The Cat

The audience was on Thursdays. It had been on Thursdays since the eleventh of September 2028, when a Prime Minister of twenty-six had been commissioned by the King, fourteen days before the King’s aircraft went into the Atlantic, and it had been on Thursdays all through the year in the Cotswolds, on a laptop, in a boot room, among forty pairs of rugby boots. It was the one fixed thing in the week. It was older than the bar.

The darts were also on Thursdays.

“I can’t miss the Cup,” said Frederick.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary, on the telephone, at four o’clock on Wednesday, in the voice of a man who had served three Sovereigns and had never before had to say the next sentence. “The Prime Minister’s audience is a constitutional obligation. The Cup is a darts competition.”

“It’s the second round. We’re playing the Lamplighter’s B team. Mr Delgado’s back’s gone. If I don’t play, they’ll have to put in Mr Quennell.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“I’ll speak to Lord Whitlock,” said the Private Secretary.

---

Lord Whitlock arrived at Eight Bars at a quarter past seven on Thursday the twenty-seventh of November with two red boxes, a protection officer, and a cat.

He came in through the front door, which nobody had expected, because nobody had expected him at all, the Private Secretary having telephoned at five to say only that the Prime Minister would make his own arrangements. He was a tall, heavy-set, fair young man of twenty-nine in a dark suit and an overcoat, and he filled the doorway, and behind him, in the doorway, was the protection officer, carrying the two red boxes, and in the crook of Whitlock’s left arm, enormous and orange and perfectly calm, looking round Eight Bars with the expression of a cat that had seen a great many rooms and did not expect to be impressed by this one, was the cat.

The bar went quiet.

It was very full. It was a Cup night, and the Lamplighter’s B team had brought their supporters, about forty, and Eight Bars had its own, about two hundred, and they were all in the bar, and every one of them looked at the door.

Whitlock looked at the bar.

“Sir,” he said, across forty feet of crowd. “I’ve brought the audience.”

---

There was nowhere else to put it.

The back room had the darts. The flat upstairs was the flat upstairs, and the Household had a view about the Prime Minister going up the back stairs past the lavatories that Dame M had expressed in advance, in writing, to the Private Secretary, in four words. So the audience was held at the end of the bar, on the two stools by the hatch, beside Kimura, who moved one stool to the left without being asked and went on drinking a pint of lager that Frederick had pulled at six for a man who had then wanted cider.

Whitlock sat on the end stool. The protection officer put the two red boxes on the bar in front of him, side by side, and then stood against the wall by the hatch with his hands folded, the way protection officers stood. The cat sat on the bar.

It sat on the bar between the two red boxes, upright, with its tail round its feet, and looked down the length of Eight Bars at two hundred and forty people and a dartboard, and closed its eyes very slowly, and opened them again, which in a cat is a form of greeting and in a Prime Minister’s cat, Frederick thought, was probably a form of government.

“He doesn’t like being left,” said Whitlock. “He gets into the boxes.”

“The red boxes?”

“He sleeps in them. He got into the Arctic papers in October and slept on the Svalbard annex. There was a hair on it when it came to you.” Whitlock opened the first box. “You initialled it anyway, sir.”

“I thought it was mine.”

“You don’t have ginger hair, sir.”

“I thought it was Theo’s.”

Whitlock considered this.

“Theo doesn’t have ginger hair either, sir,” he said, and took out the first paper.

Frederick, behind the bar, put a pint of bitter in front of him on a mat, at forty-five degrees, a finger of head. He had not been asked for it. He had seen Whitlock look at the taps when he sat down, and look away, in the way people looked at a thing they wanted and did not think they were allowed, and he had understood, for the first time in twelve weeks, without having to watch, that somebody wanted something, and what it was.

Whitlock looked at the pint.

“Sir,” he said. “I don’t think I can accept a drink from the Sovereign during the audience.”

“You’re not. You’re accepting a drink from the barman.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Rule One,” said Frederick. “There’s a whole committee about it.”

Whitlock looked at the pint a moment longer, and then picked it up and drank about a third of it, and put it down, and said, “That’s a good pint, sir,” with the expression of a man who has been Prime Minister for three years with a date on him like milk and has very rarely been brought something before he asked.

---

The audience was confidential. That was the point of it. It was the one conversation in the Realm that nobody wrote down: the Prime Minister and the King, alone, once a week, the government telling the Crown what it was doing, and the Crown asking questions, and nobody else in the room. It had been held in the Blue Drawing Room at Columbia Palace and in a study at Downing Street and on a laptop in a boot room in Gloucestershire. It had never, as far as anybody knew, been held in a bar.

So the bar did its best.

Two hundred and forty people in Eight Bars on a Cup night pretended, with tremendous concentration, not to be listening. They turned their backs on the end of the bar. They talked very loudly to each other about nothing. The Lamplighter’s B team, at the board, threw darts with exaggerated care and called out their scores in voices that were almost a shout, so as to make it quite clear that they were not hearing anything else. A man by the window started to sing, and was told to stop, and then started again, more quietly, to provide cover. Marcus, who was playing for Eight Bars that night instead of the trombone, stood with his back to the end of the bar and his hands over his ears, in an excess of discretion, until it was his turn to throw and Mr Abernathy had to tap him on the shoulder.

And Whitlock talked very quietly, leaning forward on the stool, and Frederick stood behind the bar with his elbows on it and leaned forward to listen, and between them, on the counter, the cat sat and looked at them both.

The business was the Arctic, and a disagreement between two Departments, now in its fourteenth month, and a bill about the Charter’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 2033, and something in the West about water, and the Loreto count, and a list. It took twenty minutes. At about the fifteenth minute the cat stood up.

It stood up slowly, stretched its front legs out along the counter, then its back legs, then its whole length, and then it began to walk. It walked down the bar. It walked very slowly, with its tail straight up, the way it had walked across the desk in the study on the Axis and across the keyboard in the boot room. It walked past Kimura’s lager. It walked past the bitter tap and the lager tap and the cider. It walked past the till. It walked past twenty people standing at the bar with their backs carefully turned, and every one of them saw it go past out of the corner of their eye and did not turn round, because they were not listening, and it walked to the far end of the bar, by the window, where the bar stopped, and there it found Mr Abernathy’s stool, the third from the window, which was empty, because Mr Abernathy was at the board, and it stepped down onto it, and turned round twice, and lay down, and went to sleep.

The bar did not know what to do.

Mr Abernathy came back from the board at twenty to eight, having won his leg, and found the Prime Minister’s cat asleep on his stool.

He looked at it.

The bar watched him look at it, from behind its own backs.

Then Mr Abernathy took out his red pen, and uncapped it, and pulled a beer mat towards him, and wrote on it, and put it on the bar beside the cat, and went and stood at the bar beside his stool, and Frederick pulled him a bitter, and he drank it standing up, for the first time in the eleven years, Mrs Merriweather said afterwards, since he had begun to come in.

On the beer mat it said: Occupied. B+.

---

“I’ve one more thing, sir,” said Whitlock, at the end. “It’s not on the list.”

“Go on.”

Whitlock looked at the second red box, which he had not opened, and then at the bar, and then at the jar.

The jar was on the bar by the till. It had been there since the second Friday. It was a large glass jar that had once held pickled onions, and Mrs Merriweather had washed it out and put it by the till and stuck a label on the front of it in her small handwriting, which said, in capitals, NOT TIPS, and under it, smaller, see Rule One. It was nearly full. It was full of coins, mostly, and some notes, and on the coins, every one of them, was the head of a young man of fifteen looking left.

“The Treasury,” said Whitlock, “has written to me about the jar.”

---

The letter was in the second red box. Whitlock took it out and laid it on the bar, and Frederick read it, standing behind the bar, with the cat asleep on Mr Abernathy’s stool at the other end and two hundred and forty people not listening.

It was from the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury. It was one page. It was four paragraphs. It began Prime Minister and ended I am, Prime Minister, your obedient servant, and between those it said, in four sentences of substance, with no apology, the following. That it had come to the Treasury’s attention that sums of money were being given to the Sovereign in his personal capacity by members of the public, in a receptacle on licensed premises in the Fourth Ward. That under the settlement by which the Crown’s finances were arranged, which the Treasury administered, any sum received by the Sovereign in a public capacity was received on behalf of the Crown and was to be accounted for. That the Treasury did not take a view as to whether service behind a bar was a public capacity, but noted that it was conducted in public, and that the sums were given by the public, and that the receptacle was, by its own label, the subject of a rule made by the Household. And that the Treasury would accordingly be grateful if the sums could be remitted to it, quarterly, and would be happy to discuss the arrangements at any time convenient to the Household.

Frederick read it twice.

“Can they do that?” he said.

“I asked the Attorney-General,” said Whitlock. “She said it’s arguable. She said it’s the most arguable thing she’s been asked since she took office.” He looked at the jar. “She said if it goes to the courts it’ll be the first case in the Realm’s history about whether the King can be tipped, and she’d very much like to argue it herself, and could she have the jar as an exhibit.”

“What do I do?”

Whitlock thought about it.

“Sir,” he said, “I’m afraid this is a matter on which I’m obliged to advise you, and I’m afraid my advice is that the Crown should give the Treasury the jar.” He looked at the letter. “Partly because they’ll get it in the end. Partly because I have to work with them. And partly,” he added, after a moment, “because it says in the last paragraph that they’ll be happy to discuss the arrangements, and in my experience when the Treasury says that, it means that the door is open, and it’s very important to walk through it before they remember to shut it.”

Frederick looked at the jar.

He looked at the coins in it, all those heads, looking left, and at the label in Mrs Merriweather’s small handwriting, NOT TIPS, and at Mrs Merriweather, at the till, who had heard every word, because she was eighteen inches away, and who was looking at the jar with an expression he had seen on her face once before, on the first Friday, when he had held up the little red handle.

“Fine,” he said.

Mrs Merriweather put her hand on the jar.

“I’ll want a receipt,” she said.

---

It was in the Evening Star on Saturday.

Somebody had told them. Nobody ever found out who; Kimura’s beer mat recorded at least eleven people at the end of the bar on Thursday night who had been not listening with particular intensity. The Star ran it on the front page under the headline TREASURY SEIZES KING’S TIPS, with a photograph of the jar, which somebody had taken on a telephone, and an editorial on page nine, under the heading A YEAR OF THIS?, which said that the King’s year behind a bar had begun as a charming novelty and was in danger of becoming an embarrassment, that the Sovereign had now been the subject of a ruling by the licensing authority, a letter from the Treasury, and an audience with the Prime Minister conducted in the presence of a cat, and that the paper respectfully wondered whether the Household might not consider bringing the experiment to an early close.

On Monday there was a letter on page eleven.

It was the first letter Harold Quayle had written to the editor of the Evening Star in forty-one years, which was the length of time he had worked for the Evening Star, from 1990 until June, when he had written his last column and retired. He had written it on Saturday afternoon on his stool at Eight Bars, the second from the door, which he had sat on every Saturday since September, with a half of bitter, in pencil, on four beer mats, and Mrs Merriweather had typed it up for him on the computer in the back room, and he had walked it down to the Star’s offices on the Axis himself, because he said it was the only way to make sure they printed it.

It said:

Sir. For forty years I wrote in your pages, and for a year of them I wrote every week to ask where the King was. He is now at the end of my street, two blocks from the school he went to, behind a bar, where anybody can see him, every Friday, for the price of a pint. He changes kegs badly. He cannot give change from a hundred without counting his own face out loud. He has been fined by his landlady, ruled against by a licensing inspector, beaten at darts by his own father, and robbed by the Treasury of a jar of coins with his own head on them. He has done all of this in public, in front of anybody who cares to watch, without once asking anybody to look away. Your editorial asks whether this is an embarrassment. Sir, in forty years of watching the Crown from your offices, I have never seen it less embarrassed. I am, Sir, yours faithfully, Harold Quayle, a regular.

The Star printed it in full. It was the first letter to the editor in the paper’s history to receive more replies than the editorial it was answering.

On Tuesday, in the back room of Eight Bars, the committee adopted Rule Twelve.

Rule Twelve. Sums given to the Sovereign in a receptacle on licensed premises are the property of the Treasury, quarterly, and the Sovereign shall not be consulted.

Bridget voted against.

On Friday, a second jar appeared on the bar by the till. It was another pickled-onion jar. Mrs Merriweather had washed it out and stuck a new label on it in her small handwriting. The label said THEO, and under it, smaller, not the King, see Rule Twelve, and although Theo was at medical school, learning about the kidneys, and would not be behind the bar for another fortnight, by closing on Friday it was half full.