The Programme

The Proposed Summer Programme was fourteen pages long and had a cover.

It had a cover the way a school report has a cover, in stiff cream card with the Prime Minister’s office’s crest in the top corner, and under the crest, in a typeface chosen by somebody who had thought about typefaces, the words His Majesty the King: Proposed Summer Programme, July to September 2029, and under that, smaller, Draft for discussion, and under that, smaller still, Prepared by the Office of the Prime Minister in consultation with the Household.

Frederick looked at it across the breakfast table in the small dining room for a long time before he picked it up.

“In consultation with the Household,” he said.

“I was consulted,” said Dame Margaret Roper, “on the fourth of July, for eleven minutes, by telephone.” She did not open her folder. She had it on the table beside her coffee cup, closed, with her hand flat on it, the way a person rests a hand on a dog that is not going anywhere. “I was asked whether the King would be available in the summer. I said that the King was always available in the summer, in the sense that he was alive.”

“And this is what came back.”

“This is what came back, sir. Ms Fenner brought it up herself this morning. She is in the corridor.”

“Now?”

“Since a quarter to eight. With a second copy, in case the first was lost.”

He picked it up.

---

It was not a bad document. That was the worst thing about it. He could see on every page that somebody clever and tired had sat up late with it, and cared, and wanted it to be good, and had used the word heartland only twice.

Sixty-one engagements. July to September. Numbered.

1. The opening of the new crossing at Harrisburg (the King to cut the ribbon, walk the span, and greet the construction workforce).

2. A visit to the Royal American Navy’s summer cadet camp at Annapolis (informal; sailing).

3. The first pitch at the All-Star Game.

4. Lunch with prize-winners of the National Spelling Bee (informal; the King may wish to attempt a word).

He read on. A dairy farm. A dam. The bicentenary of a canal. A wheat harvest in Kansas, from a combine (informal). A hospital in Ohio named after his great-grandmother. A county fair in Iowa (the King to judge a class of his choosing). A summer reading programme at a library in Baltimore, on the radio. A fireworks display. A ferry. A tour of five polities in eight days in August under the heading The Realm in Summer, which was the one with heartland in it, twice, and a photograph opportunity on the third day with ordinary families at an ordinary lake, which had been underlined in pencil by somebody, possibly Ms Fenner, possibly in despair.

He turned to the last page. Number sixty-one was a garden party.

He put the Programme down on the tablecloth, cover up, and looked at it.

He thought about the reception the night before. The Blue Drawing Room with the flags, and three hundred people in it, and the long hot evening, and at the end of it, by the far wall, Mr Abernathy in the brown jacket with a glass of water, who had said nothing to anybody for two hours. And a woman from the Prime Minister’s office, in a grey suit, with a clipboard, who had gone up to him at a quarter to ten and asked him something, quite politely, at length; and Mr Abernathy had listened to all of it, and looked at her over his glasses, and said three words, and gone back to his water.

He had not heard what she asked. He had heard the three words. Everybody within ten feet had.

“Is she the one who spoke to Mr Abernathy?” he said.

Dame M did not ask what he meant. She never asked what he meant.

“She is, sir. She asked whether he would be willing to appear in the Programme. Item thirty-eight. The King’s teachers, an informal conversation, on the lawn, for the summer edition of the national news.”

“And he said.”

“He said what he said, sir.”

Frederick picked up his toast. It had gone cold. He ate it anyway.

“Ask her to come in,” he said.

---

Ms Fenner came in.

She was perhaps thirty, very upright, with her hair pinned back so tightly that it pulled at the corners of her eyes and made her look more surprised than she was, and the second copy of the Programme held against her chest in both arms like a hymn book. She had been in the corridor for an hour and twenty minutes. She looked as if she had spent it rehearsing.

“Your Majesty,” she said. “Thank you. I know the Programme is long. I want to say at once that every item in it is a proposal and nothing more, and that the Prime Minister’s view is that the King’s summer is the King’s, and that the purpose of the document is only to set out, for His Majesty’s consideration, some of the ways in which the Realm might…”

“Ms Fenner.”

She stopped.

“It’s a good programme,” said Frederick. He meant it. He wanted her to know he meant it. “I can see how much work it is. The canal. The spelling bee. I’d have liked the spelling bee.” He put his hand flat on the cover of the copy on the table, the way Dame M had her hand on her folder. “But I’d prefer not.”

There was a silence in the small dining room.

Ms Fenner’s face did nothing for a moment. Then something went across it, very quickly, like a bird across a window, and he understood that she had heard those three words before, recently, at a quarter to ten, by the far wall of the Blue Drawing Room, and had not slept very much afterwards.

“Which item, sir?” she said carefully.

“All of them.”

“All of…”

“All sixty-one.”

Ms Fenner looked at Dame M. Dame M was looking at the window with an expression of great interest, as though something remarkable were happening to a cloud.

“Sir,” said Ms Fenner. “May I ask what His Majesty proposes instead?”

He had not known until she asked. He had been thinking about it since the reception, and in the car, and in the night, and he had not known what it was until she asked him in the small dining room with the Programme against her chest, and then he did.

“Nothing,” he said.

---

“Nothing,” said the Private Secretary, ten minutes later, in the study, “is not an option the constitution provides for, sir. But it provides for quite a lot of very little.”

He had come down the corridor at a pace that was not running and was faster than a man of his dignity ever walked, with a folder under one arm, and had shut the study door behind him and stood with his back to it, and Frederick knew that Ms Fenner was at that moment on the telephone in the Equerries’ Room to Charter House, and that the Private Secretary knew it too.

“I don’t mean nothing nothing,” said Frederick. “I’ll do the boxes.”

“You will do the boxes, sir.” The Private Secretary said it the way a priest says the creed. “The boxes are not engagements. They are the Crown. They will reach you wherever you are, every day, and you will do them, and they will come back, and that is not a matter on which the King has a summer.”

“I know.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And if something happens. If there’s something I have to sign, or somebody I have to see, or a Council, then I’ll come. I’m not saying I won’t be King.” He was standing by the window. Below him, on the lawn, two gardeners were taking down the marquee from the night before, slowly, pole by pole, in the heat. “I’m saying I want a summer that isn’t a programme. Six weeks. Seven. With nothing written in the diary. Not a ribbon, not a pitch, not a combine harvester. I want to be sixteen for one summer.”

The Private Secretary looked at him for a long time.

He was a grave man, the Private Secretary, perhaps fifty, in a dark suit in July, who had measured the stairs at the Hartigans’ block in 2028 before anybody had asked him to, so that he would know; and he had been the Private Secretary since before Frederick was King, and had a way of looking at a thing as though he were reading it, all of it, including the parts in small type.

“Six weeks,” he said.

“Seven, if possible.”

“With the boxes.”

“With the boxes.”

“And the detail, sir. The detail is not a matter on which the King has a summer either.”

“The detail can come. Castellanos and Kimura. Just them.”

The Private Secretary did not write anything down. He never wrote anything down in front of Frederick; he wrote it all down afterwards, perfectly, from memory, which was worse.

“And where, sir,” he said, “would His Majesty propose to spend these seven empty weeks?”

---

He had not thought about where.

He had thought about what. He had thought about the shape of it, the empty diary, the days with nothing written in them, a week, two, seven, going away in front of him like a road; and he had not thought about where the road was.

“Not here,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“Not Solliden.”

He had been at Solliden for Midsummer, as he always was, the one date in the year he had never missed. His mother was there now. She would be there until the end of August, on the terrace at six with the coffee, with Elsa and Nils rowing round the bay below; and he loved it more than anywhere, and everybody in the world knew that he went there, and there were photographers on the road to the gate every summer, and the people of Öland had put his name on a bench.

“Not Solliden, sir.”

“Not anywhere they’d think of. Not a palace. Not a house that belongs to anybody. Not a lake in Maine with a lodge. Not the place the Programme puts the ordinary families at the ordinary lake.” He looked out at the gardeners and the marquee. “Somewhere nobody would think of.”

“Everybody, sir, will think of everywhere. That is what the newspapers are for.”

“Then somewhere nobody would bother to look.”

The Private Secretary considered this.

“Somewhere ordinary, sir,” he said.

“Yes.” Frederick turned round. “That’s it. The most ordinary place there is. In the whole Realm. The place where nothing happens. If I’m there, nobody will think to look, because nothing ever happens there, and nothing will.”

The Private Secretary looked at him for a moment longer, reading him, small type and all.

“The most ordinary place in the Realm,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Is that a figure of speech, sir, or a specification?”

Frederick thought about it.

“A specification,” he said.

“Very good, sir,” said the Private Secretary, in a voice that meant it was not very good at all, and that he was going to do it anyway, perfectly.

---

His mother rang at eleven.

It was six in the evening on Öland. He could hear the gulls behind her, and the wind on the terrace, and somewhere below, very faint, the sound of oars in rowlocks that would be Nils taking the boat out to the buoy, because Nils always took the boat out to the buoy at six whether there was any reason to or not.

“The Prime Minister has telephoned me,” said his mother, in Swedish.

“I thought he might.”

“He was very polite. He said that the King’s summer is the King’s, and that he only wondered whether the King had read the Programme all the way to the end.”

“I read it to the garden party.”

“That is what I told him.” A pause. The gulls. “He also said that Ms Fenner has been with him since he was at the college and is the best person in his office and has not cried in eleven years, and that she is in the Equerries’ Room now, not crying, very carefully.”

Frederick closed his eyes.

“I’ll write to her,” he said.

“Yes. You will.” Another pause. He could see her, on the terrace, in the old blue cardigan, with her feet on the low wall and the coffee going cold beside her, looking out at the water, choosing the next sentence the way she chose everything, slowly, from several. “Fredde. Do you want to come here?”

“No,” he said. And then, because she was his mother, and because it was Solliden: “Yes. But no.”

“Good,” said his mother, unexpectedly. “That is the right answer. If you came here you would have a lovely summer and it would be my summer. You have had my summers. You should have one of your own.” The oars, below, stopped, and started. “Where?”

“I’ve asked for the most ordinary place in the Realm.”

His mother did not say anything for a while.

“Who have you asked?”

“The Private Secretary.”

“Then you will get it,” said his mother. “To three decimal places. With a bibliography.” He heard her smile; you could always hear his mother smile, it changed the shape of her Swedish. “Take Theo.”

“I was going to.”

“And somebody else. Two is a pair. Pairs are watched. Four is a group, and groups are boring, and nobody photographs a boring group of boys.” She thought. “Four. Take four.”

“Four?”

“You, and three. It is a number nobody looks at twice.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have been a queen for nineteen years,” said his mother. “I know what nobody looks at twice. It is the only useful thing the job teaches you.” The wind, on the terrace. “Ring me on Sundays.”

“Every Sunday.”

“And Fredde.”

“Yes.”

“Be very, very ordinary,” said his mother. “It is much harder than it looks. I have never managed it once.”

---

At noon Dame M came into the study with her folder, closed, and stood just inside the door.

“Ms Fenner has gone back to Charter House, sir,” she said. “She asked me to tell you that she understands completely, and that the Programme is withdrawn, and that the Prime Minister’s office will of course respect the King’s wishes.” Dame M paused. “She asked me to tell you also that she has kept a copy, in case.”

“In case of what?”

“She did not say, sir. I imagine in case the King should find, in the course of an empty summer, that he would after all like to cut a ribbon in Harrisburg.”

Frederick looked at the copy on the desk in front of him, the one with the cream cover and the crest. The second copy. Ms Fenner had left it.

“I’ll keep this one,” he said.

“Sir?”

“For the back,” he said. “The back of page fourteen is blank.”

Dame M looked at the Programme, and at him, and did not ask what he meant. She opened her folder, for the first time that morning, and wrote something on the inside of the cover, small and quick, and closed it again before he could see what it was.

“The Private Secretary,” she said, “has telephoned the Census Office.”

“The Census Office?”

“He said that if His Majesty wanted a figure of speech he would have consulted a poet, sir, and that a specification is a matter for statisticians.” She turned to go. At the door she stopped. “He has asked them for the most ordinary place in the Realm. He has asked them to show their working.”

“What did they say?”

Dame M considered.

“I understand, sir,” she said, “that there was a silence on the line of about four seconds. And then a gentleman called Mr Vollmer said that he had been waiting thirty-one years for somebody to ask him that, and that he would need until Tuesday.”