The Forecourt

At a quarter to two on Sunday the second of November there were three people at the north wing door and one at the north end of the forecourt, and the standard was up.

Frederick saw it as he came out onto the step. He always saw it, when he came out of the north wing door on a day he was not going anywhere; you could see the flagstaff from the step, over the roof of the low wing, on the central block, and when he was in the building the standard was up, and when he was not, it was not, and when his father was in the building, which was six times a year, a different one was up, bigger, without the label. It was a fact of the house, like the clock. He did not usually look at it. Today he looked at it for a long time, the arms of the Royal Standard in the grey November wind, with the white label of three points across the top, and thought that if a car came across the forecourt in fifteen minutes, the people in it would see that, and would not know what it meant, and that he would rather they did not.

Castellanos was on the step beside the door, in the grey suit, with his hands folded.

Dame M was on the step on the other side of the door, in the grey suit, with the folder under her arm and her hair entirely up.

And at the north end of the forecourt, by the corner of the railings, where the gravel met the pavement of the Axis and the public came and went all day, there was a young man in a brown leather jacket and jeans with his hands in his pockets, looking at nothing, who was the Inspector’s officer, and who had been instructed to point.

The forecourt was full of people. It was Sunday, and the State Rooms were open, and the forecourt was open, because the forecourt was always open; there was no gate across it and never had been, only the railings, waist high, and a gap in them where the Axis came in, and the public walked across the gravel to the front of the house at every hour of the day, in coats, with children and pushchairs and cameras, and stood under the portico and read the board about the opening hours and went in at the great doors, or did not, and came out again, and walked back across the gravel to the Axis. Frederick had watched them from the north wing windows all his life. He had never once stood on the step and watched them on purpose.

“Sir,” said Dame M, without looking at him. “If the car comes across the forecourt, it will come slowly, because the officer will have told it to, and there will be people on the gravel. If it stops at the north end, by this door, the people on the gravel will look, because people look at a car that stops by a door. They will not know why. They will think it is a delivery.” She paused. “Unless somebody waves at it.”

“I won’t wave.”

“No, sir.” She looked at the forecourt. “I was speaking to Sergeant Castellanos.”

Castellanos did not move a muscle of his face.

---

At five to two nothing came.

At two nothing came. The young man in the leather jacket at the north end of the forecourt looked at the Axis, and at his watch, and at the Axis. A family with a pushchair went past him onto the gravel. A coach went by on the Axis with SCHOOL PARTY in the front window, and did not stop. Frederick stood on the step and did the sum, which was that two o’clock was now and it was not here, and then did it again, and it was still not here.

At two minutes past two a brown estate car came round the corner from the Axis at about four miles an hour.

He knew it at once. He did not know how. He had never seen it; he had heard about it on a wall, a big brown one, a 1991 estate, in the garages round the back, and heard about it again from Dame M at a quarter past nine last night, read off a sheet from the switchboard pad; and it came round the corner from the Axis, a long, square, enormously brown car, the brown of a cupboard, with a rack on the roof and a dent in the back door and its headlights on although it was the middle of the afternoon, and stopped at the gap in the railings, because the young man in the leather jacket had taken his hands out of his pockets and was pointing.

He was pointing at the north end of the forecourt. At the north wing door. At them.

The car came onto the gravel.

It came across it at about two miles an hour, very straight, exactly where the young man was pointing, the way a bus comes into a stop, in a single unhurried line; and the people on the gravel moved out of the way of it, slowly, looking at it, a family and two old ladies and a man with a camera on a strap, the way you look at a car that is going somewhere you did not know cars went; and as it got closer Frederick could see the people inside.

There was a man at the wheel. He was a big, broad, quiet-looking man of about forty-five, in a dark jacket that was not quite a suit and a white shirt done up to the top without a tie, with short sandy hair going grey, and he had both hands on the wheel at ten to two and was looking straight ahead through the windscreen with the face of a man who has driven a great many large vehicles into a great many tight places and is not going to be put off by this one.

Beside him, in the front passenger seat, there was a very old man in a hat. A grey felt hat, with a band, of the kind nobody had worn since about 1960. He had his face right up to the side window and his hand flat on the glass, and he was looking at the Palace, the whole length of it, the portico and the columns and the long low wings, with his mouth slightly open, as though it were a mountain he had heard about all his life and never expected to see.

In the back there were three.

A woman, in the middle, small and straight, with dark blonde hair pulled back hard, in a navy coat, with her handbag on her knee and her two hands on it, and an envelope in one of them. A girl on the left, about fifteen, with long brown hair over most of her face and her arms folded very tight, looking resolutely, furiously, out of the window on the far side, at the Axis, at anything at all except the house.

And on the right, by the window, in a grey sweatshirt with the hole at the cuff, with something on his knees wrapped in newspaper, Theo.

He saw Frederick. Frederick saw him see. He did not wave. He looked at Frederick through the back window of Mr Dabrowski’s estate car, across the last ten yards of the forecourt, with the expression that was about to say something funny and had decided to wait; and then, very slightly, he raised his eyebrows.

The car stopped.

It stopped exactly level with the north wing door, as if there had been a line painted on the gravel, which there had not; and the engine went on running; and the man at the wheel kept both hands at ten to two and did not look round at the house at all.

On the forecourt, the family with the pushchair had stopped to watch. The two old ladies had stopped. The man with the camera had stopped and was looking at the brown car and at the door of the north wing and at the three people on the step, and back at the car, and had not yet lifted the camera, and Frederick saw the young man in the leather jacket begin, very casually, with his hands back in his pockets, to walk across the gravel towards him.

The back door on the right opened, and Theo got out.

---

He got out with the thing wrapped in newspaper held against his chest in both arms, and stood on the gravel beside the car, and looked up at the north wing, at the door and the step and the three people on it, and then, slowly, up, at the roof, and over it, to the flagstaff on the central block, and the standard on it in the wind, with the label.

He looked at it for about three seconds.

Then he looked at Frederick, on the step, and said, in his ordinary voice, the one for across a table when you want the salt:

“Hi.”

“Hello,” said Frederick.

The other back door opened, on the far side, the side nearest the Palace, and the woman in the navy coat got out.

She did not get out the way the people who got out of cars at Columbia Palace got out. They got out slowly, and stood, and waited to be met, and looked at the house, and arranged their faces. She got out quickly, the way you get out of a car on a hospital forecourt when you are on shift in four minutes, and shut the door behind her with her hip, and came round the back of the car, past the dent, with her handbag on her arm and the envelope in her hand, and up to the step, and stopped at the bottom of it.

She looked at Dame M.

She looked at Castellanos.

And then she looked at Frederick, and he understood, as she did it, that she was looking at him exactly the way his mother had looked at him on the second of September at a quarter past seven at the north wing door in her dressing gown: from his shoes to his hair, as though she were checking a list.

She was not tall. She had grey eyes, very clear, and a straight nose, and lines at the corners of her mouth that came from either laughing or not laughing, he could not tell which, and she was holding the envelope in her hand quite firmly, the way you hold a thing you have been told to hand to the right person and to nobody else.

“You’re Freddie,” she said.

It was not a question. She said it with German in it, underneath, all the way through, the way Theo’s father had Milwaukee in his voice like a stick of rock, when Theo did it on the wall; and she said it as if she had been saying it every evening for seven weeks, at a stove, with a tea towel over her shoulder, which she had.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“You drew the cake.”

“Yes.”

“It’s on the fridge.”

“Theo said.”

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she turned to Dame M, on the step, and held out the envelope.

“This is for you,” she said. “It said R.S.V.P. on the card. There wasn’t time for the post, because some people,” and she did not look round at Theo, who was standing on the gravel behind her with his parcel, looking at the flagstaff, “some people don’t tell their mothers anything until half past six on a Saturday night.” She held the envelope out a little further. “So I brought it.”

Dame M came down one step and took it.

It was a small, cheap, white envelope of the kind sold in packets of fifty, and on the front, in green ink, in a quick strong sloping hand, it said The Master of the Household.

“Thank you, Mrs Hartigan,” said Dame M.

“You’re the one on the telephone.”

“I am, Mrs Hartigan.”

“Peter said you were very kind about the lift.” Mrs Hartigan looked at her, at the grey suit and the folder and the hair that was entirely up, and Frederick saw the two of them look at each other, on the step of the north wing, in the November wind, for about two seconds, and recognise something; he did not know what; it was the look two people give each other who have both spent their whole lives being the one in the room who knows what time everything is. “And about the pond.”

“The pond is a serious matter, Mrs Hartigan.”

“I know,” said Mrs Hartigan. “I’ve met him.” She turned back to Frederick. “He’s had his lunch. He’s not to have more than two pieces of cake, because he’ll be sick, and he’ll tell you he won’t, and he will. He’s to say please and thank you. If he breaks anything, he’s to say so straight away, and not hide it under something.” She paused. “If he’s any trouble, send him home.”

“On the bus, Mrs Hartigan?” said Dame M.

Mrs Hartigan looked at her.

“He knows the way,” she said.

There was a pause on the step. Castellanos looked at the gravel with great concentration. Dame M’s face did nothing, very hard. And Frederick stood in the doorway of the north wing of Columbia Palace and looked at Theo’s mother, who had not curtseyed, or bowed, or said Your Royal Highness, or sir, or done anything at all with her face except look at him as though he were a boy who might be sick on cake, and found that his throat was doing the thing it had done at a quarter past nine last night, and that he had to stand very still.

“Thank you for bringing him,” he said.

It came out right, this time. He was glad.

Mrs Hartigan looked at him.

“Thank you for having him,” she said. And then, as she turned to go, over her shoulder, quite briskly, the way you say it to a boy at a door on any Sunday in the world:

“Happy half-birthday, Freddie.”

---

She went back round the car, past the dent, and got in at the far side, quickly, and shut the door.

In the back, the girl with the long brown hair had not moved. She was still looking out of the far window at the Axis with her arms folded, furiously. But as the door shut beside her, Frederick saw her turn her head, just slightly, not all the way, and look at him through the window from under her hair, for about half a second; and then lift one hand off her folded arm, about an inch, and put it back, and look away at the Axis again with her face going scarlet.

In the front, the very old man in the hat had wound down his window.

He had a camera. It was a small yellow cardboard one, the kind you bought at a chemist’s with the film already in it and sent away to be developed, and he held it up to his eye, very slowly, with both hands, and pointed it at the portico, and the columns, and the long low wings, and the flagstaff, and the standard; and pressed it; and wound it on with his thumb, with a sound like a zip; and lowered it; and looked at Frederick, on the step, from under the brim of the grey felt hat, with very pale blue eyes in a face like a walnut.

“Forty-six years,” said Mr Dabrowski, in a voice like a door that needed oiling. “Never once came to the end of the Axis.” He nodded at the house. “Good house.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“Not yours,” said Mr Dabrowski. “I know. I know whose it is.” He wound the window up again halfway, and stopped, and said through the gap: “Distant,” and his whole face folded up round his eyes like a paper bag, and he wound the window up the rest of the way and sat back in his seat with the camera on his knee, wheezing.

And the man at the wheel, who had not looked round at the house once, not at the portico or the columns or the flagstaff or the three people on the step, who had sat with both hands on the wheel at ten to two the whole time and looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the north end of the forecourt and the Axis beyond it, as though he were waiting for the doors to close on a bus; the man at the wheel, without turning his head, lifted the forefinger of his right hand off the steering wheel, about an inch.

It stayed up for about a second. And went down.

Beside Frederick, on the step, Castellanos lifted the forefinger of his right hand off his left, where they were folded, about an inch.

The brown car went away across the forecourt at two miles an hour, very straight, the way a bus leaves a stop, past the family with the pushchair and the two old ladies and the man with the camera on a strap, who had been joined by the young man in the leather jacket and was being asked, very pleasantly, about the time, and round the corner onto the Axis, with its headlights on, and was gone.

---

“Your dad waved at Castellanos,” said Frederick.

“He waves at everybody. He’s a bus driver.” Theo was still holding the parcel against his chest. He looked at the north wing door, and at the step, and at Dame M, who was standing on it with the green envelope in her hand, not opening it, and at Castellanos, who was looking at the forecourt. “And your man waved back.”

“I saw.”

“That’s two,” said Theo, with great satisfaction. “A finger’s a wave if you mean it.” He held out the parcel. “Happy half-birthday.”

Frederick took it.

It was flat and oblong and light, about the size of a paperback book but thinner, and it was wrapped in newspaper, and the newspaper was the comics page; he could see a dog in a hat, and a man on a desert island with a single palm tree, and a cat saying something in a speech bubble that had been torn in half by the sellotape. There was a great deal of sellotape. Somebody had wrapped it with the care of a person who had never wrapped anything before and had decided to make sure.

“Kate wrapped it,” said Theo. “Last night. At about eleven. She said if I wrapped it, it’d look like I’d wrapped it, and she’d be ashamed to be seen in the same car.” He considered. “She’s not speaking to me. She wrapped it without speaking to me. She just held out her hand for it and did it and gave it back.” He paused. “Open it now. Mum said open it now, so if you don’t like it you can say so to my face.”

Frederick opened it.

It took some time, because of the sellotape. Dame M, on the step, did not offer to help. Castellanos did not offer to help. Frederick stood on the step of the north wing and picked at the sellotape with his fingernails, and got the dog in the hat off, and the man on the island, and the cat with half a speech bubble, and found inside them a card.

It was a stiff paper card, a little larger than a playing card, red and cream, the colours of the buses, with the transit authority’s crest at the top, which was a sort of wheel with wings on it, and under the crest, in capitals, COLUMBIA DISTRICT TRANSIT, and under that, larger, DAY RIDER, and under that, smaller, Valid for unlimited travel on all routes for ONE DAY. At the bottom there was a row of small silver boxes, thirty-one of them, numbered, and another row, twelve, with the months, and a line that said SCRATCH TO VALIDATE.

None of them was scratched.

He looked at it for a long time.

“It’s a bus pass,” said Theo. “A day one. For any day. You scratch the day off when you use it, the date and the month, and then it’s good for that whole day, as many buses as you like, all of them, the twenty-two all the way out to the boathouses and back, and the nine, and all the others.” He looked at it in Frederick’s hand. “Dad got it for me at the depot. At staff price. I paid. Out of the apples. I get paid in apples, by the man with the trees, for carrying them up from the van, and I sell them at school.” He paused. “Not to you. I give you yours.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“So you can go on the twenty-two,” said Theo. “With me. One day. Any day you like. And Dad’ll be driving.” He considered. “Probably. If it’s an early.”

Frederick looked at the card. At DAY RIDER. At the thirty-one silver boxes and the twelve, unscratched, in a row, like the windows of a train that had not yet left.

He thought about the Inspector, and fire exits, and a bowling alley on Canal Street. He thought about two officers at a table not bowling, and a second car at the end of the street, and the manager at the door. He thought about what Dame M would say, at the Friday meeting, by the fire, with her hand flat on the folder, if he asked whether he might go on the twenty-two on a Saturday with a boy from Milwaukee, and he knew exactly what she would say, and that she would be right, and that she would be sorry.

“Don’t scratch it,” said Theo.

Frederick looked up.

“Till you use it.” Theo was looking at him with the grey eyes, or green, and the expression that was not about to say anything funny at all. “Don’t scratch it till you actually go. Even if it’s ages. It doesn’t run out. It’s good for any day. It says.” He pointed at the small print. “It doesn’t say which year.”

Frederick looked at the small print. It did not say which year.

“Thank you,” he said.

He could not say anything else. He held the card in both hands on the step of the north wing door, with the comics page round his feet, and the dog in the hat blowing away across the gravel towards the Axis in the November wind, and the standard up on the flagstaff behind him, and he could not say anything else at all.

“You’re welcome,” said Theo. “It’s not much. It’s a bus pass.” He looked past Frederick, through the open north wing door, into the passage, at the hard chair against the wall. “Can I come in? It’s cold. And Mum said if I stood on a step for more than five minutes looking at the house, I’d look like I’d never seen a house.”

---

He showed him the north wing.

He did not know how to. He had never shown anybody the north wing; there had never been anybody to show it to, except his cousins, who had been shown it by Dame M. So he did it in order, the way you would show somebody a document: the passage, with the hard chair, where Castellanos sat in the evenings; the stairs; the small sitting room, with the fire, and the cream telephone on the side table; the small dining room, with the long table and the end nearest the fire where they had supper on Tuesdays; the small library, where Miss Hellström read him the story about the moose who wanted to be a bishop; and up the stairs again to his room at the top, with the wall map.

Theo looked at all of it with polite, steady, enormous interest, the way he had looked at Mr Ferrante’s frog, and said very little.

In the small sitting room he looked at the clock on the mantelpiece that had belonged to somebody’s grandmother and said, “Does it go?”

“Yes.”

“Ours doesn’t. It’s been at ten past four since we moved. Dad says it’s right twice a day and that’s more than most people.” He looked at the cream telephone. “Is that the one your dad rings?”

“Yes. At four.”

“Is it four today?”

“It’s four every Sunday.”

Theo looked at the telephone a moment longer, and did not say anything, and went on.

In the small dining room he looked at the long table and said, “Do you eat at that? With all of that? Just the two of you?” and Frederick said yes, at the end by the fire, and Theo looked at the end by the fire, and then down the whole length of the table to the other end, about twenty feet away, in the dark, and said, “Huh,” in the voice he had used about the radiator, with deep respect.

In his room he stood in front of the wall map for a long time.

He looked at the six realms marked in red, and the seventh in pencil in Sweden, and the eighth, smaller, in Malaya. He did not ask what they were. He did not ask why there were six, or why one was in pencil, or what the small one was. Frederick watched him not ask. He watched him look at the map the way he had looked at the flagstaff from the gravel, for about three seconds, steadily, taking it in; and then turn away from it, and look at the rest of the room, at the bed and the desk and the bookshelves and the window onto the Axis, and say:

“You’ve got a lot of train books.”

“Yes.”

“Have you got a train set?”

“No.”

Theo looked at him.

“You know all the trains in the Realm,” he said, “and you haven’t got a train set?”

“I’ve got the timetables.”

“That’s not a train set, Freddie. That’s homework.” Theo looked out of the window at the Axis. “Where’s the kitchen?”

---

The kitchen was what he liked.

Not the north wing kitchen, the Swedish one, which was small and white and very clean and belonged to his mother’s Court and was run by a silent woman from Uppsala who made the fish; but Bridget’s, the old one, in the basement under the north wing, at the bottom of the back stairs, with the range, and the long scrubbed table, and the copper pans on the wall, and the window high up at the level of the gravel so that you could see people’s feet going past on the forecourt, and the dumbwaiter.

Theo saw the dumbwaiter before he saw Bridget.

It was in the corner, by the range, a wooden cupboard in the wall with a sliding door and a rope beside it, on a pulley, which went up through the ceiling to the small dining room two floors above, so that in the old days, before the trolleys, food had been sent up in it hot and plates sent down in it dirty. Nobody used it now, except Bridget, who used it to send up the egg on Saturdays, and to send up hot chocolate at eight o’clock on nights when nobody had asked for it.

“What’s that?” said Theo.

“It’s a dumbwaiter.”

“A what?”

“A dumbwaiter. It’s a lift. For food.” Frederick showed him: the sliding door, and the shelf inside, and the rope. “You put a thing on the shelf and pull the rope and it goes up to the dining room. And then somebody up there opens the door and takes it out.”

Theo looked at the dumbwaiter for a long time.

Then he looked at Frederick with an expression Frederick had seen on his face exactly once before: on the wall, by the bike racks, on the ninth of October, at break, when he had seen something move under the third bin.

“Freddie,” he said. “Your house has got a lift for food.”

“It’s very old.”

“I don’t care how old it is.” Theo put his head inside the dumbwaiter and looked up the shaft, into the dark. “It’s got a lift for food. We’ve got a lift that works except before seven because of Mr Dabrowski’s knees. You’ve got a lift that goes up two floors with a sandwich in it.” He took his head out. “Has anybody ever been in it?”

“No,” said Frederick.

“No,” said Bridget.

She was at the range. She had been at the range all along, with her back to them, doing something to a pan; and she had not turned round when they came in; and she did not turn round now. She said it to the pan. No. In exactly the voice in which she said eat your egg.

Theo took his hand off the rope.

“Hello,” he said. “Are you Bridget?”

Bridget turned round.

She looked at him. She looked at him the way Mrs Hartigan had looked at Frederick on the step, from his trainers to his hair, which was standing up at the back as if he had slept on it, checking a list. She looked at the grey sweatshirt with the hole at the cuff, and the trousers that had been washed a great many times, and the face, which was waiting, quite patiently, to be told whether it was in trouble.

“I’m Bridget,” she said.

“I’m Theo. I sit next to him.” Theo put his hands in his pockets. “You do the sandwiches. With the notes. Eat the sandwich.” He considered. “He does, you know. He eats it every day. I watch.”

Bridget looked at him a moment longer.

Then she wiped her hands on her apron, and went to the long scrubbed table, and pulled out a chair, the one nearest the range, the one that had been Frederick’s since he was four, and then pulled out the one beside it.

“Sit down,” she said. “Both of you. You’ll have something.”

“Mum said only two pieces of cake.”

“It’s not cake. Cake’s at half past three. Monsieur Arnaud’s doing it and he’s in a state and nobody’s to go near the pastry kitchen till he says.” Bridget put a plate on the table. “This is a biscuit. A biscuit doesn’t count.”

“Mum’ll say it counts.”

“Your mother,” said Bridget, “isn’t here.”

Theo looked at her, and at the plate, and sat down in the chair beside Frederick’s, at the long scrubbed table by the range in the kitchen in the basement of Columbia Palace, with the feet of the Sunday visitors going past the window high up on the gravel, and took a biscuit.

---

“Freddie,” said Theo, at a quarter to three, with his mouth full.

They had had four biscuits each. Bridget had gone to see about something and had said, at the door, without turning round, if anybody touches that rope I’ll know, and gone.

“What?”

“The bit that’s open,” said Theo. “The museum. Where the people go.” He swallowed. “Can we go in it?”

Frederick looked at him.

He thought about footnote four. The Inspector has asked that the Prince be reminded that the visitors in the State Rooms do not know that the family lives in the house, beyond being told so, and that a boy of twelve in a jumper is not, in the Inspector’s experience, recognised in a museum, because nobody expects to see him there.

“Why?”

“Because it’s your house,” said Theo, “and I want to see what they say about it.” He put down the biscuit. “Have you ever been round it? Like them? With the people?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“I’ve been in the rooms. Lots of times. When they’re shut.” Frederick thought. “For receptions. And the Christmas tea. And when my father’s here. But not when it’s open. Not with the people.” He paused. “Not on the tour.”

Theo looked at him across the scrubbed table with an expression of enormous, delighted, scandalised disbelief.

“Freddie,” he said. “You’ve never been on the tour of your own house?”

---

There was a door between the north wing and the State Rooms.

It was at the end of the passage on the ground floor, past the small library, an ordinary panelled door painted cream, with a brass handle and no lock, and on the far side of it, Frederick knew, was the end of the East Gallery, where the rope was, the red rope on brass posts that stopped the public going any further, and a little brass sign on a stand that said PRIVATE. The door and the understanding. He had walked past it every day of his life. He had been through it perhaps fifty times, on evenings when the rooms were shut, with his mother or his father or Dame M, to receptions, in a suit.

He had never been through it at a quarter to three on a Sunday when the rooms were open.

He stood in front of it with his hand on the brass handle.

Behind him, in the passage, Castellanos had come down the stairs from wherever he had been, and was standing by the small library door, with his hands folded, looking at nothing.

Frederick looked at him.

Castellanos looked back. For about two seconds. Then he looked at the ceiling.

“I’ve read the timings, sir,” he said, to the ceiling. “Footnote four.” A pause. “I’ll be ten yards behind.”

Frederick opened the door.

On the far side of it was the East Gallery, long and pale and full of light from the tall windows down one side, with the portraits down the other, and the parquet floor, and about forty people.

They were in coats. They were moving slowly down the gallery in twos and threes, looking at the portraits, reading the little cards beside them, and in the middle of them, about halfway down, by a portrait of a man in a white wig, there was a lady in a green blazer with a badge on it and a small flag on a stick, held up, and a group of about fifteen people round her, listening.

Frederick stepped over the red rope.

He did it without thinking; it was the only way through; and as he stepped over it he saw a man by the nearest window turn, and look at him, a boy stepping over the PRIVATE rope out of a door in the wall; and he saw the man think about it for perhaps a second; and decide that the boy was the child of somebody who worked here; and look back at the portrait.

Theo stepped over the rope behind him.

Castellanos stepped over it ten yards behind that, in the grey suit, and stood by the window, and became, instantly and completely, a man in a grey suit looking at a window.

And Frederick and Theo walked down the East Gallery of Columbia Palace among the Sunday visitors, in a jumper and a grey sweatshirt with a hole at the cuff, and nobody looked at them at all, and they went and stood at the back of the group round the lady with the little flag, behind a large man in an anorak, and listened.

“…and this,” the lady with the flag was saying, “is Ernest the First, the first King of the House of Hanover to reign in America, who came to the throne in 1840, very unexpectedly, after a tragedy. You’ll see he’s looking at a map. That’s because he’d never seen America and had to have it explained to him.” The group laughed politely. “He never did come here. None of the Kings came here very much, in the old days. It was a long way. They lived in London.” She turned the little flag. “Which is why this house was mostly empty for a very long time. A museum, really. With staff.”

Theo looked at the portrait of Ernest the First.

He looked at it for some time. Then he looked at Frederick, standing beside him at the back of the group behind the man in the anorak, and then at the portrait again, at the man in the uniform looking at a map, and then at Frederick.

He leaned over.

“Distant,” he whispered.

Frederick put his hand over his mouth.

“But it isn’t empty now,” said the lady with the flag, brightly, moving the group on. “As some of you may know. The family lives here now. Since 2016. Well, the Prince does. And the Queen, in the school year. They have the north wing, through there,” she pointed the little flag back down the gallery, at the red rope, and the cream door in the wall, and the PRIVATE sign, “and you won’t see them, of course, because the family never comes into the State Rooms when they’re open. They have their own rooms. But it’s nice to know, isn’t it, that it’s somebody’s home.”

A lady in the group said, “Ah.”

“And they say,” said the lady with the flag, “that the Prince’s favourite room in the whole house is the library. Which we’ll be seeing in a minute. He’s a great reader.”

“It isn’t,” said Frederick.

He did not mean to say it out loud. He said it to himself, under his breath, at the back of the group behind the man in the anorak, the way you say that’s wrong to a man on the radio. But the man in the anorak heard, and turned round, and looked down at him, a boy in a jumper.

“Isn’t what?”

“The library,” said Frederick. “It’s not his favourite.” He thought about it honestly. “It’s the kitchen.”

The man in the anorak looked at him for a moment.

“How d’you know?”

Theo, beside him, put his hand on Frederick’s arm, very lightly, the way you put your hand on the arm of somebody who is about to step off a kerb.

“His mum works here,” said Theo.

The man in the anorak looked at Theo. Then he looked at Frederick again, at the jumper and the blue shirt and the hair that would not settle; and nodded, slowly, as though that explained a great deal, as indeed it did; and turned back to the lady with the flag.

“Kitchen,” he said, to the woman beside him, who was presumably his wife. “Boy says it’s the kitchen. His mum works here.”

“I’d have said the kitchen,” said the wife. “Boys always like a kitchen.”

The lady with the flag was moving them on, towards the double doors at the end of the gallery and the Blue Drawing Room beyond them. The group went after her. Frederick and Theo went after the group. Behind them, ten yards, a man in a grey suit stopped looking at a window and began, with no hurry at all, to look at a different window, slightly further along.

“His mum works here,” whispered Frederick.

“She does,” said Theo. “Doesn’t she? She lives here. That’s working.” He looked straight ahead at the back of the man in the anorak. “You’d have said it’s me. You’d have said I’m the Prince and it’s the kitchen. Because you don’t lie.” He shrugged. “So I said it for you.”

“That’s not the same as not lying.”

“It’s true, though,” said Theo. “Isn’t it? Your mum. Here. Working.”

Frederick thought about his mother, in the north wing, at this moment, at a quarter to three on a Sunday, with Ebba Lindqvist and a box from Stockholm, reading the Riksdag’s papers, the way she did every Sunday afternoon, because the papers did not stop because it was Sunday.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s true.”

“Then I didn’t lie either,” said Theo, and they went through the double doors after the man in the anorak into the Blue Drawing Room of Columbia Palace, where Frederick had stood in a suit at eleven receptions, and stood at the back of a group of fifteen strangers in coats and listened, with the most complete attention he had ever given anything, to a lady with a little flag explain to them what it was all for.