The Birthday Dinner

The Grotto Hall had been made, in 1769, to look like the inside of the sea.

It was the strangest room in the Neues Palais and Alexander’s favourite, and he had asked for the dinner to be in it every year since he was fourteen, and every year the Hofmarschall’s office had suggested the Marble Gallery instead, which was warmer and held more and did not have quite so many shells. The walls of the Grotto Hall were shells. They were shells and pebbles and lumps of quartz and amethyst and coral and glittering slag from the Silesian mines, set in plaster in swirls and fans and garlands from the floor to the vaulted ceiling, thousands and thousands of them, white and grey and pink and green, with great dark shapes of rock between them where the plaster had been made to look like a cave, and in the corners fountains that had not run since before the Great War and were dry and full of more shells. At night, with the candles lit, the whole room glittered and dripped and gleamed like the inside of a wave that had stopped. There were four thousand one hundred and six pieces of quartz in the walls. He had counted them when he was twelve, over three winters.

The table ran down the middle of it, laid for thirty-two.

He sat at the centre of the long side, with his back to the windows and his face to the shells, because that was where the host sat, and on his right sat his mother, Queen Caroline, in grey silk, and on his left the Chancellor’s wife, because the Chancellor’s wife always sat on his left, and across the table, directly opposite, where the guest of honour sat when there was one, the Hofmarschall’s office had put the King of Great Britain, Hanover, America and eleven other countries.

His cousin was in white tie, with the star of the Black Eagle on the left breast, because the Household had asked him to wear something Prussian and he had nothing else, and it caught the candles and the shells and gave them back, and he looked, Alexander thought, extremely uncomfortable, and extremely like himself, which was the same thing.

On his cousin’s right sat the Chancellor. On his left sat the Minister-President of Prussia. Further down, on the same side, in an order the Hofmarschall’s office had arrived at after what Alexander understood to have been a meeting, sat Theo Hartigan in a borrowed dinner jacket, Jack Fennell in his own, which had been his father’s and was a size too large in the shoulders, and Lukas, in the uniform of the Page and Gefährte, which was dark green with silver at the collar and had been designed by a committee and looked it.

Kessler was at the wall by the dry fountain on the left. Kimura was at the wall by the dry fountain on the right. They did not look at each other. They did not need to. They had stood at opposite walls of a great many rooms together in four years, at Garfield Street and at Coln and in the hall of Columbia Palace and once, at sunrise, on the top of a mountain in Arizona, and Alexander had long ago stopped thinking of them as two people. They were one wall with two ends.

---

The Chancellor’s wife wanted to know about the beer.

She did not want to know about it from Alexander. She asked Alexander first, as the protocol required, during the soup, whether he had had a happy birthday, and he said that he had, and she said that she was so glad, and then she turned her whole body in her chair, a quarter turn, away from the German Emperor, toward the other side of the table, and said across the candles, in English, very clearly:

“Your Majesty. Is it true you can pull a pint?”

The table went quiet. It went quiet the way a table does when a question has been asked at the head of it that everybody further down has been wanting to ask since the guests sat down.

His cousin looked up from his soup.

“Badly,” he said.

“Oh, but I saw you,” said the Chancellor’s wife. “In August. On the television. We all saw you. At the banquet. In the apron. With the bell.” She put her hand on her heart. “My husband cried.”

“I did not cry,” said the Chancellor.

“He cried at the toast. When you said the bit about the plates.” She leaned further across. “And the darts. Your father. With the darts. Is it true he has never lost?”

“He lost once,” said his cousin. “To Lukas. In August. Lukas had never thrown a dart in his life.” He nodded down the table. “He took it very well.”

“And the Hanover one,” said a man further down, a Prussian minister whose name Alexander knew and whose portfolio he knew and whose wife’s name he knew and whose children’s ages he knew, and who had never in four years addressed a voluntary sentence to the German Emperor across a dinner table, “in October, the year before last, at the Zum Schwarzen Bären. My sister was there. She has a photograph. You were wearing a waistcoat. She has it framed.”

“Kuhlmann made me wear the waistcoat,” said his cousin. “It was his.”

“It suited you.”

And it went on. It went on through the soup and the fish and the venison and the dessert. It went down the table and up again. The Minister-President asked about the darts. The Minister-President’s wife asked about the bell. A general asked, at some length, whether it was true that the German Emperor’s own state banquet had been held on four hundred and eighteen yards of trestle tables in a street in the Fourth Ward of New Westminster on plates borrowed from a Cathedral, and when his cousin said yes, the general laughed until he had to be given water, and then said, wiping his eyes, that it was the finest thing a sovereign had done for the Empire since Bismarck, and that he would deny saying so.

Alexander ate his venison.

He did not mind. He had thought he might mind, and he examined the question honestly, between the venison and the dessert, the way he examined everything, turning it over to see the underneath. He did not mind. It was the most interesting thing that had happened at one of his own dinners in four years. Thirty-one of the thirty-two people at the table had sat at his birthday dinner every January since he was fourteen and talked to him about the weather and the Reichstag and the price of coal in Silesia, correctly, at the correct length, in the correct order, and not one of them had ever turned round in their chair to ask him anything with their whole body. And now they were all turned round. Not to him. Across him. To the other side of the table, where a fair-haired young man in white tie with a Prussian star on his chest was trying to explain to the wife of the Chancellor of the German Empire the difference between a pint of stout and a pint of bitter, with his hands, and she was listening as if he were telling her where the gold was buried.

Last August, in New Westminster, the whole of Germany had watched his cousin tend bar for their Emperor. And in October the year before that, in Hanover and in Brunswick, in two old taverns, in two waistcoats, the people of two German kingdoms had watched the King of one of them pull pints for them in person.

Nobody in Germany had ever watched the German Emperor do anything at all, except the things on the card.

He thought about the sheet of paper in his breast pocket, folded in four, against the cloth of the First Foot Guards, which he had not changed out of, because the programme said the uniform was worn until the guests departed.

He thought that tonight, for the first time, that might be an advantage.

---

The speeches were at half past nine.

The Minister-President spoke for Prussia, for six minutes, and said that the Kingdom was proud, and that the Kingdom was grateful, and that the eighteenth of January was a day of memory and a day of hope, and that he had been asked by the Landtag to convey its loyal greetings, and conveyed them, and sat down. The Chancellor spoke for the Empire, for eight minutes, in a voice like a large clock, and said that the Empire was a federation and not a nation, which he said every year, and that its Emperor was the keystone and not the building, which he also said every year, and that he wished His Majesty many years, and sat down.

Then the Hofmarschall, who presided at the birthday dinner as he presided at everything, rose at the end of the table with a glass in his hand and looked down the length of the Grotto Hall, at the candles in the shells, and said, in German and then in English: “His Majesty the King.”

Not His Majesty the King of Great Britain and Hanover and so on. The Hofmarschall had been at the Neues Palais for thirty-one years and served three Emperors and believed that a title said in full at a dinner table was a sign that somebody had lost their nerve.

His cousin stood.

He stood with a glass of champagne in his hand that Alexander had watched him not drink all evening, and the shells all round him took the candlelight and broke it up and threw it back, so that he stood in the middle of a cave of small lights, in white tie, with the Black Eagle on his chest, and looked across the table at Alexander, and the whole of the table looked at him.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

And sat down.

There was a pause in the Grotto Hall. It was a long pause. Thirty people who had come to the birthday dinner of the German Emperor in his own palace on Kingdom Day expecting a speech from a visiting King sat and looked at the King, who had sat down, and at each other, and at the Hofmarschall, who was still standing at the end of the table with his glass in the air and an expression that Alexander had not seen on his face in nineteen years.

Then the general began to laugh.

He laughed at the bottom of the table, in his uniform, with his medals, a great helpless wheezing laugh, and the Chancellor’s wife laughed, and the Minister-President, who had spoken for six minutes, put his face in his napkin, and the whole of the Grotto Hall was laughing, thirty-two people in a cave of shells under the gods, at a toast of two words.

Alexander did not laugh. He sat at the centre of the table with his hands in his lap and looked across it at his cousin, who was looking back at him, pink to the collar, and very slightly, at one corner of his mouth, not apologising; and he understood that it was the best toast he had ever been given, and that it was the first one that had been made to him and not to the office, and that his cousin had known exactly what he was doing and had done it anyway, in front of the Chancellor.

He picked up his glass and raised it, an inch, across the table.

His cousin raised his.

---

At twenty-five to ten the Hofmarschall went to see to the cars, and Kessler went with him, because Kessler always went to see to the cars.

Alexander watched them go. The Hofmarschall went first, through the door at the end of the hall into the long gallery, with his stick, and Kessler went after him, a pace behind and a pace to the left, without looking back, and the door closed behind them. At the other wall, by the other dry fountain, Kimura did not move.

The guests were standing. They stood about the Grotto Hall in groups among the shells with their coffee, as guests do in the ten minutes between the speeches and the cars, and his mother was talking to the Chancellor’s wife about the hospital, and the general was telling the Minister-President about a dog, and for perhaps four minutes, by the clock on the wall above the door, which was made of shells too, nobody at all was looking at the German Emperor, which was the moment.

He turned to the table.

His cousin was still sitting there, because he did not know what to do in the ten minutes between speeches and cars either and never had. Theo was beside him, in the borrowed dinner jacket, with his coffee. Jack was beside Theo, with the remains of a bread roll. Lukas was standing behind Jack’s chair with his hands behind his back.

Alexander sat down opposite them, in the chair his mother had left. He reached into the breast pocket of the First Foot Guards. He took out the sheet of paper, folded in four, and unfolded it, and laid it flat on the white tablecloth between the coffee cups, and turned it round so that it faced them, and smoothed it with both hands.

Three heads bent over it.

Nobody said anything for a while. His cousin read it the way Alexander read things, twice, the first time for the order and the second time for the errors. Theo read it once, fast, and then took out his phone under the table and did something to it with his thumb. Jack read it with his lips moving very slightly, and at the bottom of the page, at 08.10, stopped, and read the last line again, and looked up.

“Where’s last orders?” said Jack.

“There are none,” said Alexander.

“Every bar has last orders.”

“Not in Berlin. In Berlin there is no Sperrstunde. No closing hour. The bars close when they choose, and most of them do not choose.” He paused. “It is one of the few things in the city that has never been reformed by anybody.”

Jack looked at him with an expression of real distress, as though he had been told that in Berlin the sun did not set.

“Then how do you know when to go?”

“The sun comes up,” said Alexander, and touched the last line. “Ten past eight.”

Theo looked up from his phone.

“The two minutes past eleven,” he said. “From Potsdam. The S7. It’s right. It’s on time. It’s a Tuesday timetable and it’s a holiday, and they’re running Sunday service, and it still runs at two minutes past.” He looked at Alexander with an expression of grudging professional respect. “You checked the holiday.”

“I checked the holiday.”

“Nobody checks the holiday.”

“I checked it three times,” said Alexander. “Kingdom Day is the eighteenth. I was born on it. I have had nineteen years to learn that the trains run differently.”

Then they both looked at his cousin.

His cousin had not looked up. He was sitting with his hands flat on the tablecloth on either side of the sheet of paper, and looking at the first line, where it said 21.40 and nothing beside it, and at the second, where it said Communs. He was very still.

“Kimura’s by the fountain,” he said at last, without lifting his head.

“I know.”

“She’ll know in about a minute.”

“She will know at twenty-one fifty-two,” said Alexander. “When Kessler comes back from the cars and finds the table empty. He will look at her, and she will look at him, and they will both know at once, because they have done this before. That is twelve minutes.” He paused. “I have allowed for twelve.”

His cousin lifted his head and looked at him across the coffee cups.

He looked for a long time. Alexander let him. He had been looked at by his cousin in that way before, on the summit of Camelback Mountain at sunrise, and in the observatory dome at Potsdam at one in the morning when they were fifteen, and once across a bar in the Fourth Ward of New Westminster with a brass ruler on it, and he had learned that it was not a look that could be hurried, and that it was always, in the end, worth waiting for.

“You wrote a programme,” said his cousin.

“Yes.”

“For tonight. Yourself. To the minute.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never done that.”

“No.”

“Not once.”

“Not once,” said Alexander. “I have been given four thousand and eleven programmes. I have kept them all. They are in boxes in the attic of the house by the lake, in order. This is the first one I have written.” He paused. “It is probably wrong. I have never done it before. But it is mine.”

His cousin looked at the sheet of paper again. Then at Theo, who shrugged, and at Jack, who was still looking at the line about the sun with deep suspicion, and at Lukas, standing behind Jack’s chair with his hands behind his back, who looked back at him and gave him, very slightly, a single nod.

“What’s at twenty-one forty?” said his cousin.

The clock of shells above the door said twenty-one thirty-nine.

“A door,” said Alexander, and stood up, and folded the programme in four, and put it back in his breast pocket, “behind the shells.”