The Kitchen Table

Columbia Palace, New Westminster Wednesday 8 November, late

Dear Alexander,

I do not concede the hat. Lukas was not there. Lukas agreeing with you is not evidence, it is loyalty, and I will say so to his face if I ever meet him, which Theo says I must, because Theo wants to see two pages in the same room and find out what happens.

Your letter came last night, which was the first Tuesday. Dame M had it on her tray in the corridor and did not bring it in until Mamma had gone up, because she has decided, without either of us ever saying a word about it, that this is a thing we do not mention. I think she has decided it in the same way she decides which things go on the tray by themselves. I have never asked her and I am not going to.

I’m sorry about the chamberlain. I mean it. I had a geometry teacher and an email and you had a man who couldn’t finish his sentence, and you had to finish it for him, at fourteen, at seven in the morning, about your own father. I would rather have had mine too. I’m sorry that you had to choose that, and I’m glad that you told me, and I won’t tell anybody either.

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We tried for Andromeda.

This evening, after the hospital, Theo came over and the detail let us go up on the leads above the north wing, which is the flat bit of roof where they put the aerials, with a pair of binoculars that belong to the sergeant, who said we were to give them back with nobody’s fingerprints on the lenses. We found Cassiopeia. We found the W. We found where you said, near it, and very high. And we found nothing at all, because New Westminster lights everything, and the palace forecourt most of all, on the principle that power is supposed to stand in daylight, and the one thing you can’t see in daylight is a galaxy.

Theo said that was fine, he believed you. He said he’d take your word for a galaxy the way he takes mine for a timetable.

Then I read him Lukas’s thing about it coming towards us at a hundred and ten kilometres a second. Theo thought about it and said that four and a half billion years was fine, he was busy that week.

I’m going to see it, though. I’ve asked Mamma if we can be at Solliden for Christmas, and she said she’d think about it, which in Swedish means yes and in English means no, and she said it in Swedish.

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Now the kitchen table. You asked what a King isn’t allowed to have an opinion about. It’s the Navy.

Mamma put the papers out at eight, after supper, at the end of the table nearest the stove, the way she said she would. There weren’t many. She said the first week was the week they send you the easy things to see if you’ll read them. The biggest was the letters patent for the Board of Admiralty, which the Minister of Defence told the Commons about the day before Papa decided, and which the Minister is going to bring to her to sign. Three pages. The Board isn’t being abolished, which is what everybody thought would happen. It’s being given powers instead: it decides the Navy’s flag officers and its ships and its money by voting, and the civilians on it vote as well as the admirals, and the First Naval Lord is still the senior member.

And there’s a sentence in the middle of the second page that says the dissents of the members are to be recorded in the minutes.

I read it twice. Once fast and once slowly, which you will remember is my method. Then I read it a third time, because it was your sentence. It was the thing you told me in the first letter, about the minute and the date and what you’d said being written down where somebody could find it. Somebody in the Ministry of Defence has decided that if an admiral says no, it has to go in the book. They didn’t get it from you. They got it from wherever you got it, which I suppose is the same place.

I wasn’t allowed to say anything, because it was the first Tuesday, and the rule is no opinion until the second. So I wrote in the green book instead. It now says: 7 November. The Board’s dissents are to be written down. I am not allowed to say what I think of that until the 14th. F.

Mamma asked what I was writing. I said homework. She looked at me over her glasses and said, “That is the only homework in this house I am not allowed to see,” and went back to the Navy, and didn’t ask again.

She signs it when the Minister brings it. I don’t. I won’t sign anything until May. But I’ve read it, which nobody required, and I’ll be able to say next Tuesday that I did.

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You wrote: About Charlotte: no.

I’ve read it a lot of times. It’s the only sentence in either of your letters with no because in it. Everything else you write has a because. Even the jokes have a because.

I’m not going to say anything about it. I’m letting you know that I noticed, which you will hate, and which is the point. That’s all.

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Now Prussia, which you did say something about, so I’m allowed to answer.

You know what I’m going to ask. I’m going to ask it anyway.

Say Falk wins enough that she doesn’t need anybody. And then what? Then she has to not make you the first thing she does. Say she manages it. And then what? Then the people on the right say she has ignored the King’s rights, because she hasn’t done anything about them. And then what? Then it’s about you again, and you still can’t say anything, and you’re back where you were, except in a better House.

I think it’s going to be about you whatever you do, because you’re the only thing in Prussia everybody has a picture of. So I don’t think the question is how to stay out of it. I think the question is how to be so boring that nobody can use you. Go to the opening of something. Go to a school and ask about the heating. Go to the observatory every Saturday it’s clear and let them photograph you going in with a flask. Nobody can put a man with a flask on a poster. Theo says they could, but it would have to be a poster about tea.

You said you’ve never told anybody what you hope. You’ve told me now. I’m not going to tell anybody either. But I’ll tell you what I think, since I’m allowed to have opinions about Prussia, which nobody has put on the list of things I can’t: I think you want her to win because she was right, and I think you’re frightened she’ll want to be right more than she wants to govern. I think you’re frightened of it because you’d want it too.

You can tell me I’m wrong. You’re allowed. You’re an Emperor.

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Your four things.

Feierabend. It’s the river. I asked Dame M last night, when she brought your letter, whether the King could still row in the second eight, and she rang the detail, and the detail rang somebody, and before midnight the answer came back that yes, he could, but not on the regatta, which was the rule anyway, and not in the bow, which nobody had ever suggested. I don’t row in the bow. I row at five. So nothing has changed, except that now it’s a decision. We went out this morning before school, at half past six, in the dark and the cold, and the river was brown and high from the rain, and the cox shouted at me exactly as much as she shouts at everybody, and for an hour and ten minutes I was a person who rows at five. That’s mine. I’m going to keep it when it’s inconvenient. You said especially then.

You were right that it isn’t the trains. The trains are for Papa.

The coronations. So I go first. Eight months, as usual. I’ll tell you what the clock’s like at the Abbey. I don’t know where it is yet. I’m going to find out early and go and look at it when there’s nobody there, so that on the day I already know which way the minute hand goes.

The papers. I asked Mamma at breakfast this morning for the pile nobody has to read. She looked surprised, and when I came back from the hospital there was a folder on my desk marked for information only, and in it was the list of everybody who has written to the palace since September, counted by polity, and the ones from the other realms by realm. Nobody has to read it. I read it. Newfoundland, which is in New Albion and not in the Realm at all, sent the most for its size, if you count by how many people live there, which I did. Bay Bulls on its own sent more letters than some of our polities. I thought you’d like to know that the bottom of the pile is where the Crown lives. You were right about that too, and I don’t want to make a habit of saying so.

Being looked at. There was a boy who bowed. His name is Marcus and he plays the trombone. It was last Wednesday, the morning after, in the corridor outside the science block, a great sweeping bow, the kind you do in a play, with one arm out, and everybody laughed, and I didn’t know what to do with my face. Then Theo said, “Marcus, you’ve dropped something,” and Marcus looked down, and there was nothing there, and everybody laughed at Marcus instead, and that was the end of it. Today I did what you said. I asked Marcus in the lunch queue if he’d done the geometry. He hadn’t. Nobody had. We talked about it for five minutes, about the angle in a semicircle and why it’s always a right angle, and I think now that we’re friends, sort of, in the way you can be with someone you’ve only talked to about homework.

In registration Mr Abernathy still says “Hanover”, and I still say “Here.” He’s said it every morning this week in exactly the same voice as before, and I think it might be the kindest thing anybody has done.

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The thing Papa said in the Tiergarten.

I’m not cross that you left it out. I’m glad you told me now. And it wasn’t an errand. You said it wasn’t, and you’re exact, so it’s true. You can stop worrying about that.

I asked him. I went to the hospital at four today, the way I do, and did the homework, and read him tomorrow’s trains. The clocks went back on Sunday, so it’s already dark by the time I’m reading the last ones now, and the window behind his bed is black, and you can see the two of us in it. When I’d finished I asked him whether, in February, in the Tiergarten, he had told you to write to me.

He looked at me for a long time. He does that now before he says anything, as if he’s going to the back of a long room to fetch the word and bring it out.

Then he said, “Yes.”

And then he said, “Good.”

That’s what he says. It’s what he said the last Sunday, before the aircraft, which I still haven’t told you about, and still won’t, except that it was that word. I don’t know whether he meant good that he’d asked you, or good that you’d done it. I think both. I think “Good” is what he has left of all the long sentences he used to say, and he puts the whole of every one of them into it.

He’s the Duke of Cumberland. The nurses still call him sir.

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Theo has a reply for Lukas, page to page. He made me write it down exactly, like you did.

Thank you. The back of the head is a good idea. I have been looking at the back of his head in French for three years because the alphabet put him in front of me, so I have had practice. But what do you do about the ears. T.

He says the last question is serious and he wants an answer before Saturday, because Saturday is the Eleventh, at the Tomb, and it’s the first time, and he’s going to be standing behind me, and so far the plan is that he’s going to think about lunch.

I’m going to think about the clock. I don’t know where the clock is at the Tomb, either. I’ll find one.

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It’s after eleven. Dame M has been past the door once, which on a Wednesday counts as twice.

Write from Potsdam when it’s clear. Tell me if the House comes back the way it went away. Tell me what you’re boring in front of.

Yours, with every formality, which I am getting used to, except “Your Majesty” in the corridor, which Dame M has kept to once, as she promised,

Frederick

P.S. There is a five-forty from Baltimore. It’s the stopping train, and the timetable on the internet only lists the fast ones. I’ll have it, thank you.