Six Seats

At noon Kate went down for the envelope.

She went because her mother said so, and because the envelope was for her mother, and because Kate was family and not Household, and could go down fifty-six steps to the street and stand on the pavement and hold out her hand to a protection officer at a car, and come back up with something in it, and nobody could say that anything had been carried upstairs by anybody who should not have carried it.

Frederick watched her from the window over the sink.

Kimura was at the car at the corner with the envelope in her hand, and she held it out, and Kate took it, and they said something to each other that he could not hear, and Kimura laughed, which Kimura did perhaps once a month, and Kate came back across the street with the envelope held flat against her college jumper in both hands, the way the Private Secretary held a red box.

She put it down on the oilcloth with the lemons, in front of her mother.

It was long and cream and stiff, with the league’s crest in the corner, and under the crest, typed, THE CROWN’S ALLOCATION, and under that, written in a small upright hand that Frederick knew from cards left on his plate since he was four, Transferred to Mrs A. Hartigan, under the league’s rules, with the compliments of the Household. M.

Mrs Hartigan did not open it at once. She read the front of it, upside down, twice.

Then she opened it.

---

Six tickets.

Long, stiff, printed, in the league’s colours, which were nobody’s colours, a dark grey and a white, so that no club could say the final was theirs before it was played. On each one, in black, THE COLUMBIA BOWL. NEW WESTMINSTER. SUNDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2030. KICK-OFF 18.30. And under that, SECTION 114. ROW K. And a seat number, from eleven to sixteen.

Mrs Hartigan laid them out on the oilcloth in a row, between the sugar hen and the bread board, the way he had laid out three plaster heads for the coinage, and looked at them.

Mr Hartigan, in his chair by the window, lowered the newspaper.

“Section one fourteen,” said Mr Hartigan, slowly, “is behind our bench.”

“I know where it is,” said his wife.

“Row K is halfway up.” He looked at the tickets. “You can see the whole field from row K.”

“I know, Peter.”

He looked at the tickets a moment longer. Then he raised the newspaper again and held it up in front of his face, and did not turn a page, and did not lower it for some time.

---

“Six,” said Theo, counting, at the table. “Mum, Dad, Kate, me.” He looked at Frederick. “Him.” He looked at the sixth ticket. “Who’s the sixth?”

Mrs Hartigan picked up the sixth ticket. Seat sixteen. The end of the row.

“The man who’ll be there anyway,” she said.

She got up and went to the window over the sink and looked down at the car at the corner. Castellanos had relieved Kimura at noon; Frederick had seen them change, Kimura getting out and Castellanos getting in without a word between them, the way they always changed. He was sitting at the wheel now, square, with the newspaper folded small.

“If the boy’s going to sit in Section 114, row K, among sixty thousand people,” said Mrs Hartigan, to the window, “then Sergeant Castellanos is going to be standing somewhere in the gangway beside row K for four hours with his hands empty, watching sixty thousand people and not the football. I’ve seen him stand. I’m not having him stand for four hours at a final.” She came back from the window and put the sixth ticket on the oilcloth apart from the others. “He can sit down. At the end. In seat sixteen. Like anybody.”

“He won’t,” said Frederick.

“He will if I give it to him,” said Mrs Hartigan, “because it’ll be mine to give and not yours.”

---

At two Theo came out of the bedroom with the partition with the second cheese hat.

He was already dressed for the Bowl. The green and gold shirt, very old, very big, with the large G on the front and a number on the back that had been his grandfather’s, the sleeves past his hands. The green and gold socks. The knitted scarf. And on his head, at an angle, with the point at the front, the hat in the shape of a wedge of cheese: yellow foam, triangular, full of holes, without question the most ridiculous object Frederick had ever seen on a human being, and he had seen the Lord Chamberlain in full fig on the morning of a coronation.

The second one was in his hand.

“Now,” said Theo, before Frederick could say anything. “Listen. Before you say it. I’ve read the article.” He held up his telephone, with the Register on it, open, at the Columbia Bowl, at a paragraph he had clearly found some time ago and had been waiting to read aloud. “Private attendance is a different capacity and lies outside the official-neutrality rule.” He lowered the telephone. “Outside. Dame M said so. The article says so. You’re not going officially. You’re going privately. In row K. As Mum’s guest.” He held out the cheese. “So it’s allowed.”

Frederick looked at the cheese.

He had read the paragraph too. At thirteen, in the library at the Palace, the same afternoon he had read Theo’s article and laughed at cannot support anything. He had read it twice. He had thought then that it was the kind of sentence the Register wrote when it was leaving a door open for somebody, a very small door, at the back, which only one person in the Realm would ever need to use, and that the person had never used it.

His father had never used it. Not once in fifty-six years. Not in London, not in Ottawa, not in any realm. He had told Frederick so at the lodge at Lac du Roi, at nine, in front of the television: we don’t support anybody, because we’re everybody’s, and it was one of the very few sacrifices of the job he had never got used to. And he had been allowed, all along, privately. He had known he was allowed. He had never once done it.

“It’s allowed,” said Frederick.

“So put it on.”

“Private isn’t the same as unseen,” said Frederick. “Somebody’ll take a photograph. Somebody always does. And on Monday it won’t say privately. It’ll say the King in a cheese.” He looked at the hat in Theo’s hand. “And my father never did. He could have, and he never did.”

Theo looked at him for a long moment under his own cheese.

Then he put the second hat back round the bedroom door, on top of the chest of drawers, carefully, like a man putting away a gift that has been refused for reasons he respects and does not agree with.

“Fine,” said Theo. “Neutral. In row K. In the middle of the whole of Wisconsin.” He came back. “What are you going to wear? Neutrally?”

Frederick looked down at himself. His Sunday shirt, white, which Kate had washed that morning with her whites and not with the red. And over it, because February, the grey jumper from his list. Plain. Grey. No colour at all.

“This,” he said. “And my coat.”

“You look like a cloud,” said Kate, from the table.

“Neutral.”

“As Switzerland,” said Theo.

“As Sweden,” said Kate, and her mother, at the stove, said Katharina, in the voice that meant the joke was not used up but would be if she said it again.

---

At four o’clock, when he rang the kitchen at the Palace from the green telephone on the wall, Mr Hartigan got up out of his chair before Frederick had sat down with the blue book, and held out his hand for the receiver, and said the whole of the twenty-two’s Sunday service into it, from the depot at six fifteen to the boathouses and back, in the voice for the stops, and said it again when he was asked, and gave the receiver back, and went to put on his old green and gold shirt.

Then Frederick read Monday’s arrivals, all of them, to the night train from Savannah.

At the end the breath went in, and held, and his father’s lips tried the shape.

“Bowl,” said his father.

“I’m going,” said Frederick. “Tonight. In the stands. Privately. With the Hartigans.” He looked at the blue book. “Dame M gave Mrs Hartigan the six seats. The Household’s ones. She didn’t hold the ballot.”

The breath. Held. Let go. A long silence on the line, longer than any silence his father had made at four o’clock since December, and in it, faintly, the clock that was four minutes slow, and Bridget not moving at the dresser.

“Go,” said his father.

And then, after another breath, with something in it that Frederick had last heard over the chemistry paper and Latin:

“Neutral.”

From the dresser at the Palace, very faintly, Bridget laughed, and coughed to cover it.

---

They went down at half past four.

All six, though only five of them went down the stairs; the sixth was in the car at the corner and did not know yet what was in the envelope in Mrs Hartigan’s coat pocket with his seat number on it. Mr Hartigan first, in his old green and gold shirt and a green and gold scarf, with a cool box in his hand with the twenty-four Bratserl in it, raw, in their white paper and string from Margit’s counter, and a jar of the sweet brown mustard, and ten Semmerl in a bag. Then Mrs Hartigan, in her coat, with a green and gold scarf that she said she wore only for finals and only under protest. Then Kate in her college jumper with a green and gold bobble hat. Then Theo in his cheese. Then Frederick, in grey, in his school coat, last.

Professor stayed. Kate put him in his box on the rug with a lettuce leaf and the radio on low, the music station, and told him that if Green Bay lost he was not to take it personally.

On the third-floor landing, Stavros was sitting on the bottom stair of the next flight in green and gold pyjamas with his red wellington boots on, both of them, with his chin in his hands, waiting, because he had heard them coming and had come out to see.

He stood up when Frederick came round the turn of the stairs.

“Are you going to the Bowl?”

“Yes.”

“To the real Bowl? In the stadium?”

“Yes.”

Stavros looked up at him, a long way up, with his enormous brown eyes, at the grey jumper under the school coat, and then at Theo’s cheese going on ahead down the next flight, and then back at Frederick.

“If Green Bay lose,” said Stavros, “will you be sad?”

The stairwell went quiet. Below, on the second flight, Mrs Hartigan stopped. Kate stopped. Theo, under his cheese, stopped and looked back up.

“I’m neutral,” said Frederick.

Stavros considered this, on the bottom stair, in his boots.

“That’s sad,” said Stavros, and went back in.

---

On the first-floor landing Mr Dabrowski’s door was open on its chain, with the television on behind it, very loud, the pre-match, men in suits talking about history.

Theo stopped at it. Frederick saw him stop, and take something out of the inside pocket of the green and gold shirt, where he had moved it that afternoon from his blazer, from behind its button, with the eleven pounds, and unfold it, and hold it up to the gap in the door at the height of the chain.

Frederick went on down. He did not want to see what Mr Dabrowski thought of rule three.

---

They walked.

The stadium was on the eastern branch, a mile and a half from the depot, down the long straight road past the depot gates and the bus garage and the old brick warehouses and the bridge over the railway, and the whole of the north-east of the District walked it on Bowl night, Theo said, because there was nowhere to park and the buses were full and the walk was half of it.

The whole of the north-east was walking it now.

He had not known there were so many people in the north-east. They came out of every door on every street as the six of them went down the road towards the river in the falling light: out of the blocks and the terraces and the corner shops and the church on the avenue with ALL WELCOME on its board, in green and gold, in hats and scarves and shirts and coats, in cheeses, with cool boxes and children and flags, more and more of them at every corner, until by the bridge over the railway the road was full from kerb to kerb with green and gold, moving all one way, towards the river and the lights coming on over the stadium, and singing.

He did not know the song. It was the Green Bay song. Theo knew it. Theo sang it, in the cheese, very loudly, very badly, slightly ahead of everybody, like Marcus.

Nobody looked at him.

He walked in the middle of a mile and a half of green and gold in a grey jumper and his school coat, with Mrs Hartigan on his left and Mr Hartigan on his right with the cool box, and nobody looked at him at all, because it was getting dark, and because everybody was looking at the lights over the stadium, and because a tall boy of sixteen in grey in the middle of the Hartigans of the fourth floor was the least interesting thing on the road. Fifteen yards behind, Kimura, in her raincoat, not looking at him. Fifteen yards ahead, a large man in a dark coat whom Frederick did not know and understood to be the night man. And somewhere, he did not know where, he could not see him, he did not need to, Castellanos.

---

The depot’s drivers were in the car park.

They had half an oil drum on legs, with a grid on top, and charcoal in it going red, at the end of a row of cars by the river fence, under a lamp, with a green and gold flag on a pole tied to the wing mirror of a van. Four of them. Big men in green and gold, with beer, and their wives, and a dog. They looked up when Mr Hartigan came along the row of cars with the cool box.

“Peter,” they said. Several of them. Not loudly.

“Lads,” said Mr Hartigan.

He put the cool box down by the drum and opened it and took out Margit’s white paper parcel and untied the string, and laid the twenty-four Bratserl on the grid in two rows, one at a time, with his fingers, and they hissed.

Then the four drivers looked past him, at the five people who had come along the row of cars with him, and at the tall boy in grey at the back, and Frederick watched it arrive on four faces at once, from one side to the other, like the colour into a river.

Nobody said anything.

One of them, the biggest, with a beard going grey, looked at Frederick for a long time over the charcoal. Then he looked at Mr Hartigan, who was turning the Bratserl one by one with a fork and not looking at anybody.

“Peter,” said the man with the beard.

“Joe.”

“That who I think it is?”

Mr Hartigan turned a Bratserl.

“That’s Theo’s friend,” said Mr Hartigan.

Joe looked at Frederick a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, slowly, and picked up a Semmerl from the bag, and split it with his thumbs, and took the first Bratserl off the grid with his fingers, which he should not have been able to do because it was hot, and put it in the roll, and put the sweet brown mustard on it with the back of a spoon, and held it out across the half oil drum.

“Peter says you bought these,” said Joe.

“At Dorsey’s. Yesterday.”

“Then you’d better eat one,” said Joe, “before Margit sees you haven’t.”

---

Section 114 was behind the Green Bay bench, and row K was halfway up, and you could see the whole field from it.

He had been in big places. He had been in Westminster Abbey with two thousand people in it, under a canopy. He had been on a lawn at Government House in Los Angeles with nine hundred people on cots. He had never been in a place like this: a bowl of light, enormous, open to the sky, with the field in the bottom of it so green under the floodlights that it looked painted, and sixty thousand people going up all round it in tiers into the dark, and a noise that was not a noise but a kind of weather.

Seat thirteen. Between Theo in his cheese on the left and Mrs Hartigan on the right. Mr Hartigan beyond her, in eleven, on the aisle, with his hands on his knees already. Kate in fifteen, beyond Theo.

Seat sixteen, at the end of the row, was empty.

Mrs Hartigan took the envelope out of her coat pocket and took the last ticket out of it and turned round in her seat and held it up, over her shoulder, towards the gangway, at the height of her head, without looking where she was holding it.

A hand came and took it.

Frederick did not turn round. He heard the gangway step creak, and the seat at the end of the row go down, and somebody sit in it, heavily, the way a man sits who has been standing for a long time, and a long breath let out.

“Thank you, madam,” said Castellanos, from seat sixteen.

“You’re welcome, Sergeant,” said Mrs Hartigan, facing the field.

---

Three rows down, in row H, in a green and gold coat over her Dorsey’s tabard, with a cheese on her head, a woman turned round in her seat and looked up the tiers, and saw them, and her face broke open like bread.

“Na servus,” shouted Margit, up three rows of sixty thousand people. “Topfen!”

“Margit,” said Mr Hartigan, from eleven.

“Peter,” shouted Margit, and turned back round, and that, Frederick saw from the way the people round her looked at each other, was something that had happened at every final Green Bay had been in since 2026, wherever the final was, wherever Margit was sitting, and he was, for the first time, inside it.

On the field the teams came out, green and gold from the tunnel below them and dark blue and red from the far end, and the weather of sixty thousand people turned into a single sound and went up into the dark over the stadium and did not come down.

Then a band, on the field, in the middle.

The Battle Hymn of the Kingdom.

Sixty thousand people stood up. All of them, all at once, in every tier, in green and gold and dark blue and red and grey, without anybody telling them, for the country, and Frederick stood with them, between a cheese and a nurse, in row K, and sang it, because he knew the words and because everybody round him was singing it, Theo very loudly and very badly and slightly ahead, Mrs Hartigan very quietly, Mr Hartigan not at all, with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the flag at the end of the field.

At the end of the verse the band stopped.

And there was nothing after it.

No second anthem. No God Save the King. The protocol was clear, and the Household had declined, and the King was not here officially. He was a private person in seat thirteen of row K of Section 114, the guest of a householder, and nobody played anything for him at all.

Sixty thousand people sat down.

He sat down with them.

It was, he thought, sitting in the noise between a cheese and a nurse, with a Bratserl in his stomach and the whole field laid out under the lights and Castellanos breathing at the end of the row, the first time in his life that a band had stopped and he had not been waiting for the next thing it was going to play.