Six

He woke at six.

He had woken at six every morning since the thirty-first of May, without an alarm, without a reason, all at once, with his eyes open and the ceiling there and the light grey at the edges of the curtains. He did not mind it. It gave him an hour that nobody else in the building wanted, and he had begun, in the second week, to like it.

He lay for a minute and listened. A pigeon on the leads. A van in the service yard. Somewhere below, in the old part of the house, a door, and a radio being turned on low.

Then he remembered what day it was, and got up.

---

The kitchen at ten past six smelled of bread. Bridget was at the range with her back to the door and did not turn round.

“Tea’s in the pot.”

“Thank you.”

“Cards?”

“Cards.”

He had a stack of them in his dressing-gown pocket, held with a rubber band, two hundred and twelve of them, white, ruled, written on both sides in two colours of ink. He put them on the long table at the end nearest the range, where he always sat, and took the band off and put it round his wrist, and poured the tea.

On the dresser the radio was on, very low, the way it had been on every morning since the earthquake. A woman’s voice from New Westminster, level. The Pacific line running north of Santa Barbara again, as far as Lompoc. Tents coming down in the park at Ventura. A bridge over the river at Oxnard closed for a second inspection. The Governor would speak at noon. Then the weather, which was going to be hot.

He turned over the first card.

THE CHARTER OF UNION, 1783. Who signed. Who didn’t. Why the second matters more.

He knew that one. He turned it over and read the back to be sure, and he had it right, and he put it face down on the table to his left. The next one. The Peace of Boston. The next. The Regency Act 1811, s. 4. He knew that one too well, and he put it down quickly.

Bridget set a plate in front of him with two eggs on it and toast cut corner to corner, and went back to the range.

“What is it today?”

“History.”

“Kings?”

“Some.”

“Well, you’ll know about those,” said Bridget, and banged a pan.

---

Mr Ferrante had given them the list on the last day of classes, on one side of a sheet of paper, which he had stood at the door and handed to each of them as they went out, leaning on the stick he had had since California and pretended not to have.

The paper is set by the Board, not by me. I don’t know what’s on it. Nobody does. But the Board has put the River Plate on every sophomore paper since 1991, because it is the only realm in which three things happened that are easy to set questions on. Know these cold:

1930.

1955.

1976.

And remember that the question is never what happened. Anybody can learn what happened. The question is why it happened in that room and not another one.

He had read it on the steps and Theo had read it over his shoulder and said, “Three things. That’s a list of three things. I can learn three things,” and then had gone home and made eleven cards for each of them in his own capitals, which Frederick had seen on the Hartigans’ kitchen table on Sunday, under the salt.

He found the three cards in the stack, where he had put them together, and laid them out in a row on the table in front of his eggs.

1930. Uriburu. The Viceroy refuses to dismiss the ministry. The garrison won’t move against the Crown’s representative. Over in two days.

1955. Perón overthrown. The Viceroy stays at his post and swears in the army’s man. “Constitutional emergency.” Still argued about.

1976. The junta. The Viceroy refuses to sign their decrees, and is held in the Casa Rosada for seven years. The King refuses to recognise the junta. Britain and the Realm break off relations.

He looked at the third one for a long time.

On the back, in the red ink, in his own handwriting from March, smaller:

Papa was four years into his reign. He was younger than Mr Ferrante is now.

He had written that in March, at this table, and had not known why, and had left it.

---

There had been a column in a Buenos Aires paper in May, the week of the second, that the Private Secretary had put in the Plate’s box on the Thursday without a word, the way he put in everything, flat, with a paperclip, in its turn. It had been in Spanish, and long, and mostly about the bill in Congress for an elected Viceroy, and it had said a number of things about the Crown that were fair and some that were not. And in the middle of it, in a paragraph of its own, it had said that the old King had refused the junta and the new King had refused nothing, because he had not had the opportunity, because he was sixteen and had been in the Plate exactly never, and that this was not his fault and was still a fact.

He had read it twice. He had thought it was true.

He had written to the Viceroy that week, as he did now on the first of every month, a page in his own hand, in Spanish, with the mistakes left in because the Viceroy had asked him to leave them in, and he had not mentioned the column, and the Viceroy, in his answer, had not mentioned it either.

---

At half past six he went up and showered and dressed. The white shirt, the grey trousers, the Ellicott tie that he would take off at the door of the gym because the Board said candidates were to dress as for school and Mr Ferrante said that meant anything that did not have writing on it.

He put the cards in his blazer pocket. Two black pens and one spare, the spare a fountain pen of his father’s that he had been given in October and did not use. A pencil. An eraser. A ruler, because the Board’s list said a ruler, and nobody had ever been able to say what for.

In the corridor outside his door the day officer was on the chair under the window, a young man called Petrossian who had been on the detail since April and still stood up whenever Frederick came out of a room, all the way up, as if pulled.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning. Sit down.”

Petrossian did not sit down.

“Big day, sir.”

“It’s a history exam.”

“Yes, sir,” said Petrossian, with deep respect, as if Frederick had said it’s a cavalry charge.

---

His mother was in the small dining room at seven, because she had come in from the hospital at two and would not have breakfast in the kitchen after a night at the hospital, she said, because Bridget fed her too much and then looked at her.

She had a cup of black coffee and a pile of papers in a blue folder with the three crowns on it, and she was reading them with a pencil, the way she always read, and she did not look up when he came in. Stockholm was six hours ahead. By the time he was at school the Swedish government would have had its lunch.

There were no boxes on the table. That was still new. For seven months there had been boxes on this table every morning, thirteen of them, in thirteen colours, which the Regency Office brought down at a quarter to seven and took away at half past eight, and which she had done at breakfast with the coffee going cold, one at a time, with the others shut, because of the rule. Since the second of May there had been none, and the table looked too big, and she sat at the end of it with her one blue Swedish folder like a woman at a table in a station.

He kissed the top of her head and sat down.

“How was he?”

“Asleep by eleven. He was awake at ten and he wanted the window open, and I opened it, and he listened to the traffic on the bridge for an hour.” She turned a page. “He said a word.”

“What word?”

“Cars.” She made a small mark in the margin. “He was right. They were cars.”

Frederick laughed, and she looked up at him over the folder for the first time and smiled, and the smile went, and she looked at him properly.

“You’ve had two eggs.”

“Bridget.”

“And you’ve been up since six.”

“Since six.”

“Revising.”

“Looking at cards.” He took them out and put them on the cloth, with the band still on. “I know it. I’ve known it since April. I’m just looking at it.”

“Your father did that. Before a speech. He read it on the morning of the speech as if he’d never seen it, and he’d written it himself and learned it by heart a week before.” She put the pencil down. “He said it was to make sure it was still there.”

“It’s still there.”

“Good.”

She looked at the cards for a moment, and then at him, and he knew what she was going to say before she said it, because she had said it on Sunday, and on the Wednesday before that, and in May.

“You could still have the room.”

“No.”

“Dame M rang the Board on Friday. Just to ask. It’s all still arranged. The little room by the library, an officer in the corridor, a telephone on the desk that rings only if it must. Mr Lumsden would invigilate you himself, alone, and the others would have the gym. Nobody would know.”

“Everybody would know.”

“Nobody would mind.”

“I’d mind.” He picked up the cards and put them back in his pocket. “It’s an exam. Everybody in the year’s doing it. If I’m in a room by the library with a telephone on the desk, then it isn’t the same exam. It’s a different exam that I’m doing on my own with a telephone.” He stopped. “And I’d look at the telephone the whole time.”

His mother did not say anything.

“It’s three hours. From nine to twelve. Dame M’s told everybody. The Private Secretary’s told the High Commissioners. Everybody knows I can’t be got hold of from nine to twelve. That’s the point. Nothing’s going to happen in three hours that can’t wait three hours.”

“No,” said his mother.

“You said in May I should decide.”

“I did. You have.” She picked up the pencil again, and looked at the blue folder, and did not read it. “I only wanted to say it once more, so that I’d said it.”

“You’ve said it.”

“Then I’ve said it.” She turned a page. “I won’t say it again.”

---

At twenty past seven Dame M came to the door of the small dining room with a card in her hand. She did not come in. She held the card out at arm’s length, and he got up and went and took it from her, which was the arrangement, and she went away again without a word, her heels going off along the gallery towards the stairs.

It was one of her cards. White, stiff, with nothing printed on it, and three lines in her small upright hand.

Unavailable 0900 to 1200. All informed.

Car at 0800.

It is only an examination. M.

He read it twice and put it in his pocket with the others.

“What does she say?” said his mother.

“That it’s only an examination.”

“She said that to me about my wedding,” said his mother, and went back to Sweden.

---

He went to the window while she read.

The small dining room looked east, over the gardens and the wall and the trees along the Axis to the river, and the sun was already up over the Maryland shore, white and hot, and on the far side of the river the smoke from the paper mill was going straight up with no wind to take it. Hot, the radio had said. It would be hot in the gym. It was always hot in the gym in June, Theo said, because the gym had been built by a man who had never been in a gym, with high windows that did not open and a clock in a wire cage that was always four minutes fast.

He looked at the river for a while.

Somewhere south of all of it, a long way south, past the Carolinas and the islands and the whole shoulder of Brazil, it was twenty-five past eight in the morning in Buenos Aires, an hour ahead. The Viceroy would be at his desk. He was always at his desk at eight; he had said so in his first letter, in January, when Frederick was still a boy with a Regent, and had said it as though apologising for it. I was a judge for thirty-one years, Majestad, and a judge who is not at his desk at eight is a judge who will be reading his papers in court. Arrieta would be on her way to the Deputies, where the elected-Viceroy bill had its second reading tomorrow. The ships would be at sea. The river would be brown.

It was an ordinary Tuesday there too.

He took the third card out of his pocket again and looked at the back of it, at the red ink. He was younger than Mr Ferrante is now.

Then he put it away and went to get his bag.