The Customer

Earl’s van came into the Cove Point car park at ten to four, which it never did.

Frederick saw it from the towel hut. He was folding, in thirds, left-handed, slowly, because of the bandage, with the hatch open and the sun coming in through it; and he heard it first, the engine and the gravel and the man on the radio inside it singing about the old ship of Zion, loud, through the open window; and then it came round the bend from the road, white, with the blue stripe and the wheelchair lift on the back and PLEASE CALL A DAY AHEAD along the side, and stopped by the gate in a cloud of dust.

The door folded open with a hiss.

Earl leaned out of his seat and looked at the gate, and the pool beyond it, and the umbrellas, and the high white chair; and then he looked down at his clipboard.

“Cove Point,” said Earl. “Like you said.” He looked round, into the van. “That’s one fifty each, son, and the lady paid it on the phone, so you’re square.”

Somebody got out of the van.

---

He was tall, and heavy-set, and fair, and he had to duck to come down the steps; and he was wearing a cap, a plain blue one, pulled down, and a T-shirt from the marina shop with the sailing boat on it and COVE POINT RESORT - GRAND LAKE across the front, new, so new that the creases from the packet still showed across the chest in squares, and a pair of khaki shorts, and a pair of plain canvas shoes; and he carried a paper bag from the marina shop in one hand, and nothing else at all.

He turned round at the bottom of the steps, and looked up at Earl.

“Thank you,” he said. “For stopping. I know it wasn’t on the route.”

“It’s on the route if somebody rings,” said Earl. “That’s what the route is.” He looked at the young man in the cap with approval. “You have yourself a swim, son. You look like you need one.” He looked at the clipboard again, and read it, slowly, in the way he had read Hanover plus three, the first Monday, at the bottom of the farmhouse drive. “Whitlock plus one,” said Earl. “Whitlock.” He looked up. “Like the Prime Minister.”

The young man in the cap looked at him.

“Any relation?” said Earl.

There was a pause in the car park. Behind the young man, a second man had got off the van, quietly, a man of forty in a plain shirt and dark trousers with his hands folded in front of him, who was looking at the gate, and the pool, and the umbrellas, and the two hundred places round it where somebody could stand, one after another, the way Castellanos looked at a room.

“Distant,” said the young man in the cap.

“Well, don’t let it go to your head,” said Earl kindly. “Shut your screen doors.” And the door folded shut with a hiss, and the van went away round the bend towards the road with the man on the radio singing, into its own dust.

---

In the towel hut, Frederick had stopped folding.

He stood at the counter with a towel in his left hand, folded in half, not yet in thirds, and looked through the hatch across the gravel at the young man in the cap; and the young man in the cap, standing by the gate with his paper bag, looked round, slowly, at the pool and the resort and the cabins along the shore under the trees and the marina and the lake going away blue beyond it, the whole circle, the way a man looks at a place he has been told about and is seeing for the first time; and then looked at the towel hut.

He saw Frederick in the hatch. He looked at him for a long moment, across the gravel, in the sun, at the red T-shirt, and the bandage, and the badge that went over both edges; and his face, which Frederick had seen across the corner of a desk in the morning room every Thursday since May, grave and fair and young and tired, with light eyes, did not change at all.

He nodded, once, very slightly, the way you nod across a room to somebody you know and are not going to talk to yet.

Then he went and stood at the end of the queue.

---

There were nine people in front of him.

It was a Tuesday, at four, at the end of a hot day, and the queue at the pass window was short; families from the cabins, mostly, back from the lake, wanting an hour in the pool before supper, with their towels and their children. The young man in the cap stood behind them. He stood behind a woman with two small boys in armbands who were hitting each other, and in front of nobody, and he did not look round, and he did not take his cap off, and he did not look at his watch. He stood in the queue at the Cove Point pool at four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in August with his paper bag, and waited.

The man of forty in the plain shirt stood a little way off, by the white fence, and looked at everything.

Frederick watched it from the towel hut. He could not stop watching it. He folded towels without looking at them, in thirds, wrong, and had to do them again; and the queue moved, a step and a wait and a step, and the young man in the cap moved with it, a step at a time, behind the woman with the two boys; and it took eleven minutes for him to get from the end of it to the window; and in the window, in her headset, with her quick brown face under the visor and a pen behind each ear, Bonnie Tackett looked at him.

She looked at him for a long time.

Bonnie Tackett had had the radio on all day. She had had it on all of Monday, and all of Tuesday morning, and at a quarter past ten, when the news had said that the Prime Minister had left Blackjacks at seven by road and had been seen at ten o’clock standing on a closed bridge on a county road in Craig County with the county commissioner, in the heat, without a jacket, and a photographer from the Vinita paper, and that nobody knew why, she had turned it up so loud that Kaylee had blown the whistle at the snack hut.

“Five,” said Bonnie Tackett.

The young man in the cap took a wallet out of the pocket of his khaki shorts. It was an old one, brown, worn pale at the corners. He took out a five-pound note and gave it to her through the window.

Bonnie Tackett took it. She did not give him a wristband. She held the note, and looked at him over it.

“You’re the one who’s resigning,” she said.

“I’m not resigning,” said the young man in the cap.

“Hal Buckner says you are.”

“Hal Buckner,” said the young man in the cap, gravely, setting each word down as though on a table, “has never been right about anything in his life, according to my private office, which listens to him every morning in case.” He paused. “I’m going for a swim.”

Bonnie Tackett looked at him a moment longer. Then she tore off an orange paper wristband and held it out, and he put out his wrist, and she put it on him herself, round the wrist, and stuck it, the way she did for the children.

“Pool’s that way,” she said. “No bombs.”

---

He came to the towel hut.

Frederick watched him come across the gravel from the pass window with the orange wristband on his wrist and the paper bag in his hand, and stop at the hatch, and look in at him, over the counter, from under the cap; and Frederick stood behind the counter with a towel in his left hand and did not know what to do with his face.

“Afternoon,” said Lord Whitlock.

“Afternoon,” said Frederick.

“Could I have a towel?”

Frederick looked at the card on the counter. RESORT GUESTS - TOWELS - SHOW YOUR KEY - ONE EACH - BRING IT BACK OR IT’S ON YOUR BILL.

“Are you a resort guest?” he said.

“No,” said Lord Whitlock. “I’m a day pass.”

“Then I’m sorry,” said Frederick. “Towels are for resort guests. Day passes bring their own.” He pointed at the card with the towel. “It’s the rule.”

Lord Whitlock looked at the card. He read it all the way through, slowly, the way he read papers on the corner of the desk in the morning room; and then he looked at Frederick across the counter; and something happened in his grave young face, under the cap, very far back, that Frederick had never once seen in it on a Thursday.

“Then I’ll drip,” said Lord Whitlock.

“Give the man a towel, hon,” said Bonnie Tackett, through the window between the pass hut and the towel hut, without looking round, in her headset. “He’s had a hard day. Put it on mine.”

Frederick gave him a towel.

---

He swam.

He changed in GUYS, which Frederick had done at ten o’clock and again, because of rule five, left-handed, at two; and came out in a pair of swimming shorts from the paper bag that had come from the marina shop and had the sailing boat on them, and the price still on a plastic tag at the waist, which he bit off; and he went to the edge of the pool, at the shallow end, and stood there, very large and very white and very fair, in the sun, among the children; and then he went down the steps into the water, slowly, and stood waist deep, and closed his eyes.

He stood like that for a long time. A minute. More. With his eyes closed and his hands on the surface of the water and the children screaming round him and a ball going past his head.

Then he swam. He swam the length of it, as far as you could swim the length of a kidney, and back, and again; a slow, heavy, steady crawl, the stroke of somebody who had learned it a long time ago in cold water, in a bay, and had not done it since. Up and back. Up and back. The man of forty in the plain shirt stood by the fence at the deep end with his hands folded and watched him do it, every stroke.

On the high white chair, Kaylee watched him too. She did not know who he was. Frederick could see she did not know who he was. She watched him the way she watched everybody, over her sunglasses, with the whistle in her teeth: a large fair man in new shorts, swimming lengths, steadily, not in anybody’s way.

At twenty to five he got out at the deep end.

He stood on the edge where it said 9 FT. He looked at the water. Below him, in it, a boy of about ten came up from the bottom with a shout and swam away. And Lord Whitlock looked at the water a moment longer, standing on the edge in the sun; and Frederick, at the hatch of the snack hut, where he had gone at half past four for the late rush, saw his face, and knew what he was going to do a second before he did it.

He tucked his knees up to his chest and jumped.

---

It was enormous.

It was the biggest bomb Frederick had ever seen, bigger than his own, bigger than the boy who had sounded like a dropped piano; the water went up round him in a wall, white, higher than the high white chair, and came down over the whole of the deep end and half the terrace and three of the umbrellas and the man of forty in the plain shirt, who did not move, and stood there with the water running off him and his hands still folded; and Lord Whitlock went down to the bottom of the deep end and came up again through the white churning, and shouted, because you had to.

The whistle went.

It went right over his head. One sharp blast. He wiped the water out of his eyes and looked up.

Kaylee was leaning forward on the high white chair with her elbows on her knees, looking down at him over her sunglasses, with the whistle in her teeth.

She took it out.

“You,” she said. “Yes. You. Can you read?”

Lord Whitlock looked up at her from the water.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then read.” She pointed with the whistle at the sign on the fence behind him, without looking at it. “What’s it say? Fourth line.”

He looked. He had to swim round to see it. He read it, out loud, gravely, setting the words down:

“No bombs.”

“No bombs,” said Kaylee. “That was a bomb. I saw it. Everybody saw it. They saw it in Grove.” She put the whistle back between her teeth, round it, so that she could talk. “Ten minutes on the side. With the babies.” She pointed with her chin at the edge of the shallow end, where a row of small children were sitting with their feet in the water, waiting for something. “Go on.”

Lord Whitlock looked at her for a moment from the water.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t read the sign.”

“Everybody says that,” said Kaylee. “Go on.”

He went on.

---

He sat on the edge of the shallow end for ten minutes, with his feet in the water, between a girl of six in a pink swimsuit and a boy of eight with goggles pushed up on his forehead.

Frederick saw it from the hatch. He saw Tucker look sideways along the edge at the large fair man sitting beside him, in his new shorts, with his feet in the water and his hands on his knees, very upright, like a man in church; and look at him for a long time.

Tucker said something. Frederick could not hear it. He came out of the snack hut, with a tray of cans for the cooler by the fence, which did not need filling, and filled it, slowly, two yards from the edge of the shallow end, with his back to them.

“Are you the Prime Minister?” said Tucker.

There was a pause.

“Yes,” said Lord Whitlock.

Tucker thought about it, kicking his feet in the water.

“Hal Buckner says you’re resigning,” said Tucker.

“Hal Buckner is wrong.”

“My mama says Hal Buckner’s always wrong,” said Tucker. “She does Bonnie’s books.” He kicked his feet. “Why are you on the side? It’s not adult swim. You’re a grown-up. You don’t have to get out for adult swim.”

“I did a bomb,” said Lord Whitlock.

Tucker looked at him with a certain respect.

“That was a good bomb,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Kaylee doesn’t like bombs.”

“No,” said Lord Whitlock. “I gathered.”

Tucker kicked his feet in the water for a while. He looked at the pool, and at the high white chair, and at the large fair man beside him on the edge, sitting with his hands on his knees in his new shorts, very upright, with the creases from the packet still in them.

“I would hate being the Prime Minister,” said Tucker.

There was a very long pause on the edge of the shallow end.

“So would I,” said Lord Whitlock. “Most days.” He looked at the water. “Not today.”

---

He bought a hot dog at five.

He came to the hatch of the snack hut, in his shorts, with the towel round his shoulders, Bonnie Tackett’s towel, and stood in the queue, behind a girl of nine and her brother, and waited, and when it was his turn he said a hot dog, please, and Frederick said two pounds twenty.

Lord Whitlock gave him a five-pound note. From the old brown wallet, which he had kept, wrapped in the paper bag, under his towel on the edge.

Frederick opened the till. He took out the change. He held out his left hand for Lord Whitlock’s, and Lord Whitlock put his hand out, palm up, across the counter, a very large hand, and Frederick counted the change into it, the way Tucker had shown him, out loud.

“Two twenty,” he said. “Three. Five.”

Lord Whitlock looked at the coins in his hand. He looked at them for a long time.

“I did that,” he said. “At the bookshop. For two years.” He closed his hand over the coins. “Saturday mornings and three evenings. On a till exactly like that one, I think, though it was older.” He looked at the till. “It used to hit me in the stomach.”

“This one hits me in the stomach.”

“They all do,” said Lord Whitlock. “It’s how you know it’s a till.” He looked at Frederick across the counter. “When’s your break?”

“Half past five.”

“Then I’ll wait,” said Lord Whitlock, “till half past five,” and took his hot dog, and went and sat on a lounger under one of the blue and white umbrellas, the one next to the table where Castellanos was sitting in his blue T-shirt with his untouched iced tea; and the two of them, the protection officer in the blue resort T-shirt and the Prime Minister in the marina T-shirt with the creases, sat side by side under the umbrella, a yard apart, and did not speak, and looked at the pool.

---

At half past five, behind the snack hut, on two upturned crates, in the shade, they talked.

Lord Whitlock had put his T-shirt back on. He sat on the crate with his elbows on his knees and the towel round his neck and his large hands hanging between his knees, the way Castellanos had sat on the porch step at two in the morning; and he did not look at Frederick. He looked at the white boards of the snack hut wall in front of him, and talked to them, slowly, in his grave voice, setting the words down.

“The commissioner stood on the bridge,” he said.

“I heard. It was on the news.”

“In the heat. At ten o’clock. In a suit, because nobody had told him not to. With the Minister of State for Transport, who is not speaking to me, and the photographer from the Vinita paper, who was nineteen and had never photographed anybody before but a football team.” He looked at the boards. “It’s a dreadful bridge, sir. Concrete. Nineteen thirty-one. Half the parapet’s gone into the creek and there are barriers at both ends with a sign on them that says CLOSED and somebody has written under it in paint SINCE 2017 THANKS A LOT.” He paused. “The commissioner stood in front of that sign, in front of the photographer, in a suit, in a hundred and one, and said that the bridge would be open by Christmas.” Another pause. “He said it in the voice of a man reading his own death warrant.”

“Will it be?”

“It will now,” said Lord Whitlock. “He said it in front of a photographer. It’ll be on the front of the Vinita paper on Thursday. Every voter in Craig County will have it on their kitchen table.” He looked at the boards. “Ms Fenner says it was the best idea she’s ever had.”

“It was.”

“She says it wasn’t hers.” Lord Whitlock did not look round. “She told me so on Saturday. In my office. With the door shut. She said, Prime Minister, I have to tell you something, and you can never tell anybody, and it’s about the bridge.” A pause. “I said I wouldn’t.” Another pause. “I haven’t.”

Frederick did not say anything.

They sat on the two crates behind the snack hut in the shade and listened to the pool, the screaming and the splashing and the whistle, on the other side of the white boards.

---

“Sir,” said Lord Whitlock, after a while.

“Yes?”

“I’m not resigning.”

“I know. You told Tucker.”

“I’m telling you.” He still did not look round. “There are things I can’t put in a letter, and that’s one of them, because if it’s in a letter it’s in the archive, and if it’s in the archive somebody will read it in thirty years and decide it meant something. The business isn’t done. The count will be in the field until the spring. The Bill isn’t drafted. I signed a piece of paper last September saying I’d go when it was done, and I will, and it isn’t.” He paused. “I wanted you to hear that from me, sitting down, and not from Hal Buckner.”

“Thank you.”

“And I wanted to say thank you. For the bridge.” A pause. “And I wanted to see it.”

“The bridge?”

“This,” said Lord Whitlock.

He turned his head, at last, and looked at Frederick, on the other crate, in the red T-shirt with STAFF on the back, and the bandage from the wrist to the elbow with the stain coming through it in rows, and the badge that went over both edges, and the yellow-bottle smell on his hands under the mustard.

“I wanted to see you at a till,” said Lord Whitlock. “I don’t know why. I’ve been thinking about it since the Private Secretary told me, which was the day you rang Ms Fenner from a desk under some fish.” He looked at the badge. “I worked my last Saturday at the bookshop five days after I was commissioned. Because I’d said I would, and they were short-handed, and because I didn’t know, yet, that I couldn’t. A customer photographed me at the till. It was in every paper in the Realm on the Monday, and my office has not forgiven me, and I have never once been sorry.” He looked at the snack hut wall. “It was the last ordinary thing I did. I didn’t know it was the last. You never do.”

Frederick did not say anything for a long time.

“It’s not the last,” he said, at last.

Lord Whitlock looked at him.

“This isn’t the last,” said Frederick. “For you. You came on a van. You stood in the queue. You paid. You did a bomb and Kaylee sent you to the side.” He looked at the boards. “That’s ordinary. That’s the most ordinary thing anybody could do. And you did it today. So the bookshop wasn’t the last.”

Lord Whitlock did not say anything for a very long time. He looked at the white boards of the snack hut wall, with his elbows on his knees and his large hands hanging down, and his grave young tired face under the cap doing something slowly that Frederick had seen Mr Baggett’s do, and Earl’s, and Cecil Rowe’s on the porch.

“No,” he said. “I suppose it wasn’t.”

---

“There are sixty-four journalists,” said Lord Whitlock, presently, in his ordinary voice, “outside the front of the courthouse at Vinita.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Ms Fenner’s programme had a lunch,” said Lord Whitlock. “With the county officials. In the courthouse. After the bridge. It began at a quarter past twelve and ended at a quarter past two, and the county officials were very good, and very dull, and talked about roads, and I enjoyed it more than any lunch I’ve had this year.” He paused. “And at a quarter past two the county officials went out of the front door of the courthouse, all together, in a group, slowly, in their suits, down the steps, and stood on the steps and talked to each other about roads for a very long time, in front of sixty-four journalists, who waited for me to come out behind them.” Another pause. “And I went out of the side door. In this T-shirt. Which Sergeant Mulcahy bought for me at the marina shop yesterday afternoon, and brought to Blackjacks in a paper bag.”

He nodded at the man of forty in the plain shirt, who was standing by the corner of the snack hut, with his hands folded, looking at the car park.

“And I walked across the square,” said Lord Whitlock, “under the trees, past the soldier, to the bench where it says the van stops at two-forty. And Ms Fenner had rung the rural transit on Monday and put me down. And the van came at two-forty, and a man called Earl opened the door, and said Whitlock plus one.” He looked at the boards. “And I got on.”

“Earl drove you.”

“Earl drove me. Round the cove, and up a hill to a house where nobody was waiting, and to the post office with a parcel. With a man in the third row with his arm in a sling and an old lady in the second row in a lilac cardigan who looked at me through very thick glasses for fourteen miles and did not say one word.” He paused. “And on the highway, Earl told me about the train.”

Frederick closed his eyes.

“He’s going to vote for it again,” said Lord Whitlock, quietly. “He’s voted for it eleven times. He said you can’t stop wanting a thing just because they keep lying to you about it.” He was quiet for a moment. “He didn’t know who I was, sir. Not at all. Not even when he read my name off his clipboard. He said any relation.” Another pause. “I’ve been Prime Minister for eleven months, and I’ve never had a man tell me what he thinks of the government who didn’t know he was telling the government.”

“He told me too.”

“I know,” said Lord Whitlock. “He said so. On the highway. He said he’d had a boy on the van a few weeks ago, from New Westminster, staying at Loretta’s, who’d asked him why they never brought back the train, and that nobody had asked him that in twenty years.” He looked at Frederick. “He said, I hope that boy’s having a good summer.”

---

“They’ll find out,” said Frederick. “That you got on the van. Somebody saw. Somebody in the square. And they’ll ask Earl, and Earl will tell them, because Earl tells everybody everything.” He looked at the car park. “And then they’ll come here.”

“Yes,” said Lord Whitlock. “By about seven, I should think. Sergeant Mulcahy thinks half past six.”

“Then you have to go.”

“I know.” Lord Whitlock looked at his watch, for the first time, a plain one, on a leather strap. “I don’t know how. I hadn’t got that far.” He looked at the car park, at the gravel and the dust. “Earl doesn’t run in the evening.”

“Sergeant Castellanos,” said Frederick.

Castellanos was at the corner of the snack hut. He had been at the corner of the snack hut, beside Sergeant Mulcahy, for the whole of the conversation, with his hands folded, in his blue T-shirt, looking at the car park; and he did not turn round.

“Sir,” said Castellanos.

“Is there a plane tonight?”

“There’s always a plane, sir,” said Castellanos. “Every day there are boxes.” A pause. “The Household’s charter comes into the airstrip at nine. From Tulsa. With Mr Lowther.” Another pause. “It goes back to Tulsa at ten. Empty, apart from Mr Lowther and the boxes.” He looked at the car park. “It has six seats.”

Lord Whitlock looked at Castellanos for a long moment. Then at Frederick.

“Is that allowed?”

“I don’t know,” said Frederick. “Nobody’s ever asked.” He thought about it. “I’ll ask the Private Secretary. He’ll say there’s nothing against it. And there’s nothing for it either.”

“And then?”

“And then he’ll say,” said Frederick, “I shall have to tell Dame Margaret.”

Lord Whitlock looked at him for a long time on the crate behind the snack hut. Then he laughed. It was the first time Frederick had ever heard him laugh, in all the Thursdays since May; a short, startled, surprisingly young laugh, that he stopped at once, and that came back.

---

He left the pool at six, when the whistle went three times, short, with the others.

He went out through the gate with his towel, Bonnie Tackett’s, and gave it in at the towel hut, at the hatch, to Frederick, folded, in thirds, long way, then in half, not in quarters; and Frederick took it, and looked at it, and looked at him.

“Thirds,” said Frederick.

“The woman in the window told me,” said Lord Whitlock. “She said quarters is for amateurs.” He looked back through the gate at the pool, emptying, blue, the water going still in the evening light, and the high white chair at the end of it, where Kaylee was taking down the umbrella. “Who’s the lifeguard?”

“Kaylee. She’s nineteen. She’s at Northeastern, in Tahlequah, in chemistry. She’s going to be a pharmacist.” Frederick looked at the chair. “She doesn’t know who you are.”

“No,” said Lord Whitlock. “I know. That’s why she sent me to the side.” He looked at the chair a moment longer. “Will you tell her something from me?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her I read the sign,” said Lord Whitlock. “Afterwards. All of it. Every line.” He looked at the sign on the fence. “Tell her it’s the best piece of legislation I’ve seen this year.”

---

Castellanos drove him to the airstrip at a quarter to nine, with Sergeant Mulcahy in the front and Frederick in the back beside him, in the dark, in the cold of the air conditioning, with the hazards off; and at the fence by the hut with the light over its door, the small white aeroplane came down out of the dark over the lake with its landing lights on, through the two white pillars of insects, and touched, and ran, and turned, and came back.

Mr Lowther came down the steps with the two red boxes, and saw who was standing beside the King at the fence in a marina T-shirt with the creases still in it, and stopped, on the grass, with a box in each hand, and his spectacles, and did not move for a very long time.

“Mr Lowther,” said Frederick. “The Prime Minister is going to Tulsa with you tonight. If that’s all right.”

Mr Lowther looked at the Prime Minister. He looked at the boxes in his hands. He looked at the aeroplane behind him, with its six seats.

“Sir,” he said, at last. “Is there a precedent?”

“No,” said Frederick.

Mr Lowther thought about it. He thought about it very seriously, standing on the grass in the dark with the insects round his head and the two red boxes held out from his sides, the way he had thought about the moth.

“Then there is now, sir,” he said; and turned, and held the door of the aeroplane open.

---

He had rung the Private Secretary at ten past six, from the desk under the eleven fish, before the car; and the Private Secretary had listened to the whole of it, the van and the queue and the bomb and the side door of the courthouse at Vinita and the six seats, without saying a word; and then had said, in his own voice, which did not change, exactly what Frederick had said he would say. There is nothing against it, sir. There is nothing for it either. And then there had been a pause on the line from New Westminster, and Frederick had said the last part with him, at the same moment, both of them, down the telephone, I shall have to tell Dame Margaret; and there had been a much longer pause; and the Private Secretary had said quite so, sir, in a voice that in another man would have been a laugh, and rung off.

He did the boxes at the kitchen table that night, at ten, under the lamp, with the moths on the screen, and Theo on the stairs with his back turned, and the goldfish going round in the mixing bowl on the oilcloth. They were small boxes, summer boxes, letters and a list, and he did them in forty minutes.

At twenty past eleven the telephone that did nothing else rang, on a Tuesday, which it had never done.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary. “Forgive me. I thought you would wish to know.” A pause. “The Prime Minister landed at Tulsa at a quarter to eleven, our time, and was met on the apron by forty-one journalists, who had been told by a man in the courthouse square at Vinita that the Prime Minister had been seen getting on a bus. He told them that he had spent the afternoon on a bus, looking at Oklahoma-Sequoyah. He declined to say where the bus had gone. He said that it had been the best day he had had since September.” Another pause. “He then got into a car and went to bed.”

“Is that all?”

“No, sir,” said the Private Secretary. “The markets in New York, which had been down a hundred and forty points at the close, are up a hundred and sixty in the overnight trading, on the strength of a Prime Minister who looked, the wires are saying, rested.” A pause. “Ms Fenner has asked me to tell you that she has put the Programme in a drawer.”

Frederick sat at the kitchen table with the telephone at his ear and could not say anything, and put his head down on his arms, on the bandage, and laughed, and could not stop; and Theo on the stairs, with his back turned, at the horse, said what?, and he could not tell him, and Theo started laughing too, without knowing what at, the way he had on the night of the moth, until the light came on in the trailer across the yard.