The Dumpling

Castellanos stopped the car at the corner of Dunmore Street at ten to six and turned off the engine and did not get out.

“This is as far as I go, sir,” he said, to the windscreen.

Frederick sat forward in the back with his hands on his knees. He did not have his bag. He did not have anything, except the second cheese in his coat pocket, which he had taken out and put back four times since the north wing door.

“Number forty is on the left,” said Castellanos. “Halfway down. The brown brick one with the green door. Across from the depot gates.” He did not point. “I can see the door from here. I can see the windows of the fourth floor from here, the three on the right, if I lean forward, which I won’t, because the man in the newsagent’s on the other corner is already looking at the car.” He looked at the mirror. “I’ll be here until you come out. If you want me, the card’s in your pocket with the number. If you don’t want me, I’ll be here anyway.”

“Are you going to read?”

“I’ve got the paper, sir.” Castellanos lifted it off the passenger seat: an evening paper, folded, with the crossword showing. “I’m going to do the crossword.” A pause. “In pencil.”

Frederick looked at the back of his head, at the short grey hair and the large brown neck above the white collar.

“Mr Hartigan does it in pencil.”

“I know, sir,” said Castellanos. “Theo told me. On the wall. In January.” He unfolded the paper. “I thought I’d see how far I get.”

---

Dunmore Street was a long straight street of brown brick blocks, four and five storeys high, with shops on the ground floor of some of them, a launderette and a newsagent’s and a place that sold phones and a place that sold something with a sign in a language he did not read; and on the other side of the street, all the way along, behind a high fence of green-painted railings, the depot. He could see the buses through the railings. Dozens of them, red and cream, parked in rows in a great yard under lamps that were just coming on, nose to tail, the way trains stand in sidings; and men in jackets with reflective stripes walking between them; and one coming in, slowly, through the gates, with its lights on and its sign saying 22 DEPOT ONLY, and the driver lifting one finger off the wheel to the man on the gate.

Frederick walked down the left side of the street with his hands in his coat pockets and his mother’s scarf round his neck twice and down to his knees, and did not look back at the car, and felt Castellanos not look at him, from the corner, the whole way.

Nobody else looked at him at all.

A woman came out of the launderette with a bag and walked past him without seeing him. Two boys on bicycles went by in the road. A man at a bus stop was reading a newspaper with the King’s Day photograph still on page three, a month old, the balcony, the three of them in the cold, and Frederick in it in the scarf, and the man turned the page as Frederick passed, and did not look up.

Number forty had a green door with a row of bells beside it and a panel of glass in it with wire in the glass, and somebody had propped it open with a brick.

He went in.

---

There was a lift. It was at the back of the hall, a steel door with a small round window in it and a button, and above the button, taped to the wall, a piece of card in a slanting hand that said LIFT WORKS. MOSTLY. NOT 6-7 PM (MR D). Through the small round window he could see the lift going up, slowly, with an old man in it in a cardigan, standing very upright, with his hand on the rail.

He took the stairs.

He went up them the way Castellanos went up stairs, one at a time, slowly, as though each one had to be checked; and he counted them, without meaning to, because he always counted, and they were fourteen to a flight.

On the first landing there was a door with the number 2 on it and a television on behind it, very loud, a game show, people shrieking at a wheel; and a smell of somebody’s dinner, onions and something meaty; and a doormat that said WITAMY, and then, underneath, in English, in smaller letters, ALSO WELCOME.

On the second landing there was a door with a wreath on it of dried flowers, pale pink and white and the brown of paper, and a small brass plate, polished, that said MRS G. OKONJO, and behind it, faintly, a radio playing music he did not know, a woman singing in a language he did not know either. As he came up the last stair the door opened, about two inches, on its chain, and an eye looked out at him through the gap: an old dark eye in a face he could not see, steady and interested. It looked at him for about three seconds. Then the door shut again, quite gently, and he heard the chain go back, and the radio go on singing.

On the third landing somebody had a bicycle chained to the banister and a pushchair folded beside it.

And on the fourth landing there was a window.

It was a tall narrow window at the turn of the stairs, with a deep sill, and on the sill there was a spider plant in a yellow pot, very large, with its long striped leaves hanging down over the edge of the sill to the floor and its little baby plants dangling on their stems like spiders on threads; and beyond it, through the glass, four floors down, the depot. The whole yard of it. The rows of buses under the lamps, red and cream, from above, so that you could see their roofs, and the numbers painted on the roofs, and the men walking between them, small, and the gates, and a bus coming in through them with its lights on.

He stood at the window for a moment. He had not meant to. He stood on the fourth-floor landing of number forty Dunmore Street and looked down at the depot, at the buses on their roofs in rows, and thought that this was what Kringle saw, all day, from a windowsill, and that he could understand it.

Behind him, a door opened.

“You’re early,” said Theo.

---

He was in the doorway of flat sixteen in his socks and a jumper that had been Kate’s and then his, with the sleeves pushed up, and his hair standing up at the back, and an expression that was about to say something funny and had decided not to.

“It’s two minutes to six,” said Frederick.

“That’s early. Mum said six. She’s been standing at the oven with her watch since a quarter to.” Theo stood aside. “Come in, then.”

Frederick went in.

He went straight in, past Theo, over the doormat and through the short narrow passage with coats on hooks on one wall and a row of shoes on a rack on the floor under them, and into the room at the end; and the room at the end was a kitchen and a sitting room at once, as Theo had said, with a stove and a sink and a counter along one wall and a table in the middle and a sofa against the other wall and a window, and it was very warm, and full of a smell he had never smelt before, dark and sour and sweet at once, vinegar and cloves and something under them; and the window over the sink had steamed over completely, so that the lamps of the depot across the road were only yellow blurs.

Mrs Hartigan was at the stove.

She turned round.

She was in an apron over a dark blue jersey, with her hair pulled back hard and the tea towel over her shoulder, the one with the map of Wisconsin on it, faded, with the lakes in blue and a small red dot; and she had a long wooden spoon in her hand; and she looked at him, standing in the middle of her kitchen in his coat and his mother’s scarf.

She looked at his face.

Then she looked down, at his feet.

At his shoes. His school shoes, black, polished by somebody at a quarter past five that afternoon to a shine you could see the lamp in, on her kitchen floor, which was lino, pale, and very clean.

And then she looked back up at his face.

She did not say anything. Not one word. She looked at his feet and then at his face with no expression at all, the spoon still in her hand; and the room was quite quiet, except for the pan on the stove and the radio, which was on, low, on the counter, a man talking about football in an accent he did not know.

Frederick looked down at his shoes.

He looked back along the passage, at the rack on the floor under the coats, with the shoes on it in a row: a pair of large black work shoes, and a pair of trainers that had been white once, and a pair of boots, and a pair of small flat shoes; and beside the rack, on the doormat, in his socks, Theo, who was looking at the ceiling with an expression of total, devout, impenetrable neutrality.

He went back down the passage.

He took his shoes off. He untied them, and stepped out of them, and picked them up, and put them on the rack, at the end, beside the trainers that had been white once, side by side, square; and came back along the passage in his socks.

Mrs Hartigan had turned back to the stove.

She did not say anything about it. He understood, standing in her kitchen in his socks, that she was not going to; that she had said everything there was to say about it with her eyes, once, from his feet to his face; and that it did not need saying.

---

Nobody stood up.

He noticed it at once, the way you notice a stair that is not where you expected. He stood in the middle of the room in his socks, in his coat and the scarf, and nobody in it stood up.

Mr Hartigan was in a chair by the window. Not the window over the sink; the other one, on the far side of the room, the one that was not steamed, which looked out over the roofs of the block next door at a sky going dark blue; an old armchair, brown, with a lamp beside it on a small table, and the Friday paper folded on his knee so that only the crossword showed, and a pencil behind his ear and another in his hand. He was in his socks too. He looked up over his glasses, and looked at Frederick, the whole of him, from his socks to his hair, the way his wife had, but more slowly; and did not get up.

“Frederick,” said Mr Hartigan.

He said it the way you would say Tuesday, or raining. As a statement of fact.

“Mr Hartigan,” said Frederick.

Mr Hartigan nodded, once, and looked back down at the crossword.

Kate was on the sofa. She was lying along it, with her feet on the arm and her phone held above her face, and her long brown hair spread out over a cushion, and she lowered the phone, and turned her head on the cushion, and looked at him across the room, upside down. She looked at him for a long time. She looked at him the way Amira Ibrahim looked at a mathematics problem she did not think was fair.

She did not get up either.

“Hi,” said Kate.

“Hello.”

Kate looked at him a moment longer, upside down. Then she lifted the phone again and went back to it.

And on the windowsill, the one over the sink, in front of the steamed glass, in a patch of warmth from the pipe that ran under it, there was a cat. A very large, very old, very orange cat, the shape of a pastry, curled up in a ring with its tail over its nose; and it opened one eye, yellow, and looked at Frederick in the middle of the room, and closed the eye again.

That was all.

Nobody stood. Nobody said Your Royal Highness. Nobody said sir. Nobody bowed, or bobbed, or went red, or went careful, or went loud. Nobody moved towards him with their hand out or away from him with their eyes down. Nobody did anything with their face at all. A man in a chair went on with a crossword; a girl on a sofa went on with a phone; a woman at a stove went on with a spoon; a cat went on being asleep.

He stood in the middle of the kitchen of flat sixteen in his socks and did not know what to do.

He had never been in a room in his life in which nobody stood up when he came in. Not one. Not at Brookside, where the teacher stood, every morning, and then the children, because she had. Not at Ellicott, where nobody stood, but everybody looked, which was a kind of standing. Not at the Palace, where everybody stood, footmen and housemaids and Dame M and Mr Pargeter and the Inspector; where Bridget, who did not stand for anybody, turned round at the range, which was Bridget’s way of standing. Not in London, at his father’s, where his father stood for nobody, but everybody else stood for his father, and so for him. In every room he had ever walked into, something had happened, a movement, a rearrangement, a small shifting of the air, because he had walked into it.

Nothing happened here. He had walked into it, and the room had gone on.

“Coat,” said Theo, behind him.

---

The fridge was beside the door to the passage, a white one, quite small, with a hum, and it was covered.

He saw it when he turned round to give Theo his coat. It was covered from the top to the bottom with paper held on by magnets: a calendar from a pizza shop with the bin days ringed in red; a list of telephone numbers in green; a photograph of Kate at about six in a swimming costume holding up a certificate; a postcard of a lake; a school letter about a trip; a photograph of Theo at about nine in a hat shaped like an enormous wedge of yellow cheese, grinning; and in the middle of the door, at the height of his eyes, held on by a single yellow rubber magnet in the shape of a wedge of cheese, from the Wisconsin Dells, two cards.

The top one was a plain white card, a little smaller than a postcard, with writing on it in black ink in his own hand, Theo, It’s yes, and at the bottom of it a drawing. A rectangle. A line through the middle. A candle. CANDLE (1). HALF (A). HALF (B). INSERT.

And under it, overlapping, held by the same cheese, a photocopy. INSTRUCTIONS FOR ASSEMBLING THE 22. With forty bus drivers’ biro all over it.

They were holding each other up.

He stood in front of the fridge in his socks and looked at them.

“Mum put them there,” said Theo, taking his coat. “The cake one in November. The bus one at Christmas. She put the bus one under the cake one and the cheese wasn’t strong enough for both, so they kept falling off, so Dad put the cake one on top and folded the bottom of it under the top of the bus one, so they hold each other on.” He hung the coat on a hook. “Kate says it’s the stupidest thing on any fridge in the city. Kate says she’s going to put her certificate over it.” He paused. “She hasn’t.”

“Scarf,” said Mrs Hartigan, from the stove, without turning round.

Frederick took off his mother’s scarf. He gave it to Theo. Theo looked at it, at the length of it, green and white and green and white, and the F at the end, and hung it on the hook over the coat, very carefully, so that the end with the F hung down in front where it could be seen.

“Sit,” said Mrs Hartigan.

---

He did not know where.

There were five chairs at the table. Four were wooden, plain, kitchen chairs, the kind you could buy in a shop, not matching. The fifth was at the end, by the window, and had arms. He looked at them. He did not know which one was his. He did not know whether any of them were his. He stood by the table in his socks and waited to be told, the way he waited at every table he had ever sat at, for the card with his name on it, or the footman’s hand, or his mother’s.

Nobody told him.

Mrs Hartigan was at the stove. Mr Hartigan was at the crossword. Kate was on her phone. Theo had gone to a drawer for forks.

He stood there.

Then Mrs Hartigan, still at the stove, still with her back to him, still stirring, lifted the long wooden spoon out of the pan, without looking round, and pointed it, over her shoulder, at the table, at the chair on the far side, against the wall, between the wall and the chair that was clearly Theo’s because it had a sweatshirt over the back of it.

The chair had a cushion tied on. A flat square cushion, faded red, tied to the seat with two tapes, in bows, at the back.

“There,” said Mrs Hartigan.

He sat there.

The cushion was soft, and very slightly too high, so that his knees came up under the table, and the wall was at his left shoulder, cold, with a calendar on it of Lake Michigan in March, and the steamed window over the sink was at the end of the table, with the orange cat on the sill in front of it, asleep; and he sat on the chair with the cushion tied on, between the wall and Theo, and put his hands on his knees.

“Why is there a cushion?” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Because that chair’s two inches lower than the others,” said Theo, putting down forks. “It came from a different set. In Milwaukee. It’s the only one that came with us that’s from a different set, and it’s two inches lower, so Mum tied a cushion on it.” He put a fork by Frederick’s place. “It’s for whoever’s new. Mrs Thursby had it.” He paused. “Now it’s yours.”

---

Mr Hartigan came to the table when the dish did, and not before.

He came at the moment Mrs Hartigan took the dish out of the oven, as though he had been listening for it, and folded the paper and put it on the arm of his chair with the pencil on top of it, and got up, slowly, a big man getting out of a low chair, and came to the table and sat down, not in the chair with the arms at the end, but in one of the plain ones, opposite Frederick, with his back to the room.

Kate came at the last possible moment, which was when her mother put the dish on the table, and sat down at the end beside her father, and put her phone face down beside her plate, and looked at Frederick across the table again, for a long time, as though he were a sum.

The chair with the arms, at the end by the window, stayed empty.

Mrs Hartigan sat down. She did not take off the apron or the tea towel. She put her hands together on the table and said grace.

She said it in German. Quickly. All in one breath, as though God were a busy man and would rather they got on; and Frederick, who had been brought up on the Church of Sweden and the Church of America and the Book of Common Prayer and did not know a word of whatever this was except Gott and Amen, bowed his head and waited for the Amen, and heard what he thought was the end, a sort of fall in her voice, and said “Amen,” clearly.

It was not the end.

Mrs Hartigan went on. There were two more lines. He heard them go past him, quick and level, in a language he did not know, while his Amen hung in the air over the table on its own, early, like a candle lit before the cake.

Nobody looked at him. Mr Hartigan’s head was bowed. Kate’s was bowed. Theo’s, beside him, was bowed; but Frederick saw, out of the corner of his eye, the side of Theo’s face, and the corner of his mouth, and what it was doing.

“Amen,” said everybody.

“Amen,” said Frederick, again, quietly, at the right time, to his plate.

---

Mrs Hartigan served.

She served from the dish, with a spoon, the way his mother did on Tuesdays in the north wing; standing, leaning over the table, a plate at a time. She put meat on his plate first, dark, in slices, in a gravy so dark it was nearly black, that shone. Then red cabbage, a heap of it, purple, steaming. Then she put the spoon in the dish again and lifted out something else, and put it on his plate beside the meat.

It was round. It was about the size of a tennis ball, pale, whitish, with a skin on it that was faintly rough, and it sat on his plate in the dark gravy and steamed.

She put a second beside it. And then, after a moment’s thought, a third.

“Peter,” she said, and served her husband.

Frederick looked at his plate.

He looked at the meat, which he knew was meat, although he did not know what kind or why it was that colour. He looked at the cabbage, which he knew was cabbage, because it was purple and smelt of cabbage. He looked at the three round pale things the size of tennis balls, steaming, in the gravy.

He did not know what they were.

He did not know whether he was allowed to ask.

He sat at the table on the chair with the cushion tied on, between the wall and Theo, with his knife and fork in his hands, and looked at the three round pale things on his plate; and he did not know. At every table he had ever sat at in his life, he had known what everything on his plate was, because somebody had told him, before; on a card, in a menu, in a whisper from a footman, in a word from his mother; or because it was something he had always had, the egg, the fish on Tuesdays, the princess cake. He had never once sat in front of a thing on a plate and not known what it was. And he did not know whether, at this table, in this kitchen, you were allowed to ask. Whether asking was rude. Whether it would make it a thing. Whether it would be like the shoes.

He looked at the dumpling.

And Mrs Hartigan, sitting down at the end of the table opposite Mr Hartigan with her own plate, picking up her own fork, said, not loudly, not looking at him, looking at her plate, in the voice she would have used to say pass the salt:

“Anybody who sits at this table eats what’s on it, Freddie.”

He looked up.

She was not looking at him. She was cutting her meat. Mr Hartigan was cutting his. Kate was cutting hers. Theo, beside him, was already eating.

Nobody else said anything. Nobody explained. Nobody told him what it was.

He looked at the dumpling.

He cut it. It was soft all the way through, softer than he had thought, and it gave under the edge of the fork like bread that had been soaked in something, and inside it was pale and dense and faintly yellow and had small dark specks in it, and steam came out of it. He put the piece he had cut into the gravy, because that was what Theo, beside him, had done with his. He ate it.

It tasted of bread, and of something he could not name, and of the dark sour sweet gravy that had soaked into it, all the way through, so that it was like eating the gravy, but solid; and it was the best thing he had ever eaten in his life.

He ate it. All of it. And the second, and the third.

He did not ask what it was.

---

There were raisins in the gravy.

He found the first one on his fork about halfway through the meat. A raisin, black, plump, soft, swollen with the gravy, sitting on the slice of meat on his fork; and he stopped, and looked at it, and thought that somebody had made a mistake. That it had fallen in. That somewhere in the kitchen there was a packet of raisins for a cake, and one of them had got into the Sauerbraten by accident, as things got into things; and he did not know what to do with it, because it would be rude to put it on the side of his plate, where everybody would see that he had found a mistake in Mrs Hartigan’s cooking, and he could not ask, because of the rule.

He ate it.

It was sweet. Very sweet, against the sour of the gravy, so that the two of them together did something in his mouth that neither of them did apart, and he sat with it and understood, slowly, that it was not a mistake.

He found another one. And another. They were all through the gravy.

“They’re on purpose,” said Mr Hartigan, from across the table, without looking up from his plate.

Frederick looked at him.

“The raisins,” said Mr Hartigan, cutting his meat. “You stopped. Everybody stops. The first time.” He put a piece in his mouth. “I stopped, in 1997. At her mother’s. I thought one had fallen in.” He chewed. “Her mother looked at me exactly the way she looks at shoes.”

At the end of the table, Mrs Hartigan did not look up from her plate. But Frederick saw the corner of her mouth.

“That was a long time ago, Peter,” she said.

“It was,” said Mr Hartigan. “I’ve been eating raisins on purpose ever since.” He looked at Frederick across the table, over his glasses, for about two seconds. “You get used to them. And then you wait for them.”

---

He offered to wash up.

He did not know you were supposed to. Nobody had told him. But at the end of the meal Mrs Hartigan stood up and began to take the plates, and Mr Hartigan stood up and went back to his chair by the window and the crossword, and Kate stood up and went back to the sofa and her phone, and Theo stood up and took his own plate to the sink, and Frederick saw him do it, and understood that you took your own plate to the sink; and he took his; and stood at the sink beside Mrs Hartigan, who was running the hot tap into a plastic bowl with a squeeze of something green, and said:

“May I wash?”

Mrs Hartigan looked at him sideways.

She looked at him for about two seconds. Then she stepped back from the sink, without a word, and gave him the bowl.

He washed.

He had never washed anything in his life except himself. He had seen it done; Bridget did it, at the big stone sink in the kitchen at the Palace, fast, with her sleeves up, plate after plate onto the rack, without looking. He did not know how to do it fast. He knew how to do things properly. So he took the first plate, his own, out of the hot water, and the cloth, and washed it the way he had made the snowball: from the outside in, evenly, a quarter turn at a time, front and back, eight quarter turns each side, so that every part of the plate had been washed the same number of times; and held it up to the light to see whether it was clean; and turned it, and held it up again; and put it on the rack.

It took him about a minute.

He took the second plate.

Behind him the radio was talking about football. Mr Hartigan was doing the crossword. Kate was on her phone. Theo was standing by the counter with nothing to do, because there was only one plate on the rack to dry. Kringle had opened one eye on the windowsill and was watching the cloth go round.

He washed the second plate. A quarter turn. Another. He held it up to the light.

“Freddie,” said Mrs Hartigan.

He stopped.

She was standing beside him at the sink with her arms folded, in the apron, with the tea towel over her shoulder, watching him; and her face was doing nothing at all, very hard, the way Castellanos’s did.

“It’s a plate,” said Mrs Hartigan. “It’s not a christening.”

There was a sound from the sofa. Kate had put her face into the cushion.

Frederick looked at the plate in his hand.

Mrs Hartigan unfolded her arms. She took the plate out of his hand, and the cloth, and put them into the bowl, and took the bowl, and stood at the sink in his place; and with her other hand, without looking at him, without a word, she took the tea towel off her shoulder, the one with the map of Wisconsin on it, faded, with the lakes in blue and a small red dot for Milwaukee and a smaller one for a town called Kiel, and held it out to him, sideways, at the height of his hand.

He took it.

She washed. Fast, with her sleeves up, plate after plate onto the rack, without looking. And he dried, with the tea towel with Wisconsin on it, standing beside her at the sink in his socks, as fast as he could, which was not very fast; and gave each plate to Theo, who put it away, in a cupboard, in a place that Frederick watched him put it, so that he would know next time; and nobody said anything about it, and he understood, drying, that this was where he stood now. At the sink. Beside her. With the tea towel. Drying.

---

At nine Theo walked him down.

He put on his shoes at the rack in the passage, and his coat, and his mother’s scarf, twice round and down to his knees, and stood in the doorway of the room with the steamed window and the fridge and the chair with the cushion tied on, and did not know what to say.

“Thank you for having me,” he said.

He said it to the room. To all of it. To Mrs Hartigan at the sink, and Mr Hartigan in the chair by the window, and Kate on the sofa, and Kringle.

Mrs Hartigan turned round from the sink, drying her hands on her apron, because he had the tea towel; no, he had given it back; she had it over her shoulder again.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Friday. Any Friday.”

Mr Hartigan looked up from the crossword over his glasses.

“Frederick,” he said, as a statement of fact. And then, after a pause, looking back down at the paper: “Twelve across. Heir, after a fashion. Seven letters.”

Frederick stood in the doorway in his coat.

“Is there a G?” he said.

“There might be a G.”

He thought.

“I’ll tell you on Friday,” he said.

Mr Hartigan looked up at him again, over the glasses, for a long time. Then he wrote something very small in the margin of the paper, in pencil, and did not say what, and went back to the crossword.

Kate, on the sofa, lowered her phone, and turned her head on the cushion, and looked at him upside down.

“You ate all three,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Nobody eats all three the first time.” She considered him. “Dad didn’t. In 1997.” She lifted the phone again. “Night.”

“Good night.”

---

They went down the four flights in the dark, past the spider plant on the landing, and the bicycle on the third, and Mrs Okonjo’s door on the second, which was shut, with the radio still singing behind it, and Mr Dabrowski’s on the first, where the game show had become the news, very loud; and the lift going up past them in its shaft with the old man in the cardigan in it, standing very upright, with his hand on the rail; and out through the green door with the brick in it onto Dunmore Street.

It was cold. The depot was lit across the road, the rows of buses under the lamps, and a bus coming in through the gates with its sign saying 22 DEPOT ONLY and the driver lifting one finger off the wheel to the man on the gate.

At the corner, a dark blue car was parked under a streetlamp with its engine off and a large man in it, in the driving seat, with a newspaper folded on the steering wheel and a pencil in his hand.

Theo stood on the doorstep in his socks.

“What’s twelve across?” he said.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You said you’d tell him Friday.”

“I’ve got a week.”

Theo looked at him in the light from the hall.

“You’ll come Friday, then,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“Good.” Theo put his hands in the pockets of the jumper that had been Kate’s. He looked up the street at the car under the streetlamp, and the man in it with the pencil, and lifted his hand, and the finger came up off the steering wheel. And then he looked back at Frederick, standing on the pavement in the scarf, and said, loudly, so that it went up the street and came back off the depot fence, the way he said it across the yard at a quarter past three:

“Night, Freddie!”

On the second floor, a window went up.

Frederick looked up. In the window, in the light from behind her, there was an old woman in a dressing gown with her grey hair in a scarf, leaning on the sill, looking down at the street, at the boy on the doorstep in his socks and the boy on the pavement in the long scarf, with an old dark steady interested eye, for about three seconds.

“Theodore,” said Mrs Okonjo, from the second floor, in a voice like a church. “It is nine o’clock at night.”

“Sorry, Mrs Okonjo.”

Mrs Okonjo looked at Frederick a moment longer. Then she nodded to him, once, very slowly, from the window, the way you nod to a neighbour; and shut it.

At the corner, Castellanos was looking at the sky.

---

“How far did you get?” said Frederick, in the car, at the lights on Canal Street.

Castellanos looked at the newspaper on the passenger seat, folded at the crossword, in the light from the street.

“Eleven, sir,” he said. “Out of thirty-two.” He started the engine. “Mr Hartigan, I’m told, does the whole thing by Friday night.” A pause. “I’ve got a long way to go.”

“Do you know twelve across? Heir, after a fashion. Seven letters.”

Castellanos looked at the road for the whole of Canal Street.

“No, sir,” he said, at last. “But I’d say there’s a G in it.” The lights changed. “And I’d say Mr Hartigan knows exactly what it is, and wanted to see whether you’d come back on Friday to tell him.”

Frederick sat forward in the back with his hands on his knees and his mother’s scarf round his neck, in the dark, and could still taste, under everything, the raisins.