The Pause

At half past one Teresa got up off the marble.

She took her pocketbook out and wrote in it and held it in front of him.

TELEPHONE. THERE’S A LANDLINE IN THE GUARDS’ OFFICE BEHIND THE DESK THAT WORKS. THE CLERK SAYS. I’M GOING TO RING THE HOUSE AND THE HALL ON ATLANTIC AVENUE AND THE BOATS. STAY HERE. DON’T GO BACK OUT. I MEAN IT, KEANE.

He read it. He nodded.

She looked at him for a moment longer, as if she did not believe the nod, the way the girl in the transport union T-shirt had not believed it. Then she went across the lobby between the rows of people on the marble to the security desk at the far end, and round behind it, and through a door, and the door closed.

He sat against the wall under the brass plaque.

He looked at the plaque. He had not looked at it before. It was above his head, set into the stone, and he had to turn round on the marble to read it, and it said that the building had been erected by the Corporation of the City of New York in the year 1914, and gave the names of the Mayor and the members of the Board of Estimate and the architects, and at the bottom, in smaller letters, For the Better Government of the City.

He turned round again and sat with his back to it.

---

A nurse came along the row.

She was not one of the ones from the junction. She was older, fifty or so, in a proper uniform, blue, with a fob watch pinned to it upside down, the way his mother wore hers, and a badge he could not read, and she had a bag over her shoulder, and she was going along the row of people sitting against the wall, the walking ones, kneeling by each of them, looking, and getting up, and going to the next.

She knelt by him.

She looked at his hands in Teresa’s bandages first, and turned them over, and nodded at them, as if they had passed something. Then she looked at his face. Then she took his chin in her hand, the way Teresa had taken his face, and turned his head to one side, and looked at his ear, close, and at his neck, and turned his head the other way and looked at the other ear.

She took a small torch out of her pocket and shone it in.

He sat still. He could feel her breath on his cheek. He could feel the torch, a little warmth, very close. He could not hear anything at all.

She took the torch away and sat back on her heels and looked at him, and her mouth moved, and he shook his head and pointed at his ears, and she nodded, as if she had known that already, and took a pen out of her pocket and a card, a little white card with a string on it, a label, the kind they tied to people, and wrote on it, and held it up.

BOTH DRUMS.

He looked at it.

She wrote again under it, fast.

NOT NOW. YOU’RE WALKING. A DOCTOR WILL COME. DON’T GO BACK OUT THERE.

She tied the label to the button of his shirt pocket by its string, the pocket with the telephone in it and the clerk’s form, and patted it, once, flat, the way you pat a thing to make sure it will stay, and got up, and went to the next one.

He looked down at the label on his shirt. BOTH DRUMS.

He thought of his mother. He thought of her at Bellevue, on her ward, on the medical floors, the shift she had had for nine years running because the first of May was always quiet. He did not think about what her ward was like this afternoon. He thought of the fob watch pinned upside down on her uniform, and of her saying you press, Tommy, you press and you don’t let go and you look at their face, and he sat against the wall under the plaque and looked at the label.

---

The white letters on the television had changed.

He could read them from here if he leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. The clerk in the cardigan had moved the television, at some point, round on the security desk to face the middle of the lobby more, and somebody had found a bigger one from an office somewhere and put it on a trolley beside the first, and now there were two, one big and one small, and the big one had the Commons on it still, a man speaking whom Tom did not know, somebody from the back benches, and along the bottom of it the letters crawled, white on a strip of dark red, from right to left, slowly, the way they did on the newsstand television, the way he had read them over Mrs Abelson’s racks on Wednesday about the committee and the agencies.

He read them as they came.

GRAND CENTRAL 10.37 / KENNEDY 11.47 / WHITEHALL TERMINAL 12.10 / UNION MARCH 12.15 / PRIME MINISTER DECLARES EMERGENCY IN NEW YORK PROVINCE / MILITARY CORDON ORDERED / GOVERNOR-GENERAL ISSUES CONTINUITY PROCLAMATION / “THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER STANDS ENTIRE” / KING TO ADDRESS REALM AT 2PM / …

And then a new line, which had not been there before, that came in from the right of the screen in the same white letters on the same dark red, at the same speed as all the rest.

KING’S COLLEGE: SUSPECT DEVICE FOUND IN LECTURE HALL THIS MORNING, MADE SAFE / REPORTED BY A MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC / CAMPUS EVACUATED / NO INJURIES /

He read it.

He read it twice, the second time when it came round again, two minutes later, after the others. He sat against the wall with his bandaged hands on his knees and the label on his pocket and read it go past from right to left, slowly, white on red.

A fifth.

There had been a fifth.

There had been a fifth one, in a lecture hall, at King’s College, this morning, in the middle of a working day, and somebody had seen it, a member of the public, and had known what it was, and had told somebody, and it had not gone off. It had been there. It had been there all the time. While he was at Grand Central on the floor in the dust and while he was in the car on Lexington and while he was standing at the steward line at the foot of the bridge beside his brother in the sun.

There may be another one.

He saw Frank’s mouth make it. Wide. Into the faces of the men pushing against his arms. THERE MAY BE ANOTHER ONE. HOLD. And into his face, close, with Frank’s fist on his sleeve. TOM. THERE MAY BE ANOTHER ONE. DON’T.

And there had been. Not at the junction. Not where Frank had been holding the line. But there had been. In the city, this morning, on the first of May, there had been another one, exactly as Frank had said there might be, and Frank had been right to say it, and right to hold the line on it, and right to hold his brother by the sleeve, and Tom had pulled his arm free and gone in anyway.

He did not know what to do with that. He sat against the wall and let it sit in him, next to the other thing, the thing behind the door, and did not look at either of them.

---

At two o’clock the big television changed.

The Commons went. The man from the back benches went, in the middle of a sentence. There was a moment of nothing on the screen, dark blue, the colour the ABC used between things, and then there was a photograph.

It was the King.

It was the photograph everybody had seen. It was the one in the post offices and the court buildings and the school halls, the one in the frame behind the desk at the Fifty-First Street house, above the clock: a man of about fifty in a dark suit, with grey at the temples, sitting at a desk, not smiling exactly, looking at the camera as if the camera had asked him a question and he was thinking about the answer. It was an old photograph. He was older now. He would be nearly sixty. But it was the one they had, and they put it up on the screen, the whole of the screen, very still, and under it, in the white letters on the dark red, not crawling this time, still:

HM THE KING. LIVE FROM ENGLAND.

And in the lobby of the Municipal Building, everybody looked up.

He saw them do it. He could not hear it, but he could see it. All along the rows of people lying on the marble, and the people kneeling by them, and the nurses and the doctors and the men from the junction in their shirtsleeves and the clerk in the cardigan by the security desk, all of them, heads coming up, turning, towards the screen. The people who could sit up sat up. A man on a cushion from a parking-fine bench propped himself on his elbow. A doctor with a needle in her hand stopped with it in the air.

They listened.

He watched them listen. He could not hear what they were listening to. He looked at the screen, at the old photograph of a man at a desk thinking about an answer, and at the faces in the lobby turned up towards it, and he watched the words go into the faces. He could see them go in. He could not hear one of them, and he could see them go in, into the faces, one after another, the way you can see the wind go across a field of grass. Somebody near him put a hand over her mouth. A man by the door, one of the men from the local, in his shirtsleeves, with his work jacket on a banner pole somewhere out in the junction, put his head down.

Then everybody stopped.

---

He did not understand it at first.

It happened all at once, all over the lobby, at the same moment. The faces that had been moving, that had had the words going into them, stopped. They stopped moving. The woman with her hand over her mouth stopped with her hand over her mouth. The man with his head down did not lift it. The doctor with the needle in the air did not move the needle. The man on his elbow on the cushion did not move his elbow. Nobody in the lobby moved, anywhere, at all. Not a head. Not a hand. Two hundred people on a marble floor under a vaulted ceiling, absolutely still, looking up at an old photograph on a screen.

And on the screen, nothing changed. The photograph. The white letters. HM THE KING. LIVE FROM ENGLAND.

It went on.

He thought it was his ears.

He thought it quite clearly, sitting against the wall under the plaque with the label on his pocket. He thought that something had happened to his ears, more than had happened already, that whatever had been left of the world in them had gone now too, and that he was not just deaf but something else, that he had gone somewhere where nothing moved, and he looked at his bandaged hands on his knees to see if they would move, and they moved. He moved them. They were all right. He looked up again.

Nobody else had moved.

It went on. It went on so long that he started to be afraid. He looked at the clerk in the cardigan, who was nearest the screen, standing by the security desk with his clipboard against his chest, and the clerk was looking at the screen with his mouth a little open and his face very white, perfectly still, as if he were waiting for something to come back that had gone, and Tom thought: the line. The line’s gone. Like the airport. It’s gone dead.

And then, all over the lobby, at once, the faces moved again.

Not much. A breath. A head going down, a hand coming away from a mouth. The doctor with the needle lowered it. And the words were going into the faces again, he could see them going in, slowly now, one at a time, with spaces between them, the way you would put down four heavy things on a table one after another.

He did not know what they were. He would not know until the clerk wrote them down.

But he saw the man by the door, the man from the local in his shirtsleeves, lift his head, at the fourth of the four heavy things, and look at the screen, and his face, which had been a face like a closed door all afternoon, opened, and he began to cry, standing by the door with his arms at his sides, without making any movement to stop it or to wipe it, and nobody near him looked at him, because they were all doing something with their own faces.

---

When it was over the clerk wrote it down.

He had been writing all the way through. Tom saw that now. He had stood by the security desk with his clipboard against his chest and the form on it and his biro, and he had written, fast, looking up at the screen and down at the form, through all of it, except the long still part in the middle, when he had stopped like everybody else; and when the photograph went and the dark blue came back, he looked at what he had written for a long time, and then he tore it off the clipboard, and came across the lobby, and gave it to Tom.

He did not say anything. He held it out, the way he had held out the first one, and Tom took it.

It was the back of another form for a parking appeal. The clerk’s hand, quick and neat and slanting, but not as neat as the first time. There were places where the biro had stopped and gone on.

THE KING. 2.00.

Sorry he’s not here. Will be in NY Friday.

“A great many of you were murdered.” “Act of terror. I will use that word once and then leave it alone.” Murder is the word.

Doesn’t know how many. Won’t guess. Doesn’t know who or why.

(Long pause here. Very long. We thought he’d gone.)

“Grand Central. Kennedy. The Ferry Terminal. The Union March.”

Said the names because somebody should say them out loud. “Three were places people passed through on an ordinary Monday. The fourth was a thing people did.”

“At every one of those places, people ran the wrong way. Towards it.”

If you’re waiting for somebody he can’t tell you anything, sorry. If you’re working in a hospital or on a platform or at the airport, the rest of us can be patient.

“DO NOT LOOK FOR THE MURDERERS AMONG YOUR NEIGHBOURS.”

“Nothing has been suspended. Nothing will be.” The G-G has spoken, she doesn’t need him behind her. The other realms are mourning.

Commend the dead to God. Look after each other tonight. See you Friday.

God bless.

Tom read it. He read it twice.

He read the line in the middle, in the clerk’s slanting hand, between brackets, We thought he’d gone, and he looked up at the clerk, who was standing in front of him still, with his empty clipboard against his chest, and the clerk looked down at him and nodded, slowly, as if to say yes. That. That was the still part. That was what you saw.

He looked at the line again. People ran the wrong way. Towards it.

He folded the form and put it in his shirt pocket, behind the label, with the first form, and the telephone with Mum’s stitches on it, unsent.