Two Hundred and Thirty

The chamber emptied in about two minutes, and then there was nobody in it but the Speaker, the clerks at the Table, a doorkeeper by the bar, and a cleaner’s forgotten duster on the end of the front bench below the gangway.

The bells went on ringing.

“Eight minutes,” said Sayle. “Then they lock the doors. Your grandfather used to say they were the longest eight minutes in politics.” He considered. “He was wrong. It’s the ones after.”

“Which lobby did they go into?”

“Who?”

“The five.”

Sayle looked at him. “You watched them go.”

“I watched them go out of the door. Both lobbies go out of the same end.”

“Then you don’t know,” said Sayle, “any more than I do,” and he folded his hands on the top of the stick and looked down at the empty green benches as if they were a view.

They weren’t empty for long. Members began to come back from the lobbies in twos and threes, having been counted, and stood about in the gangways and behind the Speaker’s chair instead of sitting down, as if sitting down would commit them to something. The Prime Minister came back early, alone, and sat in her place on the front bench and looked at the despatch box. Renwick came back a minute later and sat opposite her, and they did not look at each other. The doors were locked at eight minutes, and the last members in the lobbies were still being counted when they were. Then the doors were opened again and everybody came back, and the chamber filled up as if a tide had come in.

The tellers did not come.

The House waited. It waited the way a crowd waits at a station when the train is late and nobody has announced anything. People shifted and talked in low voices and looked at the doors behind the Speaker’s chair, then at the clock over Caleb’s head, then at the doors again. A Conservative member with a mobile telephone held up to his ear was told by the Speaker, without her raising her voice, to put it away, and he put it away.

“How long?” said Sayle.

Caleb looked at his watch. “Twelve minutes.”

“That’s long.”

“Yes.”

“They’re counting again.” Sayle said it as a fact. “They only count twice when it’s close. I saw it happen once in the Lords, on a fisheries bill, would you believe. Thirty years ago. It came out a tie.”

“What happens in a tie?”

“In our House the motion’s lost. Against the fish. It’s always against the fish.”

At fifteen minutes the doorkeeper at the end of the gallery stood up, without any instruction that Caleb could see, and went and stood by the stairs as if he expected to be needed. The life peer whose coat had been moved had come back and was sitting at the far end with his hands between his knees. In the press gallery, opposite, every seat was taken and every pen had stopped.

Below the gangway, on the opposition side, at the end of the second bench, there were five empty places.

“They’re not back,” said Sayle.

“They went in last.”

“They’ll be counted last, then.”

“No,” Caleb said. “They’ll have been counted already. They’ll be standing at the back somewhere. They don’t sit down until it’s over.”

“How do you know that?”

“They told the committee in March. They don’t sit down until a thing’s decided, because when they do sit down somebody always asks them to move.”

---

At twenty-five past ten four members came in by the door behind the Speaker’s chair and walked up the floor of the House together, shoulder to shoulder, the way tellers do.

The noise in the chamber stopped as if it had been switched off.

Two were government whips and two were from the other side, and one of the two from the other side was a member Caleb didn’t know, a Labour man from the government’s own back benches who had volunteered to tell for the Noes. That told the House something by itself. A low noise went round the benches and died again. The four stopped at the Table and bowed to the chair together. The member on the right, a Conservative whip, had the paper.

He read it in a level voice that carried to the gallery.

“The Ayes to the right, two hundred and twenty-nine. The Noes to the left, two hundred and thirty.”

He handed the paper to the clerk, and the clerk handed it up to the Speaker.

For about three seconds nothing happened at all. Then the noise came. It was not a cheer, or not mostly. It was the sound a House makes when everyone in it says something at the same moment, and nobody hears anybody. On the opposition benches some members were standing and some were sitting with their hands over their faces. On the government benches a man in the second row put his head back and looked at the ceiling. The Prime Minister did not move at all.

“Order,” said the Speaker. “Order.”

It took a long time. She waited for it, standing, with the paper in her hand.

“The Ayes to the right, two hundred and twenty-nine,” she said. “The Noes to the left, two hundred and thirty. So the Noes have it. The Noes have it.”

“Unlock,” said somebody at the bar, as somebody always does, and the doorkeepers unlocked the doors that had already been unlocked for ten minutes.

Sayle said, very quietly, “One.”

Caleb didn’t say anything. He was looking at the end of the second bench below the gangway, where five members had come in by the far door while the Speaker was reading and were standing in the gangway beside their empty places. The woman in the grey suit stood at the front, with her hands folded in front of her. They did not sit down. Nobody looked at them, and then, as it became clear what the figures meant and members began to work out where the last of the two hundred and thirty had come from, everybody did.

The member for Tijuana North, Carrillo, in the red jacket, said something to the others, and they all sat down together.

---

The Speaker put the main question again, on Renwick’s motion as it stood, and the government did not divide the House a second time. It went through on the voices, as a matter of form, and when the Speaker said that the Ayes had it, nobody on the government benches said anything.

The Prime Minister rose.

The House went quiet for her again, faster than before. She stood at the despatch box with one hand on it.

“Madam Speaker, the House has given its opinion and I have heard it. I shall wait upon the Governor-General this evening.”

She bowed to the chair and walked out behind it, along the front bench and through the door, without looking at anybody, and her ministers watched her go and did not follow her at once. Then the Chancellor got up and went after her, and then the rest of them, one at a time.

“Shall I tell you what she’ll do?” said Sayle.

“She’ll ask for a dissolution.”

“How do you know?”

“She said she wouldn’t complain about the arithmetic. She didn’t say she’d accept it.”

Sayle turned and looked at him for a while, his hearing aid towards him.

“Your grandfather,” he said, “wasn’t nearly so clever as you, you know. Don’t let it go to your head.” He put both hands on the top of the stick and stood up in two stages. “Help me down these stairs before somebody photographs me falling down them.”

---

The doorkeeper took one of Sayle’s arms on the stairs and Caleb took the other, and at the bottom a policeman was holding the door to the central lobby with his back to the noise coming out of it. Sayle’s driver was waiting under the dome with the patience of a man who had been waiting for Sayle for twenty-two years. He took Sayle’s arm from the doorkeeper as if it were a coat.

“Go home,” Sayle said to Caleb. “Write something for tomorrow.”

“About what?”

“You know about what. There’ll be a sitting in the morning before anybody’s dissolved anything. The House will be full of people who haven’t prepared a word and want to be seen to be there. You’ll have the floor to yourself if you’ve got something on paper.” He was already turning away. “Eight minutes, and the ones after,” he said to the driver, who said, “Yes, my Lord,” and steered him off through the crowd towards the doors.

The central lobby was the fullest Caleb had ever seen it. Press, members, staff, the police, and people who appeared to have come in off the street and been let through because nobody could stop them. A camera crew had set up a light on a stand by the Commons corridor and a woman was talking into it in front of a crowd of backs. Somebody was crying, quietly, against a pillar. A Labour member he recognised from the evening’s speeches walked past him very fast with his jacket over his arm and his telephone ringing in his pocket, and didn’t answer it.

“Lord Whitlock.”

Quarles was standing by the Lords corridor with a cardboard box held against his chest.

“I printed it,” he said.

Caleb looked into the box. Thirty copies of the agenda for the Thursday meeting of the Select Committee on the Territory of Loreto, stapled at the corner, the top one with Item 1: Evidence of the Territorial Commissioner (resumed) in the middle of the page.

“There won’t be a Thursday,” Quarles said.

“No.”

“The House will sit in the morning, I should think, to be told whatever there is to be told. The committee won’t.” Quarles looked down at the box. “I thought I’d keep one. For the file.”

“Give me one as well.”

Quarles took the top copy off the pile and gave it to him, and Caleb folded it once and put it in the evidence file with the herring note and the scrap of committee paper that said Print it in his own handwriting.

“Where will you be tonight?” Quarles said.

“At home.”

“Good,” said Quarles. He looked as if he were going to say something else, and didn’t. “Good night, my Lord.”

---

Outside it was still hot.

The night had come down over Charter Hill without cooling anything, and the air at the top of the steps smelt of cut grass and traffic and the river. There were people all the way down the hill. Not a demonstration, nothing anyone had organised, just people who had heard on the radio and come, as people do, to stand near the place where it had happened. Some had radios. A man near the bottom of the steps was holding up a telephone with the ABC on it so that the people round him could hear, and the presenter’s voice came up the steps small and tinny, saying the numbers again.

Somebody on the steps recognised a member coming out behind Caleb and called out to him, and the member raised a hand and kept walking. Nobody recognised Caleb. He went down the steps through them with the file under his arm, and nobody looked at him twice.

At the foot of the hill a newsvendor had set up on the corner of the Axis under a streetlamp, with a stack of the late city edition on a stand and a hand-lettered card propped against it. The card said CONFIDENCE VOTE: FULL REPORT. The headline on the paper itself, printed at nine o’clock, said VALDEZ EXPECTED TO SURVIVE.

Caleb stopped.

“Late edition,” said the newsvendor. “Last ones.”

“It’s wrong.”

“I know it’s wrong, son. Everybody’s been telling me for twenty minutes.” He was an old man in a cap, with a canvas apron full of coins. “They’ll print another at two. You want to know what happened, you wait for that one. You want to know what everybody thought would happen, you buy this one.”

Caleb gave him a pound and took one.

He walked home along the Axis with the paper folded under his arm next to the evidence file. The great buildings were lit along both sides of it the way they always were, for nobody, the museums and the memorials and the dark ministries of the Civic Triangle with a light still burning on some top floor. A few people passed him going the other way, towards the hill, walking quickly. A taxi went by with its windows down and the radio on, and the same voice was saying the same numbers.

Two hundred and twenty-nine. Two hundred and thirty.

He went over them in his head as he walked, the way he went over a map he had just sold, and could not make them come out differently. Eighteen and five. And five more at the end of a bench nobody had made room for, who didn’t sit down until a thing was decided.

His flat was on the fourth floor of a building in a street off the old commercial quarter, up three flights of a stair that smelt of other people’s dinners. He let himself in in the dark and put the evidence file on the kitchen table, and the newspaper on top of it, VALDEZ EXPECTED TO SURVIVE face up. He stood and looked at it for a while.

Then he turned on the radio.