October

Ms Ybarra looked at him over her glasses.

“You said October,” she said.

“It’s October.”

She looked at the calendar on the wall, which had a new photograph on it, a canyon in the north with a river at the bottom of it the colour of milky tea, and then back at him, for about a second, with the expression that told him she knew exactly what day it was and had decided before he came in to check anyway.

“It’s the third,” said Ms Ybarra.

“Yes.”

“Of October.”

“I said October,” said Frederick. “In April. In this chair. You said I’d said that before.” He sat down in it. “So I came in October.”

Ms Ybarra took her glasses off and held them by the cord. She swung them, very gently, the way she did, and looked at him across the desk, past the very small cactus in its pot, which had grown since April by about the width of another pencil.

“Nobody comes in October,” she said. “I say it to everybody. Come back in October. It’s what you say in August so they’ll go away. I’ve said it for twenty-six years.” She put the glasses back on. “You’re the first one who’s come on the third.”

---

The Office of Exploratory Studies was where it had always been, down the flight of stairs at the side of the building by the library, in the long low corridor of small rooms with glass in their doors, and in the fourth room, under the window at the level of the grass, the bottoms of the palm trees were going past, and people’s feet, sandals and sneakers and one pair of cowboy boots, at half past nine on a Tuesday morning at ninety-three degrees, which in Tempe on the third of October was beginning to be called a relief.

He had come straight from Dr Pike, where Kessler had sung the bass of the part-song about the river, from under the floor, and Dr Pike had taken her glasses off again, though not for as long.

Ms Ybarra found him on the screen.

“Hanover, F.,” she said. “Sophomore now. Look at that.” She scrolled. “The Realm to 1865. Spanish, the next one up. Statistics.” She paused on it, very slightly, and went on without comment, which was a comment. “And music at eight in the morning. Again.”

“There are two of us now.”

“Two.” Ms Ybarra looked at him over the glasses. “Who’s the other one?”

He thought about Kessler in the chair by the wall, facing the door, with his hands folded on a pencil.

“A mature student,” he said.

“Good for him,” said Ms Ybarra, and came to the box, and stopped.

Intended major: Undeclared.

---

She did not ask him what he had found out. Not at once. She opened the drawer of her desk, the top one on the left, and took out a sheet of paper, and laid it on the desk between them, beside the cactus, the right way up for him.

It was pale green. It was a form. It had the university’s seal at the top, small, and under it, in capitals:

DECLARATION OF MAJOR (UNDERGRADUATE).

And under that, a set of boxes. Name. Student number. College. Intended major. A line for a signature, and a date. A line below that for the adviser, and a small square for a stamp. And at the bottom, in smaller type, in a box of its own with a heavier border, as though somebody in the registry had decided long ago that it was the part people did not read:

Students admitted as Undeclared must file this form no later than the last day of the final examination period of the spring semester of their second year.

“You’ve never seen this,” said Ms Ybarra.

“No.”

“Nobody shows it to you the first year. There’s no point. It frightens people.” She put one finger on the box at the bottom. “That’s this May. The last day of finals.” She did not need to look it up. “Friday the fourth.”

He looked at the line that said Intended major, which was empty, and long, and ruled, and had nothing on it at all.

“That’s seven months,” he said.

“It’s seven months.” Ms Ybarra did not smile. “It’s the shortest seven months in the university. Everybody tells me so in April.”

She took a pen out of the jar on the desk, a plain blue biro with the university’s name on the side of it, and held it out across the desk, past the cactus, towards him, not quickly, the way you hold out a thing that somebody may or may not want to take, and do not mind which.

He looked at the pen.

He looked at it for a long time. He thought about his father’s desk, and the pencil, and the rule in the family that you did a thing in pencil until you were sure and in ink when you were, so that ink was yes; and he thought about the line on the green form, empty and ruled; and he found that his hand did not move.

“Not today,” he said.

“No,” said Ms Ybarra, at once, as though that had been the answer she was expecting, and was the correct one. “Not today.” She put the pen back in the jar. “I didn’t think so. I wanted you to see it. That’s all.” She picked up the green form, and opened a folder that was lying on the side of the desk, a plain buff folder with HANOVER, F. written on the tab in her handwriting, which he had not known existed, and put the form in it, and closed it. “It’ll be in here. It doesn’t go anywhere. When you want it, it’s in the drawer.”

“Is that allowed?”

“It’s a form,” said Ms Ybarra. “It’s allowed to wait in a drawer. Most of what I do is let forms wait in drawers.” She put the folder back on the side of the desk. “So. What did you find out?”

---

He thought about it, honestly, in the chair, with the feet going past at the level of the grass.

“I found out I can’t do statistics,” he said. “I got fifty-eight. And then an accountant taught me with paper suns at six in the morning, and I understood it at half past six, and I’d forgotten it by lunch.” He thought. “Except the median. I’ve kept the median.”

Ms Ybarra did not write that down.

“I found out somebody I know sings bass. Nobody had asked.” He stopped. “And I found out I’m a source.”

“You said that in April.”

“That was Brennan. He said I’d be one. Across the mall.” He looked at the window, where the feet were. “This is somebody else. In History. He asks me things, in the lecture, in front of everybody, and I tell him, and he writes them down.” He thought about the green light in room 206, and the notebook on the satchel, and the word in it, underlined. “He writes source.”

Ms Ybarra looked at him for a moment, over the glasses.

“History,” she said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“No,” said Ms Ybarra. “You didn’t.” She turned back to the screen, and clicked, and somewhere in the basement a printer began to work, and she reached behind her without looking and took the sheet off it and held it out across the desk, past the cactus.

HANOVER, F. Class of 2037. Palo Verde Hall 312. Intended major: UNDECLARED.

It was the same sheet. It said the same thing. He folded it in four and put it in the back of his notebook with the other three.

“Come back in January,” said Ms Ybarra.

“I’ll come back in January.”

“You said that about October.”

“I came in October.”

“You did,” said Ms Ybarra, and turned back to her screen, and he saw, at the corner of her mouth, very briefly, the short surprised thing she seemed to disapprove of, and then it was put away.

---

Room 206 was green.

It was always green in the mornings, because the windows down one side were full of the ivy that nobody had managed to kill, and the light came in through the leaves and lay across the forty seats in long pale stripes the colour of the inside of a lettuce. Frederick sat in the third row, at the end, where he had sat since the twenty-first of August, because the first two rows had been full on the first day and the back had been full and the third row had had a seat on the end, and now it was his, in the way that seats become people’s in a room by the sixth week without anybody saying so.

The boy in the second row who had counted Dr Ashby’s ums on the first morning, and stopped, had a name for it. Frederick had heard him use it, on the stairs, in the second week, to a girl with a nose ring.

“He’ll ask the witness,” the boy had said. “He always asks the witness.”

Dr Ashby came in at half past ten exactly with the satchel and the cardboard cup, in a tie that was too tight, a dark green one this morning, which was a mistake in that light, and put them down on the desk at the front, and looked at the room, and at his notes, and at the room, and did not look at the third row.

“Okay,” he said. “Hi. So. Back to the war.”

---

They had been back to the war since Monday. The course had done the colonies in week two, as he had promised, and the long slow quarrel about money, and now in the seventh week it had come round again to the middle: to the summer of 1775, and the petition.

He told it differently this time. On the first morning he had told it as a story, walking up and down in the green light, a man reading a letter he could have put in a drawer. This morning he told it as a historian, which was, Frederick began to understand, a different thing, slower, and more careful, and full of the places where the story stopped.

“So here’s what we have,” said Dr Ashby. He wrote on the whiteboard, in the small neat hand that went slightly uphill. “We have the petition. It survives. We have Dartmouth’s advice, because Dartmouth wrote it down and kept a copy, and I’ve, um. I’ve held it.” He went pink, very slightly, and went on. “We have the King’s decision, because of what didn’t happen. No proclamation of rebellion.” He wrote RECEIVED on the board, and underlined it. “And we have the fact that he never answered it. Never. Not a line. The Congress waited for a reply for most of a year, and it never came, and they wrote the Grievances instead.”

He put the top on the marker.

“What we don’t have,” said Dr Ashby, “is him.”

---

“We don’t have the King reading it,” said Dr Ashby. “That’s what I said on the first day. The letter survives. The reading doesn’t. We don’t know if he read it once or six times or if he had it read to him by a secretary while he ate his breakfast. We don’t know what he said about it, if he said anything. There’s a diary entry by a courtier that says the King was much engaged that week, and people have built entire books on much engaged, and they shouldn’t have, because he was much engaged most weeks, he was the King.” The room laughed, a little. “So when you read, in a popular history, that George the Third sat up all night with the Olive Branch and wept, or that he read it twice and said these are my subjects, or any of the things people say, you should ask, every time, how do you know. And the answer, every time, is that they don’t.”

He stopped. He had come to the end of the row of desks at the front, and was standing by the window, in the green light, and Frederick watched him decide not to do it, and then do it, the way Brennan had used to, as a matter of physics.

“Could you,” said Dr Ashby, to the third row. “Would you mind. In your experience.”

In the second row, the boy who had counted the ums put his pen down, and very slightly, without turning round, nodded, as a man nods when a train he has been waiting for comes in on time.

“What does your family say,” said Dr Ashby, “about George the Third. And the Olive Branch.” He went pink to the collar. “If they say anything. If it’s, um. If it’s a thing that’s said.”

---

Frederick thought about it.

He thought about it honestly, because it had been asked honestly, by a man in a green tie in a green room who had held Dartmouth’s copy in his hands and gone pink saying so; and he found that he did not have to think very long, because there was an answer, and it was in his father’s voice.

He had been nine. He had been on the floor of his father’s study, in the evening, with the box open on the desk above him and his father at it with the soft pencil, initialling, small, in the top right-hand corner, and laying the pencil down after each one parallel to the edge of the paper. And he had asked, because it was a Tuesday and he had done the Four-Year War at school that afternoon, what the King had done with the letter, the first King, the George one. And his father had not stopped initialling. He had said, to the paper, in the voice he used for things that were simply so:

He read it twice.

And then, after a while, with the pencil going: That is what my father told me. He read it twice, and then he did not answer it, because the answer was not his. It was Parliament’s. He knew that. That is why he read it twice.

“They say he read it twice,” said Frederick.

The room was absolutely still.

Dr Ashby stood by the window in the green light and looked at him for a long moment.

“There’s no evidence he read it twice,” he said.

He said it gently. That was the thing Frederick noticed, and kept. He did not say it as Brennan would have said it, across the room, as a point scored. He said it the way Ms Ybarra had held out the pen: as a thing that was simply so, and that Frederick might want or might not.

“My father says so,” said Frederick.

Dr Ashby opened his mouth, and shut it again.

He looked at the whiteboard, where it said RECEIVED, underlined, in his small uphill hand. He looked at his notes. He looked at the satchel, and the notebook lying on top of it, and the pen. Then he looked back at the third row, and Frederick saw something go across his face that was not nerves at all, or not only, but something underneath them, older and more interested, the face of a man who has spent ten years in a room with the papers and has just been handed one he did not know was there.

“That’s,” said Dr Ashby. “Um. That’s a source.” He picked up the pen. “Of a kind.”

He wrote it down. Frederick could see the shape of it from the third row, because the pen went along for longer than one word this time, and then stopped, and then underlined, not once but twice; and then Dr Ashby put the pen down and looked at what he had written, and did not say what it was, and went back to the board.

“Okay,” he said, to the room. “So. Saratoga.”

---

He was at the door at a quarter past eleven, with the satchel over his shoulder and the empty cup, letting the room go past him down the stairs, as Brennan did at Tolliver; and the boy from the second row went past and said, “Good one, Dr A,” and Dr Ashby said “Thank you, Marcus,” and went pink, and then Frederick came, and Dr Ashby said, “Mr Hanover,” and Frederick stopped.

“Fred.”

“Mr Hanover.” Dr Ashby looked at the cup. “I’m sorry. About the, um. In there.”

“You asked.”

“I did. I keep doing that. I said I wouldn’t.” He turned the cup round in his hand, exactly as Brennan turned his. “Can I ask one more? Not in the room. Here.”

“Yes.”

“When did he tell you? Your father. About twice.”

“When I was nine. In his study. He was doing the box.”

“And did he say how he knew?”

“He said his father told him.”

Dr Ashby nodded, slowly, as though that were exactly the answer and exactly the difficulty.

“Did you ask him how his father knew?”

Frederick stood in the doorway of room 206 with the green light behind him.

“No,” he said.

“No. Nobody does.” Dr Ashby did not say it unkindly. “Families are the worst sources there are, and sometimes the only ones.” He shifted the satchel. “If I put twice in a book, I’d have to footnote it. And the footnote would say family tradition. Those two words. That’s what we write when somebody’s told us a thing and we can’t check it and we don’t want to say they’re wrong.” He looked at the cup. “It’s not an insult. It’s just. It’s honest. It’s not evidence.”

“Is it wrong?”

“I don’t know,” said Dr Ashby. “That’s what it means. Family tradition means I don’t know.” He looked up, and went pink again, all at once, to the roots of his hair. “I’d, um. I’d very much like to know. One day. If you ever, if it ever came up.”

“It won’t come up,” said Frederick. “He doesn’t say much now.”

Dr Ashby stood still in the doorway.

“No,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry. I read.” He looked at the floor. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You can ask,” said Frederick. “I’d rather you asked.” He thought about it. “Than footnoted.”

Dr Ashby looked at him for a long moment, with the empty cup, and then laughed, once, a short surprised sound, as though he had not known he was going to.

“That’s a very dangerous thing to say to a historian,” he said.

---

At ten that night, which was six in the morning in London, he rang his mother from the step under the narrow window, on the landing between the second floor and the third, with the window open an inch and the car park beyond it still eighty-four degrees in the dark and smelling of hot tarmac.

“You are early,” said his mother, in Swedish. “Or I am. I have not had my coffee. Your father has made it. It is very strong.” He heard the cup on the saucer. “What is it?”

“Nothing. A question.”

“For me?”

“For Pappa.”

There was a pause on the line from London, the kind that his mother made when she was deciding how to do a thing, from several.

“He is here,” she said. “He is on the sofa with the coffee and the newspaper, which he holds the right way up and reads the photographs of. Ask him slowly. One thing. He will give you one word, and it will be the right one, and then he will be tired, and that will be the end of it.” A breath. “I will put you on the speaker.”

He heard the room in London, a long way off, early, the clock on the mantelpiece and the soft sound of the newspaper being put down.

“Pappa.”

“Fredde,” said his father, near the telephone, with great satisfaction, as though he had found the word in a pocket.

Frederick sat on the step and looked at the narrow window.

“George the Third,” he said. “The first one. The Olive Branch. The letter.” He said it slowly, one thing, as she had told him. “You told me. When I was small. In the study. How many times did he read it?”

There was a long silence from London.

He heard his father breathe. He heard the clock on the mantelpiece, and his mother not saying anything, which was a thing she did very well, and the long slow effort of a word being fetched from wherever the words were kept now, from a long way down, as Kessler’s bass had come up through the floor of the music building, steadily, without seeming to notice the weight.

“Twice,” said his father.

He said it firmly. He said it in the voice he had used for things that were simply so, on the floor of the study, with the pencil going.

“Twice,” said his father again, and then, after a moment, very pleased, as if he had won something, nothing at all.

“He has always said twice,” said his mother, picking up the telephone, close again. “His father told him. It is a thing they say. In the family.” The cup on the saucer. “Why?”

“A man in History says there’s no evidence.”

“There is not, I expect,” said his mother, at once. “There is never any evidence of anything a King does by himself in a room. That is what the room is for.” A pause. “Does it matter?”

Frederick thought about the green light, and the pen going along for longer than one word, and underlining twice.

“I don’t know,” he said. “He says it’s a source. Of a kind.”

“Then it is a source of a kind,” said his mother. “Your father is very pleased to be one. Look at him.” He could hear that she was smiling; it changed the shape of her Swedish. “Go to bed, Fredde. Puss.”

---

In 312 the lamp by the door was on, and Alexander was at the desk with the programme for Wednesday, writing, and did not look up.

Frederick sat on the bed by the window and opened the History notebook at the morning’s notes, RECEIVED, and never answered, and much engaged (don’t build a book on it); and at the bottom of the page, under all of it, in the margin, very small, he wrote what his father had said.

Twice.

And then, after a while, beside it, in the same pencil, smaller still, the two words that a footnote used when it could not check.

He looked at them for a long time. Then he closed the notebook, and put it on the window desk under the cork board, where Sam’s page of suns was pinned beside the timetable and the sheet from the basement that said what all the others said, and lay down in the bed with the corners done, and did not undo them.

At the desk by the door, Alexander laid the pen down, parallel to the edge.

“Good night, Frederick.”

“Good night.”

The lamp went off. In the dark, after a while, he heard the pencil, and the tick.