Sunday at Four

At a quarter to four on Sunday Frederick was in the small sitting room in the north wing with a card in his hand, waiting for the telephone.

He had been there since twenty to. He was always there by twenty to. He sat in the chair by the side table where the telephone was, a cream telephone on a curly cord, older than he was, which was the telephone his father rang, and which nobody else in the Palace ever rang, because everybody else rang the other telephones, the new ones; so that it was in effect a telephone with one number in it, and rang once a week, and had done for as long as he could remember, at four.

The card was an index card, white, with lines, and on it, in pencil, in his smallest writing, was the Bill.

He had been working on it since Wednesday. He always started on Wednesday. On Sunday his father asked him a question, and he answered it, and then it was his turn, and he set his father one back, a hard one, a made-up one; and the made-up one had to be properly made up, with a place it was introduced and a subject and a complication, or it did not count, and his father would say that is not a Bill, Frederick, that is a wish, and they would have to start again. So he started on Wednesday. Most weeks it took him until Saturday to get one he was satisfied with. This week it had taken until half past two this afternoon, when he had rubbed out the whole of the middle and written it again, and it was, he thought, the best one he had ever done.

His mother put her head round the door at ten to four.

She did not come in. She never came in for the telephone; it was his. She stood in the doorway with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a piece of knitting in her hand, something long and dark green, on four needles, which she had started on Thursday and would not say what it was.

“Is it a good one?” she said, in Swedish.

“It’s very good.”

“Is it too good? You remember the one about the whales.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“It was in March.” She looked at the card in his hand. “He was up until two in the morning. Ebba heard it from his Private Secretary. He had the Fisheries Acts of three realms out on the floor of the study. He rang the Keeper of something at midnight.”

“He liked it.”

“He loved it, älskling. That is the trouble.” She went away with her knitting. “Tell him I said nine o’clock is late enough.”

---

At four o’clock exactly the telephone rang.

It always rang at four o’clock exactly. Not one minute past. Not when the second hand on the clock on the mantelpiece reached the twelve, even, but when the minute hand did, the way a train is on time when the doors close and not when it arrives. Frederick had tested this once, at eight, with a stopwatch, and it had been four o’clock and three seconds, which he thought was probably the time it took a telephone call to cross the Atlantic, and he had told his father so, and his father had said that it was in fact the time it took the switchboard at Buckingham Palace to say putting you through, sir, and that he had timed it too.

He picked it up.

“Hello.”

“Frederick.”

His father’s voice, from London, at nine o’clock at night, in the study. He knew exactly where. He had been in the study perhaps twenty times in his life, and every one of them he remembered: the long room on the first floor with the window onto the gardens, and the desk, very large and very plain, and the boxes. There were always boxes. They stood on the desk and on a table beside it and on the floor, in fourteen colours, one colour for each of the Crowns, so that you could tell from the door which realm was waiting: the two reds of Great Britain and America, which were not the same red and must never be called the same red, and the green of Ireland, and a dark yellow for Brunswick that Frederick thought was the colour of mustard and his father said was the colour of the Brunswick lion, which was not, in Frederick’s view, a colour that lions came in. His father would be in the chair at the desk, in the grey cardigan he wore in the evenings over his shirt, with the lamp on, and the telephone, and a fountain pen, and a pad of paper, because his father never spoke on a telephone without a pad of paper, in case.

“Hello, Papa.”

“Good afternoon.”

“Good evening.”

“It is both,” said his father. “That is the point of the arrangement.” A pause, in which Frederick could hear London: nothing, mainly, a sort of thick soft quiet like a curtain. “How are you?”

“Well, thank you. How are you?”

“Tired,” said his father, which he always said, and which Frederick had worked out at about nine was not a complaint but a fact, offered in the same spirit as the time. “There has been a great deal of New Wessex this week. They are reforming their Upper House, and the Upper House is resisting, which Upper Houses do. I have had to read the whole of the debate. In right of New Wessex, naturally, and on the advice of New Wessex ministers, who are very courteous and have sent me eleven hundred pages.” The faint scratch of the pen on the pad. “How is school?”

---

He told him.

He had been telling him about school every Sunday for five weeks, and he had found that it was the best part of the week, after the game, and possibly including it. His father listened. That was the thing. His father, who had listened to Prime Ministers of fourteen realms for fifty-three years, listened to him in exactly the same way, with the pen, with questions, so that by the end of it Frederick had always said more than he had meant to, because the questions found the parts he had left out.

He told him about the radiator. His father asked what the valve had been, and whether it had been a square drive or a slot, and Frederick said a slot, and his father said that the use of a ten-pence piece on a slotted bleed valve was perfectly orthodox and that the fault lay with whoever had not bled it since 1994, and asked who that had been, and Frederick said Mr Abernathy, and his father said ah, and wrote something down.

He told him about Mr Pavlik’s office, and the eighteen inches, and his father asked whether the Inspector had sat in the chair, and for how long, and Frederick said forty minutes, and his father said that was a long time for an Inspector, and that it was the best evidence there was that the room was right, and wrote that down too.

He told him about Ms Varga and the bowl of fruit, and his father was quiet for a moment and then said that he had once been told by an art master at school in 1959 that his drawing of a horse looked like a statement of accounts, and that he had treasured it ever since, and that it was the only thing he remembered about art.

He told him about somos.

“Without a question mark,” said his father.

“She said it isn’t a question.”

“No.” The pen. “It isn’t, is it.”

---

“And who,” said his father, “sits beside you?”

Frederick had known it was coming. His father asked it every week. He had asked it the first Sunday, and Frederick had said a boy called Hartigan, from Milwaukee, and his father had said Hartigan, from Milwaukee and written it down, and the next week he had asked again, and Frederick had said the same boy, and his father had said good, and the week after that he had asked again; and Frederick had understood, at about the third week, that his father was not asking because he had forgotten. He was asking to find out whether it was still the same boy. Because it was a question which had an answer that could change.

“Hartigan,” he said. “Still.”

“Good,” said his father. “In right of which Crown?”

Frederick looked at the telephone.

“Papa, that’s not the game. The game’s Acts.”

“I am aware that it is not the game. I am asking a different question. It has the same shape.” The pen. “The boy is from Milwaukee. Milwaukee is in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin. The Grand Duchy of Wisconsin is a polity of the United Kingdom of America. So he is my subject in right of America, and he is the Grand Duke’s in right of nothing, because the Grand Duke has no subjects, only a Landtag. And he is at school in the Columbia District, which is in right of America as well, and directly so, since the District has no polity of its own between it and the Crown.” A pause. “So: in right of America. Twice. Once by birth and once by residence.”

“And Cork,” said Frederick.

There was a silence on the line from London.

“Cork,” said his father.

“His family’s from Cork. Originally. He said. That’s why he’s called Hartigan. And they speak German at home. Wisconsindeutsch. So he’s Irish and German and from Wisconsin and he lives in the District.” Frederick considered. “That’s four.”

He heard his father put the pen down.

That did not often happen. His father put the pen down perhaps once a month on the telephone, and when he did, it was because he had decided that whatever came next did not need writing, which meant either that it was too important to write down or that it was not important at all, and Frederick could never tell which until he heard what it was.

“Ireland,” said his father, “is a separate Crown. In right of which I am also his King, if his family are from Cork, which they are not, since they are from Milwaukee, originally being a word that covers a great deal of ground.” A pause. “And German is not a Crown at all, it is a language, and Wisconsindeutsch is not even quite that, in the view of a great many people in Madison, who have been arguing about it for a century. And Wisconsin is a polity. And the District is a District.” The pause got longer. “So I make it one Crown, twice, and three things that are not Crowns, and a great deal of history.”

“Yes.”

“Which,” said his father, “is the most American thing I have heard in a week of New Wessex.”

Frederick did not know whether that was a joke. He thought it might be. With his father it was always very difficult to tell, because his father’s jokes and his father’s statements of fact came out of him at the same speed in the same voice, and you had to wait and see whether anything happened next, and usually nothing did, and you never found out.

He waited. Nothing happened.

“What does his father do?” said his father.

---

He told him that too.

He had not known he knew it until he said it. But Theo talked, on the wall, at break, with the apple; not about anything in particular, and never about anything Frederick was, which Frederick had noticed and did not know what to do with; but about the flat, and the depot, and the man whose brother had trees. So Frederick knew, it turned out, quite a lot.

“He drives a bus,” he said. “The twenty-two. It goes past the school. It stops by the bike racks. He starts at six, because he likes the early shifts. He waves at every bus going the other way, and at the men on the bins, and at a lady on Canal Street who walks her dog at the same time every morning.” He thought. “He’s called Peter. He does the crossword.”

The pen was up again. He could hear it.

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

“Yes.”

“And his mother?”

“She’s a nurse.” He thought harder. Theo had said something about it, on the wall, on Thursday, when Lucía asked why he had come in late. Mum was on nights. She’s on the acute ward. She was getting in when I was getting up, and she made me wait while she told me about a man who swallowed a key. “In acute medicine. At a hospital here. She was on nights last week. She’s called Anneliese.”

“Anneliese.” The pen. “Acute medicine.”

There was a pause, and Frederick heard his father turn a page on the pad.

He did not ask why his father wanted to know. He knew why. His father wrote everything down. His father had kept a pad by the telephone since before Frederick was born, and on it he wrote the names of the people Frederick talked about, and the names of their dogs, and the subjects they were good at and the subjects they were not, and what their fathers did, so that the next Sunday, or the Sunday after that, or months after that, he could say and how is Grant’s ear or did the Paredes girl find out about the moon; and Frederick had always assumed that this was simply what his father did with everything, the way he did it with the New Wessex Upper House and the Brunswick lion: he kept the record. It did not occur to him to think about it any more than he thought about the clock on the mantelpiece.

“I have been told,” said his father, “something else.”

Frederick sat very still.

“I have been told,” said his father, in exactly the same voice, at exactly the same speed, the voice for New Wessex, “by the Master of the Household, in her note of the twelfth, which comes to me with the papers, and in which she records events in your life that she thinks I would wish to know, that you have acquired a diminutive.”

Frederick looked at the card in his hand with the Bill on it.

“She does not say what it is,” said his father. “She says only that it was acquired on the ninth, in mathematics, over a pen, that the Household has taken no view, and that she has no idea whether that was right.” A pause. “Which is the first time in nine years that Dame Margaret has written to me that she has no idea whether something was right. I read it twice.”

“It’s Freddie,” said Frederick.

He had not meant to say it. He had meant to say nothing, the way the Household had said nothing. But his father had asked, or nearly asked, and it was his father, and his father had a rule, which was that you answered the question you had been asked; and he had been asked, in a way, by the shape of the silence; and he found that he wanted, very much, for his father to know.

There was a long silence from London.

“Freddie,” said his father.

He said it the way Frederick’s mother had said it on the step: carefully, with too much on it, so that it did not fit. It came down the line in his father’s voice, at his father’s speed, with all of London behind it, and it was the strangest sound Frederick had ever heard: his father saying a word that was not his father’s at all.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“From the boy from Milwaukee.”

“Yes.”

“Do you like it?”

Frederick thought about this properly. His father would know if he did not.

“Yes,” he said.

Another silence. He heard the pen go down again on the desk in London.

“Then I shall not use it,” said his father.

Frederick sat with the telephone.

“It is not mine,” said his father, “and I should use it badly, and then it would be spoilt, and you would have to hear me spoil it every Sunday for the rest of my life. And I am a very old man and that might be a long time or a short one, but either way it would be too long.” The faint creak of the chair in the study. “So I shall go on with Frederick. Which I chose. In a hospital. After an argument with your mother of some four hours, which I won, and which she has never let me forget.” A pause. “And the boy may have the other one.”

Frederick found that he could not say anything at all.

“Your mother,” said his father, “will say that I am making a constitutional principle of a nickname.”

“She said nine o’clock is late enough.”

“She would.” The chair creaked again. “Very well. The game.”

---

“An Act,” said his father, “of the Landtag of Wisconsin. Passed at Madison, last week, which is a real one, I have it here, and which concerns the labelling of cheese. In right of which Crown is it assented to?”

Frederick did not even have to think about it. It was a gift. It was so much of a gift that for a moment he suspected it, the way you suspect a ball that comes to you too easily in gym.

“None,” he said.

“None?”

“It’s not assented to by a Crown at all. It’s the Landtag. It’s a polity law. It gets Ducal Assent. From the Grand Duke. In Madison. The Crown doesn’t come into it, it’s not yours, you’ve never assented to a law in Wisconsin in your life and you’re not allowed to.” He stopped. “In right of nothing.”

“Good,” said his father, and Frederick heard him write something. “That was for the boy from Milwaukee. I thought you should get one right about his country.”

“It isn’t his country, it’s a Grand Duchy, it’s in the Realm.”

“It is his country,” said his father, “in every sense but the one we were discussing. Which is the sense that matters least.” A pause. “Your turn.”

Frederick looked at the card.

He read it once more, to himself, in his head, to make sure that the middle was right, the middle he had rubbed out at half past two and written again; and it was right; and he took a breath.

“A Bill,” he said, “introduced at New Westminster, in the House of Commons, by a private member. It provides that in any school in the Columbia District, any radiator that has not been bled for twenty years or more may be lawfully bled by any pupil of the school with any coin of the Realm, in the presence of a teacher, notwithstanding any notice to the contrary pinned to any board.” He looked at the card. “And it’s a boy at the school who’s the son of a Hanoverian subject, and the coin’s a Hanoverian coin, a little brass one, that his grandmother gave him, and the radiator was made in Brunswick, in 1958, and the water comes out on the Prince of Wales.” He stopped. “In right of which Crown is it assented to?”

There was a silence in London.

It went on for a long time. He heard the pen. He heard it stop, and start again, and stop. He heard his father breathe out through his nose, which he did when he was working something out, a long slow breath like a door being let close on its spring.

“The Columbia District,” said his father, at last, slowly, “has no legislature of its own. Its laws are made by the Parliament at New Westminster, in right of America. So the Bill is an American Bill and is assented to in right of America, by the Governor-General, in my name. The fact that the boy is the son of a Hanoverian subject is irrelevant, since he is at school in the District and the law of the District applies to him there. The coin is irrelevant, since the Bill says any coin of the Realm, and a Hanoverian coin is not a coin of the Realm, and so the bleeding of the radiator with it would not be lawful under the Act and the boy would be outside its protection.” A pause. “That is your trap. That is clever.”

“Thank you.”

“The radiator being made in Brunswick is irrelevant, since a radiator is not a subject of the Duchy, and Brunswick has no extraterritorial jurisdiction over its exports, as I have had occasion to explain to the Brunswick Landesverweser on two occasions, one of them about a lorry.” The pen. “And the water,” said his father, “coming out on the Prince of Wales.”

“Yes.”

“The Prince of Wales,” said his father, “is not in the District in right of Wales. Wales has no Crown. The Prince of Wales is the heir to the Crown of Great Britain, and in Great Britain he is the Prince of Wales; but in the District he is the Prince of Columbia, in right of America, and the water is therefore coming out on the Prince of Columbia, who is an American subject of an American Crown at an American school, and the whole thing is in right of America from start to finish.” A long pause. “Unless the Prince was at that moment holding a British passport, in which case…”

“He doesn’t carry one.”

“In which case nothing.” His father breathed out through his nose again. “In right of America. The Governor-General assents. The boy is not protected because he used the wrong coin. The radiator is irrelevant. The Prince is wet in right of America.” A pause. “That is my answer.”

Frederick looked at the card.

“That’s right,” he said.

“I know that it is right. I want to know whether there is anything else. It is too good not to have anything else.”

Frederick hesitated.

“The notice,” he said.

“The notice?”

“Notwithstanding any notice to the contrary pinned to any board. There’s a notice. On the board. In Room 14. It says DO NOT BLEED. Mr Abernathy put it up. On the Thursday. After.” He looked at the card. “So the Bill would overrule Mr Abernathy.”

The silence from London went on for a very long time indeed.

“A schoolmaster’s notice,” said his father, eventually, slowly, “pinned to a board in his own classroom, is an exercise of his authority over that classroom, delegated by the school’s governors, under the Education Acts of the Realm. It is not a law. But it is not nothing. An Act of Parliament which purported to override it expressly would be an extraordinary interference by the legislature in the internal discipline of a single room, and the Governor-General would be entitled, before assenting, to inquire whether ministers really wished to advise it, and I should think the less of any minister who said yes.” The pen. “In right of America. With a reservation about Mr Abernathy.”

“Papa.”

“Yes?”

“Mr Abernathy wins.”

There was a sound from London that Frederick did not at first recognise.

It was short, and low, and it came through the telephone from the study at nine o’clock at night with the boxes in fourteen colours and the lamp and the grey cardigan, and it was over almost before he had heard it; and he sat in the small sitting room in New Westminster with the cream telephone against his ear and the card in his hand, and understood, after a moment, that his father had laughed.

“Mr Abernathy wins,” said his father. “Yes. I should think Mr Abernathy usually does.” The chair creaked. “Write it down for me. The whole of it. On paper. And send it in the bag. I should like to keep it.”

“It’s in pencil.”

“Then send it in pencil,” said his father. “I have kept worse.”

---

At five past five his mother put her head round the door again with the knitting, which had got about an inch longer.

He was still in the chair by the side table. The telephone was back on its cradle. He had the card on his knee and was copying the Bill out onto a sheet of the Palace’s writing paper, the plain one without the crest, in his best writing, in pencil, because his father had said pencil.

“Well?” said his mother, in Swedish.

“He got it. Nearly all of it.” Frederick kept writing. “He didn’t get Mr Abernathy.”

“Who is Mr Abernathy?”

“My homeroom teacher. He put up a notice that says DO NOT BLEED.”

His mother looked at him over her reading glasses for some time.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said, “and I am not going to ask.” She looked at the telephone. “Was he tired?”

“He said so.”

“He always says so.” She came in, which she did not do, and stood behind his chair, and looked over his shoulder at the sheet of writing paper with the Bill on it, and read it, the whole thing, slowly, in English, with her lips moving very slightly on notwithstanding. “And did he laugh?”

Frederick stopped writing.

“How did you know?”

“Because you have the face,” said his mother, “of somebody who has heard him laugh.” She put her hand on his hair, and flattened the piece that would not settle. “It is a very particular face. I have it myself, about twice a year.”

She went to the door with her knitting.

“Mamma,” said Frederick. “What is it? The knitting.”

His mother stopped in the doorway and looked down at the dark green length of it on its four needles, as though it had only just occurred to her that she was holding it.

“Ellicott,” she said, “is green and white. Is it not?”

“Yes.”

“Then it is green,” said his mother, “and in about a month it will have some white,” and went out, quickly, before he could say anything, the way she went out of rooms when she did not want to be seen being whatever she was being; and he sat in the small sitting room and finished copying out the Bill, the whole of it, in pencil, notwithstanding, with Mr Abernathy at the end, and folded it, and wrote on the outside, in his best writing, For Papa. In right of America. With a reservation.