Her blue eyes were fixed on Arthur’s face, and for a moment Arthur wondered if she was going to try to console him or comfort him in some way. He was going to carry on, and tell her how Alice had told him afterwards that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Miss Gordon – Elizabeth, as she now called her – instead of with him, and that he’d been mourning her loss ever since; he was going to tell the Queen that he no longer cared very much about his future, that he missed Alice every minute of every day, and that even this morning, even though he knew she was thousands of miles away in Calcutta still, he’d looked for her face in the crowd.

But the old Queen didn’t seem to be interested in what had happened afterwards; she didn’t seem to want to hear Arthur talk about his feelings. She seemed lost in a dream of her own; she was looking around at the crimson-draped platform and the walls of the buildings swathed in their yards and yards of flags and patriotic bunting, at the streamers and the barriers, the row upon row of greenhouse plants in their earthenware pots, at the crowds in their Sunday best, waving their white handkerchiefs, at the Corporation men like Arthur in their embroidered robes, at the people of her own household, at the Secretary of State, at her son the Prince of Wales.

Her mouth drooped and she shook her head.

‘Nobody tells me anything, Mr Pritt,’ she murmured softly, and after that it was almost time for her to go, for her train to depart.

At the station Arthur stood with the Town Clerk and the Treasurer and the Mayor and the eleven other aldermen and watched the royal gifts being stowed away: Binns’s map, Boucher’s illustrated History in its purple Morocco binding, the enormous cake. He watched and he waved, and when she was gone he threaded his way through the dispersing crowds along the narrow streets of the town and in through the front door of his own empty house.

The Travellers

The Travellers

THE LAST TIME it happened, I packed my bags and left. I got on a train at Birmingham New Street and then on another and another and another and I didn’t get off until I reached Siberia.

I liked Siberia.

I liked the snow, the quiet.