Four Hours

The radio was a square brown thing with one dial that his grandfather had kept in the boathouse at Newport, and it got the ABC and nothing else very well. Caleb turned it up and filled the kettle and stood by the sink while it boiled, listening.

A woman was saying, “It is a quarter to eight here and there are perhaps two thousand people outside the Territory’s government offices, and they are quiet.”

He knew the voice. Ximena Alcazar had covered every one of the committee’s sessions in Tijuana, sitting in the second row with a notebook, and had asked him once, in the corridor afterwards, in Spanish, whether it was true that he was a lord, and when he said it was had looked at him for a long moment and then written something down.

“What I have been told repeatedly in the last hour,” she said, “by people who wanted to make sure I had understood it, is that they did not bring the government down over a grievance. They brought it down because the arrangement they live under says in the statute itself that it is not permanent, and they have been asked to treat it as permanent for fourteen months.”

The kettle boiled and switched itself off. He didn’t move.

“One member of the Territorial Assembly said this to me and asked me to use it: that the Realm wrote the law in 1965 for people it had not met, and was fair to them because it did not know who they would be, and has been less fair since finding out.”

He knew who that was as well. A man of about sixty with a grey moustache, who taught law at the university in Tijuana and sat in the Assembly for one of the coastal districts, and had said almost exactly the same sentence to the committee in March, in Spanish, and then again in English for the record, more slowly, because he wanted it right. Caleb had underlined it in volume three. He had not thought anyone else would ever read it.

The presenter in New Westminster said, “Thank you, Ximena.”

Caleb made a cup of tea he did not want and took it to the kitchen table and sat down in front of the newspaper. VALDEZ EXPECTED TO SURVIVE. He turned it over. On the back was a half-page advertisement for a sale of garden furniture.

---

At ten past eleven the telephone rang.

It was the old telephone on the wall by the door, with a cord, which came with the flat and which nobody but his family had the number of. He got up and answered it.

“Were you there?” said Samuel.

“In the gallery.”

“I knew it. I said to Mum, he’ll be in the gallery.” His brother’s voice had the slightly too loud quality it always had on the telephone, as if he didn’t quite trust it to carry. Behind him there was a television on, and a door banging. “Was it amazing?”

“It was hot.”

“Caleb.”

“It was very quiet. Then it was very loud. Then she walked out.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall beside the telephone. “Is Mum there?”

“She’s on the other line with Aunt Jo. Aunt Jo wants to know if this means there’ll be an election and whether she has to vote. She does every time.” Samuel paused. “They’re saying on the television it was five votes from Loreto. That’s your lot.”

“They’re not my lot.”

“They’re the ones you’re always on about.”

“I’m not always on about them.”

“You went to Mexico twice.”

“It isn’t Mexico.”

“You know what I mean.” The door banged again behind him, and a dog barked, which would be Aunt Jo’s dog, which meant Aunt Jo was there in person and on the other line with their mother at the same time, which was the kind of thing Aunt Jo did. “Dad would have loved this,” Samuel said.

Caleb didn’t answer at once.

“He’d have had the radio and the television on at the same time,” he said. “And the Charter open on the table.”

“And told us all why it was wrong.”

“And told us all why it was wrong.”

There was a short silence on the line. They had been having that silence, now and then, for two years, and both of them had learned to leave it alone until it finished.

“Anyway,” Samuel said. “There’s a man on the television saying the next Prime Minister could be somebody from the Lords.”

“They always say that.”

“Have they ever said it before?”

Caleb thought about it. “No.”

“So it’s not always.”

“It’s what they say at eleven o’clock when there isn’t an answer. It’s a curiosity. Nobody’s done it since 1859.” He shifted the receiver to his other ear. “The confidence of the House lives in the Commons. A Prime Minister who can’t be questioned by the chamber that can remove him is answerable to nothing. That’s the whole argument, and it hasn’t been improved on in a hundred and sixty-nine years.”

“You sound like Dad.”

“Dad would have made it longer.”

“He would.” Samuel laughed. “Okay. Go to bed. Are you going to be on the television?”

“Why would I be on the television?”

“I don’t know. You were in the gallery.” The dog barked again. “Mum says go to bed. Aunt Jo says hello and is it true they don’t pay you.”

“Only my expenses.”

“She says that’s the most sensible thing she’s ever heard about the House of Lords,” said Samuel, and rang off.

---

He went back to the table and opened the evidence file and took out a pad of lined paper and a pencil.

Sayle was right. There would be a sitting in the morning. The Lords sat on Thursdays at eleven, and nobody would have dissolved anything by then, and the House would be full of people who wanted to be seen to have been there and had nothing to say. A peer who had something on paper would be called. There would be no question to answer and no bill to amend. Peers would be getting up to say what they thought had happened, which was the one kind of speech the House of Lords was any good at.

He wrote My Lords, at the top of the page and looked at it.

On the radio a man was explaining the arithmetic. A member who abstains removes one vote from the government; a member who crosses removes one and adds one. Caleb had worked that out on the back of an order paper in the spring, and had shown it to Quarles, who had looked at it and said it was correct and that the Commons whips would have it on a card. He wrote underneath My Lords: Last night the House of Commons, and crossed it out. The House of Lords did not like being told what the House of Commons had done. It knew.

He wrote: There are four million people in the Territory of Loreto.

He looked at that for a long time. It was the first sentence of the committee’s interim report, which he had drafted in April and which the committee had cut, on the advice of its clerk, because the figure came from a Mexican census of Mexican citizens taken before the transfer, and the committee could not vouch for it. Quarles had been right about that too. Nobody could vouch for it. That was the point.

He crossed out There are and wrote We say there are.

The radio said that the Prime Minister had gone to Government House at eleven o’clock.

---

He got up and stood by the window.

The front room looked west over the roofs of the old commercial quarter towards the Axis. You could see the top of Parliament House from it, if you stood at the left-hand end and leaned, and the dome was lit tonight, as it was every night, white against a sky that never quite got dark in July. Somewhere down there in the streets people were still walking towards the hill. Down in the street below a car went past slowly with all its windows open and somebody in the back seat singing. Caleb couldn’t hear what.

The radio behind him said, “The Prime Minister went to Government House at eleven o’clock and is still there.” It was the presenter from New Westminster again, Alcott, whose voice he would have known anywhere, because it was the voice the committee’s sessions had been reported in, the few times they had been reported at all. “Before I say what she is doing there, I want to deal with something that has been put to me three times this evening by people who are not cranks, because you will hear it tomorrow and it is worth being accurate about tonight.”

Caleb didn’t turn round.

“It is possible, constitutionally, for the next Prime Minister of this Realm to be a member of the House of Lords. There is no rule against it. There never has been one.”

He went back to the table and sat down and picked up the pencil.

“For most of the Realm’s first seventy years that was simply how governments were formed, and the premiership moved to the elected chamber by habit rather than by law.”

We say there are four million people in the Territory of Loreto, he wrote. We do not know.

“Nobody has done it since before the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1859.”

He reached over and turned the radio off.

The flat was very quiet. The fridge hummed. The tap dripped once into the cup he had left in the sink, and then didn’t again. He looked at the page.

We do not know, because we have never counted them.

He did not cross that out.

---

He wrote for two hours.

Most of it he crossed out. He wrote a paragraph about Part VI of the Nationality Act and crossed it out, because the House knew Part VI, or thought it did, and would not be told. He wrote a paragraph about the security campaign in the sierra and crossed it out, because it was the Prime Minister’s argument and she had made it better than he could and lost. He wrote a paragraph about the five members, and what they had told the committee about sitting down, and looked at it for a long time, and crossed it out, because it was theirs and not his, and because if he said it in the Lords tomorrow it would be in the newspapers by Saturday as a story about them and not about the thing they had done.

At one o’clock he turned the radio back on, very low, and there was music, and he left it.

At half past one the music stopped for a news summary. The Governor-General had granted the Prime Minister’s request for a dissolution of Parliament. The date of the general election would be announced in the morning. The Prime Minister had left Government House shortly after midnight and made no statement. The Leader of the Conservative and Crown Union had said that her party looked forward to putting its case to the country. Alternative for the Realm had said that the government had been brought down by five votes that should never have been cast. The Leader of the Left and Solidarity Bloc had not said anything.

Then the music came back.

Caleb sat and looked at the page. It was most of a page now and half of another, in pencil, with more crossed out than left. What was left was short. He read it through once under his breath, the way he had read his maiden speech in this kitchen fifteen months before, eight minutes on section 26.1 that nobody had noticed.

This one was shorter than that.

We say there are four million people in the Territory of Loreto. We do not know, because we have never counted them. A government has fallen tonight on five votes whose foundation is a census taken by another country of its own citizens, and it has fallen on the question of what those people are. I do not ask this House to say what they should be. I ask it to say that no government of this Realm should be formed, or should fall, on the question of Loreto until they have been counted.

He sat back.

There was more. There was a paragraph before it and two after, and he would read them all in the morning and probably cut one. But that was the speech, and he knew it, and there was nothing else in it that anybody would remember.

He turned the light off in the kitchen and went and stood at the left-hand end of the front-room window and leaned, and the dome of Parliament House was still lit at the end of the Axis, white, over the roofs. It was a quarter to three. The city had gone quiet at last. In about eight hours he would walk back up the hill with a page and a half of pencil in his pocket and stand up in a half-empty chamber and say it, and Sayle would be there, probably, and Quarles, and Lady Krause, and the bishops, and about forty other people who had nowhere better to be on the morning after a government fell.

He thought it would take about four minutes.

He went to bed and slept, at once, the way he had slept at sea as a boy in his grandfather’s boat, and did not dream about anything.