King's Day

On Friday the sixth of February the whole of Ellicott High School stood up in the gym and sang God Save the King, and nobody looked at him.

He had been waiting for it since September. He had done the sum in August, in the library, with the school calendar: King’s Day fell on a Monday, the ninth, which was a public holiday, so the school kept it on the last school day before, the Friday, the way every school in the Realm did, with an assembly and the anthem and a lesson and cake. He had known that on the sixth of February he would be standing in a gym with eleven hundred people singing a song to his father, and that he would have to sing it too, and that they would look.

At Brookside they had looked. Every year. At Brookside there had been forty children in a hall and a piano, and at the first line of the anthem every one of the forty had turned round to see whether he was singing it, and what his face did when he sang long to reign over us about somebody who rang him on Sundays at four, and he had learned at five to look at the piano.

He stood in the gym at Ellicott in the line for Mr Abernathy’s homeroom, between Grant and Theo, on the bleachers, with the old championship banners from the 1980s hanging off the girders above him, and Dr Brooks at the front at a lectern in a green suit, and the school orchestra at one side, nine of them, with a boy at the back with a trombone that was very nearly as large as he was; and Dr Brooks said, “Please stand for the anthem,” and eleven hundred people stood up, with a noise like a train, and the orchestra played the first bar, slowly, not quite together, the trombone a little behind.

God save our gracious King.

He sang it. He looked at the trombone.

Long live our noble King.

Nobody turned round.

He waited for it. He sang, and waited, through God save the King, and send him victorious, and felt the gym all round him, eleven hundred people singing, flat and loud and warm and out of time with the orchestra, the way a gym sings anything; and felt them not look. Not the bleacher in front. Not the bleacher behind. Not the seventh grade on either side of him, in the order of the list. Carmen in the front row was singing with her eyes shut. Gallagher was singing the wrong words. Lucía, at the end of the row, was singing very loudly a quarter of a beat ahead of everybody else, as she did everything. Nobody, in the whole gym, turned round to see what the Prince of Columbia’s face did when he sang happy and glorious about his father.

Beside him, Theo was singing it in a voice that went up on glorious and cracked, and did not care.

Two rows down, Devon Price, behind somebody, began, on long to reign over us, from habit, from September, to bow his head; and stopped, halfway; and lifted it again, and went on singing, with his face pink, and did not look round.

God save the King.

The orchestra stopped. The trombone stopped half a bar later. Eleven hundred people sat down again with a noise like a train, and Dr Brooks began to speak about the fourteen capacities, and Frederick sat on the bleacher between Grant and Theo with his hands on his knees, and found that he was having to think, very hard, about something else, about the Fisheries Acts of three realms, in order not to do anything with his face at all.

---

“Fourteen,” said Mr Abernathy, in homeroom, afterwards, at the board, with the chalk.

He had been given the lesson. Every homeroom teacher was given it, on the last school day before King’s Day, by an arrangement older than any of them: a lesson on the Crown and the fourteen capacities, from a sheet sent round by the Board, which Mr Abernathy held in his scarred left hand and did not look at.

“Fourteen Crowns,” he said. “One man. Eleven kingdoms, two duchies and an empire. Sixty-odd per cent of you will find this dull. I know because I have taught it every February since 1994 and I have watched you find it dull. About three of you will find it fascinating, and will not say so, and I will be able to tell which three because your pens will move when nobody’s told them to.” He turned to the board. “The rest of you may sleep, quietly, and Mr Gallagher may continue to.”

He did not teach it the way the sheet said. Frederick could see the sheet; it was upside down on the front desk, and it said things like The Crown is the living symbol of the continuity of the Realm. Mr Abernathy did not say any of them. He drew a table on the board. Fourteen boxes, in rows, like the periodic table in the corner of Room 14 by the fume cupboard that said DO NOT; and in each box he wrote a symbol, two letters, and a number.

GB 1. Am 2. Ha 3. Ir 4. NW 5. NA 6.

“Elements,” said Mr Abernathy. “That’s how I think of them. Fourteen elements. You can’t make one out of another. You can’t dissolve one in another. Each has its own properties, its own ministers, its own laws, its own seals. You can put them in the same flask,” he drew a circle round all fourteen boxes, “and they won’t react. That’s the point. One man holds all fourteen. They never mix.” He put the chalk down. “Somebody tell me what happens if they mix.”

Nobody said anything.

“Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy.

The room did not turn round.

Frederick felt it not turn round. He felt the question come down Room 14 towards the desk by the window three from the back, and the room let it go past, the way it would have let a question about trains go past, or a question about a frog; and he understood, with a feeling he did not have a heading for, that Mr Abernathy had asked him because he was one of the three. Because his pen had moved when nobody had told it to.

“Then one Crown would be borrowing another’s authority, sir,” he said. “And the ministers of one realm would be advising on another realm’s business. And it would stop being fourteen Crowns and start being one empire with fourteen names.” He thought. “Which is what the Americans were afraid of in 1775.”

“Correct,” said Mr Abernathy, and wrote 1775 in a corner of the board, small, and drew a line from it to the circle round the boxes, and went on, to the Philippines; and beside Frederick, at the desk by the aisle, Theo, who never asked about the Crown, and never had, not once, was drawing, in the margin of his exercise book, very small, in pencil, fourteen boxes in a row, with a circle round them, and a little flask, and in the flask a single tiny figure in a scarf, standing very still, and an arrow, and beside the arrow, in capitals, DO NOT MIX.

He did not show it to Frederick. He did not need to. Frederick could see it, sideways, across the gap.

He bit the inside of his cheek.

---

The cake was Mrs Tolliver’s. She made it every year, Lucía said, for the whole school, eleven hundred slices, in tins the size of doors, a yellow sponge with white icing and a crown on it in red, piped, which every year came out looking more like a castle and every year Mrs Tolliver said was a crown and nobody argued.

This year it did not have a crown on it.

Frederick saw it as he came down the stairs into the lunch hall, behind Grant. The tins were on the counter, a row of them, under the high windows where you could see people’s feet going past, and on every tin, on the white icing, in red, piped, very carefully, by somebody who had spent a long time on it, there was not a crown but a cake.

A small cake. A rectangle, seen from the side, with a smaller rectangle on top. A line down the middle. One candle on the left half. And beside it, in very small red letters, HALF A.

He stopped on the bottom stair.

Behind the counter, Mrs Tolliver, in her apron, with her ladle, did not look at him. She was cutting the first tin into squares with a long knife, very steadily, with the radio on behind her playing something with a fiddle in it. She cut. She put the squares on plates. She did not look up once, at him or at anybody, and her face, under her hairnet, was entirely, completely, perfectly blank.

“Theo,” said Frederick, very quietly.

Theo, behind him on the stairs, looked at the counter.

“I didn’t tell her,” he said.

“Somebody did.”

“Lucía told everybody. In November. About the kit.” Theo looked at the tins. “Everybody at the table knows. And then everybody at everybody’s table. It’s been round the whole school since about November.” He paused. “It’s on the depot noticeboard as well.”

Frederick looked at the tins, at eleven hundred slices of Half A in red icing on the counter of the lunch hall at Ellicott High School on the last school day before his father’s seventy-ninth birthday, in place of a crown.

“She did it instead of the crown,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Theo. “She did.”

At the counter, Mrs Tolliver put a square of cake on a plate, the corner piece, the one with the most icing, the one with the A on it, and put the plate at the very front of the counter, by itself, a little apart from the others, without a word, and went on cutting.

And reached up behind her without looking, and turned the radio up, by about the width of a fingernail.

---

He flew to London on Saturday at nine, on an aircraft of the royal squadron, from the airfield across the river; and his mother flew at eleven, on another.

He had a present for his father in his bag. It was in a stiff card folder, so that it would not bend, and it was the second photocopy: INSTRUCTIONS FOR ASSEMBLING THE 22, his line and his stops and his tiny driver, with forty bus drivers’ corrections all over it in biro. Theo had brought it to school on Wednesday in a plastic sleeve and said Dad says you can have this one, he’s done another for the canteen, and Frederick had held it and thought about what to give a man who was seventy-nine and had fourteen Crowns and everything in the world that could be bought, and had understood, at once, standing on the wall in the snow, that this was it.

His father opened it on Monday morning, at eight, in the study.

He opened it at the desk, in the grey cardigan, with the boxes in fourteen colours on the desk and the table and the floor around him, the reds of Great Britain and America that must never be called the same red, and the mustard of Brunswick; and he took the photocopy out of the folder and put on his reading glasses and laid it flat on the desk, on top of a red box, and looked at it.

He did not say anything for a long time.

Frederick stood beside the desk in his dark suit, which he would wear on the balcony, and watched him look. He watched his father’s eyes go along the line, from left to right, from PART A: DEPOT to PART J: BOATHOUSES, slowly, the way he read an instrument, missing nothing; and stop at the biro. At 0733 crossed out and 0734 above it, AFTER THE LIGHTS ON CANAL WERE CHANGED IN OCTOBER. At NEVER APPROX, SHE IS THERE AT 0739 EVERY DAY, SET YOUR WATCH BY HER. At HER NAME IS MRS SZYMANSKA AND THE DOG IS CALLED BRUNO, and BRUNO BIT ME IN 2019. At PART C½: WHERE YOU SLOW DOWN FOR THE POTHOLE.

At IT IS NOT AS EASY AS THAT, and SPEAK FOR YOURSELF HAROLD.

At the dozen tiny drivers in the margin with a dozen tiny fingers raised, and WE ALL WAVE.

At the wall, and the two figures on it.

His father’s eyes stopped on the wall for a long time.

Then they went down, to the corner. To Best map of the 22 anybody’s ever made. Lad’s got a future in scheduling. And under it, in pencil: Is this the distant one? And under that, in blue: YES.

His father took off his reading glasses.

He sat at the desk in the study in London on the morning of his seventy-ninth birthday with the reading glasses in his hand and the photocopy in front of him on a red box, and did not say anything at all for perhaps a full minute. The clock on the wall of the study ticked. Outside the window the gardens were grey and white, with frost on the lawns, and somewhere beyond the wall the crowds were beginning in the Mall, a sound like the sea.

“Who,” said his father, at last, “is Harold?”

“He drives the twenty-two. He’s been on it since 1991. He’s going to frame his.”

His father nodded slowly.

“And who,” he said, “is the depot manager?”

“I don’t know his name. He’s never written anything on the noticeboard before except DO NOT PARK HERE.”

His father looked at the photocopy.

“Future in scheduling,” he said.

“Theo says he stood in front of it for ten minutes on Christmas Eve and then got out a pen.”

His father put the reading glasses back on. He looked at the photocopy again. He looked at the tiny driver at the depot end, DRIVER (1). WAVES., and the dozen beside him. He reached out, and put one finger on the tiny driver, the first one, the one Frederick had drawn, very lightly, the way you would touch something in a museum when nobody was looking.

“Peter,” he said. “The twenty-two. Early shifts.”

Frederick looked at him.

“You wrote it down,” he said. “In October.”

“I wrote it down,” said his father, “in October.” He took his finger off the tiny driver. “He waves.”

“At every bus going the other way. And the men on the bins. And Mrs Szymanska.” Frederick paused. “And at Castellanos. At the north wing door. On my half-birthday. With one finger. Off the wheel.”

His father did not say anything for a moment.

Then he opened the drawer of the desk, the top one, on the right, where Frederick had once seen him keep a single sheet of paper with a single sentence on it for three days before a speech; and took out a plain brown folder, and opened it.

Inside it, flat, square to the edges, there was a sheet of the Palace’s writing paper, the plain one without the crest, with a Bill on it in pencil, in Frederick’s best writing, about a radiator. For Papa. In right of America. With a reservation.

His father put the photocopy in on top of it. INSTRUCTIONS FOR ASSEMBLING THE 22. And closed the folder, and put it back in the drawer, and shut the drawer.

“Thank you,” he said. “It is the best present I have had in fifty-four years.”

“It’s a photocopy.”

“It is a photocopy of a map drawn by my son of a route driven by a man who waves, corrected by forty other men who wave, and returned to my son by a boy who sits by the aisle.” His father stood up. He was slow standing up. He had been slower this year than last, Frederick had noticed in the hall on Saturday, and had not said, and nobody had said. “There is nothing in any of these boxes I would rather have.” He took his stick from where it leaned against the desk. “Now. I have to speak to fourteen realms at noon, and your mother has views on my tie.”

---

The address was at noon. Frederick watched it from the next room, the small one off the study with the television in it and a chair by the fire, on his own, because his father did not like anybody in the room when he spoke, not even the Household, only the man with the camera and the man with the sound, who had done it every year since 1981.

It was live. It was always live. It went out at noon in London and seven in the morning in New Westminster and at every other hour in between and beyond, to every capacity at once, and his father sat at the desk in the study with the red box closed in front of him and the boxes in fourteen colours put away, and the window behind him onto the frost, and spoke for six minutes from the text on the desk in front of him, which he had written himself and did not depart from, about February, and the cold, and what it meant to keep a day in midwinter because that was when the day was, rather than move it somewhere warmer and pretend; and about the people who had kept it that morning before anybody else was up, the bakers and the nurses and the men who open the gates of the depots and drive the first buses out in the dark, so that everybody else could have the holiday; and stopped; and the light on the camera went off.

Frederick sat in the chair by the fire in the next room and looked at the television, where the picture had gone to the crowds in the Mall, and could not move.

The men who drive the first buses out in the dark.

It was nothing. It was the sort of thing his father said every year, about the people who kept the day going; one year it had been the lifeboats and one year the lighthouse keepers. Nobody in fourteen realms would hear anything in it but February. He had not said where, or which buses, or whose. He had said it the way Mr Gamage said the schoolchildren of the Realm.

But he had put his finger on the tiny driver that morning, very lightly, the way you touch something in a museum when nobody is looking; and Frederick sat in the chair by the fire and thought that, on Dunmore Street, at seven in the morning, four floors up over a bus depot, a big quiet man would be out already, at the wheel, with the first bus of the holiday, in the dark, and would not have heard it at all, and that this was, somehow, exactly right.

---

The balcony was at ten to four.

It was very cold. It was always very cold. King’s Day had been in February for fifty-four years and the balcony in London faced north-east over the forecourt and the Mall and the whole of the crowd, which went back from the railings as far as he could see, all the way down the Mall to the Arch, in coats and hats and scarves, with flags, thousands of them, small ones, on sticks, red and white and blue, going up and down like a field of wheat in a wind; and the noise of it, when the windows behind them opened and they stepped out, his father and his mother and himself, came up off the forecourt and hit the front of the house like weather.

He stood on the balcony between his parents in his dark suit and his dark coat and his mother’s green and white scarf, which she had said he might wear, because it was his scarf, and the Household could say what it liked; and he did not do anything with his face.

He had been on this balcony seven times. He had been on it at five, in 2019, and asked loudly why the guards did not move, and it had been in every newspaper in fourteen capacities the next day, and his father had not minded at all. He had been on it at six and seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven. He knew exactly how long it would be: eleven minutes, from the windows opening to the windows closing. He knew where to look: at a point over the crowd, about forty yards off, over their heads, so that they could look at him all they liked and he would not be looking back. He knew what his face did, which was nothing.

Below, in the forecourt, behind the railings, the guards stood in their scarlet tunics and their tall black bearskins, in two lines, a long way apart, motionless, the way the Regiment of Virginia had stood along the crest at Arlington; and the crowd beyond the railings looked at the balcony, and the balcony looked at the crowd, and the guards looked at nothing at all.

At four the fireworks went up over the Park.

They went up because four was dusk in February, and they had gone up at four every King’s Day for fifty-four years, while the small children in the crowd were still awake; and they burst over the bare trees of the Park in green and gold and white, and the crowd made the noise a crowd makes at fireworks, which is the same in every country in the world, a long oh, rising; and on the balcony his father, beside him, very slightly, so that nobody below could possibly have seen, leaned on his stick.

Frederick did not look at him. He looked at the fireworks.

He moved his feet, a little, on the stone of the balcony, so that he was standing an inch closer to his father; close enough that his shoulder was against his father’s arm, through the coats. And his father, without looking down, without moving anything that anybody in the Mall could see, leaned the other way, a little, off the stick, onto him.

They stood like that until the windows closed.

---

The question was at five.

It had been at five every year since 2019, by an arrangement that had started with a five-year-old shouting from a balcony and had been, by the following February, written down, by the Household, in London, in a folder, in the manner of the Household: After the balcony, the officer of the Queen’s Guard will bring one guardsman to the Prince, at the forecourt door, for one question, at the Prince’s request. It said the Queen’s Guard because it had been the Queen’s Guard since Victoria, and nobody had changed it, because nobody changed anything in that folder.

Seven years. Seven questions. He had them in his head, the way he had the arrivals at Union Station.

Why don’t you move? (Because we’re working, sir.) Are you cold? (Yes, sir.) What’s inside the hat? (Me, sir.) Do you get bored? (Every minute, sir.) What happens if you sneeze? (You sneeze, sir, and you don’t move.) Can you see me? (Yes, sir. Every year.) Have you ever had a wasp? (Not in February, sir.)

He had not prepared one this year. He realised it on the stairs, going down, with his mother on one side and the officer of the Queen’s Guard, a tall young man with a moustache and a sword, on the other. Every year since he was six he had prepared one, for weeks, the way he prepared the Bill for the Sunday game; and this year he had prepared a joke instead, about a man with a spade on his head, and given his father a photocopy, and forgotten.

The forecourt door was open. Outside, on the gravel, under the lamps, with the crowd beyond the railings thinning now in the dark and the smell of the fireworks still in the air, a guardsman was standing at attention, in the scarlet tunic and the bearskin, with his rifle, alone.

He was young. Very young, Frederick thought; not much older than Kate. He had a long thin face under the bearskin with a chinstrap, and he was looking at a point about forty yards off, over Frederick’s head, at nothing.

“Your Royal Highness,” said the officer, “Guardsman Bevan, of the Welsh Guards.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

He stood on the step of the forecourt door and looked up at Guardsman Bevan, who was looking at the point forty yards off. He did not have a question. He had always had a question. He stood there with nothing prepared, in his mother’s scarf, in the cold, and the officer waited, and his mother waited, and Guardsman Bevan looked at nothing.

“What do you look at?” said Frederick.

He had not known he was going to say it until he had said it.

Guardsman Bevan did not move. His eyes did not move. His lips, under the chinstrap, moved very slightly, the way Mr Obi’s did when he talked to the clipboard.

“Sir?”

“When you’re standing there,” said Frederick. “With everybody looking at you. All day. What do you look at?”

There was a pause.

“A lamppost, sir,” said Guardsman Bevan, to the point forty yards off. “On the Mall. About forty yards down. On the left. It’s got a dent in it, at about the height of a bus.” His lips barely moved. “You pick a thing, sir, at the start. Over their heads. And you look at it. And then they can look at you all they like, and it doesn’t matter, because you’re not there. You’re at the lamppost.” A pause. “Everybody’s got one. The sergeant’s is a pigeon. The same pigeon. He says it’s been there since 2011.”

Frederick stood on the step.

He thought about the sentry on the mat at Arlington, looking at a point in the air in front of him about level with his own eyes, which was not anything at all. He thought about Castellanos in the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, looking at the yard, at nothing in particular, the way he did. He thought about himself, on the balcony, at eleven different balconies and two thousand garden parties and the corner of a gym, looking at a point about forty yards off over everybody’s heads, so that they could look at him all they liked.

He had never known that anybody else did it.

“I do that,” he said.

Guardsman Bevan’s eyes did not move from the lamppost. But something, very slightly, under the chinstrap, at the corner of the long thin mouth, happened, and was put away.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I know. I’ve seen you. From down here. Every year.” A pause. “You’ve got a good one, sir. Over by the Arch. I’ve watched you pick it.”

“What’s yours for, then? If somebody makes you laugh?”

“Bite the inside of your cheek, sir,” said Guardsman Bevan. “Hard. On the left. Not the right, the right’s where you bite when you’re cold, and you’ll get them mixed up.” A pause. “That’s two questions, sir.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, sir,” said Guardsman Bevan, to the lamppost. “Nobody’s ever asked me the second one before.”

---

His father was in the study at six, in the grey cardigan, in the chair by the fire, with his stick across his knees and his eyes shut.

Frederick sat on the floor by the chair, with his back against the side of it and his knees up, the way he sat by his mother’s in the small sitting room in New Westminster, and his father put his hand on his hair, and did not flatten it.

“Well?” said his father, with his eyes shut. “What did you ask the guardsman?”

“What he looks at.”

His father’s hand was still.

“And what does he look at?”

“A lamppost. On the Mall. With a dent in it at the height of a bus.” Frederick looked at the fire. “He said everybody’s got one. The sergeant’s is a pigeon.”

His father did not say anything for a long time. The fire burned. Outside, beyond the window, beyond the frost on the lawns and the wall, the last of the crowd was going home down the Mall in the dark, a sound like the sea going out.

“Mine,” said his father, at last, with his eyes still shut, “is a clock. On the tower of a church in the Strand. You can see it from the balcony if you know where to look, over the roofs, to the left of the Arch.” His hand moved on Frederick’s hair, very slightly. “I picked it in 1955. On my first King’s Day on the balcony, as a boy. I was eight.” A pause. “It stopped in 1987. It has said twenty past three for thirty-nine years. I still look at it.”

Frederick sat very still.

“I’ll look at it,” said Frederick. “Next year. From the balcony.”

His father’s hand was still on his hair.

“Over the roofs,” he said. “To the left of the Arch. A church in the Strand, with a white tower.” A pause. “Twenty past three.”

“Twenty past three,” said Frederick, and they sat by the fire in the study in London on the evening of his father’s seventy-ninth birthday, with the boxes put away, and did not say anything else at all, and it was the best part of the day.