Godmother

The gallery had been put on for the snow.

It was a narrow iron walkway that ran round the outside of the dome at the height of the shutter, a hand’s width wider than a man’s shoulders, with a rail at waist height and a small door in the wall of the drum to get out on to it, and his father had had it built the winter after the stove went in, so that somebody could go out in the mornings and sweep the snow off the shutter before it froze into the runners. Nobody had swept the shutter since. The gallery had stayed. In the summer you could stand on it and see the whole of the Neuer Garten: the lawns going down to the lake, and the lake going away north in a long grey arm between the trees, and on the far side the woods, and on this side, below the house, the path along the shore that went as far as the Marble Palace and stopped.

He went up at half past nine.

He went up because he always went up on the morning after a clear night, to cap the tube and clean the eyepiece and write the morning line in the log, the dew and the wind and the state of the sky, which nobody had ever asked him to do and which his father had done, and he had done since he was six, and did not know how to stop. The dome by day was a different room. The slit was shut. The light came in grey and flat under the edge of the shutter, and the stove was cold, and the boards smelled of last night’s birch, and the red lamp on the shelf was only a lamp.

He took the log down. He opened it at the night’s entry, and read it.

6 April. Clear after rain. Seeing 3. Transparency good. In his hand. And under it, in the small upright hand from five months of envelopes:

Andromeda, very low NW, in the branches. 4 observers. F.

He read it twice. Then he wrote the morning line under it, 7 April, 09.40, dew heavy, wind light W, cloud nil, and put the pencil back in the spine, and the log back on the shelf, and found that he did not want to stay in the dome with the slit shut, and opened the small door in the wall, and went out on to the gallery, into the cold.

---

Lukas came up at a quarter to ten with a flask.

It was coffee, not tea. Lukas drank tea at night and coffee in the morning and had a theory about it that involved the moon. He came out of the small door on to the gallery behind Alexander, sideways, because there was not room to come out any other way, and stood at the rail beside him, and unscrewed the flask, and poured a cup into the lid, and held it out.

Alexander took it. He did not drink it. He held it in both hands, underneath, by the edge.

“Your mother,” said Lukas.

“I know.”

Lukas looked where he was looking.

Below them, on the path along the shore, two people were walking away from the house towards the Marble Palace. They were walking slowly. The woman was in a long grey coat and a dark hat, and walked with her hands in her pockets, upright, at a pace that did not change, and the boy beside her was a head taller than her, in the coat from the airport, and walked with his hands behind his back, which was how he walked when he was listening.

They had been walking for perhaps five minutes. Alexander had seen them come out of the garden door of the house as he came out on to the gallery, and stop on the terrace, and say something, and go down the steps on to the lawn and across it to the path, and turn north, together, without looking back at the house, and without looking up.

“She asked him at breakfast,” said Lukas. “I was there. You weren’t. You’d gone up. She said, Frederick, would you walk with me? I’d like to see the Marble Palace, and I don’t like to go on my own, which is not true, because she goes on her own every morning when she’s here, I’ve seen her from the dome a hundred times, at seven, before anybody’s up.”

“I know.”

“And he said, Yes, Aunt Caroline, and put down his roll.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know, you weren’t there,” said Lukas. “I’m telling you. That’s not a thing, it’s a report.” He poured himself a cup of coffee into the cap of the flask, which was too small and which he used anyway, and drank it, and looked at the two figures on the path. “He put down his roll. Theo saw it as well. Theo said afterwards that in three and a half years he’s never seen Freddie put down a roll he’s halfway through, for anybody.”

---

They walked as far as the Marble Palace.

It took them a quarter of an hour. From the gallery Alexander could see the whole of the path, the long curve of it along the water under the bare trees, and the two figures on it getting smaller, and the pink and white of the little palace at the end of it, on its lawn by the lake, with its shutters closed for the winter and its steps going down into the water. He watched them reach it. He watched them stop on the lawn in front of it. He watched his mother take one hand out of her pocket and point at something on the building, a window, the roof, he could not see, and Frederick look where she was pointing, and nod.

He could not hear anything. The wind was the wrong way, and it was too far, and there was a duck somewhere under the gallery, close, complaining about something in a long flat voice, that drowned everything else.

“She’s his godmother,” said Lukas.

“I know.”

“She gave him a pen. When he was confirmed. He still uses it.”

Alexander turned his head.

“How do you know that?”

“Theo told me,” said Lukas. “Theo knows everything about him. He’s like a reference library that eats rolls.” He drank his coffee. “And she’s his heir. Since October. If anything happened to him she’d get all fourteen, and then you. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“Everybody knows that. Nobody says it.” Lukas looked at the two small figures in front of the Marble Palace. “Not in public. Neither household. It’s in the Register. It says so. Neither household has said anything about it in public.” He was quiet for a moment. “So what do you think she’s saying to him, on a path, by a lake, where nobody can hear?”

Alexander did not answer.

He watched his mother and his cousin turn away from the Marble Palace and start back along the path, towards the house, and the dome, and him, slowly, at her pace.

“You’re not going to answer that,” said Lukas.

“No.”

“You’re not going to guess.”

“No.”

“You’re not going to ask him.”

“No.”

Lukas nodded slowly, the way he had nodded in the dome on the night of the election when Alexander said I’m not supposed to, as though no were an answer, which between the two of them, on a gallery, it was.

---

He did not guess.

He made himself not. It was a discipline, like the log: you wrote down what you saw, and the conditions, and the uncertainty, and you did not write down what you wanted to have seen. He watched them come back along the path, and he wrote down, in his head, what he saw.

He saw his mother talking. She talked for a long time, more than she talked to anybody in a room, walking, looking ahead at the path and not at Frederick, with her hands back in her pockets. He saw Frederick listening, with his hands behind his back and his head a little down, and not saying anything, for a long time, perhaps five minutes, perhaps more, the length of the path from the Marble Palace to the bend by the reeds.

He saw Frederick say something. One thing, short.

He saw his mother stop.

She stopped on the path, by the bend, where the reeds came up to the edge of it, and turned and looked at Frederick, and Frederick stopped as well, and they stood there facing each other on the path for a moment, a woman of sixty-two in a grey coat and a boy of fifteen a head taller than her, by a lake, in April, and then his mother took one hand out of her pocket and put it on Frederick’s arm.

Once. On his sleeve, above the elbow. She held it there for perhaps the length of a breath, and then took it away, and put it back in her pocket, and they walked on.

Alexander did not move.

He had seen her do that perhaps four times in his life. Not to him; he could not remember her doing it to him, though she must have. To Charlotte, once, on the steps of the cathedral, on the morning of the funeral. To his father, once, in a doorway, in a way he had not understood at the time and understood now. To the chamberlain, the one who had cried and could not finish his sentence, on the Sunday after, in the corridor, in passing, which the chamberlain had never forgotten and had told Alexander about a year later, in tears again. And now to Frederick, on a path, on the shore of the Heiliger See, about something Alexander would never hear.

“She touched his arm,” said Lukas, quietly.

“I saw.”

Lukas did not say anything else. He poured the last of the coffee into the cap of the flask and did not drink it, and held it, and they stood at the rail together and watched the two figures come the rest of the way along the path, past the boathouse, on to the lawn, and up towards the house, until they were directly below the dome, on the grass, small and foreshortened, the top of a dark hat and the top of a fair head.

---

His mother looked up.

She stopped on the lawn and lifted her face and looked at the dome, at the gallery, at him, and he looked down at her, over the rail, with the cold cup of coffee in his hands, and neither of them waved. She did not wave. He did not wave. It was the one thing about them that everybody in the family had always agreed on.

She had never once climbed the ladder. He had never once asked her to. She looked up at him for a long moment from the grass, in her grey coat, with her face doing something that he could not read from that height and would not have been able to read from closer, and then she nodded, very slightly, once, the way she nodded at the end of a document she had read all the way through, and went on up the lawn to the house, and in at the garden door.

Frederick did not go in.

He stood on the grass below the dome with his hands behind his back and looked up at the gallery, at the two of them at the rail, and Lukas leaned over the rail, with the cap of the flask in his hand, further than Alexander would have, and called down, in English, quite loudly, in the voice of a person who has decided to do the thing nobody else will:

“What did she say?”

Frederick looked up at him.

He shaded his eyes against the grey bright sky with one hand, and looked at Lukas for a moment, and then at Alexander, beside him, and his face did something, not polite and not nothing, and he took his hand down.

“Not to you,” he called back.

And went in.

---

Lukas stood at the rail for a while after that.

“That was my one thing for today,” he said, at last.

“I know.”

“I’ve still got the other one. The one from March. That was a different one.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to tell you,” said Lukas. “You know that. Not because you asked. He’s going to tell you some time when you haven’t asked, because you didn’t ask, because that’s what he’s like. I’ve watched him for a week. He’s like a cat. If you call it it won’t come, and if you sit still and look at a book it gets in your lap.”

Alexander looked at the garden door, which had shut.

“Don’t tell him you said that,” he said.

“I’ll tell him tonight,” said Lukas. “After you’ve gone on the lake.”

Alexander turned his head and looked at him.

“What lake?”

Lukas looked back at him, with the empty cap of the flask, and his face did nothing at all, as perfectly as Frederick’s ever had, as though he had been practising it on the bus all week, and Alexander understood that something else had been arranged, and that he was not going to be told what, and that he was, for the second day running, in a house full of people who knew something he did not, and that for the first time in his life he did not mind.

“Nothing,” said Lukas. “Drink your coffee. It’s cold.”

He drank it. It was cold. He went back in through the small door, into the dome, and capped the tube, which he had forgotten, and cleaned the eyepiece, which did not need it, and went down the ladder, and left the hatch open an inch behind him.