The Mothers

His mother’s sitting room was on the first floor at the back of the house, over the lake, and it had been arranged.

He saw that from the door. Somebody had moved the two small armchairs from the window and put them side by side in the middle of the room, facing the fire, with a low table in front of them and nothing on it. His mother’s own chair was where it always was, to the left of the fireplace, and his aunt was in the other one, the one his father used to sit in, to the right of it. It was a Council table. It was the shape of the room in Berlin where nine people had once sat round him and voted in his name, two chairs facing two, and he understood that his mother had arranged it like that without meaning to, because it was the only shape she knew for a room in which something had to be said.

The fire was lit. It was eleven in the morning in April and the fire was lit.

“Sit down,” said his mother. “Both of you. And shut the door, please, Frederick.”

Frederick shut the door. They sat down in the two small armchairs, side by side, with their hands on their knees. Alexander could feel Frederick beside him not moving, the way you can feel somebody not moving in the next seat at a concert.

His mother looked at them. His aunt looked at the fire.

“I am going to say this once,” said his mother, “and then your aunt is going to say her part, and then we are going to talk about what happens, and then we are going to have lunch, and I would like all four of us to be at lunch. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Yes, Aunt Caroline.”

“Good.” His mother folded her hands in her lap. “I have read Frederick’s letters to you, Alexander. All of them. I read them a fortnight before Easter, in your room in Berlin, at your desk, from the box in the second drawer. I chose to read them. I want to be very clear about that, because I have thought about how to say it for a fortnight and that is the only honest way. Nobody gave them to me. I did not come across them. I knew they were there, and I knew they were private, and I knew they were yours, and I opened the drawer and read them.”

Alexander did not move.

“How did you know they were there?”

“The Ambassador told me.”

“He’s frightened of you.”

“He is,” said his mother. “He has been frightened of me since my wedding, when he was a young man in the protocol office and I told him his seating plan was wrong, and it was. He came home for Easter leave and he called on me in the week of the nineteenth, and he sat in my drawing room in Berlin for an hour and talked about the weather in New Westminster, and at the end, at the door, with his coat on, he said that he had been carrying private letters in the bag for five months on your instruction, that he had never opened one, and that he could no longer carry them without telling somebody, because he had begun to dream about them.” She paused. “He said he was telling me as your mother and not as anything else. I said I understood. He went away. That evening I went to your room.”

“You could have asked me.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “I could. I thought about it. I sat on your bed for twenty minutes and thought about it. And I knew that if I asked you, you would tell me that they were private, which they were, and that I would have to accept that, which I would have. And I wanted to know what was in them more than I wanted to be the kind of mother who accepts that.” She looked at him steadily. “That is the whole of it. I am not going to tell you I am sorry, because I am not certain that I am, and I am not going to lie to you in this room. I am going to tell you that I knew what I was doing while I did it, and that I would rather you knew that than thought I had stumbled into it.”

The fire moved. Nobody said anything.

“You tied the ribbon on the wrong side,” said Alexander.

His mother looked at him for a long moment. Then something happened at the corner of her mouth, very slightly, that was not a smile.

“I know,” she said. “I couldn’t remember whether the knot had been on top or underneath. I stood there for a long time trying. In the end I decided that you would notice whichever I chose, so I put it on top, where you would see it the moment you opened the lid, so that you would know for certain and not wonder.”

“I noticed.”

“I know you did. On the Tuesday. You retied it at a quarter past four and locked the drawer and went up to the roof. Kessler told me you went up to the roof. He didn’t know why.” She looked down at her hands. “I have been waiting for you to ask me for a week. You didn’t ask. I thought you wouldn’t. You never ask the thing. You walk round it twice and then you write it down.”

Beside him Frederick had gone very still.

---

“And now me,” said his aunt, to the fire.

She did not look at them. She sat in his father’s chair with her hands folded on her knee, in her cardigan, with her glasses pushed up on her head, and spoke to the fire in English, carefully, the way she spoke at the Council in New Westminster, Frederick had once told him, as though every sentence had to be carried across a room without spilling.

“I read one page,” she said. “On Tuesday the twentieth of March, at the kitchen table, at the end of the papers. You left your civics folder on the table, Frederick, under the boxes, as you do every Tuesday, and when I lifted the boxes to put them away the folder came with them and fell open, and the pocket at the back fell open, and there was a letter in it, several pages, and the first page came out onto the table face up, in front of me. I picked it up because it was lying on my kitchen table. I read it because it was in my hand and I thought it was your homework. I had read nearly the whole of the first page before I understood that it was not your homework, and whose hand it was, and who it was to.” She stopped. “Then I stopped. I put it back in the pocket. I put the folder back on the table where you would find it. I did not read the second page. I have not read any other.”

“Mamma,” said Frederick.

“I am not finished,” said his aunt, very gently, still to the fire. “I want you both to know that I stopped. Not because it was right to stop. Because it was not mine. Your aunt chose to read, and she has told you so, and I think she was wrong, and I think she was right, and I think that is between her and her son and not my affair. I did not choose. I read one page by accident and then I chose to stop. Those are different things, and they are both true, and I want them both on the record.” She looked at Frederick at last. “The page was enough. I knew what you had been doing. I knew what he had been doing back. I didn’t need the second page to know.”

Frederick’s face had gone the colour of the ash in the grate.

“I telephoned your aunt the next day,” said his aunt. “Or she telephoned me. We have not been able to agree which. We spoke for a long time. We discovered that we had each found the same thing the same week from different ends, which neither of us thought very likely and both of us found very funny, at about two in the morning, my time.” She almost smiled. “We decided that you were both coming here for Easter anyway, and that we would say nothing until you were both in one room, because a thing like this should not be said to one of you across the Atlantic while the other one did not know. So we have said nothing. For a fortnight. Which has been, I think, the hardest thing either of us has done this year, and your aunt has had a harder year than I have.”

His mother looked at her across the fireplace, and his aunt looked back, and that was the look from the gravel, the three seconds too long, and Alexander understood what it had been.

---

“I want to tell you why I minded,” said his mother.

She leaned forward in her chair, with her elbows on her knees, which she never did.

“When I married your father,” she said, “there was a rule. It was written down, because everything in your father’s household was written down, and it was the first rule I was given. My brother was King of Hanover, and of thirteen other things, and your father was German Emperor and King of Prussia, and I was the sister of one and the wife of the other. And the rule was that I could talk to my brother about the family as much as I liked, as long as both their ministries knew we were talking, but that I could not carry anything between them. Not a document. Not a question. Not a message. Not a piece of advice. Not even a word from one to the other that began, Tell him that. If your father wanted to say something to my brother, he said it through his ministers, and if my brother wanted to say something to your father, he said it through his, and I was their sister and their wife and I carried nothing.” She looked at him. “Holidays and private letters were not to become diplomacy. That was the sentence. I kept it for twenty-six years. I kept it when it would have been very easy not to. I kept it in 2006, when my brother rang me on the night of May Day and could not speak, and your father was in the room, and I put the telephone down and did not say to your father one word of what my brother had said to me, because it was not mine to carry.”

She sat back.

“And then I opened a drawer,” she said, “and found that my son and my godson had built the channel I would not be. In his father’s pen box. In the diplomatic bag. Under the Ambassador’s nose. With a ribbon round it.” She looked from one of them to the other. “One King telling another to take a power the moment it is offered. The other King answering him. That is what I found. I am not angry that you love each other. I have watched you love each other since you were seven and one of you was sick on a woman’s shoes. I am frightened, Alexander. I am frightened because you are both fifteen and you have between you seventeen capacities, and you have found out how easy it is, and I spent twenty-six years being the person who knew how easy it was and did not do it.”

“It’s not a channel,” said Frederick. “It’s letters.”

His mother looked at him.

“Yes,” she said. “That is what it always is.”

---

“So,” said his aunt. “The terms.”

She took her glasses down off her head and held them in her lap and looked at the two of them, and Alexander saw that whatever came next had been written by the two of them, the two Queens, over a fortnight, at two in the morning, and that it had been made very short on purpose.

“There are two sentences,” said his aunt. “Caroline wrote one and I wrote the other, and we have argued about every word, and we are not going to change any of them.”

She said them slowly, the first and then the second, as though reading them off a page that was not there.

“Write to each other about anything. Advise each other about nothing that has a vote in it.”

Nobody said anything.

“That’s all?” said Alexander.

“That’s all,” said his mother. “The letters go on. In the bag. The Ambassador carries them. He is relieved, I think, to be carrying something he has been told about. Neither of us will ever read another one. Not by accident and not by choice. Not one page. They are yours, and they were always yours, and you can write about the weather and the stars and the trains and that bus and each other and your mothers, which I imagine you will, and you can say anything at all, about anything in the world, as long as it has no vote in it.”

“And if it has?”

“Then you keep it,” said his aunt. “You write it down somewhere else. In your log. In your green book. You put a date on it and keep it. You do not send it.”

Alexander looked at the fire.

He thought about the box. He thought about the birthday letter, which his mother had read: If they offer it to you, take it. He thought about the one page his aunt had read at her kitchen table, and did not know which of his letters it had been the first page of, and thought that he could guess. He thought about how much of everything he had written since November had a vote in it somewhere, if you looked, and how much of it he would have to keep, and how much smaller the letters would be, and whether they would still be letters.

Beside him Frederick shifted in his chair.

“And then what?” said Frederick.

It was the first time he had said it all week. Alexander heard it and turned his head. Frederick was looking at his mother, not at Caroline, with his hands flat on his knees and his face still the colour of ash, and he had said it the way he said it to tutors, straight, wanting the answer and not the form of it.

His mother looked back at him.

“And then you write,” said his aunt. “That’s all. That’s the whole of the then.”

---

Nobody said anything about Hanover.

Alexander waited for it. He sat in the small armchair with the fire on his face and waited for one of them to say it: the Bundesrat, the twenty-third, the vote cast for Hanover, the question at the kitchen table for civics. His mother had read the letter that told it. His aunt had been at the table when it was asked. They both knew. He could see that they both knew. And neither of them said it, and neither of them looked at Frederick in the particular way that would have meant it, and the minutes went past and the fire settled and they did not say it.

He did not understand it, and then he did.

They did not know either.

He thought his mother did not know whether a question asked at a kitchen table in New Westminster had reached a Minister-President in Hanover. He thought his aunt, who had been asked it, did not know whether her answer in Swedish had reached anybody. Neither of them could know whether it had mattered, and neither of them was ever going to know, and so, he thought, neither of them could say it in this room without saying a thing they could not stand behind, and they were both, as far as he had ever seen, the kind of women who would rather say nothing than say a thing they could not stand behind. So it sat in the room with them, unsaid, under the terms, like a third chair nobody had put out.

Frederick did not say it either. He sat with his hands flat on his knees and looked at the low table with nothing on it, and did not say it, and Alexander saw that he was not going to, and that this was costing him something, and that he was going to pay it.

---

“Lunch,” said his mother, at twenty to one, and stood up. “All four of us.”

She went to the door and opened it, and stood by it, and his aunt got up out of his father’s chair and put her glasses back on her head and went past her into the corridor, and touched her arm as she passed, once. Then his mother looked at the two of them, still sitting.

“You may stay a minute,” she said. “One minute. Then lunch.” And she went out, and left the door open, which was a sentence of its own.

They sat in the two small armchairs.

“Did you know?” said Frederick, to the low table.

“About the ribbon. Since Tuesday.”

“Tuesday last week.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell me.” Frederick still did not look round. “Yesterday. In your room. With the box on the desk. You showed me the box and you didn’t tell me.”

Alexander looked at the fire.

“Nobody asks what’s in a civics folder,” he said.

Frederick turned his head then, and looked at him, for a long moment, with an expression Alexander had never seen on him, not on the crest, not in the car, not anywhere: not angry. Something under angry. Something that had been hit and had not yet decided what it was going to do about it.

Then the minute was up, and Theo’s voice came up the stairs from the hall, loudly, asking somebody whether it was true that Germans had soup before everything, and Frederick got up and went to lunch, and Alexander sat for a moment longer alone in the sitting room with the two chairs facing the two, and then got up and followed him.