The Lift Has a Notice on It

He read his father the arrivals at a quarter to four, which was not the arrangement, at the end of the long kitchen table by the range, under the clock that was four minutes slow, and his father let him, because his father understood that there were days the arrangement could be moved.

Sunday’s arrivals. All of them. The Capitol from Chicago at six fifty-eight. The Crown Limited from Boston. The locals from the Maryland side and the Virginia side. The night train from Savannah, an hour late, which the book did not say and everybody knew.

At the foot of the page he stopped, because there was no more, and shut the blue book, and put it on the table by his father’s good hand.

“I’ll ring you tomorrow at four,” he said. “From the flat. And Sunday. I’ll read them down the telephone. Bridget’ll hold it for you.”

“I’ll hold it,” said Bridget, at the sink, with her back to them. “If I must.”

His father looked at him from the wheelchair. His breath went in, and held, and his lips tried the shape, and Frederick waited, the way he always waited, and did not help.

“Left,” said his father.

Frederick stared at him.

At the sink, Bridget made a sound like a kettle beginning.

“Who told you about the spring?”

His father’s mouth went in at the corner. His eyes went, very slowly, past Frederick, to the door of the kitchen, where his mother was standing with her coat over her arm and her car keys in her hand, because she was going to the hospital at four to sit with somebody from Sweden who was having an operation, and she looked back at his father, perfectly composed, and said nothing at all.

---

One bag.

He had packed it the night before, on the floor of his room, and unpacked it, and packed it again, the way he had packed for Santa Monica in May, because the Santa Monica letter had said one bag and he had found then that one bag was a thing he was very bad at. He had too many of everything and not enough of the right things. In May the Household had offered to pack for him, and he had said no, and had arrived in Los Angeles with four jerseys and no swimming things.

This time he had made a list.

Two shirts for school, Monday. One for Saturday. One for Sunday. Jeans. The grey jumper. Socks: four. Pyjamas: the old ones. Washing things. The chemistry book. Mrs Okonedo’s sheet on equilibria. The blue book. Two towels.

He had underlined two towels. Mrs Hartigan had said bring a towel, we haven’t got enough, and Dame M had said that Mrs Hartigan had assumed two, like anybody, and he had found when he looked in the linen cupboard on the second floor that he did not know which towels were his, because he had never chosen a towel in his life, and had had to ask the housekeeper, who had looked at him for some time before giving him two plain white ones with no crest on them, and had folded them for him, and had then unfolded them and let him fold them himself, which was, he understood, a kindness.

The bag was by the side door. Castellanos had put it in the car.

---

At four o’clock he went out of the side door.

He did not look up. He had decided not to. He walked across the gravel to the car in the cold, in his school coat, with nothing in his hands, and Castellanos opened the front passenger door for him and stood holding it, and he got in, and Castellanos shut it, and went round the front of the car, and got in, and started the engine.

Then he looked up.

He could not help it.

From the front seat of the car on the gravel by the side door you could see, if you leaned forward and looked up through the top of the windscreen, the corner of the roof of the Palace, and the flagstaff on it, white, very tall, against a grey February sky. And at the top of the flagstaff, stiff in the wind off the river, the Standard. The one of 1841. The gold eagle, the British lions twice, the thirteen stripes, and the small shield of Hanover over all, that had been flying since the first of November 2028 every day that he had been in the building and no day that he had not.

There was a man on the roof.

He was a small dark figure in a Household overcoat, at the foot of the flagstaff, with his back to the wind, with one hand on the halyard and the other holding his hat on. He was looking down. Down at the side door, Frederick thought. Down at the car.

He was waiting for the door to shut.

The door had shut.

The man on the roof let go of his hat, which blew off immediately and went away across the roof towards the north wing like a black bird, and he did not look at it. He took the halyard in both hands. And the Standard came down the flagstaff, not fast, not slow, hand over hand, in the wind, the way a flag comes down when it is being brought down properly, by somebody who has been taught, and the eagle and the lions and the stripes went down the white pole until they were gone below the parapet, and the flagstaff stood there against the grey sky with nothing on it at all.

Nothing.

Castellanos had not pulled away. He was sitting with both hands on the wheel, looking up through the windscreen too.

“That’s that, then,” said Castellanos.

---

They went down the Axis.

It was the time of day when the Axis was full: the departments emptying, the buses nose to tail, the plane trees bare and black down the middle of the avenue. People on the pavements in their coats with their heads down against the wind. A woman with a pushchair. A man in a suit eating a sandwich as he walked.

At the lights by the Home Office, a man on the pavement stopped walking.

He was a thin man in a long coat with a briefcase, and he stopped in the middle of the pavement so that the woman behind him nearly walked into him, and he turned round and looked back up the Axis, towards the Palace, and stood there.

The woman behind him said something and walked round him. He did not move. He was looking up.

Then the woman stopped too, and turned, and looked where he was looking.

The light changed. Castellanos pulled away. In the wing mirror on his side, Frederick watched the two of them get smaller, standing in the middle of the pavement on the Axis at ten past four on a Friday in February, looking up at a flagstaff a quarter of a mile away with nothing on it, and a third person stopping beside them, and a fourth.

“Dame M said it’d be noon tomorrow before anybody rang a radio station,” he said.

“Dame M,” said Castellanos, “has never stood at the lights by the Home Office.”

---

The block was brown brick, four floors, on a street of brown brick blocks north-east of the Axis, past the depot where the buses slept. It was the kind of street where the corner shop had a hand-written sign in the window about lottery tickets and another about not asking for credit, and where the plane trees were younger and thinner than the ones on the Axis, and somebody had tied a yellow ribbon round one of them and nobody remembered why.

Castellanos parked on the corner opposite the door. The cross on his map, circled.

He did not turn the engine off.

“Kimura’s here at eight,” he said. “I’m here till then. The night man from eight till four, then me. I’ll be here, sir.” He looked at the door of the block, a brown door with a glass panel and a row of bells beside it, eight of them, one with a piece of tape across it. “If you need me you text. You don’t come down. You don’t open the window and shout. You text.”

“I know.”

“If anybody else needs me, they text.”

“Who else would?”

Castellanos looked at the door.

“I’ve been doing this for twenty years, sir,” he said. “Somebody always does.”

He got out, and took the bag from the back seat, and came round and opened the door for him, and stood holding it, and Frederick got out on the pavement in the cold in front of a block of flats in the north-east of the capital with a bag over his shoulder and two towels under his arm, and Castellanos did not give him the bag.

He held it a moment longer than he needed to.

“House rules,” said Castellanos.

“House rules.”

“I can’t come up.”

“I know.”

Castellanos gave him the bag.

---

The lift was in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, beside the row of metal post boxes with the names on them in different handwritings. It had a brown metal door with a small window of wired glass in it at the height of a face.

There was a notice on it.

It was on a piece of lined paper torn out of a notebook, stuck to the wired glass with four pieces of tape, one at each corner, in blue biro, in capitals:

LIFT OUT OF ORDER ENGINEER MONDAY SORRY D. (1st FLOOR)

And under it, in a different hand, in pencil, smaller:

Again.

He looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at the stairs.

The stairs went up beside the lift, in a square well, round and round, with a metal handrail painted brown and worn to the bare metal on the inside where hands went, and the treads were stone, and on the first landing there was a door with a television behind it, very loud, a game show, people clapping.

Fifty-six steps. Four flights of fourteen. The Private Secretary had measured them with a clicker in 2028.

He went up.

He did not count. He found that he was counting anyway, under his breath, the way you count anything you have been told the number of. Fourteen, the first landing, Mr Dabrowski’s television and the smell of somebody’s dinner. Fourteen, the second landing, Mrs Okonjo’s door, with a wreath on it of dried flowers and a small brass plate with her name, and behind it, faintly, a radio playing music he did not know, a woman singing in a language he did not know either. Fourteen, the third landing, two pushchairs folded against the wall and a child’s red wellington boot on its own, upside down, on the bottom stair of the next flight, as if somebody had walked out of it.

He stepped over the boot.

Fourteen. The fourth landing.

The window at the end, tall and narrow, wired glass, with the spider plant in the yoghurt pot on the sill and the empty saucer and the paperback with no cover, and beyond it, below, the depot yard with the buses coming in for the night in their rows, red and cream, their lights going off one by one, and a small figure going along between them with a torch.

He was breathing harder than he would have liked. The bag was heavy. The towels had begun to slide.

The door of the flat was the second on the left. It had the number on it in brass and no name. Under the number, at the height of his chest, there was a card in a small plastic sleeve, which had not been there on Wednesday. It said, in green biro, in a small square hand:

BELL BROKEN. KNOCK.

And under that, newer, in blue capitals, in Theo’s hand:

SHOES.

He knocked.

---

There was a sound behind the door of somebody putting something down, and then a sound of the somebody picking it up again, and then the door opened, and it was Kate.

She was nineteen and dark-haired and very like her mother about the eyes, and she was wearing a jumper with the name of the college on the river across it, faded, and thick socks, and she had under her left arm, held against her side the way you hold a thing that might go off, a cardboard box with holes punched in the lid. On the side of the box, in black marker, in large capitals, it said TEXTBOOKS.

She looked at him. At the bag, and the towels, and his school coat, and his face, which he suspected was red from the stairs.

“You took the stairs,” said Kate.

“The lift’s got a notice on it.”

“The lift’s always got a notice on it.” She stood back from the door, and the box under her arm moved, very slightly, on its own, and she put her other hand on the lid without looking at it. “Shoes.”

He took his shoes off on the mat.

“This is Professor,” said Kate, of the box. “Don’t look at him. He doesn’t like to be looked at by strangers. He’s had a very long day on the twenty-two.”

“So have I.”

“You’ve had a very long day in a car,” said Kate, and went back into the flat, and left the door open behind her for him to come in.