Finals, the First

The question was Tyler’s.

It was the third of four, on the second page, in the plain grey type the university used for everything from final examinations to the notice in the laundry room about scorpions, and Frederick read it twice in the cold of the lecture theatre at five past eight on Thursday morning, and then put his pen down on the little fold-out desk and looked at the ceiling.

3. “The King reigns; the Governor-General makes the reign operational.” The reserve powers of the Crown in the Realm are held by the Governor-General, and have been used twice since 1783. What, then, is the King for? (40 marks.)

He had been asked it eleven times since August. Not in those words. In the words of a person lying on the bed by the window with a controller in both hands: so what does a king actually do, though? Like actually? And he had answered it eleven times, at first at length and then shorter, and Tyler had put the headphones back on, or fallen asleep, before the end. He had never once got to the end.

He looked at the clock over the door. He had fifty minutes and forty marks and, for once, a reader who would have to keep reading until he stopped.

He picked up the pen.

---

The Charter’s sections sat the final together, in the big lecture theatre on the north side of the mall, which held four hundred, and on the last morning of the semester it held about three hundred and sixty, in rows, in coats.

It had been forty-four degrees at seven, when he crossed the mall under the palms with frost on the lawn by Old Main, actual frost, white, which a girl from Yuma on the second floor had photographed and sent to her mother with no words at all, because there were none. In the Valley this was winter, and the Valley had prepared for it as for a siege. All round him the March’s own young sat in hooded parkas zipped to the chin, in bobble hats, in gloves with the fingertips cut off so that they could hold a pen, and a boy in the front row had a scarf wound round his face like a man crossing a glacier.

Frederick was in the maroon jumper his mother had knitted, with the sleeves pushed up. He had been born in Stockholm and had spent a year at school in an English valley where it rained from October to March, and people on the stairs looked at his forearms in the mornings as though he had come out without his skin.

He wrote.

He wrote that the question was a good one, which was true, and that it was usually asked the wrong way round, which was the kind of sentence Brennan put a pencil line under and wrote a question mark beside. He wrote that the reserve powers were the Governor-General’s, and had been used twice, and that each time they had been used the person who used them had afterwards gone and told the King, in person, and that the telling was not a courtesy. He wrote that he had been in a room where that kind of thing was told, and that the person telling it had wanted it to be heard by somebody who could not be voted out of hearing it. He wrote that a power held in trust needed somebody for the trust to be held from. He crossed that out, because it was nearly a slogan, and Brennan hated slogans more than he hated monarchy. Then he wrote it again, lower down, better.

He was on the second side when he felt Brennan behind him.

Brennan walked the aisles in examinations, slowly, with his hands behind his back and a copy of the paper rolled into a tube in one of them, the way a man walks a beach after a storm to see what the sea has left, and he stopped where he liked. In the midterm he had stopped behind a girl in the third row for a full minute, and afterwards in the corridor she had said, to nobody, I think I just aged.

He stopped now.

Frederick went on writing. He could feel him reading. It was like having a radiator behind his shoulder: no sound, only a kind of pressure of attention, steady and warm and not going away. He finished a sentence. He began another. In the seat to his left a boy from the second floor called Diego stopped writing altogether and watched the two of them out of the side of his eye with the end of his pen in his mouth.

“Is that true?” said Brennan, very quietly, at his ear.

Frederick looked up.

Brennan was looking at the second side of the booklet, with his reading glasses pulled down out of his hair and his finger on a line halfway down it, and he had the expression he had in class when somebody said a thing he had not expected, which was not pleasure and not annoyance but something hungrier than either.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“In the room?”

“Yes.”

“Who else was…” Brennan stopped. He took his finger off the paper as though it had become hot. He straightened up and looked round, at the three hundred and sixty coats in their rows, of whom perhaps forty were now watching, and at the clock, and back at the booklet; and his face did the thing that Frederick had watched it do every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at nine since August, which was the face of a man who has just heard himself.

“Don’t answer that,” said Brennan. “It’s an examination.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good. Don’t.” Brennan unrolled the tube of paper and rolled it up again, tighter. “Carry on.”

He walked away up the aisle with his hands behind his back.

He got as far as the end of the row. There he stopped, and stood for a moment looking at the wall, at a fire notice, as though it had said something to him; and then he came back, four steps, and bent down, and said in the same quiet voice, with immense self-contempt:

“The second paragraph as well?”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” said Brennan, and went away, and did not come down that aisle again for the rest of the morning.

Diego took the pen out of his mouth.

“Dude,” he whispered. “What did you write?”

---

Rhys and Sam were on a bench outside, in the sun, with three coffees.

They had finished early. They always finished early. Rhys had handed his booklet in at twenty to nine and Sam at a quarter to, folding his reading glasses into his top pocket like a banker leaving a meeting that had gone exactly as planned; and Frederick had written for another twenty-five minutes and finished in the middle of a sentence when the man at the front said pens down, please, because the sentence had been longer than the time.

Rhys held up a coffee without looking.

“Question three,” said Rhys.

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d like question three.”

“I liked it.”

“I wrote about the 1943 instrument,” said Rhys, who was political science, and wrote about instruments. “And the Clerk’s commentary. And the bit in the textbook about the trust.” He drank his coffee. “Eleven citations. I counted.”

“I wrote about you,” said Sam.

Frederick looked at him.

Sam Oyelaran was accounting, and wore a quarter-zip sweater of a grey he said was the colour of a balance that agrees, and he did not look up from the small notebook open on his knee, in which he kept, in pencil, in columns, the cost of everything the three of them ate.

“Me?”

“In the second half. After the citations.” Sam turned a page. “I said the King was for there being somebody for the officers to stand next to. When it goes wrong.” He thought about it. “I said it better than that. I had fifty minutes.”

There was a short silence on the bench.

“Did you cite it?” said Frederick.

“I cited myself,” said Sam. “Personal communication.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I know,” said Sam. “I’ll lose marks.” He wrote coffee x 3 in a column and the sum beside it, and underlined the sum. “It was true, though.”

---

His mother rang at twelve.

It was seven in the evening in London. He took it on the stairs, as he took all her calls now, on the landing between the second floor and the third, where there was a window onto the car park and a step that was the right height to sit on. He had taken the first of them there in August because it was the only quiet place in the building, and since October, since she had sat down on that step, he had taken them nowhere else.

“Well?” said his mother, in Swedish.

“It’s done.”

“And?”

“There was a question about me.”

“There is always a question about you,” said his mother. “That is why I asked about the Charter and not about the stars.” He heard her move: a cushion, a cup set down on a saucer, and under it something else, a small effort, the sound a person makes when they shift their weight in a chair they would rather not have to shift in. “What was the question?”

“What the King’s for.”

His mother laughed.

It was the laugh the room heard, the one she did not do often, low and sudden; and it came five thousand miles down the line from London, across the Atlantic and the whole of the continent, to a landing in a residence hall in Arizona with a window onto a car park, and made the landing warmer.

“And what is he for?”

He told her. He told her the short version, the one that had come right at the bottom of the second side, after the crossing out. She listened to all of it without saying anything, which was what she did, and which was the reason, he had decided at about fourteen, that he had always told her everything and his father most things.

“That is what your father would have written,” said his mother, when he had finished. “At your age. If anybody had ever asked him a question and let him answer it.” A pause. “He would have got a C.”

“I haven’t got anything yet.”

“No.” Another pause. Then, in a different voice, not the laughing one, the voice in which she read the papers for the Council of State: “Fredde. The Master of the Household has written to me again.”

He looked out of the window at the car park.

“About Christmas.”

“About Christmas. Two pages. She was very polite to me for the whole of both of them, which is how I know she is angry.” He heard her smile at that, a little, and then stop. “She would like it recorded that the King is to spend Christmas in a closed residence hall in Arizona with two officers and a night porter, and that she was not consulted. I have written back that it is recorded.”

He sat on the step and looked at the car park.

“Have you finished?” he said. “Thinking.”

There was a silence on the line. He knew its length. It was the long one, the one in which she was deciding whether to tell him something.

“No,” said his mother. “Nearly.” A breath. He heard it, the breath; it was a fraction too long, and it came in the wrong place, in the middle of what she was saying and not at the end, and he knew that she knew he had heard it. “You said all right, Fredde.”

“I know.”

“Then let it be all right a little longer.”

Below him somebody came out of the second floor with a laundry bag the size of an armchair and dragged it down the next flight, bump, bump, bump, and was gone.

“Ring me when the marks come,” said his mother.

“They come tonight. It’ll be morning there. Six o’clock.”

“I will be awake.”

“You should be asleep.”

“I know what I should be,” said his mother. “I have three doctors and a husband to tell me. Ring me.”

---

The marks came by teatime. Three of them.

They came one at a time, on the laptop on the desk by the door, each in a small grey box with the name of a course and a single letter in it. He had never in his life had a mark that was not for something, in a margin, in red, with a sentence after it.

Introduction to Astronomy: B.

Composition: B.

Water in the West: B.

He looked at them for some time.

“Bs,” he said.

On the bed by the window, Tyler moved one headphone off one ear, which was, by the standards of the room, a gesture of the deepest interest.

“Bs are good,” said Tyler.

“Are they?”

“My cousin Jordan got kicked out of Kent State with all Ds and, like, an F in bowling.” Tyler put the headphone back. Then he took it off again. “You can fail bowling. They have bowling. It’s a whole class.” He put it back. On the screen in front of him a man in armour was running through a burning city with great purpose, and Tyler watched him do it with the expression of a person watching a bus he has no intention of catching.

Frederick sent the three Bs to Theo, who was in the middle of something with a cadaver and replied an hour later: Bs are a doctor’s grade. Ask me how I know. Love to your mum. He sent them to Jack, who replied at once, from behind the bar of the New Inn at a quarter to midnight in Gloucestershire: b for brilliant. b for boyfriend. b for absolute bloody lemon. whats the fourth And a minute after that: dont tell me yet ill get my hopes up

The fourth did not come.

It did not come at eight, when Rhys and Sam brought back three trays of something called holiday chicken from the last dinner the dining hall would serve before the break, on the grounds that somebody ought to see it off. It did not come at ten. At ten Frederick went out to the window at the end of the corridor and looked between the concrete fins at the dentist’s across the road, dark, and above it the one window with its light on, as it always had, and its blind halfway down.

At four minutes past eleven the laptop made the small sound it made.

The Charter: C.

---

Rhys and Sam knocked at five past.

They did not come in. They stood in the doorway in their socks, Rhys in front and Sam behind, the way they stood in doorways everywhere, with their phones in their hands and their faces arranged; and Frederick turned round in the desk chair and looked at them, and knew from the arrangement exactly what they had got.

“He’s posted,” said Rhys.

“I know.”

“What did you…”

“C.”

Rhys’s face did a number of things in a short time and arrived nowhere.

“What did you get?” said Frederick.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Rhys.”

Rhys looked at the floor of the corridor.

“A,” he said, to the floor, like a man owning up to a small fire.

“Sam?”

“A minus,” said Sam. “I lost marks on question three.” He considered it. “Personal communication.”

Frederick looked at the two of them in the doorway for a moment. Then he began to laugh.

He had not known he was going to. It came up out of him at the sight of two officers of the Royal Protection Service in their socks, holding their phones like flowers at a funeral, who had sat beside him three mornings a week since August so that nobody could get at him, and had learned the Charter while they were at it, from the books, better than he had. He laughed until he had to hold the edge of the desk. Rhys looked at him in deep alarm. Sam, after a moment, began to smile, which on Sam’s face was a slow and careful thing, like a column of figures being checked from the bottom up.

On the bed by the window, Tyler took his headphones off.

All the way off, round his neck. He looked at the three of them, at the doorway and the desk, with the controller in his lap and the man in armour standing quite still in the burning city, waiting.

“You got a C?” said Tyler. “In the King one?”

“Yes.”

Tyler looked at him for a while.

“Dude,” said Tyler.

Then he picked up his phone from the blanket and looked at it and scrolled, slowly, with his thumb, and turned it round and held it up, so that all three of them could see it from the doorway and the desk.

The Charter (Section 14): B.

“My mom checks,” said Tyler. “She has the password.” He turned the phone back round and looked at it again with mild interest, as if it were somebody else’s. “I didn’t go to, like, half of them. The guy put movies on.” He put the phone down on the blanket. “What’s the Charter, anyway? Like, actually?”

“It’s the constitution,” said Rhys, from the doorway, faintly. “Of the Realm. Of the whole… It’s the one with the King in it.”

“Right,” said Tyler. “Right, right.” He looked at Frederick. “So what does he actually do, though? The King. Like, all day.”

Frederick opened his mouth.

“I wrote four pages on that this morning,” he said. “Question three. If you want, I can…”

Tyler put his headphones back on, and the man in armour began to run again through the burning city, with great purpose, towards something he could not see.

---

The email from Brennan came at nine minutes past eleven. It was three lines long and had no greeting.

Mr Hanover. Your examination was the best in the section and your essay was the worst, and a C is what arithmetic does to that. You may not cite yourself, even in this course. I would like very much to ask you about the second paragraph of question three, and I am not going to. H. Brennan.

He read it twice. Then he went out of the room, past Rhys and Sam, who had gone back to their own door and were standing in it, and along the corridor in his socks to the landing between the second floor and the third, and sat on the step under the window, and rang London.

It was a quarter past six in the morning there. She answered before it had rung once.

“Well?” said his mother.

“C.”

There was a silence on the line. Then his mother laughed.

It was the same laugh, low and sudden and entirely without dignity, and it went on longer this time, as though somebody had told her the one joke she had been waiting twenty years to hear; and he sat in the dark stairwell listening to the Queen of Sweden laughing at six in the morning at a C in the Charter of the United Kingdom of America, and began, against his will, to laugh as well.

“Your father,” said his mother, when she could. “Oh, your father. He will put it in the study. In the folder, with the others.” She laughed again. “Between Hanover and the May Day files. He will be so pleased. He will pretend that he is not, and he will be so pleased.”

“It’s a C.”

“It is the first one,” said his mother. “He has kept every mark you have had since you were four, Fredde. Every report. Every one. And they are all As, and they all say a pleasure to teach, and he has never known what to do with any of them except put them in the folder.” She was laughing still, a little. “He will know what to do with this one.”

She stopped laughing.

She stopped all at once, the way a person stops when they have run out of something; and then there was the breath.

He heard it. It came down the line from London, the long, careful, deliberate breath of a woman sitting very still in a chair at six in the morning and drawing in the air as though it had to be lifted, the way his father drew in the next word; and it went on a moment longer than a breath should, and then another moment; and then it was over, and she said, in her ordinary voice, quite lightly, “Go to bed. You have done your examinations. Go to bed and sleep for a week.”

He did not say anything about the breath.

He had learned that from Theo, who had learned it from his mother, who was a nurse, and who said that the first thing you were taught on a ward was that the patient always knows you heard it.

“Goodnight, Mamma.”

“Goodnight, my love,” said his mother, and rang off; and he sat on the step under the window for a long time afterwards, in the cold, with the telephone in his lap, looking out at the car park, where nothing whatever was happening, and listening, though there was nothing to listen to, for the next breath.