Five Pounds

“Five pounds,” said Theo, on the wall, on Monday.

The snow had gone. It had gone on the Sunday, in a warm rain that came up from the south overnight and washed the yard back to tarmac, and now there was nothing left of it but a grey heap by Mr Pavlik’s bins where the custodian had shovelled it, going black at the edges, and a dampness in the stone of the wall that came up through your trousers.

“Five pounds what?” said Frederick.

“For presents. For Christmas. Five pounds and not a penny more.” Theo got out his apple. “That’s the rule. Ours. In our house. Everybody gets everybody something and it’s five pounds, and if it’s more than five pounds you have to give it back. Mum made it up in Milwaukee when Dad lost his job, and then we came here and nobody unmade it.” He bit. “So if you’re getting me something, it’s five pounds. And I’m getting you something, and it’s five pounds.” He looked at Frederick sideways. “If you get me something that’s more than five pounds, I’m giving it back. On principle. I’ll give it back in front of everybody.”

“I wasn’t going to get you anything.”

Theo stopped chewing.

“I mean,” said Frederick, “I didn’t know you were supposed to. I didn’t know that was what happened.” He looked at the depot apple in his hand. “I’ve never given anybody a Christmas present who wasn’t family. Or a regiment.”

“A regiment?”

“There’s a regiment in Hanover I send a card to, because my grandfather was its colonel. And a lifeboat. And a children’s hospital in Stockholm.” He thought. “They get a card and a photograph. In the library. In front of the same books.”

Theo looked at him for some time.

“Freddie,” he said. “That’s not a present. That’s post.” He bit his apple. “Five pounds. Friday. Last day. Before you go to wherever you go.”

“London.”

“London, then.” Theo chewed. “You’ve got till Friday.”

---

He did not have five pounds.

He realised it in the car on the way home, at the lights on the Axis, and sat with it, forward on the seat, with his bag on his knees. He did not have five pounds. He did not have one pound. He did not have a penny. He had never had one. He had never, as far as he could remember, in his whole life, held a coin of the Realm in his hand that was his, to spend, that he could take into a shop and give to somebody behind a counter in exchange for a thing; because there had always been somebody, a step behind him, at his elbow, with an envelope, or an account, or a word to the shop, that made it unnecessary. He had held coins. He had held a Hanoverian one that his great-aunt had given him at five, to look at. He had held the coins in the Treasury’s collection at the Mint on a visit at nine, in white cotton gloves. He had never once held a coin to use.

He did not know how much five pounds was.

He knew what it was, of course. He knew the coinage, the notes and their colours and who was on them, and in right of which Crown each of them was issued. He did not know what it bought. He did not know whether five pounds was a book, or half a book, or a hundred apples, or one. He had never been told the price of anything in his life except, once, by Mr Obi, the price of whatever it was that had made him look like that in his photograph.

“Sergeant Castellanos,” he said, at the lights.

“Sir.”

“What does five pounds buy?”

Castellanos looked at him in the mirror. It was the look from the second day; about two seconds long.

“Depends where, sir,” he said.

“In a shop. On Canal Street. For a boy.”

Castellanos thought about it, at the lights, with the engine running.

“A book,” he said. “A paperback. Not a new one, a new one’s eight or nine. A secondhand one, in the shop by the depot, two or three. A cinema ticket, nearly. Four coffees, the way Mr Obi makes them, if he charged, which he doesn’t. A packet of good pencils. A torch. A model aeroplane, a small one, the kind you glue. A football, a cheap one.” He thought. “About a third of a Saturday’s shopping, for a family of four, if you’re careful.”

The lights changed. They went up the Axis.

“Is that a lot?” said Frederick.

Castellanos drove.

“For that family, sir,” he said, eventually, to the windscreen, “it’s a lot.”

---

He asked Dame M on Monday evening. He went down to her office at a quarter past six, along the two corridors, and knocked, and she said come, and he went in and said:

“I need five pounds.”

Dame M looked at him across the desk in the lamplight.

“For what, sir?”

“For a present. For Theo. For Christmas.” He stood in the doorway. “They have a rule. In their house. Five pounds and not a penny more. If it’s more, he gives it back. In front of everybody. On principle.”

Dame M did not open the folder.

“Sit down, sir,” she said.

He sat.

“I can give you five pounds,” said Dame M. “I have it here. In my handbag.” She did not reach for her handbag. “But it would be my five pounds, and not yours. And I don’t think that is what Master Hartigan means.”

“Then the Household’s.”

“There is no such thing, sir,” said Dame M, “as the Household’s five pounds. Not for you.” She put both hands on the folder. “Everything that is bought for you is bought by the Household, on account, out of the Privy Purse, and recorded, and audited, and reported. Every pen Bridget puts in your bag. Every book. The scarf wool, which your mother bought herself, from a shop in Stockholm, in September, and paid for with her own money, and would not let me record.” She paused. “If the Household gave you five pounds, it would be recorded as five pounds, the Prince, a present for a school friend, and it would go in a ledger, and the ledger would go to London, and somebody in the Privy Purse office would read it.” She looked at him. “And it would still not be yours.”

Frederick sat very still.

“Then I haven’t got any,” he said.

“No, sir,” said Dame M. “You haven’t. You have never had any. Nobody in your position ever has, at your age, and very few at any age. Your father did not hold a coin of his own until he was at university, and then only because he insisted.” She paused. “It is one of the things nobody tells you about the job. That you can have anything, and own nothing, and give nothing that is yours.”

“Then what do I do?”

Dame M thought about it, honestly, with her hand on the folder.

“I think, sir,” she said, “that you had better ask somebody who knows what five pounds is.”

---

Bridget knew what five pounds was.

“Potatoes,” said Bridget, on Tuesday morning, at the range, over the egg.

Frederick looked at her.

“Fifty pence a bucket,” said Bridget. “Peeled. Properly. No eyes left in. A bucket’s about forty potatoes. Ten buckets, five pounds.” She banged a pan. “I peel two buckets a day for the staff dinners. If you peel them, I don’t. That’s work. Work’s money.” She turned round and pointed the pan at him. “And it’d be yours. Not the Household’s. Not the Privy Purse’s. Mine to give you, for your work, and yours.”

“Ten buckets.”

“Ten buckets. You’ve got till Friday. That’s two and a half buckets a day.” She considered. “Before school or after. Not during. I’m not having you peeling potatoes in a palace in school hours, there’d be questions.”

He did it. He came down on Tuesday evening after Miss Hellström and peeled two buckets of potatoes at the long scrubbed table by the range with a small sharp knife Bridget gave him, and it took him two hours and ten minutes, because he did it properly, the way he did everything, from the outside in, in a spiral, so that the peel came off in one long curling strip, every time, without breaking, and there were no eyes left in at all; and Bridget stood at the range with her arms folded and watched him do it and did not say anything, and at the end she counted the potatoes, all eighty-one of them, and looked at them, and said, “Those are the best-peeled potatoes I’ve had in nineteen years,” and gave him a pound.

A coin. Gold-coloured, heavy, warm from her apron pocket.

He held it in his palm and looked at it for a long time.

On Wednesday morning he peeled half a bucket before Castellanos came, and on Wednesday evening another two, and on Thursday morning another, and by Thursday night he had peeled eight buckets and had four pounds in coins in a sock in the drawer of the desk in his room, which was the first money he had ever had, and he had taken it out of the sock and counted it eleven times.

And on Thursday night, lying in the dark under the wall map, he understood that it was no good.

---

It was no good because of the shop.

He had worked it out on the wall that morning, watching Theo eat an apple, and had not been able to stop working it out all day. He had four pounds. By Friday morning he would have five. And then he would have to go into a shop on Canal Street, or by the depot, or anywhere, and buy something with it.

And he could not go into a shop.

He could go. Dame M would say he might. There was nothing that said he might not. But if he went, the Inspector would have to know, and would send a man to look at the shop on Thursday afternoon, the doors and the windows and the staff, and the man would ask the shopkeeper who else was expected, and the shopkeeper would understand why he was being asked. And on Friday there would be Castellanos, at the door of the shop, and a car outside, and a second car at the end of the street. And Frederick would go in with his five pounds in a sock and walk round the shop with the shopkeeper watching him and everybody in the shop watching him, and choose something, and take it to the counter, and give the shopkeeper five pounds, and the shopkeeper would look at the coins and not know whether to take them; and it would be the most expensive five pounds anybody had ever spent on Canal Street.

It would be the bowling alley. It would stop being a present from a boy and become the Prince’s shopping.

And Theo would know. Theo would know at once, the moment he opened it, that it had come out of a shop that had been looked at by an Inspector on a Thursday, and he would be nice about it, because Theo was nice; and he would not give it back, because it would be five pounds and not a penny more; and it would be wrong.

He lay in the dark and looked at the Axis.

At least it’s clear, Ms Varga had said, about the bowl of fruit.

He sat up.

---

On Friday morning, at half past six, he asked Dame M for the timetable of the twenty-two.

He asked on the stairs, on the half-landing, by the window, where she had stopped to wait for him, which she had begun to do on the days she had something to tell him and had not told him what; and she looked at him for about a second and said “The twenty-two,” as though checking that she had heard, and he said yes, the bus, the Columbia District transit authority, the twenty-two, from the depot on Dunmore Street to the boathouses, the weekday service, and she said, “Very good, sir,” and went down the stairs at the pace of somebody crossing a deck.

At five past seven, as he was finishing his egg, Dacre came into Bridget’s kitchen with the salver, and on the salver there was a leaflet.

It was a folded leaflet, red and cream, the colours of the buses, with the transit authority’s crest on the front, the wheel with wings, and ROUTE 22 in large letters, and Depot (Dunmore St) - Canal St - Market - Ellicott - Fourteenth St - Riverside - Boathouses, and Monday to Friday, and inside, in small grey print, in columns, every stop and every time, from the first bus out of the depot at five fifty-two in the morning to the last one back at eleven forty at night.

“From the Inspector’s office, sir,” said Dacre. “Dame Margaret rang them at a quarter to seven. They sent a man to the depot.” He held out the salver. “He says the depot was very surprised. He says the man in the office asked what the Palace wanted with the twenty-two, and he said he didn’t know, and the man in the office said, it’s the Hartigan lad, isn’t it, and gave him three.”

There were three leaflets on the salver. Frederick took one.

“Thank you, Dacre.”

“Sir.” Dacre did not go. He stood with the salver. “Sir, the man says the man in the depot office said something else. He said to say the early shift on the twenty-two this week is Peter. Every day. Five fifty-two out.” He paused. “He said, in case it’s useful.”

---

He did it in the car.

He had twenty minutes, from the north wing door to the bins, past the shops and the stop and over the bridge, where nothing happened; and he had brought a plain white card from the drawer, the large kind, the size of a page, and a pencil, and the ruler with the rubber shaped like a train on the end of it, and the leaflet; and he sat forward in the back of the car with the card on his bag on his knees and drew.

Castellanos, at the lights on the Axis, looked in the mirror, and said nothing, and drove more slowly than usual over the bridge.

He drew it the way he drew everything. From the outside in, in its parts, exactly.

A long line across the card, from left to right, ruled. That was the route. At the left-hand end, a rectangle, labelled, in his smallest capitals, PART A: DEPOT (DUNMORE ST) (0727). Beside it, a smaller rectangle, a bus, seen from the side, with windows, and a door, and wheels; and an arrow from it pointing along the line, with INSERT BUS HERE beside it. And then, along the line, at intervals, the stops, every one of them from the leaflet, each a small circle on the line with a label and a time: PART B: CANAL ST (0733). PART C: MARKET (0737). PART D: LAMPPOST WHERE THE LADY WITH THE DOG IS (0740) (APPROX). PART E: ELLICOTT, BY THE BIKE RACKS (0744). And then on, past the school, to the stops he had never seen and only read about, FOURTEENTH ST, RIVERSIDE, and at the far right-hand end, PART J: BOATHOUSES (0809) (END).

He drew the bus again at the far end, turned round, with an arrow pointing back the other way, and wrote beside it ROTATE BUS 180°, and then crossed out the degree sign, because Theo would say it was showing off, and wrote TURN BUS ROUND.

Under the bus at the depot end he drew a very small figure, at the wheel, with one finger raised off the steering wheel, about an inch, and a line from it to the edge of the card, and at the end of the line, DRIVER (1). WAVES.

And at the stop by the bike racks, PART E, he drew the wall. A low wall, in front of the racks. And on it a very small figure, sitting, with a very small circle in its hand, and a line from it to the edge, and THEO (1). APPLE (1).

And beside the wall, another figure, sitting next to the first. And a line from it. And he stopped, with the pencil over the card, at the bins, with the car stopped, and Castellanos getting out, and thought about what to write.

FREDDIE (1), he wrote.

It was the first time he had ever written it. He looked at it for a long time, in his own smallest capitals, in pencil, at the end of a line on a card on his bag in the back of a car by the custodian’s bins. It was not his word. It was Theo’s. But it was on a card for Theo, about the bench where Theo had found it; and it seemed to him, at the bins, that on this card, and on no other, it would be all right.

At the top of the card he wrote the title. In larger capitals, ruled underneath, with the ruler.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ASSEMBLING THE 22

And at the bottom, small, in the corner:

COST: £0.00. (UNDER FIVE.)

Castellanos opened the door.

“Sir,” he said.

Frederick put the card in his bag, flat, between two exercise books, so it would not bend, and got out.

---

He gave it to Theo at lunch, at the round table by the radiator, because it was the last day of term and June had decreed, on principle, that the whole table would exchange presents at lunch, all nine, at once, so that nobody’s would be looked at more than anybody else’s.

So there were nine presents on the round table by the radiator, and nine people round it, and the noise of the lunch hall all round them, louder than usual, because it was the last day, and Mrs Tolliver at the counter at the end with her radio playing carols.

Theo opened his.

He took the card out of its envelope, which was a plain one with THEO on it, and looked at it.

He looked at it for a long time. He looked at it from left to right, along the line, from PART A to PART J, the way he ate an apple, slowly, all the way round, missing nothing. Frederick watched him. He watched him get to INSERT BUS HERE and stop. He watched him get to LAMPPOST WHERE THE LADY WITH THE DOG IS (APPROX) and his mouth do something. He watched him get to DRIVER (1). WAVES., and the tiny figure at the wheel with the tiny finger raised.

He watched him get to the wall.

Theo did not laugh. Frederick had thought he would. He had thought, all morning, that Theo would put his hand over his mouth, and his shoulders would go, the way they had gone at the cake with INSERT on it, in Room 14, before roll call. He did not. He sat at the round table by the radiator with the card in both hands and looked at the wall, and the two figures on it, THEO (1). APPLE (1)., and the other one, and the word at the end of the line from it, in Frederick’s smallest capitals, in pencil, for the first time; and his face did not do anything at all.

Then he looked at the bottom of the card.

COST: £0.00. (UNDER FIVE.)

“You didn’t buy it,” he said.

“No.”

“You made it.”

“In the car. On the way here.” Frederick looked at his sandwich. “I couldn’t buy anything. I haven’t got any money. I’ve never had any.” He paused. “Well. I’ve got four pounds. In a sock. From Bridget. For potatoes. But if I went in a shop with it, the shop would have to be looked at, by the Inspector, and there’d be a car outside, and the shopkeeper would know.” He turned the sandwich over. “And it’d be the bowling alley. It’d be the Prince buying something. On Canal Street.”

Theo looked at him across the corner of the round table.

“So I made it instead,” said Frederick. “And that’s free. So it’s under five. So you can’t give it back.”

There was a silence at the round table. The other seven had stopped opening their presents and were looking at the two of them. Lucía had a pair of socks with cats on them half out of their paper. June had a notebook. Devon Price, behind his tray, was holding a small parcel that he had not opened, very carefully, in both hands, the way you hold a bird.

“I’m not giving it back,” said Theo.

He looked at the card again. He looked at it for a long time. At the wall, and the two figures.

“Freddie, one,” he read out, quietly.

Frederick looked at his sandwich.

“You’ve never written that,” said Theo. “Have you. Ever.”

“No.”

“Why now?”

Frederick thought about it, honestly, because Theo had asked honestly.

“Because it’s yours,” he said. “And it’s on yours.”

Theo did not say anything. He put the card down on the table in front of him, very carefully, flat, so it would not bend, and put both hands on it, flat, the way Dame M put her hand on the folder, the way his mother put her hand on the table; and sat like that, at the round table, with the carols on Mrs Tolliver’s radio, and did not say anything at all for long enough that June, who had a principle about silences, opened her mouth, and then shut it again.

“Your turn,” said Theo, at last, without looking up. “Open yours.”

---

Theo’s was very small, and very heavy, and wrapped in the comics page, with a great deal of sellotape.

“Kate wrapped it,” said Theo. “She’s speaking to me again. She said she’d only wrap it if she could see what it was first. She saw what it was. She said it was the stupidest present she’d ever seen in her life.” He looked at it. “Then she wrapped it really carefully.”

Frederick got the sellotape off, and the dog in the hat, and a man on a desert island, and found inside them a cheese.

It was a wedge of cheese, about two inches long, bright yellow, with holes in it, made of some kind of rubber, very heavy for its size; and when he turned it over, there was a black disc on the back of it, flat, that pulled at his fingers.

It was a magnet.

“It’s from the Wisconsin Dells,” said Theo. “It’s the same as ours. On our fridge. Holding up your cake.” He looked at it in Frederick’s hand. “There’s a shop on Canal Street that sells Wisconsin things for people who miss Wisconsin. Cheese and sausages and hats. Mum goes in it when she’s sad. And they had these, by the till, in a box.” He paused. “Four pounds ninety-nine.”

“That’s under five.”

“One penny change,” said Theo. “I’ve got it. In my pocket.” He produced it. A penny. He put it on the table between them. “I was going to give you that too. So it was exactly five. But Mum said that was showing off.”

Frederick held the cheese.

He did not know what to say. It was heavy and warm from Theo’s pocket and bright yellow and had holes in it and pulled at his fingers, and it was the same as the one on a fridge four floors up over a bus depot that held a drawing of a cake with INSERT on it; and he had never in his life been given anything that was the same as something somebody else had, on purpose, so that they would both have it.

“We haven’t got a fridge,” he said. “Not one I can put things on.”

“You’ve got a kitchen,” said Theo. “Bridget’s. There’s a fridge in it. I saw. A big silver one. By the door.”

“It’s Bridget’s.”

“Then ask Bridget,” said Theo. “She’ll say yes. She gave me four biscuits and said they didn’t count.”

---

Bridget said yes.

She said it on Friday evening, at the range, when he came down at six with the cheese in his hand and stood in the doorway of the kitchen and held it out and asked. She turned round and looked at it, and at him, and at it, and said, “Give it here,” and took it, and went to the big silver refrigerator by the door, which was the size of a wardrobe and had nothing on its doors at all, because nobody had ever put anything on them, and put the cheese on the right-hand door, at the height of her eyes, with a small decisive click.

Then she went to the drawer by the range and took out a pad of paper, and tore off a sheet, and wrote on it in her round blue writing, and put it under the cheese.

EAT THE SANDWICH

She stood back and looked at it.

“There,” she said. “Now it’s a fridge.”

---

He left the four pounds in the sock.

He thought about giving it back to Bridget, and she would not take it. He thought about giving it to the lifeboat, or the children’s hospital in Stockholm, and that seemed wrong too, because it had not been earned for them. In the end he left it in the sock, in the drawer of the desk in his room, with the rubber shaped like a train and the plain cards; and put on top of it, flat, so that it would not bend, the red and cream card with DAY RIDER on it and thirty-one silver boxes and twelve, unscratched.

And beside them, the third leaflet from the depot. ROUTE 22. With the times.

On Saturday morning he flew to London, on an aircraft of the royal squadron, at nine, from the airfield across the river; and his mother flew at eleven, on another, because the King, the Queen and Frederick were never aboard the same aircraft, and the rule was only that they did not fly together. He sat by the window and looked down at the capital going away underneath him in the grey December morning, the white buildings at the end of the Axis, and the river, and north-east of the river, past the depot, the roofs of streets he could not name; and he thought that somewhere down there, at five fifty-two, a bus had gone out of a depot on Dunmore Street with a big quiet man at the wheel who had lifted a finger to every bus going the other way.