Notes

The House of Lords was debating herring.

“The Order before your Lordships,” said the minister, a Labour baroness from Maine with her glasses on the end of her nose, “sets the total allowable catch for the Gulf of Maine stock for the coming season, and reduces it, I regret to say, by eleven per cent.”

Nobody regretted it with her. There were about forty peers in the chamber, which was more than the herring usually got, and none of them were listening. Caleb Whitlock sat at the back of the crossbenches with the select committee’s evidence file on his knee and the air of a man listening. It was half past two, and the chamber was hot. The red benches held the heat of the afternoon the way a car does.

“The scientific advice,” said the minister, “is unambiguous.”

Lord Sayle came in by the door behind the Throne, stopped to bow to it, nearly lost his balance doing it, and came along the back of the crossbenches with his stick. He was eighty-three. He sat down beside Caleb in the manner of a man lowering a piano, and put the stick between his knees.

“They’re saying eighteen,” he said.

“Who is?”

“A man in the lavatory. He had it from a man in the tea room.”

“Eighteen isn’t enough.”

Sayle turned his head. He had a hearing aid in the near ear and kept turning it towards things. “You’ve counted.”

“Twenty-three. Two hundred and fifty-two against two hundred and seven. Everyone who crosses counts twice.”

“Twice.”

“One off theirs and one on to the other side.”

“Your grandfather,” said Sayle, “could not add up a mess bill. I sat behind him on these benches until they put us all out, and watched him try.” He looked across the chamber at the minister. “What is she talking about?”

“Herring.”

“Good God.”

The minister turned a page. “My Lords, I should declare that the reduction falls most heavily on the inshore fleet, and that the department has had representations.”

“I should think it has,” said Sayle, not quite under his breath, and a bishop two benches along looked round at him.

---

The first note came in at ten to three.

A doorkeeper in a tailcoat came down the side of the chamber, bent to the Convenor of the crossbench and put a folded square of paper into her hand. Ottoline Krause had been Chief Medical Officer for nine years and read the note the way she must have read the results of tests, all the way through, without any change in her face. Then she folded it again and passed it to the life peer on her left, who read it and passed it on.

It came along the bench. Caleb took it from a retired judge who had written on the back of it, in a small square hand, Disbelieve.

The note itself said: LFD whip says 21. Labour whip says 19. Tea room says nobody believes either. Bloc not saying.

He passed it to Sayle, who took his glasses out of his top pocket, unfolded them, put them on, read the note, took them off again and folded them.

“Well,” he said, “that settles it.”

Across the chamber two Conservative peers got up together and went out by the door to the Prince’s Lobby, and a minute later a Labour peer went out after them, and then a polity member from Illinois, half rising, half sitting, as if he might come back for his bag. The door swung behind them and swung again. The minister kept going.

“In the case of the Georges Bank,” she said.

“Where are they going?” Caleb said.

“Across the lobby,” said Sayle. “To stand at the back of the other place and look at the whips’ faces. It is the only reliable instrument. A whip who is winning looks bored.” He felt for something in his waistcoat and didn’t find it. “Have you been over today?”

“I’ve been here.”

“Reading.” Sayle looked at the file on Caleb’s knee. Select Committee on the Territory of Loreto. Evidence, Session 2027 to 2028. Volume III. “Is that the one with the woman from La Paz?”

“That’s volume two.”

“I liked her. She told the committee it had come a long way to ask questions it could have asked by post.”

“She told the committee a great many things.”

“Which way will she go tonight?”

Caleb turned a page of the evidence, which was the oral session of 14 March in Tijuana, the third day, with the transcript in English down one side and Spanish down the other. He had read it before. He read the top paragraph again.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know,” said Sayle, “or you won’t say.”

“I don’t know.”

“Mm.” Sayle turned his good ear back towards the herring. “Your grandfather couldn’t lie either. It made him a great deal of trouble in the Navy.”

---

At twenty past three the notes stopped coming one at a time.

They came in bunches. A doorkeeper brought three at once to the Labour front bench. A clerk at the Table, who was not supposed to receive notes at all, received one from a page and put it under the Order Paper without reading it, and then read it. On the Conservative side somebody laughed aloud and turned it into a cough. The Lord Speaker, on the Woolsack in his black gown, looked up at the gallery clock and then at the minister, who was coming to the end of her brief and knew it.

“I commend the Order to the House,” she said, and sat down.

Nobody rose to oppose it. The Lord Speaker put the question in the flat voice he used for things nobody cared about, the Contents had it, and the Order was agreed. A Gulf of Maine boat would land eleven per cent fewer herring next year, and five people in the chamber had heard why.

The next business was a question for short debate on the condition of the polity railways of the north-west, in the name of a peer from Cascadia who had gone across the lobby forty minutes earlier and had not come back. The Lord Speaker looked for him. The clerks looked for him. A whip went out to look for him and did not come back either.

“Order, order,” said the Lord Speaker gently, to nobody. “The noble Lord not being in his place, the House will proceed to the next business.”

There was no next business. There was a short pause in which two and a half centuries of procedure tried to think of something, and then the Government Chief Whip in the Lords, a heavy man from Ohio, got up and moved that the House do now adjourn during pleasure. The House agreed to that too. It did not have anything else to agree to.

Peers stood up all over the chamber and talked to the people next to them. The bishops went out in a group, still in their robes, like a flock of something. Sayle did not move.

“During pleasure,” he said. “I have always liked that. As if we were going off to enjoy ourselves.”

A doorkeeper came along the back of the crossbenches, looking at faces. He stopped at Caleb.

“Lord Whitlock?”

“Yes.”

“From the committee clerk, my Lord.” He held out a note and went away before Caleb could thank him.

It was on a sheet torn from a committee notebook, in Matthew Quarles’s very neat writing.

Lord W. Do you know what the five will do? If they vote, the Committee won’t sit on Thursday either way. Shall I print the agenda? MQ.

He read it twice. Sayle leaned over to look, and Caleb let him.

“Who are the five?” Sayle said.

“The Territory’s members.”

“Ah.” Sayle sat back. “Will they vote?”

“They’ve never not voted.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Caleb took the pencil out of the spine of the evidence file and turned the note over. He wrote No. Then he looked at it, and wrote underneath, Print it. He folded it and held it up, and after a while a doorkeeper saw it and came and took it away.

“No what?” said Sayle.

“No, I don’t know.”

---

Quarles was waiting for him in the committee corridor, under the portrait of a nineteenth-century Lord Chancellor whom nobody could identify without the label, holding the note open in one hand.

He was about forty and dressed better than his salary. He had clerked the select committee since it was set up, and he was the only person in the building who had read the whole of the evidence besides Caleb. He was also the only person who had heard Caleb’s Spanish at the evidence sessions and said nothing about it, which Caleb had taken at the time for tact and had since realised was a professional assessment.

“‘Print it’,” Quarles said.

“Print it.”

“If the government falls tonight, there won’t be a Thursday. The House will be prorogued or dissolved, and the committee lapses, and I shall have printed thirty copies of an agenda for a meeting of a body that doesn’t exist.”

“Then it’ll be the best-prepared agenda nobody ever read.”

Quarles folded the note very small and put it in his waistcoat pocket. “The member for La Paz and the Cape,” he said, “had lunch today in the members’ dining room with the Bloc’s deputy whip.”

“She has lunch with everyone.”

“Not today. Today she had lunch with the Bloc’s deputy whip and nobody else, and they sat at the table by the window, and the Labour whips sat two tables away and watched them eat soup.”

“What did they talk about?”

“I wasn’t at the table.” Quarles looked down the corridor, which was empty. A cleaner’s trolley stood at the far end with nobody near it. “My Lord, you’ve spent more time with those five than anyone in either House. More than the Home Office. More than the Prime Minister. You heard every one of them give evidence twice.”

“In committee.”

“In committee and afterwards. You went to the bar in Tijuana with the member for Tijuana North. I signed the expenses claim. You paid for it yourself.”

“I paid for my own drink.”

“You paid for three.” Quarles was not smiling, exactly. “I’m not asking you to tell me anything. I’m asking whether you know.”

Caleb looked at the portrait of the unidentified Lord Chancellor, who had a face like a closed book and a great deal of fur.

“They said what they had to say to the committee,” he said. “In March, and again in May. They said it in English and in Spanish. It’s all in volume three.”

“I know what’s in volume three.”

“Then you know as much as I do.”

“No,” said Quarles. “I know what they said. You know what they meant.” He took a step back, which in Quarles was a concession. “The Commons has never had to count them in a division that mattered. The rule is that they sit, vote and are counted like anybody else, and it’s never been tested.”

“It’s about to be.”

“Yes. It is.” Quarles looked at his watch. “They’ll divide at about ten, the clerks think. You’ll be in the gallery.”

“I hadn’t decided.”

“You’ve decided,” said Quarles, and went off down the corridor towards the committee office with his hands behind his back, past the cleaner’s trolley, and round the corner.

---

The Prince’s Lobby was full of peers who had nowhere to go and did not want to go home.

They stood in groups under the tall windows with their hands in their pockets and talked about the arithmetic. Every group had a number and none of them had the same one. Caleb went through them towards the stairs, and was stopped twice, once by a Conservative life peer who wanted to know whether it was true that the crossbench had a view, and once by the Convenor.

“Lord Whitlock.”

“Lady Krause.”

“I’m told,” said Ottoline Krause, “by people who should know better, that the crossbench is expected to have a view by this evening.”

“On what?”

“On anything. On whether a ministry that loses a confidence motion by one vote has lost it. On whether the Governor-General ought to grant a dissolution. On the Territory.” She had grey eyes and looked at him with them as if he were an X-ray. “I’ve told them the crossbench does not have views. It has members. I wanted to warn you, because if anybody in this building is going to be asked about the Territory tonight, it’s you.”

“Nobody’s going to ask me about the Territory.”

“They will. You’re the only one who knows anything about it.” She smiled briefly. “If this goes the way the corridors think, we’ll none of us be asked anything for six weeks. Try to enjoy it.”

“I’ve been enjoying it for two years.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’d noticed.” She put a hand on his arm, very lightly, the way a doctor does at the end of an appointment, and went off to be stopped by somebody else.

---

He went down to the central lobby at seven.

The lobby was the hinge of the building. The Lords at one end, the Commons at the other, and between them a high round hall with the Union’s arms in the floor, where the public came to ask for their members and the members came to avoid them. The walk across it took about forty seconds at an ordinary pace. The building had been laid out so that everyone would notice the walk, and on most days nobody did.

Tonight it was full. Press at the barrier with their passes on lanyards, lobby correspondents talking into telephones with one hand over the other ear, a party of schoolchildren from somewhere who had been brought for a tour on the wrong day and were standing in a tight group under the dome, looking up at everybody. A policeman stood at the door to the Commons corridor and let nobody through who did not have business there. Members came out of it and went back into it, and every time the door opened the noise of the chamber came out after them, low and constant, like the sea heard through a wall.

Caleb stood at the Lords end of the lobby and looked across.

He had crossed it perhaps two hundred times. He had crossed it on the first day, in November 2026, to look at the other chamber from its gallery, because a peer who had sponsored him said a new member ought to see what the Lords was for, and the way to see that was to watch the Commons for an afternoon. He had crossed it to give evidence to a Commons committee once, about the evidence his own committee had taken, which had been his first experience of being asked a question by somebody who had decided the answer.

A man from the ABC went past him with a camera on his shoulder, talking. “No,” he was saying, “no, she’s in the chamber, she’s been in all afternoon, she hasn’t left. Nine hours. I know.”

“Whitlock.”

Sayle had come down the stairs behind him, one at a time, with the stick.

“I thought you’d gone home,” Caleb said.

“I am eighty-three. I can go home any night I like.” Sayle stood beside him and looked across the lobby at the door to the Commons corridor, the policeman, the noise. “Your grandfather came down from Newport the night the Gore ministry won by eleven. Two thousand and six. You’d have been four. He hadn’t a seat by then, so I got him into the gallery on my pass.”

“Four.”

“We sat in the peers’ gallery, and Gore stood up and won, and looked as if he’d lost. Your grandfather said it was the worst thing he’d ever watched. He’d been in a hurricane.” Sayle shifted his weight on the stick. “Come on, then. They let us sit up there if we don’t clap.”

“Are you sure you can manage the stairs?”

“No,” said Sayle, and started across the lobby.

Caleb went with him. The schoolchildren under the dome watched them go, the old man with the stick and the tall young one carrying a file. One of them said something, and the teacher said shush and looked at Caleb as if trying to work out who he was. She didn’t manage it. Nobody did. At the door the policeman looked at their passes, then at Sayle, then at Caleb, and then at Caleb’s pass again, longer, and at his face, as if the name on it might belong to somebody’s son.

“Gallery, my Lords?”

“Gallery,” said Sayle.

The policeman opened the door, and the noise of the House of Commons came out to meet them.