Four O'Clock

At four o’clock there was a cake on the table.

It was a lemon cake, round, pale gold, with a crust of white sugar on top that had gone crisp and cracked like ice on a puddle, and thin curls of yellow peel scattered over the sugar, and it was on Mrs Hartigan’s own plate, the blue and white one with the windmill on it from Milwaukee, and it had come out of the hamper.

He knew it had come out of the hamper. He knew the cake. He had eaten it in the kitchen at the Palace in June with eleven lemons from Pomona in a blue china bowl on the dresser beside it, and Bridget had said to the sink that she had never had a lemon like it in her life and did not intend to say so to anybody from California.

Beside it, on the tray with the cloth folded back, Mrs Okonjo’s puff-puff.

And the coffee in the red tin with the windmill, made, in the pot.

“For everybody,” said Mrs Hartigan, putting down five small plates. “Because I’ve put it there.” She looked at the cake. “She’s very good. Your Bridget.”

“She’s not my Bridget.”

“She’s somebody’s Bridget,” said Mrs Hartigan, “and she’s sent a cake four floors up to a woman she’s never met, with a letter, to feed a boy who’s eating my food by rule.” She cut it. “That’s a person who knows what a kitchen’s for.”

---

He had the blue book in his bag. He took it out and put it on the oilcloth beside his plate.

AmRail’s timetable for Union Station, the one with the soft cover gone at the corners. Open at Sunday.

“It’s four,” he said.

Mrs Hartigan looked at the clock on the cooker, and then at him.

“Your father,” she said.

“I read him the arrivals. At four. Every day. I said I’d ring.” He looked at the telephone on the wall, the old green one on the curly cord. “I can do it from the landing on mine. I don’t want to…”

“You’ll do it from there,” said Mrs Hartigan, and pointed at the telephone on the wall with the cake knife. “It’s our telephone. It rings the Navy every hour. It can ring your father.”

---

He rang the Palace switchboard from the green telephone on the Hartigans’ kitchen wall, with the curly cord stretched across to the table so that he could sit down with the blue book in front of him, and asked for the kitchen.

It rang four times.

“Kitchen,” said Bridget.

“It’s me.”

There was a silence on the line, and in it he could hear the kitchen at the Palace as clearly as if he were standing in it: the range, ticking; the radio on the dresser, low, the music station; a tap dripping that had dripped since before he was born; and the clock over the range, which was four minutes slow, not ticking, because it was electric, but present.

“He’s here,” said Bridget. “At the end. He’s been looking at the telephone since half past three.” A pause. “Did you get the cake?”

“It’s on the table. Mrs Hartigan put it on.”

Another silence. Different.

“Did she,” said Bridget.

“She said you know what a kitchen’s for.”

Bridget did not say anything for a moment. Then, roughly, quickly, the way she said things to the window: “Well. Never mind that. I’ll hold it for him. Wait.”

He heard her cross the kitchen at the Palace. He heard the cream receiver on its curly cord being carried, the cord dragging against the corner of the dresser. He heard a chair, or the wheelchair, being moved a little. And then a breath, close, against the receiver, a breath he knew from the sixth floor of New Westminster General and from the end of the long table by the range, slow, careful, every breath counted.

“Papa,” he said. “It’s four.”

The breath went in. Held. Let go.

---

He read.

He read the way he always read, in the voice from the tannoy at Union Station, the voice he had learned at nine on a bench on the concourse while a man in a grey suit stood a little way off pretending to look at the departures board, the voice that was not his own and was the only voice he had ever had for this.

“Six fifty-eight. The Capitol. From Chicago. Via Pittsburgh.”

At the Hartigans’ kitchen table, in the room that was two rooms, nobody moved.

Kate had a piece of lemon cake halfway to her mouth, and it stayed there. Mrs Hartigan had sat down at the end by the stove with her coffee and her elbows on the oilcloth and was looking not at him but at the blue book, upside down, reading it from habit, and then, he saw, deciding not to, and looking at the window instead. Mr Hartigan, in his chair by the window, with the crossword on his knee, had lowered the crossword.

“Seven twelve. The Crown Limited. From Boston. Via New York and Philadelphia.”

He read them all. The locals from the Maryland side and the Virginia side. The trains from the south. The night train from Savannah, an hour late, which the book did not say and everybody knew. A train from Richmond that ran only on Sundays and stopped at eleven places, and he read all eleven, in order, because his father liked that one, because it was slow and stopped everywhere and his father said it was the only honest train in the book.

He came to the foot of the page and stopped.

There was nothing on the line for a moment but the breath.

Then it went in, and held, and he heard his father’s lips trying the shape before the sound, the way you try a door, and he waited, at the Hartigans’ kitchen table with the blue book in front of him, and did not help.

“Bus,” said his father.

---

Frederick looked at the receiver.

“Bus?”

The breath. Held. Let go. And again, more firmly, with something in it that Frederick recognised from the coronation and the chemistry paper and Latin, which was satisfaction:

“Bus.”

He did not know what it meant. And then he did, all at once, the way you see the answer to a crossword clue you have been looking at for a week.

His father had been in this kitchen once.

On the night of the Eleventh, sixteen months ago, three weeks after he woke, when he could not yet walk across a room alone. He had come up these fifty-six steps on Peter Hartigan’s arm and his son’s, a step at a time, with the light on the timer going out on every landing, in his old grey coat with the velvet collar, and stood in that doorway in his stockinged feet, and sat at the end of this table in the chair with the arms, and eaten the cabbage because nobody refused the cabbage. And Peter Hartigan had told a story about a man who got on his bus with a goat, and the goat had got larger as the story went on, and his father’s mouth had moved at the one corner that worked. And then Peter Hartigan had read out a crossword clue, and his father had put his fork down, and found a word.

He had not been back. He could not manage the stairs now any more than he could then. But he had sat at the end of the kitchen table at the Palace for nine weeks since December, and Bridget talked, and his mother talked, and he remembered the goat.

His father wanted the bus.

---

He turned round in his chair, with the receiver in his hand on its curly cord, and looked across the room at Mr Hartigan, in the chair by the window, with the crossword lowered on his knee.

“He wants the bus,” said Frederick.

Mr Hartigan looked at him.

“My father,” said Frederick. “He’s asking about the bus. Your bus. The one with the goat.” He stopped. He did not know how to say the rest. “He likes timetables,” he said. “He’s always liked timetables. He was King for fifty-six years and I think the thing he liked best in all of it was the trains. I think he wants to hear the bus.”

Kate put her piece of cake down on her plate very slowly.

Mrs Hartigan did not move at all.

Mr Hartigan sat in his chair by the window for a long moment, with the crossword on his knee and the light from the depot window behind him, looking at the King of fourteen realms holding a receiver out across his kitchen towards him on a curly cord that had come from Milwaukee in a box.

Then he folded the crossword. In half, once, with the pen inside it. He put it on the arm of the chair. And he got up and crossed the kitchen, not fast, not slow, and took the receiver from Frederick’s hand, and held it to his ear, and stood there, by the table, in his socks, a broad quiet tired man with stubble already on his face, and said, into the green telephone, in a voice Frederick had never heard him use, a careful, clear, carrying voice, the voice of a man who has called out stops to a full bus in the rain for twenty years:

“Sir. This is Peter Hartigan.”

The breath, at the other end.

“I drive the twenty-two,” said Mr Hartigan. “Sunday service.”

---

He did not have a book. He did not need one.

He stood at the end of his own kitchen table with the receiver at his ear and his free hand on the back of Kate’s chair, and he said it from memory, the whole of it, in the voice for the stops, steady and unhurried, every word put down square on the table:

“First bus, six fifteen, from the depot. Calling at Bladen Street. The avenue, by the church. Dorsey’s. The lottery shop. Tenth Street. The bridge.” A breath. “The Heights. The hospital, the main gate. The Axis, at the Home Office lights. The river road. The school. The college. The boathouses.” Another. “Then back. Every forty minutes on a Sunday. Last bus from the boathouses, eleven fifty. Arriving depot, twelve thirty-five. Lights off.”

He stopped.

There was a silence on the line. A long one.

Mr Hartigan stood with the receiver at his ear and his hand on the back of Kate’s chair and did not move, and his face did not change, and Frederick watched it not change, and understood that Mr Hartigan was waiting the way he himself waited at four o’clock every day, for the breath and the hold and the lips trying the shape.

He had not been told to wait. He waited anyway.

Then Mr Hartigan’s face did change. Very slightly. At the corner of the mouth.

“Yes, sir,” he said into the telephone. “I can do that.”

And he said it again. The whole of it. From the depot at six fifteen, every stop, to the lights going off at twelve thirty-five, in the same voice, at the same pace, not one word different, while his wife sat at the end of the table with her hands round her coffee and her eyes on the window, and his daughter sat with a piece of lemon cake on her plate and did not eat it, and the King sat beside the blue book with his hands flat on the oilcloth with the lemons on it and did not look at anybody.

At the end Mr Hartigan listened for a moment more. Then he held the receiver out to Frederick.

“He said again,” said Mr Hartigan. “So I did it again.” He went back to his chair by the window and sat down and picked up the crossword and unfolded it. “Then he said good.”

Frederick took the receiver.

“Papa?”

The breath. And under it, very faintly, from the kitchen at the Palace, the sound of Bridget, by the dresser, blowing her nose.

---

Theo came in at half past four.

He came in at the door in his green St John cadet’s jacket with the white letters on the back, wet from the rain, carrying his first-aid bag, and kicked his shoes off on the mat, and stopped, and looked at the table: at the lemon cake on the blue and white plate with the windmill, half gone; at Mrs Okonjo’s tray of puff-puff, a quarter gone; at the blue book; at his sister, who was crying very slightly and pretending to be eating cake; at his mother, at the end, looking at the window; at his father, in his chair, doing the crossword with his pen very still on one clue; and at Frederick, at the table, with a green telephone receiver in his lap on its curly cord and the line dead.

“What happened?” said Theo.

Nobody answered.

Theo looked at all of them again, one at a time, with the expression of a cadet arriving at an incident with his bag and finding everybody already sitting down.

Then he crossed to the cupboard over the counter, the one on the right, by the fridge, and opened it, and looked in, and moved a tin of soup, and a jar of jam, and looked behind them, and turned round.

“Where’s my peanut butter?”