Westminster

The black eye came from the Leach scrum half, on the Saturday, in the second half, and the broken finger came from the Leach full back, three minutes later, and both of them apologised afterwards with such sincerity that Frederick found himself apologising back.

Windrush won. Fourteen to twelve. It was the first time Windrush had beaten Leach in a house match since 2009, and Mr Pryce, on the touchline, had taken off his tweed cap and thrown it into the air, and it had come down in a puddle, and he had left it there. Frederick had not scored. He had been tackled four times, three of them by the same boy, and on the fourth occasion the Leach full back had landed on his right hand, and something in his right hand had made a small, distinct, interesting noise, like a pencil.

The school doctor had looked at it on Saturday night. She was a brisk woman called Dr Asante who had been told, clearly, at some length, by somebody from the Household, who her patient was, and had decided it made no difference to fingers.

“Broken,” she said, holding it up to the light. “The fourth one. Clean break. It’ll mend in five weeks. I’ll strap it to the third.” She strapped it to the third. “No rugby. No writing with it. No shaking hands.”

“I’m opening Parliament on Wednesday.”

Dr Asante looked at him over her glasses.

“Do you have to shake hands to open Parliament?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done it.”

“Then don’t,” said Dr Asante, and looked at his eye, which by Saturday night had gone the colour of a plum, and touched it, very lightly, with one finger. “That’ll be green by Wednesday. And yellow by the weekend.” She considered it with professional interest. “I’d use a lot of powder.”

---

On Monday Mr Pryce taught him the Welsh.

He had asked for it. He had gone to Mr Pryce’s room in the sports block after the match with his hand in its strapping and his eye going purple and asked whether Mr Pryce, who came from a valley in the south of Wales and still spoke to his mother on the telephone every Sunday in the language she had been born in, would teach him one sentence, for Wednesday, because he had one in Gaelic, and it would be wrong to have one and not the other.

Mr Pryce had looked at him for some time from behind his desk with his nose like the coast of Norway.

“Who taught you the Gaelic?” he said.

“A ghillie called Morag.”

“On a riverbank.”

“Yes.”

“With the line round a tree.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because that’s how everybody learns anything worth knowing,” said Mr Pryce. “On a riverbank. With the line round a tree.” He got up and shut the door. “Sit down. What does the Gaelic say?”

Frederick told him.

Mr Pryce sat down again, slowly, behind the desk, and looked out of the window at the rugby pitches in the rain for a while.

“Right,” he said. “We’ll do it the same.”

They did it in an hour. Mr Pryce said it, and Frederick said it after him, and Mr Pryce said no, and said it again, and Frederick said it again, and somewhere around the fortieth time Mr Pryce stopped, and looked at him, and said, where did you get that accent? and Frederick said from you, and Mr Pryce said, in a strange voice, that’s my mother, and did not say anything for a while, and then said, again.

At the end of the hour he wrote it down in the blue notebook under the Gaelic. Two sentences. The same meaning, in two languages older than the House he was going to say them in.

“Will they let you?” said Mr Pryce, at the door.

“They have,” said Frederick. “I asked on Friday. The Prime Minister’s office said it was the first time anybody had asked.”

“What did they say?”

“They said yes,” said Frederick. “And then they rang back an hour later and said are you sure, and I said yes, and they said is it the same sentence in both, and I said yes, and they said what does it mean, and I told them, and there was a pause, and they said right.”

---

The 6.15 from Kemble was dark and nearly empty, and he sat in it with his hand in its strapping in his lap and Castellanos opposite and Kimura across the aisle with her murder in a country house, which she had finished in Scotland and was now reading again from the beginning to see if she had missed anything, and he watched the dark go past the window and turn slowly grey.

Theo and the class came on the 7.40. They had been invited. All thirty-one of them, and Mr Abernathy, and Mr Ferrante, to sit in the gallery of the House of Lords as guests of the Lord Great Chamberlain, who had written to Dr Ord in a hand so beautiful that Dr Ord had had it framed. Theo was not coming as a Page. Theo’s warrant was a Realm warrant; it said so on the paper; and in Britain the King had pages of his own, three boys from London, who had done this before.

“I’ll be in the gallery,” Theo had said, on Tuesday night. “In a suit. Waving.”

“Don’t wave.”

“I’ll wave a little.”

---

They put powder on the eye at the Palace at eleven, in the Robing Room, a long red and gold room with a high ceiling and portraits round the walls of every sovereign since somebody he could not remember, all of them looking down at him with the expression of people who had also been put into these robes and knew exactly what came next.

The powder covered most of it. It did not cover the green.

The robes went on: the crimson, eighteen feet of it, which the three London pages took at the corners behind him without being told, because they had done it before, in the Abbey, a year ago; the ermine cape; and then, last of all, carried in on a cushion by an old man in a black tailcoat with a face like a closed door, the Crown of State.

In the Realm the crown was never worn. It was carried in front of the King at the State Opening on Charter Hill and set on a table beside the Throne, and it sat there, and the King read the Speech bareheaded, and that was how the Realm liked it: a Crown that was there, and was not on anybody.

In Britain they put it on your head.

The old man in the tailcoat lifted it off the cushion with both hands, very slowly, as though it were full of water, and raised it, and lowered it, and set it on Frederick’s head.

And Frederick’s head went down about an inch.

He had worn the other crown, in the Abbey, for perhaps four minutes, and it had been heavier, so heavy that he had not been able to turn his head. But that had been four minutes. This one he would wear for forty. He felt it settle, all the weight of it, gold and velvet and stones, on the top of his skull and down through his neck into his shoulders and down his back, and he understood, standing in the Robing Room with his broken finger and his green eye, why every face in every portrait on these walls looked the way it did.

“Sir,” said the old man in the tailcoat. “Chin up, sir.”

Frederick lifted his chin.

The crown came with it. It was like lifting a bucket.

“Very good, sir,” said the old man, and stepped back, and looked at him critically, as at a hat in a shop. “You’ll want to keep it there. It’ll be fine as long as you keep it there.” He paused. “If you look down, sir, it’ll want to go with you.”

---

The Chamber of the House of Lords was red.

That was the first thing. On Charter Hill everything was white, white walls and white stone and pale wood, and the light came in clean and flat through tall windows. Here everything was red, the benches and the carpet and the leather, and the gold went up the walls and over the ceiling in carvings and paintings and gilt until there was no wall left, only gold, and the windows were high and full of coloured glass, and the light came through them red and blue and gold and lay on everything in patches, like spilled wine.

It was full. Every bench. The peers in their red robes with the white fur down the front, row on row of them, old men and old women, sitting very still. The judges in their wigs on the woolsacks in the middle. The bishops on their bench in white. The ambassadors in the gallery, a row of them in the uniforms of forty countries. And above the ambassadors, in another gallery, at the end, in a long row of thirty-one, in suits, with Mr Abernathy at one end in the brown jacket and Mr Ferrante at the other in the scarf that went round three times, the senior class of Ellicott High School, New Westminster, looking down.

He saw Theo. He could not miss Theo. Theo was a head taller than everybody in the gallery, in a dark suit Frederick had never seen, and he was not waving.

He was sitting with his hands folded on the rail of the gallery and his face perfectly still. It was the face he had worn on the steps of the Abbey a year ago, holding a train, with something underneath it that Frederick could see from forty yards away and nobody else in the Chamber could have guessed at, which was that Theo Hartigan, Page of Honour to the King in right of the United Kingdom of America, holding no warrant whatsoever in this building, was so proud he was having difficulty breathing.

Frederick looked away from him before it reached his own face.

He walked up the Chamber. He went up the steps of the dais to the Throne, under its gold canopy, the crown on his head like a bucket, chin up, eyes front. He turned. He sat down.

The crown wanted to go with him. He did not let it.

“My Lords,” said the Lord Great Chamberlain, beside the Throne, “pray be seated.”

Several hundred people in red robes sat down.

---

Black Rod went down the corridor.

He went the whole length of it, a long corridor between the Lords and the Commons, a tall grey man in black with a black rod with a gold lion on top of it, walking at the slow particular pace of a man who has done this before and knows exactly what is going to happen and is going to do it anyway. Frederick could not see him. He could hear him. He could hear the footsteps on the stone going away down the corridor, and then stopping.

And then, from a long way off, very faint, through two sets of doors and the whole length of the Palace of Westminster: the slam.

He had heard about it all his life. He had read about it at twelve in the library at Columbia Palace. He had heard the girl from Coln in the common room describe it with fierce local pride. He had never thought about what it would sound like, from the Throne, under the crown.

It sounded like somebody saying no.

Then three knocks. Knock. Knock. Knock. The black rod on the oak of the door. Then the door opening, far off, and a voice, and a pause, and then the long slow sound of the House of Commons coming, several hundred of them, down the corridor, toward the Lords, talking, not hurrying, at the pace of men and women who have been sent for by a King and wish it understood that they are coming because they choose to.

They crowded in at the far end of the Chamber, behind the bar, standing, a great untidy mass of them in ordinary suits, and at the front of them, a short stocky red-haired man of about fifty with a face like a disappointed boxer, who looked up the length of the red and gold Chamber at the boy on the Throne with the green eye, and very slightly inclined his head.

That was Rennie. Frederick had met him in November last year in a room at the Palace and in the north transept of the Abbey, where Rennie had shouted God save the King louder than anybody, and he had liked him then, and he thought now, watching him at the bar of the House of Lords in a suit that did not fit with his hands at his sides, that he was going to like him more.

The Lord Chancellor came up the steps of the dais and knelt, and took from a purse of embroidered silk a booklet bound in white, and gave it to him.

He opened it.

He did not need to look at the first page. He had it by heart.

---

Before the first line of the Speech, before My Lords and Members of the House of Commons, before anything the Prime Minister’s office had written, he said the Welsh.

He said it in Mr Pryce’s mother’s voice, from a valley in the south of Wales, because that was the only voice he had it in.

There was a silence in the House of Lords that he would remember for the rest of his life. It was not a shocked silence. It was the silence of several hundred people who had sat in this room for the opening of every Parliament for thirty, forty, fifty years, and had heard every word that had ever been said in it, and had not, ever, once, heard this.

Then he said the Gaelic.

He said it in Morag’s voice, from the bank of the Teith, with a line round a tree.

Somewhere on the benches on his left, among the peers in their red robes, an old woman with white hair took a handkerchief out of her sleeve.

He did not translate either of them. He had agreed with Rennie’s office that he would not. They had agreed that anybody who wanted to know what they meant could find out, and that the people who already knew would not need to be told.

Then he said: “My Lords and Members of the House of Commons.”

And read the Speech.

---

It took thirty-eight minutes.

It was about the economy, and the National Health Service, and a new railway line to the north, and Scotland, and Wales, and Kernow, and England at Winchester, and the Concord station, and the Arctic, and a great many other things that Rennie’s government had written and that Frederick had read in the boot room twice and initialled in pencil with his left hand, badly. He read all of it. He read it clearly and at the right speed and did not stumble and did not look down, because if he looked down the crown would go with him, and he kept his chin up for thirty-eight minutes under the weight of it, and felt it press, and press, and press, down through the top of his head into his neck, until by the end of it he could feel every one of the bones in his neck individually, as if somebody were counting them.

My Lords and Members of the House of Commons, I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels.

He closed the booklet.

He sat for a moment on the Throne in the red and gold Chamber with several hundred people looking at him.

Then he stood up.

The crown came with him. It wanted, very much, at that moment, to go forward. He did not let it.

---

Afterwards, in the Robing Room, the old man in the black tailcoat lifted it off his head with both hands, the way he had put it on, very slowly, as if it were full of water, and Frederick’s head came up about an inch, of its own accord, like a cork.

He stood there. He could not turn his neck in either direction.

“Thank you, sir,” said the old man, setting the crown back on its cushion with infinite care. “Very well done, sir. Very steady.” He looked at Frederick with something that was very nearly approval. “Your father always looked down at My Lords. Every year. Fifty-six years. I’d see it go and think, here we go.” He touched the crown on its cushion, lightly, as you might touch a horse. “You never looked down once.”

“I couldn’t. You said.”

“I did say, sir,” said the old man. “Nobody ever listens.”

---

He could not turn his head for a week.

He went back to Gloucestershire on the 16.21 from Paddington with his hand in its strapping and his eye going from green to yellow and his neck held perfectly straight, so that when Theo, in the seat opposite, said Freddie, he had to turn his whole body round from the waist to look at him, like an owl in a coat.

“What,” said Frederick.

“It was good,” said Theo. “The Welsh. And the other one.”

“Thank you.”

“The old lady cried. On the left. With the hanky.”

“I saw.”

Theo looked out of the window at the fields going past in the dark.

“What do they mean?” he said. “You never told me. Morag wouldn’t tell me, and Mr Pryce wouldn’t tell me, and the Prime Minister’s office said I’d have to ask you.” He looked back at Frederick. “So I’m asking.”

Frederick told him.

I am a guest in this house, and I will try to be a good one.

Theo listened. Then he looked out of the window again for a long time, at the dark fields and the lights of a village going past and a church tower against the last of the sky.

“Yeah,” said Theo at last. “That’s right. That’s what you are.”

---

On Thursday Harold Quayle’s column said:

WHERE IS THE KING? On Wednesday the King was in the House of Lords at Westminster, opening the Parliament of Great Britain in person, in a crown, with what the British press describe as a black eye and what your correspondent’s source in the gallery describes as “a shiner, sir, a proper one”. He was also, it is reported, wearing a bandage on one finger, sustained playing a game called rugby, which your correspondent has looked up, and wishes he had not.

Before his Speech the King spoke one sentence in Welsh and one in Gaelic. The British press have been told what they mean. Your correspondent has not. Your correspondent would merely ask, as a citizen of the Realm and a taxpayer and a man whose grandmother was from Monterey, why it is that the King of the United Kingdom of America can find a sentence for the Welsh and a sentence for the Scots and cannot find one for the millions of his own subjects who speak Spanish at home.

Your correspondent asks. He will go on asking. Next Thursday.

Frederick read it on his telephone on the third step of the Windrush stairs, with the telephone held against the window, with his neck perfectly straight.

“He’s got a point,” said Theo, from the bottom of the stairs.

“I know he has.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Find one,” said Frederick.

---

On Tuesday, at six in the evening, in a small panelled room on the first floor of the Palace, with a fire in the grate and a plate of shortbread on the table that nobody touched, he had his first weekly audience with the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Rennie sat in the chair opposite him with his red hair standing up and his tie loosened and a folder on his knee that he did not open.

“Sir,” said Rennie. “How’s the neck?”

“I can’t turn it.”

“No. You wouldn’t.” Rennie looked at him with a disappointed boxer’s sympathy. “My father had a neck like that. Forty years on the boats. Out of Anstruther. Herring, then white fish, then nothing, because there wasn’t any.” He leaned back. “Looking up at the weather, he said. You spend your whole life looking up at the weather and one day you can’t look down.” He considered Frederick. “You’ll be all right. It’s only a crown.”

“It’s very heavy.”

“It’s meant to be,” said Rennie. “So you’ll take it off.” He opened the folder at last. “Right. Business. Then you can tell me about the rugby, because I’m told you’re on the wing, and I’ve got opinions.”

“What about?”

“Everything,” said the Prime Minister of Great Britain, with deep contentment. “I’m from Fife. I’ve got opinions about everything.” He looked at the folder. Then he looked up again. “Sir. One thing first.”

“Yes?”

“The Welsh. And the Gaelic.” Rennie closed the folder again. “My office told me what they meant, on Friday, and I said yes, and I’d have said yes to anything, because you’re the King and it’s your speech and that’s what we do.” He looked at the fire. “But I didn’t know what they meant until I heard you say them. In that room. To them.” He looked back at Frederick. “My mother was a Gaelic speaker. From Skye. She’d have cried like the old lady on the left.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I’m just telling you,” said Rennie. “So you know. Somebody should.” He opened the folder for the third time. “Right. Business.”