Yellow and White

Kimura was on the pavement by the grey car with two boxes.

She was standing at the open back door with one under each arm, in her raincoat, in the grey light, with the depot gates behind her and the street empty except for a milk float going by very slowly at the far end with its bottles chiming, and she did not move when he came out of the street door, and she did not say anything until he had crossed the road to her.

“Sir.”

“Sergeant.”

“Two boxes,” said Kimura. “From Dame M. At twenty to seven. By a man from the Palace in a car who would not get out of it, because he said this street is the detail’s and he was Household and he had read the napkin.” She held them both a little out from her sides, one in each hand, like a woman holding two cakes at a fête. “Dame M said to give you whichever one was needed.”

The one under her left arm was green. Dark green, cardboard, long and flat, with a gold G on the lid. It was taped shut. Nobody had opened it.

The one under her right arm was white.

It was long and flat too, and heavier, he thought, from the way she held it, and the cardboard was thick and good and had come a long way, because the corners were soft, and on the lid there was a crest he knew: a white horse, rearing, on a red ground, and under it, in small black capitals, in German, KÖNIGLICH HANNOVERSCHES KRONAMT.

The Royal Hanoverian Crown Office.

“It came in the courier’s bag,” said Kimura. “With the week’s papers from Hanover. It landed at six. The man in the car said the Crown Office’s courier had been told on Sunday afternoon by the Master of the Household to put in the bag something that was not a paper, and that he had sat on it across the Atlantic for nine hours because there was nowhere else to put it.” She looked at the white box. “He said it was the first thing that had ever come in that bag that wasn’t signed by somebody.”

He took the white one.

Kimura looked at the green one under her other arm for a moment. Then she opened the back door of the grey car a little wider and put the green box on the back seat, carefully, flat, and shut the door on it.

“I’ll give it back to Dame M,” she said. “Unopened.”

“Thank you.”

“Seven out of ten,” said Kimura, looking at the depot gates, “for the weekend. You lost three for the stairs in your socks.” A pause. “And ten for the box. I’d have given ten for the box whatever was in it.”

---

He took it up the fifty-six steps.

He did not run. He walked, at the pace Mr Hartigan had walked up them at six, one step at a time, with the white box from the Royal Hanoverian Crown Office held flat in both hands in front of him the way the Private Secretary held a red box, and he did not hit the light switch, because it was light enough now, grey and early, coming in at the window on every landing.

On the second landing Mrs Okonjo’s door was open and she was standing in it in her dressing gown with a cup of tea, and she looked at the box, and at the crest, and at him.

“For Theodore,” said Mrs Okonjo.

“For Theo.”

“Ah,” said Mrs Okonjo, and went back in, and did not shut her door.

On the fourth landing, the kitchen chair with the wobble, against the wall, where it lived now. The spider plant on the sill. The depot below the window, with a gap in the second row where the six fifteen had been.

The door of the flat was open.

---

Theo was standing in the middle of the room that was two rooms in his school shirt, with his tie not done up and his blazer over his arm, and he had clearly not moved since Frederick went down. Kate was beside the table with her telephone in her hand. Mrs Hartigan was at the end by the stove with her coffee. Mr Hartigan was on the sofa, on his side, under the crocheted blanket, with his eyes open.

Theo looked at the box.

He looked at the crest on it. The white horse. The red ground. KÖNIGLICH HANNOVERSCHES KRONAMT.

“Oh no,” said Theo.

Frederick put the box down on the table, on the oilcloth with the lemons, between the sugar hen and the bread board, square, and stood back from it.

“You said anything,” he said.

“I said anything,” said Theo. “I said a dress. I said Mr Abernathy’s jacket.” He did not move towards the box. “I said except.”

“You said except at breakfast on Sunday,” said Frederick. “The napkin was ratified on Wednesday.” He looked at the box. “It says anything. In capitals. In your own hand. With two witnesses and a ratification and a pair of initials.”

From the sofa, Mr Hartigan made a sound that might have been a cough.

Theo looked at his father.

Then he crossed the room to the table, and stood over the box, and undid the tape at each end with his thumbnail, carefully, the way he undid the tape on a dressing at St John, and lifted the lid.

---

Inside, in white tissue paper, folded, there was a shirt.

He lifted it out by the shoulders and it fell open in front of him.

It was yellow.

It was the yellow of the Welf standard, the yellow of the Kingdom of Hanover, and it was not gold, and it could not by anybody be mistaken for gold, or for the gold of the green and gold. It was the yellow of a daffodil, and a lemon from Pomona, and a foam wedge of cheese, and a custard. The collar was white. The sleeves were white. And on the left of the chest, over the heart, embroidered, about the size of a man’s hand, a white horse, rearing, on a small red shield.

On the back, in white letters across the shoulders, HANNOVER. And under it, a number. 1.

There was a card in the tissue paper. Kate picked it up, because Theo was holding the shirt and could not, and read it aloud, in English, because it was in English:

With the compliments of the Royal Hanoverian Crown Office. The Kingdom’s football shirt, home colours, size XXL, as requested. The Minister-President, informed at four o’clock on Sunday of the purpose, asks to be remembered to the King’s Page, and hopes that he will wear it in good health and with the Kingdom’s gratitude for carrying the train at Westminster in November. The number is the Minister-President’s own choice.

Kate lowered the card.

“One,” said Kate.

Theo stood in the middle of the room holding the shirt up by its shoulders in front of himself, the shirt of the Kingdom of Hanover, yellow and white, with a white horse on it and a number one on the back, and his face did something that Frederick had never seen it do, in four years, through everything, the Ferris wheel and the gym and the bluff and the Abbey.

It went the same colour as the shirt.

---

“Put it on,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“Mum.”

“You said anything.” She drank her coffee. “It’s on the napkin. I ratified it.” She looked at the shirt over the top of her cup. “It’s a very good shirt. It’s better made than anything in Dorsey’s.”

Theo looked at the shirt for a long moment more.

Then he put his blazer down on the back of a chair, and took off his school shirt, there, in the middle of the kitchen, the way you take off a shirt in a changing room after football, and pulled the shirt of the Kingdom of Hanover on over his head.

It fitted. It fitted perfectly. Somebody at the Royal Hanoverian Crown Office, in Hanover, at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in February, had found a shirt in exactly the size of a sixteen-year-old defensive lineman who had lifted weights in a school weights room three mornings a week since he was thirteen, and put it in the courier’s bag with the week’s papers, and sent it across the Atlantic, and it fitted.

He stood in the middle of the room in it, yellow, with the white horse on his heart.

Kate held up her telephone.

“Can I?”

Theo looked at her.

“It’s for my wall,” said Kate. “At college. Next to the sun. From the eighth grade.” She did not lower the telephone. “So they’re a pair.”

Theo shut his eyes.

“Fine,” he said.

Kate took the photograph.

---

From the sofa, Mr Hartigan lifted his head off the arm and looked at his son.

He looked for a long time. At the yellow. At the white horse. At the 1 on the back, when Theo turned round, because his mother had said turn round and he had turned round. At his son standing in the room that was two rooms on a Monday morning in February in the football shirt of a kingdom four thousand miles away that belonged to his friend.

His breath went in. Frederick saw it go in.

“Gelb,” said Mr Hartigan.

Yellow.

And put his head back down on the arm of the sofa, and shut his eyes, and under the crocheted blanket from Milwaukee his shoulders began, very slowly, to shake.

Kate did not hold up any fingers. She had run out on Sunday.

---

They caught the twenty-two at half past seven.

It was the rule. Theo had written it on the napkin on Wednesday, beside the first line, small: (THE 22). When you get off the twenty-two at the stop by the bike racks on Monday morning, it’s over.

They went down the fifty-six steps together, the two of them, Frederick in his school coat with his tie done up now and Theo in his blazer over the yellow shirt, buttoned, because it was February, and because Theo had tried to keep the blazer buttoned over it so that nobody would see, and the shirt was so yellow that you could see it at the collar and the cuffs and in the gap between the buttons, and the white horse had its head out over the top button as if looking for somebody.

The stop was at the corner by the depot gates. There were five people at it already. A woman in a nurse’s uniform under her coat. A man with a briefcase. Two girls of about twelve in a uniform Frederick did not know. An old man with a newspaper.

They all looked at Theo.

Not at Frederick. At Theo. At the yellow at his collar and his cuffs and the white horse looking out between his buttons.

“That’s Peter’s boy,” said the woman in the nurse’s uniform to the man with the briefcase, not quietly. “Hartigan’s. From the fourth floor.” She looked at the yellow. “What’s he wearing?”

“Is that a horse?” said one of the girls.

Kimura, fifteen yards behind them at the depot wall, did not look at anybody, and Frederick was nearly certain she was smiling.

---

The bus came at seven thirty-one.

It was a red and cream bus, the same as all of them, with 22 BOATHOUSES VIA BLADEN ST & THE AXIS on the blind, and it pulled in at the stop with a hiss of air brakes, and the door opened, and the driver was a woman of about forty with short grey hair and the transit authority’s badge on her jacket, and she looked down the steps at the queue, and at Theo, and her face changed.

“Hartigan,” she said. “Is it true about your dad?”

“Stone,” said Theo. “He’s home. He’s on the sofa. He’s all right.”

“Lasko said. At the depot. He did the six fifteen himself. First time in eleven years. Double-declutched all the way to the boathouses.” She looked at the yellow at Theo’s collar. “What’s that?”

“A bet,” said Theo, and showed his pass, and went down the bus.

The driver looked at Frederick.

She looked at him for exactly as long as she looked at everybody who got on her bus, at seven thirty-one on a Monday morning, and he held up his pass, the school one, with the photograph on it from September, and she looked at that too, and back at him, and he watched her see who it was, from one side of her face to the other.

She did not say anything.

She nodded at the pass, the way Mr Obi nodded at it at a quarter past three, and he went down the bus and sat beside Theo by the window, on the left, halfway back, and the doors hissed shut, and the bus pulled out.

---

He had never been on a city bus in the Realm.

He had been on buses. He had been on a coach to Los Angeles and a bus in London once, at eleven, with his mother, on the top deck, so that he would know what one was. He had never once been on a city bus in the capital of his own country, at half past seven in the morning, with people going to work, sitting by a window on the left halfway back beside his best friend in a yellow shirt.

He looked out of the window.

Bladen Street. The stop where the people who worked at the bakery and the hospital and the Home Office had stood at ten past six in the dark, and had had a bus, because an old man with a torch had driven it. The avenue. The church with ALL WELCOME on its board. The launderette, with its door open already and the warm smell of it coming out. Dorsey’s, yellow, unmissable, with the shutters going up, and at the door, in her white hat and her green and gold coat, unlocking it, Margit, who looked up at the bus as it went past, at the windows, and saw the yellow at the window halfway back on the left, and stopped with the key in the lock, and stared.

Theo slid down in his seat.

The lottery shop. Tenth Street, where the Schusters lived, who were the other family Margit kept the good Topfen for. The bridge, over the river, grey and fast and brown, with a branch going down it. The hill. The hospital, the main gate, where he had gone every day for fourteen months at four o’clock, and the emergency entrance round the back, where the ambulances were still in a row with their lights going round, and a man came out of the doors at the bottom of the ramp in a green and gold shirt with blood on it and a cheese hat in his hand and his nose in a white plaster, and stood on the ramp in the grey morning with his face up to the sky, breathing.

The Axis.

The bus came down the hill onto the Axis at the Home Office lights and stopped for the red, and he looked out of the window to the right, past Theo, up the long white avenue with the bare plane trees down the middle, to the Palace at the top, and the roof, and the flagstaff.

It was bare.

White, very tall, against the grey sky, with nothing on it at all.

And on the pavement below it, at the Home Office lights, by the railings, there were people. Not a crowd. Perhaps twenty. Standing, in their coats, with their briefcases and their shopping, at twenty to eight on a Monday morning in February, looking up at a bare flagstaff on the Palace roof. Two of them had a flask. One of them, a thin man in a long coat with a briefcase, Frederick was nearly certain, was the man who had stopped on Friday at ten past four and looked back up the Axis and made the woman behind him walk into him.

They were waiting.

At half past three, when he walked in at the side door, it would go up.

The light changed. The bus went on.

---

The river road. The boathouses. The long brick building of three floors on the river side of the road, with the glass block behind it that leaked worse than the old one, and the car park, and the wire fence, and Mr Obi’s hut by the side gate. And the bike racks, by the gate, and the stop beside them, with a shelter and a timetable in a frame.

The bus pulled in. The doors hissed.

Theo stood up, in his blazer, with the yellow at his collar and his cuffs and the white horse looking out between his buttons, and looked down at Frederick still sitting by the window.

“Well,” said Theo. “Go on, then.”

Frederick got up.

He went down the bus, past the nurse and the man with the briefcase and the two girls of about twelve, who had not stopped looking at Theo for one second since the depot, and past the driver, who did not look at him, and nodded at the windscreen, and said “Mind how you go” to the windscreen, which was what she said to everybody.

He stepped down off the twenty-two onto the pavement by the bike racks at Ellicott High School at nine minutes to eight on Monday the eleventh of February 2030.

Theo stepped down behind him.

The doors hissed shut. The bus pulled away, towards the boathouses, with its lights on, and they stood on the pavement by the bike racks and watched it go.

“That’s it,” said Theo. “It’s over.”

“It’s over.”

“You lasted.” Theo looked at the bus going away along the river road. “Friday to Monday. House rules. All of them. The sofa and the spring and the beetroot and the stairs. The Household not upstairs except when it was for Dad. You lasted.” He put his hands in the pockets of his blazer and the blazer came open and the shirt underneath it shone in the grey morning like a lamp. “You won.”

“Mrs Hartigan said I won.”

“Mum rules on what it means,” said Theo. “So you won.” He looked down at himself. At the yellow. At the white horse. At the 1, which he could not see but knew was there. “I look like a custard.”

“You look like the Kingdom of Hanover.”

“That’s what I said,” said Theo.

---

At a quarter past eight Mr Abernathy called the register.

The brown jacket. The roll book of the ordinary homeroom, thirty names. The radiators under the long windows over the playing field that had been fixed in September and that nobody touched.

“Abrams.”

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

Castañeda. At the desk by the door, where she always sat, Inés said here, and did not look round, and did not need to, because she had looked round when they came in, and had looked at Theo’s collar, and at Frederick, and had written something on the corner of her crossword in a hand that was quick and slanting and very black and had folded it and passed it along the row to Priya, who had passed it to Frederick, without reading it, because Priya did not read other people’s things.

He had it in his hand. He had not opened it.

Diaz. Eckhardt. Feeney. Gallagher. Grant. The homeroom voice, level and dry. Each name, the answer, the small mark, the small pause after every name that was for everybody.

“Hanover.”

“Here.”

The mark. He did not look up.

“Hartigan.”

“Here,” said Theo.

The mark.

And then Mr Abernathy, for the first time in four years and a summer, at the roll, in the homeroom, at a quarter past eight on a Monday, did not go on to the next name.

He looked up.

He looked over the top of his glasses down the room, past the H’s, at the boy at the second desk from the window in the fourth row, with his blazer buttoned, and the yellow at his collar and his cuffs, and the white horse of Lower Saxony looking out between his buttons on its small red shield, as if looking for somebody.

The room went very quiet.

“Hartigan,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Sir.”

“You are yellow.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr Abernathy considered this, in the homeroom voice, which was the same voice whatever was on the television, for exactly as long as he considered anything.

“It suits you,” he said, and looked down at the roll book, and made the mark again, very small, beside the first one. “Ibrahim.”

---

He opened Inés’s note under the desk.

It was the corner of yesterday’s crossword, torn off, folded twice. On it, in the quick slanting black hand, four words, and her initial.

I take it back. I.

He folded it again and put it in his blazer pocket, with Mrs Okonedo’s sheet on equilibria, done twice, and the receipt from Dorsey’s with PEANUT BTR CRNCHY on it twice, once cancelled, which Mrs Hartigan had given back to him at a quarter to seven at the door without a word, along with his towel, the one that had not been under the cushion.

Moreno. Novak.

Beside him, at the next desk, Theo had his planner open on his knee, under the desk, where Mr Abernathy could not see it, at the back, at the page where he kept the score, and was writing, very fast, in capitals, with the tip of his tongue showing.

Frederick did not look. He did not need to.

He could see it anyway, out of the corner of his eye, upside down, the way Mrs Hartigan read a chart.

THE BET.

FREDDIE: STAYED.

SHIRT: YELLOW.

HORSE: WHITE.

NUMBER: 1.

And at the bottom, after a moment’s thought, smaller, in a line of its own:

NEXT FRIDAY: OURS. MUM SAYS.