. It wasn’t quite the right colour, either – too grey – but it was a new tube and the packaging had been intact. So she smoothed some on her face and within a matter of hours, her skin erupted.’
‘Poor woman!’
‘She was quite indomitable about it. I assured her I could manage perfectly well without her until she felt better, but she was positively offended by the idea. And the housekeeper at the residence was rather mean to her, but of course one couldn’t say anything.’
‘If the packaging looked untouched, it must have been a professional job . . .’
‘I know,’ the Queen said. She glanced across at the youngest corgis. ‘Whisky! Sherry! Come back here this minute, you terrors. That’s better. Go over there, with your mother. What was I saying? Oh, yes, the packaging. It’s worrying, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a step up in their behaviour,’ Joan agreed. ‘It suggests they have technical support. They’re not entirely opportunistic.’
‘It still feels so scattergun, though.’ The Queen looked up at the castle, which loomed grey and solid in the background. She sighed. ‘I mean, face cream! Honestly! And itching powder – that’s what it must have been, some industrial version of it. It’s such a schoolboy prank, isn’t it? Like apple-pie beds and buckets on doors.’
‘Did they take the tube to have it tested?’ Joan asked.
The Queen gave her a sidelong look. ‘They couldn’t. By the time Bobo thought to look for it, half the residence knew about her skin reaction. Several servants had been in and out of our rooms, any one of whom might have spirited it away. I helped in the search personally, and there was nowhere we didn’t check . . . But there was no sign of it.’
‘Tony Radnor-Milne is interested in technology,’ Joan said. ‘He may well have contacts in the research world who could tamper with a new tube of cream and make it look untouched.’
‘Sir Hugh’s brother is a world-class chemist.’
‘Oh.’
‘Professor Masson has a whole Cambridge laboratory at his disposal. He’s an expert in insulin manufacture. I can’t believe he’d do anything so petty and juvenile. But if his brother asked him to, and said it was a joke . . .’
‘At least it was only face cream, ma’am,’ Joan said, in an effort to be encouraging. Her Majesty was looking very glum by now.
The Queen shook her head. ‘Ah, but I’m not Bobo. I’m not sure I could have carried on with a raging itch and skin that looked like Vesuvius, in front of all those people . . . It wouldn’t have been fair on them, as much as anything. It wasn’t a pretty sight.’
‘What would you have done, ma’am?’
The Queen didn’t answer straightaway. She called the corgis to her and bent down to stroke the closest. When she stood up again, she stared thoughtfully at the sky.
‘I don’t know, Joan. I really don’t know.’
Chapter 27
‘You’re not aware of anyone who wishes harm on me, are you?’ the Queen asked the prime minister at their meeting the following Wednesday.
It took place as usual in the pale blue sitting room in Buckingham Palace that she liked to use as an audience room. Hard to imagine here, among the porcelain and Canalettos, that she was worrying about something as mundane as the contents of a tube of Elizabeth Arden.
‘Goodness me, no!’ Harold Macmillan said, smiling at the outrageousness of the idea.
He was a confident politician who had settled quickly into the job. According to Sir Hugh, he had a note pinned to the door of the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street, saying ‘Quiet, calm deliberation / Disentangles every knot’. It was a quotation from The Gondoliers. Not only was it sensible advice, especially for the Cabinet, but anyone who could quote Gilbert and Sullivan as a mantra for running the country was a man she could do business with.
‘Not the Russians?’ she suggested.
‘Oh no, ma’am. They may bluster, but I believe even they’re quite fond of you, really. Why do you ask?’
‘A few odd things have happened recently.’
She didn’t elaborate, but he saw that she was serious. ‘I don’t think you need worry, ma’am. No friend wishes you ill, and if anything were to happen your popularity would only soar, and your enemies would suffer.’
‘My enemies?’
‘If you have any. Which, as I say, I doubt. For us as a country . . . That’s a different matter. These are choppy waters, ma’am, as you know. We need all the friends we can get – but you’re good at getting them.’
‘I wondered . . . Singapore and Ghana gaining their independence this year. Everyone had been quite charming to me in person, but behind the scenes . . . ?’
‘Behind the scenes, they have a lot to say about the British Empire, ma’am, not all of it favourable. But they’re complimentary about you personally. Were it not for your focus on friendship, things would have been much more difficult.’
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. That focus had been her father’s legacy and she wanted it to be hers too. But was it working?