The Apron

The wheels touched at twenty-six minutes to eight.

A long hard bump, a second, the nose going down, the engines roaring backwards, and fifty-seven sophomores on two rows of webbing leaned towards the flight deck all at once and back again, like grass in a wind.

Marcus started to clap, looked round, and stopped.

They taxied a long time. Through the front window: very green grass, the edge of a runway, a line of blue lights in the grass not lit yet, a grey hangar with its doors shut, the evening coming across from the west, from the way they had come. A slow turn. The engines running down one after another, roar to whine to a long falling sigh.

Silence. The first in five hours. Everybody took the orange foam out of their ears at once and sat holding it, listening, and it was the loudest thing he had ever heard.

Gorski walked to the ramp and put his hand on a lever in the wall and looked back up the hold.

“Sir.”

He pulled it.

---

The ramp came down into the evening, the other way round from Riverside: a line of gold at the top, then a slot, then a square growing from the top down, and the light coming up into the grey hold like a tide up a beach. Low, level, warm. And the air of home with it, soft and wet after the white dry coast, cut grass and jet fuel and, faintly, from somewhere past the hangars, honeysuckle.

The ramp touched the concrete with a soft thud.

He unbuckled. Theo unbuckled and did not get up. Nobody in the hold was going to get up until he did.

He walked down the floor between the knees. Marcus, Felix, Priya, Lucía, Devon. Señora Ruiz with the folder. Mr Ferrante with his stick across his lap. Kimura, Brannigan, Clare Kerridge with the red case. Mr Abernathy at the end of the right-hand row with his pen out and the carton on his knee, waiting. Castellanos standing by the ramp.

He went down it into the light.

---

The crew had come round from the front door and stood in a line beside the ramp in the gold light, at attention, Major Voss at one end and Airman Soto at the other with her chin up.

Major Voss saluted. He inclined his head.

“Thank you, Major. All of you.”

“Sir.”

He looked past them, past the wing, across the apron.

Wide grey concrete with yellow lines, grass, the hangars. Far off at the edge, a fence, and on a rise beyond it, small, a crowd with long lenses, held there by somebody who would be Rosalind Aird. Forty yards away, a plain white rope on posts, the kind they put up at the Tomb on the Eleventh. Behind it, three and four deep from one end to the other, families. Men, women, children, old people in ordinary clothes, standing very still, all looking at the ramp.

Marcus’s mother, with the camera she had brought to every concert since ninth grade. The Hartigans. Kate.

In front of the rope, on the concrete side of it, a little way out, by herself, in a pale coat with her hands clasped: his mother.

And beside her a chair.

---

A chair with wheels, the black kind from the sixth floor. A tartan rug over the knees. Niamh behind it holding the handles, her hair in its plait. Beside her a man in a grey suit who was looking at the chair and not at the aircraft, which meant he was a physician. And in the chair, very straight, in a dark overcoat although it was seventy-four degrees, white hair brushed, hands on the arms of the chair, a man of eighty-two who had not been out of a hospital room since the twenty-ninth of September, when he had crossed this apron on a stretcher in the dark.

His father was on the apron.

There was a way it was done. His feet took no notice. He was walking and then he was running, across the grey concrete and the yellow lines, in Thursday’s clothes with the bluff in the seams and the collar in his pocket, in front of fifty-seven families and a crew and a fence full of lenses, the way Theo had run up Twenty-Second Street.

In September he had counted. Ten steps beside the stretcher from the aircraft to the ambulance door, on this concrete, before Castellanos took his arm. He had counted them again every night since, in the north wing.

He did not count these.

---

He stopped in front of the chair, and did not know what to do, so his body did it: down on his knees on the concrete, his face level with his father’s.

His father looked at him the way he had looked from the pillow at twenty to four on the twentieth of October, when they brought Frederick in after his mother. For a long time, slowly, all of him: the face, the cut over the eye, the dust, the torn shirt, the hands. Reading him from the first word to the last. Grey eyes, very pale, wet at the rims.

One hand came off the arm of the chair, slowly, across the tartan rug, and found Frederick’s left hand, the one with the skinned knuckles and the cut from the gap, and closed on it.

The weakest grip he had ever felt. He did not move his hand by a hair.

His father’s mouth moved. Frederick knew how it went from every afternoon since October at four: the breath in, the hold, the lips trying the shape before the sound, like trying a door to see if it is locked. He waited. He did not help. Behind the chair Niamh had gone completely still, and the physician, and his mother, and the rope, and the families, the whole apron in the gold light waiting with him.

“Sceptre,” said his father.

---

“He asked for the radio,” said Niamh, very softly, behind the chair. “In the car, on the way out. He kept looking at it, sir. The driver found the tower. We sat at the edge of the apron forty minutes with the window down, listening. And at twenty-nine past seven it said Sceptre, you’re number one, runway one-niner, cleared to land, and he shut his eyes, and didn’t open them till you were down.”

Not about himself. To him, looking at him, the way you say a name.

“Yes, Papa. It means me now.”

His father’s breath went in and out, short and fast, twice, the way it had on the telephone at Vienna. Laughing, with no words left for it.

---

“Där är du,” said his mother.

The way she had said it when he was three, coming in from the garden at Solliden with mud on his knees. There you are. As though he had only been at the bottom of the garden and she had been waiting by the door.

His father let go first, slowly, and put his hand back on the arm of the chair. Frederick stood, and his mother put her arms round him.

She did not say anything. She had to reach up now, which she had not at Christmas. She held on with her face against his dusty shoulder, perfectly still, and through the pale coat he could feel her shaking very slightly all the way through, the way the ground goes on shaking after, so little you think it is you.

“Four words,” she said at last into his shoulder, in English. “Nineteen times, between a quarter to ten and one o’clock. Alive. Unhurt. Bluff. Holding.” She held him a little way off and looked at him. Her eyes were dry. “And then on Friday at two o’clock, it stopped.”

“I know, Mamma. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.” Her hand flat on his chest, over his heart. “Mr Abernathy is coming down the ramp with a list. I think you should let him finish it.”

---

Mr Abernathy stood at the foot of the ramp in the brown jacket, carton in his good hand, pen in the bandaged one, and the class came down behind him in its pairs, and he counted them off aloud.

Fifty-one. Fifty-two. Fifty-three.

Behind the rope the families stood with their hands on it and watched their children come down the ramp of an Air Force aircraft in Thursday’s clothes, and not one of them crossed it.

Fifty-six. Fifty-seven.

He looked up over his glasses across forty yards of concrete.

“Hanover.”

Quite quietly. It carried across the whole apron to the rope and the fence and the hangars.

“Here.”

“Fifty-eight.”

He made the mark. Then he folded the carton along its crease and put it in the inside pocket of the brown jacket and buttoned the jacket over it, and turned to the fifty-seven families behind the rope, and said in the homeroom voice:

“That’s everybody.”

---

Somebody from the Household lifted the end of the rope off its post and it fell on the concrete, and the families came. Walking fast, most of them, some running, the way people walk at a station when the train is in and they have seen the face at the window. The class went to meet them, and in the middle of the grey concrete the two became one thing with no edges he could see.

He saw pieces of it.

Marcus’s mother, small and round with the camera round her neck, not taking a photograph, taking Marcus’s face in both hands. Were you still in the King’s row? And Marcus: there weren’t any rows, Mum, it was an aeroplane for tanks, and bursting into tears.

A very old woman in a sari the colour of marigolds, tiny, with a stick, coming across the concrete by herself because she could not hurry, and Priya going to her fast in her socks, and stopping, and holding out the cracked phone with eleven per cent. The old woman looked at it a long time, and up at Priya, and said something in Tamil, and Priya laughed and cried at once, and the old woman put a hand on her cheek.

Lucía’s mother, who looked like Lucía, holding out a telephone across the last few yards, already ringing. Abuelo. Sí. Sí, sí, the six-oh-two. Lucía turned with it at her ear and held it out a little towards him across the concrete. He raised his hand. She said something into it, and laughed.

“He says the lemons are in the post.”

And Señora Ruiz, crossing the apron towards his mother with the plastic folder, not hurrying. She stopped two yards off and inclined her head, and opened the folder that had gone down ninety-eight steps and up them and inland and through a six point four and onto a bus and an aircraft, and took out from near the top, between Hamid and Hartigan, a single sheet. SOPHOMORE CLASS TRIP: LOS ANGELES, MAY 29 TO JUNE 5. At the bottom, on the line for a parent or guardian, in a small upright hand: Christina.

“Ma’am. I believe this is yours. I kept it.” A pause. “In case.”

His mother took it in both hands and looked at it, and he saw that she was going to say something and could not. Señora Ruiz saw it too, and inclined her head again, and turned back towards Mr Ferrante waiting on his stick at the foot of the ramp.

Frederick went after her.

“Señora Ruiz.”

He held out the pen. Cheap blue plastic, the end chewed, ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL nearly worn off.

“I never gave it back. I’m sorry.”

She looked at it the way his mother had looked at the form.

“Keep it, mijo. It’s signed something.”

Her hand flat on his arm, once. Then across to Mr Ferrante, and she took his free arm and he leaned on her, and they stood at the foot of the ramp together and watched the families.

---

The Hartigans had waited at the rope and let everybody else go first. Anneliese was a nurse and knew how a ward worked; Peter drove a bus and knew how a stop worked; Kate was eighteen and was not going to be seen running across an airfield in front of a fence full of lenses. When the apron had filled, they came across it together at a walk, to Theo at the foot of the ramp in the T-shirt that said FORT IRWIN.

Kate got there first, walking very fast, and hit him on the arm quite hard with her fist, and then put both arms round his neck and held on.

Anneliese did not put her arms round him at once. She took both his wrists and turned his hands palm up and looked at them, and at his arms to the elbow, and at the brown under his nails that the tap on the lawn had not got out. Frederick watched her face change. She knew exactly what the brown was and how long it took to get under nails like that.

“How long.”

“Thirty-eight minutes.”

“Above the heart?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you take your hands off to look?”

“No.”

A very long moment. Then she put her arms round him and Kate together, and Peter Hartigan put his round all three, and they stood in a knot at the foot of the ramp in the gold light, so long that Airman Soto, at the end of the line, looked at the concrete.

---

Peter Hartigan let go first and came over: a big quiet man in his bus company jacket who had driven the number fourteen through the capital every day for four years, at whose kitchen table a boy had once said he was going to be King and been told by Theo to eat his dinner.

“Freddie.”

“Mr Hartigan.”

“Anneliese says you’ve never once done anything stupid in four years.” He looked at the cut. “I said that’s not true. I said there was the canoe.” He held out his hand. “I’m going to have to tell her about the canoe now. You’ve used up the canoe.”

Frederick shook it.

Then Kate in front of him, arms folded, chin up, taller than her mother, Theo’s face but older and sharper and with much less patience in it.

“Next time, I’m coming.”

“I know.”

“So I can make sure.”

“I know, Kate.”

“And you owe me a lizard.”

“Theo said, on Thursday. I didn’t know what it meant.”

“The first time you came to the flat you were twelve, and you told me you’d never seen a real lizard, not outside a glass box. I said California’s full of them, they run up walls. You said if you ever went you’d bring me a photograph of one. A real one. On a wall.” She looked at him. “Did you see one?”

“One. On Friday. On the wall of Señora Ruelas’s garden, among the roses, while I was waiting for the Governor. A small brown one. It ran up the wall. I didn’t have a camera.”

Kate looked at him a long time.

“Then you still owe me,” she said, and her voice went at the end, and she turned round and went back to her mother rather fast.

---

Theo came across from the ramp with his family behind him and stopped in front of the three of them: Frederick, his mother with the form in her hands, his father under the tartan rug.

Theo bowed. Properly, the way the Household had taught him in October for the three duties and no others: from the neck, once, slowly, to the Duke of Cumberland in the chair, and then to the Queen. In a T-shirt down to his knees, with brown under his nails and dust in his hair, perfectly. Frederick saw his mother see it, and something in her face moved.

“Your Royal Highness. Ma’am.”

“Theo.”

He straightened. Frederick’s father looked back at him, slowly, reading him.

“Sir. Ma’am. I’d like to raise a matter, if that’s all right. On the record.” He looked at Frederick. “I’ve been a Page of Honour since October. Three duties and no others. That’s what the warrant says. I’ve read it.” He counted on his fingers. “This week I’ve also been a search party. I’ve been on bread. I’ve been the person who tells small children in tents the Milky Way isn’t smoke. I’ve been thirty-eight minutes on a man’s arm on a playing field. I’ve been the one who holds the seat.” He put his hand down. “None of that’s in the warrant.”

“No,” said Frederick.

“So I’d like it on the record, in front of witnesses, that I need a raise.”

“You’re not paid.”

“That’s what I mean.”

A small silence round the chair.

Then his father laughed.

Out loud. Not the breath in and out with no sound. A real sound, short and cracked and rusty, like a door that had not been opened since September, so that Niamh jumped and the physician turned his head and his mother, with the form in her hands, turned and looked at her husband as though he had spoken a whole sentence.

Three or four breaths of it. Then his father sat with his eyes wet and his mouth a little open, looking at Theo Hartigan in an Army T-shirt, with the face he used to have on the terrace at Columbia Palace when somebody said something absurd at dinner and he put down his glass.

“He laughed,” said Niamh, very quietly. “Ma’am. He laughed out loud.”

“I heard.”

Theo’s face had gone completely red.

“I wasn’t joking.”

His father laughed again.

---

At a quarter to nine, when the gold had gone to grey and the blue lights in the grass had come on, the physician said it was time.

Frederick walked beside the chair to the car. Niamh pushed. His mother walked behind with the form. The black car at the edge of the apron had its small flag and its door open, and the radio still on inside, very low. Roger. Contact ground.

At the door his father looked up at him, the long look, and lifted his hand off the arm of the chair, slowly, and put it flat on Frederick’s chest over his heart, where his mother had put hers, and took it away.

“Tomorrow. At four. I’ve got something to read you.” The folded page from a loadmaster’s notebook. “It’s not a timetable. It’s sort of a timetable. It’s an arrival.”

The breath, the hold, the lips trying the shape. Frederick waited. He did not help.

Nothing came. His father shut his mouth and nodded once, slowly, the way Castellanos nodded, and Niamh and the physician lifted him into the car.

The door shut. The car went slowly across the apron towards the gate in the fence by the hangar, and as it went through, in the back window, a hand came up, slowly, a long way, and stayed there until the car turned the corner and was gone.

“Come on,” said Theo. “Your mum’s waiting. And Kate’s going to ask you about the lizard again if you let her. She’s already told me.”

“She’s not in our car.”

“She is now. Your mum asked all three of them. She said it was the first thing she’d asked for since May.” He looked at Frederick sideways. “I’d have said no, if I were you. To the lizard. But I’m not paid.”

At the foot of the ramp, in the last of the light, Airman Soto was still at attention at the end of the crew’s line, very small, chin up, watching him go, and she did not move until he was in the car.