Customers

By the third week the election had come into the shop with the customers, the way weather does.

It came in on their clothes and in their voices. A woman bought a guide to the Shenandoah and told him, while he wrapped it, that she had voted Labour all her life and would not this time and did not know what she would do instead. A man in a CCU rosette asked for a wall map of the Realm with the constituencies on it, and stood in front of the one on the back wall for twenty minutes counting something on his fingers, and went away without buying anything. Two students argued at the travel guides about whether Alternative for the Realm was a party or a symptom, and one of them said symptom so loudly that Mrs Pell looked up over her glasses, and they lowered their voices and went on arguing in whispers and bought a guide to Iceland.

Nobody talked about anything else. Caleb had expected that. What he had not expected was how much of it would be about the Territory, which nobody in the shop had ever mentioned before July and which now seemed to be the only subject in the Realm. The atlas of the Territory had sold its twenty. Mrs Pell had ordered twenty more without consulting him and without comment.

On the Friday, at eleven, the two old men came in.

---

They came in together and had clearly been arguing since well before the door. They were both in their late seventies, one tall and stooped in a seersucker jacket, the other short and round in a cardigan in spite of the heat, and they went to the plan chests at the back as if they had been coming to the shop all their lives, which, Caleb discovered later, they had. Mrs Pell said “Good morning, Mr Ainsley. Good morning, Mr Coyle,” without looking up, and both of them said “Good morning, Agnes,” and went on arguing.

“She cancelled it,” said the tall one, Ainsley. “That’s the beginning and the end of it. Markham called an election, Markham died, she cancelled it. Two weeks in office and the first thing she does is cancel an election.”

“The writs were never issued,” said Coyle.

“I know the writs were never issued.”

“Then it was never called. You can’t cancel a thing that hasn’t been called.”

“Don’t be a lawyer at me, Frank.”

“I am a lawyer. I was a lawyer for forty years.”

“You were a conveyancer.”

“Conveyancing is law.” Coyle pulled open the top drawer of the plan chest, which held the large-scale maps of the Columbia District, and began to go through them, not looking for anything. “Nobody objected at the time. You didn’t object at the time.”

“I objected.”

“You did not. You said it was very sensible, in view of the circumstances. I remember it. We were in the Treasury canteen.”

“We have not been in the Treasury canteen since two thousand and eleven.”

“It was the club, then.” Coyle found a map of the old quarter, looked at it, and put it back. “You said it was very sensible. Everybody said it was very sensible. The Conservatives said what Conservatives say and went home. It’s only now she’s lost that it’s a scandal.”

“It’s a scandal because she lost.”

“It’s a scandal,” said Coyle, “because now you can see it. It wasn’t a scandal in two thousand and twenty-five because nobody could see what it was for. It was for Loreto. She wanted three years with nobody asking her anything, and she got them, and she spent them buying a peninsula and not deciding what it was.”

Ainsley turned round. “Young man,” he said to Caleb. “You’ve been listening. Settle this.”

Caleb had been listening. He had a map of the lower Hudson in his hands, half folded, and he went on folding it.

“I’m afraid I sell maps,” he said.

“You must have a view.”

“I’ve a very good view of the plan chest,” said Caleb, “and you’re both standing in front of the Districts drawer, which a lady wanted ten minutes ago and went away from.”

Coyle laughed. Ainsley looked at him for a moment longer, then laughed as well, the short reluctant laugh of a man who has been told off and knows he deserved it.

“Agnes,” he said, “where did you find this one?”

“He came in off the street,” said Mrs Pell, “and asked for a job.”

“Did he? Is that how it’s done?”

“It used to be,” said Mrs Pell. “He’s the first one in thirty years who could fold a map.”

---

They stayed an hour. They bought a map of the Shenandoah between them, for a walk they had been planning since the spring and would not take until October, and on the way to the till they stopped at the travel guides and started again on the subject of the five.

“They should never have been seated,” said Ainsley. “That’s what the Alternative people say and for once in their lives they’re right. A Mexican census. Of Mexicans.”

“They were seated under the Treaty.”

“Then the Treaty was wrong.”

“Then take it up with the people who signed it.” Coyle took a guide to Portugal off the shelf and looked at the back of it. “They sit, they vote, they’re counted. That’s the rule, and it’s been the rule since the Treaty, and nobody objected to that either, at the time.”

“Everyone objected to it.”

“The Alternative objected to it. Nobody else did.”

“I heard,” said Ainsley, with the air of a man producing a card from his sleeve, “that on the night, after the vote, they were trying to get some lord to be Prime Minister. Some lord from the Lords. To run things until the courts said whether the five were legal.”

Caleb, at the till, put Coyle’s change down on the counter.

“I heard that on the radio,” said Coyle.

“It wasn’t only on the radio. My nephew’s in the Labour whips’ office. He says it was serious for an hour or two.”

“Which lord?”

“He didn’t know. Nobody seemed to know. Some old boy in ermine, I expect, who’s been there since the sixties. That’s how they do it in the Lords. They find the oldest one and see if he’s still breathing.” Ainsley picked up the Shenandoah map and tucked it under his arm. “Can you imagine. A Prime Minister who can’t even come into the Commons. They’d have to wheel him in.”

“They’d have to let him stand at the bar,” said Coyle. “I expect there’s a precedent.”

“There’s always a precedent with you.”

“There’s always a precedent,” said Coyle. “Somebody just has to find it.” He picked up his change and counted it, then looked at Caleb. “Thank you, young man. You’re very patient.”

“Not at all.”

“No, you are. Agnes’s last one used to hide in the back when we came in.” He put the change in his pocket. “Who are you voting for, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Caleb had his hand on the till drawer.

“The candidate who knows how many people live in Loreto,” he said.

Coyle looked at him for a moment and then smiled, slowly, as if it were the best answer he had heard all week.

“Then you’ll be spoiling your ballot,” he said. “Good morning, Agnes.”

“Good morning, Frank. Good morning, Peter.”

The bell rang behind them. Through the window Caleb watched them go off down the street side by side, still arguing, Ainsley’s hands going and Coyle shaking his head, until they turned the corner by the closed-down tailor’s and were gone.

---

Mrs Pell let the shop be quiet for a while after they had gone. She worked through the order book. Caleb priced a box of second-hand guides at the counter, a pencil figure on the inside cover of each, the way she did it, and didn’t look at her.

“They’ve been coming in since nineteen ninety,” she said, after a while. “Every Friday. Mr Coyle did my husband’s will. Mr Ainsley was something at the Treasury that he’s never once explained, and I’ve never once asked.”

“They’re very nice.”

“They’re very lonely. They argue so that they’ve got something to do on a Friday.” She turned a page. “They’ll vote the same way, you know, when it comes to it. They always have. They argue for six weeks and then they both vote Labour and go to the club and say it was a disgrace.” She took her glasses off and looked at him. “You didn’t have to give him an answer.”

“He asked.”

“People ask all sorts of things in shops. You don’t have to answer any of them.” She put her glasses back on. “It was a good answer, mind.”

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t say thank you. I said it was a good answer.” She closed the order book. “Do the window.”

“The window?”

“It’s been the Chesapeake since nineteen ninety-six. People have stopped seeing it. It wants something for the election. You pick.” She went through the curtain to the back, and he heard the kettle go on.

He stood and looked at the window for a long time from inside the shop, at the back of the framed Chesapeake and the dust on the sill and the street beyond the glass with the people going past. Then he went and got the atlas of the Territory, a fresh copy from the new twenty, and a small easel stand from under the counter, and took the Chesapeake down from its hooks, very carefully, because it was the most valuable thing in the shop. He leaned it against the wall behind the counter, where it would be safe.

He opened the atlas at the page at the back with the old Mexican state boundaries in dotted grey lines, as if somebody had nearly rubbed them out, and stood it on the easel in the middle of the window, facing the street.

Next to it he put a small card, in his own handwriting, in pencil, which was all there was time for. He thought about what to put on it for a while. In the end he wrote: THE TERRITORY OF LORETO. About four million people. Nobody knows.

Mrs Pell came back through the curtain with two cups of tea and looked at the window. Then she put the tea down on the counter and went out of the front door and stood on the pavement in the heat with her arms folded and looked at it from the street, for a long time, the way the customers did.

She came back in.

“Hm,” she said, and handed him his tea.

The atlas sold out again by Tuesday. Nobody bought the one in the window, though a good many people stopped to read the card, and on the Monday afternoon a woman in a dark jacket stood in front of it for nearly a minute without coming in, and wrote something down in a notebook, and walked on before Caleb could see her face.