Eight O'Clock

Bridget had the radio on before he came down, which she never did at breakfast, and she had it on loud, which she never did at all, and she was standing at the range with a wooden spoon in her hand not stirring anything, listening to it.

“…the first time in living memory,” the radio was saying, a man’s voice, the ABC, Stephen Alcott, whom Frederick knew the way he knew the trains. “The Clerk has confirmed that the doors of the chamber can be opened at a quarter to eight. Members began arriving at Charter Hill a little after seven, many of them, we are told, on foot.”

“Sit down, pet,” said Bridget, without turning round. “There’s porridge.”

He sat down. The clock above the range said six minutes to eight, which meant ten to.

His mother was already at the end of the long table. She was not reading the newspapers. They were there, folded, the five of them in their pile, and she had not opened one. She was in a dark suit he had not seen before, navy, almost black, with a white blouse and no jewellery except her wedding ring and a small brooch at the collar, a gold crown with three stones in it that had been her grandmother’s and that she wore, he knew, only for things in Sweden that mattered. She had her coffee in front of her and her hands round it and she was looking at the radio.

“You look nice,” said Frederick.

She looked at him then. Her face did something small and complicated.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m going to sign two things today, and I thought I’d better look as though I meant them.”

“Two?”

“Britain first. At half past eight, at the High Commission, the same as on the second of October, the same room, the same three privy counsellors. Their Act passed this morning in London while we were asleep. It’s waiting.” She drank her coffee. “And then ours. When it comes. Here. In my study. Before noon, if the Lords do what they say.”

“It is eight o’clock,” said the radio, “and the Speaker is in the chair.”

Nobody in the kitchen moved.

There was a sound on the radio that Frederick had heard before, in the library, on recordings, the sound of a large room full of people standing up and sitting down again, a rustle and a scrape and a long settling, and then a voice, old and dry and very far away, saying something he could not quite hear, and then another voice, very close to the microphone, Stephen Alcott, quietly: “Prayers. The House always begins with prayers. They will take about three minutes.”

His mother put her coffee down.

“It’s the Father of the House who moves it,” she said, to the radio, as if she were telling it. “Mr Penhallow. He’s eighty-one. He walked in this morning from his flat on Seventh Street. Dame Margaret had a man watching, in case he fell over. He didn’t.” She looked at Frederick. “He sent a note last night, to your father, care of the Regency Office. One line. I will do it properly, sir. That’s all. I read it to your father at the hospital. He held the note.”

Bridget put the porridge in front of him. He ate it. It was very hot, and he burned his tongue, and he did not mind.

---

The prayers ended. There was another rustle. And then a different voice, an old man’s voice with Maine in it, the long flat vowels of the coast, slow, as if every word had to be carried a long way up a hill and put down carefully at the top.

“Mr Speaker. I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.”

Frederick put his spoon down.

He had never heard Mr Penhallow speak. He had seen his name, on the order paper, last night, in heavy type, in the pocket of the trousers he was wearing now. He had imagined him, without meaning to, as somebody like Mr Abernathy, dry and brown and unsurprised. He was not like Mr Abernathy. He sounded, Frederick thought, like somebody’s grandfather, somebody’s actual grandfather, at a wedding, getting up to say something he had written on a card and finding that he did not need the card.

“The House has been asked to do one thing,” said Mr Penhallow. “It has not been asked to judge it. It has not been asked to improve it. It has been asked to give effect, in our law, to a decision that is not ours, made by the only man who had the right to make it, in the same words as every other realm of his, so that he goes from all of them together and his son comes to all of them together and nobody, anywhere, is left for an hour with the wrong King. That is the whole of our duty this morning. I ask the House to do it exactly, and not to add to it.”

There was a pause on the radio. A cough. Somebody’s chair.

“I have sat in this House under one King,” said Mr Penhallow. “I came in in 1986, and he had been King for fourteen years, and I thought him then a cold, correct, distant man, and I said so, in this chamber, in my first year, and I was right, and it was the least important thing about him. I have watched him for forty-two years do a job that cannot be done, in fourteen languages of law, without once mistaking one for another, without once, that I know of, telling any of his governments a thing it did not need to hear. And now he has told us one. He has told us what he cannot do.”

His mother was very still.

“The King has told us what he cannot do,” said Mr Penhallow. “It is not for us to say that he could.”

He sat down. Frederick heard him sit down; you could hear it, on the radio, the creak of the green leather and a long breath out. And then the next voice, and the next, the leaders of the parties, one after another, a minute each, and they all said very nearly the same thing, in different accents, and Frederick stopped being able to hear the words and only heard the voices, going on, one after another, as if a great many people were taking turns to put their hands on the same table.

“School,” said his mother.

He looked at the clock. It was twenty past eight, which meant twenty-four minutes past, which meant he was late.

---

She walked him to the side door. She did not usually do that either. Castellanos was at the car with the door already open, and her own car was behind it, with her own officer, and the engine running, and it was cold, and the sky was white and high and very clear, the first clear morning in a week.

At the door she stopped him with her hand on his arm.

“At two,” she said.

“I know. I’ll be in geometry. Sixth period.”

“The school will be told. Dr Brooks asked me last night how I wanted it done, and I said I didn’t know, because nobody has ever done it, and she said she’d think of something.” His mother looked at him. “I’m not coming. I wanted to. I’m not. It’s yours. It should happen where you are, and not where I am.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be in my study. With the Clerk of the Parliaments, and a pen, and Dame Margaret, and the radio.” She almost smiled. “And then at two o’clock I shall be sitting in my study with nothing to do, for the first time in five weeks, and I don’t know what I shall do with my hands.”

“Mamma.”

“Mm.”

“Is Papa all right? This morning?”

“He’s awake. He knows what day it is. He asked me at seven, at the hospital, and I told him, and he said Tuesday, and I said yes, and he said Late, and I didn’t know what he meant, and then I did.” She looked at him. “The Senator. On Tuesdays. Because of the bridge.”

Frederick laughed. It came out of him on the step in the cold, and his mother laughed too, and her officer by the second car looked carefully at the sky.

“Go to school,” she said. “Be ordinary. You’re very good at it.”

---

There were more photographers across the road than he had ever seen, perhaps twenty, in a long line, and not one of them lifted a camera. Some of them had their hands in their pockets. One of them, an older man in a flat cap, nodded at the car as it went past, the way you nod at a neighbour.

The side gate. The custodian’s bins. The back of the gym. Theo by the fire extinguisher, with his hands in his pockets, stamping, because it was cold.

“You’re late.”

“Mr Penhallow was talking.”

“Who?”

“The Father of the House.”

“Whose father?”

“The House’s. It’s what they call the one who’s been there longest.” Frederick fell in beside him. “He’s eighty-one. He walked in.”

“Good for him,” said Theo, and then, after a few steps, “Was it good? What he said?”

Frederick thought about it.

“Yes,” he said. “It was the best thing anybody’s said.”

Theo nodded, and did not ask what, and held the door.

---

It was a Tuesday.

That was the thing about it, the whole morning. It was a Tuesday at Ellicott High School, the last Tuesday of October, and it was Halloween, which nobody mentioned. Two freshman girls had come in cat ears, and one boy in the hall outside the gym had a plastic axe through his head on a headband, and in the front office the paper pumpkins were still up in the window, and somebody had added a paper bat, and nobody said a word about any of it, not in homeroom, not in the halls, not in the line at the water fountain, as though Halloween too had been asked politely to wait.

Mr Abernathy called the roll in the voice. Hanover. Here. It was the same. Of course it was the same. Frederick had known it would be the same and had still, at Gallagher, at Grant, found his hands going tight on the edge of the desk, and had made himself let go.

At the end of homeroom Mr Abernathy closed the roll book and looked up, which he did not usually do, over the top of his glasses, at nobody in particular.

“It is the thirty-first of October,” said Mr Abernathy. “I am required by the district to remind you that costumes which obstruct the face are not permitted on school premises. Mr Kowalski, your axe does not obstruct your face, and may stay.” He took his glasses off. “That is all I am required to say about today. I don’t propose to say anything else about it. Go to class.”

They went to class.

---

He did not know when the Commons passed it.

He found out afterwards that it had been at twenty past nine, in a little over an hour, without a division, three times the Speaker putting the question and three times nobody calling for the lobbies, and that when it was done the House had not cheered, and had not stood, but had sat, for about a quarter of a minute, and then gone out quietly. He found out afterwards. At twenty past nine he was in Spanish, conjugating haber in the subjunctive, and Señora Ruiz was walking up and down between the desks saying hubiera, hubieras, hubiera, and he got it right, all of it, for once, and she stopped at his desk and tapped the page with one finger and said, “Bien,” and walked on.

He knew because of Devon.

Devon Price caught him in the hall between second and third period, by the clock in the wire cage, in the crush, and said, quite quietly, not whispering but not loud, without stopping, as he went past in the other direction, “It passed. The Commons. Nobody voted against.” And was gone, round the corner, towards the music rooms, before Frederick could say anything at all.

He stood by the water fountain for a moment. Somebody bumped him with a bag and said sorry, and he said sorry back.

Then he went to history.

Mr Ferrante did not collect the homework, because it was not due until Thursday. He taught them about the Reform Act of 1859 for fifty minutes, with the red pen, which was new, and drew the franchise on the board as a set of steps with people standing on them, and pointed the pen at Felix and asked him who was on the bottom step, and Felix said, “Me,” and Mr Ferrante said that in 1859 that was very nearly true. He did not look at Frederick any more than usual, or any less. At the end, while they were packing up, he said to the whole room, to the board, “Thursday. Two sides. What is a proclamation for. Some of you will find you have more material than you expected,” and then he went very red, and turned round, and wiped the board for a long time.

---

The Lords sat at ten. He did not know when they passed it either. Fourth period was chemistry, and Mr Abernathy was talking about moles, and Theo, beside him, was drawing a small mole in the margin of his lab book, an actual mole, with whiskers and a waistcoat, and labelling it 6.02 x 10 to the 23, and at some point while Theo was doing the waistcoat, at some point in the middle of the morning, in a building on Charter Hill that Frederick could have seen from the top floor of the science block if there had been a window on that side, which there was not, a room full of old men and women had stood up and sat down and said yes, and he did not feel anything at all.

At eleven forty-two, in her study, on the first floor of the north wing, at a desk he had sat under when he was four, with the Clerk of the Parliaments standing at her shoulder and Dame M at the door and the radio on the windowsill, his mother signed.

He did not know that either, at the time. He was copying the molar mass of sodium chloride from the board. It was 58.44. He wrote it down. He would remember, for the rest of his life, that it was 58.44.

The bell went at three minutes to twelve.

---

At the long table by the window, the telephones were face down again. All nine of them, in a row. He saw them from the line, with his tray, and knew.

He sat down. Theo pushed the salt towards him without being asked.

Nobody said anything for a while. Then June, who almost never spoke first, who had been his friend since they all started at Ellicott and whom the Household had never named, said, very quietly, looking at her lunch:

“It’s an Act.”

He looked at her.

“Since eleven forty-two,” said June. “My mum texted. She texts me everything. She said it was on the radio.” She looked up at him, quickly, and then down again. “She said to say she’s thinking of you. I’m not supposed to. I said I would.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick. “Tell her thank you.”

“I will.”

Felix looked at the clock on the cafeteria wall, which was right, or nearly.

“So it’s two o’clock,” said Felix. “That’s when. Six in London. My dad said.” He stopped, and went red. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“I didn’t mean to say it.”

“It’s all right,” said Frederick again. “It is two o’clock. Everybody knows. It’s on the radio.”

There was a pause at the long table.

“An hour and fifty-four minutes,” said Marcus, from the end, without looking up, in a flat voice, the way he counted bars. “From now.”

“Marcus,” said Devon.

“What? It is. He can count.”

And Theo, beside him, who had not said anything at all, picked up the salt again and put it down on the other side of Frederick’s tray, where it had been before, carefully, as though it mattered which side the salt was on, and said, to his sandwich, quite loudly, so that the whole table could hear:

“Who’s done the geometry?”

Nobody had done the geometry. They talked about the geometry for the rest of lunch. The proof was due today, sixth period, the angle in a semicircle, and nobody had understood the bit at the end, where you draw the line from the centre, and Frederick explained it, with a knife and a fork and the edge of his tray for the diameter, and a bread roll for the point on the curve, and moved the bread roll round and round the curve to show them that wherever you put it the angle came out the same, and they all watched the bread roll, all nine of them, as though it were the most interesting bread roll in the world, and Priya, who had come over from the next table to listen, said, “Oh. Oh. That’s actually beautiful,” and Frederick said, “Mrs Pruitt says it’s the most beautiful fact in elementary geometry,” and Theo said, “Mrs Pruitt needs to get out more,” and the whole table laughed, too loudly, for too long, the way you laugh when you have been holding your breath, and the people at the other tables turned round to look, and then turned back.

The bell went at twenty-five to one.

He put the bread roll back on his tray. He did not eat it. He picked up his bag and his tray and went to fifth period, which was English, and the man still looking at his field, and after that it would be sixth period, and geometry, and two o’clock.