Sceptre West

The Colour was trooped at eleven o’clock on Horse Guards Parade, on the King’s official birthday, which in Britain was a Saturday in June and had nothing to do with the second of May, because, the Household had explained to him in a memorandum in April, the second of May was usually wet.

He had never seen it done.

His father had taken the salute at it for fifty-six years. Frederick had watched it on television every June of his life, at Columbia Palace, at five in the morning, because of the time difference, in his pyjamas, on the sofa in the north wing with his mother, and had seen the same thing every year from the same angle: a great sandy square in front of a long grey building with a clock tower, and on it, in lines so straight they looked ruled, more than a thousand soldiers in scarlet tunics and tall black bearskin hats, and horses, and bands, and in the middle of all of it, very small, on a horse, or later, in his father’s last years, in a carriage, his father.

Now he was in the middle of it.

He came onto Horse Guards from the Mall at eleven in an open carriage, alone, in the uniform of the regiment whose Colour it was, which had been made for him by the same robemaker who had made his coronation robe and who had let it out a quarter of an inch too little at the shoulders, on purpose, so that you sit up, sir. The carriage stopped at the saluting base. He got down. He stood on the base, a low wooden platform at the side of the square, with his hand at the peak of his cap, and the square in front of him went absolutely still.

A thousand soldiers. Not one of them moving. The bearskins in their lines. The bayonets in the sun. The horses of the cavalry along one side, black, motionless, the light on their breastplates. And the bands, massed, at the far end, silent, waiting.

He had never in his life heard a thousand people make no sound at all.

Then the bands played, and the Colour was trooped.

---

He did not know, afterwards, how long it took. He knew that it was long. He knew that the Colour, a great square of crimson silk with gold on it, was carried slowly along the lines of soldiers, between them, so that every man could see it, which was the whole point, his father had told him, in single words, in March, at the round window: Show. A breath. Men. A breath. What. A breath. For. He knew that the bands marched and countermarched across the sand in a slow wheeling pattern that looked, from the saluting base, like a clock with all its hands going round at once. He knew that the sun was hot and the tunic was tight at the shoulders, on purpose, and that he did not move for a very long time, and that at one point a soldier in the front rank of the nearest line, a boy of about his own age, swayed, very slightly, in the heat, and steadied, and did not fall, and that he had felt the whole square hold its breath for him, and let it go.

And he knew that behind the barriers at the side of the Mall, where the crowd was, a hundred thousand of them, packed in along the edges of St James’s Park in the sun, with flags, there was a shout.

He could not see who it was. He could not turn his head. He did not need to.

It was one voice. In a crowd of a hundred thousand people who had all, at the moment the Colour went past the saluting base, gone completely silent, because that was what you did, it was one voice, from somewhere behind the barriers on the left, very loud, from Gloucestershire, at the top of its lungs:

“HANOVER!”

And then, a beat later, slightly less loud, as if somebody nearby had hit it:

“Sorry! Sorry. Sorry.”

On the saluting base, with his hand at the peak of his cap and his face perfectly still, and a thousand soldiers in front of him not moving a muscle, the King of Great Britain did not laugh.

It was the hardest thing he had done all year.

---

The class was on the Mall. All thirty-one of them, and the English form, and Mr Abernathy and Mrs Abernathy, and Mr Ferrante in his scarf. They had stood behind the barriers since eight in the morning in the sun to get a place at the front, and had been told by a policeman at nine that they could not stand on the barriers, and by a different policeman at ten that they could not sit on them, and by a third policeman at half past ten, who had looked at Theo, six foot two, at the front, and then at the crowd behind Theo, and then at Theo again, that he would very much appreciate it if the tall lad could crouch.

Jack had a flag.

It was a Union flag. It was enormous. It was on a pole. He had bought it from a man on the Mall at half past seven for twelve pounds, and he had waved it, Theo reported afterwards, for three and a half hours without stopping, including through the whole of the Trooping, at which, Theo said, nobody waves anything, ever, and the woman behind him kept saying “young man”, and he kept saying “sorry”, and he kept waving it.

And when the Colour went past, and the crowd went silent, he had shouted.

“He couldn’t help it,” said Theo. “He said afterwards. He said he just saw you on the platform with your hand up and you weren’t moving and nobody was moving and it was so quiet, and it came out.” Theo shook his head. “And then Lucía hit him.”

“Lucía hit him?”

“With her programme,” said Theo. “On the back of the head. That’s why he said sorry.” He thought about it. “Then the woman behind him hit him too.”

---

At one o’clock, on the balcony of the Palace, his father stood.

He had been told he could sit. There was a chair. Niamh had put it there, on the balcony, at the back, at nine in the morning, and had put a cushion on it, the one from the play, from the front row in the tithe barn, and had told the Master of the Household’s deputy that if anybody moved it she would push them off the balcony into the crowd.

His father did not sit on it.

He came out onto the balcony behind his son and his wife at one o’clock, in a dark suit, with the hazel stick, slowly, into the noise, the enormous noise, of a hundred thousand people packed down the whole length of the Mall from the Palace to Admiralty Arch, in the sun, shouting, with flags, and he walked to the front of the balcony, to the stone balustrade, beside his son, and stood there.

And did not sit down.

The flypast came over at five past one. From the east, low, over the Mall, out of the sun: aircraft in a long line, old and new, propellers and jets, the oldest first, a single grey fighter from the war with a sound like a sewing machine, and then the others, one after another, louder and louder, and at the end, nine red jets, very low, very fast, in a tight arrow, trailing red and white and blue smoke over the Palace, so loud that the balcony shook.

His father stood through all of it.

He stood at the balustrade with one hand on the hazel stick and the other on the stone and his head back, watching them come over, every one, end to end, the way he had looked at the instrument panel of an aircraft once, carefully, so as to know it later. He had flown. He had been a pilot. He had been in the sky over the Atlantic in a jet of the royal squadron in September two years and nine months ago, and had come down into it. And he stood on the balcony of the house he had lived in for fifty-six years and watched the aircraft go over, every one, in the sun, and did not sit down, and did not look away.

At the end, when the red jets had gone, and the smoke was drifting down over the park, red and white and blue, and the noise of the crowd came back up the Mall like a wave, his father turned his head and looked at his son.

“Kittyhawk,” said his father.

Frederick looked at him.

“Not,” said his father. “Now.” He looked up at the sky, where the smoke was. “Just.” A breath. “Planes.”

---

On Sunday morning at nine, outside the hotel near Paddington where the class had stayed, the coach was waiting, and Mick Fennell was at the wheel, and his son was in the front seat.

The front seat by the door. The one behind the windscreen. The one Castellanos had sat in on the thirtieth of August going the other way. Jack was in it in his red sweatshirt with his knees up against the dashboard and his face to the windscreen and his hands in his pockets.

He did not look round when Frederick got on.

Frederick went halfway down on the left, to the window, where he had sat in August. Theo beside him. The class behind. The suitcases in the hold, his with the brass plate and two belts and the rope from the lambing shed. The English form had gone back to the valley on Saturday night on the train, all of them, in a crowd, after the balcony, and said goodbye on the platform at Paddington in a long untidy row of hugging that had made the man from the information desk come out to see what was wrong, and they would see each other in September, at Ellicott, all of them, in the gym, in the radiators that did not work, and Will had said, on the platform, you’ll have to show me where to stand on the first morning, and Frederick had said Abernathy will, and Will had said Abernathy’s retiring, and they had both stood on the platform not knowing what to say to that.

Mick drove.

He drove out of London on the motorway at exactly the speed limit, in the middle lane, not overtaking anything, with his hands at ten to two on the wheel, the way you would drive a coach full of eggs. Nobody on the coach talked. Not the class, not Mr Abernathy, not Mr Ferrante. Kimura, in the front seat on the other side of the aisle from Jack, read her murder in a country house, which she had now read four times, and did not turn a page once.

Castellanos was at the back.

Frederick had not seen him get on. He was in the very last seat, at the back of the coach, by the emergency door, on his own, in his dark suit, with his hands folded, looking out of the back window at the road going away behind them.

---

At Heathrow, at a quarter past ten, Mick stopped the coach at the kerb at Terminal Five, at a bay at the end of a long concrete pavement, where the white coach with COTSWOLD CRUISERS on its side had stopped on the thirtieth of August to take them west.

He opened the doors.

Nobody moved.

Then the class got off. One at a time. Down the steps. Onto the pavement. Mr Abernathy first, with the roll book, and Mrs Abernathy, and Mr Ferrante, with the map of 1779 under his arm, rolled up, which he had compared with the present county of Gloucestershire field by field for a year and had concluded, he said, was substantially accurate, which is a disappointment. And Lucía, and Inés with her book, and Devon, and all of them, one at a time, down the steps, and the hold open, and the suitcases coming out.

Frederick got off last but one. Theo behind him.

Jack was standing on the pavement.

He had got off first. Before anybody. He had got out of the front seat and down the steps the moment the doors opened, and he was standing on the pavement at the bottom of the coach steps in his red sweatshirt with his hands in his pockets, and he did not say anything.

Frederick stopped in front of him.

Jack took his hand out of his pocket.

There was something in it. He held it out. It was a cap. A cricket cap, navy blue, gone grey at the peak with sun and wear, with a small faded badge on the front, a shield with a church tower on it and three letters underneath, C.S.A.C.C., and inside the band, when Frederick took it and turned it over, in black marker pen, very old, gone brown, a name. J. FENNELL. U11.

He looked at it.

He looked at Jack.

Jack did not say anything. He looked at the cap in Frederick’s hands. He looked up at Frederick’s face. His own face did nothing at all.

Frederick put the cap on.

It was too small. It had been made for a boy of eleven. It sat on the top of his head like a saucer on a melon, absurdly, at the kerb at Terminal Five at Heathrow, on the King of fourteen countries, with the class on the pavement behind him and the suitcases coming out of the hold and a man in a high-visibility jacket waving the coach on because it had been at the bay too long.

Jack looked at it on his head.

Then the grin came. Not all of it. A corner of it. One side. The beginning.

He did not say anything. He reached up, and straightened the cap, a quarter of an inch, on the top of Frederick’s head, so that it was on properly, or as properly as it could be, and took his hand away.

Then he turned round, and got back on the coach.

He sat down in the front seat. He put his knees up against the dashboard. He put his hands in his pockets. He looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the concrete wall at the end of the bay.

Mick Fennell, at the wheel, looked at his son for a long moment.

Then he looked down the steps of the coach at the King, standing on the pavement in a cricket cap made for a boy of eleven.

“August,” said Mick.

“August,” said Frederick.

Mick shut the doors.

The coach pulled out from the bay, slowly, very slowly, the way Mick drove everything, and went along the concrete road toward the exit, and Frederick stood on the pavement and watched it go, and through the windscreen, in the front seat, Jack did not look round, and did not wave, and at the very end of the road, where it curved away under a bridge toward the motorway, lifted one hand, without looking, about an inch.

And was gone.

---

“Without a word,” said Theo, beside him, on the pavement, very quietly.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t say anything.” Theo looked at the empty bay. “Jack Fennell. At Heathrow. Didn’t say one word.” He shook his head slowly. “He’s only quiet when something matters.”

“Alexander said that.”

“Alexander was right,” said Theo. He looked at the cap on Frederick’s head. “You look ridiculous.”

“I know.”

“You’re not taking it off.”

“No,” said Frederick.

---

The aeroplane was ordinary.

That was the astonishing thing about it, again, at the end, as at the beginning. A long white aircraft on a stand at Terminal Five with a hundred and fifty strangers in it and the senior class of Ellicott High School and a meal in a tray. He went down the air bridge behind a woman with a baby. The stewardess at the door said good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon and did not look up from the passes, and when she said it to him she looked up, because she had been told, and saw a tall boy in a jumper with a cricket cap on the top of his head made for a child of eleven, and her face did something, and she said good afternoon in a different voice, and he went down the aisle.

Seat 34K. Window. Starboard. Over the wing.

Theo in 34H. Castellanos in 34J, between them, with his hands folded.

And in row thirty-eight, four rows behind, on the aisle, in a grey coat, with her hat on her knee, his mother. And beside her, in the window seat, in a tweed cap, with the hazel stick across his knees, his father.

He had not known.

He turned round in his seat and looked back along the aisle at row thirty-eight, and his father, in the window seat, looked back at him, and lifted the stick an inch off his knees.

“Two aircraft,” said Frederick, to Castellanos, beside him. “An hour apart. The rule.”

“Yes, sir,” said Castellanos.

“Nobody’s changed it.”

“No, sir.”

“Then what are they doing in row thirty-eight?”

Castellanos looked at the back of the seat in front of him for a long time.

“The Duke,” he said at last, “came to the Household’s office on Wednesday morning at nine o’clock, with the stick, on his own, up four floors, because the lift is for people who need it. He stood in front of the Master of the Household’s deputy’s desk for eleven minutes. He did not sit down. He said one word.” Castellanos looked at the seat in front. “He said no.” He was quiet for a moment. “And then he said, I. Fell. Out. Of. One. And then he said, Not. Again.” Castellanos folded his hands. “And the Master of the Household’s deputy looked at him for some time, and then picked up the telephone, and rang Dame M, and Dame M said, I am told, for God’s sake, Peregrine, give the man a ticket.”

Frederick looked back along the aisle at row thirty-eight.

His mother was looking out of the window past his father’s shoulder at the stand. His father was looking at him.

“Same,” said his father, quite clearly, across four rows of an aeroplane, so that the man in the seat in front of him turned round. “Plane.”

---

Inés was across the aisle. In 34D. With her book with the ship on the cover, open, on the tray table, which she was not reading.

He knew she was not reading it because she had not turned a page since Heathrow, and because, at about two in the afternoon, over Ireland, she closed it, and took out of the inside of the front cover, from against the endpaper, the long white envelope with the crest on the flap, and held it on the tray table, and looked at it.

Then she looked across the aisle.

“I said yes,” said Inés.

He looked at her.

“In May. On the twenty-eighth. Three days before the deadline.” She looked at the envelope. “I wrote the letter in the boot room. In Windrush. At midnight. On your desk. With your pen. The blue one from the Ellicott drawer. You left it in the boot room.” She turned the envelope over. “I’m sorry. I put it back.”

“That’s all right.”

“I didn’t tell anybody. Not Mr Ferrante. Not Lucía. I wanted to tell my grandmother first. And I couldn’t tell her on the phone, because she doesn’t hear properly on the phone any more.” She looked at the envelope. “So I’m going to tell her tomorrow. In Ventura. In her kitchen. I’m getting the bus.” She looked up. “And I wanted to tell you first. Before her. Because you were the first person I told about the letter. On the bench. In April.” She paused. “That’s not fair to her. But it’s fair to you.”

“Inés.”

“I’m going to write to her,” said Inés. “Every Sunday. From Oxford. About the buildings and the river and the bells.” She looked out of the window across the aisle, past him, at the sea under the wing, grey, a very long way down. “Mrs Haverfield told me. On the green. In May. She said your King says you’re going to Oxford, and I said he doesn’t know that, and she said he will, and then she told me about her brother. And the biscuit tin.” She put the envelope back inside the cover of the book. “So I’m going to write every Sunday. And she’ll have them. In a tin.” She closed the book. “Whatever happens.”

He did not say anything.

“Are you fine?” said Inés.

He thought about it. Over the sea, in seat 34K, in a cricket cap made for a boy of eleven, with his father four rows behind and a girl across the aisle who checked.

“Yes,” he said. “Mostly.”

Inés nodded.

“Good,” she said. “That’s the right answer,” and opened the book, and turned a page, and read it.

---

Over the middle of the ocean, at about four in the afternoon by London’s clocks, he took out the blue notebook.

He did not write in it. He turned to the back of it, where the pages were blank, and tore one out, carefully, along the fold, and took the pen out of his pocket, the cheap blue ballpoint with the end chewed, ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL, the one Inés had borrowed, and wrote on the torn page, at the top, in his own hand:

To the Editor, the New Westminster Evening Star.

And under it, one line.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he signed it.

F.

He folded the page in half and in half again and gave it to Castellanos, beside him, who took it without a word and put it in the inside pocket of his dark suit, the way he had carried everything, and did not ask what it said.

---

Harold Quayle’s column ran on the following Thursday. It was the last one. It was very short.

WHERE IS THE KING? For nine months your correspondent has asked. This week he received an answer.

It came by hand, to the front desk of this newspaper, on Monday morning, delivered by a sergeant of the protection service in a dark suit who declined to give his name, and it is reproduced here in full, with the permission of its author, who was not asked, and who your correspondent hopes will forgive him.

It reads:

Sir. He is home, and grateful to a valley that let him be lost, and to you, for asking every week. F.

Your correspondent has covered the Crown for thirty-four years. He has written, in that time, perhaps four thousand columns. He has never before received a letter from a King.

He is retiring this week. The newspaper has been kind enough to let him go at the same time as the column. He would like to say, in his last paragraph, that he does not think the question was ever really where the King was. He thinks the question was whether the King was all right.

He is told, on good authority, by a sergeant, that the answer is: mostly.

Your correspondent will settle for that.

---

The Realm came up under the wing at nine in the evening, London time, which was four in the afternoon in New Westminster, in the sun.

He saw the coast first. A long low line of sand, and the sea breaking on it in a thin white seam, and behind it the green, the flat wide green of the Virginia shore, which was nothing like the green of England, which was not crowded and not cut up into small fields with hedges round them but went away in long straight lines, wide, flat, enormous, to the edge of the sky. And then the bay. And then the river, wide and brown and shining, coming down out of the land in great slow bends.

And then the city.

The Monument first, because it was tallest, white, in the sun, at the end of the Axis, like a pin stuck in a map to say here. Then the dome. Then the long green line of the Axis itself, going straight as a ruler between the trees from the Hill to the river. Then the roofs, and the bridges, and the traffic on the bridges, glinting, and somewhere among the roofs, though he could not see it, a north wing, and a kitchen, and a clock over the door that was four minutes slow.

He looked at it.

He had looked at it from aeroplanes all his life. He had looked at it on the thirtieth of August going away and thought he would not see it again for ten months. He looked at it now and thought that he had never in his life been so glad to see anything, and that he had never in his life been so sorry to leave anywhere as he had been to leave a valley in Gloucestershire on Friday, and that both of those things were true at once, and that this was, he supposed, what it was going to be like from now on.

Beside him, in 34H, Theo had woken up.

He leaned across Castellanos to look out of the window at the city going past underneath.

“Big,” said Theo.

“It’s not that big.”

“It’s enormous. Look at it. Look at the roads. You could fit the whole of Coln Saint Aldwyns in one of those car parks.” He looked for a while. “Where are the walls?”

“There aren’t any walls.”

“There should be walls,” said Theo, and sat back.

The wheels came down with a bump and a roar. George Washington International, going past the window, wide and flat and hot in the afternoon sun. The captain came on, the same cheerful English voice, a man who sounded as though he had been to a good school and enjoyed it, and said welcome to New Westminster, where the local time was four-oh-five and the temperature was eighty-four degrees, or about twenty-nine for those of you who’ve got used to it, and that on behalf of the whole crew he would like to wish a particular welcome home, and there was a small pause, to all our passengers from the Realm.

The cabin laughed. The American half of it, and then, a beat behind, the English half.

Theo looked at him.

“Home,” said Theo.

“He meant the passengers from the Realm.”

“Sure he did,” said Theo, and stood up, and hit his head on the overhead locker.

---

The Hartigans were at the barrier.

All three of them, at the end of the long cool hall at George Washington International where the arrivals came out through the sliding doors, at the front of the crowd: Peter Hartigan in his transit-company jacket, straight off a shift; Anneliese in her coat, with her hands pressed together in front of her mouth exactly the way the Queen of Sweden had pressed hers together on the ice at Drottningholm; and Kate, between them, holding up a piece of cardboard on which she had written, in thick black marker, in capitals, HANOVER, with a drawing underneath of a rabbit.

Theo went through the doors.

He did not walk. He did not run. He went through the sliding doors into the arrivals hall at George Washington International at a quarter to five on a Sunday afternoon in June with his rucksack on one shoulder and his ears scarlet and his face doing everything at once, and his mother put her arms round him before he had reached the barrier, across it, over it, and held on, and his father put his arms round both of them, and Kate dropped the cardboard, and the three of them held Theo Hartigan in the middle of the arrivals hall while four hundred people went round them with suitcases, and did not let go.

Frederick came through the doors behind him.

He stopped.

Anneliese Hartigan looked up over her son’s shoulder, and saw him, standing in the doorway in a jumper with a cricket cap on the top of his head made for a boy of eleven.

She let go of Theo with one arm.

She held it out.

He went.

He did not decide to. He went across the arrivals hall at George Washington International, past the barrier, to the four of them, and Anneliese Hartigan, a nurse in acute medicine at a hospital in New Westminster, who answered the Household’s letters because she was the one who answered letters, put her free arm round the King of fourteen countries and pulled him into the middle of the Hartigans, and held on.

“You’re thin,” said Anneliese Hartigan, into his shoulder.

“I’ve been eating for a year. In a pub.”

“Then the pub has failed,” said Theo’s mother, and did not let go, and behind him, at the sliding doors, the Duke of Cumberland came through, slowly, with the hazel stick, and the Queen of Sweden on his arm, and saw them, and stopped, and stood there, in the arrivals hall, and lifted the stick an inch off the floor, and put it down again.

Home.