Book Nine: Junior Year Part Two: Westminster Characters
Chapter Fourteen
The Eve
Frederick. London. Friday, 16 November 2029.
In the autumn of 1973, after his coronation in London, he attended the Accession Service at Columbia Cathedral, the first sovereign to be present at it.
The envelope came at nine, by hand, on the Household’s tray.
Plain white, his name on the front in a neat upright hand he did not know, and on the back, A. Lyle. Inside, a folded sheet of the abbey’s paper and a photocopy.
Sir. You asked what was in the window on the north side in 1973. Plain glass, as I thought, from 1946 until 1974. I enclose the Dean’s minute of the gift. I thought you would like to have it the night before rather than the night after. A. L.
The photocopy was of a page from a minute book, typed on an old machine, the letters uneven.
21 March 1974. The Dean reported that the Royal Air Force Association had offered a memorial window to His late Majesty King Ernest IV, and that His Majesty King Ernest V had expressed the wish, through his Private Secretary, that it be placed in the third bay of the north aisle of the nave, being the place at which His Majesty had paused during the procession at his coronation. The Chapter agreed.
He read it twice.
Father. Window. Looked up. Saw him.
Plain glass. A young man of twenty-six in a crimson robe two-thirds of the way up the nave, stopping for ten seconds under a window with nothing in it, and looking up. And a year later, a window, put there because he had asked, where he had stopped. With a dog that was meant to be a lion and a face that was a bad likeness.
He put the photocopy back in the envelope and the envelope in the inside pocket of his coat, with the paper poppy and the plan and the radio message from over the sea, Papa asleep. Snoring.
His mother came at ten.
His room was on the second floor overlooking the garden, a high square room with a bed too big for anybody and a fire somebody had lit and a dressing gown laid out that was not his. Through a door in the wall, shut, the room where his father was.
She knocked and came in without waiting and sat on the end of the bed, the way she had when he was seven and had a temperature, and looked at him.
“Du sover inte.”
“No.”
“Nobody does. Not the night before.” She folded her hands in her lap. “In Sweden the last King to be crowned was Oscar the Second, in 1873. The next one decided it was a great deal of trouble for a hat, and nobody has done it since.” She looked at the fire. “So I have never seen one, except your father’s on film, in the library at Solliden, when I was fourteen, at school. I did not know then that I would marry him.” A pause. “I thought he looked very frightened, and very thin, and I felt sorry for him.”
“Was he frightened?”
“He says not. He says he was cold.” Her eyes creased. “It is the same thing, with your father.”
The fire moved.
“Mamma.”
“Ja.”
“Where will you be? Tomorrow.”
“In the south side of the sanctuary. In the front. In a chair with my name on it, which I am told is a great privilege, and which I am told I must not leave for four hours.” She looked at him. “Do not look for me.”
“Why not?”
“Because you will find me, and then you will look again, to see that I am still there, and then you will spend the morning checking.” She leaned forward and put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart, where she had put it on the apron in June. “I will be there. You will know. You do not need to see it.”
She left the hand there a moment, and took it away.
“Your father is awake,” she said, standing. “He is pretending not to be. Niamh says he has been pretending since nine.” She went to the door to the corridor. “The other door is not locked. It never is.” She opened the corridor door, and stopped. “God natt, älskling. Sleep. Or don’t. You will be crowned either way.”
The door in the wall was open an inch. He had not seen anybody open it.
He got up at half past eleven and went to it and stood there. Through the inch, darkness, and a lamp low on a table, and a shape in the bed, and the sound of breathing that was not the sound of somebody asleep.
He pushed the door.
His father was on his back on three pillows with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling. The black stick with the silver band was propped against the bedside table where he could reach it. Niamh was in a chair in the corner, under a blanket, asleep, or pretending to be.
His father’s head turned on the pillow.
“Boy.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“No.” A breath. “Nor. I.”
Frederick came and sat on the edge of the bed. His father’s hand moved on the cover, slowly, and found his knee and stayed there.
Neither of them spoke. The lamp. The fire in the grate, low. Rain, still, on the window. Somewhere a long way off in the Palace, a clock.
“Papa. Canon Lyle sent me something.” He took the envelope out. “The window. On the north side. It was plain glass in 1973.” He did not open the envelope. “You asked for the window to go there. Where you stopped.”
His father looked at him.
The breath. The hold. The lips trying the first shape of it. Once. Again.
“I,” said his father.
A breath.
“Saw.”
Frederick waited.
“Him.”
His father’s hand tightened on his knee.
“There.”
The breath went out of him and came back and held, longer than any of them, and Frederick could see what it was costing, and did not help, and did not hurry.
“Truly.”
Five words. One at a time, with the breath between, in the dark, in a room at the back of a palace in London on the night before.
I saw him there. Truly.
Not a likeness. Not glass. A man of twenty-six who had lost his father the year before, walking up a nave in a crimson robe, who had looked up at a plain window and seen him, and had stopped, and had said so to nobody for fifty-six years except a Dean’s minute, through a Private Secretary, in the third person, as a place in a building.
Frederick sat on the edge of the bed and found that he was crying, and did not wipe it, because his father’s hand was on his knee and he did not want to move.
“Did you tell anybody?”
His father’s head moved on the pillow. No.
“Not Mamma?”
A very small movement of the mouth. Almost a smile.
“Now,” said his father. “You.”
In the corner, under the blanket, Niamh did not move at all, with great skill.
He did not go back to his own room. He sat on the floor by his father’s bed with his back against it, the way he had sat on the floor of the blue car at the top of the wheel, and his father’s hand came down off the edge of the bed, slowly, and rested on his shoulder, and stayed there.
At some point the breathing above him changed, and caught, and went long, and his father was asleep. Snoring. Niamh would say it was good.
Frederick stayed where he was.
He did not know whether he would see anybody in a window tomorrow. He did not think he would. He did not think that was what find yours had meant. He thought it had meant that there would be a place, two-thirds of the way up something, where he would stop, without deciding to, and that he would know it when he got there, and that nobody would know why, and that it would go in somebody’s notes with a question mark.
The clock a long way off struck twelve.
The seventeenth.
His father’s hand was still on his shoulder, asleep, and he did not move it, and some time after one, against the side of the bed, with his head on the cover, he was asleep too.