The Napkin

THE BET, wrote Theo, at the top of the napkin, and underlined it twice, and the second line went through the green name of the catering company.

Under it:

1. FRIDAY 8 FEB AFTER SCHOOL TO MONDAY 11 FEB SCHOOL.

He looked up.

“Monday school,” said Theo. “Not Monday morning. Monday school. You go to school from ours. On the bus.”

“On the bus?”

“On the twenty-two, like a person. With me. That’s the end of it. When you get off the twenty-two at the stop by the bike racks on Monday morning, it’s over.” He wrote it in, small, beside the line: (THE 22). “If you’re still in. Which you won’t be.”

2. HOUSE RULES. ALL OF THEM.

“What are all of them?” said Devon.

Theo did not look up. He wrote, in a column, in smaller capitals, the way he had written the score in February in the back of his planner, very fast, with the tip of his tongue showing.

EAT WHAT’S ON IT.

CLEAR YOUR PLATE TO THE SINK.

SHOES OFF AT THE DOOR.

JOBS. YOU GET GIVEN THEM. YOU DO THEM.

BATHROOM BY THE ROTA.

NOBODY STANDS UP.

He looked at the last one for a moment, and then at Frederick, and did not cross it out.

“That’s not a rule at ours,” said Frederick. “Nobody stands up at yours anyway. Nobody ever has.”

“It’s a rule for you,” said Theo. “It’s so you know it is. If anybody stands up for you, you lose a point.”

“How can I lose a point for somebody else standing up?”

“Because you’ll have done something to make them,” said Theo, and went on writing.

---

3. NO HOUSEHOLD UPSTAIRS.

He wrote it in larger capitals than the rest.

“Castellanos stays in the car,” said Theo. “Kimura stays in the car. Nobody from the Palace comes up. No footmen. No butlers. No Dame M.” He paused, and then, because he was honest, wrote under it: (DAME M CAN RING.) “She can ring. I’m not stupid. If she can’t ring she’ll come up herself, and then we’ll have Dame M on the landing in her grey suit eating Mum’s cake again, and Mum’ll ask her to stay for supper, and she will, and then it’s Household at the table, which is worse.”

“She ate two bits,” said Lucía. “In September. Kate told me.”

“She ate two bits,” said Theo darkly. “Nobody’s seen Dame M eat anything in thirty years. She came up four floors and ate two bits of apple cake and Mum’s never got over it.”

4. THE SOFA.

“The sofa,” said Frederick.

“You’re not having a bed. There isn’t one. There’s Mum and Dad’s and there’s mine and there’s Kate’s and there’s the sofa.” Theo considered. “Kate’s home Sunday. With the washing. She’s not giving you her bed and she’s not giving you mine, and she’d be right.”

“I didn’t ask for anybody’s bed.”

“You didn’t have to. Mum’ll try to give you hers. She’ll say it’s no trouble and that she and Dad’ll have the sofa. She’ll do it on Friday night at ten o’clock with clean sheets already on. That’s why it’s a rule.” Theo underlined SOFA twice. “So that when she does it you can say I’m sorry, Mrs Hartigan, it’s in the bet.”

Frederick looked at the word.

He had slept in a great many places. He had slept on the floor of a gym in Santa Monica on a cot with a blanket from the Red Cross, and on an aircraft over the Atlantic, and in a bed at Solliden that had been his grandfather’s grandfather’s, and in a room in London the night before he was crowned that was so large he had not been able to see the far wall in the dark. He had never once slept on a sofa.

He did not say so. Theo knew. Theo always knew.

---

“There’s a fifth,” said Frederick.

Theo looked up.

“Boxes.” Frederick said it quietly, because the cafeteria was not a place for it. “I’ve got boxes, Theo. Every day. They come at half past seven and at six. I can’t just not do them for a weekend because of a bet. I’m…” He stopped. “They come.”

Theo looked at him for a long moment, with the pen held over the napkin.

Then he did a thing Frederick had not expected: he nodded. Slowly. The way Mr Ferrante nodded when somebody had said something true at the back of the room and he wanted them to know it had been heard.

“Okay,” said Theo. “They come. You do them.” He bent over the napkin. “At the kitchen table.”

5. BOXES AT THE KITCHEN TABLE. LIKE HOMEWORK. IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY.

“In front of everybody?”

“That’s what homework is at ours. You do it at the table and Mum looks at it upside down and Kate tells you it’s wrong.” Theo wrote on. “Nobody leaves the room. You know your rule. One box open at a time. Fine. But we’re in the room. It’s our room. You don’t get to make us go and sit in the bedroom so you can be King at our table.”

“That’s not how…”

“It’s how it is at ours.”

Frederick thought about the rule. He thought about the study at the back of the first floor, with the window that faced the wrong way, and the boxes on the desk one at a time with the others shut, and the Private Secretary standing at his elbow, and the door closed. And then about the kitchen table four floors over the depot, with the oilcloth on it and the sugar bowl shaped like a hen, and Mrs Hartigan reading his papers upside down.

Nothing in any realm’s law said who could be in the room. Only what could be open in it.

“All right,” he said.

Priya made a small note on the back of her hand with a second pen.

---

“Stake,” said Devon. “You’ve got to have a stake. It’s not a bet without a stake.”

“I know it’s not a bet without a stake, Devon.”

“So what is it?”

Theo looked at the napkin, where there was just room at the bottom, under the five rules, above the fold. He looked at Frederick. He looked, for some reason, at Marcus, who had gone on humming and stopped.

Then his face did something that Frederick had last seen at the top of a Ferris wheel in Santa Monica, a second before the wheel stopped, when Theo had looked down at the whole of the bay laid out under them in the morning sun and said I am going to remember this when I am a very old man.

“Shirt,” said Theo.

“What shirt?”

“Loser wears a shirt to school on Monday. Winner chooses.” Theo was already writing. “All day. Homeroom to the last bell. No jacket over it. No jumper.” He wrote it. STAKE: LOSER WEARS A SHIRT TO SCHOOL MONDAY. WINNER CHOOSES. ALL DAY. NO JACKET. He looked up. “And if you lose, I’m choosing a Packers shirt.”

There was a short silence at the table.

Then Priya put her apple down.

“He can’t,” said Priya.

Everybody looked at her.

“He can’t wear a Packers shirt,” said Priya, in the calm voice she used for things that were simply the case, like the angles of a triangle. “It’s in the protocol. The Bowl protocol. We did it in civics in eighth grade, and I wrote it down because I thought it was sad. No royal figure presents a partisan colour, influences venue selection, or claims a club. The King can go to the Bowl as a neutral guest, and if he does they play the anthem, and that’s all. He can’t wear a club’s colours. He can’t support anybody.” She picked her apple up again. “He’s not allowed.”

“Exactly,” said Theo, with deep satisfaction. “So he’d better not lose.”

---

Frederick looked at the napkin.

He had known it, of course. He had known it since he was nine, when he had asked his father, at the lodge at Lac du Roi, in front of the television with a game on, who they were supporting, and his father had said, gently, that they did not support anybody, because they were everybody’s, and that it was one of the very few sacrifices of the job that he had never once got used to.

Frederick, who holds fourteen Crowns and cannot support anything.

He had read that in the Register, in Theo’s own article, in the section about the Packers, at thirteen, and had laughed out loud, alone, in the library at the Palace, because it was so exactly true and so exactly the kind of sentence the Register wrote about things it found funny and would not say so.

If he lost, he would walk into homeroom on Monday the eleventh of February in a green and gold shirt with a G on it, and Mr Abernathy would call the roll, and somebody would take a photograph, because somebody always did, and by lunch it would be on the radio, and by Tuesday there would be a question in the House about whether the Crown had claimed a club, and the Household would have to issue a statement, and the Packers’ supporters, who owned their club and voted on things, would vote on whether to make him an honorary something, and Dame M would look at him across the small dining room over her folder for a very long time without saying anything at all.

“And Sunday’s the Bowl,” said Theo, as if this were an afterthought, which it was not. “Green Bay. Against Boston. It’s on at half six. You’re watching it at ours.”

“Neutrally.”

“You can watch it as neutrally as you like,” said Theo. “In a flat full of people who own the club.”

---

“And if you lose?” said Frederick.

“I won’t.”

“If you do.”

Theo shrugged, magnificently.

“Then you choose. Anything you like. I’ll wear it. I don’t care. I’ll wear a dress. I’ll wear Mr Abernathy’s brown jacket.” He wrote it in, at the bottom: IF THEO LOSES: FREDDIE CHOOSES. ANYTHING. “Because I won’t.”

Frederick looked at ANYTHING for a moment.

He did not know what he would choose. He did not have to know yet. He had three days, and if he did not last them it would not matter, and if he did, he would think of something. He thought he would think of something good. He had a feeling, somewhere at the back of his mind, the way you feel a thing that has not arrived yet, that he would know it when he saw it.

“Witnesses,” said Theo, and held out the pen.

Priya took it and signed, at the bottom right, under ANYTHING, in her small neat hand that she used for calligraphy: Witnessed. P.

Then she held the pen out along the table, and Inés, at the end, who had not said one word since she had passed the napkin across, looked at it, and at the napkin, and at Frederick, and took the pen, and leaned over, and signed under Priya, in a hand that was quick and slanting and very black:

I. Castañeda. Witnessed. He won’t last.

“Inés,” said Lucía, scandalised.

“I’m a witness,” said Inés, and handed the pen back to Priya, and went back to the crossword. “Witnesses say what they see.”

---

Theo folded the napkin in half, and in half again, and put it in the inside pocket of his blazer, on the left, where he kept the eleven pounds, and buttoned the pocket over both.

“Shake,” he said, and held out his hand across the table, over the potatoes.

Frederick shook it.

Across the cafeteria, at the end of the long teachers’ table by the doors, Castellanos lowered his newspaper by about an inch, and looked at them over the top of it, at the two hands across the table in the corner by the radiator, for exactly as long as it took them to let go.

Then he folded the newspaper. Not small, the way he folded it when he was reading. In half, once, flat, the way he folded it when he had stopped reading and was going to do something else. He put it on the table beside his cup, and put his hand flat on it, and sat looking at nothing in particular, at the far wall, with the expression of a man who has just been told that his weekend has been rearranged by somebody who did not ask him.

“He saw,” said Lucía.

“He sees everything,” said Theo, with satisfaction. “That’s his job. Mine’s the napkin.”

The bell went for fifth period. Frederick picked up his bag, with the chemistry paper still at the bottom of it, under the banana, and it seemed to him, for no reason that he could have given, much lighter than it had been at noon.