The Flag at the Gate

The third high window was the one above him, and through it, because the old building stood on its rise above the river road, he could see the side gate.

It was very small at that distance. The whole car park lay between, white in the sun, with the cars in their rows and the heat coming up off them so that the far end shimmered, and beyond it the wire fence, and the gate in the fence, and Mr Obi’s hut beside the gate with its flat roof, and the road. He could see it the way you see a thing in the bottom of a pond.

There was a car at the gate.

It was on the road side, stopped, with its nose to the gate as though it expected the gate to open. A long black car, longer than the cars in the car park, very clean, with the sun on its roof in a single white line. A driver in the front. Somebody in the back. And on the near wing, at the front, on a short chrome staff, there was a flag.

It was hanging straight down. There was no wind. The air over the car park was as still as the air in the gym, and the flag hung against its staff like a dishcloth on a rail, a small fold of cloth with no shape, and he could not see what it was.

Then the back door of the car opened, and the air the door moved lifted the flag, a little, for perhaps two seconds, out from the staff and back.

Sky blue. White. Sky blue. A gold sun in the white band with a face in it. And in the corner by the staff, small, red and white and blue, the crosses.

He had learned the flags at six from a book with a gold crown on the cover, all fourteen, the way other children learned the planets. He had known that one before he could read the name under it. The River Plate.

The flag fell back against the staff and hung there.

---

A man got out of the back of the car.

He was old. You could see it from the gym even at that distance, from the way he got out, one foot and then the other and then a hand on the top of the door and then the rest of him, carefully, the way old men get out of low cars. He straightened up. A dark suit. White hair, a great deal of it. Under his left arm, held flat against his side, something dark and square: a folder, or a case, leather, the kind with a strap.

He stood by the car and looked at the gate.

Mr Obi came out of the hut.

He came out in his shirtsleeves with the clipboard and stood on his side of the gate, inside it, and the old man stood on the other side, outside it, on the road, and between them was the gate, which was a wire gate on wheels that ran along a rail, and which was shut.

They talked. He could not see their faces. He could see Mr Obi’s arm come up and point at the sign on the window of the hut, the laminated one with the ink running out, NO VISITORS TO BE ADMITTED TO THE SITE, and stay pointing, and he could see the old man turn his head and look at the sign, and read it, for what seemed a long time, and turn back.

The old man said something. Mr Obi shook his head.

The old man said something else. He took the folder out from under his arm and held it in both hands in front of his chest, not offering it, only holding it, the way a man holds a hat.

Mr Obi looked at the folder. He looked at the car, and the flag on the wing of the car, which hung down. Then he went back into the hut, and Frederick saw him through the hut’s window pick up the telephone on the shelf, and speak into it, and put it down.

He came out again and stood where he had stood, inside the gate, with the clipboard against his chest.

He did not open the gate.

---

Frederick realised that he was holding his pen above the paper and had been holding it there for some time, and that there was a small round blot on the page where the nib had touched it and stayed. He put the pen down in the groove.

Nobody else was looking at the window. He looked round the gym, quickly, without moving his head, the way you look round a room in a dream. Ninety heads down. The sun in bars. Theo writing. Mr Lumsden at the table with his glasses on, reading his own sheaf of papers, not looking at anything.

The windows were too high for anybody to look through who was not looking for something.

He looked back at the gate.

---

Dr Brooks came across the car park.

She came from the doors at the front of the old building, below and to the left of him, out of sight and then into it, and she was not walking fast now. She was running. Not the way people run for a bus; the way a woman runs who has not run for years and has decided that she is going to, and is doing it properly, with her elbows in and her head up and her heels in her hand. She had taken her shoes off. He could see them, two small dark things in her left hand, swinging. She went across the white car park in her stockinged feet on the hot tarmac between the rows of cars, straight, not going round anything, and she reached the gate and stopped beside Mr Obi, and put one hand on the wire of the gate, and stood there getting her breath.

The old man on the other side of the gate bowed to her.

He bowed from the neck, not deeply, the way old men from some countries bow and men from others do not, and she nodded back, still getting her breath, and they talked through the wire.

Frederick watched them talk.

She was asking him to come in. He could see it. Her free hand went out, towards the building, towards the office, towards the shade, and came back, and went out again. Please. Come inside. It’s ninety degrees. There’s a chair.

The old man listened to her. He looked at the building, the old brick building on its rise, at the doors and the windows, and Frederick thought, for a moment, absurdly, that the old man was looking at the third high window, at him. He could not have been. You could not see into the gym from the car park; you could see only the sky in the glass.

The old man shook his head.

He said something, and pointed with the folder, not at the building, but down. At the ground he stood on. At the road, on the far side of the gate, outside the school, where the car was, and the flag.

He would stay there.

Dr Brooks stood with her hand on the wire for a long moment. Then she said something to Mr Obi.

Mr Obi went into the hut and came out with his chair. It was the chair from inside the hut, the one he sat on all day, a wooden kitchen chair with a cushion tied to it with string, and he carried it out of the hut and rolled the gate back on its rail, eighteen inches, no more, the width of a chair, and carried the chair through the gap onto the road, and set it down on the pavement in the strip of shade that the hut threw, beside the car, and came back through the gap, and rolled the gate shut.

The old man looked at the chair.

He bowed to Mr Obi, from the neck, as he had bowed to Dr Brooks. Then he went and stood beside the chair, in the shade of the hut, with the folder under his arm again, and did not sit down.

Dr Brooks put her shoes back on, one hand on the gate, and walked back across the car park, slowly now, with her head down, and went in.

---

The flag on the wing of the car hung against its staff. The driver had not got out. Beyond the car, further along the road, by the bus stop, there was a second car he knew, the grey one Kimura used, parked half on the verge, and Kimura was out of it and standing by its back door in her dark suit with her arms folded, watching the old man.

The old man stood beside Mr Obi’s chair and did not sit on it, and waited.

He knew who it was.

He had known when the man got out of the car, from the way he got out, and from the hair, and from the bow. He had seen him bow like that in the Blue Drawing Room on the second of May, when he had taken the Plate’s oath in Spanish with his hand on the book, and the High Commissioner of the United Provinces of the River Plate had stood as witness at the end of the table, and had bowed from the neck when it was done, not to Frederick but to the book.

Don Ignacio Anchorena. Seventy-one. Who had sat in the Senate for the federal capital and wrote everything by hand with a broad nib, and made one joke a year, and had made this year’s on Saturday. I shall hold the Plate for three hours.

---

He made himself list it.

The High Commissioner of the Plate at the gate of Ellicott High School at twenty past ten, in the official car with the flag, which he did not fly for ordinary business. Frederick had seen the car in New Westminster twice, both times outside the Palace: on the second of May, and on the thirty-first of October.

A folder under his arm, held as a thing that was to be given to somebody and to nobody else.

Asking to come in, and being told he could not, by Mr Obi, under the Board’s rule. Being told, by Dr Brooks, that he could, by her authority, into her office, out of the sun. Declining. Choosing the road outside the gate.

Waiting.

And before him, Castellanos with the Palace telephone at twenty to ten, and Dr Brooks at ten past, who had run to the gate as soon as the car came, because she had known it was coming. The school would have been rung. The High Commission would have rung the school to say that the High Commissioner was on his way, and Dr Brooks had come to the door of the gym to ask whether the candidate in 4D could be told, and had been shown the card, and had gone to the gate to meet him.

So it was the Plate.

Whatever it was, from twenty to ten, it was the Plate.

He breathed out. He had not known he was not breathing. It was the Plate. It was not his father, it was not the sixth floor, it was not the hospital. If it had been the hospital it would have been his mother at the door, not a High Commissioner at the gate. It was the Plate, and something in the Plate had happened that the Plate’s own man in New Westminster had got into his car with the flag on it to bring to the King by hand.

And was waiting for him. Outside the gate. Because the gate was shut, and the rule was the rule, and he was a man who had sat in a Senate and knew what a rule was for.

---

What did a King do in the Plate? With his own hand?

He knew this. It was on a card. It was Question Eight, if he wanted it to be.

The Viceroy appoints the President of the Council, summons and dissolves Congress on advice, gives the royal assent to laws and holds the reserve powers of the Crown. The Viceroy did everything. The King did almost nothing. The King appointed the Viceroy, on the President of the Council’s advice, from the three names Congress sent. The King approved the honours, on the same advice; he had done four this morning, a surgeon and a schoolteacher and a woman in La Boca and a goalkeeper. The King received the President of the Council when she came to New Westminster. The King wrote to the Viceroy on the first of the month, in Spanish, with the mistakes left in.

And the King could be asked. That was the other thing. Anybody could ask the King anything. They could not make him answer, but they could ask.

He thought about the Viceroy’s letter. A colonel of the garrison has written to a newspaper. I do not think it is anything.

He thought about the free vote on Wednesday.

He thought about the Viceroy’s five years being up in March, and the shortlist that Congress had not agreed, and a Viceroy who was seventy-six. A man of seventy-six at his desk at eight every morning in a hot pink house. If the Viceroy were ill. If the Viceroy were dead. Then there would be an administrator, the Chief Justice, by the Act of 1910, and the King would have to appoint a new Viceroy, and the King could not, because there was no shortlist. That would be a thing for the King. That would be a thing worth bringing by hand.

But it would wait until twelve. It would have to. There would be nothing he could do with it at a quarter to eleven in the fourth row that he could not do at twelve in Dr Brooks’s office, and everybody at that door had known that, and that was why nobody had asked him to come out.

He did not believe it was the Viceroy.

He did not know why. He did not believe it.

---

He looked down at the paper. At the small round blot.

8. Why did the River Plate become a realm of the Crown in 1910, and not before?

He could answer it. He had answered it, in his head, for the cartoon, half an hour ago: the creature in the gaucho’s hat, and its own knife, and the lion who did not understand. He knew the Act of the Centenary and the hundred years of colony before it and the Treaty of Córdoba and the self-governing Congress of 1856 and the negotiation that took ten years and ended on the anniversary of a revolution. He could write it in fifty minutes and it would be a good answer, and Mr Ferrante would read the mark when it came in July and say nothing, which was the best thing Mr Ferrante said.

He turned to the planning page and drew a line under the plan for seven, and wrote 8 beneath it, and under the 8, 1810, 1813, 1820, 1856, 1910.

He looked at the dates.

Then he looked up at the third window, at the gate, at the old man standing beside a kitchen chair in the strip of shade, with the folder under his arm, in a dark suit, in ninety degrees, on the outside of a wire fence, holding the Plate for three hours, and he found that he could not write about the Plate’s dignity in 1910 for fifty minutes with that man standing there. It would be like writing a letter to him. Every sentence would be addressed to the gate.

He drew a line through 8 and the five dates, one straight line, with the ruler.

The clock said eighteen minutes to eleven, which meant twenty-one and a half to.

He had an hour and twenty minutes and one question to answer, and he had not chosen it, and outside the gate, under the hut’s flat roof, the High Commissioner of the Plate had not sat down.