A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

It is the commonest observation in the world that a week can sometimes pass in an hour and an hour in a week, but it is true. Lenox’s final days at Everley had been idyllic — long rides out on Sadie, afternoon tea in the great drawing room, walks in the garden with Sophie and Jane — and had passed in such a flash that now, sitting in a small anteroom outside the House of Commons, he felt practically dazed.

From the chamber there was a steady hum of human voices, each, because it belonged to a member of Parliament, more than usually accustomed to attention.

“Are they preparing for a great failure, do you think?” asked Lenox, and then laughed rather weakly.

Graham was the only other person in the dim room. Frabbs, their carrot-haired clerk, was at the door, prepared to reject entrance by anyone other than the prime minister himself. Or, if he were to stretch a point, the Queen. “I’ve no doubt they’re speaking of their suppers and their women,” said Graham.

“You are right of course.”

They were on two blue leather sofas, with a mahogany table between them. There was a plate of biscuits and a bottle of claret there. Both were untouched as yet. Bottlesworth — that noble expert on comestibles who had advised Lenox to have two pints of porter and a passel of sandwiches before his speech — would have been distressed.

Lenox shuffled through the papers in his hand, looking at them and seeing nothing. He was all nerves; Lady Jane was in the visitors’ gallery, McConnell too, and the press box, he had seen, was jammed. The prime minister had sent him a very civil communication, congratulating him on the tone of the speech and inviting him to dine together afterward.

“We shall see about that, if it goes badly,” muttered Lenox.

“Sir?”

“Oh, nothing.”

The door opened. Lenox assumed it was Frabbs and didn’t turn, but then noticed with some consternation that a man in a snuff-colored suit of clothes had entered the room, and said, in a hoarse voice, “I have come to give my best wishes for your speech.”

Lord preserve me from well-wishers, thought Charles, and why has Frabbs—but as he turned, artificial smile on his face to accept the compliment, he saw that it was his brother. Of course! Edmund had a cold in his head and shouldn’t have been here at all, were it not for the occasion.

“Why, thank you, Ed.” Charles’s face was flushed with true pleasure as he spoke these words.

“I am prepared to hear a thumper.”

“Lower your expectations, for the love of all that’s good.”

Edmund smiled. “Graham, I wish you joy of your achievement today, too.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Will it be a third or a fourth, Charles?”

“Anyhow not a second.”

In the brothers’ experience there were four kinds of speeches delivered in the House of Commons, and this shorthand, long since developed, helped them communicate to each other — in the lobby of the House, for instance — whether it was necessary to go and sit upon the benches for a speech, or whether it could be tolerably missed.

Of the four types, two were good and two were bad. The first was a sympathetically bad speech, often full of painstaking research, mumbling, and indecisively argued points (for true intelligence welcomes dissent, unlike a good political speech); the second was an unsympathetically bad speech, full of bluster and steadily increasing passion without much bottom; the third was a powerful speech, with conviction and right on its side, also full of bluster and steadily increasing passion; but the fourth, the cynosure of parliamentary addresses, crowned all of these. It had circumspection, careful argument, passion, rhythm, suasion, wit, poignancy, ease, command, all stitched together seamlessly.

Lenox had aimed to make his speech a fourth. Time would tell.

Very little time, in fact. “A glass of wine, sir?” asked Graham.

“I think not, thank you.”

“It would be wise to take something, Charles,” said Edmund.

“I have spoken before the House, you know. Some thirty times.”

Graham shook his head. “You cannot know how hungry you are, sir. You will rise and feel weak in the knees.”

It was rare that Graham was insistent upon anything other than Lenox’s schedule, and so the member took a half-cup of wine and a biscuit, albeit with great churlishness. Immediately he felt better and more solid. “A full House?” he asked his brother.

Edmund smiled. “Tolerably full.”

“You ought to go in.”

The older brother looked at his pocket-watch, their father’s. “Yes, you’re right. Two or three minutes is all that’s in it. I say, good luck, Charles. Graham, mind that he doesn’t bolt for the channel.”

Graham and Lenox both laughed; then, as Edmund left to take his seat and Frabbs went out to check the composition of the house for them, they were alone.

For many, many years, since Lenox was an undergraduate at Balliol, they had lived almost changelessly together, the same house, the same daily pursuits, Graham often helping Lenox with his cases — the same rhythm of life. Then all had changed. Lenox had married, been elected to Parliament, had a child, cobbled his house together with Jane’s into a rambling new hybrid. Most radically of all he had asked Graham, and not a lad fresh from Charterhouse or Downing, to act as his political secretary. It had been a change that demanded Graham endure the slights of those above him in station and work harder than he ever had before. Now, more thanks to his efforts than any other single man’s, Lenox was opening Parliament. It was a friendship that Lenox reflected upon only very occasionally — perhaps because whenever he did he felt some strange emotion, which with greater deliberation he might have identified as true brotherly love. One might have used the word loyal about Graham, did it not imply one-sidedness: In their friendship the loyalty was mutual and equal in weight.

As they sat here that association filled the silence. At last, Lenox said, “You know, Graham—” He halted.

“Sir?”

“Oh, nothing. Only that I feel better for having had the wine and the biscuit.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” He checked his own watch. “And now perhaps you should go into the chamber. Don’t forget to bow to the Speaker and pay your respects to the opposition leader, before you shake the prime minister’s hand.”

The two men shook hands. Graham would watch from the sliver of the cracked secretaries’ door, and be waiting there when it was all finished.

The benches of the chamber were jammed, and the doorways, through which members were still streaming, a positive fire hazard. Lenox paid his proper obeisances and then took a spot along the first bench. All of it was rather a blur. He had imagined there would be a great passage of time in which he might steel himself to the task, when in fact it happened in no time at all that he was called to speak. He stood up, legs watery, and addressed the chamber.

“Mr. Speaker, Prime Minister, good evening, and thank you,” he said. “It is my humble honor to address the House of Commons at this opening, and my hope is that my words will incline you not toward partisan rancor but toward national pride; not toward meanness but toward generosity; not toward argument but toward reconciliation and progress. It ought only be such when we remember that we represent, together, the greatest nation the world has yet known.

“Indeed, we congregate here at the very center of the civilized world. I would ask you to set aside the next half of an hour to peer into the homes of those who still live as if in the last century, those who live solid, honest, British lives, but are afforded too little protection from the vicissitudes of fortune by their government. I would ask you to consider the poor.”

It was a good speech, Lenox realized as he read on, but not a great one. It moved too much perhaps in the direction of fervor — the subject was too close to his heart. There was a passage about a family in Somerset who had to choose between medicine and food that was the God’s honest truth, but might, he feared, have come across as nearly Dickensian.

But then why not? Dickens’s greatest gifts had been humor and a conscience, two virtues that belonged in a political speech. As he spoke on about the Somerset family, about the shoeless children walking down frosted dirt paths, about the father who had one hot meal in a week, about the terror of the workhouse, Lenox felt his conviction rising.

He was aided by the men around him. On both sides, the right, the left, there were murmurs of assent. This was not the House of Lords, that ivoried domicile of the rich and remote. Among the men on the benches were brewers, stockbrokers, even publicans. They understood poverty. Most had seen it.

He remembered to take a sip of water after some time and realized his hand was trembling. It gave him confidence, strangely.

Just when the speech might have become the first kind, a mumbling recitation of facts, he saw his brother, and his voice strengthened. He offered a series of proposals and saw the nods around the chamber.

His conclusion was perhaps fanciful. He had been talking for well on thirty-five minutes, and his heart fell when he came to the last page. Was it a mistake to mention the coining, to have a little joke? In Everley it had seemed a clever idea, but here it seemed self-important. It had made the papers, yes, but …

He needn’t have worried. “If only we could all turn coiners, the problems would be solved,” he said, voice unsteady, and was instantly gratified to receive an enormous laugh. Even the Speaker, propriety personified, smiled.

He wouldn’t remember finishing, only thanking the house and returning to his seat in silence. Ten or fifteen seconds passed before he realized that it was not silence at all, but wave after wave of applause.