Interview

It had taken Mr Quennell four months.

He had started on the first of February, the day after the letter came, at the table in the back room of Eight Bars, with the Duke’s three words written at the top of a clean sheet, Ours. Another one., and by the end of February the sheet was eleven sheets, and by the end of April it was a folder, green, separate from the blue one, with 1 JUNE on the front in capitals. He had spoken to the Private Secretary, who had spoken to the Royal Air Force, who had spoken to the squadron, who had said that an aircraft of the royal squadron could carry a Page of Honour to an interview only if the Page was travelling in attendance on the Sovereign, because the aircraft was the Sovereign’s and nobody else’s, and that the Sovereign would therefore have to be on it.

“Then I’ll be on it,” Frederick had said.

“Sir, the Sovereign is behind a tea stall in Kuala Lumpur on the thirty-first of May and the second of June. He has been asked to be. By another king. Twice.”

“Then I’ll be on it on the first.”

Mr Quennell had looked at him, and at the green folder, and at the time zones, which he had written out in a column in the margin of the third sheet, and had done, Frederick could see, the arithmetic, and had seen that it could, just, be done, and had gone very pale, and then rather pink, and had said, in the voice of a young man who has never in his life done anything foolish and is about to organise the most foolish piece of travel in the history of the Household, yes, sir.

---

The aircraft was on the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur at a quarter to eleven on Monday night, white, with the royal arms on the tail, in the warm wet dark, with its engines turning, and rain coming down through the lights in long silver lines.

Theo stopped at the bottom of the steps.

He had not been on an aircraft of the royal squadron before. Not like this. He had been on one with the King, on the way to things, in attendance, on a seat at the back, as the Page. He had never been on one because of himself, and he stood at the bottom of the steps in the rain in his tea-stained shirt and the Cranwell apron, which he had forgotten to take off, with his rucksack and the letter from the Faculty in a plastic folder, and looked up at it.

“This is the King’s aeroplane,” he said.

“Yes.”

“For an interview.”

“For your interview.”

Theo looked at it a moment longer.

“My dad,” he said, “drives the Thirty-Two.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to be so embarrassed,” said Theo, and went up the steps, and at the top the steward, a young flight sergeant in a white jacket, looked at the Page of Honour in a tea-stained shirt and a white apron that came down past his knees, and did not blink, and said good evening, sir, and Theo said good evening and sorry about the apron and went in.

---

The time zones ran the right way.

That was Mr Quennell’s great discovery, the thing in the margin of the third sheet. Kuala Lumpur was twelve hours ahead of New Westminster. So an aircraft that left Kuala Lumpur at eleven o’clock on Monday night left, by the clock in New Westminster, at eleven o’clock on Monday morning, and if it flew for twenty hours, which was what the squadron said it would take, with a stop for fuel in Anchorage, it would land in New Westminster at seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, New Westminster time, three hours before the interview. It was, Mr Quennell said, the only piece of luck in the whole year that had gone in their favour without anybody having to do anything, and he had not believed it until he had checked it eleven times.

“And back?” Frederick had said.

“Back is worse,” Mr Quennell had said. “Back loses the twelve hours instead of gaining them.” He had looked at the margin. “If you leave New Westminster at noon on Tuesday, you land in Kuala Lumpur at eight on Wednesday night. The second night at the stall starts at seven.” He had looked up. “You’d be an hour late.”

“Mr Muthu won’t mind.”

“Mr Muthu,” Mr Quennell had said, “isn’t the one who’ll mind.”

---

They slept, somehow, for most of the first nine hours, over the South China Sea and Japan and the dark North Pacific, Theo on one side of the cabin with the letter from the Faculty in his hand and Frederick on the other, and at three in the morning by some clock or other, which turned out when they worked it out to be half past eleven at night in Anchorage, they came down through cloud into Alaska.

It was light. That was the first thing. It was the beginning of June, and they had come so far north that it was nearly midnight and the sky was the colour of a pearl, and there were mountains all round, white on top, and a long grey inlet with mud flats, and the airfield, and a man on the tarmac in a high-visibility jacket waving the aircraft in with two orange batons.

They were on the ground for fifty-two minutes. Nobody had told anybody. That was the arrangement, and it held, for about forty minutes, until a man who was driving the fuel truck looked up at the cabin windows and saw, in one of them, the King of fourteen countries in a T-shirt that said EIGHT BARS, eating a cheese sandwich, and in the next window a tall young man in a white apron, reading a letter for the fiftieth time, and the man who was driving the fuel truck took out his telephone, and by the time the aircraft was taxiing out again at a quarter past midnight in the pearl-coloured light there were about sixty people at the perimeter fence, in their coats, some of them with dogs, waving.

Frederick waved back through the window.

Theo, in the next window, looked at the sixty people and the dogs, and at the mountains, and the pearl-coloured sky, and the long grey inlet, and said, very quietly, “I want to live here.”

“You said that about Wellington.”

“I meant it about Wellington,” said Theo. “I mean it about here as well. I mean it about everywhere.” He looked at the letter. “I just want to live somewhere they let me in.”

---

The suit was the problem.

They found out at six o’clock in the morning, New Westminster time, over Canada, when Theo opened his rucksack to take out the suit he had packed in September for exactly this, and found that it was not there. It was in the hotel in Kuala Lumpur. It was hanging in the wardrobe of room 1408, where he had hung it on Friday so that it would not crease, and where it was still hanging, uncreased, ten thousand miles behind them.

Theo looked into the rucksack.

He looked into it for a long time.

“I can’t go in in the apron,” he said.

“No.”

“I can’t go in in this.” He looked down at the tea-stained shirt. “It’s got the Agong’s tea on it. And mine. And Mr Muthu’s.” He looked up. “Freddie, I can’t go to an interview to get back into medical school in a shirt with three kinds of tea on it.”

Frederick looked across the cabin.

He had a suit. He had a suit because the King always had a suit, on every aircraft, in a bag in the forward compartment, in case, because a King could be called upon at any moment by any of fourteen governments to be a King, and needed to look like one. It was a dark grey suit. It had been made by Mr Szabo, the Household tailor, in March. It fitted the King perfectly.

The King was five foot eleven.

Theo was six foot three.

---

They landed at five past seven on Tuesday the first of June in New Westminster, on a grey warm morning with a little rain, and the Duke was on the tarmac.

Nobody had told him. That was not true; everybody had told him, because he had been at the table in the back room of Eight Bars on every Tuesday since February while the green folder was being built, at the dartboard, practising, and had heard every word. But nobody had asked him to come, and he had come anyway, on his own, in his tweed cap and his coat, without a stick, and he was standing at the bottom of the steps when the door opened.

He looked up at Theo, coming down the steps in the King’s dark grey suit, which was four inches too short in the sleeves and, which was worse, because Theo had tried to fix it over Canada with the trousers belted round his ribs, four inches too long in the leg, so that they fell in great grey folds round his shoes like the trousers of a clown.

The Duke looked at the trousers.

He looked at them.

“Wait,” he said.

He went to the car that was waiting beside the aircraft. He opened the back door. He reached in and took out a bag, a long one, a garment bag, which he had evidently brought from the north wing, and came back across the tarmac with it, slowly, the left foot dragging slightly, and held it out to Theo.

“Mine,” said the Duke. “From. Before.” He found the next word. “Taller.”

Theo unzipped the bag.

It was a suit. Navy blue, very old, very good, with a narrow lapel, and a tailor’s label inside the jacket with a date on it, 1974, and it had been made for the King of fourteen countries when he was twenty-seven years old and six foot two and a half, before the sea, before the years, before he had become, as old men do, an inch and a half shorter than he had been.

“I can’t,” said Theo.

“Can,” said the Duke. “Go. Change.” And then, after a moment, with something that was very nearly a smile, the sentence coming all at once, the way it did when it mattered: “Wear it. Well. Not like. Him.”

---

The Faculty of Medicine was on the river. The Thirty-Two went past the gate.

They did not take the Thirty-Two. There was not time; it was half past nine. They took the car, and the car went down the Axis and over the bridge and along the river and stopped at the gate, under a stone arch with a crest on it, a red cross on a white star, and Theo got out in the Duke’s navy suit, which fitted him, very nearly, all except the sleeves, which were half an inch short, and stood on the pavement under the arch with the letter in its plastic folder.

“I’ll wait,” said Frederick.

“You don’t have to.”

“I flew ten thousand miles. I’ll wait.”

Theo looked at him. Then at the arch. Then at the letter.

“What if they ask me what I learned?”

“They will ask you what you learned.”

“What do I say?”

Frederick thought about it. He thought about it on the pavement under the arch at a quarter to ten in the morning on the first of June, with the river behind him and the King’s own aircraft on a tarmac three miles away and a tea stall in Kampung Baru ten thousand miles away with an urn being kept hot.

“Say what you learned,” he said.

Theo went in.

---

He waited in the corridor. There was a plastic chair in it, outside a door with a frosted glass panel and the words INTERVIEW ROOM 3 on it, and he sat on the chair, the King of fourteen countries, in a T-shirt that said EIGHT BARS, at ten o’clock in the morning, and waited, and medical students went past him in the corridor in ones and twos, with folders, and every single one of them looked at him and then looked away and walked a little faster, and one of them, a young woman with a stethoscope, stopped, and came back, and said, are you waiting for the Page?, and he said yes, and she said, we’ve all got the T-shirt, and went.

Kimura stood at the end of the corridor, at the edge.

It took forty-one minutes.

He did not hear anything. The door was thick. He sat on the plastic chair and looked at the frosted glass and thought about a vicar in a cake tent, and a judge on the steps in Bloemfontein, and an old man in Clare with very bright blue eyes, and Mr Abernathy’s handwriting going downhill on a beer mat, and the forty-one seconds his father had waited at the oche, and he did not decide anything, because there was nothing to decide, and at nineteen minutes to eleven the door opened.

Theo came out.

He closed the door behind him, carefully, the way he closed doors in hospitals, and stood in the corridor in the Duke’s navy suit with the sleeves half an inch short, and looked at the King on the plastic chair.

“Well?” said Frederick.

“They asked,” said Theo.

“What did they ask?”

“What the letter said. Whether a year behind a bar had helped me understand anything.” Theo looked at the frosted glass. “There were four of them. One of them was the one who wrote on the letter about the T-shirt. She asked it.”

“What did you say?”

Theo was quiet for a moment.

“I said I’d learned that you can see what’s wrong with somebody from across a room,” he said. “If you’ve been standing in it long enough. If you’ve been watching.” He looked at the floor. “I said in September I couldn’t. I could only see it when they were on the floor in front of me. And then I spent a year behind a bar, watching a room, every night, the way Jack’s mum says you have to. Knowing who’s next. Who’s had enough. Who’s about to cry.” He stopped. “And in April I saw a man’s handwriting go downhill on a beer mat from twelve feet away, and I knew why. Before he did.”

He looked up.

“I said I wanted to be a doctor because I wanted to know why. And a bar taught me how to see it coming.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Then she wrote something down,” said Theo. “And they all looked at each other. And she said, thank you, Mr Hartigan, you’ll hear from us in writing. And I said thank you. And I got up. And I was nearly at the door.” He stopped again. “And she said, Mr Hartigan. And I turned round. And she said, see you in November.”

---

They left New Westminster at five past twelve.

The Duke did not come to the aircraft. He had gone back to the north wing on the Thirty-Two, which Peter Hartigan was driving, and had sat, Peter said afterwards, on the telephone, in the seat by the bend, and not said anything for the whole of the route, which was forty minutes, and at the stop by the Palace gate had stood up and come to the cab and leaned in and said, to the driver, three words, your boy, good, and got off.

Theo slept for fourteen hours.

He slept in the Duke’s navy suit, all the way across North America and over Alaska, where it was the middle of the afternoon and nobody was at the fence, and across the whole of the Pacific, with the letter from the Faculty on his chest in its plastic folder and his mouth open, and the steward in the white jacket put a blanket over him somewhere south of Japan, and did not wake him, and Frederick sat across the aisle and did not sleep at all.

They landed in Kuala Lumpur at four minutes past eight on Wednesday night, in the rain.

They were at the stall in Kampung Baru at a quarter to nine.

It was full. It was fuller than it had been on the first night, two hundred plastic chairs and every one taken and people standing in the road under umbrellas, and they had been there since seven, waiting, and when the car came down the street they did not go quiet. They cheered. They had seen the newspapers. They knew where he had been.

Mr Muthu was behind the counter, in his vest and his checked sarong. He looked at the King coming in under the tin roof, a little after nine, in a T-shirt that said EIGHT BARS, having crossed the world twice in forty-five hours, and he did not say anything. He took two steel mugs from the shelf, and filled one from the urn, which was hot, which had been kept hot, as the Agong had told him to, since Monday, and held them out.

Frederick took them.

He did not think about it. He could not have thought about it if he had tried. He had not slept for thirty-one hours, and he could not remember what time it was in any of the places he had been, and he could not feel his feet, and he lifted the upper mug above his shoulder, as high as his arm would go, all the way, and held the lower one at his knee, and poured, and did not look, and the tea came down out of the upper mug in a long brown stream, three feet, four, and went into the lower one, all of it, without a drop going anywhere else, and he poured it back up in an arc, and down, and up, six times, seven, and poured it into a glass, and put it on the counter, with a head on it a finger deep, like a pint.

Mr Muthu looked at it.

“Yes,” he said.

Two hundred people under the tin roof in Kampung Baru, and the people in the road under their umbrellas, who had been waiting since seven, saw it, and did not cheer this time. They clapped. Slowly, all of them, the way you clap at the end of something.

At the end of the counter, Theo, in the Duke’s navy suit, with three kinds of tea on his shirt under it and the letter in his pocket, picked up the glass, and drank it, and put it down, and said, to the King, with his eyes shut, very nearly asleep on his feet:

“Six. Too straight at the end.”