Free The Autobiography of The Queen by Emma Tennant Page A

meant that no one had seen TV all day; and thus the news of the disappearance (or possible demise) of the Queen was unknown to the group. The Rum Shop had no television; it had been billed as a more ‘authentic’ visit to a St Lucian village than the Rainforest Bar or the Joli Hotel could provide.
    The Queen had demonstrated her usual pragmatic good sense when Austin, determined to go off fishing in the deep waters beyond the Gros Piton, greeted her on her return from her visit to reception and subsequent adventures in the wilds of ‘the King’s’ secret land, with the information that he was leaving now and would be out all day. ‘Auntie’, as he now called this strange new client, must mind the bar. Go easy with the grenadine,put rum in the coke and say it’s a Crack Baby cocktail … Austin, unaware that he addressed the woman who had granted him and all St Lucians independence when he was a child, lingered a little longer by the bar. Then, with a shout to the Rasta revving up his broken outboard engine at the end of the beach, he strode off to embark on his day’s fishing.
    The Queen by now realised that further visits to the Rainforest Bar were not advisable. She would either be evicted, as had happened already, or recognised – and there was no way of knowing which was worse. The memory of Lady Bostock’s excited face floated before her as she assured this unusually wilful servant (no permission had been asked for him to go out in a boat all day; this surely could never happen at Balmoral) of her acquiescence to his request. But by the time she granted him leave, Ford had gone. The Queen knew it was her duty to repay the proprietor of the Rum Shop in some way, for, dimly at first and then with certainty, she realised that she depended on him to help her avoid the global outcry already seen underway on Sky News at the hotel. Austin could hide her. And, as she went firmly into the Rum Shop, fighting a wave of nausea at the sickly sweet smell of alcohol and days-old flat Coke there, she prepared to do her duty; she did not yet, but this would come along with the thirsty Canadians, give thought to the fact that she had no option other than to trust thatstrangers would show her the same degree of kindness that she, in those already far-off days when she had been Head of State, had happily shown them.

High Noon
    By noon, when the sun had taken a new and menacing strength, the Queen decided she would leave the Rum Shop and go across to the half-finished restaurant to see if any meals were to be served today. It seemed an age since Austin had set out – the phut-phut of the engine had ceased abruptly once the boat arrived by the great dark bulk of the Gros Piton: it had broken down but she was not to know this, and it was possible that a good catch would galvanise the cook into action. This she fervently hoped: the tourists, now the worse for wear after drinking in this heat, would otherwise have to walk the length of the beach to the Rainforest Bar and there was of course no guarantee that they would get anything to eat once there. Booked into a humble boarding house where the shriek of incoming jets was their twenty-four-hour entertainment, they had clearly set out without even theminimum breakfast – and not one looked as if the ‘inclusive’ menu, ‘real seafood soup’ or even Latin buffet, would be on offer to them there. The Queen was not considered to be a person who felt pity or compassion for others – she was hardly deemed to be a person, after all, she was the Queen – but she did feel strangely sorry for her elderly Canadian subjects as they huddled under a canopy on benches by the edge of the rock-strewn sea. How patient these people were! – and the Queen thought of the probable reaction of any of her children (or the Duke) to finding themselves hungry and sunburned, with no food in sight. Would they have taken such an appalling