Exactness

Alexander had brought a ruler.

It was brass, about six inches long, with millimetres engraved down one edge and inches down the other, and it had belonged, he said, taking it out of the inside pocket of his jacket at the bar of Eight Bars at seven o’clock on Tuesday, to Bessel, the astronomer, who had measured the distance to 61 Cygni in 1838 and had been the first person in history to measure the distance to a star, and the observatory at Potsdam had kept it since, in a drawer, and the German Emperor had borrowed it.

“For a pint,” said Frederick.

“For your pint,” said Alexander, and laid the ruler on the bar beside a stopwatch, which was also brass, and also old, and had, he said, belonged to somebody else he would not name. “You served me nothing in Hanover. I was on apple juice. It was a rehearsal. You served me nothing in Phoenix, because I was on lemonade, and also we were not allowed to talk about it.” He sat down on the stool beside Kimura’s. “I have come four thousand miles on a state visit. I wish to be served a pint by my cousin. And I wish,” he said, picking up the stopwatch, “to know precisely what it is.”

---

It was a Tuesday. The bar was full. It was always full now; there had not been a quiet night at Eight Bars since about the first week of August, when the street had begun to fill up with trestle tables, and people had started coming from all over the Realm to look at them, and stayed for a drink. Theo was at the far end in the Cranwell apron. Lukas was at the hatch, cutting lemons, because he had liked it yesterday and had asked, through Alexander, whether he might do it again. Mr Abernathy was on his stool. The Duke was at the dartboard in the back room, through the open door, practising, as he practised every evening now, because the German Emperor had written in October to say that he had bought a board, and the Duke had read the letter and said good and had not stopped practising since.

Frederick took a glass.

He was aware, as he had not been since the first week in September, of being watched. Not by the room. The room always watched. By one person, very closely, with a ruler and a stopwatch, the way Alexander watched the sky through the telescope at Potsdam, carefully, end to end, so as to know it.

He pulled.

Forty-five degrees. The side, not the bottom. He did not think about it. He had stopped thinking about it in Dublin, on Saint Patrick’s Day, at about half past four, and had not really started again, and the glass came up as it filled, and the head rose, and he took the glass away from the tap and put it on a mat in front of the German Emperor.

Alexander clicked the stopwatch.

“Fourteen seconds,” he said. “And four tenths.”

He picked up Bessel’s ruler, and held it against the side of the glass, vertically, very carefully, with his eye at the level of the head, the way he would have held it against a photographic plate.

“Twelve millimetres,” he said. “At the front.” He moved the ruler round. “Eleven at the back. The head slopes.” He moved it again. “Towards the handle side.”

“There isn’t a handle.”

“Towards the side where a handle would be,” said Alexander, “if there were one. You tilted it back at the very end. By about one degree.” He put the ruler down. “Without noticing.”

“Sue Fennell said that in November.”

“Then Sue Fennell has a very good eye,” said the German Emperor, and looked at the pint, and then took out his small black notebook, and wrote, for some time, and then looked up.

“Placement,” he said. “Three millimetres left of centre. Temperature,” he put a finger against the glass, “adequate.” He wrote. “Fourteen point four seconds is two point nine seconds slower than the mean of the pints I pulled yesterday.” He looked at the notebook. “Head depth deviates from my own by between one and two millimetres. The slope is the most significant error.” He closed the notebook. “On every measurable criterion, your pint is inferior to mine.”

“I know.”

“It is also,” said Alexander, “the best pint I have ever had.”

He drank about a third of it, and put it down, and looked at it again, and did not say anything.

“I cannot measure why,” he said at last. “That is what is so annoying.”

---

Jack came in at half past eight.

He came in off the evening flight from Bristol, through the queue, with his rucksack, in the same jacket he had worn to Daly’s and San Isidro and the final, which Theo said had now been on more aeroplanes than most diplomats, and he stopped inside the door of Eight Bars and looked at the room, at the bar and the booths and the photographs, fifty of them now, and the bedsheet on the ceiling, and the German Emperor on a stool with a brass ruler and a stopwatch on the bar in front of him, and the King behind the bar, and said, loudly, so that everybody heard:

“Right. What have I missed?”

“He’s judging my pint,” said Frederick.

Jack came down the bar. He looked at the pint in front of Alexander, a third drunk, on its mat, three millimetres left of centre. He looked at the ruler. He looked at the stopwatch. He looked at the small black notebook, which Alexander had left open, with its columns of figures in a small upright hand. He looked at the Emperor.

“You’ve measured it?”

“I have quantified it,” said Alexander.

“You don’t measure a pint,” said Jack, in a voice of deep personal outrage. “You look at it.” He picked up the glass. He held it up to the light from the window, the way his father held up a bus engine, the way his mother held up a glass at the New Inn, and looked at it, for about two seconds.

“Six,” he said, and put it down. “Too straight at the end.”

“It is not too straight,” said Alexander. “It is tilted back by one degree. Towards the side where the handle would be.”

“That’s what too straight at the end means.”

“Then why do you not say it?”

“I did say it. I said too straight at the end.”

“That is not a measurement. That is an opinion.”

“It’s not an opinion, it’s a six,” said Jack, and the German Emperor and the boy from Gloucestershire looked at each other across the bar of Eight Bars with expressions of complete and mutual incomprehension, and then, at exactly the same moment, both looked at the pint.

“Six,” said Jack.

Alexander looked at his notebook.

“On a scale of ten,” he said slowly, “taking all criteria together and weighting the head slope as the most significant error.” He did a sum in the margin. “It would be.” He stopped, and looked at the sum, and then at Jack, with something on his face that Frederick had not seen on it since they were about nine. “Six point one.”

“Told you,” said Jack.

---

At a quarter past eight, Mr Abernathy, who had been watching all of this from his stool without any expression at all, uncapped his red pen.

He did not ask for a pint. He pulled a beer mat towards him and wrote on it and pushed it to the end of the bar, and it went along the counter, hand to hand, to the German Emperor, who picked it up and read it.

Herr Kaiser: the measurement is correct. Mr Fennell: the opinion is correct. Both of you: see me.

Alexander put the mat in the pocket of his jacket, with Monday’s.

“I am accumulating,” he said, “a great many of these.”

---

The darts were at ten.

It had been ten months. The letter had come in October, in the diplomatic bag, the week after Hanover: I have heard about your father and the darts. I have bought a board. Lukas says I am very bad. I have ten months. And the German Emperor had practised, Lukas reported through Alexander, every evening since, in the old kitchen of the Neues Palais, on a board that the Hofmarschall had had hung at regulation height and that he had measured with a tape and written on the plaster in pencil, for one hour, between nine and ten, three hundred darts a night, for ten months, which was, Alexander had calculated, on the aeroplane, ninety thousand darts.

“And Lukas?” said Frederick.

“Lukas has watched,” said Alexander. “Every night. From the table. He has never thrown.” He took his darts out of the inside pocket of his jacket, a set in a small leather case, black, with silver flights, and the black eagle on the case. “He says he is not interested in darts. He is interested in why I am bad at them.”

The Duke was at the line in the back room.

He had been there since seven. He had not thrown a dart since half past nine. He was standing at the line with his three darts with the brass barrels and the red flights in his right hand, waiting, and when the German Emperor came through the door of the back room with his leather case, the Duke turned round, and looked at him, and said:

“Alexander.”

“Uncle Ernest.”

Alexander’s mother was the Duke’s sister. Frederick had known it all his life, the way he knew that he had been born in Stockholm, and had never once heard Alexander call his father anything but sir, or Your Royal Highness, or, in letters, your father. He heard it now, in the back room of Eight Bars, among the crates of empty bottles and the Christmas tree in its box and the photograph of two kings at a tea stall, and his father heard it too, and his father’s face did not move, but the corner of his mouth did.

“Five hundred and one,” said the Duke. “Double out.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

---

Alexander had practised immunity.

Frederick saw it at once. He had heard about Wait, as Mr Pruszynski had heard about it, and Margit Holm in Stockholm, and he had done what Mr Pruszynski had done, in the old kitchen of the Neues Palais, with Lukas standing behind him not throwing for a minute and then two and then three, and when the Duke went to the line at four hundred and one and stood there with his dart in his hand and did not throw, Alexander, at the side, did not shift his weight. He did not look at his darts. He did not take a breath. He stood perfectly still, with his hands folded in front of him, and looked at the board, as though he were waiting for a star to rise, and after forty seconds, and fifty, and a minute, the Duke, at the line, lowered his hand, and turned his head, and looked at the German Emperor.

“Good,” said the Duke.

“Thank you, Uncle Ernest.”

“Wait,” said the Duke, to the board, and threw a hundred and forty.

It took twenty minutes. It was, Kimura said afterwards, who had watched from the door, the best darts match ever played in Eight Bars, including the final, including Jack’s dart, and it went right down to the end, the Duke on forty and the Emperor on thirty-six, and the Emperor threw for double eighteen and hit the single, and the Duke threw for double twenty and hit it, and that was the match, and Alexander lowered his hand and looked at the board.

“Ninety thousand,” he said.

“Good,” said the Duke, and held out his hand, and the German Emperor shook it.

---

It was a quarter to eleven when somebody said Lukas should play.

It was Theo. He said it from the door of the back room, where he had come to watch, still in the Cranwell apron, with a cloth over his shoulder, and he said it without thinking, the way Theo said things sometimes, the way he had said you were counting to Seánie Hegarty in Clare.

“Lukas should have a go.”

Everybody looked at Lukas.

Lukas was sitting on an upturned crate by the door, where he had sat for both matches, very still, with his hands in his lap, watching. He had not said anything all evening, because he had said his one thing on Monday at ten o’clock, and it was not yet his time. He looked at Theo. Then at Alexander. Then at the Duke.

“He’s never thrown,” said Alexander. “Not once. In ten months.”

“He’s watched,” said Theo. “Every night. You said.”

Alexander looked at his friend on the crate for a long moment.

Then he held out the leather case with the black eagle on it.

Lukas did not take it. He stood up, and went to the dartboard, and stood in front of it, close, about a foot away, and looked at it, for a long time, the way he looked at the sky from the observatory at Potsdam, sitting on the floor with his back against the mount, looking up. He looked at the treble twenty. He looked at the wire. He looked at the place where the Duke’s three darts had gone, a hundred times, and the place where Alexander’s had gone, and the place, a little below and to the left of it, where Alexander’s had gone more often.

Then he went back to the line, and took the leather case from Alexander, and took out three darts with silver flights.

“All three,” said the Duke, behind him, and went to stand at the side, and Alexander, after a moment, went to stand beside him. “Five hundred. And one.”

They threw in turn, the Duke and then the Emperor and then Lukas, and Lukas went third, and threw.

He did not throw like the Duke, slowly, with long pauses. He did not throw like Alexander, precisely, with his elbow still. He threw like a man who had worked out where something was going to be and was putting the dart there before it arrived, lightly, without any apparent effort, one, two, three, and all three went into the treble twenty, so close together that the third knocked the flight off the second, and the flight fell onto the floor of the back room of Eight Bars by the Duke’s shoe.

The Duke looked at the flight.

Nobody said anything.

Lukas threw again. Treble twenty, treble twenty, treble nineteen.

He threw again.

He finished in eleven darts, from five hundred and one, with the Duke still on a hundred and forty and the Emperor on a hundred and sixty-one, with a double sixteen, which was, Mr Delgado said afterwards, who had played darts for the Anchor when it was the Anchor and had been in the league since 1983, something he had seen done twice in his life on a television and never once in a room, and when the last dart went into the double sixteen Lukas lowered his hand and stood on the line and looked at the board, and then turned round, and looked at the German Emperor and the Duke of Cumberland, who were standing side by side by the Christmas tree in its box with their mouths open, and at the King in the doorway, and at Theo, and at Jack, behind Theo, who had his hands on his head.

It was not yet his time. He had said his one thing on Monday at ten.

He said another one anyway.

“It is the same as a star,” said Lukas Brandt. “You do not look where it is. You look where it is going to be.” He held out the leather case to Alexander. “You have been looking where it is. For ninety thousand darts.”

Alexander took the case.

He looked at it. Then at Lukas. Then at the board, with eleven darts’ worth of holes in the treble twenty and one in the double sixteen.

“You never told me,” he said.

“You never asked,” said Lukas, and sat down on the crate again, and did not say anything else for two days.

---

On Kimura’s beer mat, that night, at the bottom, there was an entry under a line.

22.51. Brandt. 11 darts. Never thrown before. Duke and Emperor beaten.

And under it, smaller, in the same blue biro:

Detail notes that the best barback, the best darts player and the most popular man in the bar this year were none of them the King. Detail notes the King seems very pleased about it.