Confidence

The New Year Honours list had been published on the thirty-first of December, in the newspapers, in small type, eleven pages of it, and Frederick had not read it.

He had not been meant to. The list was drawn up in London by committees, from nominations sent in by anybody who wanted to nominate anybody, and checked, and checked again, and sent to the Prime Minister, and sent by the Prime Minister to the King, who approved it, in a box, with a pencil, at the bottom, approved, without reading the eleven pages, because that was how it was done and had always been done, and because if the King read the eleven pages and had opinions about them the honours would become the King’s, and they were not the King’s. They were the country’s.

He had approved it in December in the boot room with a pencil without reading it.

On page nine, in small type, under British Empire Medal (Civil Division), between a lollipop man from Worcester and a woman who ran a choir for the deaf in Swansea, it said:

Michael John FENNELL. Bus Driver, Cotswold Country. For services to Rural Transport in Gloucestershire.

He had not seen it.

He found out on the second of January, at the New Inn, when Sue Fennell put a newspaper down on the table in front of him folded open at page nine with her finger on the line, and said, in a voice that could have stopped a tractor, “Did you do this?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t know. I never read the list. Nobody reads the list. You’re not supposed to read the list.”

Sue Fennell looked at him for a long time.

“The bus company put him in,” she said at last. “Forty years. In March. Without telling him. And half the village signed it.” She looked at the newspaper. “Edna Dunning got two hundred signatures in the shop. Two hundred. Edna Dunning can’t get a stamp on straight and she got two hundred signatures.” She folded the newspaper. “And he’s going to stand in front of you in May at the Palace and get a medal off you and he’s going to think you did it, and he’s going to die.”

“I’ll tell him I didn’t.”

“He won’t believe you,” said Sue Fennell. “Nobody’s going to believe you. Not in a million years.” She tucked the newspaper under her arm. “I don’t believe you, and I know you didn’t.”

---

Nobody believed him.

The investiture was on Tuesday the twentieth of May, in the ballroom at the Palace, a long white and gold room with chandeliers and a dais at one end and rows of gilt chairs for the families, and a military band in the gallery playing something gentle, and a hundred people waiting in a corridor in their best clothes to be called in one at a time and given something for being good at their lives.

It was his first. He had asked to do it. His father had done investitures for fifty-six years, two hundred people at a time, standing on the dais for two hours, and had told him, in the room with the round window, in March, in single words, that it was the best thing in the job. Faces, his father had said. Every. A breath. One.

He stood on the dais. A man from the Household read out each name. Each person came forward, and stopped, and bowed or curtseyed, and came up onto the dais, and he put the medal on them on a hook that had been fixed to their coat in the corridor beforehand by somebody with a box of hooks, and shook their hand, and said something, and they said something back, and went away.

A nurse from Sheffield. A lifeboatman from Anglesey. A woman who had run a soup kitchen in Glasgow for thirty years and looked at him as if she would very much like to give him some soup. A man who had planted eleven thousand trees in Norfolk. The lollipop man from Worcester, who was eighty and had seen every child in his town across the same road for fifty-one years and who said, when Frederick put the medal on him, you’re very tall, in a tone of great disappointment, as if he had hoped for a King he could see across a road.

Mr Michael Fennell, said the man from the Household. For services to Rural Transport in Gloucestershire.

Mick came in.

He was in a suit. His own, this time, not the one Jack had worn to London. Dark grey, new, bought for the purpose in Cheltenham with Sue standing over him. A tie. The hook on his lapel. His hair cut. His shoes polished so hard they shone. And his face, as he came up the length of the ballroom between the rows of gilt chairs, past Sue in the third row in a hat, past Jack beside her in his grandfather’s tie, past Mrs Haverfield in her new blue coat, who had come up on the train with them and announced on the platform at Paddington that this was her last trip to London and she was going to see it properly, was the colour it had been on the first Saturday in September, behind the wheel of the 860, at the war memorial, with a ticket held out in the air.

He stopped at the foot of the dais. He bowed. He came up.

He stood in front of the King.

Frederick took the medal off the velvet cushion. It was silver. Round. Small. On a ribbon of pink and grey. He hooked it onto Mick’s lapel, on the hook, and straightened it, and looked at it there, on the new grey suit, and then at Mick.

Mick was looking at a point about three inches above his left ear.

“Mr Fennell,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“I didn’t do this.”

Mick’s eyes came down from the point above his ear and looked at him.

“I didn’t know,” said Frederick. “I didn’t read the list. Nobody reads the list. The bus company put you in, in March last year, and the village signed it, two hundred of them, in the shop, and it went to a committee, and the committee said yes. I approved the whole list in a box in December with a pencil and I never saw your name.” He held out his hand. “This is from them. Not me. It’s the country’s. It’s never been mine.”

Mick Fennell looked at him.

He looked at him for a long time on the dais in the ballroom with the band playing something gentle in the gallery and a hundred people in gilt chairs watching. His face did not change. It was the face of a man being told, very politely, by somebody he admired more than anybody alive, a thing he did not believe and was never going to believe, and deciding, on balance, out of courtesy, not to say so.

He shook the King’s hand.

“Course you didn’t, sir,” said Mick Fennell, very gently. “Course you didn’t.”

And bowed, and went down off the dais, and back down the long ballroom between the gilt chairs, past his wife and his son and his grandmother, with a silver medal on a pink and grey ribbon on the lapel of a new grey suit, walking very straight, like a man driving a bus full of eggs.

In the third row, Sue Fennell had her face in her hands.

In the fourth, Mrs Haverfield had her chin up and her eyes shut.

And beside his mother, Jack, in his grandfather’s tie, was looking up at the dais with an expression that said, very clearly, without any words at all, nobody believes you, Hanover, and nobody ever will, and I love you.

---

On Wednesday he opened the depot.

It was the new bus depot in Cirencester, the one that was replacing the corrugated shed behind the builders’ merchant where Jack worked on Saturdays and where Frederick had held a lamp in the wrong place for twenty minutes in February. It was a long low clean building of steel and glass on the edge of the town with room for twelve buses and a pit that did not drip, and a canteen, and a sign over the door that said COTSWOLD COUNTRY, and a ribbon across the door, and a pair of scissors on a cushion, and every driver in the company standing in a line in front of it in their uniforms, and Mick in the middle of the line with the silver medal on his uniform jacket, which he had been told he did not have to wear and was wearing.

It was the most mortifying day of Mick’s life. Jack said so afterwards. Jack said he had never seen his father so happy and so mortified at the same time; that he had stood in the line in front of the new depot with the medal on, with the King walking down the line shaking every driver’s hand, getting closer and closer, and had gone redder and redder, and when the King got to him and shook his hand and said good morning, Mr Fennell, Mick had said good morning, sir, and then, because he could not stop himself, because it had been building up in him since the ballroom, thank you for the medal, sir, and the whole line of drivers had laughed, and Mick had wanted, Jack said, to go and lie down in the new pit.

He cut the ribbon.

Dennis, the old mechanic, who had been at the garage for forty years and had stood at the edge of the pit in February and said should have left him there, was at the end of the line. He looked at the King with the scissors in his hand. He looked at the new depot. He looked, for a long time, at the new pit.

“Doesn’t drip,” said Dennis, at last, with the bitterness of a man who has been dripped on for forty years.

“No,” said Frederick.

“You held that lamp,” said Dennis, “in the wrong place for twenty minutes.”

“I know.”

“Worst lamp-holder I ever saw.” Dennis looked at the pit a while longer. “Come back any time,” he said, and walked away into the new depot with his hands in his pockets.

---

On Wednesday afternoon he opened the hospital wing.

It was a children’s wing, at the hospital in Cirencester, on the edge of the town not far from the depot, and it had taken eleven years to raise the money for, from fêtes and fun runs and a sponsored pancake race in 2026 and a man who had walked from Cirencester to John o’ Groats in a bear costume. It had a ward with walls painted with a mural of the wold, the walls and the fields and the sheep, and in one corner of the mural, very small, a bus, green and cream, with 860 on the front, which the artist said had not been his idea.

There were children in the beds. He talked to all of them. A girl of six with a broken leg who asked him if he had a crown on under his hair and was very disappointed when he said no. A boy of ten who had seen the photograph of the morris in the newspaper and asked if he could do the dance, and he did, a bit of it, in the ward, without the bells, and the boy laughed so hard the nurse had to come.

Outside, at the front entrance, in a green uniform with a white cross on the shoulder, standing beside the St John Ambulance vehicle that was on duty for the opening in case anybody fainted, Theo.

He had been on duty since eight. He had asked to be. He had not been told by anybody that the King was opening the wing; he had found out from the St John rota, which had HOSPITAL OPENING, CIRENCESTER, 2 P.M. on it for the Wednesday, and had put his name down before he had looked to see who was opening it, and then had looked, and had not taken his name off.

He did not look at Frederick when Frederick came out of the entrance at four.

He stood beside the vehicle with his hands behind his back and his face perfectly, solemnly, profoundly serious, the face he had worn holding a train down the nave of Westminster Abbey and being Wall, and watched the crowd, and the King walking past the crowd to the car, and did not look at the King once, because he was on duty, and you did not look at the King when you were on duty. You looked at the crowd. In case somebody fainted.

Frederick stopped beside the vehicle.

“Hartigan,” he said.

“Sir,” said Theo, to the crowd.

“Anybody faint?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

“There was a man at two who said he felt dizzy,” said Theo, still to the crowd. “But he’d been standing in the sun for an hour and a half to see you, and he hadn’t had any lunch.” He paused. “I gave him a biscuit.”

“Did it help?”

“He said it was the best biscuit he’d ever had,” said Theo, “because it came off a St John Ambulance at the King’s hospital opening.” He did not look round. “I didn’t tell him it was from a packet in the glove box. I didn’t want to ruin it for him.”

Frederick stood beside him for a moment longer, in front of the hospital in Cirencester, in the sun, the King of Great Britain and his Page of Honour, who held no warrant in this country at all, and was here anyway, in a green uniform, on his own name, because he had put it on a rota.

“Thank you, Hartigan,” said Frederick.

“Sir,” said Theo, to the crowd, and his ears went slowly pink, and he did not look round.

---

On Thursday afternoon he named a ship.

It was a Realm ship. A polar research vessel, the first the Realm had built in forty years, red and white, enormous, with a hull strengthened for the ice, which had been built at a yard on the Pacific coast and was to sail in the autumn for the Antarctic, and was to be named, in the usual way, by the King, in the usual way, at the yard, with a bottle, against the bow.

He was not at the yard. He was in the Windrush common room in Gloucestershire, at four in the afternoon, which was eight in the morning on the Pacific coast, on a video link, on Kit’s laptop, on the pile of copies of Persuasion, with the whole of Windrush crowded in behind him to watch.

On the screen, at the yard, in the early morning, the ship stood on the slipway, red and white, so huge that the people at the bottom of it in their hard hats were like ants. On a platform at the bow, a long way up, hung a bottle, on a rope, on a pulley, and beside it there was a button, and beside the button a man in a hard hat, and the man in the hard hat was looking at a screen, and on his screen, presumably, was the Windrush common room, and the King, and forty English and American sixth-formers in school uniform and their own clothes crowding behind him, waving.

The ship’s name had been chosen by the Realm’s schoolchildren.

This had been the Realm’s own idea, in the autumn, before anybody in the Household had been asked. A competition. Every school in the Realm. Every child could send in a name, and the children would vote on the best of them, and the King would name the ship whatever the children chose.

The children had chosen.

He had the card in front of him, with the words on it, which he was to read out. He had known for a month. He had not told anybody in Windrush what it said, on the instructions of the Household, which had been, in a memorandum, in April, quite emphatic.

“Sir,” said the man in the hard hat, on the screen. “When you’re ready.”

He stood up. He held the card. He looked at the screen. Forty sixth-formers behind him went quiet.

“I name this ship,” said Frederick, “Snowball the Brave.”

The Windrush common room was silent for about two seconds.

Then Kit Barraclough said, very quietly, “No,” and the whole room went.

---

He pressed the button.

On the screen, at the yard, the man in the hard hat pressed the corresponding button on the platform, and the bottle came away from its hook on the rope, and swung, on the pulley, in a long slow arc, down and across the bow of Snowball the Brave, and hit the hull, red, steel, strengthened for the ice, square in the middle.

And bounced.

It bounced off. It did not break. It hit the bow of the ship and bounced off it as if the ship were made of rubber, and swung back out on the rope, slowly, in the morning light, and swung back in, and hit the hull again, and bounced again, and swung out, and hung there, on the end of its rope, turning slowly, intact.

Nobody at the yard moved.

In the Windrush common room, forty sixth-formers were lying on the floor.

The man in the hard hat looked at the screen with an expression of profound and personal despair.

“Sir,” he said. “I’m so sorry. That’s never, in thirty years.”

“It’s strengthened for the ice,” said Frederick.

“It is, sir.”

“Then it’s working.”

The man in the hard hat stared at him.

“It’s a polar research ship,” said Frederick, “named Snowball the Brave, by children, and it’s so strong that a bottle can’t break on it.” He looked at the screen, at the bottle turning slowly on its rope against the red bow. “I think that’s the best christening a ship’s ever had.”

On the screen, somebody at the yard, at the bottom of the slipway, in a hard hat, very small, began to clap.

And then all of them were clapping, all the ants in their hard hats at the bottom of the enormous red and white ship, in the early morning on the Pacific coast, and the man on the platform at the bow reached out with one hand and took hold of the bottle on its rope, and held it, and looked at it, and then, with no ceremony whatsoever, like a man opening a beer, whacked it hard against the rail of the platform, and it smashed, and the champagne went everywhere, all over him and his hard hat and the rail and the red bow of Snowball the Brave, and the yard roared.

---

On Thursday night, at a quarter to eleven, Whitlock’s cat ended the audience.

It was the business: the Arctic, and Snowball the Brave, which Whitlock had watched from the official residence on the Axis at seven in the morning his time and described, gravely, as the finest moment of the session, and the anniversary of the Charter in 2033, and a disagreement between two Departments that had been going on since October and was now, Whitlock said, in its eighth month, sir, which is a record, even for the Department of the Interior. It was point eleven. Whitlock was very close to the camera. He was so close, by point eleven, that Frederick could see a small shaving cut on the Prime Minister’s chin.

The cat came along the desk behind him.

It was the same cat. Large, ginger, serene. It walked along the edge of the desk with its tail straight up, past the Prime Minister’s shoulder, toward the keyboard, and Frederick watched it come, and did not say anything, because Whitlock was in the middle of a sentence about the Department of the Interior and his eyes were closed with concentration.

The cat reached the keyboard.

It looked at the screen. At the King. At him.

Then it sat down on the keyboard with great deliberation, and looked at him through the screen, steadily, with its yellow eyes, for perhaps three seconds, as if to say: enough.

And the screen went black.

---

The vote was on Friday night, at midnight, Gloucestershire time.

It was seven in the evening in New Westminster. He watched it in the Windrush common room, on Kit’s laptop, on the pile of Persuasions, with the fire not lit, because it was the end of May, and the windows open, and the sound of the river coming in, and every sixth-former in Windrush who had been told what it was, which was all of them, in the eleven armchairs and on the arms of the eleven armchairs and on the floor.

On the screen, the Commons on Charter Hill. The long green room. The benches full. The Speaker in the chair.

The motion was on the paper. He had read it in the Realm box on Monday. He had read it four times.

That this House has confidence in Lord Whitlock as Prime Minister, and releases him, with the consent of the five parties to the Heads of Agreement of 10 September 2028, from the sixth paragraph of that Agreement.

The sixth paragraph was the one that said he would resign on the conclusion of the business in the agreement, or on the thirtieth of June 2031, whichever was the earlier, without being asked. He had agreed to it before he was offered the office. He had agreed the date. He was a Prime Minister of twenty-eight in the House of Lords, commissioned because five parties holding three hundred and ninety-seven seats could agree on nobody else, chairing a ministry he did not lead, with a date on him like a carton of milk.

And the business was not concluded. And the date was in five weeks.

The motion was moved by the Leader of the Opposition.

That was the thing. That was what nobody in the Realm had expected, and what Harold Quayle had written about for three Thursdays running, and what Whitlock himself, at the audience on Thursday before the cat, had described as unprecedented, sir, and frankly a little alarming. It was not moved by any of the five. It was moved by the leader of the party that had not been a party to the agreement, had not been invited, had sat on the other side of the House for nearly three years and voted against nearly everything the ministry put up.

She stood up at the despatch box. A small grey-haired woman in a dark suit whom Frederick had met twice, both times at receptions, both times briefly, and who had looked at him both times with an expression of polite and total reserve.

She spoke for six minutes.

She said that the Heads of Agreement had been written for a House that could not agree on anything except that it needed somebody to stand at the front of it, and that the sixth paragraph had been written so that nobody would have to trust him for longer than they could bear. She said that the House had now watched him stand at the front of it for two years and eight months. She said he had answered the Lords every week and stood at the bar of the Commons every month, by leave of the Speaker, and taken every question the whole House could think of, standing, for two years and eight months, and had never once asked for the date to be moved. She said her party had voted against nearly everything his ministry had done and would go on doing so. She said that was not the question. She said the question was whether the House of Commons had confidence in him.

“And it is my opinion,” she said, “that this House has had confidence in him since about the fourth month, and has been too proud to say so, and that it is time it did.”

She sat down.

The House was silent for a moment.

Then somebody on the benches behind her, one of her own, an old man in a grey suit, said hear, hear, quite loudly. And then somebody on the other side. And then it was everywhere, from every bench, the long rumbling hear, hear of a House of Commons agreeing with itself, which Frederick had heard a thousand times from the gallery and never once heard like this, because it was coming from both sides at once, and did not stop.

The division bell rang.

---

They waited eleven minutes.

In the Windrush common room, at eight minutes past midnight, forty English and American sixth-formers sat in the eleven armchairs and on the floor and watched an empty green chamber on a laptop while the members of the House of Commons of the Realm walked through two lobbies four thousand miles away to be counted, and nobody said anything.

Then the tellers came back. Four of them. They stood in a row at the table in front of the Speaker’s chair, and the one on the right read out the numbers.

The Ayes to the right: four hundred and forty-eight. The Noes to the left: nine.

The Commons roared.

In the Windrush common room, Will Ellis said, quietly, “Nine.”

“There’s always nine,” said Inés, from the floor by the window, not looking up from her book. “Every Parliament. Somewhere. There’s always nine.”

On the screen, on the front bench in the Lords’ gallery, where peers sat when they came to watch the Commons, the camera found him. Whitlock. Sitting very upright on the bench in the gallery, a tall, heavy-set, fair young man of twenty-nine with a slightly crooked tie, looking down at the House that had just voted, four hundred and forty-eight to nine, that it trusted him, and his face was perfectly blank, the way a face goes when it has been told something it will need a week to believe.

Then he put both hands over his face.

He held them there for a moment, and took them away, and looked down at the House again, and the camera, which was a good camera, and had been on Charter Hill for thirty years, and knew when to stay and when to go, stayed.

---

The video link opened at twenty past twelve.

He had not asked for it. It was not the night. It was a Friday. The secure screen in the boot room among the rugby boots lit up at twenty past twelve, and he went down, and sat at the small desk under the single enormous sweater on the back of the door, and the screen showed, at first, a ceiling, with a plaster rose, and then lurched, and swung, and was a forehead.

“Sir,” said the forehead.

“Prime Minister.”

The forehead withdrew. The face came into view. Whitlock, in the study of the official residence on the Axis, still in his suit, with his tie undone, and behind him, on the desk, sitting perfectly upright with its tail wrapped round its feet, the cat.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Whitlock. “It’s not Thursday. I know it’s not Thursday. I know it’s past midnight. I wasn’t going to.” He stopped. “And then I was sitting here. And I thought.” He stopped again. “I don’t know what I thought.”

Frederick looked at him.

He thought about what to say. He thought about saying congratulations, which was what you said, and which the King did not say about a vote in the House of Commons, because the King did not have opinions about votes in the House of Commons, and could not, and if he had them could not say them, and Whitlock knew that, and had rung anyway. He thought about saying thank you, which was worse. He thought about saying nothing.

He looked at the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America on the screen, at twenty past midnight, with his tie undone and the cat behind him and an expression on his face that Frederick had seen once before, on the steps of the Abbey, on Theo, holding a train.

“Well,” said Frederick.

Whitlock looked at him.

That was all. One word. Well. The word his father used at the end of the arrivals when he had got further than before. The word Bridget had used on the last morning of junior year, when he had woken at ten past seven. The word you said when something had happened that you could not have a view about and had seen anyway.

Whitlock sat in the study on the Axis for a long moment.

Then he nodded, slowly, as if he had been told something at great length and had understood all of it.

“Well,” said the Prime Minister. “Yes, sir. Exactly.”

Behind him, the cat stood up, and stretched, and walked along the edge of the desk, toward the keyboard, with its tail straight up.

Whitlock did not look round.

“Good night, sir,” he said, and the cat sat down, and the screen went black.