Round the World

By the morning it had been round the world.

The telephone on the desk had been buzzing against the wood all night, like something trying to get out of a box, and at ten past six, when he picked it up, it said that he had two hundred and eleven messages. He read the ones he could not have stopped himself reading.

Jack had written at four, which was noon at the New Inn, in capitals.

HANOVER.

HANOVER YOU ARE ON THE FRONT OF THE PAPER IN THE SHOP IN BIBURY.

MUM HAS PUT YOU BEHIND THE BAR. BETWEEN THE DARTS TROPHY AND THE FIRE CERTIFICATE. SHE HAD TO BUY A NAIL.

And then, on a line by itself, without capitals:

you look so happy you absolute lemon

Theo had written at five, which was eight in New Westminster, from what was evidently the back of a lecture.

Your aseptic technique is appalling. You have contaminated the entire field to the elbow and you are holding your hands up as though somebody is about to glove you. Nobody is going to glove you, Freddie. Love to your mum.

Alexander had written from Potsdam, where it had been a quarter past two in the afternoon, in English, correctly punctuated.

The photograph has reached Potsdam. It is above the fold in every Berlin paper. There is paint on your left ear, which nobody in the press has remarked upon. Lukas has remarked upon it.

The Private Secretary had written at four in the morning, New Westminster time, which meant that he had been awake for it.

The Household has no comment, sir, and would be grateful to know whether you have one.

Frederick looked at it for some time. Then he wrote back, It’s a good photograph, and the answer came in under a minute, as though the Private Secretary had been sitting with the telephone in his hand at ten past nine in the morning in an office in Columbia Palace waiting for exactly that.

The Household agrees, sir, and has no comment.

There was one more. It had come at eleven the night before, from a number that was not in the telephone under any name, only a single initial, and it was four lines long.

Butte is city land, not campus. Arrangement with editors covers campus. Gazette within it. It held.

K.

He put his hand up to his left ear. There was paint on it.

---

Tyler was asleep, as he had been for most of the previous twenty-four hours, and did not stir.

Mr Luna was at the desk at the end of his shift with the Arizona Gazette spread open in front of him under the lamp.

It was the whole of the top of the front page, across five columns, and above it, in the Gazette’s large plain capitals, it said FIRST COOL MORNING, and nothing else. They had not needed to say anything else.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses.

“Son,” he said.

“Good morning.”

Mr Luna put one finger on the caption and read it aloud, slowly, the way he read the clues in the crossword.

“F. Hanover. A first-year of Palo Verde Hall.” He looked up. “That you?”

“Yes.”

“At the whitewash of the A on Tuesday morning.” He looked up again. “That right?”

“Yes.”

“Palo Verde does the cracks.”

“We do.”

Mr Luna considered the caption for a while, and then the photograph, and then Frederick’s arms, which had gone in the night from maroon to a deep dull rose, like a brick that has been rained on, with the line still sharp across them at the elbow.

“Every word of it true,” said Mr Luna.

“Yes.”

“Huh,” said Mr Luna. He folded the paper in half, and in half again, with great care, along the creases, and put it in the drawer of the desk with the coffee can and the spare earplugs, and shut the drawer. “I’m keeping that.”

---

The dining hall had it on the wall.

There was a television high up in the corner over the coffee, which in the mornings showed the ABC with the sound off, and the ABC’s two presenters sat on their sofa with their coffee cups in front of a young man on a hill holding up his maroon arms, enormous, and every so often one of them turned round and looked at it and laughed. The line of words along the bottom of the screen said KING AT TEMPE WHITEWASH: PALACE “HAS NO COMMENT”, and then FIRST COOL MORNING IN VALLEY, and then the weather, which was eighty-six.

The newspapers on the rack by the door, which nobody ever took, had all been taken. They were spread out on the tables, the Columbia Gazette and the New York Herald and the Boston Chronicle and the two from Phoenix, and every one of them had it on the front, credited in small type to the woman in the canvas hat, with a different headline over it, and none of them as good as FIRST COOL MORNING.

He went down the line with his tray, and the hall looked at him, and then did something he had not expected.

At a table by the window, eight sophomores in maroon sweatshirts put down their forks and held up their arms.

They had painted them. Every one of them, both arms, from the fingers to the elbow, in maroon, with a hard straight line at the joint as though they had dipped them in a bucket, the way Kaylee had done hers for the Nebraska game on the wall of the Furnace; and they held them up in front of them as he went past with the hands open and the fingers spread, exactly as he had held his on the A, like a row of surgeons waiting to be gloved, and said nothing at all, with perfectly straight faces.

He did not know what to do. So he held his up too, the tray balanced on one forearm, the rose-coloured arms, with the line at the elbow; and the table by the window cheered, and went back to its eggs.

---

Rhys was at their table with his head in his hands.

“I’ve got my mouth open,” said Rhys.

Sam, opposite him, had the Columbia Gazette folded to a quarter in front of him, beside the notebook, and was examining the photograph with a magnifying glass that he had evidently brought down to breakfast for the purpose. It was a small brass one with a handle, and it made him look like a jeweller.

“In every paper in the world,” said Rhys, to the table. “With my mouth open. My mother rang at five.” He lifted his head. “She said, close your mouth, love. That was the whole call. She rang at five in the morning to say close your mouth, love, and rang off.”

“Mine rang too,” said Sam.

“What did she say?”

Sam moved the glass a quarter of an inch across the photograph, to the right, to the young man in round glasses kneeling by his straight lines, looking at the camera.

“She said I looked like I was working,” said Sam.

“You were,” said Frederick.

“I know. She said I always look like that.” Sam put the glass down. “She said it in Yoruba, so it was worse.”

---

Brennan had taped them to the blackboard.

Frederick saw them from the door of Tolliver 104 at two minutes to nine and stopped, so that Rhys walked into his back and Sam into Rhys’s. The whole of the blackboard behind the bench was covered with front pages, printed out in colour and stuck up with masking tape in two rows, and every one of them had the same photograph on it, under a headline in a different typeface, and some of the headlines were in English and some of them were not.

The room was full, and quiet, and looking at the board, and at the door.

He went up the curved rows to the aisle two from the back and sat down with Rhys on his left and Sam beyond, and Brennan came in at one minute to nine with the leather bag and the cardboard cup, and did not look at the aisle at all. He picked up a piece of chalk and stood for a moment with his back to the room, looking at the front pages.

“Week nine,” said Brennan.

He turned round.

“In week one,” he said, “I promised you the best joke in the document. Article Two. The King acts on advice.” He wrote it, under the front pages, in the strip of blackboard that was left: ACTS ON ADVICE. “Of ministers answerable to Parliament, it says. And upon no other advice. Four words. Two hundred and fifty years, and every person in this Realm with an opinion has given the King advice, his mother, his barber, the newspapers, me, and the instrument that made the Crown says that none of it counts. That’s the joke. That’s week nine.” He put the chalk down. “I had a lecture for it. I’ve given it for twenty-two years. It’s quite a good lecture.” He looked at the board behind him. “And then I came in at seven this morning and ran the department’s printer out of maroon.”

The room laughed. It was a nervous laugh. It was the laugh of eighty people who could see where this was going and could not see how it would get there.

“Fifteen front pages,” said Brennan. “The Columbia Gazette. The Times, in London. Ottawa. Dublin. The Sydney Morning Herald, which is a day ahead of us and had it with breakfast. Johannesburg. Manila. Kingston. Buenos Aires. Delhi. Kuala Lumpur. Hanover. Brunswick. Rouen.” He touched each one as he said it, one after another, along the two rows, with the end of the chalk. “That’s fourteen. One from each of his.” He came to the last one, at the end of the bottom row, and stopped. “And one from a country that isn’t. Yet.”

He did not turn round to the aisle. Frederick could feel him not turning round.

“Here is my question,” said Brennan. “It is a constitutional question, and you will need it for the essay in November.” He picked up the chalk and pointed it at the photograph in the middle of the board, the Gazette’s, the largest. “Whose advice was this?”

Nobody said anything.

“The King acts on advice. Everything he does, he does on somebody’s. He signs on advice, he appoints on advice, he assents on advice. That is the whole of the Crown in the Realm: a man who does what he is advised to do and is told things.” He tapped the photograph. “And this is the only thing the Crown has done this year that nobody advised. And it’s on the front of fifteen newspapers. And it is worth more to the monarchy than every reserve power in the Charter put together.” He looked at the board. “This is the best argument for a crown I’ve seen in twenty-two years of teaching the Charter.” He put the chalk down on the bench, quite gently. “That is why I’m a republican.”

The room was very quiet.

Beside Frederick, Rhys had written best argument / republican in his notebook and highlighted it in two colours, one on top of the other, so that it had gone brown.

---

Brennan lasted eleven minutes.

He talked about Bagehot, and the dignified part and the efficient part, and about the conventions that were not in the instrument and the reason that they held anyway; and he talked very well, walking up and down in front of the fifteen front pages with his hands behind his back, and at no point did he look up the curved rows to the aisle two from the back.

At eleven minutes past nine he stopped in front of the photograph.

He stood and looked at it. He looked at it for some time, with the room watching him look, and Frederick watched the colour begin, very faintly, at the collar of the professor’s shirt.

“Mr Hanover,” said Brennan, to the photograph.

The room did not turn round, with tremendous force.

“Yes.”

“Who advised you to catch the bucket?”

“Nobody,” said Frederick. “It was falling.”

The room laughed, properly this time, the whole of it, all eighty, and Brennan laughed too, once, a short surprised sound that he seemed to disapprove of; and the colour came all the way up out of his collar into his face to the roots of the hair that had been red, and he said “Yes. Thank you. That’s the…” and turned back to the board, and Frederick thought that was the end of it.

It was not the end of it. Brennan’s hand had stopped on the last front page, at the end of the bottom row. The one from the country that was not, yet.

It was Expressen, the Stockholm evening paper. The photograph took up the whole of the page under the masthead, and over it, in heavy black capitals, there were two words.

Brennan looked at them. He turned round, slowly, and looked up the curved rows, and his face was the face of a man who knows perfectly well what he is about to do and is unable, as a matter of physics, not to.

“I can’t read this one,” he said. “You can.”

Eighty people waited.

Frederick looked at the two words on the blackboard at the front of Tolliver 104, in black, over a photograph of himself on a hill in his mother’s jumper.

“Kronprinsens svar,” he said.

“Which means?”

“The Crown Prince’s answer.”

Brennan looked at him.

“Answer to what?”

The room was absolutely silent. Beside him, Rhys had stopped breathing again. Beyond Rhys, Sam had put his pencil down flat on the desk, parallel to the edge, exactly.

“I don’t know,” said Frederick. “I didn’t know I’d been asked.”

The room laughed again. It was a good line, and it had been said well, and eighty people laughed at it with relief, and Brennan did not.

He stood at the front of the room with his hand on the Stockholm paper and looked up the curved rows at the aisle two from the back for perhaps three seconds longer than he had looked at anything all morning; and Frederick saw him see something, he did not know what; and saw him take hold of the next question, whatever it was, and put it back, physically, on the high shelf, and leave it there.

“Hm,” said Brennan, and took his hand off the paper. “Week nine.”

---

His mother rang at a quarter to eleven, which was a quarter to seven in the evening in London.

He took it on the stairs. He did not decide to. He walked back across the mall with the telephone already in his hand, and into Palo Verde Hall, past the lift, which was working again, and up and round the turn; and he sat down on the step on the landing between the second floor and the third, under the narrow window, and only when he was sitting there did he understand where he was, and why.

“I have seen the photograph,” said his mother, in Swedish.

“I know.”

“Everybody has seen the photograph. Stockholm has seen the photograph. The Marshal sent it to me at six o’clock this morning with no message at all, which is how the Marshal sends a message.” He heard the cup go down on the saucer. “Ebba has seen it. Ebba laughed. I have known Ebba for forty-five years and I have heard her laugh four times, and two of them were at you.”

“Did you see what they called it?”

“Yes.”

“Kronprinsens svar.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “I saw.” She was quiet for a moment. “They have had it on the television since noon. A man from the Riksdag’s committee and a woman from the Republican Association, on a sofa, arguing about your arms.”

“Mamma, it was…”

“You were wearing it,” said his mother.

He stopped.

He looked out of the narrow window at the car park, between the concrete fins, where the shadow lay across the bonnet of a different car.

“You said to.”

“I did not say to put it in every newspaper in the world.”

“I didn’t put it anywhere. A woman asked my name.”

There was a silence on the line from London. Then his mother laughed.

It was the laugh the room heard. It came down the line low and sudden, all the way from London, and went on, and he sat on the step and held the telephone and heard it; and at the end of it there was the breath, a long one, a little too long, in the wrong place, and he heard it, and did not say anything about it, and she knew that he had heard it.

“You look happy,” said his mother.

“I was.”

“Good.” Another breath, shorter. “That is the only thing about it that I care about. I would like you to know that, before I tell you the other thing.”

“What’s the other thing?”

“The Marshal would like to know,” said his mother, in the voice for papers, “whether it was an answer.”

He looked at the fire notice on the wall opposite.

“It was a bucket,” he said.

“I will tell him it was a bucket.” A pause. “He will not believe me. Nobody in Stockholm believes in buckets. They believe in answers.” He heard her move, on the sofa, with the small effort that she would rather he had not heard. “Your father has cut it out of the Times with the kitchen scissors. It is in the folder. With the reports.” The voice changed, and was hers again. “He held it up to me at breakfast, Fredde, and he did not say anything at all, and he did not need to.”

He sat on the step.

“I still haven’t answered,” he said. “The other thing. The letter.”

“No,” said his mother. “I know. The newspapers have answered for you, which is what newspapers are for, and they are wrong, which is also what they are for.” The breath. “Not today. I said not today, and I meant it. But it is still a question, Fredde. A photograph is not an answer, however good it is. It is only a photograph.”

“I know.”

“Good.” And then, quite differently, very low: “It is a very good photograph.”

---

At four o’clock in the afternoon Tyler woke up.

He woke up all at once, the way he did, as though somebody had switched him on, and sat up in the blanket with the hood still up and looked round the room at the two screens, which were dark, and the window, which was blind, and Frederick, who was at the desk by the door with his arms on a towel, because Mrs Montoya had said butter again in the afternoon and he did not dare not.

“Dude,” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

“Everybody in the raid last night was talking about some picture.” Tyler felt about in the blanket for his telephone, found it, and looked at it with one eye. “Of the king guy. Like, the actual king. Jussi saw it. In Finland.” He considered this. “Jussi doesn’t see anything. Jussi doesn’t know what day it is.”

“Did you see it?”

“Nah. I was on wood.” Tyler put the telephone down. “He was painting something, Jussi said. Like a sign.” He yawned enormously. “Weird job.”

Then he looked across the room, properly, at Frederick at the desk, at the towel, and at the arms on the towel: rose-coloured, buttered, shining faintly in the light from the gap at the edge of the blind, with the hard line across them at the elbow.

“What happened to your arms?”

“I painted the A.”

“What A?”

Frederick pointed at the blind.

Tyler looked at the blind for a while, as though the blind were a person who had said something surprising at dinner. He did not lift it.

“Oh, right,” he said. “The butte thing. Yesterday.” He nodded slowly, satisfied. “Was it cool?”

“It was the best morning I’ve had since January.”

“Cool,” said Tyler, and meant it. He lay back down in the blanket. Then he lifted his head again. “Was he there? The king guy? Jussi said it was at, like, a college.”

Frederick looked at his arms.

“He was there,” he said.

“What was he like?”

“He caught a bucket.”

“Huh,” said Tyler, with interest, to the ceiling. He thought about it. “So is that, like, a king thing? Painting stuff?” He reached for the headphones. “What does a king actually do, though? Like when he’s not…”

“Mostly,” said Frederick, “he’s told things. Every day. In a box. And then he signs them, on advice, and there’s a professor in Tolliver who says the advice is the best joke in the document, and I think he’s right, and the only thing I’ve done this year that nobody advised me to do is…”

Tyler had the headphones on. On the two screens over the desk, which had come on by themselves as the computer woke, it had begun to snow again, on the forest, in the dark, and somebody in Finland had already got the fire going.

Frederick sat at the desk with his arms on the towel and looked at them. They were going pink at the wrists. Mrs Montoya had said Thanksgiving. He thought that he would very much like it to be longer than that.