Reserve Powers

At eighty degrees the University of the March put on its coat.

It happened in a night. On Tuesday the mall had been shorts and sandals and the long arcades full of people keeping to the shade as though it might run out, and on Wednesday morning Frederick came out of Palo Verde Hall at twenty to nine into a campus that had dressed for winter. There were hoodies everywhere, maroon and gold, with the Sun Devil grinning on the front of them over his fork. There was a girl outside the library in a knitted hat with a bobble on it. There was a boy at the tram stop in a quilted jacket zipped to the chin, blowing on his hands.

“He’s wearing gloves,” said Sam.

“He’s from here,” said Rhys. “It’s his first cold snap. He thinks he’s going to die.”

“It’s seventy-four.”

“Seventy-three,” said Rhys, who had looked.

You could pick out the people who had grown up somewhere with a winter in it a long way off, by their arms. Tyler, when Frederick left the room, had been asleep on the bed by the window in a T-shirt and shorts, with the blind down and the room at sixty-eight and the blanket on the floor, because he had come to Arizona to get away from snow and was not going to be told by anybody in a bobble hat that this was cold.

---

The Charter met at nine in Tolliver 104, the sloped room with the curved rows, and it was full, eighty of them, because it was required, and because it was Brennan.

Professor Brennan lectured without notes and, as far as anybody had been able to establish, without sitting down. He carried the plain-language edition of the Charter, the free one with the blue cover, rolled up in one hand like a newspaper he was going to use on a fly, and he walked while he talked, from one end of the front to the other, and turned, and came back, and every so often stopped dead and looked up into the rows as though somebody had just said something stupid, which usually nobody had. His reading glasses lived in his hair and came down only for the board.

He stopped at the board and wrote on it, in chalk, II.3.

“Article Two, clause three,” he said. “Somebody read it. Not you, Mr Whitfield. You’ve read enough this semester. Give somebody else a chance.”

There was a laugh. Rhys, beside Frederick, went pink to the ears and looked at his pen. A girl three rows down unrolled her own blue copy and found the place.

“The King may commission a person to represent him within the Union, upon the advice of his American ministers.”

“Thank you.” Brennan looked at the two characters on the board for a while, as though somebody else had left them there. “Nineteen words. I’ve been counting for twenty-two years and it’s always nineteen. That is the Governor-General. That is the entire office, in the founding document of this country. No name. No term. Nothing about who may hold it, or for how long, or what happens if the person turns out to be a crook or a drunk or a fool. It doesn’t say the Governor-General may do anything at all. It says the King may commission a person, and then it stops, and goes on to talk about something else.” He unrolled the little blue Charter and looked into it, as if it might have changed since he last looked. “And yet.”

He wrote two numbers under the clause. 1943. 2006.

“Twice in two hundred and fifty years somebody holding a commission of nineteen words has taken the government of this country into their hands and held it. A soldier, with the Prime Minister and the Speaker both down at once, in the middle of a war. A political scientist, on May Day, with four sites in New York still burning. On what authority?” He held up the book. “Not this. It isn’t in here. I’ve been looking since I was your age, and I’ll tell you a secret: nobody else has found it either. Everybody in the Realm knows the reserve powers exist, and nobody can tell you where they are.”

Under the numbers, in larger letters, he wrote:

Where are the reserve powers?

“Two thousand five hundred words,” said Brennan, with his back to them. “Friday the second of December, nine o’clock, in this room, on paper, because I’m old and I like to hold things.” He put the chalk down and turned round. “And sources. I’ll say it twice, because every year somebody doesn’t hear it the first time. Sources. I don’t want to know how you feel about the Crown. I have very strong feelings about the Crown myself, I’ve had them since before most of you were born, and I promise you nobody in this room has feelings about the Crown as interesting as mine.” The laugh again, louder. “I want what you can show me. Statute. Proclamation. The record of the Commons. Somebody’s memoirs, if you can show me they were in the room. If you can’t put a footnote under it, I don’t want it.”

Eighty people wrote down footnote.

“And here’s the question under the question,” said Brennan. “A power that depends entirely on the good character of one appointed person is not a constitution. It’s a temperament.” He let that sit. “Tell me I’m wrong. With footnotes.”

And then it happened, the thing that happened at least once in every class, and that Frederick had learned to feel coming the way you feel a lift begin to move. Brennan’s eyes went up the curved rows, to the aisle two from the back, where Frederick sat with Rhys on his left and Sam beyond Rhys; and Frederick watched the professor decide, quite clearly, not to say anything.

“Mr Hanover,” said Brennan.

The room went quiet in the particular way it did, which was not silence. It was eighty people not turning round.

“No,” said Brennan. “Never mind.” And went on to Marshall in 1943, and talked about him for eleven minutes, very well, with his back to the aisle two from the back.

---

He got to the end of the class before he lost the fight.

People were already standing, and zipping their bags, and putting on their hoodies, when Brennan, who had been rolling the blue Charter tighter and tighter for the last five minutes, said over all of it, “Mr Hanover.”

The standing stopped.

“Sir.”

“Has anybody ever told you where they are?”

Frederick thought about it. It seemed only fair, since he had been asked, and since eighty people had stopped putting on their hoodies to hear him do it.

“No, sir.”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“It used to,” said Frederick. “When I was fifteen.”

“And now?”

“Now I think if anybody could tell me where they were,” said Frederick, “they’d be in the wrong place.”

Brennan looked at him for a long moment, up the curved rows, with the Charter rolled up in his fist, and his face did the thing it did, which was the face of a man who has just heard himself.

“That’s an opinion, Mr Hanover,” he said. “I’ll want a footnote.”

The room laughed, properly this time, and began moving again, and Brennan raised his voice over it and said, to all of them and to nobody, “And none of you is to telephone Government House. That isn’t a source. That’s a favour,” and Frederick felt the back of his neck go hot, and laughed with everybody else, because there was nothing else to do and because it was, he had to admit, quite good.

---

“Nine books,” said Rhys, on the mall.

“Already?”

“I got them out in September. In case.” Rhys had the list on his phone and was walking with it held out in front of him like a compass. “Rice gave evidence to the New York Investigation, so that’s all on the record. Marshall’s in the published papers. And the Goldwater papers are here.” He looked up at the library as though it had done something wonderful. “In the building. The four-page report. Nineteen ninety-four.”

“What’s the Goldwater thing?” said Sam.

“The Lord Marcher’s emergency authority. It’s not the reserve powers, it’s the March’s own, but it’s the same kind of thing, and it’s the only one that’s written down. He proclaimed once without advice, when the ministry wouldn’t, and wrote a report, and it’s in every textbook.” Rhys put the phone away. “And after him they made a rule. Since ninety-six the Lord Marcher has to report every time the power was considered and declined.”

Sam stopped walking.

“Say that again.”

“They have to write down the times they thought about using it and didn’t.”

“They keep a record,” said Sam slowly, “of things that didn’t happen.”

“Yes.”

Sam looked at the library with an expression Frederick had not seen on his face in eleven weeks of corridor and lecture and dining hall, nor before that in New Westminster, when Sam had been one of the young officers who stood very still in doorways. It was the face of a man who has been told that somewhere in the world there is a ledger of everything nobody did, kept to the penny.

“That,” said Sam, “is the most accounting thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Do you want to read it?”

“I want to frame it.” He started walking again. “Do footnotes count towards the twenty-five hundred?”

“Footnotes never count.”

“Then I’m putting everything in the footnotes. A hundred words of essay and two thousand four hundred of footnote, and he can’t say a thing, because he said it himself. I’m going to put a footnote under the title.”

“He’ll give you an A,” said Rhys, with gloom. “He gave you a ninety-one on a quiz you did on the tram.”

“I did it on the tram properly.”

Frederick, between them, with seventy-eight on the same quiz and no footnotes at all, said nothing, and thought about nine books taken out in September, in case, and about the fact that he had not yet taken out one.

---

His phone went at a quarter to twelve, in the dining hall, against the salt.

bookd it. fri 25th. lands 3.40 your time. if i die in the heat its on you

He typed: It’s November. It’s eighty.

The answer came at once, which meant that it was a quarter to seven in Gloucestershire and Jack was behind the bar with the phone under the counter where his mother could not see it.

80 WHAT

Fahrenheit.

There was a pause, in which Frederick could see Jack quite clearly doing the sum on the back of a beer mat with his tongue out.

thats 27

Twenty-six and a bit.

THATS AUGUST. thats a heatwave. mum shuts the beer garden at 27. im bringing the hat

It’s the cool season. People are wearing gloves.

your all mad. the whole contry

And then, a minute later:

is the game the one with the egg ball or the round ball

The egg ball.

do i have to understand it

Nobody understands it.

good, wrote Jack. ill fit in

---

His mother rang at one, which was eight in the evening in London.

He took it on the landing between the second floor and the third, on the step under the narrow window, where he took all her calls now. The window was open an inch, and through the gap, beyond the concrete fin, there was the car park, and a man from the grounds crew going along the gravel bed at the edge of it with a rake.

“You are on the stairs,” said his mother, in Swedish. “I can hear the stairs.”

“How can you hear stairs?”

“Stairs have a sound. It is the sound of nobody wanting to stay on them.” She paused, and there was a quality in the pause, a sort of space at the back of it, which he had heard on the telephone nearly every week since August and could no longer not hear. “I have had another letter from the Marshal of the Realm.”

“I thought you might.”

“It is a very good letter. He writes like a man who has a fountain pen and has been told he may not use it for emails.” The pause again, with the space in it. “The room by the castle is still held. The spring term still begins in the middle of January. He has read your letter, which I sent him, as you asked, and he thanks you for it, and he has asked me to ask you again.”

“I answered.”

“I told him you had answered. He asked me to ask anyway.” She said it gently. “So I am asking, and you are going to say no, and I am going to write and tell him that I asked and that you said no, and he is going to write back and say he understands entirely, and in December he is going to write again.” A breath. “He is very good at his job. It is a terrible thing in a man.”

“No,” said Frederick.

“Thank you. That was very clear. I will tell him it was very clear.”

Down in the car park the man with the rake reached the end of the bed and turned round.

“Where are you?” said Frederick.

“At home.”

“Where at home?”

The pause was longer this time, and in the space at the back of it he heard something he had not heard before, which was the sound of a house: a clock somewhere below her, and a door, and the tall hollow quiet of a stairwell.

“On the landing,” said his mother.

“Sitting?”

“Your father,” said his mother, “has bought a chair.”

And close to the telephone, from somewhere just beside her, as though he had been at her shoulder the whole time waiting for his moment, his father said, in English, slowly, each word found and set down on its own:

“Green.”

“He would like you to know that it is green,” said his mother.

“What sort of chair?”

“It is the ugliest chair in London. He went to a shop in Marylebone on Tuesday with Brannigan, without telling anybody, and chose it himself, and paid for it himself, with a card, and had it carried up by two men and Brannigan and put on the landing of the main stairs, exactly halfway, so that there are eleven stairs below it and eleven above. It is green velvet. It has buttons. It has small fat legs like a dachshund.” A breath. “I sit on it.”

“Every.” His father, beside her. A breath. “Day.”

“Ernest.”

“Every day.”

“Your father,” said his mother, in the voice of a Queen who has been contradicted by the only man in the world permitted to do it, “is very proud of his chair.”

Frederick sat on the step under the window and found that he could not, for the moment, say anything at all. Down in the car park the man with the rake reached the place where he had begun, and looked at it, and seemed satisfied, and went away round the corner of the hall.

“Is it worse?” he said.

“It is the same.”

“You said it was the same in September.”

“It was the same in September. It is a valve, Fredde. It does what it does. The cardiologist is a calm man with very clean hands and he tells me every month that it is the same, and I believe him, because he has no imagination.” A pause. “The chair is not because it is worse. The chair is because your father has been on a raft and in a hospital and up and down a great many stairs, and he knows exactly how long eleven stairs are, and he decided in Marylebone that I was not going to do all twenty-two at once any more, and he did not ask me.” Then, quite differently, so that he could hear her turn her head away from the telephone to the man beside her: “And he was right. And I am not going to tell him so.”

“Heard,” said his father.

“Yes. You heard. Go downstairs.”

There was the sound of a stick on a stair, going down, one at a time. Frederick counted. Eleven.

“And you,” said his mother, back in Swedish, with something brisk laid over the space in her voice, like a cloth. “You are on the stairs.”

“Yes.”

“Then we are both on the stairs,” said his mother. “That is very silly of us. Tell me what you are doing. Not Uppsala. There. This week.”

“An essay.”

“On what?”

“The reserve powers.”

There was a short silence on the landing in London. Then his mother laughed. It was the real one, low, all the way down, and it went on for some time, and at the end of it there was a small catch, and a breath, and another, which he listened to very carefully, and which was all right.

“I have been Queen of Sweden for twenty-three years,” she said, “and I have never had a reserve power in my life. Not one. We took them all away the year I was born. I open the Riksdag and I am told things and I sit at the head of a table and nobody asks me anything.” She considered. “I have reserves of patience. You are using them.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Write it well. Write it from the books. A republican will be looking very hard for a reason,” said his mother, “and you are not to give him one.”

---

Tyler was awake when he got back to the room, in the sense that his eyes were open and his hands were moving.

He was on the bed by the window with the keyboard on his knees and the headphones on, and the two screens on the desk under the window lit his face from below, white and then blue and then white, and on both of them, in silence, across a dark forest, the snow was coming down. The blind was down. At its far edge, beyond Tyler’s bed, there was the gap of an inch between the blind and the frame, and through it, if Frederick stood at the end of his own bed and leaned, he could see a strip of white afternoon three feet tall and, at the bottom of it, brown, the shoulder of the butte.

He sat down at his desk and opened the laptop and made a new document.

“Hey,” said Tyler.

Tyler had pushed one side of the headphones back off one ear, which was, for Tyler, an act of extraordinary sociability, like another man getting up and crossing a room.

“What’s the essay?”

“Reserve powers.”

“What’s that?”

“The powers the Governor-General has,” said Frederick, “for if everything goes wrong. If the Prime Minister’s ill and the Speaker’s ill and nobody can meet. They’re for that. They’ve been used twice.”

Tyler thought about it, with his fingers still moving.

“Like a save point,” he said.

“A bit.”

“Cool.” On the screen a figure in furs put a log on a fire, and Tyler’s fingers did something very fast, and he did not look at it. “So what does the King do, though? Like, actually. Like all day.”

He had been asked it six times since August. He had begun to answer it six times. He began again.

“Well,” said Frederick, “every day there are papers. From fourteen governments. Some of them he has to sign, and some he’s only told about, and the ones he signs, he signs because somebody’s advised him to, and the advice comes from…”

The headphone had gone back over the ear at papers.

Frederick looked at him for a while. Then he turned back to the desk, and the document, which was white and had nothing on it.

At the top, in the middle, he typed Where are the reserve powers? and made it bold, and then made it not bold, because Brennan would think bold was showing off. Under it he typed F. Hanover, and the name of the course, and the date it was due, a month away.

Then he sat there.

He sat there while the strip of afternoon at the edge of the blind went gold and then pink and then grey; while the hall filled up below him with people coming back from afternoon classes, complaining to each other about the cold; while the alarm on his phone, which still said BUTTE across the top in capitals and which he had never got round to deleting, did not go off, because it was set for twenty to six in the morning and had not been switched on since the first week of October. He sat there until, at ten exactly, far down through the floors, he heard the lobby door open and shut, and the voice of Mr Luna coming on, saying good evening to the day porter going off, in the tone of a man who had said it every night for thirty years and meant it every time.

On the white page under the question the cursor went on and off, on and off, patiently, like somebody on a landing, waiting.