Four O'Clock

Monsieur Arnaud brought the cake down himself, at half past three, on a board, with both hands, and he had slept.

Frederick could see that he had slept. He came down the back stairs into Bridget’s kitchen in a clean white coat and the white hat, carrying the board out in front of him level, the way the eighth-grade girl had carried her tray and Dame M had carried the almond cake; and his face, which on Saturday morning had been the face of a man who had not slept since Tuesday, was round and pink and calm, the face of a man who has been told at last what something is supposed to look like and has made it look like that.

He put it on the long scrubbed table by the range.

It was a chocolate cake, rectangular, about a foot long and four inches high, on a white board, with dark chocolate icing poured over it so smooth that you could see the kitchen in it. It had been cut, very cleanly, straight down the middle, top to bottom, into two halves, and the halves had been pushed apart by about an inch, so that you could see the cut, and the inside, which was dark and soft and had a line of something red through it. On the left-hand half there was one candle, white, tall, unlit. The right-hand half had nothing on it at all.

And on the board, in white icing, piped very small and very neat, there were labels.

A thin white line from the candle to the edge of the board, and at the end of it, CANDLE (1). A line from the left half: HALF (A). A line from the right half: HALF (B). And an arrow, white, curving down from the candle into the cake, beautifully, like an arrow in a diagram in a book about engines, with one word beside it, in capitals, in sugar.

INSERT.

Theo looked at it.

He stood at the long scrubbed table with his hands at his sides and looked at the cake for about five seconds with no expression at all, the way he had looked at the frog under the bin. Then his face went, from the middle outwards, all at once, like a window breaking; and he sat down on the floor of Bridget’s kitchen, with his back against the leg of the table, and put both hands over his face, and laughed until he could not breathe.

Monsieur Arnaud looked down at him with deep and quiet satisfaction.

“Is it correct, Monseigneur?” he said to Frederick.

Frederick looked at the cake. At INSERT, in sugar. At Half B, with nothing on it.

“It’s exactly right,” he said.

“Bon,” said Monsieur Arnaud, and took off his hat, and held it against his chest, and bowed, very slightly, not to Frederick, but to the cake; and put his hat on again, and went back up the stairs, with his hands in the pockets of the white coat, and Frederick heard him on the stairs, going up, humming.

---

His mother came down at twenty to four.

She did not come into Bridget’s kitchen. She never had, in the mornings, by an arrangement nobody had ever explained to him; and in the afternoons there had never been any reason to. But at twenty to four on the second of November she came down the back stairs of the north wing in a grey jersey and a skirt, without Ebba, with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and stopped at the bottom, in the doorway of Bridget’s kitchen, and looked in.

Bridget, at the range, turned round and saw her, and stood very straight.

“Ma’am.”

“Bridget.” His mother did not come in. She stood in the doorway. “May I?”

Bridget looked at her for a moment as though she had been asked whether the Queen of Sweden might come into her kitchen, which she had.

“It’s your house, ma’am,” she said.

“It is your kitchen,” said his mother, and waited.

Bridget looked at her a moment longer. Then she wiped her hands on her apron, and went to the long scrubbed table, and pulled out a chair, the third one, on the far side, facing the range.

“Sit down, ma’am,” she said. “You’ll have something.”

His mother came in and sat down.

Theo had got up off the floor. He was standing by the table with his hands at his sides and his face still red and wet from laughing, and he had seen who it was, and Frederick watched him see; watched him take in the grey jersey and the reading glasses in the hair and the way Bridget had stood up straight; and he waited for it, for the shadow to go across Theo’s face, at last, here, in the kitchen, at the sight of a Queen in a grey jersey sitting down at a scrubbed table.

It did not go across.

Theo looked at his mother the way he had looked at the flagstaff from the gravel, for about three seconds, steadily, taking it in; and then he said, in his ordinary voice:

“Hello. I’m Theo.”

His mother looked at him over the cake.

“I know,” she said, in English, in her careful voice. “You are the boy who sits by the window.”

“No,” said Theo. “He’s by the window. I’m by the aisle.”

There was a pause in Bridget’s kitchen.

His mother looked at Theo. Then she looked at Frederick. Then she looked back at Theo, and Frederick saw her face do the thing it had done in the car at the red light on the first day, beside the bus, when he had said distant; saw it start at the corner of her mouth, and be stopped, and start again.

“By the aisle,” she said.

“There’s a gap,” said Theo. “About this wide.” He held his hands apart, the width of an arm. “I’m on the other side of it.”

“I see.” His mother put her hand flat on the table, the way she did, the way Dame M did on the folder. “Then I stand corrected. You are the boy who sits by the aisle, next to the boy who sits by the window.” She looked at the cake. “Who drew that?”

“He did,” said Theo. “On my card. And then the cake man did it again in chocolate.”

His mother looked at INSERT in sugar for some time.

“Of course he did,” she said, in Swedish, very quietly, to Frederick, and then she put her hand up to her mouth.

---

They lit the candle at a quarter to four.

Bridget lit it, with a long match from the box by the range, because she said nobody else in this kitchen was to be trusted with a match, and the flame stood up off the candle on Half A, straight, in the still warm air of the kitchen, and the four of them stood round the long scrubbed table and looked at it: Bridget with the match, and his mother in the grey jersey, and Theo with his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and Frederick.

“Now you sing,” said Bridget.

“Who sings?” said Frederick.

“Everybody sings. That’s the rule. Somebody lights the candle and everybody sings.” Bridget blew out the match. “Go on, ma’am. You start.”

His mother started.

She started in Swedish. Frederick had known she would. She sang the song she sang every year, at breakfast, on the second of May, in the small dining room, once, the Swedish one, ja, må han leva, which was not happy birthday at all but a different song, faster, and with hurra at the end four times, and which she sang in a clear, small, perfectly true voice, the voice he had only ever heard her use for that and for hymns.

And at the same moment, because she had told them to, Bridget and Theo started on the other one. In English. Happy birthday to you. Slowly, the way it is always sung, flat and warm and a little out of tune, with Bridget’s voice underneath and Theo’s on top, and Theo’s cracking a little on dear.

So there were two songs at once in Bridget’s kitchen, in two languages, at two speeds, going round the cake and over each other and under each other, the Swedish one racing ahead and coming back round to meet the English one, and his mother not stopping, and Bridget not stopping, and Theo not stopping, and none of them looking at each other, all of them looking at the candle on Half A; until they came to the end, all three of them, by some accident, at almost exactly the same moment, the English to you and the Swedish hurra, hurra, hurra, and his mother sang the fourth hurra alone, into the silence, quite loudly, and then stopped, and went pink.

“Blow it out,” said Bridget.

He blew it out.

“Did you wish?” said Theo.

“What?”

“You have to wish. When you blow it out. You have to wish something and not say it.” Theo looked at him. “Did you?”

Frederick looked at the candle, with its thin line of smoke going up off it into the warm air of the kitchen, towards the high window where the feet of the Sunday visitors were going past on the gravel.

He had not wished. He had not known you were supposed to. Nobody had ever told him. At breakfast on the second of May there was the song, and the princess cake with the green marzipan, but no candles; candles were for children’s parties, his mother said, and he had never had a children’s party; and the only candles he had ever blown out had been on a cake at the diplomatic corps’ Christmas tea when he was six, for a photographer, and he had been so busy not doing anything with his face that he had blown them out without thinking at all.

“Can I do it again?” he said.

Bridget looked at him. Then she struck another match, without a word, and lit the candle again.

He looked at the flame on Half A. He thought about it. He thought about it carefully, the way he thought about everything, the way you would think about a Bill. And then he wished, and did not say it, and blew the candle out.

---

At five to four Dame M came to the kitchen door and said, “Sir,” and nothing else.

He went up. He left Theo in the kitchen with Bridget and his mother and the cake, which Bridget was cutting into pieces with a long knife, Half A only, very carefully, saying two, he’s to have two, his mother said; and he went up the back stairs and along the passage and into the small sitting room, where the fire was lit, and sat down in the chair by the side table with the cream telephone on it.

He did not have a card. He had not made a Bill this week. He had not been able to think about anything for long enough.

At four o’clock exactly the telephone rang.

“Hello.”

“Frederick.”

“Hello, Papa.”

“Good afternoon. Good evening.” A pause. “Many happy returns.”

Frederick sat very still.

“Of the half,” said his father.

He knew. Of course he knew. Dame M’s note would have gone to him with the papers, on the Monday, as it always did, with the events in Frederick’s life that she thought he would wish to know; and the timings had probably gone too, both pages, with the footnotes; his father would have read them at the desk in London with the boxes in fourteen colours, and the pen, and the pad, and read Footnote two: Probably, and done whatever his father did when he read a thing like that, which Frederick could not imagine.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I am told,” said his father, “that you have a guest.”

“Yes. Theo. He’s in the kitchen. With Bridget. And Mamma.” He paused. “And a cake.”

“I am told the cake was a matter of some difficulty.”

“Monsieur Arnaud didn’t sleep from Tuesday to Saturday.”

“So I am told.” The faint scratch of the pen. “Dame Margaret’s note said that the question of the half had been resolved by the Prince, on Saturday morning, with a pencil.” A pause. “She did not say how.”

“I drew it.”

“Ah.”

“Like the bowl of fruit,” said Frederick. “As instructions.” He looked at the fire. “Papa.”

“Yes?”

He had thought about how to do it. He had thought about it since Tuesday the twenty-first, since his mother had said at the end of the long table he will be told by his son, on Sunday, at four, and folded the photocopy under her hand; and he had decided to do it the way his father did things, in order, with the date first, and the source.

“There’s a precedent,” he said. “For the half-birthday. Dame Margaret found it. She rang the Royal Archives at Windsor. The Keeper found it in the day-book at Balmoral.” He took a breath. “Tuesday the ninth of August, 1955.”

There was silence on the line from London.

“H.R.H. Prince Ernest’s half-birthday,” said Frederick, from memory, because he had read it so many times that he did not need the photocopy, which was on his mother’s dressing table under a book. “By H.R.H.’s own request, which His Majesty was pleased to allow. One guest. Master Alasdair Munro, aged nine, son of the head stalker. Tea in the nursery at four. A cake, divided.” He paused. “Both boys in the river at five. Recovered.”

The silence from London went on.

It went on for longer than any silence his father had ever left on the telephone. Longer than the silence after Cork, or after Mr Abernathy wins. He could hear London in it, the thick soft quiet like a curtain, and the clock on the mantelpiece in the small sitting room ticking, and the fire. He could not hear the pen. He listened for the pen, and it was not there.

“Papa?”

“Alasdair Munro,” said his father.

His voice was not the voice for New Wessex. Frederick had never heard the voice it was. It was lower, and slower, and it came from somewhere a long way back, behind the study and the boxes and the cardigan, as though his father had had to go and fetch it from a room he did not often go into.

“He was nine,” said his father. “I was eight and a half. He was a head taller than me and he had red hair and he could tickle a trout. He could lie on his stomach on the bank of the Dee with his arm in the water up to the shoulder and stay there for half an hour without moving and then bring one out in his hand.” A pause. “He taught me. That afternoon. After the cake. He said that a Prince ought to be able to tickle a trout in case of famine.” A longer pause. “I fell in.”

“He pushed you in?”

“No,” said his father. “I fell in. On my own. Because I could not stay still for half an hour. He came in after me.” The faint creak of the chair in the study. “We were both recovered. By a ghillie. The nurse was not pleased. My father was told.” A pause. “My father was not told for some time, as it happens. Because the ghillie did not tell him. I found out when I was grown that the ghillie had told nobody, and that the nurse had told nobody, and that the day-book said recovered because somebody had to write something and nobody wanted to write anything more.” The silence again. “I had forgotten. Entirely. Seventy years.”

Frederick held the telephone.

“I asked for it myself,” said his father. “The half-birthday. I remember now. I asked my father, at breakfast, in August, because my real birthday was in February and was always in London, and always official, and nobody I knew came to it. And I had heard of half-birthdays from somebody. A boy at the Christmas tea, from one of the embassies.” A pause. “And my father said yes. I remember that. I remember being astonished that he said yes.”

“Mamma said that’s what she was,” said Frederick. “When I asked. Astonished.”

“Your mother,” said his father, “will have laughed.”

“For a minute.”

“She would.” The chair creaked again. “Where is the boy?”

“In the kitchen. With Mamma and Bridget. Having two pieces of cake. His mother said two.”

There was a pause.

“Then why,” said his father, “are you on the telephone to me?”

Frederick looked at the cream telephone.

“It’s four,” he said. “It’s Sunday.”

“It is four, and it is Sunday,” said his father, “and there is a boy in the kitchen who came to your half-birthday, who was brought by his parents in a car, and who is the first, and there will never be another first.” The voice was the New Wessex one again, now, but not quite; there was something still at the back of it from the other room. “And you are sitting in the small sitting room talking to an old man in London about a trout.”

“I wanted to tell you.”

“And you have told me. In order. With the source. I am very grateful.” A pause. “And now you will go back to the kitchen.”

“But the game.”

“The game,” said his father, “will keep for a week. It has kept for fourteen Crowns and fifty-three years. It will survive a Sunday.” The faint sound of something on the desk in London being moved; the pad, perhaps, being pushed away. “Go back to the kitchen, Frederick. Have some cake. Do not fall in the pond.”

“Dame Margaret said that already.”

“Then you have been told twice, and you must do as you are told.” A pause. “Goodbye.”

“Papa.”

“Yes?”

Frederick did not know what he had been going to say. He sat with the telephone in the small sitting room and the fire and the clock, and his father waited, on the line from London, at nine o’clock at night, with the boxes, without the pen; and Frederick could not find it, whatever it was.

“Many happy returns of the half,” said his father, quietly. “To both of us.”

And the line went.

Frederick sat with the telephone in his hand for a moment. Then he put it back on its cradle, very carefully, and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It said six minutes past four.

It had never said six minutes past four at the end of a Sunday call before. It had always said a quarter to five, or five, or once, the week of the whales, a quarter past six.

He got up. In the doorway of the small sitting room, his mother was standing, with her back against the frame and her arms folded, and her face wet; she had come up the stairs behind him, he understood, and stood in the next room, as she had said she would, and listened.

“He ended it,” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said his mother. “I heard.” She unfolded her arms and wiped her face with the back of her hand, quickly, the way you do when you do not want to be seen doing it. “He has never ended it before. Not once. Ever.” She put her hand on his hair, and did not flatten it. “He closed the folder, älskling. Go back to the kitchen.”

---

In the kitchen Theo was pulling the rope of the dumbwaiter.

He was doing it with both hands, slowly, hand over hand, the way you would pull up a bucket from a well, with his whole face lit up, and Bridget was standing beside him at the range with her arms folded, watching him do it, with an expression on her face that Frederick had never seen there before and did not have a heading for.

“Bridget said,” said Theo, without stopping. “Bridget said I could send something up. Just once. To the dining room.” He pulled. “So I put a piece of cake on the shelf. Half A. On a plate. With a note.” He pulled. “For your mum. When she goes in for her supper. It’ll be there.”

“She’s not in the dining room. She’s upstairs.”

“I know. Bridget said. That’s the point.” Theo pulled. “She’ll go in later and open the hatch and there’ll be cake in it.” He stopped pulling. The rope had gone tight. “That’s it. It’s up.” He looked at the dumbwaiter, at the empty shaft behind the sliding door, with his face still lit up. “Freddie. I sent a piece of cake up two floors. In a lift for food. In a palace.”

“What did the note say?”

Theo looked at Bridget. Bridget looked at the range.

“For Freddie’s mum,” said Theo. “Half A. From Theo. P.S. I’m by the aisle.”

---

At half past five they went into the garden, because Theo said you could not have a half-birthday without going outside and doing something stupid, and it was dark, and cold, and the lamps were on along the paths, and the garden at the back of the north wing went away down a slope in the dark to the trees at the bottom, and the pond.

They stood by the pond.

It was a round pond with a stone rim, about forty feet across, black in the dark, with the lamps from the path reflected in it in long wobbling lines, and dead leaves on the surface, and somewhere in the middle of it, invisible, a fountain that was turned off for the winter.

“Is this the one?” said Theo. “The one your cousin went in?”

“Yes. His sister pushed him.”

“From where?”

“About there.” Frederick pointed at the stone rim, at a place on the far side.

Theo looked at the place for some time.

“I’m not going in,” he said.

“Nobody said you were.”

“Your lady said. On the phone. To Dad. Nobody should fall in the pond.” Theo looked at the black water. “And then your dad said. On the phone. To you. I heard you. Dame Margaret said that already.” He considered. “And my mum said, at the door, if he breaks anything he’s to say so. And she didn’t say the pond, but she meant the pond. She always means the pond. Every pond. Since I was four.” He put his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt. “So that’s three people who’ve said don’t go in the pond.”

“Yes.”

“So I’m not going in,” said Theo. “On principle.”

They stood by the pond in the dark with their hands in their pockets and their breath coming out white and did not go in it, for about ten minutes, on principle, side by side, in silence; and behind them, ten yards up the path, under a lamp, Castellanos stood with his hands folded and watched them not go in it; and it was, Frederick thought, the stupidest thing he had ever done, and the best, and he could not have explained why to anybody in the world except the person standing next to him.

---

At six o’clock the brown estate came across the forecourt with its headlights on.

It came at two miles an hour, very straight, exactly where the young man in the leather jacket was pointing, and stopped exactly level with the north wing door, and the engine went on running. There were only two people in it this time. Mr Dabrowski in the front, in the grey felt hat, with his face to the window. And at the wheel, with both hands at ten to two, the big quiet man in the dark jacket.

The man at the wheel got out.

Frederick had not expected that. Only the boy’s getting out, the man had said, to Dame M, on the telephone, at four minutes past nine. But now he got out. He opened the driver’s door and got out onto the gravel and shut the door behind him and stood beside the car, a big broad man of about forty-five with short sandy hair going grey and a white shirt done up to the top without a tie, and looked at the north wing door, and the step, and the people on it: Dame M in the grey suit, and Castellanos, and Frederick, and Theo, with a box in his arms.

The box was from Bridget. It was a white cardboard cake box, with string, and in it was Half B. Frederick had given it to him in the kitchen at a quarter to six, all of it, untouched, the plain half with nothing on it, in the box, with the string; and Theo had looked at it and said what’s this, and Frederick had said it’s the half that’s not anybody’s yet, and Theo had looked at him for a long time and said it is now, and taken it.

Mr Hartigan came to the bottom of the step.

He did not come up it. He stood at the bottom, on the gravel, with his hands at his sides, the way you stand at a door you have not been asked into; and he looked up at Dame M first, and nodded to her, once, the nod of a man to a woman who sounds as though she is in charge; and then at Castellanos, and nodded to him, the same nod, and Castellanos nodded back; and then at his son, with the cake box, and his face did nothing, the way Castellanos’s face did nothing, very hard; and then at Frederick.

He looked at Frederick for some time.

Frederick looked back at him. At the big quiet face with the lines in it from squinting through windscreens, and the sandy eyebrows, and the eyes, which were Theo’s, grey or green, you could not tell in the light from the door.

Then Mr Hartigan said, in the voice Theo had done on the wall, low and slow, with Milwaukee in it all the way through like a stick of rock:

“Thanks for having him, son.”

That was all.

He did not say Your Royal Highness, or sir, or Prince Frederick. He did not bow. He did not say anything about the house, or the flag, or the forecourt, or the Axis, or anything that he had seen, or that his son had told him, or that he had told at the depot. He said thanks for having him, son, the way a bus driver would say it to any boy at any door at six o’clock on any Sunday in the world, and then he held out his hand for the cake box, and Theo gave it to him, and he put his other hand on the back of his son’s neck, lightly, and turned him towards the car.

Theo went down the step.

At the bottom of it he turned round.

“Freddie,” he said.

“What.”

“Did you wish?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t tell me what.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Good,” said Theo, and got into the back of the brown estate, with Half B on his knees in its box, and shut the door.

Mr Hartigan went round to the driver’s side. He opened the door. He looked once more, over the roof of the car, at the north wing door and the people on the step, and then, for the first and only time, up, over the roof of the low wing, at the flagstaff on the central block, and the standard on it in the dark, lit from below, with its label of three points.

He looked at it for about three seconds. The way his son had.

Then he got in and shut the door and put both hands on the wheel at ten to two, and the brown estate went away across the forecourt at two miles an hour, very straight, with its headlights on, the way a bus leaves a stop; and as it went, without turning his head, he lifted the forefinger of his right hand off the wheel, about an inch.

On the step, Castellanos lifted his.

And in the back window of the car, going away across the gravel in the dark, Frederick saw a face, pressed to the glass, looking back at the house; and a hand come up, the whole hand, not one finger, palm flat against the glass, and stay there, all the way across the forecourt, past the young man in the leather jacket, and round the corner onto the Axis, until he could not see it any more.

He stood on the step.

“Sir,” said Dame M, beside him, after a while. “It’s cold.”

“I know.”

“Your mother is in the small dining room,” said Dame M. “She has just opened the hatch of the dumbwaiter, for the first time in nine years, because Bridget told her to.” She paused. “I’m told she is sitting at the end of the table by the fire with a piece of chocolate cake and a note, and that she has been sitting there for some time.” She looked at the forecourt. “Bridget says she is laughing. Bridget says it is the other one.”

Frederick looked at the forecourt, at the place where the car had been.

“I’m by the aisle,” he said.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Nothing,” said Frederick, and went in, and up the stairs, to the small dining room, where his mother was sitting at the end of the long table nearest the fire with a slice of Half A on a plate in front of her and a scrap of paper in her hand, in a boy’s handwriting, and her reading glasses on, laughing the one that went on and got away from her; and he sat down beside her, at the corner, where Dame M had sat, and she put her arm round him without looking at him, and held on, and did not stop laughing for a long time.