Two Forty

Oliver woke at seven on the sofa with the blanket over his head and said, from under it, “Is it today?”

“It’s today.”

“Right.” He took the blanket off his head and looked at the ceiling. “Right. I’m going to the bureau to resign. Then I’m going to buy a suit, because I haven’t got one that doesn’t have soup on it. Then I’ll be on the Rise at four.” He sat up. “Not as a reporter. As whatever I am by four o’clock.”

“What will you be?”

“Unemployed, for about five hours.” Oliver found his shoes and looked at them as if he had never seen them before. “Are you going to the shop?”

“I’m due at work.”

Oliver looked at him for a long moment, holding one shoe.

“Of course you are,” he said. “Of course you’re due at work.” He put the shoe on. “Tell her before the radio does. That’s the only thing I know about today that I’m sure of.”

---

He opened up at nine.

The blinds, the inch down and then all the way. The sign turned to OPEN. The morning coming in sideways over the atlas on its easel in the window and the card propped against it in ink, and lying along the plan chests and the globe stand and the bottom row of the travel guides, sun-faded on their spines in a straight line exactly where it reached. He swept the floor, which he did every Monday. He dusted the globes, which he did on Mondays and Thursdays. He took the delivery from the courier at half past nine, a box of road atlases for the Great Lakes polities, and signed for it, and the courier said “Cheers, mate,” and did not look at him twice.

Nobody came in. It was a Monday morning in September and nobody ever came in until ten.

He stood behind the counter in the empty shop with his hands flat on the glass and looked at the street through the window. A woman went past with a pushchair. A man went past reading a newspaper, and the headline on the back of it, which Caleb could read backwards through the glass, said FIVE NEAR AGREEMENT: TALKS CONTINUE. That was Oliver’s paper. That was Oliver’s eight hundred words, with the last two paragraphs taken out.

He had not thought of anything to say to Mrs Pell. He had lain awake from three until five trying, and had thought of a great many things, and none of them had been right, and at five the first bird had started and he had stopped trying.

At ten the bell rang, and she came in.

---

She had the radio under her arm again. She came in out of the sun with her bag and the radio and her glasses on their chain and her cardigan over her arm, and put the radio on the counter, and looked at him, and stopped.

“You’re wearing the grey jacket,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It’s Monday.”

“Yes.”

She put her bag down on the counter beside the radio, slowly. She did not take her cardigan off her arm. She stood at the end of the counter under the lamp and looked at him, the way she looked at a map she was pricing, with no expression at all, and waited.

He had not thought of anything to say. He said it anyway.

“I won’t be in tomorrow,” he said. “Or on Friday. Or after that.” He stopped. “I’m sorry. I should have told you on Saturday, when the telephone rang. I didn’t know on Saturday. I knew a bit. I found out last night, properly, at about eight o’clock, in a hotel, and I was told not to tell anybody except my family until twenty to three this afternoon, and I was told to tell you before the radio did.” He looked at her. “So I’m telling you. It’ll be on the radio at twenty to three. I’d rather you heard it from me.”

Mrs Pell did not say anything for a long time.

She took her cardigan off her arm and hung it on the back of the chair behind the counter, where she always hung it. She took the radio and plugged it in and turned it on, very low, and the ABC was saying something about the weather in the Great Lakes polities. She sat down on the chair, which she did not usually do until eleven.

“Twenty to three,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The Prime Minister.” It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“I see.” She took her glasses off and folded them and held them in her lap. “You’ll want to tell me it isn’t what it sounds like. That they’ve written it all down and you’re only chairing it and you can’t appoint anybody and you’ve got a date to go by.” She looked up at him. “Mrs Halvorsen said something like that to me on the telephone on Saturday, before she asked for you. She said not to worry, it wasn’t what it would sound like. I didn’t say anything. I thought I’d never once worried about anything that boy did, and I wasn’t going to start because a woman from Minnesota rang up on a Saturday.”

He stood behind the counter and could not say anything at all.

“Will you be in tomorrow?” said Mrs Pell.

“No.”

“Friday?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll need a card for the window,” said Mrs Pell, and put her glasses back on, and opened the order book.

---

The morning was very long.

The radio stayed on. At eleven it said that the five party leaders had been at the Concord Hotel on the Axis since Friday and had reached agreement late last night on a programme, and that the name of the person they would recommend to the Governor-General would be announced in the afternoon. At twelve it said the same thing again. At one it said that the Prime Minister had been at Government House twice since Friday and was expected there again at about four. It said that people in three of the five parties had been heard discussing a Prime Minister from the House of Lords, and Mrs Pell, at her end of the counter, turned a page of the order book very deliberately and did not look up.

People came in. A man wanted a map of the Pennines for a walking holiday in England. A woman wanted a globe for an office and could not decide between the blue oceans and the antique ones, and chose the antique ones, and then came back twenty minutes later and changed it. A boy of about fifteen wanted a chart of the Chesapeake approaches because he had just got his first boat, and Caleb found him the right sheet and showed him the shoals off Thomas Point and the channel into Annapolis, and the boy said he had never seen a chart before that you could actually read, and Caleb said that was because most people drew them for people who already knew where they were going.

“Who draws them for people who don’t?” said the boy.

“Nobody,” said Caleb. “You have to work it out.”

He did not think about twenty to three. He did not think about anything except the next customer and the next map, and when there was no customer he swept the floor again, which did not need sweeping, and Mrs Pell watched him do it and said nothing.

At half past one she went through the curtain and made two cups of tea and gave him the one with the roses on it.

He looked at it.

“That’s Samuel’s cup,” he said.

“It’s the good cup,” said Mrs Pell. “It’s for occasions.” She sat down on the chair with her own. “Drink your tea.”

---

The man with the Adirondacks came back at twenty-five to three.

He came in with the tube under his arm and an apologetic face, and stood at the counter, and said that he was terribly sorry, he was sure it was his own fault, but he had got home and unrolled it on Saturday night and it was Lake George, not the High Peaks, and his wife had been delighted because it had the lake on it but he really did want the summits.

“Mr Whitlock will change it for you,” said Mrs Pell, from the end of the counter.

Caleb took the tube. He went to the plan chests and opened the Adirondacks drawer and found the High Peaks sheet, and brought it back to the counter, and unrolled it on the glass so that the man could see that it was the right one this time, the summits in brown contour lines climbing up through the middle of the sheet, Marcy and Algonquin and the long ridge of the Great Range.

“That’s it,” said the man. “That’s the one.” He bent over it. “That’s Marcy. I climbed Marcy when I was nineteen. I want to do it again before I’m sixty. My wife says I’m mad.”

The radio behind the till, very low, made the little sound it made before the news.

Mrs Pell reached up without looking and turned it up.

“Stephen, I can give you the name.”

Caleb’s hand was flat on the map. On the summit of Mount Marcy, in fact, in brown ink, at five thousand three hundred and forty-four feet.

“The parties have agreed to recommend Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, who sits on the crossbenches, who took his seat in 2026, and who is twenty-six years old.”

“Twenty-six,” said the presenter.

“Twenty-six,” said Delia Moreno.

The man with the Adirondacks was still bent over the map. Then he went still. Then he looked up, slowly, from the High Peaks, at the man whose hand was on Mount Marcy, and looked at his face for a long moment, and then looked across the shop at the radio, as if it might explain, and then back.

On the radio the presenter was saying that the youngest Prime Minister the Realm had ever had was John F. Kennedy, who was forty-three in 1960, and that if this happened the record would be broken by seventeen years.

The man opened his mouth and closed it again.

Caleb rolled the High Peaks sheet, carefully, and put it in the tube, and put the cap on, first time, and held it out across the counter.

“The High Peaks,” he said. “I’m sorry about Saturday. That was my mistake.”

The man took the tube. He held it in both hands against his chest and did not move.

“You’re,” he said.

“I sell maps,” said Caleb. “Until about half past three.”

On the radio Delia Moreno was explaining that inheriting a barony did not give anybody a seat in the House of Lords, and Mrs Pell, at the end of the counter, reached up and turned it down again, quite low, until it was only a voice in the corner of the shop saying something nobody needed to listen to.

The man with the Adirondacks went out of the shop backwards, still holding the tube against his chest, and stood on the pavement outside the window for some time, looking in at Caleb past the atlas and the card, and then walked away very fast in the direction of the Axis.

---

The telephone rang at a quarter to three. Mrs Pell answered it and said “Pell’s,” and listened, and said “No,” and put it down. It rang again at once. She answered it and said “No,” and put it down. It rang a third time, and she took the receiver off the hook and laid it on the counter, where it made a small far-off noise like an insect, and left it there.

“Newspapers,” she said. “They’ve found out where you work. They want to know if you’re here.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them no,” said Mrs Pell. “Which is true. You’re not here. You’re at work.” She looked at him. “You’ll need a photograph. They’ll want one. They’ll have nothing.”

“There’s one.”

“Samuel’s.”

He looked at her.

“He came in on the Wednesday morning,” said Mrs Pell, “before his train, to say goodbye, and showed it to me at this counter. On his telephone. You in your father’s jumper with your head down.” She did not smile. “Ring him. Tell him to send it to whoever needs it. It’s a good photograph. It looks like you.”

He rang Samuel from the shop telephone, with Mrs Pell’s permission, after she had put the receiver back on the hook for long enough to let him dial.

Samuel answered on the first ring.

“We heard,” he said. He sounded as if he had been crying, or laughing, or both. “Mum’s sitting on the stairs again. She took the afternoon off. She told Henry Lindqvist she had the dentist and he said, again, Ellen, and she said yes, again.”

“Sam. The photograph.”

“I haven’t sent it to anybody. I promised.”

“Send it to Oliver. He’ll know what to do with it. It’s the only one there is.” Caleb looked at Mrs Pell, who was looking at the order book. “Mrs Pell says it’s a good photograph.”

There was a short silence in Newport.

“She remembers it?”

“She says it looks like me.”

“It does,” said Samuel. “It looks like Dad, as well.” His voice changed. “I’m sending it. Whit. Ring us after. Mum wants to see you on the television and then she wants to hear you on the telephone, to check it was really you.”

“I will.”

He put the receiver back on its hook. It rang again at once, and Mrs Pell took it off the hook again and laid it on the counter.

---

At twenty past three Mrs Pell got up and went to the window.

She took the card out from where it was propped against the atlas on its easel, the ink one, THE TERRITORY OF LORETO. About four million people. Nobody knows., and brought it back to the counter and put it down in front of him.

“You’ll want this,” she said. “It’s your handwriting.”

He picked it up.

Then she took a fresh card from the drawer under the till, and her fountain pen from her cardigan pocket, and wrote on it, standing at the counter, in her small upright hand, taking her time. When she had finished she blotted it on the corner of the order book and held it up for him to read.

ASSISTANT WANTED, it said. Three days a week. Must be able to fold a map.

“Will that do?” she said.

“That’ll do.”

She took it to the window and propped it against the atlas, where his had been, and came back and stood behind the counter, at her end, under the lamp, and looked at him over her glasses.

“Go on,” she said. “You’ll be late. You’ll want to go home first and wash your face. You look as if you haven’t slept.”

“I haven’t.”

“No. I don’t suppose you have.” She sat down on the chair. “Go on, Mr Whitlock.”

He did not move.

“Mrs Pell.”

“Mm.”

“Thank you,” he said. “For two years. For never asking.”

Mrs Pell considered that for a while, with her glasses in her hand.

“I didn’t need to ask,” she said. “You told me everything I needed to know about you in the first week. You could fold a map.” She put her glasses back on and opened the order book. “And you’ll do the blinds on your way out. The inch, and then all the way. I’m closing early. I don’t suppose anybody’s going to want a map this afternoon. They’re all going to be listening to the radio.”

He did the blinds. The inch down, and then all the way. The shop went dim and cool, the way it did at five on an ordinary day, and the plan chests and the globes and the travel guides went grey in the half-light, and the card in the window, in Mrs Pell’s hand, stood against the atlas with the light of the street behind it.

At the door he turned round.

She was sitting at the end of the counter under the lamp, in her cardigan, with the order book open in front of her, writing, with her head bent. She did not look up.

The bell rang over his head as he went out, and the door closed behind him, and he heard her key turn in the lock.