Six in the Morning

He woke at a quarter past five because his body thought it was a quarter past eight.

Theo was breathing by the window, slow and heavy, the breathing of somebody who could sleep through a war, and through a window that opened four inches came the sea at the bottom of the bluff, the long hush, the pause, the hush again. Three thousand miles away Bridget would be at the range. Dame M would be at her desk under the ship’s barometer with the day’s list. His mother would be in the study with the boxes and the coffee. On the sixth floor of New Westminster General the nurse with the plait would be on her first round, and his father would be awake, looking at the window.

He dressed in the dark and put his shoes on and knocked once on the connecting door.

It opened at once. Castellanos was dressed and shaved and holding a cup from the machine in the corridor, which must be the worst coffee in California and which he drank every morning as though it were a duty.

“Sir.”

“I’d like to go down to the lobby. To telephone.”

Castellanos did not look at his watch.

“Four o’clock,” he said. “Except it’s six.”

“Except it’s six.”

“Shoes on,” said Castellanos, which they were, and put the coffee down, and came.

---

The lobby was empty except for the night porter, an old man in a maroon jacket asleep upright behind the desk with a newspaper folded on his chest. The first light came in through the long front windows from the park and the sea and lay across the blue and white and yellow tiles in pale panels, and across the wall behind the desk, so that the crack showed under its paint, a long dark line from floor to ceiling, like a vein.

There was a telephone in a little room off the lobby behind a glass door, with a stool and a shelf and a hotel notepad. Castellanos had a telephone nobody could listen to. Frederick wanted the little room. Castellanos stood outside the glass with his back to it, watching the lobby and the porter and the door and the sea.

On the way across he had taken a leaflet from the rack by the front door. He unfolded it on the shelf.

It was a timetable. The Santa Monica line, the grey trains with the orange board he had seen from the coach on Tuesday: every station from the beach to the Plaza, every train from the first in the morning to the last at night, in small blue print in columns, with notes at the bottom in English and Spanish about holidays and bicycles. Free, in a rack, for anybody, and nobody had taken it.

He dialled.

---

Four rings. Then the nurse with the plait said Sixth floor, and when he told her, oh, in a different voice, and one moment, sir. He heard the receiver put down on something hard, and the hospital, which he knew well enough to see: a trolley, a door, somebody laughing at the nurses’ station, the lift going ping at the end of the corridor. Footsteps. The receiver picked up and held, carefully, against something. Breathing.

“Papa. It’s me.”

The breathing changed.

Seven months of four o’clocks on the end of the bed, and Sundays at nine on the telephone from wherever he was, twice from Potsdam at Easter on a line that hummed. He knew all his father’s breathings: the tired one, the cross one, the one that meant a word was coming, the one that meant a word had got as far as the back of the throat and would come no further. This was none of those. This was the one that meant you.

“I’m in Santa Monica. In the hotel. It’s six in the morning here, nine for you. I couldn’t do four o’clock, so I’m doing nine. Is that all right?”

A short sound. Yes.

“Niamh’s holding the phone. I can hear her. Hello, Niamh.” The nurse laughed a little, off to one side. “I’ve got trains. Not ours. Theirs. The Santa Monica line. Do you want them?”

The sound again, slightly longer.

He smoothed the timetable flat with the side of his hand.

“Santa Monica to the Plaza. First train four fifty-one. Then five twenty-one. Every fifteen minutes till seven, every ten till nine, every fifteen again till three. Thirty-eight minutes end to end. Nineteen stations. It runs on the old right of way, Papa, the one from before 1910 that they never pulled up. Down Colorado, then across, past a place called Sawtelle, and Westwood, where the university is, then a long straight run, Pico, I think, then underground into the Plaza. The Venice line comes in at a junction at Vineyard.” He looked at the columns. “Overhead wire. Pantographs. Nearly the same as ours.”

He read him the nineteen stations, in order, slowly, from the beach to the Plaza. He read him the five fifty-one and the six oh-six and the six twenty-one, which would be leaving in four minutes from the station at the bottom of the hill by the pier. He read him the note about bicycles, and the note about holidays in Spanish, which said the same as the English one, because his father liked to hear him speak languages.

Then he told him about Mr Paredes. The five-car sets, the brakes at Rialto, the bridge over the Santa Ana River that sang, the baby called Claremont, the tie with anchors and the red one in the pocket, in case. The six-oh-two on the ninth day, and Mr Paredes sitting down on the grass. He did not tell him about Mrs Okafor on the stairs, or the names. His father had heard every bulletin from his bed for ten days in November, with the sound up, and would not have the radio turned off.

The line was quiet a long while.

Then the breathing that meant a word was coming. Frederick waited. He had learned in the first month never to help and never to hurry and never to finish a word his father had started: his father had said, with enormous difficulty, don’t, and it had taken Frederick a week to understand.

“Sea,” said his father.

Frederick shut his eyes.

“Yes. It’s right there, at the bottom of the hill. The hotel’s on a cliff, Papa, a sandy one, all yellow, with a park along the top, and then a road and a beach and then the sea. It’s enormous. It’s grey in the morning and silver at lunch and gold at night, and there’s a pier going out into it with a Ferris wheel on the end, with lights, and Theo says he’s going to make me go on it, and I’m not going to.” He opened his eyes and looked through the glass door, across the lobby, out of the long windows, where the light had gone pale gold and the palm trees in the park were black against it. “I can see it now. The sun’s up behind the hotel and the sea’s going light. There’s nobody on the beach but a man with a dog. The dog’s in the sea.”

The breathing was slow and even.

“I’ll ring tomorrow. Same time. Every morning till Tuesday, Tuesday from the airport, and then Wednesday at four, at the bed, like always.” He folded the timetable along its creases. “I’m keeping this. I’ll bring it. You can have it.”

A short sound. The one that meant good.

“Bye, Papa.”

The receiver was taken away, and Niamh said he’s smiling, sir, he’s smiling, I don’t know if you can hear that, and the line clicked.

---

His mother rang back at twenty past six. Not on the room telephone. On Castellanos’s, and Castellanos opened the glass door and held it out without a word and went back to watching the lobby.

“You rang your father,” said his mother, in Swedish.

“Yes.”

“Niamh rang me. She said he was smiling.” A pause. “She said you read him nineteen stations.”

“It’s a short line.”

His mother laughed, three thousand miles away at twenty past nine in the morning, the short surprised laugh she did not do in front of anybody but the family, and he had not heard it since the second of May.

“Are you eating?”

“Yes. A cook from Pomona said last night that they weren’t feeding me in the palace. She said to tell you. She said tell her a cook from Pomona said.”

“Tell her the palace has been trying for sixteen years and she is welcome to come and try herself.” A paper moved. “Listen. The Prime Minister. It’s Thursday.”

“I know.”

“He’s offered to do it by telephone this afternoon at four your time, or tomorrow. He’d rather tomorrow, because there’s a division in the Commons today on the second Supplementary Estimate, the one for the valleys, and he’d like to be able to tell you how it went. I’ve said tomorrow, unless you’d rather today.”

“Tomorrow’s fine.”

“I thought it would be. He also said to tell you, and I quote, that he has never been to a theme park and does not intend to start, and that his private office has a sweepstake on whether you went on any rollercoasters.”

Frederick looked through the glass at Castellanos’s back.

“Tell him four. Two with skulls. And Sergeant Brannigan went on all of them.”

“I shan’t tell him about Sergeant Brannigan,” said his mother, “because Sergeant Brannigan will be in his own report and I don’t want to spoil it.” Then, more quietly, in the voice under the Swedish: “Frederick. Is it good? The trip?”

The small girl with the ice cream. The sign on the bluff, the arrow pointing up. Mr Paredes’s hands on the tablecloth, showing him the controller.

“Yes. It’s the best thing I’ve done.”

She was quiet a moment.

“Good. That’s what I wanted. That’s all.” The paper again. “Go and have breakfast. You’re going to the pier?”

“At nine.”

“Go on the wheel.”

“Mamma.”

“Your father went on one in Vienna, the summer we were married, with me, and he was so frightened that he held my hand the whole way round and pretended he was holding it because I was frightened, and I let him.” A pause. “Go on the wheel. Then you’ll have something to tell him tomorrow that isn’t trains.”

---

He came out of the little room at half past six with the timetable in his back pocket, and Castellanos fell in a little behind him, and they crossed the lobby over the long gold panels of light.

Marisol had come in. She was behind the desk taking her coat off, and the night porter was awake and folding his newspaper with great care, as though he had been reading it all along.

“You’re up early. Both of you.”

“It’s nine o’clock at home.”

“It’s always nine o’clock somewhere.” She hung her coat on a hook under the crack. “Breakfast’s not till seven. There’s coffee in the dining room. It’s better than the machine upstairs.” She looked at Castellanos. “Much better.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Castellanos, with feeling.

Frederick stopped at the desk.

“The street behind yours. In San Bernardino. You said on Tuesday it wasn’t there any more. Is anybody building it again?”

Marisol took her glasses off and held them by the chain.

“They started in April. The first two houses. The foundations. A man from the county comes on Wednesdays and looks at them and writes things down.” She put the glasses back on. “I walk past on my way to the bus. They’re very deep. Much deeper than the old ones.” She looked down at the register. “I think that’s the code. I think it lets them move.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “I think it does.”

He went out into the park with Castellanos behind him and stood at the railing at the top of the bluff in the cool air. The sun was coming up behind him over the city, and the whole sea in front of him was going from grey to silver. A long way down, very small, the man walked along the edge of the water and the dog went in and out of the waves barking at them. The pier went out into the light with the wheel at the end of it, still, not turning yet, waiting for nine o’clock.