Free The Autobiography of The Queen by Emma Tennant

and down. This must be the coast below: here she would find the Rainforest Bar – or, if she arrived at Windsor Village, there she would find Ford and he would bring her tea. For the Queen, like all who have employed servants, saw all those inferior to her in class and status as potential doers of the royal bidding.
    â€˜Madam.’ The voice was gruff and appeared to issue from behind a large boulder on the forest path. ‘You are mistaking your way, madam,’ the voice continued, as its owner came heavily up through a cleared area: behind him, as the Queen could now see, the land dropped away steeply and what appeared to be a monastery or abbey sat further down, its colonnades pointing out to sea.
    â€˜Where is one?’ said the Queen. She had recognised the old man with flowing white hair as the creature glimpsed in the sea off Joli Beach, Ford in attendance with a towel.
    â€˜Ravissant Estate,’ replied the old man.
    The Queen waited. There would surely be an invitation to go down to the religious-looking building below, which, as she now saw, had a gold roof. Possessor of unlimited amounts of art treasures, castles and palaces, the Queen felt no particular interest in the building – although thoughts of a boring film about Tibet shown her by Prince Charles did come to mind. ‘May one follow you down?’ the Queen asked the old man.
    But no invitation was forthcoming. Despite his age, the King (as the Queen had heard him called by Ford, and for that reason she felt she would like to know more about him) descended with agility to his demesne overlooking the sea.
    The Queen had never not been invited by anyone before. Her subjects were warned months in advance of the royal arrival and departure dates, and were presumed to be grateful for the information. No, the present Queen had never been rejected in this way before. Surprised at this rebuff from the white-haired recluse, she decided she must find Ford urgently, and a path that would lead away from the forested kingdom of the old man.
    The sea grew nearer as she walked and half slithered down the side of the Piton where she had lost her way. Then the Queen found herself almost at once just above the half-finished village which bore her name.

The Rum Shop
    â€˜So that’s two banana daiquiris, three Piton lagers and a Coke,’ said the tourist to the woman behind the bar of the Rum Shop – this newly opened with wooden sill extended to provide a counter-cum-bar, and on the floor a nest of stools for those too old, tired or drunk to stay on their feet.
    That this was frequently the case for the customers of Austin Ford’s ‘internationally famous’ establishment (announced on the reverse of the Escort Service card along with a line drawing of a cocktail glass topped with a cherry) was confirmed by today’s batch of drinkers in the half-finished village. With a combined age of at least three centuries, the white-haired or egg-bald Canadian gentlemen, their wives in long caftans and dangling earrings hanging by the sides of their faces in an attempt to conceal jowls or wrinkles, the customers at the Rum Shop – with the exception of a solitary American male – were allCommonwealth born and reared. That their monarch, the Queen of Canada’s snowy wastes, the sovereign of high-rise cities and pine-clad mountains, leader of all those banished from a cruel homeland ruled over by kings uncaring of the Clearances and bored at the thought of this distant offshoot of Scotland far away – that this historic personage was the one who served the drinks here today, would have been surprising in the extreme to them. A tour of ‘Wild St Lucia’, comprising a brief walk in the botanical gardens and a goggle down at the sulphur springs which gave Soufrière its name, followed by a handiwork shop in the town and the purchase of miniature wooden boats, further dangly earrings and postcards of the Pitons,