Englishmen rule

I discovered I was pregnant the same day I met the Queen. It was one of those lightless December afternoons when the sky clamps down on London like the lid on a cast iron pot. I went straight from my doctor’s surgery in Shepherd’s Bush to a media reception at Buckingham Palace where I was ushered up the stairs into a large drawing room hung with Old Masters and rammed with journalists sucking back free champagne, trying to look blasé. The courtiers gently herded us all into a queue, prised flute glasses from sticky fingers and prodded us one by one into the adjoining room.

And suddenly there she was: Elizabeth II, tiny and smiling beatifically in a mint-green skirt suit and gloves. She was paler and prettier than I’d expected, gave off a whiff of perfumed powder and had an extraterrestrial glow I have only ever seen in one other mortal up close: the teenaged Scarlett Johansson. Prince Philip stood to her right and a bit behind, looking bald and bemused. ‘Leah McLaren, the Globe and Mail!’ a man in a footman’s costume announced. The Queen clasped my right hand, looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘How do you do?’

Now, I’ve lived in Britain the better part of the last decade — long enough to know that when an English person asks you this question they are not actually inquiring after your general wellbeing. In my first couple of years here I’d reply brightly, ‘Fine thanks! And yourself?’ Only to watch the speaker recoil in a kind of genteel revulsion. So I knew the Queen wasn’t actually interested in how my day was going. And yet, since she’d asked, the thought did cross my mind: why not tell her?

So I stood for a moment, squeezing the monarch’s hand and preparing my answer.