The Folder

Mrs Thursby asked to see him on Wednesday, at six, in the small library of the north wing, after Miss Hellström.

He had not expected it. He had not known that she would want to; he had thought, in so far as he had thought about her at all in three months, that she would be a name in Dame M’s mouth and a date in a folder, the third week of February, and that one evening she would go to Dunmore Street and come back and that would be that, and he would be told whatever he was told, which would probably be nothing. He had not thought that she would be a person who came up the back stairs of the north wing at six o’clock on a Wednesday and knocked on the door of the small library, and waited until he said come in, and came in.

She was small and grey. That was the first thing. She was perhaps sixty, in a grey wool coat over a grey skirt and a cardigan that was a slightly different grey, with grey hair cut short and neat and reading glasses on a chain round her neck, and she had a folder under her arm, a plain buff one, thick, held shut with an elastic band; and she looked, standing in the doorway of the small library with the moose who wanted to be a bishop still open on the table behind him, exactly like the lady who had sat at the desk at Brookside every morning for seven years and said Good morning, Frederick in the same voice, as though she had been wound up. Except that she did not say anything at all. She stood in the doorway and looked at him, quite steadily, the way you look at somebody you have heard a great deal about and want to see for yourself.

“Your Royal Highness,” she said. “I’m Mrs Thursby.”

“Hello.”

“Dame Margaret said I might have ten minutes.” She did not come in further. “If it’s convenient. If it isn’t, I’ll go.”

“It’s convenient.”

She came in. She sat down on the chair across the table from him, where Miss Hellström had sat, with the folder on her knee, and did not open it, and put her hand on it, flat, the way Dame M did; and he wondered whether everybody in the Household learned that from Dame M, or whether Dame M had learned it from somebody, and whether there was a chain of them going back to 1790, women with their hands flat on folders.

“I’m going to Dunmore Street tomorrow evening,” said Mrs Thursby. “At seven. After Mr Hartigan’s shift and before Mrs Hartigan’s, I’m told.” She paused. “I’ve done this for fourteen years, sir. Families of people who are going to be near the King. Or near you. I go to the house and I sit at the table and I tell them what’s going to happen, and I ask them whether they mind, and I leave them a piece of paper and a telephone number.” Another pause. “I’ve done it two hundred and eleven times.”

“Dame Margaret said nobody had ever waited for you before.”

Mrs Thursby looked at him for a moment.

“No, sir,” she said. “They haven’t. Usually it’s wanted by Tuesday.” She looked at the folder. “Dame Margaret said you asked her to wait. In November. When she offered to have it done the other way, without me.”

“Yes.”

“May I ask why, sir?”

Frederick thought about it, because she had asked properly.

“Because Sergeant Castellanos asked for it to be done by a person and not a letter,” he said. “And because Theo said he’d rather know.”

Mrs Thursby did not say anything for a moment. She sat across the table from him with her hand flat on the folder and her reading glasses on their chain against her grey cardigan, and he saw her take that in, the way Dame M took things in, all the parts, in order.

“Then I have one question for you, sir,” she said. “Before I go. I ask it of whoever I can, before every visit, and usually there’s nobody to ask, because usually the person who’s going to be near the family doesn’t know the family yet.” She looked at him. “You do.”

“What’s the question?”

“What should I know,” said Mrs Thursby, “before I sit down at their table?”

---

He had not expected that either.

He sat at the table in the small library with the moose who wanted to be a bishop and looked at her, at the small grey woman with the buff folder, and understood that she was not asking him what the Household needed to know. The Household would find that out. That was what the folder was for, and the screening, and the two weeks after. She was asking him something else. She was asking him what she needed to know so that when she walked into a kitchen that was also a sitting room four floors up over a bus depot, she would not walk into it as a stranger with a folder.

He thought about it carefully, the way you would think about a Bill.

“The cat’s called Kringle,” he said.

Mrs Thursby did not write it down. She did not open the folder. She just looked at him, and he saw her put it somewhere.

“He’s orange,” said Frederick. “He’s old. Kate named him when she was five, after a pastry, because he was the same shape. He sits on the windowsill and watches the buses come in. He fell off it in November when Kate screamed, into the dish rack, and went under the sofa, and he might still be under it. Theo didn’t say he’d come out.”

“Kringle,” said Mrs Thursby.

“Mr Hartigan calls everybody who sounds like they’re in charge ma’am. Even if they’re men. Theo says it’s quicker. He’ll call you ma’am.” Frederick thought. “He does the crossword. In pencil. In the chair by the window. If he puts the pencil down, it’s important.”

Mrs Thursby nodded, very slightly.

“Mrs Hartigan writes in green,” said Frederick. “So she can find her own handwriting in a pile. She answers letters. She’s the one who’ll ask the questions. She’ll look at you from your shoes to your hair before you sit down, and she’ll know whether you’re nice in about four seconds, Theo says, because of the hospital. She says you can tell a nice doctor from one who isn’t by how they say good morning to the cleaner.” He paused. “She doesn’t take back a yes. Ever. It’s a rule.”

“And the daughter?”

“Kate. She’s fifteen. She’s not speaking to Theo. Or she is now; she stopped not speaking to him at Christmas. She wraps everybody’s presents. She knows about the frog.”

Mrs Thursby looked at him over the reading glasses on their chain.

“The frog, sir?”

“There isn’t a frog,” said Frederick. “Officially.”

Mrs Thursby looked at him a moment longer, and he saw something happen at the corner of her mouth, and be put away, very neatly, the way you fold a letter back into its envelope.

“And Theo?” she said.

Frederick looked at the table.

He thought about Theo. About the wall, and the apple, eaten in a spiral, and the bottom of the core. About distant, whispered back in history, and Freddie, pen, and does he get lunch, and it was my idea, so I have to come. About a hand flat against the back window of a brown car going away across the forecourt in the dark, all the way to the Axis. About a cabbage, a third of the way round, under his left hand.

“Ask him,” he said. “Not his mum and dad. Him.” He looked up. “He’d rather know. He said so. He said it on the wall. He’ll want to be asked himself.”

Mrs Thursby looked at him across the table in the small library for a long time.

Then she took her hand off the folder, and opened it, at last, for the first time, and took a pen out of the pocket of her grey cardigan, and wrote something on the inside of the cover, short, in a small upright hand, and closed it again.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “That’s what I needed.”

She stood up. She tucked the folder under her arm. At the door she stopped, and turned round, which Dame M never did.

“Sir,” she said. “Two hundred and eleven families. And nobody has ever told me the cat’s name before.” She opened the door. “Usually I have to find it out for myself. In the first five minutes. By looking for the bowl.”

---

“She’s coming tonight,” said Frederick, on the wall, on Thursday, at ten to eight.

“I know,” said Theo. “Mum’s made a cake.”

He was in the dark red coat with the sleeves turned back and the green hat with the bobble, sitting on the wall with an apple, in a thin grey rain that had been coming down since midnight and had taken the last of the snow off the yard and left the tarmac black.

Frederick looked at him.

“A cake?”

“An apple one. With the apples from the man at the depot. She made it last night after her shift. At one in the morning.” Theo bit his apple. “She said if somebody’s coming to sit at her table and ask her questions for the Palace, they’re going to have cake while they do it, because she’s not having anybody say the Hartigans didn’t give them anything.” He chewed. “And Dad’s been told to put on a clean shirt. And Kate’s been told to be in. And I’ve been told to tidy our room, which you can’t do, because it’s half Kate’s and Kate won’t let me touch her half and her half’s where all the mess is.”

“Theo.”

“What.”

“I’m sorry.”

Theo stopped chewing. He looked at Frederick sideways, from under the bobble, with the rain running off the brim of the hat.

“What for this time?”

“For her coming. For all of it. For them looking at you.” Frederick looked at the depot apple in his hand, the small lopsided one with the leaf. “She’s nice. I met her. Yesterday. She’s small and grey and she’s done it two hundred and eleven times. But she’s still coming to look at you. Because of me.”

Theo looked at him for a long time.

“Freddie,” he said. “Did she ask you anything?”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Yesterday,” said Theo. “When you met her. Did she ask you anything?”

Frederick thought about it. He had been asked a question. He had been brought up to answer questions.

“She asked what she should know,” he said. “Before she sat down at your table.”

“And what did you say?”

“Things.”

Theo looked at him.

He looked at him for about three seconds, steadily, from under the bobble, in the rain, the way he had looked at the flagstaff from the gravel and the wall map in the north wing; taking it in. Frederick waited for him to ask what things. He waited for him to say Freddie, what did you tell her. He did not know what he would do if Theo asked, because he would have to answer, because he did not lie.

Theo did not ask.

“Huh,” he said, and bit his apple, and looked across the yard at the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, and lifted his hand, and the finger came up off the cup.

---

He was not told anything on Thursday evening.

He had known he would not be. Dame M had said so, at the Friday meeting the week before, by the fire, with her hand flat on the folder: What is said at the Hartigans’ table is between the Hartigans and Mrs Thursby, sir. It will not be repeated to you. Not by me, not by her, not by anybody in this house. If it were, they would have been told one thing and done another. And then, after a pause: If you want to know, you will have to ask Master Hartigan. And he will tell you what he likes.

So he did his homework at the table under the window in the small sitting room, all of it, including the optional questions, and did not look at the clock on the mantelpiece more than eleven times, and his mother sat in the armchair by the fire with a new piece of knitting, which was blue, and which she would not say what it was; and at seven o’clock, when somewhere across the river, past the depot, a small grey woman with a buff folder was knocking on the door of flat sixteen on the fourth floor of number forty Dunmore Street, he was doing a question about the Great Lakes, and got it wrong, and had to rub it out.

“Älskling,” said his mother, at half past seven, without looking up from the needles.

“Mm.”

“You have rubbed that out four times.”

He looked at the page. He had.

“She will be eating cake,” said his mother. “An apple one. At one in the morning, Mrs Hartigan made it, I understand, from the apples of a man at the depot whose brother has trees.” She counted a stitch. “And she will be sitting at a table, and asking a boy whether he minds. And he will say what he likes.” The needles clicked. “And there is nothing in the world that you can do about any of it from this side of the river, and it is good for you.”

“Why is it good for me?”

His mother looked up from the knitting, over her reading glasses.

“Because you are going to be in a great many rooms in your life, älskling,” she said, “in which things are decided about you by people you love, and you are not there. And you may as well start practising now, with a cake.”

---

At a quarter past nine Mrs Thursby came back.

He did not see her. He heard the north wing door, and footsteps in the passage, light ones, unhurried, going past the hard chair where Castellanos was sitting with his notebook, and along the passage to the back stairs, and down them, towards Dame M’s office. He heard Castellanos say good evening, Mrs Thursby, and a quiet voice say good evening, Sergeant, and something else he did not catch.

At half past nine Dame M knocked on the door of the small sitting room and came in, in the grey suit, with nothing in her hands.

“Ma’am,” she said. “Sir.”

His mother put down the knitting.

“Mrs Thursby has been to Dunmore Street,” said Dame M. “She was there two hours and ten minutes.” She paused. “She has asked me to tell you one thing, sir, and one thing only, and to tell you that it is the only thing she will tell anybody, including me, about what was said.”

Frederick sat at the table under the window.

“They consented,” said Dame M.

He did not move.

“All of them,” said Dame M. “Mr and Mrs Hartigan, and the daughter, who was asked as well, and who Mrs Thursby says asked more questions than anybody she has visited in fourteen years, some of them very good.” She paused. “And the boy.”

“The boy.”

“Mrs Thursby says that she asked him herself, sir,” said Dame M. “Separately. At the end. At the table. She says that that was the first time in two hundred and twelve visits that she had asked the child.” She looked at him across the room. “She says she was told to.”

---

“She was nice,” said Theo, on Friday, on the wall, at ten to eight. “The nice one.”

The rain had stopped. The tarmac was drying in patches, grey and black, and the sky over the gym was a pale washed blue, and the wall was wet, so Theo was sitting on his bag; and he had two apples, and gave Frederick one, the smaller and more lopsided, with a leaf, and did not bite his own.

“She was small,” said Theo. “And grey. All of her was grey. Even her cardigan, and it was a different grey from her coat. And she came in, and Mum did the thing. From her shoes to her hair. And Mrs Thursby stood there in the door and let her. She didn’t say anything. She just stood there, in the door, with the folder, and let Mum look.” He turned the apple over. “And then she said, good evening, Mrs Hartigan. And then she looked past Mum, at Dad, in his chair, in the clean shirt, and said, good evening, Mr Hartigan. And then at Kate, on the sofa, good evening, Kate. And then at me.” He paused. “Good evening, Theo.”

“She knew your names.”

“Everybody’s. She said them all before anybody had told her.” Theo looked at the apple. “And then she looked round the room. Not at the furniture. At the floor. Like she was looking for something. And she saw the bowl. By the fridge. Kringle’s bowl, with KRINGLE on it, Kate painted it when she was six. And she looked at it, and then she said…” He stopped. He did not do a voice. He just said it. “And how is Kringle? I hear he’s had a difficult winter.”

Frederick looked at the depot apple in his hand.

“And Kringle came out from under the sofa,” said Theo.

“He didn’t.”

“He did. He’d been under there since November. Three months. Dad’s been feeding him under there. Mum put a towel down. And she said his name, and he came out. Like that. Out from under the sofa, all orange, with dust on him, and walked across the floor, slowly, the way he walks, like he owns the building, and sat down on her foot.” Theo bit his apple at last. “On her foot, Freddie. He’s never sat on anybody’s foot. Not Mum’s. Not mine. He sat on Mrs Thursby’s foot for two hours and ten minutes and wouldn’t move.”

He chewed.

“And Mum looked at the cat on her foot,” he said, “and looked at Mrs Thursby, and Mrs Thursby looked back, and that was it. That was the four seconds. Mum said sit down, you’ll have some cake, and pulled out the chair. The good one. Dad’s.”

---

He told him the rest of it at break, and at lunch, and on the wall at a quarter past three, in pieces, the way he told things, in the order they occurred to him.

That she had sat at the table, in Dad’s chair, with the folder, and the apple cake, which she had eaten two pieces of, and said was the best she had had since her mother died. That she had opened the folder and taken out four sheets of paper, typed, and put them on the table, and turned them round so that they faced the Hartigans, and not her. That she had gone through them, line by line, all four, slowly, in a voice like somebody reading a recipe, and not left anything out. What would be looked at. Who would look at it. Why. What would happen to it after, and who would see it, and where it would be kept, and for how long, and who to ring if they did not like any of it.

“Dad asked what they’d find,” said Theo. “And she said, probably a parking ticket, Mr Hartigan.” He stopped. “She knew. About Racine. She said, a parking ticket in Racine in 2011, outside a bakery, unpaid, on principle. And Dad put the pencil down.” He looked at Frederick. “She’d looked already, Freddie. Before she came. Just a bit. Just the ordinary stuff anybody can look at. And she told him. She said, I always tell people what I already know, Mr Hartigan, so that they don’t spend the evening wondering.” He considered. “Dad laughed. Dad never laughs. He laughed out loud and said, nine minutes for a kringle is an errand, ma’am, and she said, I quite agree, Mr Hartigan, and I shall say so in the report.”

That Mum had asked eleven questions, and Kate had asked fourteen, and some of Kate’s had been about whether the report would say anything about her that a newspaper could find, and Mrs Thursby had said no, and if a newspaper ever finds anything about you, Kate, it won’t be from us, and here is the number to ring if it does, and Kate had gone quiet and then asked whether Mrs Thursby had any children, and Mrs Thursby had said two, both grown, one’s a nurse, and Mum had looked at her.

That Mrs Thursby had told Mum, at the end, what it would be like. Having him at the table. A car at the corner of Dunmore Street, on Fridays, with a man in it. The man would not come up. The neighbours would notice, for a while, and then stop. Somebody on the street might take a photograph one day, and a newspaper might print it one day, and if that happened the number on the card would be answered at any hour by somebody who would know what to do.

“And Mum said,” said Theo, “and what does he eat?”

Frederick looked at him.

“And Mrs Thursby said, whatever you give him, Mrs Hartigan. And Mum said, good.” Theo ate his apple. “And that was the end of that one.”

---

“And then she asked me,” said Theo, on the wall, at a quarter past three.

He was doing up a shoelace that did not need doing up.

“At the end,” he said. “When she’d done the four pages and Mum’s eleven and Kate’s fourteen and Dad’s one. She put the pages back in the folder. And she shut it. And she put her hand on it, flat, like your lady does. And she turned round in Dad’s chair, with Kringle still on her foot, and she looked at me.” He pulled the lace. “Not Mum. Not Dad. Me. On the sofa, next to Kate. And she said, Theo, do you mind?”

Frederick sat very still on the wall.

“And Mum,” said Theo, “opened her mouth. To answer. Because that’s what Mum does, she answers, she’s the one who answers. And Mrs Thursby looked at her. Just looked. And Mum shut her mouth again.” He pulled the other lace. “And then Mum looked at Dad. And Dad looked at the crossword. And Mum looked at me, and she said…” He stopped.

He did not do the voice. He did not do anybody’s voice. He sat on the wall with both hands on his shoelaces and said it in his own, quite quietly, the way you say a thing that was said to you and that you are going to keep.

“It’s his to say.”

The bell went. They did not move.

“So I said yes,” said Theo.

He finished the second shoelace. A double knot. Tight.

“I said yes, and that I’d rather know. And Mrs Thursby nodded, and wrote something on the inside of the folder. And then she took out a card. A white one, with a telephone number on it. And she gave it to Mum. And Mum put it in the drawer under the telephone. With the takeaway menus.” He stood up and put his bag on his shoulder. “And then Mrs Thursby stood up, and Kringle got off her foot, and went back under the sofa, and she said, thank you for having me, at the door. Like you do. Like at a party.” He considered. “And Mum said, thank you for asking him.”

He looked down at Frederick, on the wall.

“Two weeks,” he said. “She said it takes two weeks. For the looking. And then you can come.” He turned towards the gate. “Mum says the sixth of March. A Friday. She’s already doing the dumplings.” He stopped, and turned round. “Freddie.”

“What.”

“She knew Kringle’s name,” said Theo.

Frederick looked at him.

“Before anybody told her. Before she saw the bowl. She looked for the bowl because she already knew. I could tell.” Theo looked at him, from under the bobble, with the grey eyes, or green. “Somebody told her.”

Frederick did not say anything.

He sat on the wall and looked back at Theo, and waited, because Theo had said a thing that had a question in it, and if Theo asked the question Frederick would have to answer it, because he did not lie.

Theo did not ask.

He stood there for about three seconds, on the wet tarmac, by the bike racks, with his bag on his shoulder, looking at Frederick on the wall; and then he nodded, very slightly, once, the way his father had nodded to Dame M at the bottom of the step; and turned round; and went off towards the gate and the buses without looking back.

At the gate he stopped. He lifted his hand, without turning round. Not the whole hand. One finger.

And Frederick, on the wall, alone, lifted his.