Your Majesty, Once

Dame M was at the side door.

She was standing just inside it, in the stone passage, under the light, in her grey suit and her low heels, with her hands folded in front of her and nothing in them, no folder, no list, and she had been standing there, Frederick thought, for some time. The passage was cold. There was a chair against the wall that the officers used when they were waiting, and she was not sitting in it.

Castellanos opened the car door. Frederick got out, and went up the two steps, and in, and Castellanos stayed outside.

Dame M looked at him.

He had known her his whole life. He knew all her looks. He knew the look for a midshipman who has volunteered, and the look for a midshipman who has come down from the masthead in a gale, and the look she gave a footman who had put a fork in the wrong place, which was the same as the one she gave a minister who had said something foolish at dinner. He did not know this one. It was not a look he had seen her give anybody. It was very still and very level and it went on for a long time, and behind it, he thought, something was happening that she was not going to let reach her face, and was holding back with her whole body, the way you hold a door shut in a wind.

“Your Majesty,” said Dame M.

She said it quite quietly. She did not curtsey. She inclined her head, the inch she had inclined it in the corridor on Wednesday, and brought it up again, and her hands stayed folded in front of her, and her voice did not change at all, and it was the first time anybody had said it to him.

He stood in the stone passage in his school coat with his bag on his shoulder and did not know what to do.

And then her face did change. Only slightly. Only at the corners. It changed the way the surface of water changes when something moves underneath it a long way down, and she looked, for a moment, not like Dame M at all, but like a woman of sixty-three who had been a captain in the Navy and then had come to run a house with a boy in it, and had watched the boy grow up in it for twelve years, and was now standing in a cold passage in front of him, having said the thing.

“I’m sorry,” said Dame M. “I had to say it once.”

And she turned, and walked away along the passage, quite fast, her heels very exact on the stone, and went round the corner by the flower room, and was gone.

He stood there.

Castellanos came in behind him and shut the door, and looked at the ceiling of the passage, at a bracket where a lamp had once hung, and said nothing.

“She said it,” said Frederick.

“Yes, sir,” said Castellanos. “She’s been standing there since half past four. I asked her if she wanted the chair. She said no.” He looked at the bracket. “She said she’d only say it once, sir, and she wanted to be standing up.”

---

The Council sat at six.

It sat in the Council Room on the first floor, on the garden side, beyond the morning room, a long room with a long table and portraits on three walls and windows on the fourth, and he had sat in it five times since the thirtieth of September, every time in the same chair. The chair was at the side of the table, not the head and not the foot, halfway along, on the window side, and it was a chair like all the others, a dark wood chair with a green leather seat, and it had no plate on it and no cushion and nothing to mark it out, and it had been put there on the thirtieth of September because section 4 of the Regency Act said that the heir might attend the Council and observe, and somebody had had to decide where the heir would sit, and had decided there.

He was not the heir now. He went to the same chair.

Nobody stopped him. Nobody told him to sit anywhere else. The Lord President, an old man with a white beard who had been Lord President for eleven years and who had a habit, on the thirtieth of September, of looking at Frederick over his glasses every time anybody said the heir, did not look at him over his glasses. The Clerk of the Council, who had told him in September that in thirty years nobody had ever asked him for a copy of an Act who meant to read it, was standing at the end of the table with a red folder and did not look at him either. He sat down. The leather seat was cold.

There were twenty-two of them. He had counted, on the thirtieth of September, and counted again now, by habit, and it was the same: twenty-two privy counsellors round the long table, in dark suits, two of them in uniform, one in a bishop’s purple, and the Lord President, and the Clerk, and his mother at the head. They had all stood when his mother came in. They had all stood, too, when Frederick came in, and he had not noticed until he had sat down, and then he noticed that they were still standing, all twenty-two of them, and that nobody would sit until somebody sat, and that his mother was standing at the head of the table waiting, looking at him, with her face very calm.

He understood that they were waiting for him.

He did not know what to do. He was sitting. He was already sitting. He had sat down first, without thinking, the way he had sat down in that chair five times, and they had all stood up, and stayed standing, and now he could not stand up again without it looking as though he meant something by it, and he could not say please sit down, because he was not allowed to speak, and because he did not want to, and because he would not have known how.

His mother sat.

She did it smoothly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had meant to sit at exactly that moment anyway. And the twenty-two sat after her, with a long scrape of chairs and a settling, and the Clerk opened his red folder, and nobody looked at Frederick, and he understood that she had done it for him, and that she would go on doing it, every time, at every table, until May.

---

At the far end of the table, on the other side, near the foot, there was a large young man with a careful face, tall and heavy in the shoulders, in a dark suit that was slightly too tight across them, as though it had been bought for somebody a size smaller and he had not had time since September to buy another. He sat very straight, with a sheet of paper square in front of him that he did not look at, and his hands folded on it, and when the Clerk began to read he listened to the Clerk with an expression of complete attention, as though every word the Clerk said were being weighed separately and put down on the table in front of him.

Lord Whitlock was twenty-six. Frederick had sat at the same table as him five times. He had heard his voice on the radio in the car on Wednesday saying two sentences. He had sent him a single line in September asking whether he had read section 4, and had not had an answer.

He did not look at Lord Whitlock. Lord Whitlock did not look at him.

---

It took about twenty minutes. Afterwards he could not have said what most of it was. There was a great deal of reading. The Clerk read the King’s declaration, the one sentence, and then the Realm’s Act, which had one clause and a schedule, and which had been an Act since eleven forty-two. Then the Lord President said something about the occasion, in an old man’s careful voice, and asked the Council whether it was the Council’s pleasure that His Majesty’s accession be proclaimed, and the twenty-two said, all together, not loudly, “Content.”

Then the oaths.

His mother stood for them. She stood at the head of the table with her right hand on a Bible that the bishop held for her, and the Clerk read the words to her, phrase by phrase, and she said them back, phrase by phrase, in her clear Swedish-English, without looking at the paper. It was the Regent’s oath. He had heard her take it once before, on the thirtieth of September, for his father. It was almost the same oath. It had his name in it now instead of his father’s.

“…that I will truly and faithfully execute the office of Regent,” said the Clerk.

“That I will truly and faithfully execute the office of Regent,” said his mother.

“…in the name and on behalf of His Majesty King George the Fifth…”

There was the smallest pause. Not in his mother. In the room. A very slight change in the stillness, as twenty-two people heard the name said aloud in that room for the first time and did not look at the chair halfway along the window side.

“In the name and on behalf of His Majesty King George the Fifth,” said his mother, steadily, and went on.

He sat in the chair and listened to his mother swear to act for him.

He had imagined, if he had imagined anything, that it would feel like something. Like being given something, or having something taken. It did not. It felt like listening to his mother read the bulletin at breakfast, in English and then in Swedish, the hard things plainly. She was promising, in front of twenty-two people and a bishop and a Bible, to do in his name, until May, everything that he could not yet do, and to do it truly and faithfully, and he believed her absolutely, because she had never once in his life said a thing she did not mean, and he found that he was gripping the edge of the green leather seat with both hands, underneath, where nobody could see, and he held on.

Then she sat down. And the Clerk read the proclamation.

He read it at the table first, for the Council to approve, before it was read outside. Whereas His Majesty King Ernest the Fifth has by his Declaration of Abdication given up the Crown. It was very long and had a great many commas in it and almost no full stops, and it went on through the Parliament of this Realm and solely and rightfully come and His Royal Highness Prince Frederick Alexander, and Frederick heard his own name in it, his whole name, the one he was christened with, and then, after it, the other one. We, the Lords and others of His Majesty’s Privy Council, do now proclaim him George the Fifth. And then the long string of what he was King of, which was only the Realm, in this proclamation, because each realm proclaimed for itself. And then his mother’s name, Her Majesty Queen Christina as Regent in his name until he attains the age of sixteen years. And then the last three words.

“God save the King,” read the Clerk.

“God save the King,” said the Council.

Twenty-two voices. Not loudly. A low, even, murmured sound, like the response at the cathedral, Lord, hear our prayer, the sound of a great many people saying a thing they had said many times before and meant differently now. It went down the table and came back, and he sat in the middle of it, in his chair, halfway along, and it went round him and over him like water round a stone, and he did not say anything, because he was not allowed to, and because he was the one it was about, and because there was nothing at all in the world that he could have said back.

Then the counsellors signed it, one at a time, standing, at the end of the table, with the Clerk’s pen. He watched them sign. The Lord President first, very slowly. The bishop. The two in uniform. And near the end, Lord Whitlock, who stood up from his place near the foot, and walked round the table, and signed, in a small quick hand, without hesitating, and put the pen down square to the edge of the paper, and walked back.

He came back round the window side.

Frederick did not see it happen. He was watching the next counsellor sign. He felt something touch the table near his right hand, very lightly, and Lord Whitlock was already past him, walking on, back to his place, his face quite still, looking at nothing.

There was a small piece of paper by Frederick’s hand. It was folded once. He put his hand over it.

---

At twenty past six the Council rose, and his mother rose, and everybody stood again, and this time Frederick stood too, at the same moment as his mother, because he had worked out that if he stood when she stood then nobody would have to wait for him. They went out by different doors. The counsellors went down the main stairs to the hall, to the doors that opened onto the forecourt, where the Clerk would stand on the steps. Frederick went the other way, up the back stairs, alone, to the long window on the landing of the north wing, which looked out over the whole of the forecourt from above, and where nobody would see him.

He unfolded the paper on the stairs.

It was a small square of thick white paper with Charter House printed at the top, in very small capitals. Underneath, in the same small quick hand he had just watched sign the proclamation, was one word.

Twice.

And under it, smaller: C.W.

He stood on the back stairs and read it four times. Have you read section 4? he had written, on the thirtieth of September, a single line, and had not had an answer, and had not expected one, and had thought about it, sometimes, at night, and been a little ashamed of it, as though he had been rude to somebody who was too polite to say so. And now, a month later, at the first Council of a reign that was his, after a twenty-six-year-old Prime Minister had signed his accession, the answer.

Twice.

He put it in his breast pocket, behind the order paper from last night, and went on up the stairs.

---

The long window on the landing went almost down to the floor, and the curtains were open, and there was no light on in the landing, so that he could stand back from the glass in the dark and see out without being seen.

The forecourt was full.

He had not known it would be full. He had known there were people. Grace Ebanks had said on the radio at two o’clock, Rosalind Aird had told him afterwards, two or three thousand, and he had not been able to imagine two or three thousand people, and he could not now; it was not a number, it was a surface. It went from the steps of the palace right across the forecourt to the railings, and through the railings, and out into the avenue beyond, and along it in both directions, under the street lamps, as far as he could see, people in coats, very close together, with their faces turned up towards the steps, all of them, the same way, like a field of something that turns to the sun. Some of them had candles. Some of them had children on their shoulders. Nobody was making any noise at all.

The doors below him opened. A long bar of yellow light went out across the steps and the first rows of faces.

The Clerk of the Council came out into it, a small figure from above, in black, with the red folder, and stood at the top of the steps, and opened the folder, and the silence in the forecourt changed, and became a different kind of silence, the kind that is listening.

He could hear the Clerk’s voice through the glass, faintly. Not the words. Only the voice, going on, a long sentence with a great many commas in it and almost no full stops, rising and falling, small and dry and very clear in the cold air over three thousand people who were not making a sound.

And then the last three words, which he did not need to hear.

And then the forecourt answered.

It came up to him through the glass like weather. It came up from the steps and the forecourt and the railings and the avenue beyond, from three thousand people and more, all at once and not quite together, ragged at the edges, a great low rolling sound that was words and was also not words, the way the sea is water and is also not water, God save the King, three thousand times, in three thousand voices, old and young and men and women and children on shoulders, said back, to the steps, to the Clerk, to the palace, to the window on the landing of the north wing where nobody could see him, and it went on for longer than it took to say it, because the people at the back were later than the people at the front, and the people out in the avenue later than that, so that it rolled away from him down the avenue into the dark, the King, the King, the King, getting smaller and smaller, like a train going away.

Then it stopped.

Then nobody moved. Nobody went home. They stood there, in the forecourt and the avenue, in the cold, under the lamps, with their candles, and did not know what to do, he could see that they did not know what to do, and so they stayed.

He stood back from the window in the dark landing with his hand flat on his breast pocket, on the order paper and the square of white card with one word on it, and found that his face was wet, and that he had not noticed when it started, and that he did not mind, because nobody could see, and because his father had said Good, and because the woman in the brown coat had held up a timetable, and because three thousand people he would never meet had said a thing back to a man on the steps in the cold and then not known what to do and stayed, and because it was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him, and he had had an autumn.

---

Rosalind Aird found him in the kitchen at a quarter to seven.

He was at the end of the long table, the end where he had written the statement on Wednesday, with the green exercise book open in front of him at the back, where the drafts were, and a pen, and he had not written anything yet. Bridget was at the range with her back to him, not cooking anything. The clock above the range said nineteen minutes to seven, which meant a quarter to.

Rosalind Aird had her proper shoes on. She sat down at the corner of the table, not near him.

“Her Majesty is issuing a statement at seven,” she said. “She’s written it. It’s three sentences. And she has asked whether you’d like to issue one with it, which you don’t have to, and which nobody will think less of you for not doing, and which I’ll take down whatever it is.” She paused. “Your fifth.”

“I know.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Wait.”

He wrote it straight through. It took him about a minute. He did not cross anything out. He had been writing it, he understood afterwards, since the hospital, since Where? and Good and the open hand on the blanket, and on the landing in the dark with the forecourt saying it back, and it came out of the pen already finished, in his sloping hand like a fence in a wind, four lines.

My father is still in hospital, and I will see him tomorrow at four.

Thank you for being kind to him.

I am going to try to be good at this.

Frederick

He looked at it.

He thought about signing it the other way. He thought about it seriously, for about five seconds, with the pen over the page. George. George R. He thought about how it would look, in his own hand, at the bottom of four lines on a Tuesday, the first time. And he thought that it would look like a coat in a shop that he had tried on and that did not fit him yet, and that his father had signed Ernest R. this morning, no, yesterday morning, in four minutes, going over the R twice, and that he did not want his own R yet, not until it was his to sign, in May, and not his mother’s to sign for him.

He left it Frederick.

He turned the book round and pushed it across the table to Rosalind Aird.

She read it. She read it twice, once fast and once slowly. Her face did not do anything the first time. The second time it did, and she looked down at the table for a moment, and then up.

“I won’t change a word,” she said.

“I know you won’t.”

“Signed Frederick,” she said. “Not George. Not R.”

“Not until May,” said Frederick. “It’s not mine to sign till then. It’s Mamma’s.” He thought. “And it’s for letters. Frederick. I said.”

Rosalind Aird looked at him for a long moment, and then she took the exercise book by the corner, very carefully, the way she had taken the sheet on Wednesday, and stood up.

“Rosalind.”

She stopped.

“What does Mamma’s say?”

“You can ask her,” said Rosalind Aird. “She’s in the hall.”

---

His mother was in the hall outside the kitchen, by the foot of the back stairs, with Dame M, and a sheet of paper, and her glasses on, which she wore for reading and for nothing else, and she looked up when he came out.

“I’m sorry I sat down,” said Frederick. “At the Council. First. I didn’t think.”

“You sat down where you’ve sat for a month,” said his mother. “It was the right chair. I sat when you’d sat. Nobody noticed.” She looked at him over her glasses. “Everybody noticed. Nobody minded.”

“What does yours say?”

She held it out.

It was three sentences, in her neat upright hand, the Swedish way of making the sevens.

My son became King this afternoon in every one of his realms. He is fifteen, and until his birthday in May I shall act for him, as I have acted for his father.

There was a space. A third line, not yet written.

“I wasn’t sure of the last one,” said his mother. “I thought you might tell me.”

He looked at the space.

He thought about the forecourt. He thought about three thousand people standing in the cold with their candles not knowing what to do. He thought about the photographers across the road from the school with their cameras down, and Mr Obi at the gate making ticks on his clipboard, and Castellanos practising the door, and Theo going back to his book, and Mrs Pruitt drawing the point on the curve six more times. He thought about tomorrow. Wednesday. The first of November. Homeroom, and Hanover, here, and the water fountain that only worked with two thumbs, and Mr Abernathy, and moles.

“Can tomorrow be ordinary?” he said. “Just a day. School. The hospital at four. An ordinary day. Can it be that?”

His mother looked at him over her glasses for a long time.

Then she took the pen from Dame M, without asking, and put the sheet against the wall at the foot of the back stairs, and wrote the third line in the space, in her neat upright hand, and signed it, and gave it to Dame M, and Dame M took it, and read it, and went away with it very fast.

He had seen it upside down.

He has asked that tomorrow be an ordinary day, and it will be. Christina.

---

At seven his telephone buzzed. It was Theo.

PAGE, said the message. OFFICIAL. IT SAYS ON THE RADIO.

And then:

Mum cried. Then she said I need a haircut. Tomorrow. Before school. She has already rung the man.

And then:

Night Freddie

And then, a minute later:

Your Majesty

And then, at once, before he could answer:

joke. FREDDIE. condition

He sat on the bottom stair at the foot of the back stairs and laughed until Bridget came out of the kitchen to see what the matter was, and saw, and went back in.