IN CASE

The telephone went at two minutes to four, on the blanket, and the screen said BRANNIGAN.

He was awake before he knew he was awake. He had the telephone in his hand and his feet on the floor and the door of 312 open before the second ring, because a telephone at four in the morning means one thing in any family and means it twice in his, and he did not want to hear it in the room with somebody asleep in it. The corridor lights were on, as they always were, and the lino was cold, and he went down it in his socks to the fire door and through it and down the half flight to the landing, where the narrow window was, and the step under it, and the thermometer on the wall that said seventy-nine.

He sat down on the step.

“Brannigan.”

“Sir.” It was the voice he had heard every Christmas of his life from the front of a car, square and careful, and it was perfectly steady, which was how he knew. “Sir, it’s Brannigan. I’m sorry for the hour.”

“What’s happened?”

“It’s your father, sir. He’s had a turn.” A pause, exactly the length of a man choosing the next word because it matters which one. “A stroke, sir. A small one. They’re saying small. I want you to have that first, before anything else. Small.”

Frederick looked at the narrow window. It was black. There was the car park beyond the concrete fin, under its lamps, and nothing moving in it.

“When?”

“Half past ten, sir. Our time. At breakfast. He was at the table in the morning room with the paper and he went to pick up his cup and he didn’t.” Another pause. “He dropped it. It wasn’t the cup that told me, sir. It was his face. One side of it. I’ve driven him a long time, sir. I knew his face before he did.”

“Where is he?”

“In the hospital, sir. We had him there inside the half-hour. Your mother went in the ambulance with him and I came behind with her bag. He knew her, sir. In the ambulance. He said her name.” Brannigan’s voice did not change at all. “He’s had the scan. They’re with him now. Your mother’s in the corridor. She asked me to ring you myself, sir, so it wouldn’t be the Household. She said you’d want a voice you knew and not a voice that had been told what to say.”

“Thank you.”

“Sir.”

“Brannigan.” He did not know what he was going to ask until he had asked it. “Is he frightened?”

There was a silence on the line from London, of a different kind.

“No, sir,” said Brannigan. “He’s annoyed. He wanted to finish the crossword.” And then, lower, the voice from the front of the car on the long way back from somewhere in the dark: “He’s himself, sir. I’ll stake my place on it. He’s still in there, and he’s cross.”

---

His mother rang at eighteen minutes past four. It was eighteen minutes past eleven in London.

“Fredde.”

“Mamma.”

“He is all right.” She said it at once, in English, in the voice for things that had to be said first. “Listen to me. He is all right. It is small. The doctors have said small three times and I have counted. It is on the left side of the head and so it is on the right side of the face, and his right hand is slow, and his words are slower than they were, which is a thing I did not know was possible and is.” A breath, not in the wrong place. “He knew me. He knew Brannigan. He was rude to a nurse about the pillow. He is himself.”

“I’m coming.”

There was a short silence in London.

“Wait until the doctors have finished,” said his mother. “They have not finished. They will say more this afternoon. Wait until they have said it.”

“I’ll be at the airport when they say it.”

“Fredde.”

“I’ll be at the airport, Mamma. That’s all. If they say come I’ll be there. If they say…” He stopped. “I’ll be there either way.”

There was a breath down the line. He heard the corridor round her, a long one, with a floor that squeaked, and somebody being paged in a quiet voice, and a trolley.

“Then go to the airport,” said his mother. “And when the doctors have finished, I will ring you. And you will answer.” She paused. “Puss.”

“Puss.”

He sat on the step with the telephone in his lap for some time.

Then he got up.

---

The light was on in 312.

Alexander was sitting up in the bed by the door, with the blanket folded back to his waist, and his hands on it, in his pyjamas, buttoned to the neck, quite still, looking at the door as Frederick came through it. He had turned the lamp on. He had not got up. He had sat up and turned on the lamp and waited, which was, Frederick understood, the most he could do without being asked, and he had done exactly that much and no more.

“My father,” said Frederick. “A stroke. Small. They say small.”

Alexander did not say anything for a moment.

“What do you need?” he said.

Frederick did not answer. He was already on his knees by the bed by the window, with his hand under it, in the dark under the frame, among the dust and the things that live under a bed for a year, and he found the camp bed first, folded in three, which sighed when he touched it, as it always did, still breathing; and beside it, against the wall, the corner of a cardboard box.

He pulled it out.

It was a plain cardboard box about the size of a case of wine, its flaps folded under each other, with the Household’s white label on the top, and on the label a printed word with a line drawn through it in black pen, and above it, by hand, two others.

IN CASE.

He had not thought I will take the box. His hand had gone under the bed by itself, the way a hand goes to a light switch in a house it has lived in; and now the box was on the carpet between the two beds, in the lamplight, and he was looking at it, and so was Alexander.

Alexander looked at the label for a long time.

He did not ask what was in it. Frederick saw him not ask. He saw him read the word through the line, which had been meant to be read through, and then the two words above it, and then look up, from the box, at Frederick’s face; and Frederick saw that he knew exactly what was in it, because every royal house in the world keeps the same thing at the back of a wardrobe, and Alexander had worn his at fourteen, in a cathedral, three rows in front of a boy in a coat that was too big for him.

“In case,” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

That was all. He did not say it is small. He did not say you will not need it. He did not say anything about it, then or afterwards.

---

There was a knock at the door, two, flat, with the side of a fist.

Sam was in the corridor, dressed, in his jacket, with the grey backpack with the broken zip over one shoulder and a set of car keys in his hand. Behind him Rhys was dressed too, with his telephone at his ear, saying “Yes. Yes. No, the first one. Two seats with him. Yes,” in the voice he used for things that were not for the floor.

“You heard,” said Frederick.

“The landing carries, sir,” said Sam. “You know that.” He looked past Frederick at the box on the carpet, and at the label, and his face did nothing, very carefully. “Car’s in the lot. Four minutes.”

“The first London flight’s at a quarter to nine,” said Rhys, taking the telephone from his ear. “The Household’s holding three seats.” He looked at Frederick. “Have you said?”

“Airport,” said Frederick. “That’s all I’ve said. To wait.”

“Then airport,” said Rhys, and put the telephone back to his ear. “Airport. To wait. Yes.”

Frederick dressed, in the order his hands chose, and at the end of it he was in jeans and the maroon jumper, For October. M., with his wallet in his pocket; and then he bent and picked up the box. It was lighter than he expected. A suit weighs very little. A hot-water bottle weighs nothing at all.

Alexander was out of bed. He was standing by the desk by the door in his pyjamas, with his hands at his sides.

“I will be here,” said Alexander.

“I know.”

“I will be here when you come back. Or I will be here when you ring.” He looked at the box in Frederick’s arms. “Either. I will be here for either.”

Frederick looked at him for a moment, in the lamplight, the German Emperor in buttoned pyjamas by a desk in a residence hall at half past four in the morning, with his pencil parallel to the edge of the desk behind him and the programme for Sunday on it, still blank.

Then he went.

---

Mr Luna was at the night desk under the lamp, with the crossword folded on the clipboard and the radio off, and he had been looking at the stairs, Frederick saw, since before they came down them.

He looked at the three of them over his glasses. He looked at Frederick. Then he looked at the box under Frederick’s arm, and at the label on it, and read it, the line and the word under the line and the two words over it, and Frederick watched him understand it the way a man of seventy understands a thing he has seen in his own family, all at once, without needing it explained.

“Your dad, son,” said Mr Luna.

“A stroke. A small one.”

Mr Luna nodded slowly.

He did not say anything else for a moment. Then he put out one hand and pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk, the inch he always pushed it, and Frederick took one, and put it in the pocket of the jumper, and did not eat it.

“You called your mother?” said Mr Luna.

“She called me.”

“Call her again,” said Mr Luna. “From the airport. Even if she said she’d call you.” He looked at the box. “Mothers say that. They mean call anyway.”

“I will.”

“Go on, son,” said Mr Luna, and wrote something on the clipboard, which was not a temperature, and Frederick did not look at what it was.

Outside, under the arcade, it was fifty-two degrees and very dark; and across the road, on the second floor over the dentist’s, the lamp was on behind the blind, halfway down, as it was at every hour of every night. It did not move. It did not need to.

---

Rhys drove.

Frederick sat in the back with the box on his knees, because he did not want to put it in the boot, and there was nowhere else; and Sam sat in front with the grey backpack on his lap.

The I-10 was empty under its lights, running west in its long straight lines of orange, with nothing on it but them and a lorry with FRESH on its side. Rhys drove at exactly the limit with both hands on the wheel, and indicated for nobody.

Nobody said anything.

At the exit for the airport, Sam turned round in his seat.

“It’s twenty to twelve in London,” said Sam.

“I know.”

“The doctors said this afternoon.” Sam looked at the box on Frederick’s knees, and then at his face. “Afternoon’s after twelve. So it’s not yet.”

“I know, Sam.”

“I’m just saying it’s not yet,” said Sam, and turned back round, and Frederick understood that Sam had worked it out, the minutes between now and any afternoon in London, and had wanted him to have the number, because a number was a thing you could hold on to in a car.

---

Terminal Four at a quarter past five on a Sunday morning in January was nearly empty and very bright.

A man was polishing the floor with a machine in long overlapping curves, and at the bottom of the departures board, in white, it said LONDON HEATHROW 08.45 ON TIME.

Rhys took them through somewhere that was not the queue. He did it without saying anything, with a card that he showed to a woman at a desk who looked at it and at Frederick and at the box under his arm and said nothing either, and then they were on the other side, at the London gate, at the end of a long concourse, in a row of grey seats by a window, and there was nobody else there at all.

He sat down by the window with the box on his knees.

Outside the window it was still dark. The aircraft for London was there already at the end of its jet bridge, white, lit from inside, with men in orange jackets going round under its wings with torches, and beyond the runways, very faintly over the mountains, the first grey.

Rhys stood a yard off by a pillar with his telephone. Sam sat two seats down with the backpack.

He did not open the box.

He sat with both hands on the lid of it, and knew what was in it without opening it, from the top: a red rubber hot-water bottle in a knitted cover of grey wool with small white stars, and two cards in a careful square hand, Sir. They tell me the desert is cold at night. B., and Sir. Still. B.; and under them, in tissue, the black suit, pressed and ready, as such things are kept ready, so that when the telephone goes at four in the morning nobody has to look for anything.

He had not looked for anything. His hand had known where it was.

He sat with it on his knees and watched the grey come up over the mountains.

---

At six he rang his mother, because Mr Luna had said to.

It was one o’clock in London. She did not answer. He left nothing. A minute later a message came.

With him. Doctors at half past one. Wait. M.

He waited.

At half past six the first passengers came, in ones and twos, with coffee, and sat down at the far end of the row, and did not look at the young man by the window with a cardboard box on his knees, because there are a great many of those at an airport.

At a quarter to seven the telephone lit in his hand.

M.

---

“Fredde.”

“Mamma.”

“Where are you?”

“At the gate.”

“I know. Rhys told Ebba and Ebba told me.” She paused. Her voice was tired, and under the tired there was something that sounded, very faintly, like relief trying not to be heard. “The doctors have finished. I am going to tell you what they said, and then I am going to tell you something else, and you are going to listen to both.”

“Okay.”

“Okay does not count.”

“Yes.”

“It is small,” said his mother. “They have said it again, with the pictures, and the man with the clean hands who did my valve came down from his floor to look at the pictures as well, because he said he wanted to, and he said small, and he does not say things to be kind. It is a small one. The right hand will come back. The face will come back. The words…” She stopped, and started again, more slowly. “The words were few before, and they are fewer now, and they will come back, they think, slowly, a few at a time, as they came back after the sea. He will be in for some days. Then he will come home. Brannigan has already moved the green chair.”

He did not say anything. He sat with his hand flat on the lid of the box.

“That is what the doctors said,” said his mother. “Now the other thing.”

“Mamma, I’m at the gate. It boards at a quarter past eight. I can be there by…”

“Stay,” said his mother.

He stopped.

“Stay, Fredde. As last year.” She said it quite gently, and quite without any give in it at all, the voice she had used on the stairs a year ago to say don’t come. “He is himself. He is in a bed with a cup he is not allowed to hold and a nurse he does not like and Brannigan in the chair by the door, and he is himself. If you come, you will sit in a corridor for five days, and he will know you are in the corridor, and he will try to be better faster because you have come five thousand miles, and he will not be able to, and he will mind. He will mind very much.” A pause. “And you have classes tomorrow.”

“I don’t care about classes.”

“He does,” said his mother. “That is the other thing. He says your name. He has said it twice since the ambulance.” Her voice went, a little, and came back. “He says Stay.”

Frederick sat very still on the grey seat by the window.

“He said that?”

“He said Stay, Fredde,” said his mother, “and then he said Hill.”

---

He did not say anything for some time.

Outside the window the sun had come up behind the mountains to the south-east, not over them yet, but behind them, so that the whole ragged line of them stood up black against a sky gone the pale clean yellow of the inside of a lemon, and the white aircraft at the end of its jet bridge had gone gold down one side; and the men in orange jackets had put away their torches.

“He knows where I am,” said Frederick.

“He has always known where you are.” A breath. “Your name, twice. Stay. Hill. Four words in four hours, and two of them the same.” She paused. “I have been counting.” And then, quieter: “Puss, Fredde. Go back to the hill. Ring me tonight. He will be asleep, and I will tell him in the morning that you rang, and he will say Good. He always says Good.”

“Puss, Mamma.”

The line went.

He sat with the telephone in one hand and the other flat on the lid of the box, by the window, in the sun.

Rhys had not moved from the pillar. Sam had not moved from his seat. Neither of them looked at him. They looked, with tremendous force, at the departures board and the floor, and Frederick understood that they had heard every word.

“Stay,” said Frederick.

Rhys looked round.

“He said stay,” said Frederick. “My father. And then he said hill.”

Rhys’s face did something, and he put it back, very quickly, and nodded once, the way he nodded at a point of procedure correctly observed.

“Then we’ll stay, sir,” said Rhys, and took out his telephone, and said into it, quietly, “Release the seats,” and put it away.

---

He carried the box back to the car.

He carried it the whole length of the concourse, against the passengers for London coming the other way, who were going where he was not, and out into the morning, which smelled of jet fuel and of the creosote bush along the car park; and he did not put it down once, and he did not open it.

In the car, in the back seat, with the box on his knees again, he took the butterscotch out of the pocket of the jumper, where it had been since twenty to five, and unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth.

Sam, in the front, turned round.

“The porter’s?”

“Yes.”

Sam nodded, as at a figure that reconciled, and turned back.

They drove east into the sun, and the butte came up at the end of the long curve by the river, brown, rough, with the A on its flank and people on the stepped path, small, coming down, because it was Sunday and they had gone up for the sunrise.

---

It was a quarter to nine when he came up the forty-five steps with the box.

The door of 312 was open. Alexander was at the desk by the door, dressed, in the buttoned shirt, with the programme for Sunday in front of him, in his own hand, and the pencil; and he did not turn round when Frederick came in, because he had heard him on the stairs, and knew.

Frederick knelt down by the bed by the window and put the box back under it.

He put it against the wall where it had been, beside the camp bed folded in three, which sighed when the box touched it, still breathing; and he pushed it in until it was square with the wall and the label was facing up, so that anybody who looked under the bed with a torch would read IN CASE first, with the line through the word under it, and not the word.

Then he stood up, and looked at the bed.

It was made. It had not been made when he left. He had left it with the blanket thrown back and the sheet pulled half off by his foot on the way to the door. It was made now, perfectly, tight as a drum, with the blanket folded down at the top exactly a hand’s width over the sheet, and at the corners, at the foot, the sheet folded under in two neat triangles, the way they fold it in hospitals and in the Army and in nowhere else.

“Did you make my bed?”

“No,” said Alexander, at the desk, without turning round.

“Did Kessler?”

“Kessler does not make beds.”

Frederick looked at the hospital corners. Then he looked at the back of his cousin’s head, and the buttoned collar, and the programme on the desk, on which, he could see from where he stood, there were two items at the top that had been written in later than the others, smaller, squeezed in above the first line: 04.00. Frederick (telephone), and below it, 08.45. Frederick, with no word after the name at all; and against the second, very fresh, a tick.

“That’s not the time you were told,” said Frederick.

“Rhys told Kessler at seven, from the gate,” said Alexander, “and Kessler told me.” He laid the pencil down, parallel to the edge of the desk. “It is the time I was told.”

Frederick sat down on the made bed, carefully, so as not to spoil the corners, and put his face in his hands, and stayed like that for a while; and Alexander, at the desk by the door, read the next paper all the way to the end, including the small type at the bottom, and did not turn round once.