The Oath

Niamh woke him at six with a hand on his shoulder.

He was on the floor by his father’s bed with his head on the cover and a blanket over him that had not been there at one. His father was awake above him, on the pillows, looking at the ceiling.

“Morning,” said his father.

“Morning, Papa.”

“Cold?”

“No.”

“Will. Be.”

Niamh made a small sound that might have been a laugh, and opened the curtains. Grey light. Rain had stopped. On the garden the grass was white with frost, and above the wall at the end of it, very faint, a sound like the sea, which was London, awake, and waiting.

---

Mr Hawes dressed him at eight in a room with a mirror, and he looked in it this time.

Under everything, the shirt and breeches of the morning, white. Over them, the crimson. Mr Hawes and Priyanka lifted it on and the weight came down, a person leaning. The ermine at his neck. The train folded behind him on the floor in its long zigzags. A quarter of an inch tight at the shoulders. He did not notice. Mr Hawes did, and said nothing, and smiled at a point beside his ear.

He looked at himself in the mirror. Sixteen. Fair. Grey eyes. A cut over the left one, healed, a thin white line now. In crimson to the floor.

He did not look like a painting. He looked like somebody about to be in one.

“Sir,” said Mr Hawes. “May I?”

“Yes.”

Mr Hawes reached up and straightened something at the collar that did not need straightening, and stepped back.

“Your father,” said Mr Hawes, “asked me in 1973 if he looked all right. I was nineteen. I was carrying pins. I said yes.” He looked at the mirror. “You are not going to ask me. So I am telling you.”

---

The carriage was gold and very old and moved like a boat.

Down the Mall between the trees, wet, with the sun just coming through, and on both sides people. Twenty and thirty deep. They had been there all night: he could see the sleeping bags rolled at their feet, the flasks, the folding chairs, the flags on sticks, the Union flag and here and there, small, the Realm’s. Children on shoulders. A noise he had never heard, not even on the apron, not even at the Tomb: a long continuous roar that went with the carriage like a wave going along a beach, starting a little ahead of it and ending a little behind.

He sat with his hands in his lap the way he had been told, and lifted one, now and then, to one side and the other, the way he had been told.

At the corner of Whitehall, on the kerb, in the front, behind a barrier, in a red coat, a young woman was standing with her hands in her pockets, not waving, not cheering, looking straight at the carriage.

Kate.

No camera. Dame M had it, and her phone, until Sunday. She had come and stood on a kerb at six in the morning to wait, as she had said she would.

He lifted his hand to that side.

She did not wave back. She took one hand out of her pocket and pointed at him, once, very precisely, the way you point at somebody across a room to say you, I mean you, and put it back.

---

At the west door they took the train.

Four of them, out of the annexe, in scarlet and white, at the corners. Hugo at the front left, Samir front right, Charlie Pike back right. Theo back left.

He did not turn to look. You did not turn the robe. But he felt it, the weight change, lift, become level behind him, the way the bedsheet had become level eleven times in a white room on Thursday.

“Ready, sir,” said Mr Tilney, at his elbow, very quietly.

The doors opened.

---

The nave.

Not grey. Not today. Full of light from the high windows, and full of people, standing, two thousand of them, in robes and uniforms and good coats, on both sides, all the way up, and at the far end, very small, the theatre, crimson now, and the throne on it uncovered, and the choir beginning.

I was glad when they said unto me.

The slab, just inside the door. Black, with its border of red paper poppies. The procession in front of him divided and went round it, left and right, and came together again beyond it.

He went round it on the left. Behind him he felt the train go round it too, Hugo and Theo on the left of the slab, Samir and Charlie Pike on the right, the crimson lifting over the black stone, not touching it.

Then the nave.

He walked. A hundred and twenty-three yards. He knew the plan. He knew where the screen was, and the quire, and the crossing. He did not think about any of them. He walked at the pace Mr Tilney had shown him, which was the pace you would walk to somebody’s door, and the people on both sides went past him one row at a time, faces, faces, and he did not look at any of them, and the choir sang, and the train came level behind him.

Two-thirds of the way.

He stopped.

He did not decide to. His feet did it, the way they had run on the apron. He was walking and then he was not.

Behind him the train stopped. Theo, at the back left, did not bunch it. He felt Theo not bunch it.

On the left, in the front of the seats on the north side, under the third window, under the dog that was meant to be a lion, three people were standing.

A tall black man of about fifty in the dark uniform of the Metropolitan Police, very upright, with his cap under his arm. A small woman of about forty in the blue of the Royal Air Force, with a steward’s badge. And beside them, older, thin, in a morning coat, a man who held himself as though something in his back still hurt.

Inspector Mensah. Sergeant Tranter. Major Fenwick.

The raft.

They had asked to sit there. He knew it the moment he saw them. Somebody had asked, and somebody had said yes, and they were under his grandfather’s window on the north side two-thirds of the way up the nave, where his father had stopped, the three of them who had come out of the sea with him.

Inspector Mensah did not move. He stood at attention with his cap under his arm and looked at the King. His eyes were very bright.

Frederick looked at him.

He did not count. He did not know how long. Long enough for the choir to get to the end of a line and start the next. Long enough for the three of them to understand that he had stopped for them.

Then he walked on.

Behind him the train came level again. He felt it come.

Find yours.

---

The theatre.

Up the west steps. The train came up behind him, the two at the back lifting high, the two at the front already on the boards. He did not look at the steps. The steps were where they were. They had been there in 1066.

He stood on the theatre in the crossing with the throne behind him and the whole abbey round him, the nave going back down to the west door, the transepts going out to north and south, the sanctuary going up beyond, the altar.

On the south side of the sanctuary, in the front, in a chair with her name on it, his mother. He did not look for her. He knew.

Beside her, in another chair, with a stick against it and a rug over his knees and Niamh one seat behind, in a dark coat with a star on it, his father.

He did not look for him either.

---

The Recognition.

The Archbishop came to the east side of the theatre. Frederick turned, as he had been shown, to the east. He did not look at the Archbishop’s face. He looked at a point beside it.

“Sirs, I here present unto you King George, your undoubted King. Wherefore all you who are come this day to do your homage and service, are you willing to do the same?”

From the east, the sanctuary, the clergy and the peers and his mother:

“God save King George.”

He turned to the south.

The same words. From the south transept, louder.

“God save King George.”

To the west, down the whole of the nave, two thousand people, and the three under the window.

“God save King George.”

And to the north.

The north transept was full of the Commons of Great Britain, and in the front of it, square and grey in a morning coat, Alistair Rennie.

“Sirs, I here present unto you King George, your undoubted King.”

The north transept did not wait for the rest of it.

“GOD SAVE KING GEORGE.”

It went up into the roof and came back off it like the knocking on Charter Hill. In front of the north transept, Rennie’s mouth was still open. He had shouted, as he had said he would.

Somewhere behind Frederick, on the theatre, very faintly, one of the four boys holding the end of the train made a sound like a laugh going the wrong way. He thought it was Charlie Pike. He thought it might be Theo.

The Archbishop’s face did nothing. But it took him a moment longer than it should have to go on.

---

The altar.

Down off the theatre, up the steps. Twenty yards. He did not count. The train came behind him across the old floor of coloured stone, red and green and gold and black, laid in circles, worn, that nobody walked on except today and the people who had to.

He knelt at the altar on a cushion that somebody had put there, and the Archbishop stood above him with a book, and asked.

“Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and the Territories to it belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?”

I solemnly promise so to do.

Law and justice in mercy.

I will.

The Church of England, as by law established.

All this I promise to do.

His voice did not go thin. It did not do anything. It said the words. He heard them come back off the roof a fraction late, like everything in that building.

The things which I have here before promised, I will perform and keep. So help me God.

They put the book on the altar in front of him, open, and a pen beside it.

A good pen. Black and gold, heavy. He looked at it.

He did not have a chewed blue ballpoint in his pocket today. Señora Ruiz’s was in the drawer of his desk in the north wing, in New Westminster, three thousand miles away, on top of the green exercise book, under Lord Whitlock’s plan. He had thought about bringing it. He had decided it was not this pen’s turn to be replaced.

He picked up the good one and signed.

George R.

He did not write the I. Not here. This was Britain’s.

He put the pen down.

Behind him, across the coloured stones, at the corner of a long crimson train, very quietly, in a voice that would not have carried to anybody but him, Theo said:

“Okay.”