The Rota

He lay on his front on the rug in his socks with his cheek against the wool and a lettuce leaf held out in front of him at arm’s length into the dark under the sofa, and did not move.

“Slower,” said Kate, from somewhere above and behind him.

“I’m not moving at all.”

“Your hand’s moving. I can see it moving. He can see it moving.”

“It’s not moving. It’s holding.”

“Holding is a kind of moving,” said Kate. “To a rabbit.”

Under the sofa, about a foot from the end of the lettuce, the two round dark eyes looked at him. Nothing else of Professor was visible: the eyes, and the faint grey shape of a nose, very slightly twitching, and above them, in the dark, two long ears laid flat, and above the ears, the underside of the sofa, where the springs were, and one of them, on the left, hung down lower than the others in a loop of rusty wire.

He had been there for four minutes. He could hear the tap running behind him, and the plates, and Theo drying, and Mr Hartigan’s newspaper. He could hear the radiator thinking about something.

He did not move his hand.

The nose twitched. Then the eyes came forward, an inch. Then another inch. And then Professor came out from under the sofa into the light of the lamp with the fringed shade, all of him, large and grey and brown and very serious, and stopped six inches from the lettuce leaf, and looked at it, and at the hand holding it, and at the face on the rug beyond the hand, for a long time.

Then he took the lettuce. He took it the way a man takes a document across a desk: carefully, from the very edge, without touching the fingers that held it. And sat back on his haunches on the rug and ate it, looking at Frederick the whole time.

Nobody in the room said anything.

“Six minutes,” said Kate at last, very quietly. “That’s six minutes.” She was kneeling on the rug beside him with the empty box. “He took six weeks to take one off me.”

“Maybe he likes me.”

“He doesn’t like anybody,” said Kate. “He’s a professor.” She looked at the rabbit, and then at Frederick, and then at the rabbit again, with an expression of deep and personal betrayal. “He’s just never seen anybody lie still for that long before.”

---

He dried.

It was the job he always did after supper at this table: Mrs Hartigan washed, Theo or Kate dried, and he put away, because he knew where everything went. But tonight Mrs Hartigan handed him the tea towel and said dry, and gave Theo the job of putting away, and Theo opened his mouth to say something and shut it again and put away.

The tea towel had a map of Wisconsin on it, faded, with the lakes in blue and a small red dot for Milwaukee and a smaller one for a town called Kiel that Mrs Hartigan’s family came from.

He dried the plates, and the big dish, and the three little glass dishes the colour of weak tea, including the one that had had the beetroot in it, which had left a faint purple ring at the bottom that would not come off. He held it up to the light.

“It never comes off,” said Mrs Hartigan, without turning round. “That one’s been purple since 2009.”

---

The rota was on the fridge.

He had seen it when he came in and had not read it, because the fridge had a great many things on it: the calendar in green biro, a magnet from the Wisconsin State Fair in the shape of a cow, a postcard from somebody in Milwaukee of a lake, a photograph of Kate at about ten on a bicycle, a list of telephone numbers for the hospital, and a drawing in crayon that Theo said he had done at five and that his mother would not take down. The rota was new. It was on a sheet of lined paper, held at the top by the cow, written in green biro in a column.

BATHROOM. SATURDAY.

4.45: PETER. 6.20: FREDERICK. 6.40: ANNELIESE. 7.00: THEO (ST JOHN 7.30). 7.20: KATE.

And under Kate, a line, and under the line, in smaller writing: Kate: 7.20 to 7.40. Not 8.15. A.H.

“Six twenty,” he said.

“You wake at six,” said Mrs Hartigan, at the sink. “Theo says. Since the earthquake.” She rinsed a pan. “So you can lie there for twenty minutes and listen to Peter’s alarm come through the wall at a quarter to five, and then go back to sleep, and then wake up at six, and then lie there for twenty minutes more and think about what you’ve let yourself in for, and then go in at six twenty when it’s empty and warm, before I get in at twenty to seven.” She turned the tap off. “It’s the best slot. I gave it you because you’re a guest.”

“I thought I wasn’t a guest.”

“You’re not a guest at the table,” said Mrs Hartigan. “You’re a guest in the bathroom. They’re different rooms.”

---

At nine Mr Hartigan went to bed.

He did it the way he always did it: he looked at the clock on the cooker, and folded the crossword in half with the pen inside it, and stood up, and put the newspaper on the arm of his chair, and said night to the room in general, and went to the door at the far end of the kitchen half, which was the door to the short passage with the two bedrooms and the bathroom.

At the door he stopped and looked back, the way he had stopped and looked back on the night in October 2028 when the Sauerbraten had taken three days.

He looked at the sofa.

“Left,” said Mr Hartigan, and went out.

Kate said, “That’s three,” under her breath, and Theo wrote it on his hand.

---

The knock came at half past nine.

It was not a loud knock. It was two knocks, polite, on the door of the flat, the kind of knock somebody gives when they do not want to wake anybody and are not sure whether they ought to have knocked at all.

Theo was at the table with his chemistry. Kate was on the rug with the rabbit, who was asleep now, in his box, with the lid off. Mrs Hartigan was in the chair by the lamp at the sitting-room end with her feet up on a stool, reading a paperback in German with a picture of a lighthouse on the front. Frederick was on the sofa, at the right-hand end, carefully, with his chemistry book open on his knee at equilibria, not reading it.

They all looked at the door.

“I’ll go,” said Theo, and went.

He opened the door. He looked out onto the landing. He looked left, towards the stairs, and right, towards the window with the spider plant.

“Nobody,” said Theo.

Then he looked down.

---

It was a hamper.

It was on the landing, on the floor, exactly in front of the door, square to it, so that you could not have opened the door without seeing it. A wicker hamper, large, the old-fashioned kind, the colour of honey, with two leather straps round it and a brass buckle on each and a leather handle on the lid. It was the kind of hamper Frederick had seen on the top shelf of the dresser in the kitchen at the Palace all his life and had never once seen come down.

Tucked under one of the leather straps, there was an envelope. Cream. Not the Household’s paper; there was no crest on it. Plain.

On the front, in a round firm hand in blue-black ink, the hand of somebody who had learned to write at a school where you were made to:

Mrs Hartigan.

Theo looked at the hamper for a long time. Then he looked down the stairwell, over the rail, and listened. There was nothing. Mr Dabrowski’s television, faintly, on the first floor. The street door, very far below, closing.

“It’s from the Palace,” said Theo.

“It’s from Bridget,” said Frederick.

“Same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

Theo turned round in the doorway.

“No Household upstairs,” said Theo. “Rule three. It’s on the napkin. In capitals. Nobody from the Palace comes up.” He pointed at the hamper. “Somebody from the Palace came up. Four flights. With that. And knocked.” He looked at Frederick with dawning delight. “Freddie. It’s Friday night. You’ve been here five hours. That’s one.”

“Theo.”

“That’s a point. That’s a point against. I’m writing it on my hand.”

“Theo,” said his mother, from the chair by the lamp.

She had put the paperback down on her knee, open, face down, with her finger in it, and she was looking at the hamper through the open door with an expression that Frederick could not read.

---

Mrs Hartigan got up.

She went to the door. She did not touch the hamper. She bent and took the envelope from under the strap, and straightened, and opened it, and took out a single sheet, folded once, and read it, standing in the doorway in her socks with her reading glasses on, upside down from habit and then the right way up.

She read it twice.

Then she said, without looking up from it:

“The napkin says upstairs.”

“Yes,” said Theo. “So…”

“Upstairs,” said Mrs Hartigan, “is this side of this door.” She tapped the doorframe with the edge of the letter. “That is the landing. The landing is Mrs Okonjo’s and Mr Dabrowski’s and the twins’ and the man from the council who comes about the lift. The landing is everybody’s. It is not upstairs. It is not in this flat. Nobody has come into this flat.” She folded the letter. “Somebody has left a basket on the landing, which is allowed, because people leave things on the landing in this building every day of the week. Mrs Okonjo left a pie on it in December.”

Theo looked at his mother.

“That’s a loophole,” said Theo.

“It’s a ruling,” said his mother. “I ratified the treaty. I rule on what it means.” She looked at the hamper. “Bring it in. Put it on the counter. Don’t open it.”

Theo brought it in.

---

The letter was for Mrs Hartigan, and Mrs Hartigan did not show it to anybody. But she read it a third time at the counter with the hamper beside her, and then she took the green biro out of the jar by the telephone, and a sheet from the pad beside it, and wrote for a minute, standing, with her back to the room.

She folded what she had written once, and put it in the cream envelope, on top of Bridget’s letter, and wrote on the front, under Mrs Hartigan, crossing that out first with a single line:

Bridget.

“What did she say?” said Frederick.

“That’s between two kitchens,” said Mrs Hartigan.

She undid the straps of the hamper and opened the lid, and looked inside for a moment, and did not take anything out, and Frederick, from the sofa, could not see in. Then she closed it, and did up the straps, and put the envelope back under the first strap, and carried the hamper to the door herself, and put it out on the landing, square to the door, exactly where it had been, and came back in, and shut the door.

“It’ll be fetched,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Whoever brought it will come back for it, because nobody leaves a hamper like that on a landing in this building overnight unless they want it in the depot by the morning.”

“What’s in it?” said Kate.

“Things,” said Mrs Hartigan, and picked up her lighthouse book, and sat down, and put her feet back on the stool. “Some of which will be on this table tomorrow at four o’clock. For everybody.” She found her place. “Because I will have put them there. Which makes them on it.”

Theo opened his mouth.

“On it is on it,” said his mother, and turned a page.

---

At ten o’clock she came out of the passage to the bedrooms with an armful of sheets.

Clean ones, folded, white, with a pillow on top in a clean case, and a second blanket, a real one, dark blue, and she held them in front of her with her chin on the pillow and came across the room to the sofa and stood in front of him.

“Peter and I’ll have the sofa,” said Mrs Hartigan. “You have our bed. It’s made up. It’s no trouble.”

Across the room, at the table, Theo put his pen down very slowly and looked at Frederick with the face of a man watching a prophecy fulfilled.

Frederick stood up.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Hartigan,” he said. “It’s in the bet.”

She looked at him over the pillow for a long moment.

“I know it is,” said Mrs Hartigan. “I wanted to hear you say it.”

And she put the pillow at the right-hand end of the sofa, and shook the sheets out over the brown corduroy, and tucked them in round the cushions, hard, the hospital way, so tight he could have bounced a coin on them. And then she took a towel from the pile he had brought, one of the two plain white ones with no crest, and folded it in four, and lifted the left-hand seat cushion, and laid the towel over the place underneath it where the spring was, and put the cushion back, and smoothed it, and pressed it down with the flat of her hand to see.

It still sat very slightly higher than the others.

“That’s the best I can do,” said Mrs Hartigan. “The rest is up to you.”