Friday Supper

The letter was under the salt all through supper.

Frederick saw it as soon as he came into the room, at half past six exactly, in his socks, because he had taken his shoes off at the rack without being told, as he had every Friday since March: a sheet of cream paper, folded in three, on the table, at the end by the window, by the chair with the arms, with the salt cellar on top of it, a plain glass one with a steel top; and beside it, face down, the cream envelope, with the stamp on it, which he could not see, and knew, with the King’s head looking left.

Nobody said anything about it.

Mrs Hartigan was at the stove, with the tea towel with Wisconsin on it over her shoulder and the long wooden spoon in her hand, and she turned round and looked at his face and then at his feet in their socks and then at his face, and turned back. Mr Hartigan was in his chair by the window with the crossword, in his socks, and looked up over his glasses and said “Frederick,” as a statement of fact, and Frederick said “Mr Hartigan. Four down. Delta,” because he had worked it out on the Tuesday, what the river does at the end, in short, and Mr Hartigan looked at him and said “I had it Saturday,” and wrote something very small in the margin and went back to the crossword. Kate was on the sofa with her phone and did not look up. Kringle was on the windowsill over the sink in the evening light, a ring of orange, asleep.

And Theo was laying the table. One fork, two, three, four, five. He put the fifth by the chair with the cushion tied on, between his own and the wall, and did not look at the end of the table where the salt was, at all.

They sat down at the moment the dish did.

It was sausages, fat and brown and split along their sides, on a bed of red cabbage, and potatoes in their skins, and a mustard in a little pot that was brown and grainy and made his eyes water at the first taste; and Mrs Hartigan said grace in German, quickly, as though God were a busy man and would rather they got on, and Frederick said Amen at the right time, now, with everybody else; and Mrs Hartigan served.

Nobody said anything about the letter.

They talked about the cake. There was a piece of it left, with the O on it, in a tin on the counter, and Kate said it was hers, and Theo said it had his name on it, and Kate said it had O on it and O could be anybody, and Mr Hartigan said, from behind his sausage, that O was the fifteenth letter of the alphabet and he was claiming it on the grounds that he was the eldest, and Kate threw a potato at him, which he caught.

They talked about the pothole, and Harold, who had held a sort of wake for it in the canteen on Wednesday, with a cake, which the depot manager had attended, and at which the depot manager had made a speech of one sentence, which was it was a good pothole.

They talked about Kringle and the pigeon, and about Mrs Okonjo, who had carried the letter up two flights at eighty-one without the lift because it was not her hour, and had said Anneliese, I think this is the one, and gone down.

Nobody said the letter. Nobody looked at the end of the table. The salt sat on it, a plain glass cellar with a steel top, holding it down; and Frederick ate his sausage and his cabbage and his potatoes, and the mustard that made his eyes water, and did not look at it either.

---

After supper Mrs Hartigan did not wash up.

She stood up when the plates were done, as she always did, and took them to the sink, as she always did; and Frederick stood up with his, and took it to the sink, and stood beside her, and held out his hand for the tea towel; and she did not give it to him.

She looked at him sideways.

Then she put the plates in the sink, in the bowl, and did not run the tap. She dried her hands on the tea towel with Wisconsin on it. And she went back to the table, and sat down, not in her own place at the end, but in Mr Hartigan’s, opposite the chair with the cushion; and reached down the length of the table, and lifted the salt off the letter, and put the salt down, and picked up the letter, and held it out across the table.

Not to Mr Hartigan, who had come back from his chair by the window and was standing behind her with the pencil behind his ear. Not to Theo. Not to Kate, who had sat up on the sofa.

To Frederick.

“Read it,” said Mrs Hartigan.

Frederick looked at her.

“Out loud,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Please.” She held it out. “I’ve read it eleven times. Peter’s read it four. I want to hear it in somebody else’s voice.” She did not lower her hand. “In yours.”

He came back from the sink. He sat down in the chair with the cushion tied on, between the wall and Theo’s, and took the letter.

It was three pages. The cream paper, without the crest. The small upright hand, in black ink, from a fountain pen, a clerk’s hand, taught by a man with a ruler in 1953, with no crossings-out anywhere, not one, because his father did not write in drafts.

He unfolded it.

He looked at the first line. He knew he would know the voice; he knew the voice better than any voice in the world, from fifty Sundays a year at four on a cream telephone. But he had not known that he would hear it so clearly, from the paper, in the kitchen of flat sixteen, four floors up over a bus depot, with the steamed window going gold in the evening and Kringle on the sill and a salt cellar on the table beside him; and he had to stop, for a moment, before he could begin.

“Columbia Palace,” he read. “Wednesday, 3rd June 2026.”

“Dear Mr and Mrs Hartigan.”

---

“I write first to thank you for allowing Theo to come to tea this afternoon, and to apologise to you, as I have apologised to him, that there was no tea. I was kept on the telephone to London from ten past four until twenty to six, on a matter I could not leave and cannot describe, and when I was released from it I had five minutes before I was due elsewhere. I met him in a corridor, for four of them. It was not what I had intended, and it was not what he had been promised, and it is my fault and nobody else’s. I am sorry.

“I write secondly to ask you something, and I should like to ask it plainly.

“Every summer since 1972 I have spent the month of August at a lodge called Lac du Roi, in the Laurentian hills, in New Albion, about seventy miles north of Montreal. It was given to me by the Albian people in the year I came to the throne. It is a plain house of wood on the shore of a lake, with nine rooms, a dock, a boathouse, and pine trees to the water, and very little else. There is no town nearer than eleven miles. There is no television. There is a wireless that receives one station, in French. My son has spent most of his summers there since he was six.

“I should like to ask whether you would allow Theo to come and stay with us there, for a week, from Thursday the 20th of August to Thursday the 27th.”

Frederick stopped.

He did not mean to. He read the 20th of August and stopped, at the table, with the letter in his hands, because it was the day after a birthday; and he felt the whole table go still round him, Mrs Hartigan opposite with her hands flat on the oilcloth, and Mr Hartigan behind her with the pencil behind his ear, and Kate on the sofa, and Theo beside him, who did not move at all.

“Go on,” said Mrs Hartigan quietly.

“I have chosen those dates,” he read, “because I am told that his birthday is on the 19th, and that he will be thirteen, and a boy should be at home on his birthday, with his family, on the day. I hope I have that right. If I have it wrong, I should be grateful to be told, and the dates can be moved.

“If you allow it, this is what the week would be.

“He would travel on the morning of the 20th from the airfield across the river from the Axis, on an aircraft of the royal squadron, with my son and with Sergeant Castellanos, whom I believe you know by sight, and who has been asked to look after them both. It is a flight of an hour and forty minutes, to an airfield at Sainte-Agathe, and then forty minutes by car. I travel separately, by a rule of my household which concerns aircraft and has nothing to do with Theo.

“He would sleep in the room at the top of the stairs, which has two beds in it and a window onto the lake, and which my son has slept in every summer since he was six. My son would be in the other bed. The room has a door that shuts.”

Kate, on the sofa, made a small sound.

“The household at the lodge is very small,” Frederick read. “There is myself; my son; Sergeant Castellanos and one other officer, who live in a cabin by the boathouse; a cook from Sainte-Agathe called Madame Bergeron, who has cooked there since 1979 and is very fierce; and a caretaker, Monsieur Lavoie, who lives in a cabin at the end of the drive with his wife and keeps the boats. My wife is in Sweden in August, as she is every year, and will not be there. Nobody else will be there at all.

“There is nothing to do at Lac du Roi except swim, and walk, and fish, and sit on the dock, and go out on the lake in the canoes. I am told Theo swims, and has a badge from Milwaukee. The water is very cold even in August, and very deep fifty feet from the shore, and he would be asked not to swim beyond the dock without one of the officers. There are four canoes, of red cedar, older than either boy. Nobody takes them out before seven in the morning, and nobody takes them out without Sergeant Castellanos. That is a rule of the house, and has been since 1972, and it is kept.”

He heard Theo, beside him, breathe out, very slowly, through his nose.

“The nearest hospital is at Sainte-Agathe, eleven miles away, and it takes nineteen minutes by the road in August. There is a doctor in the village who will come out. Mrs Hartigan will want to know that. I should want to know it, in her place.

“He will eat what is on the table, which at Lac du Roi is mostly fish, and potatoes, and whatever Madame Bergeron has decided. I understand that this is also the rule in your house, and I can only say that it is the rule in mine, and that Madame Bergeron enforces it more strictly than I do.”

Mrs Hartigan, opposite, put her hand over her mouth.

---

“He will need a passport,” Frederick read. “New Albion is a separate realm, and the frontier is a real one, and I cannot waive it for anybody, least of all for a guest of my own, because that would be to borrow one Crown’s authority for another, which is the one thing I have spent fifty-four years not doing. I am told he has not got a passport. They are issued by the Post Office, at a counter, and take about three weeks. If it would help, the Household can tell you which office is quickest. If you would rather it did not, I understand.

“He will not need any money. There is nowhere to spend it. He will need a jersey, because it is cold on the dock at night and very cold at five in the morning, which is when boys want to go out in canoes, and are not allowed.

“He would come home on the afternoon of Thursday the 27th of August, on the same aircraft, to the same airfield, at about five o’clock, where I hope one of you would be able to meet him. If you cannot, Sergeant Castellanos will bring him to your door, but I should think that he would rather it were one of you.

“That is everything I can think of. If there is anything I have not thought of, I should be glad to be asked, by letter or by any other means you like.

“I should say one more thing, and then stop.

“I met your son for four minutes this afternoon, in a corridor. I have met a great many people for four minutes in fifty-four years, and I have learned, as one does, to know at the end of four minutes something of what a person is like. My son told me in April what Theo is like, in one sentence, and I wrote it down, and I have not shown it to anybody but the Master of my Household. This afternoon I saw that the sentence was true.

“It is entirely your decision, and Theo’s. If you would rather he did not come, you have only to say so, and I shall not ask why, and nothing will be any different at all, and he will still sit by the aisle, and my son by the window.

“With my thanks, and my very good wishes to you both, and to Kate,

“Yours sincerely,

“Ernest R.”

He stopped.

There was a postscript. He saw it, at the bottom of the third page, under the signature, smaller. He read it.

“P.S. I have been told of a cat called Kringle. I hope he has recovered from the winter.”

---

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Frederick sat in the chair with the cushion tied on with the three pages in his hands and looked at the last line, I hope he has recovered from the winter, and did not look up. He did not know what his face was doing. He had read his father’s voice out loud, in a kitchen, to a family, for the first time in his life; and it had come out of him in his own voice, as Mrs Hartigan had asked; and he had heard, reading it, that it was the same voice; that his own voice reading his father’s letter sounded like his father; and he had not known that until now.

On the windowsill over the sink, Kringle had opened one yellow eye.

Mrs Hartigan took her hand away from her mouth.

“Ernest R,” she said.

“It means Rex,” said Frederick. “King. In Latin.” He thought. “It’s how he signs things. Not Acts. Letters.”

“I know what it means.” Mrs Hartigan looked at the letter in his hands. “I looked it up. On Thursday. At four in the morning.” She held out her hand for it.

He gave it back.

She folded it, in three, along its creases, exactly as it had been folded, and put it on the table in front of her, and put her hand flat on it.

“Right,” she said.

---

She had eleven questions. Frederick had known she would.

She asked them across the table, in order, with her hand flat on the letter, the way Mrs Thursby had gone through four typed pages, line by line, in a voice like somebody reading a recipe; and Frederick answered them, because he had been asked, and because he knew.

Were there mosquitoes? Black flies in June, mosquitoes in August, and you put on the stuff in the green bottle that Madame Bergeron kept by the kitchen door, and it smelled of lemons and did not work.

Was the water clean? It was the cleanest water he had ever seen. You could see the bottom at twenty feet, and the stones on it, and the fish.

Were there bears? There had been a bear in 2019, at the bins. Monsieur Lavoie had shouted at it in French and it had gone away. Frederick did not think it had understood the French.

What would he wear? Jerseys. Old ones. And shorts, and a raincoat, because it rained every third day, suddenly, from over the hill. And shoes he did not mind getting wet, because everybody got wet.

Who would wash his clothes? Madame Bergeron. On Mondays. Whether you wanted her to or not.

Would there be other children? No. Nobody. Just them.

Would he be lonely? Frederick thought about that one for a long time.

“No,” he said. “There’ll be me.”

Mrs Hartigan looked at him across the table.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I asked.”

---

Kate had fourteen.

She had them from the sofa, and then, when the sofa was too far, from the table, where she came and sat in her own place beside her mother, with her arms folded. Most of them were about why Theo was going and she was not.

“Because he sits next to him,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“I could sit next to him.”

“You’re fifteen.”

“I’ll be sixteen. In October.”

“In October,” said Mr Hartigan, from behind his wife, “the lake will have frozen.”

Kate looked at her father with an expression of the deepest betrayal. “It’s not fair. He gets Canada.”

“It’s not Canada,” said Theo, beside Frederick. “It’s New Albion.”

“What’s the difference?”

Theo looked at Frederick.

Frederick opened his mouth to explain about the separate Crown, and the frontier, and in right of which realm, and the Treaty of something in some year, and the Albian people and the gift in 1972; and found that he could hear his father in it, every word, and that it was all true, and that none of it was the answer to Kate’s question, which was not about Crowns at all.

“There isn’t one,” he said, “if you’re the one who isn’t going.”

Kate stared at him.

Then she unfolded her arms, and put her face in her hands, on the oilcloth, and made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else; and Mrs Hartigan put her hand on the back of her daughter’s head, without looking at her, and left it there.

---

The argument was about the passport.

It began in German, quietly, between Mrs Hartigan at the table and Mr Hartigan behind her, at about eight; and Frederick, who had not understood a word of the argument about money in March except the nouns, found that he understood a little more of this one, because there were more nouns.

“…der Passport…”

“…ja, aber die Birth Certificate…”

“…in der Drawer…”

“…nein, in Milwaukee, bei deiner Mutter…”

He understood that much. The passport needed a birth certificate. The birth certificate was in a drawer. Or it was not in a drawer; it was in Milwaukee, at somebody’s mother’s. Mrs Hartigan thought it was in the drawer. Mr Hartigan thought it was at his mother’s in Milwaukee, in a tin, with his own, and Kate’s, and the deeds to a house that had been sold in 2025.

Mrs Hartigan got up and went to the drawer.

Not the drawer under the telephone, with the takeaway menus and Mrs Thursby’s card and the battered blue box of cards. The other drawer, the one in the sideboard by the sofa, where she kept things; Theo had told him about it in October, on the wall, my christening certificate, and Kate’s swimming badges, and a letter from the Grand Duke’s office when my nan was ninety, and a menu from a restaurant in Kenosha where Dad asked her to marry him; and the posh card, now, from the Household, with the crest, requests the pleasure. She opened it. She took things out, one by one, and put them on the sideboard. A menu. A certificate. Two swimming badges with fish on them. A stiff white card with a gold edge. A green envelope with a robin on it. A photograph.

At the bottom of the drawer, in a plastic sleeve, there was a piece of paper with a seal on it.

She took it out. She looked at it.

“Na?” said Mr Hartigan, behind her.

Mrs Hartigan turned round with it.

“Theodore James Hartigan,” she read. “Born the nineteenth of August, 2013. St Joseph’s Hospital. Milwaukee.” She looked at her husband. “In the drawer.”

Mr Hartigan looked at the piece of paper for a long time.

Then he said something in German, short, which Frederick did not understand at all, because there were no nouns in it; and Mrs Hartigan said something back, shorter; and Mr Hartigan laughed. Once. Out loud. In the middle of the kitchen.

“What did he say?” Frederick whispered to Theo.

“He said she’s always right about drawers,” said Theo. “And she said yes. And that he’s always wrong about his mother.” He considered. “It’s not Racine. But it’s close.”

---

Mr Hartigan did not say anything else for a long time.

He stood behind his wife’s chair at the table with the pencil behind his ear and looked at the birth certificate in its plastic sleeve, on the table now, beside the folded letter; and at the letter; and at the salt cellar, which had held it down all through supper; and at his son, in the chair beside Frederick’s, by the aisle, who had not asked a single question all evening, not one, about the lake or the canoes or the bear or the aircraft or the passport or the King, but had sat there with his hands on the oilcloth and listened to everybody else ask theirs.

Then Mr Hartigan reached up, and took the pencil from behind his ear, and put it down. On the table. Beside the letter.

Kate looked at it.

Mrs Hartigan looked at it.

Frederick looked at it. He knew what it meant. Theo had told him, on the wall, on the third of November. He never puts the pencil down. Not in the middle of a crossword. Not if the depot’s on fire.

“Theo,” said Mr Hartigan.

Theo looked up at his father.

“Do you want to go?” said Mr Hartigan.

That was all.

He did not say anything else. He did not say it’s a long way, or it’s a lot of money, or it’s the King, or what about your mother. He did not say it’s your first time out of the Realm, or you’ve never been on an aeroplane, or are you sure. He asked the one question that nobody had asked all evening, not Mrs Hartigan with her eleven or Kate with her fourteen or the King with three pages; and he asked it the way he said Frederick, as a statement of fact, low and slow, with Milwaukee in it all the way through.

Theo looked at him.

He looked at him for about three seconds, steadily, from the chair by the aisle, the way he looked at everything; taking it in. Frederick, beside him, did not breathe.

“Yes,” said Theo.

Mr Hartigan nodded. Once. The nod of a man at the bottom of a step.

He picked up the pencil again. He put it back behind his ear.

“Then write to the man,” he said.

---

Mrs Hartigan did not say anything.

She sat at the table in her husband’s place with her hand flat on the folded letter and looked at her son; and then at her husband, behind her, with the pencil behind his ear again; and then at Frederick, in the chair with the cushion tied on, who had read it out to her in somebody else’s voice.

“It’s his to say,” she said.

She said it quietly. Not to anybody. To the table. The way she had said it at this table in February, Theo had told him, to a small grey woman with a folder and a cat on her foot.

And then she stood up, and went back to the sink, and ran the tap, and squeezed in the green stuff, and held out the tea towel with the map of Wisconsin on it, sideways, without looking round, at the height of his hand.

He took it. He dried.

Nobody said anything else about it, all the way through the washing up. Mr Hartigan went back to his chair by the window and the crossword. Kate went back to the sofa and her phone, and did not look at it, and lay looking at the ceiling. Theo put away, in the cupboards, in the places Frederick had learned since March, without saying a word; and on the windowsill over the sink, in the last of the evening light going gold through the steamed glass, Kringle stood up, and stretched, and walked along the sill, very slowly, the way he walked, like a cat who owns the building, to the end nearest the table; and stepped down onto the counter; and onto the table; and walked across the oilcloth to the folded letter on cream paper in a King’s hand, which was lying beside a birth certificate in a plastic sleeve and a salt cellar with a steel top; and sat down on it.

He sat down on it, in a ring, with his tail over his nose.

“Kringle,” said Mrs Hartigan, at the sink, without turning round.

Kringle opened one yellow eye.

“Leave him,” said Mr Hartigan, from behind the crossword. “He’s recovered from the winter.”

And Theo, at the cupboard, with a plate in his hand, put his face against the cupboard door and laughed, silently, with his shoulders going; and Frederick, at the sink, with the tea towel with Wisconsin on it, bit the inside of his cheek, on the left, hard, the way Guardsman Bevan had said, and held it, all the way to the end of the plates.