The Letter

The new cup lived on the shelf above the kettle in the flat.

It was a thick plain white cup with no crest on it, from the same staff canteen in the basement of Columbia Palace as the one he had given away in June, and Bridget had sent it over in September in a box with a tea towel round it and a note in her handwriting that said for Mondays, and don’t chip this one. He had not chipped it. He took it down every Monday at five to nine, and the other one, his own, and made the coffee in the small pot on the one ring of the cooker that worked properly, with the beans from a green tin that Bridget also sent, and at nine exactly there was a knock on the door at the top of the back stairs, and it was Castellanos.

He did not come in. That was the arrangement. He sat on the top step of the back stairs, outside the door of the flat, in his jacket and his visitor’s lanyard, which he still wore, because Kimura had told him that if he came into a building the King was in without one she would personally escort him out, and Frederick sat on the floor of the landing inside the door with his back against the frame, and they drank the coffee, and did not talk very much, and at twenty to ten Castellanos stood up and gave back the cup and went down the stairs and through the bar, past the stools, upside down on the tables, and out of the front door onto Garfield Street, and caught the Forty-One to the training school, where he had a class at ten.

“Good,” he said, on the last Monday in January, about the coffee, as he always did.

“How are the recruits?”

“Twenty this term.” Castellanos looked at the stairwell. “One of them asked me last week what you do if the principal walks into a bar.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said, it depends on the bar.” He drank. “And then I said, you stand at the edge of the room, and you don’t sit at the bar, because if you sit at the bar you become part of the bar, and then you’re a customer, and then you’ve stopped working.” He finished the cup. “That’s what I told her.”

“Kimura sits at the bar.”

“Kimura,” said Castellanos, “is very good at her job,” and stood up, and handed back the cup, and went.

---

That was Monday morning.

On Monday evening, at twenty past seven, Frederick came up out of the cellar with a crate of tonic water and saw him.

He was at the end of the bar. Not Kimura’s end, the far end, by the window, which was Mr Abernathy’s end, but on the stool beyond Mr Abernathy’s, the last one, by the wall, where the light from the window did not reach. He was in his jacket. He had his visitor’s lanyard in his pocket, so that the card did not show. He had a pint of bitter in front of him on a mat, half drunk. He had evidently been there some time. And he was sitting, Frederick saw, very slightly turned on the stool, so that his back was to the wall and he could see the door and the bar and the room, all of it, end to end, the way he had sat in a hundred rooms for thirty years.

Frederick put down the crate.

Castellanos saw him see him. His face did not move.

Frederick went down the bar, past the till, past the jar with THEO on it, past Mrs Merriweather, who was looking at him with the expression of a woman who had known about this for some time, and past Mr Abernathy, who did not look up from his beer mat, and stopped in front of the last stool.

“Inspector,” he said.

“Sir.”

“You’re sitting at the bar.”

“I’m aware of it.”

“You told her you don’t sit at the bar.”

“I’m aware of that as well.” Castellanos looked at his pint. “I’m not working. I’m off duty. I’ve been off duty since June.” He drank. “I’ve been coming in on Mondays since November.”

“November?”

“After the coffee. I go to the training school. I teach until four. Then I go home. Then I come back.” He put the glass down. “Mrs Merriweather keeps this stool. She doesn’t let anybody have it on Mondays. She put a beer mat on it with RESERVED on it the first week, and I asked her to take it off, because a reserved stool is a security risk, and she took it off, and now she just stands next to it and glares until whoever’s on it gets up.” He looked down the bar at Mrs Merriweather, who looked back at him without any expression at all. “She’s very effective.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Castellanos thought about this.

“Because you’d have come down to this end,” he said, “and stood here, and talked to me. And then it wouldn’t have been a bar any more.” He looked at the room. “I spent six years at the edge of the room you were in, sir. I never once sat down.” He picked up the pint. “I wanted to see what it was like from the stool.”

“What’s it like?”

Castellanos looked down the length of Eight Bars, at the pennants and the trombone and the wall of photographs and the pool table with its slope and the booths and the English form in the corner and Kimura on her stool at the other end with her back to the bar and her eyes on the door, the way his had been for six years.

“Loud,” he said. “Warm.” He drank. “Good.”

---

Theo’s jar was heavier than the Treasury’s.

It had been since about the second week of January. Mrs Merriweather had weighed them both on the kitchen scales in the back room, on a Sunday, for the Treasury’s quarterly remittance, because the Treasury, in a second letter, had asked for the sum to be certified, and she had certified it by weighing it, and written the weights on the back of the Treasury’s letter, and sent it back. The Treasury’s jar, the first one, NOT TIPS, which she had refilled since November because people kept tipping the King anyway, out of habit, and then remembering, and then not taking it back, weighed four pounds and three ounces. Theo’s jar, THEO, not the King, see Rule Twelve, weighed nine pounds and eleven.

“I don’t understand it,” said Theo, on Wednesday, looking at it.

“It’s not complicated,” said Mrs Merriweather.

“I haven’t done anything. I’m terrible. I dropped four glasses on Saturday. I gave a man a pint of cider when he asked for a gin.”

“Yes.”

“So why do they tip me?”

Mrs Merriweather thought about it, at the till, with her camera on its strap round her neck.

“Because they can,” she said. “They can’t tip him. There’s a rule. The Treasury takes it. So they tip you.” She rang something up. “And because you’re nice to them. And because you came back from medical school to stand behind a bar with him and drop glasses, and everybody in the Fourth Ward knows it.” She shut the till. “And because Mr Delgado started it, and Mr Delgado is a very bad influence.”

At the bar, Mr Delgado, who had been listening, raised his glass an inch.

“Nine pounds eleven,” he said, with deep satisfaction.

---

The envelope came on Friday.

It came in the second post, at a quarter past eleven, through the door of the flat, which had a letter box that also banged, though not as loudly as the radiator, and it was a long white envelope with a crest on the top left-hand corner, a red cross on a white star, and it was addressed to Mr T. Hartigan, and under that, in somebody’s careful handwriting, c/o Eight Bars, Garfield Street, New Westminster, CD, because Theo had given the medical school his address in September and had given them the right one.

Theo was in the kitchen, eating toast. He saw it on the mat and stopped eating.

He did not open it. He picked it up and put it on the kitchen table, by the toast, and looked at it, and went on looking at it, and did not eat any more toast, and Frederick, who had been in the front room reading the red box that had come over from the Palace at ten, came to the kitchen door and saw him.

“Is that it?”

“I think so.”

“Open it.”

“I’m going to.” Theo did not move. “I’m looking at it first.”

“Why?”

“Because once I’ve opened it,” said Theo, “it’ll say what it says.” He looked at the crest. “And right now it doesn’t say anything. It could say anything.” He put his hand flat on the envelope. “Right now I’m still a medical student. On leave. Coming back in November. Right now, nobody’s said I can’t.”

Frederick came into the kitchen and sat down at the table, on the third chair, the one that wobbled.

He did not say anything. He had learned, in a year and a half, from a man of eighty-four who had lost most of his words and found some of them again, that waiting was sometimes the thing, and he waited.

The radiator in the front room banged.

“Eleven minutes,” said Theo, and opened it.

---

It was one page. He read it to himself, and then he read it out loud, because, he said afterwards, if he did not read it out loud he would not believe it.

Dear Mr Hartigan,

Further to your request of 2 December for a leave of absence from the programme for the remainder of the academic year, I write to confirm that the Faculty has considered your request and is pleased to grant it.

The Faculty’s practice, in cases of leave taken for reasons other than health, is to require that the student attend an interview in person with a panel of the Faculty before resuming the programme, in order to satisfy the Faculty that the period of leave has been used in a manner consistent with the student’s development as a future physician. I am instructed to inform you that your interview has been fixed for Tuesday 1 June 2032, at ten o’clock in the morning, at the Faculty, and that attendance in person is a condition of your return.

The Faculty notes from your original application that you wished to study medicine in order to understand why a man collapsed in a tent. The panel will wish to discuss with you whether a year behind a bar has helped you to understand anything.

Yours sincerely,

And a name, and a title, and under the title, in the same careful handwriting as the envelope, a line that was not typed:

The panel very much enjoyed the T-shirt.

---

Theo put the letter down.

“The first of June,” he said.

“That’s fine.”

“Ten o’clock. In the morning. In person.” He looked up. “Where are we on the first of June?”

Frederick did not need to look it up. He had looked it up in September, in the schedule, which was in a blue folder that Mr Quennell kept and updated on Tuesdays, and he had read it so often since that he could recite it.

“Kuala Lumpur,” he said.

There was a short silence in the kitchen.

“That’s ten thousand miles,” said Theo.

“About that.”

“That’s a day on an aeroplane.”

“About that.”

“The trip’s the twenty-eighth of May to the fourth of June.” Theo had the schedule as well. Everybody had the schedule. “The elected king’s coming to the stall on the thirty-first. They’ve moved it twice already. It’s the only day he can do. And then there’s the second night on the first and the second.” He looked at the letter. “I can’t be in Kuala Lumpur on the thirty-first and in New Westminster at ten in the morning on the first.”

“You can. If you leave on the thirty-first at night.”

“There aren’t any flights. I looked. In September. When I saw the schedule. In case.” Theo put his face in his hands. “I looked at everything, Freddie. There’s one flight on the thirty-first from Kuala Lumpur and it goes through two other places and gets in at four in the afternoon on the first.”

“Then we’ll move the trip.”

“You can’t move the trip. The elected king’s moved it twice. You can’t ask another king to move a thing a third time. Even I know that.” Theo took his hands away from his face. “And you can’t not go. And I can’t not go. Because I’m your Page, and I’m on the schedule, and it’s in the blue folder.” He looked at the letter. “And I can’t not go to this. Because it says. A condition of your return.”

Frederick looked at the letter on the table, by the toast, with the red cross on the white star, and the line at the bottom in handwriting about the T-shirt.

He thought about Mr Quennell, and the blue folder, and the Tuesday committee, and the elected king who had moved it twice, and ten thousand miles, and a day on an aeroplane, and a Faculty that would like to know whether a year behind a bar had helped anybody to understand anything.

“We’ll think of something,” he said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That’s what you always say,” said Theo. “And then something terrible happens.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “But then we get there.”

---

On Tuesday, in the back room, Mr Quennell read the letter out to the committee, and the committee was silent for some time, and at the dartboard the Duke threw three darts into the treble twenty and turned round.

“June,” he said. “First.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Duke looked at the schedule, which was on the table in its blue folder, open at the last week of May.

“Plane,” he said.

“There aren’t any, sir. Not that arrive in time.”

The Duke considered this. He considered it, with a dart in his hand, the way he considered a board when he needed a hundred and one.

“Ours,” said the Duke of Cumberland.

Nobody at the table spoke.

Through the hatch, very quietly, Kimura said: “Sir. Not that one.”

The Duke looked at the hatch.

“No,” he agreed, after a long moment. “Not. That one.” And then, slowly, finding it, the way he found things: “Another. One.”

And he turned back to the board, and threw.

Mr Quennell wrote it down. He wrote it at the top of a clean sheet, under the heading 1 June, in capitals, and underlined it once, and then sat looking at it with his pen in his hand and the expression of a young man who has just been handed, by a Duke of eighty-four, in three words, the most complicated logistical problem in the history of the Household, and has realised that he is going to enjoy it very much.