The First Thursday

He finished the letter at a quarter to one in the morning and signed it Frederick, and then sat looking at the signature for a long time, and then added a postscript, and then another, and then put it in an envelope and wrote Alexander on the front, nothing else, and went to bed.

At half past seven he took it down to Dame M.

She was in her office off the stone corridor, at the desk under the ship’s barometer, with a cup of tea and the day’s list, and she stood up when he knocked, the way she always did. He held the envelope out. He did not say anything. She looked at it, and at the one word on the front, and did not ask.

“The gentleman from the Embassy is coming at eight, sir,” said Dame M. “I telephoned last night. I said there would be something to collect, and that it was family, and in the bag, and not to be opened by anybody.” She took the envelope from him, by the corner, the way Rosalind Aird took things. “He asked whether it was urgent. I said that it was the reply to a letter that had been waited for for fifteen years, and that he could decide for himself.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he would come at seven,” said Dame M. “I said eight would do.” She put the envelope on the small silver tray on the corner of her desk, by itself. “I shall give it to him myself, sir. Into his hand. And I shall ask him to tell me his full name and his rank first.”

“Thank you.”

“Sir,” said Dame M, and then, as he turned to go, “Sir. There is another letter. For you. It came by hand from Government House at seven.”

She took it from the drawer of her desk. It was a small envelope, white, with the badge of Government House printed on the flap in blue, and his name on the front in a handwriting he knew.

Not His Majesty. Not The King.

Frederick.

He took it. He did not open it in Dame M’s office. He took it up the back stairs to the kitchen, where Bridget was at the range and his mother had already gone, and sat down at the end of the long table, and opened it there, with the clock above the range saying twenty-three minutes to eight, which meant a quarter to.

It was one card. One side. Five lines, in the same hand, and he read it once and then put it face down on the table and put his hand flat on it, and sat like that for a while.

He would not have been able to say, afterwards, what was in it that mattered. It said that she was sorry about today. It said why, in one sentence, plainly, which was the reason he had understood on the telephone on Tuesday night and not asked about, and it was the right reason. It said that the Charter would keep, and so would the library, and so would the rule. It said one other thing, which he did not tell anybody, then or ever.

And it was signed the way she signed nothing else, in the way that nobody else had ever seen, and that was all.

He turned it over and read it again. Then he put it in his breast pocket, behind the Charter House card that said Twice, and ate his toast.

---

It was the first Thursday of the month.

He had gone to Government House on the first Thursday of every month since he was nine. Six years. He had been driven across the Charter Axis at a quarter past four in the afternoon, after school, before the hospital existed, and taken up a staircase with a red carpet on it to a room on the second floor with books on every wall and a long table under the window, and on the table there had always been an open Charter, the big one, the facsimile, with the pages held down by two brass weights shaped like lions. And for an hour, every first Thursday, he had sat at the table with the Charter open in front of him and asked questions.

That was the rule. He asked. She answered, or said she did not know, or said that she knew and would not tell him because he should work it out, or turned it round and asked him one back. But he asked first. He had asked, at nine, why the Charter was so short. He had asked, at eleven, whether the King could refuse to sign a bill. He had asked, at thirteen, what a republic would do about her office, and she had said it would have to invent one, and that this was an argument both ways. He had asked, in September, why the Realm had a Governor-General at all, and she had said she had been waiting six years for somebody to ask.

And in the library, at that table, with the door shut and nobody else there, she called him Frederick.

Nobody else did, outside the family. Not like that. Teachers said Frederick in the way teachers say names, as a summons. Rosalind Aird had said it once, on Wednesday, in the passage, and it had been like being handed something. But in the library at Government House, every first Thursday for six years, it had simply been his name, said by somebody who was not his mother and not his father and was not paid to say it and did not have to, and who said it the way you would say the name of anybody you were glad to see, and he had not known until this morning, with the card in his breast pocket and the toast going cold, how much he had counted on it.

It would not be today. He understood why. He did not mind the why. He minded the library.

“Pet,” said Bridget, from the range, without turning round. “You’ve been looking at that toast for five minutes. Either eat it or give it back.”

He ate it.

---

At school, for three periods, it was Thursday, and nothing else.

Mr Abernathy called the roll. Hanover. Here. Theo’s ears had not grown back overnight and were still the subject of some discussion at the back of homeroom. Kowalski had come in without the axe and looked, Frederick thought, slightly lost.

In history, Mr Ferrante collected the homework.

He went down the rows with his hand out, the way he always did, and people put their two sides into it, and he did not look at any of them; he squared each one onto the pile without reading it and moved on. What is a proclamation for. When he came to the second row by the window Frederick put his in. It was the one he had written on the end of the bed at the hospital on Monday, in pencil, with the reader open on his knee at page ninety-two. He had copied it out in ink on Tuesday night, after the bath, and had not changed a word, except one. At the end, where he had written it is the difference between a thing being true and a thing being known, he had added, in ink, and on Tuesday I found out that it is also the difference between a thing being true and a thing being felt, which is a third thing, and which I did not have room for in two sides.

He did not know whether that was allowed. It was over the two sides. It was on the back.

Mr Ferrante took it and squared it onto the pile like all the others and moved on to Theo, who put in one side and a drawing of a man in a wig, labelled THE PRIMATE (1840) (PROBABLY).

“Hartigan,” said Mr Ferrante. “This is one side.”

“It’s a very good side,” said Theo.

---

The first phone went at seventeen minutes past eleven.

It was in a bag on the floor in the third row, and it was not a ring, because nobody at Ellicott was stupid enough to leave a ringer on in Mr Ferrante’s room. It was a buzz, the long double buzz that meant an alert and not a message, and the girl whose bag it was went red and put her foot on it, as though that would help.

Mr Ferrante did not turn round from the board. “Whoever that is,” he said, “has until the end of this sentence.”

Then the second one went. Then one at the back. Then three at once, on different sides of the room, the same long double buzz, so that for a moment the whole room seemed to be humming, and Mr Ferrante put the chalk down and turned round.

Nobody looked at their phones. Everybody looked at Mr Ferrante. And then Priya, in the front row, who had hers in her pocket and had felt it go against her leg, took it out, under the desk, and looked at it, and her face changed.

“Sir,” she said. “There’s been an earthquake. In Los Angeles.”

Nobody said anything.

“A big one,” said Priya. She was reading. “It says seven point eight. It says the San Andreas. It says,” and she stopped, and scrolled, and her thumb was not quite steady, “it says buildings are down in, in Pasadena, and San Bernardino, and there’s a freeway, and they don’t know yet. It says they don’t know yet.”

“How big is seven point eight?” said somebody at the back.

“Big,” said Mr Ferrante.

He stood at the front of the room for a moment with chalk on his fingers. Then he said, “All right. Phones out. Everybody. For five minutes. Then we’ll see,” and twenty-six phones came out of twenty-six bags and pockets, and the room went quiet in a new way, the way a room goes quiet when everybody in it is reading the same thing.

Frederick did not have his phone. It was in his bag, switched off, the way it had been switched off every school day since September, because Castellanos had asked him to and because there was nobody, these days, who could tell him anything by text that would not reach him faster another way. He sat in the second row by the window with his hands on the desk and watched Theo’s screen over Theo’s shoulder.

There was a picture of a freeway with a piece missing out of the middle, the two ends hanging. There was a picture of smoke, a great deal of it, brown and grey, going up behind a line of palm trees into a sky that was very blue, because it was a quarter past eight in the morning there and a beautiful day. There was a video somebody had taken in a supermarket, with the shelves coming down, and the sound of people shouting, and Theo turned it off before it finished. There was a map with a red line on it, a long red line, running up from the bottom right towards the top left, through places Frederick knew only as stations: Indio, Banning, San Bernardino, Palmdale. The line was nearly two hundred miles long. He had not known an earthquake could be a line.

At the front, a girl called Lucía Paredes had stood up with her phone held against her ear and was not getting through.

“My grandparents are in Pomona,” she said, to nobody, to Mr Ferrante. “It just rings. It doesn’t even ring. It just doesn’t.”

“Go,” said Mr Ferrante. “Corridor. Take as long as you need.”

She went. The door shut behind her.

And then, one by one, without meaning to, the way you look at the clock when something is late, the class looked at Frederick.

Not all of them. Not for long. Most of them looked away again at once, because of Tuesday, because of Mrs Pruitt and the twenty-six people looking at their books on purpose. But he felt it go round the room, the small turn of heads, and he understood what it was, and it was not curiosity. It was the thing you do when the news is very bad and there is a person in the room whose job it is. They were not looking at Frederick Hanover. They were looking, for half a second, without wanting to, at the King, to see whether he knew more than they did.

He did not. That was the thing. He sat in the second row by the window with no phone and no note and nobody at the door, and he knew exactly what twenty-five people in a history class knew, because they had told him, and for the first time since Tuesday at two o’clock the Realm had happened to him the way it happened to everybody else: on somebody else’s screen, out loud, in a classroom, from a girl in the front row whose thumb was not quite steady.

He thought: Mamma knows. Mamma knew before Priya’s phone went. He thought: somebody is telling her now, in the morning room, standing up. He thought: Pomona. Pomona is the fourth stop out of Union Station on the line to San Bernardino, and then he was ashamed of himself for thinking it, and then he was not, because it was where Lucía’s grandparents were, and it was a real place, with a real platform, and he could see it.

Theo, beside him, had put his phone face down on the desk.

“You okay?” said Theo, very quietly.

“Yes.”

“You want to go out?”

“No,” said Frederick. “No. I want to stay.”

At twenty-five past eleven there was a knock, and the door opened, and it was not Lucía. It was Castellanos, which had never happened before, in history, in the middle of a period. He did not come in. He stood in the doorway in his grey suit and looked at Mr Ferrante, and Mr Ferrante nodded, and Castellanos looked at Frederick and said, “Sir. A moment,” and Frederick got up and went out into the corridor, and Lucía was at the far end of it by the window with her phone against her ear and her other hand over her other ear, not getting through.

“Her Majesty has asked me to tell you,” said Castellanos, low, “that she has the Prime Minister on the line and the Governor of California after him, and that the Governor is at Government House in Los Angeles and is safe. Her Majesty asks you to stay at school, sir, unless you would rather not. She will tell you everything herself at the palace this evening. She said you would want to know first that she knew.” He paused. “She said to say: the same as Tuesday. Stay in the room.”

Frederick looked down the corridor at Lucía.

“Can you find out about Pomona?” he said. “Not for me. For her. Her grandparents. Paredes. Is there anybody who can find out?”

Castellanos looked at him for a moment. Then he looked down the corridor at the girl by the window.

“I can ask, sir,” he said. “I can’t promise.”

“Ask,” said Frederick, and went back in, and sat down in the second row, and Mr Ferrante said, “Phones away, please. Thank you,” and picked up the chalk, and went on with 1840, because there were twenty minutes of the period left and he could not think of anything better to do with them, and neither, Frederick found, could anybody else.

---

Band was at lunch on Thursdays, in the music room at the end of the corridor past the gym, the one with the piano that somebody was always playing wrong.

Frederick and Theo went at twenty past twelve, with their sandwiches, and stood at the back by the door, where Marcus had said. The door had a small window in it, and they could see through it before they went in: twenty or thirty people on plastic chairs in a half circle, with music stands, and instruments, and the music teacher at the front, a small woman with grey hair in a bun and a baton, waiting for everybody to stop talking.

They went in very quietly and stood against the wall by the door.

Marcus was in the second row, on the left, with the other trombones. There were three of them. He had his trombone on his knee and his music on the stand and he was staring at the music as though it might change if he looked away. He did not see them. Frederick was certain he did not see them. He was the only person in the room who did not look round when the door opened.

“We are going to play it anyway,” said the music teacher, before they began, to the whole half circle, and Frederick understood that she was talking about Los Angeles, and that she had been deciding it all through the last period. “Because it is Thursday, and because there is a concert on the Eleventh, and because I do not know what else to do. If anybody needs to leave, leave. Nobody needs to ask.” Nobody left. “From the top,” said the music teacher. “And Marcus. Breathe.”

They played. It was a march, the kind of march that is played at graduations and on the Eleventh and at the opening of things, with a lot of brass in it and a drum underneath, and the band played it not very well and not very badly, the way school bands play marches, the trumpets slightly ahead and the clarinets slightly behind and the drum holding the whole thing together by force. Frederick did not know it. Theo, beside him, was nodding along with the drum.

About two minutes in, everybody stopped.

Not stopped playing. Stopped playing loudly. The trumpets put their trumpets down on their knees and the clarinets went very quiet and the drum went down to almost nothing, a soft tap at the edge of the skin, and in the middle of the quiet the music teacher pointed her baton at the second row, on the left, and Marcus stood up.

He stood up with the trombone. He had not been told to stand up. Frederick could see from the music teacher’s face that he had not been told to stand up, and that she had decided, in about half a second, to let him.

And he played his eight bars.

They were slow. They were a slow tune, a sad tune, the melody of the march taken down and slowed and played on one instrument alone, so that it was not a march any more but something else, something you might play at the end of a day, and Marcus played it all the way through, eight bars, with his eyes shut and his cheeks going in and out and the slide going smoothly out and back, and he did not crack a single note. Not one. The last note he held for a long time, longer than it was written, Frederick thought, because the music teacher’s baton was still in the air and she was not bringing it down, and it went on, low and round and steady, a trombone in a school music room at lunchtime on a Thursday, and it was the most beautiful thing Frederick had heard all week, and then it stopped.

The music teacher brought the baton down, and the whole band came back in, loud, all at once, trumpets and drum, and Marcus sat down very fast and went red to the ears and stared at his music.

Theo, beside Frederick, had stopped nodding.

They did not stay for the end. They went out very quietly, the way they had come in, and closed the door, and stood in the corridor outside, by the trophy case, and neither of them said anything for a while.

“He didn’t see us,” said Theo.

“No.”

“Good.” Theo looked at the door. “He’d have played it wrong.”

“He’d have bowed,” said Frederick.

Theo laughed, once, and then stopped, and they ate their sandwiches walking back to the cafeteria, and at the long table by the window when Marcus came in ten minutes later with his trombone case and sat down at the end, nobody said a word about it, and Felix pushed the salt towards him without being asked.

---

At the end of seventh period a girl from the front office came to the door of Spanish with a note.

She was a senior, one of the ones who worked in the office during their free periods, and she gave the note to Señora Ruiz, who read it and looked up at the second row by the window and said, “Frederick. La directora.”

He went.

Castellanos was not outside Dr Brooks’s door this time. Castellanos was in the small office by the custodian’s room, where he always was at this time of the afternoon, with his kettle, and Frederick walked down the corridor past the trophy case and the photograph of Mr Abernathy in 1998 and the paper pumpkins in the window of the front office, which somebody had finally taken down and replaced with paper leaves, and knocked.

“Come in.”

Dr Brooks was at her desk. She did not get up. She pointed at the green chair.

He sat in it. He had never sat in it. He had sat on the plastic chair by the wall, twice, on the twenty-eighth of September and on Monday, opposite his mother, who had sat in it. It was lower than it looked, and the springs had gone, and it tipped you back very slightly, so that you were looking up at the person behind the desk, and he thought that was probably on purpose and probably very old.

“Thank you for coming,” said Dr Brooks. “This won’t take long, and you can say no.”

“All right.”

“There’s an assembly tomorrow,” said Dr Brooks. “Before first period. In the gym. The whole school. It’s been on the calendar since September, as it happens. It was going to be about the Fall Formal and the new rules for the parking lot.” She almost smiled. “I’ve decided that it’s going to be about something else.”

He waited.

“I’m going to say a few things,” said Dr Brooks. “About Los Angeles, first. There are at least nine students in this school with family out there that I know of, and one of them is still waiting, and I’m going to say something about that, although I don’t know yet what. And then about Tuesday. About how proud I am of this school. About how every single person in this building stayed in their classroom when I asked them to, and nobody stood up when they weren’t asked to, and nobody has sold anything to a newspaper, although three people have been offered money that I know of and I’m sure there are more.” She looked at him over the desk. “I’m going to thank them. And then I’m going to ask you whether you’d like to say a few words to them yourself.”

He sat in the green chair.

“You don’t have to,” said Dr Brooks. “I want to be very clear about that. Nobody will think less of you if you don’t. Nobody will know I asked. I’ll thank them, and that’ll be the end of it, and we’ll go to first period.” She folded her hands on the desk. “But I thought you might want to. I thought you might want to say something to them yourself, once, all of them together, so that you don’t have to say it to them one at a time for the next two and a half years. And I thought I should ask, rather than decide.”

He thought about it.

He thought about the corridor outside the science labs, and Marcus folded in half, and his own face not knowing what to do. He thought about the hall in the math wing, and twenty-six people looking at their books on purpose. He thought about Mr Obi at the gate, and Devon doing up his shoes, and the bread roll going round the curve at lunch on Tuesday, and Priya saying it’s not the law, it’s manners. He thought about eleven hundred people in the gym, and himself standing up in front of them, and his voice going thin the way it had in the morning room.

“How long?” he said.

“As long as you like. A minute. Five. Thirty seconds.” Dr Brooks almost smiled again. “The record for a student speaking at an assembly in this school is forty minutes. It was a boy called Reuben Clay, in 2009, on the subject of the cafeteria. Nobody has wanted to break it.”

“Do I have to wear anything?”

“You have to wear what you wore today,” said Dr Brooks. “That’s rather the point.”

He nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

Dr Brooks looked at him for a moment. She did not say good, or are you sure, or thank you. She nodded, once, the way Mrs Pruitt had nodded in the hall.

“I’ll call you up by your name,” she said. “Frederick Hanover. The way I’d call anybody up for anything. And you’ll come up, and say what you want, and go back to your seat. And then we’ll all go to first period.” She stood up, which meant it was over. “Eight o’clock. In the gym. Sit with your homeroom. Mr Abernathy will be at the end of your row. He has asked to be.”

“He asked?”

“He came to see me at seven this morning,” said Dr Brooks, “before I’d decided anything, and said that if I was going to do what he thought I was going to do, he would like to sit at the end of the row.” She opened the door. “He has never asked me for anything in eleven years. I said yes.”

---

At four he was at the hospital, on the end of the bed, with the Spanish.

His father was tired again. Mr Asante had not come, because it was not Wednesday, but somebody had, because the rubber ball was on the floor under the tray table and the blanket was rumpled at the knees, and his father was lying back against the two pillows with his eyes half shut, watching the television on its bracket in the corner, with the sound off.

It was Los Angeles. It had been Los Angeles all day, the nurse with the plait said; he had asked for it, by pointing, at twenty past eleven, before anybody on the floor knew why, because the bulletin had broken into the morning programme and he had seen the word on the strip along the bottom of the screen. The helicopters were up now. There was the freeway with the piece missing. There was a hospital car park in San Bernardino full of beds, out of doors, in the sun, with people in green moving between them. There was the fire, still going, in the east of the city.

His father had been a King for fifty-six years, and had been to all of them. Frederick knew that without anybody telling him. The floods, and the fires, and the hurricanes. He had gone to every one of them, in the first week, and walked about in the mud in the wrong shoes, and been photographed listening, and come home and not talked about it. And now he was lying against two pillows on the sixth floor with the rubber ball on the floor, watching it with the sound off, and could not go, and could not say so.

Frederick sat on the end of the bed.

“Mamma’s doing it,” he said. “She had the Prime Minister on the line by half past eleven. The Governor’s all right. She’s at Government House.” He looked at the screen. “I’ve got to write something tonight. A message. From me. Mamma says it should be from me and not from her, because it’s my name on it now, and she’s right.” He looked at his hands. “I don’t know what to put. There isn’t anything you can put.”

His father looked at him, and then at the screen, and then at him again, for a long time. His mouth moved, once. Nothing came. He shut his eyes.

Frederick picked up the Spanish.

At half past four Frederick put the Spanish down.

“Papa. I’ve got to speak tomorrow. At school.”

His father’s eyes came round.

“There’s an assembly,” said Frederick. “The whole school, in the gym. Eleven hundred. Dr Brooks asked me this afternoon if I wanted to say something. She said I could say no.” He looked at his hands. “I said yes. I don’t know what I’m going to say yet. I’m going to write it tonight. In the book. After Lord Whitlock.”

His father looked at him for a long time.

It was the long look, the one that went to the back of the room and fetched. Frederick waited. He watched his father’s mouth move, once, and nothing come, and move again, and he thought, it’s going to be Good, because it was nearly always Good now; Good was the word that came most easily, the one in the front pocket, the one his father put the whole of every long sentence into.

It was not Good.

“Short,” said his father.

Frederick stared at him.

And then he laughed. He could not help it. He laughed out loud on the end of the bed on the sixth floor, so that the nurse with the plait looked round the door and went away again, because it was exactly what his mother had said to him on the twenty-eighth of September about his first statement, make it shorter, and he had already made it shorter, and she had laughed. And it was what his father had said, every single time, every speech, every toast, every Christmas broadcast for fifty-six years, to everybody who had ever written anything for him to say. Short. It was the only rule of speeches his father had ever had. Frederick had heard him say it to Private Secretaries down the telephone. Shorter. Then shorter than that.

“I know,” said Frederick. “I know. Short.”

The right-hand corner of his father’s mouth went up.

“Mamma will say it too,” said Frederick. “She’ll say it’s already short. She always says that.” He picked up the Spanish again. “I’ll make it short. I promise. Shorter than the statement. Shorter than Thank you for listening.”

His father shut his eyes.

At a quarter to five Frederick read him Friday’s trains, all of them, from Richmond, and his father listened with his eyes shut and the corner of his mouth still up, and at five the nurse came, and Frederick went down in the lift with Castellanos, and it was dark already, at five, on the second of November, and in an hour and a half the Prime Minister was coming to Columbia Palace for the first audience of the reign, which had been going to be about nothing very much and was now going to be about Los Angeles, and Frederick sat in the back of the car with his hand flat on his breast pocket, on a card that said Twice and a card that said a thing he would never tell anybody, and thought about the word short, for the assembly, and for the other thing he had to write tonight, which was harder, and found that it was the best advice he had been given all week, for both of them, and that it had come from the person who could least afford to give it.