Signed

Theo had saved him a sandwich. It was cheese and pickle and had been sat on, slightly, in Theo’s bag, and Theo put it on the table in front of him without a word when he sat down at the long table by the window at twenty past twelve, and then put Frederick’s chemistry book beside it, and then went back to his own lunch.

Nobody at the table said anything.

There were nine of them. June and Felix, and Marcus and Devon, and the three from the football side at the end. They had all seen it. He could tell from the telephones, which were all face down on the table, every one of them, in a row, like cards that had been dealt and not picked up. They had seen it at noon in the lunch queue, the message and the terms and the name, and they had all, separately, without discussing it, he thought, turned their telephones over and put them face down and waited for him to come in.

He ate the sandwich. It was terrible. He ate all of it.

After a while Felix said, “Did anybody do the French?”

Nobody had done the French. They talked about the French for ten minutes, very seriously, as though the French were the most important thing that had ever happened at Ellicott High School, and at the end of the ten minutes Marcus said, without looking at anybody, “I’ve got eight bars on my own on Thursday. In band. In the middle,” and everybody said that was good, and it was, and the bell went.

In French they got the test back. He had sixty-eight. It was the worst mark he had ever had in a language, and he looked at it for a long time, at the red 68 in the corner, and found that he was enormously, unreasonably pleased by it, because it was so completely his.

---

There were more people outside the hospital.

There had been people across the road from the side entrance every day since the twenty-ninth of September, a few, in the mornings and evenings mostly, standing behind the low wall of the car park opposite, and the hospital had put a bench there for them in the second week, and they used it. Today there were perhaps a hundred. They were not doing anything. They were standing behind the wall in their coats, in the grey light, quietly, in rows, and some of them had flowers, and the flowers had been put along the top of the wall, all along it, in their cellophane, so that the wall looked as though it had been planted.

Nobody shouted. When the car turned in under the canopy a few of them lifted their hands, the way the woman with the pushchair had on Wednesday, not a wave, only a hand, and then put them down.

“Sir,” said Castellanos, and opened the door the same way he always opened it.

---

The sixth floor was the same. The tea-coloured corridor, the trolley with the blood-pressure machine on it, the window at the end with the railway in it. The nurse on the desk looked up and said, “Afternoon,” and looked down again. Everything was the same, and he walked down the corridor between all the things that were the same and felt as though he were walking across ice.

At the end of the corridor, by the window, a man was standing.

He was one of his father’s. Frederick knew him by sight and not by name: a big quiet man in a dark suit, one of the four who had come out from London at the end of September, when the King was brought to New Westminster General, and who took the corridor in turns, day and night, standing by the window at the end where he could see the lifts and the stairs and the door of his father’s room at once. He was standing with his hands folded in front of him and he was looking at the ceiling.

Frederick had walked past him every day for a month and never once seen him look at anything else.

---

His father was in the chair by the window.

He was awake. He was not in bed, and he was not asleep, and he did not look, Frederick thought, coming in, different at all, and that was the strangest thing, stranger than the flowers on the wall: he looked exactly the same as he had looked yesterday, in the same chair, under the same blanket, in the same grey cardigan, with the same railway behind him, and he had given up fourteen Crowns since then.

His mother was not there. She was at the palace, where the telephones were.

There was nothing on the tray table. There was a jug of water and a plastic cup and a box of tissues, and that was all. Frederick looked at it. He did not know what he had expected. A pen, perhaps. A folder. He had imagined, all afternoon, in French, with the sixty-eight in front of him, that when he came in there would be something in the room that showed it, some mark, some trace, like the ring a glass leaves on a table. There was nothing. The paper had gone to London by twelve different hands, his mother had said, and Dame M had taken it, and it was gone, and the tray table had been wiped.

“Papa.”

His father turned his head.

He was tired. Frederick could see it at once, the way you could see it in the colour of his face and the way his eyes took a long time to arrive, and the way his right hand lay on the blanket and did not move. He was more tired than yesterday. He had done a thing this morning that had taken four minutes, and it had taken more than four minutes out of him.

Frederick sat on the end of the bed.

He had meant to say it straight away. He had planned it in the car: he would come in, and sit down, and say Mamma told me, and then the rest. He sat on the end of the bed and looked at his father and could not.

He did his homework instead.

He did not know why. It was what he did. He came at four and sat on the end of the bed and did his homework until a quarter to five, every day, and the doing of it was part of the hour, and he found, sitting there with the words all ready and nowhere to put them, that he wanted the hour to be the same hour, all of it, in order, the way it always was. So he took out the history and wrote two sides on what a proclamation was for, in pencil, with the reader open on his knee at page ninety-two, at the box. Nothing done at the Palace or in this cathedral this morning has made him King, or could have. He wrote that a proclamation was not for making anything. He wrote that it was for telling people what had already happened, so that they would know, and that it mattered because otherwise a man could be King of a place for a month and nobody there would know it, and that it was the difference between a thing being true and a thing being known. He wrote that both of those mattered, and that they were not the same. He did not know whether it was right. He thought Mr Ferrante would like the last bit.

His father watched him write. Twice Frederick looked up and found his father’s eyes on him, on the pencil, following it across the page and back, the way he had used to watch Frederick do his homework at the desk in the study in London in the summers, when Frederick was small and the homework was sums, and his father would sit in the other chair with a document and not read it.

At a quarter to five he put the history away and took out the timetable.

“Tuesday,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

He read them all. The six-fourteen from Richmond. The six-forty from Baltimore, the fast one. The seven-oh-two from Philadelphia, calling at Wilmington. The seven-twenty-five from Harrisburg. He read them slowly and in order and did not miss any, and his father listened with his eyes shut. The eight-ten from New York, the Senator, which would be twelve minutes late, because it was a Tuesday, because of the bridge at Havre de Grace, because some things did not change.

He shut the timetable.

“Papa,” he said. “Mamma came to school. At lunch.”

His father’s eyes opened.

“She told me,” said Frederick. “All of it. About this morning. About the chair. And the paper, and today. And what you wrote, and what she wrote under it.” He stopped. He had his hands between his knees and he made himself take them out and put them flat on the blanket, on either side of him, the way his mother put her hand flat on the folder. “And about London. And everybody. And the day the last one acts, and six o’clock.” He swallowed. “And the message. She read me the message. I know you crossed out never.”

His father looked at him.

“I know,” said Frederick. “That’s what I came to say. That I know. So you don’t have to tell me. So you don’t have to find the words.” His voice did the thing in the middle again, and he let it, and went on through it. “You asked me to tell them, on Wednesday. And I did. And now you’ve told them yourself. In your own message, with your own name on it. And I’m glad. I’m glad it was you that said it. Not me.”

He did not know if he was supposed to say anything else. There was a great deal else. There was the cathedral, and the river, and the angle in a semicircle, and Ernest the Sixth, and the last Sunday, and twelve years of telephone calls at four o’clock, and none of it would go into words in that room any more than it would go into his father’s.

“And the name,” said Frederick. “They took the name.”

His father’s mouth moved.

It took a long time. It was the longest of all of them. Frederick watched the word being looked for, in all the pockets, one after another, patient, and he could see in his father’s face that it was there, that he knew where it was, that it was only a matter of getting his hand round it and bringing it out, and that this was harder, today, than it had been yesterday, because of the four minutes this morning, and the R, which had been gone over twice.

“George,” said his father.

It came out low and rough and clear, both syllables, the second one heavier than the first, the way you would say a name you were trying for the first time, to see how it sat.

Frederick could not say anything at all.

His father’s right hand moved on the blanket. It came up, slowly, an inch, two inches, and turned over, palm up, and lay there, open, between them, and Frederick looked at it for a moment, and then put his own hand in it, and his father’s fingers closed on it, not hard, because they could not close hard any more, but all the way, and held on.

They sat like that for a long time. The light went out of the window and the railway lights came on below, green and red. A train went by, not the one from the north, a freight, long and slow, wagon after wagon after wagon. His father’s eyes closed, and his hand did not let go, and Frederick did not take his away, and at five o’clock the nurse put her head round the door, and saw them, and took it out again without a word, and did not come back until a quarter past.

---

The big quiet man was still at the end of the corridor when Frederick came out, by the window, with his hands folded, looking at the ceiling.

Frederick stopped beside him. He did not know why. He had never stopped before.

The man looked down.

It was the first time Frederick had seen his face properly, from the front, close to: a heavy, ordinary, middle-aged face, with grey in the eyebrows, and very tired eyes, and it was looking at him, now, directly, for the first time in a month, and Frederick saw that the man knew, that of course he knew, that everybody in the building knew, and that he did not know what to say, and was not going to try.

“Sir,” said the man.

He had a London voice. He said it the way Castellanos said it, and the way Dame M said it, and it meant the same thing as when they said it, and it did not mean anything more, and Frederick understood that it had been chosen very carefully, out of everything the man could have said, as the one thing that was still exactly true.

“Thank you,” said Frederick. “For looking after him.”

The man looked at him for a moment longer. Then his eyes went back up to the ceiling, slowly, and stayed there, and Frederick walked on down the tea-coloured corridor to the lift.

---

In the car, at the lights on Canal Street, he said, “Mr Castellanos.”

“Sir.”

“Why do you all look at the ceiling?”

Castellanos drove through the lights. The radio was off. Outside the shops were lit and people were going home in the dark with their collars up.

“Who, sir?”

“All of you. You. The man on the sixth floor. The one at the school with Mamma. You all do it. You stand by a door and look at the ceiling.” He thought. “I used to think it was a rule. For seeing the whole room.”

“It’s partly that, sir.”

“What’s the other part?”

Castellanos was quiet for a block.

“The ceiling is the only place in a room that nobody’s in, sir,” he said. “If you look at it, you’re not looking at anybody. And in this job, sir, most of the time, the person you’re looking after is having the worst day of their life, or the most private, or both. And they’ve got enough people looking at them.” He changed down for the turn. “So you look at the ceiling. And they know you’re there. And they know you’re not watching. Both of those at once.” He was quiet for a moment. “I learned it from the man you just spoke to, sir. He came out with your father on a visit, eleven years ago, in my first week on the royal detail. He told me that the ceiling was the most useful thing in any building, and I thought he was mad.”

Frederick looked at the back of his head.

“He said sir to me,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Castellanos. “He would.”

He looked up through the windscreen, at the sky over Canal Street, which was dark now and orange underneath with the city, and had nothing in it at all.