Book Ten: Senior Year Part Four: Home Characters
Chapter Thirty-three
Leaving Day
Frederick. Coln Abbey School and Coln Saint Aldwyns. Thursday, 5 June, to Friday, 6 June 2031.
Since 31 October 2028 the King lives in New Westminster, and Britain holds the position the other realms held.
Mr Abernathy asked him to come to the staff house at nine o’clock on Thursday night.
He did not say why. He said it at a quarter past eight in the morning, in the chapter house, after the roll, the last roll but one, closing the roll book and putting the cap back on his pen, and looking up, not at the class, at Frederick, by the window, three from the back. Hanover. Staff house. Nine tonight. Ten minutes. And then he had stood up and said chemistry is in the old dairy, don’t get lost, which he had said every morning for nine months, and gone.
So at nine o’clock Frederick walked down the drive in the long June dusk to the staff house at the bottom of it, a small grey cottage by the gate where Mr Abernathy and Mr Ferrante had lived since August, and knocked, and Mr Abernathy opened the door in his shirtsleeves, without the brown jacket, which Frederick had never seen, and said, come in, and took him through into the kitchen.
It was a small kitchen with a table and two chairs and a kettle. Mr Ferrante was not there. On the table were two mugs of tea, already made, and a plate with two biscuits on it, and the roll book.
Mr Abernathy sat down. Frederick sat down.
“I’m retiring,” said Mr Abernathy.
He did not say anything else for a while. He put his hands round his mug and looked at the table.
“Tomorrow,” he said at last. “At speech day. I’m going to say so. In the barn. In front of everybody.” He turned the mug round. “Dr Ord knows. Ferrante knows. Ferrante’s known since February. My wife’s known since 1991.” He looked up. “And now you know.”
“Why are you telling me first?”
Mr Abernathy looked at him across the small table for a long time with his face doing nothing at all, the way it did at a quarter past eight every morning over the roll book.
“Because you’re the King,” said Mr Abernathy, “and the King should not be surprised in public.” He drank some of his tea. “I’ve taught you for four years, Hanover. I read your name every morning. Hanover. Here. Seven hundred and twenty times, give or take.” He put the mug down. “And on the first morning, the very first, in ninth grade, when you were fourteen and nobody had told the class who you were yet and they were all looking at you sideways, I made a decision. I decided that I would read your name at exactly the same speed as everybody else’s. Every morning. No matter what. And I’d never once look up when I read it.” He looked at the roll book on the table. “And I didn’t. Not on the morning after Santa Monica. Not on the morning after your father’s aircraft. Not on the morning after the Abbey.” He looked back at Frederick. “That was the only thing I could do for you. Read your name at the same speed.”
Frederick did not say anything.
“So I thought,” said Mr Abernathy, “that I owed you one thing. Which is that you’d hear this from me, in a kitchen, at a table, before you heard it in a barn.” He picked up a biscuit and looked at it and put it down. “Forty years. I started at Ellicott in 1991. I was twenty-four. I had hair. My wife was twenty-two and she said, Martin, you’ll do this for five years and then we’ll go somewhere.” He looked at the biscuit. “Forty years. She’s waited forty years for me to stop. And I promised her, at Christmas, on the telephone, from the New Inn, that this would be the last one. This year. With you lot. In England.” He looked up. “She’s coming tonight. On the last train. She’s never been to England.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“Nobody knows I’m married,” said Mr Abernathy. “I’ve never mentioned it in school. In forty years. It’s mine.” He looked at the roll book. “Like your name at the same speed. Some things you keep.”
Mrs Abernathy came off the 21.17 at Kemble an hour later.
Frederick was not there. He heard about it from Mr Ferrante, the next morning, who had driven Mr Abernathy to the station in the staff car, and who said that Mr Abernathy had stood on the platform at Kemble for twenty minutes before the train came, in the brown jacket, in the dark, without saying a word, and that when the train came in, and stopped, and the doors opened, and a small grey-haired woman of sixty-two in a raincoat got off it with a suitcase on wheels and looked up and down the platform, Martin Abernathy, who had read the roll at Ellicott High School at exactly the same speed every morning for forty years, had walked down the platform toward her at a speed Mr Ferrante had never once seen him move at, and had not said anything, and had put his arms round her, on the platform at Kemble, in the dark, and she had said, Mr Ferrante reported, very distinctly, well, Martin, it’s about time.
The ball was on Thursday night in a marquee on the lawn below Windrush.
It had been the English form’s idea. The leavers’ ball was a tradition at Coln Abbey, Will said, since about 1950: the Upper Sixth, on the last night, in a marquee, in black tie, with a band, until dawn. It was always themed. One year it had been Arabian Nights and one year it had been The Titanic and one year, in 2019, it had been Underwater and the marquee had been filled with blue light and paper fish and Mr Gage at the lodge had refused to discuss it ever since.
This year, the English form had decided in March, without telling the Americans, that the theme would be Stars and Stripes.
“As a joke,” said Will, at lunch, in May, when the posters went up. “It’s a joke. It’s an American theme. For the Americans. Because they’re leaving.” He looked at the poster, which had been designed by Hattie and showed a bald eagle in a top hat holding a cup of tea. “We thought you’d find it funny.”
“We’re not American,” said Inés.
Will looked at her.
“We’re from the United Kingdom of America,” said Inés. “It’s got a King. We’ve never had stars and stripes. That’s not ours,” she said, and frowned. “That’s not anybody’s. That’s never been a flag of anything.”
Will looked at the poster again.
“We know,” said Will, after a moment. “That’s the joke.” He looked at her. “It’s the flag you would have had. If you’d lost. In 1775. If it’d all gone the other way.” He shrugged. “Hattie found it in a book. In the library. A history of what if. There’s a picture. Somebody in the 1800s drew it. What the flag would’ve been. Stars and stripes. Thirteen of each.” He grinned. “We thought it was hilarious.”
Inés looked at the bald eagle in the top hat holding a cup of tea for a long time.
“It is quite funny,” she said at last, flatly, and went back to her book.
So the marquee on the lawn below Windrush on the last night was hung with flags that had never flown anywhere. Red and white stripes, thirteen of them, and a blue corner full of white stars, on every pole, and strung in bunting along the ropes, and painted on a banner over the entrance that said, in Hattie’s hand, WELCOME TO THE COLONIES (ALTERNATIVE). There was a band from Cheltenham that played old American songs nobody in the Realm had ever heard, because they had never been written, except that somebody in the English form had found the sheet music for some of them in the same library book, what might have been sung, and the band had learned them, and they were terrible and wonderful and the Americans danced to them laughing so hard they could not stand.
The form went as a form.
That had been decided too, in March, at the New Inn, at the table by the fire, without anybody deciding it. No dates. Nobody would take anybody. The thirty-one English and the thirty-one Americans would go as one thing, together, in a group, sixty-two of them, in black tie and long dresses borrowed from mothers and aunts and the drama department’s cupboard under the stairs, and walk across the lawn from Windrush to the marquee at eight o’clock in a single crowd, and nobody would be anybody’s.
And they did. And it was the best thing about it.
He walked across the lawn in a dinner jacket that had been sent down from the Palace by Dame M with a note pinned to the lapel that said Sir. It will be too long in the sleeve. It always is. M.R., which it was. Theo was on one side of him and Will on the other and Kit in front, in a dinner jacket that had belonged to his father and been worn at his father’s wedding in 1989 and had been let out twice since. Lucía was behind him, in a dress of her mother’s from Pomona, red, with her hair up, and Inés beside her in black, reading, while walking, a paperback with a ship on the cover, which she put in her bag at the entrance to the marquee and did not take out again all night.
Devon and Hattie were at the back. Holding hands.
They had broken up on the Tuesday, at supper, over the menu. They had got back together on the Wednesday, at breakfast, over a boiled egg. They walked across the lawn at the back of the crowd in the last of the light with their hands held between them and their heads together, laughing, and nobody believed it would last until midnight, and Will said, over his shoulder, they’ll be off by the pudding, and Hattie said, without looking up, we will NOT, and they were not.
He danced with everybody.
He did not mean to. It happened. He danced with Lucía to a song that had never been written, about a railroad that had never been built, in a country that had never existed. He danced with Hattie, who taught him a step from a ball in Bath in 1790 that she had learned for an audition and that he could not do. He danced with Inés, who could not dance, and said so, and danced anyway, very seriously, with her chin up, counting under her breath, the way Mrs Haverfield sang the second verse. He danced with Freya Lomax, who danced the way she did everything, briskly and well and without apology, and said, halfway through, you’re terrible, you know, and he said I know, and she said, Hartigan’s worse, and nodded across the marquee at Theo, who was being taught the same step from Bath in 1790 by Hattie and was getting it so spectacularly wrong that the band had stopped to watch.
He did not dance with Jack.
Jack was not there. Jack was not in the form. Jack was not at the school. Jack was in the village, at the New Inn, behind the bar, on the last Thursday night, pulling pints, and Frederick knew it, and had known it since March, and had walked across the lawn in a dinner jacket that was too long in the sleeve knowing it.
At midnight he went outside.
He stood on the lawn at the edge of the marquee in the warm dark with the music coming out behind him and the stars overhead, the real ones, the ones over the wold that Lukas had shown them in April, and looked up the valley toward the village.
“He’ll be there,” said a voice beside him.
It was Inés. She had come out after him. She was standing with her arms folded in her black dress, looking at the stars.
“Where?”
“On the wold. At dawn. Above the school. At the top of the field.” She did not look at him. “Everybody goes up after the ball. At four. To watch the sun come up over the valley. It’s what the leavers do. Will told me. Since 1950.” She looked at the stars. “He’ll be there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s been told,” said Inés, “by Will, and by Hattie, and by Kit, and by Theo, and by me. Separately. This week.” She shrugged. “We all thought somebody should.”
Frederick looked at her.
“You did that?”
“Somebody had to check,” said Inés, and went back into the marquee.
At four o’clock in the morning sixty-two sixth-formers in black tie and long dresses walked up the long field above the school in the dark in a single crowd, with their shoes in their hands, in the dew, and sat on the wall at the top of it, in a row, with the whole valley below them in the dark, and waited.
He was at the end of the row.
Jack was already there.
He was sitting on the wall at the very end of it, where it met the gate, in his red sweatshirt and his jeans and his work boots, with his knees up and his arms round them and Ernest asleep at his feet in the long grass, and he had clearly been there for some time, because his hair was wet with the dew, and he did not look round when sixty-two people in black tie came up the field behind him in the dark. He did not move.
Frederick sat down beside him on the wall.
“You came,” said Frederick.
“I was told,” said Jack, to the valley. “By about five people. Separately. Will came in the pub on Monday and said four o’clock, top field, after the ball. Then Hattie came in on Tuesday. Then the tall one. Then the one with the glasses. Then that girl who reads, on Wednesday, who didn’t say anything, she just stood at the bar till I looked at her and then she said four and went out.” He looked at the dark. “I’d have come anyway.”
The sky was going grey in the east.
Below them, the valley was coming up out of the dark, slowly, the way the green had come up out of the cloud over England on the first morning from the aeroplane. The river first, a pale line, because it caught the light before anything else. Then the willows along it. Then the long grey roof of the abbey with the clock tower. Then the village beyond, the church tower and the roofs, grey stone in grey light, and smoke from somebody’s chimney, already, at half past four, going straight up into the still air and then bending.
Sixty-two people on a wall in black tie did not say anything.
The sky went from grey to white to a long thin line of gold along the top of the wold on the far side of the valley. The birds started. All of them, at once, the blackbirds in the yews and the wood pigeons in the trees and the larks over the field behind them, going up, invisible, singing, higher and higher.
And the sun came up over the wold.
It came up all at once, the way it does, the edge of it first, gold, too bright to look at, and then the whole of it, and the light came across the valley in a single long wave, down the far slope, across the village, over the church tower and the New Inn and the green and the war memorial and the churchyard wall, across the river, up the field, and onto the wall where sixty-two people sat in black tie with their shoes in their hands, and onto two boys at the end of it, one in a dinner jacket too long in the sleeve and one in a red sweatshirt with dew in his hair.
Jack’s hand was on the wall between them.
Frederick put his on top of it.
Sixty-two people on the wall in the first sun looked at the valley. Nobody looked at the end of the wall. Not one of them. They looked at the valley, and the light coming across it, and did not look, the way the New Inn did not look, the way the whole of Coln Saint Aldwyns had not looked for nine months; and then, at the far end of the wall, Theo, without looking, lifted his hand off his knee and held it up, flat, in the air, the way Mrs Haverfield had held up her hand to Peter Hartigan on the 860; and then Will did; and then Kit; and then Lucía and Hattie and Devon and Inés and Freya Lomax and Hugo Lomax and Ollie from Evenlode and every one of them, sixty, all along the wall, in the first sun, without looking round, held up one hand.
Jack looked along the wall at sixty hands held up in the light.
He did not say anything.
He did not say anything for so long that Frederick turned to look at him, and his face was doing the thing it had done behind the bonfire and at the telescope and at the crossroads, which was nothing at all, and his eyes were full.
“Room,” said Jack, very quietly.
Speech day was at eleven in the tithe barn.
It was hot. The barn was full, every chair, all four hundred pupils and their families and the staff, and the doors open at both ends to let the air through, and the light coming in through them across the stone floor in two long bright bars, and the swallows going in at one door and out at the other, over everybody’s heads, all through the speeches, as if they had been invited.
Dr Ord spoke first. She spoke for eleven minutes, without notes, about the year, and did not mention the King once, by name or title, in any of the eleven minutes, and at the end of it said that the school had had the honour of thirty-one guests from the United Kingdom of America who had arrived as visitors and were leaving as members of four houses named for four rivers, and that she had been told by the diplomatic service that one should never become attached to the citizens of a foreign country, and had found, at the end of thirty-seven years, that the diplomatic service was wrong about almost everything. She said that the school was also losing, at the end of the term, its drama teacher, Ms Roberts, to the stage, in Swansea, where she belonged, and that the school had known she would not stay from the moment she reduced the head of school to silence over a fire door, and had been grateful for every day she did. At the end of the third row, Ms Roberts, in a dark dress, with her large dark eyes, looked at the floor of the tithe barn and did not take the paint off anything at all.
Then the prizes.
He did not expect to get one. He did not get one. He got a mark. The English Literature results were read out by Mr Crane, in his bow tie, with his eyes shut, from memory, every name in the set, in alphabetical order, with the mark, the way Mr Abernathy read the roll. The school marked the one-year course itself, Mr Crane said, with his eyes shut, and had done since 1974, and the marks were final, and he would not be taking questions.
“Hanover,” said Mr Crane. “A.”
He sat very still on the bench in the tithe barn in the hot light.
Mr Crane opened one eye.
“Persuasion,” said Mr Crane, to the barn, “is about the consequences of taking good advice. Mr Hanover wrote in his final essay that the novel is in fact about the consequences of taking good advice for eight years, and then, at the last possible moment, not taking it.” He closed the eye. “It is the best essay I have marked in a decade. I disagree with every word of it.” He turned the page. “Hartley. B.”
Will spoke for the English form.
He had been asked by the form in May. He had said no, four times. He had said yes on the fifth, at the New Inn, after two pints and a look from Hattie. He stood up from the Windrush bench in the tithe barn at a quarter to twelve in his blazer, very red, with a piece of paper in his hand that he did not look at once, and walked to the front, to the stage that had been Athens and a wood and a wall, and stood in the bright bar of light from the open door, and looked at the barn.
He spoke for four minutes.
He spoke about the Americans. All of them. By name. He said that Lucía Paredes had scored against Bibury and that Theo Hartigan had won the shin-kicking and that Inés Castañeda had climbed along a fourteenth-century beam with a screwdriver and that Devon had been Lysander and that Kit Barraclough had got an A, and Kit’s not even American, but he’s going with them, so he counts.
And then he stopped, and looked at the piece of paper in his hand, and folded it, and put it in his pocket.
“I was told in July,” said Will, “that I’d be partnered with the King.”
The barn went very quiet.
“I was told by letter. It said he was very keen on history and a good listener. And I didn’t know what to say back, so I said I was keen on sheep.” He looked at his feet. “And I thought, all summer, I thought, he’ll be terrible. He’ll be stuck up. He’ll want things. He’ll have people. He’ll never once in his life have done anything for himself.” He looked up. “And he came off the coach in August and he got lost on a footpath in the first week. And he pulled a lamb in March, at one in the morning, because his hands were smaller than mine. And he sang bass in the church. Badly. And he scored a try. And he went into the river on a tray. And he went off a cliff after a cheese.” The barn was laughing now. Will did not laugh. “And I thought, by about November, I thought, he’s not a King at all. He’s just Fred.”
He stopped.
“And then,” said Will, “at the end of the play, in this barn, in March, on the last night, I was in the wings in my Thisbe wig, waiting, and I watched him do Bottom’s speech, the one when he wakes up. I have had a most rare vision. And I watched his face. And it wasn’t Fred’s face.” Will looked at the floor of the stage. “It was the face of somebody who’s had to be a King since he was fifteen, and had a year off, and knows it’s ending.” He looked up at the barn. “And I thought, oh. He’s both. He’s always been both. He’s Fred and he’s the King, and he’s had to carry both of them every single day, and he’s never once complained, and he’s never once let us see how heavy the second one is.” He looked straight down the barn at the Windrush bench. “I don’t know how you do it, Fred. I couldn’t. None of us could.” He stopped. “I just wanted you to know we saw.”
He went and sat down.
The tithe barn was silent for a long time.
Then the swallows went over, in at one door and out at the other, and somebody started to clap, and it was Mrs Haverfield, in the front row, in her blue coat and her hat with the bird on it, who had come up from the village on Mick’s arm at half past ten and taken the seat at the end of the front row that Dr Ord had kept for her, and had clapped for nobody all morning, and was clapping now, slowly, with her chin up, and then everybody was.
Mr Abernathy said it at twelve.
He stood up from his chair at the end of the staff row in the brown jacket and walked to the front, to the stage, slowly, and stood in the bright bar of light, and did not have a piece of paper.
He said that he had taught at Ellicott High School for forty years, and that this was the last of them, and that he was retiring, at the end of June, and that he wanted the school to know, and the class to know, and his wife, who was in the fourth row, and had never been to England, and had waited forty years for this sentence, to hear him say it out loud.
He said it at exactly the speed he read the roll.
And sat down.
Nobody clapped. For a moment. The barn was so quiet you could hear the river through three feet of stone.
Then Mr Ferrante stood up.
He was not on the programme. Dr Ord had not asked him to speak. He stood up from the staff row in his scarf, which he was wearing in June in a hot barn because he always wore it, and walked to the front, to the stage, and stood beside Mr Abernathy’s empty place in the light, and took a glass of water off the table at the side of the stage that had been put there for the speakers, and held it up.
“Martin Abernathy,” said Mr Ferrante, “has told me for twenty years that history is not the paper. It’s the people who were already there, carrying their pans.” He looked at the glass. “I have told him for twenty years that he was wrong. In April, in a record office in Winchester, I found out that he was right.” He looked down the barn at the fourth row, where Mrs Abernathy was sitting very straight in her raincoat. “I have taught beside him for twenty years. Every morning, at a quarter past eight, he read the roll. Every name. At the same speed. For forty years. Thirty-one names a morning, a hundred and eighty mornings a year.” He held the glass up higher. “I did the arithmetic last night. It’s about two hundred and twenty thousand names. Two hundred and twenty thousand, Martin. At the same speed. And not one of them, ever, read faster or slower than any other.” He stopped. “That’s not teaching. That’s something better. I don’t know what it’s called.” He lifted the glass. “Martin Abernathy,” he said. “Here.”
And the senior class of Ellicott High School, all thirty-one of them, on the benches of the tithe barn at Coln Abbey, without being told, stood up, all together, and said, as one, the way they had said it every morning for four years:
“Here.”
At the end of the staff row, Mr Abernathy did not move.
He sat on his chair in the brown jacket with his hands on his knees and his roll-book face on, the one from a quarter past eight. He sat like that for a long time.
Then he took off his glasses.
At the back of the barn, by the open door, in the bright bar of light, two women were standing side by side with their arms folded.
One was small and straight-backed, about sixty, in a dark grey suit, with a face like a well-kept knife. The other was taller, a little older, in a dark suit, with her glasses on a chain.
They had met at ten o’clock that morning, on the gravel, when Dame M had come down from London on the early train to see the leaving day, because somebody from the Household should, and it will not be the Master of the Household’s deputy, and Dr Ord had come out of the front door of the abbey to meet her, and the two of them had looked at each other on the gravel for perhaps four seconds, two women who had each spent their whole lives being the most formidable person in any room they walked into, and Frederick, watching from the Windrush door, had held his breath.
Then Dr Ord had said, Dame Margaret. I have read your memorandum on rugby boots.
And Dame M had said, Dr Ord. I have read your letter on Christmas broadcasts.
And they had looked at each other a moment longer, and then Dr Ord had said, coffee?, and Dame M had said, please, and they had gone into the abbey together, and had not, as far as anybody could tell, been more than four feet apart since.
They stood at the back of the barn now, side by side, in the light, with their arms folded, watching the class stand up and say here.
Frederick, on the Windrush bench, turned round and looked at them.
They both looked back at him. At the same moment. With the same expression.
He had never in his life been so frightened.
At noon, the coach.
It was on the gravel in front of the abbey, a large white coach with COTSWOLD CRUISERS on its side in sweeping blue script, the same company that had brought them from Heathrow on the thirtieth of August in the rain. The suitcases had gone into the hold at eleven while everybody was in the barn, thirty-one of them, and Frederick’s, with the brass plate, which had shut in August only because Theo had sat on it and would not shut now at all, and had been strapped with two belts and a length of rope from the lambing shed that Will had produced without comment.
The driver was Mick Fennell.
He had asked. In March. He had gone to the coach company in Cirencester, which was owned by the same people as the bus company, and asked if he could drive the leaving-day coach to London, and they had said Mick, you drive a single-decker, it’s a sixty-seater, and he had said I’ve got the licence, I got it in 1993, I’ve never used it, and they had looked at the licence and said yes.
He stood at the coach door in his uniform with the silver medal on his jacket.
He did not look at anybody. He looked at the coach door.
They went down the drive. Through the gates. Along the lane by the river, at a walk, the way the coach had come up it in August, past the willows and the weir and the field with the horses in rugs, into the village.
The village was in the street.
All of it. From the churchyard gate to the bridge. On both sides of the lane. Every house. Every person. Two hundred of them, in the sun, at noon, standing in a line along the walls and the gates and the doorsteps, the way they had stood for Mrs Haverfield on the seventeenth of May, quite still, and nobody had told them to, and nobody had told them not to.
Mick drove at a walk.
The coach went down the lane between them. Frederick was at the window, halfway down, on the left, where he had sat in August. Theo was beside him. The class was behind him, and the English form was in the coach too, all of them, because they were coming to London for Trooping, and then they were coming back to the valley on Sunday, and in September they were coming to the Realm.
He looked out of the window.
Gaz and Little Rob, at the bus stop, in clean shirts, not crying, absolutely not crying, both of them. Mr Purvis at his gate in his overcoat with his medals, ninety-one, with his cap off. The vicar on the church steps in his cassock, with a hat, and a bottle of water, because Freya Lomax had told him. Mr and Mrs Ellis outside the New Inn, Mr Ellis with his arm round his wife, and his face, for once, not anxious at all. Mrs Dunning outside the shop with her arms folded and a stamp on an envelope in her hand, held up, straight, which she had clearly got right at last and wished to be seen. Poppy, on her father’s shoulders, in her red coat, waving with both hands. Sue Fennell in the doorway of the New Inn in her apron, with Bridget beside her, who had flown over again for the leaving day without telling anybody, both of them with their arms folded, both of them not crying, absolutely not, under any circumstances.
Nobody waved. Except Poppy.
They stood. They watched the coach go past. And as it went past each of them, each of them said something, quietly, that Frederick could not hear through the glass and did not need to.
On the churchyard wall, by the lych-gate, in her blue coat, sat Mrs Haverfield.
She did not stand up. She sat on the wall with her stick and her chin up and her pale clear eyes on the coach as it came down the lane toward her, slowly, at a walk, with her grandson at the wheel.
Frederick put his hand flat on the window.
She looked at it.
She did not wave. She lifted her chin, very slightly, a quarter of an inch, which meant, he had learned in nine months, everything that anybody else would have needed a sentence for.
And then Ernest got on the coach.
Nobody saw him go. He was at Mrs Haverfield’s feet, on his lead, which was looped round her stick, and then he was not. He had slipped the lead, the way he slipped it every day on the way to Ready Token when he saw a rabbit, and he came across the lane at full speed with his ears inside out and his tongue out, eleven years old, three teeth, convinced, and in at the door of the coach, which Mick had opened at the bus stop by the war memorial because Gaz had knocked on it, and up the steps, and down the aisle, between the seats, past thirty Americans and thirty English sixth-formers who were all suddenly shouting, to the seat halfway down on the left by the window.
And sat down on Frederick’s feet.
And looked up at him, panting, with an air of having found exactly what he had been looking for.
The coach was silent.
At the front, Mick Fennell turned round in the driver’s seat and looked down the aisle.
From the door of the coach, from the step, a voice said, “ERNEST!”
Jack.
He had been at the New Inn. He had been behind the bar, because Sue had said someone had to be, and he had come out of the door of the pub at a run when he saw the dog go, and across the green, and he was at the bottom of the coach steps now, in his red sweatshirt, out of breath, with the empty lead in his hand.
“Ernest,” said Jack. “Get. Off. That. Coach.”
Ernest did not get off the coach. Ernest sat on Frederick’s feet.
Jack came up the steps.
He came down the aisle of the coach, between the seats, past sixty sixth-formers who had all gone completely silent, to the seat halfway down on the left by the window, and stopped, and looked at Ernest sitting on Frederick’s feet, and then at Frederick.
“He wants to come,” said Frederick.
“I know he wants to come.” Jack crouched down. “He can’t come. He’s Nan’s.” He put his hand on the dog’s head. “Can’t you, Ernest. You can’t come. You’re Nan’s. And Nan’s on the wall. And she’ll have my guts.” He clipped the lead on. “She’ll have me stuffed.”
He picked Ernest up. In both arms. Like a parcel. Ernest let him, with an expression of deep personal betrayal, all four legs sticking out, looking over Jack’s shoulder at Frederick.
Jack stood in the aisle of the coach with the dog in his arms.
He looked at Frederick.
He did not say anything. For once. In front of sixty people. He stood in the aisle of a coach at the war memorial in Coln Saint Aldwyns with his great-grandmother’s dog in his arms and looked at the King of fourteen countries in the seat by the window with his hand still flat on the glass, and his face did nothing at all, and then he turned round and carried Ernest down the aisle and down the steps and off the coach.
At the bottom of the steps he stopped.
He turned round.
“Sunday,” said Jack, up the steps, to his father in the driver’s seat. “I’m coming. To Heathrow. On the coach. At the front.” He looked past his father, down the aisle. “I’m not saying goodbye now. Not here. Not with Ernest.” He hitched the dog higher. “Sunday.”
Mick Fennell looked down at his son from the driver’s seat for a long time.
“Right,” said Mick.
And shut the doors.
The coach went on. Past the bus stop, past the New Inn, past Sue and Bridget in the doorway. Over the bridge. Out of the village. Up the lane between the walls, at a walk, the long hill up out of the valley, between the banks, with the trees meeting overhead in a green tunnel, the way it had come down in August.
At the top, where the lane came out of the trees, Mick stopped the coach. At the side of the road. By a gate. With the engine running.
“I always stop here,” said Mick, to the coach, without turning round. “Everybody wants a look.”
Frederick looked.
The valley. Below them. Narrow and green and very quiet in the noon sun, with the river along the bottom of it, clear and quick, and the willows, and the village on the slope, grey stone, close together, leaning all in the same direction like people at a bus stop, and the church tower among its dark trees, and the pub, and smoke going up from somebody’s chimney.
And on the churchyard wall, very small, from up here, a dot of blue.
And beside it, standing in the lane, a dot of red, with a smaller dot of brown and white in its arms.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then Mick put the coach in gear, and the valley went behind the trees, and was gone.
In the blue notebook, on the coach, on the motorway, with Theo asleep against the window, he wrote:
Leaving day. Mr Abernathy in the kitchen. Mrs Abernathy off the train: about time. Stars and Stripes, which was never a flag. Sixty hands on the wall. An A. Will said we saw. Two hundred and twenty thousand names at the same speed. Here. Dame M and Dr Ord. The village in the street. Mrs Haverfield’s chin. Ernest got on the coach. Jack carried him off. Sunday.
He looked at it.
He did not write anything else. He thought that it was enough.