Good Friday

The programme came at nine, on a card.

It was the stiff white card the secretariat used for everything that was not a state occasion and not nothing, with the small crest at the top that was neither the imperial one nor the Prussian one but the household’s, a plain shield that his father had chosen because, he said, a family ought to be able to send a man a card about lunch without making a constitutional statement. It lay on the desk in his room in Berlin when he came back from breakfast, square to the edge of the blotter, where somebody had put it so that he would see it before anything else.

PRIVATE VISIT

Saturday 31 March to Sunday 8 April 2029

Potsdam

He read the names.

His Majesty King George V

Her Majesty Queen Christina of Sweden, Regent

Mr Theodore Hartigan, a friend of the King’s

Under that, smaller, the arrangements, which he did not read, because he knew them: Berlin, Saturday, twenty to two; the cars; the house in the Neuer Garten; the rooms on the garden side; Sunday, Easter Day, the Friedenskirche at ten. Under that, smaller still, Protection: by arrangement, which meant Kessler and a great many people Kessler knew, and a sergeant from Tucson who looked at ceilings.

He read the third name again.

A friend of the King’s.

It was not the secretariat’s phrase. The secretariat would have written Page of Honour, because the secretariat liked a title the way Mrs Hartigan liked a rule, and because a title told the house where to put a person at table. Somebody in New Westminster had told them not to. Somebody in New Westminster had decided that Theo Hartigan was coming to Potsdam for Easter as nothing but a boy who had sat next to the King because of an alphabet, and had written it down so that nobody in Germany could mistake him for anything else.

Alexander thought that it was very like his aunt. Then he thought that it might be very like Frederick, and that he did not know which, and that a fortnight ago he would have known, because Frederick would have told him.

He put the card back on the blotter, square to the edge, where it had been.

---

Charlotte rang at eleven.

He knew it was her before he looked, because it was Good Friday and nobody else in the family would ring anybody on Good Friday except to say that they would see them in church. Charlotte did not go to church on Good Friday. Charlotte had finals.

“I can’t come,” said Charlotte.

“I know.”

“To Potsdam. Next week. I can’t. I’ve got the written on Tuesday and the long case on Thursday and the oral on Friday, and if I come to Potsdam I’ll sit in the garden and look at the lake and fail all three of them, and I’m not going to fail, Alex, I’ve been doing this for six years and I’m not going to fail it in the last week because my brother has guests.”

“I know. I didn’t think you would.”

“Not even Sunday. Not even lunch. Tell Mama I’m sorry, and that I’ll ring on Easter Day, and that I’m eating.” He heard a page turn, slowly, and then her hand go flat on it. “Tell her the last part twice.”

“I’ll tell her.”

There was a pause on the line. He could hear the flat: the radiator, the page, a tram somewhere below the window.

“You sound,” said Charlotte.

She stopped.

He waited. He did not know what he sounded. He had been told often enough that he sounded like nothing, like a boy reading out a list, that he had stopped thinking he could sound like anything else. But his sister had heard something, down a telephone line, between pharmacology and the long case, and had started to say so, and stopped.

“Never mind,” said Charlotte. “I’m not asking. I’ve got pharmacology.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m just busy.” Another page. “Say hello to Frederick for me. And tell him the ending is not wrong, and he can try to prove it at Easter if he likes, but he’ll have to do it by post, because I’m not coming to argue about a novel in the middle of my finals.”

“What ending?”

“He’ll know,” said Charlotte, and he heard her almost smile, which she did not often do on the telephone, and then she said, “Happy Easter, Alex,” and was gone.

He sat with the phone in his hand.

She had not asked. She had heard whatever it was in his voice and had not asked, on purpose, because she had pharmacology, and because she was his sister and his Regent and would, if the Landtag did what the newspapers said it would, be only his sister by the end of April, and she had decided, he thought, not to start being either of them more than she had to in the last weeks of being both. He did not know whether that was kindness. He thought it might be the other thing, the thing his mother did instead. He thought that with Charlotte it was probably just pharmacology.

---

The service was at three.

The cathedral was cold, as it always was on Good Friday, because on Good Friday nobody lit anything and the heating was turned down out of a feeling that it ought to be, and the altar was bare, and the black cloth was over the cross, and the bells did not ring. They walked in from the side, his mother first, because during his minority she governed the Church, and it was her service before it was his, and then him, and then Lukas, who had been asked by Frau Reinhardt whether he would like to come and had said yes before he had heard the question, and Amalie and Jakub, who had not been asked and had come anyway, with their parents, and sat four rows behind.

He sat at the front, on the left, where he had sat on the first of March last year, in the same chair.

He had not sat in that chair since. He had not meant that to be so; it had simply happened, the way things did now, by programme. He sat down and folded his hands and looked up, past the pulpit, past the dome, to the back of the nave, to the west door.

The clock was still there.

He had known it would be. Clocks did not move. It was over the west door, high up, with a white face and black hands, and it said six minutes to three, and he looked at it and was, for a moment, fourteen, in a cloak that was too heavy, with two fingers of his left hand under the edge of a cushion where nobody could see them, watching the minute hand go from seventeen past to eighteen while a bishop put a crown on him. He had told Frederick about it. Find your clock. It was the best thing he had ever told anybody, he thought, and Frederick had found a crack in a lid at Arlington, and said it was better, and it was.

The minute hand went to five to three.

---

At three o’clock the cathedral was silent.

It was the hour. Nobody said so; it was not in the order of service; but everybody in the building knew it, and at three, by the clock over the west door, the pastor stopped, and nobody moved, and there was nothing, the way there had been nothing on the crest in November, three thousand people breathing and not breathing. It was shorter than the crest. It was much longer.

He looked at the clock.

He decided, in the silence, to ask for the visit to be put off.

He did not decide it all at once. It came the way the cold came up through the floor of the cathedral, slowly, from underneath, until it was simply there. He would go to his mother after the service, in her sitting room, and he would say: Mama, I’d like the visit postponed. Not cancelled. Postponed until the summer. Charlotte can’t come, and I have exams after Easter, and the Landtag will be sitting, and it isn’t the right week. All of which was true. None of which was why.

Why was a box in a drawer with a knot on top. Why was a letter with a full stop after Dear Frederick, and a fortnight of nothing in the bag since, and a boy in New Westminster who had not written because he had been told, in one line, that there was nothing to answer, and who would get off an aeroplane in Berlin tomorrow at twenty to two and walk across a floor towards him, and Alexander would not know, until he was close enough to see his face, what his face was going to do. Why was his aunt, who had read something, or why would his mother have rung her about rooms; and his mother, who had read everything, and had been kind to him for nine days; and the two of them in one house, at one table, with the lake outside, and himself in the middle of it, being looked at.

He could not do it. He did not know how anybody could do it. He thought that if he had been asked, in a room, by a doctor with green chairs, what he was afraid of, he would have said: of being in a house with four people who all know something about me, and all know that I know, and all decide, out of love, not to say.

The silence ended. The pastor went on. Beside him his mother let out her breath, very quietly, and he realised that she had been holding it for the whole of the silence, as he had.

He did not look at her.

He looked at the clock. It said a minute past three. It went on saying it for a long time.

---

They came back to the house at half past four, in the cars, through the grey streets with the shops shut and the city quiet the way it was only on Good Friday and on the morning after the New Year. His mother went straight up to change. Lukas came up the stairs behind him, because Lukas was coming to Potsdam with them that evening, and had his bag in the hall, and nowhere to be until the cars left at six.

Alexander went along the corridor towards his mother’s sitting room.

He had his hand on the wall as he went, which he did not usually do, flat, on the old green silk, as though the corridor might move. Her door was at the end. It was shut. He could hear, behind it, nothing at all, which meant she was in the dressing room beyond, changing out of the black, and would be out in five minutes, and would sit in the chair by the window, and he would knock, and she would say Come in, and he would go in and say it.

“Where are you going?” said Lukas, behind him.

He had not heard Lukas follow him. He stopped, with his hand on the silk.

“To ask her to put it off.”

Lukas came and stood beside him, not close, and looked at the door at the end of the corridor, and then at Alexander’s hand on the wall, and then at the door again.

“You won’t,” said Lukas.

“Why not?”

“Because you’d have to tell her why.” Lukas put his hands in his pockets. “And you won’t tell her why. Because if you tell her why, you’ll have to say the box. And if you say the box, she’ll have to say yes. And then she’ll have to say why she did it, and why she rang his mother about rooms, and what his mother said. And you don’t want to know what his mother said. Not here. Not in a corridor in Berlin on Good Friday with me standing behind you.” He looked at the door. “Neither of you is going to go first. So you’ll go in, and you’ll say exams, and Charlotte, and the Landtag, and she’ll look at you over the coffee she doesn’t want, and she’ll know it isn’t any of those, and she’ll say of course, if you like, because she’s being kind. And then it’ll be put off. And then you’ll have to live with having put him off. For the summer. On a lie about exams.” He shrugged. “So you won’t.”

Alexander did not say anything.

Down at the end of the corridor, behind the door, a drawer shut, softly.

“And because he’s packed,” said Lukas.

“How do you know?”

“Theo’s line this week.” Lukas took his phone out of his pocket and did not look at it, because he did not need to. “One word. We’re allowed one line a week and he used one word. Packed.” He put the phone away. “That’s not my one thing, by the way. That’s a fact. Theo said it. I’m only passing it on.”

Alexander took his hand off the wall.

He stood in the corridor, on the old green carpet, with the door at the end shut and his mother behind it, changing out of the black, and Lukas beside him with his hands in his pockets, and he thought about a boy in a bedroom in New Westminster, in the north wing, with a bag on the bed, packed, on the Tuesday, probably, because Frederick would pack on the Tuesday for a Saturday, because Frederick knew the trains by heart and would know the aeroplanes too; and a boy on the fourth floor of a block of flats by a bus depot, with a bag of his own, who had used his whole line for the week on one word so that somebody in Germany would know.

He did not go to the door.

He turned round and went back along the corridor, past Lukas, to the stairs, and down, and Lukas came after him without saying anything at all, and in the hall Kessler was standing by the bags looking at the ceiling, and Alexander said, “Six?”, and Kessler said, “Six, sir,” and that was all.

---

They drove out to Potsdam at six, in the dark, past the station, where a train was coming in from Berlin.

The house in the Neuer Garten had all its lights on. It never did. It had been opened, the garden side, all three rooms, the shutters back and the windows lit, and from the drive he could see them going along the first floor above the terrace in a row, yellow, with the dark lawn below them going down to the lake and the lake beyond black and flat and the boathouse at the bottom with its doors shut.

He went up after supper, alone, and stood in the doorway of the first of them.

The bed was made. There was a vase of something white on the table by the window, and a towel folded on a chair, and a carafe of water with a glass upside down on top of it, and nothing else, because his mother had been told, presumably by his aunt, that Frederick did not like rooms with things in them. The window looked out over the lake. You could see, from the doorway, the lights of the far shore on the water, and the black line of the wood above them, and above that nothing, because it was cloudy, and Andromeda was in the trees anyway, low, the wrong way up, where it would be next week.

He had a pack of cards in his pocket. Thirty-two. He had bought them in Potsdam in December and practised with them against Lukas, who was already better. He had brought them up from his room without quite deciding to.

He stood in the doorway and took them out and looked at them.

Then he put them back in his pocket. It was not his room. He would not put anything in it. Whatever was going to be in it, Frederick would bring.

He turned off the light that somebody had left on by the bed, and stood a moment longer in the dark doorway with the lake outside, and then closed the door, quietly, the way Herr Schade closed the hatch, so that it was not quite shut, an inch, and went to bed, and the guard came past at eleven, and the house was very quiet, and tomorrow at twenty to two an aeroplane would land at Berlin.