Ratified

“It has to be ratified,” said Theo, on the steps after the last bell. “By Mum. Otherwise it’s just two boys and a napkin.”

“It is two boys and a napkin.”

“It’s a treaty,” said Theo. “And treaties have to be ratified. You know that. You’re the one with fourteen of everything.” He hitched his bag. “Come tonight. Six. Mum’s off till Friday. It’s goulash.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“Goulash doesn’t know what day it is.”

---

So at six he went up the four flights, because the lift was working but Theo said nobody used it before seven because Mr Dabrowski on the first floor took it to the fourth and back three times every evening for his knees, and stood on the landing with the spider plant on the windowsill and the depot below with its rows of red and cream buses coming in for the night, and knocked, because the bell was broken, and Theo opened the door and said shoes, and he took them off.

The room that was two rooms smelled of paprika and onions and the radiator.

Mrs Hartigan was at the stove. She did not turn round. She said, “Frederick,” in the voice she used for his name, which was exactly the voice she used for Theo and Kate and Peter, and which he had first heard at twelve and had been trying to describe to himself ever since. It was not warm and it was not cool. It was the voice you use for somebody who is there.

“Mrs Hartigan.”

“Bowls.”

He got the bowls down from the second shelf, five, and then put one back, because Kate was at college, and set four round the table on the oilcloth with the pattern of lemons on it, and the spoons, and the bread board, and the sugar bowl shaped like a hen, which did not need to be on the table for goulash and was always on the table anyway.

Mr Hartigan was in his chair by the window with the crossword folded on his knee. He looked up, and nodded, and looked down again.

That was supper number forty-eight. Theo, behind him, said so under his breath, and wrote it on his hand.

---

They ate.

It was goulash, and it was very good, and it was the same as the goulash he had eaten at this table eleven times before, and there was more of it, and he had more, because the rule was the rule, and because he wanted to.

At the end Theo cleared his plate to the sink, and Frederick cleared his, and Mr Hartigan cleared his own and Mrs Hartigan’s, and Mrs Hartigan sat at the table with a cup of tea and her elbows on the oilcloth and looked at the two boys standing at the sink, and said, in Wisconsindeutsch, to her husband, something short that Frederick followed about half of. It had the two of them in it, and a word that meant plotting, and a word that he thought was the word for a goose.

Mr Hartigan said something shorter, and went back to the crossword.

“Mum,” said Theo. “We’ve got a treaty.”

---

He took the napkin out of his inside pocket, from behind the buttoned flap with the eleven pounds, and unfolded it, and smoothed it flat on the oilcloth beside the sugar hen, and turned it round so that it was the right way up for his mother.

She did not turn it back. She read it upside down.

She read it upside down the way she read everything that came into the flat, letters and school reports and the electricity bill and the card that had come from the Household in December with the crest on it, with her elbows on the table and her tea in both hands and her head very slightly on one side. She had told Frederick once that she read upside down because she had learned at the hospital, from twenty years of reading charts at the foot of beds, and that it meant she could read what was on a doctor’s clipboard before the doctor had decided what to tell her.

She read all of it. The five rules and the column under rule two. The stake. ANYTHING. The two witnesses.

At He won’t last her mouth moved at the corner.

“Who’s Inés?”

“From Ventura,” said Theo. “She’s new. In September. She’s living with her aunt in the Heights.”

“She has good judgement,” said Mrs Hartigan, and went on reading.

---

When she had finished she put the tea down and held out her hand without looking up, and Theo, who knew, put a pen in it. Not Priya’s black one. The green biro from the jar by the telephone on the wall, the one she used for the calendar.

She uncapped it.

She went to rule two, the column. NOBODY STANDS UP. And she drew a line through it, neatly, one line, and wrote beside it in the margin, in green, in a small square hand:

Not needed. Nobody ever has. A.H.

“Mum.”

“It’s not a rule if you have to write it down,” said Mrs Hartigan. “If you have to write it down, it means you think somebody might. Nobody in this flat has stood up for him since he was twelve and ate the dumpling, and nobody is going to start on Friday because of a napkin.” She looked at Frederick for the first time. “Is anybody?”

“No, Mrs Hartigan.”

“Good.” She went on.

Under rule four, THE SOFA, she wrote: There is a spring. And under that, after a moment’s thought: The left side.

Under rule five, BOXES AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, she wrote nothing for a long time. She looked at it. She looked at Frederick again, and he saw her think about it properly, the way she thought about a chart, all the way down to the bottom.

Then she wrote, in green, under it: And homework first. Saturday morning. Chemistry.

Theo made a sound.

“You told me,” said his mother, without looking up. “On Tuesday. In German, because you thought he wouldn’t follow it if he came up the stairs. Fifty-four.” She wrote one more line. Before the boxes. A.H. “His father failed Latin. I’ve failed nothing in my life except to make your sister tidy, and I don’t intend to start with chemistry.”

“I’m not your son,” said Frederick, before he could stop himself.

Mrs Hartigan looked at him over the napkin.

“From Friday at four to Monday at eight,” she said, “you are a person eating at my table, and that is the same thing.” She capped the pen. “That’s the rule. It’s at the top. You agreed to all of them.”

---

“There’s one more thing,” said Mrs Hartigan.

She got up. She went to the telephone on the wall by the fridge, the old green one on a curly cord that the Hartigans had brought from Milwaukee in a box and that nobody rang except the hospital, and her mother in Milwaukee on Sundays, and, once in 2027, a newspaper, which she had put the receiver down on without a word. She took it off the hook.

“Does your mother know?”

“Not yet.”

“Then she knows tonight. Before I sign anything.” She held the receiver against her shoulder and looked at him. “What’s the number?”

He told her. The Palace switchboard. It was the number on the card the Household had given the Hartigans in 2026, which Mrs Hartigan kept in the drawer under the telephone with the takeaway menus and had never once used.

She dialled it. He heard it ring. He heard the switchboard answer, small, through the receiver: Columbia Palace.

“This is Anneliese Hartigan,” said Mrs Hartigan, in English, clearly, every consonant, the way she spoke English to the Household and to doctors. “I’d like to speak to the Queen, please. If she’s free. It’s about her son. He’s well.”

There was a pause.

Mr Hartigan, in his chair by the window, lowered the crossword, and looked at his wife, and raised his eyebrows very slightly, and raised the crossword again.

---

His mother came on the line after about forty seconds.

He knew it was his mother because Mrs Hartigan’s face changed, very slightly, the way faces change when the person on the other end turns out to be the person you asked for. And then Mrs Hartigan said, in English, “Good evening. It’s Anneliese. I’m sorry to ring you at home,” and he heard, faintly, his mother’s voice say something, and Mrs Hartigan laughed, once, short.

And then his mother said something else, and Mrs Hartigan answered, and he realised after a moment that they were not speaking English any more.

They were speaking German.

Not the same German. His mother’s was the German she had spoken to her own mother as a girl at Solliden, clear and correct, the German of Stockholm and Berlin. Mrs Hartigan’s was Wisconsindeutsch, older, broader, with words in it that had come from villages in the hills a hundred and seventy years ago and had stopped changing when they crossed the sea. They did not quite match. They met in the middle, the way two people from two ends of a long table meet in the middle to pass the salt, and he sat at the table with his hands round a cup of tea that had appeared in front of him from somewhere and listened to them do it.

He followed perhaps a third.

Sofa, which was the same in both. Bathroom. Something about the stairs. Something about Dame M that made both of them laugh. Chemie, from his mother, with a weight on it. A long sentence from Mrs Hartigan that had Peter in it and five o’clock and a word he did not know. And then, near the end, his mother, quite clearly, a sentence he did understand, because she had said it to him in German once, at Solliden, when he was seven and had wanted to sleep in the boathouse:

Er soll es nur versuchen. Let him try.

Mrs Hartigan said something, and laughed again, and said, in English, “Thank you. Good night,” and hung the receiver back on its hook, and came back to the table, and sat down, and picked up the green biro.

“Your mother,” she said, “says that you are to ring her at nine every night, and that if you lose she wishes to be told the colour of the shirt in advance, so that she can be out.” She uncapped the pen. “She says she has never slept on a sofa either. She sounded very envious.”

---

Under the stake, under ANYTHING, under the two witnesses, she wrote, in green:

Ratified. Anneliese Hartigan.

She turned the napkin round, the right way up for her husband, and slid it across the oilcloth to him, and held out the pen.

Mr Hartigan put down the crossword.

He looked at the napkin for a long time. He read it all. He read it slowly, the way he read the crossword, every clue, as if it might be a trick. Then he looked at Frederick across the table, a long steady look, a bus driver’s look, the look of a man who has spent three years watching people get on and off a bus and has learned to tell in one second which of them is going to be trouble.

“The spring,” said Mr Hartigan, “is on the left.”

It was the first complete sentence Frederick had heard him say in a week. Possibly in a month.

Then he took the green biro and wrote, very small, under his wife’s name: P.H., and gave the pen back, and picked up the crossword.

---

The telephone on the wall rang at half past eight.

Mrs Hartigan answered it. She listened. She held the receiver out across the room at the full length of the curly cord, not to Frederick, but to Theo.

“Your sister.”

Theo took it. “Kate. Yes. Yes. Mum’s signed. And Dad.” A pause. “Initialled.” A longer pause. Theo’s ears went red. “How do you know? Who told… Lucía? How does Lucía have your…” He listened. “Fine. Fine. Yes. I’ll tell him.”

He held the receiver against his chest and looked at Frederick.

“Kate says she was coming home on Sunday with the washing. She says she’s now coming home on Friday with the washing. She says she is not missing this for anything in the world, and that she’s bringing Bethany’s rabbit, because Bethany’s going home for the weekend and the residence won’t let it stay on its own.”

“A rabbit?”

“Professor,” said Theo. “The rabbit’s called Professor. It lives in a box.” He put the receiver back to his ear. “Kate. Kate, Mum says no rabbit.”

Mrs Hartigan, at the sink, said, without turning round: “I did not say no rabbit.”

Theo looked at the back of his mother’s head for a moment in betrayal.

“Mum says rabbit,” he said into the telephone, flatly, and hung up.

---

At a quarter past nine Castellanos texted, because the bell was broken, and Frederick put his shoes on at the door, and Mrs Hartigan gave him the napkin to look at once more before Theo folded it away, and he looked at it.

Five rules in blue capitals and one struck out. Two witnesses, one of them rude. A mother’s ratification in green. A pair of initials, very small. There is a spring. The left side.

“Friday,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Four o’clock. Bring a towel. We haven’t got enough.”

He went down the four flights in the dark, past the spider plant and Mr Dabrowski’s door on the first floor, where the television was on very loud, and out into the cold, where the dark blue car was at the kerb with its engine running and Castellanos at the wheel looking straight ahead through the windscreen at the depot gates.

He got in the front.

Castellanos did not start the car. He sat with his hands on the wheel.

“Sir,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I saw the napkin.” Castellanos looked at the depot gates. “In the cafeteria. I want you to know I saw it, so that you don’t have to tell me.” A pause. “I’m going to need you to tell Dame M yourself.”