Windrush

The tall fair boy with the sheepdog was called Will Ellis, and the sheepdog was called Nell, and Nell was not allowed.

“She’s not allowed,” said Will Ellis, on the gravel, holding out his hand. “I’ve been told. She came with me in the Land Rover and she won’t get out of my sight, so she’s going home with Dad at eleven.” He shook Frederick’s hand with a farmer’s grip, hard and short, and let go. “I’m your partner. Will. You’ll have had a letter.”

“I had a letter.”

“So did I. It said you were very keen on history and a good listener.” Will looked at him with frank grey eyes. “I didn’t know what to say back. I said I was keen on sheep.”

“Are you?”

“I’m going to be a vet,” said Will. “So I have to be. You can’t be a vet and not like sheep. Well, you can. But you’d be miserable.” He looked down at Nell, who was looking up at Frederick with her head on one side, the way Kimura looked at aeroplanes. “She likes you.”

“How can you tell?”

“She’s not herding you,” said Will. “She herds people she doesn’t trust. Into corners.” He considered. “She herded the headmistress at the open day. Into the chapel. We had to get her out with a sandwich.”

The line of English sixth-formers had broken up and gone forward onto the gravel to find their Americans, each of them with a piece of paper in a hand, some of them reading a name off it aloud, uncertainly, the way you would read a name off a card at a party for a stranger you were supposed to know. There was a great deal of handshaking. There was a great deal of standing about afterwards with nothing to say. The English stood with their hands in their pockets and said things like good flight? and you’ll be knackered, and the Americans, who did not know what knackered meant, said yes, thanks, to all of it.

Theo was being met by a dark, wiry boy a head shorter than he was, with glasses and a Yorkshire accent you could have cut bread with, who held out his piece of paper and read off it, in a voice of great and deliberate flatness, “Theodore Hartigan. Page of Honour. Interests: chemistry, biology, first aid.” And then looked up at Theo, who was six foot two, and then a long way up, and said, “Bloody hell. They didn’t say you were a lamp post.”

“Who are you?” said Theo.

“Kit. Barraclough. From Leeds.” He folded the paper. “I’m a scholarship boy. I’m telling you now so you don’t have to find out. I’m here on a scholarship and I’m not going to pretend I’m not, and if anybody says anything I’ll tell them where to go.” He looked at Theo hard through his glasses. “I’m going to be a doctor.”

“So am I,” said Theo. “Well. A paramedic. Maybe a doctor.”

“Maybe,” said Kit, with enormous scorn, and took Theo’s rucksack off his shoulder without asking and turned and walked into the school with it, and Theo, after a moment, followed.

---

Windrush was one of four houses, and all four of them were named for rivers. Coln was the river at the bottom of the valley, the one no wider than a kitchen. Windrush and Evenlode and Leach were the others, the rivers of the next valleys over, which ran south and east down through the wold to join the Thames. Each house had a building of its own round the edge of the old abbey grounds, grey stone like everything else, and Windrush’s was the oldest and the coldest and the most crooked, a long low range that had been the abbey’s guest house in the thirteenth century and smelled, on the stairs, of polish and wet coats and something that Will said was probably the thirteenth century.

The room was on the second floor at the end of a corridor.

It had two beds, two desks, two wardrobes that did not match, one window with small panes and a deep stone sill, and a radiator under the window. The radiator was cream. Frederick looked at it for some time.

Then he put his hand on it.

It was warm.

He took his hand away and put it on again, to make sure. It was still warm. It was, in fact, so warm that after a few seconds he had to take his hand off it.

“It works,” he said.

“Course it works,” said Will, behind him in the doorway, with his suitcase. Will was across the corridor. “It’s a radiator.”

“The radiators at Ellicott don’t work.”

“Never?”

“Not in four years.”

Will thought about this. “What do you do in winter?”

“Wear a coat. Sit near Theo.” Frederick looked at the radiator with something close to love. “He’s warm.”

Theo came in with Kit Barraclough behind him, still carrying Theo’s rucksack, and Theo stopped in the middle of the room and looked round it, at the two beds and the window and the radiator, and put his own suitcase down on the bed by the door, which meant that it was his, and that the one by the window was Frederick’s, and they did not need to discuss it, because they had never needed to discuss it.

“It’s smaller than your bathroom,” said Theo.

“It’s smaller than my wardrobe.”

“Good,” said Theo, and sat down on his bed and bounced on it, once, the way he had sat on the suitcase. The bed made a noise like a small animal surrendering. “It’s like the suitcase.”

Kit put the rucksack down on the end of Theo’s bed. He looked round the room, at the radiator, at the window, at Frederick, without any expression at all.

“So you’re him,” he said.

“I’m Frederick.”

“I know who you are. I’m just saying.” Kit pushed his glasses up his nose. “My dad said to say. He said, if you meet the King, tell him from me that the Number Four’s been late every morning for eleven years and it’s not the drivers’ fault.”

Theo, on the bed, went very still.

“Your dad,” said Theo, “drives a bus?”

Kit turned round.

“Forty-one years,” said Kit. “First West Yorkshire. The Number Four. Leeds city centre to Seacroft.” He looked at Theo suspiciously. “Why?”

“Mine drives a bus,” said Theo. “Twenty-three years. Milwaukee, then New Westminster Transit. The Thirty-Two. Union Station to Anacostia.”

There was a short silence in the room.

Kit Barraclough looked at Theo Hartigan, and Theo Hartigan looked at Kit Barraclough, and Frederick, by the window with his hand on the radiator, had the very strong sense that he was watching two gunfighters in a film recognise each other across a street.

“Single-decker or double?” said Kit.

“Articulated,” said Theo.

Kit’s face did something complicated.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, that’s cheating.”

“How is it cheating?”

“That’s not a bus. That’s two buses with a concertina in the middle. Anybody can drive that. You just point it.” Kit folded his arms. “A double-decker round Seacroft in the snow at six in the morning. That’s a bus.”

“Twenty minutes,” said Theo, standing up, “across the Anacostia bridge, at rush hour, sixty feet long, in the Columbia District in August, with the air conditioning broken and a man on the back seat who thinks he’s the Duke of Wellington.”

“In Leeds that’s Tuesday.”

“In Leeds you don’t have August.”

Will Ellis, in the doorway, looked at Frederick.

“Is it always like this?” said Will.

“I don’t know,” said Frederick. “It’s never happened before.”

---

At half past seven Will’s father came to take Nell home. He was a big, anxious, sandy-haired man in a waxed jacket with the shoulders gone white, who stood on the gravel in front of Windrush and shook Frederick’s hand three times, and each time he did it he said, very pleased, very pleased, and each time looked at his own hand afterwards as though he were not sure he was allowed to have done it.

“You’ll come to the farm,” said Mr Ellis.

“I’d like that.”

“You must come to the farm. Lambing. Not till February, mind. But you must come.” He wiped his hand on his jacket, and then looked horrified at having done it, and then put both hands in his pockets. “We’ll clean. Before. We’ll have it all cleaned.”

“Dad,” said Will.

“We’ll clean, Will.” Mr Ellis looked at Frederick with great earnestness. “It’s a farm, you see. It’s not. It’s not clean.”

“I’ve never been on a farm,” said Frederick.

Mr Ellis looked at him with an expression of such profound pity that Frederick nearly laughed.

“Never?”

“Not a working one.”

“Oh, lad,” said Mr Ellis, and then went red to the tops of his ears, because he had called the King lad, and opened his mouth to apologise, and Will said, “Dad, Nell,” and Mr Ellis said, “Yes, Nell, right,” and whistled, and the sheepdog, who had been sitting at Frederick’s feet the whole time, got up with obvious reluctance and went to the Land Rover and jumped into the back of it and looked out at Frederick through the rear window with an expression of deep personal betrayal all the way down the drive.

---

At eight that evening the school assembled in the hall.

The hall had been the abbey’s church. It was very long and very high, with a wooden roof like the inside of a ship turned upside down, and pointed windows down both sides full of old glass that made the evening light come in the colour of weak tea. The four houses sat in blocks on long wooden benches, the English in navy blazers, the Americans in their own clothes, so that from the gallery at the back, Frederick thought, you would have seen four dark rectangles each with a scatter of colour in it, like four boxes of chocolates with the wrappers left on.

The headmistress came in at eight exactly.

She was a small, straight-backed woman of about sixty, in a dark grey suit, with short grey hair and a face like a well-kept knife. She did not walk to the lectern on the platform so much as arrive at it, and when she reached it she did not look down at any notes, because she did not have any, and she did not wait for silence, because there already was some, of a very particular kind.

“Good evening,” she said. “I am Dr Ord.”

Four hundred people said good evening, Dr Ord, in the voice of four hundred people who had been doing it for years. The thirty-one Americans said it about half a second later and much less tidily.

Dr Ord looked at them over the heads of the English.

“For the benefit of our guests,” she said, “I will tell you three things about myself, and then I will not mention myself again, because a school is not about its headmistress, whatever its headmistress may have been led to believe.” She folded her hands on the lectern. “The first is that I have been at this school for eleven years, and before that I was a diplomat for twenty-six, and for four of them I was His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador at Stockholm.”

Frederick, in the middle of the Windrush block, became aware that a great many heads near him were not turning round to look at him with great care.

“The second,” said Dr Ord, “is that while I was at Stockholm I had the honour of knowing, slightly, a young woman who was then Crown Princess of Sweden and is now its Queen. She was a better skater than I was and a much better shot.” She paused. “The third is that I was taught by the diplomatic service that there is one way to treat the head of a foreign state, and by twenty years in schools that there is one way to treat a boy of seventeen, and I have given the matter a great deal of thought over the summer, and I have concluded that the second way is correct in every instance in which the first does not actually require me to curtsey.” She looked straight down the hall at the Windrush block, and found him, without searching, and held his eye for exactly one second. “I do not believe it will.”

Somebody in the Leach block laughed, and stopped.

“Welcome to Coln Abbey,” said Dr Ord. “You will be cold, you will be confused by the money, and you will go home in June knowing a river, a village and four hundred people you did not know today, and some of them will be your friends for the rest of your lives.” She looked round the hall. “That is all. Supper is at seven. It is shepherd’s pie. I apologise for it in advance.”

She left the platform.

Four hundred people stood up. Thirty-one Americans stood up a moment later.

Beside Frederick, Theo leaned down and said, very low, “You will be cold, you will be confused by the money.”

“I heard.”

“That’s what Abernathy said. At the airport. Word for word.”

“I know.”

“Do you think they’ve met?”

Frederick looked along the row. At the end of it, standing with the Windrush staff by the pillar, Mr Abernathy, in the brown jacket, without the tweed cap, was watching the door Dr Ord had gone out by with the expression of a man who has just heard his own best joke told at a dinner party by somebody else, better.

“I think,” said Frederick, “they’ve been writing to each other.”

---

The shepherd’s pie was not as bad as Dr Ord had promised. It was much worse. Theo ate three helpings of it, and Kit Barraclough, across the table, watched him do it with an expression that went from contempt through disbelief to something like reluctant respect, and on the third helping said, “Articulated,” under his breath, as though it explained everything.

Afterwards, in the common room, which had a fire and a television and eleven armchairs that had all been sat in by everybody who had ever been at Windrush, the English sixth-formers explained the money.

They explained it for an hour. They put coins on the table in rows and named them. They held up notes. The Americans held the notes up to the light, because they had all been told to, and on every note, in the window of clear plastic in the corner, very small, looking slightly to the left, was Frederick.

They passed one along the row to him.

He looked at himself in the little window.

“It’s not very like you,” said Will.

“It’s from when I was sixteen.”

“You look cross.”

“I was cross. It was a Tuesday. They made me sit very still for an hour and a woman from the Mint kept saying chin.” He gave it back.

“What do we call it?” said Lucía, holding up a five-pound note. “In the shops. Do we just say five pounds?”

“You say a fiver,” said a girl from the Coln block, who was sitting on the arm of a chair.

“And a ten?”

“A tenner.”

“And a twenty?”

The girl thought. “A twenty.”

“Why isn’t it a twentier?”

“Because that’s stupid,” said the girl, with complete conviction, and the English all nodded, and the Americans all looked at each other, and that, Frederick thought, was the moment the year began.

---

He got into bed at ten in the room at the end of the corridor with the radiator on and the window open an inch and the sound of the river coming in through it, very small and quick and continuous, like somebody talking quietly in the next room and never stopping.

He had a notebook on the desk. Not a large one. Blue, with a soft cover, from a stationer’s at Heathrow, which he had bought while the class waited for the coach because Kimura had been looking at it on the stand and had said, you should keep a diary, sir. A line a day. You’ll want to remember.

Why would I want to remember? he had said.

Because you’re going to have a nice time, Kimura had said, and nobody believes you when you say so.

He had bought it. Kimura had then been told, in the queue to pay, in a tone she seemed to find very amusing, that she was not to read it, ever, under any circumstances, and she had said, sir, I would not dream, and had looked at the ceiling.

He opened it now. He wrote the date at the top of the first page.

Then he wrote:

The radiator works.

He looked at it. It seemed enough. He closed the book.

From the other bed, in the dark, Theo said: “What did you write?”

“Nothing.”

“You wrote something. I heard the pen.”

“I wrote that the radiator works.”

There was a pause.

“That’s good,” said Theo, with great seriousness. “That’s the right thing to write.” And turned over, and was asleep.

---

At a quarter to six on Monday morning, which was the first day of term, somebody knocked on the door three times, hard, and when Frederick opened it in a T-shirt and the sweatpants he had slept in, Will Ellis was standing in the corridor in a towel and a pair of rubber sandals, and behind him, in towels, in a shivering line that went down the corridor and round the corner to the stairs, was every sixth-former in Windrush, English and American, with Theo’s head sticking up above all the others at the end, with an expression of a man who has been woken at a quarter to six and is being very brave about it.

“Swim,” said Will.

“What?”

“The Coln. First Monday. Everybody new goes in.” Will was shivering already, slightly, from the knees. “It’s tradition. Since about 1700. Dr Ord’s tried to stop it twice. You go in up to the neck and you count to ten and you get out and you’ve done it, and then you’re Windrush.” He looked at Frederick’s T-shirt. “You’ll want a towel.”

Frederick looked past him down the corridor at the line.

“Is everybody doing it?”

“Everybody new.”

“Even.”

“Everybody,” said Will, and then, a little awkwardly: “We did talk about whether. Last night. In the common room. When you’d gone up.” He looked at the floor. “Whether we should ask you. Whether we were allowed. And somebody said, well, we’d better ask him if we’re allowed, and somebody else said, well, he’s asleep, and then Kit said.” He stopped.

“What did Kit say?”

“Kit said if the King’s too grand to get cold, he can stay in bed and we’ll know,” said Will, very fast. “Sorry.”

From the end of the line, Kit Barraclough, in a towel, with his glasses on, looked at the ceiling.

Frederick went back into the room and got the towel off the end of the bed.

---

The Coln at six in the morning on the second of September was the coldest thing he had ever felt.

He had been in the Pacific in November at night. He had been in the sea off Santa Monica. Neither of them, he thought afterwards, had been anything like this, because neither of them had been a small, quick, clear river coming straight down off a hill of limestone that had been holding the cold of the winter in it like a jug all summer. It did not feel like water. It felt like being hit, everywhere at once, by something that had been waiting.

He went in up to his neck. Beside him, Theo went in up to his neck and made a noise like a whistle. On the bank, in a dark coat, with her hands in her pockets and the mist on the meadow round her ankles, Kimura stood with Castellanos and watched, with her head on one side.

“One,” said Will Ellis, in the water, through his teeth.

They all counted. Twenty boys up to their necks in the River Coln in the grey light, counting to ten in two accents, very slowly, and the sound of it went up off the water into the willows.

At ten they came out.

Frederick came up the bank on his hands and knees, onto the wet grass, and stood up, and could not feel his feet, or his hands, or anything at all between his chin and his knees, and the mist was rising off the river in the first sun behind him, and somebody put a towel round his shoulders, and it was Kit Barraclough.

“Right,” said Kit, through his teeth. His glasses were completely fogged. “Right. Fine. You’re Windrush, then.” He sniffed. “Fred.”

“Fred?”

“That’s what we’ll call you. You can’t have Frederick. Nobody’s called Frederick. And we’re not calling you Your Majesty in the showers.” Kit wiped his glasses on the corner of his towel, which made them worse. “Fred. All right?”

Nobody had ever called him Fred.

His father called him Frederick. His mother called him älskling and, when she was cross, his whole name. Theo called him Freddie, and had since the second week of seventh grade, and nobody else in the world was allowed to. The Realm called him sir, and His Majesty, and in the newspapers the King. Castellanos called him sir. Mr Abernathy called him Hanover.

Nobody had ever, in seventeen years, called him Fred.

“All right,” said Frederick.

And on the bank, in the mist, he heard Kimura say, quite quietly, to Castellanos, in the voice of a woman marking something down: “Seven.”

“Out of what?” said Castellanos.

“Out of ten,” said Kimura. “For the swim. He’d have got a nine but he came out on his hands and knees.”