Two Languages

The bar was called Le Bon Mot, which meant The Right Word, and it said so on the sign outside in both languages, in letters of exactly the same size, French on the top line on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and English on the top line on the other days, because the sign was on a hinge and the landlord turned it every morning at seven.

It was a Friday. The French was on top.

“It’s the law,” said the landlord.

He was a tall bald man of about sixty called Gilles Ouellette, who had been born in Hull, across the river, and had owned Le Bon Mot for twenty-two years, and he had met the King on the pavement at four o’clock in front of a guard of honour, two photographers and about nine hundred people, and shaken his hand, and said, in French and then in English, welcome to my bar, I have only one rule, and then explained the rule, in both languages, for four minutes.

“The sign’s not the law,” said Frederick. “The sign’s yours.”

“The sign is the spirit of the law,” said Monsieur Ouellette. “In this country everything is in both languages. The laws. The courts. The cereal boxes. Neither version is subordinate to the other. Ni l’une ni l’autre.” He held up a finger. “So in my bar, tonight, in honour of the occasion, every order is in both. The customer asks in French and in English. You answer in French and in English. You say the price in French and in English. If you get one wrong, you say it again.” He smiled. “You speak French?”

“Some.”

“How much is some?”

Frederick thought about Madame Tessier in room 214 at Ellicott, in the autumn of tenth grade, handing back a test on the past conditional with a large red number on the front of it.

“Sixty-eight,” he said.

“Out of?”

“A hundred.”

Monsieur Ouellette considered this, his head on one side.

“Then tonight,” he said, “will be very good for you,” and went inside.

---

The guard of honour was on the pavement outside the door, twelve men and an officer in scarlet tunics and bearskins, with rifles, who had marched down the street at a quarter to four behind a band and halted in front of Le Bon Mot and presented arms to a bar. The band was still there, on the other side of the road, playing. It had been playing since a quarter to four. It played the Realm’s anthem, and then New Albion’s, and then the Realm’s again in case anybody had missed it, and then a selection of marches, and then, for reasons nobody could afterwards explain, the theme from a film about a shark.

“Are they going to stay?” said Theo, at the window, at five.

“I think they’re the state occasion,” said Frederick.

“All night?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re in bearskins,” said Theo. “It’s seventy-two degrees. That’s twenty-two. They’ll faint.” He looked at the guard with the professional interest he had for anybody who might fall over. “The one on the end’s going already. Look at his knees.”

Kimura, on a stool at the end of the bar, without turning round, said, “His knees are fine.”

“His knees are locked. You lock your knees, you faint. Everybody knows that.”

“He’s a guardsman,” said Kimura. “He’s been locking his knees since he was nineteen. He’ll go when they tell him to go.” She drank. “Not before.”

The guardsman on the end did not faint. He stood there until a quarter to eleven, when the officer gave an order, and the guard came to attention and turned and marched away up the street towards Parliament behind the band, which was by then playing the shark again, and the guardsman on the end marched with them, perfectly, and at the corner Frederick, watching from the window, saw him lean very slightly towards the man beside him, and the man beside him, without breaking step, put out an elbow.

---

The first order was at six minutes past five.

A woman of about forty in a suit, a civil servant by her shoes, came to the bar and said, very clearly, “Une bière, s’il vous plaît. A beer, please.”

“Oui, madame. Yes, madam.” Frederick took a glass. Forty-five degrees. The side, not the bottom. “Quelle bière? Which beer?”

“La blonde. The lager.”

He pulled it. It was a good one, nearly. He put it on the bar, on a mat.

“Six dollars, s’il vous plaît. Six dollars, please.”

“Six dollars,” said the woman, “c’est le même mot.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s the same word,” she said. “Dollars. In French it’s the same word. You don’t have to say it twice.”

He looked at Monsieur Ouellette, at the end of the bar.

“Il faut le dire deux fois,” said Monsieur Ouellette serenely. “You must say it twice.”

So he said it twice. And the woman paid, in New Albion dollars, with a ten, on which there was a former prime minister, and he gave her the change in coins, four of them, on each of which there was his own head, looking left, the same portrait as the pound, with GEORGIUS V REX round the edge, and the woman looked at the coins and at him and said, “Merci. Thank you,” and he said, “De rien. You’re welcome,” and she went away, and the man behind her came up, and said, “Une bière. A beer,” and he said, “Oui, monsieur,” and it began.

---

By seven he had stopped thinking.

It was the only way to do it. If he thought, he had to think in English and then think in French and then say both, and the French came out at sixty-eight per cent, with the genders all over the place. But if he did not think, if he just let the words come, they came, both of them, one after the other, like a pair of shoes. Une pinte. A pint. Deux pintes. Two pints. Un verre de vin rouge. A glass of red wine. Une eau gazeuse. A sparkling water. Douze dollars. Twelve dollars. Merci. Thank you. De rien. You’re welcome. Désolé. Sorry. Désolé. Sorry. Désolé. Sorry, because it was not all going well, and sorry came up a great deal, and by eight o’clock he had said it, Kimura reported later, in both languages, a hundred and four times.

Theo was worse.

Theo’s French had stopped at the end of ninth grade, when he had chosen Spanish, and it consisted, as far as Frederick could tell, of bonjour, merci, croissant, and a phrase he had learnt from a box of cereal in 2024 which meant with added vitamins. He said bonjour to everybody, including people who were leaving. He said merci when he was given an order and merci when he handed the drink over and merci when he was paid and merci when the customer said merci, so that some of his transactions went on for some time. And at half past seven a man asked him in French for a gin and tonic, and Theo, who did not understand a word of it, looked at him with great kindness and said, “Avec vitamines ajoutées?”, and the man laughed so hard that he had to sit down.

---

The Bloc came at eight.

Four of them. Frederick knew one face from the papers in the red boxes, a deputy for a riding in the east of Quebec who had voted against the Regency Act on the sixth of October 2028 and had made a speech about it that Frederick had read twice, at fifteen, because it was the only speech in fourteen realms that week that had said, in effect, that the question was not about him at all, and he had found that oddly restful. She came in at the head of the four, a small grey-haired woman with very bright eyes, and walked down the bar to a booth at the back, under a framed photograph of a hockey team from 1972, and sat, and the other three sat with her, and she looked at the bar and said, very loudly, in French only, so that everybody heard:

“Nous ne serons pas servis par le roi.”

The bar went quiet.

“What did she say?” said Theo.

“She said they won’t be served by the King.”

“Oh.” Theo thought. “Then who’s going to serve them?”

It was a good question. The waiting staff at Le Bon Mot, Monsieur Ouellette had told him at four, were two young women called Mathilde and Priya, both students at the university, and they had been given the night off, because, Monsieur Ouellette said, nobody would sit at a table tonight, everybody would want to come to the bar. He had been right. There were three hundred people in Le Bon Mot and every one of them was standing at the bar or trying to, and the booths at the back were empty except for the four deputies of the Bloc, who sat in one of them, with nothing in front of them, in a silence that was itself a political position, for twenty minutes.

Then for forty.

At nine, the deputy for the riding in the east of Quebec looked at her watch.

At five past nine she looked at the bar.

At ten past, one of the other three, a young man with a beard, said something to her in a low voice, and she said something back, sharply, and he said something else, and she looked at the bar again, at the three hundred people standing at it, at the King behind it saying désolé and sorry and putting pints on mats, and at Monsieur Ouellette, who was polishing a glass and looking at nothing at all with the expression of a man who has owned a bar near Parliament for twenty-two years and has seen everything at least twice.

At a quarter past nine, the four deputies of the Bloc stood up, and walked to the end of the queue, which was by then out of the door and on the pavement, and stood in it.

---

They reached the bar at a quarter to eleven.

The deputy was first. She put her hand on the counter and looked at him, and he looked at her, and the people around them, who had been waiting for this for an hour and a half, stopped talking.

“Quatre bières,” she said. “Blondes.”

Only French. Not a word of English.

He waited.

She waited.

At the end of the bar, Monsieur Ouellette put down his glass.

“Madame,” he said, very gently. “Dans mon bar, ce soir, il faut le dire deux fois.”

The deputy looked at him for a long time.

Then she looked back at Frederick, and her bright eyes were, he thought, very slightly amused, in the way of a woman who has lost a small battle in order to win a large one, or possibly the other way round.

“Quatre bières,” she said again. And then, after a pause so long it was practically a speech: “Four beers.”

“Oui, madame,” said Frederick. “Yes, madam.”

He pulled them. He pulled them better than anything he had pulled all night, all four, the angle right, the side not the bottom, the glass straightening as it filled, the head a finger deep, and he put them on four mats in a row in front of the four deputies of the Bloc, and said, “Vingt-quatre dollars. Twenty-four dollars.”

The deputy paid. She paid with a twenty and a five. He gave her the change. It was a single coin, a dollar, with his own head on it.

She looked at it.

Then she put it back on the bar.

“Pour vous,” she said, and picked up her beer, and drank about a third of it, and said, with the air of someone conceding an amendment, “Pas mal.” And then, after a pause, very precisely: “Not bad.”

And went back to the booth, with the other three behind her, carrying their beers.

At the end of the bar, Kimura uncapped her pen and wrote on the beer mat in front of her: 22.47. Tipped. Bloc. Rule One, breached again.

---

The rye was on Saturday.

It had been in the schedule for six weeks. Mr Quennell, who had come on the trip as an observer, for the record, and had spent Friday night at the end of the bar beside Kimura with a French dictionary, a notebook and a club soda, had shown it to him on the aeroplane: Saturday, 1400 hours. The Sovereign is invited by the Minister of Heritage to taste the national spirit. Live, national television. Duration: four minutes. There was a footnote. The footnote said (rye).

The tasting was at Le Bon Mot, at two, before opening. There were three cameras and a man with a microphone on a pole and a minister, a cheerful man in his fifties with a tie in the colours of the realm, who made a speech of two minutes about the history of rye whisky in New Albion, the distilleries on the lakes, the grain of the prairie, the cold winters that gave it its character, and then poured a glass, an inch, golden, into a small heavy tumbler, and gave it to the King, and stood back, and the three cameras came in close.

Frederick looked at the glass.

He had drunk whisky twice. The first time had been in Soho, in May, at eighteen, at a bar at the bottom of a staircase with Jack and Castellanos and Kimura, when Castellanos had bought it for him and he had not liked it and finished it. The second time had been in Phoenix, three weeks ago, at the whisky wall at Giligin’s, which he was still not allowed to talk about, and he had not liked that either, and had finished that too.

He lifted the glass. He smelled it. It smelled of a wooden floor that had been set on fire in a bakery.

He drank it.

He found out afterwards, from Theo, who watched it four times that evening on his phone in the hotel, that his face had done three things in the four seconds after the rye went down, and that the three cameras had caught all of them. First it had gone completely still, as though it had been told something very important and was trying to remember it. Then his eyes had watered. Then, very slowly, from the bottom up, starting at the chin, his whole face had folded inward towards the nose, the way a paper bag folds when you blow into it and then suck the air out, and stayed folded, for about a second and a half, while his eyes streamed.

Then he swallowed, and unfolded, and looked at the minister, and said, in a voice about an octave higher than his own, “Thank you. That’s very. Thank you. Merci.”

“It’s a fine rye, sir,” said the minister happily. “One of our best.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Oui. I can tell.”

By Sunday morning the face was on the front of three newspapers in Ottawa, two in Montreal, the Courier in New Westminster, and, Jack reported by text at four in the morning Eastern time, the bloody Gloucestershire Echo, with the headline KING’S FACE SAYS IT ALL, and a subhead, Whisky “very. Thank you”, says monarch. The Albian Distillers’ Association issued a statement on Sunday afternoon saying that they were honoured that the King had tasted their product and that they hoped he would try it again in more relaxed circumstances, and the Minister of Heritage, asked about it at a press conference on Monday, said only that the King had finished the glass, which is more than some of my colleagues can say.

---

On the aeroplane home on Sunday, Mr Quennell sat across the aisle with his notebook and wrote for two hours without looking up. Somewhere over Pennsylvania he leaned across with it, open, and showed Frederick a page.

At the top it said DRAFT, FOR TUESDAY. Under it there were three numbered paragraphs.

Rule Three. Where the custom of the place requires the Sovereign to serve in more than one language, he shall do so; and where his command of a language is incomplete, he shall apologise in each language once only, and not one hundred and four times.

Rule Four. The Sovereign shall not be tipped by members of a legislature.

Rule Five. The Sovereign shall not taste spirits on live television.

Frederick read them.

“Four’s going to be hard,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re all members of a legislature. Half the people in that bar were members of a legislature. And it wasn’t me, it was her.”

“Yes, sir.” Mr Quennell looked at the paragraph. “I’m aware the rule addresses the wrong party. I’m afraid it’s the only party the Household has any authority over.” He took the notebook back and looked at it. “I may have to redraft.”

Across the aisle, on the other side of Theo, who was asleep with his head on the window and a beer mat from Le Bon Mot in his shirt pocket on which Monsieur Ouellette had written Avec vitamines ajoutées and his signature, Kimura opened her eyes.

“Five’s going to be hard as well,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re doing the River Plate in February,” said Kimura, “and it’s in the schedule,” and closed them again.