Two Kings

There was no beer.

He had known there would be no beer. It had been in the blue folder since September, on the Malaya page, in Mr Quennell’s handwriting, underlined: The Federation’s religion is Islam. Many citizens do not drink. The Household has agreed with the High Commissioner that the Sovereign will work not at a bar but at a stall. And then, under that, a word Mr Quennell had evidently looked up and copied carefully, with the accent marks in pencil: mamak.

A mamak stall was a corner. That was the nearest he could get to it, on the first night, Friday, standing behind it. It was a corner of a street in Kampung Baru, the old Malay quarter, under a tin roof held up on poles, with forty plastic tables and two hundred plastic chairs spilling out of it into the road, and fans on the poles, and a long steel counter at the back with urns on it and a griddle and a glass case full of things to eat, and it was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and had been since 1971, and it was the most crowded place he had ever stood in, including Daly’s on Saint Patrick’s Day, and it served tea.

It served other things. It served roti, flat and flaky, slapped and spun on the griddle by a man who threw the dough up in the air in a sheet so thin you could see the lights through it. It served rice, and curry, and noodles, and fried eggs, and a dozen kinds of drink, lime and iced and coffee and a sweet green thing made of something he could not identify. But what it served, what everybody came for, at every hour, what was on every table, was tea. Teh tarik. Pulled tea.

“It’s the national drink,” said Mr Quennell, on Friday afternoon, with the folder. “Unofficially. The Federation doesn’t have an official one.” He turned a page. “The man who owns the stall has been pulling it for forty-one years.”

---

The man who owned the stall was called Mr Muthu.

He was about seventy, thin and brown and bald, in a white vest and a checked sarong, and he had come to Kuala Lumpur from a town in the north in 1971, at nineteen, with nothing, and had opened the stall on the corner with a single urn and four tables, and had pulled tea on it every day since, at, he said, standing behind the counter on Friday at four, without any pride at all, as a fact, about four hundred glasses a day, which was, Theo worked out on the back of a napkin, about six million glasses of tea.

“You pull,” said Mr Muthu.

He took two steel mugs, with handles, one in each hand. He filled one from the urn, tea, dark and strong, with a great deal of condensed milk in it, so that it was the colour of a wet sandbank. And then he lifted it. He lifted it up, the full one, in his right hand, above his head, and held the empty one low, in his left, at about the level of his waist, and poured.

The tea came down out of the upper mug in a long thin brown stream, three feet, four, the length of his arms spread as wide as they would go, and landed in the lower mug, exactly, without a drop going anywhere else, and as it landed it foamed, and Mr Muthu, without looking at it, without looking at anything, poured the lower mug back up into the upper one, the stream going up this time, somehow, in an arc, and then down again, back and forth, five times, six, the stream getting longer each time, until the tea in the mug had a head on it, thick and pale and frothy, a finger deep, like a pint.

He poured it into a glass and put it on the counter.

“Like that,” said Mr Muthu.

---

It was the pint lesson all over again.

It was worse. In the New Inn in August Jack had said forty-five degrees and he had been able, at least, to see what forty-five degrees looked like. Here there was no angle. There was a height, and a stream, and a mug at each end of it, and between them, in the air, tea, very hot, which did not want to go into the lower mug and went, as soon as he lifted the upper one above his shoulder, everywhere else.

It went on the counter. It went on the floor. It went on Mr Muthu’s sarong, and Mr Muthu looked at it, and at the King, and did not say anything, because, Kimura said afterwards, Mr Muthu had been pulling tea for forty-one years and had seen everybody try. It went on Theo, who was beside him, in the Cranwell apron, with two mugs of his own, and was, if anything, worse, because Theo kept his eyes on the stream and his arms in the wrong place, so that the stream was perfect and missed the mug entirely by about six inches every time.

By Saturday night he could pull from a height of about eighteen inches without spilling more than half.

By Sunday night, two feet.

“It’s in the wrist,” said Mr Muthu, on Sunday, at one in the morning, watching. “Not the arm. You are using your arm. The arm is only to lift. The wrist is to pour.” He took the upper mug from the King’s hand. “You are thinking about it.”

“Everybody says that.”

“Everybody is right,” said Mr Muthu, and Frederick, who had heard some version of that in three languages in the last year and a half and had never once found it funny, found that he was laughing, at one in the morning, behind a tea stall in Kampung Baru with tea down the front of his shirt, and could not stop.

---

The Yang di-Pertuan Agong came on Monday at five.

His visit had been moved twice. It had been fixed for Friday, in September, and moved to Saturday, in January, because of a meeting of the Conference of Rulers, and moved to Monday, in March, because of a state visit to the Federation by somebody else. It could not be moved again. Monday the thirty-first of May at five o’clock was, the High Commissioner said, at Carcosa, on Friday, in the voice of a man who had been dealing with the Palace for six months, the only day His Majesty can do, sir, and I have been asked by the Palace to say that it is also the only day His Majesty will do.

So it was Monday.

And on Monday, at noon, the High Commissioner came to the stall with a folder of his own, which was thicker than Mr Quennell’s, and said that he wished to discuss the protocol.

“There isn’t any,” said Mr Quennell.

The High Commissioner looked at him.

“I’ve looked,” said Mr Quennell. He had his own folder open on a plastic table, and the Household’s manual, which now ran to nineteen rules and four pages, and the Malayan constitution, in English, with tabs. “The manual covers the Sovereign behind a bar in any of his realms. It covers ministers, legislators, the public, the press, the detail, umbrellas and cricket. It does not cover the Sovereign behind a stall in the one realm where he is not head of state, being visited by the head of state.” He looked up. “There’s no rule.”

“Then there must be a precedent.”

“There’s no precedent,” said Mr Quennell. “No Protector has ever worked a stall.”

The High Commissioner opened his folder.

“In every Malayan document,” he said, “the elected king’s style is written first and the Protector’s second. In every Malayan ceremony, the elected king enters first, sits first, speaks first. His Majesty the Yang di-Pertuan Agong is, in the Federation, the sovereign. His Majesty,” he nodded at the King, behind the counter in a tea-stained shirt, “is the Protector, with a defined external role and nothing else.” He closed the folder. “So when the Agong comes to the stall, the Protector will serve him. That is correct. That is the order.”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“First,” said the High Commissioner. “Before anybody else. A glass of teh tarik.”

“Yes.”

“Pulled,” said the High Commissioner, with the faint air of a man who had seen the films from Saturday night, “properly.”

---

He practised all afternoon.

He practised from one until a quarter to five, behind the counter, with Mr Muthu beside him, and two hundred people at the plastic tables watching, and the fans going round on the poles, and the tea going everywhere. He got it to two feet and a half. He got it to three, once, at a quarter past four, and the stream went down into the lower mug, exactly, and foamed, and Mr Muthu said yes, and two hundred people at the plastic tables cheered, and then he tried to do it again, and thought about it, and it went on Theo.

At a quarter to five the cars came.

They came down the street in Kampung Baru very slowly, three of them, black, with a yellow flag on the first, and the crowd in the street, which had been building all day, did something that crowds in the Realm and in Britain and in Ireland did not do. It went quiet. Not the quiet of Eight Bars when Mr Abernathy came in. A deeper quiet, an older one, the quiet of a crowd that has been told since it was born what a king is, and has not been told it about the one behind the counter.

The Yang di-Pertuan Agong got out of the first car.

He was about sixty, broad and grey-bearded, in a dark suit and a black songkok, and he stood on the street in front of the stall for a moment and looked at it, at the tin roof and the poles and the forty plastic tables and the urns, and at the man behind the counter in a white vest and a checked sarong who had been pulling tea on this corner for forty-one years and had come to the front of the stall and bowed, and at the young man beside Mr Muthu in a tea-stained shirt, who had also bowed, and was holding two steel mugs.

He walked in under the tin roof.

The High Commissioner, at the side, with his folder, said, very quietly, now, sir.

Frederick lifted the upper mug. He lifted it above his shoulder, in his right hand, the full one, and held the empty one low, in his left, and looked at the Agong, and the Agong looked at him, and two hundred people at the plastic tables and two thousand in the street did not breathe, and he poured.

He thought about it.

He knew he was thinking about it as soon as he started. He could feel himself thinking about it, the way he had felt it with the stout in Dublin in December, with the eleven men and their watches. He was thinking about the height and the wrist and the arm and the mug and the High Commissioner’s folder and the word properly, and the stream came down out of the upper mug and went, as it always went when he thought about it, about an inch to the left of the lower one, and hit the edge, and went on his shoe.

The Agong looked at the shoe.

---

There was a silence under the tin roof that went on for a very long time.

Then the Yang di-Pertuan Agong of the Federation of Malaya, the elected king, chosen by the nine rulers from among themselves, whose style was written first in every Malayan document, took off his jacket.

He folded it over the back of a plastic chair. He rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, both of them, to the elbow, very neatly. And then he walked round the end of the steel counter, past the urns, past the glass case of things to eat, past the man throwing roti in a sheet so thin you could see the lights through it, who stopped throwing, and came behind the counter, and stood beside the Protector of Malaya, and held out his hand.

Frederick gave him the mugs.

The Agong filled the upper one from the urn. He lifted it. He lifted it high, higher than Mr Muthu had, all the way up, above his head, his arm straight, and held the lower one at his knee, and poured.

The tea came down out of the upper mug in a stream four feet long, and five, and landed in the lower mug without a drop going anywhere else, and the Agong poured it back up, in an arc, and down, and up, eight times, without looking at it, without looking at anything except the King, and talking, quite calmly, in English, while he did it.

“I was nine,” said the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, “and my father was the Sultan of Johor, and he sent me to work at a stall in Johor Bahru for a summer. In the market. A stall like this one. He said a ruler who cannot pull tea does not know his people.” The stream went up and came down. “I pulled tea for three months. I was very bad. Then I was less bad. At the end of the summer the man who owned the stall said I would do.” He poured it into a glass. “I have never been prouder of anything.”

He put the glass on the counter in front of the King. It had a head on it a finger deep, thick and pale and frothy, like a pint.

“There,” said the Agong. “Now you have been served by the head of state.” He picked up a cloth and wiped his hands. “That is also correct.”

---

It was taken by a girl of about fifteen at a plastic table at the front, on a telephone, and it was everywhere by seven: the elected king of Malaya, in his shirtsleeves, behind a tea stall in Kampung Baru, with a steel mug held high above his head and a stream of tea coming down out of it, five feet, and beside him, looking up at the stream with his mouth slightly open and tea all down his shirt and on his shoe, the King of Great Britain and thirteen other countries, being shown.

The Courier in New Westminster ran it on Tuesday under the headline TWO KINGS, ONE STALL. The Malayan papers ran it under headlines that Mr Quennell translated on the aeroplane later and that all said, more or less, OUR KING SHOWS THEIR KING. In the back room of Eight Bars, on the following Tuesday, it went on the wall between the feathers and the cricket ball, and Mrs Merriweather had a brass plate engraved for it that said, simply, KUALA LUMPUR, and under that, SERVED.

The Agong stayed for an hour. He sat at a plastic table at the front with the King and Mr Muthu and Theo and drank the tea he had pulled, and two more glasses that Mr Muthu pulled, and one that Theo pulled, which went about half into the glass and half onto the table, and the Agong looked at it and said that is a Page’s glass, and drank it anyway.

At six, standing, putting on his jacket, he looked at the King.

“You fly tonight,” he said.

Frederick looked at him.

“Your Page has an interview,” said the Agong. “In New Westminster. Tomorrow morning. At ten. It is in the newspaper.” He buttoned the jacket. “My Palace has been told that you are taking him yourself, on your own aircraft, tonight, ten thousand miles, and coming back the day after for the second night at this stall. My Palace says it is the most foolish piece of travel it has ever heard of.” He settled his songkok. “I said it is exactly what my father would have done.”

He held out his hand.

“Go,” said the Yang di-Pertuan Agong. “I will tell Mr Muthu to keep the urn hot.”