A Precedent

At a quarter past six on Monday he went down the stairs at the back of the north wing on his own, along the two corridors, without a footman, and knocked on the door with the brass plate that said MASTER OF THE HOUSEHOLD.

“Come.”

Dame M was at the desk with the lamp and the cold tea and the folder. She stood up.

“Sir.”

“I’d like to ask for something,” said Frederick.

He had practised it. He had practised it all Saturday and Sunday, in his room, in front of the wall map with the six realms on it and the seventh pencilled in Sweden, in different ways, until he had found one that had all the parts and no extra ones. He stood in the doorway now and said it, the way he had practised, the way his father would have said it to a minister, in order, with the date first.

“On Sunday the second of November,” he said, “I would like to have a half-birthday. At home. In the afternoon. With a guest.”

Dame M did not sit down. She did not open the folder. She stood behind her desk in the lamplight with one hand flat on it and looked at him across the room, and he watched her hear it, all of it, every part, in order; and then he watched her get to the second part, and stop.

“A half-birthday, sir,” she said.

“I’ll be twelve and a half. On the second of November. It’s six months from the second of May.” He had brought it with him, written out, in case: May, June, July, August, September, October, November. He did not take it out. “It’s a thing in Milwaukee.”

Dame M considered this.

“Is it, sir?”

“Some people in Milwaukee,” said Frederick, with the dignity he had learned on the wall. “When their real one’s no good. A boy called Dieter. His is on Christmas Eve.”

Dame M looked at him a moment longer. Then she sat down, slowly, and gestured at the chair across the desk, and he came in and sat in it.

“Sir,” she said, “I’m going to be honest with you, because you’d know if I weren’t.” She put both hands on the folder. “The Household has a form for nearly everything. It has a form for a christening, and a confirmation, and a coming of age, and a jubilee, silver, gold and diamond. It has a form for a State Visit and a form for a private one. It has a form for a birthday. It has had a form for your birthday since before you were born.” She paused. “It has never, in two hundred and thirty years, had a form for half of one.”

“No,” said Frederick.

“Which is not a reason to say no.” She looked at him. “It is a reason to say: give me a day.”

---

He did not see what happened in the day.

He heard about it, in pieces, the way he heard about most things the Household did, from the people who had been standing at the edges of it with cups.

He heard from the footman who brought his supper on Monday evening, a young man called Dacre with very large hands who had been at the Palace a year and was not yet good at being invisible, that Dame M had been in her office until ten, with the door shut, on the telephone, and that the man from the Private Secretary’s office with the moustache had gone in at eight and come out at half past eight looking, Dacre said, like a man who’s been told to hold a ladder.

He heard from Bridget, at breakfast on Tuesday, at the table by the range, over the egg, that the man with the moustache was called Mr Pargeter, and that he had said to Dame M, in Bridget’s hearing, in the corridor outside the kitchen at a quarter to seven that morning, that if the Prince was to have an occasion, however informal, then the guests should be a representative selection.

“A representative selection,” said Bridget, and banged a pan. “Of what, I said to myself. Of what. And he said it to her, he said: the children of the diplomatic corps, ma’am, perhaps, or the children of members of the Privy Council, a dozen, carefully chosen, so that no realm and no party feels left out.” She banged the pan again. “For a half. For a boy of twelve and a half to eat a bit of cake. A dozen children of the Privy Council, so nobody feels left out. I’ve never heard the like.”

“What did Dame M say?”

Bridget put the pan down and looked at him.

“She said: Mr Pargeter, the Prince has asked for one guest, and named him, and if we give him twelve, the occasion will acquire a seating plan.” Bridget nodded slowly. “And Mr Pargeter said that a seating plan was not in itself a bad thing. And Dame M said, for a half-birthday, Mr Pargeter, it is the worst thing in the world.”

Frederick ate his egg.

“And then,” said Bridget, “the Inspector came.”

---

He heard about the Inspector from Castellanos, in the car, on Tuesday morning, on the way to school.

Castellanos did not usually say anything in the car on the way to school except seat belt, sir. But at the lights on the Axis he looked in the mirror and said, in the voice he used for gravel:

“The Inspector would like an address, sir.”

Frederick looked at the back of his head.

“Whose?”

“The young man’s. Theo’s.” Castellanos looked back at the road. “For the second. The Inspector doesn’t mind the half, sir. He’s had worse. He had a fortnight in Öland with a dog that bit. But he needs to know who’s coming to the house, and where from, and who’s bringing him, and when.” A pause. “So he asked me. Last night. In Dame M’s office. Whether I knew the address.”

“Do you?”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t either,” said Frederick.

He realised it as he said it. He did not know where Theo lived. He knew that there was a flat, and a block, and a man called Fred who fixed the boilers and had a van, and a depot with a man whose brother had trees, and a window; he knew that it was on the twenty-two, somewhere, and that Theo’s father drove the twenty-two; he knew that there was a hole in it somewhere that pens went down. He did not know the name of the street. He had never asked. He had never asked Theo anything about where he lived that was not about apples.

“The Inspector said,” said Castellanos, “that we could find out. Easily. In an afternoon.” He drove. “And I said that I thought that might not be the best way of finding out, sir. In this case.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I was probably right, and asked how I suggested he found out.” Castellanos looked in the mirror. “And I said, sir, that I’d suggest he waited, and you asked.”

---

He asked at break, on the wall.

He did not know how to. He had never asked anybody for their address in his life. Addresses had always been something that other people had already, in folders, before he arrived; the Household knew where everybody lived, the way it knew where the fire exits were. He sat on the wall with the depot apple Theo had given him, a small lopsided one with a leaf, and turned it in his hand, and found the place he wanted, and bit, in a spiral, and tried to think of a way of asking that did not sound like the Inspector.

“Theo.”

“What.”

“Where do you live?”

Theo looked at him.

“Why?”

“For the second.” Frederick looked at the apple. “I asked. Yesterday. The lady with the folder. Dame Margaret. For the half-birthday.” He took a breath. “She’s thinking about it. And if it’s yes, they’ll need to know. Where you’re coming from. And who’s bringing you.” He looked at the apple harder. “There’s an Inspector. He’d have found out anyway. In an afternoon. Castellanos told him not to. He said I should ask.”

Theo was quiet for a moment.

“Your man said that?”

“Yes.”

Theo looked across the yard at the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, where Castellanos was sitting with his coffee, looking at the yard. He lifted his hand. The finger came up off the cup.

“Fourth floor,” said Theo. “Dunmore Street. Number forty. Across from the depot. Flat sixteen.” He thought. “The lift works. Mostly. Except before seven, because there’s a man called Mr Dabrowski on the first floor who goes up and down in it for his knees.” He took a bite of his apple. “There’s a spider plant on the landing. On the window. Mrs Okonjo waters it. Tell your Inspector not to touch it, she’ll know.”

Frederick wrote it down. He did not have anything to write it on except the back of his hand, so he wrote it on the back of his hand, with one of Bridget’s pens, 40 DUNMORE ST, FLAT 16, 4TH FLOOR, and looked at it, and thought that it was the first address he had ever written down himself in his life.

“Who’s bringing you?” he said.

Theo looked at the back of Frederick’s hand.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I haven’t asked.”

“Asked who?”

“Mum and Dad.” Theo turned the apple over. “I haven’t told them.”

Frederick looked at him.

“You haven’t told them?”

“About the half?”

“About anything.”

Theo looked across the yard. He did not say anything for a while. He ate the apple right round, in a spiral, carefully, and then the bottom of the core, and put the core in his pocket.

“I’ll tell them,” he said. “When it’s yes.”

---

It was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays his mother kept the evening clear.

She had kept Tuesday evenings clear since he was five, since the first year she had lived at the Palace in the school year, and nobody had ever been allowed to put anything in them: not a dinner, not an ambassador, not Ebba Lindqvist with a folder from Stockholm, not the Swedish Prime Minister, who had once tried and been told, by Ebba, on the telephone, in Frederick’s hearing, that Her Majesty was very sorry but that Tuesday was spoken for. On Tuesdays they had supper together in the small dining room of the north wing, the two of them, at the end of the long table nearest the fire, with the rest of the table bare, and nobody waiting at it, because his mother did not like to be waited on when she was being his mother; the food came up from the north wing kitchen, the Swedish one, on a trolley, and his mother served it herself, out of the dishes, with a spoon, and they talked in Swedish, about anything, or nothing, and she knitted afterwards, by the fire, and he did his homework on the other side of it, until nine.

On Tuesday the twenty-first of October, at a quarter to eight, when they had finished the fish and his mother had served the cake herself, there was a knock at the door of the small dining room.

His mother looked up.

Nobody knocked on Tuesdays. Frederick saw her face do something, very fast, and stop. And then she said, in English, in her ordinary voice:

“Come in.”

It was Dame M, with the folder.

She came in, and stopped just inside the door, and stood very straight, the way she stood on bridges in photographs, and said: “I beg your pardon, ma’am. Sir. I would not have come on a Tuesday. But there is a question about the second of November, which I can’t answer, and which I think is yours.”

His mother put down her fork. She looked at Frederick, across the end of the table, and then at Dame M.

“Then you had better sit down, Margaret,” she said, “and have some cake.”

---

Dame M sat down. It was the first time Frederick had ever seen her sit at a table in the north wing. She sat at the corner, at his mother’s left, on the edge of the chair, with the folder on her knee, and his mother cut her a piece of the cake, which was a Swedish one with almonds, and put it in front of her, and Dame M looked at it as though it were a document she had not been sent in advance.

“I have spent a day on it, ma’am,” she said. “The half-birthday. I have spoken to the Inspector, and to Mr Pargeter, and to the kitchens. I have spoken to Bridget, which was a mistake, since she now has a view. I have looked at every form the Household has.” She paused. “There is no form.”

“No,” said his mother.

“So I telephoned Windsor,” said Dame M.

His mother raised her eyebrows.

“The Royal Archives, ma’am. At half past nine last night, our time, which was half past two this morning theirs, which I regret. I spoke to the Keeper. I asked him whether there was any record, anywhere, in the papers of the Household, in any realm, of a half-birthday being kept.” Dame M looked at the cake. “He said that he would look. He rang back at eleven this morning. Our time.” She opened the folder.

Frederick had never seen her open it. In nine years, at the Friday meetings, on the stairs, at the door of the sitting room, in the car, he had never once seen Dame Margaret Roper open the folder. It had been, as far as he knew, a sort of object, like a mace, which was carried rather than used. And now she opened it, on her knee, at the corner of the table in the small dining room of the north wing, on a Tuesday, beside a piece of almond cake, and took out a single sheet of paper, a photocopy, grey, with the black edges that photocopies of very old pages have, and held it out across the corner of the table to his mother.

“There is a precedent, ma’am,” said Dame M.

His mother took it. She put her reading glasses on. She read it.

Frederick watched her read it. He watched her face, which was very still, and then went stiller; and then he saw something start at the corner of her mouth, and be stopped, and start again; and his mother put her hand up to her mouth, with the photocopy in her other hand, and looked at Dame M over the top of her reading glasses, and Dame M looked back at her with no expression at all.

“Margaret,” said his mother. “Is this real?”

“It is from the day-book of the Household at Balmoral, ma’am,” said Dame M. “For August 1955. The Keeper has the original. He read it to me over the telephone twice, because I asked him to. And then he sent this.” A pause. “He said that he had worked in the Archives for twenty-six years and it was the best thing he had ever been asked to find.”

His mother looked at the photocopy again. Then she held it out across the table to Frederick.

“Read it to me, älskling,” she said, in Swedish. “Out loud. In English. Please. I want to hear it in your voice.”

---

He took it.

It was a page from a big book, ruled in faint lines, with a date in the margin and the entries written across in a very upright, very neat, very old-fashioned hand, in ink that had gone brown, the kind of handwriting that had been taught to clerks in the 1930s by men with rulers. At the top of the page, printed, it said BALMORAL. HOUSEHOLD DAY-BOOK. There were other entries on the page, above and below, about deliveries of coal and a visit from a minister and somebody’s horse going lame. The one in the middle had been marked, in the margin, very recently, in pencil, with a small neat bracket, by somebody who had wanted to make sure it was found.

He read it out loud.

“Tuesday, 9th August, 1955,” he read. “H.R.H. Prince Ernest’s half-birthday, by H.R.H.’s own request, which His Majesty was pleased to allow. One guest. Master Alasdair Munro, aged nine, son of the head stalker. Tea in the nursery at four. A cake, divided.”

He stopped.

There was one more line.

“Both boys in the river at five,” he read. “Recovered.”

There was a silence in the small dining room of the north wing.

He looked up from the photocopy. His mother was looking at him, with her hand at her mouth. Dame M was looking at the cake.

“Prince Ernest,” said Frederick.

“Your father, sir,” said Dame M. “Aged eight and a half.”

Frederick looked at the page again. By H.R.H.’s own request. He thought about his father, at eight and a half, at Balmoral, in August, in 1955, which was a very long time ago, longer ago than the history book’s last chapter, asking for a half-birthday; and being allowed; and having one guest, a boy called Alasdair whose father was the head stalker; and tea in the nursery, and a cake, divided; and the river.

He had never once thought of his father being eight.

“Did he tell you?” he said, to his mother. “Ever?”

“Never,” said his mother. “Not once. In sixteen years.” She took her hand away from her mouth. “I have heard about every Act of every Parliament he has ever assented to, älskling. I have heard about the Brunswick lorry twice. I have never heard about the river.”

“Does he know? That you’ve found it?”

“No, ma’am. Sir. Not from me.” Dame M closed the folder. “The Keeper asked whether His Majesty should be told. I said that it was not my place to say, and that the question was the Queen’s.” She looked at his mother. “Which is why I came on a Tuesday.”

His mother took the photocopy back from Frederick, gently, and looked at it, at the brown upright clerk’s hand and the pencil bracket in the margin, for a long time.

“He will be told,” she said at last. “By Frederick. On Sunday. At four. Not by me, and not by the Household, and not by the Keeper at Windsor, who has had his fun.” She folded the photocopy once and put it on the table beside her plate, under her hand. “He will be told by his son, who has asked for exactly the same thing seventy years later, without knowing, and I should like to be in the next room.”

---

“Now,” said his mother, in English. “The question.”

Dame M sat up very straight on the edge of the chair.

“Three questions, ma’am,” she said. “The guest list. The arrangements. And the programme.”

“The guest list.”

“The Prince has asked for one guest. Master Hartigan.” Dame M did not look at Frederick. “Mr Pargeter has suggested a representative selection. A dozen children of the diplomatic corps or the Privy Council. So that no realm feels left out.”

His mother looked at her.

“How many guests did the Prince ask for, Margaret?”

“One, ma’am.”

“How many guests did his father have, in 1955, at Balmoral?”

Dame M did not look at the photocopy.

“One, ma’am.”

“Then that is the precedent,” said his mother. “One. Thank Mr Pargeter for me. Tell him that no realm will feel left out of a half-birthday, because no realm knows it exists, and I should like to keep it that way.” She paused. “The arrangements.”

“The Inspector has the address now, ma’am. The Prince obtained it himself, today, at school.” Dame M did not look at the back of Frederick’s hand, on which, faintly, it was still written, because he had not washed it. “The Inspector proposes to send a car for the boy at a quarter to two. With an officer. And bring him back at six.”

Frederick sat very still.

He thought about Dunmore Street, which he had never seen. Number forty, across from the depot. A spider plant on the landing that Mrs Okonjo watered. A dark blue car from Columbia Palace drawing up outside, on a Sunday afternoon, at a quarter to two, with a man in a grey suit getting out of it and going in at the door; and every window in the block going up.

He looked at his mother.

His mother was looking at him. She had seen his face. He did not know what it had done, but she had seen it, and she looked at it for a long moment across the end of the table, and then she turned back to Dame M.

“No,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“No car.” His mother put her hand flat on the folded photocopy beside her plate, exactly the way Dame M put her hand on the folder. “The boy has parents. He is not being sent for. He is being invited. When a child is invited to a birthday, his parents bring him, and his parents come and fetch him, and they stand at the door and say thank you for having him, and he says thank you for having me, and that is how it is done. In Stockholm and in Milwaukee and in London and on Öland and, I imagine, at Balmoral in 1955.” She looked at Dame M. “His parents will bring him. As parents do. And nobody from this house will go and get him. Is that clear?”

Dame M looked at her for a moment.

“Perfectly clear, ma’am,” she said. And then, after a pause: “The Inspector will be relieved. He did not like the car either. He said it would be the most conspicuous thing that had happened to Dunmore Street since the depot was built.”

“And the programme,” said his mother.

Dame M took a breath.

“The kitchens would like to know what to prepare. The Inspector would like to know which rooms. The footmen would like to know whether they are required. Mr Pargeter would like to know whether there is to be a photograph.” She paused. “In short, ma’am, the Household would like a programme.”

His mother looked at Frederick.

“Do you want a programme, älskling?”

Frederick thought about it. He thought about the Household’s form for his birthday, which had existed since before he was born: the photograph in the library in front of the same books, and the lunch, and the telephone at eleven, and the letters. He thought about a boy on a wall saying I just want to see you have a birthday where somebody came.

“No,” he said.

“Then there will be no programme,” said his mother, to Dame M. “No photograph. No footmen, unless somebody needs carrying. The kitchens may make a cake, because there must be a cake, and Bridget would leave us if there were not. The boys may go where they like in the north wing and in the gardens and anywhere else that is not locked. And at six his parents will come for him.” She picked up her fork. “That is the ruling.”

Dame M stood up. She tucked the folder under her arm.

“Thank you, ma’am.” She looked at the piece of almond cake on the plate in front of her chair, which she had not touched. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I seem to have…”

“Take it with you, Margaret,” said his mother. “On the plate. You can bring the plate back on Friday.”

Dame M looked at the cake. Then she picked it up, on its plate, very carefully, in the hand that was not holding the folder, and held it in front of her, level, the way the eighth-grade girl had held her tray, and went to the door.

At the door she stopped, as she always did, without turning round.

“Ma’am,” she said. “The Household will, I’m afraid, produce some timings. For the second. Not a programme. I understand that there will be no programme. But the Inspector must know when the boy arrives and when he leaves, and the kitchens must know when the cake is wanted, and when there are three people in a building who need to know what time something is, somebody writes it down.” She paused. “I mention it so that when you see it, ma’am, you will know that it is not a programme.”

His mother looked at the back of Dame M’s grey suit for a moment.

“How long will it be, Margaret?” she said. “The timings.”

Dame M considered this honestly, at the door, with the folder under her arm and the cake held level in front of her.

“I should think about two pages, ma’am,” she said, and went out.

---

His mother sat at the end of the long table in the small dining room of the north wing, with the photocopy folded under her hand, and laughed.

Not the dinner laugh. The other one. The one he had heard in the car at the red light beside the bus, on the first day, when he had said distant. It went on, and got away from her, and she had to put her napkin to her eyes, and she sat there laughing with the napkin and the photocopy from Balmoral under her hand, and Frederick sat across the corner of the table from her and found that he was laughing too, without knowing exactly at what: at Dame M with the cake, and Mr Pargeter with his ladder, and the Keeper at Windsor at half past two in the morning, and two boys in a river in 1955, recovered.

“Both boys in the river,” said his mother, into the napkin, in English. “Oh, Ernest.”

She took the napkin away and looked at the photocopy again.

“I’m going to have this framed,” she said. “And put it on his desk. In London. Between the red boxes. Where he will have to look at it every day while he reads about New Wessex.” She folded it again. “But not until after Sunday. Sunday is yours.”

“Mamma,” said Frederick.

“Mm?”

“In Sweden,” said Frederick, “would I have a half-birthday?”

His mother thought about it.

“In Sweden,” she said, “you would have a name day. Everybody has one. It is in the almanac. A day for every name. Fredrik is the eighteenth of July.” She smiled, a small one. “We have never kept it, because on the eighteenth of July you are always at the lake with your father, and he does not believe in name days, because they are not in any statute.” She folded her napkin. “So you have been owed one for twelve years. You may consider the second of November an instalment.”

She picked up her knitting from the chair beside her, the long dark green thing on four needles, which was now about a foot long and had, Frederick saw, at the end nearest the needles, the beginning of a band of white.

“Now,” she said, in Swedish, “your homework. And then tell me about this boy, who sits on a wall, and has a cousin called Dieter, and whose parents do not yet know that they are bringing him to a palace.”

Frederick looked at her.

“How do you know they don’t know?”

His mother did not look up from the needles.

“Because you have the face, älskling,” she said, “of somebody who has just found out that the person he likes best has not told his own mother about him. And I know that face too.” The needles clicked. “I have had it myself. About your father. For most of a year, once.” She counted a stitch. “It goes. When they tell. Do your homework.”