The Clerk

Quarles came in on the second Tuesday of the election, at twenty past three, in a linen jacket and no tie.

Caleb didn’t recognise him for a moment. He had only ever seen him in the building, in a dark suit, with a file. Out of it he looked younger and less certain, like a man who had come to the wrong address, and he stood just inside the door with the bell still going above him and looked round the shop as if pricing it.

“Matthew.”

“My Lord.” Quarles stopped himself. “Mr Whitlock. I suppose here it’s Mr Whitlock.”

“It’s Caleb here.”

“I don’t think I could manage that.” He came to the counter. “I’d like a chart of the lower Potomac. The one with the soundings.”

“For sailing?”

“For sailing badly.” Quarles put his hands in his jacket pockets and took them out again. “I have a share in a boat at Alexandria with two men from the Treasury. None of us can sail. We go out on Sundays and argue about the wind.”

Caleb went to the chart drawers at the back. The Potomac was in the third drawer down, under the Chesapeake approaches, in two sheets: Washington Channel to Indian Head, and Indian Head to the mouth. He brought both back and laid them on the counter, one over the other, and Quarles looked at them without seeing them.

“The second one,” Quarles said. “Below Indian Head. That’s where we run aground.”

“Everybody runs aground below Indian Head. There’s a bar off Mattawoman Creek that moves.”

“You sail.”

“I used to. At home.”

“In Newport.” Quarles nodded slowly. “Your grandfather was the Admiral. Of course you sail.” He picked up the corner of the chart and put it down again. “I’ve come to tell you something, and I thought I’d buy a chart while I was doing it, so that it wasn’t only that.”

Mrs Pell was in the back, on the telephone to a supplier in Philadelphia about a box of school atlases that had come with the wrong polity colours. Her voice came through the curtain in short courteous sentences, each of which ended the supplier’s argument.

“Go on,” said Caleb.

---

“On the night of the division,” Quarles said, “after you’d gone home, I was in the central lobby until about midnight. Everybody was. The whips were trying to work out whether there was anything to do except a dissolution. There wasn’t, and they knew there wasn’t, but they had to be seen to look.” He looked at the chart. “One of them asked me whether there was anybody in the Lords who knew anything about the Territory. Not as a joke. They were thinking aloud. A Prime Minister from the Lords for six weeks, or six months, to hold the thing together while the courts decided about the five seats. Somebody who couldn’t stand at an election and couldn’t be accused of rigging one.”

“I heard it on the radio.”

“Yes. Everybody heard it on the radio.” Quarles looked up. “I gave them your name.”

Caleb looked at him.

Then he laughed. It came out of him before he could stop it, short and loud in the quiet shop, and in the back Mrs Pell’s voice paused on the telephone for a moment and then went on.

“Me,” Caleb said.

“You.”

“For what?”

“For Prime Minister,” said Quarles. “For about four hours.”

Caleb stopped laughing.

He stood behind the counter with his hand flat on the chart of the lower Potomac, Indian Head to the mouth, the bar off Mattawoman Creek in small blue figures under his thumb, and didn’t say anything for a while. Outside a lorry went past and the shop window shivered in its frame. The framed Chesapeake in the window shivered with it.

“Who took it seriously?” he said.

“I’m not going to tell you which party.”

“I didn’t ask which party. I asked who.”

“The managers,” said Quarles. “The people who count. It went to them from the whip I gave it to, and they talked about it, and they came back to the whip and asked him two questions about you. How old you were, and whether you had ever been a member of any party. He came back to me with the questions. I answered them.”

“What did you say?”

“Twenty-six. No.” Quarles turned the chart round on the counter so that the river ran the right way for him. “And then about one o’clock in the morning the Governor-General granted a dissolution, and nobody needed anybody, and it was over. That’s all. It went no further than that.”

“Four hours.”

“About four hours. From about nine to about one, if you count from the first time anybody said a peer, which was before the division. Your name was in it for about two of them.”

---

Mrs Pell’s voice came through the curtain. “Yes. Thank you. No, I quite understand. Twenty-four, with the correct colours, by Friday. Thank you.” The telephone went down.

Neither of them moved.

“Why are you telling me?” Caleb said.

Quarles considered the question as if it had been put to him in committee and deserved an accurate answer.

“Because the committee has lapsed,” he said, “and I’m not your clerk for six weeks, and I might not be again. Because somebody will tell you eventually, at a dinner, as an anecdote, and get it wrong. And because I printed you an agenda for a meeting that never happened and didn’t tell you what I’d done with your name the same night.” He looked at Caleb. “It seemed a dishonest combination.”

“Why my name?”

“Because they asked for somebody who knew what the vote was about, and you were the only peer in the building who did.”

“That isn’t a reason to be Prime Minister.”

“No,” said Quarles. “It was a reason at eleven o’clock at night, in a lobby full of people who didn’t have one.” He took his wallet out of his jacket. “It isn’t a reason now. There’s an election. Whoever wins it will form a government in the ordinary way, and you’ll go back to the committee, and I’ll go back to clerking it, and in five years it’ll be a footnote that nobody reads, in a book about the Valdez ministry that nobody writes.”

“Don’t tell anybody.”

“There’s nobody left to tell.” Quarles almost smiled. “The people who heard it have forgotten it. Whips forget everything that didn’t happen. It’s the only way they can stand the job.”

He paid for the chart, the second sheet only, and Caleb rolled it for him and put it in a tube, and got the cap on wrong and had to take it off and do it again.

“I’m sorry,” Quarles said, at the door. “I should perhaps have asked you first.”

“There wasn’t time to ask anybody anything.”

“No. There wasn’t.” Quarles stood with the tube under his arm and the bell ringing over his head. “If it’s any consolation, my Lord, the managers said you were too young and they’d never heard of you. Both. In that order.”

“That’s a consolation.”

“I thought it might be,” said Quarles, and went out.

---

Mrs Pell came out from behind the curtain with the order book under her arm and her glasses pushed up into her hair.

“Who was that?”

“A friend. From work.”

She looked at him for a moment longer than she usually looked at anybody. Then she looked at the counter, where the first sheet of the Potomac lay unrolled on its own, Washington Channel to Indian Head, with his hand still flat on it.

“Did he buy anything?”

“The second sheet.”

“Not the first?”

“He only runs aground on the second.”

“Then he’ll be back for the first,” said Mrs Pell. “They always come back for the first.” She went to her end of the counter and opened the book. “That chart goes in the third drawer, under the approaches, not the second. You put it in the second last Friday and I had to find it.”

“Sorry.”

He rolled the first sheet and put it in the third drawer, under the Chesapeake approaches, where it went.

At four o’clock a man came in wanting a road atlas of the New England polities for a holiday in Maine, with his wife and two small children waiting outside on the pavement looking at the Chesapeake in the window, and Caleb found him one, and showed him the coast road and the turn for the ferry, and told him which of the islands had a shop and which didn’t. The man thanked him. His wife waved through the window. The children pressed their noses to the glass over the Chesapeake until their mother pulled them away.

“You were good with him,” said Mrs Pell, when they had gone.

“He was easy.”

“They’re all easy, if you’re paying attention.” She turned a page. “You weren’t, for a bit. Earlier. Now you are.” She didn’t look up. “That’s all I’ll say.”

It was all she said.

At half past five she turned the sign and he did the blinds, the inch down and then all the way up, the way you had to, and then all the way down again for the night, and walked home along the edge of the old quarter in the heat. On the hoarding at the end of the street somebody had pasted up a new poster since the morning, in red and black, with nothing on it but two words in very large letters. COUNT THEM. A woman’s photograph in the corner, square-faced, unsmiling, in a dark jacket. Signe Halvorsen. Left and Solidarity Bloc.

He stopped and looked at it.

He had said that. He had said it in the Lords on the afternoon after, to thirty peers and a sleeping bishop, in pencil from a kitchen table. Not settled. Counted. It was the obvious thing to say. Anyone who had read the evidence would have said it. Halvorsen sat in the Commons with twenty-two other members and had never, as far as he knew, read a word of the evidence, and she had got there by herself, which was good, because it meant it was obvious.

He went on home.