Time, Gentlemen

The German Emperor left at half past eleven.

He left the way he had come, down Garfield Street, past the trestle tables, under the lights in the plane trees, with Lukas a pace to his left and his suite behind him and the Lord Chamberlain beside him with the leather folder under his arm, to the barrier at the Ninth Street end, where the cars were, and at the barrier he stopped, and turned round, and looked back up the whole length of the street at Eight Bars, with its sign and its painted trombone and its window with Theo’s face in it on a T-shirt, and the light coming out of the door onto the pavement.

Then he lifted his hand. Not a wave. He lifted it, flat, palm out, about to the height of his shoulder, and held it there, the way he held a hand up at Potsdam to a crowd he wanted to thank and could not speak to, and Frederick, in the doorway, in white tie and the crimson sash and the apron, lifted his back.

The Emperor got into the car.

At the last moment, before the door closed, Lukas Brandt leaned out of the other side, and called back up Garfield Street, in German, quite loudly, the first thing he had said since the toast and the last thing he would say until Potsdam:

“Next year, the board is mine.”

And the door closed, and the cars went.

---

The state banquet went at midnight.

It went table by table, from the church end, the way the cat had walked it, slowly, the guests standing and finding their coats and shaking hands and looking back at the bar, and going. The Prime Minister went at five to twelve, with the cat asleep in the crook of his arm, and stopped at the door of Eight Bars and said sir, and thank you, and I’m so sorry about the toast, and Frederick said it was the best toast, and Whitlock looked at him and said Lukas said that, and Frederick said Lukas is right, and Whitlock went pink and went. The Speaker went in her robe, with the Serjeant at Arms, and the Chief Justice, and the Leader of the Opposition, who shook his hand and said see you in the league in October, and the ambassadors, and the German community, who sang something in German at the barrier that Frederick did not know and that the Duke, at the end of the table nearest the dartboard, knew all the words to and sang back.

The Bloc went last of the guests. The deputy from the riding in the east of Quebec stopped at the door, and looked at the King in the apron and the sash, and said, in French and then in English, we were not served by the King, and he said no, and she said, it was the best dinner I have ever not been served at, and went.

By half past twelve, the trestle tables were empty. The crew from the Palace were taking down the lights in the plane trees, one string at a time, carefully, and the plates were going back into their crates, Cathedral and church and church and church and school, none of them matching, and a man from the city in a yellow jacket was standing at the barrier at the Ninth Street end, waiting for the Lord Chamberlain to tell him he could open the street, and the Lord Chamberlain, who had gone with the Emperor, had sent a message that said not yet.

---

The regulars did not leave.

That was the thing. The state banquet went, and the Emperor and the Prime Minister and the Speaker and the Bloc and three hundred people went, and the street went quiet, and the lights came down out of the trees. And the regulars of Eight Bars did not leave. They had come out of the street, from their places at the trestle tables, at about midnight, one by one, without being asked, and come back inside, to the bar, where they belonged, and sat down.

Mr Delgado was on his stool at the bar. Mr Abernathy was on his, the third from the window, with Mrs Abernathy beside him on the stool that Castellanos used on Mondays, and his stick hooked over the edge of the counter. Harold Quayle was on his, the second from the door, with a half of bitter. Castellanos was on the last one, by the wall, in white tie, which he had been told to wear by the Lord Chamberlain and was wearing with the expression of a man who had been told to wear a costume, with his visitor’s lanyard in his pocket so that the card did not show. Marcus was on the pallet by the window, with the trombone on his knee, not playing. Mr Quennell was in the booth by the pool table with a half of bitter, which he was drinking, all of it. Bridget was at the end of the bar by the kitchen, in her apron, with her shoes off. Dame M was beside her, in grey, with her gloves on the counter, which nobody had ever seen her take off in a bar, and her glasses on the end of her nose. Captain Szymanski was at the door with his clicker, which said, when he looked at it, forty-four thousand and ninety.

The landlords had not left either. Seventeen of them. They were behind the bar, still, where they had been all night, wedged, eight feet, nineteen people, and nobody had asked them to come out from behind it and none of them had, and Sue Fennell was drying glasses and Mr Kinsella was looking at the stout tap and Herr Kuhlmann and Herr Brandes were sitting on two upturned crates at opposite ends, as far apart as possible, which was about four feet, sharing the last of the Mumme.

And at the end of the bar, where they had been all evening, at the table nearest the dartboard, in the back room, through the open door, his mother and his father.

Kimura was on her stool by the hatch.

She had a glass in front of her. It was a whisky, from the bottle with the masking tape, with a drop of water in it, that the King had poured at a quarter to ten and left on the bar when Mr Quennell read out the last rule, half drunk, and had forgotten about, and she was drinking it, slowly, being an error.

---

At a quarter to one, Mrs Merriweather rang the bell.

She rang it three times, the way she rang it every night at a quarter to one, and had rung it every night since September, and every night before that since 1983, when her father had rung it in the Anchor. Three times. It was the sound that meant last orders, and then, a quarter of an hour later, closing, and the regulars of Eight Bars, every one of them, had heard it on every Friday and Saturday for eleven months and gone, more or less, when they heard it.

Nobody moved.

Mrs Merriweather looked down the bar. She looked at the regulars on their stools and in the booths, and the seventeen landlords behind the bar, and her son on the pallet, and the Master of the Household with her gloves off, and the fire marshal at the door, and the King and the Queen of Sweden and the Duke in the back room. She looked at them for some time.

Then she looked at the King.

“You do it,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Call it.” She held out the cord of the brass bell. “It’s your last night. You’ve never called it. Not once. In eleven months. I’ve always done it.” She held the cord out further. “Call it.”

He took the cord.

He stood behind the bar of Eight Bars at a quarter to one on Friday the twentieth of August 2032 in white tie and the crimson sash of the Charter and an apron with EIGHT BARS on the bib soaked through with three kinds of beer and a little rum punch, with seventeen landlords from fourteen countries round him and the regulars in front of him and his parents in the back room and a protection officer on a stool drinking his last mistake, and he rang the bell. Three times.

Then he said it.

He did not say last orders, which was what Mrs Merriweather said, and what every bar in the Realm said, and what Mr Muthu said at the stall in Kampung Baru and Don Aurelio said at La Esquina and Mr Ouellette said at Le Bon Mot in two languages. He said what they said at the New Inn. He said what Sue Fennell said at a quarter to eleven every night in a village in Gloucestershire where they had been calling it since 1632, and what Jack had said to him on the step at Columbia Palace a year ago, as a joke, when he had told him about the bar, and what he had heard Mrs Hegarty say in Clare and Mr Kinsella say in Dublin, in the same words, in the same voice, the voice you used for it, which was not loud and not soft but carried.

“Time, gentlemen,” said the King. “Please.”

---

Nobody moved.

Nobody moved at all. Not Mr Delgado. Not Mr Abernathy. Not Harold Quayle, nor Castellanos on the last stool, nor Marcus on the pallet, nor Mr Quennell in the booth, nor Bridget with her shoes off, nor Dame M with her gloves on the counter. Not the seventeen landlords behind the bar. Not Captain Szymanski at the door, who looked at his clicker and then put it in his pocket.

They sat there. All of them. They looked at the King, behind the bar, with the bell cord in his hand, and he looked at them, and nobody said anything, and nobody left, and he understood that nobody was going to.

“I said time,” he said.

“We heard you,” said Mr Delgado.

“Then you have to go.”

“No,” said Mr Delgado, and picked up his glass.

Mrs Merriweather, beside the till, did not say anything. She was holding the camera, in both hands, against her chest, and she was not lifting it.

---

He found out afterwards that it had been Theo’s idea.

Theo had gone round the trestle tables at about half past eleven, while the Emperor was saying goodbye, in the Cranwell apron, with a cloth, and had stopped at every place where a regular was sitting, and leaned down, and said four words, and gone on to the next. Theo told him the four words at three in the morning, in the kitchen of the flat, on the chair that wobbled, with the radiator banging every eleven minutes through the wall.

Don’t go when he calls it.

“Why?”

“Because it’s your last night,” said Theo. “And if they go, it’s over.” He looked at the table. “And Jack said. In San Isidro. Across the table.” He picked at the edge of the table. “He said it’s not a bar. None of them are. He said it’s standing there. Till it happens.” He looked up. “So I thought, if they don’t go, you have to stand there a bit longer.”

---

At one o’clock, Mrs Merriweather lifted the camera.

She did not take a photograph of the regulars. She did not take one of the landlords, or the Master of the Household with her gloves off, or the Duke, or the bedsheet on the ceiling that said HANOVER IS RUBISH, with one B. She turned round, at the till, and took one of the bar, the eight feet of floor behind it, between the bitter and the till, where the King had stood every Friday and Saturday since September.

Theo was standing there, beside him, in the Cranwell apron, which came down past his knees, with a cloth over his shoulder, because he had come behind the bar at a quarter to one when the King rang the bell and had not gone out again.

The two of them. In aprons. At closing. Behind the bar of Eight Bars. Not looking at the camera, because they did not know she had lifted it, looking at the room, at the regulars who would not leave, and at each other, and laughing.

The flash went off.

It was the fifty-second. There was no room on the wall for it. There had been no room on the wall since June. Mrs Merriweather took it to the photograph shop on the corner of Ninth on Friday afternoon, and had it printed, and framed, in black, and she took down the first photograph, the one from the first night, THE FIRST KEG, the King in a cloud with his hands up and his mouth open, and moved it one space to the left, and moved all the others one space to the left, fifty-one of them, along the whole length of the wall from the cellar door to the optics, which took her two hours, and put the new one at the end, where the first one had been, nearest the cellar door, where you saw it first, coming up the steps.

She had a brass plate made for it in her lunch hour, as she had for all of them.

It did not say THE LAST NIGHT, or CLOSING, or TIME, GENTLEMEN.

It said NOT A DISASTER.

---

At half past one, his father came out of the back room.

He came out slowly, without a stick, the left foot dragging very slightly on the tiles, in white tie, with the medals of a long reign across his chest and the crimson sash of the Charter, which he had worn as Sovereign for fifty-six years and wore now as a Knight Grand Cross, and his wife on his arm, the Queen of Sweden, in blue, and he walked the length of the bar, past the regulars on their stools, who did not stand up, because he had asked them in November not to, and past the seventeen landlords behind the bar, and stopped in front of his son.

He looked at him across the bar.

He looked at him, the way he looked at things he wanted to know later, end to end, carefully, the whole of him: the white tie and the sash and the star and the apron and the beer and the bell cord still in his hand.

Then he asked him.

He asked the way he asked things now, in the short sentences that had come back to him in the last year, more of them every month, but not all of them, and not always in the right order, so that sometimes a word was missing and you had to wait for it, or find it yourself, or understand that it did not matter that it was not there.

“What now,” said the Duke of Cumberland. “For you?”

The bar was quiet.

Frederick looked at his father.

He thought about the year. He thought about the foam, and the red handle, and the Minister for Transport in the queue, and the coin with his own head on it on the bar by the till. He thought about the Bloc, and the rye, and his face on three channels. He thought about Herr Brandes’s green hat, and the tide coming in at the speed of a horse walking, and the guard of honour running. He thought about Jack, behind the bar at the New Inn, not watching, just knowing. He thought about Rennie and the drop of water and the beach at night. He thought about Lucia, and the candles, and his father saying the whole of the first line of the song in the dark. He thought about Mr Kinsella and the eleven watches, and Seánie Hegarty and the drum, and Mrs Fitzsimmons and Mr Tane and ten glasses like the keys of a piano. He thought about Don Aurelio and the grandfather in the Plaza de Mayo, and the warm beer in Bloemfontein, and a cricket ball coming through a window over a fig tree, and three hundred and eighty feathers, and Marisol in white under her arch, and the Agong with his sleeves rolled up, and ten thousand miles, and Theo coming out of a door in a suit from 1974, and his mother’s face on a coin, and Mr Abernathy’s handwriting going downhill and coming back, and Jack’s dart, and Alexander cheered for a mistake, and a cat on a table four hundred and eighteen yards long.

He thought about all of it, and he did not decide anything, because there was nothing to decide, and he found that he did not mind.

“Not decided,” he said.

His father looked at him a moment longer.

Then the corner of his mouth went, the way it went, the thing that Frederick had seen at Coln on the window seat and at the oche in November and on the tarmac with a suit from 1974 and in Källaren on National Day, very small, and stayed.

“Good,” said the Duke.

---

Behind him, at the end of the bar, Sue Fennell reached under the counter, and took out the bottle with the masking tape on it, from a shed outside Auchtermuchty, nearly four years old and still not the best, and put it on the bar in front of the King, with a tulip glass, and a jug, and a teaspoon.

“You’re off shift,” she said. “You rang it. Rule Twenty-Eight doesn’t apply.”

He looked at the bottle.

Then he took two glasses down from the shelf, not one, and poured. A finger each. He dipped the teaspoon in the jug and let one drop of water fall off the end of it into each glass, and watched the whisky turn over, like smoke, and pushed one of them across the bar to his father.

The Duke picked it up.

He held it under his nose, the way he had been shown in the officers’ mess at Cranwell in 1968 by a flight lieutenant from Kirkcaldy, and breathed, and his face did not move.

Frederick picked up the other one.

At the till, Mrs Merriweather did not lift the camera. In the booth by the window, Marcus put the trombone to his mouth, and did not play, and put it down again. Behind the bar, seventeen landlords from fourteen countries stopped what they were doing. On the stool by the hatch, Kimura put down her glass, which was empty, and turned round, for the last time that year, and looked at the King.

He lifted the glass.

It was not the best.

It was good.

He drank it, behind the bar of Eight Bars, at half past one in the morning, in an apron, with the regulars who would not leave in front of him and his father across the counter and Theo beside him and nobody in the room deciding anything at all, and when it was finished he put the glass down on the bar, on a mat, in the centre, and looked out at the room, and the room looked back, and nobody went home.