Chapter 36

‘How long is it since you’ve seen her?’ Elizabeth asks.

‘I was on leave in Athens during the war, in 1941, before the German occupation. She was living very simply then.’

Philip keeps his tone even. Talking about his mother always leaves him feeling … complicated. He hates the way he had to work up to mentioning her to Elizabeth. It is ridiculous. He is a grown man, and it is not his mother’s fault that she was ill. He knows that. He has always known that.

‘She sounds like an interesting woman,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I’d like to meet her.’

It stings that she keeps her tone carefully neutral. Of course she has heard that his mother is eccentric, mad. A crazy woman confined to a sanatorium. Her own mother will certainly have told her in an effort to dissuade her from marrying him.

‘You know my mother is going to be a problem,’ he says abruptly. ‘Interesting is a kind word to use. She’s not like other people. She’s certainly not like any other royals.’

‘I heard that she was amazingly brave during the war,’ Elizabeth says. ‘They say she fed people who were starving, hid a Jewish family from Germans, looked after orphans … How many of the rest of us would have done half as much?’

‘Yes, she would do anything for other people’s children.’

Philip stops, appalled at the bitterness in his own voice. Elizabeth hears it, of course. She turns to look at him, but he won’t meet her eyes. He scowls at a squirrel running up the trunk of a great oak. He doesn’t want to talk about his mother.

He isn’t going to talk about her.

‘I went to look for her one day when I was on leave in Athens,’ he hears himself say, ‘and I found her at a soup kitchen she ran. She had this scrap of a boy clinging to her skirts while she berated some man twice her size about the way he’d been treating him. The man tried to argue with her but she wasn’t having it. She threatened to have him arrested for cruelty and when he’d given up and gone away, I watched as she put her arms around that boy and told him she would look after him, that he would be safe with her. Mon petit chou, that’s what she called him.’

All at once, there’s a viciously tight block in Philip’s throat, and his mouth twists with the effort of swallowing it down. He’s still not looking at Elizabeth but he can feel her quiet eyes on his face.

‘That’s what she used to call me when I was small,’ he says. ‘My little cabbage.’

‘How sweet,’ she says and he can tell that she is smiling. ‘I can definitely see you as a cabbage. A rather naughty one, I suspect.’

‘I was very naughty,’ he admits, grateful to Elizabeth for lightening the moment.

‘Did she know you were there?’ she asks after a moment.