The Empty Table

Dame M came for him at five to two, by the real time, which was nine minutes to by the clock above the range, and he was already standing.

“Sir.”

“I’m ready.”

“I did not doubt it,” said Dame M, and stood aside to let him go first, which she had never done before in a corridor, and he noticed, and did not say so.

The way to the morning room from the kitchen was the back way, up the servants’ stair and along the passage on the garden side, past the flower room and the door to the old billiard room that nobody had played in since anybody could remember, and it was the way he had gone to everything in this house for twelve years, because it was the way that did not go past the portraits. He had the folder in his hand. Inside the folder was the sheet, typed now, on the cream paper with the small crown at the top like a cake, and behind it, because Rosalind Aird had said that a person should always have the words in their own hand as well, in case, the clean copy he had written out himself, folded once.

He did not need either of them. He knew it the way he knew the trains.

Dame M walked a pace behind him and to the left, as she would have walked behind his father, and said nothing, and her low heels made a small exact sound on the boards that he found he was walking in time to.

At the corner by the flower room Rosalind Aird was waiting, in her proper shoes, with her notebook shut against her chest. She did not say anything either. She looked at him, quickly, all over, the way his mother looked at him before church, and then reached out and turned down the back of his collar, which had been up, and stepped back.

“Three of them,” she said. “Grace Ebanks for the ABC, and one for the wire, and one for the papers, for everybody. They’re at the back by the window. They’ve been told there are no questions and they’ve said they don’t have any. The camera’s the pool camera. Everybody gets the same picture.” She paused. “It’s a minute. You’ve timed it. It’s a minute.”

“Fifty-eight seconds.”

“Then it’s fifty-eight seconds,” said Rosalind Aird. “And then you walk out of the same door, and that’s all, and nobody follows you.”

“All right.”

“Frederick.” She had never called him that before. It had always been sir, in the Household way, or nothing. “It’s good. It’s yours. Go and say it.”

---

The morning room was on the garden side, at the end, and it was small for that house, with a long window that went down nearly to the floor and looked out at the lawn and the bare beech at the bottom of it and the wall, and beyond the wall the tops of the buses going along the avenue. Somebody had once used it for writing letters in the mornings, because it got the sun early, and then nobody had, for a long time. There was a carpet the colour of weak tea and a fireplace with nothing in it and a clock on the mantelpiece that was right.

And there was the table.

It stood in the middle of the room on the carpet with nothing on it at all, a plain polished table with a chair pushed in behind it, square, facing the door, so that whoever sat at it would have the window at their back and the light behind them. There was no cloth. There was no glass of water and no microphone and no flag and no photograph and no flowers. Somebody had taken everything off it, carefully, and polished it, and the window was in it, upside down, very faint, with the beech.

He stopped inside the door and looked at it.

He understood, looking at it, that he was not meant to sit at it, or that he was not meant to have to. That it had been put there because a room needed something in it, and then everything had been taken off it, because anything that was on it would have been a thing the newspapers wrote about. A flag would have been a flag. A photograph of his father would have been a photograph of his father. The table had been left empty so that it could not say anything, and he thought, standing in the doorway with the folder, that it was the best thing anybody in the house had done all day, and that he would never find out who.

He did not sit at it.

He walked past it, to the side of it, and stood beside it on the carpet, with his left hand on the edge of it, very lightly, because a hand needed somewhere to go, and the polished wood was cold, and he could feel the edge of it under his fingers, square and exact, and that helped.

The camera was in the corner by the fireplace, on legs, with a man behind it in a grey jumper who did not look at him. The man had grey hair and a kind, square, tired face, and he looked through the camera and not over it, and he had been told not to speak, and he did not speak, and when Frederick looked at him he moved one hand, slightly, away from the side of the camera, palm up, the way a person shows you the way through a door. Then the hand went back.

At the back of the room by the long window there were three people standing in a row, two women and a man, with notebooks and no cameras, and one of them was Grace Ebanks, whom he knew from the television, who had stood outside the hospital every night for a week in September in the rain. She was shorter than she was on the television. She had her notebook open and her pen on it and she was not writing anything. She looked at him once, when he came in, and then looked at the table, the way he had, and then at the floor.

There was a red light on the camera.

He took the sheet out of the folder. He put the folder down on the table, which was the only thing he put on it, and then thought better of it, and picked it up again and held it at his side in his left hand, so that the table was empty again. Then he looked at the sheet, although he did not need to, because his father always held the paper, even when he knew the words, because the paper is the proof that you meant it in advance.

He read.

“My father has asked his Private Secretary to find out, in each of his fourteen realms, what it would require for him to abdicate.”

His voice sounded thin in the small room. It sounded like his own voice in a recording, which he had always hated, higher than it was in his head. He went on, and it got better.

“He has not decided anything. He wants to know before he decides.”

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. It was a small, light clock with a quick tick, quicker than a heart.

“He asked me to tell you, because he cannot tell you himself the way he used to.”

And then he looked up.

He had not planned to. He had planned, in the kitchen, to read every word off the sheet, because that was what the sheet was for, and because if he read every word then he could not get any of them wrong. But at He said to me the sheet was no use to him any more, because the next words were not his, and they were not on the paper in any way that mattered. They were in a room on the sixth floor of New Westminster General, at a quarter past four on a Tuesday, in his father’s voice, which had taken a long time to find them.

He looked up, at the camera, at the dark round glass of it with the red light beside, and past it, because he could not quite look at it, at the corner of the room where the wall met the ceiling.

“He said to me, ‘I cannot speak for them now.’”

Nobody in the room moved. At the back, Grace Ebanks had shut her eyes.

He did not look down again. He did not need to. He said the rest to the corner of the ceiling, and then, because that seemed rude, to the camera, properly, to the glass, which was the whole of the Realm and was also a man in a grey jumper who had been told not to speak.

“My mother is with him at the hospital. We wanted you to hear this from us, and not from anybody else.”

And then the last two words, which had been the hardest to keep, because in the second version he had written Thank you for listening, and in the third version he had taken out for listening, because his father never thanked anybody for listening, he only thanked them.

“Thank you.”

He stood there for a second. It might have been longer. The red light was still on. He did not know whether he was supposed to wait for it to go off, and nobody had told him, and he understood, quite suddenly, that nobody had told him because nobody knew, because nobody had ever done this before in that room or in any other, and that he could do what he liked.

He folded the sheet once along the middle, the way his father folded speeches, and turned, and walked out of the same door.

Nobody followed him.

---

Dame M was in the corridor.

She was standing a little way along it, by the window that looked over the garden, with her hands folded in front of her, the way she stood at the foot of the stairs on the mornings when his father was in residence. She did not move towards him and she did not speak. She looked at him, a long, level, grey look, the look she gave a midshipman who had come back down from the masthead in a gale, and then she inclined her head, very slightly, perhaps an inch, and turned, and walked ahead of him back along the passage the way they had come.

That was all. She did not say well done. She did not say sir. She did not say anything at all, the whole length of the passage and down the servants’ stair and along the stone corridor to the kitchen, and her heels went on the boards and then on the stone in the same small exact way, and he walked behind her for once, and at the kitchen door she stood aside for him, and he went in, and she went away.

He had known her his whole life. He knew what it meant when Dame M said nothing. It meant that anything she said would be less than what she thought, and that she would rather say nothing than say less.

He sat down at the end of the long table where he had written it, and put the folded sheet on the table in front of him, and his hands were shaking, which they had not done in the room, and he put them under his legs and sat on them until they stopped.

Bridget, at the sink, did not turn round.

“There’s tea in the pot, pet,” she said, to the window.

---

Rosalind Aird came down at a quarter past two. She had taken her proper shoes off and was carrying them, and she put them on the dresser next to the cake tin, which nobody ever did, and Bridget looked at the shoes and then at her and said nothing about them.

“They played it,” said Rosalind Aird. “In full. At four minutes past. They didn’t cut anything. Stephen Alcott said they were playing all of it because it was short and because it was yours.” She sat down at the corner of the table, not near him. “And then they read out the physicians’ note and the line about your mother, word for word, and then Stephen Alcott said, the King has asked a question, he has not decided anything, and said he would say it again on the hour, and as often as he needed to.”

“Good,” said Frederick. “He hasn’t.”

“No.”

“Did they say anything else?”

She looked at him for a moment, deciding, he thought, how much of the truth was the truth he had asked for.

“Grace Ebanks said you looked up for the last part. She said she thought you’d given them those six words because they were the whole of the reason, and because they were your father’s.” She looked at her notebook, which was shut. “That’s all. The rest of it was about the Court, and about the Regency Act, and about what happens next, which nobody knows, so they talked about it for a long time.”

He thought about Grace Ebanks at the back of the room with her eyes shut.

“Was it all right?”

“You asked me that this morning.”

“I’m asking again.”

“It was fifty-eight seconds,” said Rosalind Aird, “and I didn’t change a word of it, and nobody will ever be able to say I did. That’s the best thing that can happen to a statement. It’s the best thing that’s happened to one I’ve been near in nine years.” She stood up and took her shoes off the dresser. “I’m going upstairs to answer the telephone. It’s going to ring until about Friday.”

At the door she turned round.

“You didn’t sit at the table,” she said.

“No.”

“I’d bet you a dollar,” said Rosalind Aird, “that they write about that more than anything you said.” And she went, in her socks, carrying her shoes.

---

His telephone buzzed at ten past three. It was Theo, who was not allowed his telephone in school and had evidently been let out.

Abernathy put the radio on in chemistry, said the message. He didnt say anything. Nobody said anything. Then he turned it off and we did moles.

And then, a minute later:

Moles are stupid btw.

And then, a minute after that:

You did good Freddie. Eat something.

He read it several times. Then he looked at Bridget’s back at the sink, and at the soup pot on the range, and got up and got himself a bowl of the soup, the leek and potato, cold now and thick, and ate it standing up at the range, with the telephone in his other hand, and Bridget did not turn round, and did not say pet, and he could tell from her shoulders that she was very pleased.

He wrote back, I ate something, and then, because it was Theo, Moles are not stupid. You are stupid, and put the telephone in his pocket.

---

Castellanos was waiting at the side door at twenty to four with the car, the same as every day, as though it were a day like any other, which Frederick understood was the point.

“Afternoon, sir.”

“Afternoon.”

They went out of the side gate onto the avenue. There were more people than usual on the pavement across from the gate, perhaps thirty, standing in twos and threes in their coats, not doing anything, not holding anything up, only standing and looking at the palace, the way people stood outside a house where somebody was ill. A woman with a pushchair lifted her hand as the car came out, not a wave exactly, only a hand, and then put it down again. Castellanos did not slow and did not speed up.

At the lights on Canal Street he said, without turning round, “Radio, sir?”

Frederick had not had the radio on in the car since September. Castellanos had stopped asking after the first week, and had started again this morning, at the hospital, without saying why.

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Please.”

Castellanos put it on, low. It was the ABC, and it was a woman’s voice, in a corridor somewhere, with other voices behind her and a door banging.

“…the shortest statement I have heard in that House,” the woman was saying. “He stood up at the despatch box and said this, and nothing else.”

And then a man’s voice, recorded, in a big room with a hum in it, a young man’s voice, very level and very careful, as if every word in it had been weighed separately and put down on a table, square to the edge.

“The question is the King’s, and if it is answered it will be answered in fourteen realms together. This ministry will do what the law asks of it, and nothing else.”

That was all. The woman came back and said that he had been pressed twice and had answered twice and sat down, and the man in the studio said something about a ministry that the Prime Minister chaired and did not lead, and Frederick stopped listening.

He knew who it was. He had sat at the same table as Lord Whitlock on the thirtieth of September, at the Privy Council, at the far end, without a voice, taking notes in a school exercise book. Lord Whitlock had been the only other person at the table under thirty, and afterwards had sent him a note, which said that it was the worst seat in the room and the best view, and Frederick had sent back a single line asking whether the Prime Minister had read section 4. He had not had an answer to that. He had not expected one.

The question is the King’s.

“He said it was Papa’s,” he said.

Castellanos looked in the mirror.

“Sir?”

“The question. He said it was Papa’s. Not his. Not the government’s. Not anybody’s.” Frederick looked out of the window at the Canal Street shops going by, a laundrette and a shoe repairer and a place that sold Ethiopian coffee and had a queue. “He could have said anything. He could have said what he thinks. People will want to know what he thinks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he said together.”

Castellanos drove for a block.

“He’s a careful man, sir,” he said. “Lord Whitlock. I was on the detail at Charter House in his first month. He reads the whole of everything. He reads the bits at the bottom.” He turned onto the hospital road. “I would say, sir, if you asked me, that a careful man said exactly what he meant.”

He looked up through the windscreen at the sky over the railway, which was low and white and had a single gull in it, going the other way.

---

His mother was in the chair by the window.

She had been there since half past one. He could tell, because she had taken her shoes off, which she did only when she had been somewhere a long time, and her coat was over the back of the chair and her handbag was on the floor with a book on top of it that she was not reading. She looked up when he came in and did not get up, and held out her hand, and he went and took it, and she held it very hard for a second and let it go.

“We watched,” she said, in Swedish. “The nurse brought the television in on its trolley. We watched it together.” She looked at the bed. “He watched all of it.”

His father was sitting up against the pillows, with the second pillow, and his eyes were open, and he was looking at Frederick. It took him a while to turn his head and it took him a while to look, and when he looked it was the way he used to look at a document, one clause at a time, from the top.

“Papa.”

Frederick sat down on the end of the bed, where he always sat. He did not take his homework out. There was no homework, because he had not been to school, and the bag with his history and his geometry in it was still on the chair in his bedroom at the palace where he had left it at eight o’clock that morning, a hundred years ago.

“I said it,” he said. “At two. In the morning room. I read it off the paper, mostly, the way you do.” He stopped. “And I looked up for yours. For your words. I didn’t read those. I said them.”

His father looked at him.

It was a long look. Frederick had learned, in a week, to wait for his father’s looks, the way you wait for a train you can hear but not see, and not to fill them up with talking, because if you filled them up there was no room left for what came at the end. He waited. His mother, in the chair by the window, did not move at all.

His father’s mouth moved. It moved twice without anything, the way it did now, the word being looked for somewhere and not found, and then looked for again, somewhere else, and Frederick watched it being looked for and did not help, because his father had never once wanted help with a word, and because he knew, the way you know a thing in your hands before your head, which word it was going to be.

“Which?” said his father.

It came out clear. It came out in his old voice, the Sunday voice, the voice that had said down a telephone line from London every week of Frederick’s life, a Bill introduced at Ottawa: which Crown?

His mother put her hand over her mouth.

“Yours,” said Frederick. “I used yours, Papa. I cannot speak for them now. That’s what I said. Those ones. Your ones.”

His father shut his eyes.

It was not tiredness. Frederick did not know the difference yet, not properly; he would know it by Saturday. But he knew, sitting on the end of the bed, that it was not tiredness, and that it meant something, and he decided, as he would decide again and again in that room in the next week, what it meant. It meant good. It meant that will do. It meant you got it right, the Crown that assents, and you are my son, and possibly also now let me rest, and all of those were true at once.

He looked at his mother. She had taken her hand from her mouth and was looking out of the window at the railway with her face quite still and her eyes very bright, and she did not look at him, and he did not need her to.

---

At a quarter to five he took out the timetable.

It was in his coat pocket, where he had put it at the palace before Castellanos came, because he had known, all day, even at two o’clock, even in the morning room with the red light on, that at a quarter to five he would want it. He opened it at Thursday.

“Thursday,” he said. “Tomorrow.” His father’s eyes stayed shut. “Six-fourteen from Richmond. Six-forty from Baltimore, the fast one.”

His mother turned from the window. She had never heard him read the trains. She came at seven, when he left, and he came at four, when she went home to change, and the trains were his and the debates were hers, and neither of them had told the other. He saw her understand it. He saw her understand it all at once, the way he had understood them at this bed the day before: what he did in this room every afternoon at a quarter to five, and why, and for how long, and that he had never once said.

She did not say anything. She sat back down in the chair by the window in her stockinged feet, and folded her hands in her lap, and listened.

“Seven-oh-two from Philadelphia, calling at Wilmington,” Frederick read. “Eight-ten from New York. The Senator.” He looked up. “It’ll be late. It’s late on Thursdays as well, now. They’re still doing the bridge at Havre de Grace.”

His father’s mouth moved, very slightly, at the corner, and was still.

Outside the window, at exactly a quarter to five, the long train from the north came in under the hospital, and his mother watched it go by, and Frederick read on.