Never

By the middle of October all nine chairs at the round table by the radiator were taken, and nobody had chosen any of it.

It had filled up the way the seating had filled up in Room 14, in the order of something nobody had decided. Grant and Theo and Amira Ibrahim on the first day, because they had come down the stairs in the order of the list. Frederick, because he was in the list. Priya, on the first day too, because she had been sitting there already with her crisps when they came, by herself, and had not moved. Lucía on the second day, because she had come with Theo, and June because she had come with Lucía. Gallagher, with the crew cut and the gap in his teeth, in the third week, because he had been sitting at the long table by the door with his cousin and his cousin had moved to a table of eighth graders and Gallagher had been left on his own on a bench for two days, eating very slowly, and on the third day Grant had gone red and said there’s a chair, and Gallagher had come.

And Devon Price, last, in the fifth week, because after Devon, it’s Friday he had stopped bowing and started, instead, being behind the round table, at lunch, at a distance of about six feet, standing with his tray, for four days, as though waiting to be told whether it was permitted; until on the fifth day Theo, without looking up from his tray, had pushed the last empty chair out from the table with his foot, about a yard, and Devon Price had sat down in it, very carefully, behind his tray, and said nothing for the whole of lunch, and come back the next day and sat in it again, and was still sitting in it.

Nine chairs. Nine people. Nobody had been asked and nobody had asked. It had just happened, like weather.

Frederick had never been at a table that had happened. Every table he had ever sat at had been arranged, by somebody, for a reason, with cards.

---

On Wednesday June said, at lunch, putting down her yoghurt with a click, “It’s my birthday on Friday.”

Everybody looked at her.

“I’m telling you now,” said June, “so that it isn’t a surprise on Friday. I don’t like surprises. I don’t think it’s fair to surprise people with a birthday. They might not have a card.”

“Nobody has a card,” said Gallagher.

“That’s what I mean. So now you’ve got two days.” June picked up the yoghurt again. “And I’m having a party on Saturday. At the bowling alley on Canal Street. At two o’clock. Everybody at this table is invited, because you’re all at this table, and it would be wrong to invite some of the table and not all of it, because then the table would have sides.” She looked round the table, at each of them, in turn, the way Mrs Lockyer looked at the yard. “So you’re all invited. That includes you, Devon.”

Devon Price, behind his tray, went very still.

“Me?”

“You’re at the table,” said June. “On principle.”

Devon Price looked at the table as though it had just spoken to him. Then he looked at his tray. Then, very slowly, he went pink, not as far as Grant went but further than Frederick had ever seen him go, and nodded, and said “Okay,” in a small voice, and did not say anything else for the rest of lunch, but at the end of it, when the bell went, Frederick saw him stand up and push his chair in, very carefully, square to the table, as though it were his.

“And you,” said June, to Frederick.

He had known she would. He had felt it coming down the table towards him the way he had felt The Coming of the House of Hanover coming down the contents page towards Lucía.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” said June. “I’m just saying you’re invited. Because you’re at the table. It’d be rude not to.” She looked at him steadily, with her red hair in its two bunches and her very serious face. “But you can say no if you want. I won’t mind. I’ll mind a bit. But I won’t say anything.”

“I’ll ask,” said Frederick.

June nodded, as though that were a perfectly ordinary thing for a person to say about a bowling alley, and went back to her yoghurt; and Theo, beside him, who was eating something grey with a crust today, looked at Frederick sideways for about a second, and then looked back at his tray, and said nothing at all.

---

He asked on Wednesday evening.

Dame M did not come on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays Miss Hellström came at five, for Swedish, and stayed until six, and they sat in the small library in the north wing and read a story about a moose who wanted to be a bishop, which Miss Hellström said was the greatest work of Swedish children’s literature and which Frederick privately thought was about the Riksdag. So he had to go and find Dame M. He had never done that. He did not know where she was at a quarter past six on a Wednesday, and he had to ask a footman, who looked at him with an expression of mild alarm, as though he had asked where the Palace kept its lightning, and took him along two corridors and down a flight of stairs to a door on the ground floor at the back, with a brass plate on it that said MASTER OF THE HOUSEHOLD, and knocked.

“Come.”

Dame M was at a desk. It was a large plain desk, not unlike his father’s, with nothing on it but a telephone, a lamp, a cup of tea that had gone cold, and the folder, closed, with her hand flat on it. When she saw who it was she stood up.

“Sir.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know where you’d be.”

“I am usually here, sir. From six to seven. With the next day.” She did not sit down. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” He stood in the doorway. “I’ve been asked to a birthday party. On Saturday. At a bowling alley. On Canal Street. At two.”

Dame M looked at him for some time.

“By whom, sir?”

“June. She’s at the table. At lunch. She’s asked everybody at the table, because she says if she only asked some of the table the table would have sides.” He thought. “Her surname’s Delaney. She’s in the homeroom across the corridor. She has a principle about things.”

Dame M did not open the folder. She did not write anything down. She stood behind her desk with her hand flat on it and looked at him across the room, in the lamplight, and he saw her think, and he saw that she was thinking a great many things very quickly, the way she did, and that some of them were not about bowling.

“Sit down, sir,” she said.

He sat in the chair across the desk from her. She sat too.

“You may go,” she said.

He looked at her.

“There is nothing,” said Dame M, “that says you may not. You are twelve. You go to school. Children who go to school are asked to birthday parties by other children at school, and they go. It is entirely ordinary. The Household does not stand in the way of ordinary things.” She paused. “But I should be failing in my duty if I did not tell you what it would involve. And I think you would rather I told you than that you found out on Saturday.”

“Yes.”

“Very well.” She put both hands flat on the folder. “The Inspector would need to know by tomorrow. He would send an officer to the bowling alley on Friday, to look at it. The doors, the windows, the car park, the fire exits, the lanes. He would ask the manager who else had booked for Saturday afternoon. He would ask for the names of the staff on shift. The manager would, at that point, understand why he was being asked.” She paused. “On Saturday there would be two officers. Sergeant Castellanos and one other. Not at the corner of the building; inside. In plain clothes. At a table near the lanes, with a coffee, not bowling. And there would be a car outside, and a second car at the end of the street.” She paused again. “Miss Delaney’s parents would be told. Not asked; told. Because it would not be fair to them not to know that there would be two police officers at their daughter’s party, and why.”

Frederick sat with his hands on his knees.

“And the other children,” said Dame M, “at the table, would have been told by their parents, by Saturday, because Miss Delaney’s parents would have told the other parents, because that is what parents do. And at two o’clock on Saturday they would arrive at a bowling alley on Canal Street, all nine of you, and the manager would be at the door, and the staff would know, and there would be two men in plain clothes at a table near the lanes, not bowling.” She looked at him. “And it would be a very nice party. I am sure of it. I am sure Miss Delaney would be very happy.”

“But it wouldn’t be hers,” said Frederick.

Dame M said nothing.

He sat in the chair across the desk from her and thought about the bowling alley on Canal Street, which he had never seen, and a manager at the door, and staff who knew, and June in her two bunches with her very serious face, at her own party, watching everybody watch him bowl.

“It would be the Prince’s,” said Frederick. “At June’s party.”

Dame M looked at him across the desk for a long moment, in the lamplight.

“Yes, sir,” she said quietly. “I am afraid that it would.”

---

“I can’t come,” he said to June, on Thursday, at lunch.

June looked at him over her yoghurt.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I said you could say no.” She put the yoghurt down. “Is it because of your…” She stopped, and Frederick watched her not say the men, or the Palace, or your dad, or whatever it was, because she had told her mother she would not say anything about it, and she was not going to, not even now, not even at the cost of a sentence that had no end. “Is it a reason?”

“It’s a reason.”

“A good one?”

He thought about it.

“If I came,” he said, “it would turn into my party. And it’s yours.”

June looked at him for a long time. Around them the round table had gone quiet. Lucía had her fork in the air. Gallagher had stopped eating. Devon Price, behind his tray, was looking at Frederick with an expression of enormous and complicated respect.

“That’s a principle,” said June, slowly.

“Yes.”

“That’s a good principle.” She nodded, once, as though stamping something. “Okay. That’s fine. That’s better than fine.” She picked the yoghurt up again. “I’ll save you a cake.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m going to anyway,” said June. “On principle.”

Beside him, Theo was eating his lunch. He had not looked up. He had not said anything, all through it. He was eating something brown with a crust, slowly, with his fork, with the enormous concentration he brought to everything he ate, and he went on eating it, and did not look at Frederick, and Frederick knew, without knowing how, that he had heard every word, and was thinking about it, and was not going to say anything about it until he had finished thinking.

---

On Friday June brought nine cakes.

She brought them in a square tin with a picture of the Rocky Mountains on the lid, and opened it at the round table at lunch, and inside there were nine cupcakes in paper cases in three rows of three, with white icing, and on each one, in blue icing, very neatly, a letter.

“I made them last night,” said June. “My mum helped with the icing. One each.” She turned the tin round so they could see. “It’s the table.”

They looked. The letters were G, H, H, I, P, R, D, P, G.

“Grant,” said June, pointing. “Hanover. Hartigan. Ibrahim. Paredes. Raghunathan.” She pointed to her own. “Delaney. Price. Gallagher.” She took hers out, the D. “Happy birthday to me.”

They each took theirs. Frederick took the H that was nearest him, and Theo took the other H, and they looked at each other’s.

“Which one’s yours?” said Theo.

“I don’t know. They’re both H.”

“They’re the same H,” said June. “I did them the same. On principle. So you’d have to work it out.”

They ate the cakes. The cake was a little dry and the icing was very sweet and it was, Frederick thought, one of the best things he had ever eaten, because somebody had made it last night at a kitchen table with her mother for nine people who had happened, and one of them was him, and he had not been asked to come or arranged to come or been told to come; he had simply been at the table, and so there was an H.

Lucía sang Happy Birthday. She did it suddenly, loudly, standing up, with her hands, and the round table joined in, raggedly, except Devon Price, who mouthed it, and Priya, who sang it very quietly in tune; and the whole of the lunch hall looked round, as lunch halls do, and some of the tables near them joined in too, the way strangers do, because it was a birthday and that was what you did; and Frederick sang it, which he had never done for anybody except his mother, in Swedish, at breakfast, once a year, which was a different song.

At the counter at the end of the hall, Mrs Tolliver, with her ladle, looked across at the round table by the radiator, at nine people round a tin with the Rocky Mountains on it, singing; and turned the radio off altogether, for the length of the song, and then on again.

---

“What do you do?” said Theo, at a quarter past three, on the wall.

He was doing up a shoelace. It did not need doing up. He did it very slowly, and Frederick, who was sitting on the wall beside him with his bag between his feet, as he had sat every morning and every break and every afternoon since the twenty-sixth of September, waited, because he knew by now that when Theo did up a shoelace that did not need doing up, he was about to say something he had been thinking about, and needed somewhere to put his hands while he said it.

“When?”

“On yours.” Theo finished the shoelace and started on the other one. “Your birthday. What do you do?”

Frederick thought about it.

“I have my photograph taken,” he said. “In the library. By the Household’s photographer. In the morning. In front of the same books. Every year. So that if you put them side by side you can see me grow up.”

“Okay.”

“And then I have lunch with my mother. In the small dining room. She makes the cake herself. It’s a Swedish one, with green marzipan on it. It’s called a princess cake.” He paused. “That’s not because of me. It’s just called that.”

“Okay.”

“And my father rings. Not at four. At eleven in the morning, because it’s four in London. And he says many happy returns and asks me what I’ve been given, and writes it down. And in the afternoon there are letters. People write. From all over. Hundreds. And there’s a lady from the Household who answers them, but I read some of them, with my mother, in the afternoon.” He thought. “And then it’s evening.”

Theo had stopped doing up the shoelace. He was sitting on the wall, bent over, with both hands on the laces, and not doing anything with them.

“Who comes?” he said.

“Comes?”

“To your birthday. Who comes round.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Nobody comes,” he said. “It isn’t that kind of day.”

Theo looked up from the shoelace.

“What, never?”

“There was a cake at Brookside,” said Frederick. “In the classroom. Every year. On the second of May, or the nearest day. Mrs Tremlett brought it in. The whole class had some.” He thought about it honestly. “It was arranged. The Household sent it. It was a very good cake. Everybody said thank you to me for it, as if I’d made it.” He paused. “And once, when I was seven, my cousin came, from Berlin, for the day, with his sister, and we played in the gardens, and his sister pushed him in the pond.” He thought. “That was a good one. But that was family. That was arranged as well. It took four months.”

“No,” said Theo. “I mean friends. Somebody from school. Just coming round. To your house. On your birthday. To have cake and do something stupid in the garden.”

Frederick opened his mouth to answer, and found that the answer was one word, and that he had never in his life said it out loud before, or thought it, as a word, about this, because there had never been any reason to; it had just been the shape of the day, like the bowing, like the looking, like the weather.

“Never,” he said.

---

Theo did not say anything for a while.

He finished doing up the second shoelace, properly this time, a double knot, tight, and then sat up, and looked across the yard, at the bike racks, and the steps, and the low brick building behind the gym where Castellanos sat in the window with his coffee.

Then he held up his hand, and started counting on his fingers.

Frederick watched him. He counted slowly, moving his lips, touching each finger with the thumb of the other hand, the way you count when you are seven, or when you want to be absolutely sure.

“When’s your birthday?” he said, halfway through.

“The second of May.”

“Right.” Theo started again. “May. June. July. August. September. October.” He looked at the six fingers he had used. “November.” He looked at Frederick. “The second of November’s six months.”

“From what?”

“From the second of May. Six months. Half a year.” Theo held up the fingers. “It’s your half-birthday. The second of November. You’ll be twelve and a half.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“It’s a thing.”

“It isn’t. There’s no such thing as a half-birthday. Nobody has a half-birthday.”

“In Milwaukee they do,” said Theo.

Frederick looked at him with deep suspicion.

“Do they?”

“Some people,” said Theo, with great dignity. “Some people in Milwaukee. When their real one’s no good. Like if it’s at Christmas. Or if it’s in the summer and everybody’s away. My cousin Dieter’s is on Christmas Eve and nobody ever came, ever, because they were all at church, so his mum did him a half one in June, and everybody came, and he got two lots of presents.” He considered this. “That might just be Dieter’s mum. But it’s a thing.”

“The second of November,” said Frederick slowly.

“It’s a Sunday. I looked.” Theo had not looked; Frederick was almost sure Theo had not looked; but then, he realised, Theo might have, in the time it took to do up two shoelaces, because Theo noticed things, and the calendar was on the wall of Room 14 by the door, and Theo walked past it every morning. “And nobody’s booked it. Nobody’s going to take your photograph in the library on your half-birthday. Nobody’s going to write you hundreds of letters. Your dad’s not going to ring at eleven. It’s not anybody’s day.” He spread his hands. “It’s empty. It’s just there. Nobody’s arranged anything on it, because nobody knows it exists.”

Frederick sat on the wall.

He thought about it. He thought about the second of November, which was a Sunday, and which was empty; and the second of May, which was not; and the space in between them, six fingers wide, which he had never once thought of as having a middle.

“And you can’t go to June’s,” said Theo, “because if you go anywhere, it turns into yours.” He said it quite matter-of-factly, the way he said everything, looking across the yard. “I heard you. You’re right. It would.” He shrugged. “So don’t go anywhere. Have it at yours. Your house is already yours. Nobody’s got to go and look at the fire exits of your own house. They’ve looked already. They looked when you were born.”

Frederick looked at him.

“It’s a palace,” he said.

“I know it’s a palace,” said Theo. “It’s still your house.”

There was a silence on the wall. In the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, Castellanos put down his coffee and looked at the yard.

“Who would come?” said Frederick.

He meant it as a real question. He did not know the answer. He was thinking of the round table, all nine, and a tin with the Rocky Mountains on it; and of the Inspector, and fire exits, and the parents of eight children being told, not asked, why there would be two officers at a table not bowling; and of Lucía, in the State Rooms, asking about ghosts.

Theo looked at him as though he had asked what day it was.

“Me,” he said. “Obviously.”

“Just you?”

“It was my idea,” said Theo. “So I have to come. That’s the rule. If it’s your idea you have to turn up.” He picked up his bag. “Anybody else, you can ask. But I’m coming. I’ve decided.” He stood up off the wall. “You don’t have to have anything. You don’t have to have a cake. I just want to see you have a birthday where somebody came.”

The bell went.

Theo put his bag on his shoulder. He looked down at Frederick, on the wall.

“Ask, then,” he said.

“Ask who?”

“Whoever you ask,” said Theo. “The lady with the folder. Your mum. Whoever says yes in your house.” He turned towards the front gate. “Ask them for the second of November. Tell them it’s a thing in Milwaukee.” He began to walk away, and then stopped, and turned round, walking backwards across the yard. “And tell them I’m coming!”

“They’ll ask why.”

“Tell them it was my idea,” called Theo, backwards, across the yard, past the three tall boys on the steps, who turned and looked at him; and then he turned round and went on towards the front gate and the buses, and did not look back, and the three tall boys looked after him, and then, slowly, across the yard, at Frederick, on the wall, by himself.

Frederick sat there.

He sat on the low wall by the bike racks with his bag between his feet and June’s H still in his stomach, and the cold of the stone coming up through his trousers, and the sky over the gym going the colour it went at the end of October at half past three, which was a sort of grey with yellow underneath it; and he did the sum himself, on his own fingers, without moving his lips, to be absolutely sure. May. June. July. August. September. October. November.

Six. And then the second.

Castellanos came round the corner of the gym, from Mr Pavlik’s, and stood there, at the corner, on his yard of gravel, ten yards away, and waited.

Frederick got up off the wall.

He walked across the yard to him, past the three tall boys on the steps, who did not say anything, and when he got to the corner Castellanos turned and walked in front of him along the back of the gym towards the gate, ten yards, over the gravel, which crunched, past Mr Obi with his clipboard, who said pass, and looked at it, and said still looks like somebody told you the price of something, and made a tick; and at the car Castellanos opened the door, and Frederick got in, and sat forward, with his bag on his knees.

“Seat belt, sir.”

He put on his seat belt.

“Sergeant Castellanos,” he said.

“Sir.”

“Is the second of November a Sunday?”

Castellanos did not look at a calendar or a telephone or anything. He thought about it for about two seconds, at the wheel, with the engine running, the way he thought about sight lines.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “It is.”

“Is anything happening on it?”

Castellanos looked at him in the mirror. It was the look he had given him in the first week, when Frederick had asked whether he had had lunch: about two seconds long, which was a long time for Castellanos, with something in it that Frederick did not have a heading for.

“Not that I know of, sir,” said Castellanos. “It’s empty.”

“Good,” said Frederick, and looked out of the window all the way home, past the shops and the stop and the bridge, where nothing happened, and up the Axis in the grey and yellow light, doing the sum again, on his fingers, under his bag, where nobody could see.