The Executive

Rhys had a fifth highlighter.

He had had it since August. He had bought it at the bookshop on the first Saturday, in a packet on its own, and had carried it about for three weeks in the inside pocket of his bag, separately from the other four, in the way that a man carries a ring about before he has found the evening for it; and it was a colour that Frederick had no name for, somewhere between the green and the yellow and not either, and Rhys had not used it once.

He came into 312 at six on Monday evening with it in his hand, uncapped.

He did not knock. Rhys always knocked. He came straight in through the open door and stood in the middle of the room between the two beds, with his bag still on his shoulder and the highlighter held up a little in front of him like a man holding a candle in a procession, and he was pink. He was pink from the ears inwards, which was the way Rhys went when something had happened that was larger than he was, starting at the tips of both ears and travelling across his face towards the middle until it met.

“Sir,” said Rhys. “Fred. Sir.”

“What?”

“He took him apart.”

---

On the bed by the door, Alexander did not look up from the Charter.

“I did not take him apart,” he said.

“You took him apart, Alex.”

“I am a first-year.” Alexander turned a page. “And I asked him three questions. They were questions. He answered all three. That is what is supposed to happen in a seminar.”

“It’s not a seminar. It’s sixty people.” Rhys turned to Frederick, with the highlighter. “He’s in my section. The Executive. Political science, two-forty, Mondays and Wednesdays at half past ten, after the Charter. I didn’t know he’d signed up for it. Nobody tells me anything.” He looked at the highlighter as though it had told him. “He was in the second row. I’m in the second row. I’ve always been in the second row. He sat next to me.”

“It was the only seat,” said Alexander.

“It was not the only seat.”

“It was the only seat in the second row,” said Alexander, “which is the correct row. The first row is for people who wish to be seen to be listening. The third is for people who wish to be seen not to be. In the second row one simply listens.” He laid the pencil down beside the Charter, parallel to the edge of the bed. “Mr Whitfield understands this. It is why he sits there.”

Rhys went pinker, from the ears, and could not, Frederick saw, decide whether he had been complimented, and decided that he had, and was undone by it.

“Sit down, Rhys,” said Frederick.

Rhys sat down on the end of the bed by the window, with the bag still on his shoulder, and the highlighter still in his hand, uncapped, and told him.

---

The professor was called Mercer.

He was about fifty, Rhys said, and tall, and he taught standing up and walking about, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, in a room in the political science building with a projector, and he had a photograph in his office, which Rhys had seen through the glass in the door, of Franklin Roosevelt at a desk in Charter House in 1942, signing something with his sleeves rolled to the elbow.

“He’s very good,” said Rhys. “I want to say that first. Sir. He’s a very good lecturer. He’s got a book.”

“About what?”

“The Executive. It’s the textbook. It’s his.” Rhys found it in the bag and held it up: a thick blue paperback with a photograph on the cover of a hand, a man’s hand, on a desk, holding a pen. “His thesis is that the premiership’s become presidential, and thank God. He says that on the first page. And thank God.” He opened it and showed the first page, where Frederick could see, from the bed, that Rhys had already highlighted the three words in the yellow, the pink and the blue, one on top of another, so that they had gone the colour of a bruise. “He says the Realm’s got too many hands on the wheel. The Commons, the Lords, the Crown, the polities, the courts, the Rights Act. He says it’s a constitution designed so that nothing can happen, and that in an emergency you want one hand. He says the great executives of history are the ones who got things done.” Rhys closed the book. “And today was Roosevelt.”

“The sixteen years.”

“The sixteen years. He said Roosevelt was the greatest Prime Minister the Realm ever had because he was the only one who was ever allowed to be one. He said the Depression and the war showed what the office could do when you let it.” Rhys looked at the highlighter. “And he said the tragedy of the Realm was that it took it all away again afterwards.”

“And?”

“And I put my hand up,” said Rhys.

---

“I said Lincoln,” said Rhys. “Obviously. I said the Realm’s measure of a premier in an emergency isn’t Roosevelt, it’s Lincoln. Lincoln governed through the rebellion without suspending habeas corpus. He had every excuse to take more and he didn’t. He handed the office on in 1869 and went home to Springfield.” He was pink to the middle now. “It’s in every textbook. It’s in Mercer’s textbook. It’s on page forty.”

“What did Mercer say?”

“He said Lincoln was the exception that proves the rule.” Rhys looked at the floor. “And he said thank you, Mr Whitfield, and went on, and I sat there.”

On the bed by the door Alexander had stopped reading. He was looking at the Charter, open on his knees, but he was not reading it, and Frederick, who had seen him not read things before, knew the look.

“The exception that proves the rule,” said Alexander, “is a phrase which means that the speaker does not wish to discuss the exception.”

“That’s what you said,” said Rhys. “That’s exactly what you said. In the room.” He turned to Frederick. “He put his hand up. Right after me. He didn’t wait. He just put it up, and Mercer said yes, at the back, and he said I am in the second row, Professor, and Mercer said yes, sorry, in the second row, and…”

“I said as Mr Whitfield said,” said Alexander.

Rhys stopped.

“Yes,” he said. “You did.” He looked at the highlighter in his hand. “You did say that. You said as Mr Whitfield said, and then you said what I’d said, again, the whole thing, slower, and…” He stopped. “And this time he heard it.”

“He had not heard it the first time,” said Alexander. “It seemed a pity. It was correct.”

---

There were three points.

There were always three. Frederick had known Alexander all his life, and had never once heard him make two points or four; he divided everything, as other people breathed, into three, and the three were always in order, and the third was always the one he had come to make.

The first was Lincoln, as Mr Whitfield had said.

“The second,” said Alexander, from the bed by the door, because Rhys had got the second wrong in the telling and he could not bear it, “was Roosevelt himself. The Professor said that the tragedy of the Realm was that it took the power back. I said that the Realm did not take it back. It gave it back. It was not seized from him, and it did not lapse; it was dismantled, under Truman, by statutes that expired in phases, on purpose. It was done deliberately, by a Parliament that had the power not to.” He looked at Rhys. “That is how the Realm’s own writers describe it. Not as a tragedy. As the thing it is proudest of. So if the Professor admires the sixteen years, he must also admire the years that undid them, because the Realm regards those as the same achievement. The Realm does not remember Roosevelt for what he took. It remembers him because the office could take it, and then did not keep it.”

“And Mercer said?”

“He said that was a very interesting reading,” said Rhys. “In the voice.”

“What voice?”

“The voice professors do,” said Rhys, “when somebody’s right and they’ve got forty minutes left.”

---

“And the third,” said Frederick.

Rhys looked at Alexander. Alexander looked at the Charter.

“The third,” said Rhys, slowly, because he had clearly been going over it all the way back from the political science building, in the heat, in the arcades, and wanted to get it exactly right, “was the best thing I’ve ever heard anybody say in a classroom. Sir. And I’ve sat through the Charter with you for a year.”

“Thank you, Rhys.”

“Not you. Him.” Rhys took a breath. “He said: There is an executive in Europe today who may stop a law passed by the elected members of a hundred and fifteen million people. By himself. With one signature. He does not need the Commons or the courts or anybody’s advice. He is twenty years old. And then he said: If you admire an executive who can get things done alone, Professor, that is the office you are describing. I would not recommend it to you.”

There was a silence in 312.

Frederick looked at the bed by the door. Alexander was turning a page of the Charter, though he had not finished the one before.

“Nobody knew,” said Rhys. “Nobody in the room. Sixty people. None of them knew. They thought he was a first-year from Germany who’d read a lot.” He looked at the highlighter as though it might, at any moment, be called on to say something. “And Mercer looked at him for a bit. And then he laughed, the way you laugh when you’ve been told a fact at a dinner party. And he said, well, I don’t know the man. I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice young man.”

Frederick put his hand over his eyes.

“And then he said,” said Rhys, “thank you, Mr Hohenzollern. That’s a very valuable European perspective. And went on to Eisenhower.”

---

“Did you mind?” said Frederick, later, when Rhys had gone back to 316 to tell Sam, which would take, Rhys said, all evening, because Sam would want it in order.

Alexander was at the desk by the door now, with the Charter shut and the pencil parallel.

“European perspective,” said Frederick.

“No,” said Alexander. “It is accurate. I was born in Potsdam. It is in Europe. My perspective is from there.” He considered it. “It is the only perspective I have. It would be strange to be thanked for any other.”

“And perfectly nice young man?”

Alexander did not answer at once.

“That,” he said, “I minded.”

“Because he doesn’t know you.”

“Because he does not know the office,” said Alexander. “He was standing in front of sixty people teaching them about the executive, with his sleeves rolled up, as Roosevelt rolled his, and he was told that there is an office in Europe that can stop a hundred and fifteen million people, and the only thing he could think to say about it was whether the man who holds it is nice.” He laid the pencil a fraction straighter, though it had been straight. “That is exactly the thing that ought not to matter. If it matters whether the man is nice, the office is wrong. That was the point. He made it for me, and did not notice.”

“So you won.”

“No,” said Alexander. “Nobody wins in a lecture. He has the book.” He looked at the blue paperback, which Rhys had left on the end of Frederick’s bed, with the hand on the cover holding the pen. “And he is not wrong about everything. He is wrong about the thing he loves. That is the most difficult kind of wrong to be told about, and he was told it by a first-year, in the second row, in front of his students, and he laughed and thanked me and went on to Eisenhower.” He considered the book. “I should like to be able to do that. I am not sure I could.”

---

At half past eight the quizzes came out.

Mercer had handed them back at the end of the hour, Rhys said, coming back along the corridor to the door of 312 with Sam behind him: a quiz on the first three weeks’ reading, twenty questions, marked out of twenty, face down. Rhys had not looked at his. He had carried it all the way back to the hall face down in the textbook, and had not looked at it at dinner, and had not looked at it while he told Sam, in order, about Lincoln and Roosevelt and the perfectly nice young man.

“Because I wanted to look at it at the same time,” said Rhys, in the doorway, to Alexander. “As you.”

“I have not looked at mine.”

“I know. I watched you put it in the Charter.”

So they stood in the corridor of the third floor of Palo Verde Hall, the two of them, outside 312, under the paper suns, with Frederick in the doorway and Sam behind Rhys with the notebook and a freshman from the far end of the floor going past in flip-flops with a towel and stopping, because something was obviously happening, and Rhys took his quiz out of the blue textbook and Alexander took his out of the Charter.

“One,” said Rhys. “Two. Three.”

They turned them over.

Rhys looked at his. Then he looked, before he could stop himself, at Alexander’s.

18/20.

18/20.

The freshman in flip-flops looked at both of them, and then at Frederick, and then went on down the corridor to the shower, with the face of a person who has seen something he does not understand and has decided to mention it to nobody.

“Which ones did you lose?” said Rhys.

Alexander looked at the paper.

“Four,” he said. “And eleven.”

Rhys looked at his own paper for some time.

“Four and eleven,” said Rhys.

There was a long silence in the corridor.

“That’s not possible,” said Rhys.

“It is evidently possible,” said Alexander. “It has happened.”

“What did you put for eleven?”

“Eleven asked for the source of the rule that a ministry must hold the confidence of the Commons. I wrote that the Charter has no confidence clause. That Article Four ends without one, and the rule is a convention, and the Charter is silent.” He looked at the red cross beside it. “Professor Mercer has written Article III in the margin.”

Rhys held his own paper out, with his finger on the place.

“The Charter is silent,” he read. “That’s what I put. I put no confidence clause, Article Four is silent.” He looked at the red in the margin. “Article III. He’s written Article Three on mine as well.”

They looked at each other’s papers.

“There’s nothing in Article Three,” said Rhys. “I’ve read it eleven times. There’s nothing about confidence anywhere. That’s the point of it. Brennan did a whole week on it.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “We are both right. We have both been marked wrong for it, in the same words.” He considered the cross. “That is a kind of fairness.”

“And four?”

“Four asked when the parties began to choose their leaders by a ballot of the members. I wrote the early 1950s.”

“I put 1952.”

“He has given you a cross,” said Alexander, looking. “And written early 1950s. And on mine he has written 1952.” He folded the paper in half. “So on four you have my answer in your margin, and I have yours in mine.”

Rhys looked at the two papers for a long time, going pink at the ears again, but in a different way, a way Frederick had not seen before, which was the way of a man about to argue on somebody else’s behalf against his own interest and enjoy it very much.

“Yours was better,” said Rhys. “On four. Nobody knows the year. The early fifties is the honest answer. I’m going to his office hours.”

“You will not,” said Alexander. “If you go to his office hours to argue for my mark, I shall go to his office hours to argue for yours. 1952 is the better answer. It is more exact.”

“Then we’ll both go.”

“Separately.”

“Separately,” said Rhys, “obviously,” and they looked at each other in the corridor under the paper suns, the political scientist from Wilmington and the German Emperor, eighteen and eighteen, with the expression of two men who have just discovered that they are going to spend a year doing this and are delighted about it and will never say so.

Behind Rhys, Sam was writing in the notebook.

“What are you writing?” said Frederick.

“Eighteen and eighteen,” said Sam. “First week of September.” He underlined it. “I’m going to keep a column.”

---

At ten the suitcase was by the door.

It was a small one, the one he had brought from New Westminster in August, and it had in it a dark suit and the Order of the Seraphim in its case and a shirt Rhys had ironed that afternoon before the Executive on a towel on the floor of 316, and on top, in a folder, three pages in Swedish, typed, which he had been given by Stockholm on Friday and had read every night since on the step, under the narrow window, aloud, very quietly, to the car park.

The car was at five.

Alexander was at the desk by the door, writing the programme for Tuesday on a sheet of the Neues Palais paper, by the lamp, which he did now on some nights; and he stopped, and looked at the suitcase, and at the folder on top of it.

“Will you read it?” he said.

“Now?”

“I have only ever heard you speak Swedish to your mother. On the telephone. Through a wall.” He laid the pen down. “I should like to hear it once before it is in the newspapers.”

So Frederick sat on the end of the bed by the window and took the three pages out of the folder and read them, aloud, to the room: to the German Emperor at the desk by the door with his hands folded, and to the box by the door with the dial that said 68, and to Tyler’s two empty bottles of Glacier on the floor by the end of the bed, which Tyler had left at ten to six as written. He read it in his mother’s language, slowly, in the voice Hellström had told him to use, the one from lower down; and it was short, because the speeches were short, and because his mother had told him on the telephone on Saturday that at her first opening she had spoken for three minutes and made one joke, and the Riksdag had laughed, and then, a little late, applauded.

When he had finished, he looked up.

Alexander had his telephone in his hand, face up, on the desk. He had been timing it.

“Three minutes,” said Alexander, “and eleven seconds.”

“Is that good?”

“It is eleven seconds longer than your mother.” Alexander put the telephone down, parallel to the edge of the desk, beside the pen. “There is no joke in it.”

“I couldn’t think of one.”

“No,” said Alexander. “It is better without. You would have made it at the wrong speed.” He picked up the pen again, and looked at the programme for Tuesday, and wrote something on it at the top, above the first line, in the upright hand; and Frederick, going past to the box by the door at twenty-nine minutes past ten, read it over his shoulder, because the desk was by the door and he could not help it.

05.00. Frederick leaves.

And beside it, already, before the thing had happened, because a tick was for the time you were told, a small one, in pencil.