Institute for Protocol and Bearing of the Foreign Service, in a former counting house on a canal, six hundred metres before it runs into the sea. Eight women with rank, file and ambition, and one without; rooms with rules; two registers, the official one by day and the private one in the evening. Above the gate a sign older than the House, and out in the river mouth an island the fishermen call the Back.
The Republic of the Two Banks is a cool, small country: one harbour, a network of canals, a hinterland of moors and brickworks, three million inhabitants, no army a neighbour would need to fear. What it has is a Foreign Service that learned across two centuries that one keeps a seat at the table of ...
The teaching of the House can be said in one sentence, and the Director says it to every aspirant on her first day: bearing is not an opinion but a body that knows where it is. Whoever is in the room is wholly in the room; whoever is silent is visibly silent; whoever serves serves so that those serv...
Six steps, from the bottom up: Aspirant, Attachée, Registrar, Prefect, First Prefect, Director. At any time the House holds exactly one Director and exactly one First Prefect; the other ranks are open, but not empty. By day the pin at the standing collar shows the rank: gold for the Director, silve...
The House has many spaces, but only seven rooms; a room is a space with a rule. The rule says how one stands in it, what light prevails there and which dress applies. The rooms form a path, and the path has a direction. The Gate, the lodge on the canal on the ground floor of the old building: cold,...
The official register: a slate-grey jacket with a standing collar and the pin, beneath it a white blouse, a black pencil skirt to the knee, stockings, black low-heeled pumps, the hair pinned up, the face bare but for a single line. The uniform is as comfortable as a sentence one knows by heart; it s...
Reception: the Aspirant opens the door towards the canal for the guest and names his role, not his name. Roll call: the attachées stand in a line in the hall, feet together, hands at their sides, chins at one height; the highest in rank stands at the edge and not in the middle, because the middle be...
The House receives visitors, rarely and with a role. The Inspector from the Ministry comes the long way round, with an errand he does not quite name; he may see everything and order nothing, and the Prefects know that his report decides next year's budget. The invited guest is a friend of the House ...
Before the gate lies the quay: rough granite blocks, iron bollards, and in the embankment wall rings of bronze gone green, to which no barge has been moored since 1931. Flood marks are cut into the wall, each with a year, the storm tides of two centuries. The highest stands half a metre above all th...
From 1889 the firm of Marsch & Tiede sailed to the South Seas, to islands whose names stand in its bills of lading and in no atlas. It traded in copra and mother-of-pearl and brought back, so they say at the river mouth, a contract no notary ever saw. Around the firm there grew up among the fisherme...