The Gallery

The peers’ gallery was a single bench and a rail, high up at the end of the chamber over the clock, and it was full.

A doorkeeper in the gallery’s own tailcoat found them two places at the end by moving a life peer’s coat, and Sayle lowered himself into one with a noise like a gate. Caleb took the other. Below them, the House of Commons was as full as he had ever seen it. Members were standing behind the Speaker’s chair and sitting on the steps of the gangways, and some of them had been there long enough to take their jackets off.

It was a quarter past seven, and the debate was in its seventh hour.

“Who’s that?” said Sayle.

A man on the government benches was on his feet, two rows behind the ministers, with his notes in one hand and the other hand in his pocket. He was speaking to the bench in front of the opposition, or to the gangway, or to the far corner of the chamber where a group of members from his own side sat together with their arms folded. He wasn’t speaking to the Prime Minister. She sat on the front bench below him with her hands in her lap and did not turn round.

“Labour,” Caleb said. “One of the Ohio seats. I don’t know his name.”

“I’ve been in the Lords thirty years. I don’t know anyone’s name.”

The man was saying that he had been in the House for eleven years and had never voted against his party on a whipped motion, and that he had read the Nationality Act on the train that morning, the whole of Part VI, and that it took twenty minutes. He said a Part that told the reader in its own words that it was not a permanent settlement could be read by anybody in twenty minutes. Then he said, “And I’d say to colleagues who are thinking what I’m thinking that there are more of us than you’ve been told,” and sat down.

The noise that went round the chamber was low and long, and the Speaker let it go on for a few seconds before she said, “Order.”

Sayle leaned in. “There are more of us,” he said, “than you’ve been told. That isn’t a speech. That’s a whip’s note read aloud.”

“It’s a whip’s note for the other side.”

“Mm.” Sayle looked down at the doors. “Look at the whips.”

Caleb looked. There were two at each door behind the Speaker’s chair, Labour and the LFD at one and the Greens and Labour again at the other, holding lists on clipboards, and they were not doing anything. On an ordinary night of a close vote a whip would have been at the end of a bench with an arm along the back of it, talking to a member in a low voice. Tonight they stood at the doors like ticket collectors and let the members go past them in both directions without a word.

As he watched, the two at the far door turned to each other, held their lists side by side, looked at them for a while, and put them away without saying anything.

“Ah,” said Sayle.

“What?”

“That’s two whips who have just discovered they’ve counted the same members and got different totals.” He sat back. “Your grandfather’s ship had a navigator like that. Brilliant at sums. Put them aground twice.”

---

At eight o’clock the House emptied a little for supper and filled again. A woman from the Greens spoke, then a man from the LFD, then a Labour member from Oregon who spoke for three minutes and sat down to a silence, and then a Labour woman from Minnesota who had been elected at a by-election the year before, and none of them looked at the front bench. The Labour woman said she had spent the recess in the Territory at her own expense, in Ensenada and La Paz, and that the people she met there were not interested in whether the government survived. They were interested in whether anybody in this building could count to four million.

Caleb was listening with his whole body, and Sayle noticed it.

“Did you know that?” Sayle said. “That she’d been out there?”

“No.”

“Do you know her?”

“No.”

“She’s quoting you.”

“She isn’t. I said that in committee in March, and nobody reads the evidence.”

“Somebody read it,” said Sayle.

The doorkeeper at the end of the gallery looked along at them. Sayle raised a hand in apology, the hand with the stick in it, so that the stick waved over the rail above the House of Commons, and three members on the benches below looked up. Caleb took the stick by the middle and brought it back down.

“Where are they?” Sayle said, quieter.

“Who?”

“Your five.”

They were below the gangway on the opposition side, at the end of the second bench, which was where they had sat since they first took their seats, because nobody had told them to sit anywhere else and nobody on either side had made room for them. Three men and two women. One of the women was at the end, nearest the gangway, in a pale grey suit, with a pen in one hand that she was not using.

“The one at the end is La Paz and the Cape,” Caleb said. “Then Ensenada and the Pacific Coast. Mexicali. Tijuana South.” He paused. “The one in the red jacket is Tijuana North. Carrillo.”

“The one you bought a drink.”

“The one I bought a drink.”

Sayle looked at them for a while through the rail. “They don’t look like people about to bring down a government.”

“How do people about to bring down a government look?”

“Like the Labour whips.” Sayle nodded down at the doors. “Exactly like the Labour whips.”

---

The Leader of the Bloc was sitting on the bench in front of the five, writing in a notebook on her knee. Signe Halvorsen led a party of twenty-three members, whose votes, the arithmetic said, could not decide anything tonight on their own. She did not speak in the debate. She wrote steadily through the speeches of other people and once, when the Labour woman from Minnesota said four million, looked up and then went on writing.

Margaret Renwick sat on the opposition front bench with her legs crossed and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She had moved the motion at one o’clock, at the start of the nine hours, and had spoken for forty minutes without a note. The clerks had put her speech into the record and Caleb had read it on a printed sheet in the Lords library at five. It had been dry and exact, and it had not mentioned the Territory’s people once. It was about the Charter, and the law, and the difference between a temporary arrangement and one that had become permanent by being left alone. She had not needed the people. The five on the bench behind her had made the point by sitting there.

At half past nine a page came into the gallery with a slip for the life peer whose coat had been moved. He read it, said “Good God” quite loudly, and left. The doorkeeper looked at the empty place and then at Caleb, and Caleb shook his head.

At twenty to ten the Speaker called the Prime Minister.

---

Ana Valdez stood up at the despatch box with no notes at all.

She had been Prime Minister for two years and nine months, and had never fought a general election as leader of her party. She stood with both hands flat on the box and waited for the House to be quiet. It took a long time, and she did not ask for it. The noise ran down slowly from the back benches to the front, then from the opposition to the government side, until the only sound in the chamber was the ventilation and somebody in the press gallery dropping a pen.

She began with the motion and the Charter, and answered Renwick point by point in the order Renwick had made them, which nobody in the gallery could follow without the speech in front of them and which Caleb could. She talked about the security campaign in the sierra for five minutes without a single adjective. She thanked the Territory’s Commissioner and the Home Office, and the five members by their constituencies, one at a time, and the woman in the grey suit looked at her steadily and did not move.

Then a woman on the back benches behind her stood up, a Labour member Caleb did not know, and said, “Will the Prime Minister give way?”

Valdez turned round. “I give way.”

“I’m grateful. I’d only ask the Prime Minister one thing, which I’ve been asking for a year. When will the government settle the status of the Territory?”

She sat down. The Prime Minister turned back to the despatch box and looked at it, and for the first time that night took her hands off it.

She did not look round at the member. “The honourable member asks when the government will settle the status of the Territory. I will tell her what I have told the Assembly at La Paz, which is that I will not settle it while the operation in the sierra is unfinished, because a settlement made in the middle of a security campaign is a settlement made by the campaign.”

Nobody made a sound.

“I know what that costs and I know what it looks like. A territory bought and not enfranchised is a colony. I said so to this House when I asked it to buy the place, and I say it again now, and the difference between me and the honourable members who will vote against me tonight is not that they believe it and I do not. It is that they believe a year is too long to wait and I believe a decision taken tonight would be worse than the delay.”

She paused, and looked along her own back benches, the whole length of them, from the Speaker’s end to the bar.

“If the House disagrees, the House will say so, and I shall not complain about the arithmetic.”

She sat down.

There was no cheering. The government benches made the low sound a party makes when it means to support its leader and does not know whether it can, and it stopped almost at once. On the opposition side nobody made any sound at all. Caleb found that he had been holding the rail with both hands, and let go of it.

“She’s going to lose,” said Sayle, very quietly.

“She knows.”

“How do you know she knows?”

“She just told them.”

Sayle turned his good ear towards him and then away again, and looked down at the front bench where the Prime Minister sat with her hands back in her lap, looking at nothing.

“Your grandfather would have liked her,” he said.

---

The Speaker stood.

Margaret Considine had been in the chair for sixteen years, and her voice carried the length of the chamber without her raising it.

“The question is as on the Order Paper,” she said. “As many as are of that opinion say Aye.”

The government benches said Aye, loudly, in the way of a side that is trying to sound larger than it is.

“Her amendment,” Sayle said in Caleb’s ear. “Words of confidence in her own conduct. Aye to keep her and No to put her out. Renwick let it be put first, so that nobody can say afterwards they didn’t know what they were voting for.”

“Of the contrary, No.”

The whole of the opposition side of the House said No, and from the government benches behind the Prime Minister a few voices said it too, scattered, then a few more. Caleb watched the faces turn towards them along the benches.

The Speaker looked at the House for a moment, and the House looked back at her.

“Division,” she said. “Clear the lobbies.”

The bells began, everywhere in the building at once, in the corridors and the tea room and the library and the bars, and on the far side of the central lobby in a chamber where there was nobody left to hear them. The House stood up together, four hundred and sixty-four people and a Speaker, and began to move towards the doors.

Below the gangway, at the end of the second bench, the five members for the Territory of Loreto stayed in their seats.

“They’re not moving,” said Sayle.

“No.”

“Are they abstaining?”

“No.”

The woman in the grey suit capped her pen and put it in her pocket. Then she looked up, the whole height of the chamber, past the press gallery and the clock, to the peers’ gallery over it and the end of the bench where Caleb sat. She looked for perhaps two seconds, without any expression at all. Then she turned to the four beside her and said something, and they stood up together, and waited for the crowd at the doors to thin, and went out last.