The New Inn

“Forty-five degrees,” said Jack Fennell.

“I know.”

“You don’t know. If you knew, you’d be doing it. Look at it. That’s sixty. That’s nearly straight up. That’s a man holding a glass under a tap in a hurricane.” He reached across the bar of the New Inn and took Frederick’s wrist, the one with the glass in it, and tipped it. “There. Forty-five. The beer hits the side, not the bottom. Hits the bottom, it goes mad. Hits the side, it slides.” He let go. “Now pull.”

Frederick pulled.

The beer came out of the tap brown and fast and hit the side of the glass and slid, the way Jack said, and for one second, two, three, it was beautiful, it was exactly what a pint was supposed to look like, and then the glass was two-thirds full and he could not remember what came next, and he looked at Jack, and while he was looking at Jack the beer went over the top and down his hand and onto the floor of the oldest pub in the valley.

“Straighten it,” said Jack. “Straighten it, straighten it, Hanover, you bring it up as it fills, you don’t just stand there like a lamp post.”

“You didn’t say that.”

“I’m saying it now.”

“You said forty-five degrees.”

“For the start.” Jack took the glass off him, and tipped the top inch into the drip tray, and held it up to the light from the window, and looked at it the way his father looked at a bus engine. “That,” he said, “is the worst pint that has ever been pulled in this building. And this building’s been here since 1632.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Sir Walter Raleigh would have sent it back.”

“He’s from before 1632.”

“He’d have come back to send it back.”

At the far end of the bar, Sue Fennell, who had been pulling pints in the New Inn since before the King was born, did not look up from the glasses she was drying, and said, “Jack, let him do another one,” in the voice of a woman who had heard her son explain things to people for eighteen years and had views about it.

“He’s done four.”

“Then let him do five.”

---

It was Saturday morning, half past ten, and the New Inn did not open until twelve, which was the only reason there were not two hundred people in the lane outside. As it was there were nine: two photographers who had followed the car from Kemble, a woman from the parish council who had come about something else and stayed, Gaz and Little Rob on the churchyard wall with a flask, and Mrs Haverfield’s terrier, Ernest, on the step, asleep, because it was his step and he did not see why anything should change because of a King.

Frederick had flown in on Friday night. He would fly out again on Sunday afternoon. Jack had flown home on Monday, from New Westminster, after two weeks in the Realm, a night in Phoenix that nobody was yet allowed to talk about, a sunrise on a mountain, and one day, the Sunday before he flew, which Jack had spent at Columbia Palace being shown the kitchen and the step and the clock that was four minutes slow and the Monument, and at the end of which, on the step, at nine at night, with the two white cups, Frederick had told him.

“A bar,” Jack had said.

“For a year.”

“Behind a bar.”

“Behind it.”

“Serving.”

“That’s the idea.”

Jack had looked at him on the step for a long time in the lamplight.

“That’s my thing,” he had said at last, very slowly, in the voice of a man discovering that his house has been burgled. “That’s my thing. That’s what I said. At DJ’s. On the wrong bus. I want to stand behind a bar for forty years. I said that. You were there. You heard me.” He had put his cup down on the step. “And you’re going to go and do it first.”

“For a year. You’ve got thirty-nine left.”

“That’s not the point, Hanover.”

And then, after a while, staring at the Monument, in a different voice: “You’ll be rubbish.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know how to pull a pint.”

“No.”

“You’ve never pulled a pint in your life.”

“Never.”

Jack had picked his cup up again, and drunk the rest of it, and put it down, and said, in the voice of a man accepting a terrible duty: “Then you’d better come to Coln.”

---

So he had come to Coln.

He did the fifth pint. It went over the top. He did the sixth, and straightened the glass as it filled, and it did not go over the top, and it had a head on it about a finger deep, which Jack looked at for a long time, and then said was nearly acceptable, which from Jack was a knighthood. He did the seventh, and forgot the angle, and it went mad. He did the eighth with Jack’s hand on his wrist, and the ninth without it, and the ninth was the best of the morning, and Sue Fennell came down the bar with her cloth and looked at it, and at him, and said, “Well, that’s a pint,” and went back.

“I don’t know how you do it,” said Frederick. “All day. Every day. You don’t even look.”

“You stop looking after about a year,” said Sue. “Then you can do it with your eyes shut. Then about ten years after that you can do it while having a row with your husband about the van.” She hung up a glass. “The trick isn’t the pint. Anybody can learn the pint. It’s the room.”

“The room?”

“Knowing who’s next. Knowing who’s had enough. Knowing who’s about to cry and who’s about to hit somebody and who’s going to ask you for the toilet key and then not give it back.” She looked at him over the glasses. “You can’t teach that. You just stand there until it happens.”

“How long does it take?”

Sue considered.

“Jack’s been behind this bar since he was fourteen,” she said. “Washing up, at first. Then serving, when the law let him. Four years.” She hung up another glass. “He’s about halfway.”

“Mum.”

“Well, you are, love.”

---

Then the cellar, for forty seconds, at a quarter to twelve, because Mick had come in through the back with a delivery and needed the trap open. Jack took him down the steps, quickly, because it was nearly opening time and there were things to do, and stood him in front of a keg and talked very fast about couplers and gas and the pressure and this one, never this one, pointing at a small red handle on the top of the coupler, and then Mick shouted from the top of the steps and they went up again.

“Did you get all that?” said Jack, at the top.

“Yes,” said Frederick, who had got the word never and the colour red, and not which of them went with which.

---

At twelve, Sue opened the doors, and the lane came in.

He did not serve. Jack had been very clear about that. “You don’t serve,” Jack had said, at five to, by the fireplace, with his arms folded. “Not here. Not today. This isn’t a lesson, this is the New Inn on a Saturday, and they’re not here for a drink, they’re here for you, and if you go behind that bar there’ll be three hundred people in it by one o’clock and Mum’ll have a heart attack and the fire brigade’ll come from Cirencester, and anyway you’re not good enough.” He had unfolded his arms. “Sit in the corner. Have a pint. Watch.”

So he sat in the corner, by the window, at the table where he had sat on the night of his eighteenth, with a pint that Jack had pulled, and watched.

He watched Jack.

He had never really watched Jack work. He had seen him behind the bar, of course, a hundred times in the year, in passing, collecting glasses on a Saturday, pulling a pint for Mick at closing. He had never sat and watched. And it was, he found, sitting in the corner with his pint, like watching somebody play an instrument. Jack did not look at the taps. He did not look at the till. He looked at the room, all of it, the whole time, the door and the bar and the fire and the corner where old Mr Purvis sat, and his hands did the rest on their own: the glass, the angle, the straightening, the head, the glass down on the mat, the money, the change, the next one, the next. He talked the whole time. He talked to everybody. He knew what everybody drank. He knew whose wife had been in hospital and whose dog had got out and whose son was in the Navy. When a man by the fire raised his empty glass an inch off the table, Jack had a full one on the bar before the man had stood up. When Mrs Dunning from the shop came in looking as though something was wrong, Jack had a half of cider in front of her and was listening before she had said what.

It’s the room, Frederick thought. You can’t teach it. You just stand there until it happens.

He thought about Eight Bars, in New Westminster, which he had been inside once, in July, for an hour, being shown round by Mrs Merriweather with her camera on her chest and her son behind her carrying the trombone case for no reason at all. He thought about the long dark counter and the pennants and the pool table with the slope. He thought about standing behind that counter on Friday with a hundred people in front of him, and the room, and not knowing who was next.

He drank his pint. It was perfect. That was the worst part.

---

“Why?” said Jack, at four, in the beer garden, which was a strip of grass behind the pub with three tables and a view of the river and a goat belonging to somebody in the next cottage who let it out on Saturdays.

“Why what?”

“Why a bar.” Jack was sitting on the table, not at it, with his feet on the bench. “You could do anything. You’re the King. You could go to university. You could go in the Navy. You could go to the moon, probably, if you asked. Why a bar?”

Frederick thought about it. He had thought about it a great deal, over the summer, and had not got a good answer yet, and he did not want to give Jack a bad one.

“Because I haven’t decided,” he said at last.

“Decided what?”

“Anything. What comes next. University or the forces or something else. I don’t know.” He looked at the river. “And everybody keeps asking. And I thought, if I go to a university because I haven’t decided, I’ll be there three years, and I still won’t have decided, I’ll just have a degree. And if I go in the forces because I haven’t decided, it’s the same, but with boots.” He picked at the edge of the table. “And then I thought about Phoenix. About the bars. About that woman in the first one, who worked out who I was from my hands. About DJ’s. About you saying forty years.” He stopped. “And I thought: I’ve never had a job. Not one. I’ve never done anything for a whole day that somebody else could tell me I’d done wrong. Everything I do, if I do it wrong, people just write it down very politely and do it again for me. And I thought: I want to be bad at something, properly, in front of people, and get better. Or not get better. And find out.”

Jack looked at him.

“That’s a terrible reason,” said Jack.

“I know.”

“That’s the worst reason anybody’s ever had for doing anything.”

“I know.”

“It’s a good reason,” said Jack, after a while, to the river.

The goat came over, and looked at them both, and ate one of the beer mats off the table.

“Theo’s doing it with me,” said Frederick.

“Theo is?” Jack turned round. “Theo’s going to medical school. He said. In Phoenix. He said November.”

“He is. He’s starting in November. He’s going to do the first term.” Frederick watched the goat. “And then he’s going to stop. For the rest of the year. He’s already asked them. They said yes, on conditions. He said somebody had to be there to stop me killing anybody with a cocktail.”

“Theo can’t make a cocktail.”

“No.”

“Theo can’t make tea. I’ve seen him. He makes tea like he’s defusing it.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “That’s why he’s coming. He says if we’re both bad at it, nobody can tell which of us is the King.”

Jack considered this.

“Everybody can tell which of you is the King,” he said.

“I know. He knows. That’s not really the point.”

---

He flew home on Sunday on the evening flight, and on Monday, the first of September, at ten in the morning, with Kimura and Theo and a small suitcase each, he moved into the flat above Eight Bars.

It was two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom with a bath on feet. One room had a window on Garfield Street and one had a window on the yard at the back, where the empty kegs went, and Theo, who had grown up sharing a room with his sister behind a partition his father had built, took the yard room without being asked and said it was the best room he had ever had. The kitchen had a kettle, a cooker with two rings that worked and two that did not, and a table with three chairs. The radiator in the front room banged. It banged once every eleven minutes, very loudly, as though somebody inside it had dropped a wrench, and Mrs Merriweather, showing them round, said it had banged since 1994 and the plumber said there was nothing wrong with it, it just liked to be noticed.

At eleven, Dame M came to look.

She had asked to, in the voice the Master of the Household used when asking was not really what she was doing. She came up the back stairs in her grey coat, past the lavatories, which she did not look at, and into the front room, and stood in the middle of it, and looked at the window, and the radiator, and the two armchairs that did not match, one of which had a burn on the arm, and the rug, and the light fitting, which was a paper ball with a tear in it, and the view of the laundromat across the road.

She did not say anything for some time.

“Sir,” she said at last. “I wonder whether we might discuss the arrangement.”

“Which arrangement?”

“The arrangement,” said Dame M, “by which the Sovereign proposes to sleep above a public house on Garfield Street.” She looked at the paper light. “For a year.”

“It’s not a public house. It’s a bar.”

“I am not certain the distinction helps, sir.”

“Kimura’s next door. In the room across the landing. Mrs Merriweather’s cleared it out. And there’s the team in the van.”

“I am aware of the van.” Dame M looked at the window, and the laundromat. “I am aware of Sergeant Kimura. I am also aware, sir, that there is a radiator in this room which has, since I came in, made a sound like a gun going off in a church.”

“Eleven minutes,” said Theo, from the kitchen door. “Every eleven minutes. You get used to it.”

“I do not intend to get used to it,” said Dame M, “because I do not intend to live here.” She turned round. “Sir. The Household has been very patient.”

“I know.”

“The Household was patient about Coln. The Household was patient about the bus in Phoenix, about which it has still not been fully informed, and about which Sergeant Kimura has submitted a report of four pages which she has asked me not to read before Christmas.” She put her gloves together. “The Household is prepared to be patient about the bar. The bar, sir, is a matter for you. But the Household would very much like it if the Sovereign came home to sleep.”

“It’s two blocks from Ellicott,” said Frederick. “It’s eleven seconds from the bar. It’s got a bath with feet.” He looked round the room. “It’s the first room I’ve ever lived in that nobody chose for me.”

Dame M looked at him.

Then she looked at the paper light, and the burned chair, and the laundromat, and the radiator, which banged.

“I see,” she said.

She went to the window and looked down at Garfield Street, at the van, and the two photographers on the pavement, and the woman from the laundromat having a cigarette in the sun and looking up at the window as though she knew exactly who was in it, which she did.

“Then the Household,” said Dame M, without turning round, “will need to form a committee.”

“A committee for what?”

“For the bar, sir. For the conduct of the Sovereign while employed behind it. For the rules.” She turned round. “There will have to be rules.”

“Rules for a bar?”

“Rules for a King in a bar,” said Dame M. “Which is not the same thing, and has not, so far as the Household’s records show, been attempted. We shall have to write them as we go.” She put on her gloves. “We shall meet on Tuesdays. I shall want Bridget. I shall want Inspector Castellanos, if the training school can spare him. And I shall want somebody young, to do the drafting, who has never been in a bar and will therefore approach the question without prejudice.”

“Who?”

“I have somebody in mind,” said Dame M, and went down the back stairs, past the lavatories, at exactly the speed she went down every staircase, and the radiator banged as she reached the bottom, and Theo said, from the kitchen, “Eleven minutes.”