Wait.

Theo left for medical school at ten past seven on Monday morning with a rucksack, a packed lunch from Bridget in a paper bag with T. HARTIGAN on it in capitals, a stethoscope that his mother had given him on Sunday night and that he had been told not to take on the first day because nobody would need it, and which he had in his rucksack anyway, and the expression of a man going to his own execution who has been told it will be very interesting.

Frederick walked him to the stop on the corner of Garfield and Ninth.

The Thirty-Two came at eighteen minutes past, as it always did, articulated, red and cream, with the bend in the middle like a caterpillar thinking. The doors folded open. Peter Hartigan was driving. He was always driving the Thirty-Two at eighteen minutes past seven on a weekday from Garfield and Ninth; it was his route, and had been for six years, and it was, Frederick had come to understand, the reason Theo had chosen that university over two others, because the Thirty-Two went past the gate.

“Morning,” said Peter, from the cab, looking straight ahead through the windscreen.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Exact fare.”

Theo held up his pass. His father looked at it, for a long time, as though checking it very carefully for forgery.

“That’ll do,” said Peter Hartigan, and Theo got on, and went halfway down the bus, to the bend, and sat in the seat by the window where he had sat every school morning for six years, and looked out of it at Frederick on the pavement, and Frederick lifted a hand.

Then the doors closed, and the Thirty-Two pulled out into the traffic on Ninth, and went away towards the river with Theo in it, and Frederick stood on the corner of Garfield and Ninth at twenty past seven in the morning on the third of November with his hands in his pockets, and found that he did not know what to do next.

He had not been without Theo behind a bar since the first night.

---

“A stand-in,” said Dame M, on Tuesday, in the back room.

“For six weeks,” said Mr Quennell, consulting his clipboard. “Mr Hartigan’s first term ends on the twelfth of December. He then takes leave from the medical school until the autumn, by arrangement, and returns to Eight Bars. Until then the Sovereign works the bar alone.” He looked up. “With Mrs Merriweather. And Marcus on Fridays.”

“He can’t do it alone,” said Bridget.

“Mrs Merriweather says he’s very nearly adequate, ma’am.”

“Mrs Merriweather,” said Bridget, “has been taking it out of his wages since September. I’ve seen the book. He owes her four hundred and twelve pounds.”

“Four hundred and nineteen,” said Kimura, through the hatch, without turning round. “There was a tray on Sunday.”

Dame M looked at the papers.

“The committee,” she said, “has a duty to consider who might properly stand behind a bar beside the Sovereign. Not as an employee of the Household. As a colleague.” She took off her glasses. “It must be somebody discreet. Somebody the public will accept. Somebody who understands the position.” She paused. “And somebody, I am told by Mrs Merriweather, who can pull a pint.”

There was a silence in the back room.

At the far wall, the Duke of Cumberland, who had come on the Thirty-Two at a quarter past two as he did every Tuesday now, and had thrown about forty darts while the committee discussed Rule Nine, which concerned umbrellas, put his darts down on the top of the filing cabinet without handles, and turned round.

“Me,” he said.

---

Frederick had not been told.

He was behind the bar on Friday at a quarter to five, setting up, alone, slicing lemons, badly, when the door opened and his father came in, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a black waistcoat and, over it, an apron, a long one, white, of the kind barmen had worn in photographs from before the Second Great War, which he had evidently brought from home, because it had a small embroidered crest in the corner, very faded, and a laundry mark.

He walked down the length of Eight Bars without the stick, the left foot dragging very slightly on the tiles, and lifted the flap at the end of the counter, and came behind the bar, and stood there.

Frederick looked at him.

“Dad.”

“Friday,” said the Duke.

“You’re working?”

“Six weeks.” His father looked at the taps. “Till Theo.” He found the next part, slowly, the way he found things now, not all at once but in pieces that came in their own order, and Frederick waited for them, the way he had learned to wait since the September he was fifteen. “Committee said. Somebody. Who can. Pull.” He picked up a glass. “I can.”

“Since when?”

His father held the glass up to the light from the window and looked through it, the way Jack did, the way Sue Fennell did, checking it for marks.

“Sixty-eight,” he said.

“Nineteen sixty-eight?”

“Mess.” The Duke put the glass under the tap of the bitter. “Cranwell.”

Frederick stared at him.

He knew, in the way he knew a great many things about his father, from the Register, from the article that had been written about him, from the books, that his father had trained as a pilot in his twenties, at Cranwell, in the late 1960s, with the Royal Air Force, which had been unusual for an heir and had been allowed because his own father had wanted it. He knew that his father had flown jets. He knew that he had flown, for fifty-six years, in aircraft of the royal squadron, across the Atlantic and back, hundreds of times, until a night in September three years ago when he had come down into it. He did not know, and had never been told, and had never thought to ask, that at the age of twenty-one, in an officers’ mess in the flat fields of Lincolnshire, the heir to fourteen crowns had stood behind a bar.

“Every officer,” said the Duke, slowly, one piece at a time, with his hand on the tap. “Did a. Night. Behind the.” He pulled. “Bar.”

The beer came out of the tap brown and slow and hit the side of the glass at exactly forty-five degrees and slid, and the glass came up as it filled, smoothly, without any hurry, the way an aircraft comes up off a runway, and the head rose, and stopped, a finger deep, exactly, flat as a coin, and his father took the glass away from the tap and set it on the bar on a mat in one movement, and did not look at it, because he did not need to.

It was, Frederick thought, the best pint that had ever been pulled in Eight Bars.

“Sixty-three years,” said the Duke, and almost smiled. “Still. There.”

---

At a quarter past eight, Mr Abernathy came in.

He came in at the speed he always came in, in the brown jacket, and walked to the stool, the third from the window, which had been kept empty for him since six by a queue that had learned its lesson in September, and sat, and looked up, and saw the Duke of Cumberland behind the bar, in the apron, with his sleeves rolled up.

For the first time since Frederick had known him, which was four years and two months, Mr Abernathy’s face did something before he had decided it should.

It was very small. It was an eyebrow. The left one. It went up about an eighth of an inch, and came down again.

“Sir,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Mr Abernathy,” said the Duke. And then, to Frederick’s astonishment, a whole sentence, all at once, the way his father’s sentences came when he had been saving them up: “I hear you mark.”

“I do, sir.”

“Mark mine.”

Mr Abernathy looked at him for a long moment.

“A pint of bitter, then,” he said. “If you would, sir.”

The Duke pulled it. Forty-five degrees. The glass coming up. The head. The mat. He did not look.

Mr Abernathy picked it up and drank about a quarter of it and put it down exactly on the mat and took out the red pen and uncapped it and moved the glass two inches to the left and wrote.

The Duke did not look at what he had written. He went on to the next customer.

Frederick looked.

On the beer mat, in red, it said: A−. Head: exemplary. Temperature: correct. Angle: held throughout. Minus for not looking, which is showing off.

Under it, smaller: Mr Hanover: C+, see last week. Your father is better than you. This is normal.

---

The darts were on Thursday.

There was a league. Frederick had not known there was a league, because he had not, until September, known anything at all about darts, except that there was a board in the back room of Eight Bars and his father had a set with red flights that nobody could account for. But there was. The Columbia District Pub Darts League had been founded in 1947 by a group of bar owners in the Fourth and Fifth Wards who were tired, the league’s handbook said, of arguments about whose bar had the best team, and it had been producing arguments about whose bar had the best team every Thursday night from October to July ever since. It had four divisions. Eight Bars had entered in September, at the bottom of Division Four, on Mrs Merriweather’s application, with a team of six: the Duke, as captain; Mr Abernathy; Marcus, on Thursdays as well as Fridays now; Mrs Merriweather herself; a retired postman called Mr Delgado who had played for the Anchor when it was the Anchor; and, to make up the numbers, because Theo had been going to and was now learning about the kidneys, the King.

He was, it turned out, very bad at darts.

He had expected that. He was bad at everything at Eight Bars. What he had not expected was that it would be a different kind of bad. Behind the bar he was bad in a way that was loud, and wet, and involved foam. At the oche he was bad in a way that was silent and slow and terribly visible, because darts was the only thing in the bar that everybody watched at once, and when he stood on the line and threw, the whole room watched the dart go up in an arc, quite high, like a small bird that has had a fright, and come down into the wall about a foot to the left of the board, where there was a patch of cork that had been put up by Mrs Merriweather’s father in 1983 for exactly this purpose and that was, by the end of the evening, mostly holes.

“Elbow,” said the Duke.

“I know.”

“Up.”

“I know.”

“Then. Do it,” said his father, and the room laughed, and Frederick threw again, and hit the cork.

The opposition on Thursday was the Ninth Ward Rovers, from a bar called the Lamplighter four blocks east, who had been at the bottom of Division Four for six seasons and were, their captain said cheerfully, shaking hands, delighted to have somebody beneath them at last. Their captain was a woman of about sixty in a cardigan with a darts badge on it for every year she had played, which was thirty-one, and her name was Mrs Pruszynski, and she threw like a sniper.

She threw the first leg in eleven darts. Mr Delgado lost the second. Marcus won the third, with a double sixteen that he hit while humming, and was so surprised that he dropped his remaining dart. Mr Abernathy won the fourth, slowly, without any expression, and recorded his own score on a beer mat. Mrs Merriweather lost the fifth. The King lost the sixth, to a boy of about nineteen with a ponytail, by a margin that the league’s scorer, a small precise man with a clipboard who had travelled with the Rovers, wrote down and then, after looking at it for a while, underlined.

So it came to the last leg, three each, the captains, the Duke of Cumberland and Mrs Pruszynski, at half past ten, with Eight Bars full to the door and the door open and people on the pavement looking in through the window, and the scorer’s clipboard on the bar, and Kimura on her stool with her back to the bar, for once, facing the board.

Mrs Pruszynski threw first.

She threw a hundred. Then a hundred and forty. Then a hundred. She was, after nine darts, on a hundred and sixty-one, and the Duke was on two hundred and seventy-three, because the Duke threw slowly, carefully, with long pauses between darts, and had not yet hit a treble, and Frederick, standing by the bar with an empty tray, began to feel the cold thing in his stomach that he had felt at the till in September, the thing that said this is going to be very public.

Mrs Pruszynski threw sixty, and was on a hundred and one.

The Duke went to the line.

He stood there. He held the dart. He did not throw.

He stood there. The room waited. Mrs Pruszynski, at the side, with her darts in her hand, waited. The scorer waited. The people on the pavement, looking through the window, waited.

The Duke lowered his hand.

“Wait,” he said.

It was the only word he said. He did not say it to anybody. He said it to the board, or to himself, or to the room, quietly, the way a man says it to a dog. And then he stood on the line with his hand down by his side and the dart in it, and looked at the board, and waited, for what Kimura afterwards timed on her beer mat as forty-one seconds.

Forty-one seconds is a very long time in a bar.

At about the twentieth second, Frederick noticed Mrs Pruszynski.

She had been standing at the side with her darts in her hand, perfectly composed, thirty-one years of badges on her cardigan. At the twentieth second she shifted her weight. At the twenty-fifth she looked at the scorer. At the thirtieth she looked at her own darts, as though checking they were still there. At the thirty-fifth she took a small breath, and let it out, and took another one, and Frederick, who had stood at the side of a cricket pitch in May while the last over of a match went by with sixty people counting stones, knew exactly what was happening to her, because it had happened to him, and to the bowler, and to everybody on the green.

At the forty-first second the Duke lifted his hand and threw three darts, one after the other, without any pause at all.

Treble twenty. Treble twenty. Treble nineteen.

A hundred and seventy-seven.

The room breathed out.

Mrs Pruszynski went to the line. She needed a hundred and one. She had thrown a hundred and one, Frederick found out later from the Rovers’ scorer, in her sleep, on nine hundred occasions, over thirty-one years.

She threw a one. Then a five. Then a twenty, single, which left her on seventy-five, and she stood on the line looking at the board as though it had been replaced, while she was not looking, by a different and much smaller board.

The Duke went back to the line.

He was on ninety-six. He threw a treble twenty, and a twelve, and a double twelve.

It was over.

---

Mrs Pruszynski shook his hand afterwards, at the bar, for a long time, and looked at him, and said, “What did you say? Before you threw?”

The Duke considered the question.

“Wait,” he said.

“I know. Why?”

His father thought about it, and Frederick watched him look for the words, and find some of them, and leave the rest where they were.

“Everybody,” said the Duke of Cumberland, slowly, “hurries.”

He let go of her hand.

“Don’t,” he said, and went back behind the bar, and put on the apron, and pulled her a pint, at forty-five degrees, without looking, and put it on a mat in front of her, and she looked at it and at him, and then, for reasons she never afterwards explained, began to laugh.

On Kimura’s beer mat, at the bottom of the back, under a line, there was a new entry.

22.31. “Wait.” 41 seconds. Opposition went to pieces. Eight Bars: 4. Rovers: 3. First win.

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

Detail would like it noted it is now frightened of the Duke.