Newport

His mother was waiting at Providence in the car, outside the station, with the engine running and a file open on the steering wheel.

She closed it when she saw him and leaned across to open the passenger door, which stuck, as it always had. Ellen Whitlock had driven the same car for eleven years on the principle that a car which still started had not finished its work. She looked at him over her glasses while he put his bag on the back seat.

“You’ve lost weight.”

“I haven’t.”

“Two pounds. Your face.” She took the file off the wheel and put it on the dashboard and pulled out into the traffic without signalling, because she never did in Providence on a Saturday. “How was the train?”

“Full. Everyone talking about the election.”

“Everyone’s talking about the election. Mrs Danforth next door has put a poster in her window. Conservative. She’s never had a poster in her life.” She took the turn for the bridge. “How much is that woman paying you now?”

“The same.”

“The same as what?”

“The same as last year.”

“Then she’s paying you less. There’s inflation.” She drove in silence across the bridge with the Bay opening out on both sides, grey-blue and full of small sails. “Has your lease been renewed?”

“In June.”

“For how long?”

“A year.”

“Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

“The whole of it? Including the clause about the window boxes?”

“There isn’t a clause about the window boxes.”

“There’s always a clause about the window boxes.” She glanced at him. “And the committee?”

“It’s lapsed. Parliament’s dissolved. Every select committee lapses.”

“Lapsed,” said his mother, approvingly, as if he had chosen the word himself. “Not suspended. Lapsed. It’ll have to be reappointed by the new Parliament.”

“If the new Parliament wants it.”

“It’ll want it. It’ll be the only thing anybody wants to talk about.” She drove on. “Did you get the letter from the Heralds?”

“I sent it back.”

“Good.”

That was all she asked. She asked about his lease and his pay and the committee and a form from the College of Heralds that had wanted his signature, and whether he was eating properly. She did not ask what he was going to do. She had never asked him that, not when he graduated, not when he came home to help with their father, not when a group of hereditary peers he had never met asked him to stand for a seat in the House of Lords at twenty-four. She had read the papers the peers had sent him, every page, and pointed out two errors in the drafting, and said, “It’s your decision.” Then she had driven him to the train.

---

The house stood where it had stood since 1794, at the top of a steep narrow street a block back from the harbour, three storeys of grey clapboard with a fanlight over the door. The first baron had built it with the money he had made lending to a Realm that had very little of its own, and it was the only thing of his money that was left. The roof needed doing. The roof always needed doing.

Samuel was sitting on the front step in his bare feet, eating an apple.

“You’re late,” he said.

“The train was late.”

“Mum said you’d say that.” Samuel stood up. He was nearly as tall as Caleb now and thinner, with their father’s narrow face, and he had grown a beard since Easter that did not suit him and that nobody in the family had yet mentioned. “There’s a catboat at the Kimballs’ dock with nobody using it until Tuesday. Mr Kimball says we can have it tomorrow if we bring it back with the sail dry.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“I said yes already.” Samuel took his brother’s bag. “Mum’s made the fish thing.”

“Which fish thing?”

“The only fish thing,” said Samuel, and went in.

---

They ate in the kitchen, because the dining room was their father’s study now and had been since the last year of his illness, when he could not manage the stairs. Nobody had moved anything out of it. His books were on the table where he had been reading them, with paper slips in them at the pages he had marked, and his reading glasses were on top of the pile, and the door was kept shut.

The fish thing was the same as always. Samuel talked about his degree, which was history, which their father had been delighted about and had pretended not to be. He was writing a dissertation in his final year on the Newport slave trade, and he had found a voyage in the Customs House records that he thought might be the first baron’s, and then had found it wasn’t, and was disappointed in a way he could not quite explain.

“You wanted it to be him,” their mother said.

“I didn’t want it to be him.”

“You wanted to know. That’s different.” She poured water. “Your father would have said the same. He looked for twenty years and never found one either, and it bothered him that it bothered him.”

“Why did it bother him?”

“Because not finding a thing isn’t the same as there being nothing to find,” she said. “He said it to his sixth form every September, and to you two at this table every week. He was careful never to teach either of you, and he taught you anyway.”

“I wasn’t listening,” said Samuel.

“Nobody listens to their own father,” their mother said. “That’s what other people’s fathers are for.” She looked at Caleb. “Who are you voting for?”

He had a fork halfway to his mouth.

“I haven’t decided.”

“You’re registered in the District?”

“Yes.”

“One seat for the whole capital,” said his mother. “A Realm that put its own capital below the floor so that it couldn’t loom over Parliament, and then forgot to give the people who live there anything else.” She cut a potato in half. “I’m voting Labour. I always vote Labour. This time I’m doing it with my eyes shut, but I’m doing it.” She looked at him again. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve decided.”

“No, you won’t,” said his mother. “You never have. You’re like your father.” She put her knife and fork together. “There’s pie.”

---

On the Sunday morning he walked up the hill alone to the cemetery before the others were up.

It was early and already warm, with a haze on the water that the sun had not yet burnt off, and the cemetery was empty except for a man with a strimmer working along the far wall. His father was in the newer part, towards the top, where you could see the harbour between the trees if you stood in the right place. The stone was plain grey granite, as his father had wanted, and had been cut the winter before last with what his mother had decided after a week of saying nothing to anybody.

THOMAS WHITLOCK, it said. TEACHER OF HISTORY. And underneath, smaller, the years.

Nothing else. No title, which his father had never used. His mother had been asked by the monumental mason, who was a careful man and had looked it up, whether she wanted Sixth Baron Whitlock of Wickford cut on it, since there was room, and she had said: “He’d have been mortified,” and that had been the end of it.

Caleb stood in front of it for a while with his hands in his pockets.

He did not say anything aloud. He had read somewhere that people did, and had tried it once, in the first spring, and felt foolish, and not done it again. He stood and looked at the harbour between the trees, the masts in the marina, the grey bulk of the naval college across the water, the ferry going out to Jamestown with its wake spreading behind it in a long V. His father had liked the ferry. He had liked to take it over and back for no reason on Saturday mornings with a newspaper, and say that it was the cheapest sea voyage in the Realm.

The man with the strimmer stopped, and the cemetery went quiet. A gull went over.

“They counted them,” Caleb said, after all, quietly, to nobody. “In the Commons. One vote. Everyone was counting.” He stopped. “You’d have liked it.”

The strimmer started again. He went back down the hill.

---

They took the Kimballs’ catboat out at ten.

It was a heavy old wooden boat with a single gaff sail and a cockpit you could have held a dinner party in, and it sailed the way catboats sail, steadily and without hurry, as if it had somewhere to be and knew it would get there. Samuel took the tiller out of the harbour and Caleb tended the sheet. Neither of them said much until they were clear of the breakwater and the wind came steady out of the south-west and the boat heeled and settled into it.

“Where are we going?” Samuel said.

“Across.”

“Across where?”

Caleb pointed west, past the bridge and the end of Conanicut, towards the far shore of the Bay, where a small white village sat low on the water a long way off.

Samuel laughed. “Wickford.”

“Why not?”

“Your barony.” Samuel put the tiller over a little. “Are we going to go and look at it?”

“There’s nothing to look at. There’s a harbour and a church and a warehouse that isn’t ours.”

“Was it ever ours?”

“The first baron kept a warehouse and a wharf there. Somebody else owns it now. It’s a shop that sells sweaters.” Caleb looked at the far shore. “A designation is a naming convention, not a conveyance. Dad used to say that.”

“Dad used to say a lot of things.”

“He did.”

They sailed for an hour without talking much. It was easy, the way it had always been easy with Samuel on a boat, because there was always something to do with your hands and something to look at, and nobody expected you to say anything that mattered. The Bay was full of sails. A big ketch went past them going the other way with a family on deck, and a small boy waved at them with both arms and Samuel waved back.

Halfway across, Samuel said, “Did they ever find out who the lord was?”

Caleb had the sheet in his hand. He let a little out, because the wind had come round a point, and the boat came upright.

“Which lord?”

“On the night. On the television. The man said they were talking about a Prime Minister from the House of Lords.” Samuel kept his eyes on the luff of the sail. “I just wondered if anybody ever found out who they meant. Mum said it was probably some old duke.”

“Nobody knows,” said Caleb.

“Do you think it was serious?”

“It was eleven o’clock at night. Everything’s serious at eleven o’clock at night.”

Samuel thought about that.

“That’s a very Dad answer,” he said.

“Is it?”

“It’s the kind of answer Dad gave when he didn’t want to tell you something.” Samuel glanced at him, briefly, and then back at the sail. “It’s all right. I’m not asking.”

They tacked off Wickford at noon, close enough to see the white church and the harbour and the old grey warehouse at the end of the wharf with a sign on it saying KNITWEAR, and did not go in. Samuel brought the boat round very neatly and they started back on the other tack with the wind on the other side and the long view of Newport opening up ahead of them, the spires and the naval college and the grey roofs, and somewhere among them, out of sight, a grey clapboard house with a roof that needed doing.

“I might come back with you,” Samuel said. “To the capital. For a few days. If that’s all right.”

“Of course it’s all right.”

“I’ve never seen the shop.”

“There’s nothing to see. It’s a shop.”

“I’ve never seen it,” Samuel said again, as if that settled it, and it did.