Snow Day

It snowed in the night on the thirteenth of January, a foot of it, without warning, and at seven in the morning Dr Ord’s voice came over the speaker in every boarding house at once, which had never happened in anybody’s memory, and said:

“Good morning. The school is closed. The lane is blocked at the top by a lorry, the bottom by a tractor, and the middle by Mr Purvis, who is digging it out with a shovel and has asked to be left alone. There will be no lessons. Breakfast will be at eight. At nine o’clock I shall be on the slope below the tithe barn with a tray.” There was a pause. “Anybody who would like to join me is welcome.”

And the speaker clicked off.

Every boarding house was silent for perhaps three seconds.

Then four hundred people got out of bed at once.

---

At nine o’clock the slope below the tithe barn was black with people.

It was a long white hillside running down from the barn to the meadow by the river, steep at the top and gentle at the bottom, and every tray that could be found in the school was on it, and a great many things that were not trays. There were dining-hall trays, and the lids of dustbins, and a door off a cupboard in the old dairy that somebody had taken off its hinges, and two of the long wooden benches from the hall, turned upside down, with eight boys from Leach on each, steering by shouting. There was a sledge, a real one, wooden, with iron runners, that had been found in the roof of the tithe barn by the groundsman and was said to have belonged to a boy who had been at the school in 1890. There were bin bags. There was Kit Barraclough’s suitcase.

At the top of the slope, on a dining-hall tray, in a long navy coat and a woollen hat and a pair of leather gloves, sat Dr Ord.

“Mr Hanover,” she said, as he came up past her with a tray of his own. “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Dr Ord.”

“Have you done this before?”

“In the Columbia District. On the hill below the Monument. When I was eight.”

“And?”

“I was stopped by the police.”

“Ah.” Dr Ord settled her gloves. “There are no police here.” She looked down the white slope at the meadow, at four hundred of her pupils shrieking. “There is only the river. Try not to reach it.”

And she pushed off.

She went down the slope on her dining-hall tray in her long navy coat with her back perfectly straight and her hands on the sides of the tray and her face perfectly composed, gathering speed, faster and faster, past the Leach benches and the cupboard door and the boy from 1890’s sledge, and the whole slope went quiet to watch her, and she reached the bottom and went on across the flat of the meadow, and on, and on, and stopped, finally, about four feet from the edge of the river, and sat there for a moment on her tray in the snow.

Then she stood up, and picked up her tray, and turned round, and began to walk back up the hill.

The whole slope cheered.

Dr Ord did not acknowledge it. She walked up the hill with the tray under her arm, past four hundred pupils cheering, and as she came past Frederick at the top she said, without slowing down, “Four feet, Mr Hanover. Beat it.”

He did not beat it. He went into the river.

---

On the Wednesday, with the lane still blocked and the school still closed, the Privy Council came.

They came on foot. There were four of them, three old men and a woman, in dark coats and hats, and they had come down from London on the early train to Kemble and been driven as far as the top of the valley, and then the lorry had been in the way, and they had got out and walked, a mile and a half, down the lane between the drifts, in their good shoes, holding their hats on, and arrived at the New Inn at eleven o’clock, an hour before it opened, looking like four people who had been shipwrecked.

There was business that needed the King. There always was. Orders to be made, appointments to be approved, a list of things that in Britain required the sovereign in person or a Regent, and could not be signed by anybody else, and could not wait. Under his father they had waited; when his father was abroad they had simply been held until he came back. But his father had never been abroad for ten months, and the Lord President of the Council had written to him in December to say, with great tact, that the list was getting long.

He had said: come to the village.

It had seemed, in December, a simple thing to say.

It had not seemed simple to the Lord President, who was a thin anxious man of seventy with a briefcase, and had never in thirty years in public life held a meeting of the Privy Council in a building with a dartboard in it.

“Sir,” he said, in the doorway of the back room of the New Inn, with snow on his shoulders and his hat in his hand. “Is this.”

“It’s the back room,” said Frederick.

It was the back room. It was a low stone room behind the bar with a stone floor and one small window, and it was where Sue Fennell kept the beer. There were barrels along two walls, stacked two high, and crates of bottles, and a stack of chairs, and a calendar from a brewery on the wall that was still on December, and a smell of hops and cold stone and very old beer, and in the middle, where Sue had cleared a space, a small round table with nothing on it.

“We’ll stand,” said Frederick. “You always stand. At a Privy Council. Don’t you?”

“We do, sir,” said the Lord President faintly.

“Then it doesn’t matter about chairs.”

So they stood. The King of Great Britain and four Privy Counsellors in their good coats with snow melting on them, round a small round table in the beer cellar of the New Inn at Coln Saint Aldwyns, among the barrels, under a brewery calendar of December, at a quarter past eleven on a Wednesday morning in January, while through the wall they could hear Sue Fennell in the bar putting the chairs down off the tables and Jack singing something with no tune to it at all.

The Lord President read the list.

It took eighteen minutes. There were thirty-one items. Frederick said approved after each of them, which was what you said, and the Lord President made a mark, and at item nineteen, which was something about the charter of a university in the north, there was a loud knock on the door.

Everybody stopped.

“Ten minutes,” said Sue Fennell’s voice through the door. “I open at twelve. I’m not having the brewery in at twelve and a Privy Council in my cellar. Ten minutes.”

The Lord President looked at Frederick in horror.

“Thank you, Sue,” said Frederick.

“Ten minutes,” said Sue, and went away.

They finished in nine. At the end of it the Lord President put the list back in his briefcase and shut it, and stood for a moment in the cellar among the barrels, looking at the brewery calendar, and then at the King.

“Sir,” he said. “May I say something?”

“Of course.”

“In thirty years,” said the Lord President, “I have never once known a Privy Council to be told to hurry up.” He put his hat on. “I found it extremely refreshing.”

---

Saturdays had a shape now.

They had had it since November, without anybody deciding, the way a path gets made across a field. On Saturday mornings Theo put on a green uniform with a white cross on the shoulder and went into Cirencester on the 860 with a bag, and spent the day with the St John Ambulance at whatever there was: a football match, a market, a fun run, an old people’s home where they taught the residents to use the defibrillator and the residents taught them gin rummy. He did not talk about it. He came back at five with the bag and went upstairs and did his chemistry and if you asked him how it was he said fine, and if you asked him what he had done he said nothing much, and once, in December, he had come back with a split lip and a cheerful expression and said a man at a football match had fainted and come round fighting and that it had been very interesting.

Kit went with him. Kit was not St John Ambulance. Kit went because Theo went, and stood at the edge of whatever it was with his hands in his pockets and his glasses steaming, and watched, and said things.

“He’s too slow,” Kit said, in January, at supper, about Theo, to Frederick, as though Theo were not sitting beside him. “With the dressings. He’s too careful. He does every one like it’s an exam.”

“It is an exam,” said Theo. “Every one.”

“It’s a grazed knee.”

“It’s a grazed knee on somebody,” said Theo, and went on eating.

Kit looked at him. He did not say anything else. But Frederick, across the table, saw his face, and thought that it was the face of somebody who had been told something that he would think about later, in bed, for a long time.

---

Kit cracked on the twenty-second of January.

Frederick did not see it. He heard about it afterwards from Theo, at two in the morning, in the dark, in the room at the end of the corridor, after Theo had come back in from somewhere in his dressing gown and sat on the end of his own bed without turning the light on.

“Kit’s not all right,” said Theo.

Frederick sat up.

“He got his mocks back. Today. The chemistry. He got sixty-eight.” Theo was quiet for a moment. “He needs an A. For the scholarship to Leeds medical school, the one that’ll hold his place while he’s at Ellicott next year. The one his dad saved for. Forty-one years on the Number Four. He needs an A and he got sixty-eight and he’s been sitting on the floor of the drying room since ten o’clock with his back against the radiator and he wouldn’t let anybody in.”

“He let you in.”

“He didn’t let me in,” said Theo. “I went in.” He was quiet again. “I sat down next to him on the floor. And I didn’t say anything. For about an hour. And then he said, my dad’s going to be so disappointed, and I said, no he isn’t, and he said, how would you know, and I said, because my dad drives the Thirty-Two and when I got fifty-four in chemistry in tenth grade he said well, at least it’s not forty-four.” Theo laughed, very quietly, in the dark. “And Kit said that’s not even a joke, and I said I know, my dad’s not funny, and then he started laughing, and then he started crying, and then he did both for a while, and then he stopped.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I’m going to help him,” said Theo. “With the chemistry. Every night. Equilibria. Like Mrs Okonedo did with you. A problem a night. Till May.” He lay back on the bed in the dark. “He’ll hate it. He’ll argue with every one. He’ll say I’m doing them wrong.” A pause. “I’m going to do it anyway.”

“I know you are.”

“Don’t tell him I told you.”

“I won’t.”

Theo was quiet for so long that Frederick thought he had gone to sleep.

“Freya was outside,” said Theo at last. “In the corridor. When I came out of the drying room. At one in the morning. In a coat over her pyjamas.” He sounded puzzled. “She’d heard. Hugo told her. She was just standing there.” He stopped. “She said, you’re too soft, Hartigan, you’ll be a terrible doctor, and then she gave me a cup of tea, and went back to Evenlode.”

“Was it good tea?”

“It was horrible,” said Theo, with enormous warmth. “She’d put sugar in. I don’t take sugar. I drank it all.”

---

Lucía was on the Coln Valley Ladies.

She had joined in November, after a match on the village field that she had walked past on a Sunday afternoon and stopped to watch, and then had gone down to the touchline at half-time and asked the captain, a large calm woman of forty who farmed pigs above Bibury, whether they needed anybody. The captain had looked at her, small and fierce and American, and said can you run, and Lucía had said yes, and the captain had said can you kick, and Lucía had said I’m from Pomona, which was not an answer, and the captain had thrown her a ball, and Lucía had kept it in the air with her feet for forty-one touches without letting it hit the ground, and then flicked it up, and caught it on the back of her neck, and stood there, balancing it, looking at the captain.

She had played every Sunday since. She had not scored. She was saving it, she said.

“For what?” said Frederick.

“Bibury,” said Lucía. “March. Away. Everyone says Bibury are the ones. They beat the Coln Valley Ladies eleven times in a row. Their goalkeeper’s a policewoman.” She looked at him with the expression of Theo at the top of the caber. “I’m going to score against Bibury.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve decided,” said Lucía.

---

Devon and Hattie Ellis had broken up again on the Friday, at supper, in front of the whole of Coln, over a remark of Devon’s about Titania’s costume, and had got back together again on the Saturday, at breakfast, in front of the whole of Coln, over a piece of toast. It was the fourth time since Christmas. Nobody knew when it had started. Will said he had stopped asking. They’re like the weather, said Will. You just look out of the window in the morning and see.

---

On the first Saturday of February, Jack took him to the bus garage.

It was on the edge of Cirencester behind a builders’ merchant, a long corrugated shed with six green and cream buses in it in a row, and a pit under the floor between the rails at one end, and Jack worked there on Saturday mornings, sweeping and fetching and handing things to the mechanics, and on that Saturday the 860 was over the pit with a noise in its gearbox that Mick had been complaining about since November.

“Get in,” said Jack, at the top of the pit.

“Get in where?”

“Under it.” Jack held out a pair of overalls. They were orange and had COTSWOLD COUNTRY on the back and had belonged to somebody much shorter. “Come on. You wanted to see what I do.”

So the King of Great Britain went down the steps into the pit under the 860 in a pair of orange overalls that stopped six inches above his ankles, with a lamp on a cable, and stood under the bus, and looked up at it. It was the underneath of a bus. It was black and oily and enormous and incomprehensible, all pipes and rods and things that went round, and a drip of something warm came off it and landed on his forehead.

“What do I do?” he said.

“Hold the lamp,” said Jack, beside him in the pit, with a spanner.

He held the lamp. He held it in the wrong place for twenty minutes, and Jack said left, and no, your other left, and up, and Hanover, the lamp is supposed to be pointing at the thing I’m looking at, not at me, and an old mechanic called Dennis, who had been at the garage for forty years and had not been told who the tall boy in the short overalls was, came and stood at the edge of the pit for a while with his hands in his pockets, looking down at them, and said at last, to Jack, where’d you find this one, and Jack said on a footpath, and Dennis said should have left him there, and went away.

They found the noise. Jack found it. It was a bolt. Frederick handed him the spanner, which was the only useful thing he did all morning, and came up out of the pit at twelve with oil on his face and his hands and in his hair and a sense of complete and utter uselessness that he found, to his surprise, entirely wonderful.

---

On Saturday afternoons, now, Jack taught him to drive.

In Mick’s old car. It was a small brown car of great age, older than either of them, which Mick had bought in 1998 and driven to the bus garage and back every day for twenty years until it had been retired, honourably, to the end of the garden behind the Fennells’ cottage on the Bibury road, where it had been living for six years under a tarpaulin with a family of mice. Jack had got it going again over Christmas. It had taken eleven days and two new parts and a great deal of language that Sue Fennell had come out into the garden twice to object to.

It had L plates on the front and back, red on white, held on with string.

“Clutch,” said Jack, in the passenger seat.

“Which one’s the clutch?”

“The one on the left. The left, Hanover. You drive on the left here, you change gear with your left, the clutch is on the left, everything’s on the left.” Jack put his head in his hands. “In the Realm do you not have gears?”

“Not in a car.”

“What do you have?”

“Automatics.”

Jack lifted his head out of his hands and looked at him with an expression of the deepest pity.

“You poor sod,” he said.

Behind them, about forty yards back along the lane, at a steady walking pace, followed the dark car of the detail, with Kimura at the wheel.

She had been told by Castellanos that the King was not, under any circumstances, to drive on a public road in Gloucestershire in a brown car from 1998 with a family of mice under the back seat and a boy of eighteen with no instructor’s qualification in the passenger seat. She had considered this instruction. Then she had said to Castellanos, Sergeant, he’s going to do it anyway, and I would rather be forty yards behind him when he does it than four miles away reading a book, and Castellanos had looked at her for a long time and said forty yards, and gone back into the lodge.

So she followed. Forty yards. Every Saturday. And at the end of every lesson, when the brown car stopped outside the Fennells’ cottage on the Bibury road and the King got out of it, white, and Jack got out of it, laughing, she pulled up behind, and wound down her window, and held up a piece of card, on which she had written, in thick black marker, a number.

The first Saturday it was 2.

The second Saturday it was 3.

“Three?” said Jack, outraged, at the window. “He went round the green twice without stalling!”

“He went round the green twice,” said Kimura, “on the right.”

---

He took the test on the twenty-ninth of January in Cirencester.

He took it under his own name, which was not Hanover, although nothing would come of it. The Sovereign was the one person in Britain who needed no licence to drive, which had been true for as long as there had been licences and which the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency had confirmed by letter, in some alarm: there would be no licence, no card with his photograph on it, nothing. Jack had said he was taking it anyway. Everyone takes the test. You don’t get out of it by being King. He took it in the brown car, with the L plates, because Jack said that was the car he had learned in and you should take your test in the car you learned in, it knows you. The examiner was a small grey woman of about sixty with a clipboard and a grey cardigan who met him at the test centre, looked at the name on her clipboard, looked at him, looked at the brown car with its L plates held on with string, looked at the dark car of the detail parked across the road with Kimura in it, and wrote something on the clipboard.

She did not look up again for thirty-eight minutes.

She sat in the passenger seat of the brown car with the clipboard on her knee and gave him instructions in a flat grey voice, left at the next junction, please, pull up on the left when it is safe to do so, I would like you to reverse into the bay on your left, and wrote on the clipboard, and did not once look at him, or at the road, or at anything but the clipboard. He did not know if she was afraid to look at him, or did not care who he was, or had simply been an examiner for so long that she no longer needed to look at anything. He drove round Cirencester for thirty-eight minutes in a brown car from 1998 with the King’s detail following at forty yards and an examiner who did not look up, and he did not stall, and he did not go round anything on the right.

At the end of it, in the car park of the test centre, she finished writing, and clicked her pen, and looked up for the first time.

“You’ve passed,” she said.

He sat with his hands on the wheel.

“Thank you.”

“You’ve two minors. One for observation at the roundabout by the hospital, and one for the speed you took the corner by the church.” She tore a sheet off the clipboard and gave it to him. “You took it like a man on a carpet.”

He looked at her.

“My grandson’s in the Coln Valley Ladies’ supporters’ club,” said the examiner. “He says the Americans walk like they’re on a carpet. All of them.” She got out of the car. “Especially you. Congratulations.”

She stopped with one foot on the tarmac.

“Normally,” she said, “I’d tell you to send that off for your full licence.” She looked at the sheet in his hand. “I’m told you don’t get one.”

“No.”

“So you’ve passed a test you didn’t need to take, for a licence you can’t have.”

“Yes.”

The examiner considered this.

“Best kind,” she said, and shut the door.

---

Kimura held up the card at the window.

It said 9.

“Nine,” said Jack. “Nine. He passed first time and you’re giving him a nine?”

“I’m giving him a nine,” said Kimura. She took the card back in, and turned it over, and wrote something on the other side with the marker, and held it up again. “And I’m giving you a ten.”

Jack looked at the card.

“For what?” he said.

“For teaching the King of fourteen countries to drive on the left in a car with mice in it,” said Kimura, “without either of you dying, or telling anybody, or me having to explain it to Sergeant Castellanos.” She wound up the window, and then wound it down again. “Mostly the last one,” she said, and wound it up.

---

On the Saturday before, the twenty-fifth, it had been Burns Night, and Rennie had asked him to Downing Street.

It had been in a long panelled room at the top of the house with a fire and a table for twenty, and the twenty had been Rennie’s own people, his family and his oldest friends from Fife, a fisherman’s son’s people, in kilts and tartan sashes and their best clothes. There had been a piper. There had been a haggis, carried in on a silver dish behind the piper by Rennie’s sister, who was a nurse in Kirkcaldy, while everybody stood and clapped in time. And then Rennie had stood up at the end of the table with a knife in his hand and addressed the haggis, which is a thing you do, in Scotland, on Burns Night, out loud, in verse, in Scots, all eight verses of it, and he had done it badly, in a strong Fife accent, forgetting a line in the fourth verse and making up the fifth, and at the end of it he had stabbed the haggis with the knife and the whole table had cheered.

Then he had looked down the table at Frederick.

“Sir,” he said. “The Selkirk Grace. It’s for the guest of honour. Would you?” He held up a card. “It’s only four lines. I’ve written it out.”

Frederick had not taken the card.

He had stood up at the end of the long table in Downing Street and said the Selkirk Grace. He had said it in Morag’s voice, from a riverbank by the Teith, with a line round a tree. Four lines. Some hae meat and canna eat, and some wad eat that want it. He said it slowly and without a mistake, in the accent of a woman of twenty-five from the hills north-west of Stirling who had told him he cast like a Sassenach, and at the end of the fourth line, sae the Lord be thankit, he sat down.

The room had been silent.

Then Rennie’s sister, the nurse from Kirkcaldy, with the empty silver dish still in her hands, had said, quite loudly, to the table, “Where did he get that?”

And Rennie, at the end of the table, with his knife, had looked at the King of Great Britain for a long time with his disappointed boxer’s face.

“Sir,” he said. “That’s Stirlingshire. That’s a Stirlingshire accent. I’d know it anywhere. That’s my mother’s cousin.”

“It’s a ghillie called Morag,” said Frederick.

“Well, she’s somebody’s cousin,” said the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and sat down, and refilled his glass, and said, to nobody in particular, with deep feeling, “Christ, I didn’t know he could do that,” and then, to the table, raising his glass: “The King!”

And the table, all twenty of them, in their kilts and their sashes, standing, said, “The King,” in twenty Fife voices, and drank, and the piper, who had been sitting in the corner with a whisky, stood up again and began to play something that went on for a very long time.

---

In the blue notebook, on Saturday the first of February, he wrote:

Snow day. Dr Ord four feet from the river. I went in it. Privy Council in the beer cellar, nine minutes. Kit’s not all right. Theo’s going to help. Freya put sugar in. Lucía’s going to score against Bibury because she’s decided. Passed my test. Two minors. Like a man on a carpet. Burns Night. Somebody’s cousin.

And then:

Nobody at school knows about the accents yet. Only Morag and Mr Pryce and Rennie’s sister.