The Telephone

He had worked Saturdays since July.

The girl who usually did them had gone home to Baltimore in July for the rest of the summer, and then back to college, and Mrs Pell had said on the Friday after the dissolution, without looking up, that since he had nowhere to be on Wednesdays and Thursdays he might as well have nowhere to be on Saturdays as well, and he had said yes, and that had been the arrangement. He opened up at nine. She came in at ten, because she said Saturdays did not begin until ten whatever the clock said.

This Saturday she came in at a quarter past nine, with the radio from the shelf behind the till already under her arm, as if she had gone to fetch it from somewhere.

“It’s not Friday,” Caleb said.

“It’s not an ordinary week.” She put the radio on the counter and plugged it in and turned it on, low. “Nobody’s going to buy anything anyway. They’ll all want to know.”

The papers on the stand by the door said the same thing in six different typefaces. NO WINNER, said one. DEADLOCK, said another. THE REALM SAYS NOTHING, said the Chronicle, which was the cleverest and the least true, because the Realm had said a great deal, very clearly, and the trouble was that it had said it to everybody at once. On the radio the ABC was going through it all again, the seats, the losses, the sum that came to two hundred and thirty and the sum that came to two hundred and thirty-four, and the sum that came to two hundred and ninety-two, and the men and women from the parties came on one after another and said that they were talking, and that talks were continuing, and that nothing was ruled out except the things that were.

At eleven they went to Minnesota.

“We spent three years being told we weren’t needed,” said Signe Halvorsen, in the flat voice he knew now. “We’ve come back with forty-eight seats. We have no wish to be needed now.”

The interviewer asked her whether that meant the Bloc would not take part in a government.

“It means what I said,” said Halvorsen, and the interview ended.

Mrs Pell turned the radio down a little.

“Good for her,” she said.

“Do you think so?”

“I think it’s the most honest thing anybody’s said since Thursday.” She looked at the radio. “She’ll do it anyway, of course. Whatever it is. People who say they don’t want to be needed always end up doing the washing up.”

---

The shop was busier than she had said it would be. People came in on Saturday mornings in any weather, and this Saturday they came in to be somewhere that was not their kitchen with the radio on, and wandered round the plan chests and the globes and touched things. Nobody talked about the election. They talked about holidays, and walks, and somebody’s grandchild who was going to Peru.

At half past eleven the girl came back with the map.

She was the girl from Thursday, the one of about twelve who had come in alone and asked for a map of Loreto for school, and she came to the counter with it folded very exactly along its creases and held it out to Mrs Pell with both hands.

“I’ve finished with it,” she said. “Thank you.”

Mrs Pell took it. “Did you get a good mark?”

“We haven’t had the marks yet. But I did the five seats in five colours, like the atlas, and I wrote the numbers on it from the television.” She looked at Caleb. “Everybody voted. Eighty per cent. My teacher said that’s more than anywhere.”

“It is,” said Caleb.

“She said nobody’s going to be able to say they didn’t want to be counted.”

“No,” said Caleb. “Nobody is.”

The girl nodded, satisfied, as if a point had been confirmed for her by an authority, and went out. Mrs Pell unfolded the map on the counter. On the back, in very careful felt-tip, in five colours, the girl had drawn the peninsula and its five seats and written the turnout in each, and in the corner, in pencil, smaller, a sum: 4,000,000 people. Nobody knows. (Mr Whitlock at the map shop.)

Mrs Pell looked at it for a long time.

“I’ll keep that,” she said, and folded it again, and put it under the counter.

---

The telephone rang at twenty to four.

It was the shop telephone, the old cream one on the wall behind the till, which rang perhaps three times a week, always for Mrs Pell, always a supplier or a customer wanting to know whether something was in stock. Caleb was at the plan chests with a man who wanted the Adirondacks, the walking sheets, and was trying to decide between the High Peaks and Lake George. Mrs Pell answered it.

“Pell’s.”

She listened.

“Yes, he is,” she said. “Who shall I say?”

She listened again. Then she held the receiver against her cardigan, and looked across the shop at him, over her glasses, with no expression at all.

“It’s for you,” she said. “A Mrs Halvorsen.”

The man with the Adirondacks went on talking about the High Peaks. Caleb heard him go on, and did not hear what he said. He said “Excuse me,” and went to the counter, and Mrs Pell gave him the receiver and went down to the other end of the counter, to the order book, and did not look at him.

“Hello,” he said.

“Is that Lord Whitlock?”

“It’s Caleb Whitlock.”

“Good. I don’t do titles either.” It was the voice from the radio, flat and unhurried, with the room behind it, a sound of voices and somebody laughing and a door. “This is Signe Halvorsen. I’m sorry to ring you at work. I didn’t have another number. A clerk of the Lords called Quarles gave me this one this morning, and told me you’d be there on a Saturday, and said if I was going to ring I was to be polite to whoever answered, because she would be.”

“She was.”

“She was,” said Halvorsen. “I’ll tell him.” A pause. “I read your speech, Mr Whitlock. The twenty-seventh of July. I read it on the train back to Minnesota the next morning, in the record. I don’t suppose anyone else did.”

“A few people.”

“A few people. And in August I walked past a map shop in the old commercial quarter on my way to the Treasury, and there was a card in the window about the Territory in pencil that said nobody knows. I stood and read it, and wrote it down, and walked on.” Another pause. “I didn’t know it was your shop until Quarles told me this morning. I put it together on the telephone. It made me laugh.”

He did not say anything. The man at the plan chests had taken out the High Peaks sheet and unfolded it on the top of the chest and was holding it at arm’s length, as if trying to see the mountains.

“I’ll be brief, because I’ve been asked to be,” said Halvorsen. “The leaders of five of the parties are meeting tomorrow. Myself, Margaret Renwick, Ana Valdez, Priya Raghunathan and Naomi Feldt. We have been meeting since yesterday and we will go on tomorrow. We’d like you to come and meet us. All five of us.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather they told you. It’s their meeting as much as mine, and I’m only the one who remembered your name.” Something in the background, a voice saying something, and Halvorsen saying one moment away from the telephone, and then back. “I’ll tell you this much, because it’s fair. It’s about the count. It’s about what you said in July. And nobody wants anything from you that you’d have to decide today.”

“Where?”

“The Concord, on the Axis. Not the front, there’s press at the front. There’s a door on Market Street with a man on it. Come at one. He’ll know your name.” A pause. “Will you come?”

He looked across the shop. The man with the Adirondacks had folded the High Peaks sheet up wrong and was trying to fold it again. Mrs Pell was at the order book, writing something, her head bent, not listening with great care.

“Yes,” he said.

He heard himself say it. He had not decided anything. He had not got as far as deciding. The word had come out before the thought did, the way the answer comes out at a quiz before you know you know it.

“Thank you,” said Halvorsen. She did not sound surprised. “One o’clock. Market Street. Bring whatever you’ve been writing in that back room, if Quarles is right that you’ve been writing something.”

“How does Quarles know that?”

“I’ve no idea. He seems to know most things.” The voice in the background again. “I have to go. Mr Whitlock?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for the card,” said Halvorsen, and rang off.

---

He put the receiver back on the hook. It took him two tries, because the hook was old and sticky and his hand was not doing exactly what he told it.

Then he went back to the plan chests.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the man with the Adirondacks.

“Not at all, not at all.” The man held out the two sheets. “I think the High Peaks. Don’t you? I want the summits. My wife wants the lake. I’m going to have to tell her the lake’s on this one.”

“It’s on the edge of it.”

“The edge will do.” The man laughed. “Marriage is the edge of the map, isn’t it? Everything’s on the edge.”

Caleb took the sheet to the counter and rang it up and took the man’s money and gave him his change, and rolled the sheet and put it in a tube, and got the cap on first time, and the man thanked him and went out with the tube under his arm, and the bell rang behind him.

Mrs Pell did not look up for some time.

When she did, she looked at the plan chest drawer where the Adirondacks were, and then at him.

“You sold him Lake George,” she said.

“What?”

“He wanted the High Peaks. He said so. He held it up to the light. You rolled Lake George and put it in the tube.” She took her glasses off. “He’ll be back on Monday. I’ll change it.”

He stood with his hands on the counter.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Mrs Pell. “It’s the first mistake you’ve made in two years.” She put her glasses on the order book. “I was beginning to think you were incapable of it.”

She did not ask him who Mrs Halvorsen was. She did not ask him what she had wanted. She did not ask him anything at all. At five she turned the sign on the door and turned off the radio and put it back on its shelf, and he did the blinds, the inch and then all the way, and when he came back to the counter she was standing behind it with her bag on her arm, looking at him.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she said.

“Yes.”

“We’re shut on Sundays.”

“I know.”

“So you won’t be in.” She looked at him for a moment longer. “Wear the grey jacket. Not that one. That one’s got chalk on the elbow from the window.”

She went out, and he heard her key in the lock, and stood alone in the dim shop for a while with the plan chests and the globes, and the atlas in the window on its easel with the card against it, in ink.

He looked at the elbow of his jacket. There was chalk on it.

---

He telephoned Quarles from the flat at seven.

“You gave her the shop,” he said.

“She asked where to find you. She already knew who you were. She’d read the record.” Quarles’s voice was careful and very level, the voice he used in committee when a witness had said something the clerks would have to deal with later. “She asked me this morning at nine, at my own front door, my Lord. In person. She’d got my address from the Clerk of the Parliaments’ office, which I shall be raising with the Clerk of the Parliaments. I told her where you’d be on a Saturday. I told her to be polite to Mrs Pell.”

“She was.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” A pause. “Did she say why?”

“No.”

“No,” said Quarles. “She wouldn’t. Not on the telephone.” Another pause, longer. “My Lord. If I might.”

“Go on.”

“Take the notes. Whatever you’ve been writing. She asked me whether you’d been writing anything and I said I thought you probably had, because you always are.” Quarles cleared his throat. “And don’t agree to anything you haven’t read twice. That’s not advice. That’s procedure.”

“Thank you, Matthew.”

“Good night, my Lord,” said Quarles, and rang off before Caleb could ask him anything else, which was, Caleb thought, entirely deliberate.

---

He sat at the kitchen table until late with the notes.

There were twenty-two pages of them now, pencil on lined paper, in the order he had thought of them, with The whole job is finding the doors at the top of the first page, underlined twice. He read them through from the beginning. He crossed out a sentence about the cost, which he still did not know. He added a line about the Assembly at Loreto, which should be asked first, before anybody else, before any form was printed. He numbered the pages in the top right corner. He put them in a brown card folder from the shop, the kind they used for maps that came in loose, and wrote nothing on the front.

Then he sat and looked at the folder for a while.

He thought about ringing Oliver, who had said to call if anything happened. Nothing had happened. A woman had rung him at work and asked him to a meeting. It would turn out to be about the count, as she had said, and they would want him to give evidence, or advise, or chair something, because he was the only person in either House who had read all the evidence, and that was all, and he would go and do it and come back and sell maps on Monday.

He did not ring Oliver.

He got up and opened the fridge. The six bottles of beer were there on the bottom shelf, cold, in a row, where he had put them on Tuesday. He looked at them.

He closed the fridge.

He went and stood at the left-hand end of the front-room window and leaned, and the dome of Parliament House was there at the end of the Axis, white, lit, over the roofs, for nobody. Somewhere under it, or near it, in a hotel he had walked past a hundred times on his way to the Lords, five people were sitting in a room, deciding something.

He took the grey jacket out of the wardrobe and hung it on the back of the bedroom door, where he would see it in the morning. Then he went to bed, and lay in the dark, and did not sleep for a long time, and did not think about anything in particular, which took a great deal of effort.