The State Opening

The car with the flag.

He had not been in it since June. It stood on the gravel at the north wing door at a quarter past eight with the small Standard on its wing, and Castellanos was not driving it; a driver from the Mews in a dark coat was. Castellanos sat in front. Frederick sat in the back, alone, with the Speech in a red leather folder on the seat beside him, closed.

He had read it eleven times. It had come in the Realm’s box on Thursday with read on the corner in pencil, not read twice, and he had read it four times that night and seven since. Nineteen pages in large type. He knew the shape of every sentence and he had not written one of them.

Down the Axis under the trees, slowly. People along both kerbs, three and four deep, in coats; the first cold morning of the autumn, fifty-one degrees, the leaves just turning on the planes. Children on shoulders. A man holding up a paper sign that said ELLICOTT, and beside him a woman holding one that said POMONA. Past the Monument, white, and the museums, and the windows Lord Whitlock looked into. At the far end Charter Hill, and on it Parliament House, pale and long, with the flag on its tower.

He was missing chemistry. Mrs Okonedo had said on Friday, without looking up from the register, you’ll have the notes from Mr Hartigan, which meant Theo, who was not in chemistry either.

---

The Robing Room was small and panelled and had a fire lit, and a long mirror on one wall that nobody looked in.

Two men from the Household put the robe on him. The Realm’s robe of state, older than the Realm’s railways, heavy across the shoulders, the ermine at the edges yellowed like old piano keys. It had been his father’s for fifty-six years and had been let out once, in the 1980s, and taken in for him on Thursday, and still sat a little wide.

On a table by the window, on a cushion of dark red velvet, was the Crown.

The Realm’s. Not London’s. He had seen it at every State Opening his father had made in person, carried in front and set on a table beside the Throne, and never once worn. Nobody had ever worn it. The Realm had an Accession Service and no coronation. The Crown came to Parliament and sat beside the King on a cushion, and that was the Realm’s whole argument about Kings, in one piece of furniture.

He looked at it. It looked back, gold and slightly dented on one side, where somebody had dropped it in 1861.

The door opened and Theo came in.

The Page’s livery the Household had made for him last October: a dark blue coat to the knee with scarlet facings and brass buttons, white gloves, black shoes polished until they hurt to look at. He had grown two inches since it was made. The sleeves had been let down on Friday.

He stopped inside the door and looked at Frederick in the robe.

“Right,” said Theo.

“What.”

“Nothing. You look like a painting.” He came and stood a yard behind on the left, hands behind his back, and looked at the Crown on its cushion. “Is that the one that got dropped?”

“1861.”

“Who dropped it?”

“Nobody knows. The Household says a footman. The footman’s family says the Lord Chamberlain.”

“Good,” said Theo, with satisfaction. “That’s the right answer.”

---

The Royal Gallery was long and high and gold and full.

Down both sides, standing, the people who were allowed to stand there: officers of the Household, the heralds in their tabards, men and women in uniform with swords, and, in her place among the officers of state, the Governor-General. Above them, on the walls, enormous paintings of battles he had studied for exams.

In front: the Crown on its cushion, carried by a peer in scarlet who held it as though it might go off. Then the Sword. Then the Ebony Rod, a tall grey man with the black staff. Then the King, in the robe, with two pages of the Household at the train, and a yard behind him on the left, Theo.

He walked. The gallery went quiet in front of him like a field when the wind drops. Not the abbey; a hundred and fifty feet. He did not measure it.

His mother was in the gallery of the chamber when the doors opened. He saw her before anybody else, in the front row above the bishops’ bench, in a dark green coat, with her hands in her lap. She did not wave. She looked at him the way she had looked across the gym at Ellicott in November with her hands in her lap: as though he were the only person in the room, and as though that were entirely ordinary.

---

The Lords chamber was red. Red benches, red carpet, a red-gold ceiling going up into the dark. At the far end, under a canopy, the Throne, and before it on the floor the Woolsack.

Two hundred people in scarlet and ermine stood up.

And among them, here and there, all down both sides, in ordinary suits and ordinary dresses, the polity members, who had no robe to wear. A third of the chamber. A woman from the Navajo Republic in a velvet blouse with silver at the collar. A man from Alaska in a grey suit with a tie that had a salmon on it. An old man from the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin in a brown cardigan, who Frederick suspected had worn it on purpose.

He walked up the length of the chamber between them and up the three steps and turned, and the peer in scarlet set the Crown down on its table at his right hand, very carefully, and stepped back with visible relief.

Frederick sat on the Throne.

It was harder than it looked. Theo went to the foot of the steps on the left and stood there, a yard below him, hands behind his back, looking straight down the chamber at nothing, the way he had looked at nothing on the floor of the blue car at the top of the wheel.

“My Lords,” said Frederick, “pray be seated.”

It was the only thing he would say all day that was not on the paper. Four words, and they were the form too.

They sat. A long soft sound, like a wave going back.

---

The Lord Speaker turned to the tall grey man.

“Gentleman Usher. Let the Commons know that the King commands their attendance in this House.”

The Ebony Rod bowed and turned and went down the chamber with the black staff, out through the great doors, and the doors stayed open behind him.

From the Throne, through the doors, Frederick could see the whole length of the central lobby: the tiled floor, the statues, the light from the high windows, and at the far end, small, the doors of the Commons. Closed. The grey figure walked the length of the lobby. It took a long time. Nobody in the Lords spoke.

At the far doors the figure stopped and raised the staff and struck them. Three times. He heard it a fraction late, very faint, down the length of the building: knock. Knock. Knock.

The doors opened.

And the Commons came. Not quickly. Down the whole length of the lobby in a loose dark crowd, four hundred of them, talking among themselves, with the Speaker at the front in a black gown and the Serjeant at Arms with the mace, walking as slowly as people can walk without stopping, because they were not the King’s and wished it known. It took four minutes. He watched every one of them.

Theo, at the foot of the steps, did not move. But Frederick saw his jaw go in at one side.

They crowded in at the bar of the House, standing, at the far end. The Speaker bowed. The Prime Minister, who was a peer and had been in the chamber all along on the front bench in scarlet he wore once a year, came up the steps of the Throne with the red folder and held it up.

Lord Whitlock’s face did nothing. His hands were quite steady. He went down the steps backwards, three of them, without looking, which Frederick had watched him practise in the small study on Thursday with a chair for the Throne, and had not laughed.

Frederick opened the folder.

---

“My Lords and Members of the House of Commons.”

His voice did not go thin. He had been afraid it would. It came out level and carried down the red chamber to the bar of the House and the four hundred standing there, and he heard it come back off the ceiling a fraction late, like the knocking.

“My Government’s first concern in this session will be the reconstruction of the Commonwealth of California and of those parts of the Realm hurt by the earthquakes of November and of May.”

Every word the ministry’s. Approved by the Cabinet, line by line, on Thursday. He read it as written. That was the whole of his part. The Realm had made the form so that a King could stand in front of his Parliament and say the government’s programme in the first person, my Government will, and nobody in the chamber would think for a moment that it was his.

The roads. The interurban. The ports. The Coast Service, and new helicopters for it. A bill on the Bank. A bill on the Lakes. Treaty business with the Nations. Eleven items from the five-party agreement still to be done, in a sentence so long that he took a breath halfway through it, where the Private Secretary had pencilled a small tick in the margin of his copy on Monday, and nobody noticed.

Page six. The reconstruction bill.

“A Bill will be brought forward to place the assistance voted by Parliament in June on a footing of law for ten years, and to provide that such assistance shall be assessed on the damage suffered by persons, and not on the value of property held.”

He read it at the same speed as the rest. He did not slow down. He did not look up.

At the bar of the House, among the four hundred, he saw a woman lift her head. He did not know her. He thought she might be the member for Ventura.

It was the ministry’s sentence now. It had been written by the Cabinet Office and approved by the Cabinet and put on page six of a speech that was not his. And it had been his first, on a satellite telephone in a plastic chair in a principal’s office, and he was the only person in the chamber who could say it aloud without anybody thinking he meant it, and he had just said it, and he did.

He turned the page.

---

Page eleven. My Government will advise Me on the recognition of those who, in the earthquakes of this year, gave help to others at the risk of their own lives.

Page fourteen. I look forward with pleasure to My coronation in Westminster Abbey on the seventeenth of November, as King of Great Britain.

He had read that sentence eleven times and it had been strange every time. A Speech to the Realm’s Parliament, from the Realm’s Throne, mentioning another realm’s coronation as an engagement in the King’s diary. That was the form too. The Speech said what the King would be doing. It did not say what it meant.

Page nineteen.

“I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels.”

He closed the folder.

Twenty-six minutes. He had not looked at a clock. He knew because the Private Secretary had timed him in the library on Sunday, three times, and it had been twenty-six minutes each time, and he had asked the Private Secretary whether that was good, and the Private Secretary had said it is twenty-six minutes, sir, which was the Private Secretary’s highest praise.

He stood. The chamber stood. He came down the three steps, past Theo, who fell in a yard behind on the left without being told, and the peer in scarlet picked up the Crown with the same expression as before, and they went back down the red chamber between the scarlet and the cardigans, and out.

---

On the steps of Parliament House, after, in the cold, with the robe off and his own coat on and the cars waiting, Theo said:

“They’re doing it on purpose. The Commons. It’s the slowest walk I’ve ever seen. Marcus walks faster to chemistry.”

“It’s so the King knows they’re not his.”

“I know. Mr Ferrante said. It’s still rude.” Theo pulled at the white gloves. “Did you see the man with the salmon tie?”

“Alaska.”

“And the cardigan.”

“Wisconsin.”

“I know it’s Wisconsin. My grandad had that cardigan.” He looked out over the Axis, the crowd going home along it, the trees. “You said it. The thing. On page six. Like it was nothing.”

“It was on the paper.”

“I know it was on the paper.” Theo looked at him sideways. “You didn’t change your voice. Not even a bit. I was listening for it.” A pause. “That was the best bit. That you didn’t.”

---

At four o’clock he sat in the plastic chair by the bed on the sixth floor with the blue book on his knee, the autumn one, and his father in the chair by the river window with the rug over his knees.

The television on its arm over the bed was off. Niamh said it had been on from ten until eleven and then His Royal Highness had pointed at it, and she had turned it off, and he had sat looking at the river.

“Did you watch, Papa?”

“Yes.”

His father looked at him. The long reading look.

Then the breath, and the hold.

“Page. Four,” said his father.

Frederick looked at him.

“Fast.”

Page four. The roads and the interurban and the ports, a long list, and he had gone through it, he knew now, a little quickly, because it was a list and he had been thinking about page six.

“Yes,” said Frederick. “I was.”

His father nodded, slowly, as a man nods who has caught a minister out and has no intention of making anything of it.

Then the breath again, and a longer hold.

“Page. Six.”

Frederick waited.

“Same. Voice.” A breath. “Good.”

He sat in the plastic chair with the autumn book open on his knee and could not, for a moment, read the first line of it.

“Seven oh four,” said his father, helpfully. “Capitol.”

“I know, Papa.” He found the place. “Seven oh four. The Capitol. From Chicago. Via Pittsburgh.”