Four O'Clock on a Sunday

The clocks had gone back in London in the night, and nobody in New Westminster had touched a clock, and it made a difference to nothing at all except that when Frederick came down to breakfast his mother was sitting at the end of the long table with her telephone in her hand, looking at it, and said without looking up, “It’s four hours now. Not five.”

“London?”

“Since two o’clock this morning. Theirs.” She put the telephone face down beside her plate. “Until next Sunday, when we go back too, and then it’s five again. One week in the year when we’re four hours apart.” She drank her coffee. “Your father always said it was the week the Atlantic got narrower.”

He sat down. Bridget put a plate in front of him, an egg and toast, and he ate it, and did the sum without meaning to, the way he did it every Sunday, because every Sunday of his life until five weeks ago had had a quarter to four in it and then four o’clock, and the telephone in the small sitting room on the north side ringing exactly on the hour, never a minute early, never a minute late, because his father in London had sat down at his desk at five to nine with the clock in front of him and waited.

Four o’clock here. Eight o’clock there, today.

He would have been sitting down at five to eight.

“Church,” said his mother. “Eat your egg.”

---

They went to the cathedral, because they went every Sunday that they were in New Westminster, and because nothing had been changed that did not have to be. They went in the car to the side door on the north transept, where the verger met them and nobody else did, and they sat in the stall on the south side of the choir that had been his since he was confirmed, which had a small brass plate on the front of it with nothing engraved on it at all.

Nobody photographed them. That was the rule, and it held, here, at church, on a Sunday. There were people in the nave, more than usual, the way there had been more than usual every Sunday since September, and some of them turned their heads when he came in and then turned them back, carefully, the way you would in somebody else’s house.

He had always liked the cathedral best for the part of the service nobody else noticed, which was the prayers, because the prayers for the King were the only place in the whole week where anybody said his father’s name out loud in a voice that was not worried. The words had not changed since 1840. The Dean said them every Sunday in exactly the same tone he used for the weather and the harvest and the sick of the parish, and Frederick had sat in this stall every Sunday since he was confirmed and listened to his father’s name go up into the vaulting with all the rest of them, and come back down, and settle, and be ordinary.

The Dean said them today.

“For Ernest our King,” said the Dean, from the stall opposite, in his weather voice, “that he may be restored in body and in mind, and may know himself held in the prayers of all his peoples.”

And then, after a breath, the same voice.

“For Christina the Queen, who is Regent; and for Frederick, Prince of Columbia.”

“Lord, hear our prayer,” said the cathedral.

He had heard his own name in the prayers every Sunday of his life. He had never once listened to it. He listened to it now, and it went up into the vaulting with his father’s and his mother’s, the three of them in a row, and came back down, and settled, and did not mean anything more than it had meant last week, and he found that he was holding the edge of the stall with both hands, and let go.

Beside him, his mother did not look at him. She put her gloved hand on the pew between them, flat, and left it there until the end of the hymn, and then took it back to hold the book.

---

At a quarter to four Castellanos drove him to the hospital, the same as every day, and it was Sunday, and it was raining a little, a thin rain that did not quite come down, and the streets were nearly empty, and the radio was off.

“Mr Castellanos.”

“Sir.”

“What time is it in London?”

Castellanos looked at the clock on the dashboard, which was the only clock Frederick knew that was always right.

“A quarter to eight, sir. Since this morning.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “I just wanted somebody to say it.”

Castellanos drove for a while.

“Sundays,” he said, eventually, to the windscreen, not as a question.

“Yes.”

“My father used to ring from Nogales,” said Castellanos. “When I was a boy. He drove a truck. He rang from a payphone outside the same diner every Sunday at six, my mother’s time, and he talked to her for four minutes and to me for one minute, because it was a dollar a minute and he had five dollars, every week, in quarters.” He turned onto the hospital road. “I don’t remember a single thing he said. Not one. Thirty years, and I can’t tell you a word of it. I remember the quarters going in. You could hear them drop.”

Frederick looked out of the window.

“I remember all of mine,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Castellanos. “I’d expect you would.” He pulled in at the side entrance, under the concrete canopy, and put the handbrake on, and did not get out at once. “That’s the difference, maybe, sir. Mine was only ringing up. Yours was teaching you something.”

---

His father was in the chair by the window again, with the blanket over his knees and the grey cardigan from the study, and the rain was on the glass behind him, and the railway below was dark and wet and empty, because it was Sunday, and the Sunday trains were thin.

There was nobody else in the room. His mother came at seven. The nurse had been and gone, and had left a cup of tea on the tray table that his father had not drunk, with a straw in it, which his father hated and would have said so, a month ago, in four exact sentences.

Frederick sat on the end of the bed. He had his chemistry in his bag and did not take it out.

The clock on the wall above the door said four minutes to four. It was a hospital clock, white, with a red second hand that did not tick but swept, round and round without stopping, and he watched it sweep up past the fifty and the fifty-five and come round to the top.

Four o’clock.

Nothing rang. Nothing was ever going to ring at four o’clock on a Sunday again, not like that, not from London, not from a desk with a clock on it and a man sitting at it who had been waiting since five to. He had known that for five weeks. He had known it before he knew anything else, before the wreckage, before the boat, on the first evening, at the palace, when Dame M had come to find him at a quarter past six and told him, and he had thought, absurdly, the first thing he had thought, before anything sensible, on Sunday he won’t ring.

His father was looking at him.

Frederick did not know how long he had been looking. His father’s eyes had come round from the window, slowly, the way they did now, and found him, and stayed, and there was something in the look that Frederick had not seen in it since September, a kind of waiting, a kind of attention, as though his father too had been watching the red hand come round to the top, and knew what it was, and what hour.

“Papa,” said Frederick. “It’s four.”

His father’s eyes did not move.

He had not planned it. He had thought about it, every Sunday for five weeks, in the car, at a quarter to four, and decided every time that he would not, because it would be cruel, because his father could not find the words for tea or window or Christina some days, and it would be cruel to ask him for the name of a Crown and watch him not find it. He had decided that four Sundays running. He had decided it again this morning, in the cathedral, with his name going up into the vaulting.

He did it anyway.

“A Bill,” said Frederick. His voice did something in the middle and he waited for it to stop and went on. “A Bill introduced at Ottawa. In the House of Commons there. It passes both Houses.” He swallowed. “Which Crown?”

It was the question from the last call. The twenty-fourth of September. His father had asked it at four o’clock exactly, from the desk in London, at nine o’clock at night there, the night before he flew to Ottawa, and Frederick had said New Albion, because it was easy, because it was the easiest one there was, and his father had said Good, and then they had talked about the second eight, and the Head of the Potomac, and whether Frederick’s jumper with the hole in it was the green one or the grey one, and his father had said that he would see him in November, and rung off. Frederick had never told anybody about that call. Not his mother. Not Theo. Not the Governor-General. It was the one thing he had that was only his.

He had asked it the wrong way round. That was the game: his father asked, and he answered, and then he set his father one back, a hard one, a made-up one, a Bill introduced at Hanover about a ship registered at Manila carrying something to Rouen, and his father would think about it, down the telephone, and get it right, nearly always. Today Frederick had asked the easy one. His father’s one. The wrong way round.

His father looked at him.

It was a long look. It was longer than any of them had been, longer than Which? on Wednesday, longer than Thank him. The red hand went round once and then again. Outside a car went by on the hospital road with its tyres hissing in the wet. Frederick sat on the end of the bed with his hands between his knees and did not move and did not help and did not fill it up, because if he filled it up there would be no room left at the end.

His father’s mouth moved.

It moved and found nothing, and moved again, and Frederick watched the word being looked for, the way you watch somebody look for their keys in a coat with a great many pockets, patient, one pocket at a time.

“New Albion,” said his father.

It came out slowly, one word and then the other, with a space between them, New, and then Albion, but it was clear, and it was right, and it was in the Sunday voice.

Frederick sat very still.

He was supposed to say something now. He knew what. He had heard it said to him, every Sunday of his life, at the end of the first question, before the hard one; it was what came next, it was the whole of the grammar of the thing, it was what you said when somebody had got the Crown right.

“Good,” said Frederick.

His father shut his eyes.

Frederick looked at the window. The rain had thickened and was coming down properly now, running in sheets down the glass and turning the railway lights into long red and green smears, and he looked at it for a long time, because he did not want to look at anything else, and because he did not want his father to open his eyes and see his face.

After a while he said, “I’m not going to set you a hard one. Not today.”

His father’s eyes stayed shut. His right hand, the one that worked, lay on the blanket. Frederick leaned forward and put his own hand on it, the way he had on Tuesday, and his father’s hand did not turn over, and did not need to.

“Next Sunday,” said Frederick. “I’ll set you one next Sunday.”

At a quarter to five he read his father Monday’s trains, all of them, from the six-fourteen from Richmond to the last one from Boston, slowly, in order, and his father listened with his eyes shut and said nothing else, and at five the nurse came, and he went.

---

His mother was at the kitchen table at nine, when she came back, with the folder.

She did not open it. She put it down on the table in front of her, square to the edge, and put her handbag on the chair beside her, and took off her gloves one finger at a time, and Bridget put a plate of something in front of her that she did not look at, and went away, and turned her radio off on the way out, which she never did.

Frederick was at the other end of the table with his chemistry, because there had been no time for it at the hospital, because he had not done it at the hospital. He had done three questions in an hour. He put his pen down.

“How was he?” he said.

“Tired.” His mother looked at the folder. “He said one thing. When I came in. I don’t know what he meant.” She frowned at the folder, slightly, as if it had said it. “He said Good.”

Frederick looked at his chemistry.

“Maybe he was pleased to see you,” he said.

“Maybe.” His mother looked at him, down the length of the long table, for a long moment, with her head a little on one side, and he made himself look back, and did not say anything, and it was the first time in his life, he thought, that he had kept something from her on purpose and she had known that he was doing it and let him.

She put her hand flat on the folder.

“Thirteen,” she said.

He waited.

“One still to come.”

He waited again, for the rest of it, for the name, for ask me which. It did not come. His mother sat with her hand on the folder and looked at it, and did not open it, and did not say anything more at all, and Frederick, who had asked which about everything since he could talk, who had asked it on Friday at this table and been told, sat at the other end of the table with his pen and his three questions on moles, and found that he did not want to ask.

He did not need to. He had sat at this table on Friday and been told that four had not answered, and that one of them was the hardest, and that it was theirs.

“All right,” he said.

“All right,” said his mother.

She picked up her fork and ate some of whatever Bridget had left her, without looking at it. The clock above the range said ten past nine, which meant fourteen minutes past, which meant fourteen minutes past one in the morning in London, four hours ahead, this one week of the year when the Atlantic was narrower, and somewhere in Charter House, or in a flat in the north of the city, or in a Labour member’s office with the lights on, somebody was writing the last answer.

“Bed,” said his mother, after a while. “You’ve got school.”

He went up. At the door he looked back. She was sitting at the end of the long table with her hand still on the closed folder, not reading it, the way his father had sat at his desk in London every Sunday at five to nine, with the clock in front of him, waiting for it to be time.