The Milwaukee Paper

Rosalind Aird came down to the kitchen at a quarter past six, while he was eating his supper, with her trainers on and a sheet of paper in her hand that had been printed from a screen, and stood at the end of the table looking at it as though it had insulted her mother.

“There’s a paper in Milwaukee,” she said.

Frederick put his fork down.

“It’s a weekly. It comes out on Monday evenings. It’s been coming out on Monday evenings since 1891, in English on one side and German on the other, and it covers the north side of the city, and funerals, and the bowling league, and it has never once in a hundred and thirty-seven years had anything in it that anybody outside Milwaukee has read.” She put the sheet down on the table in front of him. “Until about forty minutes ago.”

He looked at it. It was the English side. The headline was not large.

PRINCE’S FRIEND TO BE PAGE, SAY SOURCES

And under it, smaller:

North side boy would serve on accession, “on one condition”

He read it. It was short, eleven paragraphs, and written carefully, by somebody who had been told a great deal and wanted to be seen not to have made any of it up. It said that the Household meant to reverse its decision of 2027 and make Theo Hartigan, formerly of Lindsay Street, a Page of Honour on the accession, if there was one. It said that the reason given inside the Household was the cost that the Household’s own memorandum had admitted, that under the old arrangement nobody’s job was him, and that a King’s closest friend could not be left to nobody. It said that the appointment would carry three duties and no others: the State Opening of Parliament, the Eleventh at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the accession itself. It said that Theo’s parents had told the Household that the decision was his, as they had with the screening in 2026. It said that he had said yes.

It said, in the ninth paragraph, that he had said yes on one condition, and that the condition was that he would go on calling the Prince Freddie.

And it said, in the last paragraph, almost as an afterthought, that the Prince would finish at Ellicott High School with his year.

He read the ninth paragraph again.

“Is it true?” said Rosalind Aird.

He looked up at her.

“I’m asking you,” she said, “because I don’t know. Nobody told me. If it’s a decision about the Household, it’s Dame Margaret’s, and it would go to your mother, and none of it would come to me until it was announced, because my job is to say true things and you can’t say a thing that isn’t decided.” She looked at the sheet. “So I don’t know if it’s true. And I’m not going to ask you to tell me. I’m only telling you what I’m going to do, which is nothing. The Household doesn’t comment on Milwaukee. It never has. I’ve checked. It didn’t comment on Milwaukee in 1952, when a Milwaukee paper said the King was coming to open a bridge, and he didn’t come.” She sat down at the corner of the table. “And the papers here won’t touch it.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the understanding. About you. And about him, since last year.” She tapped the sheet. “The capital’s papers have agreed for a year that they don’t print anything about Theo that the Household hasn’t said first. Not since the fortnight on the pavement. They’re ashamed of that fortnight, most of them, and they should be. So they’ll read this, and they’ll know, and they won’t print a word of it. And the Milwaukee paper isn’t party to any understanding about anything, because nobody ever thought it needed to be.” She almost smiled. “It’s the only paper in the Realm that’s never been asked to keep a secret, because nobody ever told it one.”

“Somebody told it this one.”

“Yes,” said Rosalind Aird. “Somebody did.” She looked at him, levelly. “And it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was you, and I don’t think it was them. I’d guess it was somebody who meant well and is having a very bad evening.” She stood up. “Eat your supper. The telephone’s going to ring in the flat on the fourth floor for about a week, and I’m going to go upstairs and make sure the man on the gate knows that Mrs Hartigan’s number goes straight through to Dame Margaret, tonight, at any hour, whoever answers.”

She went.

He looked at the ninth paragraph. On one condition.

He thought about Theo on the landing in the yellow light from the depot, saying so now we’re even, that’s all, don’t make a thing of it, and he thought that it had been made a thing of now, by somebody, in English on one side and German on the other, and he did not know whether Theo would mind.

---

Theo did not mind.

The telephone in the small sitting room on the north side rang at twenty to eight, and Bridget answered it, and came to the kitchen door and said, “It’s your friend, pet. He says he’s in the newspaper,” with an expression of deep disapproval, and Frederick went.

“Freddie.”

“Theo.”

“I’m in the paper.”

“I know. I’ve seen it.”

“My Oma’s paper.” Theo’s voice was enormous with happiness, so loud that Frederick held the telephone a little way from his ear. “She’s taken it for fifty years. She takes it for the funerals. She rang Mum at half past six and read it to her. The whole thing. All eleven paragraphs. Out loud. Twice. And then Dad came in from the depot and she rang back and read it to him. And then she rang back again and read it to me, in German, from the other side, because she said the German side was better written, and she cried, Freddie, my Oma cried down the telephone from Milwaukee about me, and she’s never cried about anything, she didn’t cry when Opa died, she said he’d have hated it.”

“Is your mum all right?”

There was a pause on the line.

“Mum’s livid,” said Theo, with satisfaction. “Mum’s the most livid I’ve ever seen her. She’s standing in the kitchen with a tea towel saying things in German I’m not allowed to say. She says it’s exactly what she said would happen, which is people deciding things about her family and then telling the whole world before they tell her family. She says it’s last year all over again.” He paused. “Except it isn’t, though. Because they did ask. The lady with the folder asked. On Saturday. And I said yes. So it’s not the same, it’s just told early.” Another pause. “Dad says it’s the lady’s boss. Kate says it’s whoever it always is. Kate’s in her room. She came out to look at it and said, it’s spelled right, at least, and went back in.”

“Spelled right?”

“Freddie,” said Theo. “In the paper. With two Ds. Kate says she’s seen it spelled with one D in Wisconsin before and it was a disgrace.” He was laughing now. “Freddie, it’s in print. I’m a condition. I’m a condition in a newspaper. Nobody’s ever been a condition in a newspaper before. Oma’s going to cut it out and put it in the Bible with the funerals.”

Frederick sat down on the arm of the sofa in the small sitting room on the north side, which was where his father’s calls used to come in, and found that he was laughing too.

“Theo.”

“What?”

“I didn’t tell anybody. About the stairs.”

“I know you didn’t.” Theo’s voice changed, a little, went quieter. “I didn’t either. Not even Kate. So it wasn’t us.” He was quiet for a moment. “It doesn’t matter, Freddie. Mum’ll calm down. Dad’s already calmed down, he’s doing the crossword. It’s true, that’s the thing. It’s all true. Every bit of it. Even the bit at the end about Ellicott.” He paused. “Is that true? That you’ll stay?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Theo. “Because I’m not doing the Parliament on my own. I’d get lost.”

“You wouldn’t be on your own. You’d be with me. That’s what a Page is.”

“I know what a Page is,” said Theo. “I looked it up. I’ve been looking it up since Saturday. There’s a picture of one from 1911 in a hat with a feather in it, and if they give me a hat with a feather in it, Freddie, I’m resigning.” Somebody said something behind him, sharply, in German. “That’s Mum. I’ve got to go. She wants the telephone to ring Oma back and tell her to stop ringing.” A pause. “Freddie.”

“What?”

“Was it today? Your dad? I saw it at lunch. Everybody saw it at lunch.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “This morning. In the chair by the window.”

Theo was quiet for a long time, on the line from the fourth floor.

“Okay,” he said, eventually, the way he had said it on Tuesday, at the table, over the pork chops, in exactly the same voice. “Okay, Freddie.”

“Okay.”

“Eat your dinner.”

“I’ve eaten my dinner.”

“Eat it again,” said Theo, and rang off.

---

At nine his mother rang from the hospital to say goodnight, and that his father was asleep, and had been asleep since six, and that she was going to stay until he woke or until midnight, whichever was first, and that he was to go to bed. She did not mention Milwaukee. He did not either. He thought, afterwards, that she knew, and that Dame Margaret knew, and that between the two of them they had decided to let the Milwaukee paper be the only thing that happened that evening that nobody was responsible for.

At half past nine he went to find Dame M.

She was in her office on the ground floor, off the stone corridor, a small square room with a desk and a ship’s barometer on the wall and nothing else, and she was at the desk with a lamp on, writing, and she stood up when he knocked, which she always did, and which he had stopped asking her not to do when he was ten.

“Sir.”

“Dame Margaret. Can I see the order paper?”

She looked at him.

“For tomorrow,” said Frederick. “For the Commons. The bill was read a first time this afternoon. I heard it on the radio, in the car. At half past three, without a debate, the way they always are.” He stood in the doorway. “I’d like to see what they’re doing tomorrow. On paper. If it’s printed.”

Dame M did not say anything for a moment. Then she opened the drawer of her desk, and took out a sheet folded once lengthways, the way order papers came, and held it out to him across the desk.

“It came over from Charter Hill at eight o’clock, sir,” she said. “I had thought you might ask.”

He unfolded it.

It was the order paper of the House of Commons for Tuesday 31 October, on thin paper, closely printed, with the crown at the top that was not quite the same crown as the one on the palace paper, because it was Parliament’s, and a long list underneath of things that would happen in the House in the order they would happen. Most of it he did not understand. Some of it he did, from the Privy Council, from section 4, from reading the debates in the library in the evenings when his mother thought he was doing his French.

At the top, before anything else, in heavy type:

The House will meet at eight o’clock.

And under it, the first business, before questions, before statements, before anything:

HIS MAJESTY’S DECLARATION OF ABDICATION BILL: Second Reading. And after it, Committee of the whole House, and Remaining Stages, and a name, Mr Harold Penhallow, and beside the name, in small italics, the name of a seat in Maine that Frederick had never heard of and would never forget.

“Eight o’clock,” he said.

“The House has agreed to sit at eight, sir,” said Dame M. “It agreed at six this evening, without a division. It has not sat at eight o’clock in the morning in anybody’s memory. The Clerk had to look up whether the doors could be opened that early.” She paused. “They can.”

“And then the Lords.”

“The Lords has been asked to sit at ten, sir. If the Commons has done.”

“And then Mamma.”

“Her Majesty has said that she will be at Columbia Palace all morning,” said Dame M, “in her study, sir. With her pen.”

Frederick looked at the order paper. The House will meet at eight o’clock. He thought of the clock above the range in the kitchen, four minutes slow, and the clock in the wire cage at school, two minutes fast, and the clock on the principal’s wall, which had been right, and the red hand at the hospital that swept round without ticking.

“So it’ll be tomorrow,” he said. “Probably. If everybody does what they say.”

“Everybody generally does, sir,” said Dame M, “in my experience. Tomorrow.”

“At two.”

“At two, sir. In New Westminster.”

He would be in geometry. He knew his timetable the way he knew the trains. On Tuesdays, after lunch, sixth period, he had geometry, with Mrs Pruitt, in the room in the math wing with the ghost of a quadratic equation on the whiteboard, and the proof that was due was the one about the angle in a semicircle, and he had done it on Friday night after the cake, and it was in his bag.

“Can I keep this?” he said.

“It is yours, sir,” said Dame M. “I had it sent for you.”

He folded it along its crease and put it in his pocket, where the timetable from 1962 had been, and the card with Saint Christopher on it, which were both in the drawer of his desk upstairs now, with Ciaran’s two letters and Mrs Ochoa’s three sides about the order of words.

“Goodnight, Dame Margaret.”

“Goodnight, sir,” said Dame M.

At the door he stopped, and turned round. She was still standing behind the desk, with the lamp on and the barometer behind her, in her grey suit, very straight, and she was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before and could not name, and she did not sit down.

“Is there anything else, sir?”

He thought about it. There was everything else.

“No,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Sir,” said Dame M, and he went, and she was still standing when he turned the corner.

---

He did not sleep.

He went to bed at ten, because he had said he would, and lay on his back in the dark in the north wing with the curtains open, the way he had slept since September, so that he could see the sky over the garden, which was never dark in the city, but orange, low, and empty. He could hear the buses on the avenue beyond the wall, fewer and fewer. He could hear the house ticking as it cooled. Somewhere, a long way off, a siren, going somewhere else.

He thought about the order paper in the pocket of his trousers on the chair. He thought about a man in Maine he had never met getting up in the dark at five in the morning to put on a suit. He thought about his mother at the hospital in the chair by the window, in her stockinged feet, waiting for his father to wake up, or for midnight. He thought about the sixty-eight. He thought about Theo’s grandmother in Milwaukee cutting a column out of a newspaper with the kitchen scissors and putting it in a Bible with the funerals. He thought about the angle in a semicircle, which was always a right angle, wherever you put the point on the curve, which Mrs Pruitt said was the most beautiful fact in elementary geometry, and which he had proved on Friday night and not understood why it was beautiful until now, lying in the dark, when he understood that it was beautiful because you could put the point anywhere you liked and it made no difference at all.

At midnight he was still awake.

So he did what he always did, when he could not sleep, since September. He did the trains.

He did them in the dark, in his head, in order, with his eyes shut, the way his father listened to them. Not tomorrow’s. All of them. The whole line. From the beginning.

Richmond. The six-fourteen. Calling at Fredericksburg and Alexandria, which was the Virginia side, which you could see from the river at half past six in the morning, black trees and nothing behind them.

Union Station. Change here for everything.

Baltimore. The six-forty, the fast one. Wilmington. The seven-oh-two from Philadelphia, which went the other way, and passed it, somewhere in the dark, at a speed nobody on either train ever felt.

Philadelphia. Trenton. Newark, where the man from the Pennsylvania Railroad had driven trains for thirty-eight years and read his wife the timetable in the evenings in a hospital, because she knew it, because she could follow along.

New York. Penn Station, where the light had come back. The eight-ten, the Senator, which would be twelve minutes late tomorrow, because it was a Tuesday, because of the bridge at Havre de Grace, because some things did not change, and he held on to that, in the dark, the twelve minutes, as though it were the most important fact in the world.

New Haven. Providence, where the line came down to the sea and ran along beside it, and you could see boats.

And Boston, at the end of the line, at the top of the map, where the trains stopped because there was nowhere further for them to go, and turned round, and came back.

Somewhere between Providence and Boston, he slept.