For the Family

The box had not come on the first or the second, which were holidays in the Realm, and therefore holidays in the box. On the third it came at a quarter to seven, as it always came, across the road in Sam’s grey backpack with the broken zip, and Sam put it down on his own desk under the poster of the federal tax brackets, and stood back from it.

“There’s a letter,” said Sam.

“There’s always a letter.”

“On top.” Sam did not touch it. “It came in the bag. From Potsdam. The sergeant says it’s not a state paper, but it’s on the Emperor’s paper, so it travels like one, because nobody knew what else to do with it.” He considered the backpack. “She says it went through four pairs of hands with gloves on.”

Frederick unlocked the box.

It was on top of the papers, where Sam had said: a long envelope of heavy cream, the colour of the inside of a loaf, with a small black eagle embossed in the corner that you could feel with your thumb and not quite see, and across the front, in a hand he had known since he was fifteen, upright and small and exactly spaced, as though each letter had been measured against the next:

His Majesty the King. By hand. Private.

And under it, smaller, in the same hand, as an afterthought that was not one:

Frederick.

---

The observatory, Potsdam Thursday 29 December, a quarter past ten at night

Dear Frederick,

Your mother telephoned mine on Tuesday.

I was not in the room. I was in the room next to it, which in this house is a room with a door that does not quite shut, and Mama knew that, and did not shut it. So I heard her say “yes, Christina,” three times, and “of course,” once, and then nothing for a long time, and then “he will,” and I knew that I had been volunteered for something, and I was glad before I knew what it was.

Then she came into the next room and told me.

I am to stand in the Hall of State on the first of February. For the family. Your mother says that this means you. My mother says that it means all of us. The Swedish Court, which wrote to me on Wednesday with commendable speed, says that it means a place on the left of the dais, behind the Duke of Cumberland’s chair, three paces from the wall, and has sent a plan. The plan is very exact. I have it here. I like it very much. I have marked my three paces on it in pencil, which you will appreciate, and I have been told that the clock above the doors is twenty seconds fast, which I appreciate.

I have said that I will, if you agree. That is why I am writing, and not telephoning. If I telephoned, you would agree at once, out of manners, before you had thought about it, and I would like you to think about it. So I am asking you in a letter, which takes a week, and you may answer it in a line.

I will say nothing in the Hall. I have been told that the family says nothing, and I am good at it. It is the one thing in that room that will be mine to do, and I intend to do it properly.

Lukas has asked to come. He has never been to Stockholm. He asked, which he does not do often, so I said yes. He wished to know what one wins in a Hall of State, and I said nothing, and he said that he would see.

You will wonder whether I mind. On the Kreuzberg, last January, I minded something, and you saw it, and you did not say so, which was kind. I do not mind this. I would like you to know that I am glad, and not only dutiful. There is a room in which you cannot be, and somebody must be in it who would rather it were you. I would rather it were you. That is the qualification.

At half past three I shall look at the clock above the doors, and subtract twenty seconds, and think of a hill.

It is clear tonight. Orion is going down behind the trees. I have no other news.

Alexander

P.S. I have not told Jack. I assume that you have not either. He will forgive us both on the ninth, at length.

---

He read it twice at Sam’s desk, under the tax brackets, with the box open beside it.

Sam had gone to sit on the end of his bed with the cereal, as he did every morning, and was eating it, and not watching. Rhys was at the ironing board on its towel by the window, ironing a shirt, slowly, with the attention of a man who has never once in his life ironed a shirt badly and does not intend to begin in front of a King; and he was not watching either, so carefully that the iron had been on the same cuff for some time.

Frederick folded the letter and put it in the inside pocket of the coat.

Then he did the box.

It was an ordinary box. It was the first of the year, and full, because nobody in any government sends a King anything between Christmas and the second of January and then everybody does, all at once, on the third: a commission for an ambassador, a list of honours for the Philippines in a blue folder that had come round by way of the Palace and had a coffee ring on it, a paper from Transport about a bridge. He read them. He read every one, all the way down, because that was the job, the half of it that was being told. And at the top right-hand corner of each page, when he had read it, he initialled it, small, in pencil, a soft one, kept very sharp, and laid the pencil down after each one exactly parallel to the edge of the paper; and on the ninth page he stopped, with the pencil laid down, and looked at it.

“Rhys,” he said.

“Sir.”

“What time is it in London?”

Rhys looked at his watch without putting down the iron.

“Ten to two, sir.”

Frederick took out his telephone.

---

He rang his father’s telephone, which his father had had since the spring of 2029 and answered, when he answered it at all, with the single word Yes, as though somebody had asked him something.

“Yes.”

“Dad. It’s me.”

“Fredde.” Again, the Swedish word, carefully, almost right. A breath. “Early.”

“It’s seven here. I’ve done the box.”

“Box.” His father said it with deep approval, the way another man might have said church. “Good.”

“Dad. Can I ask you something?”

There was a silence on the line from London. It was not a long one. It was the silence of a man putting something down so as to have both hands.

“Yes.”

“Why did you initial them in pencil?”

The silence went on.

He did not fill it. He sat at Sam’s desk with the box open and the pencil lying parallel to the edge of the page, and waited, the way he had learned to wait since the September he was fifteen, without filling the space, because if you filled it the word went away and did not come back. Across the room Rhys had put the iron down on its heel and was standing quite still beside the board, looking at the shirt.

“Who,” said his father. A breath. “Asked?”

“A professor. Here. On the first day, in August. In front of everybody. He asked me why, and I said you did, and he asked why you did, and I didn’t know.” He looked at the pencil. “I said I’d ask you at Christmas.”

There was a pause.

“I’m late,” said Frederick.

“Late,” said his father, with enormous satisfaction, as if it were the best thing that could be said of anything, and Frederick heard him settle in his chair, in the study, five thousand miles away, between the realm boxes and the May Day files and the folder with the C at the front of it.

---

“My father,” said his father.

He waited.

“Ink.” A breath. “Big.” The next word was not there, and his father went and looked for it, and Frederick heard him look, along the corridors, opening doors. “E,” his father found. “Big E. Like a.” A breath, longer. “Cheque.”

“Grandfather did his in ink?”

“All over.” His father lifted something, a hand, from the arm of the chair, and let it fall; Frederick heard it. “Like a man.” A breath. “Buying a car.”

He laughed, at Sam’s desk. He could not help it. On the end of the bed Sam had stopped eating his cereal.

“And you didn’t.”

“Seventy-two.” His father said it the way he said the numbers of trains. “First box.” A breath. “Pencil.”

“Why?”

This time it took a long time. He heard it take a long time. He heard his father breathe, and the clock in the study, which he knew, a small brass one on the mantelpiece with a loud tick, and once a car going past in the street, and the breath again; and he did not say anything, and across the room nobody moved at all.

“Ink,” said his father. “Is.”

The word went.

He waited.

“Yes,” his father found. “Ink. Is yes.”

“Ink is yes?”

“Minister’s.” A breath. “Bottom.” Another. “Of the page.” And then, quite clearly, the rest of it all at once, the way his sentences came when they had been carried about a long time: “His name. His yes. In ink.”

“And the top corner?”

“Top. Corner.” A breath. “Pencil.” Another, the longest yet. “Says.”

Frederick sat very still.

“Read,” said his father. “Only. Read.”

He looked at the page in front of him. At the top right-hand corner, small, soft, grey, his own initial. At the bottom, in black ink, a minister’s name, signed large.

“So nobody could think it was yours,” he said. “The yes.”

“Never.” A breath. “Mine.” And then, more slowly, finding each one and setting it down, as he had once set down the word green: “Never. Was.”

The clock ticked in the study in London.

“Lowest,” said his father, and stopped. Frederick heard him hear it, and be cross, and go back. “No. Lightest.” A breath. “Lightest thing.” Another. “On the page.”

---

He did not say anything for a while. He did not need to. He sat at Sam’s desk in Palo Verde Hall at five past seven in the morning with the telephone at his ear and the first box of the year open in front of him, and looked at the soft grey letter in the corner of a paper about a bridge, and thought about a man of twenty-five in 1972 with his first box open on a desk and his father just dead, picking up a pen, and putting it down, and picking up a pencil instead.

“Did you ever rub one out?” he said.

“Once.”

“When?”

There was a pause on the line of tremendous dignity.

“Not,” said his father. A breath. “Telling.”

He laughed again, and heard his father hear it, in London, and be glad.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Never,” said his father. A breath. “Asked.”

Frederick put his free hand over his eyes.

He sat like that for a moment, at the desk, under the federal tax brackets, with his hand over his eyes, and thought of a staircase in August, a step under a narrow window, and his mother on the telephone saying no, you must ask him, and he would like very much to be asked something he knows the answer to; and he understood, all at once, as he had understood almost nothing she had said that week, that she had known exactly what she was saying, and had been waiting since August for him to find out.

“Ask,” said his father.

He took his hand away from his eyes.

“More.” A breath. “Ask. More.”

“What was in it?” said Frederick. “The first box. In seventy-two. What was the first paper?”

There was no silence at all this time. It came at once, as if it had been at the front of a drawer for sixty years, waiting.

“Fisheries,” said his father. A breath. “Scotland.” Another, and then, with an immense and shining pleasure, as though it were a present he had been keeping: “Herring.”

---

His mother’s text came at a quarter past seven.

What did you ask him? He has come out of the study and walked the whole length of the hall without his stick and gone to tell Brannigan something about herring.

Why he used a pencil, he wrote.

There was a pause. Then the three dots, which came and went, and came.

At last, wrote his mother.

---

Rhys had found the page by eight.

He did not say that he was looking for it. He finished the shirt, and hung it on the back of the door on its hanger with the collar straight, and then he sat down on his bed with his Charter notebook, the one from the first week, and turned back through it, past the reserve powers and the week-nine joke and upon no other advice written out in capitals with three lines under it, to the first page of all, with the date at the top underlined twice. And there it was, in very small letters, under the date, highlighted in green: pencil (father).

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he uncapped a pen, and under it, in the same very small letters, he wrote something, and capped the pen, and took the green highlighter out of the row of four on the desk, and highlighted that too.

Frederick read it over his shoulder.

Ink is yes. Pencil is read.

“Are you going to tell Brennan?” he said.

Rhys looked at the page.

“No, sir,” said Rhys. “That’s yours.”

---

Jack rang at half past four, which was half past eleven at night in Gloucestershire, and the first thing Frederick heard was water.

“Where are you?”

“Bench. By the bridge. Outside.” Jack sounded as though he had run, or carried something heavy, or both. “Called time at eleven, got the last of them out by twenty past, the man from Bibury tried to sing again, Mum’s doing the till. I’ve got a pint I didn’t pay for and a coat on and it’s four degrees and the river’s up.” A pause. “Celsius. Before you start.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were. I could hear you getting ready.” The water went on behind him, fast and close, the Coln over the weir below the bridge, which he had stood beside a hundred times and could see now with his eyes shut: the stone, the dark water, the lamp on the bridge, the pub behind with its windows going out one by one. “Happy New Year, Hanover. Properly. Not a text.”

“Happy New Year.”

There was a pause on the line from Gloucestershire.

“What’s up?” said Jack.

“Nothing’s up.”

“You’re doing the voice.”

“What voice?”

“The one where you’re keeping something in a box.” Jack drank. “You did it in Berlin, all night, the night before the hill. You’ve been doing it since you picked up.”

Frederick looked out of the window at the end of the corridor, where he had gone to take it, between the concrete fins, at the dentist’s across the road and the one window over it, with its blind halfway down.

“I can’t tell you,” he said. “Till the ninth.”

“The ninth.”

“Monday.”

“Is it your mum?”

He did not say anything.

“Right,” said Jack, quietly. The water went on. “Is she…?”

“She’s all right. It’s not that. She’s all right.”

“Is it big?”

“Yes.”

“Is it bad?”

He thought about it. He thought about a green chair, and after is nice, and a man walking the length of a hall without his stick to tell somebody about herring.

“No,” he said.

“Is it good?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Jack was quiet for a moment.

“Okay,” said Jack. “The ninth. I’m going to write it on the beam behind the bar, in chalk, where Mum writes the guest ales, and when people ask what it is I’m going to say it’s a beer.” Another pause. “Hanover, you absolute lemon. You could’ve just said can’t tell you at the start, instead of doing the voice at me for five minutes.”

“I didn’t know I was doing it.”

“You never know you’re doing it. That’s what makes it the voice.” He drank. “Is anybody else keeping it?”

“Some people.”

“Alex?”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I knew it,” said Jack, with deep satisfaction. “He rang me on Sunday. Alex. Rang me. He has never rung me in his life, he writes to me, he writes to me like a bank. He rang me on Sunday to ask what you wear in Arizona in March. Shorts, I said. He said I see, like I’d told him something about the Treaty of Versailles. Then he said Happy New Year, Jack, like it was a treaty, and rang off.” The water rushed. “Something’s up with Alex as well. I’m surrounded. I’m the only person in Europe who doesn’t know something.”

“You’ll know on Monday.”

“I’ll know on Monday,” said Jack. “I’ll know at the same time as the whole of Gloucestershire, probably, and Mum’ll know before me, she always does.” A pause, and then, in a different voice: “Hanover. Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

He thought about it, at the window at the end of the corridor in Palo Verde Hall, in the coat, with the letter from Potsdam in the inside pocket and a soft grey initial in the corner of a paper about a bridge, and the sun going down gold on the butte.

“Yes,” he said. “Properly.”

“Good,” said Jack. “Then go and eat something. Not eggs.” And then, before Frederick could say goodnight, Jack took a breath, the big one, the one from the top of the Kreuzberg and the barrier at Terminal Four, and shouted, down the telephone, across the river and the bridge and the dark water meadows of the Coln valley at twenty to midnight, so that somewhere in Coln Saint Aldwyns, faintly, through the telephone, a dog began to bark:

“NINTH!”

---

He wrote to Potsdam at nine, by text, because Alexander had said that he might answer in a line, and Alexander always meant exactly what he said.

Yes. Thank you. Stand near Dad.

The answer came in a minute, though it was five in the morning at Potsdam, which meant that his cousin had been up, in the dome, with the red torch and the chart, writing down the conditions.

I will. Three paces from the wall. A.

And then, a minute later, which was the second time in a week, and was not like him at all:

If he looks for a word, I will wait for it.