Confidence

They had opened the Lexington passage on the Monday.

He came up it at five to seven on the Thursday, on the left, against the people coming down, the way he had come up it every morning for two years before the first of May; and it was the passage. Low and long. The floor polish and the coffee and the trains under it. The clock in AmRail’s colours on the wall, two minutes fast; somebody had put it back up, or it had never come down. Men in raincoats with papers under their arms going down. Women in trainers with their good shoes in a bag. Fewer of them. But going.

And halfway up, on the right, against the wall, the chair.

It was the same chair. He knew it by the brass rail for the feet, which had a dent in it now, a long one, on the left side, where something had hit it, and by the two steps, which were scuffed white at the edges. Somebody had mended it. The back had been split on the first of May, he had seen it split when he lifted it off the old man, and it was not split now; there was a new piece of wood let into it, pale, not yet stained to match, with the screw heads showing. The box under it with the brushes and the tins. The stool. And on the wall behind it, in the old frame, which had lost its glass on the first of May and hung by one corner, a photograph. Not the old one. A new one, in colour, small, taken with somebody’s telephone and printed out: the chair, in the passage, empty, with the brass rail and the two steps, and the box under it, and nobody in it, and nobody beside it.

And beside the chair, in his brown work coat with his rag over his shoulder, Mr Pettiford.

There was a scar on the side of his head, in the grey hair above his ear, where the blood had come out through the white. A long one. Pink, with the marks of the stitches still beside it. He was standing the way he stood, by the chair, waiting for the first pair of shoes of the day.

He saw Tom come up the passage.

“Officer,” said Mr Pettiford.

---

He heard it.

He stopped on the left side of the passage with the people going past him and heard it, all of it, the whole word, clearly, the first word since the first of May that had come to him without going through a wall first: not flat, not far off, not blurred, but there, in the passage, in the old man’s voice, which he had not known he knew until he heard it, low and dry and with something at the back of it like a laugh it was not going to let out. Officer. The way he said it every morning. With a perfectly straight face.

He stood there.

He did not know what his own face was doing. He thought it was probably doing what the face of the man by the door in the lobby of the Municipal Building had done at two o’clock on the first of May at the fourth of the four names, when it had been a face like a closed door all afternoon and then opened. He did not do anything to stop it.

Mr Pettiford looked at him. The straight face did not move. Not by a hair. The eyes in it were very dark, the way they had been on the floor of the passage under the chair with the blood running down through the white, and there was something in them that was not the joke, and the face held the joke anyway. It held it up for him, the way it had then. Like a light.

“Mr Pettiford,” said Tom.

He heard his own voice. A little. From inside his head, mostly, the way you hear yourself with a cold. But he heard it.

Mr Pettiford looked down at his shoes.

Tom stood there and let him.

They were black. They had been black since the second of May at a quarter to six, when the first sun came in through the window over his father’s sink and touched their toes on the lino by the back door. He had not done them since. He had not needed to. His father had done them again on the Sunday, at the kitchen table, after dinner, with the old tin and the old brush and the black cloth from forty years of boots, while Frank sat across the table with his ribs strapped and watched and did not say anything, and his mother washed up; and they shone.

Mr Pettiford looked at them for a long time.

“Those aren’t your work,” said Mr Pettiford.

“No.”

“Those are old school.” He bent a little, with a hand on the chair, and looked closer, at the welts, at the heels. “That’s a man who was taught by a man who was in the army, or on the boats, or on the steel. That’s forty years in a tin.” He straightened up. “Who did those?”

“My father.”

Mr Pettiford nodded, slowly, as though that explained something he had been wondering about for some time.

“Tell your father,” said Mr Pettiford, “that they’re better than mine.”

And looked away up the passage at the next pair coming.

---

The concourse was half a concourse.

The west half was open. Anybody with a ticket; anybody without one; anybody. The floor was swept and the marble was clean and the booth was there in the middle with its clock, saying seven in four directions. The flowers had gone from round it. They had gone on the Tuesday after the King, the families had agreed it, to a room off the west balcony that the station had given over, where they were being kept, the cards and the photographs and the six red caps and the nineteen papers, until somebody decided what to do with them.

The east half was behind a hoarding.

A long wall of plywood, painted dark green, the green of the ceiling, right across the floor from the foot of the east balcony to the Forty-Second Street side, twenty feet high, with a door in it for the builders and a sign on it with the Corporation’s crest that said the concourse was being restored to its original drawings and thanked the public for its patience. Behind it, over the top of it, you could see the scaffolding going up to the ceiling, and the nets, and men on the scaffolding with lamps, very high, at the holes, putting the stars back.

The floor went round.

Thinner. He stood with his back to the booth and watched it. The trains were coming in again, some of them, on the lower level and on the upper tracks on the west side, and the people were coming up off them and across the west half of the floor and out through the doors to the city; and there were fewer of them, and they walked a little faster, some of them, and some of them looked up at the hoarding, and at the scaffolding over it, as they went; and some of them did not look at anything.

But they went round. In every direction. Without touching. He watched it for a long time, and nobody touched anybody.

---

Nico came at ten.

He came up the Lexington passage with his case and stopped at the mouth of it where it came out onto the floor, and looked at Tom, and at Teresa beside him, and did not say anything.

He did not ask. Tom saw that. He did not say it’s the first of May, everybody’s marching, the market office is shut. He stood at the mouth of the passage with the case in front of him in both hands like a man holding a hat, and waited, and looked at Teresa, because it had been Teresa, twice, and Tom, twice, and then on the first of May Tom; and he did not know which of them it was going to be.

Teresa looked at him for a long moment. She looked at the case.

“Go on, Nico,” said Teresa.

Tom heard it. Not all of it. Her voice came to him with the edges still blurred, but it came, the shape of it, and the shape was go on.

Nico knelt down and opened the case.

He played the first one. The one that went up at the end like a question. Tom heard most of it. Not the very top of the question; the very top went somewhere he could not follow it yet. But the rest.

He played the second one, the wedding one, round and round on itself, and a man going past with a suitcase smiled without knowing he was smiling.

Then the third.

Tom heard the bottom of it. The long way down, into the low strings, where the fiddle sounded like a man’s voice; that came clear now, all of it, with nothing in the way. And then it went up, very high, and he watched Nico’s fingers go up the neck, and the bow, and the note that held; and he heard some of it. Not all. The start of it. A thin high bright line that came through to him for a second and a half, two seconds, like light through a crack in a door, and then went somewhere above where he could follow, and he watched the rest of it instead, Nico holding it, on and on, with his eyes shut, and the people on the floor near the passage stopping, and turning round, and standing.

Teresa was beside him. She was not watching Nico. She was watching Tom.

He did not look at her. He did not need to.

---

At a quarter to three the day tour came off and went down to the canteen and the television on its steel bracket in the corner had the Commons on it.

Everybody knew. It had been on the radio all day, and in the papers that morning on every stand on every corner, and in the muster room at seven when the Inspector read the day: the Opposition’s motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister and his ministry, debated since eleven, the division at a quarter to three. The canteen was full. The day tour coming off and the late tour coming on and people from upstairs who had no business in the canteen at a quarter to three, standing along the walls with cups, looking up.

He sat at a table with Teresa. He could hear the television; the canteen had turned it up as far as it would go, and he could hear the House, the noise of it, like surf on a beach a long way off, coming and going.

The picture was the chamber. Empty benches; the House had gone out to divide. The Speaker in his chair at the end in his wig, high up. The clerks at the table. The mace.

Then the tellers.

Four men, coming in from the lobbies behind the Speaker’s chair, in a line, and walking up the floor of the House between the empty benches to the table, and stopping in front of it, in a row, the way the four men with the poles had stopped at the foot of the ramp with the old red banner between them.

The House was coming back in behind them. Filling the benches. Fast. He heard the noise of it, the surf, rising.

One of the tellers spoke. A sheet of paper in his hand.

He could not hear the words. He could hear the voice, flat and far off, a man reading two numbers, the same way they had all read their sheets of paper since the first of May. And he could hear, after the first number and before the second, the House: the surf, all at once, very loud, a wave coming in on the beach, and then breaking, and going back.

The white letters came up along the bottom of the screen.

NO-CONFIDENCE MOTION DEFEATED. GOVERNMENT SURVIVES BY ELEVEN.

---

The canteen made a sound.

He heard it. It was not one sound. It was several, together, and he could hear that it was several. At the table by the counter three men from the late tour had their fists in the air, and their mouths open. At the table by the stairs two women from upstairs had their hands over their faces. Along the wall a man he did not know was shaking his head, slowly, once to the left and once to the right, the way Tom’s father did. Bernadette at the counter had put her spatula down and was looking at the screen with her arms folded. Most of the room was not doing anything. Most of the room was sitting with its cup and looking at the television, and its face was not doing anything at all.

On the screen, the front bench.

The Prime Minister was sitting on it, where he had sat on Monday night with his hands on his knees looking at the floor between his feet while the thin grey minister read from a sheet of paper that the file had never been opened. He was sitting there now. Around him, on the front bench and behind it, his own side were on their feet, some of them, a few, cheering, with their order papers waving; and the Prime Minister was not on his feet. He was sitting with his hands on his knees.

He was not looking at the floor this time. He was looking across the House, at the benches opposite, at the Leader of the Opposition, who was sitting too, with his arms folded and his face set like a rock; and the two of them looked at each other across the floor of the House, over the table and the mace, for a long moment, while the benches round them made the noise of the surf; and neither of them did anything with his face at all.

Then the Prime Minister looked down at the paper in his hand, and folded it in half, and in half again, the long way, and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

---

Teresa leaned across the table to his left ear.

…he’s going to go anyway.

He heard it. He looked at her.

“How do you know?”

He heard himself say it, from inside his head. She heard it too; he saw her hear it.

She looked at the screen. At the man on the front bench with his hands on his knees and the folded paper in his pocket, who had won the division by eleven and was not on his feet.

She did not answer straight away. She looked for a long time.

…look at him, said Teresa.

He looked at him.

On the screen the picture went from the House to the studio, and the man at the desk, and the white letters, GOVERNMENT SURVIVES BY ELEVEN, and the canteen went back to its breakfasts that were not breakfasts and its tea, and the noise in it went down, slowly, the surf going out; and he sat at the table with Teresa and could hear it go.

It was a quarter past three. Upstairs the late tour was signing on, in the book by the door, one at a time, and he could hear, very faintly, through the ceiling of the canteen, the sound of their feet on the lino of the muster room, walking.