The Paper

The room behind the double doors was long and low and smelt of coffee that had been standing since the afternoon.

There was a long table down the middle of it, mahogany, with too many chairs, and at the far end of it, in a group, as if they had all drifted there over the course of the day and stayed, sat four women. Papers everywhere. Cups everywhere, some with saucers and some without. A plate with the remains of sandwiches. A jug of water like the one in the Chesapeake Room. At the near end of the table, by itself, in front of an empty chair, a single sheet of paper lay face down.

Halvorsen went round the table and sat down with the others. Nobody else was in the room. The lawyers, the aides, the people who made the tea, had all gone somewhere else.

“Lord Whitlock,” said Margaret Renwick. “Thank you for coming. Please sit down.”

He sat down in the chair in front of the paper. He put the brown folder on the table beside it.

They looked at him, all five of them. He had seen each of them from somewhere: Renwick from the gallery with her reading glasses pushed into her hair, Valdez at the despatch box, Halvorsen on a poster and through the four inches of a door, Raghunathan in a corridor saying may not shall, Feldt with a cup of tea, reading. He had sat in a small room with one of them for ten minutes that afternoon. He had never been in a room with all of them. He had never been in a room with five people who between them led three hundred and ninety-seven members of the House of Commons, and he noticed that he was noticing the number, and stopped.

Ana Valdez was at the end, slightly apart from the others, with her hands folded on the table in front of her. She was the only one of them who smiled at him.

“I’m sorry about the room you were in,” she said. “We should have found you a better one. That was my fault.”

“It had a ship in it.”

“Did it?” She looked, for a moment, genuinely interested. “I never went in. What kind of ship?”

“A brig. In a storm. Off Cape Henry.”

“Did it get round the cape?”

“The painter didn’t say.”

“No,” said Valdez. “They never do.” She glanced at Renwick. “Margaret.”

---

“I’m going to say very little,” said Renwick, “because the paper says it, and we’ve all agreed that you should read the paper before anybody says anything to you about it.” She was a thin, precise woman of about sixty, with the reading glasses now on her nose and a fountain pen in her hand that she did not seem to know she was holding. “I’ll say three things. We are the leaders of the five parties in the Commons that are not the Alternative. Between us we have three hundred and ninety-seven seats. We have spent two days writing that.” She pointed at the paper with the pen. “It’s been signed by nobody yet. It will be signed tonight, by all five of us, if what happens in the next hour goes the way some of us think it will, and if it doesn’t, it will be torn up and none of us will ever mention it again.”

She put the pen down.

“The third thing is this. Nobody in this room is going to ask you anything until you’ve read it. Read it. Take as long as you want. Then you can ask us whatever you like.” She sat back. “That’s all.”

He turned the paper over.

It was one sheet, typed, single-spaced, with a heading in capitals and six numbered paragraphs, and no signatures at the bottom, only five lines with five names typed under them and a space for the date. Somebody had corrected a word in the fifth paragraph in ink, very small, and initialled it. He read it.

HEADS OF AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE PARTIES REPRESENTED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

1. The parties will support the commissioning of a Prime Minister who is not a member of the House of Commons, and will not move or support a motion of no confidence in that ministry before the business set out in paragraph 3 is concluded.

2. The Prime Minister shall chair the ministry and shall not lead it. Portfolios are allocated among the parties in the proportions set out in the schedule. The Prime Minister appoints no member of the Cabinet and may dismiss none.

3. The business of the ministry is limited to the following and to what is necessarily incidental to it:

(a) a federal enumeration of the Territory of Loreto, to be commenced within ninety days;

(b) a Bill to settle the constitutional form of the Territory, to be laid before Parliament within one year of the enumeration’s return;

(c) supply, and such other business as is necessary for the ordinary administration of the Realm.

4. No party is bound to support any provision of the Bill under paragraph 3(b). The undertaking in paragraph 1 is an undertaking to allow the Bill to be brought forward and voted on, and is not an undertaking as to its content.

5. The Prime Minister shall answer to the House of Lords weekly and shall attend the bar of the House of Commons monthly to answer questions there, standing, by leave of the Speaker, which leave the parties will move to give.

6. On the conclusion of the business in paragraph 3, or on 30 June 2031, whichever is earlier, the Prime Minister shall resign without being asked.

He came to the end of it.

Then he went back to the beginning, and read it again.

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. He was aware, at the edge of the paper, of the five of them sitting very still at the far end of the long table, and of the coffee smell, and of somebody’s watch ticking, and of nothing else. He read it the second time more slowly than the first, a sentence at a time, the way he read evidence, the way he had read the lease his mother had asked about in the car. The parties will support the commissioning of a Prime Minister who is not a member of the House of Commons. The Prime Minister shall chair the ministry and shall not lead it. A federal enumeration of the Territory of Loreto. Within ninety days. Standing, by leave of the Speaker. Without being asked.

There was no name in it anywhere. There didn’t need to be.

He put the paper down on the table, face up, and put his hand flat on it, the way he had put his hand flat on the chart of the lower Potomac when Quarles told him about the four hours.

“Thank you,” he said. “May I ask two questions?”

“Ask as many as you like,” said Renwick.

“Two will do.”

Raghunathan, at Renwick’s elbow, made a small sound that might have been a laugh. Halvorsen did not move.

---

“Paragraph two,” Caleb said. “The schedule. May I see it?”

There was a short silence at the end of the table.

“No,” said Renwick. “I’m sorry. The schedule is the parties’ business. It sets out which party has which portfolios and in what proportion, and it’s the thing we spent most of yesterday on, and none of us is going to show it to anybody until the ministry’s announced, including to each other’s members.” She looked at him over her glasses. “You wouldn’t be appointing anybody under it in any case. That’s paragraph two. You’d be chairing whoever the parties sent.”

“Yes,” said Caleb. “I see that.”

He didn’t say anything else. Renwick waited for him to argue, and when he didn’t, she looked very briefly at Raghunathan, and Raghunathan looked at the table.

“Second question,” said Caleb. “Have the Territory’s members seen this?”

The silence this time was longer.

“No,” said Feldt, after a while. She was the youngest of them by some way, with short dark hair and an open, anxious face, and she said it as if it hurt her a little. “They’re not a party. The paper’s between the parties represented in the Commons, and the five sit as five, not as a party. We discussed it. Yesterday afternoon, for about an hour.”

“And?”

“And we decided it would be wrong to ask them to sign an agreement about how they’d be governed,” said Raghunathan. “When it’s not settled whether they’ll be allowed to sit in the House that governs them.”

Caleb looked at her.

“They’ll be counted by it,” he said.

Nobody answered that.

He did not press it. He had said it, and they had heard it, and it was true, and there was nothing more to say about it that would not have been an argument, and he had told them he would ask two questions. He took his hand off the paper.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s all.”

---

Renwick looked at the others. Something went round the end of the table, not words, a set of glances, the way the two whips had compared lists at the doors of the Commons in July and put them away without speaking.

“Then before we go any further,” said Renwick, “we need you to agree one thing. Not as a condition. As a fact. Paragraph six.”

“The thirtieth of June 2031.”

“Or the end of the business, whichever is earlier.” Renwick took her glasses off. “We need to know that, before anybody asks you anything else, you accept that date. That whoever chairs this ministry goes when the business is done, or on that date, and doesn’t need to be asked, and doesn’t wait to be asked, and doesn’t find a reason to stay. Because if you don’t, there’s no point in the rest.”

“I accept it,” said Caleb.

“Just like that?”

“It’s a good date. It’s the end of a session. It gives the count time, and the Bill time, and the House time to vote on it, and a little over.” He thought about it. “And it’s written down. I’d rather it was written down than promised.”

Valdez, at the end of the table, looked at him.

“So would I,” she said. “Now.”

Renwick put her glasses back on.

“Lord Whitlock,” she said. “The five of us would like to advise the Governor-General that you be commissioned as Prime Minister on the terms of that paper. We’d like to know if you’ll allow your name to go forward.”

He had known it was coming since the Chesapeake Room, since Ruth had gone red to the roots of her hair, since the telephone in the shop, since the beer mat, since Quarles. He had known it, and it did not make any difference. When it came, said aloud by the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons across a long mahogany table that smelt of cold coffee, it arrived as if he had not known it at all.

He looked at the paper. The Prime Minister shall chair the ministry and shall not lead it.

He thought about Mrs Pell saying your lot.

“Yes,” he said.

---

It went quickly after that, because they had been ready for it to go either way and had prepared both.

There would be no announcement tonight. The paper would be signed by the five of them after he had left, here, in this room, and kept private. His name would be announced at twenty to three tomorrow afternoon, and the paper published with it in full, so that nobody could say there had been a private bargain. The Prime Minister would go to Government House a little after four and resign. He would go after her. Nothing would be said to anybody by anybody before twenty to three.

“I’ll need to tell my mother,” he said.

“Tell your family,” said Valdez, before Renwick could answer. “Of course. Tell them tonight. Nobody else.” She paused. “And your employer. You’ll need to tell her something. You’re due at work in the morning.”

He looked at her.

“How do you know I’m due at work?”

“Signe told us about the shop,” said Valdez. “Yesterday. I’ve been thinking about it all day.” She almost smiled. “I’d tell her before she hears it on the radio. In my experience the people who employ you have a right to hear it first.”

Raghunathan said, quietly, to the table rather than to him: “There’s the disclaimer.”

“There’s always the disclaimer,” said Renwick.

“He could lodge one in three years and be in the Commons by a by-election before he’s thirty.”

“Everything’s three years away, Priya,” said Renwick, without looking round. “I can’t run a country on what happens in three years. I can barely run a party on what happens on Wednesday.” She looked at Caleb. “You don’t need to say anything about that.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good,” said Renwick, and almost smiled too.

---

They stood up. All five of them shook his hand, one at a time, round the end of the table, the way people shake hands at the end of a funeral. Renwick’s hand was dry and quick. Raghunathan’s was firm and she held on a moment and looked at him as if trying to read the small print. Feldt’s was warm and she said “Thank you” as if he had done her a personal kindness, and meant it. Valdez took his hand in both of hers, briefly, and let go, and said nothing at all, which, he thought afterwards, was the kindest thing anybody said to him all evening.

Halvorsen walked him to the door.

In the long red corridor outside, under the brass lamps, with the double doors swinging shut behind them on the four women and the paper, she stopped.

“You didn’t negotiate,” she said.

“There was nothing to negotiate. It’s your paper.”

“That’s what worries me.” She looked at him, square-faced, very tired. “They’re pleased with you. Margaret’s pleased, Priya’s pleased. You asked two questions and accepted the date and said yes. You’re exactly what they hoped you’d be.” She paused. “I’m not sure they’re right about what that is.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I think you read it twice,” said Halvorsen, “and they didn’t notice.”

He held out the brown folder.

“These are notes,” he said. “On how you’d count them. Whoever does the count will want them. They’re not finished. The first page is the important one.”

She took the folder, and opened it, there in the corridor, and read the first line under the lamp: The whole job is finding the doors. She read it twice. Then she closed the folder and held it against her chest, the way Ruth had held hers.

“It’ll be the Federation,” she said. “It’ll be one of mine. He’ll want these very much.” She looked at him. “Go home, Mr Whitlock. Ring your mother. Ruth will take you down the back stairs, there are photographers at the front who’ve been there since Friday and don’t know what for.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” said Halvorsen. “I’ve done you no favours at all.” She turned back towards the double doors, and then stopped. “One more thing. You said it first. Count them. In July. I want you to know I know that. Nobody else is going to say it, so I’m saying it.” She pushed the door. “Good night, Prime Minister.”

She went in. The doors swung shut.

He stood in the corridor for a moment. Then Ruth came round the corner at the far end with a lanyard and a torch, red in the face, not looking at him, and said, “This way, sir,” and took him down the back stairs, past the kitchens and the trolleys of plates and the smell of floor cleaner, to the door on Market Street, where the porter with the clipboard opened it for him and said “Good night, sir,” and he stepped out into the dark, and the door closed behind him.