Nineteen

Eight Bars did not open on Sundays. It had not opened on Sundays since 1983, when Mrs Merriweather’s father had decided that a navy bar should keep the Sabbath, or at least the part of it that came before the football, and Mrs Merriweather had kept the rule when she took the bar over and renamed it, partly out of respect and partly, she said, because she needed one day a week when nobody asked her for anything.

On Sunday the second of May it opened at six.

It opened because Lucía Paredes had come to the door on Friday night at closing and asked. She had come home from her first year at the university in Pomona on Thursday, where she was studying engineering, because her grandfather had said she should build things, and she had walked into Eight Bars on Friday night with Devon Price and Priya and Marcus, who was playing, and four others from the table of nine, and had sat in a booth all evening watching the King pull pints badly, with an expression of deep personal satisfaction, and at a quarter to one she had gone up to the bar and said to Mrs Merriweather, in front of him, Sunday’s his birthday, can we have the bar.

Mrs Merriweather had looked at her.

“For what?”

“For the class,” said Lucía. “All of us. Everybody who’s home. We’ll do it. We’ll do the bar.” She looked at Frederick. “He sits on the other side. For once.”

Mrs Merriweather looked at the King. Then she looked at Lucía, who was small and fierce and had once been so angry with the King for not telling her about Jack that she had not spoken to him for three days in the Cotswolds, and had then forgiven him on the Underground, in front of her grandfather, at the top of her voice.

“Six until midnight,” said Mrs Merriweather. “Nobody touches the cellar.”

---

So at six o’clock on Sunday the second of May, on his nineteenth birthday, the King of fourteen countries sat on a stool on the customer’s side of the bar of Eight Bars, in a shirt that was not black and did not say EIGHT BARS on it, for the first time since August, and looked at the bar from the other side.

It was strange. He had stood behind it for eight months. He knew every inch of it: the drip tray that leaked at the left corner, the tap of the bitter that stuck if you pulled it too fast, the place by the till where the counter had been mended in 1990 and you could feel the join under your hand. He had never seen it from here. From here it was taller. From here the optics on the wall behind it glowed in the light like a row of stained-glass windows. From here the wall of photographs was the whole of the wall, the first keg and the Minister for Transport and the coin and the Duke in his apron eleven times and the cricket ball in its glass box and the King in feathers, all of it, eight months, in black frames, and he sat on the stool and looked at it, and thought that he had never in his life been able to see a whole year of himself at once from the outside, and that he did not mind it.

Behind the bar, Lucía Paredes pulled him a pint.

She did it badly. She did it at about sixty degrees, straight onto the bottom of the glass, so that it foamed up and went over, and she looked at it with an expression of fury and tipped it away and did it again, and it went over again, and the class of 2031, who were behind the bar with her, and in the booths, and at the pool table, and on the pallet by the window, about twenty-four of them, the ones who were home, cheered.

“It’s not funny,” said Lucía.

“It’s a bit funny,” said Frederick.

“How do you do it?”

“Forty-five degrees,” said Frederick. “The side, not the bottom. Straighten it as it fills.” He looked at the glass. “It took me about three months.”

Lucía looked at him across the bar of Eight Bars, with beer on both her hands, for a long moment.

“You’ve got better,” she said, in the voice of a woman discovering a fact she would have to report to her grandfather.

---

They had all got something.

That was the thing about the class of 2031 that he understood that night, on the wrong side of the bar. A year ago they had been thirty-one people in homeroom in a school in the Cotswolds, and then thirty-one names read at the usual speed in a gym in New Westminster, and then they had gone. They had gone in thirty-one directions. And on the second of May, about twenty-four of them came back to a dive two blocks from the school, and they had all got something, in eight months, that they had not had before.

Devon Price had got a beard. It was not a good beard, Priya said, but it was his own. He was at a college on the Axis studying something to do with computers that he tried to explain to Frederick for ten minutes at the bar and then gave up on and said it’s like the till, but on purpose.

Priya had got a job, at a newspaper, the Courier, as the most junior person on the most junior desk, and had been sent, on her third day, to cover the King’s first Friday at Eight Bars, and had done it, and had written about the foam, and the Minister, and the hundred-pound note, and her editor had put it on page three, and she had not told the King it was her until tonight.

“You wrote that?”

“THE KING WILL SEE YOU NOW,” said Priya, with great dignity, “was the headline. The headline wasn’t me. The headline was the night desk.” She drank. “The bit about the floor disappearing was me.”

Marcus had got a gig. A real one. At a jazz club on the river, on Wednesdays, which paid. He had been playing it since February. He had not told anybody, because, he said, nobody would have believed him, and his mother, behind the bar, beside Lucía, who had known since February, because she had been at every one with the camera, said I believed you, darling, and he went red.

Hattie Ellis was not home, because Hattie Ellis was not from here. Hattie Ellis was from Coln, and was at Ellicott that year on the return exchange with the rest of the English form, and she came anyway, with Will and Kit and Freya Lomax and the others, in their navy blazers, which they had been told they did not have to wear in New Westminster and wore anyway, out of what Kit called spite, and Hattie had got the lead in the Ellicott spring play, which was Twelfth Night, and was playing Viola, and was, Mr Ferrante said, who had seen it, terrifyingly good.

And Inés was not there, because Inés was in Oxford. But at half past seven a telephone was propped against the till, on a stand that Devon made out of beer mats, and on the telephone was Inés Castañeda, in a small room with a sloping ceiling and a window with rain on it, at half past twelve at night her time, in a jumper, with her book.

“Happy birthday,” said Inés.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not staying up,” said Inés. “I’ve got a tutorial at nine. On Hobbes.” She looked at him through the telephone. “You look different.”

“So I’m told.”

“You’re told wrong,” said Inés. “You look the same. You look like you know where you are.” She paused. “That’s different.”

---

Mr Ferrante came at eight. He had a letter.

He came in with his scarf, in May, because Mr Ferrante wore a scarf in all months, and a large envelope under his arm, and went to the bar, where Frederick was sitting, and did not say happy birthday, because Mr Ferrante never said things that other people were already saying. He put the envelope on the bar.

“It came on Thursday,” he said.

Frederick looked at it. It was from the Register.

He knew what the Register was. Everybody in the Realm knew what the Register was. It was the great reference work of the Realm and its sister realms, the thing you looked things up in, the thing that had been looking things up and writing them down since before the Charter, and he had grown up being written down in it, and so had his father, and so had every King and every Prime Minister and every war and every bridge and every pub with a plaque on an oak tree in a village in Gloucestershire.

“Thomas Gale,” said Mr Ferrante. “The pancake race.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “I wrote to them in June. With a copy of the letter from the Hampshire Record Office. Thomas Gale, carpenter, Coln Saint Aldwyns, eighteen hundred. They wrote back and said they’d look into it. They said these things take time.”

“And?”

Mr Ferrante opened the envelope and took out a single sheet and put it on the bar.

It was very short. It thanked Mr D. Ferrante, of New Westminster, for his correspondence of June 2031 and the documents enclosed. It said that the Register’s editors had examined the documents and consulted the Hampshire Record Office directly. It said that the Register was satisfied that the earliest recorded running of the pancake race at Coln Saint Aldwyns was in 1800, and not in 1801, as previously stated. It said that the entry would be corrected. It said that the Register was grateful.

And under the typed signature, in pen, in a small hand, a line:

It is the kind of letter we like best.

Frederick read it twice.

“You did it,” he said.

“It’s a very small thing,” said Mr Ferrante.

“You said that last year.”

“It was a very small thing last year as well.” Mr Ferrante folded the letter and put it back in the envelope and put the envelope back under his arm. “It’s still the best thing I’ve ever done.” He looked at the King. “Happy birthday, Hanover,” he said, and went and sat in a booth with the English form, who had been in his history class all year and were, he said, very nearly adequate.

---

At a quarter past eight, Mr Abernathy came in.

He came in with his stick, and Mrs Abernathy on his arm, slowly, the left foot dragging very slightly on the tiles, and Eight Bars went quiet, the way it went quiet for him now, which was a different quiet from the way it had gone quiet in September, deeper, and he walked down the length of the bar to the stool, the third from the window, and the King got up off the stool next to it and stood, and Mr Abernathy sat.

Lucía pulled him a bitter. She did it at forty-five degrees, the side, not the bottom, straightening it as it filled, because she had been practising for two hours, and it came out well, with a finger of head, and she put it on a mat in front of him and stood back, and the whole of the class of 2031 watched.

Mr Abernathy looked at the pint.

He drank about a quarter of it. He put it down exactly on the mat. He took out the red pen, with his right hand, and moved the glass two inches to the left, and wrote, slowly, the letters going straight along the line.

Lucía did not look. She did not dare. Frederick looked for her.

B. For a first attempt. Miss Paredes: see your grandfather. He will be pleased.

Then Mr Abernathy did something he had not done in eight months at Eight Bars, or, as far as anybody in the room could remember, in four years of homeroom.

He took a piece of paper out of the inside pocket of the brown jacket.

It was folded in four. He unfolded it on the bar. It was a list. Frederick could see it from the next stool. It was typed, and it had been typed a long time ago, on a typewriter, and it had been folded and unfolded so many times that the folds had gone soft and furry, and it had thirty-one names on it.

It was the roll. The homeroom roll, the one he had read every morning for four years, at a quarter past eight, at the usual speed, and then once more, in a gym, in June, as his address.

Mr Abernathy put on his reading glasses.

He looked round Eight Bars, at the booths and the pool table and the pallet and the bar, at the class of 2031, about twenty-four of them, the ones who were home, and at the telephone propped against the till with Inés on it, in Oxford, who had not gone to bed after all, and who had seen the list and gone very still.

Then he began to read.

He read it slowly, because he had to now, because the doctors had said that his words would come back by the summer and they were not all back yet, and some of them came out a little wrong and he stopped and found them and went on. But he read it at the usual speed, the speed he had always read it, because that was the speed it was read at. And when he read a name that was in the room, the person in the room said here. And when he read a name that was not in the room, he looked at the room for a moment, and then said, quietly, the name of the place they were, and went on.

“Castañeda.”

“Here,” said Inés, from the telephone, from Oxford, at twenty past one in the morning, in a jumper, very clearly.

“Ellison.”

“Here.”

“Hanover.”

Frederick, on the stool beside him, on the wrong side of the bar, on his nineteenth birthday, opened his mouth.

“Here,” he said.

Mr Abernathy did not look at him. He looked at the list, and made a small mark beside the name with the red pen, and went on.

“Hartigan.”

Theo, at the end of the bar, by the hatch, in the Cranwell apron, which he had refused to take off even though Lucía had told him he was not working, said here, in a voice that was not quite steady.

“Paredes.”

“Here,” said Lucía, from behind the bar, with beer on her hands.

“Price.”

“Here.”

He went on to the end. Thirty-one names. Twenty-four heres, and seven places, said quietly: a city in the west, a ship, a university in the north, a hospital, a farm, a town in Mexico, another country. When he got to the end he folded the list in four, along the soft furry folds, and put it back in the inside pocket of the brown jacket, and took off his reading glasses.

He did not say anything. He picked up his pint, the one Lucía had pulled, and drank, and put it down exactly on the mat.

Behind the bar, Mrs Merriweather lowered the camera without taking the photograph, and stood with it in her hands, and did not lift it again for some time.

---

At midnight the class of 2031 gave the bar back.

They washed every glass. They wiped every table. They put the chairs on the tables, upside down, the way Frederick put them every night, and Lucía tipped the last of the drip tray away and wiped it and looked at it and said how do you do this every night, and he said you just do, and she said I’m going to tell my grandfather I can pull a B, and went.

The last person to leave was Mr Abernathy, on Mrs Abernathy’s arm, with the stick. At the door he stopped, and turned round, and looked back down the length of Eight Bars at the King, who was standing at the bar, alone, on the customer’s side, with the chairs on the tables round him and the photographs on the wall.

He did not say happy birthday. He did not say anything. He took the red pen out of his pocket, and held it up, very slightly, an inch, the way the Duke had once held up a hazel stick, and put it back.

Then he went out into Garfield Street.

On the bar, by the stool, there was a beer mat that nobody had seen him write. It was face down. Frederick turned it over.

It said, in red, in letters that went perfectly straight along the line:

Nineteen. A.