The Lawn

The hall was full of Kings.

Through the front door with no glass in it, past the old woman in the deckchair, who had gone back to sleep: a long high cool hall with red floor tiles and a staircase curving up at the far end, and all the way round the walls, in heavy gold frames, men in uniforms and robes and sashes with their hands on swords or tables or the heads of dogs. He had known every one of them since he could walk.

George the Third by the door, in red, very young. George the Fourth, enormous, in ermine. William with his sailor’s face. Victoria in the middle of the long wall, a girl in white, who reigned three years and lost Hanover the day she came to the throne. Ernest the First, who got Hanover back. Ernest the Second. Ernest the Third, who crossed the Atlantic for the statue in New York and reigned fifty-eight years. Ernest the Fourth, the Wartime King, in khaki at a desk with a map. Nobody on the walls had been the fifth George.

Half of them were on the floor, stood carefully upright against the walls below their hooks, so that they looked up at him from knee height. George the Fourth face down. A long tear across Victoria’s white skirts. William had come down on the corner of the staircase and lost his frame entirely, and leaned against the bottom step in bare canvas, looking faintly surprised, the way sailors look when the deck goes.

At the far end, at the foot of the stairs, in the light from the empty windows, was his father.

---

The portrait from the year Frederick was born, the same one that hung smaller in the morning room at Columbia Palace. His father at sixty-six in a dark suit at a window, one hand on the back of a chair, looking at something to the left of the painter, the corner of his mouth very slightly up, the way it went when he had thought of something he was not going to say.

It had not fallen. It had swung on its wire and come to rest at a long slant, like the clock on its green post on the pier.

Beside it on the wall was a rectangle of paler paint with two empty brass hooks at the top, and in the middle of it, held up by four pieces of tape, a photograph cut out of the Times of Los Angeles. The one Columbia Palace had issued on the first of November. A boy of fifteen in an open-necked white shirt by the library window, not smiling and not not smiling. Under it, on a strip of paper, in somebody’s best biro: HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V. PORTRAIT TO FOLLOW.

“The housekeeper did that,” said the Governor. “Mrs Okada, in November. The Household said the portrait would be sent when it was painted, and she said a hall with every King since 1783 in it was not going to have a hole in it in the meantime. I didn’t think I could stop her.”

“No.”

He reached up, not for the photograph but for his father, one hand on the bottom corner of the frame and one on the side, the way you straighten a picture without marking the glass, and moved it a little at a time until the bottom edge ran level with the stair-rail. His father stood straight at the window again.

He took his hands away. It stayed.

By the door, Castellanos looked at the ceiling.

---

Supper was soup, out of the kitchens at half past eight in pots the size of dustbins, two men to a pot, steaming, across the gravel to trestle tables by the dry fountain. The line already went back across the lawn between the tents in the dusk: bowls, mugs, saucepans, in one case a hubcap.

He went and stood behind the first table, between a woman in a white apron and one of the men who had carried the pots. She looked at him, and at Castellanos three feet away with his arms folded. Castellanos did nothing. She handed Frederick a ladle.

It was steel and long-handled and hot.

“One each. Fill it, tip it, next. Don’t stop to talk, or the line stops. I’ve been serving soup since Thursday at four. I’ll tell you if you’re doing it wrong.”

He did the first six wrong. Too full, spilled. Not full enough. Too fast, down the side of a woman’s mug onto her hand.

“Sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s soup, honey. It’s hot soup. It’s fine.”

“Slower,” said the apron, without looking at him. “And from lower down.”

The seventh was right, and the eighth.

He did not count them. He filled and tipped and said there you are and next, and the faces came past him in the dusk and then in the dark, under strings of bulbs the Army had hung between the trees from a generator. An old man with no teeth: gracias, mijo. A girl of about six holding her bowl up in both hands, looking at the soup and not at him. A man in a suit with the jacket gone who stopped with his bowl out and his mouth open, until the woman behind him said keep moving, Gerald, he’s busy. A father of five who took the fifth bowl and said, very quietly, we heard you at two, we got under the table, all five of us, and was gone before he could answer.

Theo at the next table doing bread. Marcus doing cups. Priya and Lucía walking the queue with a pad, finding who could not stand in it and taking soup to them: the old, the people on crutches, the woman with the baby from Franklin sitting on the fountain steps with the thin man in the suit. At the end of the tables, by the pots, Mr Abernathy with a borrowed clipboard, counting bowls.

After an hour the apron took the ladle out of his hand.

“That’ll do. You’ve done a hundred and twelve. Go and eat something. You look like you need it.”

“Everybody says that.”

“Everybody’s right.” The last of the pot, a heel of bread, and a finger pointed at the grass.

---

At ten, eating on the grass with Theo by the fountain, he saw a pair of legs in Army trousers sticking out from under the green canvas tank at the far end of the lawn, and heard a voice saying things to a spanner that it would not have said if it had known who was listening.

He went over. Castellanos came.

Three soldiers by the lorry in shirtsleeves, grey with dust, drinking from tin mugs. They saw him coming under the bulbs with a man in a torn grey suit a step behind, and put the mugs down and stood very straight, and one said sergeant, loudly, and the legs stopped.

She came out on her back on a wheeled board and looked up at him, upside down, for a long moment. Thirty-five perhaps, small and wiry, hair scraped back, face black with grease. She got up and stood straight with the spanner in her hand, and he watched her decide in half a second not to put it down.

“Sir. Staff Sergeant Duarte, Fourteenth Engineers, Fort Irwin.” She swallowed. “Sorry about the language, sir. There’s a valve on this tank that’s been stuck since Thursday.”

“Please don’t stop. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Nobody’s interrupted us since Thursday, sir. That’s sort of the problem.” To the three: “Stand easy.” They stood easy, and did not look easier.

He had pictured ships and helicopters and lines of soldiers in Ventura and a hand to shake at the end of each line. Not this.

“Thank you. For the water. There are four hundred people on this lawn and they all had water tonight because you’re under that tank. And at Franklin yesterday the water came at four, in a truck. Was that you too?”

“That was the city, sir. We got in from Irwin at six this morning. We were in Oxnard till two, then they sent us here. There’s another company in Oxnard now, and one in Ventura, and one still in San Bernardino from November. We never quite left San Bernardino.” She paused. “Sir. Can I tell you something?”

“Yes.”

“At two o’clock we were on the road by the strawberry fields at Oxnard with the trucks, and we had the radio on in the cab of the first one, because we always do, and it was you. Talking about a train. Then the aftershock came and the whole road went sideways, and you said get down, get under something, hold on, and every man and woman in my company got under the trucks.” She looked at him. “Fourteen years in the Army, sir. I’ve given that order in training a hundred times and nobody’s ever done it that fast. They did it for you.”

He could not answer.

“So thank you, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a valve.”

She lay back on the board and pushed herself under the tank with her heels, and the spanner started again, the voice quieter now. A very young soldier with a sunburnt neck held out his tin mug. Frederick took it. Coffee, terrible, worse than the machine in the hotel corridor. He drank all of it.

---

At half past eleven a long low beating came over the hill from the north, over the observatory, and everybody on the lawn looked up. It came down out of the dark onto a square of lights the Army had marked by the far wall, in a storm of dust and leaves and loose washing, and the blades slowed in the light from the bulbs.

Red and white, with a stripe. ROYAL AMERICAN COAST SERVICE.

A tanker lorry drove across the grass to it with its lights off. Four people in orange climbed out and sat down on the grass beside it all at once, as though their legs had been cut, while the man from the lorry put the hose in.

He went across. Castellanos was beside him before he had taken three steps.

Three men and a woman, backs against the wheels, helmets off. Forty perhaps, faces burned by sun and wind and grey with tiredness, orange suits black to the knee with mud. One man had a bandaged hand. The woman had her eyes shut. The man with the bandage started to get up.

“Please don’t. Stay there.”

He sat back down.

Frederick sat on the grass in front of them, cross-legged, the way he sat for assemblies at Ellicott. For a while nobody said anything. The hose ran. The blades above them had stopped.

“Where have you been?”

The woman opened her eyes.

“Oxnard. Since Thursday at eleven. The sea came in two miles at Oxnard, over the fields, into the streets. It’s flat. There’s nowhere to go up. People went up on their roofs. We’ve been taking them off roofs.”

“How many?”

It came out before he could stop it. He watched her decide. She had a number; every crew on that coast had one. She was not going to give it to him.

“A lot, sir. Not enough.” She looked across the dark lawn at the tents. “There was a family this afternoon on a roof by the fields. Mother, father, three kids, a grandmother, and a dog. The water still up to the gutters. The father wouldn’t come up the cable without the dog. He said they’d lost the house and the car and the fields and he wasn’t losing the dog.” She almost smiled. “So Ray went down for it. It bit him.”

“It was a good dog,” said Ray. “It was frightened. I’d have bitten me.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

They did not know what to do with it, any more than he had known what to do with Duarte’s. So he sat with them by the wheels in the dark. After a while the woman shut her eyes again and Ray leaned his head back against the wheel, and the five of them sat there until the man from the lorry took the hose out and said you’re full.

At the door the woman turned round.

“Sir. We were in the air over Oxnard at two when it came, and we heard you say get down. And people on the roofs below us heard you too, on their radios, and they got down flat and held on to the chimneys. I saw them do it.” She looked at him. “I thought you should know.”

The door slid shut. The blades turned faster, and it went up in its storm of washing and hung a moment over the gate with the crowns on it, and turned north over the cracked dome of the observatory, towards Oxnard.

---

At midnight the Governor was on the top step of the porch beside the empty deckchair, elbows on her knees, the old jacket round her shoulders, a mug in her hands, looking out at the tents and the bulbs and the dark square where the helicopter had been.

She moved along the step without looking at him, and he sat.

“The Coast Service comes in every night to fuel. There’s a tanker here and nowhere else on this side of the basin.”

“They said there were people on the roofs in Oxnard who heard me.”

“I’ve heard it from four crews. From the engineers. From the hospital at Ventura. From the State Chancellor, who heard it from a mayor in the valley, who heard it from a farmer in a packing shed with forty pickers. Get down. Get under something. Hold on. And then the Spanish.” She looked at him. “You know what you did at two o’clock, sir?”

“I told people to get down.”

“You told the whole Commonwealth to get down at the exact second it needed telling, in both its languages, on the one service everybody was listening to, in the voice they’d all been listening to since Thursday.” She looked back at the lawn. “I’ve written the drills. I’ve stood in a school hall in Fresno saying drop, cover and hold on to four hundred children while they giggled. I’ve never once got a whole state to do it at once.”

He said nothing.

“I don’t govern anything, sir. It’s the first thing anybody says about this office. The Governor of California lives in Los Angeles and governs nothing. It’s true. Sacramento governs. I sign what Sacramento sends me and certify what the courts tell me to and open sessions by walking in and declaring them open and walking out again.” She turned the mug in her hands. “And I open gates. That’s what I’m for. On Thursday at four I opened that one down there, without asking anybody, because there were people outside it with nowhere to go. This morning you made it so nobody can tell me I shouldn’t have.” She looked at him. “That’s all the Crown is, most days, in a place like this. A gate, and somebody standing at it deciding whether it’s open.”

The side gate of the airfield at George Washington International, forty times, never the front doors. The gate on Twenty-Second Street, through the roses, without asking. The grey door behind the stage with the little running man over it.

“Governor. Is there a gate at Columbia Palace? Like that one?”

“I’ve never been to Columbia Palace, sir. But I’d think there’s a gate at every house the Crown has.” She finished the mug. “The question’s never whether there’s a gate. It’s whether anybody remembers it opens.”

She stood, and put her hand flat on his shoulder for a moment, and took it away.

“There’s a tent for you by the fountain. Your Page and two of your classmates, and your sergeant across the flap. I’m told the Page snores.”

“He does.”

“Go to bed, sir. The Prime Minister’s paper comes at seven. You’ll want to read it twice.”