The Viceroy in the Room

A candidate may leave the examination room at any time after the first hour of the examination, on giving notice to the invigilator.

He could put his hand up.

That was all it would take. He would put his hand up, and Mr Lumsden would look at him over the half-moon glasses, and get up from the gym bench, and come down the aisle at his one speed, and stand by 4D, and Frederick would say, quietly, I’d like to leave, sir, and Mr Lumsden would say you understand that you may not return, and Frederick would say yes, and Mr Lumsden would take the paper, three and a half sides on the Viceroy and a planning page with a line through Question Eight, and write the time on it, and put it in the brown envelope with the Board’s crest, and walk him to the door, and draw the bolt.

And Castellanos would be there.

And then the corridor, and the doors, and the car park, and the white heat on the tarmac, and the gate, and an old man in a dark suit holding out a leather folder.

And then whatever was in it.

He put his hand flat on the desk instead.

---

He thought about the Viceroy.

He did not mean to. It was a quarter to eleven here, a quarter to twelve there, and he thought of the Viceroy at a quarter to twelve the way you think of the face of a clock: without deciding to, because it is there.

A study on the first floor, at the corner over the square. A window that looked at the obelisk and a window that looked at the river and did not open, because a Viceroy in 1912 had had it painted shut after a pigeon. A desk. You will know which desk I mean. A small old man in a dark suit at it, at seventy-six, with a fountain pen in his breast pocket and his jacket on, because the Viceroy would not take his jacket off in his own study, Frederick was sure of that, not in any heat.

He did not know what was on the desk this morning.

He knew that whatever it was, the Viceroy was sitting at it. He would have been there since eight. A judge who is not at his desk at eight is a judge who will be reading his papers in court. He would be there now, with the window that did not open at his back, reading whatever it was, all of it, carefully, the way he said he read things because of the man who had sat there before him and had not signed.

Whatever was happening in the Plate, the Viceroy was in the room.

He looked at the essay he had just finished. At the line he had drawn under it.

A refusal is a thing done in a room, to someone’s face. Only one of them was in the room.

He had written that forty minutes ago about 1976. He had written it as an answer to a question set by a Board in a building on Seventeenth Street by people who had chosen the Plate because three things had happened there that were easy to set questions on, and he had believed it while he wrote it, and he believed it now, and he found he did not like believing it now as much as he had at ten past ten.

---

He thought about what he would do if he went out.

He would take the folder from Don Ignacio at the gate. He would read it. Then he would ring somebody. He would ring the Palace, and the Private Secretary would tell him what the Private Secretary knew, in the flat voice, from memory. Then he would ring the Plate.

And then what?

He could not do anything in the Plate on his own. Nothing. That was the whole point of the Plate. He had known it since he was nine, and had signed four names this morning on the strength of it, initialled in the corner, on the advice of the President of the Council. The King of the River Plate acted on the advice of the ministers of the River Plate, and on nobody else’s, and certainly not on his own. Whatever was in the folder, if it needed the King to do something, it needed Arrieta to tell him what, first. And if it did not need him to do anything, then it did not need him at a quarter to eleven.

And if it was something that the Viceroy could deal with himself, then the Viceroy was dealing with it. In the room. At the desk. With his jacket on.

A King who was not in the room could only agree with what was done in it.

So the only thing he could add, by going out now, was that he would have gone out. That the King of the River Plate had put his hand up in the middle of an examination and walked out of a gym and across a car park to a gate, as soon as something happened, before he knew what it was. That was the only thing it would tell anybody. And he did not know who would be told it, or what they would make of it, and he did not like that at all.

---

There was also Theo.

He did not look at him. He did not need to. He knew exactly what Theo was doing at 4E, a yard to his right, without looking: writing, fast, with his left arm curled round the paper and his tongue between his teeth, on his second question now, he thought, because Theo had gone through the first as if it were a building on fire. He knew it from the sound of Theo’s pen. Theo pressed hard. You could hear Theo’s pen from the next room.

And he knew what Theo would do if Frederick put his hand up.

Theo would look up. Theo would see Mr Lumsden come down the aisle and stop at 4D, and see Frederick stand, and see the paper go into the brown envelope, and Theo would not think about it for a single second. He would put his own hand up. He would be out of his chair before Mr Lumsden had got the bolt drawn, saying me too, sir, I’m with him, I’m his Page, in his ordinary voice, which carried, and Mr Lumsden would say you understand that you may not return, and Theo would say I don’t care, and mean it. And Theo’s paper would go into a brown envelope with a question and a half on it, and be marked as it stood, and Theo would not get his B, and would not go on the cadet scheme in the summer, and would not be on an ambulance at seventeen.

And Theo would never once say that it had been Frederick’s fault, not in his whole life, and Frederick would know it every time he saw an ambulance.

He did not put his hand up.

---

Mr Lumsden walked the aisles at a quarter to eleven.

He came down from the table and up the first aisle and down the second, at his one speed, with his hands behind his back, looking at the air above the desks, and up the third, and down the fourth, past 4D.

As he passed, he did not stop. But Frederick, who was looking at his own hand flat on the desk, saw the grey shoes go by, and the grey trouser legs, and the hands behind the grey back, and saw that the right hand, behind the back, was holding the left by the wrist, quite hard, the knuckles pale, the way a man holds his own wrist when he does not want it to do something.

Then Mr Lumsden was past, and up the fifth aisle, and gone.

---

At ten to eleven he looked at the third window again.

The old man had not sat down. He was standing beside Mr Obi’s kitchen chair in the strip of shade that the hut threw, which had grown narrower as the sun went round, so that he was standing in the very last foot of it with his shoulder against the wall of the hut. The folder was still under his arm. The flag on the wing of the car hung against its staff.

As Frederick watched, Mr Obi came out of the hut with a mug.

He came out carefully, with the mug in one hand and the clipboard in the other, and put the clipboard on the shelf through the hut’s window, and rolled the gate back on its rail the width of a mug, which was not much, and held the mug out through the gap.

The old man looked at it.

Then he took it, in both hands, the folder trapped under his elbow, and bowed over it, from the neck, and Mr Obi nodded once and rolled the gate shut and went back into the hut.

And the High Commissioner of the United Provinces of the River Plate, Don Ignacio Anchorena, who had sat in the Senate for the federal capital and wrote everything by hand with a broad nib, looked at the mug for a moment, and then at the chair, and then sat down on Mr Obi’s kitchen chair with the cushion tied on with string, on the pavement outside the wire fence of Ellicott High School, with the folder on his knees and a mug of Mr Obi’s tea in both hands, and drank.

Frederick found that his eyes had gone hot. He looked down at the paper until they stopped.

---

The garrison of Buenos Aires would not act against the Crown’s representative.

That was 1930. That was the man in the arch, in Source C, an hour ago. That was the card. Over in two days.

He had said, in Source C, that what mattered was that somebody was standing there, and had the right to. Not who. Anybody could have stood in that arch. The soldiers in the square had not sat down because of the man. They had sat down because of the place he was standing in, which was the Crown’s, and which they had sworn to.

He thought: and the man had to stand in it. That was the part he had not written. The place was the Crown’s, and the oath was the Crown’s, and the soldiers’ rifles had been stacked because of the Crown, but somebody had had to walk down the stairs and through the rooms and stand in the arch in the afternoon in September in front of all of them, with his hands behind his back, and not go back inside. And it could not have been the King. The King had been in London, in 1930. It was evening there. He had been at dinner, probably, with the windows open on a September night.

And somebody had come in and bent and said a thing in his ear, and he had put down his knife, and by then it was already being done without him, in an arch, by a man standing still.

---

At five to eleven he chose.

10. “Written for a King who cannot act.” How well has the Regency Act 1811 served the Realm?

He had his copy of the Act at home in the study, in the drawer of his grandfather’s desk, the printed copy he had asked the Clerk for on the thirtieth of September, marked in two colours, black for what it said and red for what it had meant that week. He knew it better than he knew anything on the paper. He had sat at the table of the Privy Council under section 4 with a school exercise book, at fifteen, without a voice, while his mother took the oath, and his father lay on the sixth floor and could not open his eyes.

It was the one question on the paper that nobody else in the gym could answer from the inside.

He had nearly not chosen it for that reason. He chose it for that reason.

On the planning page, under the crossed-out 8, he wrote 10, and drew a line down the middle with the ruler, and wrote at the top of the left side 1811, and at the top of the right 2028.

Under 1811 he wrote: George III. Mad. The Prince of Wales. A King who is alive and cannot act.

Under 2028 he wrote: Kittyhawk. 25 September.

He stopped. He looked at the date. He had not written it down before, anywhere, in eight months, in any exercise book. He had said it, and heard it said, a thousand times. He had not written it.

He wrote under it: Papa.

Then he crossed that out, with the ruler, very neatly, because the planning page would not be marked but it would be seen, and wrote instead the King, and looked at it, and that was when the handle of the left-hand door went down for the third time against the bolt, and stopped.

Not once, carefully. Not to be heard trying it.

Twice. Quickly. As somebody tries a door who does not know it is locked, and has not stopped to think.