Washing

On Sunday Mr Hartigan did not go to work.

It was the one day in the week he did not, the rota said, because the depot gave every driver one fixed day off and Peter Hartigan had chosen Sunday in 2027 and had never once changed it, not for overtime, not for a strike, not for a man from a newspaper who had offered him a sum of money on a Sunday morning outside the depot gates to talk about his son’s friend. Theo had told him that on the coach to Los Angeles. Dad doesn’t do Sundays. Sundays are for the Bowl, and church if Mum makes him, and pancakes.

At six o’clock, when Frederick woke, there was a smell of pancakes.

He lay on the sofa with his eyes open and the low ceiling there with the water stain shaped like a man in a hat, and the rabbit on his chest again, folded, asleep, and listened. A pan on the stove. A whisk in a bowl. The radio on the windowsill, very low, a man talking about the weather in the north. And under it, humming, tunelessly, a song Frederick did not know, in a man’s voice that was low and rough and had not, in forty-nine suppers, ever once hummed in his hearing.

He lifted his head an inch.

Mr Hartigan was at the stove, in his socks and a grey jumper with holes in both elbows, with his back to the room, making pancakes, and humming.

---

The pancakes were thick, the Wisconsin kind, the size of a saucer, with apples in them, the sour ones from Dorsey’s, sliced thin and cooked into the batter so that they went soft and sweet at the edges, and Mr Hartigan made them one at a time in the black pan from Saturday and put them on a plate in the oven to keep warm, and did not stop humming, and did not turn round, and did not say anything when Frederick got up at twenty past six and went to the bathroom with his washing things and his towel and came back.

At seven he put the plate on the table, with a stack of fourteen pancakes on it, and stood back.

At seven Theo came out of the bedroom with the partition with his hair standing up on one side and looked at the table.

On it: the pancakes. A jug of syrup. The good Topfen, in its tub with the hand-written label, with a spoon in it. The coffee in the pot. And in the middle of the table, between the sugar hen and the bread board, square, on its own, a glass jar with a red lid.

Crunchy.

Theo sat down in front of it and looked at it for some time.

“For the boy whose it was,” said Mrs Hartigan, coming in from the passage in her dressing gown, and sat down at the end, and held out her cup without looking, and Mr Hartigan filled it.

Theo picked up the jar and unscrewed the lid. He looked inside. Then he put a spoon in, and took out a spoonful, and ate it, off the spoon, slowly, with his eyes shut, in front of everybody, the way people in films eat the last of something before the world ends.

“Bridget,” said Theo, with his eyes shut.

“Write to her,” said his mother.

“I’m going to,” said Theo. “I’ve started. I’m on the second page.” He opened his eyes. “It’s in capitals.”

---

They ate pancakes. Kate came out at twenty past seven, which was, everybody noticed and nobody said, twenty minutes before her slot on the fridge, with her hair wet and her college jumper on and a heap of washing in her arms the size of a small sheep, which she put down on the floor by the door with a thump.

“Laundry,” said Kate.

“After breakfast,” said her mother.

“I know after breakfast.” Kate sat down and took three pancakes. She looked across the table at Theo, eating peanut butter off a spoon, and at Frederick, eating a pancake with Topfen on it, which he had been shown how to do by Mr Hartigan without a word, by Mr Hartigan putting Topfen on his own pancake and then looking at him.

“So,” said Kate, to Theo. “Tomorrow.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“The shirt. If he lasts.” She poured syrup. “What do you think he’ll make you wear?”

“He won’t last.”

“If he does.”

Theo shrugged. He licked the spoon.

“Anything,” said Theo. “I said anything. I’ll wear anything. I’ll wear a dress. I’ll wear the inspector’s suit from last February. I’ll wear Mr Abernathy’s jacket.” He put the spoon back in the jar. “Except yellow.”

There was a short pause at the table.

“Yellow?” said Frederick.

“I look terrible in yellow,” said Theo. “Everybody knows I look terrible in yellow. In the eighth grade we had a play and I was a sun and Mum made me a costume and I looked like a custard. Kate’s got a photograph.” He pointed his spoon across the table at his sister. “She’s got it on her wall at college. Next to Bethany’s rabbit.”

“It’s a very good photograph,” said Kate.

“I’ll wear anything,” said Theo, with great dignity, going back to his pancake. “Except yellow.”

Frederick looked at his plate.

He did not say anything. He cut a piece of pancake and put Topfen on it and ate it, very carefully, and kept his eyes on the plate, and kept his face entirely still, the way he had kept it in the fourth row of a gym in June, and across the table Kate looked at him for a long moment over her syrup, with her head on one side, the way her mother looked at a chart.

She did not say anything either.

---

The telephone on the wall rang at eight.

He got it.

“Sir,” said Dame M. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“I have a ruling on the Standard.”

He took the receiver to the end of its curly cord, which was as far as the passage door, and stood there in his socks with his back to the kitchen, because it seemed to him that a ruling on the Royal Standard should be taken standing up, even on a curly cord.

“The Lord Chamberlain woke in London at five o’clock this morning our time,” said Dame M, “and had a view. I have disregarded it. It was that a flag should be flown from the nearest available flagstaff to the King’s place of residence, which he had ascertained from a map to be the transit authority’s flagstaff at the bus depot on the far side of the street.” A pause. “I have declined to fly the Royal Standard of the United Kingdom of America over a bus depot.”

“Thank you.”

“I have instead read the regulations again. They are, as I told you on Thursday, quite clear about a private house in which the sovereign is a guest. They say that in a private house the Standard is flown only at the invitation of the householder.” Her voice did not change. “I rang the householder at a quarter to eight.”

He turned round, with the receiver to his ear, and looked across the kitchen at Mrs Hartigan, at the end of the table, in her dressing gown, with her coffee, who was looking at nothing at all.

“She declined,” said Dame M. “She said that it was very kind of the Crown, and that she did not wish to seem rude, but that the lease on the flat forbids anything to be hung from the windows, and that the landlord is a Mr Gruber who lives in Maryland and has never come to look at the lift in eleven years but would certainly come to look at a flag.”

“So it doesn’t fly.”

“It does not fly there,” said Dame M. “And it does not fly here, because you are not here. The regulations are therefore satisfied in both places, by its not flying in either. The flagstaff on the Axis will remain bare until you return to the building on Monday, and the Axis will go on looking at it, and Mr Brandon will go on talking about it, and on Monday at half past three the Standard will go up, and the Axis will look at that instead.” A pause. “I am told that at nine o’clock last night eleven people were standing on the pavement at the Home Office lights looking up at the flagstaff. Two of them had brought a flask.”

“That’s…”

“It is the most attention that flagstaff has had since 1841, sir,” said Dame M. “I do not propose to deprive them of it.”

---

“There is one other thing,” said Dame M, “which is not the Standard.”

“Yes.”

“The league has invited the King to the Bowl.”

He stood very still in the passage door.

“It does so every year, sir. It has done so every year since the final was first played. The letter comes in November, on the league’s paper, to the Master of the Household, and it offers the King the box at the halfway line, and the anthem, and the Commissioner’s arm on the steps.” Her voice did not change. “And every year the Household has declined, because the King was in London, or because the King was ill, or because the final was in a city the King could not reach in a day. This year the final is in New Westminster, at the stadium on the eastern branch, a mile and a half from where you are standing, and the King is in the District. I have declined it anyway.”

“Good.”

“Official presence invokes the anthem protocol, sir. It would mean the box, and the Commissioner, and God Save the King after the Battle Hymn, and sixty thousand people turning round to look at you. And it would mean the Household. A car, an equerry, myself. It would mean, in short, a great many people coming for the King.” A very small pause. “I have read the napkin.”

He said nothing.

“But the league’s allocations are published, sir, not granted,” said Dame M, “and the Crown’s allocation has always had two parts. The box, for official presence, which I have declined. And six seats in the ordinary stands, which the Household has never once declined, because every year since 1967 they have gone by ballot to the staff. Last year they went to two footmen, a gardener, the man who sees to the flagstaff and his wife, and Bridget, who did not want to go and went.” She paused. “This year I have not held the ballot.”

“Dame M.”

“Tickets are transferable under lawful rules, sir. The article on the Bowl says so, and so does the league. At a quarter to eight, after the Standard, I asked the householder whether she would accept the transfer of six seats in Section 114, row K, for herself and her family and any guest she chose.” A pause. “Mrs Hartigan said that it was not for her to say, because it was her husband’s club and not hers, and that she would ask him. I heard her ask him. In German.”

He turned round in the passage door, with the receiver at his ear, and looked across the kitchen.

Mr Hartigan was at the stove, with his back to the room, turning a pancake that did not need turning.

“What did he say?” said Frederick.

“He said one word, sir,” said Dame M. “I did not need it translated.” She let that sit for exactly as long as it needed. “The tickets will be with Sergeant Kimura at the street door at noon, in an envelope addressed to Mrs Hartigan. Nobody will bring them upstairs. Who sits in the six seats is a matter for Mrs Hartigan.” Another pause. “I understand from her that she intends to take a guest.”

“I can’t go,” said Frederick. “Not officially. You said.”

“You cannot go officially, sir,” said Dame M. “I have declined it. Private attendance is a different capacity. It lies outside the official-neutrality rule. The article says so, in those words, and the distinction is maintained deliberately.” Her voice did not change at all. “A private person may sit in Section 114, row K, as the guest of a householder, and nobody plays anything for him. Whether he can sit there without sixty thousand people noticing is, I think, a question for Sergeant Castellanos, and I have already put it to him, and he has already said a word as well, which I also did not need translated.”

---

“Dame M.”

“Sir.”

He stood with his back to the kitchen, in the passage door, and lowered his voice, though the passage was empty and the kitchen was three yards away and Kate, he was quite certain, could hear every word.

“I need something by seven tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“At the street door. Not upstairs. Given to Kimura in the car, and Kimura can give it to me on the pavement when I come down for the bus.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s a football shirt.”

There was a pause on the line. Not long. Exactly long enough.

“Of which club, sir?”

“Not a club. The Kingdom of Hanover. The national side.” He thought about it. “It’s yellow and white, isn’t it? With the horse.”

“Yellow and white,” said Dame M, “with the white horse of Lower Saxony on the breast, sir. The Hanoverian side plays in the colours of the Welf standard.” Another pause, a shorter one. “In what size?”

He looked over his shoulder, through the passage door, at the table, where Theo was sitting with the jar of peanut butter in front of him and a spoon in his mouth, in the grey T-shirt he slept in, which was the largest size the shop on the avenue had, because Theo played on the defensive line and had lifted weights in the school weights room three mornings a week since he was thirteen.

“Extra large,” he said. “Possibly extra extra.”

“I see,” said Dame M.

She did not ask what it was for. She did not ask who it was for. He had known her since he was three, and she had never once asked him what a thing was for when she could find out by waiting.

“The Hanoverian Crown Office sends its courier with the week’s papers on Sunday night, sir,” said Dame M. “It lands at six on Monday morning. It is two o’clock in the afternoon in Hanover, and the bag is not sealed until nine.” Her voice did not change at all. “I shall ask the Crown Office to put something in it that is not a paper. It will be with Sergeant Kimura at a quarter to seven.”

“Thank you.”

“Sir,” said Dame M. “I have a question of my own, which you need not answer.”

“Yes.”

“If you lose,” said Dame M, “are you aware that I have also been asked by Mrs Hartigan’s son, through Sergeant Castellanos, on Wednesday night, to obtain a Green Bay Packers shirt in your size, by seven tomorrow morning, to be given to Sergeant Kimura in the car?”

He stood very still in the passage door.

“Did you?”

“I have it on my desk, sir,” said Dame M. “In a box. It came on Friday. I have not opened it.” A pause. “I am, as you know, the Household. I do not take sides.”

“Which one goes to the car?”

“Whichever one is needed, sir,” said Dame M, “at a quarter to seven,” and rang off.

---

The laundry room was in the basement.

Kate took him down after the boxes, which the Private Secretary brought at nine and took away at twenty past, and which had nothing in them but a letter from the Governor of Hawaii and a paper from Ottawa about fisheries, and which he did at the kitchen table among the pancake plates with Kate reading upside down and Mrs Hartigan turned to the window.

“You’re coming,” said Kate, picking up the heap of washing the size of a sheep. “Mum says. It’s a job.”

“I thought my job was the shopping.”

“Your job is anything Mum says is your job,” said Kate. “That’s what a job is. Bring your Saturday shirt.”

They went down the fifty-six steps. Kate went first, with the washing in both arms and her chin on top of it, and he went behind her with his Saturday shirt and a box of powder, past the window with the spider plant, past the twins’ door on the third floor, where a small voice behind the door said is that him and a larger one said Stavros, breakfast, past Mrs Okonjo’s door on the second, with the radio playing, past Mr Dabrowski’s on the first, where the television was on, very loud, a church service, people singing, and on, past the hall and the post boxes and the lift with its notice, down a further flight he had never known was there, narrower, concrete, under a bare bulb, to a door that said LAUNDRY. RESIDENTS ONLY. NO DYEING.

“No dyeing?” said Frederick.

“Mr Dabrowski,” said Kate. “In 2011. Somebody dyed a bedspread black in number three and it came out on everybody’s sheets for a month. He wrote that. He’s been here since before the Flood.” She pushed the door open with her hip. “He writes everything.”

---

There were four washing machines, white, in a row, and two dryers above them, and a long table for folding, and a window high up in the wall at the level of the pavement, through which you could see, from inside, the feet of people walking past on the street outside. A pair of boots. A dog. The wheels of a pushchair.

Kate put the washing on the table and began to sort it, fast, without looking, into heaps: darks, whites, colours, and a fourth heap, small, that she called the jumper, and that was a single woollen jumper, dark red, which she held up and looked at with great seriousness.

“This,” said Kate, “goes in on its own. On cold. It’s Bethany’s. She lent it to me in October and I’ve been too frightened to wash it.”

“Why?”

“Because if it goes in with anything white, everything white comes out pink, and then I have to tell Bethany, and Bethany cries.” She put it in the fourth machine on its own, and shut the door, and looked at the dial. “It’s the only rule in this room. Never put red in with anything.”

He looked at his Saturday shirt in his hand. White.

He looked at the dark red jumper going round on its own behind the round glass door of the fourth machine.

“Which one’s mine?” he said.

“The first,” said Kate. “With my whites.” She opened the door of the first machine and held out her hand. “Give.”

He gave her his shirt. She put it in, with her whites, and the powder, and shut the door, and turned the dial, and pressed the button, and the machine began to fill.

“There,” said Kate. “Now you’ve done laundry.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You came down the stairs and handed me a shirt and didn’t put it in with the red,” said Kate. “That’s what laundry is. Most people can’t manage the last bit.” She sat down on the folding table and swung her legs and looked at him, standing in the basement laundry room of a block of flats in the north-east of the capital in his socks and his Sunday shirt, under a bare bulb, watching a washing machine fill.

“Yellow,” said Kate.

He did not say anything.

“I saw your face,” said Kate. “At breakfast. When he said yellow. You kept it very still. You kept it so still I could see you keeping it still.” She swung her legs. “You’ve got a yellow one.”

“I haven’t got anything yet.”

“Yet,” said Kate.

He watched the machine.

“Don’t tell him,” he said.

Kate looked at him for a long moment, from the folding table, with her legs swinging, and her face, which was so like her mother’s about the eyes, doing something he could not read.

“I’ve got a photograph of him as a custard on my wall,” said Kate. “Next to a rabbit. I’ve never told him anything in my life that would make him happier than not knowing.” She jumped down off the table. “Colours,” she said, and opened the second machine, “go in this one.”