The Uncommon Reader

she woke in the early hours unable to sleep.
    The policeman in the garden, seeing the light go on, turned on his mobile as a precaution.
    She had been reading about the Bronte’s and what a hard time they had had of it when they were children, but she didn’t feel that would send her off to sleep again and, looking for something else, saw in the corner of the bookshelf the book by Ivy Compton-Burnett which she had borrowed from the travelling library and which Mr Hutchings had given her all that time ago. It had been hard going and had nearly sent her to sleep then, she remembered, so perhaps it would do the trick again.
    Far from it, and the novel she had once found slow now seemed refreshingly brisk, dry still but astringently so, with Dame Ivy’s no-nonsense tone reassuringly close to her own. And it occurred to her (as next day she wrote down) that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks (they were hardly jokes) that she had not even noticed before. And through it all she could hear the voice of Ivy Compton-Burnett, unsentimental, severe and wise. She could hear her voice as clearly as earlier in the evening she had heard the voice of Mozart. She closed the book. And once again she said out loud: “I have no voice.”
    And somewhere in West London where these things are recorded a transcribing and expressionless typist thought it was an odd remark and said as if in reply: “Well, if you don’t, dear, I don’t know who does.”
    Back in Buckingham Palace the Queen waited a moment or two, then switched off the light, and under the catalpa tree in the grounds the policeman saw the light go out and turned off his mobile.
    In the darkness it came to the Queen that, dead, she would exist only in the memories of people. She who had never been subject to anyone would now be on a par with everybody else. Reading could not change that — though writing might.
    Had she been asked if reading had enriched her life she would have had to say yes, undoubtedly, though adding with equal certainty that it had at the same time drained her life of all purpose. Once she had been a self-assured single-minded woman knowing where her duty lay and intent on doing it for as long as she was able. Now all too often she was in two minds. Reading was not doing, that had always been the trouble. And old though she was she was still a doer.
    She switched the light on again and reached for her notebook and wrote: “You don’t put your life into your books. You find it there.”
    Then she went to sleep.
    IN THE WEEKS that followed it was noticeable that the Queen was reading less, if at all. She was pensive and abstracted even, but not because her mind was on what she was reading. She no longer carried a book with her wherever she went and the piles of volumes that had accumulated on her desk were shelved, sent back to the libraries or otherwise dispersed.
    But, reading or not, she still spent long hours at her desk, sometimes looking at her notebooks and occasionally writing in them, though she knew, without quite spelling it out to herself, that her writing would be even less popular than her reading, and did anyone knock at the door she immediately swept them into her desk drawer before saving, “Come in.”
    She found, though, that when she had written something down, even if it was just an entry in her notebook, she was happy as once she would have been happy after doing some reading. And it came to her again that she did not want simply to be a reader. A reader was next door to being a spectator whereas when she was writing she was doing, and doing was her duty.
    Meanwhile she was often in the library, particularly at Windsor, looking through her old desk diaries, the albums of her innumerable visits, her archive in fact.
    “Is there anything specific that Your Majesty is looking for?” said the librarian after he had brought her yet another pile of material.
    “No,” said the Queen. “One is just trying to remember what it was like. Though what ‘it’ is one isn’t sure either.”
    “Well, if Your Majesty does remember, then I hope you will tell me. Or better still, ma’am, write it down. Your Majesty is a living archive.”
    Though she felt he could have expressed this more tactfully, she knew what he meant and reflected, too, that here was someone else who was urging her to write. It was almost