Book Ten: Senior Year Part Two: Advent and Lent Characters
Chapter Fourteen
Christmas on the Wold
Frederick. Coln Saint Aldwyns. Wednesday, 18 December, to Wednesday, 25 December 2030.
In the Realm's press she is simply "the Queen", and in the Realm's schools "the Swedish one", a name she has said she does not mind.
They recorded the Christmas messages on the Wednesday before the end of term, in his study at the end of the corridor in Windrush, and the man from the BBC could not believe it.
“Here?” he said.
He was a tall nervous man in a cashmere scarf who had produced the Christmas broadcast for eleven years, and for every one of those years it had been filmed in a drawing room at the Palace or a library at Windsor with a Christmas tree and a fire and a table of family photographs in silver frames, and he stood in the doorway of the room at the end of the corridor and looked at it with the expression of a man who has been asked to film the Pope in a bus shelter.
The room was the room. Two beds, two desks, two wardrobes that did not match. The radiator. The window with small panes looking down the valley, with the river at the bottom of it and the village beyond, grey stone in grey light, and smoke going up from chimneys. On Theo’s bed a heap of laundry. On Frederick’s desk the blue notebook, a copy of Persuasion with seventeen strips of paper sticking out of it, a cricket ball, and a photograph of a house on Twenty-Second Street with half a roof on.
“Here,” said Frederick.
“Sir, there isn’t a tree.”
“There’s a tree outside the window.”
The man from the BBC looked out of the window. There was a tree outside the window. It was an oak, bare, enormous, about four hundred years old.
“Sir,” he said, very gently, the way you would speak to a man standing on a ledge, “the Christmas message has always.”
“I know,” said Frederick. “That’s why.”
His mother had approved it. He had asked her at the Palace in November, and she had looked at him over her coffee for a long moment and said, what do you want to say? and he had told her, and she had said, then say it where you are.
So he said it where he was.
He sat at his desk, in a jumper, the one with the elbows going, with the window behind him and the valley in it, and the man from the BBC set up one camera and two lights and a microphone on a stand, and moved Theo’s laundry, and then, after a look from Frederick, put Theo’s laundry back.
He did not have a script on a screen. He had a sheet of paper, which he did not look at.
It was the British one first. Six minutes. It was about his father.
He had thought about what to say for a month. He had thought about saying something about the year, the Abbey and the crown and the Speech, which was what the Household had suggested, in a memorandum, in October, with headings. He had thought about saying something about the country, which he had lived in for four months and had come to love, which was true, and which he did not think he could say on television without sounding like a man selling it.
In the end he talked about his father learning to walk.
He talked about it simply. He talked about the hospital in New Westminster and the corridor on the sixth floor and ten steps at a time. He talked about four hundred yards on the flat and the Back Walk at Stirling and forty-one steps, some of them without a rail. He talked about the barrier at the end of platform nine at Paddington, and a man of eighty-three who had stood there in the rain in a tweed cap, with nobody noticing him, to meet a train. He said that in two years his father had learned to do again, very slowly, a great many things he had done all his life without thinking, and that watching him learn them had taught his son more than he had been taught by anybody about what it was to begin again; and that he thought, at Christmas, that a great many people in Britain were beginning something again, for one reason or another, very slowly, a step at a time, without a rail, and that he wished them the patience his father had, and the people round them that his father had, and somebody at the end of the platform.
That was all. He did not say anything about the Crown or the Realm or the Commonwealth. He said happy Christmas, and stopped.
The man from the BBC, behind the camera, said nothing for some time.
Then he said, “Sir. Could we.” and stopped. “No,” he said. “No, we couldn’t. That’s it. That’s the one.” And took off his cashmere scarf, for some reason, and held it.
The Realm’s message was second. Four minutes. He did that one differently. He talked to the Realm about the space at the front of the crowd at the Tomb on the Eleventh, and how he had watched it on a laptop on a pile of books, and how he had understood, watching it, that the Realm did not need him in the room to keep its silence, and that this was the best thing anybody could know about a country, and that he was proud of it, and would be home in June.
And at the end, before happy Christmas, he said the Spanish.
He had it by heart. He had said it to himself every night for a fortnight, in the dark, very quietly, so as not to wake Theo, in Señora Ruelas’s voice, which he had only heard once, under a table, in the dark, in June of last year, with the house coming down round them, and which he had never forgotten.
Pasen, que hay para todos.
Come in. There is enough for everybody.
He did not translate it. He said happy Christmas, and stopped.
The term ended on the Friday. Most of the class flew home, on a coach from the gravel at six in the morning, with their suitcases, to Heathrow, to the Realm, to Christmas in Pomona and Ventura and the Columbia District, and Frederick stood on the gravel with Kimura and watched them go, and Lucía waved out of the back window with both hands, and Inés did not wave at all but held up her book, the one with the ship on it, against the glass, as a sort of salute.
Theo went too. He had not wanted to. He had stood on the gravel by the coach door with his rucksack and said I’ll stay, and Frederick had said your mother’s expecting you, and Theo had said she’ll understand, and Frederick had said Kate won’t, and Theo had thought about Kate, and got on the coach.
Kit went to Leeds. Will went up the hill to the farm. The school emptied in a morning, like a bath.
And on the Saturday afternoon, at three o’clock, a dark car came down the lane from the main road into the valley of the Coln, very slowly, behind a tractor, and stopped outside the New Inn, and the Duke of Cumberland and the Queen of Sweden got out of it.
They had taken two rooms over the pub.
Nobody could quite remember afterwards whose idea it had been. Dame M said it had been the Queen’s. The Queen said it had been Niamh’s. Niamh said it had been the Duke’s, at dinner, in November, when Frederick had said he would be in the village for Christmas, and the Duke had put down his fork and pointed, with one finger, at the floor of the dining room, and said there, and then at his son, and then, with a slow and very deliberate gesture, had mimed pulling a pint.
The Household had not liked it. Castellanos had not liked it. The Gloucestershire Constabulary had been to see the New Inn twice and had walked round it with a clipboard and gone away looking ill. But the Queen had said that the Duke would spend Christmas where his son was, and the Duke had said nothing at all, and had sat at the head of the dining table at the Palace with his hands on the head of his stick, looking at the Master of the Household’s deputy until the Master of the Household’s deputy went away.
So they had two rooms over the pub.
They were the two best rooms, at the front, over the door, with low ceilings and sloping floors and windows looking out across the bridge at the river, and Sue Fennell had got them ready herself, and had put flowers in them, and a heater, and a hot water bottle in each bed, and a bell on the bedside table in the Duke’s room for him to ring if he needed anything, and a handwritten card beside the bell that said DON’T RING IT AFTER ELEVEN, I’LL BE ASLEEP. S.F.
The Duke read the card.
He looked at Sue Fennell, who was standing in the doorway with her arms folded.
Then he picked up the bell, and looked at it, and put it in the drawer of the bedside table, and shut the drawer.
“Right,” said Sue Fennell, with deep approval. “We’ll get on.”
Bridget arrived on the Sunday.
She came on the 860, from Cirencester, having flown in on the Saturday night and come down on the train from Paddington, with one suitcase and a large cardboard box tied up with string, and Mr Fennell had to help her with the box, and when the 860 stopped by the war memorial she got down off it in her good coat and hat and looked round the green, at the church and the cottages and the pub and the river, with the expression of a woman who has been told about a place for four months and is not going to admit that it is as nice as she was told.
“Bridget,” said Frederick.
“You’re thin,” said Bridget.
“I’m not thin.”
“You’re thin. Where are they feeding you?”
He took her up to the school, on the Monday morning, because she asked, and showed her the kitchens.
He would remember it for the rest of his life. Bridget, in her good coat, standing in the doorway of the school kitchens at Coln Abbey, which were empty for the holidays, a long low room under the old refectory with steel counters and enormous steel pots and a range of ovens along one wall and a smell, even empty, even in December, of four hundred portions of shepherd’s pie, looking at it.
She did not say anything for a long time.
Then she walked into it. She walked very slowly down the length of the steel counter, touching nothing, looking at everything, the pots, the ovens, the ladles on their hooks, a laminated sheet on the wall that said WEDNESDAY: FISH PIE OR VEGETARIAN OPTION, and at the end of it she stopped in front of a large steel tub on the floor with a lid on it, and lifted the lid, and looked inside, and put the lid back on, very gently, the way you would close the eyes of the dead.
“What’s in there?” said Frederick.
“Gravy,” said Bridget, in a voice like the end of the world.
She turned round.
“Four months,” she said. “Four months. In this.” She looked at him. “No wonder you’re thin.” She looked at the laminated sheet. “Vegetarian option,” she said, with infinite contempt, and walked out.
She cooked at the New Inn for the rest of the week. Nobody asked her to. She went into Sue Fennell’s kitchen on the Monday afternoon with her sleeves rolled up and her cardboard box, which turned out to be full of things from the north wing kitchen at Columbia Palace that she did not trust England to have, and she and Sue Fennell looked at each other across the kitchen for perhaps four seconds, two short solid women with their arms folded, and then Sue Fennell said, right, what are you doing with the goose, and Bridget told her, and they did not come out of the kitchen for three days.
On Tuesday it snowed.
It had not snowed in the valley at Christmas, Mr Purvis said, since 2019, and before that not since 2009, and he could remember every one, he said, since 1946, and he was ninety and he did not expect to see many more. It began at four in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, out of a sky that had been heavy and yellow-grey all day, a few flakes at first, large and slow, coming down past the window of the New Inn as if they were looking for somewhere particular to land, and then more, and then all at once, so that by five o’clock the green was white and the churchyard wall was white and the bridge was white and the whole valley was going quiet under it, the way a room goes quiet when somebody comes in.
Frederick stood in the lane outside the pub with his face turned up and let it land on him.
He had seen snow before. The Columbia District had snow most winters, wet grey snow that turned to slush on the Axis in a morning and was pushed into heaps by the ploughs and stayed there, black, until March. He had seen snow in Hanover, and in the Alps, and once, at Stockholm, with his mother, snow so deep and dry and cold that it squeaked under your boots.
He had never seen it at Christmas. Not once. Not on the day.
He stood in the lane and the snow came down on him, and through the window of the pub behind him he could see his father at the table by the fire, with his hands on the head of his stick, looking out at it, and his face was the face of a boy.
The carols were at six.
St John the Baptist was lit with candles, every window, and the snow was coming down past them, and the whole village came up the lane through it with torches and lanterns and their collars up and snow on their hats, and the church was so full that people were standing at the back by the font under the board with the names on it, and in the doorway, and outside it, in the snow, looking in.
His parents were in the second pew. They had come up the lane from the pub at a quarter to six, very slowly, in the snow, his father with the stick in his right hand and Castellanos at his left elbow, an inch away, and his mother on Castellanos’s other side, and the village had stood back on both sides of the lane to let them through, not looking at them, the way the pub did, and then, when they had gone past, had followed them up the lane to the church in a long dark crowd with lanterns, like a procession that did not know it was one.
Frederick was in the choir stalls in his surplice two sizes too big, between Mr Purvis and Mr Treadgold, with Sue Fennell in front of him glaring.
The vicar had asked him in November to read a lesson.
The shepherds, the vicar had said, in the vestry, in his Army voice. Luke two. Eight to twenty. Every year somebody from the village reads it. Last year it was Purvis and he lost his place twice. He had looked at Frederick. It’s about some men in a field at night doing an ordinary job who get told something extraordinary and go and look. I thought it might suit.
So at the fourth lesson he went down from the choir stalls to the lectern, which was a brass eagle with its wings out, and the church was very quiet, and the candles were going, and the snow was coming down past every window, and he read the shepherds.
He read it plainly. He did not read it like a Speech. He read it the way Ms Roberts had told him to read Bottom, as a man who has been told about something too big to say and is trying to say it anyway. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. He thought about Will’s father on the hillside at the farm, and the ewes, and the lambing in February that he had been promised. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. He thought about a field of bullocks lifting their heads all together, and a boy with a dog lead coming round the corner of a wall. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.
He got to the end. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.
He looked up.
In the second pew his father was looking at him with his hands on the head of his stick and his face perfectly still.
In the front pew, in her coat and headscarf, with Ernest under the pew, Mrs Haverfield was looking at the second pew.
After the carols, in the porch, in the snow, she was waiting.
She stood just inside the porch door, very small, with her stick and Ernest on his lead, while the village went out past her into the snow with their lanterns saying happy Christmas, Mrs Haverfield and night, Mrs Haverfield, and she said happy Christmas back to each of them by name, and did not move, and when the Duke came out of the church door on Castellanos’s arm, slowly, with the Queen behind him, she stepped forward into his way.
His father stopped.
They looked at each other. The old woman in the headscarf with the dog, ninety-nine, and the old man in the tweed cap with the stick, eighty-three, in the porch of St John the Baptist in the snow, with the candles behind them and the dark in front.
“You were in the car,” said Mrs Haverfield.
His father looked at her.
“In 1951,” said Mrs Haverfield. “In the lane. By Purvis’s gate. Your father leaned out and asked me the way to Bibury. You were in the back. In a sailor suit. You waved at me.” She held his eye. “I didn’t wave back.”
His father did not say anything. His face was doing something very slow.
“I was twenty,” said Mrs Haverfield. “I thought I was too old for waving. I’ve thought about it every week for seventy-nine years.” She lifted her chin. “I should have waved.”
And she let go of her stick with one hand, and leaned the stick against her hip, and lifted her hand, the small lined hand in its woollen glove, and waved. Once. A small, stiff, deliberate wave, like a flag going up a pole.
His father looked at the hand.
Then he took his own hand off Castellanos’s arm. He did not need it. He stood in the porch on his own, with the stick, and lifted his free hand, slowly, the whole way, to the height of his shoulder, the hand that had not been able to lift a cup two years ago, and waved back.
Nobody in the porch said anything.
Outside, in the snow, the village had stopped on the path with its lanterns and was not looking.
“Bibury,” said his father, after a while, very carefully.
“Yes,” said Mrs Haverfield.
“Other.” A breath. “Way.”
“It was the other way,” said Mrs Haverfield, with enormous satisfaction, and picked up her stick, and went out past him into the snow, with Ernest, without looking back.
Christmas lunch was at the New Inn, at one, at the long table by the fire, which Sue Fennell had pushed together out of four smaller ones and covered with two white tablecloths, and there were nine of them round it.
There was his father at the head, and his mother on his right. There was Frederick. There was Niamh, who had come down from London on Christmas Eve on the last train with a bag of the Duke’s things and her own and a look on her face that said she had come to keep an eye on him and was going to have a nice time doing it. There was Dame M, who had come down with Niamh, and sat very upright at the end of the table in a dark red dress, the first time Frederick had seen her in anything but a suit, eating very small pieces of everything with great attention. There was Castellanos, who had been told by the Queen that he was to sit down, and had sat down, and was very uncomfortable about it. There was Kimura, who was not uncomfortable at all, and had brought crackers.
And there were Mick Fennell and Jack.
Sue Fennell did not sit down. Sue Fennell was in the kitchen with Bridget, and came out with plates, and went back, and came out with more plates, and every time she came out she looked at the table and the nine of them round it with her arms folded and an expression that said she had been running this pub for twenty-two years and had never once had a Christmas like it and was not going to let anybody see that she minded.
Mick Fennell sat opposite the Duke with his hands on the tablecloth and could not eat.
He had put on a suit. He had put on a tie. He had sat down opposite the man whose photograph had been on the first page of his scrapbook since the first page, and had looked at him, and had not been able to pick up his knife and fork, and had sat with his hands flat on the tablecloth on either side of his plate, very still, while the goose went round, and the potatoes, and Bridget’s stuffing, which had come from the cardboard box, and had said thank you to each dish as it went past him and taken nothing.
“Bus,” said the Duke.
Mick Fennell jumped.
“Sir?”
The Duke pointed at him with his fork. “Bus,” he said again. “You.”
“Yes, sir. The 860. Sir.”
The Duke considered this. He put down his fork.
“Late,” said the Duke.
There was a pause at the table.
Mick Fennell went slowly red from the collar up.
“It’s not my fault, sir,” he said, in a strangled voice. “It’s the lanes. And the tractors. And.” He looked down the table at his son, who was eating goose and trying very hard not to laugh. “And Nan,” he said. “Mostly Nan.”
The Duke looked at him a while longer.
“Trains,” he said, and lifted two fingers, and laid them on the tablecloth side by side, like rails. “Never.” A breath. “Late.”
“Sixteen forty-two,” said Jack, through a mouthful of goose.
Everybody looked at Jack.
“The sixteen forty-two,” said Jack, swallowing. “From Kemble. You said. Hanover said. He said you said it was two minutes late at Paddington. In September.” He pointed his fork at the Duke, which Frederick had never seen anybody do in his life. “Trains are always late. Buses are late because of tractors. Trains are late because of leaves.” He looked round the table for support. “Leaves. On the line. That’s not even a reason.”
There was a long silence at the table.
Dame M had stopped eating.
The Duke of Cumberland looked down the table at Jack Fennell, eighteen, in a borrowed tie, with a fork pointed at him, for a long time. Frederick watched his father’s face. He had seen it do a great many things in two years. He had not seen it do this.
“Leaves,” said the Duke, slowly, with tremendous scorn, “are.” A breath. “Real.”
“They’re leaves,” said Jack.
“Wet,” said the Duke. “Leaves.” He pressed his two fingers on the tablecloth like a train on a rail and slid them, and lifted them, and made a small noise, fft. “Slip.”
“A bus doesn’t slip on a leaf.”
“Bus,” said the Duke, with infinite contempt, “has.” A breath. “Tyres.”
Jack opened his mouth and shut it again.
At the end of the table, Kimura, very quietly, pulled a cracker with Niamh and said, “Eight,” and Niamh said, “Nine,” and they looked at each other, and neither of them said what for.
And Mick Fennell, opposite the Duke, looked from his son to the old man with the stick and back again, and something in his face let go, all at once, the way a knot lets go when you find the right end, and he picked up his knife and fork, and began, at last, to eat his Christmas dinner.
The pudding came out at half past two, on a plate, alight, carried by Bridget with Sue Fennell behind her, and the blue flames went up off it in the dim room by the fire, and everybody clapped, and Sue Fennell put it down in front of the Duke and, for the first time that day, sat down. In the empty chair beside the Queen. Without being asked. With her sleeves still rolled up.
The Queen looked at her.
Sue Fennell looked at the Queen.
“I’ve been on my feet since five,” said Sue Fennell.
“So have I,” said the Queen of Sweden. “I have been sitting on a chair in a room with a sloping floor since five, listening to my husband and a man from the Household argue through a wall about whether one can be a member of the Royal Family and also stay in a public house.” She held out her plate for pudding. “It has been exhausting.”
Sue Fennell looked at her for a moment. Then she took the Queen’s plate and cut her a slice of pudding that was very nearly a quarter of the whole, and put brandy butter on it, a great deal of brandy butter, and gave it back.
“There,” said Sue Fennell.
The Queen looked at the plate.
“Thank you,” she said, and ate some, and closed her eyes, and opened them, and said, “That is a pudding,” and Sue Fennell said, “It’s my mother’s,” and the Queen said, “It is better than my mother’s,” and Sue Fennell said, “Well, it would be,” and from that moment, Frederick could see, they understood each other perfectly.
At ten to three the Duke stood up.
He did it with the stick, slowly, pushing himself up from the table with his free hand, and the table went quiet, and Niamh half rose from her chair and his mother put a hand on Niamh’s arm and Niamh sat down again.
He stood at the head of the long table at the New Inn, by the fire, with the snow outside the windows and the pudding in front of him with its holly on top, and he lifted his glass, which had a very small amount of red wine in it, which Niamh had permitted.
He looked round the table. At his wife. At his son. At Niamh and Dame M and Castellanos and Kimura. At Bridget, standing in the kitchen door with a cloth over her shoulder. At Sue Fennell, beside his wife, with her sleeves rolled up. At Mick Fennell, with his tie loosened now, and gravy on it. At Jack.
Frederick watched him gather it.
He could see it happen. He had seen it on the Back Walk at Stirling and at the barrier at Paddington and every afternoon at four o’clock at the end of a kitchen table for two years. The breath. The hold. The lips trying the shape. And then the words, coming up from wherever they came from now, one at a time, like stones being laid in a wall.
But they did not come one at a time.
“To,” said his father, “the people,” and the breath, and the hold, and Frederick waited for the stop, and it did not come, “who sat with me at the end of the table every afternoon at four o’clock while I learned to read the trains again.”
Nobody moved.
It was the longest sentence his father had said in two years and three months. It was the longest sentence since the sea. He had said it without stopping, all the way through, the whole of it, standing at the head of a table in a pub in Gloucestershire in the snow, and when he got to the end of it he stood there with his glass up and his face quite calm, as if he had not noticed.
Then he noticed.
Frederick saw him notice. He saw it go across his father’s face, from the inside out: surprise, and then something else, much bigger, that he did not have the word for.
“Oh,” said his father.
His mother had her hand over her mouth.
Niamh had her watch up in front of her face and was not looking at it.
And at the end of the table, very slowly, Jack Fennell stood up, in his borrowed tie, and lifted his glass, which had lemonade in it, because his mother was watching, and said, loudly, because Jack could not say anything any other way:
“To the people at the end of the table.”
Everybody stood up.
At three o’clock the New Inn was full, because at three o’clock on Christmas Day the King spoke to Britain, and the New Inn had a television on a bracket on the wall over the fireplace, and the whole village had come down the lane through the snow to watch it there.
They did not look at him.
That was the remarkable thing. A hundred people in the pub, standing and sitting, with their drinks, packed in between the beams, looking up at the television on the wall where the King of Great Britain was sitting at a desk in a jumper with the elbows going in a room with a heap of laundry on the bed, talking about his father; and the King of Great Britain himself was sitting at the long table by the fire in the same pub, in the same jumper, with his family round him, and not one of the hundred people looked at the table once.
Not once. Not for six minutes. They looked at the television, and he could feel the effort of it, a hundred people not looking at him, like heat off a fire.
On the screen, he talked about the barrier at the end of platform nine. He talked about ten steps at a time. He said somebody at the end of the platform, and stopped, and said happy Christmas, and the screen went to the royal arms, and the pub was silent.
Then, from the bar, very loud, a sound that he had never heard before and would know anywhere afterwards: Jack Fennell, trying not to cry.
He failed. He failed spectacularly. He stood at the end of the bar with Gaz and Little Rob on either side of him and his face screwed up and the tears running down it, and made a noise like a goose being stepped on, and Gaz looked at him, and Little Rob looked at him, and Jack said, loudly, to the whole pub, “I’ve got something in my EYE,” and the whole pub, all hundred of them, still not looking at the table by the fire, said, more or less together, “Course you have, Jack.”
They gave presents in the evening, upstairs, in the Duke’s room over the door, with the heater on and the snow still coming down past the window and the sound of the pub underneath them through the floor.
He gave his father the stick.
It was hazel, cut on the wold in November by Mick Fennell, from a hedge at the top of the valley, and dried in the shed behind the bus garage in Cirencester, and finished, and the handle shaped to a hand, and a brass ferrule put on the end. Mick had made it in the evenings for a month. He had not been asked. Frederick had asked him in November, on the 860, whether he knew where you got a walking stick, and Mick had gone silent for the whole of the rest of the journey and then, at the war memorial, had said leave it with me, and four weeks later had handed it to him at the bus stop wrapped in newspaper without a word and driven off.
His father held it. He turned it over. He put the brass end on the floor and his hand on the handle and stood up with it, and stood there, leaning on it, testing it, the way he had once tested the controls of an aircraft.
“Hedge,” he said.
“From the top of the valley.”
His father nodded slowly. He looked at the old stick, the one he had used for two years, leaning against the wall by the bed, black, with a rubber end. Then he looked at the hazel one in his hand.
“Keep,” he said, of the hazel, and then, of the black one, with a small movement of the head toward it: “Not.”
His mother gave Frederick three things.
The first was a pair of skates. Old ones. White leather, gone yellow, with the blades rusted at the edges and the laces replaced, and when he looked at them she said, mine, from when I was your age, from the lake at Drottningholm, we will be in Stockholm in February and it will be frozen and you will skate on it, and he said I can’t skate, and she said I know.
The second was a jumper. She had knitted it. Nobody had known she could knit. She could not, very well. It was dark blue and slightly too long in one arm and had a pattern across the chest that was supposed, she said, to be snowflakes, and was, Niamh said, something, and he put it on at once, over the one with the elbows going, and did not take it off for the rest of the week.
The third was a book. It was old and soft, a paperback with the cover coming off, and it was Persuasion.
He opened it. On the inside of the cover, in pencil, in a girl’s hand, very neat, in Swedish, it said: Christina. Stockholm. 1991. For English. And inside, all the way through, on every few pages, in the margins, in the same girl’s hand, notes. In Swedish and in English. Underlinings. Exclamation marks. On one page, beside a paragraph, simply, in English, NO, and beside another, three pages on, YES, and near the end, beside the letter, the long one, the one Captain Wentworth writes, in a different pencil, darker, pressed so hard it had gone through the paper: oh.
He looked up at her.
“I was seventeen,” said his mother. “I had to read it for school. I thought it was the most romantic thing I had ever read in my life.” She looked at the book in his hands. “I still do. Do not tell your father.”
From the chair by the window, his father said, without turning round from the snow, “Heard.”
Jack gave him the map at the bus stop by the war memorial at ten o’clock that night, in the snow, under the light, with Ernest at his feet and nobody else on the green at all.
It was an Ordnance Survey map of the wold. It was folded in the way they are folded, into a stiff pink cover, and when Frederick opened it out under the light at the bus stop it was the whole of the country between Cirencester and Burford, every field, every wall, every farm, every footpath in green dashes, and on one of the green dashes, in red biro, going up from the churchyard of St John the Baptist across two fields to a stile, and then across a field marked Purvis in red capitals, and through a gate, and up a lane, and along a track to a crossroads marked Ready Token, somebody had drawn a line, very carefully, with arrows on it, all the way, and then another line, going back down a different way, to the school.
At the stile, in red biro, small, it said: NOT A PATH. A LIE.
At the crossroads, it said: YOU WERE HERE.
At the gate above the school, where Kimura had been waiting in the lane, it said: HANOVER.
“So you never get lost again,” said Jack.
He had his hands in his pockets. He was looking at the war memorial.
Frederick looked at the map for a long time.
Then he gave Jack his. It was small. It was in a paper bag. It had come from a stall in the Cirencester market on the last Saturday of term, from an old man who sold second-hand things, and Frederick had chosen it himself, out of a box of second-hand things, without asking anybody, and paid for it with coins, and it had cost two pounds.
It was a cricket ball. Old, very old, the red gone brown, the seam worn smooth, with something written on it in faded ink that you could just read if you held it to the light. Coln St Aldwyns v. Bibury. 1951. 6 for 11.
“The old man said it came out of a house clearance,” said Frederick. “In the village. Years ago. He didn’t know whose.”
Jack held the ball up to the light at the bus stop.
He read it. He read it again. He turned it over in his hands.
“1951,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That’s the year your granddad asked Nan the way to Bibury.”
“Yes.”
“Six for eleven.” Jack looked at the ball. “Against Bibury.” He looked up. “Someone from here took six wickets for eleven runs against Bibury in 1951, and you found the ball, in Cirencester, in a box.” He stared at it. “Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“Neither do I,” said Jack, “but it’s brilliant,” and his face did the thing, and then, under the light at the bus stop in the snow by the war memorial with his great-grandmother’s dog at his feet, he put both arms round the King of Great Britain and held on, hard, with the cricket ball in one fist against Frederick’s back, for a long time, and did not say anything, for once, at all.
In the blue notebook that night, in the room over the bar at the New Inn that Sue Fennell had given him, next to his parents’, with the snow outside and the pub gone quiet underneath, he wrote:
Christmas. Snow. The shepherds. Mrs Haverfield waved. Dad waved back. Leaves are real. Dad said a whole sentence. Jack cried and said it was his eye. Mum’s Persuasion says oh. A map. A ball.
And then, after a while, he wrote the Spanish, again, under all of it, because he wanted to.
Pasen, que hay para todos.