The Autobiography of The Queen Read Online Free Page B

van swerved, and the Queen, hanging from a strap, narrowly missed being thrown first on to the floor and then out through the open van door and on to the road.
    â€˜Où sommes nous maintenant?’ the old lady demanded, as the road now ran through open country and a small town could be seen in front of a blue stripe that was the sea.
    â€˜Soufrière,’ Alvyne yelled, as he accelerated down the hill past a group of backpackers gathered round a large noticeboard, announcing the entrance to the Botanical Gardens. Large letters gave this as the birthplace of a royal personage, I’Impératrice Joséphine.
    But to this piece of information the Queen did not respond. Slightly worried – had the old lady suffered a stroke, had he offended her in some way? – Alvyne could not have known that the second of these possibilities was in fact the correct one.
    â€˜One didn’t come all this way,’ said the Queen grimly in an undertone (and in English: she had no wish to offend the driver, after all), ‘one simply didn’t expect to have to take in Napoleon!’

Dream Home
    From Soufrière – where, as was reported on the local radio in the ever-present patois of the island, a van had been implicated in a brawl in the main street and two eighteen-year-old men arrested – the road climbed steeply once more, this time through green lawns bearing shop-window arrangements of bougainvillea and hibiscus and coconut palms waving in a faint breeze from the sea. Joli Estate, said a large notice, as the van, spluttering at the effort in first gear, heaved its way above the Joli Hilton Hotel, the main reception and the high-up cottages, each with its plunge pool, allotted to the second rank of visitors. Seventy-five lots, Joli Estate, more boards insisted, as the road curved higher and the Pitons, like dinosaurs frozen on their deep base in the waters of the Caribbean, pushed in and then disappeared again from view as the Queen stared from the window and hung on to the strap.
    One had been held up, of course, by the activity – so the Queen had chosen to label the brawl in the run-down and pitted streets of Soufrière. A gun had gone off, and it was perhaps this that had jolted her into realising she was not witness – as she and the Duke had been countless times in all the far-flung previous colonies they had visited and revisited in fifty years of the Queen’s place on the throne of Great Britain – to a ritual dance or ceremony. This had been the real thing. Nevertheless, there had been something theatrical about it all; and yawns had to be concealed, as they had so regularly been in past days.
    Alvyne jammed on the brakes at the point, high above the valley, where the words Bananaquit Drive were prominently displayed on a white board. The paint on the board was peeling; and the Queen, met invariably on official visits by coats of fresh emulsion or shining white gloss, assumed that the new distressed look, of which her younger relatives had informed her, was the intention of the decorators responsible for the development of Joli Estate.
    That none of the lots had a house – or pool or anything else, for that matter – became clear once the Queen, refusing a helping hand from the driver (royals, especially the monarch, cannot be touched; a hand in the back or, worse, a familiar nudge is disallowed on all occasions), had descended from the van and looked around her. Banana plants were plentiful up here, certainly – but of BananaquitDrive, or any other signs of development, there were none. Here and there it appeared that an effort had been made, before the project had been abandoned; and it was by a hole in the ground at what could have been designated as No. 5 that the Queen stood for a while, until the heat drove her back to the van.
    Alvyne was sorry for the old lady. He had tried to tell her what she would find here, but she hadn’t understood.
    It was