Undeclared

The box came at seven, in Sam’s backpack.

It was the ordinary red box, the one that had followed him every day of his life since he was sixteen, to Coln and to Garfield Street and to Solliden, and it had come to Tempe in the night by whatever way the boxes came, and been taken in across the road over the dentist’s, and at a quarter to seven Sam had crossed the road with it in a grey backpack with a broken zip, like a student carrying his laundry, and brought it up the forty-five steps to three hundred and sixteen, and put it on his own desk.

So Frederick did the first box of the University of the March at Sam’s desk, in Sam’s chair, under a poster of the Realm’s federal tax brackets for the year, which Sam had put up on Friday with four drawing pins and nothing else on the wall at all, while Sam ate a bowl of cereal on the end of his bed and Rhys ironed a shirt.

Rhys ironed it on a towel on the floor. He ironed it very carefully, the collar first and then the yoke and then the sleeves, cuff to shoulder, with his tongue between his teeth.

“It’s the first class,” said Rhys, without looking up.

“It’s a shirt.”

“It’s the first class, sir.” He turned the sleeve over. “Fred. First impressions.”

“Of what?”

“Of the Charter,” said Rhys, as though nothing could be more obvious, and ironed the cuff.

Frederick initialled the last paper in the box, in pencil, as he always did, small, in the top right-hand corner, and closed the lid, and turned the key, and gave it back to Sam, who put it in the backpack with the broken zip and finished his cereal.

---

Tolliver Hall was a long low building of brown brick at the end of an arcade, named, a plaque by the door said, for the first woman to head the college, who had kept it open through the Depression by teaching half the classes herself. Room one hundred and four was on the ground floor at the end of a corridor that smelled of floor polish, and it was a sloped room, with eighty seats in curved rows going up to the back and a long bench at the bottom with a lectern on it and a blackboard behind, a real one, with chalk.

The course was called The Charter. That was all. On the timetable it said CHT 101, The Charter, M W F 9.00, Tolliver 104, Prof. H. Brennan, and every first-year student at the University of the March had to take it and pass it, whatever they had come to study, because the Regents had decided in 1958, the year the college became a university, that a person who was going to be given a degree by the March ought at least to know what the March was in.

Frederick sat on the aisle, two rows from the back. Rhys sat beside him, in the ironed shirt, with four highlighters in a row on the desk in front of him, yellow, green, pink and blue, and a notebook open at a page on which he had already written the date and underlined it twice.

The room filled. It filled the way the corridor had filled on Thursday and the Wright on Friday: with people who came in through the door talking, and saw him, and stopped talking, and went to their seats looking very hard at the blackboard.

At one minute to nine the professor came in.

---

He was tall and stooped and about fifty-five, with a grey beard cut short and reading glasses pushed up into hair that had been red and was mostly not now. He wore a pale linen jacket, crumpled, in a hundred and six degrees, and a tie with something on it that might have been fish, and he carried a battered leather bag over one shoulder and a cardboard cup of coffee in his other hand, and he put both down on the bench, and picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote on the board, in large rapid capitals:

THE CHARTER OF UNION OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES, 1783.

And under it:

18 ARTICLES. 14 AMENDMENTS. 1 QUESTION.

Then he turned round.

“My name is Hal Brennan,” he said. “I’ve taught this course for twenty-two years. I’m a republican, which in the March is legal, and in this building is tenured.”

The room laughed, a little uncertainly, the way a room laughs at the first joke of a term when it does not yet know whether it is allowed to.

“I’d like to say one thing about that,” said Brennan, “and then never say it again.” He took the reading glasses down out of his hair and did not put them on. “There is a student in this room whose job is in the syllabus. Article Two. Weeks four to six.”

Eighty people did not turn round.

“I’m going to treat him exactly as I treat the rest of you,” said Brennan. “Which means I’m going to ask him nothing that I wouldn’t ask you.” He looked, for the first time, up the curved rows to the aisle two from the back, and met Frederick’s eyes, briefly, and nodded, once, as one man nods to another across a room. “Good. That’s done.” He put the glasses on. “Who can tell me who the parties to the Charter are?”

Rhys’s hand went up so fast that the pink highlighter rolled off the desk.

---

He was good.

That was the first thing, and it surprised Frederick, though he could not have said why. He had been taught the Charter before, by two tutors at Columbia Palace and a judge who came on Thursdays and an old man from the Lords who had once been Attorney-General, all of them with enormous care and in great detail, as a man might be taught the workings of a house he had inherited, so that he knew where every pipe went. Brennan did not teach it like that. Brennan taught it like a man telling you about a quarrel that had happened in his own family two hundred and fifty years ago and was still going on at Christmas.

“The Congress did not found anything,” said Brennan, walking up and down in front of the bench with the chalk. “Look at the Preamble. Three voices. The King first, the Lords and Commons second, the Congress last. And what does the Congress say? We the people. Everybody knows that bit. It’s on the tea towels. But read the sentence to the end.” He wrote on the board. DO ACCEPT. “The Congress is not making a country. It’s answering an offer. The King says, here are the terms. The Congress says, all right.” He turned round. “And what does an acceptance mean?”

Silence.

“It means,” said Brennan, “that you could have said no.”

He let it sit.

“The continuance of allegiance by consent rather than by compulsion,” he said. “That’s the Charter’s own phrase, and it’s the most dangerous sentence in it, and you’ll spend all year with it. If allegiance is given, it’s given by somebody. If it’s given, it can be withheld.” He tapped the third line on the board, 1 QUESTION, with the chalk, twice. “And nobody has ever been asked again. Not since 1783. The Congress made a compact with a man, George the Third, by name. He died in 1820. A compact with a man ought to have needed renewing. It didn’t get renewed. Nobody asked.” He put the chalk down. “The whole constitution of this Realm rests on a question that nobody asked in 1820. My job, for the next nine months, is to ask it.”

Beside Frederick, Rhys had stopped writing. He was looking at Brennan with an expression of rapt and slightly frightened devotion, the yellow highlighter uncapped in his hand, and had not noticed that he was highlighting the desk.

---

It happened at nineteen minutes to ten.

Brennan had come to the Articles. He was going through them one by one, briefly, a sentence each, a map of the year, with a number on the board for each and a word beside it, and he had got to the second.

“Article Two. The Crown.” He wrote II. CROWN on the board. “Weeks four to six. The King acts on advice. Article Two, section four: the advice of ministers answerable to Parliament, and upon no other advice. We’ll come to those last four words in week nine, because they’re the best joke in the document. But in practice the advice reaches him in writing, every day, in a box. A red box. And he reads it, and he initials it, and it goes back…”

He stopped.

He stopped with the chalk on the board, at the end of the N of CROWN, and stood there, with his back to the room, quite still, for perhaps two seconds.

Then he turned round, and looked up the curved rows, two from the back, on the aisle.

“Is it true,” said Brennan, “that you initial them in pencil?”

The room went absolutely silent.

It was not the silence of the Wright, or of the circle with the green wristbands. It was the silence of eighty people who had been told forty minutes before, by the man now asking the question, that the question would not be asked, and who had all, every one of them, been waiting for it.

Beside Frederick, Rhys had stopped breathing.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Brennan looked at him for a moment.

“Why pencil?”

“My father did.”

“And why did he?”

Frederick thought about it. He thought about his father’s desk, when he was small, and his father at it in the evening with the box open and a pencil, a soft one, kept very sharp, initialling, small, in the top right-hand corner of every page, and putting the pencil down after each one exactly parallel to the edge of the paper; and he found that he did not know. He had sat on the floor of that study a hundred times and watched. He had never asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never asked him.”

“You should,” said Brennan.

And then Brennan’s face changed.

Frederick watched it happen. He watched Hal Brennan remember, in front of eighty people, what everybody in the Realm knew about the Duke of Cumberland: the aircraft, and the sea, and the raft, and the words that had come back slowly and not all of them; and he watched the colour come up out of the professor’s collar and into his face, all at once, to the roots of the hair that had been red.

“I’m sorry,” said Brennan. “That was…” He put the chalk down on the bench. “I said I wouldn’t. I said it forty minutes ago.” He looked at the chalk. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” said Frederick.

“It isn’t, really.”

“I’ll ask him,” said Frederick. “At Christmas.”

Brennan looked at him for a moment longer, up the curved rows, with the colour still in his face.

Then he picked up the chalk again and turned back to the board, and wrote III. PARLIAMENT, and said, “Article Three,” in a voice that was almost his own, and the room breathed out.

Beside Frederick, Rhys had written, in his notebook, under the date with two lines under it, in very small letters, pencil (father), and was looking at it in horror, and highlighted it, in green, before he could stop himself.

---

At the door, at ten, Brennan was waiting.

He was standing just outside, in the corridor that smelled of floor polish, with the leather bag over his shoulder and the coffee cup, empty, in his hand, and the students went past him in a stream, carefully, and he let them all go, and when Frederick came out with Rhys a pace behind he said, “Mr Hanover.”

“Fred.”

“Mr Hanover.” Brennan looked at the cup. “I owe you an apology.”

“You’ve made one.”

“I’ve made one in public. That’s different. That’s for the room.” He turned the empty cup round in his hand. “I said I’d treat you like the others, and inside forty minutes I’d asked you a question I wouldn’t ask anyone. I’d like to say it won’t happen again.” He looked up. “I’m not sure it’s true.”

“You can ask,” said Frederick.

Brennan looked at him.

“I’d rather you asked,” said Frederick, “than wondered.”

There was a pause in the corridor. Rhys, a pace behind, had gone very still, in the way of a man who has heard his principal say something that is going to need writing down later for somebody across the road.

“That,” said Brennan slowly, “is a very dangerous thing to say to a republican.”

“Is it?”

“We wonder professionally.” Something happened at the corner of the grey beard, very briefly, that might have been the beginning of a smile. “It’s all we’ve got.”

He nodded, and turned to go, and went three steps down the corridor, and stopped, and turned round again.

“Is the…”

“Yes?”

Brennan stood in the corridor with the empty cup and his mouth slightly open, and Frederick watched him take hold of the question, whatever it was, and put it back, physically, as a man puts something back on a high shelf.

“Nothing,” said Brennan. “Wednesday.”

---

The Office of Exploratory Studies was in a basement.

It was down a flight of stairs at the side of a building near the library, in a long low corridor of small rooms with glass in their doors, and in the fourth room, under a window that was at the level of the grass outside, so that all you could see through it was the bottoms of the palm trees and people’s feet going past, there was a desk with a computer on it and a very small cactus in a pot, and behind the desk a woman of about sixty with reading glasses on a cord and a cardigan, which was the second cardigan Frederick had seen in Arizona.

“Graciela Ybarra,” she said, and shook his hand. “Sit down. This won’t hurt.”

He sat down.

She looked at her screen, and then at him, over the glasses, for about a second, with an expression that told him she knew exactly who he was and had decided before he came in that it would make no difference to the next twenty minutes, and then back at the screen.

“Hanover, F.,” she said. “Class of thirty-seven. Palo Verde.” She scrolled. “You’ve got the Charter, Composition, Introduction to Astronomy and Water in the West. That’s a nice first semester. Who picked it?”

“I did.”

“Good.” She scrolled again, and came to a box, and stopped. “Intended major.”

He looked at the box.

“What do you like?” said Ms Ybarra.

He thought about it. He tried to think about it honestly, which he found he had not often done, because he had not often been asked; or rather he had been asked a great deal, by a great many people, and had always known that the answer was going to be written down somewhere and read by somebody else, and had answered for them.

“Trains,” he said. “Timetables. The sky. I liked astronomy at school. Water. Where it comes from. How it gets to where it’s going.” He stopped. “Languages, a bit. Sheep. I was quite good with sheep, once. For a winter.” He stopped again. “I don’t know.”

Ms Ybarra had not written any of it down. She had taken her glasses off and was holding them by the cord and looking at him.

“Everybody who comes in here,” she said, “wants something. Engineering. Nursing. Business. Or their parents want something, and they’ve come to tell me what it is, and I can see in their faces it isn’t what they want.” She swung the glasses gently on the cord. “You’re the first person this week who’s told me the truth.”

“Which is what?”

“That you don’t know.” She put the glasses back on. “That’s a perfectly good thing to know, in August. Most people who tick a box in August change it by May. You’ll just be honest sooner.” She clicked something. “Undeclared.”

He looked at the screen. She had turned it a little toward him, so that he could see.

Intended major: Undeclared.

“Is that all right?” he said.

“It means you haven’t decided,” said Ms Ybarra. “It doesn’t mean you can’t.” She scrolled on. “Employment while studying. Do you work?”

“Yes.”

“How many hours a week?”

He opened his mouth and found that he did not know, and that the honest answer was either all of them or about two before breakfast, depending on how you counted, and that neither would fit in the box.

Ms Ybarra looked at him over the glasses for a moment.

“I’ll put yes,” she said, and typed it. “Emergency contact.”

“My mother.”

“Name?”

“Christina.”

“Surname?”

He paused, very slightly.

“Bernadotte.”

Ms Ybarra typed it, B-E-R-N-A-D-O-T-T-E, with two fingers, and did not blink. “Telephone?”

He gave her the London number. She typed it and looked at it.

“London,” she said.

“She lives in London.”

“Is there anybody closer?” said Ms Ybarra. “Geographically. In case. London’s a long way to come if you fall off something.”

“Ruth Kimura,” said Frederick. “Across the road from Palo Verde.”

“Is she family?”

He thought about Kimura on the steps of the Kreuzberg with a paper bag of rolls, saying eat something; and on her stool at the end of the bar of Eight Bars for eleven months, writing on beer mats; and in the lane above Coln on a September afternoon, saying professionally.

“Sort of,” he said.

Ms Ybarra typed it in without comment, and pressed something, and somewhere in the basement a printer began to work, and she reached behind her without looking and took a sheet of paper off it and held it out across the desk with the small cactus.

“Your plan,” she said. “Keep it. Come back in October and tell me what you’ve found out.”

He took it.

HANOVER, F. Class of 2037. Palo Verde Hall 312. Intended major: UNDECLARED.

He read it twice. Then he folded it in four and put it in the back of his notebook, and thanked her, and went up the stairs into a hundred and six degrees.

At the top of the stairs he took out his telephone, and photographed the paper, unfolded, against the wall, and sent it to Coln, where it was eight in the evening.

The answer came while he was still in the shade of the arcade.

SAME

And then:

SINCE 2012

---

Tyler had been to one class.

He told Frederick so at ten at night, from the window bed, taking off the headphones, in the tone of a man reporting an expedition. It had been at eleven, Introduction to Programming, in a building he described as the glass one, and it had been all right, and he had sat at the back, and a guy next to him had said something that Tyler had been thinking about since.

“He said the King’s in the Charter class.” Tyler looked at him. “The nine o’clock one. You’ve got the nine o’clock one, right? On Mondays?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see him?”

Frederick looked at the gap at the edge of the blind.

“Yes.”

“No way.” Tyler sat up. “What’s he like?”

Frederick thought about it.

“Tall,” he said.

“Huh.” Tyler absorbed this. “Did the professor, like, bow or something?”

“No. He asked him a question.”

“What question?”

“Whether he initials things in pencil.”

Tyler looked at him for a long moment, frowning, as though trying to work out which part of this was the interesting part.

“Why would he do it in pencil?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Huh,” said Tyler again. He lay back down on the window bed and looked at the ceiling. “But like. What does he actually do, though? The king. Like, all day.”

“He reads papers,” said Frederick. “A box of them comes every morning, and he goes through every one, and…”

“Hang on,” said Tyler.

His telephone had lit up on his chest. There was the small picture of a flame, guttering. He was gone, at once, into it, with his thumbs going and his face gone narrow, and the headphones were on, and he was saying into the small microphone, “No, I’m here, I’m here, who’s on wood,” and the snow on the two screens over the desk came up out of standby and went on falling.

Frederick waited for a minute, in case.

Then he took the folded paper out of the back of the notebook, and unfolded it, and pinned it with one drawing pin to the cork board over his desk, where there was nothing else yet, at the height of his eyes, so that it was the first thing he would see in the morning.

Intended major: UNDECLARED.

He looked at it from the bed for some time, in the light of the snow.