Marcus

The newspapers were on the kitchen table in their pile, the five of them, and every one of them had the forecourt on the front.

Not him. The forecourt. The photographers had kept to the rule about school and to the rule about the hospital, and on the steps of the palace at half past six there had been nobody to photograph but the Clerk of the Council with his red folder, and so every newspaper in the Realm had done the same thing, and printed the crowd. Three thousand faces under the lamps, turned up towards the steps. Candles. A man with a child on his shoulders. A woman with her hand over her mouth. On the front of the Courier somebody had taken it from high up, from a window across the avenue, so that the crowd went all the way back out of the picture, and over the top of it, in the biggest type Frederick had ever seen the Courier use, two words.

GOD SAVE

And underneath, smaller, because there had not been room:

the King

His mother had the Courier folded in half on top of the others, the picture side down. She was reading the Gazette with her coffee, the inside pages, the way she always did, and she did not look up when he came in.

“Good morning,” she said, in Swedish.

“Good morning.”

“Sit. Bridget has made eggs.” She turned a page. “It’s Wednesday.”

“I know.”

“I’m telling you anyway. In case anybody tries to tell you it’s anything else.” She looked at him over the paper for one second, and then back at it. “It’s Wednesday, and you have school, and it’s the first of November, and that’s all it is.”

Bridget put the eggs in front of him. She put her hand on his shoulder for a moment as she did it, which she had never done in the kitchen in front of his mother, and took it away again, and went back to the range, and said nothing at all, not even pet.

The clock above the range said twenty to eight, which meant sixteen minutes to.

He ate the eggs. His mother read the Gazette. The radio was off. Outside the window the sky was white and very clear, the second clear morning running, and the beech at the bottom of the garden had lost almost all its leaves in the night, as if it had been waiting for something.

At ten to eight his mother folded the Gazette, put it on the pile, put the Courier on top of it picture side down again, and stood up.

“I’ll be at the hospital at seven,” she said. “And in my study before that. There’ll be things in my study after school. Dame Margaret will show you.” She picked up her cup. “You may look. You may not touch.”

“What things?”

“You’ll see,” said his mother, and went out, and then put her head back round the door. “Ordinary,” she said. “You asked. I said. It will be.”

---

Theo had had his hair cut.

He was standing by the fire extinguisher with his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up, the way he always stood, and his hair, which had been long enough on Monday to get in his eyes in geometry, had been cut so short at the sides that Frederick could see the shape of his skull, and his ears stood out from his head like the handles of a jug.

Frederick stopped.

“Don’t,” said Theo.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.” Theo looked at the sky. “The man came at seven. To the flat. Mum rang him last night at half past seven, after the radio, and he came at seven this morning with a bag and a sheet and did it in the kitchen, and Mum stood behind him the whole time telling him shorter.” He touched the back of his neck. “He said he’d never cut a Page’s hair before. Mum said nobody had, in this country, so he couldn’t get it wrong. He said that was what worried him.”

“It looks fine.”

“It looks like I’ve been arrested,” said Theo. “Kate laughed so much she had to sit on the stairs. Dad said it’d grow.” He fell in beside Frederick, towards the doors. “Lukas had better be right about the back of the head. Because if anybody’s looking at the back of mine they’re going to see a great deal of it.”

“Who’s Lukas?”

Theo looked at him sideways.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me. You’re the one who looked like that at seven o’clock last night.” He held the door. “You texted me the five weeks at a quarter to nine and nothing else. I thought you’d gone mad.”

Frederick had not known he had texted anything. He thought about the bathroom floor, and the towel, and the telephone on the edge of the basin, and found that he did remember, very faintly, picking it up.

“I’ll tell you later,” he said. “At yours. Tonight.”

“You’d better,” said Theo. “Mum’s doing goulash for the Page. She says it’s an occasion. She’s never done goulash on a Wednesday in her life.”

---

Mr Abernathy opened the roll book.

He took his pen out of the inside pocket of the brown jacket. He did not look up.

“Abrams.”

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

The room was full. It was quieter than usual, not as quiet as Thursday, but quiet in a different way, a careful, listening way, as if everybody in it had agreed with everybody else, the night before, by some means Frederick did not know about, that this morning was going to be ordinary if it killed them. Carmen in the front row had her hands folded on her desk. Somebody at the back had a newspaper in their bag, and he could see the corner of the picture of the forecourt sticking out of it, and the somebody saw him see it and pushed it down.

Diaz. Eckhardt. Feeney. Gallagher. Grant.

“Hanover.”

The same. The same voice, the same speed, the same small pause after it that Mr Abernathy left after every name, to give the person time. He had said it on Thursday, the day after the statement, and on Monday, the day of the message, and on Tuesday, the day of everything, and he was saying it now, the first morning of the reign, and it had not moved by so much as a hair.

“Here,” said Frederick.

“Hartigan.”

“Here,” said Theo, and the girl behind him made a small noise at the back of his neck, and Theo said, without turning round, “Yes, all right, I’ve seen it,” and somebody laughed, and the room let its breath out.

“Ibrahim.”

At the end, when he had closed the roll book, Mr Abernathy looked up over his glasses for the second day running, which was a record.

“The district,” he said, “has asked me to inform you that yesterday was Halloween, and that any confectionery brought onto school premises today is to be consumed outside class time.” He put his glasses away. “Mr Kowalski, you may take the axe off now. It is November.”

Kowalski took the axe off.

---

It happened between first and second period, in the corridor outside the science labs, where the whole of the tenth grade crossed over from one side of the building to the other at five past nine every morning, and where there was never enough room.

Frederick was halfway along it, with Theo, going towards history, in the crush. It was loud, the way it always was, a hundred people talking and lockers banging and somebody’s shoes squeaking on the polished floor, and he was thinking about the subjunctive, which Señora Ruiz had just given back to him with a Bien on it, and about whether Theo’s ears would be a problem at the Opening of Parliament, and he did not see Marcus until Marcus was in front of him.

Marcus stopped. Right in the middle of the corridor. With his trombone case in his left hand.

And then he bowed.

It was not a small bow. It was not a nod, or a dip of the head, or the inch Dame M had given him in the passage. It was a great sweeping theatrical bow, the bow of a man in a play, a courtier in a costume drama, with his right arm flung out to the side and his right leg going back and his whole body folding down from the waist until his head was nearly at the level of his knees, and the trombone case swinging out on the other side for balance, so that two people behind him had to step out of the way.

The corridor stopped.

Not all of it. But the part of it near them, twenty or thirty people, all stopped at once, in the middle of whatever they had been saying, and looked, and then, a second later, laughed. Not unkindly. Not at Frederick, exactly. It was a surprised, delighted, helpless laugh, the laugh of a corridor that has been told to be ordinary for a day and a half and has just watched somebody do the least ordinary thing it could think of, on purpose, with a trombone.

Frederick stood in the middle of it and did not know what to do with his face.

He could feel it. He could feel his face trying to do several things at once and not being able to choose. It wanted to laugh, because it was funny, it was very funny, Marcus bent double in the corridor with his arm out and his trombone case in the air was the funniest thing he had seen in a week. And it wanted to go red, and was going red, from the collar up, like Mrs Pruitt’s. And it wanted to do something else as well, something he had seen his father’s face do on the television, a small grave pleasant expression that acknowledged a thing without accepting it, and he did not know how to do that, and his face was trying anyway, and the three things were all happening at the same time and getting in each other’s way, and Marcus was still bowing, and everybody was looking, and Frederick stood in the corridor outside the science labs with his bag on his shoulder and thought, quite clearly, this is what it is going to be like now, and could not move.

“Marcus,” said Theo.

He said it in an ordinary voice. Not loud. Not cross. The voice you would use to tell somebody their shoelace was undone.

“You’ve dropped something.”

Marcus looked down.

He did it at once, without thinking, the way anybody would. He was already bent double, with his head at the level of his knees, and he looked down at the floor between his feet, and then to the left, and then to the right, and then, still bent double, with his arm still out, round behind him, at the floor of the corridor, searching it, with a small worried frown, for whatever it was he had dropped.

There was nothing there.

The corridor laughed again. It was a different laugh. It was louder and it was at Marcus, all of it, completely, Marcus folded in half in the middle of the tenth grade with his arm out and his trombone in the air looking for something on the floor that was not there, and Marcus heard it, and straightened up, slowly, and looked at Theo, and went extremely red, redder than Frederick, and said, “Hartigan,” in a voice of deep betrayal.

“Sorry,” said Theo. “Thought I saw something.”

And the corridor moved again. Just like that. People started walking. Somebody said Marcus, you idiot, fondly. Somebody else said that was amazing and somebody else said do it again and Marcus said no, and the crush closed back round them, and a locker banged, and the shoes squeaked, and the bell for second period went, and it was over. It had taken perhaps fifteen seconds.

Frederick found that he could move his face again.

“Theo.”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?” said Theo. He was looking straight ahead, down the corridor, towards history. “He’d dropped something. I saw it.”

“What had he dropped?”

Theo thought about it for a few steps.

“His dignity,” he said. “It’s all over the floor. Somebody’s going to slip on it.”

Behind them, a long way back now, they heard Marcus say to somebody, quite loudly, I was being nice, and somebody else say I know, Marcus, and Frederick laughed, properly, all at once, in the corridor, and his face did only that, and nothing else, and it was the easiest thing it had done all morning.

---

He thought about it in history. Mr Ferrante was doing the Reform Act again, the second half, the part where the franchise went up another step and the people on the bottom step got onto the next one, and Frederick took notes and thought about Marcus.

He did not mind that Marcus had bowed. That was the strange thing. He had expected to mind, if anybody did, and he had expected somebody to, sooner or later, and it had been Marcus, and he did not mind at all. Marcus had meant it. That was the thing. Marcus had stood in the middle of the corridor and done the biggest, silliest, most ridiculous bow anybody had ever done at Ellicott High School, and he had meant it, completely, the way he had meant God Save the King in the lost property office, because it was the only thing he knew all of. It had been a present. It had been the wrong present, in the wrong place, wrapped in the wrong paper, and it had been a present all the same, and Frederick had not known how to take it, and Theo had taken it for him, and put it down somewhere safe, and made it a joke, so that nobody would have to remember the present, only the joke.

He wrote that down. Not in his history notes. On the back page, where nobody would look, very small.

Marcus bowed. T. said he’d dropped something. It was the right thing. I couldn’t have.

He looked at it for a while. Then he thought that it was not history and not homework and not anything, and that he did not know what it was, and that he would find out, and he left it.

---

At lunch Marcus sat at the end of the long table by the window, with the three from the football side, and did not look at Frederick at all, very carefully, and ate his sandwich with his trombone case between his feet.

After about five minutes Frederick got up with his tray and walked down to the end of the table and sat down opposite him.

Marcus stopped eating.

“Marcus.”

“I know,” said Marcus. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to be a thing. I meant it to be nice.” He put the sandwich down. “My granddad was in the Navy. He said you always did it properly or not at all. So I did it properly.”

“It was very proper,” said Frederick.

“It was stupid.”

“It was both,” said Frederick. “Both of those are true at once.” He thought. “I didn’t know what to do with my face.”

“I saw,” said Marcus. “That’s why I felt bad.” He looked at his sandwich. “Hartigan’s a menace.”

“I know.”

“I looked for ages. I really thought I’d dropped something.” Marcus picked the sandwich up again. “I’m not going to do it again.”

“You can if you want.”

“I don’t want,” said Marcus, with feeling. “Once was enough. I’ve got the eight bars tomorrow. In band. I’m saving myself.” He took a bite. “You’re not coming, are you? To band?”

“Do you want me to?”

Marcus thought about it with his mouth full.

“No,” he said. “Yes. No. I’d play it wrong.” He swallowed. “Come and stand at the back. By the door. Don’t tell me.”

“All right,” said Frederick.

---

Castellanos was at the car at ten past three, with the door open, the same way.

“Afternoon, sir.”

“Afternoon.”

“Dame Margaret asked whether you’d come by the palace before the hospital, sir,” said Castellanos, when they were moving. “Ten minutes, she said. She said Her Majesty had told you.”

“She said there’d be things in her study.”

“Yes, sir,” said Castellanos, and looked at the road.

---

Dame M was waiting at the side door. She did not say anything this time. She walked him up the back stairs to the first floor of the north wing, to his mother’s study, and opened the door, and stood aside, and he went in.

His mother was not there. The lamp was off. The big dark desk with the green leather top was clear, except for the pen in its stand and a pile of folders squared off at one corner, and the afternoon light was coming in sideways through the window over the garden and lying across the floor.

On the table under the window there were three boxes.

They were red. They were a dark, worn red, like old leather books, the size of a small suitcase each, flat, with brass handles on top and brass locks on the front, and they were lined up side by side on the table in a row, with their handles all facing the same way, as though somebody had measured the gaps between them. On the lid of each, in the middle, in faded gold, there was a crown, and under the crown, in gold capitals that had been gone over so many times by so many hands that some of the letters had nearly worn away, two words.

THE KING

He stood in the doorway and looked at them.

He knew what they were. He had seen them all his life. They had been on his father’s desk in London every summer, in the study with the clock, two or three or four of them, and his father had sat behind them with his reading glasses on and his pen and gone through them every evening, one at a time, and Frederick had been told when he was very small that he must never touch them, ever, not even the handles, and he had not. He had been told that they were the King’s. He had been told that what was in them was for the King to see and nobody else, and that the Prime Ministers of fourteen realms put things in them every day and the King took them out and read them and wrote on them and sent them back, and that this was most of what being King was, most days, more than anything with flags.

He had watched them go back and forth across his father’s desk for fifteen summers. He had never seen inside one.

“They came this morning, sir,” said Dame M, behind him, quietly. “From Charter House, and from London, and from the Regency Office. They are addressed to you.” She paused. “They are the first.”

“Can I open them?”

“No, sir.”

He had known that. He had known it before he asked. He asked anyway, because his father had taught him to ask the question even when you know the answer, so that the answer is said out loud.

“Her Majesty opens them, sir,” said Dame M. “Until May. She will open these tonight, when she comes back from the hospital, at that desk, and do what is in them, in your name, and send them back. That is what the Act provides, and what the terms provide.” She paused again. “And on Tuesday evenings, sir, as I understand it, she will show you what she has done.”

“You understand it?”

“Her Majesty informed me at half past eleven last night, sir,” said Dame M, “that there was to be a new standing arrangement on Tuesday evenings, and that I was to see that nothing was ever put in its way.” Her face did not move. “I have made a note.”

He went across the room to the table. He did not touch them. He stood in front of them, close, with his hands in his pockets, so that his hands could not do anything by themselves, and looked.

The middle one was the oldest. He could see that. The leather on the corners had worn through to something paler underneath, and the brass on the lock had gone brown and smooth, and the gold of the crown on the lid had been rubbed away on one side, the left side, in a long soft patch, as though a great many people had carried it by the handle with their left hands for a very long time and their thumbs had always gone in the same place. He wondered how many Kings it had been addressed to. He wondered whose thumbs.

THE KING. Not His Majesty. Not George. Not anybody’s name at all. Just the two words, in gold, worn. The box did not know who he was. It had not been told. It was addressed to whoever was King, and it had been addressed to whoever was King for longer than anybody could remember, and it would go on being addressed to whoever was King after him, and the gold would go on wearing off on the left-hand side, and it did not mind at all who it was.

He found that he liked that very much. He did not know why.

He stood in front of the three red boxes in his mother’s study for a long time, longer than ten minutes, with his hands in his pockets and the light going sideways across the floor, and Dame M stood in the doorway behind him and did not hurry him and did not say anything, and the clock on his mother’s desk, which was right, ticked.

“Dame Margaret.”

“Sir.”

“Did my father have to wait? For his? When he was King and couldn’t open them yet?”

There was a pause.

“His Majesty, your father, was twenty-five, sir,” said Dame M. “He opened his own on the first evening.” She hesitated. “I am told he found them very dull. He said so, I believe, to his Private Secretary. That they were the dullest thing he had ever been given and the most important.” Another pause. “He said that the dullness was the point, sir.”

Frederick looked at the boxes.

“Both of those,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Nothing,” said Frederick. “It’s something Mamma says.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “I’ll go to the hospital now.”

“Yes, sir.”

He went to the door. At the door he turned round and looked at them once more, the three red boxes in a row on the table under the window, with their handles all facing the same way and the gold worn off the left-hand side, waiting, perfectly patient, for his mother to come home and open them in his name.

Then he went down the back stairs to the car, where Castellanos was waiting with the door open, and it was a quarter to four, and it was Wednesday, and it was the first of November, and that was all it was.