Karly

I was rewatching The Crown with my mother when I became completely distracted by something I’d somehow never properly noticed before, which is that Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret are constantly greeting one another with “hello, you,” a phrase so ordinary that it should barely register and yet, once you hear it, it becomes impossible not to notice how much emotional work those two words are doing every single time.

They don’t say “hello, Margaret”, or “hello, Lilibet”, and they certainly don’t greet each other with the sort of formal language you might expect from two women whose family relationships are permanently entangled with titles, duty, rank and constitutional anxiety. Instead, one of them walks into a room, the other looks up, and there it is again, “hello, you,” delivered with some tiny variation in warmth, amusement, irritation or relief, as though the phrase has spent years absorbing everything they’d never be able to say directly.

I should admit that Olivia Colman and Helena Bonham Carter are my absolute favourite Elizabeth and Margaret, although I mean that with nothing against Claire Foy, Vanessa Kirby, Imelda Staunton or Lesley Manville, all of whom are brilliant and all of whom have to perform the strange task of making the same two women feel continuous across decades without simply imitating the actresses who came before them. There’s something about the middle period, though, that I find especially compelling, perhaps because by then the great rupture in their lives has already happened, Elizabeth has long since become Queen, Margaret has long since realised what being the Queen’s sister will and won’t allow her to have, and their relationship has settled into that very sibling-like mixture of devotion, resentment, dependence and mutual exasperation which can only exist between people who knew each other before either of them became fully themselves.

What Olivia Colman and Helena Bonham Carter capture so beautifully is that sense of history sitting behind every exchange, because Elizabeth and Margaret never seem to be speaking only as the women they are in that particular scene. They’re also the little girls they once were, the young women who imagined their futures before one of those futures was swallowed by the Crown, the sisters who’ve disappointed and defended one another repeatedly, and the only two people in most rooms who truly understand what it was like to grow up inside that particular family. When Elizabeth looks at Margaret, she isn’t simply looking at her younger sister as she exists in the present, and when Margaret looks at Elizabeth, she isn’t only looking at the Queen, because each of them is carrying every previous version of the other at once.

That’s why “hello, you” feels less like a greeting and more like recognition. It says there you are, still being impossible, still understanding me better than almost anyone, still capable of hurting me in ways that strangers could never manage, and still somehow belonging to me despite everything that’s happened between us. The “you” is intimate precisely because it’s so unspecific, because a name would almost be too formal for what they’re trying to express, while anything more emotional would require a degree of openness that neither of them has been raised to find comfortable.

There’s also something wonderfully English about disguising enormous feeling inside language that sounds almost comically casual, because neither Elizabeth nor Margaret is likely to say that she’s missed the other, that she’s frightened, that she needs reassurance or that she can’t quite imagine herself without the other woman somewhere nearby. Those declarations would be far too exposing, and exposure isn’t something their family has ever handled particularly well, so instead one of them says “hello, you,” perhaps with a small smile or a raised eyebrow, and trusts that the rest of the sentence will be understood without ever having to be spoken aloud.

The Crown has always been interested in what people can’t say, particularly when saying it would force them to admit that beneath all the conversations about duty, propriety and the institution there are simply human beings asking to be loved, forgiven or chosen. Elizabeth and Margaret are especially suited to this kind of storytelling because almost every conflict between them is both personal and political, and neither woman is ever allowed the luxury of keeping those two things separate. Margaret wants a sister, but Elizabeth is also the sovereign who can determine the shape of her life, while Elizabeth wants the comfort of being known by someone who remembers her before the throne, yet Margaret is also the person most likely to resent her for having it.

Their relationship is therefore never easy enough to be described as simply loving or simply destructive, because sibling relationships are rarely polite enough to remain one thing at a time. Margaret envies Elizabeth’s power while understanding more clearly than most what that power has cost her, and Elizabeth can be restrictive, judgmental and maddeningly loyal to the institution while also seeming softer and more recognisably herself in Margaret’s presence than she does with almost anyone else. Margaret represents a form of freedom Elizabeth was never permitted to pursue, while Elizabeth represents the stability Margaret resists, depends upon and occasionally wants to be rescued by, which means they spend much of their lives circling the same wound from opposite sides.

Perhaps that’s also why I noticed the phrase while watching with my mother, because there’s something about sitting beside someone with whom you share your own private shorthand that makes you more alert to it in other relationships. Families are full of phrases which would mean almost nothing to anybody outside them but which contain entire histories for the people involved, and sometimes affection survives not through grand declarations but through repetition, tone and the reassurance of being greeted in a way that belongs only to you.

By the time one of them says “hello, you,” we already know that the phrase might mean I’ve missed you, I’m still angry with you, I know exactly what you’re about to say, or I’m relieved that you’re here, and perhaps the reason it feels so moving is that the sisters themselves know it too. They don’t need to explain which meaning applies, because the whole point is that they’ve spent a lifetime learning how to hear everything the other has left unsaid.