The Green Chair

Dr Brooks was standing behind her desk.

She had her shoes on again. She had put them on at the gate; he had seen her do it, one hand on the wire. She was standing with both hands on the back of her own chair, the big swivel chair with the split in the leather of one arm, and she was not sitting in it, and the room smelled of the coffee she had not drunk, cold in a mug on the blotter.

On the desk, turned to face the green chair, there was a laptop, open, with the sound off.

“Mr Hanover,” said Dr Brooks.

“Dr Brooks.”

“The office is yours until you don’t need it. The telephone on the desk is a direct line and does not go through Mrs Delahunt. Mrs Delahunt has been told that she is not to put anybody on hold.” She took her hands off the chair. “I shall be in the staff room. I’ve never been in the staff room at lunch in eleven years, and I’m told it’s a revelation.”

She came round the desk. At the door she stopped, beside him, and looked at him for a moment, as she had looked at him through the inch of open door at ten past ten, and he did not look away this time.

“It was a good paper,” she said. “I saw it at eight. Seven was a gift.”

Then she went out, and Castellanos, outside, shut the door behind her and stood with his back to it.

---

The laptop showed the Plaza de Mayo.

He knew it from Source C. He knew it from the book with the gold crown on the cover. He had never seen it in colour, moving, from above, and for a moment he did not understand what he was looking at, because it was too bright: the stones of the square white in the sun, the palm trees very dark, the obelisk in the middle with its shadow lying south across the stones like the hand of a clock, because it was winter there and the sun was in the north.

And the building at the far end. Long, low, too many windows, too many balconies, an arch in the middle like the arch of a railway station.

Pink.

It was pinker than he had thought. In every photograph he had ever seen it had been grey, or a faded pink, the colour of a photograph left in a window. In the sun of a winter noon in Buenos Aires, from a camera on a rooftop somewhere on the far side of the square, it was the pink of the inside of a shell, and the shadows under the balconies were blue.

In front of it, in the square, there were armoured vehicles.

Twelve. He counted them. Big, square, eight-wheeled, the colour of sand, in a long line across the square between the obelisk and the building, nose to tail, with their guns pointed not at the building but over it, high, at nothing, at the sky. Their hatches were open. Men were sitting on top of them in the sun with their helmets off. Two of them, at the near end of the line, were sharing a bottle of water, passing it back and forth.

Between the vehicles and the arch, in front of the arch, a line of men in dark blue, standing. Sixty, perhaps. Not many. In a single rank across the front of the building, with their rifles grounded.

He looked at the arch. It was in shadow. He could not see into it.

He looked at the corner of the building, the first floor, the window at the corner over the square. He could see the window. He could not see anyone in it. The glass was dark with the reflection of the sky.

At the bottom of the screen, a line of white text going past, right to left, in Spanish. RIVER PLATE BROADCASTING CORPORATION. PLAZA DE MAYO. SEGUIMOS EN DIRECTO. We continue live.

---

“Sit down, sir,” said the Private Secretary.

He had put the pale blue folder on the desk, square, beside the telephone, and opened it, and was standing beside the desk with his hands at his sides. There were four papers in it. Frederick could see their edges.

“Where?”

The Private Secretary looked at Dr Brooks’s swivel chair with the split arm, behind the desk, and then at Frederick, and did not say anything.

Frederick sat in the green chair.

It was the visitor’s chair, in front of the desk, with the wooden arms and the seat that had been re-covered too many times. It was where you sat when you were being told things. His mother had sat in it on the twenty-eighth of September. He had sat in it on the second of November, and again in February, with a Prime Minister on hold. He sat in it now, at a quarter past twelve on the twelfth of June, in his white school shirt, wet down the back, with a lemon in his blazer pocket and his telephone still dark in his hand, and looked across the desk at the laptop and the square.

His mother had come in behind Castellanos and was standing just inside the door.

“Shall I go?” she said.

He turned in the chair and looked at her.

“There’s a rule,” said his mother, carefully. “You know it better than I do now. One realm’s papers in a room at once.”

“You’re not a paper.”

She looked at him.

“Stay,” said Frederick. “Please. By the window. You don’t have to say anything. You can’t say anything. I know you can’t. But stay.”

She went and stood by the window, which looked out over the yard and the bike racks and the long roof of the glass block, with the cardigan over her arm, and her back to the glass, and did not say anything.

---

“Tell me what I can do,” said Frederick. “Not what I should do. What I can do.”

The Private Secretary did not look at the folder. He did not need to.

“You can do nothing in the Plate, sir, except on the advice of the President of the Council. You can receive advice from her, and act on it, or decline to act on it, and if you decline she may advise you again. You can speak to the Viceroy, who is your representative, at any time, about anything, without anybody’s advice; that is not an act, it is a conversation. And you can be asked things by anybody, and decline to answer them.” He paused. “Those are the four things, sir. There isn’t a fifth.”

“And the colonel’s instrument.”

“Is a paper that you are being asked to sign by a man who is not your minister, sir, and whom nobody has the power to make your minister except the Viceroy, who has declined. You cannot sign it. Not because you shouldn’t. Because nobody has advised you to, and nobody who could advise you will.”

“What happens if I say nothing at all?”

The Private Secretary considered this.

“Then the colonel has asked the King, sir, and the King has not answered. And the Viceroy has answered for him. And the President of the Council is in Córdoba.” He paused. “And the King of the River Plate will have spent the morning of a military attempt in the Plate sitting a history examination in New Westminster, and that will be the whole of what is known about it, for a long time.”

Frederick looked at the screen.

“In 1955,” he said.

“Sir?”

“In 1955 the Viceroy stayed at his post. When they overthrew Perón. He stayed, and swore in the army’s man, and called it a constitutional emergency.” He did not look away from the square. “Did the King say anything? In 1955?”

“Not that I know of, sir. It was your grandfather. I believe he was advised by the President of the Council the army had appointed, and accepted the advice.”

“Because the Viceroy had sworn him in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So the King did what the Viceroy had done.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And in 1976 the Viceroy refused and the King refused.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And in 1930…” He stopped. “In 1930 I don’t know. I don’t know what the King did in 1930. It’s not on any of the cards.”

“I believe he was at dinner, sir,” said the Private Secretary.

Frederick turned in the green chair and looked at him.

The Private Secretary was looking at the wall, at the photograph of Ellicott’s staff in 2019 that hung over the filing cabinet, with Dr Brooks in the middle of the front row. His face had not changed at all.

“It was in the evening in London,” said the Private Secretary. “I looked it up on Monday, sir, at the same time as the Colegio Nacional. Out of interest.”

---

On the screen, at the near end of the line of vehicles, one of the men who had been sharing the water stood up on the top of his vehicle and stretched, with his arms over his head, the way a man stretches who has been sitting on something hard for two hours in the sun. Then he sat down again, and took the bottle back, and drank.

At the edges of the square, behind the roadblocks at the ends of the streets, there were people. Frederick had not seen them at first, because the camera was looking at the middle. But they were there, at the edges, a dark line of them along the north side where the Avenida de Mayo came in, and along the south, standing, not moving, behind the barriers. More than he could count. More, he thought, than there had been a minute ago.

He looked at the window at the corner on the first floor. Dark glass. The reflection of the sky.

“The President of the Council first,” said the Private Secretary. “If I may, sir. Constitutionally. She will advise, and the rest follows from what she advises.”

“No.”

The Private Secretary waited.

“The Viceroy first.” Frederick looked at the corner window. “I’m not going to ask him anything. I’m not going to tell him anything. I can’t; I haven’t been advised. I want to hear him.” He turned the dark telephone over in his hand, the crack across its corner. “He’s been at that desk since eight o’clock their time, by himself, and he refused in my name, and nobody could ask me, and he couldn’t ask me. I’m not going to ring Córdoba first and then ring him to tell him what Córdoba said. I want him to hear me before he hears anybody else telling him what I’ve done.”

The Private Secretary looked at the wall for a moment longer.

“There is no rule against it, sir,” he said. “The King may speak to his representative at any time.”

“Is there a rule for it?”

“No, sir.” A pause. “I think it would be very much what the Viceroy would expect.”

---

The Private Secretary picked up Dr Brooks’s telephone, the direct line, and dialled, without looking anything up, a long number that began with the code for the Plate, and listened.

Frederick heard it ring, small, through the receiver at the Private Secretary’s ear. Twice. Then a voice, and the Private Secretary said, in Spanish, in an accent that was very correct and entirely without music, la Casa Rosada; de parte de Su Majestad, para el señor Virrey, and listened again.

On the laptop, the square. The vehicles. The men in dark blue in front of the arch. The people at the edges, more of them.

The Private Secretary held out the receiver across the desk.

Frederick leaned forward out of the green chair and took it. It was warm from the Private Secretary’s hand. He held it to his ear and heard, very far away, through the hiss of nine thousand kilometres of line, a room: a clock ticking, slow, on a wall somewhere; a pigeon, outside a window; and under it, faint, a sound like the sea, which he understood after a moment was a great many people in a square, not shouting, only being there.

Then a chair creaking, and a breath, and an old man’s voice, very close, very dry, in Spanish.

“Majestad.”