Binns was kneeling now on the carpet, indicating with a malacca baton the course of the river through the town. On the far left-hand side of the platform, Arthur could see Mrs. Maudesely’s vast three-tiered cake on its trolley, ready to make its approach. The Queen had shifted her head slightly and was looking at it, at its profusion of thistles and shamrocks and roses, its expanse of hard white icing like plaster of Paris, and at the lonely little sugar statue of herself balanced on the topmost layer. She looked away, as if the cake had depressed her even more than the bagpipes and the morris dancers. It seemed to produce a lowering effect on her spirits, to have to see herself up there on the cake looking so tiny and isolated and aloof. She rested her chin on her hand, her eyelids drooped. Arthur wondered if she’d heard what he’d said about him being sorry for it all; perhaps she was about to turn to someone from her household and order them to remove him immediately from the platform. Instead she turned a little towards him and said, ‘Tell me a story, Mr Pritt.’

Her son the Prince gave Arthur a sharp look and Arthur hesitated.

‘Please, Mr. Pritt. A story.’

So Arthur told the Queen a story, and either because he wasn’t an imaginative person, or because the Queen’s grief had made him dwell more deeply than ever on his own, or because the time had come when he wanted to tell someone what had happened, he told her a true one, about his wife.

‘It was when we were in India,’ he told the Queen, ‘in Calcutta.’

For the first time all day, a flicker of interest seemed to pass, like a gentle wind, across the Queen’s melancholy face. She waved the crouching map-maker away with the point of her fan.

‘I left the house as usual one morning,’ said Arthur, ‘and walked through the city down to the water where the company offices were. When I’d been there an hour, I discovered I’d left some papers behind and went home to fetch them.’

By now Mrs. Maudesely and her helpers had wheeled the gigantic cake into the middle of the platform; the Prince of Wales was leaning down a little towards his mother as if he might be about to ask her to pay attention, but the Queen’s hooded eyes were on the balding alderman at her shoulder and without looking at the Prince she flicked her black glove in his direction, a smart reminder that she was the Queen and she would do what she liked.