He had taken the wireless out onto the kitchen table and turned the volume low, the way a man does when he is afraid of hearing something he already knows. Outside, the Berkhamsted morning was the colour of weak tea: six degrees, partly cloudy, the kind of English May that promises nothing and keeps its promise. The cables had come in through the night and lay on the oilcloth in a small disorderly heap, like prayers after a bad confession.
The first item, of course, was the ceasefire that was not a ceasefire. American warships and Iranian patrol boats had exchanged fire in the Strait of Hormuz, and the President, in Washington, had said that the truce remained in effect. It remained in effect, he thought, the way a marriage may be said to remain in effect after the second pistol has been drawn from the bedside drawer. He had read enough such bulletins, in enough hotel rooms from Saigon to Havana, to recognise the precise pitch of the official lie. The official lie always sounded slightly more reasonable than the truth, which was its purpose.
He set the kettle on. There was something almost decent in the kettle. It had no opinions.
In the Strait, between the warships and the rhetoric, twenty thousand seafarers were stranded. He thought about that number for a while. Twenty thousand men in metal hulls under a hard sun, listening to the radio for news of their own deliverance, eating tinned meat and writing letters that would not be posted. Filipino, Indian, Pakistani, Greek: the unnoticed nationalities of every shipping lane. They had not voted for the war, nor had they been consulted about its ceasefire. They were the small print at the bottom of the page where the crude oil prices were quoted, and Brent had risen overnight, naturally. Brent always rises. It is the one reliable thing in the modern world.
The second cable concerned the Pope. Leo XIV had completed his first year upon the throne of Saint Peter, and the dispatches noted, with the faint surprise of journalists, that he had been willing to criticise the American President without obvious fear. This was reported as a kind of novelty, as though courage in a Pope were a piece of unexpected weather.
He found himself smiling, the bitter sort of smile that costs nothing. He had been a Catholic long enough to understand that the Church's quarrels with power were never really about power. They were about the soul of the man who held it, and the souls of those who profited by his holding it. There was a passage somewhere in Newman, or perhaps he had only imagined it, that the worst sin of empire was not its cruelty but its capacity to make cruelty appear administrative. The bombing of an Iranian patrol boat was, in the language of the briefings, a measured response. The dead at Villahermosa, where a fire had broken out at a fairground packed with one hundred and thirty-five thousand people, were a tragic incident. Five souls. The number was small enough to file under entertainment.
In Moscow, on Saturday, there was to be a Victory Day parade without tanks. The BBC's man had filed the observation with what passed, in modern journalism, for delicacy: the absence of military hardware was, one inferred, a sign that the war in Ukraine was not going according to plan. He read the sentence twice. Not going according to plan. As if war ever did. As if the plan were not, in every case he had ever witnessed, the first casualty, lying on the floor of the conference room with the cigarette ash still on its lapel.
He thought of the parades he had seen, in Havana and Hanoi and once, on assignment, in a small Central American capital where the General had ordered three borrowed howitzers paraded twice round the square so that the photographers might count six. There was always a man with a clipboard, and always a boy in the second rank whose uniform did not quite fit. The boy had a mother somewhere who had ironed the shirt that morning. He wondered who had ironed the shirts in Moscow, and whether she had cried.
The kettle boiled. He poured.
The German finance minister, a man named Klingbeil, had called the President's war irresponsible and blamed it for the slowdown of his country's economy. The German would be correct, and the German would be ignored. From Hungary, a quieter dispatch: the voters had, after long patience, exposed the limits of a friendship between Beijing and the outgoing strongman in Budapest. A battery factory had proved, the report said, a step too far. He liked that phrase. A step too far. It was the epitaph of every empire he had ever covered, and most marriages.
In Gaza, talks had stalled, and in the West Bank a young Palestinian named Nayef Samaro had been shot dead, hours before his son was born. The cable gave the man's age. Twenty-six. The cable did not give the son's name, because the son did not yet have one. He sat with his tea cooling in front of him and considered the particular cruelty of a death that is preceded by the news of a birth, the way the universe sometimes arranges its small ironies as if to test whether one has been paying attention. There were nights, in his younger years, when he had blamed God for such arrangements. Now he was old enough to know that God, at least, did not put the bullet in the chamber.
Outside, the chalk hills had not moved. The clouds went over them in the slow, indifferent way of English clouds. In Vienna, a dispatch said, several thousand schoolchildren had spent three weeks without their telephones, and the experiment had been described, in the language of the newspaper, as a digital detox. He thought it was perhaps the only news of the day that suggested the species might still be capable of repenting of an addiction. The children, the report added, had reported sleeping better. He could believe it. He himself had slept better in the years before the wireless.
He folded the cables and put them aside. He was not a young man, and he had stopped believing, long ago, that any one morning's news could be made to mean anything. What he believed in now were the small, undeniable things: the kettle, the chalk hills, the boy ironing his shirt in Moscow, the seafarers waiting in the Strait, the Palestinian father who had not lived to name his son.
The ceasefire, the President had said, remained in effect.
He drank his tea and watched the cloud move across the chalk. Somewhere, faintly, a bell was ringing for someone else.
