On Hold

The front office was a long room on the ground floor of the old building, with a counter across it like a post office, and behind the counter Mrs Delahunt’s desk, under the clock, and behind Mrs Delahunt’s desk a door with a frosted glass panel that said DR A. BROOKS, PRINCIPAL, in gold letters that had been put on in 2017 and were beginning to come off at the P.

There was a bench outside the door, on the near side of the counter. It was where you sat when you had been sent to the office. It was dark wood, very hard, polished by about forty years of people sitting on it waiting to be told things, and it had a groove worn along the front edge where their hands had held on.

He sat on it.

“Dr Brooks is with the inspector,” said Mrs Delahunt, without looking up. “She’ll be five minutes. She says you’re not in trouble. She said to say that first.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m saying it first.”

“Thank you, Mrs Delahunt.”

Mrs Delahunt went on typing. She typed with two fingers, very fast, so that it sounded like rain on a tin roof, which, since there was also rain on the windows, made the whole office sound as if it were raining twice.

On the wall above the bench there was a framed photograph of the school from the air, taken some time before the glass block was built, and a notice about head lice, and a calendar from a garage in Anacostia with a picture for February of a red sports car on a beach. He looked at all three of them. The car did not seem to be going anywhere.

He could hear voices through the frosted glass. Dr Brooks’s, low and level. And another one, which he knew by now as well as he knew Mr Abernathy’s, a voice that said quite a great deal.

“…in Virginia, Dr Brooks, at the Fairfax Academy…”

---

Mrs Delahunt’s telephone rang.

It was a big grey telephone with two rows of clear plastic buttons along the bottom, each with a little light behind it, and a coiled cord that had been stretched so many times it hung nearly to the floor. When it rang, one of the buttons lit up and flashed.

Mrs Delahunt picked it up without stopping typing, and wedged it between her ear and her shoulder, and went on typing.

“Ellicott High School.”

She listened.

“Who?”

She listened a little longer. Her typing slowed, and then stopped, with one finger in the air.

“The Prime Minister,” said Mrs Delahunt, “of what?”

Frederick sat very still on the bench.

Mrs Delahunt listened. Her face did not change at all. It was the face she used for parents who rang to say that their child had a dentist’s appointment and parents who rang to complain about the buses and parents who rang, on the morning of the first of November, four hundred and twelve of them, to ask whether it was true, and Frederick knew that because Theo had counted the light on the telephone going on and off from the corridor at break.

“I see,” said Mrs Delahunt. “Well, Dr Brooks is with the inspector. Yes. The inspector. He’s been waiting since one.” She listened. “I’m sure it is, dear. They all say that. Can you hold?”

She did not wait to hear whether he could hold. She pressed a button. The flashing light on the telephone stopped flashing and went steady, a small amber light, the second from the left.

She put the receiver down on the desk, on its back, and went on typing.

---

“Mrs Delahunt,” said Frederick.

“Mm.”

“Who was that?”

“Man on line two.” Mrs Delahunt did not look up. “Says he’s the Prime Minister.”

“What’s he called?”

Mrs Delahunt stopped typing and looked at a yellow sticky note she had written something on while she was listening, at the corner of her desk.

“Lord something,” she said. “Whitlock.”

“He is the Prime Minister.”

Mrs Delahunt looked at the sticky note for a moment longer. Then she looked at the receiver, lying on its back on the desk with its coiled cord, and at the small steady amber light on line two.

“Oh,” she said. “Well.” She went back to typing. “He’ll keep. Dr Brooks is with the inspector, and the inspector was here first.”

---

From the receiver, lying on its back on the desk, very faintly, there came music.

He knew it at once. It was the hold music. Everybody at Ellicott knew the hold music, because everybody at Ellicott had at some point had to ring the office, to say they were ill or their bus had broken down or they had left their gym kit on the 22, and been put on hold, and listened to it. It was a recording of the school band playing the school song, made in the gym in 2026 for the spring concert, and it had been put on the telephone system by the caretaker, who was proud of it, and it went on a loop, two minutes and forty seconds, over and over, for as long as you were on hold.

It was not a very good recording. The band had not been a very good band in 2026. And in the middle of it, in the second verse, where the tune went up, there was one instrument that was a little louder than all the others and a little ahead of them and entirely, gloriously sure of itself, a trombone, playing the tune, the only tune it knew, as though it had been waiting all its life to be asked.

Marcus.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America was on hold to Ellicott High School, listening to Marcus.

He sat on the bench and listened to it through the receiver, faintly, across the counter, and found that something was happening to his face that he could not stop, and put his hand over his mouth, and looked very hard at the red sports car on the beach.

---

One minute. The loop went round. Marcus came in again in the second verse, slightly ahead, entirely sure.

Two minutes. Mrs Delahunt typed. The rain rained twice.

Three. A seventh-grader came in with a note from Mrs Hendry and gave it to Mrs Delahunt, who read it and said Go back to class, Leo, and tell Mrs Hendry that there are detentions until May and after it, and the seventh-grader, who was the one who had said it was complicated, looked at Frederick on the bench, and at the receiver on its back on the desk, and went out without saying anything, with the face of a boy who has seen something he will be able to describe for the rest of his life.

Four. Through the frosted glass: “…quite, quite, but the principle, Dr Brooks, the principle…”

Five. The amber light. Marcus.

“Mrs Delahunt.”

“Mm.”

“Should you check he’s still there?”

Mrs Delahunt looked at the amber light. Then she picked up the receiver, without stopping typing, and wedged it on her shoulder.

“Still there? Lovely. She won’t be long.” And put it down again, on its back.

Six.

He thought about Lord Whitlock.

He had sat at the same table as Lord Whitlock perhaps twelve times now, at the Privy Council and at Columbia Palace on Wednesdays when the Prime Minister came to see his mother, and Lord Whitlock was a very large, careful young man who sat very straight and listened to every word anybody said as though it were being weighed, and put his pen down square to the edge of the paper. He had a voice that never went up at the end. Frederick had once heard him say thank you to a footman as though the footman had done him a service of state.

He thought about Lord Whitlock, at Charter House, in his office, holding a telephone, listening to Marcus play the school song for the second time, and the third, and the fourth, without putting the telephone down, because Lord Whitlock did not put things down until they were finished.

Seven. Eight.

“…in my thirty years, Dr Brooks…”

Nine.

The face thing happened again and he could not stop it, and he bent down and retied his shoe, which did not need retying, for a long time.

Ten.

Eleven.

---

The frosted door opened.

Mr Stroud came out first, with his clipboard against his chest, and his scorched sheet still in his breast pocket where Frederick could see the brown edge of it, and behind him Dr Brooks, who was a tall grey-haired woman in a grey suit with reading glasses on a chain, and who had been the principal of Ellicott for eleven years, and had shaken Frederick’s hand on his first morning in seventh grade, in this office, and had not shaken it since.

Mr Stroud saw Frederick on the bench.

He stopped. The hand went along the shelf and stopped.

“Hanover,” he said. “The boy with the sixteen.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In trouble, Dr Brooks?”

“Not with me,” said Dr Brooks.

“Inattentive,” said Mr Stroud, to Dr Brooks, confidentially, as though sharing a diagnosis. “Four lessons in five. I’ve given you the details. And struck by a ball.” He looked down at Frederick with something that was, he thought, very nearly kindness. “Pay attention, Hanover. It’s the courtesy a man pays the present.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Art next,” said Mr Stroud, to nobody in particular, and looked at his watch, and went out through the counter flap with his clipboard, into the corridor, where Frederick heard him say, to somebody outside, Lost, are you?, and Castellanos’s voice say Thank you, no.

---

Dr Brooks looked at Mrs Delahunt.

Mrs Delahunt looked at the amber light.

“Man on line two,” she said. “Eleven minutes. Says he’s the Prime Minister.”

“He is the Prime Minister, Joan.”

“So the boy said.”

Dr Brooks looked at the receiver on its back on the desk, and at the amber light, and listened for a moment to the very faint sound that was coming out of it, which was Marcus, in the second verse, going up.

“Is that the school song?”

“It’s the hold music.”

“Since when?”

“Since 2026. Mr Gaskell put it on. He’s very proud of it.”

Dr Brooks closed her eyes, briefly, the way a woman closes her eyes when she has been in a meeting with an inspector for fifty minutes and has come out of it to find that the Prime Minister has been listening to the school band for eleven.

“Put him through to my office, Joan, please,” she said. “Frederick. The green chair.”

---

The green chair was in front of Dr Brooks’s desk.

It was an armchair, old, upholstered in dark green leather that had gone soft and cracked at the arms, and it was very comfortable and very low, so that when you sat in it you had to look up at Dr Brooks across the desk. Everybody at Ellicott knew about the green chair. You sat on the bench outside when you were in trouble. You sat in the green chair when you were being told something. People had been told they had got into university in the green chair, and that their parents were divorcing, and that there had been an accident, and that they had won a prize, and on the twenty-eighth of September his mother had sat in it, and he had sat across from her on the plastic chair by the wall, and she had told him that wreckage had been found and nobody had been found with it. He had sat in it himself, the first time, in November, to be asked whether he would speak at an assembly.

He sat in it now.

Dr Brooks sat behind her desk and picked up her telephone, which was the twin of Mrs Delahunt’s, and pressed the button for line two, and the amber light went out.

“Prime Minister. This is Dr Brooks. I am so sorry about the wait.”

He could not hear Lord Whitlock. He could hear Dr Brooks, and he could see her face, which was the face of a woman who has said the buses will be twenty minutes late on the loudspeaker for eleven years in the same voice and does not intend to change it now.

“Yes. Yes, I’m afraid that is the school song. No, the band’s improved since.” Pause. “Thank you. I’ll tell them.”

Pause.

“I’m sure you have, Prime Minister. I have seen it too. I have had it described to me by a member of the inspectorate for the better part of an hour.” Pause. “No. I’m afraid not. The school does not discuss its pupils.” Pause. “With anybody, Prime Minister. That has been the school’s position for four years, and I’m afraid it includes you.” Pause. “Yes. I know you are.” Pause. “Yes. I know he is.”

She looked across the desk at Frederick in the green chair.

“He’s here,” she said.

Pause.

“I’ll ask him.”

She put her hand over the mouthpiece.

“The Prime Minister,” said Dr Brooks, “would like to speak to you, if you have a moment. I’ve told him that you’re in sixth period and that you have art, and that the school does not interrupt art. He says he’ll be very brief. It’s your choice. You may say no.”

“Can I say no to the Prime Minister?”

“You can say no to anybody in this office,” said Dr Brooks. “That’s what the chair’s for.”

He thought about it.

“I’ll speak to him.”

Dr Brooks held the receiver out across the desk.

---

“Sir,” said Lord Whitlock.

His voice was exactly as it always was, level and careful and never going up at the end. It was strange to hear it on a school telephone, out of a grey receiver that smelled faintly of Dr Brooks’s hand cream, in the green chair.

“Hello,” said Frederick.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your school day.”

“That’s all right. I’ve got art. I’m not very good at art.”

“No,” said Lord Whitlock. “Neither was I.” There was a pause on the line. “I won’t keep you. I need to ask you one thing, sir, because I’m going to have to say something, and I’d like to say the right thing. There’s a man on the radio.”

“Gary.”

“Gary,” agreed Lord Whitlock, in the voice of a man who had now heard a great deal of Gary. “Sir. Did you say it?”

“Yes.”

“In those words?”

“No. I said you can’t reign till sixteen. He wrote be King.”

There was a short silence on the line. Frederick could hear, behind it, very faintly, the sound of a pen.

“And do you believe it?” said Lord Whitlock. “That you can’t reign?”

Frederick looked across the desk at Dr Brooks, who was looking out of the window at the rain with an expression of total absorption in it, the way Theo looked at a board.

“I did at half past eight,” he said.

“And now?”

“I’m nearly sure I was wrong. I’m nearly sure I’m nearly sure. I haven’t got it in writing.”

“You were wrong, sir,” said Lord Whitlock. He said it plainly and without any weight on it, the way he said everything, as though putting it down square to the edge of the table. “I’m sorry. You reign. You’ve reigned since two o’clock on the thirty-first of October. It’s your mother who acts, until May. But it’s you who reigns. It’s in the terms. It’s four words. I’ll send you them.”

“Priya’s going to tell me.”

“Who’s Priya?”

“She’s in my history class. She knows everything. She doesn’t do the Charter at break.”

“I’d like to meet her,” said Lord Whitlock, after a moment, quite seriously.

---

“What are you going to say?” said Frederick. “To Gary?”

“As little as I possibly can. One line.”

“Which line?”

“That you are King.”

Frederick thought about it.

“Is that all?”

“It’s the only thing that’s true that I’m allowed to say. Everything else is a history lesson, and I don’t comment on history lessons. I was very badly taught history myself.” A pause. “It’ll go out in about twenty minutes. I’d have done it sooner, but I was on hold.”

“I know. I heard. I’m sorry. That’s Marcus.”

“Who’s Marcus?”

“The trombone. In the second verse. He’s in my class. He only knows one tune.”

There was a silence on the line, a different kind, and then Lord Whitlock said, in exactly the same level voice, without any change at all:

“It’s a good tune, sir. I’ve heard it eleven times. Please tell him.”

“I will.”

“Go back to art, sir. I’ll do the line.” A pause. “And thank you for telling me the truth. You’d be surprised how few people do, on the first asking.”

“I didn’t know it was the truth. I thought I was right.”

“That’s why it counted,” said Lord Whitlock, and the line went quiet, and then went to the long single tone a telephone makes when there is nobody on the other end of it any more.

---

He gave the receiver back across the desk.

Dr Brooks put it down in its cradle, square. She looked at him in the green chair for a moment over her reading glasses.

“Frederick.”

“Yes, Dr Brooks.”

“The school does not discuss its pupils.” She took her glasses off and let them fall on their chain. “But it does, very occasionally, discuss its boards.” She folded her hands on the desk. “You were wrong this morning.”

“I know.”

“Good. That’s the whole of what I had to say. I wanted to say it in the chair, so that you’d know I meant it, and so that you’d know it wasn’t anything worse.” She looked at the window. “It isn’t anything worse. It’s a history lesson. You’ll put it right.”

“How?”

“I have no idea,” said Dr Brooks. “I’m a principal, not a historian. But you have Mr Pettigrew again in seventh period, and I’m told he likes nothing better than a boy who argues with him.” She put her glasses back on. “Go to art. Ms Varga will want you to feel something. Try to oblige her. It’s been a long day for everybody.”

He got up out of the green chair, which took a moment, because it was low.

At the door he turned round.

“Dr Brooks.”

“Mm.”

“Mrs Delahunt put the Prime Minister on hold.”

“Yes,” said Dr Brooks. “She did.” And for the first time since his first morning in seventh grade, across the desk, in the office with the gold letters coming off the door, she smiled at him, very briefly, the way a principal smiles when she has been in a meeting for fifty minutes and has found, at the end of it, that the school is exactly where she left it.

“The inspector was here first,” said Dr Brooks.