Notice

The letter came in the diplomatic bag on Monday the second of August, in the small upright hand, on the Potsdam paper with the black eagle at the top.

The dates are fixed. I arrive on Sunday the fifteenth. The state banquet is on Thursday the nineteenth. I leave on Saturday the twenty-first. Your Lord Chamberlain and mine have agreed everything, in eleven meetings, by video, over five months, and my Lord Chamberlain says yours is a very fine man who has never once raised his voice. I have read the programme. It is a very good programme. It has the Monument and the Charter and the Cathedral and a wreath at the Tomb and a reception for the German community at the Embassy and a concert. It has the Ballroom on the east front, on Thursday, for a hundred and sixty, with the gold plate.

I should like to make one request.

I should like the state banquet to be held at Eight Bars.

I have discussed it with nobody. I am writing to you first, because it is your bar, or rather Mrs Merriweather’s, and because if I write to my Lord Chamberlain first he will discuss it with yours, and they will hold a twelfth meeting, and both of them will raise their voices for the first time in their lives. A.

And under it, in a different pen:

Lukas says I am not allowed to ask for this. I said that is precisely why I must.

---

The Lord Chamberlain came to the flat on Tuesday.

He came up the back stairs, past the lavatories, at eleven in the morning, a tall thin man of sixty-seven with white hair and a grey suit and a face like a well-made drawing of a face, and he stood in the front room, between the burned armchair and the radiator, and did not sit down, because he had not been asked, and when he was asked he still did not sit down, because, Frederick saw, he could not, physically, sit down in a room with a paper lampshade in it while discussing a state banquet.

“Sir,” he said. “I have arranged eleven state banquets.”

“I know.”

“In the Ballroom. For a hundred and sixty. With the gold plate, which was made in 1841 and has been used for every state banquet in the Realm since.” He looked at the radiator. “I arranged the banquet for a visiting president in 2019, at which the president’s wife fainted, and for a visiting king in 2023, at which a candelabrum fell into a soup, and for a visiting emperor in 2026, at which the band played the wrong anthem for eleven bars and nobody has ever discovered why.” He paused. “I have never been asked to arrange a state banquet in a bar.”

“No.”

“Nobody has,” said the Lord Chamberlain. “In any realm. Ever. I have looked.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, sir,” said the Lord Chamberlain. “I’m not complaining.” He looked round the front room, at the window, and the laundromat across the road, and the woman from the laundromat on her step with a cigarette, looking up. “I’m thinking about the plates.”

The radiator banged.

The Lord Chamberlain did not move. Not a muscle. He had stood, Frederick reflected, through a fainting and a candelabrum and eleven bars of the wrong anthem, and he stood through the radiator, and when it had stopped he said, without any change of expression at all:

“Is it always like that?”

“Every eleven minutes.”

“Since?”

“1994.”

“Then it will have to be in the seating plan,” said the Lord Chamberlain, and took out a notebook, and wrote something, and Frederick understood that the state banquet for the German Emperor was going to be held at Eight Bars.

---

Mrs Merriweather said yes before he had finished asking.

She was at the till. It was Tuesday afternoon, half past two, and the committee was in the back room, and the Duke was at the dartboard, and he went down the bar to her and stood in front of her and said, “Mrs Merriweather, the German Emperor would like,” and she said “Yes,” and went on counting the change.

“I haven’t said what.”

“You don’t need to.” She shut the till. “Priya’s got it at the Courier. It’s in the paper tomorrow. Page one. EMPEROR WANTS DIVE.” She looked at him. “She rang me at eleven to ask if I had a comment. I said I’d need the King to ask me first.” She folded her arms. “So ask me.”

“The German Emperor would like his state banquet to be held at Eight Bars.”

Mrs Merriweather looked at the bar. She looked at the whole length of it, the counter and the booths and the pool table with its slope and the pennants and the wall of photographs, forty-nine of them, from the first keg to Jack at the oche, and the bedsheet on the ceiling that said HANOVER IS RUBISH with one B, and the trombone on its brass hooks over the bar, polished, with a light on it.

Then she looked at her son, in the booth by the window, where Marcus was sitting on a Tuesday afternoon because it was August and he had nothing else to do, with the trombone case on his knees, as he had sat on the first Friday, eleven months before, waiting to play.

“Marcus,” she said.

“Mom?”

“There’s going to be a state banquet.”

Marcus looked at her.

“Here?”

“Here.”

“Who’s playing?” said Marcus.

---

The guest list was a hundred and sixty.

It had been a hundred and sixty for five months, and the Lord Chamberlain had it in a leather folder: the German Emperor and his suite; the King and his parents; the Prime Minister and Cabinet; the Leader of the Opposition; the Speaker; the Chief Justice; the Governor-General, who would not be described; ambassadors; the German community; the presidents of the Realm’s two great universities; and a number of other people who were the people who came to state banquets, and had come to the last eleven, and expected to come to this one.

Eight Bars held a hundred and twenty, standing.

“Seated,” said the Lord Chamberlain, on Wednesday, on the pavement of Garfield Street, with a tape measure, “it holds sixty-four.”

“That’s quite a lot fewer than a hundred and sixty,” said Theo.

“Yes,” said the Lord Chamberlain.

He stood on the pavement, looking at the front of Eight Bars, with its sign and its painted trombone and its window with Theo’s face in it on a T-shirt that Mrs Merriweather had never taken down. Then he looked at the street. Garfield Street. Two blocks long, from Ninth to Eleventh, with the laundromat and the shoe repair and the place that sold second-hand radios and the bakery on the corner, and a church at the end, and plane trees down both sides, old ones, with the August sun coming down through the leaves.

“Sir,” he said. “Who owns the street?”

“The city.”

“Then I shall need,” said the Lord Chamberlain, “to speak to the city.”

---

The city said yes on Thursday. The fire marshal said yes on Friday.

The fire marshal was Captain Szymanski, who had come on the first Friday with a clicker and had come every week since, and who had stood behind a girl with seven candles on her head in December with an extinguisher held in both hands, and he came to the meeting in the back room of Eight Bars on Friday the sixth of August with the clicker on a string round his neck and a plan of Garfield Street on a roll of paper and a red pen, and he looked at the Lord Chamberlain’s seating plan for a long time.

“You want to close the street,” he said.

“From Ninth to Eleventh,” said the Lord Chamberlain. “Tables down the middle. Under the trees. From the door of the bar to the church.”

“For how many?”

“A hundred and sixty.”

Captain Szymanski looked at the plan. Then he looked at the King, at the end of the table, behind the hatch, because he was not a member of the committee and was not allowed to sit at it, and was standing behind the bar, listening, as he had stood behind it listening every Tuesday since September.

“Sir,” said Captain Szymanski. “I’ve stood at that door since September with a clicker. I’ve seen everything that’s happened in this bar. I’ve seen the foam, and the Lucia girl, and the day Theo saw the old man’s writing go wrong. I’ve counted every single person in and every single person out, forty-three thousand, two hundred and eight, as of last night.” He put his hand on the plan. “A hundred and sixty isn’t the number.”

“What’s the number?”

“You’ve been to fourteen countries,” said Captain Szymanski. “You’ve stood behind a bar in every one of them. Somebody let you. Every time.” He picked up his red pen. “Who’s inviting them?”

---

He wrote the letters himself.

He wrote them on Friday night and Saturday, at the kitchen table in the flat, on the chair that wobbled, with the radiator banging every eleven minutes in the front room, in his own hand, on the plain paper with the royal cipher at the top and nothing else, which was the paper he used for letters that were from him and not from the King. He wrote seventeen.

He wrote to Mr Ouellette at Le Bon Mot in Ottawa, and to Herr Kuhlmann at the Zum Schwarzen Bären in Hanover, and to Herr Brandes at the Mummehaus in Brunswick, who was eighty-two now, and had sent Theo a Christmas card. He wrote to Madame Lecoq at Le Mascaret, in Norman, which took him two hours and a dictionary and was, Theo said, reading it over his shoulder, probably a war crime against the language. He wrote to Sue Fennell at the New Inn. He wrote to Mr Kinsella at Daly’s, and to Mrs Hegarty at Hegarty’s, with a second letter inside it for Seánie. He wrote to Mrs Fitzsimmons at the Harbour Master’s Arms and to Mr Tane at the Southerly, on the same day, so that neither could say the other had been asked first. He wrote to Don Aurelio at La Esquina, who was a republican, and wrote a line at the end that said you will be the only republican at the table, which I think you will enjoy. He wrote to Mr Mahlangu in Pretoria and Mrs Arendse in Cape Town and Mr Botha in Bloemfontein, the same letter, word for word, so that none of the three capitals could say it had been given more. He wrote to Mr Muthu at the stall in Kampung Baru. He wrote to Mrs Dela Cruz in San Isidro, and put in a second letter, for Marisol, who was twelve now. He wrote to Mrs Clarke in Kingston. And he wrote to Herr Lindqvist at Källaren in Stockholm, who was not related to Ebba Lindqvist, and said so at the bottom of the letter, so that Herr Lindqvist would not have to.

He wrote the same thing in all of them, in English and in whatever the other language was.

The German Emperor is coming to the Realm on a state visit, and he has asked for his state banquet to be held in the bar where I have worked this year. It is on Thursday the nineteenth of August, at seven. You let me stand behind your bar. I would very much like you to come and sit at mine.

And he signed them Frederick, which was the name he signed letters with that were from him.

---

On Monday the ninth, Mr Quennell brought the replies to the back room in a box.

There were seventeen. They had come by every means there was: by email, by the diplomatic bag, by courier, by ordinary post with a stamp on it, by a telephone call to the Household from Mrs Dela Cruz at two in the morning New Westminster time that had been taken by a very surprised night clerk, and, in the case of Seánie Hegarty, by a postcard of the Cliffs of Moher with four words on the back in pencil, Coming. Bringing the drum.

Seventeen yeses.

“The guest list,” said the Lord Chamberlain, on Monday, at the round table, with the leather folder, “now stands at one hundred and sixty, plus seventeen landlords, plus their guests, plus the regulars of Eight Bars, whom Mrs Merriweather says cannot be left out, plus the committee, plus the English form, who have written from Coln to say they are flying in at their own expense and that Ollie of Evenlode will be bringing a quiz, plus the Bloc deputies from Ottawa, who have written to say that they will not attend a state banquet for a monarch but would be glad to attend a dinner in a bar, plus the Speaker, who has asked whether she may bring the robe.” He closed the folder. “Three hundred and eleven.”

“Can the street hold three hundred and eleven?” said Dame M.

Captain Szymanski, at the end of the table, with his clicker, looked at the plan.

“The street can hold four hundred,” he said. “Seated. From the door to the church. Under the trees.” He made a mark with his red pen. “I’ve measured it. Twice.” He looked up. “It’s the best plan I’ve ever seen.”

---

They closed the street on Friday the thirteenth.

They closed it at six in the morning, from Ninth to Eleventh, with barriers at both ends and a man from the city in a yellow jacket at each barrier, and by noon the plane trees down both sides of Garfield Street had strings of lights in them, white, hundreds, that had been put up by a crew from the Palace who had never in their lives put up lights in a tree on a public street and did it, the foreman said, better than the Ballroom. By four, the tables were coming. Long ones, trestles, from the Palace and the Cathedral and three churches and the Ellicott High School cafeteria, which had lent forty, and they were set out down the middle of the street in a single line, end to end, from the door of Eight Bars to the steps of the church, four hundred and eighteen yards, under the trees, and at six o’clock, on Friday, with a week still to go, the Lord Chamberlain stood at the door of Eight Bars and looked down the length of it.

He did not say anything for some time.

“Sir,” he said at last. “The gold plate.”

“Yes?”

“It won’t go in the street. It’s too heavy, and too old, and the Household won’t let it out of the Palace, and I wouldn’t let it either.” He looked at the tables. “I’ve spoken to the Cathedral. They have plates. And the churches. And the school.” He paused. “None of them match.”

“Is that all right?”

The Lord Chamberlain looked down four hundred and eighteen yards of trestle tables in the evening light, from a dive in the Fourth Ward to a church, under strings of lights in the plane trees, with the laundromat open and the woman from the laundromat on her step, and the man from the shoe repair standing in his doorway with his hands in his pockets, and children on bicycles at the barrier at the Ninth Street end looking through, and the Duke, who had come on the Thirty-Two at five, sitting on a chair outside Eight Bars that somebody had put there for him, in the sun, in his tweed cap, watching.

“Sir,” said the Lord Chamberlain, “I have arranged eleven state banquets. Every one of them matched.” He closed the leather folder. “I believe this is going to be the first one I remember.”