The Bag

The Governor-General telephoned at a quarter past seven.

He took it in the small sitting room on the north side, where his father’s calls used to come in, sitting on the arm of the sofa. It lasted four minutes. Afterwards he could remember almost all of it, and would not, he found, have wanted to tell anybody any of it, not because there was anything in it that was secret but because it had been said to him and not to anybody else. She had said three things. The third had been that he was doing very well. He had said thank you. He had said that he would see her on Thursday, in the library, because it was the first Thursday of the month, and she had been quiet for a moment and then said that she thought, on reflection, not this Thursday, and that she would write, and he had understood, and not asked why, and they had said goodnight.

He put the telephone down and sat on the arm of the sofa.

Everybody had told him that today. Mr Obi at the gate. Devon, doing up his shoes. Rosalind Aird, without saying it, by not changing a word. Now the Governor-General. Everybody had told him he was doing very well. Only his mother had not. He sat on the arm of the sofa and thought about that, and found that it was the one he believed.

---

Dame M came at half past seven.

She knocked on the door of his sitting room in the north wing, which she did not usually do, because she did not usually come to his sitting room at all, and when he said come in she came in, and stood just inside the door, and she had a tray.

It was a small silver tray, oval, with a raised edge, the kind that letters came on in the old days, in films. There was one thing on it. It was a long envelope, cream, heavy, with nothing written on the front at all except, in a hand he did not know, very small, in the top left-hand corner, F.

“This came at six, sir,” said Dame M. “During the Council. A gentleman from the German Embassy brought it in a car. He would not give it to the gate, and he would not give it to the duty officer, and he would not give it to me until I had told him my full name and my rank and that I was personally responsible for its delivery into your hand.” She paused. “He looked, sir, as though he had been told that he would be shot if he did otherwise. I gave him tea. He did not drink it.”

“Who’s it from?”

Dame M looked at the envelope. Then she looked at him.

“I did not ask, sir,” she said. “He said only that it was family, and in the bag, and not to be opened by anybody.” She held out the tray. “I kept it back until the Council was over, and until your statement had gone. I thought it best.” She hesitated, which he had never seen her do. “It is the first thing that has come for you all day, sir, that was not for the King.”

He took the envelope off the tray.

It was very thick paper. He turned it over. On the back, across the flap, there was a seal, not wax, an embossed seal pressed into the paper itself, very small and very sharp, and he knew it. He had seen it on Christmas cards, once a year, his whole life. An eagle, with a crown above it.

He looked up. Dame M was still standing by the door with the empty tray.

“Dame Margaret.”

“Sir.”

“Thank you. For keeping it.”

Dame M looked at him for a moment. And then she said, in exactly the voice she used, he knew, on the bridge of a ship, the voice for a junior officer who had done something under fire that would go in the log, crisp and level and very slightly louder than it needed to be:

“You have done very well today, sir.”

And she went.

---

He read it in the bath.

He did not know why. He had meant to read it at his desk. He had sat down at his desk with it, and looked at it, and the eagle, and the F., and found that he did not want to open it at a desk, where he did his homework and his statements and the history of 1840, and so he had run a bath, very hot, the way his father liked them and his mother said was bad for you, and got into it, and sat in it up to his chest with his knees up, and opened the envelope with a wet thumb, carefully, along the top, and taken out the letter, and held it up out of the water with both hands, and read it.

It was his first bath as King. He thought that, getting in, and thought it was the stupidest thought he had ever had, and laughed out loud in the bathroom, alone, with the taps dripping.

Dear Frederick,

He knew at once. He knew from the first two words. Nobody wrote Dear Frederick to him except people who did not know him, and people who did not know him wrote Your Royal Highness, and today would write something else. Dear Frederick was a joke. It was a joke that was eight years old. It was a wedding in Stockholm, and a man in a sash, or a woman in a hat, and a word, diminutive, and a boy beside him in a sailor suit laughing so hard that something had happened, and he had to be taken out.

Alexander.

He had never had a letter from Alexander. Not in his life. Not one. Christmas cards, from the whole family, signed by an aunt. A photograph once, of a telescope, with nothing written on the back. They had met perhaps eight times, at weddings and christenings and one jubilee, and spoken perhaps four times properly, and the last time had been at a wedding two summers ago, when they were thirteen, and Alexander had been the Crown Prince and had stood at the back of the reception with his hands behind him, watching the dancing, and had looked, Frederick had thought, from across the room, like a boy standing very carefully inside a shape somebody had drawn for him.

He read it. He read it once fast, the whole of it, to the end, to the P.S., and then he put it down on the edge of the bath, on the dry part, and sat in the water and looked at the taps for a long time.

Then he picked it up again and read it slowly.

I felt nothing.

I mean that exactly.

Haltung, they said, which is a word we have and you don’t, because the English never needed one, they just stood up straight and assumed God had noticed. It means bearing. It means keeping your shape when something has gone through you.

I was standing in my own shape and there was nobody in it, and nobody could tell the difference.

He read that part three times.

He thought about the morning room on Wednesday. The empty table, and the red light, and his voice going thin in the small room and then getting better, and looking up at He said to me, and Rosalind Aird saying afterwards it’s the best thing that’s happened to a statement I’ve been near in nine years. He thought about the principal’s office, and the plastic chair, and asking and then what four times. He thought about the hall in the math wing with the sun on the floor, and do you want to come back in, and yes, and walking back across the front of the room to the second row. He thought about the Council, and the oath, and gripping the green leather underneath where nobody could see. He thought about everybody, all day, telling him he was doing very well.

And he did not know. That was the thing. He sat in the bath with Alexander’s letter held up out of the water and tried to tell, honestly, from the inside, whether he had been in his own shape all day or whether there had been nobody in it, and he could not. Some of the time, yes. On the stairs at the flat, yes. In the hospital, with his hand in his father’s, yes, all the way. In the hall, with Mrs Pruitt not saying anything, yes. On the landing in the dark with the forecourt saying it back, oh, yes. But in the Council, with twenty-two people waiting for him to sit down? At the side door, with Dame M saying the two words? In the principal’s office, at noon, when the telephones went off down the building like rain?

He did not know. He could not tell which, from the inside, and Alexander had said he would not be able to, and here was a person, eight months younger than he was, four thousand miles away, in a palace he had been inside once, who had known exactly what today would be like before it happened, and had written it down, and sent it in the bag.

Find one person who can. I had Lukas. You have Theo.

He laughed again, in the bath, because it was true, and because Theo would have hated being told it, and because Theo had texted him at seven o’clock Your Majesty and then joke, which was exactly, he thought, what Alexander meant.

---

He read the three things. Your mother. The record. The oath. He read them carefully, the way he read the debates in the library, clause by clause, and he thought that Alexander was right about all three of them, and that the first one was the one that mattered, and that it was the only one he could do anything about tonight.

Ask her in the first week, before she has got into the habit of not showing you, because habits get harder to break than laws, and she will be very tired in the first week and might say yes.

He thought: tonight, then. Not the first week. The first night.

Find your clock.

He did not need a clock. He thought of the clock above the range in the kitchen, four minutes slow, that nobody had ever wound properly, and the clock in the wire cage at school, two minutes fast, and the red hand at the hospital that swept round without ticking. He did not need any of them. He had the trains. He could do every arrival at Union Station from the six-fourteen from Richmond to the last one in from Boston at eleven fifty-two, in order, in his head, with his eyes shut, and nobody could ever see him doing it. Alexander could have his clock. He would have the timetable.

And then he came to the part about his father.

When Papa died, your father came to Berlin for the funeral, and he stayed two days longer than the programme said.

He had not known that. His father had gone to Berlin alone in February, for the funeral, from London, and come back, and said on the Sunday telephone only that it had been very cold, and that Alexander had done very well, and he had not known that his father had stayed.

and on the second of the two days he took me for a walk in the Tiergarten in the rain, with his detail and mine walking twenty yards behind us like two funerals of their own, and he said almost nothing for an hour. Then he said: “You have three capacities. Keep them in three drawers. Never open two at once.” And I asked him how many drawers he had, and he said, “Fourteen. I have had to buy a very large desk.”

The bath had gone cold. He had not noticed. He was sitting in cold water with his knees up, and his hands were shaking, so that the letter shook, and he held it tighter, and it was the paragraph about the desk that did it, not any of the rest, not the five weeks, not the planet, not Haltung; it was his father in the rain in the Tiergarten saying I have had to buy a very large desk, in the dry voice he used for jokes, which Frederick had not heard since the twenty-fourth of September and did not know whether he would ever hear again.

I wanted you to know that he gave it, and that it worked, and that whatever is happening to him now he was, in February, the person who knew exactly what to say to a boy whose father had stopped all at once.

He got out of the bath.

He got out because he was cold, and because he could not stay in it, and he put the letter down very carefully on the closed lid of the laundry basket where it would stay dry, and wrapped himself in the big towel off the rail, and then found that he could not stand up either, and sat down on the bathroom floor with his back against the side of the bath, in the towel, with his knees up, on the cold tiles, and picked the letter up again, and found the place, and read the part about the five weeks a third time.

It lasted about five weeks. It stopped on a Thursday in March, in the observatory, at Potsdam, at about two in the morning, when I was looking at Jupiter, which is not a sad planet, and I started crying and could not stop for an hour.

Five weeks.

It had been five weeks. Tonight. Five weeks since the twenty-fifth of September, the Monday, the library, Dame M at a quarter past six, the Governor-General until ten, Does Mamma know? Five weeks, tonight, almost to the hour. His father’s message had said it. These five weeks.

He sat on the bathroom floor in a towel and did not cry, and then did, not for an hour, not at a planet, but for a while, quietly, with the letter held away from him so that it would not get wet, at nothing at all, at a desk in the rain, and nobody came, and nobody heard, and after a while it stopped, and he wiped his face on the corner of the towel, and read the P.S.

Do not, under any circumstances, sign your reply George. I will not be able to read it with a straight face, and I have to keep a straight face for a living.

He had already signed something tonight. Four lines. Frederick.

He laughed. On the bathroom floor, with his face still wet, in a towel, he laughed until he had to put his head back against the side of the bath, and the laugh went up into the corners of the bathroom ceiling and came back, and it was, he thought, the first time all day that he had been completely certain he was in his own shape, all of it, and that there was somebody in it, and that it was him.