The light in the dining room of the Royal Inn was neither warm nor cold. It was simply present, a thin grey wash that made everything look as though it had been wiped with a damp cloth. François sat on the edge of the chair, with his knees together and his hands flat on his thighs. He was seventy-one years old and his knees had begun to look like knotty birch boles, but he was wearing his third-best suit because the best one was at the dry cleaner and the second-best had a smudge of egg on the lapel from Tuesday.
‘You have six minutes,’ said the young woman from the Ministry. She was standing by the laminated table with a small plastic bottle of still water in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Her badge said HERITAGE & MEDIA, though the second word had been partly scraped off by a key or a nail.
‘I don’t need six,’ François said. ‘I have eleven lines.’
‘The Vice-Marshal is very keen that we keep to the protocol. The TvC are already outside with the satellite dish. If you go over three minutes on the reading, we lose the sat window for the North East.’
François looked down at his shoes. They were dark brown, polished until the leather had the dull gleam of an old horse chestnut. He had bought them in 1984 for his sister’s wedding in Bordeaux-en-Gâtinais.
‘She liked the one about the pike,’ he said.
‘Pardon?’
‘The late Queen. In ninety-seven. After the famous bridge opening. I read the piece about the river mist and the pike under the weeds. She looked at me for three seconds. A very dry look. Like a magpie considering a tin lid.’
The girl checked her watch. It was a digital one with a pale pink strap that looked too small for her wrist.
‘We need to move through to the holding area. The Lord Chamberlain’s representative is coming up in the lift now.’
The poem was written on a sheet of cream lay-laid paper he had taken from his study two days ago. He had used an old Parker fountain pen with blue-black ink that took five minutes to dry on the hard surface. There were no long words in it. He had tried three different adjectives for the gravel drive and had deleted all of them, leaving only the stones.
In the corridor, the carpet was a dark crimson with a small repeat pattern of gold keys. A man in a high-collared coat was standing by the ice machine, reading something on an iPad. When François passed, the man did not look up, but his thumb moved twice across the glass, swift and silent.
‘Here,’ the girl said, opening a door marked SYNDICATE 4.
Inside, there was a small table, two folding chairs and a tall black microphone on a heavy iron base. The wire ran across the carpet like an adder, disappearing under the skirting board near the radiator.
François stood by the table. He did not sit. He touched the edge of the paper in his pocket with the tip of his middle finger, feeling the crisp deckle edge.
‘When the red light comes on,’ the girl whispered from the door, ‘you have four seconds before the feed goes live to Radio 4. Don’t mention the rain.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not in the briefing.’
François nodded once. He looked at the black furry head of the microphone. It smelled faintly of stale tea and someone else’s aftershave. He wondered if the old King had ever sat in a room that smelled of carpet cleaner while three people with lanyards watched him through a small square of double-glazed glass in the door. The red light on the wall gave a small click and began to glow like a dying coal.
François took out the paper, unfolded it slowly and cleared his throat into the silence.
