Schafkopf

He told Theo about the peanut butter.

He told him at the table, with the lemon cake between them, and Kate and Mrs Hartigan listening, and Mr Hartigan in his chair by the window with the crossword. He told him about Margit and the Topfen in the back, and the nineteen kinds of mustard, and the nine rolls, and till four, and forty-one sixty, and Mrs Adeyemi looking at him over her glasses on their chain while he looked at sixteen things in a heap for four seconds.

“The only thing that was only one person’s,” said Theo slowly.

“Yes.”

“Mine.”

“Yes.”

Theo sat back in his chair in his wet St John jacket and looked at him across the table for a long time. His ears had gone red. Frederick watched them do it, from the tips down.

“That,” said Theo at last, “is the most insulting thing anybody has ever done for me.”

“For you?”

“For me. You put back my peanut butter for me. Because it was mine. Because everybody else’s stuff was everybody’s and mine was only mine, and you were one sixty over, and you looked at the whole of Mum’s list in a heap in Dorsey’s in front of the whole north-east, and you thought, the one person in this flat who won’t mind going without is Theo.” Theo picked up a piece of puff-puff and looked at it. “That’s what you thought.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You were right,” said Theo, and ate the puff-puff, and looked at the table, and said nothing for a while, and his ears stayed red.

---

The Private Secretary came at six with the evening boxes.

He knocked three times, measured, and Frederick opened the door, and the Private Secretary was standing one pace back from the strip of brass with a red box in each hand, in his buttoned overcoat, breathing as though he had not climbed anything at all, and on the landing beside him, against the wall, was the kitchen chair with the wobble, where Mrs Hartigan had left it, with a cup and saucer on the seat, clean, and a biscuit on the saucer.

The Private Secretary looked at the chair.

“Sit down,” said Mrs Hartigan, from the sink, without turning round. “It’s still Saturday.”

He sat down on the chair with the wobble, with his knees together, and ate the biscuit, and waited, facing the window with the spider plant, while the King did two red boxes at the kitchen table with the family in the room, one at a time, with the other shut, and Kate reading upside down, and Mrs Hartigan with her back turned at the sink.

Neither box had anything in it that wanted three plaster heads.

At twenty past six he handed them back across the brass, and the Private Secretary stood up and took them, and looked at him.

“The radio, sir,” said the Private Secretary.

“I heard.”

“The Household’s statement went out at two. Privately, with friends, in the Columbia District, and well. It has been read on every station since.” He considered the spider plant. “Mr Brandon read it at half past two and then said that in his experience privately with friends was what the Household said when the King was sleeping on somebody’s sofa. He then asked his listeners whether anybody had a spare sofa in the north-east with a King on it.”

“Did anybody ring?”

“Fourteen people, sir,” said the Private Secretary, “all of whom had a sofa, none of whom had a King.” He picked up the boxes. “Nobody has said the name. Nobody has said the street. Mr Brandon has been told by his producer that he is not to try to find out, and he has said so on the air, at some length, as if he were very disappointed in himself.” He went to the head of the stairs. “Dame M says that is the most helpful thing he has ever done for anybody.”

---

Supper was fried potatoes with bacon, the Speck, in a big black pan, crisp, with onions, and red cabbage.

The red cabbage came to the table in a dish of its own, dark purple, glistening, sweet and sharp, cooked with apples, the sour ones, and a little vinegar, and it was, Frederick saw as it came, very exactly the same colour as the beetroot, and in the same kind of dish, and had the same faint purple tide already beginning at the edges.

“It’s not beetroot,” said Kate, watching his face.

“I know it’s not beetroot.”

“It’s cabbage. It’s red cabbage. It’s the beetroot’s older brother,” said Kate. “It’s nicer. It went to college.”

It was on the table. He took some.

It was, in fact, nicer. It was sweet, and soft, and tasted of the apples he had chosen in Dorsey’s by smelling them, and not at all of a terrace at Solliden, and he took some more, and Mrs Hartigan, at the end of the table, watched him take more and said nothing, which was what she said when a thing was all right.

Mr Hartigan, at the other end, said: “Good for the blood.”

Kate held up eight fingers.

---

The second hamper came at eight.

Two knocks, polite. Nobody on the landing when Theo opened the door, and the hamper on the lino, square to the door, honey-coloured wicker, two leather straps, a brass buckle on each, and an envelope under the first strap, cream, plain, Mrs Hartigan, in the round firm blue-black hand.

Mrs Hartigan read the letter at the counter, with her back to the room, twice. She did not show it to anybody. She undid the straps and opened the lid and looked inside.

Then she turned round and looked at Theo.

“Theodore,” she said.

Theo, at the table, looked up.

Mrs Hartigan took something out of the hamper and held it up. A jar. Glass, with a red lid. Crunchy.

Theo stared at it.

“How,” said Theo. “How. It was this morning. It was in Dorsey’s. It was one sixty. How does a woman in a palace kitchen on the other side of the city know that I didn’t…”

“Sergeant Kimura,” said Frederick, slowly, “said she’d have paid the one sixty if she’d been allowed.” He looked at the jar. “And she told Castellanos. And Castellanos tells everybody everything that isn’t a secret. And Bridget…”

“Bridget,” said Mrs Hartigan, putting the jar down on the counter beside the bread board, “has written to say that it is for the boy whose it was, and that she is aware that it is not on the table, and that she leaves it to me to decide whether it ever will be.” She looked at the jar. “Which I have.”

“Is it?” said Theo.

“Breakfast,” said Mrs Hartigan. “On the table. For the boy whose it was.” She looked at Frederick. “And for anybody else who wants it, because on it is on it.”

Theo did not say anything. He looked at the jar on the counter for a long time with his mouth shut and the corners of it gone in. Then he got up, and went to the counter, and picked up the jar, and held it in both hands for a moment, the way Frederick had held a lemon from Pomona in a corridor at Ellicott in June.

“I’m going to write to her,” said Theo. “Bridget. I’m going to write her a letter.”

“She’d like that,” said Frederick.

“I’m going to write it in capitals,” said Theo, and put the jar back on the counter, very carefully, square to the edge.

---

Mrs Hartigan wrote her reply in green at the counter, standing, and folded it, and put it in the cream envelope under Bridget’s, and crossed out Mrs Hartigan on the front and wrote Bridget, and Frederick saw her put something else in the hamper before she did up the straps. Something wrapped in a clean tea towel. Round. About the size of a saucer.

“What’s that?”

“Topfen strudel,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Margit’s Topfen. The good one. I made it this afternoon while you were reading Mr Dabrowski’s petition.” She did up the second buckle. “It’s for her kitchen. Not for you.”

She carried the hamper out to the landing herself and put it down square to the door and came back in and shut the door.

“Two kitchens,” said Kate.

“Two kitchens,” said her mother.

---

At half past eight Kate went to the drawer under the telephone, the one with the takeaway menus and the Household’s card from 2026, and took out a pack of cards.

Not an ordinary pack. Smaller, and thicker, and the backs were dark green with a pattern of acorns, and when she fanned them on the oilcloth he saw that the suits were not hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs but hearts and leaves and acorns and bells, and the faces were men in old costumes with moustaches and swords and feathers in their hats.

“Schafkopf,” said Kate. “Do you want to lose?”

“I always lose.”

“I know you always lose,” said Kate. She began to shuffle, under the edge of the table, onto her knee, the way she had shuffled sixteen months ago on the night of the Eleventh, so that her mother would not see. “I’m asking if you want to.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She cut the pack. “You’re still better than your cousin.”

He looked at her. He remembered it: the night of the Eleventh, nine at the table, his cousin on Kate’s other side in his shirtsleeves with the apron still on, being taught in a whisper with his whole face very serious, because Kate was.

“Alexander was learning,” he said.

“Alexander,” said Kate, dealing, “played like an emperor. He kept trying to declare things. You can’t declare things in Schafkopf unless you’ve got the cards for it, and he never had the cards, and he declared anyway, every hand, because he thought that was what you did when you were in charge.” She dealt him eight cards, face down. “He lost four hundred matches. He paid me in a letter. It came in the diplomatic bag at Christmas. Four hundred matches, in a box with a crest on it, and a note that said with the Emperor’s compliments and apologies.” She picked up her own cards. “I’ve still got them. I’m never using them. They’re the only thing I’ve ever won off a monarch.”

“You’ve won things off me.”

“Matches,” said Kate. “Off you, I win matches. Off him I won matches with a crest.”

---

They played for matches.

Four of them: Kate, Theo, Mrs Hartigan, and Frederick, because Schafkopf was four or it was nothing. Mr Hartigan had gone to bed at nine, as he always did, and had stopped at the door to the passage and looked at the table with the four of them round it and the cards and the box of matches, and had said nothing at all, and had gone.

Kate explained the rules again, because she explained them every time, and they were still the most complicated rules of any game he had ever played, and he had played chess with a German Emperor and croquet with an Archbishop. The trumps were not one suit; they were all the queens and all the jacks and all the hearts, in an order that had to be learned by heart and that made no sense, and the aces were called Sau, which meant sow, and you could play alone or with a partner, and you did not know who your partner was until a particular card was played, and the scoring was in points and the points were not the tricks. He had known all of it once, at the end of every game he had lost at this table. He forgot it every time he went down the stairs.

He lost the first hand. He lost the second. He lost the third so badly that Theo put his head down on the table.

He did not declare anything. He had watched his cousin.

And somewhere in the fourth hand, while he was looking at his eight cards and trying to remember whether the queen of acorns beat the queen of leaves, Mrs Hartigan said something across the table to Kate.

In Wisconsindeutsch. Quickly. Low. The way the family said things across the table when it did not wish to be understood: by a visitor, or a reporter on the landing, or the boy in the H’s who was eating at their table by rule.

He followed it.

All of it. Every word. Because he had been at this table forty-nine times now, and had been listening, and because it was short, and because she was not trying very hard to hide it, and because she had said it, he thought afterwards, in the way you say a thing in a language somebody half knows when you are not sure whether you want them to understand it or not.

Er spielt wie sein Vater. Er wartet, bis die anderen fertig sind.

He plays like his father. He waits until the others have finished.

---

He did not look up.

He looked at his cards. At the queen of acorns and the queen of leaves and the jack of bells and a heart that he thought was a trump. His face was hot. He kept his eyes on the cards and his hands still on the oilcloth and played the queen of acorns, which was wrong, and lost the trick, and Theo groaned.

Mrs Hartigan had met his father once.

At this table, on the night of the Eleventh, sixteen months ago, when his father had sat at the end in the chair with the arms, in his stockinged feet, three weeks after he woke, and she had cut his beef for him without a word and put the fork back into his hand, handle first. She had watched him all evening the way she watched anybody at her table: across the dumplings, upside down, without seeming to. She had watched him sit through the goat and the cabbage and the crossword, saying nothing, waiting, until Peter read out a clue nobody could get, and the table had gone quiet, and then his father had put his fork down square on the side of his plate and said Desk, and laughed.

She had seen him once. She had seen enough.

He waits until the others have finished.

Across the table, Kate had gone quite still. She was looking at him over her cards. She had seen his face go hot. She had seen him not look up.

“He understood that,” said Kate, in English.

Mrs Hartigan looked at him over her cards for a long moment. Her face did not change.

“I know he did,” she said, in English. “I meant him to.”

And then, in the same voice, without any change at all, looking at the table:

“Your trick, Theodore.”

---

At nine he rang his mother from the landing, and told her about the Bus, and the cake, and Er spielt wie sein Vater, and she was quiet on the telephone for a long time, and then said, in Swedish, she’s quite right, and then, in English, ring tomorrow, and rang off.

At ten the telephone on the wall rang, on the hour, and Dame M said that the hamper had come back with a strudel in it and that Bridget had cut it at once, which she never did with anything from outside, and had eaten a piece standing at the range, and had then put the rest in the larder with a plate over it and a note on the plate that said NOBODY, and that Dame M had not been offered any, and did not expect to be.

At eleven the light went out.

He lay on the sofa in the dark under the hospital sheets and the dark blue blanket and the crocheted one, with the spring under his hip through a towel folded in four, and the radiator thinking about two o’clock, and Mr Hartigan snoring through the wall like a bus at a stop, and in the dark, on the rug in front of the television, the sound of a box marked TEXTBOOKS having its lid nudged off from inside.

He had lost two hundred and eleven matches.

He did not mind at all.