Boxes

The Private Secretary was standing on the landing exactly one pace back from the door, with a red box in each hand.

He was in a dark suit and a dark overcoat, buttoned, and his shoes were very polished, and he was breathing exactly as a man breathes who has climbed fifty-six steps carrying two boxes and has decided that nobody will know it. His face was pink only at the very top of the cheekbones. Behind him the window at the end of the landing was grey with a fine rain, and the spider plant on the sill was moving very slightly in the draught from the stairwell.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning.”

“The lift,” said the Private Secretary, “has a notice on it.”

“I know.”

“It says again,” said the Private Secretary, “in pencil,” and his face did not change at all.

---

He did not come in.

He did not try to. He stood one pace back from the threshold, on the landing, where the brown lino of the landing met the strip of brass at the bottom of the Hartigans’ door, and held out the first box across it, at arm’s length, handle first, the way you hold out a thing across a line you have been told is there.

Frederick took it. Then the second.

“The Realm’s, sir. And New Albion’s.” The Private Secretary took his hands back and folded them in front of him over his overcoat buttons. “Nothing long. The Realm’s has something in it that wants looking at, and I’ll explain it when you come to it, if you would like me to, from here.”

“From there?”

“From the landing, sir.” The Private Secretary looked at the strip of brass. “I understand that the landing is not upstairs.”

Behind Frederick, Mrs Hartigan had come to the door, drying her hands on the tea towel with the map of Wisconsin on it.

She looked at the Private Secretary. She had met him twice before, both times in the street, at the car door, in the rain, for about a minute. She looked at him now, standing very upright on her landing at nine in the morning in a buttoned overcoat with his hands folded, with the rain on the window behind him.

“You walked up,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“Yes, madam.”

“With those.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Then you’ll want a chair,” said Mrs Hartigan, and went back in, and came out again with one of the kitchen chairs, the one with the wobble that was usually Kate’s, and carried it out over the strip of brass herself, onto the landing, and put it down against the wall beside the door, facing the window with the spider plant, and went back in.

The Private Secretary looked at the chair.

“Sit down,” said Mrs Hartigan, from inside, without looking round. “It’s Saturday.”

---

He sat down.

He did it carefully, with his overcoat still buttoned, on the edge of the chair with the wobble, with his knees together and his hands on his knees, facing the window, and sat there like a man in the waiting room of a very old-fashioned dentist.

Mrs Hartigan came to the door with a cup of coffee.

“I won’t, thank you, madam.”

“It’s made.”

“It’s very kind of you. I won’t.”

She went back in. She came back to the door a minute later with the same cup, which she had not poured away, and a saucer under it now, and a teaspoon on the saucer, and a small jug of milk beside it.

“I really won’t, madam. I’m very grateful.”

She looked at him. She went back in.

The third time she came to the door she had added a biscuit, a plain one, on the saucer, next to the spoon, and she held it out over the strip of brass, and said nothing at all, and waited.

The Private Secretary looked at the biscuit.

“Thank you, madam,” he said, and took it.

Mrs Hartigan went back in without a word and shut the door to, not quite closed, an inch open, and went to the sink. Frederick, at the table, looked at her back. The corner of her mouth, which he could see in the dark window over the sink, had gone in, exactly the way Theo’s did.

---

The rule was one box at a time, with the others shut.

The rule did not say anything about the oilcloth.

He put the Realm’s box on the table in front of him, between the sugar hen and the bread board, and New Albion’s on the chair beside him, shut, on its own, and undid the catch of the red one, and lifted the lid.

Kate, who had come out of the bedroom with the partition with her hair still in the towel and a slice of toast, stopped in the doorway and looked at the box with an expression of the most intense interest he had ever seen on her face, including at the rabbit.

“Is that it?” said Kate.

“Is what it?”

“The red box. The actual one. The one they show on the news.” She came and stood behind his chair and looked down into it over his shoulder. “It’s just papers.”

“It’s just papers.”

“I thought it’d be…” Kate considered. “More.”

“It’s never more,” said Frederick. “It’s always just papers.”

---

Mrs Hartigan sat down at the end of the table by the stove with her second cup of coffee and her elbows on the oilcloth and looked across the table at the open box, and at the top paper in it, which was a letter on the Realm’s thick cream paper, and Frederick saw her eyes go to it, and start to read it, upside down, from habit, before she had decided anything at all.

Then she stopped.

She looked away from it, sharply, at the window, the way you look away from somebody undressing.

“I’m not reading it,” she said. “I can’t help it. Twenty years of charts. If I can see writing, I read it.” She put her cup down. “Tell me if I should go. I’ll go and sit in the bedroom. I don’t mind.”

“You don’t have to go. It’s your room. Anybody can be in the room. It’s what’s open that matters.” He said it the way the Private Secretary had said it on Thursday morning, to the horse. “That’s the rule.”

“Then I’ll be in the room,” said Mrs Hartigan, “and not read it.”

She picked up her chair, the chair with arms that was at the end of the table, and turned it round, all the way round, so that it faced the window over the sink and the depot, with its back to the table and to him and to the box. And sat down in it again, with her coffee, and her back very straight, and looked out at the rain on the buses.

Kate looked at her mother’s back for a moment.

Then she picked up her own toast and went round the table and sat down in Theo’s chair, directly opposite the box, and put her chin on her hands, and looked into it.

“I’m reading it,” said Kate.

“You can’t read it.”

“I’m in the room,” said Kate. “Anybody can be in the room. You said.”

---

The first paper was a warrant of appointment to the Household, which was the King’s own gift and nobody’s advice: a new Clerk of the Kitchen at the Palace, under Bridget, a woman from Baltimore who had cooked for a hospital for twenty years. He read it, and signed it, George R, in the space at the bottom, with his own pen, which he had brought, on the oilcloth with the lemons, which the pen went through very slightly at the end of the R, so that he had to lift the paper and blot it on his sleeve.

Kate watched him sign it with her chin on her hands.

“That’s it?” she said. “That’s your name? That’s how you do your name?”

“That’s how I do my name.”

“It’s very short.”

“It’s two words.”

“It’s one word and a letter,” said Kate, “and the letter’s not even a word,” and ate her toast.

The second paper was a letter from the Governor of California, three pages, about the reconstruction at Ventura, which he read twice and put to one side to answer in his own hand on Sunday. The third was a list of names for the Order of the Charter, with a paragraph beside each, which he read all of, and initialled, and in the middle of which, at the seventh name, Kate said I know her, she was at my school, she was a dinner lady, and he looked at the paragraph again, and it was true, and it said that she had been a dinner lady at a school in the north-east of the District for thirty-four years and had cooked a hot meal for every child on every day of the Kittyhawk week, including the Saturday and the Sunday, without being asked.

“She’s getting a medal?” said Kate.

“She’s getting a medal.”

Kate did not say anything for a while. She sat with her chin on her hands, looking at the paragraph upside down.

“Good,” said Kate.

---

The fourth thing in the box was an envelope, large, stiff, with the Mint’s mark on it, and a slip clipped to the front in the Private Secretary’s small hand:

For decision. Three models for the effigy on the Realm’s new coinage. The Mint would like the King’s choice by the end of the month. They are not to be seen outside the room. This is the one I mentioned.

Frederick looked at the slip. He looked at Kate, opposite, with her chin on her hands. He looked at the back of Mrs Hartigan’s chair, facing the window.

Then he got up and went to the door, which was open an inch, and opened it another few inches, and looked out at the Private Secretary on the kitchen chair on the landing with his cup of coffee balanced on his knee and the biscuit gone.

“Not to be seen outside the room,” said Frederick.

“Yes, sir.”

“Kate’s in the room.”

The Private Secretary looked at the spider plant.

“Then Miss Hartigan is in the room, sir,” he said. “The Mint was very particular about outside it.”

---

He opened the envelope at the table.

Inside, between sheets of tissue paper, were three photographs. Large ones, the size of a page, black and white, very sharp, each of a round plaster model about the size of a dinner plate, lit from the side so that the relief stood up out of it in light and shadow. Each of them was his own head, in profile, facing left, which the Governor of the Reserve had settled on the Mint’s advice because it suited him better. Bare-headed. No crown. Round the edge of each, in capitals, GEORGIUS V D G REX, and a space for the rest.

He laid them out on the oilcloth in a row, between the sugar hen and the bread board.

Kate stopped eating her toast.

She looked at them for a long time. She looked at the first one, and the second, and the third, and then at him, across the table, at the side of his face, comparing, the way Mr Lumsden had compared a face to a photograph on a card, and then back at the three plaster heads.

“Oh no,” said Kate.

“What?”

“That one,” said Kate, putting her finger on the first, “looks like you’ve smelled something. That one,” the second, “looks like you’re about to say something boring to a mayor. And that one,” the third, “looks like Theo trying to remember the endocrine system.”

“It does not.”

“It does. Look at the eyebrow.” She looked closer. “It’s the exact eyebrow. It’s the gland eyebrow.”

He looked at the third one. It did, slightly, have the gland eyebrow.

“I have to choose one,” he said. “By the end of the month. It goes on every coin in the Realm. For the rest of my…” He stopped. “For a long time.”

Kate sat back.

“Well,” she said. “No pressure.”

---

Behind them, at the end of the table, facing the window, Mrs Hartigan said:

“Is the Mint in the room?”

“No.”

“Then I’m not looking at your coins,” said Mrs Hartigan, to the window. “I’m in the room and I’m not looking.” She drank some coffee. “Describe them.”

So he described them. The angle of the head, and the jaw, and the line of the hair at the back of the neck, which the Mint had made shorter in all three than he wore it, and the eyes, and the mouth. Kate added the eyebrow. Mrs Hartigan listened, with her back to them, looking at the rain on the buses, and asked two questions, both about the mouth.

“The one where it’s closed,” said Mrs Hartigan. “But not tight. Where it looks like you’ve just finished saying something and you’re waiting to see if anybody’s going to answer.”

He looked at the three of them.

It was the second one. The one Kate said was about to say something boring to a mayor. He looked at it again, with Mrs Hartigan’s words in his head instead of Kate’s, and it was not about to say anything. It had just said it. It was waiting.

“That one,” said Mrs Hartigan, to the window. “That’s the one that looks like you when you’ve done your homework.”

He put the other two back in the tissue paper. He wrote on the slip, under the Private Secretary’s note, in pencil, The second. G., and put all three back in the envelope, and the envelope back in the box, and shut the lid, and did up the catch.

Kate looked at the shut box for a moment.

“I’m going to be on a coin,” said Kate, slowly. “I mean, you are. But I chose it. Sort of. I’m going to have it in my purse.”

“Mrs Hartigan chose it.”

“Mum didn’t even look,” said Kate. “Mum chose it with her back.”

---

He did New Albion’s, which was two papers from Ottawa and took four minutes, and shut it, and carried both boxes to the door, and opened it, and held them out across the strip of brass.

The Private Secretary stood up off the chair with the wobble and took them, one in each hand, and looked down at the Realm’s box, at the catch, and then at Frederick.

“The Mint, sir?”

“The second. It’s on the slip.” Frederick hesitated. “Mrs Hartigan chose it.”

“With her back,” said Kate, from the table.

The Private Secretary looked past him into the room, at the chair with arms at the end of the table, turned round to face the window, with Mrs Hartigan sitting in it very upright with her coffee, not looking at anybody.

Something happened to his face that Frederick had seen happen to it perhaps twice before.

“I shall tell the Mint, sir,” said the Private Secretary, “that the King made his choice after consultation.” He considered. “In the room.”

Then he picked up the two boxes, and went to the head of the stairs, and paused there, and looked back at the kitchen chair with the wobble, standing empty against the wall of the landing beside the Hartigans’ door, with an empty cup and saucer on the seat of it, and a teaspoon, and a crumb.

“Thank Mrs Hartigan for the chair,” he said. “I’ll be back at six, sir. With the evening ones.”

He went down. Fifty-six steps. At about the thirtieth, on the second landing, Frederick heard a door open, and a woman’s voice, startled, and the Private Secretary’s voice say good morning, madam, and the woman’s voice say, after a pause, in a tone of the deepest suspicion, who are you?, and the Private Secretary’s voice say, I’m a friend of the family, and go on down.