Half-Term

There were four mail sacks in the porters’ lodge on the morning of the fourteenth of February, and Mr Gage was sitting behind them at his desk with an expression of a man who has been at Coln Abbey since the Suez crisis and has never in all that time seen four mail sacks.

“For you,” said Mr Gage.

It was the longest sentence Frederick had heard him say.

They were cards. Valentine’s cards. Two thousand and some of them, Mr Gage estimated, from the weight, though he had not counted and did not intend to. They were from Britain, almost all of them, from every part of it, Cornwall and Caithness and Belfast and Bolton, and they were addressed in every kind of hand, to The King, and HM The King, and King George, and Fred, which meant that somebody had told somebody, and in one case, in green crayon, in capitals, to THE KING (THE YOUNG ONE) AT HIS SCHOOL, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, ENGLAND, PLEASE.

He opened eleven of them, standing in the lodge.

They were mostly very kind. Several were from girls of about fourteen who wanted him to know that they had his picture on their wall. Two were from boys of about fourteen who wanted him to know the same. One was from a woman of ninety in Penzance who said that she had sent a Valentine to every King since 1951 and that he was the first one young enough to make it worth her while. One was from a man in Sunderland who said he was not sending it for romantic reasons, God forbid, but because he had heard the King had been tackled by a scrum half and wanted him to know that the man in Sunderland had once been tackled by a scrum half too, in 1987, and still could not feel his left ear.

He stood in the lodge and read them and laughed so much that Mr Gage, behind the mail sacks, very nearly smiled.

“What do I do with them?” said Frederick.

Mr Gage considered the question.

“Your father,” said Mr Gage, “had a lady at the Palace who answered them.” He looked at the sacks. “I’ll send them up.”

“Every one?”

“Every one,” said Mr Gage, and picked up the telephone.

---

The other card was on his desk.

He did not know how it had got there. He came back up to the room at the end of the corridor in Windrush at eleven, after chemistry, and it was on the desk, on top of Persuasion, propped against the cricket ball from the nets. It had not come in the post. There was no stamp on it and no address. There was just an envelope, cheap, white, slightly crumpled, as if somebody had been carrying it in a pocket for some time while they decided, and on the front, in blue biro, in capitals that sloped downhill to the right:

HANNOVER

With two Ns.

He opened it.

It was a card from the shop in the village, which sold cards when Mrs Dunning felt like it, and this one had a picture on the front of two cartoon sheep standing in a field with a red heart between them, and under the sheep, in pink, it said EWE ARE MY VALENTINE.

Inside, in the same blue biro, sloping downhill:

ROSES ARE RED VILOETS ARE BLUE YOU ARE RUBISH AT CRICKET THIS CARD IS ANNONYMOUS

And under that, after a gap, as if the writer had stopped and thought about it for a long time and then decided he might as well:

X

He sat on the bed and looked at it for a long time.

Then he got up and put it on the wall above the desk, with a pin, beside the map, which had been there since Boxing Day, and beside the columns, which his mother had been cutting out of the Evening Star every week and posting to him in an envelope marked FOR YOUR WALL, and which now went halfway along the plaster in a row.

Theo came in at lunch and looked at it.

He looked at it for some time.

“Annonymous,” said Theo. “With two Ns.”

“I know.”

“And Hannover. With two Ns.”

“I know.”

“So it’s from somebody who can’t spell,” said Theo, “and doesn’t want you to know who it is, and lives in the village, and knows you’re rubbish at cricket, and came into Windrush and up the stairs and into our room and put it on your desk without anybody seeing.” He sat down on his bed. “I wonder who that could be.”

“I don’t know,” said Frederick.

“No,” said Theo. “Me neither.” He lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling. “Viloets,” he said, with deep tenderness, to nobody, and closed his eyes.

---

The Hartigans came on the Sunday.

They came on the 860, from Cirencester, at a quarter past two, having flown into Heathrow on the Saturday night on an ordinary aeroplane, with crisps, Kate said, and come down on the train, and Frederick and Theo were waiting at the stop by the war memorial when the bus came round the corner by the New Inn, and the doors folded open, and Peter Hartigan got off it first, in a coat and a cap, and stood on the green, and looked round at it, at the church and the cottages and the river and the pub, and then turned round and looked back up at the bus.

At the bus. Not at the driver. At the bus. The whole length of it, the green and cream paint and the orange letters over the windscreen and the wheels and the step and the mirrors, slowly, the way the Duke had looked at the train at Paddington.

“Single-decker,” said Peter Hartigan.

“Yes,” said Theo.

“Rear-engined.”

“Yes.”

“Manual gearbox?”

“Yes.”

Peter Hartigan looked at the bus a while longer. Then he looked up into the cab, at Mick Fennell, who was sitting behind the wheel looking down at him with an expression of great wariness.

“How do you find her,” said Peter Hartigan, “on the hills?”

Mick Fennell looked at him.

“She’s all right on the hills,” said Mick slowly. “She’s not all right on the hill up out of Bibury when it’s wet, because the clutch goes, and she’s not all right on the lane by the church when there’s a tractor, because nothing is. But on the hills she’s all right.”

“Clutch goes,” said Peter Hartigan, nodding, with deep understanding. “Mine’s articulated. Sixty foot. Automatic. No clutch.” He paused. “Anacostia bridge, though.”

“What’s on the Anacostia bridge?”

“Everything,” said Peter Hartigan.

Mick Fennell looked down at him from the cab for a long time.

“Get on,” said Mick. “I’ll show you the hill out of Bibury.”

And Peter Hartigan, who had flown four thousand miles to see his son at school in England for the first time in six months, got back on the bus he had just got off, and sat down in the front seat behind the driver’s cab, and the doors folded shut, and the 860 pulled away from the war memorial with Peter Hartigan in it, going back the way it had come.

Anneliese Hartigan and Kate stood on the green with three suitcases and looked after it.

“Well,” said Anneliese Hartigan. “That’s the last we’ll see of him.”

---

It was. More or less. For the whole of half-term. Peter Hartigan rode the 860 from the first run at seven in the morning to the last run at a quarter to six at night, every day, Monday to Friday, in the front seat behind the cab, and he and Mick Fennell talked. Nobody knew what about. Mick Fennell, who had said four words to the King on the first Saturday and then could not speak, and had said nothing on the 860 for a whole term except mind your head, talked, Mrs Haverfield reported from the front seat on the Tuesday, without stopping, from here to Cirencester and back, four times, about gearboxes.

“Gearboxes,” said Mrs Haverfield, on the churchyard wall, with deep disgust. “And routes. And somebody called Lasko. And the Union Station, wherever that is. And timetables.” She looked at Frederick. “I’ve been getting that bus for sixty years and I have never once been unable to get a word in.”

“Did you try?”

“I tried twice,” said Mrs Haverfield. “Your American just held up his hand. Like this.” She held up her hand, flat, like a policeman stopping traffic. “Like that. To me.”

“What did you do?”

“I let him,” said Mrs Haverfield. “He was telling Michael about a man on his back seat who thinks he’s the Duke of Wellington.” She looked at the church. “It was a very good story.”

---

On the Wednesday a third bus driver came.

He came from Leeds, on a train that changed at Birmingham, because Kit had told him on the telephone on Monday night what was happening on the 860, and Kit’s father had put the telephone down and said to Kit’s mother, I’m going to Gloucestershire, and Kit’s mother had said what for, and Kit’s father had said, there’s an American on a single-decker telling a Cotswold man about articulated buses and nobody’s there to stand up for the double-decker.

He was a short wiry man of about sixty-five with glasses and a Yorkshire accent so thick that even Kit, who had grown up inside it, had to translate parts of it for Mick Fennell, and he got on the 860 at the war memorial at a quarter past ten on the Wednesday, and sat down in the front seat on the other side of the aisle from Peter Hartigan, and folded his arms.

“Barraclough,” he said. “First West Yorkshire. Forty-one year. The Number Four.” He looked across the aisle at Peter Hartigan. “You’ll be the articulated.”

“Hartigan,” said Peter Hartigan. “New Westminster Transit. Twenty-three years, six of them on the Thirty-Two.” He looked across the aisle at Mr Barraclough. “You’ll be the double-decker.”

They looked at each other across the aisle of the 860.

Mick Fennell, in the cab, looked at both of them in his mirror.

“Right,” said Mick. “No fighting on my bus.”

Nobody fought. Mrs Haverfield, who was on the bus again on Wednesday, because I was not going to miss this, reported that they talked, all three of them, from the war memorial to Cirencester and back, four times, for the whole of the day, and that at about three o’clock in the afternoon, on the hill out of Bibury, in the rain, with the clutch going, the three of them had stopped talking at the same moment and listened to the clutch, all three, with their heads on one side, and then nodded, all together, and Mr Barraclough had said aye, and Peter Hartigan had said yep, and Mick Fennell had said told you, and that she had never in her life seen three men agree so completely about anything without saying a word.

“It was like church,” said Mrs Haverfield.

---

Anneliese Hartigan went to London on the Tuesday to see Niamh.

Frederick did not see it. He heard about it on the telephone at four o’clock, from his father, which was itself remarkable, because his father did not, at four o’clock, tell him things. His father read the arrivals at Paddington. But on Tuesday at four, when Niamh held the telephone, there was a long pause on the line, and then his father said, instead of sixteen oh-two:

“Two.”

“Two what?”

“Nurses.” A breath. “Kitchen.” Another. “Four.” A longer one. “Hours.”

“Mrs Hartigan’s there?”

“Yes.” His father made a noise that might have been a laugh. “Talking.” A breath. “Me.”

“They’re talking about you?”

“Yes,” said his father, with immense dignity. “All.” A pause. “Day.”

In the background, very faint, through the telephone, from what must have been the Palace kitchen, he could hear two women’s voices, one Irish and one from Wisconsin, both talking at once, and laughing, and one of them, he thought it was Anneliese Hartigan, saying no, no, you’ve got to let him do the buttons himself, I don’t care how long it takes, and the other one, Niamh, saying that’s what I SAID, that’s exactly what I said to the Master of the Household’s deputy, and then both of them laughing again.

“Help,” said his father, on the line, in a voice of great contentment.

---

On the Monday Kate saw the sheep.

Will took her up to the farm. He had offered on Sunday night at the New Inn, at supper, across the table, after Kate had said, in the course of explaining what she was doing at nursing school on the river, that she had never in her life seen a sheep in real life, only in pictures and once on a bag of wool, and Will had put down his fork and looked at her with the expression Jack had used for cricket and Morag had used for casting, and said you’ve never seen a sheep, and Kate had said we don’t have sheep in the Columbia District, we have raccoons, and Will had said right, and tomorrow, and wellies.

So on Monday morning Will and Kate and Theo and Frederick went up the hill to the farm, and Mr Ellis met them in the yard, very anxious, having cleaned everything, including, Will said, the sheepdog, and they went out into the top field where the ewes were, three hundred of them, fat and grey and heavy with lambs that would come in a fortnight, standing in the field in the cold in a great grey crowd, looking at the visitors.

Kate stopped at the gate.

She looked at three hundred sheep.

Three hundred sheep looked at her.

“Oh,” said Kate, in a voice Frederick had never heard her use, small and high and astonished, the voice of somebody of about six. “Oh, they’re so big.”

“They’re pregnant,” said Will.

“They’re so woolly.”

“They’re sheep.”

“They’re looking at me.”

“They look at everybody,” said Will. “They’re not very clever. They think you might have food.” He opened the gate. “Go on. They won’t hurt you.”

Kate went into the field.

She walked out into the middle of three hundred sheep in a pair of borrowed wellingtons and a nursing-school sweatshirt, very slowly, with her hands held out in front of her, the way you walk into the sea, and the sheep parted round her, and closed behind her, and stood round her in a great grey ring, looking at her, and she stood in the middle of it, in the field, in the cold, at the top of the valley, with three hundred sheep looking at her, and began to laugh.

She laughed for a long time. She could not stop. She stood in the middle of the ring of sheep with her hands out and laughed until she was bent over, and the sheep watched her with mild interest, and Mr Ellis, at the gate, stopped being anxious for the first time that Frederick had ever seen, and looked at Kate Hartigan in his field with an expression of pure delight.

“She likes them,” said Mr Ellis, to Will.

“Course she likes them,” said Will. “Everyone likes them. They’re sheep.”

---

Kate guessed on the Thursday, in five minutes.

It was at the New Inn, at lunch, at the long table by the fire. The Hartigans were having lunch, all three of them, Peter Hartigan in from the 860 for an hour because Mick’s shift had a break, and Theo, and Frederick, and Kit, whose father had gone back to Leeds the night before with what Kit described as a look on his face like he’d seen God and God was a gearbox. Kate was at the end of the table, by the bar.

Jack brought the plates.

That was all. Jack came out from behind the bar with five plates, two on each arm and one in his hand, the way Sue had taught him, and put them down on the table one at a time, and when he put Frederick’s down he said, there you go, Hanover, as he always did, and went back behind the bar.

That was all that happened. Frederick was sure of it afterwards. He went over it a hundred times. Jack had put down five plates and said there you go, Hanover and gone back behind the bar. He had not looked at Frederick in any particular way. He had not touched him. He had not done anything at all except put down a plate.

Kate watched him go back behind the bar.

She looked at the bar, where Jack was now drying a glass, and talking to Gaz, and not looking at the table at all.

She looked at Frederick.

She looked at the bar again.

Then she picked up her fork, and looked at her plate, and said, quite quietly, to the plate, so that nobody but Frederick, on her left, could possibly have heard it over the noise of the pub:

“Oh.”

He did not say anything.

Kate ate a piece of pie. She chewed it for some time. She looked at the fire.

“Five minutes,” she said, to the fire, still very quietly. “I’ve been in this pub for five minutes, Freddie.” She ate another piece of pie. “Since Sunday I’ve been in it for about four hours and I didn’t see it, and then today I came in and sat down and he brought the plates and said there you go and I saw it in five minutes.” She put down her fork. “It’s the there you go.”

“What about it?”

“He says it to you like he’s handing you something that isn’t a plate,” said Kate.

Frederick looked at his own plate.

“I’m not going to say anything,” said Kate. “To anybody. Not to Mum. Not to Theo. Theo knows, obviously, Theo’s known since about November, Theo’s been walking round all week looking like a man carrying a full glass of water across a room.” She picked up her fork again. “I’m just saying I know. So you know I know. So you don’t have to wonder if I know.” She ate some pie. “That’s all.”

“Thank you, Kate.”

“Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything.” She looked across the table at her brother, who was talking to Kit about buses with his mouth full and his ears going slowly pink, because Theo always knew when he was being talked about, from any distance, by instinct, like a dog. Then she looked back at Frederick. “He’s nice,” she said. “The plate one. He’s got nice hands.”

“Kate.”

“I’m a nurse, I notice hands,” said Kate, and went back to her pie, and did not mention it again for the rest of the week, not once, not by a look, and on the Saturday, at the bus stop by the war memorial, when they were leaving, with the three suitcases, and Mick Fennell had brought the 860 round the corner by the New Inn and opened the doors, and Peter Hartigan had shaken Mick’s hand for a long time without saying anything, she hugged Frederick goodbye, hard, and said, in his ear:

“Professor says hello. And five minutes, Freddie. If I can see it in five minutes, you’ve got about a month before the whole village has a meeting about it.”

“The whole village already knows.”

Kate pulled back and looked at him.

“Does it?”

“Mrs Haverfield’s known since September. Sue’s known since Halloween. Gaz and Little Rob knew before I did.” He looked across the green at the churchyard wall, where Mrs Haverfield was sitting, with Ernest, watching. “They just don’t say anything.”

Kate looked at the wall for a while. At the old woman on it, very small, with her chin up.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s lovely.”

And got on the bus.

---

In the blue notebook that night:

Two thousand cards. One with two Ns. Three bus drivers. A clutch, and they all listened. Two nurses in the Palace kitchen. Kate and the sheep. Five minutes. It’s the there you go.

He looked at the card on the wall, the one with the sheep on it.

He wrote, under all of it:

X