The Tide

“Coefficient one hundred and seventeen,” said Madame Lecoq, and tapped the card on the wall.

She said it in Norman. Frederick understood about half of it, because Norman was close enough to French that he could follow the numbers and not quite close enough that he could follow anything else, and the half he understood was one hundred and seventeen, which did not help, because he did not know what a coefficient was.

“It’s the tide,” said Mr Quennell, at his elbow, with the notebook. “They measure the tides here by a coefficient. Twenty is the smallest. A hundred and twenty is the largest possible.” He looked at the card, which was a tide table, printed, with the day’s figures circled in red. “One hundred and seventeen is very nearly the largest possible, sir. It’s the highest tide of the autumn. Possibly of the year.”

“Tonight?”

“At nine fourteen.”

Frederick looked out of the window of the bar.

The bar was called Le Mascaret, which meant the tidal bore, and it was the last building at the bottom of the one street on Mont-Saint-Michel, just inside the gate, with the town going up the rock behind it in steps and turrets and roofs to the abbey at the top, and in front of it, through the window, the bay. At five o’clock on the twenty-fourth of October the bay was sand. It was sand as far as he could see, grey and wet and shining, miles of it, with channels of water running through it like veins in the back of a hand, and the causeway going out across it to the mainland, straight, on its piers, and on the causeway, drawn up in two ranks with their backs to the sea, the Ducal Guard.

They had marched out at four. Thirty men in blue with white facings and black shakos, a colour, a drum, an officer with a sword, who had come down the causeway from the car park on the mainland in step, two miles, and halted at the place on the causeway that had been marked on the order of precedence as Position of Honour, facing the Mount, about four hundred yards out, where they could be seen from the gate, and presented arms to the bar.

They had been standing there for an hour. They would stand there, according to the order of precedence, which was in a folder in the hands of an official of the Ducal Household, a precise young woman called Mademoiselle Leroux, until the Duke had served his first drink, at which point they would march back.

“When do I serve my first drink?” said Frederick.

Mademoiselle Leroux consulted the folder.

“At nine o’clock, Monseigneur.”

“Nine.”

“After the reception.” She turned a page. “The reception at the town hall is at six. The address of welcome at seven. The dinner at seven thirty. The Duke arrives at Le Mascaret at a quarter to nine and serves the first glass at nine, live, on Norman television, and the guard marches back.” She closed the folder. “It is all arranged.”

Frederick looked at the tide table on the wall. 21.14, it said, circled in red. 117.

He looked at the guard, out on the causeway, on the sand.

“Mademoiselle Leroux,” he said. “Who arranged it?”

“The Ducal Household, Monseigneur. In consultation with the town. And the Guard. And the television.”

“Did anybody consult the tide?”

Mademoiselle Leroux looked at him. Then she looked at the window. Then, slowly, she opened the folder again.

---

The reception was at six. The address of welcome was at seven, given by a guide who had shown people round the abbey for fifty-one years, and was forty minutes long, and was in Norman, of which Frederick understood about half, the half with numbers in it, which was mostly dates. The dinner was at half past. He sat at it between the guide and the Bishop of Coutances and ate a lamb that had grazed, the guide told him, on the salt meadows round the bay, so that it tasted already of the sea, and it did, and he thought about the guard.

At ten past eight, Kimura came into the dining room and bent down by his chair.

“Sir,” she said. “The tide’s turned.”

“Already?”

“Twenty minutes ago. The harbourmaster says it’ll be at the causeway by half past eight. Under it by nine.” She paused. “Under the bit where they’re standing, anyway. The causeway’s on piers. The sea goes underneath it. But there’s a stretch out there, by their position, where the causeway’s low, and they put the old road back for the tourists in 2014, and that bit floods.” She paused again. “That’s the position of honour.”

He put down his knife.

“Has anybody told them?”

“The officer knows. He’s been looking at the sand for a quarter of an hour.” Kimura looked at the window. “He’s not allowed to move. He’s under orders. He’s to hold the position of honour until the Duke has served his first drink. He sent a runner to ask. The runner asked Mademoiselle Leroux. Mademoiselle Leroux says the order of precedence is the order of precedence, and the Duke has to serve the first drink at nine o’clock, live, and the television’s booked.”

“Then I’ll serve it now.”

“You’re at dinner, sir.”

“I know where I am.” He stood up. Everybody at the table stood up, because he had. The Bishop of Coutances stood up with his napkin still tucked into his collar. “I’m the Duke,” said Frederick, in French, at sixty-eight per cent, to the whole dining room. “I can suspend things. It says so. In the constitution. I’ve read it.” He put his napkin on the table. “I’m suspending dinner.”

---

He ran down the one street of Mont-Saint-Michel at a quarter past eight in the dark, past the shops shut for the night and the restaurants open and the souvenir stalls with their plastic abbeys and their biscuit tins, with Kimura beside him and Theo behind her and Mr Quennell some way behind Theo holding his notebook against his chest like a hot water bottle, and Mademoiselle Leroux behind Mr Quennell with the folder, saying, in Norman and then in French and then, despairingly, in English, Monseigneur, Monseigneur, it is not yet the time.

He came through the door of Le Mascaret at nineteen minutes past eight.

Madame Lecoq was behind the bar. She looked at him, out of breath, in a dinner jacket, and at the clock, and said something in Norman that he understood, because it was short, and it was You’re early.

“I’m suspending the order of precedence,” he said, in French.

Madame Lecoq looked at him.

“Ch’est pas du français,” she said. That’s not French. Which was a joke, because it was, and he was speaking it, and she was not, and the bar, which was full, and which had been waiting since four, laughed, and Madame Lecoq laughed with it, and came round the end of the bar and took his elbow and walked him behind it, to the tap, and put a glass in his hand.

“Vite,” she said, which was the same in Norman. Quickly.

He looked out of the window.

He could see the guard, out on the causeway, in the floodlights that ran along it on posts, two ranks of blue, very small at four hundred yards, perfectly still. He could see the sand beyond them, grey, and beyond that, where the floodlights did not reach, something else: a line, pale, moving. It was coming across the bay from the west, low and wide and quite silent, not a wave, more like a sheet being pulled across a bed, and it was faster than he had thought anything so wide could be, and where it had been the sand was gone, and there was only black water with the floodlights in it.

“They say,” said Theo, at the window, “it comes in at the speed of a galloping horse.”

“They don’t say that,” said Madame Lecoq, in Norman, which Theo did not understand, so she said it again in French, which Theo did not understand either, so Frederick said it in English. “She says that’s a story for tourists. She says it comes in at the speed of a horse walking.” He looked at the line. “She says that’s quite fast enough.”

He pulled the pint.

Forty-five degrees. The side, not the bottom. Straighten as it fills. A cider, as it turned out, because in Le Mascaret the first drink was always cider, from the orchards on the mainland, pale gold and cloudy, and it came out of the tap fast and foamed up the side of the glass, and he straightened it, and the foam settled, and it was, he thought, a perfectly good glass of cider. He put it on the bar.

“Le premier verre,” he said. The first glass. “Tell them.”

Mademoiselle Leroux, in the doorway, out of breath, with the folder, looked at the glass, and at the clock, which said twenty-two minutes past eight, and at the television camera, which was not there, because it was booked for nine and was still in a van on the mainland, and at the window.

Then she took out her telephone, and pressed a number, and said into it, in Norman, very fast, four words.

---

Frederick did not hear the order. Nobody in Le Mascaret did. But they saw it.

Out on the causeway, in the floodlights, four hundred yards away, the officer turned round. He lifted his sword. And the Ducal Guard of Normandy, thirty men in blue with white facings and black shakos, came to attention as one man, and turned to the right as one man, and then, at a command that came across the water thin and high as a gull’s cry, broke from the march into the double, and ran.

They ran up the causeway towards the mainland in two ranks, perfectly in step, shakos bobbing, the colour streaming, the drummer drumming at the double, which Frederick had not known was possible, and the line of the sea came in across the sand behind them, to the left of the causeway, silent and pale and steady, at the speed of a horse walking, and reached the low stretch of the old road where they had been standing, the position of honour, about forty seconds after the last man had left it, and went over it, and covered it, and kept coming.

The bar of Le Mascaret, which had crowded to the window, cheered.

They cheered the whole way. They cheered the guard up the causeway and onto the high part of it, on the piers, where the water went underneath, and they cheered when the guard reached it and slowed, without being told, from the double to the quick march, and they cheered when the officer, safe on the high causeway with the sea all round him in the floodlights, turned round, and faced the Mount, and raised his sword in salute, very straight, towards the lit window of Le Mascaret, and held it there.

Frederick, behind the bar, raised the glass of cider back.

---

The Calvados was at nine, live.

The camera had arrived at twenty to, in a van that had come along the causeway at the last possible moment with the sea on both sides, and the crew had set up in the corner, and the presenter, a young man in a scarf, had explained to the camera in Norman and then in French that the Duke had served the first glass early, by ducal suspension, a phrase he seemed delighted by, and that the guard was safe, and that the Duke would now taste the spirit of the duchy, in the duchy, live.

Madame Lecoq took down a bottle from the top shelf. It was very old, dusty, with a handwritten label, and she poured an inch of something deep amber into a small glass, and put it on the bar, and the smell came up out of it, of apples and wood and autumn and a cellar.

Mr Quennell stepped forward.

“Sir,” he said, in a low voice. “Rule Five.”

“I know.”

“The Sovereign shall not taste spirits on live television.” Mr Quennell looked at the camera. “It was adopted on the thirtieth of September, sir. After Ottawa. Three in favour, one abstaining.”

“Bridget.”

“Yes, sir. On the grounds that it would not work.” He looked at the Calvados, and the presenter, and the little red light on the camera. “Sir, I have looked into it. I telephoned the television company at half past eight from the street. Norman television broadcasts with a delay of seven seconds. It is standard. It is so that if anything is said that should not be, they can stop it.” He paused. “So the broadcast is not, strictly, live. It is seven seconds after live.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Is that true?”

“It is a technical truth, sir,” said Mr Quennell, with the expression of a young man doing something he had been taught at the civil service examination never to do. “I believe it would satisfy the rule.”

At the end of the bar, Kimura uncapped her pen.

Frederick picked up the Calvados and drank it.

It went down warm, and then hot, and then it was apples, a whole orchard of them, all at once, in the dark, and his eyes watered, and his face, which was being broadcast seven seconds later to every household in Normandy, did not fold up the way it had in Ottawa. It did something else. It went still, and then surprised, and then, slowly, very slightly, it smiled.

“Ch’est bouon,” he said. It’s good. In Norman. The only Norman he had learned all day, from Madame Lecoq, at four, for exactly this.

Madame Lecoq put both hands flat on her bar and looked at him with an expression that he had seen on Sue Fennell’s face and Mrs Merriweather’s and Señora Ruelas’s, the expression of a woman who has taught a boy something and watched him get it right.

The bar of Le Mascaret, live, seven seconds before Normandy, roared.

---

Outside, the sea had come all the way in. It was right up to the walls. It was at the foot of the gate, black and quiet, with the floodlights of the causeway shining across it like a row of moons. The Mount was an island. Nobody could come and nobody could go until the tide went out again, at three in the morning, and Madame Lecoq, who had seen it every month of her life, said in Norman that this was the best thing about the place, and turned the music up.

On Tuesday, in the back room of Eight Bars, Mr Quennell, who had come back from Normandy very quiet, proposed an amendment to Rule Five.

He proposed that it should be amended to read The Sovereign shall not taste spirits on live television, live meaning live and not seven seconds after.

Dame M looked at him over her glasses.

“Mr Quennell,” she said. “Who discovered the seven seconds?”

Mr Quennell looked at the table.

“I did, ma’am.”

“And who advised the Sovereign that it would satisfy the rule?”

“I did, ma’am.”

Dame M looked at him for some time.

“Rule Eight,” she said at last. “The officer drafting the rules shall not advise the Sovereign on how to get round them.”

“Seconded,” said Bridget, at once, and patted Mr Quennell’s hand, and at the dartboard the Duke threw three darts into the treble twenty and said, without turning round, “Good. Boy.”

Nobody was ever sure which of them he meant.