The Queen and I Read Online Free PDF Page B

Magnolia paint tins lay in the garden. Somebody had tried to set fire to them, lost heart and left them. The Queen called the little dog inside, but he wanted to explore this new territory and ran on his ridiculous little legs to the end of the garden, where he disappeared into the mist.
    When Harris reappeared he was carrying a dead rat in his mouth. The rat was frozen into an attitude of extreme agony. It took a sharp crack on the head with a wooden spoon before Harris would release his gift to the Queen. She had once eaten a mouthful of rat at a banquet in Belize. To have refused would have caused great offence. The RAF were anxious to retain the use of Belize as a refuelling stop.
    “Mornin’. Sleep all right?”
    It was Beverley in an orange dressing gown taking frozen washing off the line. Tony’s jeans stood to attention as though Tony were still inside them. “’E’s got an interview for a job ’s afternoon, so I’ve gotta get ’is best clothes dry.”
    Beverley’s heart pounded as she spoke. How did you talk to someone whose head you were used to licking and sticking on an envelope? She unpegged Tony’s best jumper which was frozen into an attitude of arms-raised triumph.
    “Harris found a rat,” said the Queen.
    “A ret?”
    “A rat , look!” Beverley looked down at the dead rodent at the Queen’s feet. “Am I to expect more?”
    “Don’t worry,” said Beverley. “They don’t come in the houses. Well, not often. They’ve got their own complex at the bottom of the gardens.”
    Beverley made it sound as though the rats inhabited a timeshare village, frolicked in a kidney-shaped swimming pool and argued over sun-loungers.
    Somebody was knocking on the front door. The Queen excused herself and went through the little hall. She put a coat on over her nightdress and cardigan and tried to open the door. It was extraordinarily difficult. True, it was years since she’d opened the front door of any house, but surely it had been easier than this? She pulled with all her weight. Meanwhile, the person on the other side of the door had opened the letter-box. The Queen saw a pair of soulful brown eyes and heard a sympathetic female voice.
    “Hi, I’m Trish McPherson. I’m your social worker. Look, I know it’s difficult for you, but it’s not going to help the situation if you won’t let me in, is it?”
    The Queen recoiled from the words “social worker” and stepped back from the door. Trish remembered her training; it was important to be non-confrontational. She tried again, “C’mon now, Mrs Windsor, open the door and we’ll have a nice chat. I’m here to help you with your trauma. We’ll put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea, shall we?”
    The Queen said, “I am not dressed. I cannot receive visitors until I am dressed.”
    Trish laughed gaily, “Don’t worry about me; I take folks as I find them. Most of my clients are still in bed when I call.”
    Trish knew that she was a good person and she was convinced that most of her clients were good, deep down. She felt truly sorry for the Queen. Her fellow social workers had refused to take on the Windsor case file but, as Trish had said in the intake office this morning, “They may be royal, but they are human. To me, they are just two displaced pensioners who will need a great deal of support.”
    Not wishing to antagonise her client, Trish withdrew, wrote a note on Social Services notepaper and pushed it through the door. It said, “I will call round this afternoon, about three. Yours, Trish.”
    The Queen went upstairs, scraped the ice from the inside of the window and looked down at Trish, who was scraping ice off the windscreen of her car with what looked like a kitchen spatula, the sort the Queen occasionally used at barbecues at Balmoral. Trish was dressed in Aztec-styled clothes and could easily have strayed off the stage during a performance of The Royal Hunt of the Sun . She appeared to be wearing parts of a dead goat on