Speedbird

The suitcase would not shut.

It was a large suitcase, navy, with his initials on a brass plate by the handle where anybody at a baggage carousel could read them, which Dame M had said was the point, since nobody at a baggage carousel would believe them. It had been open on the floor of his room in the north wing since Sunday. It had been full since Tuesday. Since Wednesday it had been more than full, and this evening, the last evening, it had been sat on.

“Again,” said Theo.

He was sitting on it. He had been sitting on it for some minutes, cross-legged, with the air of a man meditating on a mountain, and every so often he bounced, and the lid came down another quarter of an inch, and the zip moved forward along its track by about a tooth.

“It’s the boots,” said Frederick.

“It is not the boots.”

“The rugby boots. Dame M put them in. They weren’t on the list.”

“Everything’s on the list.” Theo bounced. “Read me the list.”

Frederick read him the list. It was two pages long, typed, and had come up on the breakfast tray on Monday in an envelope marked SENIOR YEAR. CLOTHING. FINAL, and someone, at some point between the typing and the tray, had gone through it with a fountain pen. Coat, waterproof, 2 had become Coat, waterproof, 3 (it is England). Shoes, sensible had had a line drawn through sensible, with a note in the margin, There is no such thing for a boy of seventeen. Two pairs. At the bottom, under Sundries, was a single word: Boots, and in the margin beside it, Rugby. Do not argue.

“Rugby,” said Theo. “Are you going to play rugby?”

“I don’t know. Nobody’s asked me.”

“Dame M’s asked you. That’s what do not argue means.” He bounced again. Something inside the case made a noise like a small animal surrendering. “What else.”

“Jumper, wool, four.”

“Four.”

“It says it is England again.”

“How many times does it say it is England?”

Frederick counted. “Seven.”

“She’s never been.”

“She was in the Navy. She’s been everywhere.”

“Then she knows,” said Theo darkly, and took hold of the zip with both hands, and leaned back, and pulled, and the zip went all the way round the corner and along the side and up to the top in one long ripping sound, and stopped, and held.

They looked at it.

“Don’t touch it,” said Theo.

“I’m not touching it.”

“If you touch it, it will open, and everything in it will come out, and we will be here until the aeroplane goes, and you’ll arrive in England with nothing but the boots.” He climbed off very slowly, the way you climb off something that might go off. “Don’t breathe on it.”

Frederick did not breathe on it.

His own room looked strange without his things in it. The shelves had gaps. The desk was clear except for the lamp and the photograph of his father at the controls of a light aircraft in 1971, which he had decided last night to leave, and then decided at midnight to take, and then decided at six this morning to leave, because the man in the photograph was coming too and would be in the same city and would think it odd. On the wall above the desk the map of the Columbia District that had been there since he was nine had a pale rectangle beside it where the timetable of the six-oh-two had been, which was now in the case, under the boots.

“It’s a year,” said Theo, sitting on the bed. “It’s not forever.”

“I know.”

“You’ve got the look.”

“What look?”

“The look you get. Like you’re counting something.” Theo lay back on the bed with his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling, at the crack in the corner. “Thirty-one of us. One year. Then June. Then graduation. Then the step on the Monday. Abernathy said.”

“Abernathy said a lot of things.”

“Abernathy said, and I quote, you will be cold, you will be confused by the money, and you will be home before you know it, and I will be the only one of us glad of it.” Theo yawned. “He’s been to England. He went in 1987. He showed us a photograph. He had hair.”

“I’ve never been to England.”

Theo turned his head on the pillow.

“You’ve been to England,” he said. “You were crowned in England. I carried your train. I was there. I had breeches on.”

“For six days. In a car. In a church. In a palace. That’s not England.” Frederick sat down on the floor beside the case, carefully, not touching it. “I’ve never been on a bus in England. I’ve never been in a shop. I don’t know what the money looks like. I don’t know what they call anything.” He thought about it. “I’m the King of a country I’ve never lived in.”

“Well,” said Theo. “Now you are going to.”

---

At four o’clock his father was at the end of the kitchen table, as he was at four o’clock every day, with the timetable open in front of him and a mug of tea that Bridget had made too strong because she always did and he had never once said so.

The kitchen at Columbia Palace was the same as it had always been. The long scrubbed pine table, a foot from where it had stood before December, because nobody had moved it back. The range. The clock over the door that was four minutes slow and had been four minutes slow since before Frederick was born. Bridget at the sink with her back to everybody.

His father read the arrivals.

He read them every day at four, the arrivals at Union Station, from the timetable, in order, in the voice that had come back to him in pieces since September of the year before last: not all at once, never all at once, but a train at a time. Some days he got as far as the four-forty from Baltimore. Some days he got to the five-fifteen. On a very good day in July he had read the whole sheet to the six o’clock from Richmond and then put the paper down and looked at his son across the table with an expression of enormous, silent, smug satisfaction, like a cat that has knocked a glass off a shelf on purpose.

Today he read to the four-forty.

Then he stopped, and turned the sheet over, which he did not usually do, and on the back of it, in pencil, in the large careful capitals he had been using since the spring, he had written something else.

PADDINGTON.

And under it, a list. The arrivals at Paddington. Four o’clock, London time. 16.02 OXFORD. 16.09 READING. 16.14 WORCESTER SHRUB HILL. A whole column of them, copied out from somewhere, in pencil, slowly, each one a little crooked.

Frederick looked at it.

“Where did you get those?”

His father tapped the side of his nose.

“Niamh,” said Bridget, to the sink. “She rang the station. She spelled every one of them out to him over the speaker telephone, and he wrote them down, and it took an hour and a quarter, and I had to listen to the whole thing while I did the potatoes.”

His father looked enormously pleased with himself.

“Read,” he said. “There.” He put his finger on the column. “Every.” A breath. “Day.”

“In London.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to read the Paddington arrivals.”

“Yes.”

“To whom?”

His father looked at him, steadily, the way he had looked at him across this table every afternoon for a year, and lifted one hand from the paper, and turned it over, palm up, and pointed at him.

“I’ll be in the Cotswolds,” said Frederick. “Two hours away. I can’t come to the kitchen at four.”

“Telephone,” said his father.

“Every day?”

“Four,” said his father firmly, and then, with an effort that Frederick could see from the other end of the table, the breath, the hold, the lips trying the shape: “Four. O’clock. London.” A pause. “Not. Late.”

From the sink, Bridget made a noise that might have been a laugh, or might have been the tap.

---

His mother came in at half past four in a grey coat with her hair up, from a meeting with a minister of her own, who had flown in from Stockholm that morning and was flying back that night and had wanted, she said, to spend the whole of the meeting telling her how cold England was going to be.

“Does everyone think England is cold?” said Frederick.

“Everyone who has been there,” said his mother, and sat down at the table, and took his father’s tea out of his hand, and drank some, and gave it back. “I was in London for one summer with my father when I was fifteen. It rained every day for six weeks except one, and on that one the English all went outside and took their shirts off and lay in the parks, and it was the most frightening thing I have ever seen.” She looked at the list on the back of the timetable. “Paddington,” she said.

“He’s going to ring me every day at four.”

“You are going to ring him,” said his mother. “He cannot dial yet. Niamh will hold the telephone.” She put her hand on his father’s arm on the table, briefly, the way she did, and took it away. “We go on Saturday. You go tonight. That is the rule.”

“I know the rule.”

“Two aircraft,” said his mother. “Two days apart. Your father and I on Saturday, on the one from Riverside, which is not a nice aeroplane. You tonight, with your class, on the American to New York, with a hundred and fifty strangers and a drink in a plastic cup, and in the morning on Concorde, which is a very nice aeroplane, with sixty strangers and a meal on china.” She looked at him across the table with her clear grey eyes. “I have been told by the Household that this is the safest way to send the King to England, because nobody would think of looking for him in seat 31A of the evening American to Kennedy.”

“Is that true?”

“I have no idea,” said his mother. “I have been told it by three different people this week, and each of them said it as though it were their own idea, so I assume it is somebody’s.”

---

The thirty-one of them were at Columbia Regional at seven that evening, in the old hall of 1941, at the American desks, checking in for London by way of New York, in a long untidy crocodile that went past a coffee stall and a shop selling neck pillows and around a pillar and back.

Mr Abernathy was at the front with the roll book.

He had brought the roll book. Frederick had not believed that he would, and then had seen it in his hand at the head of the crocodile, the brown one, with the cardboard corners, and had felt something settle in him that he had not known was loose. Mr Abernathy was in the brown jacket and a hat that nobody had ever seen before, a flat tweed cap, very new, which he had clearly bought for the purpose of going to England and which made him look like a man in a photograph of a man going to England.

“Passports,” said Mr Abernathy.

Thirty passports went up in the air, and one hand with nothing in it.

It was the first time most of them had needed one. You did not need a passport inside the Realm; you could go from Maine to the bottom of Loreto, if you had a mind and a long enough holiday, without anybody asking who you were. But Britain was another country, with another Parliament and another citizenship, under the same King, and the airline would not sell anybody a seat on the morning Concorde without seeing one. The same King had none. He had never had one. Every passport in the Realm was issued in his name, and you could not issue one to yourself, and nobody had ever thought it worth the trouble, because there had never been a desk on the other side that would ask him for it.

Frederick held his hand up anyway, with the others, because it seemed rude not to.

“Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy, without looking.

“Sir.”

“The airline’s been told. Put your hand down before they forget.”

Lucía Paredes was behind him in the line with a rucksack the size of a small car and a bag of lemons from her mother’s tree in Pomona, which she was going to try to take to England in her hand luggage, and had been told four times she could not, and had a plan.

“What’s the plan?” said Frederick.

“I’m going to eat them,” said Lucía.

“Before security?”

“If I have to.” She looked at the bag. “There are nine.”

Behind her was Inés, reading, a fat paperback, the kind of book that has a ship on the cover. Behind Inés was Devon, telling anybody who would listen that he had read on the internet that in England they put beans on toast, on purpose, for breakfast. Behind Devon the line went round the pillar, past the neck pillows, and somewhere at the far end of it was Mr Ferrante, without his stick, holding a large rolled document under his arm that turned out at the gate to be a map of Gloucestershire from 1779, which he had borrowed from the university and intended to compare with the present county, field by field, for a year.

Castellanos stood a little apart from all of them, by a window, in a dark suit, with his hands folded in front of him and a small suitcase of his own on the floor at his feet.

And beside him, half a step back, Kimura.

Sergeant Ruth Kimura had come onto the detail the spring before Santa Monica. She was the one who had sat on a bench on Ocean Avenue with her arm up, and had moved fifty-eight sophomores up a hill in the dark without raising her voice. She was perhaps thirty. She had a short black fringe and a way of looking at a room as though it had just told her a joke and she was deciding whether to laugh. She had not been told, as far as Frederick knew, that she was going to be the one standing at the edge of the room next June. But she was here, at the window, half a step behind Castellanos, and she was looking out at the aeroplane on the stand with her head on one side.

“It’s very long,” she said, to nobody.

“It’s a seven-five-seven,” said Castellanos.

“I know what it is, Sergeant. I’m saying it’s long.” She watched a man in a high-visibility jacket walk underneath it. “For a hundred and fifty strangers and the King of fourteen countries. In seat 31A.”

“Thirty-one F,” said Castellanos.

Kimura turned her head.

“He’s in 31F?”

“Window. Starboard side. I’m in 31E, you’re in 32F, Hartigan’s in 31D. The Household changed it on Tuesday. It was 31A on the list that went to everybody’s wife.”

Kimura looked at him for a moment with great respect.

“Sergeant,” she said. “You’ve done that before.”

Castellanos did not answer. He picked up his suitcase.

---

The boarding was ordinary. That was the astonishing thing about it.

He had flown all his life. He had flown in the King’s aircraft, in the Royal Air Force’s, in the Realm’s, in a helicopter over the Pacific with a woman screaming numbers in his headset. He had never once in his life shuffled down an air bridge behind a man with a guitar case, holding a boarding pass between his teeth, while a stewardess at the door said good evening, good evening, good evening to each person in turn in exactly the same tone and did not look up from the passes.

She did not look up when she said it to him.

“Good evening,” she said, and took the pass, and looked at it, and gave it back, and said “Good evening,” to Theo behind him, and it was not until Frederick was three rows down the aisle that he heard, behind him, a very small sound, like somebody dropping a pen.

He did not look round.

Seat 31F was by the window, just behind the wing, with a blanket in a plastic bag on it and a pair of headphones and a small card explaining what to do if the aeroplane landed on water, which he read from beginning to end, because he always read them, and because he knew more about what happened when an aeroplane landed on water than anyone else on board, and he wanted to see whether the card agreed with him.

It did, more or less.

Theo sat down in 31D and put his bag at his feet.

“She dropped her pen,” he said.

“I heard.”

“She went white.” Theo took his blanket out of its bag. “Then she went red. Then she went into the little kitchen bit and said something to the other one, and the other one looked round the curtain, and then they both went back into the little kitchen bit.” He shook the blanket out. “They’re going to give you extra crisps.”

“I don’t want extra crisps.”

“You can give them to me,” said Theo.

Castellanos sat down in 31E, between them, and folded his hands, and looked straight ahead at the back of the seat in front, which had a screen in it showing a small white aeroplane on a large blue map. The small white aeroplane was sitting on the coast of Virginia, and in front of it, up the coast, was a short dotted line to New York, and beyond New York, in a different colour, a long thin dotted line across all that blue to a point near London.

---

The engines went up. The aeroplane moved.

From the flight deck, through the cabin speakers, the captain’s voice came on, an easy voice from somewhere south of Richmond, and welcomed them aboard American’s evening flight to New York Kennedy, and said they would be in the air for fifty-five minutes, and that the weather at Kennedy was seventy-one degrees and clear, and that if anybody was going on to Europe in the morning, as he understood a good many of them were, he hoped they had packed a coat.

Thirty-one seniors said that they had packed three.

Somewhere at the front, Mr Abernathy, in his new tweed cap, said “Sit down,” in a voice that carried to row thirty-four.

They taxied. They turned. They stopped at the end of the runway, and Frederick, with his face close to the window, saw the lights of the capital beyond the river, the Monument white in the middle, the long dark line of the Axis, the tower of the cathedral on its ridge. He had been looking at that view from aeroplanes his whole life. He had never looked at it knowing that he would not see it again for ten months.

The trolley came before they had stopped climbing, with a drink in a plastic cup, as his mother had said, and with it, on his tray and nobody else’s, three extra packets of crisps, laid out in a row, perfectly straight, like an honour guard. He gave them to Theo, who had fallen asleep the moment the wheels left the ground, in the way that Theo slept, completely, like a light being switched off, and who woke up for exactly as long as it took to put them in his bag, and went back to sleep.

---

The class slept at Kennedy, at a hotel on the edge of the airfield where the airline had taken a floor for them, four to a room, with the windows sealed against the noise and the noise coming through anyway.

He did not sleep. He had not expected to.

Theo slept in the next bed as though he had been paid to. Devon, in the bed by the door, explained beans on toast to the dark until the dark stopped answering, and then slept too. Somewhere outside in the corridor, in a chair, Castellanos did not sleep at all, or if he did, he did it with his eyes open. Every minute and a half an aircraft went over, low, heavy, going out over the water towards somewhere, and the glass in the window hummed with it and was still. He lay on his back and counted them, the way his father counted trains, and at about two in the morning he lost count and started again.

At half past four Mr Abernathy knocked on every door on the corridor with the roll book, as though there might be somebody in a hotel at Kennedy who had not yet been accounted for.

---

It was on the stand at the end of the British Airways building, in the grey before sunrise, and the whole class stopped at the window of the lounge when they saw it and did not say anything at all.

It was smaller than he had thought. It was white, and long, and thin, with its wings swept back to the tail in one smooth triangle, and its nose was down, drooping, like a heron’s beak over water, the way it lowered it on the ground so that the pilots could see. It did not look like an aeroplane. It looked like something an aeroplane had been designed to look like by somebody who had never seen one and had been told about birds.

“It’s very small,” said Kimura, to nobody.

“It’s Concorde,” said Castellanos.

“I know what it is, Sergeant. I’m saying it’s small.” She watched a man in a high-visibility jacket walk underneath the nose without having to duck. “For the King of fourteen countries. At twice the speed of sound.”

“Nine A,” said Castellanos.

“I didn’t ask.”

“You were going to.”

The cabin was narrow, and low, and quiet, with four seats to a row, two and two, and an aisle down the middle that Theo had to turn sideways in, and windows the size of a hand. There were a hundred seats, and the class had a third of them, and the other two thirds belonged to people in good suits who had clearly done this before and were looking at thirty-one Americans in hooded tops with the expression of people who had paid for silence.

Frederick had 9A, the window. Theo had 9B. Across the aisle, in 9C, a man of about sixty in a cardigan had already opened a newspaper, and beyond him, by the far window in 9D, sat Castellanos, with his hands folded, looking at the man in the cardigan as though he had been told to and had decided to enjoy it. Kimura was in the row behind, with the murder in the country house.

On the bulkhead at the front of the cabin there was a small black panel with three lines of red figures on it: the speed, the height, and a number that said MACH and then 0.00.

---

From the flight deck, through the cabin speakers, the captain’s voice came on, a cheerful English voice, a man who sounded as though he had been to a good school and enjoyed it, and welcomed them all aboard Speedbird Concorde Four to London Heathrow, and said they would be in the air for three hours and twenty-five minutes, at fifty-eight thousand feet and twice the speed of sound, and that the weather in London was fifteen degrees, which for our friends from the Realm was fifty-nine, and damp, which got a laugh from the English half of the cabin and a puzzled silence from the American half.

Then he said: “And I’m told we have a particularly distinguished group of passengers on board this morning. A school party from Ellicott High School, New Westminster, on their way to a year in Gloucestershire. Welcome to you all. You’ll love it. You’ll freeze.”

Thirty-one seniors cheered.

At the front, Mr Abernathy, in his new tweed cap, said “Sit down,” in a voice that carried to the back of the aeroplane, which on Concorde was not far.

They taxied. They turned. They stopped at the end of the runway, with the sun coming up red over the water behind them.

Through the open headphones on Castellanos’s knee, very small, came the voice of the tower. The ordinary channel, the one any passenger could listen to on these aeroplanes if he found the right socket in the armrest, which Castellanos, for reasons of his own, always did.

“Speedbird Concorde Four, runway three-one-left, wind three-one-zero at six, cleared for take-off.”

And then the captain, reading it back. And then a pause.

And then the tower again, a different voice, older, a man who had clearly leaned across somebody to the microphone:

“And Speedbird Concorde Four. Sceptre Speedbird, I should say. Safe flight, sir.”

The captain, after a moment, cheerful, as though somebody had told him a very good joke at dinner and he was trying not to laugh in front of the bishop:

“Sceptre Speedbird. Thank you, Kennedy. We’ll look after him.”

Castellanos took his headphones off his knee and put them in the seat pocket.

“That,” he said, to the back of the seat in front, “was not on the list.”

Then the engines went up, and up, and kept going up past the place where engines stop, and something behind them caught with a thump like a door slammed in another house, and the whole aeroplane leaned back and went, and Theo, who had been about to say something, did not say it, and pressed the back of his head into the seat, and grinned at the ceiling all the way down the runway.

---

They went up through the morning in a long steep slope until the sky outside the little window stopped being blue and became something else.

He had never seen it. Nobody had told him. At fifty-eight thousand feet the sky above them was not blue but a deep dark violet, nearly black at the top of the window, and below it, very far down, the cloud lay over the ocean like a floor, white and still, and at the edge of the world, where the cloud met the dark, the line of it was not straight. It curved. Very slightly. He looked at it for a long time to make sure.

On the bulkhead the red figures said MACH 2.00 and stayed there.

Theo was asleep again, with his head on Frederick’s shoulder, which he would deny. The meal had come, on china, as his mother had said, with a linen napkin and a small silver knife, and Theo had eaten his, and half of Frederick’s, and gone to sleep with the napkin still tucked into the neck of his hooded top.

He knew where they were without a map. He worked it out from the time since Kennedy and the figures on the bulkhead, the way he would have worked out a train between two stations, and when the minutes came round he looked down at the cloud and knew that somewhere under it, east of Newfoundland, was the place where the dotted line of another aircraft had stopped two years ago. He watched the aeroplane pass over it and keep going. He had known it would. He watched anyway.

Everybody else on board had a passport in a pocket. He thought about that, at twice the speed of sound, with nothing in his. He had been to Britain six times and Germany twice and once to Stockholm, and every time somebody had met him at the foot of the steps and there had been no desk, no queue, no man in a booth to look at his face and then at his photograph and then at his face. This afternoon there would be a desk. He did not know what he was going to put on it.

The man in the cardigan across the aisle, an Englishman of about sixty, who had been reading a newspaper since Kennedy, folded his newspaper, and leaned across the aisle, past Theo, who was asleep, and said in a low voice, very politely:

“Excuse me. I’m so sorry. You’re not, by any chance, going to Gloucestershire?”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“I thought so. I heard the captain.” The man nodded. “I’m from Cheltenham. Wonderful county. You’ll love it.” He paused. “Bit wet.”

“So I’m told.”

“Which school?”

“Coln Abbey.”

“Oh, Coln Abbey.” The man was delighted. “My cousin’s boy went there. Lovely place. Very old. Terrible food. You’ll have a marvellous time.” He looked at Frederick in the strange dark light from the window for a moment, kindly, with the faint frown of a man who has a word on the tip of his tongue. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

“I don’t think so,” said Frederick.

“No. No, I’m sure not. You’ve just got one of those faces.” The man picked up his newspaper again, and unfolded it, and Frederick saw, on the front page, under the masthead, a photograph of himself, from the coronation, in the crown, with a headline above it in large black letters that said THE KING IS COMING (TO SCHOOL).

The man read it for a while.

Then he lowered it, very slowly, and looked across the aisle again.

Frederick was looking out of the window.

The man raised the newspaper again, all the way up, so that it covered his face entirely, and did not lower it until Heathrow.

---

They came down out of the dark at about three, London time, the violet going to blue and the blue to white as they dropped, and then they were in cloud, a long time in cloud, grey and wet and full of shaking, and then out of the bottom of it.

And there it was.

Green. That was the first thing. He had seen it from the air before, in November, but in November it had been brown and grey and wet under a low sky. This was the end of August, and it was green in a way that nothing in the Realm was green, not even Virginia in May, a soft, close, crowded green, cut up into small fields with hedges round them, hundreds of them, thousands, in every shape, none of them square, as though somebody had dropped a green plate a thousand years ago and nobody had ever swept it up. Little roads ran between them, not straight. Little villages sat in them, grey and brown, each with a church tower. A river went through it all in loops, shining.

Theo had woken up. He leaned across Frederick to look.

“It’s tiny,” said Theo.

“It’s not tiny.”

“It’s tiny. Look at it. Look at the fields. You could fit that whole field in the yard at Ellicott.” He looked for a while. “Where are the cows?”

“I don’t know.”

“There should be cows.”

Below them a train went along a line between two hedges, a short train, four carriages, going somewhere small. Frederick watched it until the wing hid it.

He thought that he was the King of all of it. Every field. Every hedge. Every one of those grey churches with its tower. And the train, and the man driving the train, and the people inside the train, who were going home early on a Friday afternoon at the end of August and were thinking about anything but him.

He thought he had never been anywhere that made him feel so entirely like a visitor.

The wheels came down with a bump and a roar, the nose high, the long white body settling behind it like a heron landing. They were on the runway, the grey airfield going past, the long low buildings, the rain on the little window in lines. The captain came on and said welcome to London Heathrow, where the local time was twenty-five past three and the temperature was fifteen degrees, fifty-nine for the Realm, and that he hoped they had enjoyed the flight, and that on behalf of the whole crew he would like to wish a particular welcome home, and there was a small pause, to all our British passengers.

The cabin laughed. The English half of it, and then, a beat behind, the American half.

Theo looked at him.

“Home,” said Theo.

“He meant the British passengers.”

“Sure he did,” said Theo, and stood up, and hit his head on the overhead locker, which on Concorde was lower than on any aeroplane he had ever been on, as he did every time on every aeroplane, and said a word that Mr Abernathy, five rows in front, heard perfectly well.