Sceptre East

His parents went first, at eight.

He watched their aircraft go from the window of the lounge at the field in Maryland: grey, the Air Force’s, the same type as his, lit up on the ramp under the floodlights and then moving, slowly, along the taxiway into the dark, and then the sound of it going away down the runway, and the lights climbing, and gone.

An hour ahead. Because of the rule.

His father had gone up the steps on his own feet. Not with the frame; with a stick, a black one with a silver band, and Niamh one step below him and Mr Bayliss one step below her, and at the top he had stopped and turned round, which nobody had asked him to do, and looked down across the floodlit concrete at the lounge window, and lifted the stick about two inches. Then the door.

“He waved,” said Theo, beside him at the window. “With the stick.”

“He waved.”

“Is he allowed to do that?”

“Nobody’s told him he isn’t.”

---

At nine his own.

The same type, the same grey, with a cabin fitted at the front: a long room with eight wide seats that went nearly flat, a table, a curtain, and behind the curtain the ordinary seats, rows of them, for the Household. ROYAL AMERICAN AIR FORCE along the side, and on the tail the Realm’s roundel, and on the steps a captain he did not know, a Major Okoro, who saluted and said that the weather was fair to Gander and less fair after, and that they would be at Northolt at a quarter past eight, London time.

He had asked for the Hartigans to be on it. Nobody had argued. A Page’s family, flying with the Page, to see him carry the train; Dame M said there was precedent, from 1838, and he did not ask whether there really was.

So: Anneliese Hartigan in the seat across from his, upright, with her handbag on her knee, looking at the cabin the way she had looked at the Blue Drawing Room in July, as though she would like to know who cleaned it. Peter Hartigan behind her, very still, in his good jacket, with his hands flat on the armrests, a man who had driven ten thousand people and been driven by nobody. Theo by the window, already with his shoes off. And Kate.

Kate was across the aisle from Theo with her face against the window and her phone in her hand, and when the engines started she made a small sound and turned round and looked at the whole cabin, at all of them, at Castellanos in the seat by the curtain and Dame M behind him and the Private Secretary behind her with a box on his knee, and at Frederick.

“I’m on Sceptre,” said Kate.

“You’re on Sceptre.”

“Bethany’s never going to believe me.”

“Bethany’s got a rabbit called Professor,” said Theo, without opening his eyes.

---

The tower said it. He heard it faintly through the curtain to the flight deck, which was open: Sceptre, runway one-niner, cleared for take-off. He knew what it sounded like now. It sounded ordinary. He found he was glad of that.

The engines rose and the floor tilted and the lights of Maryland went under the wing, orange, a great many of them, all on.

Then the dark.

---

Anneliese Hartigan was asleep before Delaware, sitting up, with her handbag still on her knee. Peter Hartigan did not sleep at all. Theo was asleep against the window with his mouth open, as he had been asleep against every window Frederick had ever seen him near.

Kate was not.

At midnight, over somewhere in the dark that might have been Maine, she came across the aisle in her socks and sat in the empty seat beside his, and pulled her knees up, and looked out past him at nothing.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Why an hour?”

He looked at her.

“Mum told me,” said Kate. “On Sunday. I asked her why your mum and dad went first and she said because of the rule, the way you all say it, like it’s the name of a thing. And I said what rule, and she told me.” She looked at her knees. “So that if one goes down there’s still the other. That’s the rule. Isn’t it.”

“Yes.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes.”

“Nobody says it out loud.”

“No.”

Kate was quiet for a while.

“I’m going to be a nurse,” she said. “Mum says the first thing you learn is to say the thing out loud. To the patient. In words. Not we’ll see and not it’s procedure. The thing.” She looked at him. “So I’m saying it. It’s horrible, and they’re an hour ahead of us, and your dad waved with his stick, and I hate it.”

“So do I.”

“Good.” She put her chin on her knees. “Then we both hate it and that’s that.” She looked out of the window at the dark. “Is that the sea?”

“Not yet. Nova Scotia. The sea’s after Gander.”

“How do you know?”

“Timetable.”

Kate stared at him, and then laughed, quietly, so as not to wake her mother, and went back across the aisle and lay down with her coat over her and was asleep in ten minutes.

---

At a quarter past two he was the only one awake in the front of the cabin.

The reading light over his seat made a small yellow circle on the tray table, and in the circle was Lord Whitlock’s plan of the abbey, unfolded along its old folds, the paper soft and brown at the edges. He had brought it in the inside pocket of his coat with the paper poppy.

The west door. The nave, a hundred and twenty-three yards. The theatre. The steps. Twenty yards to the chair.

Through the open curtain, faintly, a voice he did not know, a woman’s, calm and level and Canadian:

Sceptre, Gander Centre, good evening. Radar contact. Climb flight level three-nine-zero.

And Major Okoro: Three-nine-zero, Sceptre. Good evening, Gander.

He sat with his hand flat on the plan.

The same room. Not the same voice; it would not be, after a year. But the same room, the same frequency, a dark room in Newfoundland with screens in it, where somebody had heard three words and a name, and then nothing, and had gone on calling for an hour into the nothing, because that was what you did.

Good evening.

He looked out of the window. There was nothing under the wing at all. No lights. Not one. A long way down, very faint, where the moon was, a grey shine that might have been cloud and might have been water.

Castellanos was awake. Frederick knew without turning round. He was in the seat by the curtain with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling, which had nothing on it.

Frederick did not go to the flight deck. He had thought he might. He sat with the plan under the reading light and watched the grey shine under the wing, the sea his father’s aircraft had gone into on the twenty-fifth of September last year, somewhere off to the north of this line in the dark, and did not look for anything, because there was nothing to see and he knew it.

At three the Private Secretary came forward through the curtain with a sheet of paper.

“From your mother’s aircraft, sir. By radio. Through Gander.” He held it out. “I was asked to give it to you at once, whatever the hour.”

It was one line, in the Private Secretary’s handwriting, taken down from the radio.

Papa asleep. Snoring. Niamh says this is good. Mamma.

He read it twice. He folded it and put it in the pocket with the poppy.

“Thank you.”

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary, and went back through the curtain, and Frederick turned off the reading light.

---

He slept for two hours. He did not mean to.

When he woke, the cabin was grey, and somebody had put a blanket over him, and the blind was up, and outside the window there was a long low line of cloud, white, and under it, through gaps, green. Very green. Fields with hedges round them, small, a great many, all different shapes, like the pieces of a puzzle somebody had given up on.

“That’s England,” said Theo, from his window, with his face against it. “Isn’t it.”

“That’s Cornwall. Or Devon.”

“Timetable?”

“Map.”

Kate was at her window. Anneliese Hartigan was awake and had put on lipstick, which Frederick had never seen her do. Peter Hartigan had not moved and was looking at the fields under the wing with an expression of very great suspicion, as though he expected to be asked to drive across them.

The engines changed. The floor tilted.

Sceptre, Northolt Tower. A different voice, English, quick and dry. Wind two-four-zero at twelve, runway two-five, cleared to land.

---

Northolt was grey. A grey airfield in a grey morning, wet, forty-six degrees, with a line of officers on the concrete in greatcoats and a Union flag on a pole that the wind had wrapped round itself.

His parents’ aircraft was on the stand next to theirs, empty, its door shut.

At the foot of the steps a tall man in a dark coat bowed his head and said he was the Lord Lieutenant, and that His Majesty was welcome, and that the Queen and the Duke had gone ahead to the Palace an hour ago, and that the Duke had walked down the steps.

“All of them?”

“All of them, sir. With a stick.” The Lord Lieutenant paused. “He stopped at the bottom and said something to the officer commanding the station. The officer commanding has asked me to tell you what it was, in case you would like to know.”

“What was it?”

“Cold,” said the Lord Lieutenant. “Good.”

---

The cars went into London along a road he did not know, between houses he did not know, in rain. Brick, and more brick, and red buses, and a great many people with umbrellas who did not look at the cars at all, because there were cars like it every day, and because it was raining.

Theo sat beside him with his face against the window and said nothing for twenty minutes, which had never happened.

Then the river. Grey, wide, fast, with the tide going out. A bridge. And on the far side, over the trees, over the roofs, grey on grey, two square towers and a long high roof between them, older than anything in the Realm.

He had seen it once. At eleven, from a gallery, for forty minutes, with his father.

He took the plan out of his pocket and did not unfold it. He held it on his knee and looked at the towers until the car turned a corner and they were gone.

“Is that it?” said Theo.

“That’s it.”

Theo looked at the place where the towers had been.

“It’s very big,” said Theo, eventually, “for a job with stairs.”