Then You Should Know Better

Mr Obi was in his hut.

He had a cup of tea and a newspaper, and the newspaper was folded small, the way he always folded it, to the crossword, and he did not look up as they came across the last of the car park between the puddles. He waited until they were level with the window. Then he put the newspaper down, and slid the window open, and held out his hand.

“Pass.”

Frederick shifted the box onto one arm and got his pass out of his pocket with the other and held it up.

Mr Obi took it. He looked at it as though he had never seen it before. He looked at the photograph on it, and then at Frederick, and then at the photograph again, for exactly as long as he had looked at it every afternoon for three and a half years, at a quarter past three, through this window, including the afternoon of the thirty-first of October, when there had been two hundred people across the road from the side entrance and a woman holding up a timetable, and Mr Obi had looked at the pass for exactly this long and handed it back.

He handed it back.

“Mr Hanover,” said Mr Obi.

“Thank you, Mr Obi.”

Mr Obi slid the window shut and picked up the crossword.

“Seven letters,” Frederick heard him say, through the glass, to nobody. “Rightful heir, under age.”

---

Mr Pettigrew’s car was very small and very green and very old, and it had a dent in the driver’s door shaped exactly like Ohio, and a sticker in the back window, faded nearly white, that said ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL STAFF 2009-10, and on the back seat a sack of something with HULLED SUNFLOWER on it in blue letters, and a pair of Wellington boots with mud dried on them in a pattern that might have been the Dakotas.

He opened the boot. It stuck, and he hit it with the flat of his hand in a particular place, and it came up.

“In there, Hanover. On the blanket. Mind the goose.”

There was no goose. There was a tartan blanket, and on it a single long grey feather, which Mr Pettigrew picked up and put in his top pocket, where it stuck up beside his scarf like a quill.

Frederick put the box on the blanket. CHARTER 1974. STILL GOOD. It sat there in the boot of the green car looking, he thought, quite pleased with itself, like a box that had had a day out.

“Thank you,” said Mr Pettigrew. He shut the boot. It did not stick going down. “You’ve been my box man all day, Hanover. Carried it there and carried it back. Twice right, once wrong, once corrected. That’s a very good day for a box man.” He held out his hand. “I don’t even know your Christian name.”

Frederick shook his hand. It was long and dry and very thin, and it gripped hard, the way old men’s hands sometimes do, as though making sure of something.

“Frederick, sir.”

“Frederick,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Frederick Hanover.” He said it again, to himself, as if trying it on. “Frederick Hanover.” Something went across his long face, very faint, like the shadow of a bird crossing a field. “There was a Hanover in my form in 1983, you know. Set fire to a map of Ohio. No relation, I suppose.”

“No, sir.”

“No. He was a terrible boy. You’re not a terrible boy.” He let go of the hand. “You’re a very good boy who didn’t do his reading.”

---

Behind them, the dark blue car without a flag was parked in the next space, where it was parked every afternoon at a quarter past three, with its engine running.

Castellanos had come up from the walkway at a parent’s distance and was standing beside it. As Frederick watched, he went round to the front passenger door, the near one, on Frederick’s side, and opened it, and stood holding it, the way he had held it every afternoon since October and every afternoon for three years before that, and Frederick saw his hand go up to the badge on his chest, the one that said PARENT, and unpin it, and put it in his pocket.

It was a quarter past three. The school day was over. The inspection was over. The inspector had gone off along the walkway into the rain, and Dr Brooks had gone back across the yard, and there was nobody left at Ellicott who needed Castellanos to be anybody’s parent. He was, Frederick saw, with a feeling he did not have time to name, going back to being himself, all at once, in the ordinary way, by an open car door, the way a man takes off a coat when he comes in.

“Majesty,” said Castellanos. “The car.”

---

He said it in his ordinary voice. Not loudly. The way he said it at the side door of Columbia Palace every morning at ten to eight, and at this door every afternoon at a quarter past three, since the first of November, Majesty, the car, two words and a pause and two more, the way you would say it to anybody whose car it was.

Mr Pettigrew heard it.

Frederick watched him hear it. He was standing by the boot of his green car with his long hand still a little held out where Frederick had let go of it, and the goose feather sticking up from his top pocket, and he heard it, and Frederick watched it arrive.

It did not arrive all at once. It came in, the way the colour came into the river on Saint Patrick’s Day, from one place, and spread.

He looked at Castellanos. At the grey suit. At the open door of the dark blue car. At the man who had been lost in the corridor that morning, the office is downstairs, and by the vending machine, and at the door of the gym, and against the wall outside room fourteen, all day, everywhere, with a badge on.

He looked at the car. A dark blue car. With no flag on it. Where a flag would go.

He looked at Frederick.

And Frederick watched the whole of the day go back through Mr Pettigrew’s face, like a reel being wound back: the nice quiet class at a quarter past eight who did not throw anything; some trouble with the King’s aeroplane, I gather; Abernathy’s voice, it came right, in a manner of speaking; twenty-five people holding one breath when he asked a boy his name; Hanover, sir; a question nobody would put a hand up for; a confident answer; the number sixteen, which the boy had known and the old man had not; the brackets; a boy at three o’clock who corrected it at the board with an authority, you can’t act in somebody’s name if he isn’t there yet; who would tell you herself; there’s been some news since October; and a class that went out quietly, one at a time, the way people leave a church, every one of them saying thank you.

Somebody’s told him, sir. Today.

Who told him?

Everybody, sir.

---

Mr Pettigrew did not say anything for quite a long time.

Behind him, by the wire fence, Theo had stopped with his bag over his shoulder and his planner open in his hand, and was standing perfectly still, the way he had stood in room fourteen with the pen held over the page, and Frederick saw him, without taking his eyes off Mr Pettigrew’s face, find the top line of the column with his thumb, the first line, the one that had not moved all day, and cross out the nought, very carefully, with a single straight line, and write beside it.

Mr Obi, in his hut, put down the crossword.

“You’re the King,” said Mr Pettigrew.

“Yes, sir.”

“Since October.”

“The thirty-first, sir. At two o’clock in the afternoon. I was in geometry.”

“In geometry.” Mr Pettigrew looked at the glass block across the yard, as if he could see the math wing through it. “Of course you were. Where else would you be. It’s a Tuesday.” He looked back at Frederick. “And the King’s aeroplane. In the autumn. My daughter-in-law said there was something on the wireless.”

“It was my father’s, sir. He’s alive. He’s in hospital. He’s getting better. He gave up the Crown at the end of October.” Frederick thought about it. “It came right, sir. In a manner of speaking.”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Mr Pettigrew slowly. “Abernathy.” He shut his eyes for a moment. “Abernathy. Still in the jacket. Standing there in front of the whole class telling me it came right in a manner of speaking. In the same voice.” He opened his eyes. “He always did deserve a C.”

---

He looked at Frederick for a long time, in the car park, in the thin yellow light coming in under the clouds from the river.

“Your father,” said Mr Pettigrew, “said a thing to me once. In 1987. At a prize-giving. I told the class this morning. I told you.”

“Yes, sir. Oh, poor you, there’s so much of it.”

“Oh, poor you, there’s so much of it.” Mr Pettigrew almost smiled. “About history. He was a very kind man, your father, and he was quite wrong. There isn’t nearly enough of it. There’s never enough. You’ll find that.” He looked at the boot of his car, where the box was. “And this morning, in my classroom, in front of everybody, with my pen, you told me that a person under sixteen may not reign.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I wrote it on the board. In capitals. With your name after it. In brackets.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And it went out,” said Mr Pettigrew, with the air of a man finally working out what all the faces had been about, “on the wireless, didn’t it.”

“Yes, sir. All afternoon. And the Prime Minister rang the school. And Mrs Delahunt put him on hold.”

Mr Pettigrew looked at him.

“For how long?”

“Eleven minutes, sir.”

There was a pause.

“Good for Joan,” said Mr Pettigrew.

---

Then he drew himself up.

He was very tall when he drew himself up. Frederick had not quite seen it in the classroom, because he had been behind a desk, and in the doorway at half past eight, because he had been carrying a box. He saw it now. Mr Pettigrew drew himself up to his whole height beside his small green car with the dent in the door shaped like Ohio, with the goose feather in his pocket and his white hair standing up in the wind off the river, and he looked down at the King of fourteen realms, fifteen years old, in the car park of Ellicott High School at seventeen minutes past three, exactly as he had looked down at forty years of boys who had not done the reading, with his chin up, and patience, and very slight amusement, like a man watching a kettle he knows perfectly well is going to boil.

“Frederick Hanover,” said Mr Pettigrew. “You are the King. You have been the King since two o’clock in the afternoon on the thirty-first of October. It is the one thing everybody knows.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you should know better.”

Frederick looked at him.

He thought about the board, and the four words in gold, and the arm of a signal at clear against a sky the colour of the river, and his mother’s hand on the back of a saddle he had not looked round to see. He thought about Henry at Staines, shrieking, and everybody in England knowing all the same. He thought about all the people who had told him today, one after another, in their own way, without telling him, because it was manners, and about the one person who had not, because he had been among the geese, and who was telling him now, plainly, to his face, in the car park, the way a teacher tells you a thing so that you will never need to be told it again.

“Yes, sir,” said Frederick.

He should. He did.