Citizen and Sovereign

Tolliver Hall was on his way.

It was not on his way. The History building was on the other side of the mall, the brick one with the ivy, and his first class was not until half past ten, and Tolliver was at the end of an arcade in the other direction entirely; and at twenty to nine on the first Monday of the year, at ninety-eight degrees, Frederick walked to it anyway, under the arcades, beside his cousin, because it was on his way.

Alexander had the linen jacket on, buttoned, and a notebook under his arm with the pencil in its spine, sharpened at half past eight, and the hat in his hand.

“You don’t have to walk me,” said Alexander.

“I’m not walking you.”

“You have History at half past ten.”

“How do you know I’ve got History at half past ten?”

“It is on the cork board over your desk,” said Alexander. “At the height of the eyes.”

They walked. A boy on a skateboard went past them under the arcade, close, at speed, and said “Hey, Fred,” and then, after he had gone, from further off, the sound of the skateboard stopping and the boy turning round on it and looking back; and then the sound of the skateboard starting again.

“Eleven,” said Alexander, very quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Alexander. “It is the first day. I am starting again.”

---

The corridor in Tolliver smelled of floor polish.

It was the same smell, exactly, as last August, and the same long low corridor, and the same water fountain and the same fire notice beside it, and the same door at the end with a narrow pane of glass in it at the height of a man’s face. The door was open, and there were first-years going in through it, in a stream, talking and then not talking, and beside it, in the corridor, just outside, with a leather bag over his shoulder and a cardboard cup of coffee in his hand, in a crumpled linen jacket and a tie with a fish on it, stood Hal Brennan.

He saw Frederick first. Frederick watched him see him: the eyes going up from the cup, and stopping, and the beard doing nothing at all.

Then the eyes went on, to the young man beside Frederick in the buttoned jacket with the hat in his hand; and stopped there, and stayed.

“Mr Hohenzollern,” said Brennan.

“Professor Brennan.”

“You came back.”

“I said that I should like to see it taught,” said Alexander. “One day was not enough.”

Brennan looked at him for a long moment, over the cup, in the corridor that smelled of floor polish, with the first-years going past them both into the room in a stream and not one of them looking at the young man in the jacket, because none of them knew yet that there was anything to look at.

“It’s a year,” said Brennan. “The course. Two semesters. Eighty seats. Three times a week at nine.”

“I know. I have enrolled for it.”

“You’re enrolled?”

“As a first-year. In political science. Intended.” Alexander considered. “Hohenzollern, A. It will be on your list.”

Brennan took the list out of the leather bag, without taking his eyes off Alexander, and looked at it, and ran his thumb down it, and stopped; and Frederick, standing beside his cousin, watched a professor of the Charter of fifty-six years of age and twenty-three years in this room read a name on a class list twice, once for what it said and once, he supposed, for the errors, of which there were none.

“So it is,” said Brennan.

He put the list back in the bag.

“You know the rule,” he said.

“I may not cite myself.”

“You may not cite yourself. You’ll be graded like everybody else in the room, and that includes the essay, and the essay is where Mr Hanover came to grief.” Brennan did not look at Mr Hanover. “I’d like that understood before you sit down. It’s not personal. It’s arithmetic.”

“I understand it,” said Alexander. “I should be disappointed if it were otherwise.”

“Good.” Brennan drank from the cup, and found it empty, and looked at it with mild reproach. Then he looked, at last, at Frederick. “Mr Hanover.”

“Professor.”

“You’re not in this section.”

“No.”

“You’re not in any section. You passed it.” Brennan considered him. “In the end.”

“I’m walking.”

“On your way?”

“Yes.”

“History’s on the other side of the mall,” said Brennan.

“I know.”

Brennan looked at him for a moment longer, and something happened at the corner of the grey beard, very briefly, and went away; and he did not ask, though Frederick watched him take hold of the question and get it down off its shelf and look at it, and put it back.

“Hm,” said Brennan, and went in.

---

Alexander went in after him.

He did not go down the curved rows to the front, where the first-years who had come early and wished to be seen to have come early were sitting with their laptops open, and he did not take the aisle seat two from the back, which Frederick had sat in for a year and which was taken already by a girl with a water bottle the size of a fire extinguisher. He went up the rows to the very back, to the last row, under the clock, and along it to the middle, and sat down there, upright, and put the notebook on the desk in front of him, and took the pencil out of its spine, and laid it beside the notebook, parallel to the edge.

Frederick stood in the corridor and looked at him through the narrow pane of glass in the door.

He looked very small, at the back of Tolliver 104, in the last row under the clock: a young man in a pale jacket among eighty first-years in maroon, with his hands folded on the desk. Nobody in the room looked at him. The girl with the water bottle looked at the board. A boy in the row in front turned round, once, to look at the clock, and looked at Alexander instead, briefly, the way you look at somebody older who has come into the wrong room, and turned back.

At the front of the room Brennan put the bag and the empty cup down on the bench, and picked up a piece of chalk, and Frederick knew without being able to see it from the door that it was the same chalk, gone down about an inch and a half since last August, and then about another inch since; and Brennan went to the left-hand end of the blackboard and wrote, in large rapid capitals:

THE CHARTER OF UNION OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES, 1783.

And under it:

18 ARTICLES. 14 AMENDMENTS. 1 QUESTION.

Then he stopped.

He stood at the board with the chalk on it, and his back to the room, and Frederick saw his shoulders in the crumpled jacket do what they had done once, in April, in front of the same board: decide something. Then Brennan moved along the board, to the right, to the clear space past the third line, and wrote under it, in the same capitals, at the same speed, without stopping at any word:

CAN A MAN BE A CITIZEN AND A SOVEREIGN AT ONCE?

He underlined AT ONCE. Twice.

Then he turned round, and looked up the curved rows, not at the front, and not at the aisle two from the back, where there was a girl with a water bottle, but all the way up, to the last row, under the clock.

Frederick could not hear what Brennan said. The door was too thick and the room was too big. He saw the beard move, and he saw eighty first-years go still in the particular way of a room that has been told something it does not yet understand; and at the very back of the room, under the clock, he saw his cousin sit forward, with his hands together on the desk, as he had sat forward for Tyler in the lounge in March, and for Brennan in this room in March, with an expression on his face that Frederick knew, because he had seen it at a whist table and in this room and at a bar on the Avenue with a glass of water in front of him: complete and private happiness.

Frederick stepped back from the glass.

It was not his class. He had had his year of it. He had a C from December to show for it and a sheet of paper in a basement that said UNDECLARED, and a man had said goodbye, Fred to him at the end of this corridor in April and walked round the corner, and that had been the end of it, and it was supposed to have been the end of it.

He went back down the corridor that smelled of floor polish, past the water fountain and the fire notice, and out into the heat, and across the mall.

---

The History building was brick, and the ivy on it was alive.

It was the only ivy Frederick had seen in the March. It went up the whole of the south face of the building in a dark green sheet, three storeys of it, over the windows and round them, so that from the outside the building looked as though it were being slowly and patiently eaten; and in a hundred and two degrees, on the mall at twenty past ten, it was green. There was a small brass plate beside the door that said the building had been the library of the teachers’ college from 1930 to 1966, and under it a smaller plate, newer, that said PLEASE DO NOT WATER THE IVY. IT IS ON A SCHEDULE.

“It’s on a drip,” said a voice beside him. “There’s a line up the back. It goes on at four in the morning. Nobody’s ever managed to kill it. They’ve tried.”

It was a young man of about thirty in a blue shirt and a tie, with a satchel over his shoulder and a coffee in a paper cup, and a face that was trying, very hard, to look as though it had not just realised who it was talking to; and the tie was knotted very small and very high and very tight, so that it pushed the collar of the blue shirt up round his neck like a bandage.

“Who’s tried?” said Frederick.

“The, um. Facilities. For the water.” The young man looked at the ivy, which was easier. “The department wrote a letter. It’s a very good letter.” He looked back at Frederick, and went pink, and shifted the cup to the other hand, and held out the free one. “Nathan Ashby. I’m, um. History. I’m teaching the survey. You’re in it. I think. The Realm to 1865?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Great. Good.” Dr Ashby shook his hand, and let go of it, quickly, as though he were not sure he had been supposed to take it. “I’m new. I mean, I’m the newest. In the department. Since January.” He looked at the door. “It’s room two-oh-six. The stairs are on the left. The elevator’s out.”

“It’s always out,” said Frederick.

“Is it?” said Dr Ashby, with real interest, and then, as though it had just reached him, “Oh. Palo Verde. You live in Palo Verde.” He went pinker. “Sorry. I read. Everybody’s read. I mean, it’s public. It’s on, it’s in the papers.” He stopped. “I’ll see you upstairs.”

He went in under the ivy very fast, and Frederick heard him on the stairs inside, taking them two at a time, and then stop, and say, to nobody, quite clearly, “It’s always out.”

---

Room 206 was long and narrow, with tall windows on one side that were full of ivy, so that the light came in green, and forty seats in it in rows, and a whiteboard, not a blackboard; and Frederick sat in the third row, because the first two were full and the back was full and the third row had a seat on the end.

Dr Ashby came in at half past ten exactly with the satchel and the cup, and put them down on the desk at the front, and looked at the room, and at his notes, and at the room, and did not look at the third row.

“Okay,” he said. “Hi. This is The Realm to 1865. HST one-oh-nine. If you’re in the wrong room, now’s the, um. Now’s a good time.” He picked up a marker, and took the top off it, and wrote on the whiteboard, in a small neat hand that went slightly uphill:

1775 to 1779.

“Most surveys start at the beginning,” said Dr Ashby. “With the colonies. Jamestown, Plymouth, the charters. We’ll do all that. We’ll do it in week two.” He turned round. “But I’m a historian of the Four-Year War. It’s what I, um. It’s what I do. So I’m going to start with it, because everything in this course is either on the way to it or on the way out of it, and I’d like you to know where the middle is before we go and stand at either end.”

He wrote, under the dates:

THE WAR NO ONE WON.

“That’s what it’s called,” he said. “In the textbooks. In the, the popular histories. The war no one won.” He looked at the words. “It’s a very good phrase. It’s a very bad description. By the end of this semester I’d like you to be able to tell me who won it, and I’d like each of you to give me a different answer, and I’d like all of them to be defensible.” He put the top back on the marker. “That’s the course.”

---

He was good.

That was the first thing, and it surprised Frederick, as Brennan had surprised him a year before, though he could not have said why. Dr Ashby was nervous, and his tie was too tight, and he said um about every forty seconds, and Frederick saw a boy in the second row begin to count them on a pad and then, at about the fifteen-minute mark, stop counting, and put the pen down, and listen; because when Dr Ashby got to the summer of 1775, and the Congress, and the petition, his voice changed, and the ums went, and he stopped looking at his notes and began to walk up and down in front of the whiteboard in the green light from the ivy, and told it like a man who has spent ten years in a room with the papers and has come out to tell you what was in them.

“It reached London in August,” said Dr Ashby. “Parliament wasn’t sitting. And the Colonial Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, advises the King to receive it. Not to accept it. To receive it. As a petition from his subjects. Because receiving it costs nothing.” He stopped walking. “And the King reads it.”

He let that sit, in the green light.

“Everything,” said Dr Ashby, “everything in this room, the Charter, the Union, this university, the fact that you are sitting in a building named for a teachers’ college in a March of a Realm under a Crown, follows from a man reading a letter he could have put in a drawer.” He turned round. “And I’ve spent ten years trying to find out how he read it. In what order. At what desk. On what day. Whether he made notes. Whether he read it twice.” He looked at the room. “And the honest answer is that we don’t know very much. The letter survives. The King’s reading of it doesn’t.”

He looked at the third row.

It was twenty minutes into the hour. Frederick had felt it coming since the word Dartmouth; and Dr Ashby had been not looking at the third row for twenty minutes with such force that the whole room had felt it, and now he was looking at it, and he had gone the colour of the inside of a peach.

“Could you,” said Dr Ashby. “Would you mind. In your experience.”

The room went absolutely still.

“Does the family still keep the Olive Branch letter at Windsor?”

Forty people did not turn round, with tremendous force.

Frederick thought about it. He thought about it honestly, because it had been asked honestly, by a man in a tie that was too tight who had spent ten years trying to find out how a King had read a letter; and he thought about Windsor, which he had been to perhaps a dozen times in his life and had never once been shown a letter at.

“No,” said Frederick. “It’s in the archives. It isn’t ours.”

“Not at Windsor.”

“It’s never been at Windsor. I’ve never seen it.”

Dr Ashby looked at him for a long moment.

Then he turned round to the desk, and picked up a pen, not the marker, and opened a notebook that was lying on top of the satchel, and wrote something in it, small, quickly, and Frederick, from the third row, could see the shape of the word, because the pen paused at the end of it and then underlined it.

Source.

“Thank you,” said Dr Ashby, to the notebook. He put the pen down. “That’s. Um. That’s very helpful.”

“It’s only what I know.”

“That’s what a source is,” said Dr Ashby, and turned round again, and picked up the marker, and went back to the summer of 1775, in the green light, and did not look at the third row for the rest of the hour; and Frederick sat in it with his hands on the desk and found that he did not mind at all.

---

Spanish was at noon, at the next level, in a basement room with no windows and a woman from Hermosillo who made them read aloud from the first minute, and who stopped him after four lines and said “Más despacio, Fred. No es un discurso,” and he went more slowly, and it was not a speech, and it was better.

Statistics was at two.

It was in the glass building, in a large flat room with a hundred and twenty seats, and it was taught by a woman who was perhaps five feet tall and wore enormous earrings, and who stood in front of the screen with a pointer and drew on it, in the first ten minutes, a shape like a bell; and then a second bell, flatter, and wider, beside it.

“Same mean,” she said. “Different spread. That’s variance.” She tapped the second bell. “This one’s honest. It’s telling you the data are all over the place. It’s not hiding anything.” She turned to the room. “Variance is your friend.”

Frederick looked at the flat bell for the rest of the hour.

It was not his friend. He knew it was not his friend in the way you know at the foot of a hill that you are not going to enjoy it; and when the woman with the earrings put up a formula with a sigma in it, and a bar over an x, and a small two hanging off the top of a bracket, he wrote it down very carefully in his notebook, exactly as it was, in pencil, and looked at it, and understood nothing about it at all except that Sam would.

---

On the cork board over the window desk, at the height of his eyes, his timetable was pinned beside the sheet from the basement.

HANOVER, F. Class of 2037. Palo Verde Hall 312. Under it the four courses, the History and the Spanish and the Statistics and the Music at eight on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And at the bottom, in the same type as everything else, as though it were a course too:

Intended major: UNDECLARED.

He looked at it at four, when he came in, before Tyler did. Then Tyler came in, at four, with the hood up and the bottle and the laptop, and said “Hey,” and sat down on the floor between the beds in the shadow of the window bed, and put the headphones on, and did not say anything else for two hours; and at the desk by the door his cousin, who had come back from the Charter at ten and gone out again to two more classes and come back at half past three, made a small tick on a sheet of cream paper beside 16.00. Tyler, and went on reading.

---

At ten at night Alexander was still reading.

He was at the desk by the door, in the dark blue pyjamas, buttoned to the neck, with the lamp on and the little blue Charter open flat in front of him under one hand and the notebook beside it, and the pencil beside the notebook, parallel to its edge. Frederick, on the window bed, with Ashby’s green book about the war no one won, could see the page from across the room. It was not Article One. It was not Article Two, or Three.

“You’re on Four,” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“He’ll do Four in about October.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I should like to have read it first.” He turned a page. “Article Four is the Parliament’s privileges. Which no Sovereign may question. I should like to know what I may not question before I begin to question it.”

Frederick looked at him.

“What did he say?” he said. “After he wrote it.”

Alexander did not look up for a moment. Then he did, and looked at the blind, which was down, and at the inch of orange night at its edge.

“He said that he had a student in the room who was both,” said Alexander. “Or claimed to be. That the student was enrolled in the Realm as a first-year, and would be a citizen of nothing in it, and would be graded by a citizen, and was, in another place, under another law, the person in whose name the law was made.” He considered it. “He said that he had asked for nine months last year whether anybody had consented to the Crown. He said that this year he would like to know whether anybody could hold one and still be held by anything.” He looked down at the Charter. “He said that we have a year.”

“What’s the answer?”

“He did not say.”

“What’s yours?”

Alexander put the pencil down beside the notebook, and looked at it, and moved it a sixteenth of an inch, so that it was exactly parallel to the edge.

“I have three,” he said. “I shall tell him first. It is his question.”

He turned back to Article Four.

Frederick lay on the window bed with the green book open on his chest at the summer of 1775 and did not read it. Across the room his cousin read, and made a small mark in the margin of the notebook, and laid the pencil down again, parallel; and the thermostat by the door said 68, which they both wanted; and in the morning, at the same second, two lamps would go on.