Rival

The blackboard was by the fire, on an easel, where Sue Fennell normally wrote the specials. Tonight it did not have the specials on it. Somebody had drawn a line down the middle of it in chalk and written at the top of the left-hand side HANOVER and at the top of the right-hand side FENNELL, and under each name, so far, at a quarter to six, nothing.

“Who did that?” said Frederick.

“Gaz,” said Jack, from behind the bar, without looking up. “And Little Rob. They’re keeping score.”

“Score of what?”

“Everything,” said Jack, and pulled a pint without looking at it, and put it on a mat in front of Mick, who had come in from the bus at half past five and was sitting at the end of the bar in his uniform, and Mick looked at the pint, and at his son, and at the King standing on the wrong side of the bar in a black T-shirt with EIGHT BARS on it, and said, “Well, this is going to be good,” and drank.

---

It had been arranged by the Household and the Lord-Lieutenant of Gloucestershire and the British government, in that order, and it had been arranged, as everything was arranged that year, as a state occasion. The Household had wanted a pub in London, near Parliament. The British government had wanted a pub in Fife, for reasons it did not entirely explain, but which became clear on Saturday. The Lord-Lieutenant had wanted somewhere with a car park.

Frederick had wanted the New Inn.

“It’s a matter for the realm, sir,” Mr Quennell had said, on the aeroplane, with the folder. “Each realm chooses its bar.”

“It’s a matter for me.”

“The precedent, sir, is that the realm’s government chooses.”

“Then I’ll ask the realm’s government,” Frederick had said, and had telephoned Alistair Rennie from the aeroplane, over the Atlantic, at eleven at night Downing Street time, and Rennie had answered on the third ring and listened and then said, in his flat Fife voice, Aye, fine, sir, the one where the lad hit me for six, I take it, and Frederick had said yes, and Rennie had said I’ll be down on Saturday, then, and rung off, and that was the British government.

So it was the New Inn. And the state occasion was a guard of honour of one, because the New Inn was in a lane the width of a tractor and there was no room for more: a sergeant of the Rifles from the Lord-Lieutenant’s office, in green, with a bugle, who stood by the door from five o’clock and blew a call on the bugle every time somebody came in, until about a quarter past five, when Sue Fennell went out and spoke to him, and he stopped, and came in, and had a half of cider by the fire, still holding the bugle.

---

The rules were Jack’s.

“Three rounds,” he said, at six, to the whole pub, which was full, and which had come in specially and had been waiting since four on the green in the cold. “Round one, a pint. Bitter. Same pump. I do one, he does one. Mum judges.” He held up one finger. “Round two, speed. Ten pints, in order, for the cricket team, who are over there.” He pointed at a table by the window, where eleven young men and one young woman in sweaters were sitting with expressions of deep anticipation. “First one done wins.” He held up a third finger. “Round three.”

He stopped.

“What’s round three?” said Frederick.

“The room,” said Jack.

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll see,” said Jack, and lifted the flap at the end of the bar, and held it open, and Frederick went behind the bar of the New Inn for the first time since August, when he had pulled nine pints there before opening and the ninth had been nearly acceptable.

Jack came behind it after him and let the flap down.

The New Inn’s bar was narrower than Eight Bars’. There was about five feet of floor behind it, between the pumps and the shelves, and two people in it was a crowd. Frederick stood at the left-hand end, by the bitter. Jack stood at the right-hand end, by the cider. They were about four feet apart. They did not look at each other.

“Ready,” said Jack.

“Ready.”

“Mum.”

Sue Fennell, at the end of the bar, with a cloth over her shoulder, looked at the two of them, and at the pumps, and at the ceiling, as though asking the beams of 1632 for patience.

“Go on, then,” she said.

---

Round one was a pint of bitter.

Frederick did it the way he had been doing it for ten weeks: forty-five degrees, the side not the bottom, straighten as it fills, a finger of head. He did it carefully, slowly, watching the glass the whole way. It came out well. It came out, he thought, as well as any he had pulled since September, apart from the four for the Bloc. He put it on the bar on a mat.

Jack did his without looking. He did it while talking to Mick about the van. He did it in about half the time, with one hand, and put it on the bar on a mat beside Frederick’s, and went on talking to Mick about the van.

They were, as far as Frederick could see, identical.

Sue Fennell picked up Frederick’s and held it to the light. She put it down. She picked up Jack’s and held it to the light. She put it down. She did not drink either of them. She looked at them for a while, side by side, and then she leaned down and looked at them sideways, at the level of the bar, with one eye shut, like a woman sighting a rifle.

“The head,” she said.

“What about it?” said Frederick.

“Yours has a slope on it.” She straightened up. “About a millimetre. Towards the handle. Because you tilted it back at the very end when you weren’t thinking.” She picked up a piece of chalk from the bar and handed it to Gaz. “Fennell.”

Gaz went to the blackboard and wrote 1 under FENNELL, and the pub cheered, and Mick, at the end of the bar, raised his glass an inch.

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Round two was the cricket team.

Ten pints, in order: four bitters, two lagers, a cider, a stout, a shandy for the wicketkeeper, who was driving, and a half of the guest ale for the young woman, who was the captain and had views. Jack said go. Frederick went.

He was not fast. He had never been fast. He did the four bitters at the angle, one after another, and put them on the bar, and the lagers, and his hands were wet and his heart was going, and he could hear, four feet away, Jack’s glasses going down on the bar at about twice the rate of his own, clunk, clunk, clunk, like a clock running fast. He did the cider. He did the stout, which took forever, because stout always took forever, and the shandy, which he got wrong, half lemonade and half lager, and then remembered that the wicketkeeper liked it a quarter, and poured some off. He did the half of the guest ale.

He put it down.

Jack had finished about a minute and a half before. Jack was leaning on the bar with his arms folded, watching him, with an expression on his face that Frederick had not seen on it before, and could not, for a moment, read.

“Fennell,” said Sue, and Gaz wrote 2.

The cricket team took their pints. The captain took both halves of the guest ale, Frederick’s and Jack’s, and drank a little of each, and gave Frederick a look of great kindness and said, “Yours is fine, sir,” in the voice in which people say your painting is very interesting, and went back to her table.

---

At seven, the Duke came in.

He had come down on the Cotswold Line from Paddington by himself, as he had come so many times in the spring, and taken the 860 from Cirencester with Mick’s cousin driving it, and walked from the war memorial, without a stick. He came in through the door of the New Inn in his tweed cap and his coat, and the sergeant of the Rifles, by the fire, stood up and lifted the bugle out of habit, and Sue Fennell looked at him, and he put it down again.

The pub did not go quiet. It went warm. Everybody in it had met the Duke at Christmas, last year, at the long table, when he had stood up with his glass and made the longest sentence anybody had heard him make since the sea, and they had not forgotten it, and they did not stand up now, because he had asked them at Christmas not to, and they said evening, sir and all right, sir and there he is, and he nodded to them, and went to the window seat.

Mrs Haverfield was on the window seat.

She was a hundred. She had been a hundred since May, when the village had driven her round the green in an open car from 1949 with the King, and she had been sitting on the window seat of the New Inn since half past five, in her coat and her hat with the bird on it, with Ernest asleep on her feet, and a glass of port, and she had watched both rounds without saying anything, and the Duke sat down beside her, carefully, with his left leg out, and she looked at him.

“You were four,” she said.

“I know.”

“In the back of your father’s car. In 1951. In a sailor suit.”

“I know,” said the Duke. “I. Waved.”

“You did. And I didn’t wave back.” She looked at the bar. “Your boy’s losing.”

“Yes.”

“He’s not very good.”

“No,” said the Duke, with deep and evident pleasure.

---

Round three was the room.

“Here’s how it works,” said Jack, at a quarter past seven. “For the next hour, it’s a normal Friday. Normal. People come in. People order. People sit down and talk and get up and want things. We both work it. You do your end, I do mine.” He looked at the blackboard. “At the end of the hour, Mrs Haverfield decides.”

“Decides what?”

“Who did the room better.”

“How does she decide?”

“She just knows,” said Jack, and turned away, and served a man who had just come in, without asking him what he wanted, a pint of the guest ale, which was what the man wanted.

So it was a normal Friday.

It was not, of course, a normal Friday. There were a hundred and forty people in a pub licensed for ninety, and a photographer from the Echo on the stairs, and a sergeant of the Rifles by the fire, and a Duke on the window seat, and the King behind the bar. But Frederick tried. He tried to do what Sue had told him in August: to know who was next, who had had enough, who was about to cry, who was going to ask for the toilet key and not give it back. He watched the room. He watched it with everything he had. He watched the door and the fire and the window seat and the cricket team and old Mr Purvis in his corner, and he served whoever came to his end of the bar, as quickly as he could, and as well as he could, and said sorry about once a minute, and it was, he thought, by the half hour, the best he had ever done.

And at the other end of the bar, four feet away, Jack did the room.

Frederick had watched him do it in August, from the corner, and had thought it was like watching somebody play an instrument. It was not like that. It was more like watching somebody breathe. Jack did not watch the room. He did not need to. He knew it. He knew that Mr Purvis would want his second half at twenty past seven, and had it on the bar at nineteen minutes past. He knew that the cricket captain was about to come up and complain about the shandy and had a new one ready, a quarter lemonade, before she had stood up. He knew that the woman by the fire was waiting for somebody who was not coming, and took her a glass of wine she had not ordered and put it down and said on the house, love, he’s an idiot, and went back, and the woman laughed, and then cried a bit, and then laughed again. He knew that Ernest had woken up on Mrs Haverfield’s feet and wanted the water bowl by the door filled, and filled it, and Ernest drank, and went back to sleep. He talked the whole time. He served twice as many people. And at no point in the hour did he look at the other end of the bar, at Frederick, not once.

At a quarter past eight, Sue rang the bell.

---

The pub went quiet.

Everybody looked at the window seat.

Mrs Haverfield did not get up. She sat on the window seat with her port in her hand and Ernest on her feet and the Duke beside her, and she looked at the bar, at both ends of it, at the King, who was standing at the left-hand end with a cloth in his hand and his T-shirt wet down the front, and at Jack, at the right-hand end, with his arms folded, not looking at anybody.

“Well,” said Mrs Haverfield.

She took a sip of port.

“I’ve been drinking in this pub,” she said, “since nineteen forty-nine. When Mr Hale had it. Then Mr and Mrs Dawes. Then the brewery, which was a very bad time, and we don’t talk about it. Then the Fennells.” She looked at Sue. “Eighty-two years. I’ve had a great many pints pulled for me by a great many people. I’ve had one pulled for me by a King’s son in an officers’ mess apron, an hour ago, and it was a very good pint, sir,” she added, to the Duke, who inclined his head. “I’ve had one pulled for me tonight by a King.” She looked at Frederick. “And it was a perfectly good pint as well.”

She put the port down.

“But Jack,” she said, “knew I wanted it before I did. He’s always known. Since he was fourteen and washing glasses. He knew when my husband died, and he knew when I’d had a fall, and he knew when I was a hundred and didn’t want anybody to make a fuss, and he made one anyway, because he knew I did really.” She looked at the King. “You’ll get there, love. You’re watching. I saw you watching. You watched the whole hour.” She looked at Jack. “But you don’t watch, do you, Jack. You never have. You just know.”

She picked up her port again.

“Fennell,” she said.

Gaz wrote 3.

The New Inn cheered so loudly that the sergeant of the Rifles, by the fire, put his hands over his ears, and Ernest woke up, and barked, once, and went back to sleep.

---

Jack did not cheer.

Frederick saw it. He was standing four feet away, at his end of the bar, with the cloth, and he saw that Jack, at the moment Gaz wrote the 3, did not cheer or laugh or do any of the things Jack did. He stood with his arms folded, very still, looking at the bar in front of him, and his face went red, slowly, from the collar up.

Then he unfolded his arms and turned round and looked at Frederick for the first time in an hour.

“You’ve got better,” said Jack.

“I lost three nil.”

“I know you lost three nil. I beat you three nil.” Jack’s voice was quiet, under the noise. “You’ve got better. In August you couldn’t pull a pint. Tonight you did the stout without spilling it. You did the room for an hour and you didn’t drop anything. You watched.” He stopped. “Nobody watches. In this whole village, in four years, I’ve never seen anybody try to do the room. They just pull pints. You tried.”

“I was rubbish.”

“You were rubbish properly,” said Jack, and the corner of his mouth went up. “That’s the main thing.”

Across the pub, on the window seat, the Duke said something to Mrs Haverfield that nobody else heard, and Mrs Haverfield laughed, a high, delighted, very old laugh, and put her hand on his arm.

At the end of the bar, Mick Fennell looked at the blackboard, where it said HANOVER and nothing and FENNELL and 3, and then at his son, and then at the King, and said to nobody in particular, in the voice of a man who drives a bus and has seen most things from the cab:

“Well, I’m glad that’s settled.”

He finished his pint.

“Who’s going to tell Rennie?”