The Rows

The Household had advised against it in April, in writing, two pages on the small silver tray with a great many sentences in the conditional. The first month of a reign in the King’s own right, it said, was a month in which a great many people would wish to see him, and a school trip of eight days to the Pacific coast would be, in the Household’s respectful view, difficult to explain. It said respectful four times.

He wrote back on one side of one sheet. On the thirty-first of October, he wrote, the Household had announced on his behalf that he would finish at Ellicott with his year; the sophomore trip was part of his year; he would like to go on it, and if anybody asked, he would explain it himself. He signed it George R., and looked at the signature for a while, because it was still strange.

Dame M read it in the stone corridor, standing up.

“Sir,” she said, folding it. “I shall need the dates.”

---

At six in the morning on the twenty-ninth of May he walked into George Washington International through the front doors, like everybody else, and stopped.

He had been to this airport forty times. He had never been inside it. He had always come in a car with flags on it, through a gate at the side of the field, across the apron to the steps of an aircraft painted white and blue, and turned at the top and lifted his hand for the photograph, and gone in.

It was one room.

The roof went up and away from him in one long shallow curve, hung on cables between great columns that leaned outwards along both sides, and under it there was nothing at all. No pillars. Only the floor, pale and polished, going away with people on it, hundreds of them, with bags and trolleys and coffee, and at the far end a wall of glass from floor to roof, and through the glass the airfield, grey in the early light, and a jet lifting off the far runway in silence, tilting, gone.

“Freddie,” said Theo, behind him. “You’re blocking the door.”

“I know.” He did not move. “Theo. Look at it.”

Theo looked at it with the polite attention of somebody being shown a photograph of a stranger’s holiday.

“It’s a roof,” said Theo.

“It’s hung on cables. There’s nothing under it. Not one pillar. He drew the extension before he died and they built it sixty years later to his drawings, and you can’t see the join. Look.”

“You’ve been here a million times.”

“Not here.” He pointed through the glass, the whole length of the room away, at a gate in a fence by a hangar that you could only just see. “That’s the one I go in by. I’ve never seen the inside.” The departures board was turning over, all its white letters at once, clicking: Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Miami, London. A little girl in a red coat was asleep on a pile of suitcases on a trolley. An old man on a bench had his hat on his knee. “It was all here,” said Frederick. “Every time. On the other side of the glass.”

Theo took him by the arm, which he had never done in his life, and moved him six feet to the left so that the rest of Ellicott could come in.

“Okay,” said Theo. “Now look at it.”

---

The Southwest desk was at the far end, under a big striped heart, and the queue went back and forth across the floor between ropes. Fifty-eight sophomores from Ellicott High School joined the end of it in hooded sweatshirts, with their bags and pillows, making the noise fifty-eight people make at six in the morning after being told to be quiet.

He had never stood in a queue at an airport. He had never been handed a boarding pass. Twenty minutes, and then a woman of about sixty with a badge that said DOLORES and reading glasses on top of her head looked up at him over the desk.

“ID, hon.”

Theo had already handed over his Ellicott card, with his photograph on it looking startled and HARTIGAN T underneath. She held her hand out for Frederick’s.

“I haven’t got any,” said Frederick.

“Everybody’s got ID, hon.”

“I haven’t. Nobody’s ever made me one.” Every card and licence and passport in the Realm was issued in his name, and you could not issue one to yourself, and saying so aloud to a woman called Dolores with fifty-seven people behind him would be the most pompous sentence ever spoken in an airport. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t have one.”

Dolores looked at his face. Then she took the glasses down off her head and put them on and looked at it again, for one more second.

“Well,” she said. “I guess your face’ll have to do, hon.”

She typed. The machine beside her made a noise and she tore something off it.

“Twenty-three A. That’s a window. Bags were free, now they’re twenty-five, and somebody’s already paid it, which is nice for you. Don’t let them sell you the premium. It’s two inches of legroom and a bag of almonds.”

It was printed on thin card, with the heart in the corner, HANOVER/F, HWL, LAX, SEAT 23A, GROUP B. He held it the way everybody in the queue held theirs, slightly too tightly.

“She called you hon,” said Theo, low, as they walked away. “She put her glasses on. She knew exactly who you were and she called you hon.”

“I know.”

“Bridget calls you pet. That’s different. That’s Bridget.”

“I know,” said Frederick, and looked at the boarding pass, and was smiling. Sir, he had been called, for seven months. Your Majesty. Majesté. Majestät. Once, by an archbishop, Sire. Nobody had looked at him and decided he could do with hon.

---

Mr Abernathy counted them at the gate, moving his lips, and when he got to the end he started again, because somebody had gone to the toilet. Mr Ferrante, at the back, was looking at the roof as though he had a question about its construction. Señora Ruiz, in the middle, held a plastic folder of fifty-eight permission slips and fifty-eight medical forms, because she trusted nobody to remember their own allergies, and had said so on the coach, in two languages.

Against one of the leaning columns, with a cup of coffee he was not drinking, stood Castellanos.

Three of them, he had said in April, and not more, whatever anybody said, because more than three was a procession and people photographed processions. Castellanos in the grey suit, against the column, where he could see everything. Sergeant Kimura, small and quiet, six places back in the queue with a boarding pass of her own. Sergeant Brannigan, very large and very pink, already through, in a college sweatshirt so that he would look like somebody’s father, which he did, if you did not look at his eyes.

Castellanos looked at him across the room and did not nod.

---

The gate was at the very end of the room, against the glass, and they had forty minutes.

Mr Abernathy said they could sit down, so they sat on the carpet in a long untidy row along the glass wall with their bags, the way people sat at gates, which he had seen on the television and never done. Theo sat with his back against the glass and his eyes shut. Frederick sat with his face to it.

Right outside the glass, nose to the building, stood the mobile lounges, a row of them on their legs like enormous patient animals, white, with their doors shut, waiting. Beyond them was the apron, and beyond the apron, out on the field, the aircraft: nose after nose in long rows at the far concourses, every colour, every airline, each with its tail up and a tug at its front wheel and men in orange jackets walking under its wings with the ownership of people walking under a tree. A truck with a tank on its back pulled up beside one and a man got out and plugged a hose into its wing as if it were a car. A small yellow vehicle went past towing a dozen luggage carts piled with suitcases, round a corner, gone. On the far runway a jet took off every minute, and he watched each one, all the way, until it was a point and then not anything, and did not get tired of it.

And theirs was out there, in the third row from the left: blue, with the heart on its belly, small at that distance, with a tug at its nose and a ladder against its side.

Round him the gate filled up with people who were not Ellicott. A soldier in uniform asleep sitting upright with his kitbag between his boots. A woman on the telephone saying I know, Mama, I know, I’ll call when I land, three times. Two nuns sharing a newspaper. A man in a suit eating a doughnut with enormous care over the paper bag so as not to drop any sugar on the suit, and dropping it on the suit. A family with three small children, the smallest of whom had decided to lie face down on the carpet and would not be moved. Nobody looked at him. They looked at the board, or their telephones, or the aircraft, or nothing, the way people look at nothing when they are waiting to go somewhere.

A voice came out of the ceiling. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is the gate announcement for Southwest flight two-two-one-seven to Los Angeles. We’ll be boarding in about fifteen minutes, groups A, B and C in order, please have your boarding passes ready.

He had never heard one. Not for him. He had heard his father’s name said in a great many ways in a great many rooms, but never a flight number read out over a ceiling to a gate full of strangers who might or might not be listening, and who were all going to the same place as he was for their own reasons and would never know his.

“Freddie,” said Theo, without opening his eyes. “You’re doing the face.”

“What face?”

“The airport face. From the door. You’ve been doing it for twenty minutes.” Theo opened one eye. “The nuns are looking at you.”

The nuns were not looking at him. He went on doing the face.

---

Mr Ferrante sat down beside them on the carpet.

He did it slowly, the way men of fifty do, with a hand on the glass, and arranged his legs, and sat with his back to the wall beside Theo with a paper cup of coffee and the expression he wore at the front of the history room on the first day of a new topic. Marcus, on Frederick’s other side, saw the expression and closed his eyes.

“Fun fact,” said Mr Ferrante.

“No,” said Marcus.

“In about fifteen minutes,” said Mr Ferrante, “that aircraft,” he pointed with the coffee at the blue one with the heart, “is going to be pushed back from this gate and taxi out to that runway, and when it gets to the end of it the captain is going to ask the tower for permission to take off. And the tower is going to give it to him. And it’s going to use the aircraft’s name to do it.” He drank some of the coffee. “On any other Tuesday its name is Southwest two-two-one-seven. Flight number and callsign. Southwest two-two-one-seven, cleared for take-off.” He paused. “Not today.”

Frederick turned round from the glass.

“The Air Force has a callsign for the sovereign,” said Mr Ferrante. “The same since 1952. Sceptre. Any aircraft of the Royal American Air Force with the King aboard is Sceptre and nothing else, and every controller in the Realm knows what to do when they hear it, which is mostly to get everybody else out of the way. And if the King gets on an aircraft that isn’t the Air Force’s,” he looked up at the ceiling, at the speaker the gate announcement had come out of, as though it were a blackboard, “it borrows the word, and keeps its own name after it. So that everybody knows both things at once.” He looked back at the blue aircraft. “So in about twenty minutes, somebody in a dark room at the top of that tower is going to read it off a strip of paper and say, for the first time in thirty-one years, Sceptre Southwest, cleared for take-off. And the captain is going to have to say it back.”

Nobody said anything. Even Marcus had opened his eyes.

“Thirty-one years,” said Mr Ferrante. “The last time was 1998. A shuttle from here to Boston, because the fog had grounded the Air Force and the King had to be in Boston by noon. There’s a recording of it. The captain on that one said it back three times, because he couldn’t believe it.”

“Will ours?” said Marcus.

“We’ll find out,” said Mr Ferrante. “I’m told this one’s a former Navy pilot from Phoenix with thirty years on the line. My guess is once, in a perfectly level voice, and then the weather.” He looked at the coffee. “The British have their own word for it, of course. Theirs is,” and he stopped, the way you stop at the top of a stair you have just remembered is there, and said, “different. Theirs is different.” He got up, with a hand on the glass, slowly. “There will be a question on it,” he said, and went back along the row of sophomores on the carpet to Señora Ruiz.

“Did you know that?” said Marcus. “About the Sceptre thing?”

“No,” said Frederick.

It was not true. He had been five, on his father’s knee by the door to the flight deck, and heard Sceptre, contact Boston Centre in the headphones, and asked what it meant, and his father had said it means me. He had believed for a year that his father’s name, in aeroplanes, was Sceptre.

But not the borrowing. Not a strip of paper in a room at the top of that tower, and an airliner with a heart on its belly and fifty-eight sophomores and two nuns and a soldier in it, and a pilot from Phoenix saying it back.

And the British word was Kittyhawk. The last word on the radio east of Newfoundland at thirteen minutes to six on the twenty-fifth of September. Mr Ferrante had sat down on the carpet with a fun fact and remembered, at the last step, whose son he was talking to.

He turned back to the glass. Out on the field, somebody was taking the ladder away from the blue aircraft. In 1998 his father had sat in an ordinary seat on an ordinary shuttle to Boston and been Sceptre something, and had never once mentioned it on any Sunday telephone. He would ask him. His father, who had laughed at so few things since September, and at the oddest ones, might laugh at that.

---

There was one photograph. Rosalind Aird had arranged it in a single telephone call at a quarter to eight in the evening, after which nobody had rung her back. One photographer, from the pool, at the gate, at not less than thirty feet; one picture to every paper in the Realm at once; none after, for eight days. The photographer was a woman in a green coat with one camera, against the glass by the gate. When he came through she raised it, and he did not look at it, and walked through behind Theo, and heard it go once, a small sound like a door shutting.

The Courier ran it across five columns the next day: a boy with a rucksack, from slightly behind, between another boy with a rucksack and a girl with a pillow, walking through a door in a glass wall. You could not see his face. You could see Theo’s ear. He kept it.

---

Beyond the gate, instead of a corridor, there was a room on legs.

It was the size of a house, white, slab-sided, with windows along both sides and a little cab at one end, standing on four hydraulic legs so that its door met the door of the gate. They walked straight into it, all fifty-eight of them and a great many other people, businessmen and a family with three small children and two nuns, and the door shut, and with a long sighing hiss the whole room sank down on its legs to the apron and began to drive.

“Oh my God,” said Theo, holding a pole.

Frederick stood at the window with his hand on another pole and watched the airfield go by, the tugs and the men in orange jackets and the long grey runways in the dawn, from a room that was driving across it. He had flown from here since he was three. Nobody had told him the rooms drove.

At the other end it rose again, hissing, to the height of an aircraft door, and the door opened on blue. Deep blue, the whole fuselage, SOUTHWEST in white along the front, a heart on the belly, and a woman in the doorway with her hair in a bun and a voice that carried: good morning, good morning, find your seat, let’s go, people, we’ve got a schedule.

---

The Household had bought six rows.

He saw it coming down the aisle behind Theo: rows twenty to twenty-five full of Ellicott on both sides, every seat; and in front of twenty and behind twenty-five, a row of empty seats each, like the space round a word you have underlined; and in the aisle seat of the empty row behind, already, with a paperback, Kimura.

“Six rows,” said Theo, under his breath. “Freddie. They bought six rows.”

“Eight. With the empty ones.”

“That’s a whole house.” Theo stopped at twenty-three and looked at the two boarding passes. “I’m B. You’re A.”

A was the window.

He had not asked for it. He had seen 23A in the queue and felt something in his chest that he was slightly ashamed of, because he was sixteen and a King and it was a seat on an aeroplane. On the Air Force aircraft there had always been people who needed his father, and papers, and he had been put where he would not be in the way, which was the aisle.

Theo looked at the window. Then he put his rucksack in the locker and sat down in the middle seat and stretched his legs out and opened a packet of mints.

Frederick sat down at the window and did not say thank you, because then Theo would have to say what for, and it would be a thing. Outside, a man in an orange jacket was waving a baton at nobody, and rain was running sideways across the glass.

In 23C Marcus sat down with a sigh and a horseshoe pillow round his neck.

“My mum asked if I’d be sitting near the King,” said Marcus. “I said I didn’t know. She said ask him. I said I’m not going to ask him, Mom. And now I’m in his row.” He closed his eyes. “She’s going to be impossible.”

“Tell her I said hello,” said Frederick.

Marcus opened his eyes.

“Do not,” said Marcus, “make it worse.”

---

The safety briefing was in verse.

The woman with the bun stood at the front with the microphone while they were pushed back from the stand and did the whole thing in rhyming couplets, the belts and the exits and the lights along the floor, in a voice like a game-show host’s, and the whole aircraft listened. If the cabin should lose pressure, and the masks come falling down, put your own on first, then help your neighbour, then go back to looking like a clown. At the end she looked down the cabin at the six rows and said, in exactly the same voice, and to the sophomores from New Westminster, all fifty-eight of you, welcome to Southwest, we’ve been warned about you, please keep your feet out of the aisle, and that goes for everybody, I don’t care who you are, and the six rows erupted, and Theo put his face in his hands, and Frederick laughed so hard that Marcus had to hit him on the back.

They took off at seven minutes past seven into cloud.

Grey, and then white, and thinning, and tearing, and then all at once they came up out of the top of it into a sky so blue and so enormous that somebody two rows back said oh out loud. The cloud lay underneath them like a floor, lit from above, to the edge of the world.

Theo was asleep before the seat-belt light went off, completely and on purpose, mouth slightly open, the mints still in his hand. Frederick took them out of his fingers and put them in the seat pocket.

---

He could not hear the controller. He had known he would not. He sat at the window and listened anyway, through the climb, to the engines and the ping of the seat-belt light and a baby somewhere at the front, and thought of a dark room full of screens a long way below and behind them, and a strip of paper, and a word on it.

When the captain came on it was about the weather. Clear in Los Angeles. Seventy-five degrees. A slight change of course to the north, round the storms on the plains.

Mr Ferrante came down the aisle a little later, on his way to somewhere, and did not stop. He put one finger on the back of Marcus’s seat as he passed and said, to nobody, in his ordinary voice, “Once. Level. And then the weather,” and went on.

The cloud broke up over the Ohio.

He knew it was the Ohio because he knew the timetable: not the flight’s, the railway’s. Underneath them the line ran west from New Westminster through the mountains to Pittsburgh and Columbus and Indianapolis and St Louis, and he followed it by the clock on the screen in the seat-back. Two hours. Columbus. Then a brown river, wide and curling, with a city on it, which would be Louisville, where the evening train to St Louis came through on the far bank at about ten past six.

Below the river the land was green, and then it was squares.

Fields in a grid, pale green and dark green and brown, roads ruled across them, farms at the corners, and every so often a town where two roads met, with a water tower and a grain elevator and a railway running out of it both ways as straight as a pencil line. It went on for a very long time. He had never known how big the middle of the Realm was, or how much of it was somebody’s farm.

Somewhere over Kansas Priya came down the aisle in her socks, with a bag of crisps.

“Is that Kansas?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s square. And there’s a storm to the south, look, and the pilot said we’d gone north round the storms, so that river’s the Kansas River, and that town’s probably Manhattan.”

“There’s a Manhattan in Kansas?”

“And a Moscow in Idaho and a Paris in Texas. There’s a station in all of them.”

“You’re the only person I know,” said Priya, “who’d know that, and the only person I know who’d know it because of trains.” She held the bag out. “Vinegar. Nobody in our row will eat them. Devon says they taste like a swimming pool.”

He took one. They did, slightly. He ate it anyway.

“My mother said I should take a photograph of you for my grandmother,” said Priya. “I said I wouldn’t, because of the rule, and because it’s weird. She said she was only saying.” She looked at the window. “I’ll take Kansas instead. And tell her you said it was Manhattan.”

She leaned across Theo without touching him and held her phone to the glass: the squares, the storm, the grey knot of the town by the river. Then she went back up the aisle.

A photograph of Kansas through a window he was sitting at, and he was not in it. Her grandmother would see fields and a storm and know the King had been on the other side of the glass and said Manhattan. It was the best photograph of him anybody had ever taken, and nobody would know it was one.

---

The Household had said difficult. It had been the easiest thing he had done since the second of May.

The second of May: the Blue Drawing Room in the morning, the oaths in his own right, fourteen times, in fourteen forms, his hand on the book, and his mother at the side of the room for the first time in his life with nothing to sign, looking for one moment twenty years younger, and then at the floor. Then four weeks of his own boxes, and a fitting for the coronation robes that took three hours and was moved twice and was now in October, and a great many people who wished to see him.

And on the Thursday after his birthday, a form.

The same form everybody had. SOPHOMORE CLASS TRIP: LOS ANGELES, MAY 29 TO JUNE 5. The days underneath: the park at Valencia on the Wednesday, the beach and the pier on the Thursday, the studios at Burbank, the observatory on the hill, a day at the harbour, a free day, home on the Tuesday. One bag. And at the bottom, a line for the signature of a parent or guardian.

He took it up to his mother’s study and put it on her desk without saying anything.

“I’m not your guardian any more,” she said. “Not in law. Not since yesterday.”

“You’re my parent.”

“I’m your parent.” She picked up her pen, and stopped with it over the line. “Do you want me to sign it as your parent, or do you want to sign it yourself?”

It was a real question. She did not know the answer either.

“You,” he said. “As my mother. Like everybody else’s.”

She signed it Christina, in the small upright hand, and looked at it, and laughed out loud, and said it was the first thing she had signed in eight months that she had wanted to. He put it in the box in Mr Abernathy’s room on the Friday with everybody else’s.

---

Arizona was red.

From thirty-eight thousand feet it was the floor of something, a vast cracked tray of rust and gold and purple, with the shadows of the clouds lying on it and the canyons cut into it like writing. Theo woke all at once, the way he had gone to sleep, and looked past him out of the window.

“Is that the March?”

“Yes. All of it. It goes on for about an hour.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“There are fourteen million people there. Mostly in Phoenix. That’s Phoenix, the smudge on the left, in the haze. And that line, see, going across, straight. That’s the main line to the coast. It’s the longest stretch of straight track in the Realm.”

Theo looked at the line for a while.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “I don’t mean the trains. I’ve stopped asking about the trains. I look out of the window and it’s red. You look out of the window and it’s a railway and fourteen million people and the March.”

“I don’t know what anything is,” said Frederick. “I only know the timetable. It tells you where things are. It doesn’t tell you what they’re like.” He looked down at the straight line. “I’ve never been anywhere on that line. I just know when the trains get in.”

“Well,” said Theo, “you’re going somewhere now,” and took the mints out of the seat pocket, where he had obviously known all along they were, and ate one.

---

The mountains came after the desert, brown and folded, with snow on the highest tops, in May. Then the land fell away all at once into a great flat pale-gold haze, and in the haze, going on further than he could see, there was a city.

The pilot said they had begun their descent, and that it was clear and seventy-five degrees in Los Angeles.

He leaned his forehead against the window.

At the edge of the city, where the mountains came down to it, the roofs began, and as they came lower he saw that a great many of them were blue. Not painted. Covered. Bright square patches of tarpaulin laid over the roofs like plasters, one and then another and then whole streets of them, mile after mile, catching the sun. Seven months. Since November. Nobody had taken them off yet, because there was nothing yet to put underneath.

“Is that,” said Theo, and stopped.

“Yes.”

Two rows forward somebody else had seen them, and the noise in the six rows dropped, row by row, from the front to the back, until it was quiet. Fifty-eight people from Ellicott High School looked out of the windows at the blue roofs of San Bernardino coming up to meet them in the sun, and the wheels came down with a thump, and the aircraft leaned, and turned towards the sea.