Counted

He put his name down for the debate at a quarter past nine, at the desk in the Prince’s Lobby where the list was kept, and the clerk on the desk looked at the name and then at him and wrote it in at the bottom.

“There are twenty-six before you, my Lord.”

“That’s all right.”

“It’s a take-note debate. No time limit.” The clerk was young and had been up all night, by the look of him. “The usual channels think it’ll run until about three.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Yes, my Lord,” said the clerk, in the voice of a man who had heard twenty-six other peers say the same thing that morning and expected about eight of them to be there at three.

---

The House met at eleven.

It was fuller than it had been for the herring, and much fuller than it would be by the afternoon. Peers who had not been in the building since Easter had come in for it, and stood about at the bar in their summer suits telling each other where they had been when they heard. The bishops were in their places. The Labour front bench was full and looked as if nobody on it had slept. On the Conservative side there was a kind of energy that was not quite cheerfulness, because nobody yet knew what it was for.

The Leader of the House stood up at the despatch box to repeat a statement, and the chamber went quiet.

“My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall repeat in the form of a statement the announcement made in another place a short while ago by the Prime Minister.” He was a grey, careful man from Pennsylvania who had led the House for three years and been liked by it for two. “Following the vote in the House of Commons last night, the Prime Minister sought an audience of the Governor-General and requested a dissolution of Parliament. The Governor-General has been pleased to grant it. Parliament will be dissolved by proclamation tomorrow, Friday the twenty-eighth of July, and the general election will be held on Thursday the seventh of September.”

He sat down. There were no questions, because there was nothing to ask. Six weeks. Everybody in the chamber could count that far.

Sayle, in his usual place at the back of the crossbenches, turned his good ear to Caleb.

“Six weeks,” he said.

“Six weeks.”

“Have you got something on paper?”

Caleb touched his breast pocket.

“Good,” said Sayle. “You’re twenty-seventh. You’ll be on after lunch, to the bishops and the doorkeepers and me.” He settled back with both hands on the stick. “The bishops will be asleep. I’ll try not to be.”

---

The Leader moved that the House take note of the situation following the division in the House of Commons, and the House took note of it for four hours.

It was a Lords debate of the old kind. Peers who had sat in Cabinets twenty years before got up and said what they would have done. A former Attorney-General spoke for twenty minutes on the confidence convention, and why it was not in the Charter, and why it did not need to be, and sat down to a murmur of approval from the lawyers. A Conservative life peer said that the government had been brought down by five votes that should never have been cast, and three of the polity members from the west said No loudly enough for the Lord Speaker to look up from the Woolsack. A Labour peer who had been a trade-union general secretary said that whatever anybody thought of the five, they had been elected, which was more than anyone in this House could say. That got the only laugh of the morning.

Lady Krause spoke for the crossbench for three minutes.

“I have been asked a great many times since yesterday afternoon,” she said, “what the view of the crossbench is. I have explained to each person who asked that the crossbench does not have views. It has members. I am told this is unhelpful, and I agree.” She looked round the chamber with her grey eyes. “I will offer the House only one observation, which is medical. A patient who has been told for fourteen months that his condition is temporary, by doctors who are not treating it, will eventually stop believing the doctors. That is not a failure of the patient.” She sat down.

“Good,” said Sayle, under his breath.

At one the House emptied for lunch. Caleb didn’t go. He sat in his place with the page and a half of pencil on his knee and read it again, and cut a paragraph, the second one, which explained the census and was true and was not needed. He wrote the one sentence from it he wanted to keep into the margin of the last paragraph with an arrow.

Quarles came and sat in the clerks’ box below the bar for a while, which he had no particular reason to do, and looked at nothing. When Caleb looked up, he nodded once, and went away again.

---

By half past two there were thirty-one peers in the chamber, including the bishop of somewhere in the Midwest who had been asleep since a quarter to two, and the clerk at the Table was sending notes to the whips to ask whether anybody further down the list was still in the building.

“The Lord Whitlock,” said the Lord Speaker.

Caleb stood up.

It was the thirty-first time. He had counted, because Sayle had told him in the spring that a peer who spoke more than about thirty times a session on the same subject became a bore, and he had wanted to know when he was getting near it. He stood at the back of the crossbenches, where the microphone hung down from the roof on a long wire, and the House did the thing it did for a junior member at the end of a long debate, which was to stop talking and not quite listen.

“My Lords,” he said. “I shall be brief.”

Somebody on the Conservative side said, “Hear, hear,” not unkindly.

“I sit on your Lordships’ committee on the Territory of Loreto. I have spoken in this House on no other subject, and your Lordships know that, and I am grateful for the patience with which you have listened to me say the same thing thirty times.” He looked at the page and then didn’t. “I’m going to say it once more, and then I won’t need to again for six weeks.

“We say there are four million people in the Territory of Loreto. We do not know. We have never counted them. The only figure this Realm has for the population of a territory it has governed for fourteen months is a census taken by another country, of its own citizens, before the territory changed hands. On that census we have allotted five seats in the House of Commons. On that census we have planned schools, and hospitals, and the registration of new citizens under Part VI. And on the five votes cast from those seats, last night, a government fell.”

The House had gone quieter. Not attentive, exactly. Quiet in the way a room goes quiet when somebody at the back says something nobody expected to be said aloud.

“I do not say those five votes should not have been cast. They were cast lawfully by members of the other place, who sit, vote and are counted like any others. I don’t say what the Territory should become. That is a question for Parliament, and the people of the Territory will have a great deal to say about it, and so they should.

“I say this. Parliament has spent a year arguing about four million people it has never counted. It has argued about whether they should vote, and how, and for whom. It has argued about what they are. It has never once asked how many of them there are, or who, or where. Last night a government fell on the question of what those people are, and in six weeks the Realm will elect another one, and that government will be asked the same question, and it will not be able to answer it either, because it will not know who it is answering about.”

He turned the page over. There was nothing on the back of it, and he knew there wasn’t.

“My Lords, I ask this House for nothing, because there is nothing this House can give. It will be dissolved tomorrow. But I would like it to be on the record, in the last sitting of this Parliament, that somebody said this: that no government of this Realm should be formed, or should fall, on the question of Loreto until its people have been counted. Not settled. Counted. A federal enumeration of the Territory, by this Realm, of everybody in it. It is the least we owe people we have bought, and it is the one thing nobody has proposed.

“I beg your Lordships’ pardon for detaining the House.”

He sat down.

It had taken four minutes and about ten seconds. The Lord Speaker looked at his list, found the next name, and called it, and a Conservative hereditary got up and began to talk about the Charter, and the House went back to its afternoon.

Sayle didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “Thirty-one.”

“Thirty-one.”

“That’s the one, you know. The one before you stop.” He looked at the ceiling. “Your grandfather used to say the Navy taught him to say a thing once, clearly, and then go and stand somewhere else. He never managed it. He’d have liked you to.”

---

The House rose at ten past four. There was no ceremony to it. The Lord Speaker put the question that the House do now adjourn, and the House agreed, and the Parliament of the Realm that had sat since 2023 finished its business in the upper chamber with thirty-three peers present and the bishop still asleep. A doorkeeper woke him gently.

Peers went out by both doors, slowly. A few of them stopped to shake hands with people they would not see until September, or might not see at all, since some of them were very old. Caleb collected the evidence file from under the bench and stood up.

“Lord Whitlock.”

It was the retired judge from the herring afternoon, a small dry man with a white moustache who had written Disbelieve on the back of the note. He held out his hand, and Caleb took it.

“Counted,” said the judge. “Not settled. Counted.” He nodded, as if confirming a point of law. “That was well put. Nobody will notice it, of course.”

“No.”

“They didn’t notice Magna Carta for about a hundred years.” He let go of Caleb’s hand. “Have a good summer.”

He went out. Lady Krause, across the chamber, was talking to a bishop and did not look round. Quarles had gone. Sayle’s driver was at the bar, waiting, and Sayle was lowering himself out of his place in two stages with both hands on the stick.

“Where are you going now?” Sayle said.

“I don’t know.”

“Go and sell a map,” said Sayle. “It’s what you’re good at. You can’t be any use to anybody here for six weeks.”

---

He went down the hill in the heat.

The crowd of the night before had gone, and Charter Hill was itself again, tourists on the steps photographing each other in front of Parliament House, a school party, a man selling cold drinks out of a box. Nobody looked at him. He walked down past the end of the Axis and turned into the narrow streets behind the Civic Triangle, where the old commercial quarter started and the buildings stayed low because a statute said so, and the shopfronts had the names of the people who had owned them a century ago painted over the doors.

The shop was halfway along a street of them, between a stationer’s and a closed-down tailor’s. PELL’S, said the sign, in gold on black. MAPS • CHARTS • TRAVEL. The window was full of a large framed map of the Chesapeake from 1797, which had been there since before he started and which Mrs Pell said she would sell to the right person and had never sold to anyone.

He didn’t work on Thursdays. He went in anyway.

The bell over the door rang. The shop was dim and cool after the street, and smelt of paper. Mrs Pell was at the counter at the back, under the lamp, with her reading glasses on, sorting a box of old county sheets into piles, and she looked up over the glasses when he came in and then down again.

“It’s Thursday,” she said.

“I know.”

“You don’t work Thursdays.”

“I was passing.”

Mrs Pell turned a county sheet over and looked at the back of it. She was seventy-four, small and straight-backed, with white hair cut short and a cardigan in all weathers, and she had kept the shop on her own for forty years, and for nearly two of them she had employed him three days a week and never asked him a single question about what he did on the other two.

“Well, since you’re passing,” she said, “these want sorting. Pennsylvania on the left, Ohio on the right, and anything that colours the Western Reserve the same as Connecticut goes in the box under the counter, because it’s a lie and I’m not having it on the shelves.”

“Why is it a lie?”

“Because it’s Connecticut’s claim and Connecticut gave it up in eighteen hundred, and the man who drew that map knew it and drew it anyway to sell to people in Hartford.” She held one up to the light. “That’s what most old maps are, Mr Whitlock. Somebody’s claim, drawn to be sold to somebody who wanted it to be true.”

He came round behind the counter and took the box.

Above them, on the shelf behind the till where Mrs Pell kept the radio she would not let him turn on during opening hours, there was a small transistor set, switched off, and beside it a copy of that morning’s paper, folded to the front page. The headline said GOVERNMENT FALLS BY ONE VOTE. Under it was a photograph of the Prime Minister on the steps of Government House at midnight, with her hand up against the flashbulbs.

Mrs Pell didn’t mention it. She didn’t mention anything. She sorted county sheets for an hour beside him in the lamplight while the bell over the door rang twice for customers and once for a man who wanted directions to the Treasury. At half past five she took her glasses off and folded them and put them in the pocket of her cardigan.

“There’s tea,” she said, “if you want it, before you go.”

“Thank you.”

She went through to the back to put the kettle on. Caleb stood behind the counter in the shop with a map of Ohio in his hand that coloured the whole of the Western Reserve the same pale pink as Connecticut, in the hand of a man who had known it was not true and drawn it anyway, to sell to people who wanted it to be.

He put it in the box under the counter.