The clock had struck eleven, or had it struck twelve; one could no longer be certain in this dim wash of cloudy May, nine degrees and the pavements still moist from a rain that had fallen in the small hours and left behind it that peculiar London hush, that suspended grey, in which everything appears at once nearer and further off than it is. I had crossed the bridge meaning only to walk as far as the church and back, but found myself instead drawn on, past the railings, past the news vendor with his stack of papers fluttering at the corner – Britain's electorate splintering, said the headline; the kingdom no longer a kingdom of two parties but of seven, of nine, of a rising tide of insurgent colours that the old machinery, designed for two horses pulling in opposite directions, could not be made to accommodate. Splintering. Such a word, I thought, with a small shock of recognition; for it is the word one uses of glass, of bone, of the thin ice on a January pond, and not, surely, of a country.
And yet why not of a country? Why not of any thing at all – for what, in this curious morning, was not splintering? Even the cloud above the Embankment, which from one angle showed itself a single solid lid of pewter, revealed at another to be composed of a thousand drifting fragments, each going somewhere without consulting the others.
A woman passed me carrying lilacs. She did not see me. I did not see her, properly; only the lilacs, and the thought – sudden, irrelevant – that in Wales they had voted out Labour after all those decades, that a man called Rhun ap Iorwerth, a former journalist with a name like a verse from the Mabinogion, had walked into Cardiff and taken the seats that had for a hundred years belonged to other people. How strange, to have one's whole inheritance turned over by an afternoon's counting of papers; how strange, too, that we use the same word, vote, for so private an act as the marking of a cross, and so public a consequence as the unmaking of governments. Mrs. Pembridge at the corner shop – I imagined her, though I had not seen her since Wednesday – pencil in hand at the school hall, deciding as one decides what to have for tea. And the lilacs went on towards the river.
In Hungary, too, they had changed everything; the new man, Magyar, had said I will serve, not rule – a phrase that struck me as it might have struck a child, with its formal antique cadence, its borrowed nobility, like something out of an older book. Sixteen years of one face, and now another, and the EU flag run up outside the parliament where it had so long been forbidden. End of an era, the wireless had said this morning, while I was still in my dressing-gown, and the gas-fire making its small companionable hiss. End of an era – but eras do not end, I thought; they only thin, they grow translucent, one sees through them to whatever comes next, which is itself already growing thin.
By the time I reached the gardens the cloud had not lifted, only deepened its grey to a soft pearl, and the temperature held at that exact London chill that requires a coat but not gloves. There were people on the grass already, in twos and threes; a young man asleep with a paperback over his face; a child hurling a red ball at her father, who fielded it with a tired patience. Beyond them, at the gates of the palace, a small crowd had gathered with placards. No Kings, the placards said. No Kings – and I thought how very English a protest it was, polite, slightly damp, conducted within the rules of an unwritten constitution by people who would shortly disperse for tea. They did not, I noticed, mean no kings anywhere; they meant no this king, perhaps, or no idea of king at all, and one was not sure which, and possibly they were not sure either, which is the truest thing about most demonstrations – that the placard says one thing and the heart says seventeen.
A bell rang. A pigeon lifted. Far off, the traffic.
How does one carry, in a single morning, the weight of all that is happening elsewhere? In Tenerife the medics were waiting on the quay for the cruise ship – the Hondius, a name out of some Dutch maritime past – with its cargo of frightened passengers and a virus whose name, hantavirus, had seemed yesterday to belong to medical bulletins and now belonged to the front pages. Not COVID, the WHO had said, which is the kind of reassurance one gives to a child who has woken in the night: no, no, not the wolf, while one thinks about the wolf. Off Iran's Kharg Island a slick of oil was spreading on the satellite images, dozens of square kilometres, an inkblot on the blue. In Lebanon the strikes had killed thirty-nine; in Gaza, after seven months of so-called ceasefire, the children were breaking out in skin diseases for want of clean water. And Putin, on his diminished podium in a Moscow that no longer trusted its own sky, said the war was coming to an end – while a fresh estimate placed Russia's dead above three hundred and fifty thousand, a number so large it ceased to mean anything, became merely a sound, a kind of low note held under everything else.
Coming to an end. So everything is, of course; so the morning was, even as I stood in it; so the lilacs were, on their way to whichever rooms they would scent for two days before browning at the edges. But to say a war is coming to an end is to make of ending a destination, when in fact it is only a direction, and the difference is the whole of the matter.
I turned at last for home. The cloud, holding its nine degrees over the city as a hand holds a candle, did not move. A boy on a bicycle nearly struck me at the crossing and did not apologise. In Australia, I remembered, they had elected, in a single far-off seat, the first member of a party I had heard called anti-immigrant and populist and Trumpian – a borrowed adjective, an American shadow falling on Queensland; in Sri Lanka a revered monk had been arrested for the rape of a girl; in Mogadishu a journalist had been beaten with pistols for asking after a tortured woman. One could not hold it. One was not meant to hold it. One could only walk back across the bridge while the river ran on indifferent beneath, carrying the same water it had carried yesterday and would carry tomorrow, splintered everywhere into small bright planes by a sun that had not, in fact, come out.
The hour struck somewhere. I did not count the strokes.
