Desk

Nobody on the sixth floor knew what to call him.

Frederick saw it in the first minute. The nurse on the desk, the young one with the plait, looked up when he came past and opened her mouth and he watched her go through it, all of it, in about a second, Your Majesty and sir and Frederick and love, which was what she called everybody, and arrive at nothing, and close her mouth, and smile instead, very hard, and look down. And at the door of his father’s room the physiotherapist, a big cheerful man from Ghana called Mr Asante who came on Wednesdays and made his father squeeze a rubber ball, was coming out with his clipboard, and stopped, and stood aside, and said to the doorway, “He’s had a good session, he’s tired, he’s cross with me, sir,” and then looked as though he did not know whether the sir had been for Frederick or for his father, and decided that it could be for both, and went.

That was what they had settled on, Frederick found. For his father. Nobody on the sixth floor of New Westminster General knew what you called a man who had been King of fourteen realms on Monday and was a Duke since last night and was lying in a bed in a grey cardigan doing exercises with a rubber ball. The nurses had tried Your Royal Highness once, the young one told him later, in the corridor, and his father had looked at her for so long that she had gone and got the sister. So they called him sir. Everybody did. The porters and the cleaners and the physicians and Mr Asante and the woman who brought the tea. Morning, sir. Lift your arm for me, sir. There you are, sir.

His father was in the chair by the window. He looked, Frederick thought, as though he liked it better than anything else he had been called all year.

---

He did his homework first. He always did. He sat on the end of the bed and did the chemistry, moles again, and a page of Spanish, and his father watched the window and the rubber ball lay on the tray table where Mr Asante had left it.

At half past four his father tried to say something.

Frederick saw it start. His father’s eyes came round from the window to the tray table, to the rubber ball, and stayed there, and his mouth moved, and nothing came. He tried again. His right hand lifted off the blanket an inch, towards the tray table, and stopped, and his mouth moved again, a shape Frederick almost knew, the beginning of a word with a hard sound at the front, and then it was gone, and his father’s face changed.

It went dark.

Frederick had never seen it before he came to this room. Not in fifteen years. His father did not get angry. His father was the calmest person in any room he was ever in; it was the thing people said about him first, in the newspapers, in the books, at the Privy Council, at dinner; it was the thing his mother said about him when she was teasing him, your father has never once raised his voice, it is the most infuriating thing about him. He did not get angry with ministers or with Governors-General or with the newspapers, and he did not get angry with Frederick, and he had never in Frederick’s hearing been angry with anything at all.

He was angry with the words.

It came up into his face like weather. His jaw set. His right hand, the one that worked, closed on the blanket, hard, so that the knuckles went white, and his mouth tried the hard sound again, and again, and could not get past it, and he made a noise in his throat that was not a word, a short rough noise like a door being forced, and turned his head away, sharply, to the window, and shut his eyes.

Frederick sat very still on the end of the bed with the Spanish on his knee.

He did not help. He had learned not to help. He did not say the ball? or the tea? or the table? He did not guess. He had guessed once, in the second week after his father woke, and his father had looked at him with such a face that he had never guessed again. He sat and waited and looked at the Spanish and did not see it, and after a while his father’s hand on the blanket opened, slowly, one finger at a time, and lay flat, and his father’s breathing went long again, and his eyes stayed shut.

Frederick waited until it was quite gone.

“Papa,” he said. “I had a letter.”

His father did not open his eyes.

“Last night. From Berlin.” He took it out of his bag. He had brought it in the inside pocket of the bag, in its envelope, with the eagle on the back, wrapped in a clean handkerchief because he had not wanted the envelope to bend. “From Alexander.”

His father’s eyes opened.

They came round from the window, slowly, the way they did, and found the envelope in Frederick’s hand, and stayed on it. Something moved in his face that was not anger.

“He’s never written before,” said Frederick. “Not once. It came in the bag. A man from the Embassy brought it and wouldn’t give it to anybody but Dame Margaret.” He turned the envelope over. “It’s long. Most of it’s for me. But there’s a part that’s for you. I think it’s for you. He doesn’t say so. But I think he wrote it so I’d read it to you.”

His father looked at him.

“Can I read it to you?” said Frederick. “Just that part. The way I read the trains.”

His father shut his eyes. Not the dark way. The other way. The way that meant yes, and go on, and I’m listening, and all three.

---

He found the place. He had found it so many times since last night that the paper had a soft crease at the top of that page where his thumb went.

He read it slowly. He read it the way he read the arrivals at Union Station, every word given its own space, nothing hurried, nothing run together, in the voice he used for the trains, which was not quite his own voice and not quite anybody else’s, a level, careful, even voice, a voice for things that matter and do not need to be made to sound as though they matter.

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

His father’s eyes stayed shut.

“Then he said: ‘You have three capacities. Keep them in three drawers. Never open two at once.’”

Frederick stopped for a moment. Not because he had to. Because it was the place in the trains where you stop, between the stations, so that the person listening can see the platform.

“And I asked him how many drawers he had, and he said, ‘Fourteen. I have had to buy a very large desk.’”

He did not look up. He went on.

“And I laughed for the first time since it happened, in the rain, in the Tiergarten, and I think he had walked me round for an hour so that I would.”

He stopped.

He did not read the next part. The next part was the part about the drawers working, and about February, and about a boy whose father had stopped all at once, and a boy whose father was stopping slowly, and he did not read it, because it was for him and not for his father, and because he could not have read it in the train voice, and he would not read it in any other.

He folded the letter along the crease and held it on his knee.

The room was very quiet. Outside the window the light was going, early, grey and thin over the railway, and somewhere down the corridor a telephone rang and was answered, and a trolley went by on its squeaking wheel.

His father turned his head on the chair back.

It took a long time. It took the long time it always took, and Frederick watched it and did not help, and his father’s head came round from the window and his eyes came round with it and found Frederick, on the end of the bed, with the letter, and stayed on him. It was a long look. It was a look that went all the way to the back of a long room, the way it did now before every word, and fetched something, and brought it back.

“Desk,” said his father.

It came out very clearly. It came out clearer than anything he had said all week, clearer than George, clearer than Where?, the hard sound at the front of it clean and the end of it clean, a whole word, exact, in the dry voice he used for jokes, the voice Frederick had not heard since the twenty-fourth of September down a telephone line from London.

And then his father laughed.

It was not much. It was hardly a laugh at all, if you had not known him. It was a breath, out through the nose, and a movement at the right-hand corner of his mouth, which went up and stayed up, and a movement in his shoulders, under the grey cardigan, once, twice. But Frederick had known him all his life, and he knew it, and it was his father laughing, in the chair by the window on the sixth floor, at a joke he had made in the rain in Berlin in February to a boy of fourteen whose father had just died, and had remembered, and had found the one word of, and had laughed at, again, as if for the first time.

Frederick could not look at him.

He got up off the end of the bed, carefully, with the letter, and said, “I’ll be back,” in a voice that did not work very well, and went out into the corridor, and pulled the door to behind him, and walked along to the window at the end, by the trolley with the blood-pressure machine, and stood at it.

The railway was down there in the dusk. The lights were coming on along the platforms, one at a time, and the rails were shining, and there was nothing on them.

He stood at the window for a while. He did not do anything. He stood with the letter in his hand and his forehead nearly on the glass and looked at the rails.

At the other end of the corridor, by the lifts, Castellanos was standing with his hands behind his back, looking at the ceiling. The King’s officer was there too, the big quiet man, by the stairs. Neither of them looked at Frederick. Neither of them moved. They stood at their two ends of the tea-coloured corridor with their eyes on the ceiling tiles, the only place in a building that nobody is in, and let him stand at the window as long as he needed to, and did not see a thing.

After a while he wiped his face with the back of his hand and went back in.

His father’s eyes were shut. The corner of his mouth was still up.

Frederick sat down on the end of the bed and took out the timetable and opened it at Thursday and read him the trains, all of them, from the six-fourteen from Richmond, slowly, in order, and his father listened, and did not say anything else, and at five the nurse with the plait put her head round the door and said, “That’s time, sir,” and Frederick did not know which of them she meant, and decided it was both.

---

Mrs Hartigan had made goulash for the Page.

She had made it, Theo said on the stairs, in the big pot, the one for Christmas and funerals, and she had been making it since three o’clock, and the whole stairwell smelled of it from the street door up, paprika and onions and something deep and dark underneath, so that the woman on the second floor had come out onto her landing to ask what the occasion was.

“Mum told her,” said Theo. “She said, My son is a Page of Honour to the King and we are having goulash. Just like that. On the landing.” He took the stairs two at a time. “Mrs Okonjo said congratulations and asked if it was a job with a pension.”

“Is it?”

“I asked the lady with the folder. She said it was three days a year and a pair of shoes.” Theo stopped on the third-floor landing, by the window that looked at the depot, where they had stood on Saturday in the yellow light. He did not press the button. “Freddie. You said later. It’s later.”

So Frederick told him.

He told him on the third-floor landing in the dark, in about three minutes, with the depot’s lights coming in through the wired glass. He told him about the tray, and the eagle on the back of the envelope, and the bath, which made Theo laugh, and Haltung, and the five weeks, and Jupiter, and Lukas sitting on the floor of the observatory saying nothing for an hour and then saying the moons have moved. He told him about find one person who can tell. He did not tell him the rest, the part about his mother or the part about the drawers. He told him the part that was about Theo.

“He said, I had Lukas. You have Theo.”

Theo was quiet for a moment, in the dark.

“He said that? The Emperor?”

“He said that.”

“About me?”

“About you.”

Theo thought about it. Then he pressed the button, and the landing went white, and he looked at Frederick in the light, with his new short hair and his ears, and his face was doing something complicated that Frederick had never seen it do.

“Tell Lukas thank you,” said Theo.

“I will.”

“And tell him,” said Theo, starting up the last flight, “that if he’s ever in New Westminster he’s to come to the flat. And he’ll have to eat what’s on the table. Everybody does.” He stopped on the stair above and looked back. “And tell the Emperor I call you Freddie and I’m not going to stop for anybody. Including the Crown. Which is you now. And if he’s got a problem with it he can write to me.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Good,” said Theo, and went up.

---

The kitchen was hot and full of steam and the radio from Milwaukee was playing polkas, which it did on Wednesdays, and Mr Hartigan was at the end of the table with the crossword and Kate was at the other end with her telephone face down and Mrs Hartigan was at the stove with the big pot, and when Frederick came in nobody stood up, and Mrs Hartigan said “Shoes,” without turning round, and he took his shoes off.

“Frederick,” said Mr Hartigan.

“Mr Hartigan.”

“Sit.”

He sat in his place, between Theo’s and the wall, on the chair with the cushion tied on. Mrs Hartigan said grace in German, quickly, and then, before anybody could pick up a fork, she put the spoon down and looked down the table at Theo, and said, in English, with tremendous seriousness, “To the Page.”

“Mum.”

“To the Page,” said Mr Hartigan, and lifted his water glass an inch.

“To the Page,” said Kate, without looking up from her plate, and then did look up, quickly, at Theo, and her mouth went up at one corner exactly the way Frederick’s father’s had.

Frederick lifted his glass.

“To the Page,” he said.

Theo went the colour of the goulash and ate.

---

It was very good goulash. There were dumplings in it, the small ones, and sour cream on the side, and bread to wipe the plate, and Frederick ate two helpings because he was given two, and was offered a third, and said no, and was given a third.

“Lukas,” said Theo, through a dumpling, to his mother. “That’s the Emperor’s friend. He’s a Page as well. In Prussia. He says the shoes they give you are designed by people who sit down.”

Mrs Hartigan put her fork down.

“Who says?”

“Lukas. Through the Emperor. Through Freddie.” Theo swallowed. “He says to wear shoes you can stand in. For the Parliament and the Tomb. Because it’s mostly standing.”

“Lukas,” said Mrs Hartigan, “is a sensible boy. But Lukas is wrong.” She looked at Theo with the look she gave patients who had been reading things on the internet. “The shoes are not the problem. I have stood up for a living for twenty-two years. The shoes are never the problem.” She pointed her fork at him. “The knees are the problem.”

“The knees?”

“You stand still for an hour in a cold place with everybody looking at you, and you lock your knees, because it feels steady. It is not steady. The blood goes down and it doesn’t come back up, and you go white, and then you go over, straight over, like a tree, and they carry you off on a stretcher in front of the King and it’s in the papers in Milwaukee.” She picked up her fork again. “I have seen it at every graduation I have ever been to. Never lock your knees. Keep them soft. Move your toes inside your shoes where nobody can see. You tell Lukas that from me.”

“From you?”

“From a nurse,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Tell him a nurse said it. He’ll listen to a nurse.”

Frederick thought of Alexander, holding the edge of a cushion with two fingers for an hour and twenty minutes, and wondered whether anybody had told him about his knees.

“I’ll tell him,” he said.

“Tell him to come for dinner,” said Mrs Hartigan. “If he’s ever here. He’s welcome. He’ll eat what’s on the table.”

“I’ve told him,” said Theo.

“Good.” Mrs Hartigan looked at Frederick. “And you. More bread.”

---

It was after the plates, while Mrs Hartigan washed and Theo dried and Frederick put away, that he told them about the desk.

He did not mean to. He was putting the big pot back in the cupboard under the sink, where it lived between Christmas and funerals, and he was thinking about his father’s face in the chair by the window, and the corner of his mouth, and he said, without really deciding to, to the cupboard, “My father had a very large desk.”

Mrs Hartigan’s hands stopped in the water.

“In London,” said Frederick. “He said he had to buy it. Because he had fourteen drawers. One for each.” He shut the cupboard. “He said it as a joke. To Alexander. In Berlin. I read it to him today, and he remembered. He said desk.” He stood up. “And he laughed.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. The polka on the radio finished and another one started, exactly the same.

Mrs Hartigan took her hands out of the water and dried them on the towel, slowly, one finger at a time, and looked at him.

“Did he,” she said. It was not a question.

“I’m going to need one,” said Frederick. “Now. Not one day. A desk with fourteen drawers. Fifteen with Sweden.” He tried to make it sound like a joke, and it nearly did. “I don’t know where you get one.”

There was a pause.

At the end of the table Mr Hartigan put his pencil down. He took his glasses off and folded them and put them on the crossword. He had not said anything all evening except Frederick and sit and to the Page, and he did not look up now, at anybody; he looked at the crossword, at the squares, and he said one sentence, in his slow Milwaukee voice, the voice that told stories about goats.

“I know a man out past the depot who does second-hand office furniture, and nobody in this world would ever think of looking for a King’s desk there.”

Then he put his glasses back on and picked up his pencil and went back to the crossword, and that was all he said for the rest of the evening.

Theo, at the sink, made a sound into the tea towel that he turned into a cough.

Kate, at the far end of the table, said, “That’s actually a good idea,” in a voice of total astonishment, and then looked at her father as if she had never seen him before.

Mrs Hartigan went back to the washing up.

“Peter,” she said, to the water, very fondly. And then, to Frederick, “Put the big plates on the top shelf. You know where.”

He knew where.

---

He was home by ten. Castellanos brought him up the side stairs and said goodnight on the landing of the north wing, and the night man came on, and the house went quiet.

He sat down at his desk.

It was not a very large desk. It was the desk he had had since he was nine, a plain wooden one under the window with two drawers, one on each side, and both of them full of school. He looked at it for a while and thought about a man out past the depot, and fourteen drawers, and fifteen, and laughed, quietly, by himself, and then took out two things and put them side by side on the desk under the lamp.

The first was a pad of the palace’s writing paper, the cream paper with the small crown at the top like a cake.

The second was the green exercise book. The one he had written the statement in, a week ago, at the kitchen table. The drafts were at the back, three of them, written from the back towards the middle, crossed out, the way he always used exercise books, so that the front stayed clean for whatever it was going to be for. The front was still clean. He had not known what it was going to be for.

He knew now. Alexander had told him.

Write it yourself. Date it. Keep it.

He opened the green book at the first page and took his own pen, not the palace pen, and sat for a while with the nib over the paper. It was hard to begin. It was much harder than the statement, which had been for everybody, and much harder than a letter, which was for one person. This was for nobody. This was for himself, in May, or in ten years, or never, and he found that he did not know how to write to himself, because he had never done it, and that the first thing he wrote in it would be the first thing, always, and that it mattered.

He thought about the day. He thought about the boxes, and Marcus, and the desk, and the knees. He thought about which of the things he thought he would want, in ten years, to be able to prove he had thought.

And then he wrote it, small, at the top of the first page, in his sloping hand like a fence in a wind.

1 November. The realms were right to do it together and not one at a time. F.

He looked at it.

It was not very interesting. He had thought, sitting down, that the first thing in it would be something grand, something about the Crown or about his father or about what a King was for, and it was not. It was one sentence about the realms, and it was true, and he believed it, and that was all. He hoped, looking at it, that the whole book would be like that. He hoped it would stay not very interesting for a long time.

He closed it, and put it in the left-hand drawer, under the chemistry.

Then he pulled the palace paper towards him and wrote Columbia Palace, New Westminster, and under it Wednesday 1 November, after ten, and under that, Dear Alexander, and stopped, and sat back, and looked at it, and thought about how to thank somebody for a letter that had arrived on a tray by itself and been read in a bath and on a bathroom floor and to a man in a chair by a window who had laughed.

Dame M went past the door. He heard her heels on the boards in the corridor, exact, unhurried, going one way, and a little while later, coming back.

He began to write.