The Kitchen Table

His mother was already in the kitchen when he came down, which meant she had been to the hospital and back.

She was at the end of the long table nearest the stove, in yesterday’s cardigan, with three newspapers and a cup of coffee and her telephone face down beside the cup. The kitchen at Columbia Palace had been built for forty servants and a household that gave dinners for two hundred, and it had a range that nobody used and a hearth you could stand up in and a row of copper pans along one wall that were polished every week and had not been cooked in since the war. The family used one end of one table. They had used it since the night his mother came, in September, and sat with him there until after midnight, and neither of them had said that they would go on using it. They had just gone on.

“God morgon,” she said.

“God morgon. How is he?”

“Awake. Tired.” She turned a page of the newspaper she wasn’t reading. “The physicians are certifying at eight. Then he’ll tell the office, and it will be done by half past.”

Frederick sat down opposite her. One of the kitchen staff, a woman called Bridget who had been at the palace longer than he had and who called him pet when nobody was listening, put a plate of eggs in front of him and a glass of milk and went away again without speaking, which was how he knew that Bridget knew.

“What are they certifying?” he said.

“That he understands what he’s asking, and is able to ask it.” His mother said it in Swedish, as they spoke at home, and the Swedish made it plainer. “That it’s his question and not ours.”

“Is it?”

She looked at him over the newspaper. It was the look she had used on him since he was three, the look that said she would answer the question and that he was not to ask it in that tone again.

“Yes,” she said. “It is his question.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He picked up his fork and put it down. “He told me. Yesterday. At four.”

“I know he did. He told me afterwards that he had.” She folded the newspaper in half and in half again, which she did when she was deciding something. “He said he’d asked you to say it.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to.”

“He asked me to.”

“I know. And you don’t have to. Both of those are true at once, Frederick. Your father would be the first to tell you that.” She put the folded newspaper on the pile. “If you say no, I’ll say it. Or the Household will issue a statement, and it will be four lines long and say nothing, and nobody will mind.”

“He’d mind.”

His mother didn’t answer that, which was an answer.

“I want to write it myself,” he said. “Like the others.”

“Then write it.”

“Can I stay home? From school?”

She looked at the clock above the range, which was a quarter past seven and always four minutes slow, because nobody had wound it properly since the war either.

“I’ll ring Ellicott,” she said. “You’ll go back tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Eat your eggs.”

He ate his eggs.

---

Dame M came down at eight, in her grey suit and her low heels, with a folder under her arm, and stood at the end of the table with the folder against her chest the way she had once, she said, stood on the bridge of a frigate in a force nine.

“Ma’am,” she said to his mother. “Sir.”

“Dame Margaret.”

“The physicians are with His Majesty now. The office expects the instruction to be given by half past eight. The office asks whether there will be a statement, and if so in what form, and at what hour, so that the realms’ representatives can be told before it is made.” She did not look at the folder. She never looked at the folder. “The office would prefer the realms to hear it from the Regency Office first and from the television second, and has asked me to say so, and I have now said so.”

“There will be a statement,” said his mother. “My son will make it.”

Dame M looked at Frederick. It was not a long look. It was the look she gave a midshipman who had volunteered for something, which was half pride and half a calculation of what would have to be done to make sure he survived it.

“Written or read, sir?”

“Read,” said Frederick. “By me. On camera.”

“Live or recorded?”

He hadn’t thought about that.

“Recorded,” said his mother. “And shown whole. Nobody cuts it.”

“Ma’am.” Dame M made a note without opening the folder, which Frederick had never seen anybody else do. “At what hour?”

“After the realms have been told,” said his mother. “Two o’clock.”

“Two o’clock.” Another note. “Where, sir?”

“I don’t know. Where do people do this?”

“In this house, sir, it has usually been the Blue Drawing Room, with the flags, when His Majesty has been in residence.” Dame M paused. “It is a room for a King.”

“Not the Blue Drawing Room,” said Frederick.

“No, sir.”

“Somewhere smaller. Without the flags.”

“There is the morning room on the garden side, sir. It has a table and two chairs and a window. It is not generally used for anything.”

“That one.”

“Sir.” She turned to go, and then turned back. “Miss Aird is upstairs. She has asked whether she may come down.”

He looked at his mother. His mother was reading the third newspaper, or holding it in front of her.

“Yes,” he said. “Tell her yes.”

---

Rosalind Aird had been his Press Secretary for three weeks and was the youngest person in the Household after him. She was thirty-one and from Ohio and had worked for a newspaper and then for a Premier and then, she said, for nobody, for a year, on purpose, before the palace telephoned. She wore trainers to work and changed into proper shoes in the lift. She had told him on her first day that her job was to make sure that what was said about him was true, and that she could not make sure it was kind, and that if he ever wanted her to lie for him she would resign, politely, and he had liked her at once.

She came down with a sheet of paper in her hand and stopped when she saw the exercise book open on the table in front of him.

“Ah,” she said.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, sir. Ma’am.” She looked at the paper in her hand. “I wrote a draft. Last night, after I heard. In case.”

“Can I not see it?”

She considered him.

“You can not see it,” she said, and folded it in four and put it in the pocket of her jacket. “It’ll stay there.”

“Was it good?”

“It was very good,” said Rosalind Aird. “It was the best thing I’ve written for this job. It had a sentence in it I was proud of.” She sat down at the far end of the table, not near him, with her own notebook. “That’s why you can’t see it. You’d use the sentence, and it would be mine, and everybody would know.”

“How would they know?”

“Because you don’t write sentences like that,” she said. “You write better ones. Shorter. What do you need from me?”

He thought about it.

“Tell me what they’ll ask,” he said. “Afterwards. If they could.”

“They won’t be able to. Your mother’s said no questions.”

“I know. Tell me anyway. So I know what I’m not answering.”

Rosalind Aird looked at his mother, and his mother, without lowering the newspaper, said in English, “Tell him.”

“All right.” She opened her notebook. “One. Has the King decided. Two. Is the King well enough to decide. Three. Who decides if he isn’t. Four. What happens to the regency. Five. What happens to you. Six.” She stopped.

“Six?”

“Six is the one they’ll all want to ask and none of them will. Six is how you feel.”

“What’s the answer to six?”

“There isn’t one,” she said. “That’s why you don’t take questions.”

---

He wrote it in the green exercise book, the one he had used for the Privy Council, starting from the back so that the Council notes would stay at the front.

The first version took a page and a half. It explained who his father’s Private Secretary was and that he was still at St John’s and that his deputy ran the office. It explained what an abdication was, in law, in each realm, which he had looked up in the night. It explained the Regency Act 1811, section 4, which he did not need to explain, and the physicians’ certificate, which he did not understand well enough to explain. He read it back and it was a page and a half of a boy showing that he had done his homework.

He crossed it all out with one long line, carefully, so that he could still read it.

The second version was half a page. It began As you will know, and he crossed that out at once, because they didn’t know, that was the point. It said my father the King, and he crossed out the King, because they knew who his father was. It said has asked his Private Secretary to inquire, and he looked at the word inquire for a long time, and then crossed it out and wrote find out, because that was what his father would have said if he could still say things, and because nobody in a kitchen said inquire.

At half past eight his mother’s telephone buzzed on the table. She turned it over and read it and put it down.

“It’s done,” she said.

He stopped writing.

“He gave the instruction at twenty-five past. The deputy took it down. The physicians have signed their note.” She turned the telephone face down again. “They say he was very clear.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, Find out. Each one.” His mother picked up her coffee, which had gone cold an hour ago, and drank some of it anyway. “And then he asked for the window to be opened.”

Frederick looked at the exercise book. Find out, he had written, a minute before. His father’s words, before he knew they were his father’s words.

“I’ve got that bit,” he said.

“Good.”

---

The radio on the dresser was always on, very low, because Bridget liked it and because his mother said a house that was listening to the news was a house that would not be surprised by it. At twelve minutes past ten the music stopped, and Stephen Alcott’s voice came on, the voice that everybody in the Realm had heard every evening since the aircraft, saying that it was twelve minutes past ten, and that the Royal American Supreme Court had given judgment in the case of the Loreto seats.

Frederick looked up.

“Turn it up,” said his mother, in English, to nobody, and Bridget, who was nowhere to be seen, turned it up from somewhere.

All seven Justices. The seats were valid. The members sat. And every vote they had cast, in this Parliament and in the last, was lawful, including the votes of the twenty-sixth of July.

“A seat is not less a seat,” said a woman’s voice from outside the court, as if she were reading from her notes, “because the vote cast from it was decisive.”

Rosalind Aird had stopped writing too. His mother had put the newspaper down.

“The twenty-sixth of July,” said Frederick slowly. “That’s when Valdez lost.”

“Yes,” said his mother.

“By one vote. On those five.” He worked it out. He had been at Solliden in July, and he had heard about the division on the radio in Elsa and Nils’s kitchen, in Swedish, and had not thought about it since, because in July nothing had been about him. “So if the seats weren’t valid, the vote wasn’t valid. And if the vote wasn’t valid.” He stopped.

“Go on,” said his mother.

“Then Valdez didn’t lose. And then Lord Whitlock isn’t.” He stopped again. “No. He’d still be. Because there was an election after. And the election was real.” He looked at Rosalind Aird. “Wasn’t it?”

“The election was real,” said Rosalind Aird. “But people would have said he shouldn’t be. For years. Every time he did anything.” She tapped her pen on her notebook. “Now they can’t. Seven to nothing. That’s what that is. It’s the Court taking a question away from people who wanted to keep it.”

He thought about that. Then he looked down at his exercise book, at find out and he has not decided anything, and understood that his father had asked his question on the same morning, and that, as far as he knew, nobody had planned it, and that by tonight the Realm would have two things to think about instead of one, and that this was either very bad luck or very good.

“Is that good,” he said, “for us? That it’s the same day?”

His mother and Rosalind Aird looked at each other.

“Nobody knows,” said his mother. “Write your statement.”

---

The third version was nine lines. He read it aloud to himself, under his breath, at the far end of the table where nobody could hear, and took out two more words, and wrote it out clean on a single sheet of the palace’s paper, which was thick and cream and had a small crown at the top that he had always thought looked like a cake.

He took it to his mother.

She put down her cup and read it. She read it twice, once fast and once slowly, which was where he had got it from, and he stood beside her chair and watched her face, which did nothing at all.

My father has asked his Private Secretary to find out, in each of his fourteen realms, what it would require for him to abdicate.

He has not decided anything. He wants to know before he decides.

He asked me to tell you, because he cannot tell you himself the way he used to. He said to me, “I cannot speak for them now.”

My mother is with him at the hospital. We wanted you to hear this from us, and not from anybody else.

Thank you.

She put it down on the table, square to the edge, the way his father put down papers.

“Do you want it shorter?” he said. On the twenty-eighth of September, the first time, she had asked him to make it shorter, and he had already cut it by half before she asked, and she had laughed for the first time in three days. He thought she might laugh now.

She didn’t.

“It’s already short,” she said.

“Is it all right?”

“It’s true,” said his mother. “Every line of it is true. That’s what it has to be.” She touched the sentence about the hospital with one finger. “This one will be true at two o’clock. I’ll be there by half past one.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“I know,” she said. “And I will be. Both of those are true at once.” She stood up, and pushed her chair in, and for a moment put her hand on the back of his head, which she had not done in public since he was nine and had stopped doing in private when he was twelve, at his request.

“I’ll tell him you’ve written it,” she said. “He’ll want to know which words you used.”

“Tell him I used his.”

She looked at him for a moment longer, and then she took her telephone and her cold coffee and went upstairs to change, and Rosalind Aird took the sheet of paper, very carefully, by the corner, to have it typed and copied and checked, and promised that not one word of it would move.

---

By one o’clock the kitchen was empty except for him and Bridget, who was making soup that nobody had asked for, and the radio, which had gone back to music.

He had read the sheet eleven times. He knew it. He did not need it, and he was going to hold it anyway, because his father always held the paper, even when he knew the words, because the paper is the proof that you meant it in advance.

Bridget put a bowl of soup in front of him.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I know you’re not, pet,” said Bridget. “Eat it anyway.”

He ate it. It was leek and potato, and it was the best soup he had ever had, and he told her so.

“It’s the same soup as always,” said Bridget, and took the bowl, and turned her back on him at the sink so that he would not see her face.

At half past one Dame M came to the door of the kitchen and stood in it.

“Her Majesty has left for the hospital, sir,” she said. “The morning room is ready. The camera is a single camera, and the man who operates it has been told that he is not to speak to you, and has been told why, and has said that he would not have dreamed of it.” She paused. “There is a table.”

“Do I have to sit at it?”

“You do not have to do anything, sir,” said Dame M. “That has been rather the point of this morning.”

He stood up and pushed his chair in, square to the table, the way his mother had.

“Twenty-five minutes,” said Dame M. “I shall come for you at five to.”

“Thank you.”

She went. He sat down again, because there were twenty-five minutes, and took the sheet out of the folder Rosalind Aird had put it in, and read it a twelfth time, and then turned it face down on the table and looked at the clock above the range.

It said twenty-eight minutes to two. It was four minutes slow. It had been four minutes slow for as long as anybody could remember, and nobody had ever wound it properly, and he sat at the end of the long table in the kitchen built for forty, and watched the minute hand, and found that it helped.