Book Seven: Feierabend Characters
Prologue
Alexander I. Arlington, in the Province of Virginia, and New Westminster, in the Columbia District. Saturday, 11 November 2028.
Their relationship is warm and markedly less formal than the public relationship between their houses.
They had put him beside an empty chair, and the empty chair was for the Queen. Beyond it, on the aisle, there was another, and that one was for the King.
He had been sitting in the front row since ten, in the cold, with his gloved hands on his knees, looking at the Tomb. Lukas was on his left. Beyond Lukas there was one more empty seat, at the end of the row, and a cardboard box had been put on it by an usher with a list, and then taken off it again by the same usher, who had looked at the list a second time. The box was for somebody else. Everything in the front row was for somebody else. It was the first time in nine months that Alexander had sat anywhere in public that was not, in some way, about him, and he found that he did not know what to do with it, and then he found that he did. He looked at the Tomb.
“You are not here,” said Lukas, to the Tomb, in German, very low.
“I know.”
“You are in Potsdam with a cold.”
“I know.”
“I only mention it,” said Lukas, “because you are sitting like the German Emperor. If you are in Potsdam with a cold, you have to sit like somebody else.”
Alexander considered this.
“Who?”
“Me,” said Lukas. “Nobody has ever looked at me sitting down in my life.”
He tried. He took his hands off his knees and put them in his lap. It made no difference, and they both knew it made no difference, and Lukas said nothing more, and Alexander put his hands back on his knees and looked at the Tomb, which was smaller than in the photographs, and plain, and white, with a crack running across the lid that nobody in any of the photographs had mentioned.
The Queen came up the path a little before the King, with her officer, a few paces ahead of everybody.
She did not look surprised. She had known since Wednesday; she was the one who had said yes. She came across the front of the amphitheatre in a dark coat with her handbag on her arm, and the people in the second row half rose and she put out a gloved hand at them, palm down, and they sat, and she reached the front row and looked at him, and at Lukas, and at the empty seat beside him, and sat in it.
“Alexander,” she said.
“Aunt Christina.”
“You’re in Potsdam with a cold,” said his aunt, looking at the Tomb.
“Everybody keeps telling me.”
“Good. Then everybody knows.” She put her handbag on her knees. “He doesn’t. He’s coming up the path. Don’t wave.”
“I don’t wave.”
“No,” said his aunt. “You don’t. I’d forgotten.” And she looked at him sideways, very quickly, the way his mother looked at him when she was checking whether he had eaten, and then at the Tomb again. “Your mother says you’re to be back at the Embassy by two and to wear the scarf in the evening. She said to tell you that she said it and not me.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve told you. Now I’ve done it.” She folded her hands. “She’s frightened, you know. Of you being here. Not of anything happening. Of you being somewhere she can’t see.”
He said nothing. There was nothing to say to that which would have been true and also polite, and his aunt seemed to know it, and did not wait for an answer.
He saw Frederick before Frederick saw him.
He saw him at the top of the path, where it came out from between the red coats onto the crest: a tall boy in a long dark grey coat, too heavy for him and exactly the right weight, with a high collar and a paper poppy in the lapel, the same as everybody’s, and a black tie, and a face that was doing nothing at all. Behind him, two paces back and one to the left, came a boy carrying a cardboard box flat in front of him in both hands as though it were made of glass. Theo. It had to be. Nobody else in the Realm would have been allowed to walk behind the King with a box.
Frederick came across the front of the amphitheatre and was shown to the aisle seat, and sat down beside his mother, and looked along the row to see where Theo had gone.
And stopped.
Alexander watched him stop. He had imagined it, on the aeroplane, over the Atlantic, in the dark, more times than he would ever admit to anybody, and it was not like any of the times he had imagined. Frederick did not look surprised. He did not do anything. His face went very still, and stayed still, and Alexander understood that this was the face Frederick had been wearing for six weeks, and that Frederick had just decided, in front of three thousand people, to go on wearing it, and that it was costing him something, and that he was going to pay it.
Alexander turned his head, very slightly, and looked along the row.
“Frederick,” he said.
“Alexander,” said Frederick.
Neither of them laughed. His mouth moved at one corner. He felt it go, and stopped it.
“I’m not here,” he said, quietly, in English, looking at the Tomb again. “Or rather, I am here, and he isn’t. The German Emperor sent his wreath to Government House yesterday, as your rule says, and he is in Potsdam with a cold. I am a member of the House of Hanover, attending the Eleventh at the invitation of the Regent, with my mother’s leave and my sister’s signature.” He paused. He had not meant to say the next part. He said it. “Charlotte signed it twice. Once as my sister and once as my Regent. She said that was the only way she would be sure which of them had let me go.”
Between them his aunt did not move.
“Your aunt Caroline telephoned on Wednesday,” she said, to her son, without turning her head. “Your cousin had asked whether he might come. As family. Not as anything else. I said that family stands where it likes on the Eleventh, and sits in the front row.” She folded her gloved hands in her lap. “I didn’t tell you.”
“No.”
“If I had told you on Wednesday you would have spent three days deciding what to feel about it,” said his aunt. “This way you only have to feel it.”
Alexander looked at the Tomb. He thought that his aunt had just said, in two sentences, the whole of the difference between his mother and hers, and that his mother would have told him on Wednesday, and on Thursday, and on Friday at the airport, and that he would have spent three days deciding what to feel about it, and that he had, as it happened, spent them anyway. He had bought the poppy at the airport. A dollar. The man at the Legion’s tray had given him his change and said Thank you, son, and had not looked at him again.
At the end of the row the boy with the box had sat down and was holding it on his knees and looking along the row at Lukas, with an expression Alexander knew. It was the expression Lukas had worn on the morning of the funeral in February, when somebody had put him with the household, and he had looked round the cathedral for the first time at all the people standing where he was standing, behind somebody.
Lukas did not look round. He said, very low, to the Tomb:
“The back of the head.”
“The knees,” said Theo, to the box.
“Lukas,” said Alexander, without moving.
“Theo,” said Frederick.
“We know,” said Lukas, and folded his hands, and that was all anybody said in the front row until the Book came.
The hymns were in English and he did not know them.
He knew that they were coming; he had read the order of service in the Register on the aeroplane, in the article on the Tomb, which said that the order was the order of 1921, unchanged, and gave the third line, and named only the last of the hymns, so that he had come up the crest knowing the end and not the middle. He did not sing the first. He held the sheet in both hands, underneath, by the edge, with two fingers, the way he had held the orb’s cushion in the cathedral, and found that it worked here too.
The third was the one from Stockholm.
He heard the band play the first line through alone, and knew it before the second bar, and was seven, in a white shirt with a collar that cut, in the gallery of a church, with a sheet in front of him that he could not read because the English was too long, and a woman from the British Embassy who had been sent to teach him the English hymn so that he would not stand there with his mouth shut, and who had made him say it over and over in a room with a piano until he could say it without the sheet. He had not sung it since. He had not, until this moment, known that he still had it. He had it all. He sang it, very quietly, so that only the front row could have heard, every word, in the order the woman from the Embassy had put them in, and beside him his aunt sang it, and at the end of the row Theo sang it at the top of his voice with the box held against his chest, and on the aisle, beyond his aunt, Frederick did not sing it at all.
Alexander noticed that. He noticed it and did not look. He did not know why, and he thought he could guess, and he put it away to ask about in a letter, and knew he would not ask.
The silence was the longest of his life, and he had had a long year for silences.
He did not look at the crack. Frederick was looking at the crack; he could tell from the angle of Frederick’s head, past his aunt’s shoulder, that the crack was what Frederick had found to look at, and he did not want to take it from him. He looked instead at the flag above the amphitheatre, at half mast, lifting and falling. He thought about the corridor outside his father’s study. He thought about the chamberlain, and the sentence the chamberlain had not been able to finish, and the words he had used to finish it for him, which had been is dead, and which he had said in a voice that he had not known he had, the voice that his whole family had and that he had heard his father use on the telephone to ministers, and which had come out of his own mouth at seven in the morning when he was fourteen, unasked. He thought about the man under the lid, who might be anybody, and whose family had been told nothing, and had been made, by not being told, into everybody’s.
The gun fired a second time. He breathed out with three thousand other people.
He watched Frederick walk the twenty paces.
It was the first time he had seen anybody he loved do in public the kind of thing he had to do himself. He knew what it was like from the inside. He had not known what it looked like from the outside. It looked like nothing. It looked like a boy in a coat walking at the pace you would walk to somebody’s door. Frederick looked at the crack the whole way, laid the wreath at the bottom step, and stood, and bowed his head, and lifted it, and came back, and his face did nothing, and Alexander thought that he had never seen anybody so nearly perfect at a thing he hated, and that he would not write to him about that either.
Then the boy with the box walked his twenty paces with the schools’ wreath, alone, looking at the back of the sentry’s head, and when he came back to his seat and sat down and put his hands between his knees, Lukas handed him the tissue paper that he had been holding for him, without a word, and then turned his head and spoke to him, which Alexander had not seen Lukas do to a stranger in six years.
“You did it,” said Lukas. “The back of the head. I have never managed it.”
Theo went red to the ears and did not answer. Alexander looked at the Tomb and was, for a moment, unreasonably jealous, and then was not.
At the end the priest said Let us say together, and the crest said the third line, and Alexander said it with them, in English, a little early, because he had learned it from the Register on the aeroplane and did not yet know where the breath went.
They walked down the path together afterwards, between the red coats, which had turned their rifles the right way up. His aunt went ahead with her officer and his, and Theo and Lukas came behind, two paces back and one to the left, both of them, as though they had rehearsed it. They had not. It was, Alexander supposed, simply where you walked.
They said nothing for the length of several rows. The graves went away on both sides over the slope, white, all the same size.
“You found your clock,” said Alexander, at last, to the path.
“It’s a crack,” said Frederick. “In the lid. Nobody’s mended it, because mending it would be replacing it.”
Alexander thought about that. He thought about it the whole length of a row of graves, which was a long row, and found that he did not want to say anything until he had thought about it properly, and that Frederick did not mind waiting, and never had.
“That’s a better clock than mine,” he said. “Mine was only a clock.”
Behind them Theo said something to Lukas, low, and Lukas said something back, and then Theo said, quite loudly, the way a person says a thing he has decided:
“You’re coming to the flat. Tonight. Both of you. It’s the rule. If you’re ever in New Westminster, you come to the flat, and you eat what’s on the table. Everybody does.”
There was a pause on the path.
Lukas, Alexander knew without looking, was looking at the back of his head. Alexander looked at Frederick.
“Is that true?” he said. “About the table?”
“It’s the only rule in the Realm that nobody’s ever been let off,” said Frederick. “Including the Crown.”
Alexander walked on a few steps with his gloved hands behind his back, which was how he walked when he was thinking, and which he had been told by his mother, more than once, was exactly how his uncle walked, and which he had never been able to stop.
“Then we’ll come,” he said.
The Ambassador did not like it.
The Ambassador said so at lunch, in the residence, in German, with great courtesy, at some length, and then said it again over the coffee in English in case the first time had been unclear. A block of flats. The north-east of the city. A bus depot. No advance. No list. A family nobody at the Embassy had met.
“The King has met them,” said Alexander.
“The King is fifteen, sir.”
“So am I, nearly.” He put his cup down. “And I’m not here. I’m in Potsdam with a cold. So it can’t be an incident. Nothing that happens to a person who isn’t here can be an incident.”
The Ambassador looked at Lukas, for help, and Lukas looked at his plate with tremendous attention, and the Ambassador looked at the protection officer by the door, who had come out from Berlin with them and been told it was a cold, and the protection officer looked at the ceiling.
“I shall have to tell Her Majesty,” said the Ambassador.
“Tell her,” said Alexander. “Tell her I wore the scarf.”
The car from the Embassy was the most ordinary car the Embassy owned, and it parked by the depot fence at six, under a lamp, beside a row of sleeping buses, and nobody on the street looked at it twice.
There were four flights. The stairs were concrete with a steel edge to every step, and there was a switch at the bottom for the light that gave you a minute and a half, and Theo, who had come down to fetch them, pressed it, and they went up, and on the first landing, against the wall under the window, there was a kitchen chair with a cushion tied onto it.
“For later,” said Theo, and did not explain, and went on up.
There was another chair on the second landing, and a third on the third, a better one, with arms. Alexander looked at each of them as he passed. He did not ask. He had begun to understand, from the way Theo walked past them without looking, that they were not for him.
On the fourth floor a door stood open, and in it there was a woman in an apron with a wooden spoon in her hand, and the light behind her, and a smell coming out round her onto the landing of beef, and onions, and something dark and sweet that he had last smelled in a kitchen at Potsdam that he was not supposed to be in, when he was very small.
She looked at him. She looked at Lukas. She did not look at the officer, who had stopped on the half-landing below and was looking at the ceiling.
“Good evening,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Shoes.”
Alexander stood on the landing.
He had been told, in the course of nine months, a great many things that he could not do, and some that he must, and in every case somebody had explained to him why, at length, with reference to a document. Nobody had ever said one word to him on a landing and waited.
Behind him Lukas made a very small sound, which in Lukas was the same as laughing out loud.
“I was sick on a woman’s shoes once,” said Alexander, to Mrs Hartigan, because it was the only thing in his head. “At a wedding. When I was seven. My cousin says she was Norwegian.”
Mrs Hartigan considered him.
“Then you’ll know,” she said, “why we take them off at the door.” And she stood aside.
He took them off. He put them on the rack inside the door, beside a pair of trainers with the laces still tied and a pair of heavy black work boots with the toes worn pale, and Lukas put his beside them, and they went in in their socks, into a kitchen with a table pushed out from the wall and a radio playing an accordion, very low, and a girl at the counter with her back to them who turned round, looked at the German Emperor in his black suit and his socks, and said, “Huh.”
“Kate,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Theo’s sister.”
“Hi,” said Kate.
“Good evening,” said Alexander.
“You’re shorter than on the news,” said Kate.
“Kate,” said Mrs Hartigan.
“He is. I’m just saying.”
“Everybody is shorter than on the news,” said Alexander. “It’s the camera. They stand you on a box.”
Kate looked at him for a moment longer. Then she turned back to the counter. “Do you play cards?”
“Which cards?”
“Schafkopf.”
“Not well.”
“Good,” said Kate, and that appeared to be the end of it.
He stood in the kitchen for perhaps four minutes doing nothing, and it was the longest four minutes of the day, longer than the silence. Lukas had been sent down to the second floor by Mrs Hartigan to fetch two chairs from a Mrs Okonjo, and had gone, without a word, in his socks. Theo was setting the table. Kate was doing something to a red cabbage with a knife that Alexander would not have been allowed within a metre of. Mrs Hartigan was at the stove. Everybody in the kitchen had a job except him, and nobody was going to give him one, because he was a guest, and in the most ordinary kitchen in the world he was still being protected from something.
“Mrs Hartigan.”
“Mm.”
“May I have a job?”
Mrs Hartigan turned round from the stove with the spoon.
She looked at him for a long moment, the way the doctors had looked at him in February, as though she were checking something that was not on any chart. Then she took an apron off the hook by the door, a blue one with a faded picture of a lighthouse on it, and held it out.
“Potatoes,” she said. “There’s a sack under the sink and a colander on the drainer. Small knife in the drawer. Peel toward you, not away, or you’ll take a slice off yourself and I’ll have to look at it, and I’ve been looking at people all week.” She went back to the stove. “Anybody who asks for a job in this kitchen gets one.”
He put on the apron over his suit. He found the sack and the colander and the knife. He had never peeled a potato in his life. He stood at the sink with his sleeves pushed up and his hands in the water to the wrists, a potato in one and the knife in the other, and looked at it, and began.
It was not difficult. It was the first thing he had done in nine months that was not difficult, and it was entirely his, and nobody was going to minute it. He peeled toward himself, as he had been told. The peel came off in long curls into the sink. He thought about nothing. When Lukas came back up the stairs with a chair in each hand, Mrs Hartigan gave him a tea towel that said Greetings from Door County on it and put him at the end of the counter by the window, drying plates, and Lukas dried them one at a time and, Alexander knew without turning round, looked every few plates at the back of his head, and the window over the sink steamed slowly over until the lights of the depot outside were only yellow blurs.
They came at seven.
He heard them on the stairs before anybody else did, because he was nearest the door and because it took so long. He heard the light switch at the bottom, and feet, a great many feet, slow, and then a long stop, and the light switch again from higher up, and feet, and a stop, and he understood, standing at the sink with a potato in his hand, what the chairs were for, and who.
He did not turn round. He went on peeling.
Then Mrs Hartigan opened the door before anybody had knocked, and he heard her say, in exactly the voice she had used to him, “Good evening, sir. Shoes,” and there was a pause on the landing, and then a laugh, short and surprised, a woman’s, his aunt’s. He had never heard his aunt laugh like that. He heard her take her shoes off. He heard something else, slower, which he did not understand until he turned his head, very slightly, and saw through the open door, on the landing, his cousin on one knee on the concrete undoing a pair of polished black laces, one at a time, with a hand on his shoulder.
“In you come,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Sit. Theo, the chair with the arms. Kate.”
“Coming,” said Kate, and went.
“He asked for a job,” said Mrs Hartigan, to the Regent, to the Duke, to the kitchen. “Anybody who asks for a job in this kitchen gets one.”
So he turned round.
His uncle was standing in the doorway in his stockinged feet, between Theo’s father and his own son, in an old grey coat with a velvet collar that Alexander had last seen in the rain, in the Tiergarten, in February, buttoned to the throat, on a man who had walked him the length of the park at a pace that never changed and said almost nothing for an hour, and then three things, and had made him laugh at one of them for the first time since it happened. It was the same coat. It was not the same man. The man in the doorway was grey, and wet at the temples from the stairs, and held a little crooked, and one side of his face was not doing what the other side did, and he was looking at Alexander, at the apron, at the potato, at the knife, slowly, the way he had always read a page, from the top.
Alexander put the knife down. He dried his hands on the lighthouse. He did not bow. He had been in that kitchen an hour, and it was not a room for bowing, and he knew it. He crossed the kitchen in his socks and stopped in front of his uncle and looked at him.
“Uncle Ernest,” he said.
His uncle looked at him for a long time.
Then his uncle’s right hand came up off Mr Hartigan’s arm, slowly, an inch and then two, and turned over, palm up, and stayed there, and waited.
Alexander looked at it. Then he put his own hand in it, the one that had been peeling potatoes, still damp, and his uncle’s fingers closed on it, all the way, and held on, harder than he would have thought they could. He did not know how long. Long enough that the radio finished one song with an accordion in it and started another. His uncle did not say anything, and did not need to, and Alexander understood, standing in his socks on the linoleum with his hand held, that the man who had told him in the Tiergarten to keep his Crowns in three drawers and never open two at once had just opened one he had been keeping shut, for him, in front of everybody, and that this was the last thing he had left to give anyone and he had given it to him.
Then his uncle let go.
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, and the table was too small, and nobody minded.
He sat beside Kate, opposite his cousin, with his hands in his lap, waiting to be told what to do, because he did not know the order of anything here and did not want to get it wrong. His uncle sat at the end in the chair with the arms. His aunt sat beside him. Mrs Hartigan put the beef on the plates, and the dumplings the size of tennis balls, and the red cabbage, and the potatoes, which were his, and he looked at them on the plate with a feeling he had no name for, and then she put the Duke’s plate in front of him and took his knife and fork and cut the beef into small pieces without a word, and put the fork back into his right hand, handle first, and his aunt watched her do it and said nothing, and the two women looked at each other across the table for a second, and Alexander saw it, and looked away, because it was not his.
“Peter,” said Mrs Hartigan.
Mr Hartigan put down the crossword.
Mrs Hartigan said grace in German.
It was German the way the potatoes were potatoes: completely, and from a long way back, and very fast. It was the German of a village, the German of somebody’s great-great-grandmother who had brought it over in a trunk a hundred and fifty years ago and never let it go, and half the words were words he knew only from books, and the other half were words he had heard only from the very old, and Mrs Hartigan said all of them in about four seconds, as though God were a busy man and wouldn’t mind. He understood every word. So did Lukas. They looked at each other across the corner of the table, and neither of them could believe how fast it had gone, and they said Amen half a beat late, together, and at the end of the table, a moment after everybody else, in a voice that was low and rough and perfectly clear, his uncle said it too.
“Amen.”
“Eat,” said Mrs Hartigan.
He ate.
He ate everything, which he had not done at a table since February. Mr Hartigan told a story about a man who had got on his bus with a goat, and the goat got larger as the story went on, and his aunt laughed at it, properly, with her hand on the table, and his uncle’s mouth moved at one corner. Kate passed the Duke of Cumberland the red cabbage.
“More?” said Kate.
His uncle 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 uncle.
Kate put more cabbage on his plate, and then looked across the table at Frederick for a long moment, and smiled at him, a small smile, and Alexander, beside her, saw his cousin’s face do something it had not done all day.
“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.
Alexander looked up. Across the table Frederick was looking at Theo, and Theo was looking at the light in the ceiling with an expression of complete innocence, and Alexander understood several things at once: that Frederick had told Theo about the Tiergarten; that Theo, from the look of him, had told his father nothing; and that this was, as far as anybody at the table could tell, simply the crossword, and that God, who was a busy man, had nevertheless found the time.
“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 uncle put his fork down.
He put it down carefully, square, on the side of the plate, the way he had always put down anything he meant to come back to. He looked at Mr Hartigan. His mouth moved, once, without anything, and then did not need to move again.
“Desk,” said the Duke of Cumberland.
And laughed.
Alexander had a dumpling halfway to his mouth. He did not know, afterwards, what happened to it. He knew only that he was in the Tiergarten in February, in the rain, with two details walking twenty yards behind like two funerals of their own, and his uncle had said Fourteen. I have had to buy a very large desk, and he had laughed, for the first time since it happened, helplessly, in the rain, in front of the details, the German Emperor laughing in a park in the week of his father’s funeral; and he was in a kitchen on the fourth floor in America, and his uncle had found the word again, out of all the words he had lost, and had found it for Mr Hartigan’s crossword, and was laughing, low and rough and short, the way he could laugh now; and Alexander put the dumpling down and put his hand over his face and laughed, and could not stop, and did not try.
When he took his hand away his uncle was looking at him down the length of the table, and his mouth had moved at the corner, the side that worked, and stayed there.
Mr Hartigan took the pencil from behind his ear and wrote it in, in capitals, very neatly.
“That’s why we have you,” said Mr Hartigan, to the Duke, and went back to his dinner.
Kate dealt under the table, onto her knee, so that her mother would not see, and explained Schafkopf to him in a whisper, and he took it very seriously, because she did. There were thirty-two cards. The Queens were trumps, and then the Jacks, and then the hearts, which made no sense at all and which she said was the point. At the corner Lukas was telling Theo about his telescope and the moons of Jupiter, and Theo was telling Lukas about the Green Bay Packers, and neither of them was listening to the other, and both of them were perfectly happy.
Across the table Frederick had not touched his plate.
Alexander saw it, and saw Theo see it. Theo did not look round. He looked at Frederick’s plate, and at Frederick, and said, not loudly:
“Okay, Freddie. Eat your dinner.”
And Frederick picked up his fork.
Alexander did not know what it meant. He knew that it meant something, from the way his cousin’s shoulders went, and from the way his aunt, at the end of the table, did not look, so carefully. He put it away. It was not his. It was the first thing all day that he had been quite sure was not his, and he was glad of it, and he went back to the cards.
When the two hours were up they took his uncle down.
Alexander went down ahead of them, without being asked, and stood on each landing by the switch, and pressed it when the light went out, which it did every minute and a half, so that nobody on the stairs had to reach. He had heard it pressed on the way up, from the sink, every minute and a half, and had counted. He did it on the way down. On the third landing his uncle sat in the chair with the arms, the better one, and looked out of the window at the depot, and at the buses asleep in their rows under the lamps, and Alexander stood by the switch in his socks, because he had forgotten his shoes, and pressed it, and the light came on, and his uncle looked round at him, at the switch, at his socks, and said nothing, and looked back at the buses.
At the bottom Frederick’s officer opened the car door. His uncle was put in. His aunt got in beside him. Frederick stood on the pavement for a moment, in the big coat, under the lamp.
They looked at each other. There was nothing to say that would not have been less than the day, and they both knew it, and Frederick nodded, once, and got into the car, and it went away down the street past the depot fence, and Alexander stood on the pavement in his socks until it had turned the corner.
Then he went back up the four flights for his shoes.
Kate had dealt a hand on the cleared table. He sat down without being asked, because it was the rule, and she beat him, in eleven minutes, without mercy and without letting him lose, and Theo and Lukas watched from the sink with the tea towel, and when it was over Kate gathered the cards and squared them and said, “You’ll get better,” and Mrs Hartigan gave him back his shoes from the rack and a foil package with four dumplings in it, for the Embassy, and said, “You did the potatoes right,” and shut the door.
In the car Lukas said nothing for the length of the depot fence.
Then he said, in German, to the window:
“You lost.”
“Yes.”
“At cards. To Theo’s sister. In a kitchen in America.”
“Yes.”
“In your socks, part of the time.”
“Yes.”
Lukas thought about it, as the car turned onto the avenue and the lights of the city came up yellow and clear through the clean glass, all the way to the river.
“Good,” said Lukas.
Alexander sat with the foil package on his knees. It was warm. His hands still smelled of potatoes, and of the lighthouse apron, and faintly, if he put them to his face, which he did once, when Lukas was looking out of the window, of his uncle’s coat. He did not wash them that night. He told himself that it was because he was tired, and it was not.