The Reply

“You’re not to help,” said Mrs Hartigan.

She said it at the door of flat sixteen, at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, before he had his shoes off; standing in the doorway in an apron, with her arms folded, the way she had stood on the step of the north wing door on the second of November, checking a list.

His mother had said it at breakfast. In Swedish. At the small table in the north wing by the window, in her dressing gown, with her coffee and the newspaper, without looking up: Hjälp honom inte. And then she had looked up, over the top of the newspaper, and said it again in English, don’t help him, so that there could be no question of which language he had misunderstood it in.

“I know,” said Frederick.

“Nobody’s to ask you anything, either,” said Mrs Hartigan. “I’ve told them. Peter. Kate, when she’s back. Him.” She tipped her head at the kitchen behind her. “If anybody asks you anything about it, anything at all, you say ask Theo. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll want to tell them,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Every five minutes. All day.” She looked at him a moment longer. “I know you will. I would.” She unfolded her arms. “Shoes.”

He took his shoes off at the rack.

---

The table had been laid for an examination.

That was what it looked like, from the door. The oilcloth wiped, and dried, and the salt and the pepper and the sauce bottle cleared away to the counter; and in the middle of it, at Theo’s place, the King’s letter, open, flat, the three cream pages laid side by side in a row, with the salt cellar holding down the corner of the third, which curled. In front of the letter, a pad of lined paper, the school kind, with holes punched down the left-hand side. And beside the pad, in a row, like instruments laid out on a cloth for an operation, three things to write with: a green pen, which was Mrs Hartigan’s; a blue biro with the transit authority’s crest on the side of it in white, which was the depot’s; and a pencil, sharpened at both ends, which was Theo’s.

Theo was sitting in front of it all with his hands flat on the oilcloth on either side of the pad, looking at it.

He looked up when Frederick came in. He did not say hi, or Freddie. He looked at him, and then at the sofa, and then back at him.

“You can sit there,” he said.

Frederick sat there.

From the sofa, he could see the back of Theo’s head, and the edge of the table, and the King’s letter in its row, and the corner of the pad. He could not see what was on the pad. He understood that this was the point of the sofa.

Mr Hartigan was in the chair by the window with the crossword, on a rest day, in his socks. He looked up over his glasses and said “Frederick,” as a statement of fact; and Frederick said “Mr Hartigan”; and Mr Hartigan looked at him a moment longer, at the boy on the sofa with his hands in his lap, and went back to the crossword with an expression of somebody who has seen a man put on a bus with no money and is not going to say anything about it.

Kate was at work. The bakery on Canal Street, Saturdays, from six. Kringle was on the windowsill over the sink, a ring of orange in the sun, asleep, and did not care about any of it.

Mrs Hartigan went to the stove.

Theo picked up the pencil, which was his, and put it down again, and picked up the depot’s biro, and wrote, on the top line of the pad, in his small square capitals that sloped very slightly backwards, one word.

Frederick could not see it. He saw the pen move, four times, and stop.

Theo looked at it for a long time.

“What do I call him?” he said.

He said it to the room. Not to anybody. To the table, and the letter, and the pad. And Frederick, on the sofa, who had been waiting since ten o’clock for exactly this, and had been told exactly what to do about it, opened his mouth before he could stop himself and said:

“Ask Theo.”

Theo turned round in his chair and looked at him.

“I am Theo,” he said.

There was a short silence. Then, from behind the crossword in the chair by the window, a sound that Frederick had heard for the first time the evening before, over a birth certificate in a plastic sleeve; a sound like a bus pulling away from a stop on a cold morning; which was Mr Hartigan, laughing.

---

“He wrote Dear Mr and Mrs Hartigan,” said Mr Hartigan, when he had finished. “So you write Dear, and then whatever he is.”

“What is he?”

Mr Hartigan considered this.

“A king,” he said.

“Dear King?”

“No,” said Mrs Hartigan, at the stove, without turning round.

“He’s not a Mr,” said Theo. “He hasn’t got a Mr.” He looked at the letter. “He signed it Ernest R. I can’t put Dear Ernest R.”

“No,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“Then what?”

Nobody said anything. Mrs Hartigan stirred. Mr Hartigan looked at the crossword. On the sofa, Frederick sat on his hands; actually sat on them, both of them, palms down, on the cushion; because the answer was in him, all of it, the whole of it, the form of address and the form of closure and the reason for both, from the little grey book in the Household office that his father’s private secretaries had used since 1972, and it was trying to come out.

“Write it down, then,” said Mr Hartigan. “What you’d say. Never mind the top. Do the top last. That’s what we do with an incident.”

“What do you do with an incident?”

Mr Hartigan put down the crossword. Not the pencil; the paper. He folded it on his knee and looked out of the window at the depot across the street, and said, slowly, in the voice that had Milwaukee in it all the way through, the way a man recites something he has written a great many times in a small room with a strip light:

“Ref. yours of the third instant. Received fourth instant, second post. Contents noted. Answer: yes. Passport to follow. T. Hartigan.”

He picked up the crossword again.

Theo looked at his father’s back for a moment. Then he turned round to the pad, and tore off the top sheet, the one with the one word on it, and folded it in half and put it under his elbow; and then, because Mrs Hartigan had turned round from the stove and was looking at the pad with an expression, he did not write on the next sheet.

“Not on that,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“Why not?”

“It’s got holes in it.”

“He won’t mind holes.”

“I’ll mind holes,” said Mrs Hartigan, and turned back to the stove.

Mr Hartigan got up. He went to the drawer under the telephone, where the takeaway menus were, and Mrs Thursby’s card, and the battered blue box of Kate’s cards; and took out, from under all of it, a sheaf of printed sheets, a quarter of an inch thick, held together with a bulldog clip. He brought them to the table and put them down beside the pad.

“Rota,” he said. “Last month’s. Blank on the back.” He went back to his chair. “Good paper, that. District paper. Eighty grams. We get through three hundred sheets a week.”

Theo took the top sheet out of the clip and turned it over. On the front, Frederick could see from the sofa, through the paper, against the light from the window, the shadow of a grid: days, and numbers, and names, and 22, 22, 9, 22, R.

Theo wrote his father’s incident on the back of it. All of it. In capitals. REF. YOURS OF THE 3RD INST. Frederick watched the pen go, steadily, all the way down to T. HARTIGAN, and stop.

Theo looked at it.

“That’s draft one,” he said, and put it to the side of the table, face up, under the pepper.

---

At twenty to eleven there was a knock.

It was not a knock Frederick knew. It was three knocks, slow, evenly spaced, with a long gap before the third, like somebody who had been told how to knock on a door by a sergeant in 1965 and had not seen a reason to change; and Mrs Hartigan wiped her hands on the tea towel with the map of Wisconsin on it and went to answer it, and said, in the passage, in a voice that had stopped being surprised by anything in this building some years ago, “Mr Dabrowski.”

He came in holding three things.

His grey felt hat, in his left hand, by the brim, over his heart. A folding chair, in his right, the same one he had sat on in the doorway of the second bedroom for six hours in March with the drill across his knees. And under his arm, held flat against his cardigan with his elbow, a box. A flat box, of pale blue card, faded almost to white along one edge where the sun had been at it, with a lid, and on the lid in a curly script, Fine Laid. 50 Sheets. 50 Envelopes.

He unfolded the chair in the doorway between the passage and the kitchen. He sat down on it, very upright. He put the hat on his knee. He put the box on top of the hat. And he looked at Theo, at the table, across the room, with his pale eyes, for a long time.

“I have come,” said Mr Dabrowski, in the voice like a door that needed oiling, “about the swan.”

---

Nobody said anything.

Frederick, on the sofa, felt his hands go still underneath him.

“I heard from Mrs Okonjo,” said Mr Dabrowski, “who heard from you, Anneliese, on Thursday, on the stairs, what he said. To the boy. In the corridor.” He looked at Theo. “That he had a letter from your mother in green. And that it was the first letter he had had in green since 1981. And that it was better than the other one.” He paused. “Which was about a swan.”

He opened the box on his knee.

Inside it, on top of a stack of cream paper, not quite as cream as it had been, there was a single sheet in a clear plastic sleeve. He took it out and held it up, at the end of his arm, towards the kitchen, so that they could see it. A typed letter. Short. On thick white paper, with a crest at the top, in blue, the crest Frederick had seen at the top of every piece of paper in his life that had not been written by hand.

“March, 1981,” said Mr Dabrowski. “There was a swan on the canal behind the depot. With fishing line round its leg, and round its wing. It could not fly. It went up and down by the lock gates for three days, dragging itself. And a man in the Eagle on Kearney Street told me that all the swans belong to the King.” He lowered the letter. “So I wrote and told him one of his was hurt.”

“In green,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“It was the only pen in the flat.” Mr Dabrowski looked at her. “I was thirty-five. I had been here two years. I did not know anybody. I addressed it To the King, New Westminster, because I did not know where else he lived.” He looked at the letter in its sleeve. “It got there.”

He read it to them. He held it at the end of his arm and read it in the door-hinge voice, every word, the way a man reads a thing he has read so many times that he no longer needs to look at it, and looks at it anyway.

“Dear Sir. I am commanded by His Majesty to thank you for your letter of the ninth of March, and to tell you that the swans of the Columbia District are not his, but the District’s. His Majesty has nevertheless asked me to pass your letter to those whose they are, and has asked me to say that he hopes the swan recovers. Yours faithfully.” He lowered it. “And then a name. Which I could never read.”

“And did it?” said Theo. “Recover?”

“A man from the District came the next Tuesday,” said Mr Dabrowski, “in a van, with a net and a pair of scissors. It bit him.” He put the letter back in its sleeve, and the sleeve back in the box, on top of the paper. “And then it flew away.”

There was a silence in the kitchen of flat sixteen.

“Of course it was,” said Mrs Hartigan, to the stove, to nobody. “Of course it was you.”

“This building,” said Mr Hartigan, behind the crossword.

---

Frederick sat on his hands and did not say anything at all.

He was thinking about the corridor. About his father at the end of the East Gallery, on Wednesday, at eighteen minutes to six, with the Private Secretary looking at his watch; saying it was a great deal better than the other one, which was about a swan; and about his father’s face, which Frederick had seen do the thing it did when it made a joke that only one person in the room would understand, except that there had not been anybody in the corridor who could possibly have understood it. Theo had not. Frederick had not. The Private Secretary had looked at the floor.

He had thought it was a joke for nobody. His father made them sometimes, at the Sunday call, a small dry remark into the telephone that went to London and back and was not for anybody but himself.

He looked at the old man on the folding chair in the doorway, in his cardigan, with the box on his hat on his knee.

He did not know whether his father had known. Whether there was a file. Whether forty-five years ago a letter in green ink about a swan, addressed To the King, New Westminster, from a man of thirty-five on Dunmore Street who knew nobody, had gone into a drawer in the Household with a name on it that somebody could read; and whether, this spring, when the Household made its lists, as it did, and the King read them, as he did, a name on the first floor of number forty had been on one of them.

He thought, on balance, that it probably had.

He bit the inside of his cheek, on the left.

---

“So,” said Mr Dabrowski.

He held the box out, across the kitchen, at the end of his arm.

“Fine laid,” he said. “I bought it in 1979. When I moved in. I thought I would write a great many letters.” He looked at it. “I have written four. One to my sister. One to the District about the drains. One to the King about the swan. And one to my sister’s husband, when she died.” He held it out. “Forty-six sheets. Forty-six envelopes. You do not write to a king on the back of a rota, Theodore.”

Theo got up from the table and crossed the kitchen and took it.

“Thank you, Mr Dabrowski,” he said.

“Sir,” said Mr Dabrowski.

Theo looked at him.

“At the top,” said Mr Dabrowski. “That is what you call him. Sir. That is what they taught us in the army, for a letter to anybody above a captain. Sir, at the top. And at the bottom, I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Majesty’s most obedient servant.” He nodded. “And then your name. Underneath. Clearly. So that he can read it.”

“I’m not his servant,” said Theo.

Mr Dabrowski looked at him for a long time from the folding chair, with his pale eyes.

“No more am I,” he said. “I was a soldier for two years and a machinist for forty. It is a way of saying goodbye, Theodore. Nobody means it. That is why everybody says it.” He put his hat back on. “I will stay,” he said, “if nobody minds. In case there are any more questions about the army.”

Nobody minded. He stayed. He sat on the folding chair in the doorway, very upright, in his hat, for the rest of the day.

---

Theo went back to the table with the box. He took out one sheet of the cream paper, not quite as cream as it had been, and held it up to the window at arm’s length, as though it might be a forgery; and Frederick, on the sofa, saw the lines in it, the faint laid lines, close together, like the lines in a field from a train. The same lines that were in his father’s paper.

Theo put it down and looked at it. He did not write anything on it.

He went back to the pad with the holes, which his mother had not seen him take out again, and wrote SIR on the top line, in capitals, and looked at it, and crossed it out, and wrote it again underneath, and did not cross that one out.

---

Mrs Hartigan’s draft began at half past eleven, at the stove, over the soup.

It began as help. She stood with her back to the table, stirring, and said, you’ll want to thank him for thinking of the hospital; and Theo, at the table, wrote it down. And she said and for the dates, for not taking you on your birthday; and he wrote that down. And she said and say you’ve got a jersey. Two. And say I’ll send a raincoat. And ask, ask nicely, whether there’s a lifejacket in those canoes, because he didn’t say, and I want to know. And say we’ll meet the aeroplane. Both of us. Say Peter’s swapped already.

“Have you?” said Theo, over his shoulder.

“Thursday,” said Mr Hartigan, behind the crossword. “Twenty-seventh. Swapped with Doug. Did it Friday.” He turned a page. “Doug’s having my Christmas.”

“And say,” said Mrs Hartigan, stirring, “that his nan in Milwaukee will want to know, and can she be told, or is it a secret. And say what time he should be at the airfield, because it doesn’t say, it only says the morning, and the morning is a long time. And say that we’re very grateful, and that it’s very kind, and that we know it’s very kind, and that we don’t, that we haven’t…”

She stopped stirring.

Theo had stopped writing. He was sitting at the table with the biro over the pad, in the middle of a line, with a page and a half written and the end of a sentence hanging off the edge of the paper, we haven’t; and he was looking at the back of his mother at the stove, with the long wooden spoon still in the pot and her hand still on it.

“Mum,” he said. “This is you.”

Mrs Hartigan did not turn round.

It was a long time. The soup went on. On the windowsill over the sink, Kringle opened one yellow eye at the silence, and shut it again.

“Yes,” said Mrs Hartigan.

She took the spoon out of the pot and laid it across the top. She turned the gas down. She dried her hands on the tea towel with Wisconsin on it, and came to the table, and sat down at the other end of it, in her own place; and reached across, and took a sheet of Mr Dabrowski’s cream paper out of the box, and the green pen, and pulled them both towards her.

“He wrote to us,” she said. “To Peter and me. Dear Mr and Mrs Hartigan.” She uncapped the green pen. “So we’ll answer him. I will.” She looked down the table at her son. “You answer for you.”

And she began to write.

Frederick watched her from the sofa. She wrote the way she ironed, and cooked, and dealt with the District, and the landlord, and the school, and the Household, and its cards with the gold edges and its nice lady with the folder: steadily, without stopping, without looking up, in green, from the top left-hand corner of the page to the bottom right, with no crossings-out, not one. She did not write in drafts. Nor did his father.

She wrote two pages. It took her eleven minutes. Then she capped the green pen and read it through once, and signed it, and turned round in her chair and held it out, without looking, towards the window, where Mr Hartigan put down the crossword and got up and came and took it, and read it, standing, with his glasses on, slowly, like the crossword; and took the depot biro off the table, and bent down, and wrote something at the bottom, under her name, short, in biro.

Then he gave it back to her, and went back to his chair.

“What did you put?” said Mrs Hartigan.

“Contents noted,” said Mr Hartigan, from behind the crossword. “Yes. P. H.”

Mrs Hartigan looked at the bottom of her letter for a long time.

Then she folded it in three, and put it in one of Mr Dabrowski’s envelopes, and did not seal it, and put it on the table at Theo’s elbow, beside draft one under the pepper and the page and a half of herself that had been draft two.

“There,” she said. She got up. She went back to the soup. “Now it’s only you.”

---

They had lunch at half past twelve: the soup, which was potato, with bacon in it, and bread, and Mr Dabrowski had a bowl on his knee on the folding chair in the doorway, with his hat on; and nobody said anything about the letter, or the King, or Lac du Roi, or swans.

Kate came home at one.

She came in with flour in her hair and on her black T-shirt and in the creases of her elbows, and a paper bag of yesterday’s rolls, and a temper; and stopped in the passage, and looked at Mr Dabrowski on his folding chair in the doorway in his hat, and at Frederick on the sofa sitting on his hands, and at her mother at the stove, and at her father with the crossword, and at her brother at the table, with a box of cream paper and two envelopes and a pad with SIR on it twice and a rota under the pepper; and said, in a voice that went up the whole scale and came down again:

“You started?”

“At ten,” said Theo.

“Without me?”

“You were at the bakery.”

“You could have waited.” Kate put the bag of rolls down on the counter with a thump that made Kringle sit up. “It’s Saturday. I get off at one. Everybody knows I get off at one.” She looked at the envelopes. “What’s that? Is that done? Is one done?”

“Mum’s,” said Theo. “And Dad’s. It’s sealed.”

“It’s not sealed,” said Kate, who could see. “It’s tucked.”

“It’s private,” said Mrs Hartigan.

Kate looked at the envelope with deep suspicion. Then she pulled out her own chair, beside her mother’s, and sat down in it, in her flour, and folded her arms on the oilcloth, and looked down the table at her brother with an expression of somebody arriving at a meeting she has been left out of and intends to dominate.

“Right,” she said. “The cat’s mine.”

---

“He’s everybody’s,” said Theo.

“He sleeps on my side.” This was true. Theo had complained about it on the wall for most of April. “He’s slept on my side since March. He’s mine. The King asked about him. In writing. So the answer about him is mine.”

“It’s a P.S.,” said Theo. “It’s one line.”

“Then it’s my line.”

They looked at each other down the length of the table, brother and sister, with the cream paper between them, and the green pen, and the depot biro; and Frederick watched it happen, the thing he had watched happen at this table for three months on Fridays and still did not have a word for, in Swedish or English or the language of the Household: an argument in which both people had already decided to give way and were arguing about which of them would get to.

Theo pushed the box of cream paper down the table.

Kate took out a sheet. She took the pencil, Theo’s, sharpened at both ends. She bent over the sheet, with her elbow round it, the way you do in a test when the person next to you is a cheat, and wrote for four minutes, very fast, with her tongue between her teeth; and then sat up and read it, under her breath, moving her lips; and then held it out across the table to her brother.

He read it. He did not say anything. His mouth did something at the corner.

“Read it out,” said Mr Hartigan, from the window.

“No,” said Kate.

“Read it out,” said Mrs Hartigan, from the stove.

Kate looked at the ceiling. Then she took the sheet back, and read it out, very fast, in the voice of somebody reading her own work in front of a class:

“Kringle has recovered from the winter. In May he caught a pigeon on the kitchen windowsill and did not know what to do with it, so he let it go, and it came back the next morning and sat on the same windowsill, and he has not caught it again, and they look at each other through the glass. On Friday he sat on your letter. He has never sat on a letter before, not even the gas bill. Yours faithfully, Kate Hartigan (his sister).”

She put it face down on the table.

“Yours faithfully,” said Mr Dabrowski, from the doorway, with approval. “That is correct. For somebody you have not met.”

Kate turned round in her chair and looked at Frederick on the sofa.

“Does he like cats?”

Frederick opened his mouth.

“Ask Theo,” said Mrs Hartigan, at the stove, before he could say anything at all.

“Theo doesn’t know.”

“I don’t know,” Theo agreed.

“Then what’s the point of…” Kate looked at Frederick, sitting on his hands on the sofa, with the inside of his cheek between his teeth, and stopped. Something happened at her face. She looked at him a moment longer; then she turned back round to the table and unfolded her arms and put her chin in her hand.

“Fine,” she said. “He’ll like this one.”

---

At two o’clock Mr Hartigan put down the crossword and got up and put his shoes on.

Nobody asked him where he was going. Frederick knew. Theo had told him, at lunch, the week before: he goes to the depot when he doesn’t know what to say. He watched Mr Hartigan go out of the door past Mr Dabrowski’s chair, saying Tomasz as he passed, as a statement of fact; and Mr Dabrowski saying Peter; and the door shutting; and, through the steamed kitchen window, a few minutes later, four floors down, a man in a checked shirt crossing Dunmore Street between the buses to the gate in the green-painted railings of the depot, without looking left or right, the way a man crosses a road he has crossed every day for ten months.

He came back at five past three, with a sheet of paper.

He put it on the table in front of Theo without a word, and went back to his chair by the window, and took off his shoes, and picked up the crossword.

It was a duty roster. Torn off a pad, at the top, raggedly; printed on the front; and on the back, in biro, in about thirty different hands, some of them capitals and some of them joined up and one of them, Frederick thought, from the slope of it, in the left hand of somebody who was right-handed, under a heading that somebody had written very large, and underlined twice:

THINGS FOR THEO TO PUT IN THE LETTER.

Theo read it.

He read it slowly, all the way down, and then he did a thing Frederick had never seen him do at a table, which was to put his forehead down on the oilcloth beside the sheet, slowly, and leave it there.

“Read it out,” said Kate.

Theo did not lift his head.

So Kate reached across and took it, and read it out, in her class voice, and by the third line she had stopped using the class voice, and by the sixth she could not use any voice at all.

“SAY YES. SAY YES YOU IDIOT. HAROLD SAYS THANK YOU. TELL HIM THERE IS A NEW ONE ON KEARNEY STREET OUTSIDE THE LAUNDERETTE. REPORTED TWICE. HAROLD. HAROLD CRIED. HAROLD DID NOT CRY. HAROLD. BRUNO HAS BITTEN SOMEBODY ELSE. TAKE A JERSEY. ASK HIM IF THE CANOES LEAK. DON’T ASK HIM IF THE CANOES LEAK. TELL HIM THE 9 WAS LATE ON THURSDAY AGAIN AND STILL NOBODY KNOWS WHY. BRING US BACK A FISH. DO NOT BRING US BACK A FISH. MANAGEMENT. WE ALL WAVE.”

She stopped. She put the sheet down. She put both hands over her face.

On the folding chair in the doorway, Mr Dabrowski said, gravely, from under his hat: “The fish is a reasonable request.”

On the sofa, Frederick sat on his hands, with the inside of his cheek between his teeth so hard that he could taste it, and looked at the ceiling of flat sixteen, which had a crack in it shaped like the Ohio river, and thought very carefully about the timetable of the 22, every stop, both directions, Saturdays, until it was safe to look down.

---

At four o’clock Mrs Okonjo came up.

She came up the stairs, all four flights, at eighty-one, without the lift, because it was not her hour; and Frederick heard her coming from the second landing, a step and then a pause and then a step, the way Castellanos took stairs and his father took corridors. Mrs Hartigan went to the door before she knocked.

She did not come in. She stood in the passage, behind Mr Dabrowski’s folding chair, in a dark blue coat with a brooch on it, though it was June, and a hat with a small dark feather, and held out a tin. A cake tin. Round, and dented, with roses on the lid.

“Ginger,” she said, in the voice like a church. “For the writing.”

Mrs Hartigan took it.

Mrs Okonjo looked past her, past Mr Dabrowski in his hat, down the passage and into the kitchen, at the table: at the boy at it, with his forehead no longer on the oilcloth but propped on one fist, among his drafts, the rota under the pepper, and the page and a half of his mother, and the pad with SIR on it twice, and the canteen’s list, and his sister’s sheet face down, and the box of cream paper from 1979, and the King’s three pages, in their row, under the salt.

“Theodore,” she said.

Theo looked up.

“Write to him as you would pray,” said Mrs Okonjo.

Nobody said anything.

“Thank him first,” said Mrs Okonjo. “Do not tell him things he already knows. Do not ask him for anything you can do for yourself.” She looked at him a moment longer, with her old dark steady eye. “And stop when you have finished.”

She turned round. She went back down the stairs, a step and then a pause and then a step, all four flights; and they listened to her go, all of them, in the kitchen and the passage and on the sofa and the folding chair, without moving, until the door of the second floor shut.

“Do not ask him for anything you can do for yourself,” said Mrs Hartigan, quietly, at the stove, to the cake tin.

She did not say anything else. But she looked at the tucked envelope on the table, the one with her green pages in it; and Frederick saw her decide something about it, at the face, and not say what.

---

Theo stood up at a quarter past four.

He gathered everything on the table into a pile. All of it. Draft one, from under the pepper. The page and a half of his mother. The canteen’s list. Kate’s sheet, face down. The pad with the holes and SIR twice. He squared the pile with both hands, on the oilcloth, the way Dame M squared the papers on her desk at the end of a morning; and put it to one side.

He took one sheet out of Mr Dabrowski’s box, and the depot biro. He did not take the green pen. He did not take his pencil.

He looked at the room. At his mother at the stove, and his father in the chair, and his sister in flour, and Mr Dabrowski in the doorway in his hat. He did not look at the sofa.

“I’m going to do it on my own,” he said.

Nobody moved.

There was nowhere for anybody to go. That was the thing about flat sixteen; Frederick had known it since March. The kitchen and the sitting room were one room, and the passage was the other side of Mr Dabrowski’s chair, and the bathroom was the bathroom, and the only other room was the second bedroom, with the room divider down the middle of it on the grey worn line, three pale wooden panels and a curtain across the gap, which Frederick had held the spirit level for, and which said, on the bottom rail at the end by the window, in pencil, in four sets of initials and a date, that it had been put up straight.

Theo looked at the second bedroom.

Then he picked up the sheet of cream paper and the depot biro and the King’s three pages from under the salt, and went into it, and through the gap in the room divider, to his side; and pulled the curtain across behind him.

---

He was in there for forty minutes.

Nobody said anything for all of them. Mrs Hartigan turned the gas off under the pot and sat down at the table in her place with her hands in her lap. Mr Hartigan held the crossword and did not do it; Frederick watched him not do it, for forty minutes, with the pencil behind his ear. Kate sat at the table in her flour with her chin on her fists, looking at the curtain, and could not go to her side of the room, because it was on the other side of the curtain, and said so once, in a whisper, and was looked at by both her parents at once and did not say so again. Mr Dabrowski sat on the folding chair in the doorway in his hat with his hands on his knees, as he had sat on a parade ground in the rain in 1965, waiting for a king who might or might not stop.

Frederick sat on the sofa, on his hands.

He did not think about what Theo was writing. He made himself not think about it, the way he had made himself think about the 22. He thought about his father’s desk in London instead, the one in the room above the garden, with the top worn pale where his wrists went, where the letters were put every morning at eight in a wooden tray, and his father read them before the boxes, with his glasses on, every one, and put the ones in handwriting on the left. He thought about a cream envelope, from 1979, in the tray, on the left.

At twenty to five Kringle got down off the windowsill.

He walked along the counter, and down, and across the lino of the kitchen, very slowly, past the table and Kate’s feet and Mrs Hartigan’s chair, the way he walked, like a cat who owns the building and is inspecting a tenancy; and across the carpet of the sitting room, past the sofa, where he looked at Frederick sitting on his hands and did not stop; and into the second bedroom, and along the grey worn line, to the gap in the room divider; and put his head under the curtain, and the rest of him after it, and was gone.

Behind the curtain, after a moment, very quietly, Theo said “Hi.”

Kate looked at the curtain as though it had sold her.

“He’s allowed to help,” she whispered, “and I’m not?”

“He’s not helping,” said Mr Hartigan, very low, from behind the crossword he was not doing. “He’s sitting on it.”

---

At five o’clock the curtain moved.

Theo came out, with the sheet of cream paper in his hand, folded once, and the King’s three pages, and the depot biro, and Kringle walking behind him with his tail up, as though the whole thing had been his idea. He came into the kitchen. He stood by the table.

“Done,” he said.

Mrs Hartigan looked at him from her chair. She did not ask to see it. She looked at him the way she had looked at Frederick on the north wing step, and at the door this morning: checking a list. Then she turned in her chair and looked at the sofa.

“Frederick,” she said. “Would you see Mr Dabrowski to the lift.”

---

He saw Mr Dabrowski to the lift.

It took a long time. Mr Dabrowski stood up from the folding chair, slowly, in stages, the way he did everything, with one hand on the door frame; and folded the chair, which did not want to be folded, and had to be told; and put it under his arm; and said, to the kitchen, Anneliese, thank you for the soup; and to Theo, by the table, with the folded sheet in his hand, Sir, at the top, Theodore; and went out into the passage, and out of the door of flat sixteen, onto the landing, where the spider plant was on the sill of the window that looked down into the depot yard.

Frederick went with him, and pulled the door to behind them, not quite shut.

The lift was on the ground floor. Mr Dabrowski pressed the button, and they stood on the landing and listened to it think about it, a long way down, and begin to come up, with a hum and a clank, past the second floor, where the radio was singing behind Mrs Okonjo’s door, and the third, where the bicycle was.

Behind them, through the door of flat sixteen, which was not quite shut, Frederick heard Theo begin to read.

He did not hear the words. He heard the voice. Low and steady, the voice Theo used for nothing, not for jokes and not for teachers and not for Kate; the voice Frederick had heard perhaps three times since September. Going on, steadily, for about a minute. Stopping.

Then Kate laughed. Once. Out loud. And then stopped, as though somebody had put a hand on her arm.

Then nothing, for a long time.

Then Mr Hartigan’s voice, low and slow, with Milwaukee in it all the way through, saying one word, which Frederick did hear, through the gap in the door, quite clearly, because he had heard Theo say it on the wall on Friday morning at the end of an apple, in the same voice, and now knew where Theo had got it.

“Huh.”

And then Mrs Hartigan, saying something in German, short, with no nouns in it.

Mr Dabrowski, beside him, with the chair under his arm and his hat on, looked at the lift doors.

“Your father,” he said, to the doors. “He remembers things.”

It was not a question about the letter. Frederick thought about it, on the landing, beside the spider plant, very carefully, and decided that it was not. It was a question about a swan.

“Yes,” he said.

“Everything?”

Frederick thought.

“Everything that’s written down,” he said.

Mr Dabrowski nodded, slowly, under the hat.

“Then I am glad I wrote it down,” he said.

The lift came. The steel door with the small round window opened. Mr Dabrowski stepped into it, very upright, with the chair under his arm, and turned round, and stood with his hand on the rail; and looked out at Frederick on the landing, with his pale eyes, as the door began to shut.

“A long way,” said Mr Dabrowski.

The door shut. The lift went down.

---

Theo opened the door of flat sixteen a minute later and looked at him on the landing.

“You can come back in,” he said. “I’ve finished.”

He came back in.

On the table, the pile of drafts had gone, all of it, the rota and the pad and the page and a half and the canteen’s list; somewhere, Frederick did not see where. The King’s three pages were folded again in three, and back in their cream envelope, and the envelope was in the drawer of the sideboard, he guessed, because the drawer was not quite shut. There were two things left on the oilcloth.

One was the envelope from Mr Dabrowski’s box, with his mother’s green pages tucked into it, and his father’s contents noted, and nothing written on the front.

The other was a single sheet of cream laid paper, folded once, lying beside it. Theo’s. With Kate’s sheet folded small inside it, Frederick could see from the edge, and the canteen’s list folded smaller still inside that.

Frederick did not look at it. He looked at the salt cellar.

“It’s not signed,” said Theo.

He said it to the table. He sat down at his place, in front of the folded sheet, and put his hands flat on the oilcloth on either side of it, the way he had sat at ten o’clock in front of the pad with the holes.

“Why not?” said Frederick.

He had not meant to ask. But it was not a question about the letter. He had decided that on the landing. It was a question about Theo.

“Because I don’t know how,” said Theo. “Mr Dabrowski says obedient servant. Kate says love.”

“As a joke,” said Kate, from the stove, where she had gone to look in Mrs Okonjo’s tin.

“Mum says yours sincerely. Dad says T. Hartigan, like a defect sheet.” Theo looked at the folded paper. “And none of them’s it.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet.” Theo picked up the folded sheet and put it in the envelope from 1979, behind his mother’s green pages, and tucked the flap in, and did not seal it. “I’ll know when I know.”

Mrs Hartigan, at the table, held out her hand for the envelope. He gave it to her. She uncapped the green pen and wrote on the front of it, steadily, without stopping, in green:

His Majesty the King

Columbia Palace

New Westminster

She capped the pen. She gave the envelope back to her son.

“It goes when his goes,” she said, to Frederick, across the table, as though he had asked. “One envelope.” And to Theo: “When you know.”

Theo put it in his school bag, in the front pocket, the one with the zip, where he kept his bus pass and his library card and nothing else; and zipped it.

---

He went down the four flights at half past five, in his shoes, past the spider plant, and the bicycle, and the radio singing behind Mrs Okonjo’s door, and Mr Dabrowski’s door on the first floor, behind which, very loud, a game show had begun; and out of the green door with the brick in it onto Dunmore Street, into the sun, and the smell of diesel and hot tarmac from the depot.

The car was at the corner, under the streetlamp that was not on yet. The man in the newsagent’s on the other corner was looking at it. Castellanos was in the driver’s seat with the crossword folded on the wheel, and he looked up as Frederick came along the pavement, and put the crossword away, and leaned across and opened the door from the inside.

Frederick got in.

They drove. Down Dunmore Street, past the depot gates, where a 22 was coming out, slowly, with NOT IN SERVICE on the front; and the driver of it, a large man with a moustache whom Frederick did not know, saw the dark blue car, and lifted one finger off the wheel. Castellanos lifted one back.

“Good day, sir?” said Castellanos, at the lights, to the windscreen.

Frederick thought about it.

“I didn’t help,” he said.

“No, sir,” said Castellanos.

The lights changed. They went on, towards the river and the Axis and the Palace, with the sun behind them.

“Hardest thing there is, sir,” said Castellanos, after a while, to the windscreen. “Not helping.”

Frederick looked at the back of his head.

“How do you know?”

“I sit in a custodian’s office all day, sir,” said Castellanos. “With a kettle. Since September.” He indicated, and turned onto the Axis. “I’d know.”