The Fitting

Three boxes in the library, on the long table, where the Charter usually lay open between the brass lions. The Charter had been moved to the window seat for the morning.

The boxes were long and flat and covered in black cloth, with brass corners, and they had come from London on Thursday on the Air Force’s courier flight and been carried up the stone stairs of the north wing by four men, one at each corner, the way you carry something asleep.

Three people from London stood beside them.

Mr Hawes, the robemaker, small and bald and seventy, in a grey waistcoat with a tape measure round his neck like a doctor’s stethoscope. His assistant, a young woman called Priyanka who had pins in her mouth and did not take them out once in three hours and spoke round them perfectly clearly. And a tall woman from the Lord Chamberlain’s office, Mrs Ashdown, with a clipboard, who said she was there to see that everything was done as it had been done before, and who knew how everything had been done before because she had the notes from 1973 in a folder with a ribbon round it.

“Your Majesty,” said Mr Hawes, and bowed, and then looked at him, all of him, from the top of his head to his shoes, the way his father looked at him, except that Mr Hawes was measuring.

“Oh dear,” said Mr Hawes.

“What?”

“Nothing, sir. Nothing at all. You’ve grown.”

---

They had measured him in April, in this room, before Santa Monica: Mr Hawes with the tape, Priyanka writing the numbers in a small black book, Mrs Ashdown reading the 1973 figures aloud beside them for comparison. He had been an inch and a quarter narrower across the shoulders than his father at twenty-six, and two inches longer in the arm.

“An inch across the back since April,” said Mr Hawes now, with the tape round him. “Half an inch in the arm. And the neck.” He measured the neck. He said nothing about the neck. Priyanka wrote it down round the pins.

“Is that bad?”

“It is entirely ordinary, sir, at sixteen. It is only that the robe does not know you are sixteen. The robe has been made for a gentleman in April.” He let the tape go. “We shall tell it.”

---

The first box held linen.

A plain white tunic, sleeveless, to the ankle, as simple as a nightshirt. The colobium sindonis, Mrs Ashdown said, reading it off her notes as though it were a train. Worn for the anointing and nothing else, under everything else, seen by almost nobody.

“It is the one thing in the three boxes that is new each time,” she said. “Everything else is kept. This is made for the one person and the one morning. It is not reused.”

He put it on over his shirt in the alcove behind the screen, because Priyanka asked him to, and came out, and stood on the small square of carpet Mr Hawes had put down by the window.

Nobody said anything. Mr Hawes walked round him once, slowly, and touched the hem in two places, and said yes, and Priyanka took a pin out of her mouth and put it in, and put it back.

It was the lightest thing he had ever worn. He looked down at it and thought of the white tunic he had read about in the large-type draft: the King, having been disrobed of his crimson robe, shall sit in King Edward’s Chair, and a canopy shall be held over him, and he shall be anointed. Behind a screen. The only part of the day that nobody would see.

“Is that all it is?” he said.

“That is all it is, sir,” said Mrs Ashdown. “That is rather the point of it.”

---

The second box was gold.

A long coat of cloth of gold, stiff, heavy, with wide sleeves, the supertunica; and over it a mantle of gold cloth with eagles and roses and thistles and shamrocks woven into it, so heavy that Priyanka and Mr Hawes lifted it between them. His father’s, from 1973. His grandfather’s before that, from 1937. Older.

“It has been let out and taken in eleven times since 1821,” said Mrs Ashdown. “We have the notes for nine of them.”

It went on over the white linen. It did not fit. It hung from his shoulders and stood away from his chest and the sleeves came past his fingertips.

“Good,” said Mr Hawes, unexpectedly, walking round. “Good. That is what it should do. It is a garment for being dressed in, not for wearing. You will not walk far in it.” He pinned the sleeves back at the wrist. “In April it was two inches too wide here.” He touched the shoulder. “Now it is one. You have done half my work for me, sir.”

“Is that why you said oh dear?”

“No, sir,” said Mr Hawes. “That is coming.”

---

The third box was the long one.

Crimson velvet, edged with ermine, with a train six yards long, folded in the box in long zigzags under tissue paper like a map. The Robe of State. The one he would wear into the abbey, up the whole of the nave, a hundred and twenty-three yards from the west door, and out again later, a different one, purple, which was in London still and would be fitted there.

Mr Hawes and Priyanka lifted it out between them and Mrs Ashdown took the end of the train, and they put it on him, over his ordinary clothes this time, the linen and the gold back in their boxes.

The weight came down on his shoulders all at once. Not like the Realm’s robe at the State Opening, which was heavy the way a coat is heavy. This was heavy the way a person is, leaning on you.

“Walk, sir,” said Mr Hawes. “To the door and back. Slowly. As you would.”

He walked to the library door. The train came after him, six yards of it, across the carpet, and he heard it, a long soft sound like a broom. At the door he turned. The train did not. It lay where it was in a long crimson river across the floor of the library, and he stood at the end of it, held by it, and could not get back to the window without walking round it, which you could not do in a robe.

“Ah,” said Mr Hawes. “That is the oh dear.”

“I can’t turn.”

“No, sir. Nobody can. That is what the pages are for.” Mr Hawes came and gathered up the end of the train in both arms. “Four of them, at the corners. They turn it for you. You do not turn the robe. The robe is turned.” He looked at Frederick over an armful of crimson. “And the shoulders are now an inch too narrow. Because you have grown. So we shall let it out. And then you will have a robe that fits a gentleman of sixteen in October, and in November you will be sixteen and a half and it will be a quarter of an inch tight, and you will not notice, and neither will anybody else, and I shall.”

---

Theo came at eleven, with Kate.

Kate was not supposed to be there. Dame M had said one witness for a page’s fitting, a parent, and Anneliese Hartigan had a shift, and Peter Hartigan had a bus, and Kate had come on the number twenty-two from the college on the river and said at the north wing door that she was a parent for the purposes of the morning.

“Camera,” said Dame M at the door.

Kate gave it to her. Dame M put it in the pocket of her grey suit and kept her hand on it.

“Phone.”

Kate gave her that too.

“Thank you, Miss Hartigan. You may have both back at the door.”

Theo stood on the small square of carpet by the window in his school trousers and shirt with his arms out while Priyanka measured him for the livery the London pages wore. Scarlet coat. White waistcoat. White breeches to the knee. White stockings. Black shoes with silver buckles. Priyanka read each item aloud round the pins as she measured for it, and Kate, on a chair by the bookcase with her hands folded in her lap and no camera, made a small sound at each one.

“Breeches,” said Priyanka, round the pins.

Kate made the sound.

“Inside leg,” said Priyanka.

“Kate,” said Theo, through his teeth.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking it.”

“I’m thinking about the forearm flexors,” said Kate. “For my exam.”

Mr Hawes, measuring Frederick’s arm for the third time, did not look up.

“The breeches,” he said, to nobody in particular, “were worn by the pages of honour at the coronation of 1821, and 1838, and every coronation since, and on every one of those occasions, Miss Hartigan, there was somebody’s sister.”

Kate looked at him.

“And she was not allowed a camera either,” said Mr Hawes. “In 1838 it would have taken eleven minutes and he would have had to stand very still.” He made a mark on the robe with chalk. “Mr Hartigan, you are a size larger than the page of 1973 in every measurement. He was the son of a groom at the Mews. He went on to drive buses in Croydon, I believe.”

Theo stared at him.

“Mrs Ashdown has the notes,” said Mr Hawes.

“He did,” said Mrs Ashdown, without looking up from the folder. “Route 119. Until 2009.”

---

At one they stopped for sandwiches, which Bridget sent up on a tray and which Mr Hawes ate standing up at the window with great appreciation and Priyanka ate round the pins.

Mrs Ashdown sat at the end of the long table with her folder open and the large-type order of service beside it and went through the day with him, page by page, the way the Private Secretary went through the Speech.

“Ten forty-five, the west door. The procession forms in the annexe. You go in last but for the train.”

“How long from the west door to the theatre?”

“Seven minutes, sir, at a processional pace. Your father took seven and a half. The choir sang the anthem twice through, which was not intended.”

“Why did he take seven and a half?”

Mrs Ashdown turned a page of the 1973 notes.

“It says here,” she said, “that he stopped. Once. About two-thirds of the way up the nave. For perhaps ten seconds. Nobody knew why. It is marked with a question mark.” She looked up. “Nobody asked him, as far as the notes show.”

Frederick looked at the question mark in pencil in the margin of a page from 1973.

“I’ll ask him,” he said.

---

At four he sat in the plastic chair by the river window on the sixth floor with the large-type order of service on his knee instead of the blue book.

His father was in the chair under the rug. He looked at the pale blue cover and then at Frederick.

“Not. Trains.”

“Not trains. It’s a sort of timetable.” He opened it at the first page. “I thought you could tell me if it’s late.”

His father’s eyebrows went up. Then, slowly, he nodded.

So Frederick read it, in the voice from the tannoy at Union Station, level and slow and carrying, the way he read the arrivals.

“Ten forty-five. The King’s procession. From the west door. Via the nave.” A breath. “Ten fifty-two. The theatre. The Recognition, at four sides.”

His father listened with his whole face, as he did to trains. At each one, the small mark. Less than a nod.

“Eleven ten. The Oath. At the altar.”

The mark.

“Eleven twenty. The anointing. In King Edward’s Chair. Behind the screen.”

His father’s hand lifted off the rug.

Frederick stopped.

The breath, and the hold.

“Oil,” said his father. “Cold.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Hands. Head. Chest.” A breath. “Cold. Then. Not.”

“Then not cold?”

His father looked at the river.

“Then. Not. Alone.”

Frederick sat with the order of service open on his knee and did not read the next line.

After a while his father’s hand moved on the rug towards the page. Go on.

He went on. The investiture. The orb, the sceptres, the ring. The crowning at a quarter to twelve. The enthronement. The homage. Each one in the tannoy voice, and each one the mark, until he got to the end of the service, and the procession out, and closed it.

“Papa. Mrs Ashdown has the notes from 1973. She says when you walked up the nave you stopped once, two-thirds of the way. For about ten seconds. Nobody knew why. There’s a question mark.”

His father looked at him.

It was the old look. Very slightly amused. The look of a man who had kept something for fifty-six years in case anybody asked.

The breath. The hold. The lips trying the shape of it, once, again.

“Father,” said his father. “Window.”

Frederick waited.

“Looked. Up.” A breath. “Saw. Him.”

The great west window of the abbey, high up at the end of the nave, behind him as he walked. You would have to stop and turn round to see it. No. Not the west window. Two-thirds of the way up the nave, on the north side, there were windows; Frederick had looked at them on Lord Whitlock’s plan, numbered. A memorial window. He did not know whose.

“Your father was in a window?”

“Glass.” His father’s eyes creased. “Bad. Likeness.”

Frederick laughed. His father’s breath went in and out, short, twice.

“Shall I stop there too?”

His father looked at him a long time.

“No,” said his father. “Yours.” A breath. “Find. Yours.”

Then he lifted his hand off the rug and pointed, with one finger, very slowly, at the blue book in Frederick’s school bag on the floor.

“Now. Trains.”