Mountbatten waved that away. ‘I hope you’re writing back?’

‘When I can. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a war on.’

‘You seem to have time to go drinking and dancing on shore leave,’ his uncle had pointed out.

‘I do write.’ Not that he had much to say either.

The truth is that he has struggled to remember much about Elizabeth. A quiet girl, sturdy and sensible, she has always been there at various family events like his cousin Marina’s wedding to the Duke of Kent and naturally she had been at her father’s coronation, which Philip remembered clearly. They had played croquet together at the Naval College in 1939 when Uncle Dickie, that old intriguer, had somehow arranged for Philip to look after the two princesses while the King and Queen attended chapel. There had been mumps, or measles, or some medical reason why Elizabeth and Margaret hadn’t gone too.

Philip wouldn’t be surprised if Mountbatten had engineered the whole outbreak just to put his nephew in front of the King’s oldest daughter. Not that Philip thought it had done much good. Elizabeth was painfully shy, he seems to remember, and rather chunky. He had hardly been able to get a word out of her. There had been a good tea on the royal yacht, though. He remembers that.

Good Lord, his head hurts. If only he’d been able to find an aspirin but it wasn’t the kind of thing you asked for the moment you were ushered into the Crimson Drawing Room where the King and Queen were greeting their guests for the pantomime.

The last thing Philip wants to do right now is to sit through a pantomime. The Waterloo Chamber is so big it must be impossible to heat at the best of times but with the royal family anxious to share in the country’s wartime privations there isn’t so much as an electric bar to warm the air and the cold is penetrating. He envies the Queen her fur coat.

In spite of the cold, he’s very tired. Osla’s sofa isn’t the most comfortable of beds. The effort of suppressing a yawn leaves the muscles in his cheek aching. Surreptitiously he pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. The last thing he can afford to do is nod off. For all his recalcitrance, he knows Mountbatten is right and he needs to make a good impression on the King.

‘And the Queen,’ his uncle warned. ‘You’ll have to work harder with her. It’s not at all helpful of your grandmother and great aunts to keep referring to her as a common Scottish girl!’

So far the Queen has been charm itself, but Philip is aware that her sweet smile is at variance with her sharp blue eyes.

At last, the main lights go out and the orchestra gets going. There’s some rousing music and just as Philip is seizing the opportunity to slide down in his seat, the curtains are dragged open. The drum roll bangs a conclusion, the lid of the laundry basket on stage is tossed aside and up pops none other than Princess Elizabeth, heiress presumptive to the English throne.