Book Twelve: Time, Gentlemen Part Seventeen: The State Visit Characters
Chapter Thirty-five
The Toast
Frederick. New Westminster. Thursday, 19 August 2032.
He was chosen because he was nobody, and politically he was: he had no party, no following and no record.
The King’s toast was a hundred and four words.
The Lord Chamberlain had timed it, on Tuesday, in the back room, with a stopwatch, and had said that it was the shortest toast at a state banquet in the history of the Realm, and that he approved of it entirely, and that it would be given, under Rule Twenty-Seven, from behind the bar.
So at five past ten, when Mrs Merriweather rang the brass bell once and Garfield Street went quiet down its whole length for the second time that evening, the King stood behind the bar of Eight Bars, in white tie and the crimson sash of the Charter and an apron with EIGHT BARS on the bib, with seventeen landlords round him who had moved, at last, about a foot each way to give him room, and lifted a glass of the Fife, a finger, from the bottle with the masking tape, and looked out of the door at the top table, where the German Emperor sat with Lukas Brandt on his left and the Prime Minister on his right, and spoke.
“Your Majesty,” he said. “A year ago I didn’t know how to pull a pint. Now I can, about once a week. Everybody in this street helped. Most of them are behind this bar with me now, and I can’t move my arms.” The street laughed. “You came four thousand miles and asked to have your banquet in a dive, because you wanted to see what you were visiting. This is it. It’s the mistakes. It’s the people who let you make them.” He lifted the glass. “Ladies and gentlemen. His Majesty the German Emperor.”
Three hundred and eleven people stood up at four hundred and eighteen yards of trestle tables, on plates that did not match, under strings of lights in the plane trees, and said it back, the German Emperor, and drank.
The Emperor stood.
He did not have a paper. He looked down the length of Garfield Street, from the door of Eight Bars to the church, and then at the bar, and the King behind it, and the seventeen landlords, and the wall of fifty-one photographs, and he lifted his glass, which was a stout, poured in two parts by Mr Kinsella and timed, by eleven men in caps at a trestle table near the door, at a hundred and nineteen seconds, on which, for the third time in thirty years, they all agreed.
“To the mistakes,” said Alexander.
And drank, and sat down, and that was all.
Then the Prime Minister stood up.
Frederick had known about the speech since Tuesday. Whitlock had told him at the audience on Thursday the twelfth, which had been held, as all the Thursday audiences in the Realm that year had been held, at the end of the bar of Eight Bars, beside Kimura, with the red boxes on the counter and the cat sitting between them, because the Household had given up, in about January, trying to persuade either of them to have it anywhere else.
“I’m proposing the toast to the guests,” Whitlock had said. “At the banquet. After yours and the Emperor’s. The Lord Chamberlain says it’s the Prime Minister’s toast.” He had looked at the cat. “It’s six minutes. I’ve written it four times.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever written,” Whitlock had said, honestly, “and I’m terrified of it.”
He had learned it. He had told Frederick that as well, on the Thursday. He had learned it by heart, the whole six minutes, in the study of the official residence on the Axis, every evening for a week, walking up and down the carpet with the pages in his hand, out loud, with the cat watching from the desk, so that he would not have to read it, because he had read every speech he had made for three years and eleven months, he said, and the King had never once read his, and he wanted, for once, at a banquet in a street, to look at people while he talked to them.
And at a quarter past four that afternoon, he had put the pages down on the desk in the study for one minute, to answer the telephone, and when he had come back the cat had been lying on them.
Not sitting. Lying. Full length, all of it, on its side, across all six pages, with its eyes closed, in the patch of sun from the window, and when Whitlock had lifted it off, gently, with both hands, as he lifted it off everything, the pages had come with it, stuck to its side by static and long orange fur, and had come away one by one as he held it, and fallen on the carpet, and he had picked them up, and found that the cat, at some point in the afternoon, had been sick on page four.
He had told Frederick all of this at a quarter to seven, on the pavement outside Eight Bars, in white tie, in a low voice, very fast, while the state banquet was being seated.
“I know it by heart,” he had said. “I learned it. Every word. I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I’ll be absolutely fine,” Whitlock had said, and looked down at the cat, which was in the crook of his left arm, enormous and orange and perfectly serene, and had been, he said, since he had left the residence at six, because he had not been able to leave it there, because it got into the boxes, and he had not been able to leave it with the protection officer at the residence, because it bit him, and he had not been able to leave it in the car, because it was August, and so it had come to the state banquet, and the Lord Chamberlain, seeing it, had said nothing at all, and had added a line to the seating plan in very small writing, cat: with the Prime Minister.
At ten past ten, when Whitlock stood up at the top table, the cat was on the chair beside him, between him and the Emperor, sitting upright, with its tail round its feet, looking down the length of Garfield Street.
“Your Majesties,” said Whitlock. “Your Royal Highnesses. Madam Speaker. Chief Justice. Excellencies. Ladies and gentlemen.”
He did not have any pages. He stood at the top table, tall and heavy-set and fair, with his hands at his sides, and looked down the street, the way he had said he wanted to, at people, while he talked to them, and Frederick, behind the bar, could see that his hands were shaking very slightly, and that he was holding them still against his trousers.
“Three years and eleven months ago,” said Whitlock, “I was commissioned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America because I was nobody. That was the case for me. I had no party and no following and no record, and the five parties who could agree on nobody else agreed on me for exactly that reason.” He paused. “I was twenty-six. I had a date on me, like milk. I thought I would be gone in two years and nine months and that nobody would remember I had been there.”
The street was very quiet.
“And then,” said Whitlock, “the King’s aircraft went into the sea. Fourteen days after I was commissioned.”
He stopped. It was, Frederick could see, the place where page two ended, and page three began, and he could see Whitlock see it, in his head, the edge of page two, and the top of page three, and find it, and go on.
“I have spent three years and eleven months,” said Whitlock, “sitting across a table from the youngest King in the Realm’s history. In the Blue Drawing Room. On a laptop, in a boot room, in Gloucestershire, among forty pairs of rugby boots. And this year, every Thursday, at the end of that bar,” he pointed, “beside a protection officer, drinking his mistakes.”
The street laughed. Kimura, on her stool by the door, did not turn round.
At that moment the cat stood up.
It stood up on the chair between the Prime Minister and the German Emperor, slowly, and stretched its front legs, and then its back legs, and then its whole length, the way it stretched before it walked across a desk, or a keyboard, or the bar of Eight Bars to Mr Abernathy’s stool, and Whitlock, who was looking down the street, did not see it. The Emperor saw it. Lukas saw it. The Speaker saw it, and put her hand flat on the table. And the cat stepped off the chair onto the table, onto the white cloth, between a plate from the Cathedral and a plate from the Ellicott High School cafeteria, and turned to face the length of Garfield Street, and began to walk.
“I have watched him,” said Whitlock, to the street, “be bad at something. In public. Every night. For a year. I have watched him change a keg and flood a cellar, and be told to wait by his landlady, and tipped by the Bloc.”
The cat walked past the Leader of the Opposition, who did not move, and past the Chief Justice, who moved a glass.
“I have watched him,” said Whitlock, “fail to pour a stout on the national news of Ireland, twice, and get it right on Saint Patrick’s Day without noticing.”
The cat walked past the ambassadors. It walked past the German community. It walked between the plates, perfectly, without touching any of them, with its tail straight up, down the middle of the white cloth, and three hundred and eleven people at four hundred and eighteen yards of trestle tables turned their heads, one table at a time, as it passed, the way a crowd turns its heads to follow a ball, and Whitlock, at the top table, looking down the street at people while he talked to them, saw three hundred and eleven heads turning, slowly, in a wave, away from him, and did not know why.
He carried on.
He was a Prime Minister. He had carried on through four years of a minority ministry and a Heads of Agreement and a confidence vote and a King lost at sea and found, and he carried on now.
“I have watched him,” he said, with slightly less certainty, “catch a cricket ball through the window of a tavern in Calcutta with a tray of beer in his other hand, and say nothing, because he was not allowed to have a view.”
The cat walked past the regulars of Eight Bars. It walked past Mr Delgado, who said well, look at that in a whisper that carried a hundred yards. It walked past the English form, who had been told by Ollie to be on their best behaviour and were, with enormous effort, not laughing. It walked past the Bloc deputies, who did not vote in this parliament, and the deputy from the riding in the east of Quebec lifted her cup an inch to it as it went by. It walked past Mr Abernathy, at his place halfway down, who had the red pen out and was writing on a beer mat without looking. It walked past Mrs Haverfield’s terrier, Ernest, under Sue Fennell’s chair, who woke up, and looked at it, and decided, after a long moment, that it was beneath his notice, and went back to sleep.
“I have watched him,” said Whitlock, and stopped.
He had seen it.
He had seen, at last, at the far end of Garfield Street, under the lights in the plane trees, three hundred yards away, nearly at the church, a small orange shape, walking down the middle of the table, very slowly, with its tail straight up, between the plates.
He looked at the empty chair beside him.
He looked back down the street.
Frederick, behind the bar, saw it happen on his face. He saw Whitlock look for page four, in his head, the page the cat had been sick on, the page that he had learned by heart in the study on the Axis every evening for a week, and find that it was gone. Not the words. The words were there. But they were in the wrong order, the way words were in the wrong order for his father on a bad day, and Mr Abernathy in April, and Whitlock stood at the top table with his hands at his sides and his mouth open and three hundred and eleven people looking at a cat, and did not know where he was.
The cat reached the end of the table.
It reached the last trestle, by the steps of the church, four hundred and eighteen yards from the door of Eight Bars, and stopped, and sat down on the white cloth beside the last plate, which was from the Cathedral, with its tail round its feet, and turned round, and looked back up the whole length of Garfield Street, at the Prime Minister, who had brought it, and closed its eyes very slowly, and opened them again.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Whitlock.
He said it in a voice that was not the voice of the speech. It was the voice he had used on the screen in the boot room in Gloucestershire at twenty past midnight on the night of the vote, when he had rung the King with his tie undone because he had not known what else to do.
“I had a speech,” he said. “It was six minutes. It was the best thing I’ve ever written. I learned it by heart.” He looked down the street at the cat. “He was sick on page four.”
Garfield Street laughed.
It laughed the way Eight Bars had laughed on Monday when the Emperor poured his first bad pint, the way the road at Half Way Tree had laughed when the King said bananas. It was not the laughter of people laughing at somebody. It was the other kind.
“So I’m going to give you the last line,” said Whitlock, “because that’s the only bit I can remember.” He lifted his glass. “It’s about our guests. All of them. The Emperor, and the landlords, and the regulars, and the people who let a King stand behind their bar and be bad at it for a year, and came every night to watch, and cheered when he got one right.” He looked down the street, at three hundred and eleven people, at four hundred and eighteen yards of trestle tables, at the church, at the small orange shape on the white cloth by the last plate. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America. “I give you.” He stopped. He had lost it. He looked at the cat. “The cat.”
There was a silence down the whole of Garfield Street.
Whitlock heard what he had said. Frederick saw him hear it. He went pink, then red, then a colour that Theo afterwards described, with professional interest, as about four minutes from a faint, and he stood at the top table with his glass in the air and his mouth open, and three hundred and eleven people looked at him.
The German Emperor stood up.
He stood up beside the empty chair, and lifted his stout, poured in two parts by Mr Kinsella, a hundred and nineteen seconds, and looked down the whole length of Garfield Street to the church.
“The cat,” said Alexander, very clearly, in the voice in which he had been addressing crowds since he was fourteen.
And three hundred and eleven people stood up at four hundred and eighteen yards of trestle tables, on plates that did not match, under strings of lights in the plane trees, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and the Leader of the Opposition and the Speaker in her robe and the Chief Justice and the ambassadors and the German community and the regulars of Eight Bars and the committee and the English form and the Bloc, who did not vote in this parliament, and seventeen landlords from fourteen countries behind the bar, and the Duke and the Queen at the end nearest the dartboard, and Seánie Hegarty by the door with a drum, and Theo, and Jack, and lifted their glasses, and said it back, down the whole length of the street, so that it reached the church, and the small orange shape on the white cloth by the last plate.
The cat.
And drank.
Whitlock sat down. He sat down very suddenly, beside the empty chair, and put his face in his hands, and the German Emperor, beside him, put a hand on his shoulder and left it there, and Lukas Brandt, on the Emperor’s other side, who had said his one thing on Tuesday at a quarter to eleven and had not spoken since, leaned across the Emperor and said, quite clearly, to the Prime Minister:
“It was the best toast.”
Whitlock took his hands away from his face.
“It was the wrong guest of honour.”
“Yes,” said Lukas. “That is why.”
The cat walked back.
It walked back the whole four hundred and eighteen yards, up the middle of the table, between the plates, at the same speed, with its tail straight up, while three hundred and eleven people watched it and did not say anything at all, and it reached the top table, and stepped off the cloth onto the empty chair beside the Prime Minister, and turned round twice, and lay down, and went to sleep.
Mr Abernathy, halfway down the table, capped his red pen.
The beer mat went up the table, hand to hand, past the ambassadors and the Chief Justice and the Leader of the Opposition, to the top table, and the Speaker, who was nearest, picked it up, and read it, and laughed, and passed it to Whitlock.
It said: Prime Minister: A. Cat: A+. See me, both of you.