Theo Knew

At six the day porter came on, yawning, with a coffee, and Mr Luna stood up from the desk for the first time in eight hours.

He did it slowly, a hand on the edge of the desk, the way a man stands up who has been sitting in the same chair since ten and does not intend to make anything of it. He wrote 6 a.m. 61 on the clipboard, and initialled it, and put on his jacket over the cardigan, and picked up the western and the thermos, and came round the front of the desk past the sun that said IGNACIO, and stopped by the plastic chair.

Frederick looked up at him.

“Drink water,” said Mr Luna. “Call your mother.”

“I did. Yesterday.”

Mr Luna considered this, with the thermos under his arm, and looked at him over his glasses for a moment longer than usual, as a man looks at a crossword clue that he has the letters for and not yet the word.

“Then call somebody else,” said Mr Luna, and went out through the glass doors into the dark of the arcade, and along it, a small neat shape under the one lamp, and was gone.

---

He rang Theo at seven minutes past six, from Tyler’s bed by the window, with the blind up and the butte a black shape against a sky that was just beginning, very low behind it, to be grey.

It did not finish ringing once.

“Freddie.”

“You said whatever time.”

“I did.” Theo’s voice was quite steady and very quiet, the voice of somebody sitting in a kitchen where other people are asleep. “It’s eight here. I’ve been up since four. Mum left me the pot.” A sound, a mug on a table. “Dad’s on an early. Kate’s asleep. It’s just me and the fridge.”

“Theo.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t tell you.”

“I know.”

“She asked me not to tell anybody. Until…” He stopped. “I can’t tell you that either.”

There was a short silence on the line. He heard the fridge in the Hartigans’ kitchen, which had a hum he knew from forty dinners, a low uneven note like a man humming a hymn he did not know the words to.

“Okay,” said Theo. “Then I’ll say it, and you don’t have to say anything. You’re good at that. I’ve watched you do it.” A pause. “Is that all right?”

“Yes.”

“She’s going to stop.”

He sat on Tyler’s bed with the telephone and looked at the butte.

“Sweden,” said Theo. “She’s going to give it up. Before they operate.”

Frederick said nothing. He said it as hard as he could. He sat on the bare mattress with his back against the cold breeze-block wall and his knees up and said nothing at all into the telephone, and in a kitchen in New Westminster, two thousand miles away, Theo Hartigan listened to him say it, all the way to the end.

“Right,” said Theo, very quietly. “Okay.”

---

“How long,” said Frederick, after a while.

“Have I known? I haven’t.” Theo’s voice changed a little; he had picked up the mug. “I guessed. I’ve been guessing since the first Sunday in December. When you told me she’d said not to come home.”

“You told me to go home.”

“I know. Then she told you not to, and I thought, oh.” A pause. “Mum says there’s a thing people do. On the ward. Before a big operation. The ones who are going to be all right, mostly, but not always.” He drank. “They get tidy. The week before. They pay the gas bill. They give the dog to their sister. They resign from things. She had a man in October who resigned as treasurer of his bowls club from the bed, on the phone, the night before his bypass, and then the bypass was fine, and he was furious, because they’d given it to a man called Clive.”

“She isn’t the treasurer of a bowls club.”

“No,” said Theo. “She’s not.”

The sky behind the butte had gone from grey to the colour of the inside of a shell. The shoulder of the butte came out of the dark against it, and the A, a shade paler than the rock.

“And there was always going to be an operation,” said Theo. “I knew that in September. You don’t sleep on a sofa sitting up for three weeks and get bought a chair and not have an operation. I knew it on the pillows.”

“You didn’t say.”

“It wasn’t mine to say.” Theo said it quite simply. “It was hers. She’d have told you when she wanted. And she did, didn’t she. Yesterday.” He did not wait for an answer. “So then I thought about the letters. You told me about the letters. The man with the fountain pen, every month. And what she said about him, on your stairs, when she came. That it wasn’t a plot. That it was a man who could count.”

“Yes.”

“So I counted,” said Theo. “Badly. I’m not good at it, you know I’m not, I’m the one who does the spills. But I thought: they want you in Sweden because she might not be there. That’s the whole of it. That’s every letter. And if I was her, and I didn’t want you to go, and I’d run out of ways of saying so, there’s only one way to make them stop asking for a Crown Prince.”

He stopped. Frederick heard him not say it, and then say it anyway.

“Stop having one.”

On the screens beside the bed the fire had burned down to a red heap in the night, and the figures in furs had come in close round it with their hands out.

“I’m right,” said Theo. “Aren’t I.” And then, at once: “Don’t answer that.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good. Don’t.”

---

They did not say anything for a minute or two.

It was not a difficult silence. It was the one from the Hartigans’ kitchen table, at eleven at night, with the dishes done, when Theo’s mother had gone to bed and his father was asleep in the chair with the paper and neither of the boys could be bothered to go home or to bed, and they sat, and the fridge hummed, and that was the evening.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

“Yes.”

“Have you noticed I’ve never said it before?”

“Said what?”

“Sweden.” Theo said the word carefully, as if it were heavier than it looked. “The other one. The Crown. Your mum’s. I’ve never once asked you about it. In eight years. Not once. Not when we were twelve and everybody at school was asking you, and not after Kittyhawk, and not in Berlin on the hill when you said Tempe and I said the thing about July.” A pause. “Did you notice?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think you had.”

“I noticed in the first year,” said Frederick. “I noticed every time.”

He heard Theo put the mug down.

“Everybody asks you,” said Theo. “Everybody you’ve ever met. The guy at the newsstand asks you. I didn’t want to be one more.” Another pause. “So I’m sorry. For saying it now. I had a rule.”

“Don’t be.”

“I am a bit.”

“Theo,” said Frederick. “You didn’t ask me anything. You told me.”

There was a silence on the line. Then Theo laughed, once, quietly, not the long rising one, the short one through the nose that meant he had been got.

“That’s true,” he said. “That’s a technicality. Mum’d be proud of that.”

---

“How did she sound?” said Theo.

It was the Sunday question, in the Sunday voice, the one for things he had read in a book; and then, before Frederick could answer it, Theo said, “No. Sorry. I’m not going to ask you anything. I said that in September. I’m saying it again.”

“She laughed,” said Frederick.

“Did she.”

“At the chair.”

“The green one.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Theo, and his voice did a small thing in the middle of the word, and he let it.

The sun was not up yet, and would not be for an hour, but the light had come into the sky behind the butte, and the rock had come up out of the black into its own colour, a dull red-brown like a flowerpot that has been rained on, which he had seen from the top thirty-four times in August and September, and then not again, and had forgotten.

“She sang to me,” said Theo.

“What?”

“On my sixteenth. You remember. She rang from Öland at four in the morning, her time, and you gave me the phone, and she sang me the whole thing. Every verse.” He was quiet for a moment. “She didn’t have to. Nobody made her. I’ve never got over it. So.” He breathed out. “So I’m on your side, Freddie, you know I am, I’m always on your side. But this one’s hers. I’m on hers.”

“So am I,” said Frederick.

“I know you are,” said Theo. “You’ve been on it since August. You’ve been on those stairs since August.” A pause, and in it a door, somewhere in the flat, and a key. “Hang on. That’s Mum.”

---

He heard her come in. He heard the door and the keys put down in the bowl by the door, where they had been put down every evening he had ever eaten there, and her shoes, and her voice, low, in Wisconsindeutsch, saying something to Theo that ended in a question; and Theo answering, shorter; and then the telephone changing hands.

“Is that Frederick?”

“Yes, Mrs Hartigan.”

“It’s twenty past eight in the morning, I’ve done three nights, and I’ve got a man on bay four who thinks I’m his sister.” Anneliese Hartigan’s voice was exactly as it was across her own table: flat, Wisconsin, unhurried, and impossible to argue with. “Have you slept?”

“No.”

“Have you eaten?”

He thought about it.

“Half a slice of pudding. Yesterday morning. Fried.”

There was a pause from New Westminster of a length he recognised.

“Eat,” said Theo’s mother. “Then sleep. In that order. Not the other one. You’ll want to do the other one. Don’t.” A pause. “And drink some water.”

“The porter says that.”

“Then the porter’s got sense,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Give my love to your mother.” He heard her hand the telephone back, and say something else to Theo in Wisconsindeutsch, quietly, and this time he followed all of it, because it was short: neither of you has slept, I can hear it.

Theo came back on the line.

“She’s going to bed,” he said. “She’s going to sleep till four, and get up, and make dinner, and go back. Three more.” A pause. “Ring me on Sunday.”

“You always ring me on Sunday.”

“I know,” said Theo. “This once, you ring me.”

---

He ate. He ate two eggs, which Sam broke into the pan for him, standing at his elbow, without comment, and which came out as eggs; and a slice of Rhys’s toast; and a glass of water, which Rhys put in front of him and watched him drink, all of it. Then he went up to 312 and fed the fire, and lay down on Tyler’s bed in the coat with the blind up and the sun on the butte, and slept until three in the afternoon without moving.

When he woke the fire was burning high on both screens, and Sam was sitting at Tyler’s desk with his hands in his lap, looking at it.

“It was low,” said Sam. “At one.”

“You clicked it.”

“I clicked the brown square. Then the fire.” Sam did not look round. “Nothing else.”

At the bottom of the screen there was a line of white writing.

whos this then

And under it, typed carefully, with one finger, in the square way Sam did everything:

Sam. Accounting.

And under that, a minute later, from Leeds:

fair enough

---

Rhys had read the Swedish one.

He said so at five, in the lounge, under the poster about scorpions, with the reindeer socks on and a printout on his knee that had been folded in half and then in half again and was now soft, the way paper goes when it has been read in bed.

“The Instrument of Government,” said Rhys. “In English. The Riksdag puts it up. I read it last night.” He looked at the printout. “I couldn’t sleep, sir. So I thought I’d better.”

“All of it?”

“Twice. It’s short.” Rhys turned a page, as if checking. “Chapter five’s the head of state. It’s two pages. There’s hardly anything in it for the King to do. He chairs a meeting when the government changes. He opens the Riksdag, if he likes. And that’s…” He turned the page back. “That’s nearly it.”

“I know.”

“It’s like ours,” said Rhys. He thought about it, frowning, with the expression of a political scientist who has had a thought in the night and is not sure it will survive the day. “But they wrote it down. All of it. What he doesn’t do. They wrote down what he doesn’t do.”

“In 1974,” said Frederick. “The year she was born.”

Rhys looked at the printout for a long time.

“So nobody ever had to ask her,” he said. “What she was for.”

Sam, at the next table, with the notebook, did not look up.

“There’s a box, though,” said Sam.

They both looked at him.

“Every morning. The red one. A quarter to seven.” Sam turned a page in the notebook. “In February. Is there going to be another one?”

“I don’t know.”

“What colour?”

“I don’t know if there is one.”

“There’s always a box,” said Sam, with the quiet certainty of a man who had carried one across a road every morning for four months in a grey backpack with a broken zip. He wrote something in the notebook, small, and Frederick read it upside down, and it said Feb: box? (colour?), with a line under it; and then Sam looked at the line, and at the zip on the backpack by his feet, and added, underneath, new zip.

---

The text came at eight, which was three in the morning in London, which meant that she was awake, and was not supposed to be.

The Marshal of the Realm has had his letter. Ebba took it to Stockholm on the first flight and put it into his hand. She reports that he read the first sentence standing up and the rest of it sitting down.

And then, a minute later:

He has written back already. Two pages. He says that he understands entirely. M.

He sat on Tyler’s bed by the window and read it twice, and then a third time, and on the third time he laughed out loud, alone, in the room, in the coat; and on the two screens beside him the fire burned high in the snow, and the thirty-one stood round it, all of them, with their hands out, and across the road over the dentist’s the one window with its light on had its blind halfway down, and outside the glass, black against the last of the light over the Valley, the butte stood where it always stood, with nobody on it, and the A on its flank.

He wrote back: Go to sleep, Mamma.

I know what I should do, wrote his mother. I have three doctors and a husband and a son to tell me. Goodnight, Fredde.