Five of Us

The small grey box by the door said sixty-two.

He saw it from the bed by the window at six, with the blanket up to his ears and the butte grey and lightening in the glass beyond his feet. It was the law’s thermometer. It told the building how hot it was allowed to be and had nothing whatever to say about anything else, and at six in the morning on the first day of the break it was saying, in its small green figures, the same thing it had said every morning a year ago, which was that nobody was going to warm Palo Verde Hall for four people and that there was no article of any Charter that said they had to.

He got up and took the jumper down off the shelf.

It was maroon, and his mother had knitted it, and the label she had sewn into the back of the neck in her own hand said For October. M., and it was December, and he had worn it every December morning since the first, because she had not been specific about which October. Beside it on the shelf was the white cricket hat. Jack had left it there on the Sunday after Tucson, at the door, with his rucksack on his shoulder, as he had left it in March: on purpose, he said, so that it would have to be come back for.

“It is sixty-two,” said Alexander.

He was at the desk by the door, in a long grey overcoat, buttoned, with the collar up, and the pencil in his hand.

“I know.”

“It is sixty-two inside a building in the March of Arizona, which has a law about the temperature of buildings.” He considered it. “In Potsdam this would be a matter for the Hofmarschall.”

“There’s no law that says it has to be warm,” said Frederick. “Only that it can’t be hot.”

“Doug said.”

“Doug says it every year.”

Alexander looked at the grey box for a while, as he had looked at the punter at Tucson, with his head a little on one side.

“It is a very good law,” he said. “It is only facing the other way.”

---

The programme was on the desk.

Frederick saw it when he went past to the door with his towel. It was not on the hotel paper from the noticeboard, in his own worse hand. It was on a sheet of the Neues Palais paper, cream, with the small embossed eagle at the top, that had lived in a box on the shelf over his desk since August and had not come out of it since the beginning of November; and it was written in Alexander’s own exact hand, in ink, and it was very short.

06.00. Wake. 06.15. Water. 07.00. Box: Kessler. 08.00. Breakfast (eat it). 10.00. Supermarket (Sam). 22.00. Mr Luna. 22.30. Light off.

The first two lines were ticked.

Frederick stood by the desk with the towel over his shoulder and looked at it for some time. He looked at the third line, which was his own, word for word, from four weeks of hotel paper, and at the fourth, which had his brackets in it, and at the gap between 10.00 and 22.00, which was twelve hours with nothing in it at all.

“You wrote one,” he said.

“A short one.”

“It’s very short.”

“Yes.” Alexander did not look up. “I did not know what else would happen. You did not know either, on yours. You put Free.” He laid the pencil down beside the sheet. “I thought I would leave it free.”

Frederick did not say anything else. He went out to the shower down the corridor, where the water took four minutes to come warm and he stood in the cold and waited for it, and when he came back the pill box on the corner of the desk had last night’s tick under FR, and on the programme, in the margin by 22.00, there was a line in ink that had not been there before, very small: 21.32.

---

Rhys was at the door at eight, in a grey sweatshirt, with a mug in each hand.

He looked at the King in the maroon jumper on the bed by the window, and at the German Emperor in a grey overcoat at the desk by the door, and at the sixty-two on the box, and came in and put one mug down by the window and the other by the door.

“Sir,” said Rhys, to Frederick. And then, turning, with a small exact nod that he had evidently practised: “Alex.”

“There is nobody here,” said Alexander.

“That’s why it’s sir.” Rhys stood in the middle of the room. “When there’s nobody here, it’s sir. When there’s somebody, it’s Fred.” He thought about it. “The sergeant says it’s like the fire door.”

“Did she say that?”

“She said it last year. It had the fire door in it.” Rhys looked at Alexander. “She didn’t say anything about you. So you’re Alex. Both ways.”

Alexander considered the mug.

“I accept the ruling,” he said, and drank the coffee, which Rhys made strong, the way his father had made it in a patrol car in Wilmington, and which had made Jack say in November that it was not coffee but a decision.

---

Sam came at a quarter past with the notebook and the problem, and set it out at the foot of Frederick’s bed as he had a year ago, in the manner of a man presenting figures to a board that would not like them.

“Dining hall’s shut. Till the eighth. The shop’s shut. The coffee cart’s shut.” He turned a page. “The sergeant says no deliveries.”

“The box is a delivery,” said Frederick.

“The box is an exception. It’s in the paragraph.” Sam read it off the page in the sergeant’s cadence, which he still did not know he was doing. “One courier, consulate, seven daily, signed for by the officer from across the road. Everything else is a stranger who knows the address and the room and the time.” He looked up. “So we can go out, together, on foot, within the perimeter. Or we can cook.”

“We have two rings,” said Rhys.

“We have two rings,” said Sam, with the respect due to a public work. “And a list.”

He turned the notebook round. It was Lena’s list, copied out from the kitchen wall in his own small hand, two pages of it, a day on every line, and he put his finger on the top line.

16.12. Omelette (F. may try. Ring 1 only. LOW HEAT. Rhys to supervise). Potatoes, boiled (A., 20 min exactly). Salad (S.). No pudding.

“She’s put me down for an omelette,” said Frederick.

“She’s put you down for trying one,” said Sam. “She was very specific.” He turned the notebook back round, and wrote something at the bottom of the page, and Frederick, reading upside down, made out 5.

“Five what?”

“Five of us.” Sam did not look up. “You. Him. Rhys. Me.” He wrote. “And Mr Luna, from ten. That’s five.”

“Kessler?”

“Across the road.” Sam drew a line down the page, and wrote something on the far side of it. “He’s in the other column.”

Rhys opened his mouth.

It was perfectly clear to everybody in the room what he was going to say. It had been clear since half past five the evening before, when a large man in a dark suit had crossed the dark road with a black holdall and gone up the outside stair beside the dentist’s and knocked, and the door had opened about a foot, and he had gone into it; and it had been clear to the whole third floor since the beginning of the week, when the arrangement was made, and nobody on the floor had said it once.

Sam looked at him.

Rhys shut his mouth.

“It’s a spare room,” said Sam, to the notebook. “She has a spare room. It’s on the form.”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Rhys.

“No,” said Sam. “Keep it that way. She can lip-read. Probably.”

At the desk by the door Alexander had put his hand over the lower half of his face, as he had at Tucson, and was looking very hard out of the window at the butte.

---

They went to the supermarket on the Avenue at ten, the four of them, on foot, through a campus with nobody in it.

It was as it had been a year ago: the mall running away under the palms in the low sun with every arcade empty and the fountains off, and their feet on the paving making a sound that six thousand other feet usually drowned, and a cat on the library steps as though it had been left in charge. Alexander walked through it in the grey overcoat, upright, at his ordinary pace, with a hat in his hand.

“It is very quiet,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I do not mind it,” said Alexander, and looked about him at the empty arcades and the shade that nobody was using, with something that was not quite the face of complete and private happiness, but was on the road to it, and Frederick saw it, and looked at the cat.

In the supermarket Sam pushed the trolley, and Rhys chose the bread by holding loaves up to the light, and Frederick was sent for eggs, and Alexander went with him.

There were twenty-two kinds of eggs.

Frederick had known this for a year. Alexander had not. He stood in front of the shelf in his overcoat and read every box, all twenty-two, from the left, the way he read a Charter, all the way through, including the parts nobody would ask about; and then he chose a box of a dozen brown ones, and opened it, and looked at every egg, and turned two of them over, and closed it.

When they came back to the trolley Sam took the box out of Frederick’s hands, by reflex, and opened it, and looked.

“He looked,” said Frederick.

Sam looked at Alexander.

“You looked,” said Sam.

“Yes.”

Sam closed the box and put it in the trolley with something like tenderness.

“Thank you,” he said.

At the till there was a woman of about seventy in a lilac fleece and shorts, with legs as brown as a saddle, and she looked at the four of them and their trolley and then at Frederick, and her face did something.

“You again,” she said, in the voice of the upper Midwest.

“Yes.”

“Duluth,” she said, to Alexander, by way of explanation, and pointed at herself. “Every year. We come down for the winter.” She looked at Frederick’s coat, and at Alexander’s, the long grey Prussian one buttoned to the collar. “He had a coat on last year,” she said. “In this. And now there’s two of you.” She considered Alexander with her head on one side. “Who are you?”

“His cousin,” said Alexander.

“Honey,” said the woman from Duluth, kindly, “it’s sixty-two,” and looked at him a moment longer, as though trying to place a face from a newspaper in a dentist’s waiting room; and then decided, visibly, that it was not possible that there should be two of them, and went out into the sun.

---

The omelette happened at one.

It happened on the left ring, at low heat, as specified, with Rhys at his elbow saying “Gently” and Sam in the doorway with the notebook and Alexander at the right ring with the potatoes, watching the saucepan and his watch at the same time with the concentration of a man timing a battery.

Frederick broke the eggs into a bowl, which was progress. He broke four, one at a time, and three went in and one went partly in and partly down the front of the jumper, and Rhys took a paper towel off the roll without a word and handed it to him. He beat them with a fork. He poured them into the pan. Something happened.

It was not, by any standard he knew, an omelette. It was nearer one than anything he had made before. It was flat, and round, and yellow, and it held together when Rhys tilted the pan, and it was brown at the edges, and in the middle there was a part that was still deciding.

Rhys looked at it for a long time.

“That’s an omelette, sir,” said Rhys.

“Is it?”

“It’s an omelette with a story.” He took the spatula. “May I?”

He folded it. It folded. Frederick watched it fold and felt, absurdly, as he had felt a year ago in front of a fire in a forest on two screens, extremely pleased.

“Twenty minutes,” said Alexander, at the right ring, and turned it off, exactly, and drained the potatoes into the sink in a cloud of steam, and looked at them in the colander, all of them the same size, because he had cut them the same size with the knife from Rhys’s kit, slowly, measuring each one against the first.

“Twenty minutes exactly,” said Sam, from the doorway, and wrote it down.

They ate in the lounge under the poster about scorpions, the four of them, at the card table, with a drinking fountain coughing every so often in the corridor to keep its pipe clear. Alexander ate all of his. Frederick watched him do it without watching him, which he had got better at, and Alexander, who knew perfectly well that he was being watched without being watched, ate the last potato and put his fork down exactly at the edge of the plate, and said, “That was very good, Frederick,” about the omelette, which was a lie, and the first kind one Frederick had ever heard him tell.

---

“My mum’s sent a parcel,” said Rhys, after. “It’s in the post room. The day porter signed for it before she went.”

“A pudding?”

“Pie.” Rhys looked pleased and anxious at the same time. “Sweet potato. She heard about the fire engine. She said no more puddings, they’re dangerous. She said a pie can’t catch fire.” He thought about it. “I’m not opening it till Christmas. It might have a card in it about the fire.”

“Mine sent a card,” said Sam. “Already. To the box at the post room.” He took it out of his pocket. It was in an envelope, and he did not open it. “She writes the same thing every year. It’s a verse and then the date.” He put it back. “This year it was addressed to me and the boys.”

“Which boys?”

“She didn’t say.” Sam looked at Frederick and then at Alexander. “She knows there’s more of you now. She reads the paper. She’s a deaconess. She reads everything.”

Alexander looked at his hands.

“And your mother?” said Rhys, to Alexander, because Rhys could not help himself, and then went red, because he had asked a German Emperor about his mother.

Alexander considered the question with great seriousness.

“She will send a hat,” he said.

“For Christmas?”

“For everything,” said Alexander.

---

They played whist in the afternoon, because there was nothing else to do, and because there were four of them, exactly, for the first time.

Rhys partnered Sam, because Rhys always partnered Sam, and Frederick partnered Alexander, because there was nobody else; and Sam dealt, and laid his cards down one at a time like a man paying a bill exactly, counting, with no expression; and across the table, holding his own in a neat fan, Alexander laid his down in the same unhurried way, and Frederick watched his lips move, very slightly, and knew.

They drew the first hand.

They drew the second.

“He’s counting,” said Rhys, at the end of the third, putting his cards face down. “Sam. He’s counting too.”

“I know.”

“So who wins?”

Sam considered the question with the scoresheet in his hand, and the pencil.

“Nobody,” said Sam. “That’s the point. If two people count, nobody can win. It goes on for ever.” He wrote a figure in the column. It was the same figure as on the other side. “It’s like the Commons,” he said, after a moment, “with a hung Parliament.”

“Then what are we?” said Rhys.

Sam looked at him, and at Frederick, over the cards.

“Furniture,” said Sam.

Frederick laughed so suddenly that he dropped two cards on the floor and showed his hand to Rhys, and Rhys looked at it and said, “Oh, sir,” in real pain; and Alexander, across the table, laid the next card down on the trick, exactly, and his face did not change at all, and then at the corner of the mouth it did.

They played until the light went gold and then pink on the wall of the lounge. Nobody won. At the end Sam drew a line under the two columns, which were identical, and under the line wrote DRAWN, and underlined it, and looked at it with an accountant’s deep satisfaction, as at a balance that agrees.

---

Mr Luna came on at ten.

They heard him come, through three floors of a building with nothing else in it to hear: the lobby door, and his voice saying good evening to nobody, because the day porter had gone at noon, and then, very faint, the radio coming on, low, a man talking about a game being played somewhere in the warm.

At one minute to ten Alexander had stood up from the desk by the door and put on the grey overcoat and buttoned it, from the bottom, and looked at Frederick.

“22.00. Mr Luna,” he said.

They went down.

The lobby was dim and cold, with the post-room hatch shut and the lift standing open with its light on and its sign, SORRY FOLKS, and nobody to take anywhere. On the front of the desk, under the lamp, there was still a maroon paper sun with straight gold rays, one of them a sixteenth of an inch shorter than the others, gone pale now from a year of the lobby lights, and in the middle of it in silver capitals, IGNACIO. And behind it, in the cardigan, with the jar of butterscotch and the crossword in pen and the clipboard of hourly temperatures, Mr Luna was writing a number.

10 p.m. 62.

“Lowest I’ve written in that column,” said Mr Luna, “since last Christmas.”

He did not look up. He pushed the plastic chair out from the end of the desk with his foot, and then reached behind him without getting up and brought out a second one, and pushed that out too.

“Son,” said Mr Luna. “Son.”

They sat.

“Five of you,” said Mr Luna.

“Sam says five.”

“Accountant’s right.” Mr Luna laid the pen across the crossword. “Six, with the one across the road.”

“Seven,” said Alexander.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses for a while.

“I don’t count her,” said Mr Luna. “She counts me.”

He took a butterscotch out of the jar and unwrapped it and put it in his mouth and pushed the jar an inch across the desk, and Alexander took one, and then, after a moment, so did Frederick.

On the radio somebody hit something, and a crowd a long way off made a sound, and Mr Luna listened with his head on one side and made a small noise of satisfaction.

“You call your mother, son?” he said, to Alexander.

“This morning. At seven. It was three in the afternoon in Potsdam. She was in the garden.”

“In December?”

“She was cutting something back,” said Alexander. “She said it had been asking for it.”

Mr Luna considered this.

“Good woman,” he said. He picked up the pen. “Christmas Eve, I bring the pot. Ten o’clock.” He wrote a word in the crossword, in pen, without hesitating. “You ever had a tamal, son?”

“No.”

“Hm,” said Mr Luna, and wrote another word, and did not say anything else about it; and Frederick, who had been brought up by a woman who knew the length of every silence, knew that this one meant that the matter had been noted, and would be attended to.

---

At twenty-four minutes past ten Alexander stood up.

“Goodnight, Mr Luna.”

“Night, son.”

They went up the stairs. Alexander counted forty-five. Frederick counted forty-four. On the landing between the second floor and the third the thermometer on the wall said seventy-nine, as it always did, which in December was a lie, and the step under the narrow window was in shadow, and through the window, between the concrete fins, across the dark road, over the dentist’s, the one window had its light on and its blind halfway down.

Alexander stopped on the landing and looked at it.

“Seven,” he said.

“Mr Luna says she doesn’t count.”

“Mr Luna is wrong,” said Alexander, “about that one thing,” and went on up.

In 312 he took off the overcoat and hung it on the back of the door and sat down on the bed by the door, and at twenty-nine minutes past he turned off the lamp, and at ten thirty exactly, in the dark, by feel, Frederick heard the pencil, once, on the cream paper with the eagle at the top; and then nothing; and then, after a while, from the bed by the door, very quietly, in a voice he had not heard it use since March, as though it were trying the words to see whether they would hold:

“That was a good day.”

Frederick lay on his back in the bed by the window, in the jumper for October, at sixty-two degrees, and looked at the ceiling.

“Yes,” he said.