Book Ten: Senior Year Part Four: Home Characters
Chapter Thirty-six
Monday
Frederick. Santa Monica and New Westminster. Saturday, 28 June, to Monday, 30 June 2031.
I am here until that is finished or until the thirtieth of June 2031, and then I am going, and I will not need to be asked.
The house was yellow.
He had not expected that. He had expected, without thinking about it, that it would be blue, or white, or the colour of the old one, which he had never seen standing, because the first time he had been on Twenty-Second Street the house had been standing for about four seconds and then it had not. He had seen it as a heap. He had seen it as a frame of raw timber against a blue sky in a photograph on a kitchen table in April of last year. He had seen it with walls and half a roof in a photograph on a desk in a boarding house in the Cotswolds, with the tiles in stacks in the yard.
He had not seen it yellow.
It was the yellow of the inside of a lemon. It stood between the blue house and the other yellow house, which was a paler, older yellow and looked, beside it, slightly embarrassed. It had a porch with white posts and a white rail, and a door painted green, and windows with the glass in and curtains behind the glass, and a roof, all of it, every tile, and a little window in the roof like an eyebrow. And in front of the porch, on the low wall, in a long row, the roses. Red and white and one pink one at the end that did not match. All of them out, in the haze off the sea that the city called June gloom and that was, at half past eleven, just beginning to burn away. The dashboard of the car said seventy-one degrees, which was, Theo would have told him, twenty-one and a bit.
“It’s very yellow,” said Kimura, from the driver’s seat.
“Yes.”
“I’d have had it blue.”
“Nobody asked you,” said Frederick, and got out.
He had flown on the seven o’clock Sceptre out of New Westminster, in row fourteen, with Kimura across the aisle and a man in a golf shirt in the window seat beside him who had looked at him for the whole of Ohio and then said, over Kansas, you look like the King, and Frederick had said I get that a lot, which was true, and the man had said poor kid and gone to sleep. Kimura had a car at the airport and drove it herself, because, she said, she had driven this road before and knew which bits of it moved.
He had not told anybody he was coming except Twenty-Second Street. He had written in May, from Coln, in Spanish, with his right hand, which worked again. The twenty-eighth of June. A Saturday. In the morning. I am coming. It will have walls. I will tell you the word.
She had written back in eleven days. One line, and a line under it from Rosa.
Come hungry. E.R.
She means it. R.
She was on the porch.
Not on the folding chair. On a proper chair, a wooden one, with arms, with a cushion on it, at the top of three steps, in a dark blue dress with small white flowers on it and a cardigan over it although it was seventy-one degrees, with the stick across her knees and no hat at all, her white hair pinned up very tight at the back, as though for church. She was smaller than he remembered. He had remembered her in the dark, under a table, with the house coming down, which made everybody larger. She was eighty-three. She looked at him coming up the path between the roses the way she had looked at the camera in both photographs, as though she would like to know what he thought he was doing and would be the judge of whether it was good enough.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps.
“Señora.”
“You are late,” said Señora Ruelas.
He looked at his watch. His father’s watch. Eleven thirty-four.
“You said morning, Señora.”
“I have been up since five.” She looked at him, up and down, the whole length of him, slowly, from his shoes to his hair, as though he were a house she was having built and she was checking the measurements against the drawing. “Come here.”
He went up the three steps. She put up her hand, small and dry and very strong, and took hold of his chin, and turned his face to the left, and then to the right, in the white light of the porch, and let go.
“Better,” she said. “Not good. Better.” She sat back in the chair. “Someone has been feeding you.”
“A woman in a pub, Señora. In England.”
“In a pub.” She considered this, and appeared to decide that she would let it go, for now, as a matter to be returned to. “Sit. No. Not there. Inside. I have not been up since five to sit on a porch.”
She got up. She did it on her own, with the stick and the arm of the chair, in three movements, and did not let him help her, and he did not try, because he had spent a year with a man who did not want an arm and he knew what the not wanting looked like from the back. She went in through the green door and he went in behind her.
It was the old house. He knew it at once, although he had never been inside it standing up.
It was the same size, she had written, on the same ground, with the kitchen at the back where it was, and it was. A narrow hall of new pale boards that rang a little underfoot; a front room with a sofa under a plastic cover and a wall of photographs in new frames, the ones that had come out of the heap, some with the corners gone; and at the back, through a doorway with no door in it, the kitchen.
And in the kitchen, the table.
He stopped in the doorway.
It was an old table. Dark wood, square, heavy, with turned legs and a scrubbed top that had gone pale and soft with seventy years of scrubbing and had a burn on one corner the shape of the bottom of a saucepan. It stood in the middle of the floor, square to the walls, with four chairs round it that did not match each other and did not match the table. There was a dish on it under a cloth, and a jug of water with lemon in it. He looked at the legs. One of them had a crack in it, low down, near the foot, a long one, mended with a brass plate and four screws.
“It held,” he said.
“It held,” said Señora Ruelas, behind him. “My son wanted to buy a new one. From a shop. With the money from the Governor. I said to him, if you buy a new table I will sit on the floor.” She came past him into the kitchen and put her hand flat on the top of it, the way he had seen his father put a hand on the stone of the balustrade three weeks ago. “He mended the leg. And I measured. With a tape. From that wall,” she pointed with the stick, “to here. Four feet and two inches. And from that wall to here, three feet and eleven. Where it was. Exactly where it was.” She tapped the floor once with the stick, where the leg stood. “The man from the city said it does not matter where the table is. I said to him, young man, the last time the ground moved, this table was here, and I was under it, and a boy was under it with me, and we are both alive. You may put your table where you like. This one goes here.”
Frederick looked at the floor where the stick had tapped.
Two years and one month ago he had been on his front on this floor, or on the floor that had been here before this one, in the dust, in the dark, with the timbers crossed over his back like a pair of scissors and his face an inch from a table leg, this table leg, before the crack, and a hand had turned over in the dark and taken hold of his.
“Sit,” said Señora Ruelas.
He sat. In the chair nearest the leg with the brass plate. She took the cloth off the dish.
She had made enough for eleven.
There was a stew, red, with pork in it, that she said was her mother’s, from Jalisco, and that had been cooking since five. There were tortillas, which she put in front of him one at a time out of a cloth, hot, in the order in which they came off the pan, and watched him eat. There was rice, and beans, and something green and sharp whose name he did not know in Spanish or in English. There was a cake. He was not allowed to look at the cake until he had finished the stew. He finished the stew. She gave him more stew.
Rosa came in halfway through. She was fifteen, in jeans and a T-shirt with a cartoon frog on it, with her hair in a long plait, and she stopped in the kitchen doorway with her phone in her hand and looked at the King of fourteen countries at her grandmother’s table with his mouth full, and said, in English, “Oh my God, she actually made you eat the whole thing.”
“Not the whole thing,” said Frederick. “There’s a cake.”
“There’s always a cake.” Rosa sat down opposite. “Hi. Sorry. I was at work. I work at the frozen yogurt place on Montana on Saturdays. I told my manager the King was having lunch at my grandma’s and she said sure, Rosa, so I just left.” She looked at him. “You look different. You looked different on TV.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Not tired.” Rosa took a tortilla out of the cloth, and her grandmother hit her hand, not hard, with two fingers, and she put it back. “Abuela watched all of it. The parade thing, with the horses. And the aeroplane at the airport, and you with that lady who was hugging you. And your graduation, it was on the news for like ten minutes. She made me record it. She’s watched it like nine times.”
“Rosa,” said Señora Ruelas.
“What? You have.”
“Five times.”
“Nine,” said Rosa to Frederick, and did not take another tortilla.
The cake was a tres leches. It was very wet and very sweet and it was the best cake he had eaten in a year that had included Sue Fennell’s Christmas pudding and the Dundee cake that had beaten the vicar, and he said so, and Señora Ruelas received this as no more than her due and cut him another piece without asking.
Then she sent Rosa out.
She did it in Spanish, briefly, and Rosa said oh my God again, and went, taking her phone and a piece of cake, and they heard the front door, and then the porch, and then Rosa’s voice on the porch telling somebody on the telephone, very fast, that she could not talk because he’s literally in the kitchen.
Señora Ruelas folded her hands on the top of the stick.
“So,” she said.
He waited.
“I watched the parade with the horses,” she said. “Five times. The aeroplane, the airport, the lady. The graduation.” She looked at him across the table that had held. “I am eighty-three. I have watched a great many people on the television. I watched your father marry your mother. I watched the night they found him in the sea, and the morning they brought him home. I know what a face looks like on the television.” She tapped the stick on the floor, once. “In the photographs from London, the winter before last, with the crown, you had a face like a door that somebody had shut.” She tapped it again. “On the television with the horses you had a different face. You were happy.”
He did not say anything.
“I am old,” said Señora Ruelas. “I do not have time to wait for boys to tell me things in their own time. I have waited a year already. You wrote to me from England, at Christmas, and said there was something you did not have a word for and you would tell me when you did.” She leaned forward over the stick. “So. Who?”
He looked at the table.
At the burn on the corner, the shape of a saucepan. At the brass plate on the leg. At his own hands on the scrubbed top, which had a crooked knuckle now on the fourth finger of the right, where the Leach full back had broken it in November, and which would always be a little crooked, Dr Asante had said, and he did not mind.
“A boy,” he said. “In the village. In England. His name is Jack.”
Señora Ruelas did not move.
“His father drives the bus,” said Frederick. “His mother keeps the pub. The woman who fed me. He bowls for the village on Sundays. He taught me to bowl and I was terrible at it and I still am.” He looked at his hands. “He’s loud. He talks the whole time. He talks for a mile and a half without breathing. He calls me by my surname, because he says Frederick sounds like a butler.” He stopped. “He’s coming here. In August. For two weeks. He’s never been on an aeroplane. He says he’ll be sick.”
“And the word,” said Señora Ruelas.
“It’s two words.” He looked up. “In English. Not over. It’s not over. It wasn’t for the year. It goes on. I don’t know how. That’s the word.”
Señora Ruelas looked at him for a very long time, across the table, in the kitchen at the back of the yellow house, with the roses outside the front window and Rosa’s voice going on the porch and the sound, a long way off, through the open back door, of the sea.
“In Spanish it is better,” she said at last. “No se acaba.” She thought about it. “It does not finish. That is better than not over. Not over is a thing a man says at the end of a football match when his team is losing.”
“Yes, Señora.”
“Use the Spanish.”
“Yes, Señora.”
She was quiet a moment longer. Then she asked him a question that nobody else had asked him, in a year in which, he had thought, everybody had asked him everything.
“If you told him to get down,” said Señora Ruelas. “Under a table. If the ground was moving and you said, get down. Would he get down?”
He thought about it properly, because she would know if he did not.
“No,” he said. “He’d argue. He’d say why. He’d say it loudly. And then he’d get down. And then afterwards he’d tell everybody it was his idea.”
Señora Ruelas laughed.
He had not heard her laugh before. He had heard her voice once, under the table, saying you are still too thin and I am too old for this and, at the end, very quietly, a prayer, and he had heard it a hundred times since in his own head, in her handwriting, on pale blue paper. He had not heard her laugh. It was a short, high, delighted sound, like a bird going up out of a hedge, and it went on for longer than he expected, and she put one small hand flat on the table to hold herself up.
“Good,” she said, when she could. “Then he will live a long time.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “The ones who get down when they are told are good. The ones who argue first and then get down are better. They are the ones who are still there when you come out from under the table.” She looked at him. “Bring him here. In August. I will feed him.”
“He eats a great deal, Señora.”
“Good,” said Señora Ruelas. “I will feed him more.”
He left at four. Rosa took a photograph of the two of them on the porch, with the roses, on her phone, and said she would not put it on anything, and her grandmother said something to her in Spanish about what would happen if she did, and Rosa said, in English, “She says she’ll put me under the table,” and put the phone in her pocket.
At the bottom of the steps he turned round.
“Señora. The colour.” He looked at the house. “Why yellow?”
Señora Ruelas looked at her house, all of it, the porch and the green door and the little window in the roof like an eyebrow and the roses along the wall, red and white and the one pink one at the end.
“Because the last one was white,” she said. “For fifty-two years. And it fell down.” She lifted her chin. “This one will not fall down. So I made it a colour that the whole street would have to look at.”
He was home at two in the morning. On Sunday evening he was at the Hartigans’ kitchen table.
It was the flat on the third floor, up a staircase with a landing halfway where he had stood at fifteen and been told, by a boy in a St John Ambulance sweatshirt, a condition. The kitchen was small and yellow, a different yellow, and the window over the sink looked out at the back of the bus depot, and there was a smell of Sauerbraten, because it was Sunday, which it was not usually, because it was usually Saturday, and Anneliese had moved it, she said, for him, since on Saturday he had been eating a stew in California.
“Was it a good stew?” said Peter Hartigan, from the stove.
“It was from Jalisco.”
“Was it better than the Sauerbraten?”
“No,” said Frederick, who had been raised with manners and had learnt in a year in a pub what they were for.
“Liar,” said Kate, from the other end of the table, without looking up from her phone. She was twenty-one and home from nursing school for the summer, and had opinions about everything and had expressed most of them to him in the hall in the first five minutes, in order, including that his hair was better, that Theo’s was not, and that she had watched the cricket on the internet at three in the morning with the sound off and still did not understand it and did not intend to.
Theo was at the table, on the side by the window, with the form.
It was the same form. The crest at the top, the red cross on the white star. Several pages, stapled, with a corner gone soft from being carried. He had the last page open in front of him, the one with the box, and the box was not empty.
He pushed it across the table.
He did not say anything. He did not have to. He had been not saying anything about it for two days, which in Theo meant something.
Frederick read it.
It was in pen. Black. Theo’s handwriting, small and very neat and slightly sloped, which got smaller when he was nervous. It filled the box, all of it, to the edges, and went over the edge at the bottom by one line, which was not allowed, and he had done it anyway.
On Saturday 17 May 2031, at a village fête in England, a man of seventy-one collapsed in a cake tent in front of me. I was the first to reach him. I did what I was trained to do. He lived. I have been trained to do that since I was thirteen and I have wanted, since I was thirteen, to be a paramedic, which is the person who comes and does that. Kneeling in the cake tent, I found that I did not want to know only what to do. I wanted to know why he went down. What his heart had done, and why, and whether anybody could have known on Friday. I have been on a heap of a house in Santa Monica, and in a cake tent, and every time I have known what to do, and every time afterwards I have wanted to know why. That is the reason. I want to be the person who knows why, so that next time somebody knows on the Friday.
Frederick read it twice.
He looked up. Theo was looking at the window, at the back of the bus depot, very hard, with his jaw set.
“You can look now,” said Frederick.
“I’m not looking because you’re reading it,” said Theo, not looking. “Is it all right? The last line. Over the edge.”
Across the kitchen, at the stove, Anneliese Hartigan had stopped moving. She had read the box on Friday night when Theo finished it, and had said nothing to anyone, Peter said afterwards, but had gone to bed and been heard through the wall saying something to herself in German for some time.
“The last line’s the best bit,” said Frederick. “Leave it over the edge.”
Theo looked at it.
“He’s right,” said Kate, from behind her phone.
“You haven’t read it.”
“I read it on Friday. When you were in the shower. It was on the table.” Kate did not look up. “I’m nearly a nurse. We read everything that’s left on tables.” She scrolled. “The last line’s the best bit. I cried in the bathroom. If you tell anybody I’ll deny it.”
Theo put his face down on the table on top of his arms, next to the form, and said something into the oilcloth that nobody could hear, and Peter Hartigan came over from the stove with the pan and put it down in the middle of the table on a cork mat and looked at the top of his son’s head, and then at the form, and then at Frederick, and said, in the flat Milwaukee voice that called the stops on the Thirty-Two:
“He’s posting it tomorrow. First thing. I’ll drive him.”
“It’s not your route,” said Theo, into the oilcloth.
“I’ll change my route,” said his father.
On Monday the thirtieth of June 2031, nothing happened.
That was the point. He knew it was the point. He had known for a month, since a vote of four hundred and forty-eight to nine in a House that had decided, against every expectation including its own, to say whom it trusted. He woke at six in the north wing, in his own room, in his own bed, which was too short for him now by an inch and had been since about February, with the window open on the garden and a blackbird on the wall and a bus a long way off on the Axis, and lay for a moment and listened to nothing happening, and found that it had a sound. It sounded like a blackbird and a bus.
At seven he went down to the kitchen.
Bridget had the Evening Star from Saturday on the dresser, because she kept them, and Monday’s Courier on the table, folded at page nine. On page nine, at the bottom, under a photograph of the Prime Minister’s official residence on the Axis taken from across the road with its front door shut, there was a headline of five words. He read it twice, standing up, with his coffee.
PRIME MINISTER: STILL PRIME MINISTER.
Under it, a single paragraph. It said that the thirtieth of June 2031, the date written into the sixth paragraph of the Heads of Agreement of 10 September 2028 as the last day on which Lord Whitlock might be Prime Minister, had arrived; that Lord Whitlock was Prime Minister; that he would remain so, the House of Commons having released him from the paragraph by resolution on the twenty-third of May; that he would attend on the King at eleven, in person, at Columbia Palace, for the first time since the King’s return; and that the Courier had been unable to establish what they would talk about, because, a spokesman for the Prime Minister had said, nothing in particular.
“Is that a joke?” said Bridget, at the range, with her back to him.
“No,” said Frederick. “It’s the news.”
Bridget considered this, and turned the bacon.
“Well,” she said. “It makes a change.”
At nine he made the coffee.
He made it the way he had always made it, in the small pot on the back of the range, with the beans from the green tin, in the two white cups, the plain thick ones with no crest that had come a long time ago from the staff canteen in the basement and never gone back. He looked at them on the counter in the morning light, which was wrong, because they had always been in the lamplight, at nine at night, and for a moment he thought that a thing done at night for three years could not be done at nine in the morning without becoming some other thing.
Then he picked them up and carried them down the stone corridor to the north wing door.
The chair was gone.
There had been a chair by the north wing door for six years, a hard chair, the kind that stands in corridors and is sat on by people who are waiting, and Castellanos had sat on it in the evenings, and in the mornings it had stood there empty. It was gone. In its place, flat on the flagstones, square to the wall, somebody had put a plain wooden box, the kind wine comes in, with nothing written on it.
He looked at it.
Then he went out onto the step.
The gravel, the lamp, the trees. The lamp was off, because it was morning. Beyond the gravel, the grass. The garden going away from the step, green, the whole length of it, cut that week, with the shapes of the benches along the sides and the beds along the wall, and at the far end, a long way off, a hundred and forty yards, Frederick had always been told and had never paced, the wall. And over the wall, the Axis, and the morning traffic on it, and over all of it, white in the sun, the Monument.
Castellanos was coming up the gravel from the gate.
He was not in a suit. He was in a jacket and an open-necked shirt and grey trousers and brown shoes, and he looked, in them, like a man who has been wearing a uniform for thirty years and has been given an afternoon off and is not sure what his arms are for. He had a lanyard round his neck. On the lanyard, on a white card in a plastic sleeve, in large letters, it said VISITOR, and under it, in smaller ones, in a hand Frederick knew, because it was the hand that had drawn a form on a sheet of paper in the first autumn of the reign so that a shoebox of letters could be witnessed properly, CASTELLANOS, R. (INSP.). NORTH WING. 0900. SIGNED IN: COLE, SGT.
He stopped at the bottom of the step.
“Sir,” he said.
“Inspector,” said Frederick.
Castellanos looked at the lanyard. He lifted the card a little off his chest with one finger and looked at it upside down.
“He made me sign the book,” he said. “Cole. He’s had me through that gate four thousand times. He said, name, and I said, Cole, it’s me, and he said, name, sir, and I said it, and he wrote it down and he gave me this and he said, don’t lose it, sir, or I’ll have to escort you.” He let the card fall. “I think he enjoyed it.”
“I think he did.”
“He said it was regulations.”
“It is regulations.”
“I know it’s regulations,” said Castellanos. “I wrote them.”
Frederick held out a cup.
Castellanos looked at it. Then he came up the step from the gravel, which he had never done in six years, because he had always come to it from inside, and looked round for the chair, and saw the box, and looked at the box, and looked at Frederick.
“I don’t know who did that,” said Frederick.
“Yes, you do.”
“Bridget says it was Dame M. Dame M says it was Bridget. Kimura says she wasn’t consulted.” Frederick sat down on the step. “Sit down.”
Castellanos sat down on the box. It was the right height. It was exactly the right height, which meant that somebody had measured it. He took the cup.
They drank.
“Good,” said Castellanos.
They sat for a while.
There was not a great deal to say. There never had been. That had always been the thing about the step, from the first night: that it was the one place in the building where nobody needed anything said. A gardener came out of a door by the glasshouses at the far end, saw the two of them on the step, and went back in again.
“How’s the drawer?” said Frederick.
Castellanos did not look at him.
“It’s in a drawer,” he said.
“Which drawer?”
“The top one. On the left. In the kitchen. At home.” He drank. “With the passport. And the spare keys. And the takeaway menus.” He looked at the gravel. “So that every time I go anywhere I have to move it to get to the passport. And look at it.”
“That’s very sentimental.”
“It’s very practical,” said Castellanos. “It’s the only drawer that shuts.”
Frederick looked at the garden.
“Sir,” said Castellanos, after a while. “I’ve got a class at ten.”
“I know.”
“At the training school. Eighteen of them. New. They’ve had three weeks of the law and this morning they’re mine.” He turned the cup in his hands. “There’s a lesson plan. Eight pages. Principles of Close Protection. I’m not going to use it.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
Castellanos thought about it for some time.
“Where to stand,” he said. “That’s the first one. That’s most of it. You find the edge of the room, and you stand at it, and you don’t go to the back of it, because at the back you can’t get there in time, and you don’t go to the middle, because in the middle you’re in the way. You stand at the edge.” He looked down the garden. “And then I’m going to tell them the second one. Which is that one day the person you are standing at the edge for is going to need to do something on his own, and you are going to have to let him, and that is also the job. And it’s harder than the first one.” He drank. “And then I’m going to give them the eight pages to take home.”
Frederick did not say anything.
At the corner of the north wing, where the gravel turned the end of the building toward the garages, Kimura was standing with her hands in the pockets of her jacket, in the sun, by the drainpipe. Not by the door. Not on the gravel. At the corner. She had been there, he realised, since before Castellanos came up from the gate, and she had not moved, and she did not move now, and she was not looking at them. She was looking at the garden, and the wall, and the gate, the whole of it, end to end, the way you look at a thing you are responsible for.
Castellanos looked at her too.
He looked at her for some time. Then he looked back at his cup.
“She’ll do,” he said.
At twenty to ten he stood up.
He put the cup down on the box, square, the way he always had on the floor beside the chair, and looked at his watch, and at the lanyard, and at the gate, and Frederick stood up too, on the step, so that for once they were the same height, or nearly.
“Take it,” said Frederick.
Castellanos looked at him.
“The cup.” Frederick picked it up off the box and held it out. “Take it. It’s yours. It’s always been yours. It came out of the canteen in the basement and nobody’s ever asked for it back.” He held it out further. “It’s not an Order. It’s not from the country. Nobody’s going to write to you from the Central Chancery about it. It’s a cup.” He stopped. “I’ll get another one. For Mondays. I’ll keep it on the dresser. And it won’t be the same one, and that’s all right.”
Castellanos looked at the cup for a long time.
It was a thick plain white cup with a brown ring inside it where the coffee had been and a small chip on the rim, on the side away from the handle, which had been there since the winter Frederick was thirteen and had dropped it on the step in the snow and it had not broken.
Castellanos took it.
He did not put it in his pocket. It would not have gone in his pocket. He held it, in his right hand, by the handle, the way you hold a cup, and looked at it, and then he looked at Frederick, and his face did the thing it had done in the car outside the gym at Ellicott, two and a half weeks ago, when he had been handed a small dark blue box and had said no. It did it again. And then it did something else, which Frederick had seen it do perhaps three times in six years, which was nearly to smile and decide against it and smile anyway.
“Monday,” he said.
“Monday.”
He went down the step. He went down the gravel toward the gate with his visitor’s card swinging on its lanyard and a coffee cup in his right hand, empty, by the handle, a man in brown shoes on his way to teach eighteen people where to stand, and at the corner of the north wing, by the drainpipe, he passed Kimura, and did not stop, and said one word to her, which Frederick did not hear.
Kimura took one hand out of her pocket.
“Sir,” she said.
“Not sir,” said Castellanos, without turning round. “Not any more.”
Kimura considered this.
“Inspector,” she said.
“Better,” said Castellanos, and went on to the gate, where Sergeant Cole was waiting for him with the book open to sign him out, and the pen held out, and an expression of complete and terrible enjoyment.
At eleven the Prime Minister came.
He came in person, up the steps at the front, into the Blue Drawing Room, at one minute to the hour, a tall, heavy-set, fair young man in a dark suit with his tie very nearly straight, carrying a folder, and bowed, and sat when he was asked to, on the edge of the yellow silk chair across the too-wide gap, and opened the folder, and looked at it, and closed it.
“Sir,” said Whitlock.
“Prime Minister.”
“There isn’t anything,” said Whitlock. “I want to be clear about that from the start. I’ve been through it with the Cabinet Office. There’s the Arctic, which is the same as Thursday, and the Department of the Interior, which is in its ninth month and has been referred to a committee.” He looked at the folder. “That’s the business. I could have done it on the screen. I know I could have done it on the screen.” He paused. “I wanted to come.”
Frederick waited.
“I set an alarm,” said Whitlock. “In September 2028. On my phone. The night I signed the agreement. I set it for six o’clock in the morning on the thirtieth of June 2031, and I typed on it what it was for, so that I wouldn’t be able to pretend I’d forgotten. And then I never turned it off. I didn’t think about it. I changed my phone twice and it came with me both times.” He looked at the window. “It went off this morning. At six. On the bedside table. With the word on it. And the cat sat on it.”
“The cat sat on it.”
“The cat sat on it. Until it stopped. It does that with anything that makes a noise.” Whitlock looked at his hands. “And I lay there, sir, and I thought: I’ve been Prime Minister for two years and nine months with a date on me, like milk. Every decision, every audience, every Thursday. Knowing when I would go. And this morning I’ve got no date at all, and I don’t know when I’ll go, and nobody does, and that is how it is for everybody else who’s ever done this job.” He looked at the King. “It’s much worse.”
Frederick very nearly laughed, and did not, because the King did not laugh at the Prime Minister in the Blue Drawing Room, and because Whitlock had not meant it as a joke, and because it was true.
“The first audience this year,” said Frederick, “I was in a boot room in Gloucestershire. Among forty pairs of rugby boots. On a Thursday. You were on a laptop, and you were too close to the camera.”
“I remember, sir.”
“And this one’s the last before the summer.” Frederick looked at the Prime Minister across the gap. “The same Prime Minister as the first.”
Whitlock looked at him.
There was nothing else in it. The King did not have views on votes in the House of Commons. He could not say I’m glad, and he did not say it, and Whitlock, who had read every book there was on what the King could say, knew that he had not said it, and knew what had been said instead, which was a date and a fact, and sat on the edge of the yellow chair with his folder on his knees and his face, for a moment, entirely undone.
“Same time Thursday, Prime Minister,” said Frederick.
“Yes, sir,” said Whitlock. “On the screen.”
“On the screen.”
“The cat sends its regards,” said Whitlock, standing, and then went pink, and bowed, and left.
The text came at a quarter past three. Twenty past eight in the evening in Gloucestershire.
He was in the library, at the long table, with the green folder for the summer open and the Charter put away for the afternoon, reading a paper on the Arctic that was the same as Thursday’s. His phone moved on the table. He looked at it.
walkd ernest the hole fotpath. ready token to the school and back. all of it. nan said hes to old. hes not. sat on my boot at the post at the crossroads like he was waiting for some one. 41 days. dont be rubish
He read it three times.
Then he wrote back.
Footpath has two Os.
The answer came in under a minute.
knew youd say that
And then, a minute after that, on its own:
41
He put the phone face down on the table, on top of the paper about the Arctic, and sat for a while in the library at Columbia Palace with his hand flat on it, and did not read anything.
At five his father came to the kitchen.
He came on his own, along the stone corridor from the morning room, which had been his bedroom since the December before last, when he had been brought home to it in a chair. Frederick heard him from the kitchen, the stick and the foot and the other foot, the stick and the foot and the other foot, slow and steady and unhurried, like a clock.
He came into the kitchen in a jacket and an open shirt and the tweed cap from the aeroplane, with the hazel stick, and stood in the doorway.
Frederick’s mother was at the table with the crossword. Bridget was at the sink. The clock on the wall, which had been slow since 1969, said four minutes to five, which meant it was five. The radio was on, very low, on the dresser, beside the cake tin and the green tin and the straw goat from Stockholm, which nobody had put away in two Christmases, saying something about the weather on the coast.
His father looked round the kitchen. At the range, the dresser, the clock, Bridget’s back, the window over the garden, with the sun on it, going gold. At his wife at the table. At his son, at the corner, at the end of the bench, in the place he had sat since he was six.
“Out,” said the Duke of Cumberland.
Frederick got up.
His father looked at him. Then he shook his head. Once. Not unkindly.
“Out,” he said again, and turned, and went down the stone corridor toward the north wing door.
Frederick looked at his mother. His mother had put down her pen. She was looking at the doorway where her husband had been, and her face was perfectly still, the way it had been still, Frederick had been told, in a boat on a lake in August twenty-three years ago, when a man had asked her a question and she had not answered it, and had gone home to Stockholm and answered it in one line.
“Go on,” she said. “Gå.” And then, as he went past her: “Not too close.”
His father was on the step.
He was standing on it, at the edge of it, where it went down to the gravel, with his hand on the stone of the door frame and the hazel stick in the other, looking at the garden. The whole of it. The gravel and the grass and the benches and the beds along the wall and the glasshouses at the far end and the wall at the end of it, a hundred and forty yards away, in the gold light of five o’clock on the last day of June, with the long shadows of the trees lying all the way across the grass like a set of rails.
Frederick stopped in the doorway behind him.
His father did not look round. He knew Frederick was there. He had always known. He stood on the step with his hand on the door frame and looked down the garden, at the far wall, the way he had looked at the train at Paddington and the Back Walk at Stirling and the stairs to the round window and the aircraft over the Mall, carefully, end to end, the whole length of it, so as to know it.
Then he took his hand off the door frame.
He turned the hazel stick round in his fingers, slowly, so that he was holding it by the middle, and bent, with some difficulty, his left knee not quite doing what it was asked, and laid it down on the step. Flat. Along the edge of the stone. Beside the box, which was still there, with nothing on it now.
He straightened up.
He went down off the step onto the gravel. One foot, and then the other. He stood on the gravel for a moment without anything in his hands, a tall old man in a tweed cap, in the sun, with his arms by his sides, and they did not know, for a moment, what to do; Frederick could see it from the back, the hands not knowing, the way Castellanos’s had not known that morning in a jacket with nothing to carry. And then they did. The left one went into the pocket of the jacket. The right one stayed where it was.
He walked.
Across the gravel, which was the hard part, because gravel moves. Onto the grass. Down the garden. Not fast. Not slowly either. At the speed of a man walking down his own garden on a summer evening to look at the wall at the end of it, because he wanted to, his left foot dragging very slightly at each step and then, after the first twenty yards, not dragging, or dragging less, or dragging in a way that had become part of the walk and was no longer something wrong with it. Past the first bench. Past the bed of something blue. Through the long shadow of the first tree and out of it, into the sun, and into the next.
Frederick went to the edge of the step.
He had his arms out. He did not know he had them out. They had come up of their own accord, at the height of his father’s back, an inch away, the way they had been on the stairs to the round window and on the steps of the Back Walk, and the way Castellanos’s had been on the steps with no rail, all year, everywhere, an inch away, so that if anything wanted them they would be there. They were out, and his father was thirty yards down the garden, and getting further, and Frederick’s foot was on the edge of the step, to go down onto the gravel and follow.
At the corner of the north wing, by the drainpipe, Kimura did not move.
In the kitchen window, behind him and to the left, his mother did not move.
Down the garden his father went on, past the second bench, into the shadow of the second tree, without looking back, with one hand in his pocket and nothing in the other, a hundred yards from the wall, and then less, and the blackbird on the wall at the far end stopped singing to look at him and then, deciding he was nothing to worry about, began again.
Frederick looked at the hazel stick lying on the step at his feet. Cut on the wold. On the top, above the valley, in December, by a man who drove a bus.
He put his arms down.
Then he sat down on the step, beside the stick, with his hands on his knees, in the sun, and let him.