Four O'Clock

At four o’clock he went up in the lift to the sixth floor, as he did every day, with his school bag over his shoulder and Castellanos beside him, and the lift doors opened on the long corridor and the window at the end of it over the river, and the smell of the sixth floor, which was floor polish and flowers and something underneath both that he had stopped noticing in November.

Niamh was at the desk. She stood up when she saw him. She did not usually stand up.

“He had the radio on, sir,” she said.

He stopped.

“At one. He wanted it on at one; he looked at it, the way he does, and I put it on for him, the ABC. And at half past they said they had something from Buenos Aires, and they played it.” Niamh had her hands together in front of her, under the plait, the way she held them when she was going to say something to the physicians that the physicians would not like. “Your voice, sir. In Spanish. Just the once. And then they said what it meant, in English, and I don’t think he needed them to.” She looked at him. “He didn’t sleep after. He’s been awake since. He’s been looking at the door.”

---

His father was on three pillows facing the door, with the window behind him open over the bridge, and the blue book on the shelf by the bed open at Tuesday, and his hands on the blanket.

He was looking at the door. He was looking at it as Frederick came through it, and his eyes went to Frederick’s face and stayed there, and his breath went in, and held.

Frederick knew how it went. The breath in, the hold, the lips trying the shape before the sound, the way you try a door to see if it is locked. He waited for it.

It did not come. His father held the breath, and let it go, slowly, all of it, and did not try the shape. He only looked at him. He looked at him the way he had looked at him on the apron of the airfield on the second of June, out of the wheelchair, under the tartan rug, in the gold light, when he had said Sceptre.

He knew.

“You heard it,” said Frederick.

Less than a nod.

He came round the bed and sat down in the chair, the chair that was his, by the bed, on the window side, where he had sat every afternoon at four since October except the days in California, and put his bag down on the floor between his feet, and did not open it.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “All of it. After.”

His father looked at the bag.

“After homework,” said Frederick. “I know. That’s the arrangement.”

---

The arrangement had been his mother’s, in the first week of October, when his father could not open his eyes and Frederick had asked to come every day at four. She had said yes, on the condition that he did his homework first, and he had. Homework in the chair, with the book on his knee, and the trains in the last quarter of an hour. And when his father woke, on the twentieth, and found out about it, his father had kept him to it more strictly than she ever had, with a look at the bag on the floor that needed no words at all.

Tomorrow was geometry. The Board’s paper, nine to twelve, in the gym, under Mr Lumsden, with the telephones in the box.

He took out Mrs Pruitt’s revision sheet and the textbook and a pencil, and did the volume of a cone, and the surface area of a sphere, and the one about the angle at the centre of a circle being twice the angle at the circumference, which he had never once got right first time and got right now, and did not look up.

His father watched him do it. He could feel it. His father did not watch the sheet, or the pencil. He watched Frederick’s face, the whole time, with his hands on the blanket and the window open behind him and the traffic going over the bridge.

At a quarter to five Frederick shut the textbook.

---

“There was a question on the paper,” he said. “On the history paper. This morning.”

His father’s eyes did not move from his face.

“Question Seven. About 1976.” He held the textbook on his knee with both hands. “In March 1976 the Viceroy of the River Plate refused to sign the decrees of the junta, and was held under arrest in the Casa Rosada until 1983. The King refused to recognise the junta. Which refusal mattered more?”

His father’s breath went in.

It held.

Frederick waited. He did not know what he was waiting for. His father held the breath for a long time, longer than he had ever held it for a word, with his eyes on Frederick’s face, and then let it go, and his lips did not move.

“I wrote that the Viceroy’s did,” said Frederick.

The room was very quiet. The traffic on the bridge. A trolley in the corridor. Somewhere on the floor, a telephone, ringing, and stopping.

“I wrote that he was in the room and you weren’t. That he refused first, and you agreed with him. That his refusal cost him seven years and yours cost you less. That a refusal is a thing you do to someone’s face, and only one of you could.” He made himself go on looking at his father. “I wrote that I didn’t think you’d mind my saying so. I wrote that I thought you’d say it yourself, if you were asked.”

He stopped.

“I didn’t know if that was true,” he said. “When I wrote it. I didn’t know.”

---

He had not meant to tell him the rest. It was not his to tell. But his father was looking at him, and had heard his voice on the radio at half past one in a language that was the Plate’s, and had not slept since, and had been looking at the door.

“I rang the Viceroy at twenty-five past twelve,” he said. “Before I rang the President of the Council. I asked him what he’d done, and he told me, and then he asked me how the exam had gone, and I told him what I’d written.” He looked at his hands on the textbook. “And he said he had a letter in his desk. From you. From March 2023. In the top drawer on the left. And he told me what was in it.”

His father’s hand moved on the blanket.

“The Viceroy refused,” said Frederick, from memory, in English, because the Viceroy had said it in English, reading it, the only English he had spoken on the telephone. “I agreed with him. Everyone in the Plate has remembered it the other way round for forty-seven years, and I have let them, because it was useful to the Crown, and I have never once been comfortable with it.”

He did not say the last sentence. He did not need to. He saw that his father knew it.

His father’s eyes had filled.

Frederick had seen it twice. Once on the twentieth of October, before dawn, when his father had woken and known him. Once on the apron on the second of June. He had not thought he would see it a third time, and he looked down at the textbook on his knee, at Mrs Pruitt’s sheet, at the cone, because his father would not want to be looked at.

---

The hand came across the blanket.

Not palm up. Flat. Slowly, across the folded newspaper Niamh had left there, to the edge of the bed by Frederick’s knee, the way it had come on Saturday, and lay there, still.

Then it moved again. The last inch. Onto his knee. Onto the textbook. Onto the back of Frederick’s hand, on the cover of the textbook, and stayed there.

The weakest grip he had ever felt. He did not move his hand by a hair.

He looked up.

His father was looking at him. His eyes were wet and he was not doing anything about it, and his breath went in, and held, and his lips tried the shape. Once. Again. A shape Frederick did not know; not a word from the board Niamh kept, not a train, not a name. Again.

He waited. He did not help.

“Bien,” said his father.

---

In Spanish. One syllable. The word you say at the end of a thing.

The word Señora Ruiz said when somebody got it right, bien, before she went on to the next one. The word the Viceroy had not said on the telephone, because he was a judge and did not give marks. The word, Frederick thought, that a King of the River Plate for fifty-six years would say to the King of the River Plate for eight months, in the Plate’s language, because a King who could not say it in the language of the person in front of him should not be on the coin.

Bien.

Good. Well. Well done. That’s right. That’s all.

He sat with his father’s hand on the back of his on the textbook, and did not say anything, because there was nothing else to say, and his father did not need him to. Outside the window the traffic went over the bridge. The sun had come round from the river and was on the end of the bed. Niamh, at the door, had come to see, and had seen, and had gone away again without a sound.

After a while his father’s hand went back across the blanket, slowly, and lay flat.

---

“Shall I read you the arrivals?” said Frederick. “Tomorrow’s?”

Less than a nod.

He reached up to the shelf by the bed and took down the blue book, AmRail’s timetable for Union Station, the one with the soft cover gone at the corners, and opened it at Wednesday, and did not look at it, because he did not need to; he had known it since he was nine.

But he looked at it anyway, because that was the arrangement, and the book was on his knee.

“Six fifty-eight,” he said, in the voice from the tannoy at Union Station. “The Capitol. From Chicago. Via Pittsburgh.”

His father’s eyes closed.

Not asleep. Frederick knew the difference. Closed the way you close your eyes to hear something better.

“Seven twelve. The Crown Limited. From Boston. Via New York and Philadelphia.”

All of them. In order, first to last. The Crown Limited and the locals from the Maryland side and the Virginia side and the night train from Savannah, an hour late, as it was always an hour late on a Wednesday, which the book did not say and everybody knew.

He read to the foot of the page, where the book stopped.

He did not stop. He went on, from no book at all, in the same voice.

“And at two o’clock this afternoon, Buenos Aires time. On the Avenida de Mayo. Eastbound to Palermo. One armoured car. Then another. Then another. All stations.”

His father’s eyes stayed closed. But the corner of his mouth went in, the way Theo’s did when he was trying not to say something, and his breath went in and out, short, twice, which was laughing, with no words left for it.

Frederick shut the blue book and put it back on the shelf, open at Wednesday, and sat with his father until five, and did not read anything else.