Theodor

Theo’s German came from his grandmother.

Frederick had known that, in the way he knew a great many things about Theo, without ever having thought about it. He had known that Theo’s grandmother lived in Milwaukee, on the north side, in the house she had been born in, and that she read the weekly paper there that was in English on one side and German on the other and had been since 1891. He had known that when the paper had printed, in October 2028, that her grandson was to be a Page of Honour, she had read it down the telephone to Theo’s mother three times and cried. He had known, vaguely, that Theo could speak to her in German, on the telephone, on Sundays, and that Theo did not mention this, ever, to anybody, in the way that you do not mention that you can still do the dance your grandmother taught you.

He had not known what it sounded like.

It sounded, in the corner of the Mummehaus at a quarter past nine on Saturday night, with forty people round him, like a radio play from before the First Great War. It was slow and soft and round, with all the edges taken off, and it was full of words that nobody in Brunswick had used since their great-grandparents, and some that nobody in Brunswick had ever used at all, because they had been made up in Wisconsin in about 1880 by people who needed a German word for a streetcar and did not have one. When Theo wanted a beer he did not ask for a Bier. He asked, very politely, for ein Glas Lager, bitte schön, in a voice like a man at a church supper. When somebody bought him one he said das ist aber nett, which is what Frederick’s grandmother had said in 1990 when given a cup of tea. And when a girl of about twenty asked him where he had learned his German, he went red to the ears and said, in a German so old-fashioned that the girl put both her hands over her mouth, that he had learned it at his grandmother’s kitchen table on Center Street, from his grandmother, who had learned it from hers, who had come from a village near Celle in 1902, and that he was afraid it was not very good.

The girl took her hands away from her mouth and said something very fast to the girl next to her, and the girl next to her said something to the boy next to her, and within about four minutes everybody under twenty-five in the Mummehaus knew that the King’s Page spoke German like their great-grandmothers and was from a village near Celle, and was afraid it was not very good, and was red.

That was when the beer mats started.

---

By eleven there were forty-one of them.

Frederick counted, later, in the hotel, because Theo emptied his pockets onto the bed and sat looking at them with his head in his hands. Forty-one beer mats from the Mummehaus, round, white, with a lion on them, and on each of them, in biro or pencil or once in eyeliner, a telephone number and a name. Some of them had messages as well. Für Theodor. Komm nach Braunschweig zurück. Celle grüßt dich! One said, in English, carefully, You are very sweet, and had a drawing of a heart. One said nothing at all except a telephone number, and was signed, in a small, upright hand, Mumme.

“That’s Herr Brandes,” said Frederick.

“It can’t be Herr Brandes.”

“It’s his handwriting. I’ve seen it. He wrote out the bill.” Frederick turned it over. “He’s eighty-one, Theo.”

“I know he’s eighty-one.”

“He wants you to come back for the Mumme.”

Theo put his face in the pillow.

---

The T-shirts were on Sunday morning.

Frederick never found out how. He asked, and nobody knew, or nobody would say. Somebody in Brunswick, overnight, between half past eleven on Saturday and seven on Sunday morning, had got hold of a printing machine and a great many white T-shirts, and when the King’s party came out of the hotel at a quarter past eight to walk to the station there were people waiting on the pavement, about sixty, mostly young, mostly girls, some boys, and every one of them was wearing a white T-shirt with a photograph on the front of Theo, taken from slightly below, in the corner of the Mummehaus, red to the ears, holding a jug of Mumme, and under the photograph, in black letters, one word.

THEODOR.

“Oh no,” said Theo.

The sixty people on the pavement saw him and screamed.

They did not scream at the King. Frederick, who was walking in front, and had walked out of buildings in front of crowds all his life, and knew precisely what a crowd sounded like when it saw the King, heard the scream begin and braced himself for it, and then felt it go past him. It went past him the way a wave goes past a post on a beach, round him, on both sides, without touching him at all, and broke on Theo.

“THEODOR!”

“Oh no,” said Theo.

Kimura, at his shoulder, looked at the crowd, and at the T-shirts, and at Theo, and said, without expression, “Walk.”

“Where?”

“To the station. Like you were going to.” She put a hand very lightly on his elbow. “Smile. Wave. Don’t stop.”

“I can’t wave.”

“You can wave,” said Kimura. “You’ve seen it done. Do it like him.” She tilted her head at Frederick. “But less.”

Theo waved. He waved like a man trying to put out a small fire on the end of his own arm. The sixty people in the T-shirts screamed again.

Behind them, on the hotel steps, with Lukas a pace to his left, the German Emperor had stopped.

---

Alexander did not say anything on the walk to the station.

He walked beside Frederick, a little behind Theo and the crowd and Kimura’s hand on Theo’s elbow, with his coat buttoned to the neck and his face perfectly composed, and he looked at the T-shirts. He looked at all of them. He looked at the back of every T-shirt in the crowd, where, Frederick now saw, somebody had printed a second, smaller line, Braunschweig 11.10.31, and he looked at the photograph on the front, when the crowd turned round, and he looked at Theo, and at the T-shirts, and back. He did not speak. He walked very straight. And Frederick, who had known him since they were six, and had written to him every week for three years by the diplomatic bag, and could read him the way he read a timetable, understood with total certainty that the German Emperor, King of Prussia, was counting.

At the station he stopped counting, because the crowd on the platform was too big to count.

It was about four hundred. The train to Hanover was at nine. There were people on the platform from end to end, and on the footbridge, and on the platform opposite, and there were more T-shirts, many more, and some of them were a different T-shirt, printed by somebody else, with a different photograph, of Theo laughing at the guard on Saturday’s train who had said Next station: Peine, and some of them had THEODOR on them and some had THEO and one, held up on a piece of card on the footbridge by a girl of about fourteen, said, in English, in enormous letters, THEO MARRY ME.

Theo saw it and stopped walking.

“Walk,” said Kimura.

“She’s fourteen.”

“She’s not going to get married today,” said Kimura. “Walk.”

---

On the train, in the reserved carriage, Theo sat by the window with his hood up and did not look out of it.

Alexander sat opposite, very upright, with his hands on his knees.

“Four hundred and twelve,” he said.

Frederick, beside Theo, looked up.

“On the platform,” said Alexander. “I counted those I could see. There will have been more on the footbridge. Four hundred and twelve, not counting the footbridge.” He looked out of the window at Brunswick going past. “In Potsdam, in May, I opened a hospital. It was announced in the newspapers a week before. It was a Saturday. It was sunny.” He paused. “Two hundred and nine.”

“That’s a lot of people,” said Frederick.

“It is half,” said Alexander.

There was a silence in the carriage.

“I was born in Hanover,” said the German Emperor. “I was born there. I have a grandmother in Hanover. I have been to Hanover forty times. Fifty. I have opened things in Hanover. I have had my photograph taken in Hanover with a great many children and some horses.” He looked at Theo, in the hood. “No one in Hanover has ever printed a T-shirt.”

Theo, inside the hood, said something that might have been sorry.

“It is not your fault,” said Alexander. “I wish to be clear. It is not a complaint. It is an observation. It is interesting.” He was quiet for a moment. “What is it?”

“What’s what?”

“What do they like.” Alexander leaned forward. “I wish to know. Precisely. If I am to do a state visit in August to a bar, I should like to know what it is that makes four hundred and twelve people stand on a platform at nine o’clock on a Sunday for a man with a jug.” He looked at Theo. “Is it the German?”

Theo pushed the hood back. His face was the colour of a pillar box.

“It’s my Oma’s German,” he said. “It’s old. It’s from Celle. From 1902.”

“Yes. I heard it. It is very charming. I could learn it.” Alexander’s face was perfectly serious. “Would you teach me?”

“Teach you?”

“To speak German like your grandmother,” said the German Emperor. “I speak German like the Emperor. It is not the same.”

Theo looked at him, and at Frederick, and at the window, and the four hundred and twelve people sliding past, and back at Alexander.

“Well,” he said at last, slowly, in English, “the first thing she’d say is you’re sitting too straight.”

Alexander looked down at himself.

“How should I sit?”

“Like you’ve just had a big lunch,” said Theo, “and you’re not going anywhere till Tuesday.”

Alexander tried it. He let his shoulders drop about half an inch. He looked, Frederick thought, exactly like a German Emperor who had been asked to let his shoulders drop half an inch.

“Better?”

“No,” said Theo. And then, because he was Theo, and could not help it: “Das ist aber nett.”

Lukas Brandt, who had not said anything since the night before, when he had spent his one thing on the Page, looked up from the window, and looked at the German Emperor sitting like a man who had had a big lunch, and said, in German, quite clearly:

“You are jealous.”

Alexander sat up again, straight.

“That was yesterday’s,” he said.

“It is today now,” said Lukas, and went back to the window, and did not say anything else until Tuesday.

---

At Hanover there were more of them.

There were so many, in fact, on the concourse of the main station under the big glass roof, that Kimura called for the cars to come into the station yard by the goods entrance, and they went out the back, past the parcels office and two very surprised porters, and the four hundred and twelve, and the eight hundred or so at Hanover, waited on the concourse for an hour and a half for a Page of Honour who was by then at the airport, in a lounge, with his hood up, eating a sandwich.

Frederick called Jack from the lounge.

Jack judged every pint by video. That was the arrangement. Every pint the King pulled that Mrs Merriweather or Kimura or Mr Abernathy thought worth recording, somebody filmed on a telephone, and it went to Coln, and Jack watched it, usually behind the bar of the New Inn between customers, and texted back a mark and a word. The lager in Hanover on Friday had got 6 GLASS TOO STRAIGHT AT THE END. The four pints for the Bloc in Ottawa had got 8 WHO TAUGHT YOU THAT, which was the highest mark yet. He had not judged the Mumme, because Herr Brandes had poured it.

Jack answered on the second ring, in the New Inn, at half past twelve, Coln time, with the bar behind him and the sound of a Sunday lunch.

“Hanover,” said Jack.

“Hi.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Jack. “Mum’s seen it. Everyone’s seen it. Gaz has bought one.”

“Bought what?”

“The T-shirt,” said Jack. “They’re on the internet. Gaz bought one this morning. Little Rob’s bought two. Mrs Haverfield wants one, she says, for the wall. Mum’s put one behind the bar.” He turned the telephone round. Behind the bar of the New Inn, pinned to the beam beside the photographs of the cricket team, there was a white T-shirt with a photograph of Theo on it, red to the ears, holding a jug, and the word THEODOR.

“Oh no,” said Theo, from behind Frederick, through a sandwich.

“Theo!” said Jack. “Theodor! Mate! You’re famous!”

“I’m not.”

“You’re bigger than him,” said Jack. “You’re bigger than the King. In Germany. There was a man on the radio this morning. He said the Page is more popular than the Sovereign in two realms and nobody knows what the constitutional position is.” He laughed so hard the telephone shook. “Hanover. Hanover, mate. How does it feel?”

Frederick thought about it, honestly, in the lounge at Hanover airport, with Theo eating a sandwich in a hood behind him and Alexander at the window watching the aeroplanes with his shoulders very nearly half an inch lower than usual and Lukas beside him not speaking.

“Restful,” he said.

---

On Tuesday the committee met in the back room of Eight Bars.

Mr Quennell had drafted overnight. He read it out.

“Rule Seven. The Page of Honour shall not, while in attendance on the Sovereign, be more popular than the Sovereign.”

Nobody said anything.

The Duke, at the dartboard, threw three darts into the treble twenty, and turned round.

“How,” said the Duke.

Mr Quennell looked at his draft.

“I’m not sure, sir,” he said.

“How. You stop. It,” said the Duke. He thought about it, and found the rest. “Popular.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

The Duke looked at him. Then he turned back to the dartboard.

“Can’t,” he said, and threw.

The dart went into the treble twenty.

“Withdrawn,” said Dame M.

Mr Quennell drew a line through it, and initialled it, and wrote in the margin, in very small letters, unenforceable, and underlined it once, and Bridget, beside him, patted his hand.

Through the hatch, Kimura said, “Item.”

“Sergeant?”

“There’s a box for Theo,” said Kimura. “It came this morning. From Brunswick. It’s about two foot square.” She drank. “It’s full of beer mats.”