We began to look at the paintings. Like so many art lovers and students before me, I’d always been fascinated by the ‘below stairs’ pictures of Velazquez. Great artists painting status symbols for the great and good, and particularly the monarchy, was all very common, but they so rarely used their gifts to portray the under-classes of their time—presumably because there wasn’t much money in it . Velazquez’s paintings of some of the servants of the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain were well known, but these similar paintings of servants working for the British monarchy of the time were fantastic, and I hadn’t even known they existed until now.
“We have art historians here to look at them from time to time,” the Queen said, when I asked why I’d never seen these pictures before, “but they all say the same thing: don’t move them. There are some paintings, held in galleries throughout the world which I think will never leave the rooms in which they are now housed and are destined to be seen by only a few. The argument being that they are too precious to risk moving them. I always think that if they are not being seen, then really you might as well break them up for firewood. But I suppose in the future perhaps…who knows. A Queen is not supposed to have an opinion on these things. It can be most frustrating at times. Ah, here is something a bit different.”
At the end of the gallery was a much later painting, and though it did not have the quality or innate fascination of a Velazquez, I was still glad to see it, as it portrayed the current royal family.
“Photographs are all very well and no doubt an art form in themselves,” the Queen commented. “But I do believe in keeping up old traditions like official portraiture. And really, if a woman who rides around in a horse drawn carriage can’t keep up outdated traditions, then who can?”
Her eyes sparkled with good humor, and I smiled before craning my neck to get a better look at the portrait.
If it lacked the patina of an old master it was at least a good representation, capturing accurately the likenesses of the Queen and her two sons, and I found my eyes straying of their own accord to Prince Andrew. The painter had certainly caught his good looks and also the swagger in his bearing—even in a two dimensional painting, Andrew’s cock-sure attitude seemed to leap forth. But there was something else too; a weight seemed to rest upon the shoulders of the painted monarch-in-waiting, a seriousness that lay behind his eyes and a decency that shone from his features.
All of this was a lot to read into a picture, and I knew why. I’d read in a volume of art criticism that the paintings we really love (not necessarily the best, but the ones that most capture us) were the ones to which we brought something. The more a painting appealed, the more worlds a viewer was able to read into it, and the more it seemed to speak to them personally. To put it another way: it was possible that everything I read into the painting of Andrew was stuff in my head that I was projecting onto it. And yet I still saw it clearly.
In my long study of the picture, I’d almost forgotten that I wasn’t alone in the gallery, and I jumped slightly when the Queen spoke.
“You like it?” There was a curious look in her face as she asked. She was a very perceptive woman, and I hoped she hadn’t noticed exactly where my stare had been directed.
“I…yes,” I replied. “He’s definitely captured something.”
“Perhaps.” The Queen seemed less certain. She turned her own eyes to the painting for a few more moments. “I daresay one is always overly critical when it is oneself on the canvas.” She looked back to me, that curious expression back on her face. “How are you finding it, working under Andrew?”
I swallowed uncomfortably, somewhat disconcerted by the Queen’s choice of words. Had she overheard Michael’s accusation? Was ‘working under Andrew’ her way of asking if I was sleeping with her son? Whether it was or wasn’t, it seemed clear to me that the Queen had noticed my preoccupation with the Prince in the portrait and was pursuing it. Honesty seemed the best policy, because during our very brief association, I’d come to like and trust her.
But honesty with a side order of discretion, perhaps.
“We got off to a bumpy start,” I said, which was an understatement but largely true. “But now I think it’s fine. He was quite apologetic about…about the bumpiness. And perhaps I wasn’t completely blameless either.”
Andrew’s sleazy, jerkish reaction yesterday might have been uncalled for, but I was willing to admit that the vacuum cleaner at eight in the morning had been wholly malicious in its motivation, seeing as I’d heard Rogers mention that Andrew had been to a charity soiree the night before.