Spring Break

Palo Verde Hall had gone to the sea.

It had gone on Friday afternoon, in cars, with surfboards on the roofs, two hundred miles south-west to Rocky Point, the March’s own beach on the Sea of Cortez, which everybody in the Valley went to in March; and by Saturday morning the third floor had the rinsed quiet of December again, with a single flip-flop lying outside 307, as though somebody had left in a hurry with one foot.

Tyler had not gone.

“It’s a beach,” said Tyler, from the bed by the window, at ten, when Frederick asked. “In Arizona. Arizona has a beach. Nobody told me that either. With sand. And the sea.” He said the sea the way he said snow. “I came three thousand miles to get away from weather. I’m not driving two hundred to go towards some.”

“The sea isn’t weather.”

“It’s wet,” said Tyler. “That’s weather.” On the two screens the snow came down on the forest. “Also Jussi says there’s a storm coming. In the game. So I’m on wood.”

Frederick put the form on the end of his bed.

It was the same form as November, OVERNIGHT GUEST REGISTRATION, with a line at the bottom for the roommate’s consent, because a double was two people’s and the law of Palo Verde Hall was that you asked.

Tyler looked at it.

Then he took the headphones off, all the way, which since January he did for important matters, and sat up, and read it, the whole of it, the small type as well.

“Jack Fennell,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Pubs guy.”

“Yes.”

“From the game. With the hat.” He found the pen in the blanket. “You two are still together, right?”

“Yes.”

“Cool. Just checking.” He signed, in the round careful hand of a person not often asked to sign things, and gave the form back. “In November I didn’t read it.”

“I know.”

“It had your name on it. At the top. In capitals.” Tyler looked at the screens. “Your actual name.”

“I know.”

“Huh,” said Tyler, and put the headphones on, and was gone into the forest.

---

The aircraft was grey, with nothing written on it but a number.

It came down at twenty-eight minutes to two on the far side of Sky Harbor from the terminals, and came slowly along the apron to a low white building with a flag on it that was nobody’s flag in particular, and stopped; and the engines ran down into nothing, and the heat came up off the concrete in sheets you could see through, like water poured down glass.

Down 13.32, said Rhys’s telephone. K.

“Eighty-six,” said Sam, beside him, reading the small grey box on the wall of the white building, which was not the Abernathy Index and had no opinion about it. “In the shade.”

“Where’s the shade?” said Rhys.

Sam looked round the apron for some time.

“Theoretically,” he said.

The steps came down, and a man came out first and stood at the top of them and looked at the apron, and the car, and Rhys, and the sky, in that order, without any expression whatsoever. He had a face like the end of a wardrobe. He inclined his head to Frederick perhaps a quarter of an inch, which in Kessler was a sentence, and came down, and stood at the bottom with his hands folded, and did not sweat.

Then his cousin came out into the door, in a pale linen jacket, buttoned, over a white shirt buttoned to the neck, with one hand on the rail; and Frederick watched the heat come up the steps and reach him.

It went over his face like a hand. He stood quite still for perhaps three seconds, and his eyes went very slightly wider, and that was all; and then he came down at his ordinary pace, with his hand on the rail, which was hot, and stopped in front of Frederick.

“Thirty,” said Alexander.

“Eighty-six.”

“Thirty degrees.” He said it in the voice in which he gave the conditions from the dome at Potsdam. “In March. At half past one.” He considered it. “In Berlin this morning it was four. I looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen at six, so that I would have the difference exactly.” He paused. “The difference is twenty-six degrees.”

“Is that bad?”

“It is a great deal,” said Alexander, “of difference.” He held out his hand. “Hello, Frederick.”

They shook hands on the apron, correctly, once, the King and the German Emperor, in thirty degrees.

“My mother has asked me to tell you,” said Alexander, “that I am to wear a hat.” He took one out of his pocket, a soft folded white cotton thing. “She gave it to me at the door, and said that you would see that I wore it.” He looked at it. “I do not intend to wear it.”

“Why not?”

“Because she would like me to,” said Alexander, “and I am twenty, and on a private visit.” He put the hat back in his pocket. “I will carry it. That is a compromise. She said that she would accept a compromise if it was reported to her accurately.”

Behind him, Lukas came down the steps.

He came down lightly, in shorts and a white shirt, with the dented steel flask from the top of the Kreuzberg in his hand, and at the bottom he turned slowly round on the spot to see the whole of it, the apron and the heat and the far brown line of the mountains, as if he had been set a sum and had decided to look at it first.

“Hello, Lukas.”

“Hello.” Lukas finished turning round. “It is hot,” he said, and said nothing else for some time.

Last came a young man in a grey suit with a black case in each hand, square, with small gold eagles on the lids, which he carried to the car as though they were full of eggs.

“Herr Falkenrath,” said Alexander. “He carries the boxes. He has never been west of Hamburg.” He looked at the young man, who was looking at the Valley of the Sun like a person who has opened a door in a familiar house and found a desert behind it. “I think he will be all right.”

---

Jack’s aeroplane was at five to four, at Terminal Four, and Alexander wished to see it.

“You described it,” he said, in the car, with the air on, which he had asked Kessler to turn down by two degrees and Kessler had turned down by one. “In a letter. The doors, and the canopy, and Jack standing under it like a man walking into the sea. I should like to see where that was.”

So they stood by a pillar at Terminal Four, in the strip of shade under the canopy, the six of them, with Kessler a little apart, facing the sliding doors, like a man waiting for them to do something he would not approve of.

Nobody looked at them.

People came out of the doors, and stopped in the heat, and took off their jackets, and were met, and went away. And at about twenty to four an elderly couple from the next pillar, a small brown woman in a sun visor and a tall thin man in a short-sleeved shirt with a tie, came along the pavement and stopped in front of Alexander and Lukas, and looked at them with enormous kindness.

“You boys waiting for one of yours?” said the woman.

Alexander looked at her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“From his mission.” She nodded at the doors. “Ours is coming in from Accra. Two years. Our grandson.” She looked at the two white shirts, and the jacket buttoned in eighty-six degrees, and the two of them standing very straight together by a pillar, and her face did a soft and understanding thing. “We saw you standing so nice. We figured you were from the ward.”

There was a short pause at Terminal Four.

“We are waiting for a friend,” said Alexander, with great care. “From a public house. In Gloucestershire.”

“Oh, that’s lovely,” said the woman. She patted his arm, twice, on the linen. “Bless you, honey.” And the tall thin man nodded at Alexander gravely, as one serious young man to another, and they went back to their pillar, hand in hand, to wait for Accra.

Alexander stood by the pillar with his hands at his sides.

“She thought that I was a missionary,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Of which church?”

“I don’t think she minded,” said Frederick.

Alexander considered this for some time, with a faint colour coming up in his face that was not, Frederick thought, entirely the heat.

“Nobody has ever patted my arm,” said the German Emperor.

Behind him, Kessler looked at the sky.

---

Jack came out of the doors at eight minutes past four, in a white T-shirt with a small blue and yellow shield on the chest.

He came out braced, with a rucksack on his back and a carrier bag in his hand and his shoulders up round his ears, the way he had in November; and he stopped on the pavement and waited for it, with his eyes shut, and it came, and it was eighty-six degrees. Frederick watched his shoulders come down an inch at a time, and his eyes open, and his face take on the expression of a man who has been promised a fight outside a pub and has gone out and found the other man has gone home.

“It’s warm,” said Jack.

“It’s eighty-six.”

“I know it’s eighty-six. It said on the plane. It’s a nice day in Spain. It’s a day my mum would put the tables out. Your face comes off, you said. A hundred and fifteen. I’ve had my shoulders like this since Reykjavik.”

“It’s March.”

“It was November last time.” Jack put the carrier bag down. “It’s always some month.”

Across the front of the T-shirt, under the shield, it said KUNGEN BOR I ARIZONA.

Frederick looked at it.

“For the twenty-three,” said Jack. “A man from Cardiff asked if it was a band.” And then, before Frederick could say anything, he put one arm round him, quickly and hard, with his hand flat on the middle of his back, and held on for exactly as long as two men hold on outside an airport, and not one second more, and let go, and picked up the bag.

Beside the pillar, Lukas was watching it. He watched the whole of it, the arm and the hand and the length and the letting go, with his whole attention and no expression, as if he meant to be able to do it later.

Jack saw the rest of them then. He nodded to Rhys and Sam, as one professional to another. He saw Kessler, and something passed between them that Frederick was not, he thought, meant to understand. Then he saw Alexander, upright by the pillar, and Lukas beside him with the flask.

“You came to the airport,” said Jack.

“I wished to see where you stood,” said Alexander. “In November. Frederick described it.” He held out his hand. “Good afternoon, Jack.”

Jack looked at the hand for a moment. Then he shook it, hard, once, the way he shook hands with the brewery’s man on a Monday.

“All right, Alex,” said Jack. “Lukas.”

“Hello,” said Lukas, who had said nothing since the aircraft.

Jack looked at Alexander’s jacket, buttoned to the top in eighty-six degrees, and opened his mouth, and Frederick watched him decide, visibly, that it was the first five minutes and that he had eight days; and close it again.

---

The hotel was on the lake, a long low building the colour of sand with palm trees in pots and a terrace going down to the water, and the man on the desk had a moustache and a badge that said DALE.

“Checking in?” said Dale.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“Name?”

Alexander did not answer. He turned his head, very slightly, towards Lukas; and Lukas stepped up to the desk and put his hands flat on it.

“Brandt,” said Lukas.

Dale typed. He looked at the screen.

“Brandt. Four rooms, eight nights.” He looked up at Lukas with mild approval, as at a young man who has organised a trip for his friends and got it right, and slid four cards across the desk. “You’re all down as your party.” He looked past him at the German Emperor in the linen jacket, and Kessler by the door, and Herr Falkenrath with the two black cases, and back. “Business or pleasure?”

“Pleasure,” said Lukas.

“Good for you.” Dale looked past them all, at Jack, who was standing in the doorway in his T-shirt with the carrier bag, still visibly aggrieved by the weather. “Mild one today, huh? Enjoy it while it lasts, son.”

Jack looked at him.

“Mild,” he said.

“Wait till June,” said Dale comfortably, and went back to his screen.

Outside, on the terrace, Alexander stood with the paper wallet in his hand and looked at the card in it, on which, in small type, it said BRANDT, L. + 3.

“I am the plus,” he said.

“Does that bother you?”

Alexander considered it, by the water, in the heat, with the hat in his pocket.

“No,” he said. “I have never been a plus.” He put the card in the pocket with the hat. “Lukas has been the plus since we were eight. He says it is very restful.”

---

At half past six they sat on the terrace by the lake.

The sun had gone down behind the town, and the lake had gone still and pale and was holding the whole of the sky, upside down. Out on the water two men in a rowing boat were going along very slowly, not rowing much, talking. Lukas was sitting on the low wall at the edge with the flask, looking at the sky in the east, waiting for something to come out. Jack had gone in to find a drink he was old enough to be served. Kessler was at the end of the terrace, by a palm in a pot, not there.

Alexander took an envelope out of the inside pocket of the linen jacket.

It was large and stiff and cream, with three small crowns embossed in one corner, folded once, exactly, to go into the pocket; and he held it on his knee for a moment with both hands flat on it, the way he had held the programme down on the parapet of the Kreuzberg.

“I said in my letter that I would say nothing in the Hall,” he said.

“I know.”

“I said nothing in the Hall. It was the one thing in that room that was mine to do, and I did it.” He looked at the envelope. “Afterwards I wrote to you once. I do not intend to write it again.” He paused. “This is not saying. It is a plan.”

He gave it to him.

Inside there was a single sheet of heavy card, the plan the Swedish Court had sent to Potsdam in December with commendable speed: the long Hall of State drawn from above in fine grey lines, the galleries, the canopy and the silver throne, and in front of it a small rectangle that was the dais and two smaller ones that were the chairs, with every place numbered in small type down the side.

And on it, in pencil, his cousin had marked his three paces.

He had marked them from the wall, on the left of the dais, behind the gilt chair: three short lines, very small, exactly spaced, and at the end of the third a tiny cross, which was where he had stood. Over the doors at the far end of the Hall, where the plan showed the clock, there was a small pencilled note, in the square hand he had been taught at six: + 20 s. And beside the clock, a little lower, a time.

15.30.

And a tick.

Frederick looked at the tick for some time.

Then he saw that there was something else. At the very bottom of the card, below the list of the numbered places, where the Court had left a margin, there was one line more that the Court had not printed. It was in pencil, in the same square hand, the same size as all the rest, as if it had been part of the plan all along.

07.26. Sonnenaufgang. Tempe.

And beside it, very small, a tick.

He sat on the terrace by the lake with the plan of the Hall of State on his knee in the last of the light, and did not say anything for a long time; and Alexander, beside him, did not say anything either, but looked out at the water, at the two men in the boat, with his hands folded on his knee.

“You ticked it,” said Frederick at last.

“Afterwards. In the car, at a quarter to four.” He did not look round. “I could not make them in the Hall. I was not moving. But I had the times. Half past three by the clock above the doors, less twenty seconds. And twenty-six minutes past, for you, which was the time on your father’s envelope. He showed me the envelope in the car on the way to the Palace. Twice.” He paused. “Sam told me this afternoon that the mountains made it half past. I have decided not to correct it. A tick is for the time you were told, not the time it happened.”

“Why?”

“Because you were looking at it,” said Alexander, “and I could not. So I looked at the clock.”

Down at the edge of the water, on the low wall, Lukas said a word, quietly, to nobody, in German. Frederick looked, and there was a point of light low in the east over the mountains, very bright and steady, and Lukas was looking at it as if he had been expecting it and it had come.

---

Mr Luna was at the desk at a quarter to eleven, with the ball game on low and the crossword in pen.

He looked up when they came through the glass doors, the four of them who slept there, Frederick and Rhys and Sam, and Jack in his T-shirt with the carrier bag; and he looked at Jack for a while over his glasses.

“Gloucestershire,” said Mr Luna.

“Evening,” said Jack.

Mr Luna took a butterscotch out of the jar, and pushed the jar an inch across the desk, which was an invitation, and Jack took one, as he had in November, and put it in his mouth, and said “Ta,” and Mr Luna wrote something in the column headed Notes and did not show anybody what it was.

“Drink water,” said Mr Luna.

“I’ve been told it’s mild,” said Jack.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses.

“Who by?”

“A man called Dale.”

“Hm,” said Mr Luna, and went back to the crossword.

---

Rhys brought the camp bed at eleven.

It came in the same green nylon bag, with the same foot pump, and Jack took it from him at the door of 312 as a man takes back a dog he has left with somebody, and knelt and began to pump; and the mat unfolded itself across the floor, the way it had in November, until one corner of it had gone under the bed by the window and was lifting it, very slightly, on that side.

Tyler, on the lifted bed, in the forest, put a hand out flat against the wall without taking his headphones off.

“Sorry,” said Jack.

Tyler lifted one side of the headphones an inch.

“Hey, Pubs,” said Tyler.

“All right?”

“You know now,” said Tyler. “Right? Who he is?”

Jack looked at him from the floor, with the foot pump under his knee.

“I’ve always known,” said Jack.

Tyler considered this for some time from the lifted bed.

“Everybody knew,” he said, with deep, settled injury, to the ceiling; and let the headphone go, and was gone.

---

When the light was out he took the plan out again, by the light of the snow on the two screens, and looked at the two ticks; and then he opened the drawer of the desk by the door, where the blue folder was, the one Sam had bought for two pounds forty, for the other capacity.

There had been one thing in it since January: a letter from a Prime Minister who used to teach mathematics, on one page, in which everything added up.

He put the plan in beside it.

On the camp bed, in the dark, Jack lay on his back with his hands behind his head and the white T-shirt glowing faintly blue in the light of the screens.

“Hanover.”

“Mm.”

“Alex gave you something. On the terrace. I saw from the bar.”

“Yes.”

“Is it good?”

Frederick thought about it, with his hand on the drawer.

“Yes,” he said.

“Good,” said Jack, and turned over, and the camp bed sighed under him; and on the bed by the window Tyler said into the microphone, to Finland, very low, “No, Fred’s friend. The pub one. Yeah. He’s back,” and the snow went on falling on the forest, and the fire did not go out.