Fife

Alistair Rennie came on the bus.

He came on the 860 from Cirencester at a quarter past six on Saturday evening, with two protection officers and a private secretary and a carrier bag from a supermarket in Fife, and he got off at the war memorial in a dark overcoat and a scarf in the colours of a football club that had not won anything since 1987, and stood on the green in the cold, and looked at the New Inn, and at the cricket pitch beyond it under the November dark, and said, to nobody, “Aye. That’s the one.”

Mick Fennell, who had driven the bus, leaned out of the cab.

“Three sixes, Prime Minister,” he said. “In one over.”

“I’m aware of it, Mr Fennell.”

“Off your bowling.”

“I’m aware whose bowling it was.”

“Over the church,” said Mick. “The second one. Went over the church. They found it in the vicarage.”

“I’ve had the report,” said the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and walked across the green to the New Inn, where Jack Fennell was standing in the doorway in his apron with his arms folded, and stopped in front of him, and they looked at each other.

“Prime Minister,” said Jack.

“Mr Fennell.”

“Drinks are on the house,” said Jack. “Mum says. Since June. Every time you come in. For being a good sport.”

“I’ve been in once since June.”

“Then you’re owed,” said Jack, and stood aside, and the Prime Minister went in.

---

The King was behind the bar. That was the arrangement for the second night: the King behind the bar, Jack on the other side of it, as a customer, for the first time in his life, which he found so difficult that he kept getting up from his stool to fetch things, and being told by his mother to sit down. Sue was at the end of the bar. Mrs Haverfield was on the window seat with Ernest. The Duke had gone back to London on the morning train, having made the longest sentence anybody had heard from him since Christmas on the platform at Kemble, which was Tell Rennie. The Islay. Not. The other, and Frederick did not yet know what it meant.

Rennie came to the bar, and took off his scarf, and put the carrier bag on the counter.

“Sir,” he said.

“Prime Minister.”

“I’m told,” said Rennie, “that you’ve had whisky three times.”

Frederick thought about it.

“Four,” he said. “Soho in May. Phoenix in August. Ottawa in September.” He paused. “And a Calvados in Normandy, which isn’t whisky, but I liked it.”

“And the whisky?”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Any of it?”

“None of it.”

“The Ottawa was on the television,” said Rennie. “I saw your face. My wife saw your face. The whole Cabinet saw your face. The Secretary of State for Scotland saw your face, and came to see me about it, in a state.” He took off his overcoat and gave it to the private secretary without looking round. “That was rye, sir. That was an Albian rye. It’s a fine drink. But it’s not whisky, not in the sense we mean, and you drank it in one go, standing up, in front of three cameras, with a minister watching.” He looked at the bar. “That’s not drinking whisky. That’s a hostage video.”

“Prime Minister,” said Mr Quennell, from the end of the bar, beside Kimura. “Rule Five.”

“I’ve read your rules, son.”

“The Sovereign shall not taste spirits on live television.”

“There’s no television,” said Rennie. “I’ve seen to it. There’s a photographer from the Echo on the stairs who’s been told by Downing Street that if he lifts his camera I’ll have the Echo reclassified as a hazardous substance.” He opened the carrier bag. “This isn’t a state occasion. This is a lesson.”

---

There were three bottles in the carrier bag. He took them out one at a time and set them on the bar in a row, and they were not like the rye in Ottawa or the bottle on the whisky wall in Phoenix. They were plain, two of them, with small labels in small type, and the third had no label at all, only a piece of masking tape on the side with something written on it in pencil.

“Three,” said Rennie. “From three corners of a country you are, I’d remind you, the King of. Speyside.” He touched the first. “Islay.” The second. “And Fife.” He touched the third, the one with the masking tape. “Which nobody’s ever heard of, and which is the best of the lot, and which my brother-in-law makes in a shed outside Auchtermuchty, which is entirely legal, sir, and I’d thank you not to ask.” He looked at Sue. “Three glasses, Mrs Fennell, if you would. The wee ones. And a jug of water. And a teaspoon.”

“A teaspoon?”

“A teaspoon.”

Sue brought them. Three small glasses with stems, like little tulips. A jug. A teaspoon. Rennie poured a finger into each, from the three bottles, slowly, and pushed the first one across the bar to the King.

“Don’t drink it,” he said.

Frederick looked at him.

“Smell it. Just smell it. Not like that, not like you’re checking it for poison. Hold it under your nose. Lower. Breathe through your mouth a bit as well. There.” Rennie watched him. “What do you get?”

Frederick breathed.

He had expected the bonfire. The burnt bakery floor. The thing that had come up out of the glass in Soho and Phoenix and Ottawa and hit him in the back of the throat before it had reached his mouth. It was there. But it was further away than it had been, behind something else, and the something else was sweet, and he did not know what it was, and he stood there with the glass under his nose, trying to find a word.

“Pears,” he said at last.

Rennie looked at him with the expression of a man who has been in politics for thirty years and has very occasionally been surprised.

“Aye,” he said. “Pears. That’s Speyside.” He picked up the teaspoon. “Now.”

He dipped the teaspoon in the jug and let one drop of water fall off the end of it into the glass. One drop. Frederick watched it go in, and saw the whisky do something, a small swirl, like smoke turning over.

“Now smell it again.”

He did.

The pears were bigger. There was something else behind them, honey or toffee, and the bonfire had gone so far back that it was only a sort of warmth, like a room with a fire in it that you can’t see.

“Now drink it,” said Rennie. “Not all of it. A wee bit. Hold it in your mouth. Don’t swallow straight away. Let it sit.” He watched. “Now swallow. And breathe out through your nose.”

Frederick did.

It was warm, and it was sweet, and it was pears, and then, at the very end, as he breathed out, there was something long and dry and almost salt, like the air at the top of a hill, and it stayed there, after the whisky had gone, for a long time.

He put the glass down.

He did not say anything. He could not think of anything. He stood behind the bar of the New Inn looking at the little tulip glass with a finger of Speyside in the bottom of it and one drop of water, and his face, which had been broadcast to every household in New Albion folding up like a paper bag, stayed quite still for a moment, and then it did something he had felt it do once before, in Le Mascaret, with the Calvados.

“Oh,” he said.

“Aye,” said Alistair Rennie, very quietly. “Oh.”

---

Jack, on his stool, on the wrong side of the bar, had been watching all of this with his arms folded and his mouth slightly open.

“Do me one,” he said.

“You don’t like whisky,” said Sue, from the end of the bar.

“I don’t know if I like whisky. I’ve never had whisky. I’ve had Dad’s, at Christmas, that he keeps in the van.” He looked at Rennie. “It tasted like a bonfire.”

“Your father’s whisky,” said Rennie gravely, “is not whisky. Your father’s whisky is a crime. I’ve tasted it. He gave me a glass in June. In the bus. As a consolation.” He poured a finger of the Speyside into a fourth glass and pushed it across. “Smell it. Not like that.”

Jack smelled it. Not like that. Then like that.

“Pears,” he said, astonished.

---

The Islay was next.

“Your father,” said Rennie, pouring, “said the Islay. Not the other.”

“He said that to me. On the platform. I didn’t know what it meant.”

“He means,” said Rennie, “that you’ll like the Islay. He told me in June. At the cricket. He came up to me at the tea interval with that stick he had then and said, My son. Islay. That was all. I’ve been thinking about it for five months.” He pushed the glass across. “Your father was in the officers’ mess at Cranwell in 1968. So was my father. It was my father who taught your father to drink Islay. Did you know that?”

Frederick stared at him.

“No.”

“No, well. Nobody tells anybody anything in your family, as far as I can make out. My father was a flight lieutenant from Kirkcaldy and your father was a pilot officer who was going to be King of fourteen countries and had never been allowed to buy his own drink. And one night my father bought him one.” Rennie put a drop of water in. “This one. More or less. A different bottle. Same island.”

Frederick smelled it.

It was the bonfire. It was the whole bonfire, the one from Soho and Phoenix and Ottawa, and it came straight up out of the glass, smoke and tar and seaweed and something like the inside of a church that has been burnt down, and he nearly put it down, and then, behind the smoke, a very long way behind it, something sweet, very faint, like a wave.

He drank.

It was enormous. It filled his whole head. It was smoke and the sea and wet rope and burnt sugar and iodine, and he held it in his mouth the way Rennie had said, and swallowed, and breathed out through his nose, and the smoke went all the way down into his chest and stayed there, warm, and he had the strangest feeling, standing behind the bar of the New Inn in a village in Gloucestershire in November, of standing at the edge of the sea at night, in the wind, on a beach he had never been to.

He put the glass down.

He looked at it.

“Can I have another one?” he said.

---

At the end of the bar, Kimura uncapped her pen and wrote on her beer mat, and turned it over so that nobody could see, and wrote something else.

On the window seat, Mrs Haverfield said, quite loudly, to Ernest, “Well, that’s him done for,” and Ernest woke up, and looked at the bar, and went back to sleep.

---

The Fife was last. The one with the masking tape. Rennie poured it at a quarter to ten, when the pub was full and loud and the fire was high and the King had been behind the bar for four hours and had served a hundred people and dropped two glasses and been told by Sue that he was coming along, which from Sue was a medal.

“My brother-in-law,” said Rennie, “has been making this for eleven years. In a shed. It’s three years old, which is as young as it’s allowed to be and still be called whisky, and it tastes like it, and I love it more than anything in a bottle anywhere.” He poured. “It’s not as good as the Speyside. It’s not as big as the Islay. It’s just Fife.” He pushed it across. “Like me.”

Frederick drank it.

It was rough, and young, and sweet, and a bit hot, and there was something in it like the smell of a cut field, and it was not as good as the Speyside and not as big as the Islay, and he understood, all at once, why the Prime Minister of Great Britain loved it more than anything.

“It’s good,” he said.

“It’s not.”

“It’s good,” said Frederick. “It’s not the best. It’s good.”

Rennie looked at him across the bar.

“Aye,” he said, after a while. “That’s it exactly.” And then, after another while, in a different voice, the flat Fife voice that Frederick had heard at Downing Street and on the cricket field and over the telephone at eleven at night above the Atlantic: “I’ve been your Prime Minister in this country for three years and I’ve no idea what you think about anything, sir. That’s the job. You don’t say. I don’t ask. That’s how it works.” He picked up the Fife glass and looked at the masking tape. “But I’ll tell you something. That’s the first time I’ve seen you like something that wasn’t on the schedule.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Your father,” said Rennie, “would be pleased.”

---

On Sunday, on the aeroplane, Mr Quennell drafted.

He drafted for an hour, across the aisle, with his tongue between his teeth, and at the end of it he showed Frederick the page. At the top it said DRAFT, FOR TUESDAY. Under it there was one paragraph, crossed out three times and rewritten, and at the bottom, in the margin, in very small letters, a question mark.

Rule Eleven. The Sovereign shall not express a preference for the whisky of any one part of any realm over another.

“I’m not sure it’s needed, sir,” said Mr Quennell. “But Kimura says you said Islay in your sleep.”

Across the aisle, Kimura did not open her eyes.

“Twice,” she said.