The Side Room

The man on the door in Market Street was a hotel porter in a grey uniform with a list on a clipboard, and he looked at the list and then at Caleb and then at the list again, and said, “Mr Whitlock,” as if it were a question he was not sure he was allowed to ask.

“Yes.”

“This way, sir.”

It was a service door, between the kitchens and a loading bay, and inside it was a corridor of cream-painted brick with trolleys of dirty plates against the wall and a smell of coffee and floor cleaner, and the sound, a long way off, of a great many people talking at once in a large room. The porter led him along it, round two corners, up a short flight of stairs, through a fire door with a bar on it, and into a different world: carpet, and panelling, and brass lamps on the walls, and a long quiet corridor on the first floor with doors along it with names on small brass plates.

At the far end a young woman was waiting outside one of the doors with a folder held against her chest. She was perhaps twenty-three, in a dark suit that did not quite fit her yet, with a Bloc lanyard round her neck, and she looked at him with frank and complete curiosity, as if he were an exhibit.

“Mr Whitlock?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Ruth. From Mrs Halvorsen’s office. I’m to put you in here.” She opened the door. “It’s the Chesapeake Room. It’s the only one they had left.”

He nearly laughed. He didn’t.

The Chesapeake Room was small and square and windowless, or nearly: there was one window, high up, on to an air shaft, through which came a grey light and the sound of somebody’s radio several floors below. There was a table with a green baize top and six chairs round it, and on the table a jug of water and four glasses on a tray and a glass bowl of mints in silver paper. On the wall opposite the door hung a large dark oil painting of a two-masted ship in a storm, heeling over very far, with a lot of white water and a small lighthouse on a rock, in a heavy gilt frame. There was a brass plate on the bottom of the frame that said nothing he could read from the door.

“Mrs Halvorsen says she’ll come in when she can,” said Ruth. “She says to say thank you for coming. She says there’s water.” She looked at the jug as if it had disappointed her. “I can get you coffee.”

“Water’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Right.” She lingered in the doorway. “Is there anything else?”

“No. Thank you.”

She went out and pulled the door to behind her, and it did not quite close. It never did, he discovered over the next seven hours. It was a hotel door, heavy, on a closer that had given up, and it came to rest about four inches open, on to the corridor, and stayed there whatever anybody did to it.

He sat down at the table, facing the door, and put the brown folder in front of him, and waited.

---

At half past one Halvorsen came in.

She came in without knocking, pushing the door wide with one hand, and stood in the doorway for a moment looking at him, the way she had looked at the poster’s camera: square-faced, unsmiling, in the dark jacket. She was shorter than he had expected from the gallery, and older, nearer sixty than fifty, with grey in her hair that the poster had not shown and reading glasses pushed up on her head.

“You came,” she said.

“You asked.”

“People don’t always come when they’re asked.” She came in and let the door swing to its four inches behind her and did not sit down. She looked round the room, at the painting, at the jug, at the bowl of mints. “I’m sorry about the room. It was the only one. They’ve given the others to the parties and the lawyers and the people who make the tea.” She looked at him. “Have you eaten?”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.” She looked at the folder on the table. “Is that it? What you’ve been writing?”

“Some notes.”

“Quarles said there’d be notes. He was right about most things.” She did not pick it up or ask to see it. “They’re on the second paragraph. It’ll be a while. They argued all yesterday about whether to have a first paragraph at all, and then everybody wanted one, and now they’re arguing about the second, which matters more.” She pushed her glasses up further into her hair. “I wanted to see you before they did. To say thank you for coming, and to say that I was the woman at your window.”

“I guessed.”

“I thought you might. You looked like somebody who guesses things.” She stood for a moment longer. “I’m not going to tell you what it’s about, Mr Whitlock. I said that on the telephone and I meant it. They want to tell you themselves, and they’re entitled to. It’s their meeting. I’m one of five.” She looked at him steadily. “I’ll say one thing, and then I’ll go. Whatever they say to you, you don’t have to say yes. Nobody in that room thinks you will. That’s partly why you’re here.”

“Why am I here?”

“Because you said counted,” said Halvorsen, “in a room where nobody was listening, and meant it, and nobody else in either House had said it before.” She turned to the door. “Eat a mint. They’re very old, but they’re free.”

She went out. The door swung back to its four inches. He sat and looked at it.

After a while he ate a mint. It was very old.

---

Through the four inches of door he could see a strip of corridor about a yard wide: a section of the panelled wall opposite, a brass lamp, and a length of red carpet. People went past it all afternoon, from left to right and right to left, and he saw each of them for about a second, the way you see people from a train.

At ten to two Margaret Renwick went past from right to left with a telephone held to her ear, walking fast, saying, “No. No. I said no on Friday and it’s still no on Sunday and it’ll be no on Wednesday,” and was gone. A minute later she came back from left to right, still on the telephone, saying, “Then tell him he can tell me himself,” and was gone again.

At twenty past two two young men went past carrying a cardboard box between them, very carefully, as if it were heavy or important or both.

At three a woman he did not recognise went past in tears, and another woman went past after her, quickly, saying her name.

At a quarter past three Priya Raghunathan went past with three folders under her arm and a young man beside her who was talking very fast, and she stopped, right in the strip of corridor, and said, “Read it again. Read me the second sentence again,” and the young man read it, and she said, “No. May not shall. They will never agree to shall,” and they went on.

At four Ruth came back with a plate of sandwiches with the crusts cut off and a pot of coffee he had not asked for, and put them on the table, and stood back.

“Mrs Halvorsen said you’d say you weren’t hungry,” she said. “She said to bring them anyway.”

“Thank you.”

Ruth didn’t go. She stood by the door with her hands behind her back and looked at him. He could see her deciding something.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Are you from the Palace?”

“No.”

“The Treasury?”

“No.”

“Are you a lawyer? Everybody else in here today is a lawyer.”

“No.”

She looked at him, puzzled, and then at the brown folder. “Then who are you? If you don’t mind. Sorry. Everybody on the floor’s asking, and I’m the only one who’s seen you, and I said I’d find out.”

He thought about it.

“I sell maps,” he said.

She laughed, a short surprised laugh, and then stopped laughing, because he was not.

“You’re joking.”

“I sell maps. In a shop in the old commercial quarter. Three days a week. Four since July.”

Ruth stared at him. He watched it go through her face: the joke, then not a joke, then something else, something she had heard in a corridor and not believed, arriving all at once.

“You’re the peer,” she said. “Aren’t you? The one they were talking about on the night. In July.”

He didn’t answer.

She went red, from the collar of the suit that didn’t fit to the roots of her hair, and put her hand over her mouth, and took it away again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked. Mrs Halvorsen’s going to kill me.” She backed towards the door. “Eat the sandwiches. Please. Please don’t tell her I asked.”

“I won’t.”

“Thank you.” She was out of the door. Then her head came back round it, red. “I voted for them,” she said. “Count them. I did leaflets for it all summer.” And she was gone.

---

He sat and looked at the sandwiches.

He had known. He had known, he thought, since the telephone in the shop, or since Oliver had looked at him across the table at the Ledger and not answered like what, or since Quarles had stood at the counter with a chart of the lower Potomac and said for about four hours. He had known and had not let himself know, the way you know the tide has turned before you look at the water, and do not look.

Now he had looked.

He got up and walked round the table. It took about six steps. He stood in front of the painting of the ship in the storm and read the brass plate at the bottom of the frame, which said THE BRIG CONCORD OFF CAPE HENRY, 1801, and nothing else, and looked at the ship, heeling over very far in the white water, with its sails reefed hard and somebody, a tiny figure, at the wheel. The lighthouse on its rock was very small and very far away. The painter had not made it clear whether the ship was going to clear the rock or not.

He thought about his grandfather, who had been in a hurricane, and said it was the worst thing he had ever watched until the night of the Gore division. He thought about his father on the ferry to Jamestown with the newspaper, and the stone on the hill that said TEACHER OF HISTORY and nothing else. He thought about Mrs Pell saying your lot. He thought about a woman in a red jacket saying you do know, you just won’t say.

He went back to the table and sat down and opened the brown folder, and read the notes from the beginning, all twenty-two pages, in pencil, The whole job is finding the doors at the top.

Then he ate a sandwich, because Halvorsen had said he would not, and he did not want her to be right about everything.

---

The afternoon went on.

The light in the air shaft went from grey to yellow to a darker yellow. The radio several floors below played music, and then a football match, and then music again. People went past the four inches of door. Naomi Feldt went past at a quarter to five, with a cup of tea in one hand and a sheaf of paper in the other, reading as she walked, and did not look in. Renwick went past twice more, once on the telephone and once not, and the time she was not on the telephone she was walking slowly and looking at the floor, as if she were counting the pattern in the carpet.

At half past five the door moved.

It did not open. It moved, about an inch, as if somebody in the corridor had touched it, and Caleb looked up, and Ana Valdez was standing in the strip of corridor, quite still, looking in at him through the gap.

She was smaller than she had looked at the despatch box, and very tired, in a dark suit with no jewellery, and she held a single sheet of paper folded in half in one hand at her side. She looked at him for perhaps three seconds through the four inches of door, with no expression he could read at all. It was the look of somebody checking a fact she had been told.

Then she nodded to him, once, very slightly, the courteous nod of one member of Parliament to another in a corridor, and walked on.

He sat very still for a long time after she had gone.

---

At seven Ruth brought more coffee and took away the sandwich plate without saying anything, and did not look at him, and went red again on the way out.

At half past seven his telephone buzzed in his pocket. It was Oliver. Where are you. Rumour at the Ledger the five have written something down. Rumour says Lords. Call me.

He did not answer it. He put the telephone back in his pocket, face down.

At a quarter to eight the light in the air shaft had gone, and the room was lit only by the brass lamp on the wall by the painting, and the ship heeled over in the storm in a pool of yellow light, and he sat with the closed folder in front of him and his hands flat on top of it, and waited.

At nine minutes to eight the door opened all the way, wide, as it had not since half past one, and Signe Halvorsen stood in it.

She had taken her glasses off her head and was holding them in her hand. She looked as tired as Valdez had, and as if she had been arguing for ten hours, which she had.

“They’re ready for you,” she said.

He stood up. He picked up the brown folder and put it under his arm, and then thought better of it and held it in his hand, and then put it under his arm again. He pushed the chair back under the table, because his mother had brought him up to.

Halvorsen watched him do it.

“You can leave the folder,” she said.

“I’d rather bring it.”

“Bring it, then.” She stood aside to let him pass. “Down the corridor. The double doors at the end. They’re all in there.” She looked at him as he came level with her in the doorway. “Mr Whitlock.”

“Yes.”

“Read it twice,” said Halvorsen. “Whatever it is. Before you say anything. Read it twice.”

“Somebody else told me that.”

“Then two people have told you,” she said, “and you should listen to us,” and walked ahead of him down the long red corridor towards the double doors at the end, without looking back to see whether he was following.

He was.