Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Craig Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ MOMENT OF TINKLY LAUGHTER FROM HM, A HUGE GUFFAW FROM GB, THEN TOTAL SILENCE)

      GB (SUDDENLY FRANTIC): I’ve been to Wimbledon today.

      HM (BRIGHTENING BRIEFLY): Oh, yes?

      GB (DETERMINED): Yes.

      HM: I’ve been to Wimbledon, too.

      GB (NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE): Today?

      HM: No.

      GB (OH WELL, WE TRIED): No, of course not. (PAUSE) I wasn’t at the tennis.

      HM: No?

      GB: No, I was at the theatre. (LONG PAUSE) Have you been to the theatre in Wimbledon?

      (PAUSE)

      HM: I imagine so.

      (INTERMINABLE PAUSE)

      GB (A LAST, DESPERATE ATTEMPT): You know, Ma’am, my wife’s a vegetarian.

      HM (WHAT WILL SHE SAY?): That must be very dull.

      GB (WHAT NEXT?): And one of my daughters is a vegetarian, too.

      HM (OH NO!): Oh, dear.

      Her technique is to let others do the talking. Often – perhaps more often than not – the dizzying experience of talking to a stranger more instantly recognisable than your own mother, a stranger the back of whose miniaturised face you have licked countless times, is enough to start you spouting a stream of gibberish. While you do so, Her Majesty may occasionally say, ‘Oh, really?’ or ‘That must be interesting,’ but most of the time she says nothing at all.

      As a drama student in the mid-seventies, I found myself presented to her at a party, quite unexpectedly. Our host – who later explained that he thought she might want to meet one of the younger generation – told Her Majesty that I had recently had an article published in Punch, and then left us to it. ‘That must be interesting,’ she said. This was more than enough to convince me of her thirst to know more. Within seconds I was regaling her with my various complex and no doubt impenetrable theories of humour, while every now and then she was urging me on with an ‘Oh, really?’ or a ‘That must be interesting,’ and from there I proceeded to remind her of Bertolt Brecht’s theories of alienation (‘Oh, really?’), with particular reference to their application to comedy (‘That must be interesting’).

      I have learned since that the way the Queen signals the end of a conversation is to take one step backwards, but I did not know this at the time. Friends who witnessed our meeting from the other side of the room told me that, during the final half of my discourse on Brecht, Her Majesty took first one step back, then another, then another, then another, but still found herself trapped: for each of her steps back I took a step forward.

      Throughout her life, the Queen’s technique of giving nothing away has paid dividends. Nowadays, everyone seems content to interpret her silence as wisdom. The less she says, the more we believe she has something to say. Peter Morgan’s play The Audience and his film The Queen are both predicated on this paradox: her advisers and her prime ministers may prattle away, but, Buddha-like, it is Her Majesty the Queen, with her How long have you been heres? and her Have you come fars?, who remains the still, small voice of calm, radiating common sense.

      But her younger sister was another matter. As the second-born, the also-ran, she was denied the Chauncey Gardiner option. She could never have been another whitewashed wall, there for people to see in her whatever they chose to see. To impress on people that she was royal, Princess Margaret had to take the only other path available to her: to act imperiously, to make her presence felt, to pull well-wishers up short, to set strangers at their unease. If I had tried to tell Margaret about Bertolt Brecht she would have interrupted me – ‘Too tiresome!’ – before I had got to the end of the ‘Bert –’. Like a grand guignol version of her elder sister, she took a perverse pleasure in saying the wrong thing, ruffling feathers, disarming, disdaining, making her displeasure felt. One socialite remembers seeing her at a party at Sotheby’s in 1997. By that stage, people were so reluctant to be snapped at by her that there was a sort of compulsory rota system in operation. A senior Sotheby’s figure told the socialite that he would guarantee him an invitation to every future Sotheby’s party attended by Princess Margaret if he would promise to talk to her for five minutes on each occasion.

      Compare the Queen’s conversation with Brandreth to Princess Margaret’s dinner-party conversation, as witnessed by Edward St Aubyn and recreated in his wonderfully beady novel, Some Hope.

      As the main course arrives, the Princess asks her host, Sonny, ‘Is it venison? It’s hard to tell under this murky sauce.’ A few minutes later, the French ambassador, sitting next to her, accidentally flicks globules of the sauce over the front of the Princess’s blue tulle dress.

      ‘The Princess compressed her lips and turned down the corners of her mouth, but said nothing. Putting down the cigarette holder into which she had been screwing a cigarette, she pinched her napkin between her fingers and handed it to Monsieur d’Alantour.

      ‘“Wipe!” she said with terrifying simplicity.’

      While the ambassador is on his knees, dipping his napkin in a glass of water and rubbing the spots of sauce on her dress, the Princess lights a cigarette and turns back to her host.

      ‘I thought I couldn’t dislike the sauce more when it was on my plate.’

      The ambassador’s wife offers to help.

      ‘He spilled it, he should wipe it up!’ replies the Princess. She points to a spot the ambassador has missed. ‘Go on, wipe it up!’ She then complains about ‘being showered in this revolting sauce’. At this point, the table falls silent.

      ‘“Oh, a silence,” declared Princess Margaret. “I don’t approve of silences. If Noël were here,” she said, turning to Sonny, “he’d have us all in stitches.”’

      Before long, Sonny’s seven-year-old daughter appears, having found it hard to get to sleep. Her mother asks the Princess if she may present her.

      ‘“No, not now, I don’t think it’s right,” said the Princess. “She ought to be in bed, and she’ll just get overexcited.”’

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      More often than not, the presence of

      Margaret, HRH the Princess

      in an index signals yet another tale of haughty behaviour. In the autobiography of Cherie Blair she comes between Mandela, Nelson and May, Brian. The brittle wife of the former prime minister recalls the occasion she was talking to Princess Margaret at a gala performance at the Royal Opera House when the secretary of state for culture came over.

      ‘Have you met Chris Smith, our culture secretary, Ma’am?’ asked Mrs Blair. ‘And this is his partner …’

      ‘Partner for what?’ said the Princess.

      At this point, writes Cherie Blair, ‘I took a breath.’

      ‘Sex, Ma’am.’

      This СКАЧАТЬ