A Chair

“You fry it,” said Rhys, “the day after.”

He had the last third of the pudding on a board in the kitchen behind the lounge, and he was cutting it into slices with the knife from his kit, which was not for this either, each slice exactly as thick as his thumb. The butter was in the pan on the left ring. Sam was standing on a chair under the smoke detector with a tea towel.

“My mum says it’s better than on the day,” said Rhys. “But you’re not allowed to say that on the day.”

“Why not?”

“Because then nobody’d bother with the day.” He laid the first slice in the butter. It hissed. Above him, Sam began to fan the white disc on the ceiling with the tea towel, steadily, in long slow strokes, like a man fanning a boxer between rounds, and did not stop for the next twenty minutes, and did not once look down.

“You can get off the chair,” said Frederick.

“It’s a standing risk,” said Sam, fanning.

The slices came out dark and crisp at the edges, with the butter shining on them, and Rhys put sugar on them from a paper sachet he had taken from the coffee cart in November against exactly this, and they ate them standing up in the kitchen with their fingers. They were better than on the day. Nobody said so.

Frederick ate one. He looked at the clock over the door, which said twenty past nine. He ate half of another. He looked at the clock, which said twenty-two minutes past.

Rhys watched him look at it.

“More, sir?”

“No. Thank you.”

Rhys did not say anything. He cut the rest of the slices and put them in a row on a paper plate and covered them with a second paper plate, square, the way Sam would have, and wrote on the top one in biro FOR LATER, and Frederick saw that the LATER had been written with some care, as if Rhys had thought about which word to use.

---

He fed the fire at ten.

boxing day mate, said the man from Leeds, at once, as if he had been waiting. what u eating

Pudding. Fried.

There was a pause.

proper, said the man from Leeds, and then: ur alright u for an american

He looked at that for some time. Then he typed Thank you and took his hand off the keyboard, and the thirty-one stood round the fire in the snow, a little straighter, and on the real window behind the screens the butte stood in the sun with nobody on it.

At eleven Tyler sent a photograph of a man of about fifty asleep on a carpet under a Christmas tree with his shoes on and a paper crown over his eyes.

uncle marek, wrote Tyler. second christmas. he does this every year. nobody knows how he gets there. grandma says to tell the plate happy second christmas.

Tell her the plate says thank you, he wrote. And happy second Christmas.

she says ur very polite for a plate.

---

At half past one he went out to the stairs.

He did not say where he was going. He did not need to. When he came out of 312 with the telephone in his hand Rhys was in the door of 316 with a book, and looked up, and looked at the telephone, and closed the book on one finger; and when he reached the landing between the second floor and the third and sat down on the third step from it, under the narrow window, he heard, above him, very quietly, the fire door at the top of the flight open and close, and somebody sit down on the top step; and a minute after that, below him, at the turn of the flight, the door from the second floor, and somebody else.

He did not look round. He knew how far away each of them was. They had arranged it without asking, the way they had arranged the fire door on Christmas morning, and they had put themselves at the two ends of the stairs, as far from him as the stairs went, and he could not have heard them breathing if he had tried.

The window was open an inch. Through it, beyond the concrete fin, there was the car park, empty, white in the sun, and in the middle of it a black bird with a long tail walking about in a deliberate way, stopping and starting, like a man who has forgotten where he left his car.

It was sixty-six degrees. It was the warmest day for a week. He had the coat on anyway.

At two minutes to two the telephone rang, because she was always early.

---

“Fredde.”

“Are you on the chair?”

“I am on the chair,” said his mother, in Swedish. “Your father is on the step below me, on his two cushions, which he arranged himself, and which took him some time. Brannigan has given him half an hour and gone to stand in the hall, where he thinks we cannot see him. We can see him. He is in the barometer.”

“Hello,” said his father, from below her, in English.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Are you on your step?” said his mother.

“Yes.”

“Is the window open?”

“An inch.”

“Good.” He heard her settle: the velvet, and a small sound that was her hand on the banister, and the clock below, in the hall, beyond the barometer. “Then we are both where we should be.”

He waited.

“You know the rule,” said his mother.

“Okay doesn’t count.”

“Okay does not count. You may say it as often as you like. But I would like you to let me come to the end.” A pause. “It is not long. I have made it short. I have been making it shorter since lunch yesterday, and your father has been helping, which is to say he has been taking words out.”

“Too many,” said his father, below her.

“Yes, Ernest.” A breath, the long one, lifted, and let go. “Fredde. I am going to abdicate.”

Down in the car park the black bird stopped walking.

He sat on the step with the telephone at his ear and looked at it. It stood quite still in the middle of the white tarmac with its head on one side, as if it had heard something.

“Okay,” he said.

“That is one,” said his mother.

---

“When?”

“On the first of February. It is a Wednesday. In the Hall of State at the Palace, in Stockholm, in front of the Riksdag and the government and anybody else who can find a chair.” She said it in the voice for papers, quite evenly, as though reading it off a card she had written herself and knew by heart. “At half past three in the afternoon.”

He did it without meaning to, the way Kessler had done it in a car in Berlin.

“That’s half past seven here.”

“Seven,” said his father, from the step below her. A breath. “Twenty-six.”

“What?”

“Your father,” said his mother, “has found out what time the sun comes up in Tempe on the first of February. He found it out on Tuesday, on the computer, by himself, which took most of the afternoon. He has written it on the back of an envelope and he keeps the envelope in his pocket with his railcard.”

“Seven twenty-six,” said his father, with enormous satisfaction, as if it were a train.

He sat on the step and found that he had put his free hand flat on the concrete beside him.

“Is that why half past three?”

“It is one of the reasons,” said his mother. “The others belong to the Riksdag, and to the Prime Minister, and they are very dull, and they will all be in the instrument.” A pause. “I telephoned Holmqvist at eight this morning. He was at his sister’s in Umeå. He said ja four times, and then he said Your Majesty, may I ring you back, and he rang back in nine minutes, and he had stopped saying ja.” Something that was nearly a laugh. “He is a good man. He is going to have a very bad month. So is the Marshal of the Realm, who does not know yet. I am going to tell him tomorrow, in a letter, in the first sentence, so that he can read the rest of it with his mouth open.”

“And then?”

“And then I will tell Sweden. Myself. On the ninth of January, on the television, from the Palace, so that they hear it from me and not from a newspaper that heard it from somebody who heard it from Ebba’s sister.” A pause. “Until the ninth, it is not news, Fredde. I would like to decide when it is news. It is nearly the last thing I am going to decide, and I would like to decide it.”

“I won’t tell anybody.”

“Not anybody.”

“Not Theo?”

There was a short silence on the line from London.

“Theo, I think, will not need telling,” said his mother. “But you may not tell him.” Then, more briskly: “Your officers will be told by Sergeant Kimura, this afternoon, because they are officers, and because she is going to have a very bad January and should not have to have it by herself.”

---

He looked at the car park. The bird had gone.

“Why?” he said.

He heard her hear it. He heard her decide which of the answers to give first; he knew that silence, it was the short one.

“In February,” said his mother, “after, the man with the clean hands is going to take the valve out and put a new one in. He has wanted to since October. I said not before Christmas. It is after Christmas.”

He held the rail.

“Is it…”

“He says it is very ordinary. He does it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He would like to do me on a Tuesday.” A pause. “And afterwards I will be in a chair. For a long time. I may not lift a kettle for three months, he says. I asked him about a Crown. He did not think it was funny. He has no imagination at all, Fredde, it is why I chose him.”

“Is it because of me?”

He had not meant to say it. It came out of him on the stairs before he had decided anything, and went up the stairwell, and he heard, at the top of the flight, nothing at all, very carefully.

“Because I wouldn’t go.”

“The Course,” said his mother, “is for a Crown Prince.”

He waited.

“Two years at Uppsala, and the navy, and the municipality with the very poor road. It is for a Crown Prince. It was written for one, in 2026, by four very sensible people in a room in Stockholm who had a boy of thirteen to think about.” Her voice did not change at all. “In February there will not be a Crown Prince. There will be a King. And nobody, in the whole of Sweden, has ever written a Course for a King, because nobody has ever thought he needed one.”

He sat very still.

“So it is because of me.”

“It is a part of it.” She said it gently. “It is not the whole of it. It is true.”

“What’s the rest?”

There was a silence then, and it was not one he knew. It was longer than the long one. He heard the clock in the hall below her tick, and tick again, and somewhere far down in the London house a door, and his father on the step shifting his weight on the cushions, and the stick laid along the stair rods, and then nothing; and then his mother’s voice, quite low, not the voice for papers and not the one with no door in it, the other one, the one under that, which he had heard perhaps three times in his life now.

“I am tired, Fredde.”

He did not say anything.

“Not the valve. Me. I have been Queen for twenty-three years. I have been Queen from other people’s countries for nearly all of them. I was Regent in thirteen realms for your father, and then for you, at a desk with thirteen boxes, and I took the oaths in a hospital and I did not mind, I would do it again tomorrow.” A breath, in the wrong place, and she let it be in the wrong place. “And in August I sat down on the little stairs at the back of this house, before I meant to, and I found that I would like, very much, to go on sitting down. That is all. That is the rest. It is not noble. It is a woman of fifty-nine who would like to sit down.”

The window was open an inch. Air came through it from the car park, warm, smelling of dust and the palo verdes.

“You chose a hill,” said his mother. “I am choosing a chair.”

---

On the step below her, his father said:

“Green.”

There was a pause on the line from London.

“Yes, Ernest,” said his mother. “That one.”

And Frederick, on a concrete step in Arizona with his hand on a maroon steel rail, began to laugh. He did not decide to. It came up out of him all at once, the way it had come up at a desk in December at two officers in their socks, and he put his forehead down on his knees in the long Swedish coat and laughed into them, and above him and below him the stairwell said nothing whatever, very hard; and down the line from London he heard his mother begin as well, the low one, the one the room heard, and under it, below her, his father, without any voice at all, the breath going in and out in short pieces.

“He bought it,” said Frederick, when he could.

“He bought it. He is very proud of it. He says that he chose it and I am only choosing it second.” She was still laughing a little. “It is the ugliest chair in London and I am giving up a kingdom to sit in it.”

---

“There is one more thing,” said his mother, after a while. “And you are not going to like it.”

“Don’t tell me not to come.”

“Don’t come,” said his mother.

He looked at the narrow window.

“On the first,” she said. “To Stockholm. To the Hall. Don’t come.”

“I’d be there. Of course I’d be there. I’d get on a plane on the thirtieth…”

“I know. That is why I am asking.” She did not hurry. “If you are in the Hall, it is a handing over. There will be a photograph of you, and of me, and of something passing between us, and it will be in every paper in Europe, and it will be wrong. I am not giving you anything, Fredde. I am putting it down. It will go to you at half past three by itself, because that is the law, and the law does not need you to hold out your hands.” A pause. “It will find you wherever you are standing. I would like you to be standing where you chose.”

He did not answer.

“Somebody will stand there for the family,” said his mother. “I have an idea who. I will tell you when he has said yes.”

“Dad will be there.”

“Yes,” said his father, at once, from the step.

“Your father will be there, on a chair, which the Riksdag has been asked to provide, and which will not be green.” A pause. “And at half past three he is going to look at his watch, and then at his envelope, and he will know exactly where you are. And so will I.”

He sat on the step. The light from the narrow window lay across the landing, a long thin bar of it, and touched the edge of the step below him with the chip out of it, and he looked at that.

“All right,” he said.

There was a short silence.

“That was not okay,” said his mother.

“No.”

“Good. I did not want okay today.” And then, in a different voice, lightly, so that he could hear the cloth go over the top of it: “You said it once. In August you said it nine times.”

“I know.”

“You are getting better at this.”

“I don’t want to be better at this,” he said.

“No,” said his mother. “Nor did I.” And then: “Your father would like the telephone. Brannigan has come out of the barometer and is standing at the bottom of the stairs looking at his watch with his whole face.”

---

The telephone went down a step.

“Fredde.”

His father had never once called him that. It was his mother’s word. He said it slowly, carefully, in her Swedish, as if he had been practising it on the step, and it came out almost right.

“Dad.”

There was a breath. He waited, and did not fill it.

“After,” said his father.

He waited.

“Is.” A breath, and the word was not there, and his father went and looked for it, and came back. “Nice.”

Frederick shut his eyes.

“Did it,” said his father. A breath. “Me.” And then, quite clearly, all at once, the way his sentences came when he had carried them about for a while: “Five years. Nice. All of it.”

“I know.”

“Brannigan,” said his father, with great contempt. A breath. “Watch.” And then the telephone went back up the stairs, and his mother said, “Puss, Fredde,” and he said it back, and the line went.

---

He sat on the step.

He did not know for how long. The bar of light moved across the landing, slowly, and climbed the wall, and went pale. The black bird came back into the car park and walked about and went away again. At some point the telephone lit up in his lap, and it said Theo, and under it phone’s on, and he looked at it until it went dark, and did not answer, because there was nothing he was allowed to say.

At five Rhys’s phone buzzed, at the top of the flight.

He heard it, and heard Rhys read it, which was a silence of a particular length; and then, below him, at the turn of the stairs, Sam’s, a different buzz, shorter, and Sam reading.

Then Rhys came down the stairs.

He came down slowly, the way he walked into rooms, and sat down on the step above Frederick’s, not beside him, with his feet on the step beside him and his hands on his knees. And Sam came up from the turn of the flight with his hands in his pockets and sat on the step below, with his back to the wall, facing the window.

Nobody said anything for some time.

“We’ve been told, sir,” said Rhys at last, very quietly.

“I know.”

“We’re not to say anything. To anybody.”

“Neither am I.”

Sam, on the step below, looked out of the narrow window at the car park, where the light was going gold on the tarmac and there was nobody at all.

“Then that’s three of us,” said Sam.

---

Mr Luna came on at ten.

Frederick went down at half past. He did not decide to; he found he had, and that he was in the lobby in the coat, in the dim, by the lift standing open with its light on and nobody to take anywhere, and that Mr Luna was looking at him over his glasses from the desk with the pen in his hand and 10 p.m. 62 written on the clipboard in front of him.

Mr Luna did not say anything. He put out his foot and pushed the plastic chair an inch away from the end of the desk.

Frederick sat in it.

Mr Luna went back to the crossword. The radio was playing a game from somewhere on the coast, low, two men talking about nothing in the warm. Outside the glass doors the arcade was dark, and beyond it the road, and across the road, over the dentist’s, the one window with its light on and its blind halfway down, which did not move.

At eleven Mr Luna wrote 11 p.m. 62 on the clipboard. Then he took a butterscotch out of the jar, and unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth, and pushed the jar an inch across the desk, and went back to the crossword.

Frederick took one.

They sat. Mr Luna filled in a word, in pen, and then another. He did not ask anything. He did not look up again. The game on the radio ended, and somebody had won it, and a man began to read the scores from other places in the same unhurried voice, one after another, as if they were the names of stations.

At midnight Mr Luna wrote 12 a.m. 62.

Then he sat for a moment with the pen held over the clipboard, not writing, looking at nothing in particular, the way he had looked at the doors in December when he held up his hand and did not count on it.

“Twenty-three,” said Mr Luna, to the crossword, and filled in the next word.