Government House

The class stood on the pavement in its pairs, in the dust, with the clothes they had stood up in on Thursday morning, Señora Ruiz’s folder, and Mr Abernathy’s list on the back of a water carton. The hotel was behind yellow tape. The gym was behind a fireman and a crack in the roof.

Four o’clock. Four hours to dark.

“The gathering point on Pico,” said Kimura quietly to Mr Abernathy at the gate. “It’s a ballfield. They’re putting up tents. They said there might be cots by tonight.” A pause. “They said might.”

Mr Abernathy sat at the other end of the wall with his glasses back on and the list on his knee, looking at the class the way he looked at homeroom when the roll was done.

“Then it’s Pico.”

---

Castellanos stood by the next-door steps with the satellite telephone to his ear, talking low. In his other hand, against the torn front of his jacket, was the strip of pale-blue cloth. He did not seem to know he was holding it.

Frederick went over. Castellanos lowered the telephone and looked at him the way he looked at a room: the cut bleeding again, the hands black to the wrist, the shirt with no collar.

“Sir.”

“I’m sorry.”

Castellanos waited.

“In the gym. When the chair went over. I twisted, like when I was little, and I knew you weren’t expecting it, and I did it anyway. You couldn’t find me for an hour and a half. I’m sorry.”

A long look.

“Don’t be sorry, sir. You went for the old man. I’d have gone for the old man.” He looked down at the collar as though he had just seen it. “But next time, take me with you.”

“I will.”

“I know you will.” He held it out. “I think this is yours.”

It was warm from being held, the torn seam, the button still on it. Frederick put it in his pocket beside the permission slip, and Castellanos nodded once and lifted the telephone.

“Governor’s office. He’s with me.”

---

At a quarter past four a long black car came picking its way up Twenty-Second Street round the palm trees and the abandoned cars, a police car in front with its lights going and no siren, a small flag limp on the wing. It stopped by the roses. Up and down the street people turned. The girl with the cool box, who had followed the class up from her corner, stood on the pavement with a bottle in each hand and stared.

A woman got out of the back before the driver could get round. Fifty-five perhaps, short, square, grey hair cut very short, a face that had been out in a great deal of weather. A heavy yellow-and-grey jacket with cracked reflective stripes and CALIFORNIA EMERGENCY SERVICE across the back, an old jacket, kept. A white shirt with dust on the collar. Boots.

She looked at the roses, and the heap, and the jack still in the hollow, and the firemen packing up, and the class on the wall. Then at him.

“Your Majesty,” said Teresa Marchetti. She held out her hand, hard and dry and very strong. “I’m glad to meet you. I’m sorry it’s like this. You’re bleeding.”

“It’s nothing.”

“The firemen told me. Twenty-two minutes.” She looked at the black on his hand. “I ran the emergency service for nine years before this job, sir. I’ve been in a great many holes like that one. I’ve never once been thin enough.” She let go. “Thank you for Mrs Ruelas.”

He had nothing to say to that. She seemed to understand, and looked past him at the class, and Mr Abernathy with his list, and Kimura, and Brannigan by the gate with the scrapes on his arms going brown.

“I came to take you to Ventura.”

---

Half past eight in the principal’s office. The Navy off the harbour and the Army on the roads, sir, if you’d like to see them. He had said yes, when the class was on cots in the gym and he knew where every one of them was.

“The Army cleared the road to Oxnard at noon. There’s a helicopter at the field by the airport for the rest. The Navy has a hospital ship coming into Port Hueneme at six. I’d like you to see it. I’d like them to see you.” She paused. “They’ve been working since Thursday morning, sir, and every one of them has heard you on the radio. It would mean a very great deal.”

Fifty-seven of them on the wall among the roses. Theo at the near end with his arms folded, watching him. Lucía with her phone. Marcus. Priya. The last mark at the bottom of Mr Abernathy’s list.

“I lost them once today. I’m not going anywhere without them.”

The Governor looked at him a long time, and then at the class. He watched a sum go across her face. Fifty-eight people, nowhere to put them, four hours of light.

“Where are they sleeping tonight?”

“Pico,” said Mr Abernathy, from the wall. “The ballfield. There might be cots.”

“Might,” said the Governor.

“Might,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Sir. You asked this morning for Government House to be opened in your name. I’ve had people on the lawn since four yesterday, a few hundred. The house is old, and it moved, and it stood. There are tents and the Army’s put in a water tank, and there’s room for fifty-eight more, and three officers, and two teachers, and whoever else they’ve collected.” Her eyes went to the girl with the cool box. “It’s eighteen miles, on the far side of the basin under the hill. The Commonwealth has two school buses at the Pico field that came over from Culver City this morning, and nobody needs them till tonight.” She looked straight at him. “I’m not asking you to go to Ventura. I’m asking whether you’d let your class sleep at your house.”

---

Theo came down the path between the roses.

“He’s got a house? Here?”

“It’s the Crown’s. It’s where the Governor lives.”

“So it’s your house.”

“It’s,” said Frederick, and stopped. A name on a list in the library at Government House in New Westminster, when he was nine. Government House, Sacramento. Government House, Los Angeles. Houses he had never been to.

“It’s exactly his house,” said the Governor. “I just live in it.”

“Freddie. Say yes. Marcus is going to cry if he has to sleep on a ballfield. He’s already told me.”

From the wall, quite distinctly: “I did not.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Please. Thank you. If there’s room.”

“There’s room.” She took a heavy black radio off her belt and spoke three short sentences into it. “Twenty minutes.” Then, quieter, for him and Theo: “And sir. I’ll take you to Ventura tomorrow, if you’ll let me. All of you, in the buses, on the way to Riverside Field. It isn’t on the way. I’ll make it on the way.”

---

The buses were the old square yellow kind with black stripes and CULVER CITY UNIFIED along the top. The drivers, one old and one young, had been running people from closed shelters to Pico since ten, and they watched the sophomores of Ellicott High School climb aboard like women who had driven a great many school trips and expected nothing.

He took the window of the second bus, halfway down on the left, on a green vinyl seat with a tear in it. Theo sat beside him. Castellanos in front, Brannigan behind. Kimura on the first bus with the other half. The black car with its flag in front of both, and the police car in front of that.

As the doors were closing the girl with the cool box ran up and held her two bottles to his window. He pushed it down and she gave them to him through the gap.

“You look like you need two.”

She ran back to the pavement, and the bus moved off.

---

From seat 23A on Tuesday it had been gold haze and blue roofs. From the top of the pass on Wednesday night, lights coming on. Now it went past at the speed of a school bus, the traffic lights dark, cars standing where they had been left, glass in heaps on every pavement.

It went on and on. Brentwood. Westwood. Beverly Hills. Each with its own main street and its own station on the interurban and its own name on the signs, and no gap between any of them, only more streets and more palm trees, mile after mile across the floor of the basin in the long gold light.

And it was hurt, everywhere, quietly, in ones. A chimney lying in a front garden. A shop with its whole front on the pavement and the shelves inside still stocked. A brick block of flats, five storeys, every window out and a crack from roof to ground, and the people from it sitting on the grass with their things in heaps, looking up at it. A spire leaning. A petrol station with its canopy down on the pumps. And between them street after street of houses that had only cracked, their people on the front steps in the heat, some of them looking up at two yellow buses going by behind a black car with a flag, some not.

Theo watched past his shoulder.

At a crossroads by an interurban station, a grey electric train stood dead in its platform with its pantograph down and its doors open and nobody in it. The bus stopped for a fire engine. In the quiet, from somewhere behind, a girl was singing under her breath.

Priya. Slow and low, in Tamil, going up and down in a way he had never heard music go. Nobody spoke. She did not stop until the fire engine had crossed and the dead train was behind them.

“It’s what her grandmother sings at night,” said Theo, very quietly. “She told me in the gym. It’s for when you can’t sleep.”

---

At seven, at the end of a long straight street going north, a ridge came up out of the flat roofs, brown and green and steep, and at the top, white against the evening, a building with three domes. The observatory on the hill. Monday, on the form. He would have stood on its terrace with the class and looked out over the basin to the sea.

One dome had a long black crack across it.

At the foot of the hill was a long low wall of pale stone, and in it an iron gate with a gold crown worked into the top of each half, and both halves stood wide open. No soldiers. No police. A piece of cardboard tied to the railings with string: OPEN. WATER. TENTS. EVERYONE. Families going in and out on foot with bags and chairs and children, as at a park on a Sunday.

The black car went through. The buses followed.

A long curving gravel drive between lawns, and the lawns full of tents, hundreds, small bright camping ones and big square green Army ones in rows. People cooking on little stoves, washing on lines between the trees, children running, a dog, an old man playing a guitar on the rim of a dry fountain. A green canvas tank on legs with a queue at its taps, an Army lorry with its tailboard down, a soldier in shirtsleeves on his back under the tank with a spanner.

At the top of the drive, against the hill, the house. Long and low and white, red tile roof, a deep shaded porch on white pillars the whole length of the front. Tall windows with nothing in the frames. A crack beside the door from porch to eaves. The Realm’s flag on the roof, moving in the wind off the hill. People all along the porch with their backs against the pillars; children on the wide stone steps eating out of paper; an old woman asleep in a deckchair by the door with a newspaper over her face.

The buses stopped at the foot of the steps.

He could not move. The porch. The fountain. The lawn running down to a gate with crowns on it. A house he had never been inside, full of strangers cooking supper on its grass because he had asked for it from a cot in a gym that morning.

The Governor was out of the car, waiting at the bottom of the steps in her old jacket.

“Freddie,” said Theo. “Come on. Everybody’s getting off.”

---

He came down onto the gravel in Thursday’s clothes with his collar in his pocket.

“Welcome to Government House, sir,” said Teresa Marchetti. “I’m sorry about the windows.”

On the porch the people were looking down at him. A man with a child asleep on his shoulder. A woman in an apron. Two old men with a game of draughts on an upturned crate. The children on the steps had stopped eating.

The man with the child stood up.

He did it the way you stand when a door opens in church, without seeming to decide, the child still asleep on his shoulder. Then the woman in the apron. Then the two old men, slowly, one with a hand on a pillar and the other with a hand on his arm. Then it ran the whole length of the porch, pillar to pillar, the people on the boards and on the steps and the children with their supper, getting up one after another in the evening light, until the whole front of Government House was standing. On the lawn nearest the drive people turned from their stoves and stood. The old man at the fountain stopped playing and stood with his guitar in his hand.

The gravel was quiet.

He had asked his school not to do this, from a lectern too low for him, and they had laughed and done as he asked. These were not his school. They had slept on this grass since Thursday, and they were standing for him in the dust because it was what you did when the King came to the door. It was not his to ask them not to.

So he did what his mother did at the long table in the kitchen when Bridget got up to fetch something that did not need fetching. One hand raised, palm down, moved a little. Sit. Please.

They sat, the way they had stood, from one end of the porch to the other. The children went back to their supper. At the fountain the old man sat down on the rim and after a moment began to play again, softly.

The old woman in the deckchair had slept through all of it. She woke now in the quiet, took the newspaper off her face, sat up and looked down the steps at him, a long look, all the way down.

“Well,” she said, in a voice that carried across the drive. “About time you came to see the place.”

The porch laughed, all of it at once, and behind him the sophomore class of Ellicott High School, still getting off the buses, laughed too without knowing why, and Frederick stood at the foot of the steps of his own house and found he was laughing with them.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m late.”