The Audience

His mother was already in the Blue Drawing Room when he came down, standing at the window with her back to the door, in the navy suit, looking out at the forecourt.

It was dark outside. The lamps were on along the avenue, and there were people under them again, not three thousand, perhaps two hundred, standing behind the railings in their coats, not doing anything, the way they had stood outside the hospital. A few of them had candles. One of them had a piece of cardboard, held up against the railings, and on it, in marker, very large, so that it could be read from the windows, it said LA, and nothing else. The forecourt itself was empty and swept and wet, and the light from the windows of the Blue Drawing Room lay across it in long yellow panels.

“Come and stand here,” said his mother, in Swedish, without turning round. “Not in front of the window. Beside it. They can see in.”

He went and stood beside the window, against the curtain.

He had the exercise book under his arm. The green one, from the back of his desk drawer, the one he had written the statement in on the Wednesday, and he had written in it again since five o’clock, at the desk in his sitting room in the north wing, with the radio on low, and crossed it out, and written it again, four times. He held it out to her now, open, without saying anything.

His mother took it. She read it by the light from the window, standing beside the curtain where she had told him to stand, and it did not take her long, because it was short. It was four sentences and a name.

This morning the ground moved under Los Angeles and the valleys east of it, and a great many people are hurt, and some are still where the buildings fell. I want everyone there to know that the whole of the Realm knows, and is coming. My mother and I are thinking of you tonight, and of everyone who is digging. Thank you to every one of them.

George R.

“Papa said short,” said Frederick. “This afternoon. He couldn’t say anything else. He said short, about tomorrow, about the assembly, but I think he meant this too.”

His mother read it again.

“You’ve put coming,” she said. “Not with you.”

“Because it is,” said Frederick. “Isn’t it? Coming. The Navy from San Diego and the Marines and the trains. Castellanos said. They’re not there yet. They’re coming. I didn’t want to say a thing that wasn’t true yet.”

His mother looked at him for a moment over the top of the exercise book.

“No,” she said. “Don’t.” She gave it back to him. “Rosalind will have it at half past seven, after the audience, and it will go out at eight, as it is. I’m not going to change a word.” She turned back to the window. “Your father would have changed one. He’d have taken out a great many. He always said a number you don’t know is better left out than guessed at.” She was quiet for a moment. “Leave it in. You’re right and he’d have been wrong. They don’t know. Nobody knows. A great many is what they know.”

The Blue Drawing Room was the room Dame M had suggested for the statement, a week ago, on the Wednesday, and he had said no and gone to the morning room instead, because the Blue Drawing Room was a room for a King. It had flags. It had the flags of all fourteen realms on poles along the far wall, furled, in a row, in brass holders, and a long blue carpet, and blue silk on the walls, and a fireplace with a fire actually lit in it, which was rare, and in front of the fire three chairs. Two of them were together, side by side, facing the fire. The third was across from them, on the other side of the hearthrug, a little apart.

“Which one’s mine?” said Frederick.

“The one on the left,” said his mother. “Beside me. I’m in the middle.” She turned from the window. “The Prime Minister sits across. He’ll stand until I sit, and I’ll sit when you sit, and you’ll sit when I tell you to, which will be at once. Nobody will notice.”

“Everybody will notice.”

“Nobody will mind,” said his mother. She looked at him. “This is mine, tonight. Do you understand? The audience is the Regent’s. Lord Whitlock will tell me what his government has done today and what it means to do tomorrow, and I’ll ask him questions, and he’ll answer them, and I’ll tell him what I think, if I think anything. It’s what your father did every week with the Prime Minister in London, and what the Governor-General did every Thursday in this city. On an ordinary Thursday it’s dull, Frederick. It’s meant to be dull.” She smoothed her skirt. “It won’t be dull tonight. You’ll sit and listen anyway. You may not have an opinion.”

“Until the second Tuesday.”

“Until the second Tuesday.” She almost smiled. “And at the end, if you want, you may ask him one question. One. I’ll tell him you have one. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. You can sit there and say nothing and it will be the first audience of the reign, and that will be enough.”

He thought about it.

“I’ve got one,” he said.

His mother looked at him for a moment.

“I thought you might,” she said.

---

Dame M opened the door at half past six exactly, by the clock on the mantelpiece, which was right.

“The Prime Minister, Ma’am,” she said, and stood aside.

He was bigger than Frederick remembered. That was the first thing. Frederick had seen him at the Council table, six times now, sitting very straight at the far end with a sheet of paper square in front of him, and he had seen him on the television and in the newspaper, and the photograph everybody had seen, in a rust-coloured jumper in a rented flat with his head down; but he had not stood in a room with him since the twenty-sixth of September, and he had forgotten. Lord Whitlock was very tall and very broad, with fair hair cut short and a sailor’s shoulders, and he came through the door of the Blue Drawing Room as though doors in general were slightly too small for him and he had stopped minding, and he was wearing a dark suit that was very slightly too tight across the back, and a tie that did not quite go with it, and he was twenty-six.

He stopped just inside the door. He looked at the Regent, and then at Frederick, and then he did something that Frederick had not expected and did not know what to do with: he bowed.

Not like Marcus. Not like anything. It was a short, quick, exact movement of the head, from the neck only, down and up, the bow of a man who had been taught to do it properly and did it properly and did not make anything of it, and he did it first to Frederick, and then, turning very slightly, to Frederick’s mother.

“Your Majesty,” said Lord Whitlock. “Ma’am.”

His voice was the voice from the radio in the car. Level, careful, unhurried, a voice that weighed each word separately and put it down on a table, square to the edge. It was also, close to, warmer than it had been on the radio, and lower, and it had Rhode Island in it, the long flat vowels of the coast, like Mr Penhallow’s but younger.

“Prime Minister,” said his mother. “Thank you for coming. Please.” She gestured at the chairs.

Nobody sat.

Frederick understood after about a second that nobody was going to sit until he did, and that his mother was waiting for him, and that Lord Whitlock was waiting for his mother, and that the whole thing was a chain of people waiting with him at the end of it, and he sat down, in the chair on the left, quickly, and his mother sat at once, smoothly, in the middle, and Lord Whitlock sat across from them, on the other side of the hearthrug, and put a thin leather folder on his knee, and did not open it.

Nobody noticed. Everybody noticed. Nobody minded.

---

It was not dull.

It was, Frederick thought afterwards, the plainest forty minutes he had spent all week, on the worst day of it, and the plainness was the most interesting thing about it.

Lord Whitlock told his mother what his government had done since seventeen minutes past eleven. He told her without opening the folder. He told her in order, item by item, the way the boxes were packed, and each item was short, and some of them were very short, and he did not decorate any of them.

He had been in the Cabinet Room when the first report came, at eleven twenty-one, from the duty officer, and had declared a federal emergency in the Commonwealth of California and in the March of Arizona at five past twelve, on the requests of both governments, which had come in within ten minutes of each other. The Cabinet had met at one. The Navy had sailed what it could from San Diego by two; the Marines were on the road from Camp Pendleton, where the road was there; the Army had been asked for engineers and given them. The freeways through the passes were cut, and so was the railway through Cajon, so that everything going in from the east was going by air, and the airport at Ontario was closed with a crack across the main runway, and the airport at Los Angeles was open and taking nothing but aircraft with rescuers on them.

“And the water,” said his mother.

“The aqueducts that cross the fault are broken, Ma’am,” said Lord Whitlock. “All three. There is water in the reservoirs on the city side for some days. The Commonwealth’s engineers say a week. I have asked for the figure in writing.”

He would lay a Supplementary Estimate before the Commons in the morning, for the relief, and the House would vote it on Monday.

“Can you?” said his mother. “Under the Heads of Agreement.”

“Supply is one of the three things the Agreement allows me, Ma’am,” said Lord Whitlock. “The Agreement was written for an ordinary autumn. It allows the money for this one. I telephoned the leaders of the other parties at one o’clock to make sure that they read it the same way. All of them did. The Leader of the Opposition was the first to say so.”

Overnight there would be teams coming from abroad, to dig. Japan had offered first, within the hour, a team of seventy with dogs, because Japan knew; then Great Britain; then the German Empire, a team from Hanover, which had been in the air since four.

“And one more, Ma’am,” said Lord Whitlock. “At half past three the Russian Embassy telephoned the Foreign Secretary and offered a team of forty and two aircraft. I accepted. I should tell you that I did not consult the Cabinet. It seemed to me that there was only one answer, and that it ought to be given before anybody could think of another one.”

His mother looked at him for a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Prime Minister.” And she wrote something very small in the notebook on her knee.

The Commons, Lord Whitlock said, had been going to spend the afternoon on the third clause of a bill about the inspection of bridges, which was about the definition of a bridge. It had adjourned at a quarter to twelve without a division and without anybody asking it to. Everything else, the Board of Admiralty and the committee on Loreto and the bar of the House on the twenty-first and the postal strike, would keep until next Thursday, and he would bring it then.

“And the dead,” said his mother.

“Nobody knows, Ma’am,” said Lord Whitlock. “I have been given four figures since noon and they were all different and all of them were guesses. I won’t give you a guess. I’ll give you the first figure that anybody is prepared to sign.”

Frederick sat in the chair on the left and listened.

He was not allowed an opinion, and he did not have one, mostly, because he did not know enough about aqueducts or airports or supplementary estimates to have one. But he found, after about ten minutes, that he was watching something, and that what he was watching was not Los Angeles, which he had been watching all day on other people’s screens, but the two people in front of him, his mother and the Prime Minister, doing a thing together that they both knew how to do and that neither of them made look hard, on a day when everything else was hard.

His mother asked questions. She asked short ones. She asked why, mostly, and when, and once who decided that, and every time she asked one Lord Whitlock thought about it before he answered, not for long, a second or two, the way his father used to think before he answered a question on the Sunday telephone, and then answered it exactly, the question she had asked and not a different one, and stopped. He did not say more than he had been asked. He did not say less. Twice he said I don’t know, Ma’am, without any embarrassment at all, as a fact, and once he said I think we were too slow with the airlift from the east, Ma’am, by about an hour, and that was my fault, and I have said so to the people whose fault it would otherwise have been, and his mother looked at him for a moment and said Thank you, Prime Minister, and wrote something very small in the notebook on her knee.

He was easy to listen to, Frederick thought. He was easy to listen to and you could not, Frederick suspected, have moved him an inch with a crane.

---

At ten past seven his mother closed her notebook.

“Is there anything else, Prime Minister?”

“One thing, Ma’am.” Lord Whitlock still had not opened the folder. “It isn’t government business. It’s mine. I had meant to say it tonight before any of this, and I nearly didn’t, today. But I think it should be said tonight or not at all. I’d like to say it, if I may, and then I’ll go back to the Cabinet Room.”

His mother nodded.

Lord Whitlock looked at the fire for a moment. Then he looked at Frederick.

“Sir,” he said. “On the twenty-sixth of September I came to this house, and you and I talked for twenty minutes, and we agreed not to tell anybody what about. I haven’t. I wanted you to know that I haven’t, and that I’m not going to.” He paused. “That’s all. I wanted to say it in a room with the Regent in it, so that it’s said properly, once.”

Frederick looked at him.

He remembered the twenty-sixth of September. He remembered all of it. He remembered the morning room, because that was where they had put Lord Whitlock to wait, and the cathedral before it, the prayers that had been his own idea, and coming back from the cathedral in the car with the photographers’ flashes still in his eyes, and being told that the Prime Minister was there, and not knowing what a Prime Minister was for, on a morning when his father had been lost in the sea for seventeen hours. He remembered the twenty minutes. He remembered what they had talked about. He was never going to tell anybody, and he understood, sitting in the chair on the left in the Blue Drawing Room, that the man across the hearthrug was never going to tell anybody either, and that the man had come to say so, out loud, at the first audience of the reign, with his mother listening, so that it would be on the record that it was not on the record.

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

He had not meant to speak yet. It came out. His mother did not look at him.

Lord Whitlock inclined his head, the short exact movement from the neck.

“Sir,” he said.

---

“His Majesty has a question, Prime Minister,” said his mother. “If you’ll allow it.”

“Of course, Ma’am.”

They both looked at him.

He had had the question for a month. He had had it since the thirtieth of September, since the first Council, since he had sat at the table without a voice and taken notes in a school exercise book and afterwards asked the Clerk for a copy of the Regency Act and marked it in two colours, red for what the Regent could do and blue for what she could not. He had sent one line, a single line, across the Charter Axis to Charter House: Have you read section 4? And he had waited a month. And on Tuesday, at the first Council of a reign that was his, a twenty-six-year-old man who had just signed his accession had walked round the table and put a card by his hand that said Twice.

And Frederick had wanted to know why ever since. Not whether. Why. He had read it twice himself, the first time. It was a short section. It took about a minute. Nobody needed to read it twice who had understood it the first time, and Lord Whitlock had understood it the first time, Frederick was sure of that. He had understood everything the first time. That was what everybody said about him.

He had thought, on Tuesday night, in the bath, that perhaps it was a joke. And then he had thought that Lord Whitlock did not make that kind of joke. And then he had thought that he did not know what kind of jokes Lord Whitlock made, and that he would like to.

“Prime Minister,” said Frederick. “You read section 4 twice.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Why twice?”

Lord Whitlock did not answer at once.

He looked at Frederick across the hearthrug, in the firelight, for what felt like a long time and was probably about three seconds, the way he had looked at the Regent before he answered her questions, as though he were going to the back of a long room to fetch the exact answer and not the nearest one. Then he looked down at the leather folder on his knee, and then up again.

“The first time, Sir,” he said, “I read it to find out what it let me do.”

“What did it let you do?”

“Nothing at all, Sir,” said Lord Whitlock. “It doesn’t mention the Prime Minister. It’s about you. I read it at about three in the morning on the thirtieth of September in the Speaker’s rooms, after we’d signed the declaration, because I wanted to know whether there was anything in it I had to do or prevent, and there wasn’t. It was the shortest section of the Act and it had nothing in it for me.” He paused. “So I read it again.”

Frederick waited.

“The second time, Sir,” said Lord Whitlock, “I read it to find out what it let you do. Which was to sit at the table and watch, and have no voice, and see everything, and be able to do nothing about any of it. For as long as it lasted. At fifteen.” He looked at the fire. “I thought that was the hardest job anybody at that table had been given. Harder than mine. I’m allowed to say things. I thought that if somebody had been given the hardest job at the table, then the least the rest of us could do was know exactly what it was.” He looked back at Frederick. “That’s all, Sir. I read it the first time as the Prime Minister and the second time as somebody who’d been fifteen. I thought you’d asked because you wanted to know whether anybody had bothered. Somebody had. Twice.”

The fire made a small noise, a log settling.

Frederick sat in the chair on the left and did not say anything. He did not know what to say. It was the answer, and it was the right answer, and it was not at all the answer he had expected, and he understood, sitting there, that it was the first time since the thirtieth of September that anybody had told him, in so many words, that sitting at a table with no voice was hard, and that it was a man of twenty-six who had read the Act at three in the morning who had told him, and that it had taken him a month and one word on a card to do it.

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“Sir,” said Lord Whitlock.

His mother had not moved. She was sitting in the middle chair with her hands folded on the notebook in her lap, looking at the fire, and her face was quite still, and she did not look at either of them.

---

Lord Whitlock stood up.

He did it when his mother stood up, at the same moment, and Frederick stood up too, at the same moment as both of them, because he had learned on Tuesday that if he stood when she stood then nobody had to wait for him. The three of them stood on the hearthrug in front of the fire in the Blue Drawing Room with the fourteen furled flags along the wall behind them.

“Thank you, Prime Minister,” said his mother. “Next Thursday.”

“Next Thursday, Ma’am.” Lord Whitlock picked up the leather folder, which he had never opened. He looked at Frederick. “Sir.”

He did the short bow again, from the neck, first to Frederick and then to the Regent. Then he turned and walked to the door, across the long blue carpet, a very large young man in a suit that was slightly too tight across the back, and Dame M, who had been standing outside it for forty minutes, opened it for him from the other side at exactly the right moment without being told, the way she opened every door, and he went out through it, a little sideways, the way he went through doors.

At the door he stopped. He turned round. He looked back across the room, past the Regent, at Frederick, standing on the hearthrug in front of the fire in his school trousers and his school jumper, because nobody had told him to change and he had not thought of it.

“Sir,” said Lord Whitlock. “For what it’s worth. I’d read it a third time now.”

“Why?”

“To see what it doesn’t say,” said Lord Whitlock, “about what happens when it stops.” And he very nearly smiled, for the first time, a large, easy, slightly lopsided smile, the smile of a boy from Newport on a boat, which went away again almost at once. “But that’s next Thursday, Sir. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” said Frederick.

Dame M closed the door.

It closed with a small, soft, exact sound, wood on wood, the sound of a door in an old house that has been closed behind a great many people by a great many hands and knows how to do it, and then the Blue Drawing Room was quiet, except for the fire, and his mother beside him, breathing, and the two hundred people out in the dark beyond the window under the lamps, with their candles and their piece of cardboard, who could not hear any of it, and had not been told, and were standing there anyway; and at eight o’clock, Frederick knew, the four sentences in the green exercise book would go out to them, and to everybody, and to Los Angeles, where it was five, and still light, and they were still digging.