The Poll

“Count it,” said Dr Pike.

She had stopped the record. She had lifted the arm off it with one finger, the way you lift a cat off a chair, and the room was quiet: a long low room on the ground floor of the music building with a piano in it and a record player on a trolley and twenty-four chairs, of which one, at eight o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays, had anybody in it.

“Count what?”

“The rest.” Dr Pike put the arm back on the rest, and turned round, and looked at him over the top of the trolley. She was about seventy-five, small and upright, in a cardigan the colour of a plum, and she had taught Introduction to Music at eight in the morning for nineteen years, she had told him in January, because nobody else would take the slot and she had been awake since four for most of her life and might as well. “Haydn. The end of the quartet. He plays you the tune, and then he stops. Then he plays you a bit more, and stops. Then he stops for a very long time, and the audience in 1782 thinks it’s finished, and claps.” She held up one finger. “And then he plays the beginning again. And stops. And nobody knows whether to clap or not, and he’s gone home, and he’s laughing.” She put the finger down. “It’s called The Joke. The joke is in the rests. So when I put it back on, you count the rests. Out loud. In fours.”

“Out loud?”

“There’s nobody here to hear you,” said Dr Pike. “That’s the advantage of eight o’clock.”

She put the needle down.

The quartet came back into the room, four instruments being very polite to one another in a drawing room two hundred and fifty years ago; and the tune went along, and turned a corner, and stopped.

“One, two, three, four,” said Frederick. “Two, two, three, four.”

The tune came back, a piece of it, and stopped.

“One, two, three, four.”

His telephone went in his pocket.

It went once, a long buzz against his leg, and then again, and then a third time, close together, which was Rhys, because only Rhys sent three in a row; and he went on counting, “Two, two, three, four,” with the telephone going against his leg and the quartet saying nothing at all in the long low room, and Dr Pike watching him over the trolley with her head on one side.

“Three, two, three, four,” said Frederick.

The tune came back, the beginning of it, the very first bar, as if the whole thing were going to start again; and stopped.

He did not know whether it had finished. That was the point. He sat in the one chair with anybody in it and did not know, and the telephone buzzed a fourth time against his leg, and Dr Pike did not move, and nothing happened for a long time, and nothing went on happening.

“Is it over?” he said.

“You tell me,” said Dr Pike. “Is that Sweden?”

“Probably.”

“Then it can wait two more bars,” said Dr Pike, and lifted the arm off the record, and smiled for the first time that morning. “That’s the end. That was the end. You never know till afterwards, with Haydn. He’d have made a terrible Prime Minister.” She wrote something in the small black book she kept on top of the piano. “Rests are the hardest thing in music to play, Mr Hanover. You have to count them, and nobody hears you do it, and if you get them wrong the whole room knows.” She closed the book. “Go and see what Sweden wants.”

---

Rhys was on the bench outside the music building with the laptop open on his knees, and Sam beside him with the notebook, and both of them had the faces of men who had been waiting to tell somebody something and had agreed between them who was going to.

“It’s the poll,” said Rhys.

“Whose?”

“Theirs.” Rhys turned the laptop round. “The Republican Association. They commissioned it themselves. In January, in the best month. They said on the television they’d publish whatever it said, the first week of March, to show the country where it stood.” He had found the page in Swedish and put it through a translation that had made a number of choices, and he pointed at the top of it, where the Association’s shield was, small and blue and yellow, the same shield, Frederick saw, as on the T-shirt Jack had ordered in January. “It came out at six this morning. Their time. Ten last night ours.”

“And?”

Rhys looked at Sam.

“Twenty-three,” said Sam.

Frederick sat down on the bench.

“Twenty-three per cent for a republic,” said Rhys. “Sixty-one for keeping the monarchy. Sixteen don’t know.” He scrolled. “In the autumn it was nineteen. That’s the Association’s own figure, from their own poll in October. So it’s gone up four.”

“Which is a lot,” said Frederick.

“It’s not nothing,” said Rhys, and caught Frederick’s face, and went faintly pink, because since the Wednesday before last the word had come to mean something in Palo Verde Hall. “It’s four points, sir. Fred. In a month. They’ve never had four points in a month. But the margin of error’s three, so…”

“So it’s real,” said Sam, without looking up from the notebook. “Four’s outside three. Just.” He wrote something. “It’s real and it’s small.”

“They wanted thirty,” said Rhys. “The chairwoman said in January, on the television. She said a third of Sweden. She said it twice.” He scrolled down. “They got twenty-three.”

“How do you know what they wanted?”

“I watch their television,” said Rhys simply. “With the translation on. Since the ninth. It’s very good television, sir. They have a programme where four people sit round a table and disagree for an hour and nobody raises their voice.”

---

There was more of it. The Association had asked other questions, and had published those too, every one, in a table, with the numbers to one decimal place.

Should the King be allowed to complete his studies in America before living in Sweden? Seventy-one per cent yes.

Was Queen Christina right to abdicate? Eighty-four.

Would you like the King to visit Sweden this summer? Eighty-one, which Rhys said was the highest number in the table and the only one the Association had not commented on.

“And this one,” said Rhys, and put his finger on it, and Frederick saw that he had been saving it.

Do you know what the King is studying?

Yes: 9 per cent. No: 91 per cent.

Frederick looked at it for some time.

“Nine per cent,” he said.

“Nine per cent of Sweden thinks it knows,” said Sam. He closed the notebook. “Which is nine per cent more than knows it here.”

“I’m undeclared.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Sam. “Nine per cent of Sweden thinks it knows something that doesn’t exist.” He considered it with professional respect. “That’s a very confident nine per cent.”

Rhys laughed, and stopped, and looked at Frederick sideways, the way he looked at him when he was not sure whether a thing was funny yet.

“Does it bother you, sir?”

“Which part?”

“Any of it.” Rhys looked at the screen. “The twenty-three.”

Frederick thought about it on the bench, in the sun, with a Haydn quartet still going round somewhere at the back of his head, stopping and starting.

“No,” he said. “They asked. They said they’d publish it, and it wasn’t what they wanted, and they published it anyway. To one decimal place.” He looked at the shield in the corner of the screen. “That’s the best thing anybody’s done about me all year.”

---

The chairwoman had made a statement, and Rhys had it, because Rhys had everything.

He read it out on the bench, from the translation, slowly, correcting the translation as he went where it had made choices he could not agree with; and it was short, because she had been a teacher, and teachers, Rhys said, knew how long a room would listen.

“We said we would ask the country where it stands, and publish the answer, whatever it was. We have asked. This is the answer. We are not going to pretend it is the one we hoped for.” Rhys looked up. “Then she says the numbers. Then she says this.” He found it. “The Swedish people have decided to be patient. We respect that. But patience is not the same thing as consent, and a Kingdom that is content to wait four years for its King has not yet been asked whether it needs one. We will be patient too. We are good at it. We have had a great deal of practice.”

He stopped.

“That’s a good line,” said Rhys. “Sir. Isn’t it?”

“It’s a very good line,” said Frederick.

“Is she right?”

He looked across the mall to where the butte stood up at the end of it, brown in the morning, with the A on its flank and two small figures going up the stepped path, slowly, the way people went up it now, in March, in the mornings, when it was cool enough to want to.

“Yes,” he said.

Rhys waited.

“Patience isn’t consent,” said Frederick. “She’s right. They’ve said they’ll wait. They haven’t said what for.” He picked up his bag. “That’s my job. Not this year.”

Sam, beside Rhys, opened the notebook again and wrote something in it, small, and underlined it, and did not say what it was; and Frederick, standing up, read it upside down, and it was a date, and the date was four years off.

---

Jack’s messages came at ten past nine, which was ten past four in the afternoon in Gloucestershire, between the lunches and the evening, when the New Inn was quiet and Jack did the cellar.

MUM SAYS 61 IS A GOOD NIGHT

And a minute later:

SHE SAYS SHE’D TAKE 61 PER CENT OF THE VILLAGE IN ON A FRIDAY AND SHUT THE DOOR ON THE REST AND CALL IT A RESULT

And then a photograph, taken in a mirror behind a bar, of a man in a white T-shirt with a small blue and yellow shield on the chest and three words across it, KUNGEN BOR I ARIZONA, holding up a pint glass he was drying with a cloth, and making an expression of enormous innocence.

wearing it for the 23, wrote Jack. somebody has to. its only fair

And then, after a while, with no capitals:

9 days. alex rang again. asked what you wear in arizona in march. AGAIN. i said shorts AGAIN. he said with a jacket? i said obviously not with a jacket. he said i see. hanover i dont think he sees

He doesn’t, wrote Frederick. He never has. Bring the hat.

the hats yours. its on your shelf. you were meant to wear it up the hill

I did.

There was a pause, which on the telephone was a long one.

good, wrote Jack. And then: good. i’ll bring a different hat.

---

His mother rang at one, which was eight in the evening in London, and he took it on the step under the narrow window.

“Eleven,” said his mother, before he had said anything.

“Eleven what?”

“Steps. Today. From the sofa to the long window, with Ebba on one arm and your father on the other. Ebba counted, and your father counted, and they did not agree, so we have taken your father’s figure, because he counted out loud and Ebba did not, and the man with the clean hands says that a step not counted out loud is only an opinion.” She was laughing, carefully, round the place where the bones were mending; and under it he heard the soft sound of the red pillow, held. “Eleven. The same as the stairs. Your father has been saying eleven since three o’clock as though he had invented it.”

“Eleven,” said his father, near her, with great satisfaction.

Frederick put his hand flat on the concrete beside him and found that he could not, for a moment, say anything at all.

“Fredde.”

“Yes.”

“You have seen the poll.”

“Rhys showed me.”

“Of course he did.” A breath. It was shorter than it had been at Christmas, and shorter than at New Year, and he noticed, and she knew he had noticed. “Twenty-three. When I came to the throne it was twenty-two. It has been between eighteen and twenty-five for the whole of my reign, like a tide, and twenty-three is a Tuesday. I gave them a month for nothing, and they have got four points out of it, and they have published every one. They are very honest people, Fredde. I have always liked them better than most of the people who like me.”

“The chairwoman said patience isn’t consent.”

“Yes. I heard her. She is right.” His mother did not hesitate. “She is quite right, and you are not to argue with her, and you are not to agree with her either, in public, ever. That is not for this year. That is for you, later, and it will take you a long time, and you will do it in Sweden, in Swedish, standing up.” A pause. “In the meantime be grateful to her. She is the only person in Sweden who is thinking about you properly. Everybody else is being patient.”

He sat on the step and looked at the car park.

“Mamma.”

“Yes.”

“Is it weather? Polls.”

“Polls are weather,” said his mother. “You do not govern by weather. You put on a coat.” A pause. “And sometimes you look out of the window and see that it has changed, and you were wrong about the coat, and that is also weather, and you do not complain about it, because it is not yours.” Another pause, and he could hear her decide something, from several. “I have written to her.”

“To the chairwoman?”

“Yes. On Tuesday, when they said that they would publish it whatever it said. A letter. By hand, and in the post, which in Sweden is still possible if you know the right people.” He heard her smile; it changed the shape of her Swedish. “I am a private person now, Fredde. I may write to whom I like. Nobody has to advise me. It is the most extraordinary feeling. I wrote to say that I thought it was a very good thing to have said, and a very difficult thing to do if the answer was not the one she wanted, and that I would be watching to see whether she did it.”

“And she did.”

“She did. And she wrote back, by return. The letter came this afternoon. Ebba brought it on a tray, as though it might go off.” A pause. “Two lines. In her own hand, which is a teacher’s hand, very clear, the kind you can read from the back of a room.”

He waited.

“Thank you,” said his mother. “We will win eventually.”

There was a silence on the line from London.

Then she laughed, carefully, holding the pillow, and he heard his father laugh below her without any voice at all, the breath going in and out in short pieces, and he sat on the step under the narrow window in the March sun and laughed with them, all three, five thousand miles apart, at a woman in Stockholm who had lost a poll by thirty-eight points and said so to the face of the woman who had been Queen, and been right to.

“I have put it on the mantelpiece,” said his mother, when she could. “Next to your father’s envelope. Between the sunrise and the clock.”

“Is she right? That they’ll win.”

His mother considered it. He could hear her consider it, slowly, from several, in a drawing room in London with a red pillow on her knee and her husband beside her counting to eleven.

“Ask me in four years,” said his mother. “And then ask yourself. Not me.” A breath, long and careful, and over. “Puss, Fredde. Go and have your lunch.”

“Count,” said his father, near her, as though he had been waiting to say it since three o’clock. A breath. “Rests.”

“He means the music,” said his mother. “You told him on Sunday. He has been thinking about it all week.”

And the line went; and he sat on the step under the narrow window with the telephone in his lap and the window open an inch, and counted, under his breath, in fours, for a long time, and did not know whether it had finished, which Dr Pike said was the point.