Six

“You mustn’t,” said Mr Quennell, “have a view.”

“I know.”

“It’s the Raj against New Wessex. They’re both yours. You’re King of both.” He had the blue folder open on his knee in the back of the car, and his finger on a paragraph he had written himself, in October, in anticipation. “When the Sovereign is present at a sporting contest between two of his realms, he shall not express, by word, gesture or expression, a preference for either.” He looked up. “That’s Rule Nine, sir.”

“Nine was umbrellas.”

“Nine was amended,” said Mr Quennell. “Umbrellas became Nine A.”

---

The tavern was called the Maidan, after the great green park it stood beside, and it had stood beside it since 1858, a tall narrow building of yellow plaster gone grey, three storeys, with a verandah on every floor and shutters on every window, on a road that ran along the north side of the cricket ground. From the bar on the ground floor, through the open windows, across the road, past the trams and the taxis and the stalls selling tea in little clay cups that you drank from and then threw on the ground, you could see the back of the great stand, white and enormous, and over the top of it the floodlight towers, and above that the sky, which was a hot pale blue with kites in it, the birds, turning slowly, very high.

You could not see the cricket. You could hear it. A hundred thousand people in the ground, and every few minutes a sound came over the top of the stand and across the road and in through the windows of the Maidan like a wave breaking on a beach two hundred yards away, and every person in the bar stopped what they were doing and looked up at the television over the bar, which showed them what the sound had been.

There were about four hundred people in the Maidan. There were, outside it, on the road and the pavements and the edge of the park and the tops of the trams, about a hundred thousand more, who had not been able to get into the ground and had come to be near it, and some of them had come to be near the King as well, and they did not seem to mind which.

“It’s ninety-three degrees,” said Theo.

“I know.”

“Thirty-four. Same as Buenos Aires.” Theo looked at the television. “Who’s winning?”

Frederick looked at Mr Quennell, at the end of the bar beside Kimura, who looked back at him with an expression of acute anxiety.

“I’m not allowed to know,” said Frederick.

---

Theo knew more about cricket than he had a year ago.

He knew, because he had stood on the boundary at Coln in June at the end of the last over and watched it go by with sixty people counting stones, and had not understood any of it, and had then gone home and, being Theo, read about it. He had read the laws. He had read a book about the history of the laws. He had read, at Christmas, in Clare, a long article about why the leg-before-wicket law was the most argued-about sentence in any sport in the world, and he had come back to Eight Bars in January and explained it to Mr Delgado, who had not asked.

So he stood behind the bar of the Maidan in the Cranwell apron, which in ninety-three degrees he wore with the strings undone, and pulled beer, badly, and every time the wave came over the stand he looked up at the television and said something.

“That was a four.”

“That’s lunch.”

“That’s a no-ball, he’s over the line, look, his foot.”

“That one was close.”

“Theo,” said Frederick. “You’re having a view.”

“I’m not having a view. I’m describing.” Theo poured a beer into the drip tray while watching the television. “That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“I’m not the King,” said Theo, and handed the beer, which was mostly head, to a man in a white shirt who looked at it and then at Theo and laughed and took it anyway.

---

It was the Raj against New Wessex, the second day of the second Test, and the Raj had been bowled out on the first day for three hundred and eleven, and New Wessex had been, at lunch on the second day, a hundred and ninety for three, and at the start of the afternoon a batsman from Adelaide called Doyle came out with a bat that looked like a cricket bat and used it like a club.

Frederick did not know any of this. Theo told him. Theo told him every time the wave came over the stand, which, from about two o’clock, it did less often, because the sound that came over the stand when Doyle hit the ball was not a wave. It was a groan. It was a hundred thousand people in the ground making the sound of a hundred thousand people watching somebody from the other side do something that they could not stop, and it came across the road and in through the windows and the whole of the Maidan groaned with it, four hundred people, and the hundred thousand outside groaned as well, a beat later, like an echo, and Frederick, behind the bar, kept his face perfectly still.

“Six,” said Theo, at ten past two, looking at the television.

The groan.

“Four.”

The groan.

“Six,” said Theo, at twenty past. “That’s a hundred. He’s got a hundred.”

The groan, and under the groan, from somewhere in the ground, very small, a cheer, which was, Theo said, the New Wessex supporters, about two hundred of them, in a corner, who had flown in from Sydney and Wellington and were sitting together, both halves, for once, because there was nobody else to sit with.

Frederick pulled a beer for a man who had come in from the road. He kept his face still. He thought about the ten glasses in Wellington, five and five, like the keys of a piano. He thought about Mrs Fitzsimmons and Mr Tane. He thought about how hard it was to stand in a room full of people who all wanted one thing and want nothing yourself, and he thought that it was the thing he had been doing his whole life and had only now, behind a bar, begun to notice.

---

At a quarter to four, Doyle was on a hundred and forty-one.

The Maidan had gone quiet. The groans had stopped, because there was nothing left to groan about; the man was going to get two hundred, and everybody knew it, and there was a sort of exhausted peace in the bar, the peace of people who have accepted a thing. The man in the white shirt was asleep in a corner. The television showed Doyle at the crease, leaning on his bat, wiping his face with his sleeve. Theo was washing glasses. Kimura was on her stool with a glass of something cold and green that Frederick had made at three o’clock for a woman who had asked for a lime soda and had been given, by mistake, a lime soda with gin in it, and had sent it back, and Kimura was drinking it with every sign of enjoyment.

Frederick picked up a tray.

It was a round tin tray with eight glasses on it, beer, for a table by the window, the end window, the one that faced the ground, where eight young men from a bank in the city had been sitting since eleven in the morning in their shirtsleeves, not working, watching the television, and he came out from behind the bar with the tray balanced on his left hand, the way Mrs Merriweather had shown him in October, flat, with his fingers spread underneath, and walked across the bar towards the window.

The wave came over the stand.

It was not a groan. It was not a cheer. It was a sound he had never heard a hundred thousand people make, a sort of rising, astonished roar, going up and up, like a jet taking off, and every person in the Maidan looked up at the television, and the television showed a ball going up.

It went up out of the middle of Doyle’s bat in a long, high, beautiful curve, and the camera tried to follow it and lost it against the sky, and found it again, and lost it, and the commentator was saying something very fast that Frederick could not hear because of the sound, and the ball went up over the rope, and over the seats, and over the top of the great white stand, and the camera stopped following it, because there was nothing to follow it with, and the commentator stopped talking.

Frederick, holding the tray, with his back to the window, did not see it come.

He heard it. He heard the hundred thousand people on the road outside see it, which was a different sound, closer, a sort of gasp going along the road like wind going along grass. He heard it go over the tram. He heard it go through the top of the fig tree on the pavement across the road, a sharp crack and a rattle of leaves. He heard Theo, behind the bar, say Freddie, in exactly the voice he had used on the first Friday about the floor.

He turned round.

He saw it for about a quarter of a second, a dark red thing, coming in through the end window of the Maidan, through the open shutters, about four feet off the ground, quite fast but not as fast as he would have expected, having come down from a very great height and through a fig tree, and coming straight at him, at the level of his chest.

He put his right hand up.

He did not decide to. He had umpired a cricket match on a village green in Gloucestershire and a baseball game on the same green on the same day, and he had stood in the nets in Cirencester through a whole winter while Jack bowled at him, and he had been told by Jack, every week, that he had the worst hands in England, and he had believed it. He did not decide anything. His hand went up, the right one, because the tray was on his left, and the ball went into it, and stopped.

It stung. It stung like being slapped by somebody who meant it. He stood in the middle of the Maidan with a tray of eight beers balanced on his left hand, not one of them spilled, and a cricket ball in his right, which had come from the middle of the bat of a man from Adelaide on a hundred and forty-one, over a stand, a road, a tram and a fig tree, and he looked at it.

The Maidan was completely silent.

Then a hundred thousand people outside, who had seen it go in through the window, and four hundred people inside, who had seen it come in and seen where it stopped, all at once, at the same moment, understood.

---

He had never heard anything like it. He did not think anybody had. It was not a roar. It was a sound so big that it was not a sound at all; it was a sort of pressure, coming in through every window of the Maidan and up through the floor and down from the verandahs, and the glasses on the tray on his left hand rang with it, very faintly, all eight, like a bell.

And under it, in the middle of it, from the hundred thousand on the road, one word, being shouted, over and over, by people who had worked it out at the same moment and were telling each other, in English and Bengali and Hindi and every other language of the Raj, the same thing.

OUT. OUT. OUT.

“It’s not out,” said Theo, behind the bar, in a voice of great distress. “It’s not out. It went over the boundary. It’s six. It’s a six. You can’t be caught out by somebody who’s not on the field. You can’t be caught out by somebody in a pub. It’s in the laws. I’ve read the laws.”

“OUT,” said the man in the white shirt, who had woken up, and was standing on his chair.

“It’s six,” said Theo.

On the television over the bar, the umpires in the middle of the ground had signalled six, both arms up, as they had to, and the scoreboard said Doyle 147, and the camera was on Doyle, who was leaning on his bat looking at the top of the stand with an expression of enormous satisfaction. And then the producer, who had evidently been told something by somebody, cut away from the ground, and the picture on the television over the bar of the Maidan changed, and it showed, from a camera on the road outside, through the end window, the inside of the Maidan, and in the middle of it the King, in a black T-shirt that said EIGHT BARS, holding a tray of beer on one hand and a cricket ball in the other, standing perfectly still, with his face giving away nothing at all.

He was keeping it still. He had to. It was the Raj against New Wessex. They were both his. He was not allowed to have a view.

The four hundred people in the Maidan were looking at him.

The hundred thousand on the road were looking at him.

On the television, he was looking at himself.

He walked to the end window. He walked very carefully, with the tray, and put it down on the table of the eight young men from the bank, all eight beers, not one spilled, and said “Your beers,” and they looked at him with their mouths open. Then he went to the window, the end one, the open one, that the ball had come in through, and looked out at the road, at the hundred thousand people, the trams stopped, the stalls, the fig tree with a broken branch, the back of the great white stand, and he held up the ball.

He did not say anything. He did not signal out, and he did not signal six. He stood in the window of the Maidan in Calcutta on the second day of the second Test between two of his realms and held up a cricket ball, so that everybody could see it, with no expression at all on his face, for about ten seconds.

Then he put it in the pocket of his apron, and went back behind the bar.

---

It was in every paper in the Raj on Saturday, and in every paper in New Wessex, and in the Courier in New Westminster and, Jack reported by text from the New Inn at six in the morning Coln time, the Echo, with the headline HANOVER CATCHES ONE, and a second text, a minute later, I TAUGHT HIM THAT, which was not true, and a third, HE STILL HAS THE WORST HANDS IN ENGLAND, which was.

The scorecard in the official record said Doyle, 147, six. Doyle went on to make two hundred and twelve, and New Wessex won the match on the fifth day by four wickets.

But on Saturday morning a Calcutta paper printed the scorecard of the second day on its front page, and against the hundred and forty-seventh run, where the official card said 6, the paper had printed, in bold, in brackets, the words c. George V, and below the scorecard a short note from the editor, which said that the paper was aware that a batsman could not be caught by a man in a tavern across the road, and that the laws of cricket were clear, and that the paper did not dispute the six, and that it was, nonetheless, a matter of record that the ball had been caught, cleanly, one-handed, by the King, without spilling the beer, and that a hundred thousand people had seen it, and the paper thought that ought to be written down somewhere, and so it had written it down.

The ball went on the wall of Eight Bars, in a glass box, on a small wooden stand, between the first keg and the Duke in his apron. Mrs Merriweather had a brass plate engraved for it in her lunch hour. The plate said CALCUTTA, 5 MARCH 2032, and under that, in smaller letters, at Theo’s insistence, SIX, and under that, in smaller letters still, at Mrs Merriweather’s, CAUGHT.

On Tuesday, in the back room, Mr Quennell reported that the Sovereign had complied with Rule Nine in every particular. He had expressed no preference, by word, gesture or expression. The committee noted it.

At the dartboard, the Duke, who had watched it on the television in the north wing kitchen eleven times, turned round, and said, slowly, with great satisfaction, a whole sentence.

“He has,” said the Duke of Cumberland, “my hands.”