The Step

He washed his face at the kitchen sink, because Mrs Pell had told him to, and dried it on the tea towel, and stood for a moment with the towel in his hands looking at the window over the sink, which looked at the back of another building and nothing else.

It was a quarter to four. The flat was very quiet. The radio from the boathouse was on the side table in the front room, switched off, and the telephone was on the table by the door, switched off as well, because it had rung eleven times between half past three and twenty to four and he had stopped answering it after the second, which had been a newspaper in Chicago, and the first, which had been his mother.

“I watched it,” his mother had said. “Well. I listened to it. There wasn’t anything to watch. They had a photograph on the screen.” A pause. “It’s a good photograph.”

“Mrs Pell said so too.”

“Mrs Pell,” said his mother, “is clearly a very sensible woman. I’d like to meet her.” Another pause. “Go on. You’ll be late. Ring us after.”

He put the tea towel down.

He was wearing the grey jacket, with no chalk on the elbow, and a white shirt, and the only tie he owned, which was dark blue and had been his grandfather’s and which he had last worn at his father’s funeral. He did not look at himself in a mirror. There was no mirror in the flat except the small one over the bathroom basin, and he did not go into the bathroom.

He took the card out of the pocket of the jacket, the one Mrs Pell had given him, in his own handwriting in ink, and looked at it. THE TERRITORY OF LORETO. About four million people. Nobody knows. He put it in the inside pocket, over his heart, where his father had kept his reading glasses and his grandfather his naval identity card. Then he picked up his keys, and looked round the room once, the sofa and the bookshelves and the radio and the place by the window where he had stood with his hands in his pockets in the rain, and went out, and locked the door behind him, and went down the three flights of stairs.

---

It was five to four.

He walked down Orchard Row in the sun. It was a warm afternoon, not hot, with the first edge of autumn in the light, and the street was full of ordinary people doing ordinary things: a man carrying a ladder, two women talking outside a launderette, a boy on a bicycle with no hands. A car went past with its windows down and the ABC on, loud, and the voice was saying twenty-six again, and the car went round the corner and took the voice with it.

Nobody looked at him.

He turned at the bottom of Orchard Row into the street of old shopfronts, the way he had walked to work every Monday and Tuesday and Friday for two years, past the stationer’s and the closed-down tailor’s. He had not meant to come this way. It was the way his feet went.

Pell’s was shut.

The blinds were down, all four of them, the inch and then all the way, the way he had left them. The sign on the door said CLOSED. In the window the atlas of the Territory stood on its easel, open at the page at the back with the old Mexican lines in dotted grey, and against it, where his card had been, a fresh card in small upright handwriting in fountain pen.

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

He stopped in front of the window and read it.

There was a gap of about an inch at the bottom of the blind on the door, where it did not quite meet the sill, and through it, if you bent, you could see a strip of the shop floor and the bottom of the counter and the light of the lamp. He did not bend. He stood on the pavement in the sun for perhaps half a minute and looked at the card, and then at the atlas, and then at his own reflection in the glass over both of them, a tall young man in a grey jacket and his grandfather’s tie, with nothing about him to say who he was.

Then he walked on.

---

The Axis was busier than usual for a Monday afternoon. People had come out. Not a crowd, nothing anybody had organised, the way people had come out on the night of the division: just more people than there should have been, standing in small groups along the wide pavements under the trees with radios and telephones, talking, looking towards the hill, or the other way, towards the Rise, as if they could not decide where the thing that was happening was.

In the window of a television shop on the corner of the Civic Triangle, nine screens showed the ABC at once, and on all nine of them was a photograph.

A tall fair young man in a rust jumper and socks, standing square in front of a wide window full of grey roofs, with his hands in his pockets and his head down.

A small group of people stood in front of the television shop looking at it. A woman said, “He looks about fifteen,” and a man beside her said, “He looks like he’s been told off,” and a girl of about twenty said, “He looks like my brother,” and they all laughed, not unkindly. Caleb went past behind them. None of them turned round. The man in the photograph had his head down, and the man walking past behind them had his head up, and that was apparently the whole of the difference, and it was enough.

He crossed the Axis at the lights with a crowd of office workers, and turned up the Rise.

---

Government House Rise was a short steep street off the Axis, lined with plane trees, going up between high walls to the house at the top, which stood back from the street behind railings and a small gravelled forecourt and was the least conspicuous of the three great houses of the capital. He had walked past the bottom of it perhaps a thousand times. He had never walked up it.

He was halfway up, under the plane trees, at a quarter past four, when the car came down.

It was a black car with its lights on in the daylight, not fast, a police car ahead of it and nothing behind, coming down the Rise from the gates at the top. He stepped in to the wall to let it pass. It came level with him, slowly, on the steep road, and in the back seat, alone, in a dark suit with no jewellery, with her hands folded in her lap, was Ana Valdez.

She was looking out of the window. She saw him.

The car did not stop. It went on down the Rise at the same slow pace, and for the second or two that it took to go past, she looked at him through the glass, steadily, with the same expression she had worn at the door of the Chesapeake Room, the look of somebody checking a fact.

Then she lifted one hand, very slightly, from her lap, perhaps an inch, and put it down again.

The car went on down the hill, and turned at the bottom on to the Axis, and was gone.

He stood by the wall under the plane trees for a moment longer. Then he went on up.

---

There were perhaps fifteen people outside the railings at the top. The press. A small press presence, a few photographers with long lenses on stepladders, three or four reporters with notebooks, a man from the ABC with a camera on his shoulder and a woman beside him with a microphone, whom he recognised from the lobby on the night of the division. They had been there since before Valdez arrived. They were not expecting anybody to walk up the hill.

Oliver was at the end of the line, in a new dark suit that still had the creases in it from the shop, with no notebook and no lanyard, standing a little apart from the others with his hands in his pockets.

A photographer on a stepladder saw Caleb first. He looked at him, and then at something on the back of his camera, and then at him again.

“That’s him,” he said.

The cameras turned. There was a sound like a great many small doors closing very fast. Somebody called his name, Lord Whitlock, and then somebody else called it, and then several people at once, and he did not stop and did not look round and did not do anything except walk, at the same pace, up the last of the Rise and through the open gate in the railings, which a policeman held for him, and across the gravel of the forecourt, which crunched under his shoes in a way that seemed very loud.

As he passed the end of the line Oliver did not call out. Oliver looked at him, once, and nodded, the way you nod to somebody across a crowded room when there is nothing to say and you want them to know you are there.

The front door of Government House stood open. It was a plain door, painted dark green, under a plain fanlight, at the top of four stone steps, not much bigger than the door of the house in Newport. A man in a dark suit was standing in it.

“Lord Whitlock,” he said. “Good afternoon. My name is Archer. I’m the Private Secretary.” He was about fifty, grey and courteous and entirely without curiosity, the first person all day who had looked at Caleb as if there were nothing unusual about him at all. “Her Excellency is ready for you. Would you come this way?”

It was twenty past four.

Caleb went up the four stone steps, and through the green door, and it closed behind him.

---

The hall had a black and white floor, like a chessboard, and a staircase going up out of it in a long curve, and a smell of wax polish and cut flowers. It was cooler inside than out. It was very quiet. Somewhere at the back of the house a clock was ticking, slowly, with the deliberation of a clock nobody had ever been allowed to hurry.

“Her Excellency would like a few minutes with you first,” said Archer. “Before the room. It’s usual.” He paused, and seemed to reconsider the word. “It’s usual when there’s time. This way.”

He led him not to the back of the house but to a door on the left of the hall, and knocked once, and opened it without waiting, and stood aside.

It was a small study, square, with a desk under the window and books on three walls, government reports mostly, in their grey and green bindings, with paper slips sticking out of the tops of them at all angles, the way his father’s books had stuck out on the dining-room table at home. There were two armchairs in front of a fireplace with no fire in it. In one of them, with a folder open on her knee and a pair of reading glasses in her hand, sat the Governor-General.

She was older than she looked on the television, or younger; he could not decide which. Sixty-eight, he knew, because he had looked it up once for no reason in the Lords library. A short, solid woman with dark hair going grey and cut short, in a plain navy suit with no decoration of any kind, and flat shoes, and a wristwatch with a worn leather strap. She did not get up at once. She looked at him over the reading glasses as he came in, the whole length of him, from his grandfather’s tie to his shoes, quickly, the way a doctor looks at somebody who has walked into the surgery, and then she closed the folder and stood up.

“Lord Whitlock.”

“Your Excellency.”

She held out her hand and he shook it. It was a small hand and a hard one, and she did not hold on to his for a moment too long the way Delia Marsh had. She shook it once and let go.

“Sit down,” she said. “You walked.”

“Yes.”

“From where?”

“Orchard Row. Off the old commercial quarter.”

“I know where Orchard Row is. I lived round the corner from it for six years when I was in the Commons.” She sat down again in her armchair and pointed him to the other, and he sat. “Nobody walks here. They come in cars. Ana came in a car twenty minutes ago and went out in one. You walked up the Rise past the photographers.” It was not quite a question.

“I didn’t think of getting a car.”

“No. You wouldn’t have one to get.” She put the reading glasses on the folder on her knee. “Good. Walking’s honest. They’ll write about it. Let them.” She looked at him. “I’ve got about five minutes before Archer comes back and tells me the room’s ready, and I want to use them, because once we’re in the room there’ll be a man from the wires and a photographer standing against the wall, and I can’t say anything in front of them except what’s written down. So I’ll say it here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me. Excellency in the room, because the man from the wires will notice. In here, it doesn’t matter.” She leaned forward slightly. “I want you to understand what I’m about to do, because people are going to tell you all week that I chose you, and I didn’t, and I’d like you to know it from me. I’ve got a piece of paper on my desk signed late last night by five people who between them lead three hundred and ninety-seven members of the House of Commons. It says they will not move or support a motion of no confidence in a ministry chaired by you. That is a fact about the House. My job is to find out who can command its confidence, and that paper is the answer, and I’m going to write it down. That’s all a commission is. It’s the Crown writing down a fact.”

“I understand.”

“I know you do. I read your speeches.” She said it flatly, the way she might have said that she had read the weather forecast. “All thirty-one. The clerks sent them over on Saturday when Archer asked for anything you’d ever said in public. They’re mostly about section twenty-six point one. You quote it twelve times.” She looked at him over the top of the glasses she was no longer wearing. “You can stop quoting it now. Everybody knows what it says.”

He almost laughed. He did not quite.

“Now,” said the Governor-General, “practical things. Who’s running your diary tomorrow morning?”

He looked at her.

“I don’t know.”

“Find out. Ana’s Principal Private Secretary is a career man. Good. Dull. Knows where everything is. He’ll stay if you ask him, and you should ask him, tonight. Who else have you got?”

“A friend. Oliver Grant. He was a reporter until this morning. He resigned.”

“From a newspaper? This morning?” Something moved at the corner of her mouth. “Was he the one who didn’t run it?”

“Yes.”

“I wondered why one of them hadn’t.” The thing at the corner of her mouth became, for a moment, very nearly a smile, and went away again. “Keep him. You’ll need one person who isn’t from any of the five. And the enumeration. Ninety days. You’ve read your paragraph three as many times as I have. Do you know how many people you’ll need to count four million?”

“About eight thousand enumerators. From the Territory. Spanish first.”

“Who trains them?”

He opened his mouth and closed it again.

“I don’t know yet.”

“No. Nobody does. Find out by the end of the week, because whoever the parties send you to run the count won’t know either, and they’ll think they do.” She held up a hand before he could speak. “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m not allowed to, and I wouldn’t if I were. I’m asking you a question you’re going to be asked by somebody less polite on Wednesday, and I’d rather you’d heard it here first.” She sat back. “¿Habla español?”

“Un poco. Lo aprendí para el comité.”

“Bien. Lo va a necesitar.” She said it as if confirming a stock level. “Most of them in Tijuana think nobody in this city does. Prove them wrong now and again. Don’t make a performance of it. They can tell.”

There was a knock at the door. Archer put his head round it.

“The room’s ready, Your Excellency.”

“One minute, Archer.”

He withdrew. The Governor-General stood up, and Caleb stood up with her, and she looked at him again, the whole length of him, the tie and the jacket and his hands, which he found he had put in his pockets, and took out.

“Whose tie?” she said.

“My grandfather’s.”

“The Admiral. Philipsburg. The hurricane.” She nodded. “I read the file. He was a good Lord Warden. They still say so, down there.” She picked up the folder from the arm of the chair. “When you go out on that step afterwards, they’ll want you to say something. Ana didn’t. She had her reasons, and they were good ones. You’ll have to. Don’t write it down. They can always tell when you’ve written it down.” She went to the door. “And Lord Whitlock.”

“Yes.”

“Breathe out,” said the Governor-General. “You’ve been holding it since the hall.”

He breathed out. She was right. He had been.

---

The Commission Room was at the back of the house, on the ground floor, looking into the garden.

It was smaller than he had imagined, the few times he had imagined it at all, and plainer. A long table of dark wood with nothing on it but a leather folder and an inkstand and a blotter. Chairs, perhaps a dozen, against the walls, upright, with no arms. A portrait over the fireplace of George Washington in the uniform of a colonial officer, painted when he was young, before any of it, looking out of the frame with an expression of polite and slightly suspicious patience. Tall windows on to a lawn, and a gravel walk, and an old copper beech going dark red at the edges with the first of the autumn, and the light from the garden coming in low and gold across the floor in long panels, the way the morning had come into the shop.

Eight yards of floor, he thought. Everybody who has held executive power in this Realm since the house was built has received it standing on these eight yards of floor.

The man from the wires was against the wall by the door with a notebook, a thin grey man of about sixty who looked as if he had done this many times and had stopped being surprised by it about twenty years ago, and was being surprised by it now and did not want anybody to see. Beside him a photographer with a single camera, no flash. Archer stood at the end of the table with the leather folder. The Governor-General stood at the other side of it, facing the windows. She had put on her reading glasses again.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Outside, very faintly, through the glass, a bird was singing in the copper beech.

“Lord Whitlock,” said the Governor-General, in an entirely different voice, the public voice, plain and carrying, “I have before me the advice of the leaders of five parties in the House of Commons, holding three hundred and ninety-seven seats, that you command the confidence of that House. I am satisfied that you do. Mr Archer.”

Archer opened the leather folder and read.

It did not take long. It was a single page, engrossed by hand on heavy paper, with a seal at the foot, and it said in the old language of such things that the King’s representative in America, being satisfied, did appoint Caleb James, Baron Whitlock of Wickford, to be First Lord of His Majesty’s Treasury in the United Kingdom of America, to hold that office during His Majesty’s pleasure and the confidence of the Commons. The words Prime Minister did not appear in it anywhere. Caleb noticed that, and noticed the man from the wires notice it, and write something down.

“Will you take the oath?” said the Governor-General.

“I will.”

She held out a card. On it, in large plain type, were six lines. He did not need it. He had read them in a constitutional handbook in the Lords library on the Thursday after the division, for no particular reason, the way he had once looked up her age. He took the card anyway, because it would have been rude not to, and held it, and did not look at it.

“I, Caleb James Whitlock,” he said, “do swear that I will bear true allegiance to His Majesty Ernest, King of the United Kingdom of America.

“That I will uphold the Charter of Union of the American Colonies and the American Rights Act.

“That I will tender true advice to the Crown.

“That I will govern only while I hold the confidence of the House of Commons.”

He said it plainly, at the same pace as the others, without stopping, as a man who would never be allowed into that House except to stand at its bar. He did not stop because there was nothing to stop for. It was the only promise in the oath he knew exactly how he would keep, because it was written down, in a paragraph he had read twice, with a date on it.

The man from the wires looked up from his notebook.

“And that I will surrender this office when that confidence is withdrawn.

“So help me God.”

There was a short silence in the Commission Room. The bird in the copper beech had stopped.

“Thank you,” said the Governor-General. “Mr Archer.”

Archer turned the leather folder round on the table and laid a pen beside it. Caleb bent and signed, at the foot of the page, in the space below the seal, with the one word a peer signs instruments with. Whitlock. His hand did what he told it. It was the first time all day he had been sure it would. The Governor-General signed beside him, Michelle Lujan Grisham, quickly, in a small upright hand not unlike Mrs Pell’s. Archer blotted both signatures and closed the folder.

The photographer by the wall took a single picture, with no flash, at the moment the folder closed, and lowered his camera.

That was all. It had taken, by the clock on the mantelpiece under Washington, four minutes.

---

The Privy Council took two more.

A grey-haired woman came in from a side door with a Testament and a card of her own, whom Archer introduced as the Clerk of the Council, and two privy counsellors behind her, a retired judge and a former Speaker, who had been sitting in the next room since three o’clock for exactly this purpose and nothing else and seemed entirely content about it. Caleb swore again, a different oath, shorter, to keep the King’s counsel and give it honestly. The former Speaker, an old man with a hearing aid who reminded him painfully of Sayle, shook his hand afterwards and said, “Well done, my boy. Nobody’s done it from the Lords since my great-grandfather’s time. You’ll find it very lonely. Ring me if you want to complain about it to somebody who won’t tell anyone.” And went out.

The man from the wires went out. The photographer went out. The Clerk of the Council went out with her Testament. Archer went out with the leather folder and closed the door behind him.

Caleb was alone in the Commission Room with the Governor-General, and George Washington, and the copper beech going red in the garden.

She took off her reading glasses and put them in her jacket pocket, and went and stood at the window with her back to him, looking at the garden, with her hands behind her.

“You’ll want to know what I thought,” she said, without turning round. “When I read the paper last night. Everybody does. Ana did, three years ago, and I wouldn’t tell her, and I won’t tell you.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“No. You wouldn’t.” She was silent for a moment. “I’ll tell you one thing instead, which isn’t what I think. My husband died in two thousand and four. I was forty-four. I had two daughters and a mortgage and a job I was good at, and the week after the funeral everybody I knew told me I’d be fine, because I was capable.” She turned round. “Being capable isn’t the same as being fine. Nobody’s going to tell you that this week. They’re all going to tell you you’re very capable. Write it down somewhere you’ll see it.” She looked at him. “You can write that one down. It’s not for the step.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Go and say something to them.” She nodded at the door. “They’ve been standing on the Rise since three. And then go and start. Your paper’s got a date on it.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. I’m saying it because I’m not allowed to say anything else.” The thing at the corner of her mouth again, and gone. “Go on, Prime Minister. Archer will show you out.”

He went to the door. At the door he turned.

“Excellency.”

“Mm.”

“What did Ana say? On the step. Nothing?”

The Governor-General looked at him for a long moment from the window, with the garden going gold behind her.

“She said nothing,” she said. “She’d said everything she had to say in July, in the House, and she’d lost, and she thought anything she said now would be about her, and she didn’t want it to be about her. It’s the most honest thing I’ve ever seen a Prime Minister do.” She turned back to the window. “You won’t be able to do it. You haven’t lost yet. Go on.”

He went out. Archer was waiting in the corridor, and walked him back along it to the hall with the black and white floor, past the staircase and the clock, to the green door.

“Ready, Prime Minister?” said Archer, with his hand on it.

Two people had called him that, Signe Halvorsen in a hotel corridor the night before and the Governor-General five minutes ago, and neither of them had meant it the way Archer did.

“Yes,” he said.

Archer opened the door.

---

He came out on to the step. It was a little before five.

The light had changed while he was inside. The sun had gone round behind the plane trees on the far side of the Rise and the forecourt was in shadow, and the light coming up the hill from the Axis was low and gold and came across the gravel sideways, the way the morning came into the shop. The press were still at the railings, more of them now, twenty or thirty, and behind them on the Rise a few dozen people who had walked up the hill to see, and Oliver at the end of the line in his new suit, and the man from the ABC with the camera on his shoulder and the red light on.

He stood on the top step with nothing in his hands.

The noise of the cameras came and went and stopped. Somebody at the railings said quiet. It went quiet. The plane trees moved a little in the wind off the river, and somewhere down the Rise a bus changed gear on the hill, and somebody’s telephone rang and was silenced.

He had no notes. He had not written anything. He had thought, walking up the Rise, that he would think of what to say on the step, and he had not thought of anything on the step either, and he stood there for a moment longer and found that he did not need to, because he knew what it was. It was the same thing he had been saying all summer, to Quarles and to Carrillo and to Mrs Pell and to the thirty peers and the sleeping bishop. It was only true.

He put his hands in his pockets, and took them out again.

I have accepted the Governor-General’s commission.

I am going to say three things and then go in and start, because the thing I have been asked to do has a date on it and the date is not generous.

The first is that I know exactly what I am. I am twenty-six. I have never been elected to anything by the public and I cannot be while I sit where I sit. I sit in Parliament because my father died, and because a few hundred peers wanted to make a point, and I have done nothing in my life that would qualify me to run a department, let alone all of them.

I have not been chosen because anybody wanted me. I have been chosen because I am the only person in either House who has no friends to reward, no enemies to punish, no faction to feed and no seat to save, and because I cannot become a difficulty for any of the five people who signed that paper. That is the whole of my qualification. I would rather say it myself, today, than have it said about me for the next three years by people who think they are telling me something.

I know what the newspapers will call this and they will be right to.

One more thing on that, because it will be asked and I would rather answer it before it is. A peerage in this Realm can be disclaimed, and a man who disclaims one may stand for the Commons. I am aware of that. So is everybody who signed the agreement. I am not going to give you an undertaking about it today, because an undertaking given on a step on the first afternoon is worth nothing, and because I would rather be judged on what I do in the three years than on what I promised in the first ten minutes of them.

The second is about the bar of the House. I will be at it every month. I did not ask for that provision and I would not have thought of it, and I have come round to thinking it is the best thing in the agreement. A Prime Minister who cannot be questioned by the chamber that can remove him is answerable to nothing, and that has been the objection to a premier from the Lords since before the Act of 1859, and it is a good objection. I am not going to pretend the arrangement answers it completely. I am going to stand there once a month and let the House do what it can with me, and if that turns out not to be enough then the House should not agree to this again.

The third is about the Territory of Loreto. Four million people have been told for fifteen months that their position is temporary by a Realm that wrote into its own statute that it must not be treated as permanent. A government fell over that in July and the country has just had an election about it, and I am not going to add to the quantity of things that have been said about it. There will be an enumeration within ninety days. There will be a Bill. Parliament will decide what is in it, and Parliament may decide against everything I put in front of it, and that is what paragraph 4 is for and I agreed to it willingly.

I have sat on one committee in two years and it was about that territory, and I did not choose it, it was what was left. I have thought about very little else since, which is not a qualification either, but it is the only thing I can offer that is true.

I am here until that is finished or until the thirtieth of June 2031, and then I am going, and I will not need to be asked.

Thank you.

He stopped.

For a moment nobody at the railings did anything at all. Then the cameras started again, and somebody called Prime Minister, and somebody else called it, and a reporter with a notebook called out a question about the disclaimer, which he had already answered.

He did not answer it again. He turned round.

Archer was standing in the open door behind him, holding it, with no expression at all. Beyond him, inside, there was a hall with a black and white floor and a staircase going up, and a long corridor with a light at the end of it, and somewhere along it, presumably, a room with a table in it where the business of the Realm would start being done in the morning, by a ministry he had not chosen, on a paper he had read twice, for as long as it took to count four million people and not a day after the thirtieth of June 2031.

He put his hand in his inside pocket, where the card was, and left it there for a moment.

Then he went up the last step and in through the green door to start, and Archer closed it behind him.