Inspection Day

There was a card on his plate.

It was propped against the toast rack where he could not miss it, the way Dame M left all her cards, and it said, in her square blue capitals:

ELLICOTT IS INSPECTED TODAY. A MR STROUD, OF VIRGINIA. HE HAS BEEN TOLD NOTHING. SERGEANT CASTELLANOS WILL BE IN THE BUILDING. BE ORDINARY. M.

He read it twice and turned it over. The back was blank. Dame M did not believe in the backs of cards.

“Eggs,” said Bridget, and put them down.

“Thank you.”

“There’s a card.”

“I’ve read it.”

“She was up at six writing it. I said to her, the boy’s been ordinary for fifteen years without a card. She said that was before.” Bridget went back to the range. “Eat the eggs.”

He ate the eggs. The kitchen was warm and smelled of toast and the radiator under the window, which ticked. Outside it was not yet light and was raining in the way New Westminster rained in February, finely and without stopping, as if it had been asked to.

Be ordinary. He did not know how to do it on purpose. He had only ever done it by accident.

---

His mother came down at twenty past with her coffee and the newspaper and a red box under her arm.

She put the box on the chair beside her, where it sat like a small dog that was not allowed on the table. She had brought it down every morning since November. She did not open it at breakfast. She liked it near her.

“God morgon.”

“God morgon.”

“You’ve read Dame M’s card.”

“Everybody keeps saying that.”

“Because she put it where you’d see it.” His mother unfolded the paper. “An inspector. Is that a person who looks at you?”

“At the teachers, I think. And the building. Theo says they count the buckets.”

“What buckets?”

“Under the roof. In the science corridor. When it rains.” He looked at the window. “It’s raining.”

“Then they’ll have a great deal to count.” She turned a page. “And what else is today? Apart from buckets.”

“History first. Geometry. Chemistry. Spanish. Gym. Art. History again.”

“History twice.”

“Mr Ferrante does Tuesdays double. He says it’s because the Realm happened twice as fast on Tuesdays.”

“Did it?”

“He says the Charter was signed on a Tuesday and the first ministry fell on one, and the rest he’s still checking.”

His mother made the small sound she made when she liked something and did not mean to say so.

“And the reading? You had a reading.”

He had had a reading. It was in his bag. Mr Ferrante had handed it out on Friday, six pages from the brown book they called the Brick, because of what it did to a bag, and written on the board: THE MINORITY OF THE SOVEREIGN. pp. 112-118. READ IT. YES, ALL OF IT.

“I didn’t do it,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m doing it.”

His mother looked at him over the glasses she was not wearing.

“It’s about me,” he said. “Minority. It’s me. I didn’t think I needed to read six pages about something that’s happening to me at breakfast.”

“Your father said that about Swedish.”

“That’s not the same.”

“He said, I don’t need to learn Swedish, I’m married to it.” She went back to the paper. “He’s very good now at ordering coffee.”

He ate his toast and did not say anything back, because there was nothing in it to say back to, which was how she won most things.

---

The thing about the minority of the sovereign was that everybody he knew talked about it in the same way, which was in the future tense.

In May you’ll do the boxes yourself, Dame M had said, in November, in the morning room, holding her cup of tea the way other people held a regimental colour.

In May, sir, said the Private Secretary, whenever he asked what a paper was. In May you’ll see all of it.

In May, said the Lord Chamberlain, about the investitures, and the Comptroller about the garden parties, and his mother’s Swedish secretary about something that needed signing in Stockholm, and Bridget, once, about whether he would still want his eggs at a quarter past seven when he was in charge of everything. He had said yes. She had said they would see.

May was when it started. That was what he had taken from it, if he had taken anything. People said Your Majesty now, at home, and sir, and in October they had all stood up when he came into the morning room, until he asked them to stop, and Dame M had stopped them. There had been the Privy Council and the proclamation and the Eleventh, when he had laid the Crown’s wreath at the Tomb with his hand shaking and nobody had said anything about it except Theo, who said his hand had been shaking too and he had only been carrying the schools’ one. But the boxes went to his mother. The signatures were hers. On Tuesday evenings she did them at the kitchen table, and he sat across from her with his homework and watched her sign, and when he asked what a paper was she told him, in Swedish, so the footmen could not follow, and he was allowed to have an opinion about it the Tuesday after, which was a rule she had made up in November and kept.

And in May it would be his.

He had a feeling about it that he had not told anybody, which was that it was like a bicycle you had been given for your birthday and were not allowed to ride until the spring. You had it. Everybody said it was yours. You could look at it in the garage. But it did not seem quite fair to say you could ride.

He had never asked anybody whether that was right. It had not seemed like a question. It seemed like the weather.

---

“Your father,” said his mother, at twenty-five to eight, folding the paper, “said a word yesterday after you’d gone.”

He put his cup down.

“Niamh told me on the telephone. You’d read him the Thursday trains and gone, and he said Thursday. Clearly. Twice.” She smiled at the table. “She wrote it on the board by his bed. She writes every word on the board now, with the date. There are eleven.”

“What are they?”

“Water. No. Christina, which took him a week. Thursday.” She counted on her fingers and stopped. “I’ll show you. It’s a very short list. Most of it is no.”

“That’s him.”

“That is entirely him.” She stood and picked up the red box. “Four o’clock?”

“Four o’clock. And it’s Tuesday.”

“It’s Tuesday,” his mother agreed, and patted the red box, which would be on the kitchen table tonight with the others.

“Wednesday’s trains, then. He’ll be expecting the eight-fifteen to Boston. He’s very attached to the eight-fifteen.”

“It’s the slow one.”

“I know. He likes that it stops everywhere.” She kissed the top of his head, which she still did and he still allowed in the kitchen and nowhere else. “Be ordinary.”

“I’m always ordinary.”

“Ja,” said his mother. “That’s what worries Dame M.”

---

The car was at the side door at ten to eight, the dark blue one without the flag, and Castellanos was standing by it in the rain with an umbrella he did not hold over himself.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

He got in the front. He had always sat in the front of this car, since October, when the Household had argued for an afternoon about whether a King could be driven to school in a car without a flag and with the King sitting beside the driver, and he had not been allowed to attend the argument, and had won it anyway, because Castellanos had said afterwards that he had told them the boy would sit in the front whatever they decided and they might as well decide it.

Castellanos got in and shook the umbrella out of the door and shut it.

“I’m not in the office today.”

Frederick looked at him.

Castellanos spent the school day, every school day, in the small office by the custodian’s room, with a kettle and a chair and the radio, where nobody saw him and he saw everything.

“Where are you, then?”

“Out. In the building. All day.” Castellanos started the engine. “The school asked. There’s an inspector who’s been told nothing, and he’ll want to see the custodian’s room, inspectors always want to see the custodian’s room, and Dr Brooks didn’t want him opening a door and finding a man in a grey suit with a kettle and no explanation. So I’m going to be in the corridors, with an explanation.”

“What’s the explanation?”

“I’m a parent.”

“Whose?”

Castellanos pulled out of the side gate onto the service road, and the policeman on the gate lifted a hand.

“Nobody’s asked yet,” he said.

---

They went down the Axis in the rain.

The Axis at ten to eight in February was grey and long and full of buses, and the great buildings along it, the Parliament House at the top of the hill and the departments in their stone rows, had their lights on in every window, so that the whole avenue looked like an office that had been left on overnight. He watched the buses. The 22 to the river, which Kate Hartigan took on Sundays with her washing. The 9, which was late. A 31 with a driver he thought he recognised, which might have been Theo’s father, and was not.

“Mr Ferrante’s off,” he said.

“Is he?”

“Theo texted. He’s got the thing everybody’s got. Theo says there’ll be a sub.”

“A substitute.” Castellanos said it as if he were putting it on a list. “For history.”

“For both histories. He does Tuesdays double.”

“On an inspection day.”

“Yes.”

Castellanos drove for a while.

“Do you know who it is?”

“No. Theo says the last sub we had for history was a man who’d been a submarine officer and taught the whole of 1812 as if it had been a submarine war. He kept saying dive.”

“That’s not a problem for me,” said Castellanos. “Somebody I don’t know, in a building with an inspector I don’t know, on a day I’ve told Dr Brooks I’ll be invisible. That’s not a problem at all.”

“You don’t sound as if it’s not a problem.”

“I sound like a parent,” said Castellanos. “This is what parents sound like.”

---

At the bottom of the Axis they turned east onto the river road and the rain thickened, and for a few minutes there was only the wipers and the radio, which Castellanos kept on the traffic station at a level so low it was mostly a feeling. A lorry had shed a load of cabbages on the Fourteenth Street bridge. A man rang in to say it was not cabbages but lettuces. The presenter said that either way the bridge was green and slow.

He thought about the reading in his bag.

Six pages. The minority of the sovereign. He had looked at the first paragraph on Friday night and seen the word Regent in it twice and his mother’s name not at all, because the book was older than he was, and had closed it. He knew it. He had been inside it since October. You did not read the instructions for a house you lived in.

“What’s the minority of the sovereign?” he said.

Castellanos glanced at him.

“Is this a test?”

“No. It’s the reading. I didn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s me.”

Castellanos drove past the boathouses on the river, where the second eight kept the boat they trained in and never raced. The water was brown and fast and had a branch going down it.

“I think,” said Castellanos, in the voice he used for things he had been trained not to have opinions about, “that it’s the bit where you’re King but somebody else does the work.”

“It’s the bit before I’m King,” said Frederick. “Properly. It’s the waiting.”

Castellanos did not say anything to that, and the radio said the lettuces had been cleared, and the presenter said that was a relief to everyone who had been worried about the lettuces.

---

Ellicott High School was a long brick building of three floors on the river side of the road, with a newer block behind it in glass that leaked worse than the old one, and a car park, and a side gate in a wire fence where Mr Obi sat in a hut the size of a telephone box and checked passes.

He did not usually check passes in the morning. In the morning he waved. He checked them in the afternoon, every afternoon, for three years, at a quarter past three, and looked at Frederick’s pass every time as though he had never seen it or him before, and handed it back and said Mr Hanover, and this was one of the things Frederick liked best about Ellicott.

This morning Mr Obi was standing outside the hut in the rain with a clipboard.

“Pass.”

Frederick held it to the window. Mr Obi looked at it as though he had never seen it before, and then at him, and then at Castellanos.

“And yours.”

Castellanos produced a laminated badge on a blue ribbon from his inside pocket. It said, in large black letters, PARENT.

Mr Obi looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at Castellanos, who was forty-four and built like a door, and then at Frederick, who was fifteen and built like the door’s narrower cousin.

“Whose?” said Mr Obi.

“It’s an inspection day,” said Castellanos.

Mr Obi wrote something on the clipboard. He did it slowly, and Frederick could see that it was a tick, and that Mr Obi was taking his time over the tick to make a point about ticks.

“Mr Hanover,” said Mr Obi, and handed back the pass, and stepped aside.

---

They walked across the car park in the rain. There were buckets already in the windows of the science corridor; he could see two, a blue one and a yellow one, on the sills on the first floor.

“Two,” said Castellanos.

“There’ll be more by ten.”

“How many’s normal?”

“Theo says seven’s a bad day. Eleven’s the record. Eleven was the day of the accession.”

“The roof knew,” said Castellanos.

At the main door a woman in a raincoat was holding a sign on a stick that said WELCOME, INSPECTORS, in the school’s colours, and looking at the sky as though it had done this to her personally. He knew her. She was Mrs Delahunt from the office, who sat at the front desk under the clock and had been at Ellicott longer than the clock.

“Good morning, Mrs Delahunt.”

“Frederick.” She looked at Castellanos’s badge. “Oh, good. A parent.”

“Morning,” said Castellanos.

“We weren’t told about a parent.”

“No.”

Mrs Delahunt looked at him and at the badge and at Frederick and at the sign on the stick, which was dripping, and seemed to decide that she would add it to a list of things today she was not going to think about until lunch.

“Room fourteen’s history,” she said to Frederick. “You’ve got a substitute. A Mr Pettigrew. He’s old.”

“How old?”

“Old enough,” said Mrs Delahunt, “that he taught Mr Ferrante. And Mr Ferrante’s not young any more, whatever he thinks.” She adjusted the sign. “And the inspector’s in at half past. Mr Stroud. From Virginia. He telephoned yesterday to ask whether we had a flagpole.”

“We have a flagpole.”

“I told him we have a flagpole. He said he’d be the judge of that.” Mrs Delahunt shifted her grip on the stick. “Go on. You’ll be late for Mr Abernathy, and he’ll say so in that voice.”

He went in out of the rain, into the smell of floor polish and wet coats and the radiators that were all on at once, and Castellanos came in two steps behind him with the badge that said PARENT, and the door swung shut on the sign, which said WELCOME, and was dripping onto Mrs Delahunt’s shoes.