The Rehearsal

Theo practised with a lunch tray.

He did it in the hall outside the cafeteria, between fourth period and lunch, while everybody else was going in. He had got an empty tray from the stack, a brown plastic one with a crack across one corner, and he was holding it out in front of him in both hands, underneath, at the bottom, flat, the way his mother had shown him, like a tray of glasses, and walking with it, very slowly, along the line of the lockers, counting under his breath.

“What are you doing?” said Felix.

“Twenty paces,” said Theo, without stopping. “Seventeen. Eighteen.”

“Twenty paces of what?”

“Nineteen. Twenty.” Theo stopped, and bent his knees very slightly, and held the tray out in front of him at arm’s length, and lowered it, slowly, onto the floor by the fire extinguisher, and stood up again, and stepped back two paces, and stood there looking at it with his hands at his sides and his knees not locked.

Felix looked at the tray on the floor.

“Is that the wreath?”

“It’s a tray,” said Theo. “Obviously. I’m not carrying a wreath round the cafeteria. People would think I was mad.” He picked the tray up again. “Again.”

“You’ve done it nine times,” said Frederick.

“Then this is ten,” said Theo, and went back to the end of the lockers, and turned round, and started again, very slowly, with the tray held out in front of him like a tray of glasses, counting, and a freshman coming out of the cafeteria with a carton of milk stopped dead and stared at him, and Theo said, without looking at her, “Behind the chain. Now,” in a deep voice, and the freshman fled.

Frederick laughed so much he had to lean on the lockers.

---

At the hospital his father was in the chair by the window, which had not happened since the weekend. The physiotherapist had been, the nurse with the plait said, and he had walked from the bed to the chair himself, with the frame, eleven steps, and had been very cross about the frame, and had sat down in the chair at the end of the eleven steps and said a word to the physiotherapist that the nurse was not going to repeat.

“Which word?” said Frederick.

“Not repeating it,” said the nurse, and went pink, and went out.

His father was looking at the window. It was not black yet. The light was going, grey and thin, over the railway, and the lamps along the tracks had come on, and the clouds over Virginia had a yellow edge to them, low down, where the sun had gone.

Frederick sat on the end of the bed and did his French. At half past four he put the French away.

“Papa. It’s Saturday. The Eleventh.”

His father turned his head from the window.

“I’m going to lay the Crown’s wreath,” said Frederick. “At the Tomb. Mamma said. And Dame Margaret. Not the Governor-General, this year. Me. And Theo’s laying the schools’ one, the one I used to do. On his own.” He stopped. “We’re going tonight. To practise. In the dark, after the gates shut. With the regiment.”

His father was looking at him.

“You did it,” said Frederick. “In 2021. The centenary. You laid it.” He had watched it on television, at eight, at the palace, with Dame M, in the small sitting room on the north side, and remembered very little of it except that his father had looked very small on the crest against the white stone and the whole crowd behind him, and that he had walked very slowly, and that afterwards he had not said anything. “What was it like?”

It was a long look. His father went to the back of the long room, and Frederick watched him go, and did not help. His father’s right hand moved on the arm of the chair, a little, as if measuring something, as if it were walking.

“Slow,” said his father.

Frederick waited.

“Slow,” said his father again. And then, with an enormous effort, so that his face went red and his hand gripped the arm of the chair, the second word dragged out of somewhere a long way back: “Slower.”

And then his face did something Frederick had not seen it do since September. It did not go dark. It did not go to the window. It looked at him, his father’s face, from the chair, with the light going behind it, and the corner of the mouth went up, the right side, the side that worked, a quarter of an inch, and stayed there, and Frederick understood that his father had just given him the whole of what he knew about laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in front of the Realm, in two words, and was pleased with them.

“Slow,” said Frederick. “Slower.”

His father shut his eyes.

He read the trains. The window went black halfway through Friday’s afternoon arrivals, and the two of them came up in it, small and yellow, and he read on.

---

The gates of the cemetery shut at dusk. Castellanos drove them through at half past six, Frederick and Theo in the back, through the gate in the wall below the house that the gatekeeper opened for them and shut again behind, and up the long road through the dark, past the white rows going away on both sides into nothing, thousands and thousands of them, faint in the headlights and then gone, like something written on the dark in chalk.

Theo was very quiet.

He had come straight from the flat. Mrs Hartigan had put him in his good coat and given him a flask of tea and a packet of the sour sweets for afterwards, and had said to Castellanos at the bottom of the stairs, in front of Theo, he’s to be back by half past nine and he’s to have eaten something, and Castellanos had said yes, Mrs Hartigan, in the voice he used for Dame M, and Theo had gone red.

“Freddie.”

“What?”

“Are there people in there? In the dark?”

“In the graves?”

“No, idiot. People. Walking about. Visitors.”

“No. The gates are shut. There’s nobody.”

“Except the Watch.”

“Except the Watch,” said Frederick. “They don’t stop. Not at night. Not ever. They go on exactly as in the day, with nobody watching. That’s the point of them.”

Theo looked out at the white rows going by.

“That’s mad,” he said. And then, after a while, in a different voice: “That’s good, though.”

---

The crest was dark.

It was darker than he had ever seen anywhere in the city, darker than the river at twenty past six, because on the river there were the boathouse lights and the launch, and here there was nothing. The amphitheatre stood up behind the Tomb on the east side, a great white curve of marble with nobody in it, faintly grey against the orange of the sky over the river, and below it, at the foot of the few steps up to the plaza, there was a single low lamp, and that was all. It lit the mat. It lit the bottom of the steps, and the edge of the plaza, and the corner of the Tomb, white, plain, with the crack across the lid that nobody had mended. And it lit the sentry.

He was walking.

He was walking the mat in the light of the one lamp, in the red coat and the grey greatcoat over it and the dark blue spiked helmet that the Army had given up in 1914, with the rifle on the shoulder away from the Tomb, and he was walking for nobody. There was nobody on the grass. There was nobody on the steps of the amphitheatre. There was nobody at the chain. There was only the one man, going up the mat, twenty-one paces, very slow, and the turn, and then standing, facing the Tomb, quite still, in the cold, for a long time, and then the rifle changing shoulders, and the turn, and twenty-one paces back.

Frederick stood at the edge of the plaza in the dark and counted.

Twenty-one paces. A turn. Twenty-one seconds, facing the Tomb. He counted the seconds under his breath. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. And on twenty-one, exactly, the rifle moved, and the sentry turned, and walked back. Twenty-one paces.

He had told Alexander, last night, at the bottom of the letter, that he did not know where the clock was at the Tomb, and that he would find one.

He had found it.

---

There were perhaps a dozen of them on the grass behind the chain, in the dark, in greatcoats. Two of the Watch, its captain and its first sergeant, who introduced themselves in the order in which they ran it, the captain first, quickly, and then the first sergeant, slowly, so that Frederick understood at once which of them was in charge. A tall grey woman in a long coat, with very short white hair under a beret, who did not introduce herself at all, and did not need to, because everybody else stood up straighter when she moved: the Colonel of the Regiment, who had walked this mat herself as a sentry in the 1990s, and who did the work. And a short, square, middle-aged man with a moustache and a pace-stick under his arm, who was the Regimental Sergeant-Major of the Regiment of Virginia, and whose name was Hollis, and who had been told off to teach two boys where to walk.

“Your Majesty,” said Sergeant-Major Hollis, and saluted. It was a very good salute. It was, Frederick thought, the first salute anybody had given him that he did not mind, because it was so obviously a thing the Sergeant-Major did with his arm all day, every day, to everybody who was owed it, and it did not mean anything about Frederick at all.

“Sergeant-Major.”

“And you’ll be the Page, sir.”

“Yes,” said Theo. “Sir. I’m Theo.”

“Theo,” said Sergeant-Major Hollis, gravely, as though writing it down. “Right. Theo. You’re going to get this wrong. Everybody gets it wrong the first time. I got it wrong the first time and I’ve been doing it for twenty-six years. So get it wrong now, here, in the dark, with nobody watching but me and the Colonel and the man on the mat, and then on Saturday you’ll get it right.” He looked at Theo’s feet. “Are those your shoes for Saturday?”

“No, sir. They’re my school shoes.”

“Good. Wear the Saturday ones on Friday. All day. Round the house. Wear them to bed if you have to. Never wear new shoes on the day.” He tucked the pace-stick under his arm. “And your knees.”

“Not locked,” said Theo, and Frederick, at the same moment.

The Sergeant-Major looked from one to the other.

“Who told you that?”

“My mum,” said Theo. “She’s a nurse.”

“Your mum,” said Sergeant-Major Hollis, “should be in the Army. Right. Positions.”

---

It went like this. A soldier would carry the Crown’s wreath up from the gate, along the path, through the lines of the regiment, which on Saturday would be standing all the way up the crest, and bring it to the King at the chain, and the King would take it, and carry it the last twenty paces alone, across the grass and up to the foot of the Tomb, and lay it, and step back, and stand, and then come back to the chain. That was all. It would be the first wreath. Then the Prime Minister’s, and the Leader of the Opposition’s, and the services’, and then, later, after the governments, the schools’.

“And the Page walks with you, sir,” said the Sergeant-Major, “from the gate to the chain. Two paces behind and one to the left. Not to the right. Never to the right. The right is where the officer stands. The left is yours, Theo. Two behind, one left. And at the chain you stop, and the King goes on alone, and you stay at the chain, and you don’t move, and you don’t look at anything, until he comes back.” He looked at Theo. “Got it?”

“Two behind. One left.”

“Go on, then.”

They did it. They walked from the edge of the plaza, where the path came up out of the dark, to the chain, Frederick in front with nothing in his hands, because the real wreath would not come until Saturday, and Theo behind.

Theo was on the right.

“Left, Theo,” said the Sergeant-Major, quite gently.

“Sorry.”

They went back and did it again. Theo was on the left, and three paces behind, and then, trying to correct it, one pace behind, so close that he trod on Frederick’s heel, and Frederick stumbled, and Theo said a word in German that Mrs Hartigan would not have liked, and the Colonel, on the grass in the dark, made a small sound that might have been a cough.

“Again,” said the Sergeant-Major.

They did it again. And again. On the fourth time Theo was on the left and two paces behind and one to the side, exactly, and stayed there all the way to the chain, and stopped when Frederick stopped, and stood, and the Sergeant-Major said, “That’s it. That’s it, Theo. Do that on Saturday and nobody will look at you once. That’s the whole job. Nobody looks at the Page.”

“Lukas says look at the back of his head,” said Theo, at the chain, not moving. “So I don’t laugh.”

“Who’s Lukas?”

“Another Page. In Germany.”

The Sergeant-Major considered this.

“Lukas,” he said, “is a sound man. Look at the back of the King’s head, Theo. Look at it the whole way.”

“What about the ears, sir?”

There was a pause on the dark crest.

“The ears,” said Sergeant-Major Hollis, at last, with great seriousness, “are the King’s own business. You leave the ears to him.”

---

Then it was Frederick’s walk.

The first sergeant gave him a wreath to carry. It was not a wreath. It was the frame of one, a ring of dark green wire with nothing on it, about the size of a car tyre, quite light, that the Watch kept for practising, and it had been used so many times that the wire was worn bright where the hands went.

“From the chain to the foot of the Tomb is twenty paces, sir,” said the first sergeant, slowly. She was a small dark woman with a voice like gravel, and she had been on the walk herself; he could see it in how she stood. “You carry it in front of you. Both hands. Underneath. You walk while the sentry is at the far end of his walk, facing the Tomb, so that you never cross him. You’ll have twenty-one seconds. You won’t need them all. At the foot of the steps you stop. You bend your knees, not your back. You lay it against the stone. You stand. You step back two paces. You stand again. You count, inside, and when you’re ready, you turn, and come back. You don’t speak. Nobody does. You don’t salute; you’re not in uniform. You stand. That’s all.”

“How long do I stand?”

“As long as it takes, sir.”

He took the empty wreath.

He stood at the chain with it, in the dark. In front of him, twenty paces off, the sentry was walking, in the light of the one low lamp, away from him, up the mat. Twenty-one paces. The turn. And then the sentry stood, facing the Tomb, with his back almost to Frederick, quite still.

Now.

He went.

He walked very slowly. He did not decide to. He thought of his father in the chair by the window with his hand moving on the arm as if it were walking, and the face going red with the effort, slower, and he walked slower than he had ever walked in his life, so slowly that he could feel each foot come down on the grass, and the cold coming up through his shoes, and the wire of the empty wreath in his hands, worn bright where other hands had gone. Twenty paces. He counted them. He reached the foot of the steps. He bent his knees, not his back, and laid the empty ring against the white stone, and stood, and stepped back, two paces, and stood again.

The Tomb was in front of him. The plain white face. The three lines he could not read in the dark and knew by heart. The crack across the lid. Behind it, the great empty curve of the amphitheatre, grey against the orange. And somewhere to his left, at the far end of the mat, the sentry, standing, facing the Tomb, the same way Frederick was facing it, both of them looking at the same thing in the cold.

He counted. He did not know how long. He was not counting seconds; he was counting nothing, the way you count on a landing in the dark before the light goes off. And then, at the far end of the mat, very quietly, the rifle moved, and the sentry turned, and Frederick heard it, and knew that it was twenty-one, and turned too, and walked back.

At the chain the Sergeant-Major said nothing. The Colonel, on the grass, said nothing. Theo, at the chain, two paces behind and one to the left of where Frederick had been standing, had been looking, he would swear afterwards, at the back of Frederick’s head the whole way, and had said nothing either.

The first sergeant took the empty wreath back from him.

“That was slow, sir,” she said, in her gravel voice. “Good.”

---

Then it was Theo’s.

He was later in the order, after the governments, after the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition and the services, and he would be on his own. There would be nobody behind him two paces to the left. There would be nobody at the chain to come back to. There would be a soldier with the schools’ wreath, the one the art room was making, and Theo would take it from him at the chain and carry it the last twenty paces alone.

“I’ll drop it,” said Theo, at the chain, holding the empty ring.

“You won’t drop it,” said Frederick.

“I’ll drop it, and it’ll roll.”

“It’s a ring of wire,” said the Sergeant-Major. “It won’t roll. It hasn’t got anything to roll on. Off you go, Theo. When the sentry’s at the end.”

Theo stood at the chain with the empty wreath held out in front of him, flat, both hands, underneath, at the bottom, like a tray of glasses. The sentry went up the mat. The turn. The standing.

Theo stepped over the chain.

“Behind the chain,” said the sentry. “Now.”

It came out of the dark from the far end of the mat, from the man in the red coat facing the Tomb, who had not turned his head, who had not moved at all, in a voice that was not loud and did not need to be, flat and cold and absolutely certain, and it went across the crest like a rifle shot, and Theo jumped about a foot in the air and very nearly did drop the wreath, and stepped back over the chain so fast he sat down on the grass.

Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. The sentry, at the far end of the mat, was still facing the Tomb, quite still, as though he had not spoken at all.

Then, very slowly, the Colonel of the Regiment, on the grass in the dark, began to laugh.

She did it almost without sound, with her hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking under the long coat. And then the first sergeant, who had a voice like gravel, made a noise like gravel being poured, and turned away. And then the Sergeant-Major, with his pace-stick, very red in the face, said, “He was early,” and could not say anything else.

Theo, on the grass, with the empty ring of wire in his lap, looked up at Frederick.

“I told you,” he said. “I told you. Behind the chain. Now. I said it to a freshman with a milk carton this morning.”

“You were early,” said Frederick, and sat down on the grass beside him, and laughed until he could not breathe.

---

Theo did it again. He waited for the sentry to reach the end of the walk and turn and stand, and then he went, slowly, with the empty wreath held out like a tray of glasses, twenty paces, and bent his knees and not his back, and laid it against the stone, and stepped back, and stood, with his knees not locked, in his school shoes, in the dark, in front of the Tomb, for as long as it took.

From the chain Frederick could see the back of his head. It was a very short, very round, boiled-egg sort of head, with the ears sticking out on either side, quite a lot, in the light of the one low lamp, and Frederick looked at it the whole time, and did not laugh, not once.

When Theo came back to the chain the Sergeant-Major said, “Good. Again,” and he did it again, and then a third time, and on the third time the first sergeant said nothing, and the Colonel said nothing, and the Sergeant-Major only nodded, once, and tucked the pace-stick under his arm.

---

They went down the steps from the plaza at nine, in the dark, the whole party, towards the cars. At the side of the amphitheatre, at the bottom of a short flight of stone stairs, there was a door, a plain one, painted dark green, with a lamp over it. It was the door of the Watch’s quarters, under the amphitheatre, where the sentries waited for their turn.

Over the door, cut into the white stone, very small, there were two words.

NUMQUAM SOLUS.

Frederick stopped and looked at them.

He had read about them. He had read the whole article, in the library, in September, the week after the loss, when he could not sleep, all of it, the history and the creed and the badge and the orders. He knew what the words meant. He knew they were on the back of the badge and over this door, and that they were never said aloud.

Never alone.

He thought of his father’s message. My son is young, and he will not be alone. And his father crossing out never, in the chair by the window, on the Sunday, because it was not true.

He did not say anything. He stood at the bottom of the stone stairs and looked at the two words over the green door in the lamplight for a while, and Theo stood beside him and looked at them too, and did not ask what they meant, which Frederick thought, afterwards, was because Theo had worked it out.

“Sir,” said Castellanos, quietly, behind them. “Half past nine. Mrs Hartigan.”

“Yes.”

They walked on down towards the cars. Behind them, on the crest, in the light of the one low lamp, the sentry was still walking, twenty-one paces, a turn, twenty-one seconds facing the Tomb, and twenty-one paces back, for nobody, and would go on walking all night, and all of Friday, and through the silence on Saturday, and after, and in the back of the car, going down the long dark road between the white rows, Theo opened the packet of sour sweets and gave him one, and it was horrible, and they both ate them all the way to the gate.