On the Hour

The telephone on the wall rang at ten o’clock.

Not at one minute past. Not at a minute to. At ten, exactly, by the clock on the cooker, which Mrs Hartigan kept right by the radio every Sunday, so that the first ring and the minute hand arriving at the twelve were the same thing.

Mrs Hartigan, in the chair by the lamp, did not look up from her lighthouse.

“That,” she said, “will be the Navy.”

---

Theo answered it, because Theo was nearest, and said “Hello,” and then stood up straighter, which Frederick had never seen him do on the telephone, and said “Yes, Dame M,” and “Yes,” and “Yes, he is,” and held the receiver out across the room at the full length of the curly cord.

Frederick got up off the sofa and took it.

“Sir.”

“Dame M.”

“I apologise for the hour.” Her voice on the telephone was exactly her voice in the library, level, square, every word put down where she meant it. “I said to Mrs Hartigan yesterday morning that I would ring on the hour, and I have rung on the hour. I shall do so until eleven, and again from seven in the morning, unless you instruct me otherwise.”

“Mrs Hartigan says if you ring at midnight she’ll take it off the hook.”

“Mrs Hartigan said the same to me at seven yesterday morning,” said Dame M. “I have no intention of ringing at midnight. I have rung on the hour at midnight only twice in my life, and both times it was a war.” A pause. “Has the King everything he requires?”

He looked round the room. At the sofa with its tight hospital sheets and the dark blue blanket and the crocheted one over the arm. At the rabbit asleep in his box. At Theo at the table pretending to do chemistry. At Kate on the rug pretending to read. At Mrs Hartigan in the chair by the lamp, pretending not to listen, with the lighthouse held at an angle that meant she had not turned a page since the telephone rang.

“Yes,” he said.

“The basket was received?”

“Mrs Hartigan ruled that the landing isn’t upstairs.”

“I am aware of it, sir,” said Dame M. “It was the basis on which the basket was sent.”

He said nothing for a moment.

“You knew she’d rule that.”

“I knew that a woman who has read hospital charts upside down for twenty years would read a napkin the same way,” said Dame M. “Bridget took a different view. Bridget was of the opinion that it would be sent back unopened. I declined to bet.” Another pause. “It came back at a quarter to ten with a letter in it. Bridget has read the letter. She has not told me what it says. She has gone to bed early, which she has not done since 2019, and she was humming.”

---

“The Standard,” said Dame M.

“Yes.”

“It came down at one minute past four. You saw it, I think. The man on the roof was Mr Petrossian’s uncle, who has seen to the flagstaff since 1998, and who lost his hat. The hat has been found in the gutter of the north wing.” She did not stop. “The Axis noticed it at nine minutes past four, by the Home Office lights.”

“I saw them.”

“So I am told. Sergeant Castellanos reported it at a quarter past, from the car, as an incident.” A very slight pause. “There was a call to a radio station at twenty to nine. A late phone-in on the music station that Bridget listens to. A man rang to say that he had walked down the Axis at half past seven and that the flag was down at the Palace and was anything the matter with the King. The presenter said he expected the King had gone out for the evening, like anybody on a Friday. The man said that the King did not go out on Fridays.”

“How did he know?”

“He has walked down the Axis at half past seven every Friday for eleven years,” said Dame M, “and the flag has been up every Friday since November 2028.” She let that sit. “It is not a question I can answer tonight, sir. I am telling you it has been asked. I shall ring at eleven.”

“Dame M.”

“Sir.”

“Is my father all right?”

There was a pause on the line that was different from her other pauses. Shorter.

“Your father,” said Dame M, “had his supper at six at the end of the kitchen table, as usual, and Bridget read him the arrivals at four from the blue book in your place, as you asked, and she says she read them badly, and that he let her know it. He is asleep. He said one word to her when she had finished.”

“What word?”

“Sofa,” said Dame M, “with great satisfaction. Good night, sir.”

---

He had rung his mother at nine.

He had done it from the landing, by the window with the spider plant, on his own telephone, with the door of the flat pulled to behind him, because it had seemed wrong to ring the Palace from the Hartigans’ sitting room on his own telephone with everybody listening, and also because the landing was not upstairs, and he wanted to see what it was like to stand on it.

It was cold. The depot below the window was full now, the buses in their rows under the yard lights, red and cream, dark, sleeping. Between the rows, very small, a man went along with a torch, stopping at each bus, climbing in at the front, going along inside with the torch moving from seat to seat, coming out again. Mr Lasko. Theo had told him in September: the night foreman, who checked every bus every night for things people had left.

His mother had answered on the first ring.

“Well?”

“There was beetroot.”

His mother had been quiet for a second, and then had laughed, really laughed, the way she laughed perhaps three times a year, from the bottom of herself, and had said something in Swedish that he followed all of, which was a word for the Minister of Culture that was not polite.

“Did you eat it?”

“It was on the table.”

“Then you ate it.” She had stopped laughing. “Good. Was it all right?”

“It was beetroot.” He looked down at Mr Lasko and the torch. “Mr Hartigan says it’s good for the blood.”

“Peter said that?”

“He’s said four things since Wednesday. Theo’s counting them on his hand.”

“Your father,” said his mother, “has said six since Wednesday. One of them was sofa. I’m counting them on mine.” And then, more quietly: “Good night, älskling. Ring tomorrow.”

---

At eleven the telephone rang again, on the hour. Dame M said that there was nothing further to report, and that she would ring at seven, and wished him good night, and was gone in under a minute. Mrs Hartigan, in the chair by the lamp, closed her lighthouse.

“Bed,” she said, to the room.

Kate picked up the box with the rabbit in it and took it through the door at the end into the passage, towards the bedroom with the partition. Theo put his chemistry in his bag. Mrs Hartigan went round the room turning things off: the lamp at the kitchen end, the light over the cooker, the radio, which had been on very low the whole evening with nobody listening to it. At the door to the passage she stopped and looked back.

“Bathroom’s yours at six twenty.”

“Yes, Mrs Hartigan.”

“Lights out in the room where somebody sleeps, at eleven. That’s always been the rule. It’s not on the napkin. It’s on the house.” She put her hand on the light switch by the door. “Good night, Frederick.”

“Good night, Mrs Hartigan.”

“Good night, Your Majesty,” said Theo, from the passage behind her, in his herald’s voice, very loud, and his mother said a word in Wisconsindeutsch that Frederick followed all of, and the light went out.

---

He lay on the sofa in the dark.

It was not dark, quite. There was the light from the depot, which came in through the window over the sink, yellow and steady from the yard lamps, and lay across the ceiling in a long pale shape with the shadows of the window frame in it, the way the sun had lain across the desks in the gym in June. There was the small green light on the cooker that was the clock. There was the red light on the television, on standby. There was, very faint, from somewhere under the door at the end, a line of light where Kate had not yet turned hers off.

He lay on his back with the hospital sheets tight across his chest and the dark blue blanket over them and the crocheted one over that, which Mrs Hartigan had put there at the last moment without a word, and his feet against the arm at the far end, because the sofa was about six feet long and he was six feet one, and his head on the pillow at the near end, and the spring.

He could feel the spring.

It was under the left-hand cushion, under the towel folded in four, and he was lying on the middle cushion and the right-hand one, carefully, the way you lie on the edge of a bed you are sharing. But the sofa sloped very slightly towards the left, towards the spring, so that every time he relaxed he rolled, an inch at a time, towards it, until he felt it through the towel and the cushion and the sheet, a hard round point under his hip, like a finger.

He moved back to the right.

He lay still. He relaxed. He rolled.

The fridge hummed. Somewhere in the block, below, a toilet flushed, and the pipes in the wall behind the sofa knocked twice and gurgled and were quiet. Through the wall at the end, the wall to the bedrooms, a sound began, low and regular and patient, that he understood after a moment was Mr Hartigan, snoring, steadily, like a bus idling at a stop.

He had never heard anybody snore in his life.

He lay there and listened to it, and found, to his surprise, that he liked it.

---

He could not sleep.

He had not expected to. He had slept in the gym at Santa Monica on a cot with a Red Cross blanket and the aftershocks coming every forty minutes, and he had slept on Sceptre over the Atlantic in a seat that went flat, and in the room in London the night before he was crowned, eventually. He slept well, usually. He slept, Theo said, like a man paid to.

He did not sleep here. He lay on the sofa with his hands folded on the blanket and listened to the fridge and the pipes and Mr Hartigan and the radiator, which had not done it yet, and thought about the flagstaff on the Axis with nothing on it, and the man who walked down the Axis every Friday at half past seven, and the hamper, and on it is on it, and Dame M not ringing at midnight because she had only done that twice and both times it was a war.

At half past twelve he got up.

He did it carefully, in his socks, so as not to wake anybody, and went across the room in the dark between the table and the chairs to the window over the sink, and stood at it with his hands on the edge of the sink, and looked down.

The depot. The buses in their rows. Mr Lasko and his torch had gone. Beyond the depot gates, the street, empty, under the street lamps, and at the corner, opposite the door of the block, where the cross on Castellanos’s map had been, circled, a dark car.

Its interior light was on.

He could see, very small, from four floors up, a shape in the driver’s seat. Not Castellanos; Castellanos was at home, in bed, until four, he had said, when he would be back. The night man, then. Or Kimura, who had said she would be there at eight and had said nothing about leaving. The shape was reading something with the interior light on, a book or a newspaper, held up close, and every so often it turned a page.

As he watched, the shape lowered the book, and looked up. Up the front of the block, past the first floor, the second, the third, to the fourth floor, to the window over the sink, which was dark.

He did not move.

The shape looked at the window for a few seconds. Then it reached up, and the interior light went off, and the car was dark, and Frederick could not see the shape any more at all, only the car, at the corner, under the street lamp, with its engine off, waiting, the way it had waited at the side gate at Ellicott for four years and at the side door of the Palace and outside every building he had ever been inside.

A protection car sits on the street.

He had read that in the Register too, at thirteen, in Theo’s article. The officers do not come up. He had thought it was a dry sentence. He had not thought about what it meant to sit on the street in February from eight until four with the interior light on, reading, and turn it off when a window went dark, because you were not reading, you were watching the window, and you did not want the boy at the window to see you watching.

He went back to the sofa.

---

At two o’clock, by the green light on the cooker, the radiator did it properly.

It began with a tick, small, at the far end of the pipe, under the window. Then another, nearer. Then a series of ticks coming along the pipe towards the sofa, faster and faster, like something running. And then, directly behind his head, with no further warning, an enormous single bang, like a door slammed in a cathedral, so loud that he sat bolt upright on the sofa with the blankets falling off him and his heart going and his hands up in front of his face, the way he had sat up on a cot in a gym in Santa Monica every forty minutes for two nights in June.

Silence.

Then the radiator hissed, long and contented, like a man settling into a bath.

Through the wall at the end, Mr Hartigan’s snoring did not change by so much as a breath.

He sat on the sofa in the dark with his heart going and the blankets round his waist and his hands still up, and slowly put them down, and after a while he lay down again, and pulled the blankets back over himself, and the crocheted one, and rolled, an inch, towards the spring.

Something moved on the blanket.

He held very still.

It was on his chest, on top of the crocheted blanket, a warm weight, not heavy, the weight of a cat or a folded coat. In the yellow light from the depot window he could see, just, the shape of two long ears laid flat along a back, and below them, a foot from his face, two very round dark eyes, looking at him, with an expression of profound intellectual disdain.

Kate’s door, at the end of the passage, was open an inch. The line of light under it had gone out a long time ago.

He did not move. Professor did not move.

After a while, the rabbit settled. It folded itself down on his chest, on the blanket, the way a rabbit folds, all at once, into a shape like a loaf of rye bread, and shut its eyes.

He lay under it on the brown corduroy sofa four floors over the depot with the spring under his hip and the radiator hissing and Mr Hartigan snoring through the wall like a bus at a stop, and he did not remember, afterwards, going to sleep. He remembered only that the last thing he thought, before he did, was that Kate had been quite wrong, and that it had not taken six weeks, or six minutes, but about nine hours.