Second Year

The programme on the desk by the door had come to the end of its second sheet.

FR 4.V.

06.00. London (F.).

06.53. Box.

07.45. Breakfast. (Eat it.)

09.40. Basement.

10.00. Ms Ybarra (F.).

10.25. Form.

There was nothing after it. There was the rest of the page, white, with no times on it at all, down to the staple.

Frederick read it from the bed by the window at five to six, in the grey light, with the blind up an inch, and read the last line twice, because it was the shortest line Alexander had ever typed and the only one on two sheets that did not say who it was for.

“Form,” he said.

“Yes.” Alexander was on the end of his bed in the linen jacket, buttoned, putting on his shoes, the left and then the right. “At twenty-five past ten.”

“How do you know it’ll take twenty-five minutes?”

“I do not know.” He tied the right shoe. “I have allowed twenty-five minutes. It is a programme, Frederick. It is not a prophecy.” He stood up and looked at the sheet, and at the white space under the last line, and did not pick up the pencil. “After that I have not written anything. I did not know what to write.”

---

He rang London at six, which was two in the afternoon there, from the step under the narrow window on the landing, under the thermometer, in his socks.

His mother answered on the first ring, because she had been sitting by it.

“Today,” she said.

“Today.”

“What time?”

“Ten. Six in the evening, for you.”

“I will be in the garden,” said his mother. “I will do the eleven times round at six, all of them, so that I am doing something.” A pause. “Your father wishes to speak to you. He had his lunch early, so as to be ready.”

The telephone went across a table. He heard it go, and a chair, and a breath, and the small sound of a stick being leaned against something.

“Fredde.”

“Pappa. It’s today. At ten.”

“Yes.” A breath. He did not go back along the corridor for the next one. It was there. “Ink.”

“I know. Ink is yes.”

There was a pause on the line from London, and it was the looking kind, and Frederick sat on the step and did not fill it, because if you filled it the word went away; and he heard the clock in the kitchen in London tick, five times, six, and his mother saying nothing at all, and somewhere a long way behind her a door, and Brannigan’s voice saying sir, quietly, to somebody else.

“Yours,” said his father.

Frederick sat very still on the step.

For fifty-six years his father had put his initial in the corner of every page that came to him, in pencil, so that nobody could ever think the yes was his; and the yes had been in ink at the bottom, in another man’s hand, every time, on every page, in fourteen countries. That was the whole of it. That was what a King was for. It was the lightest thing on the page.

“Mine,” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said his father. And then, with great satisfaction: “Good.”

---

The red box came at six fifty-three, in the grey backpack with the broken zip.

It had four papers in it, from four realms that had got up early on a Friday in May and had nothing much to say, and Frederick read them to the end, including the parts in small type, and initialled each, small, in pencil, in the top right-hand corner, and laid the pencil down beside each one parallel to the edge; and Sam stood by the window under the poster of the federal tax brackets with his hands in his pockets and watched the road.

“Ten o’clock,” said Sam, to the road.

“Yes.”

Sam took out his notebook, and opened it, and looked at a page near the back for some time, and did not write anything on it, and closed it again.

“What’s that one?”

“Days,” said Sam. “Since the form. The first one. August, the year before last.” He put the notebook back in his pocket. “I’ll tell you the number tonight. It’s not finished.”

On the bed under the window Rhys lay on his back in his running kit with his eyes open and his hands folded on his chest, awake, the way he had lain on the morning of every examination for two years, though he had none today, and had finished Comparative Government on Monday, and had nothing left to revise.

“Sir,” said Rhys, to the ceiling.

“Fred.”

“Fred.” Rhys did not look round. “Is it the brick building?”

Frederick did not answer, and Rhys did not ask again, and went pink, slowly, from the ears inwards, lying on his back, at the ceiling.

---

He ate breakfast.

He ate it at the table by the window in the dining hall, with the butte a mile off in the glass and the waffle iron and the ABC on the television on the wall with the sound down, showing the weather, which was ninety-eight; and Alexander sat opposite him and watched him eat it, the whole of it, and ticked 07.45 on the programme with the pencil and laid the pencil down, parallel, beside the tray.

“I’ve never seen you tick a thing you didn’t do,” said Frederick.

“I did it,” said Alexander. “I watched.”

He had a folder with him. Frederick saw it on the chair beside him when he sat down: a plain grey card folder of the kind the stationer on the Avenue sold, with nothing written on the front of it, and it stayed on the chair through breakfast, under the hat, which was the Easter hat, in its band, carried; and Frederick thought it was the box, or something from the box, or something for Phoenix, and did not ask, because Alexander’s folders were Alexander’s.

---

They left the hall at twenty to ten.

It was ninety-four under the arcade and the heat came in off the car park like water under a door, and across the road, over the dentist’s, the blind was halfway down; and as they came out from under the concrete fins into the sun it went down an inch, and then, while Frederick was still looking at it, came up again, an inch, which it had done once before, for a cake.

He looked at it a moment longer.

Then they walked. They walked along the road and across it and onto the mall, under the palms, from shade to shade, in the strips of it that the trees laid across the paths, past students going the other way with bags and boxes and the faces of people whose last examination was behind them; and Kessler came behind them at eleven yards with nothing in his hands, and was not there.

The coffee cart under the arcade by the library was open. The girl wrote FRED on one cup in purple marker, and ALEX on the other, without asking.

“Iced,” said Frederick.

“Iced,” said Alexander.

Frederick looked at him.

“It is ninety-eight,” said Alexander. “It is the last day of the year. I have had a hot coffee every morning since August.” He took the cup. “It was a programme. This is not on it.”

Across the mall, outside Old Main, the Abernathy box said 80, in red, under its strip of paper that said THRESHOLD 82, and a boy in a maroon cap was standing in front of it photographing it, the way people in other places photograph a comet.

---

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 the corridor was cold, the deep dry cold of a basement in the March in May, and it was empty, except for a row of plastic chairs along the wall opposite the doors, orange, joined together at the legs, where people waited.

Alexander sat down on one of them.

He sat on the one opposite the fourth door, and put the iced coffee on the floor beside the leg of the chair, square to the wall, and the hat on the chair to his right, and the grey folder on his knee, flat, with both hands on it.

“You’re waiting?”

“Yes.”

“It might be twenty-five minutes.”

“I have allowed for it,” said Alexander. He looked at the fourth door. “Go in, Frederick. It is ten o’clock.”

At the far end of the corridor, by the foot of the stairs, Kessler stood with his back against the wall under a fire notice, with his hands folded in front of him, and looked at nothing.

Frederick knocked on the fourth door.

---

Ms Ybarra was at her desk in a cardigan, in the cold, with her reading glasses on their cord and the very small cactus in its pot, which had grown since October by about the width of another pencil, so that it was now, he thought, nearly the size of a small egg. On the wall the calendar had a photograph on it of a lake in the White Mountains in the spring, with the snow gone off the far shore and a heron standing in the shallows.

She looked at him over her glasses.

“You said October,” said Ms Ybarra.

“I said October twice.”

“It’s May.”

“It’s May,” said Frederick.

Ms Ybarra looked at him for about a second, with the expression that told him she knew exactly what day it was and how many hours were left of it, and had known since August of the year before last that he would come on this day and no other, and had decided before he came in that it would make no difference to the next twenty minutes. Then she pointed at the chair.

He sat down.

She found him on the screen. “Hanover, F.,” she said. “Class of thirty-seven. Palo Verde, 312. Still.” She scrolled. “History, an A minus. Who gave you that?”

“Dr Ashby.”

“Of course he did,” said Ms Ybarra, with a kind of satisfaction, and did not explain it. She scrolled on, and came to the box, and stopped. Intended major: Undeclared. She took her glasses off and held them by the cord, and swung them, gently, as she always did, and looked at him.

“So,” she said. “What did you find out?”

---

He thought about it.

He had thought about it on the stairs, and on the mall, and at breakfast with Alexander watching him eat, and on the step at six with his father’s word in his ear; and he had thought he would say it the way he had said it in January and April of last year, a list, the hill and the water and the rocks and the eight o’clock, and that she would say none of that’s a major, and he would agree.

“I found out my family’s wrong,” he said.

Ms Ybarra did not move.

“About one thing. A small thing. A thing that happened in 1974, before I was born, to my father.” He looked at the cactus. “And a textbook’s wrong about it too. Differently. And there’s a letter in a box on the top floor of the library that’s right about it, but only halfway, and doesn’t say the part I want to know.” He stopped. “And my father told me the part. On the telephone. In two words. And I believed him, and I wrote it down, and I got a minus for it, because you can’t believe your father, not in a paper, not even when he’s right.” He looked at the window, at the bottoms of the palm trees going past at the level of the grass, and somebody’s feet. “And now I want to know where a piece of paper is. A piece of paper he wrote on, the night before, and gave to somebody, sixty years ago. I want to know where it is more than I’ve wanted to know anything.”

He stopped.

“That’s not a list,” he said.

“No,” said Ms Ybarra.

She looked at him for some time with her glasses in her hand.

“That’s a major,” she said.

---

She did not click. She did not reach behind her for the printer. She opened the drawer of her desk instead, the top one, and took out a form, a single sheet, printed, with a crest at the top, the university’s sun, and the words DECLARATION OF MAJOR under it in plain grey type, and lines on it; and she put it on the desk in front of him, beside the cactus, and turned it round so that it faced him.

Then she took a pencil out of the jar on the desk, a yellow one, sharpened, and held it out.

“Most people do it in pencil first,” said Ms Ybarra. “And then I make them do it again.” She held it out a moment longer. “Habit.”

He looked at the pencil.

“Ink, please,” said Frederick.

Ms Ybarra looked at him over the top of her glasses, which she had put back on, and something happened at the corner of her mouth, very briefly; and she put the pencil back in the jar, and took out a pen, a plain blue biro with the end chewed, and gave it to him.

He wrote his name where it said Name, and his number where it said Student number, and Palo Verde Hall, 312 where it said Address.

Then he came to the line.

Intended major:

He looked at it for a moment. The basement was quiet. Somewhere along the corridor a door opened and shut, and somebody laughed, a long way off, at the top of the stairs, in the heat; and the printer behind Ms Ybarra’s chair sat dark and said nothing; and on the other side of the fourth door, on an orange plastic chair joined at the legs to other orange plastic chairs, somebody was sitting with a folder on his knee and both hands flat on it, and had allowed twenty-five minutes.

He wrote it in capitals, in ink, in his own hand, which was not as good as his father’s and was his.

HISTORY.

---

Ms Ybarra turned the form round and read it.

She read all of it, the name and the number and the address and the word, and then she opened the other drawer, the bottom one, and took out a rubber stamp and a small tin pad, and opened the pad, and pressed the stamp into it, and then onto the form, at the bottom, firmly, once, and lifted it.

It said RECEIVED, in purple, with the date.

“There,” said Ms Ybarra.

She clicked, then. She clicked something on the screen, and the printer behind her came on and 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: HISTORY.

He read it twice.

Then he opened his notebook from the back, where he kept them, and took them out, the others, each folded in four, the folds gone soft and white; and he folded the new one in four along the same lines, and put it on the top of them, and put them back, all of them, and closed the notebook.

“You can throw the others away,” said Ms Ybarra.

“I know.”

“You won’t.”

“No.”

“No,” said Ms Ybarra. “Nobody does.” She took her glasses off and held them by the cord. “You know what I told you, the first time? In August?”

“That most people who tick a box in August change it by May.”

“You ticked it in May.” She swung the glasses, gently. “So you’ve got till August to change it, by my arithmetic. You won’t.” She put them back on. “Come back in October anyway. Tell me how it’s going.”

“I’ll come in October.”

“I know you will,” said Ms Ybarra, and turned back to her screen.

---

He came out into the corridor at twenty-two minutes past ten.

Alexander was on the orange plastic chair opposite the fourth door, where he had been, with the hat on the chair to his right and the iced coffee on the floor by the leg of the chair, square to the wall, and the grey folder on his knee with both hands flat on it; and when the door opened he looked up, and then he stood up.

He did not ask. He looked at Frederick’s face, the way Frederick had watched him look at a great many faces and read them, from the top steps of churches and across rooms; and whatever he read there, he read it, and did not say anything about it at all.

Instead he held out the folder.

Frederick took it. He opened it.

There was one sheet in it. It was a form, printed, with the university’s sun at the top and the words RESIDENCE LIFE: HOUSING APPLICATION, NEXT ACADEMIC YEAR under it in the same plain grey type, and lines on it, and every line was filled in, in ink, in a small upright hand that he had known since he could read, every letter in its place.

Name: Hohenzollern, A.

Hall: Palo Verde.

Room: 312.

Roommate (if requested): Hanover, F.

At the bottom, where it said Signature, there was a signature, and beside it, in the margin, in pencil, very small, a tick.

Frederick looked at it for a long time.

“I have put the same room,” said Alexander.

---

They went up the stairs at the side of the building into ninety-eight degrees.

It came down on them at the top of the flight like a hand laid flat, and Frederick stood in it, at the top of the stairs, in the sun, with the folder in one hand and the notebook in the other, and did not move for a moment; and Alexander stood beside him, in the linen jacket, buttoned, with the hat in his hand, and did not move either.

Then Frederick gave him back the folder.

“In ink,” he said.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

He put the folder under his arm, with the hat, and picked up the iced coffee, which had come up the stairs in his other hand, and looked at the pencil tick in the margin of the form for a moment, through the open side of the folder; and then they walked.

They walked back along the mall in the heat, from shade to shade, under the palms, past Old Main and the Abernathy box and the boy in the maroon cap who was still photographing it, and past Tolliver, and the brick building with the ivy, which Frederick looked at as they went past and did not stop for. Kessler came behind them at eleven yards. At the edge of the mall Frederick took out his telephone, and photographed the sheet from the printer, unfolded, against the wall of the arcade, and sent it to Coln, where it was twenty to seven in the evening and the New Inn would be filling.

The answer came while they were still under the arcade.

NOT SAME

And then:

NOT SAME ANY MORE

And then, a minute later, when they were crossing the road:

MUM SAYS ABOUT TIME. PURVIS SAYS WHAT IS HISTORY. I SAID ITS WHAT HAPPENED. HE SAID THAT CANT BE A SUBJECT

---

Callum was at the day desk in the lobby of Palo Verde Hall with his clipboard, under the sign on the lift that said SORRY FOLKS, ticking things in a pen pressed very hard.

Alexander gave him the form.

Callum read it. He read all of it, moving his lips, the name and the hall and the room and the roommate, and the signature, and the small pencil tick in the margin, which he looked at for some time as though it might be a thing that was not allowed.

“Same room?” said Callum.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

Callum looked at Frederick. Frederick did not say anything.

“Okay,” said Callum. He made a tick on his clipboard beside the last name on the third floor without one, very hard, so that the pen went nearly through. “That’s all of them. That’s the whole floor.” He looked at the clipboard as though it had surprised him. “Nobody’s ever done the whole floor.”

---

They went up the stairs.

The lift was out. The stairs went up from the back of the lobby in concrete half-flights, with the rail painted maroon, and a narrow window on every landing; and on the landing between the second floor and the third, under the thermometer, which said seventy-nine, there was the step, with nobody on it.

Alexander counted under his breath. Frederick could hear him do it, very quietly, in German, the way he had counted them on the first night in August, and every night since, and would, Frederick supposed, on the first night of the next August, coming up with two boxes.

“Fünfundvierzig,” said Alexander, at the top.

“Forty-four.”

“There is a little one.”

“I know there’s a little one.”

“Then it is forty-five.”

“It’s where you put your foot,” said Frederick, “when you stop.”

Alexander considered this, at the top of the stairs, with the folder under his arm and the hat and the iced coffee, in the cold of the corridor, for some time.

“Then it is forty-five,” he said, “and you have stopped,” and went on along the corridor to 312.

On the door there was one paper sun, maroon, with gold rays, in Callum’s silver pen, that said ALEX, where it had been since August; and beside it, where the other should have been, there was a rectangle of old tape, with nothing in it.

Frederick looked at it for a moment.

He found that he did not mind. Callum would put another up by tonight, and it would be gone again by ten. He put his hand flat on the tape, once, the way a man touches a pocket for his keys, and went in after him.