An Ordinary Day

The radio was still on the tray table when he came in at four.

Somebody had turned it off, but nobody had taken it away, a small grey radio with a handle on the top, the hospital’s, and it sat on the tray table beside the jug of water and the box of tissues as though it had been asked to stay. His father was in the chair by the window, in the grey cardigan, with the blanket over his knees, and the light was going already outside, the November light, and the railway below was lit, and the big quiet man was at the end of the corridor, looking at the ceiling.

“Papa.”

His father turned his head. It took a while. His eyes came round to Frederick and stayed, and there was something in them that Frederick had seen once before, on the thirty-first, at four o’clock, when his father had had a word ready in the front pocket and been waiting all afternoon to say it.

Frederick sat on the end of the bed.

“Heard,” said his father.

He looked at the radio. He looked at his father.

“You heard it,” said Frederick. “All of it?”

His father shut his eyes. It was the yes.

“The nurse put it on,” said Frederick. It was not a question, and his father did not answer it. “At half past ten. For the hymns.” He had heard, too, though he did not say so, what the ABC had carried after the hymns and the silence and the poem, which was Los Angeles again, as it had been every hour for nine days, and he thought his father had probably listened to that as well, and to all of it, from this bed, every hour, and had not been able to go. He thought about the crest, about three thousand people singing In Flanders Fields out over the graves and across the river. He had thought, standing in the front row with his mouth shut, that they might hear it on the sixth floor. They had not heard it. They had heard it on a radio with a handle on the top. It was the same thing. “Did you hear the silence?”

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

Frederick understood that it was a joke. That his father, who had lost most of his words, had made a joke about hearing the silence on the radio, with the corner of his mouth, without any words at all, and that it was a good one, and he laughed, on the end of the bed, and his father’s mouth moved further.

---

He told him about it anyway.

He told him about the box on Theo’s knees, with PIZZA OVEN on the side, and the big car with the flag on the wing, and the coat, and the black tie that Mamma had tied twice. He told him about the Regiment on the path with their heads down, and the Book coming up on its board, and Dorothy Calloway, who had been a nurse in Indochina and was eighty-four, and what she had said, all of it, as near as he could remember, this one didn’t have anybody to hold his hand. He told him about the sergeant with the grey moustache and the wreath that was heavier than it looked.

“I looked at the crack,” said Frederick. “The whole way. In the lid. Twenty paces. I didn’t look at anything else.”

His father looked at him.

“I put it where you put it. In 2021. By the bottom step.” He stopped. “I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to. Nobody had to tell me.”

He did not know whether his father understood all of it. He did not know how much of anything went in, now, or where it went. But his father did not shut his eyes while he talked, not once, and when Frederick told him about Theo, about the schools’ wreath, about Theo walking the twenty paces alone with the paper poppies and laying it beside the Crown’s and coming up on seven exactly, his father’s right hand moved on the blanket, and turned over, and lay open, and stayed like that until Frederick had finished.

“He didn’t faint,” said Frederick. “He said he nearly did. When he saw my face. He said I looked like you.”

His father’s hand closed, slowly, on nothing, and opened again.

---

At a quarter to five he took out the timetable.

“Sunday,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

Sunday’s were the thinnest of the week. Half the trains did not run, and the ones that did ran later, and there was no six-fourteen from Richmond, and no six-forty from Baltimore, only an eight o’clock that called at all stations and took its time. He read them all, slowly, the way he always did, and his father listened with his eyes shut, and there were so few of them that for once he got nearly to the end before the hour ran out, past the Sunday Senator, which was never late on Sundays because there was no work on the bridge at weekends, past the afternoon trains, to the evening, to the last one in from Boston at eleven fifty-two, which ran on Sundays too, because somebody always needed to get home.

He shut the timetable.

At five the nurse did not come. It was his mother.

She came in in her coat, the long dark one, with her handbag and a second coat over her arm, a man’s coat, heavy, grey, very old, with a velvet collar, which Frederick had last seen in London, in the hall outside his father’s study, hanging on the peg by the door. Behind her came the physician, the woman who had timed the signature on the thirtieth, with a folder, and behind her a porter with a wheelchair.

“Good evening,” said his mother, to the room, in English. And then, to his father, in Swedish, quite gently: “It’s time. If you still want to.”

His father looked at the coat over her arm.

Frederick looked at his mother.

“Mrs Hartigan telephoned the office on Wednesday,” said his mother, to him, in English, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. “She said that it was Saturday and it would be beef and dumplings, which took all afternoon, and that she was not going to waste it on four people, and that if the Duke could manage four flights he was to come, and if he couldn’t Mr Hartigan would carry him, because Mr Hartigan had carried a wardrobe up those stairs and a Duke would be lighter.” She looked at the physician. “Dr Haskell has said two hours. Back by nine. He’s to sit down on every landing, and he’s to eat what he’s given, which I told her was going to be the case whatever she said.”

“Mamma.”

“Mm.”

“Nobody told me.”

“No,” said his mother. “Mrs Hartigan asked that nobody did. She said you’d had enough things told to you this month to last you, and that you could have one thing that you found out by walking in.” She held out the old coat to his father. “And Theo was told he would be put on a bus to Milwaukee if he said a word, and he hasn’t. I asked him on the crest this morning. He looked at the back of my head.”

---

It took a long time to get his father into the coat.

It took the physician and the porter and his mother, and Frederick held the left sleeve, the arm that did not work, and guided it in, very slowly, and his father did not help and did not hinder, and watched him do it, and when it was done and the coat was on and the velvet collar turned up, his father looked, suddenly, in the chair by the window, so exactly like himself, like the man in the hall in London putting on his coat to go out to dinner, that Frederick had to look away, at the radio, for a moment, until it passed.

The big quiet man walked behind them down the corridor. At the lift he looked at the ceiling of the lift. At the side entrance the car was waiting, the ordinary one, not the one with the flag, and Castellanos was at the door of it.

“Evening, sir,” said Castellanos, to the Duke.

His father looked at him from the wheelchair, for a long moment, under the concrete canopy, in the cold.

“Ray,” said his father.

Castellanos did not move. Then he looked up, briefly, at the underside of the canopy, at a bracket where a lamp had once been, and down again.

“Sir,” he said, and opened the door the same way he always did.

---

Mr Hartigan was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

He was standing in the little hall inside the street door, under the light, in a jacket instead of his shirtsleeves, which Frederick had never seen, with his hands in his pockets, and when they came in he took his hands out of his pockets and did not know what to do with them and put them back.

“Evening,” said Mr Hartigan. And then, to the Duke, plainly, the way he said Frederick, as a statement of fact: “Sir.”

His father looked up at him from the wheelchair. Then at the stairs.

The stairs went up into the dark. They were concrete with a steel edge on every step and a painted rail, and on the first landing, Frederick saw, looking up, there was a chair. A kitchen chair, wooden, with a cushion tied onto it, set against the wall under the window. And above it, on the next landing, he could just see the legs of another.

“Theo’s put one on each landing,” said Mr Hartigan. “He’s been up and down since three. The one on the third is from next door. Mrs Dunleavy’s. She says you can keep it.” He looked at the Duke. “Four flights, sir. Every landing, you sit. No hurry. Nobody’s going anywhere. I carried a wardrobe up here once with your boy and it took forty minutes and the wardrobe complained more than you will.”

His father’s mouth moved at the corner.

They got him up out of the wheelchair, Castellanos on the left and Mr Hartigan on the right, and Frederick behind, and his mother behind Frederick, and the big quiet man behind her, and the porter waited at the bottom with the empty chair, and they began.

Frederick pressed the button for the light. It gave you a minute and a half.

It was not long enough. It was never long enough. They went up the first flight one step at a time, his father lifting his right foot and then bringing the left up after it, slowly, onto the same step, and stopping, and lifting the right again, with Castellanos’s hand under his left elbow and Mr Hartigan’s arm round his back, and nobody said anything at all, and the light went out when they were two steps from the landing, and Frederick pressed it again from where he stood, reaching past them, and it came on, and they went on.

On the first landing his father sat on Theo’s chair.

He sat with his hands on his knees in the old grey coat with the velvet collar and breathed, and looked at the window, which looked out at the street and the lamps and the depot across the road, where the buses slept. Somewhere above them a door opened and somebody looked out and the door closed again, very quietly. There was a smell of somebody frying onions, and of floor polish.

“Good,” said his father, after a while, to nobody, to the stairs.

They went on.

The second flight. The second chair. On the third landing, the one with the window that looked at the depot, where Theo had told him on the stairs about the lady with the folder and the condition, there was Mrs Dunleavy’s chair, a better one than the others, with arms, and an old woman in a cardigan standing in her own doorway beside it with her hands folded, who said nothing at all when they came up and sat the Duke of Cumberland down in her chair, and only nodded, once, to his mother, as one woman to another, and went back inside, and left her door open an inch.

His father sat in the chair on the third landing for a long time, looking out at the depot.

“Papa,” said Frederick. “One more.”

His father looked at him. His face was grey and wet and tired and quite calm, and he looked at Frederick for a moment, on the third landing, under the light that was about to go out, and then he put his right hand on the arm of Mrs Dunleavy’s chair and pushed, and stood, with nobody helping him, for one second, on his own, before Castellanos and Mr Hartigan had him again.

The light went out. Frederick pressed it.

---

Mrs Hartigan opened the door before anybody knocked.

She was standing in the doorway of the flat on the fourth floor with a wooden spoon in her hand and her apron on and the light behind her, and the smell came out past her onto the landing, beef and onions and something dark and sweet, and the heat of the kitchen, and the radio from Milwaukee, very low, with an accordion in it. She looked at the Duke of Cumberland on her landing, grey and wet and upright between a bus driver and a protection officer, in an old coat with a velvet collar. She looked at him the way she looked at patients.

“Good evening, sir,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Shoes.”

There was a pause on the landing.

Then his mother laughed. It came out of her all at once, the short surprised laugh from the kitchen table on the twenty-seventh, and she put her hand over her mouth, and took it away, and bent down without a word and took off her own shoes, one and then the other, and put them on the rack by the door.

Frederick knelt down on the landing and took off his father’s.

They were black, and polished, and had laces, and he undid them one at a time, slowly, the left and then the right, with his father’s hand on his shoulder for balance, heavy, and eased them off, and put them on the rack beside his mother’s, and his own beside them, and stood up, and his father was looking down at him, at the shoes on the rack, and his face was doing something that Frederick did not have a word for and would not find one.

“In you come,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Sit. Theo, the chair with the arms. Kate.”

“Coming,” said Kate, from somewhere, and came.

There were two more people in the kitchen.

They had come at six, in a car from the Embassy that had parked by the depot fence and that nobody on the street had looked at twice, and Mrs Hartigan had opened the door to them with the same wooden spoon and said shoes, and they had taken them off. Now Lukas Brandt was at the end of the counter by the window, with his sleeves rolled up, drying plates with a tea towel that said Greetings from Door County on it, carefully, one at a time, the way you would dry something in a laboratory. And at the sink, with an apron over his black suit and his hands in the water up to the wrists, peeling potatoes into a colander with the small sharp knife from the drawer, stood the German Emperor.

“He asked for a job,” said Mrs Hartigan, to the Regent, to the Duke, to the kitchen, as though it explained everything, which in that kitchen it did. “Anybody who asks for a job in this kitchen gets one.”

Alexander turned round from the sink, with a potato in one hand and the knife in the other, and looked at the Duke of Cumberland, standing in the doorway of a kitchen on the fourth floor of a block of flats in the north-east of New Westminster, in his stockinged feet, in an old grey coat with a velvet collar, between a bus driver and his son.

Alexander put the knife down. He dried his hands on the apron. He did not bow; it was not a room for bowing, and he had been in it an hour and knew that. He crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of his uncle, and looked at him, and said, in English, quietly, the way you would say it in a park in the rain:

“Uncle Ernest.”

His father looked at him for a long time.

Frederick watched it. He watched his father’s eyes go over Alexander’s face, slowly, one clause at a time, from the top, the way he read a document, and find something in it, and stay there, and he watched his father’s right hand come up off Mr Hartigan’s arm, slowly, an inch, two inches, and turn over, palm up, and Alexander looked at the hand, and then put his own in it, the one that had been peeling potatoes, still damp, and his father’s fingers closed on it, all the way, and held on.

Nobody in the kitchen said anything. The radio from Milwaukee played its accordion. Lukas stood at the counter with a plate in one hand and the tea towel in the other and looked at the back of Alexander’s head.

Then his father let go, and Alexander went back to the sink, and picked up the knife, and went on peeling potatoes, and did not turn round for some time.

---

There were nine of them at the table. There were five odd chairs and two more borrowed from next door and two from Mrs Okonjo on the second floor, who had sent them up with Lukas and asked no questions, and the table had been pulled out from the wall so that you could get round it, and it was still too small, and nobody minded. The window over the sink had steamed over completely. The lights of the depot were yellow blurs.

His father sat at the end, in the chair with the arms, which was Mrs Dunleavy’s other one. His mother sat beside him. Mr Hartigan at the other end, with the newspaper folded to the crossword beside his plate and a pencil behind his ear. Kate opposite Frederick, with Alexander beside her, very upright, with his hands in his lap, waiting to be told what to do, and Lukas beside Theo at the corner, on the stool. Theo beside Frederick, in his place, on the other side from the wall, because of the alphabet, or because it was where Theo sat. Mrs Hartigan did not sit. Mrs Hartigan never sat until everybody had something on their plate.

She put it on the plates. Beef, in a dark gravy, falling apart. Dumplings the size of tennis balls. Red cabbage. Potatoes with butter. She put the Duke’s plate in front of him and then, without asking and without any comment at all, took his knife and fork and cut the beef on it into small pieces, quickly, the way you would for anybody whose right hand had to do all the work, and put the fork back in his hand, the right one, handle first, and went on to the next plate.

His mother watched her do it. She did not say anything. She looked at Mrs Hartigan across the table, and Mrs Hartigan looked back, for a second, two mothers, and something went between them that did not need saying in English or in Swedish or in German, and Mrs Hartigan sat down.

“Peter,” she said.

Mr Hartigan put down the crossword.

Mrs Hartigan said grace in German, quickly, the way she always did, as though God was a busy man and wouldn’t mind. Frederick said Amen with everybody else. So did Alexander and Lukas, half a beat late, because they had understood the German better than anybody at the table except Mrs Hartigan and could not believe how fast it went. And at the end of the table, a moment after everybody else, in a voice that was low and rough and perfectly clear, his father said it too.

“Amen.”

Mrs Hartigan picked up her fork.

“Eat,” she said.

---

They ate.

It was very good. It was the best thing Frederick had ever eaten in this kitchen, which was saying a great deal, and he did not eat any of it. He sat with his plate in front of him and his fork in his hand and watched.

He watched his father eat. Slowly, with the fork in his right hand, a piece at a time, all of it, the beef and the potatoes and the cabbage, and the dumpling, which Mrs Hartigan had cut into four. He watched his mother not watch his father eat, which she did very well. He watched Mr Hartigan tell the story about the man with the goat on the bus, which Frederick had heard on the twenty-fourth and which had got longer, and the goat bigger, and his mother laugh at it, properly, and his father’s mouth move at the corner. He watched Kate pass the Duke of Cumberland the red cabbage.

“More?” said Kate.

His father looked at her.

“Mum says nobody refuses the cabbage,” said Kate. “It’s not a rule. It’s just that nobody ever has.”

“Yes,” said his father.

Kate put more cabbage on his plate, plainly, the way she would for anybody, and then looked across the table at Frederick, for a long moment, the way she had looked at him all autumn, as if he were a sum she had been set and had not finished. And then, for the first time since 2027, since the fortnight on the pavement, she smiled at him. It was not a large smile. It was the smile of the girl who had once laughed so hard over a card game that she had to lie on the floor.

“After,” said Kate. “If there’s time. Schafkopf. I’ll let you lose.”

“You never let me lose. I just lose.”

“That’s what I said,” said Kate.

---

“Four down,” said Mr Hartigan, after a while, to nobody, with his pencil. “Four letters.” He read it out. “Where a King keeps his drawers.”

There was a short silence in the kitchen.

Frederick looked at Theo. Theo was looking at the ceiling, at the light, with tremendous innocence, the way Castellanos looked at the ceiling, the way he had looked at it on the twenty-eighth when his father read out Boy at court, or one side of a leaf. Frederick had told Theo about the Tiergarten. Only Theo. On the Wednesday, on the third-floor landing of this building, after he had read it to his father at the hospital and his father had laughed.

“Peter,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“What?” said Mr Hartigan. “It’s in the paper.” He looked at the clue. “Four letters. I’ve got nothing.”

At the end of the table his father put his fork down.

He put it down carefully, on the side of the plate, the way he had put down documents, square, and looked at Mr Hartigan, and his mouth moved, once, without anything, and then did not need to move again.

“Desk,” said the Duke of Cumberland.

And laughed.

It was not much of a laugh. It was low and short and rough and it came out of him the way the words did now, with effort, from a long way down. But it was a laugh, and everybody at the table heard it, and across the table, with a dumpling halfway to his mouth, the German Emperor laughed too, suddenly and helplessly, the way he had laughed once in the rain in the Tiergarten, for the first time since it happened, because he was the only other person at the table who had heard that word said by that man before, in a park in Berlin, with two details walking twenty yards behind like two funerals of their own, and he put the dumpling down and put his hand over his face and could not stop, and his uncle looked at him down the length of the table and his mouth moved at the corner, the right side, the side that worked, and stayed there; and Frederick watched them both, and his mother put her hand over her eyes, and Mrs Hartigan put her hand flat on the table, and Kate looked at her plate, and Theo went on looking at the ceiling, very hard, with his face doing something, and Mr Hartigan, without any expression at all, took the pencil from behind his ear and wrote it in, in capitals, D, E, S, K, very neatly.

“That’s why we have you,” said Mr Hartigan, to the Duke, and went back to his dinner.

---

The clock on the wall above the cooker said a quarter past eight. It was right, because it was a kitchen clock in a flat on the fourth floor and nobody had ever had any reason to keep it slow. At nine the physician’s two hours would be up, and they would take his father down the four flights again, one landing at a time, with Theo’s chairs and Mrs Dunleavy’s, and the light that gave you a minute and a half and was never long enough, and back to the sixth floor and the tea-coloured corridor and the big quiet man looking at the ceiling. And tomorrow was Sunday. And at four Frederick would come, as on every day, and on Monday he would go to school, and Mr Abernathy would say Hanover in the voice, and he would say here, and it would be an ordinary day, and so would the next one, and the one after that, until May, and after May, for a very long time, he supposed, as long as anybody’s.

But it was a quarter past eight on the Eleventh, at a table on the fourth floor, and there were nine of them at it, and the radio from Milwaukee was playing something with an accordion in it, very low, and the window was steamed over so that the whole of the city outside was only yellow blurs, and his father was eating red cabbage, and his mother had taken her hand away from her eyes and was laughing at something Mrs Hartigan had said in German that she had understood, and Kate was dealing a pack of cards under the table onto her knee in preparation and explaining Schafkopf to the German Emperor, who was taking it very seriously, and at the corner Lukas was telling Theo something about a telescope, and Theo was telling Lukas something about Green Bay, and neither of them was listening to the other, and nobody was looking at him at all.

His plate was full. He had not touched it.

Theo, beside him, did not look round. He reached over without a word and took the sour sweets out of his pocket, the bad ones from the corner shop, and put the bag on the table between them, next to Frederick’s plate, and then took it away again, and put it back in his pocket, because it was not the time for the sweets, and they both knew it. Then he looked at Frederick’s plate, and at Frederick, with the face he had in math when he had got to the answer before the teacher and was deciding whether to say.

“Okay, Freddie,” said Theo. “Eat your dinner.”

Frederick looked at his plate.

It was full, this time. Beef and dumplings and red cabbage and potatoes with the butter melting on them, all of it, hot, and Mrs Hartigan’s rule was that anybody eating at her table ate what was on it, and that included the King.

He picked up his fork.

He ate his dinner.