Two Over

Columbia Palace, New Westminster Monday 4 December, late

Dear Alexander,

You haven’t written since the Eleventh. I’m not complaining. I’m putting it on the record, with a date, the way you taught me, so that later nobody can say I didn’t notice.

Theo says you’re trying to write about the potatoes and can’t finish. He knows this because Lukas told him. Lukas told him because, it turns out, at some point on the Eleventh, between the crest and the dumplings, the two of them exchanged telephone numbers, which nobody authorised, and nobody’s detail noticed, and which Theo told me about on the Wednesday after as if it were a thing that happens to everybody. They don’t talk much. Theo says they send each other one line a week. Lukas’s are about planets and Theo’s are about the Packers, and neither of them answers the other’s, and Theo says it is the best correspondence he has ever had.

So I know you’re trying. That’s all I wanted to say about it. I’ll come back to the potatoes at the end, because I want to ask you something about them, and I’m going to put it last so you have to read the rest first.

---

I heard about Prussia on the radio at the hospital.

It was yesterday, a quarter to four, our time, which I worked out afterwards was a quarter to ten at night yours. I’d got there early, because it was Sunday and there was no school to come from. Papa was asleep in the chair by the window, and the radio was on the tray table, very low, the way the nurse leaves it now, and the ABC was doing the news on the hour, and at the end of the news, after the weather in the Lakes, the man said that in the Prussian state election the Social Democrats and the Liberals together were projected to win two hundred and forty-three of the four hundred and eighty seats, two more than they needed, and would not need the Centre party to govern. Then he said a sentence about the King of Prussia, who is fourteen, and whose sister is his Regent, and who could not, he said, be reached for comment, which made me laugh out loud in a hospital, because I could see you not being reached for comment from here.

That was all they said. Two hundred and forty-three, and two over, and you not being reached. Then the music came on.

I looked at Papa. He was still asleep. I thought about waking him up and telling him, because he’d have wanted to know. Then I thought that he wouldn’t have, actually. He would have wanted to know that it was Prussia’s, and that it had been done properly, and that nobody had asked you. He’d have said that was the whole of it. So I let him sleep, and did the homework, and read him the trains at a quarter past four when he woke up, and didn’t say anything about Prussia at all.

So she needs nobody.

Does that include you?

I don’t mean it unkindly. I mean it the way you’d mean it, exactly. You told me in the dome that you hoped she’d win enough to need nobody, and that when she won she wouldn’t make you the first thing she did. Now she’s won enough. I’m asking the next question, because I can’t not. If she needs nobody, then she doesn’t need you either, and that’s what you hoped, and I want to know if it feels like what you hoped, now it’s happened. I don’t think it will. I think it’s going to feel like being left out of a room you asked to be left out of.

You can tell me I’m wrong. You usually do.

---

Now the thing I have actually been waiting all week to tell you.

Mamma said yes.

To Solliden. For Christmas and the New Year. She said it on Saturday, at breakfast, in Swedish, without looking up from the newspaper, the way she says things she has decided a long time before and has been waiting for the right breakfast to mention. She said, “Vi åker till Solliden den tjugoförsta. Packa varmt.” Which is: we’re going to Solliden on the twenty-first, pack warm. And then she turned the page.

I said thank you. She said it wasn’t a favour, it was a decision, and that decisions don’t get thanked, and that I could thank her by not complaining about the cold, because Solliden isn’t built for winter. It’s a summer house. Nobody in the family has been there at Christmas since before she was born. They’re going to open four rooms and light the stoves, and Elsa’s father, who’s the caretaker, has already been told, and Elsa has already sent a message, through her father, through the Court, through Ebba Lindqvist, through Mamma, which says that the bay freezes some years and if it does she’s going to make me walk on it.

Papa stays here. He’s not well enough to fly and nobody has pretended he is. I’ll ring him at four every day, his time, which is ten at night at Solliden, and read him the trains down the telephone, and somebody on the sixth floor will hold the receiver for him. I asked the big man from his detail, the one at the end of the corridor, and he said, “Sir,” which I think was yes.

So you’re going to get your wish. You said in the dome to try for Andromeda at Christmas, if I was ever at Solliden at Christmas. I’m going to be. If it’s clear, I’m going to look for it with Elsa’s grandfather’s telescope, the one Nils said could see Russia, and I’m going to write and tell you whether it’s the farthest thing a person can see, or whether you’ve been making it up.

And one more thing, because I’ve worked out the clocks. Solliden and Berlin keep the same time. So at midnight on New Year’s Eve I’m going to be on the jetty at Solliden, looking across the water at Kalmar, which lets off fireworks every year that you can see from the island, small, very far away, like somebody striking matches on the other side of a room. Wherever you are at midnight, I’ll be there, on the jetty, at the same minute as you. It will be the first time since the wedding we’ve been in the same minute without being in the same country. I don’t know why that matters. It does.

---

The kitchen table.

The second Tuesday was the fourteenth, and I was allowed an opinion at last, so I had one. I told Mamma that the sentence about the Board’s dissents was the right sentence, and that if I’d written the letters patent I’d have put it on the first page and not in the middle of the second, where you have to read two pages of the Navy to find it.

She looked at me over her glasses and said, “Antecknat.” Noted. That was all. Then she went on to the next paper.

I’ve decided that Antecknat is the best thing she could have said, and also the most annoying, and that it is the whole of the regency in one word. I’m allowed to say what I think. It’s written down. Nothing happens. I think that’s what you meant in the first letter about the minute. It’s more than it looks. It’s also exactly as much as it looks.

Since then it’s been every Tuesday, eight o’clock, the end of the table by the stove. I’m allowed one opinion per paper, and I’ve learned to save them. Last week I used none. Mamma said that was the most opinionated thing I had done all month.

The green book has nine entries now. Eight of them are about the Navy, the hospital, or the weather. The ninth is the line I wrote on the first of November, about the realms doing it together, and I read it again on Sunday after the radio and still think it’s right, which is the first time I have ever read something I wrote a month ago and not wanted to cross it out.

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The trains. You’ll want to know.

The timetable changes on Sunday. It changes every December, on the second Sunday, and nobody ever tells anybody, and every year there are people standing on platforms at the old times looking at their watches. I’m telling you before you find it on the internet. From Sunday the five-forty from Baltimore, the stopping train, which I’m going to go on calling the five-forty because stopping trains are allowed to be approximate, becomes the five-thirty-eight. Two minutes earlier. The fast one you found, the old five-thirty-eight, becomes the five-thirty-one, so the internet is wrong twice. They’ve taken a stop out at a place called Halethorpe, which nobody gets off at, and I’m sorry for Halethorpe.

I’ll go on thinking of you when it comes in. Two minutes earlier.

---

Papa.

He’s the same. That’s what everybody says when you ask, so I’ll say what it actually is. He’s in the chair most afternoons now, not the bed. He says about six words a day that I can hear, and I think there are more that he’s saying inside and not getting out. He says “Ray” to Castellanos every evening when we leave, and Castellanos says “Sir,” and opens the door, and I’ve stopped finding it strange and started finding it the best part of the day.

On the Monday after the Eleventh, at about a quarter to five, when I’d finished the trains and was putting the timetable away, he said your name.

Just that. “Alexander.” Quite clearly, to the window. Then he looked at me, and said, “Good.”

I don’t know what he meant. I’ve decided he meant the potatoes. I wanted you to have it, because it was yours, and because you’d have wanted it more than I’d want to keep it.

---

Theo says to tell you three things.

The first is that Kate says she beat you in eleven minutes, and that you didn’t ask to play again, and that this is the mark of either a gentleman or a coward, and she hasn’t decided which. She’s writing out her rules properly, with numbers, so that you can practise. She says you’ll get them at Christmas, because she wants to see whether a German Emperor can learn Wisconsin Schafkopf from a sheet of paper, and she thinks not.

The second is that his mother wants to know whether the Embassy ate the dumplings.

The third is that he’s still got the tissue paper Lukas held for him on the crest, folded very small, in the drawer with his socks, and that if I tell you that he will deny it.

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Now the potatoes. This is the question I said I’d put last.

When I came in that night, you were at the sink, and you’d been there an hour, and I didn’t see the hour. Nobody did except Lukas and Theo’s mother and Kate. Mrs Hartigan told me at the door, while Papa’s coat was being buttoned, that you had asked for a job. She said nobody who has ever come to that flat as a guest has asked for a job, including me, the first time, and including the man who reads the gas meter, who came once and stayed for soup. She said, “He peeled them right. Toward himself. Nobody tells them that and he listened.”

She has never said I peeled anything right. I have been peeling in that kitchen since 2025.

So that’s the question. Not what it was like. I know what it was like for me, coming in, seeing you at the sink in an apron with a lighthouse on it, and Papa’s hand. I want to know what the hour was like. The one before. The one I didn’t see. And then what?

Write when it’s clear. Or when it isn’t, and you’re in the dome anyway.

Yours, with every formality, and from a palace where nobody has ever peeled a potato either, I’ve checked,

Frederick

P.S. Dame M has asked me to tell you, through me, which is the only channel she will admit exists, that the four flights at the Hartigans’ have been measured, and that the King’s protection has added the stair light to its list of “risks”, in writing. She said this with a completely straight face. I think it’s the first joke she’s made since September, and I think it was for you.