Feel Something

The art room was at the top of the old building, up a narrow staircase past the music rooms, where the girl with the trumpet was still playing the same four notes, and it was the only room in the school with a skylight that did not leak, because Ms Varga had gone up on the roof herself in 2021 with a tube of sealant and a ladder borrowed from the caretaker and done it, and had been told off by Dr Brooks for an hour afterwards in the green chair, and had said she would do it again.

It was a big, untidy, beautiful room. There were drying racks along one wall with last week’s paintings on them, and jars of brushes on every table, and a sink with every colour in the world dried into it, and on the windowsills a row of plaster casts, a foot, a hand, a horse’s head, an ear, that nobody ever drew any more and nobody would ever throw away.

He came in late, from the office, and everybody looked up, and then everybody looked down again, in the way that meant they had been talking about him and had stopped.

“Frederick,” said Ms Varga. “Sit. There’s paper.”

He sat at the table by the window with Theo and June and Felix and Priya. Theo had his planner open on the table in front of him, in the open, under a sheet of paper on which he had drawn a large and accurate picture of a telephone.

“Well?” said Theo, without moving his lips.

“Later.”

“The green chair?”

“Later, Theo.”

“I’ve got a column.”

---

Ms Varga was small and fierce and wore a smock covered in paint that she said she had never washed since art college, because it had become a painting in its own right and she was waiting for somebody to buy it. She taught at Ellicott because, she said, she had tried teaching at a school for gifted children and had found that they were already gifted and did not need her, and she preferred children who did not know yet what they could do, which was nearly all of them, and especially the ones who said they could not draw.

She had never once, in three and a half years, treated him differently from anybody else. She had told him in seventh grade that his drawing of a bowl of fruit looked like a set of instructions for assembling a bowl of fruit. It was the most accurate thing anybody had ever said about his art, and he had told his mother, and his mother had laughed for a whole minute and then asked whether the instructions were at least clear.

“Today,” said Ms Varga, standing at the front with her arms folded over the smock, “you are going to draw something you feel.”

A low groan went round the room. Ms Varga ignored it.

“Not something you see. Not a bowl of fruit, Frederick. Something you feel. Now. Today. This afternoon. Whatever it is. You draw it. You can draw it as a thing, or as a colour, or as a shape, or as a picture of a dog, I don’t care. But it has to be what you feel, and you have to be able to tell me, at the end, why.”

“What if we don’t feel anything?” said Felix.

“Then draw that,” said Ms Varga. “It’s the hardest one. It’ll take you all lesson.”

---

The inspector was already there.

He was sitting at the back, by the plaster foot, on a tall stool that had been made for the drying racks, with his clipboard on his knee and his feet on the rung and his stopwatch in his hand, and he looked, perched up there in his three-piece suit among the drying paintings, like a very serious bird that had come down on the wrong roof.

“A question, Mrs Varga, if I may,” he said.

“Ms,” said Ms Varga.

“Ms Varga.” Mr Stroud wrote something. “How, precisely, do you propose to assess it?”

“Assess what?”

“The feeling.” He held up his pen. “If a child draws what he feels, Ms Varga, how do you know he has drawn it correctly? In Virginia, at the Fairfax Academy, the drawing master set a still life every week. A jug, a cloth and an apple. He could tell at a glance whether a boy had drawn the jug. But a feeling.” He shook his head slightly. “How do you mark a feeling?”

Ms Varga looked at him for a long moment, with her arms folded over the smock that had become a painting.

“I ask them,” she said.

“You ask them.”

“I ask them what it is and why. And they tell me. And if what they tell me is what they’ve drawn, they’ve done it. And if it isn’t, they haven’t.” She unfolded her arms. “It’s the same as your jug, Mr Stroud. Only the jug’s inside.”

Mr Stroud thought about this. Then he wrote something down, and it was quite long.

“I’ll be interested,” he said, “to see how many jugs there are.”

---

Frederick looked at his paper.

It was a big sheet of cartridge paper, white, slightly rough, the kind that drank paint. He had a pencil and a box of pastels that had been used by a great many people and were worn down to stumps, mostly the blues.

Something you feel.

He did not know what he felt. That was the trouble with art. He could have told you in history exactly what had happened and in what order and why, and in mathematics exactly what followed from what. He could not have told you, at four minutes past two on the afternoon of Tuesday the sixth of February, with the Prime Minister’s voice still in his ear saying you reign and Dr Brooks’s saying you were wrong this morning, what he felt, except that it was a lot of things at once and none of them would sit still long enough to be drawn.

He drew a line. It was a straight line. He looked at it. It looked like the first instruction for assembling something.

He rubbed it out.

---

Priya, across the table, had not drawn anything either.

She had a sheet of cartridge paper in front of her, like everybody else, but she was not drawing on it. She was writing on it. She had a pen, a proper pen, a dip pen with a steel nib, which she had taken out of her own bag, and a small bottle of black ink, and she was writing very slowly and very carefully, in letters about an inch high, with thick and thin strokes, the way monks wrote in the pictures in the history textbook.

She had been doing it since before he came in. She was nearly at the bottom of the sheet.

He watched her for a while.

She finished a letter, and wiped the nib on a rag, and dipped it, and looked up, and saw him watching, and did not look surprised, because Priya never looked surprised.

“What is it?” he said.

“It’s art,” said Priya.

“It’s writing.”

“It’s calligraphy. Calligraphy’s art. Ms Varga said in September.” She looked down at the sheet. “She said you could draw a feeling as a thing or a colour or a shape. Letters are shapes.”

“Priya, is that the…”

“I don’t do the Charter in art,” said Priya. “I do art in art.” She picked up a small brush from the jar in the middle of the table, and a tube of gold paint that had been in the art room since before any of them were born and was nearly empty, and squeezed a tiny bead of gold onto the lid of the ink bottle, and dipped the brush in it, and bent over the sheet and did something at the bottom of it, very carefully, for a long time.

Then she put the brush down and turned the sheet round on the table, and slid it across to him, between the jars of brushes, and went back to her own place, and folded her hands, and looked out of the skylight at the rain.

---

He read it.

It was beautiful. He had not known she could do that. The letters went across the page in long black lines, thick and thin, like a proclamation, like something read out by a Clerk in a flat careful voice at a long table, and they said:

The age at which a sovereign reigns in his own right became sixteen in every realm, and his mother was named his Regent until his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029, when he will reign in his own right in all of them at once.

And every time it said in his own right, the four words were not in black. They were in gold. She had gone over them in gold paint, every letter, thick and thin, so that they stood out from the black around them like a line of light under a door.

Four words. Twice.

In his own right.

---

He sat and looked at it.

He had known since lunch. He had been nearly sure since Spanish, and nearly sure he was nearly sure since the lecturer on the radio, and the Prime Minister had told him on the telephone, plainly, square to the edge of the table, and Dr Brooks had told him in the green chair. He had known.

But he had not seen it. Not written down. Not in front of him, in a hand, with the words he had read without reading picked out in gold so that there was no way, now, in any light, of not reading them.

When he will reign in his own right.

Not when he will reign. When he will reign in his own right. The reigning was not the thing that waited for May. The reigning had happened at two o’clock in the afternoon on the thirty-first of October, in the corridor of the math wing, in the sun, with somebody playing five notes wrong on a piano. It was the own right that waited. The doing it himself. The picking of the sides. The bicycle had never been in the garage at all. He had been riding it since October, with his mother’s hand on the back of the saddle, and had not looked round, and had thought, because her hand was there, that he was not riding.

He was riding.

He had always been riding.

He found he had put his own hand flat on the table beside the sheet of cartridge paper, the way you put your hand on something to make sure it is there, and that he was pressing quite hard.

---

“Thank you,” he said.

Priya did not look away from the skylight.

“It’s art,” she said.

“I know.”

“I didn’t do the Charter.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I’d have said this morning,” said Priya. “Before the inspector came in. I opened my mouth. I was going to say, Sir, it’s reign in his own right, not reign. And then the door went.” She was still looking at the skylight. “And then I thought, he’d rather find out himself. Than have it said in front of everybody. By me. He’d rather work it out.” She looked at him at last, with her calm dark eyes. “Was I right?”

He thought about it, honestly, the way she would have wanted.

“No,” he said. “I’d rather you’d said it.”

Priya considered this.

“Noted,” she said, and went back to the skylight. “Next time.”

---

“Frederick,” said Ms Varga. “You haven’t drawn anything.”

He looked down. He had not. There was the rubbed-out ghost of a line on his cartridge paper and nothing else.

“Sorry, Ms Varga.”

“Don’t be sorry. Draw.” She stood over him with her arms folded over the smock. “What do you feel?”

He looked at the four words in gold.

He looked at his sheet of cartridge paper.

And he knew, quite suddenly, what he felt, and that he could draw it, because it was the only thing in the world he had ever wanted to be, on Ellicott’s careers day in eighth grade, when he had written it on the form and been told that the Charter made no provision for it.

He picked up the pencil.

He drew a post. A tall straight post, with a ladder up the side of it. At the top of the post he drew an arm, a long flat arm with a square end, sticking out to one side, on a pivot, so that it could go up or down. He drew it pointing up. Up at forty-five degrees, against a sky he did with the blue pastel stumps, the colour of the river on Saint Patrick’s Day. He put a small round lamp on the post beside the pivot, and he did the glass in the lamp in green, which was the only green left in the box.

It took him most of the lesson. It was, he thought, the best thing he had ever drawn in that room, which was not saying very much.

---

Ms Varga came back at the end.

She stood over it with her arms folded and looked at it for a long time.

“It’s a railway signal,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It’s a very good railway signal. It’s the best railway signal anybody’s drawn in this room. I’ve had boats and I’ve had a great many horses and I had a girl in 2023 who drew her grandmother as a teapot and it was the best thing I’ve ever been given. But I’ve never had a railway signal.” She bent closer. “Why’s the arm up?”

“Because it’s clear.”

“Clear?”

“Up’s clear. On the old signals. The semaphore ones. Down’s danger. Up means the line’s clear and the train can go.” He looked at it. “I’ve been at danger all morning. Since half past eight. I thought I was waiting. I thought the line wasn’t clear till May. And it’s been clear since October. It’s been clear the whole time. Nobody told me.” He thought about it. “No. Everybody told me. I just didn’t read it.”

Ms Varga looked at the railway signal, and then at him, for a moment longer than she looked at most things.

“That,” she said, “is a feeling, Frederick.” And then, quite loudly, not turning round, to the back of the room: “Mr Stroud. You wanted to see a jug.”

---

Mr Stroud came down off his stool.

He came down slowly, because it was a high stool and he was not a tall man, and he came up the room between the tables with his clipboard against his chest and stood behind Frederick’s chair and looked at the railway signal over his shoulder for a long time, in silence.

“That,” said Mr Stroud at last, “is a piece of railway equipment.”

“It’s a feeling,” said Ms Varga.

“It is a semaphore signal of the upper-quadrant type, Ms Varga. I know it well. There was one at the end of the line at Fairfax Station until 1974.” He leaned closer. “The lamp should be red at this angle, strictly. Green shows through the spectacle when the arm is lowered. He has it the wrong way round.”

“He has it the way he feels it.”

“He has it,” said Mr Stroud, “the wrong way round.” He straightened up, and the hand went along the shelf, and stopped, and he looked down at Frederick with an expression of something like real sorrow. “The assignment, as I understood it, was a feeling. The boy has drawn a railway signal, incorrectly lit, and spent the lesson looking at another child’s handwriting. I’m sorry, Hanover. I’m afraid I can’t do otherwise.”

He wrote it.

Art. Ms Varga. 2.40. Boy in the H’s (sixteen). Railway signal. Inattentive.

5.

“Five,” said Theo, under the telephone, writing it, with deep satisfaction. “That’s a hand. That’s a whole hand.”

---

The bell went.

Everybody got up. Ms Varga went round collecting the sheets, and when she came to Priya’s she stopped, and looked at it for a long time, at the black letters thick and thin and the four words in gold, twice, and then at Priya, who was putting the cap on her ink.

“Priya,” said Ms Varga. “Is this a feeling?”

“It’s a fact,” said Priya.

“Then why is it gold?”

Priya put the ink in her bag and did up the clasp.

“Because I felt it should be,” she said, and went out.

Ms Varga looked at the sheet a moment longer. Then she did not put it on the pile with the others. She took it to the drying rack by the window, the top shelf, the one she kept for the best ones, and laid it there, flat, beside the railway signal, which she had already put there, and stood back and looked at the two of them together, the four words in gold and the arm at clear, and said nothing at all, and went to wash her hands.