Three Capitals

It was Mr Quennell who explained it, on the aeroplane, with the blue folder open on the tray table and three pages clipped together with a red clip.

“South Africa,” he said, “has three capitals.”

“I know.”

“The government sits in Pretoria. The Parliament sits in Cape Town. The courts sit in Bloemfontein. It was the arrangement at Union in 1910, so that no one of the old colonies would be the capital of the others.” He turned a page. “When the Household wrote in October to the Governor-General’s office to say that the King would work a bar in South Africa in February, it asked which city would host him.”

“And?”

“Pretoria said Pretoria,” said Mr Quennell, “on the grounds that it is the seat of the executive, and the King is the head of the executive. Cape Town said Cape Town, on the grounds that it is the seat of Parliament, and the King is part of Parliament. Bloemfontein said Bloemfontein, on the grounds that it is the judicial capital, and the King is the fount of justice, and also that nobody ever comes to Bloemfontein.” He looked at the pages. “The Governor-General’s office proposed a compromise.”

“Which was?”

“All three,” said Mr Quennell. “One night each. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And each city to arrange its own ceremony.”

Frederick looked at the three pages with the red clip.

“How long are the ceremonies?”

Mr Quennell turned to the first page.

“Pretoria is eleven minutes,” he said. “Cape Town has not yet confirmed.” He paused. “Bloemfontein says it is considering its position.”

---

Pretoria was eleven minutes.

The bar was in a street of jacaranda trees, bare now, in late summer, and it was called the Union Arms, and it had been the Union Arms since 1911, a long low red-brick building with a deep verandah and a corrugated iron roof that ticked in the heat like a clock. The ceremony was on the verandah at five o’clock. It was a guard of honour of the South African Army, in khaki, twenty men, and a band, and the two anthems, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and Die Stem, sung one into the other, the way they had been sung since 1994, in five languages, by the guard and the band and the crowd in the street and the landlord and the King, who had learned the words on the aeroplane from Mr Quennell’s folder, phonetically, and then God Save the King, and then the landlord, a large calm man called Mr Mahlangu, made a speech of welcome of four minutes, in English and Afrikaans and isiZulu, and the King made a speech of thanks of two minutes, in English, and the guard presented arms, and it was eleven minutes, exactly, by Theo’s watch.

Theo timed everything now. He had timed everything since Clare, since the bodhrán. He stood beside the King on the verandah of the Union Arms in the Cranwell apron, which he had stopped arguing about, with his watch on his wrist and his eyes on it, and at the end of the speech of thanks he looked up and said, very quietly, “Eleven. On the nose,” with the satisfaction of a man who has kept a beat.

Then they went in, and behind the bar, and he pulled beer for six hours, in rand, which were the coins with his head on them, and Mr Mahlangu said at closing that it had been the best night in the Union Arms since the twenty-seventh of April 1994, and Frederick said he was sure that wasn’t true, and Mr Mahlangu said, very seriously, no, sir, it’s not, but it was very good, and they shook hands.

Mr Quennell’s folder said: Pretoria. Ceremony, 11 minutes. Bar, 6 hours. Satisfactory.

---

On Tuesday, Cape Town confirmed. Twenty-nine minutes.

“Why twenty-nine?” said Frederick.

“The Speaker’s office,” said Mr Quennell, “has advised that the Parliament wishes to mark the occasion in a manner appropriate to the legislative capital.” He looked at the email on his telephone. “The Usher of the Black Rod will attend. With the rod. The Mace will be carried. The Speaker will read an address from the House.” He scrolled. “And the National Assembly has resolved, by a margin I’m told was very close, that since Pretoria’s ceremony was eleven minutes, it would be inappropriate for the seat of Parliament to be seen to do less.”

“So they did more.”

“So they did more,” said Mr Quennell. “Twenty-nine minutes.” He put the telephone down. “There was an amendment for thirty-five. It failed.”

---

Cape Town was twenty-nine minutes.

The bar was at the bottom of the city, near the harbour, under the mountain, which had a cloud on it, flat and white, poured over the edge of the top like a tablecloth, and it was called the Mount Pleasant, and it had been the Mount Pleasant since 1860, and the ceremony was in the street outside it, which had been closed, at five o’clock on Wednesday, in a wind off the sea that Theo said was the best wind I have ever been in, it’s like Wellington, I want to live here as well.

There was a guard of honour of the Navy, in white. There was a band. There were the two anthems, sung one into the other, and God Save the King. Then the Usher of the Black Rod came down the street from a car, in black, with the rod, and knocked on the door of the Mount Pleasant three times, because, she said afterwards, it seemed the thing to do, and the landlady, a woman called Mrs Arendse, who had not been told she would do this, opened it, and Black Rod said the House is here, and the Mace was carried in, on a man’s shoulder, gold and enormous, and laid on the bar.

The Speaker read the address.

It was nine minutes. It recalled the history of the Union. It recalled the Parliament’s long relationship with the Crown, and the day in 1994 when the King’s father had come to Cape Town to open the first democratic Parliament, and the House’s gratitude for the King’s presence in the legislative capital, and its conviction that this was the correct capital for such a presence, which it said with a slight emphasis that the crowd in the street caught at once, and cheered. Then it recalled several things about pubs, which the Speaker’s clerks had evidently researched, including the fact that the Mount Pleasant had been the first licensed premises in the Cape to serve a woman at the bar, in 1922, and Mrs Arendse, who had not known this, said really? out loud, and the Speaker said yes, really, and went on.

The King replied. He made it four minutes, because Theo, beside him, had leaned over before he started and said very quietly Pretoria was two, and he had understood.

Then the Mace was carried out again, and Black Rod knocked on the door from the inside, three times, to get out, and the guard presented arms, and it was twenty-nine minutes by Theo’s watch, and they went in.

Mr Quennell’s folder said: Cape Town. Ceremony, 29 minutes. Bar, 5 hours 31 minutes. Satisfactory. Mace left a mark on the bar.

---

On Thursday, Bloemfontein confirmed.

Mr Quennell read the email twice before he said anything. Then he put the telephone face down on the table of the hotel breakfast room and looked at it.

“Seventy-four minutes,” he said.

Kimura, at the next table, put down her coffee.

“Seventy-four?”

“The Chief Justice,” said Mr Quennell, “has advised the Household that the judiciary has observed the ceremonies at Pretoria and Cape Town with interest. The judiciary notes that the executive capital took eleven minutes and the legislative capital took twenty-nine. The judiciary does not wish to make any comparison between the branches of the constitution.” He picked the telephone up again and read from it. “It does, however, wish to observe that the judicial capital has not been visited by a reigning sovereign since 1947, and that it intends to make the most of it.”

“What’s in seventy-four minutes?” said Frederick.

Mr Quennell scrolled.

“A guard of honour,” he said. “The two anthems. God Save the King. Every judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal, in robes, in procession, from the court to the bar, which is four hundred yards. A reading of the judicial oath. A reading of the oath in each of the eleven constitutional languages.” He scrolled. “An address from the Chief Justice. An address from the Judge President of the Free State. An address from the Mayor. A choir.” He stopped scrolling. “A choir of eighty.”

“Eighty.”

“From the university.” He put the telephone down. “They’ve been rehearsing since Tuesday.”

Theo, across the table, had his watch on and was looking at it.

“Seventy-four minutes,” he said. “And the bar opens at six.” He did the sum. “If it starts at five, I mean, it’s six fourteen before you’re behind the bar.” He looked up. “Freddie. What happens to the beer?”

---

It was a hundred and two degrees in Bloemfontein at five o’clock on Friday the twenty-seventh of February.

The bar was in the middle of the town, on a square with a sandstone church and a row of old shops with deep verandahs, and it was called the Free State Hotel, and it had been the Free State Hotel since 1882, and the landlord, a tall old man called Mr Botha who had owned it for forty years, had decided, because it was a hundred and two degrees and the ceremony was seventy-four minutes long and he was a man who had been a landlord in the Free State for forty years and knew what heat did, to pour the first round in advance.

So at a quarter to five, before the ceremony began, Mr Botha had poured a tray of beer. Twelve glasses. For the guard of honour and the judges and the King, to be drunk at the end of the seventy-four minutes, as a toast. He had poured them beautifully, Frederick saw, a perfect finger of head on each, and set the tray on a table on the verandah in the shade, with a cloth over it, and there it sat, under the corrugated iron roof, in a hundred and two degrees, while the ceremony began.

The guard of honour marched in. That was three minutes.

The two anthems. Four minutes. God Save the King. One.

Then the judges came. They came out of the Supreme Court of Appeal four hundred yards away in procession, in red robes, slowly, as judges walk, in order of seniority, the Chief Justice at the front, and they came down the street in the heat at the speed of judges, which was, Theo said afterwards, timing it, about one and a half miles an hour, and it took them eleven minutes to reach the square, and when they reached it they had to stand in a line in front of the verandah in their robes in a hundred and two degrees while the judicial oath was read.

In English. And then in Afrikaans. And then in isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Xitsonga, siSwati, Tshivenda and isiNdebele. Eleven times. It took nineteen minutes.

Frederick stood on the verandah through all of it, in a dark suit, with the sweat running down the inside of his shirt, and listened to the oath in eleven languages, and thought that it was, in fact, very beautiful, and that he had never heard anything like it, and that if he had been told about it in advance he would have asked for it, and that the tray of beer on the table beside him under the cloth was getting warmer by the minute.

At the end of the oath, a judge in the second row, an old man, swayed.

Theo saw it before anybody else. Theo saw everything like that before anybody else. He was off the verandah and down the steps and beside the judge in about four seconds, in the Cranwell apron, with a hand under the old man’s elbow and the other on his back, saying something quiet, and the judge sat down, on the steps of the verandah, in his red robe, very slowly, and Theo knelt beside him and took his wrist and looked at his watch and counted, and the whole of the square watched, and the choir of eighty from the university, which had been about to begin, did not begin.

“He’s all right,” said Theo, after thirty seconds, to the Chief Justice, who had come down the line. “He’s hot. He’s been standing in a robe in a hundred and two degrees for half an hour.” He looked up. “He needs water and the shade and nobody to read anything at him for ten minutes.”

The Chief Justice of South Africa looked at the Page of Honour kneeling in an apron on the steps of the Free State Hotel.

Then she looked at the line of judges in their robes in the sun, and at the choir of eighty, and at the Mayor, with his address, and the Judge President, with his, and at the King, on the verandah, in his suit, and at the tray of beer under its cloth.

“Mr Botha,” said the Chief Justice. “Is there shade inside?”

“There’s shade and fans and a bar, ma’am.”

“Then I think,” said the Chief Justice, “that the judiciary will continue the ceremony indoors.” She looked at the Mayor. “In an abridged form.”

---

The abridged form was the choir.

Eighty students from the university filed into the Free State Hotel, which held a hundred and twenty, behind thirty judges in robes and a guard of honour and the King and the Mayor, who did not get to read his address and was later found to be greatly relieved, and stood along the back wall under the fans, and sang. They sang a song in Sesotho that Frederick did not know, in eight parts, unaccompanied, that filled the whole of the room and went up into the pressed-tin ceiling and stayed there, and the judges in their robes stood at the bar and listened, and the old judge who had swayed sat on a stool by the fan with a glass of water and Theo beside him, and when it was over nobody said anything for some time.

Then Mr Botha took the cloth off the tray.

The beer had been poured at a quarter to five. It was now twenty-one minutes past six. The beer had sat on the verandah under a corrugated iron roof in a hundred and two degrees for an hour and thirty-six minutes, and it was flat, and it was warm, and the perfect finger of head on each glass had gone entirely, and it was the colour and roughly the temperature of tea.

Mr Botha looked at it.

The Chief Justice looked at it.

The King looked at it.

“I’ll pour some more,” said Frederick.

“No,” said the Chief Justice. She picked up a glass from the tray, warm, flat, the colour of tea, and held it up. “This is the toast. This was poured for the ceremony. The ceremony went on too long.” She looked at the room, the judges, the choir, the guard, the old judge on his stool. “The judiciary will drink the consequences of its own decisions.”

And she drank it. All of it. Warm.

The judges looked at each other. Then, in order of seniority, they each took a glass from the tray, and drank it, warm, flat, all of it, every one of them, in their robes, under the fans, and the old judge on his stool was handed one by Theo, and looked at it, and said young man, I’m a hundred and two degrees, and Theo said sip it, sir, and he sipped it.

The King took the last glass.

It was the worst beer he had ever drunk. It was warm and flat and slightly sour and it tasted of an hour and thirty-six minutes on a verandah in the Free State, and he drank all of it, standing at the bar of the Free State Hotel beside the Chief Justice, because she had, and when he put the glass down she looked at him.

“Seventy-four minutes,” she said. “We were very proud of it.”

“It was very beautiful.”

“It was very long.” She put her glass down. “Next time we’ll do eleven.”

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Mr Quennell’s folder said: Bloemfontein. Ceremony, scheduled 74 minutes, actual 96, abridged by the Chief Justice on the advice of the Page. Beer: warm. Drunk anyway.

And under it, in the margin, in very small letters, an addition that he did not show to the committee:

Rule Fifteen (draft). No ceremony at a bar shall be longer than the time it takes for the beer to go warm.