The Lake

He did not have a Bill on Sunday. He had a question, and he had been preparing it for six weeks.

He had started on it the night of the dumpling, the sixth of March, in the car, at the lights on Canal Street, with the taste of the raisins still in his mouth; and he had worked on it every night since, under the wall map, in the dark, the way he worked on a Bill: rubbing out the middle and writing it again. It was not a long question. It was eleven words. But he had found, working on it, that it was the hardest thing he had ever had to put into words, because it was the first thing he had ever asked his father for that was not for himself, and not for the Household, and not in right of any Crown at all; and every way he put it, it came out sounding like something else.

He had it on an index card. In pencil. In his smallest writing.

He sat in the chair by the side table in the small sitting room with the card on his knee and the cream telephone beside him and the clock on the mantelpiece saying a quarter to four, and the robin on its Christmas card beside the clock, which nobody had moved, and a photograph of his father on the dock at Lac du Roi, in an old jersey, with the lake behind him going away to the hills, grey and still.

His mother put her head round the door at ten to four, with the blue knitting, which was now about a foot long and was, he had worked out, a jersey, because it had begun to have a shape at one end that was a neck.

“Is it a good one?” she said, in Swedish.

“It isn’t a Bill.”

His mother looked at the card on his knee. She looked at it for some time. Then she looked at the photograph on the mantelpiece, of the dock, and the lake.

“Ah,” she said.

“Mamma…”

“I am not going to ask,” said his mother, “what it is.” She looked at him over her reading glasses. “But I am going to be in the next room.”

---

At four o’clock exactly the telephone rang.

“Hello.”

“Frederick.”

“Hello, Papa.”

“Good afternoon. Good evening.” The faint sound of London, the thick soft quiet like a curtain. “How are you?”

“Well, thank you. How are you?”

“Tired,” said his father, which he always said. “Brunswick has had an election. The Landesverweser rang me at six this morning, their time, to tell me who had won, which is not something I am permitted to have a view about, and which he knows, and which is why he rang, because he likes to hear me not have a view.” The scratch of the pen on the pad. “How is school?”

He told him. He told him about careers day, and Harold, and lever seventeen off the old box at Havre de Grace, and the signalman with the hat who had read his own book; and about question three, and no provision, and Mr Ferrante, and the red pen. His father listened, with the pen, and asked what the junction outside Baltimore controlled, and whether the forty-eight levers were mechanical or electrical, and how many trains an hour it passed at the busiest time of day, and Frederick knew all of it, because it was page four; and then his father was quiet for a while.

“It should,” said his father.

“That’s what I said.”

“I know. I heard you say it.” The chair in the study creaked. “Mr Ferrante gave you five.”

“For the answer.”

“For the answer,” said his father. “Yes. He was right to.” A pause. “I should like, one day, to meet Mr Ferrante.”

Frederick looked at the card on his knee.

“Papa,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I haven’t got a Bill. This week.” He took a breath. “I’ve got a question instead. For you. Not in the game. A real one.”

There was a silence on the line from London.

“Then ask it,” said his father.

---

He read it off the card. He did not need to; he had said it to himself in the dark under the wall map perhaps three hundred times. But he read it off the card, in order, the way you read a Bill, so that every word was the word he had chosen.

“May a friend of mine,” he said, “come to the lake in August?”

Eleven words.

The silence from London went on.

He sat in the chair by the side table and held the cream telephone against his ear and heard it go on. He heard London, and the clock on the mantelpiece, and through the wall, very faintly, from the next room, the click of his mother’s needles stopping.

He did not hear the pen.

“Which friend?” said his father.

He knew. He must know. He had written Peter, the twenty-two, early shifts on a pad in October, and Anneliese, acute medicine, and put his finger on a tiny driver on a photocopy in February, very lightly, as you touch a thing in a museum. But he asked, because it was a question that had an answer, and the answer had to be given, and given by Frederick, and not assumed.

“Theo,” said Frederick. “Theo Hartigan. Who sits next to me.”

“By the aisle.”

“By the aisle.”

“Ah,” said his father.

And then, after a moment, he heard the pen.

---

“In right of which Crown,” said his father, “would he travel?”

Frederick looked at the card. That was not on it.

“Papa, that’s the game.”

“It is not the game. It is the same shape.” The pen scratched. “Lac du Roi is in New Albion. New Albion is a separate realm. It has its own Crown, its own Parliament at Ottawa, its own ministers, its own laws and its own frontier, and the King of New Albion, who happens also to be the King of America and of twelve other places, does not get to waive any of them for a friend of his son’s.” A pause. “A boy from the Columbia District who crosses into New Albion crosses a frontier between two realms. He crosses it as an American subject, in right of America, and he enters New Albion, in right of New Albion, and New Albion is entitled to ask him who he is.” A pause. “So I ask again. In right of which Crown would he travel?”

“America,” said Frederick.

“On what?”

Frederick sat very still.

He had not thought of it. He had thought of everything else. He had thought, in six weeks, under the wall map, of the aircraft, and the flight rule, and the lodge, and the room Theo would sleep in, which would be the one at the top of the stairs with two beds in it where Frederick slept, because there was no other room with two beds; and of the dock, and the boathouse, and the canoes, red, cedar, which you were not allowed to take out before seven; and of whether Theo could swim, which he could, because he had told Lucía in October that he had a badge from the lake at Milwaukee; and of what Mrs Hartigan would say, and what Mr Hartigan would not say. He had not thought of what you crossed a frontier on.

“A passport,” he said.

“Has he got one?”

Frederick thought about the drawer under the telephone at flat sixteen, with the takeaway menus and the white card from Mrs Thursby, and a pack of cards in a battered blue box; and the other drawer, the one Theo had said Mrs Hartigan kept things in, with the posh card from the Household and a christening certificate and Kate’s swimming badges and a menu from a restaurant in Kenosha.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.” He thought harder. “He’s never been out of the Realm. Not once. He told me. In February, on the wall, when I said I’d been to London. He said the furthest he’d ever been was Green Bay.”

“Then he will need one,” said his father. “From the Post Office. Which issues them. At a counter. In a queue.” The pen. “It takes about three weeks, if nobody has made a mistake on the form, and somebody generally has.”

“In a queue,” said Frederick.

“In a queue, Frederick. Like everybody else in the Realm who has ever wanted to leave it.” A pause. “I have stood in one, you know. Once. In 1968. For a passport. In London. Because my father said that a Prince who had never stood in a queue for a passport did not understand what one was for.” The chair creaked. “It took forty minutes. A woman in front of me had a goose.”

---

“When is his birthday?” said his father.

Frederick looked at the telephone.

“The nineteenth of August.”

“The nineteenth of August,” said his father, and wrote it down. Frederick heard him write it down: the date, and then something else after it, short. “He will be thirteen.”

“Yes.”

“And you would want him for a week.”

“Yes. If he could. If his parents say.”

“Then it would not be before the nineteenth,” said his father. “A boy should be at home on his birthday. With his family. On the day.” The pen. “It would be after.”

Frederick sat with the telephone. He had not thought of that either. He had thought of August as August, the whole of it, the lake from the first to the last; he had not thought that in the middle of it there was a day that belonged to somebody else, in a flat four floors up over a bus depot, with a cake, probably, and his mother, and Kate, and Kringle; and that it should not be taken.

“After,” he said.

“After.” The pen went down on the desk in London; he heard it. “Now.”

---

“What is he like?” said his father.

Frederick had known it was coming.

His father always asked it. He had asked it about every person Frederick had ever talked about on the telephone, in nine years of Sundays; about the lady at the desk at Brookside, and Toby with the trains, and Mrs Forsythe with the loops, and Miss Hellström, and Dame M; about Elsa and Nils on Öland, and Mr Pavlik, and Mr Obi, and Mrs Tolliver. What is she like? What is he like? And it was not a polite question, the kind people asked at receptions. It was the other kind. It was the question his father put to ministers. It meant: tell me the one thing about this person that is true and that matters, and leave out everything else.

He had asked it in October, about Theo, the first time, and Frederick had said he eats an apple in a spiral, and his father had said that is not an answer about character, and Frederick had said it is, though, and his father had said explain, and he had not been able to.

He had six weeks, now. He had had all year.

He sat in the chair by the side table and looked at the photograph of his father on the dock at Lac du Roi, and thought about it.

He thought about the wall, on the first morning, and a boy eating an apple with enormous concentration who was the only person in the yard within forty feet who was not looking at him. Are you any relation of the Hanovers in the history book? He thought about the second morning, when somebody had told him, and nothing had gone across his face. Does he get lunch? He thought about the end of the first week. Devon, it’s Friday. It’s not interesting. He thought about Freddie, pen, said across a desk without any discussion, as though it were the time. He thought about the frog, and what frog?, and a hand in the back window of a brown car going away across the forecourt in the dark. He thought about the snow, and never the head, and an arm round his neck all the way up the steps. Douglas. He thought about a cabbage, a third of the way round, under his left hand.

And he thought about all the others. Everybody else. The whole year of them. Devon Price bowing. The girl in the dinner queue with her tray. The mathematics teacher saying Your Ro. The librarian and the cushion. Mr Ferrante stepping over the desk. June not saying anything on principle. Lucía asking about the horse. Señora Ruiz deciding something and doing it perfectly. Ms Varga deciding to be unimpressed. Mr Abernathy deciding not to decide. The young man in the white uniform at careers day, going through it all in a second and a half behind his smile. Every single one of them, in every room, on every day, had come into the room already knowing what they were going to do about him. They had decided at home, or in the car, or on the stairs. They had decided kindly, most of them, and some of them very well. But they had decided.

And the boy on the wall had not.

He had not decided anything. He had looked at Frederick across a yard for three seconds the way you look at a bus timetable when somebody has told you the times have changed, and gone back to his apple. He had been told, and gone on. He had not decided to be ordinary with him, the way June had decided not to say anything, or kind to him, the way Mrs Tolliver had decided to turn up the radio, or careful with him, the way Mr Ferrante had decided to step over his desk. He had just not decided. He had come into every room all year with nothing decided at all, and found out what he thought when he got there, the way he found the place he wanted on an apple, by turning it round.

“He’s the only person in the room,” said Frederick, “who hadn’t decided in advance how to behave toward me.”

---

There was a silence on the line from London.

It went on for a long time. It went on for longer than the silence after Alasdair Munro, on the second of November, when his father had had to go and fetch his voice from a room he did not often go into. Frederick sat with the cream telephone and listened to it and heard, through the wall from the next room, nothing at all, not even the needles.

He heard his father pick up the pen.

He heard him write. Not short. Long. A whole line, slowly, and then a pause, and then another line, in the voice of the pen that Frederick knew from Sundays, the scratch that meant this is going in the record.

“Say it again,” said his father. “Please. Slowly. I want to have it exactly.”

Frederick said it again. Slowly.

“The only person in the room who had not decided in advance how to behave toward me.”

The pen.

“Toward,” said his father. “Not towards.”

“I don’t know. I just said it.”

“You said toward. I shall write toward.” The pen. “Your mother will say it should be towards, because she learned her English in London, and she will be right, and I shall leave it as you said it, because you said it.” A pause. The pen went down. “Frederick.”

“Yes?”

“I am going to ask Dame Margaret,” said his father, “to put that in her note.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Her note to me,” said his father. “Which comes with the papers. In which she records the events in your life that she thinks I would wish to know.” A pause. “I should like it to be in the Household’s record. Not only in mine. Not only on a pad on my desk in London, which nobody will ever read but me. In the Household’s own note. In her hand. So that it is there.”

“Why?”

His father did not answer at once.

“Because I have kept the record of fourteen Crowns for fifty-four years,” he said, at last, slowly, “and I have learned what goes in it and what does not. And most of what goes in it is what was done. Acts and instruments and seals and appointments. What a minister advised and what a Governor assented to and who was sworn and when.” The chair creaked. “And almost nothing goes in it about what anybody was like. Because nobody asks. Because it is not thought to be the business of the record.” A pause. “And so in two hundred years’ time, Frederick, somebody will sit down with the Household’s papers for this year and they will find a half-birthday and a Legion’s wreath and a security screening and a passport application, and they will not know why. They will not know what the boy was like. They will make it up.” The pen tapped once on the desk. “I should prefer that they did not have to. I should prefer that they found, in the Household’s own note, in Dame Margaret’s hand, the version that matters. Which is yours.”

Frederick sat in the small sitting room and could not say anything at all.

“That is all,” said his father. “That is the reason.” A pause. “It is a very old man’s reason. You may ignore it.”

“I won’t.”

“No,” said his father. “I don’t suppose you will.”

---

“Papa,” said Frederick, after a while. “Is it yes?”

There was another silence.

“Not yet,” said his father.

Frederick held the telephone.

“It is not no,” said his father, carefully, in the voice for New Wessex, the voice for things that had to be got exactly right. “I want you to hear that it is not no. But it is not yet yes, either. Because it is not mine to say yes to.” The chair creaked. “It is the boy’s parents’. And the boy’s. And before anybody asks them anything, I should like two things.”

“What things?”

“The first,” said his father, “is that they are asked properly. By me. In writing. To his parents. Not by you, at school, on a wall. Not by the Household, on a card with a crest on it, with requests the pleasure.” A pause. “A man does not invite somebody’s son to his house for a week by sending word through the boy’s friend. He writes to the parents, and asks, and gives the dates, and says who will be there and how he will travel and when he will be home, and leaves them to decide. And if they say no, he does not ask why.”

“And the second?”

There was a pause.

“The second,” said his father, “is that I should like to meet him first.”

Frederick sat very still.

“Before I write,” said his father. “I should like to have met him. Not for long. I do not need long. I have had fifty-four years of meeting people for four minutes and knowing at the end of them whether I should trust them with a Bill.” The pen moved on the pad. “But I should not like to write to a boy’s parents asking for their son, for a week, in another realm, across a frontier, on a passport he has not yet got, without having once looked at him.”

“When?”

“I am in New Westminster in June,” said his father. “For a week. The first week. Before the lake. As I am every year.” The pen. “There will be a day. Dame Margaret will find it.”

“Not May?”

“Not May.” His father’s voice changed, very slightly. “On the first of May I am in New York. It is twenty years. I shall be with the families, and that day is theirs, and I shall not be meeting anybody’s friend on it.” A pause. “And on the second of May you are thirteen. And that day is yours. And I shall not be meeting anybody’s friend on that either, because he is not going to be the second thing on your birthday, Frederick, he is going to be the first thing on a day of his own.” A pause. “June.”

“June,” said Frederick.

“June,” said his father. “Now. The game. I have a Bill for you. A real one. From Brunswick. About a lorry.”

“Another lorry?”

“Brunswick,” said his father, “is mostly lorries,” and asked him in right of which Crown it was assented to, and Frederick told him, and his father said good, and asked him for one back, and Frederick said he did not have one, and his father said that he would let him off this week, because he had asked a better question than any Bill, and that it would keep.

At twenty past five his father said goodbye.

---

His mother was in the doorway when he put the telephone down.

She had the blue knitting in one hand and her reading glasses in the other and she was standing with her back against the frame, as she had stood on the second of November, and her face was quite dry, this time, but very still.

“He said not yet,” said Frederick.

“I heard.”

“He said he wants to meet him. In June. First.”

His mother came into the room, which she did not do, and sat down on the arm of the chair by the side table, beside him, and put her hand on his hair, and did not flatten it.

“Älskling,” she said, in Swedish. “I have been married to your father for sixteen years. I have known him for thirty-two.” She looked at the photograph on the mantelpiece, of the dock, and the lake, and an old man in an old jersey with the hills behind him going away grey and still. “In thirty-two years I have never once known him to want to meet somebody he was going to say no to.” She took her hand off his hair. “It would be a waste of a morning. And he does not waste mornings. He has too few left.”

Frederick looked at her.

“So it’s yes?”

“It is not yes,” said his mother. “He told you. It is the parents’ yes, and the boy’s, and they have not been asked.” She stood up. “But it is your father’s. Already. I can hear it.” She went to the door. “He asked when the boy’s birthday was. He has never asked me when anybody’s birthday was in his life. He has a Private Secretary for that.” She stopped in the doorway, with her back to him, the way she did. “And he wrote it down.”

She went out, quickly, the way she went out of rooms when she did not want to be seen being whatever she was being, and he heard her go along the corridor, not to the north wing kitchen, or to Ebba, or to her own sitting room, but down the back stairs, towards the ground floor, towards a door with a brass plate on it that said MASTER OF THE HOUSEHOLD; and knock; and Dame M’s voice say come.

He sat in the chair by the side table in the small sitting room, with the index card on his knee, with eleven words on it in pencil, and turned it over.

On the back, in the corner, very small, he had written something else, six weeks ago, in the car, at the lights on Canal Street, and had not read out.

Because he came.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he put the card in the drawer of the side table, under the cream telephone, where nobody ever looked, and shut it.