Where Is the King?

The State Opening of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of America began at two in the afternoon in New Westminster, which was seven in the evening in Gloucestershire, and the Windrush common room watched it on Kit Barraclough’s laptop, because Kit Barraclough’s laptop was the only one in the house with a screen bigger than a slice of toast.

It sat on a pile of copies of Persuasion on the table in front of the fire, which was lit, because it was October and it was England. Round it, in the eleven armchairs and on the arms of the eleven armchairs and on the floor between them, sat every sixth-former in Windrush, English and American, and several from Coln and Evenlode who had heard there would be crisps.

“Why are we watching this?” said a boy from Evenlode, on the floor.

“Because it’s his,” said Will, pointing at Frederick with a crisp.

“It’s not his. He’s here.”

“That’s the point,” said Will.

On the screen, the long white Chamber of the Lords on Charter Hill filled up with people in robes. Frederick had watched this from the inside every year since he could remember. He had watched it from a chair below the Throne at the age of seven, swinging his legs, and from the same chair at twelve, not swinging them, and last year he had watched it from the Throne itself, for twenty-six minutes, reading a Speech that had been written for him by Lord Whitlock’s government about earthquakes and reconstruction and five parties and eleven things still undone, with the Cap of Maintenance on its cushion on a table beside him and his own voice coming back at him off the white walls in a way that he had found, at the time, quite frightening.

He had never watched it on a laptop. He had never watched it from the outside at all.

It looked smaller.

“Who’s that?” said the boy from Evenlode.

“That’s the Lord Chancellor.”

“Why’s he got a bag?”

“It’s not a bag, it’s a purse. It has the Great Seal in it.”

“Why?”

Frederick thought about it. “I’ve never asked,” he said.

---

The Throne was empty.

He saw it when the camera came round. It stood at the end of the Chamber on its dais under its canopy, the gilded chair with the lion and the eagle on its back, and nobody was in it. Beside it and a little below it, where his own chair had been when he was seven, there was another chair, smaller, plainer, and in that chair, in a dark suit with a long ribbon across the chest, sat the Governor-General.

He had known it would be like this. He had read the papers in the box in August. When the King was out of the Realm, the Governor-General opened Parliament; it had always been so, under his father, for fifty-six years, and his father had been out of the Realm for most of them. That was what the Governor-General was for. He had known it would be like this. He had agreed to it.

He had not known that it would be the throne that he looked at.

“Why’s nobody in the big chair?” said the boy from Evenlode.

“Because he’s here,” said Kit, with great patience, as though explaining something to a dog.

“So nobody sits in it?”

“Nobody sits in it,” said Frederick. “If the King’s not there, nobody sits in it. The Governor-General sits beside it.”

The boy from Evenlode looked at the screen. He looked at the empty gilded chair with the lion and the eagle. He looked at Frederick, on the end of the sofa by the fire with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

“That’s a bit sad,” he said.

“Ollie,” said several people.

“What? It is. It’s a big chair and nobody’s in it.” Ollie looked back at the screen. “It looks lonely.”

Frederick looked at the chair. He ate a crisp.

“It’s used to it,” he said.

---

Then the Gentleman Usher of the Ebony Rod went down the long white corridor toward the Commons, in black, with his rod, and the eleven English sixth-formers in the room all sat forward at once.

“Oh, it’s like ours,” said a girl from Coln.

“It’s not like yours,” said Inés, from the floor by the window. “We’ve got Ebony Rod. You’ve got Black Rod. They’re different.”

“How are they different?”

Inés considered. “Ours is ebony,” she said.

On the screen, the Usher reached the doors of the Commons, and the doors stood open, and he walked straight through them.

There was a short silence in the Windrush common room.

“Wait,” said the girl from Coln. “Aren’t they going to slam the door?”

“No,” said Inés.

“They have to slam the door. They slam the door in his face. And he knocks on it three times with the stick. And then they let him in.” The girl looked round the room for support. “That’s the whole point. It’s about the King not being allowed in the Commons. Since Charles the First. Since he came in with soldiers to arrest the five members.”

“We didn’t have Charles the First,” said Inés. “Well. We did. But not like that. Our Commons were never invaded by the King. So nobody slams the door.” She went back to her book. “You slam yours because you were frightened of yours. We weren’t frightened of ours, so we leave it open.”

The girl from Coln looked at Frederick.

“Is that true?”

“I think so.”

“So in your country the King can just walk into the Commons?”

“The King can’t walk into the Commons,” said Frederick. “Nobody’s ever tried. The door’s open because nobody thinks he would.” He looked at the screen, at the open door, at the Usher walking through it and down the long green room between the benches. “It’s not the same thing.”

The girl from Coln looked at him for a while.

“Well, ours slams,” she said, with a kind of fierce local pride.

“I know,” said Frederick. “I’m going to find out next month.”

---

The Governor-General read the Speech.

It took twenty-two minutes. It was about the economy, and a bridge in Oregon, and the second year of the reconstruction of Los Angeles, and a bill about the Charter’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary in 2033, and the Realm’s position on the Arctic, and a number of other things that Frederick had read in the box in September and initialled, in pencil, as having been read. He knew all of it. He had argued with Lord Whitlock over two paragraphs of it on a video call in a boot room on a Thursday night. He had won one.

But it was strange to hear it in another voice.

It was strange to hear My Government said in another voice, in the Chamber on Charter Hill, from a smaller chair beside an empty one, about his Government, to his Parliament, while he sat on a sofa in Gloucestershire eating salt and vinegar crisps four thousand miles away and was not in the room and was not missed.

That was the thing. He had expected, somehow, to be missed. He had expected the Chamber to look wrong without him. And it did not look wrong at all. It looked exactly as it had looked for fifty-six years under his father, who had been in it, in person, perhaps one year in five. The Realm opened its Parliament. It read its Speech. It did not need him in the room to do it.

He thought about that for a while, on the sofa, by the fire.

He thought it was probably good.

“Is this the bit,” said Ollie, from the floor, “where they all have to stand up?”

“No,” said Frederick. “That’s at the end.”

“How long till the end?”

“Eleven minutes.”

Ollie lay back on the floor of the Windrush common room with his arms out.

“How did you do this,” he said, to the ceiling, “every year?”

---

Harold Quayle’s first column appeared in the New Westminster Evening Star on Thursday afternoon.

It came by email, at about ten at night English time, from the press office of the Household, which sent Frederick every morning a summary of everything that had been written about him in the Realm the day before, and had sent this one separately, with a note at the top in the press secretary’s flat careful prose: Sir, the Household thought you would wish to see this. It is not a cause for concern. It is, we think, intended to be funny.

It was headed: WHERE IS THE KING?

And under it, smaller, in italics: A weekly inquiry. By Harold Quayle.

Yesterday, wrote Harold Quayle, the Parliament of the United Kingdom of America was opened with all the usual ceremony by Her Excellency the Governor-General, in the presence of both Houses, the Diplomatic Corps, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chancellor’s purse, and a very large gilded chair with nobody in it.

Your correspondent has covered State Openings for thirty-four years. He has seen them opened by a King in person, by a Governor-General in the King’s absence, and once, memorably, in 1998, by a Governor-General who had flu and read the Speech through a handkerchief. He had never, until yesterday, seen one opened while the King was at school.

In England.

In a valley.

Your correspondent has been told by the Household, in terms of great courtesy, that the King’s whereabouts are a matter of public record and that he is at Coln Abbey School in the county of Gloucestershire until June. Your correspondent does not doubt it. He would merely like, as a citizen and a taxpayer, to know what the King is doing there, and is resolved to find out.

He will report weekly.

In the meantime, the following sightings have been received:

The King was seen on Wednesday 4 September at a crossroads in a field of bullocks, lost. (Source: a man in a pub.)

The King was seen on Saturday 7 September at a Highland games in Scotland, watching his Page of Honour be crushed by a tree. (Source: the Scotsman*, with photograph.)*

The King was seen on Saturday 14 September in a market in Cirencester eating something called a pasty with both hands. (Source: a woman who sells cheese.)

Your correspondent does not know what a pasty is. He intends to find out. He intends to find out everything.

Where is the King? Your correspondent will tell you next Thursday.

Frederick read it twice in the boot room, on his telephone, standing on the third step of the stairs with the telephone held against the window.

Then he went upstairs and read it to Theo.

Theo, in bed, laughed so much that Will came across the corridor in his pyjamas to see what was wrong, and then Will read it, and laughed, and then Kit came, and read it, and said, “A man in a pub,” with great bitterness. “That’s Jack Fennell. That’s got to be Jack Fennell. He told the whole New Inn on the Wednesday night. He stood on a chair.”

“Jack wouldn’t tell a newspaper,” said Will.

“Jack wouldn’t need to tell a newspaper. He stood on a chair.” Kit took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Somebody’s cousin will have been in. Somebody’s always got a cousin in.”

Frederick took the telephone back.

He looked at the column again, at the last line. Where is the King? Your correspondent will tell you next Thursday.

“Is the Household going to do anything?” said Will.

“No,” said Frederick.

“Can’t they stop him?”

“Stop him doing what? He’s right. He’s in the Realm and I’m here and he wants to know what I’m doing.” He looked at the screen. “Somebody ought to want to know.”

Theo, in bed, wiped his eyes on the duvet.

“Are you going to tell him?” said Theo.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because then he’d stop,” said Frederick.

---

On Thursday night, at a quarter to eleven English time, which was a quarter to six in the evening in New Westminster, he had his weekly audience with the Prime Minister.

It happened in the boot room.

This had not been anybody’s plan. It had been the only room in Windrush that the Household’s people could find in August with a door that locked, a wall thick enough that nothing would carry through it, and a power socket in the right place, and it had been fitted out over a weekend with a small desk, a chair, a lamp, a secure line in a grey box on the floor, and a screen. Everything else in it had stayed exactly where it had always been: forty pairs of rugby boots on wooden racks along two walls, a smell of mud and liniment so thick you could have leaned on it, and on the back of the door, on a hook, a single enormous sweater that nobody had claimed since 2011.

The screen lit up at a quarter to eleven exactly.

It showed, at first, a ceiling.

It was a white ceiling with an ornate plaster rose in the middle of it, and Frederick looked at it for some seconds, and then the picture lurched, violently, and swung downward, past the top of a window and a portrait of a man with a beard, and stopped, and filled entirely with a forehead.

“Sir,” said the forehead. “Good evening. Can you see me?”

“I can see some of you.”

“Which bit?”

“The forehead.”

“Ah.” The forehead withdrew a little way, and became a pair of eyebrows, and then a pair of light eyes, very close, peering. “Is that better?”

“You’re very close.”

“I’m told one has to be close. For the microphone.” The eyes peered. “It’s a new screen. The Cabinet Office sent it over. A young man came and showed me which button. I’ve forgotten which button.” The picture lurched again. “Is that.”

“That’s your tie,” said Frederick.

Caleb Whitlock, twenty-eight years old, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, commanding the confidence of the House of Commons as a member of the House of Lords in his own right, sat back in his chair in the study of the official residence on the Axis, and for the first time appeared on the screen in something like his entirety, which was a tall, heavy-set, fair young man with a slightly crooked tie and an expression of earnest and total concentration, as though the screen were a Bill he had been asked to explain to a committee.

“Sir,” he said. “My apologies. I am not good at this.”

“You walk down the Axis every Thursday,” said Frederick. “At a quarter to six. To the Palace.”

“I do, sir.”

“You don’t have to walk down the Axis this year.”

“I know, sir.” Whitlock looked faintly guilty. “I walked it anyway. Tonight. Out of habit. I got as far as the Palace gates and the policeman looked at me, and I looked at him, and I remembered, and walked back.” He straightened his tie. “It’s a mile each way. I’m told I’m the only Prime Minister who’s ever walked to a weekly audience with a King who was in another country.”

“Was it raining?”

“Very heavily, sir.”

They did the business. It took forty minutes. It was the Arctic, and a bridge in Oregon, and a disagreement between two Departments over who was responsible for the Charter’s anniversary, which Whitlock explained in a sequence of numbered points without notes, all from memory, as he always did, while the picture slowly, imperceptibly, crept closer, as he leaned in, until by point seven Frederick was looking once again at a forehead.

He did not say anything about it. He thought that it was probably the most honest thing about the Prime Minister that he had ever seen: a man so absorbed in what he was saying that he forgot, every time, how close he was.

At the end of it Whitlock sat back.

“That’s all, sir.”

“Thank you, Prime Minister.”

“Sir.” Whitlock hesitated. “May I ask one thing? Not business.”

“Of course.”

“Is it nice?” said the Prime Minister. “England. The school. Is it.” He looked faintly embarrassed. “My mother asked me to ask. She’s been reading the column. She said, ask him if it’s nice, Caleb, and I said I couldn’t possibly, and she said.” He stopped.

“What did she say?”

“She said that if I couldn’t ask my King if he was having a nice time at school I had no business being his Prime Minister,” said Whitlock, very fast.

Frederick looked at the screen. Behind Whitlock, on the desk in the study of the official residence on the Axis, a large ginger cat had appeared from somewhere and was walking along the edge of the desk with its tail straight up, behind the Prime Minister’s shoulder, toward the keyboard.

“It’s nice,” said Frederick. “Tell her it’s nice. Tell her the radiators work.”

Whitlock’s face lit up with surprise.

“The radiators work?”

“Every one.”

“Good heavens,” said the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, with deep feeling. “I’ll tell her.” He leaned forward to the screen again, closer, and closer. “Same time next week, sir?”

“Same time next week.”

“Good night, sir.”

“Good night, Prime Minister.” Frederick paused. “There’s a cat.”

Whitlock looked round.

The large ginger cat, which had reached the keyboard, looked back at him with great serenity, and sat down on it.

The screen went black.

Frederick sat in the boot room for a while, among forty pairs of rugby boots, under the single enormous sweater on the back of the door, and laughed until his ribs hurt.

---

On Saturday he wrote in the blue notebook:

Parliament opened without me. It was fine. Nobody sat in the chair. Ollie said it looked lonely. Harold Quayle wants to know where I am. The Prime Minister has a cat.

He looked at it.

Then he added, under it, smaller:

It’s nice. Tell her it’s nice.