Five Hours Again

The clocks went back at two in the morning, and this time they were theirs.

He woke at six, which was seven, and lay in the dark in the north wing working out what time it was, and in London, and in Stockholm, and in Manila, the way he always did on the morning of a clock change, as a kind of exercise, like doing the trains, and found that he had got it wrong twice before he got it right, and that the reason he had got it wrong was that for a week he had been doing four, and now it was five again.

Five hours. The narrow week was over. The Atlantic was its ordinary width.

When he came down to breakfast the clock above the range said four minutes to eight, and it was right about the hour, for once, because Bridget had changed it in the night, or at least had changed the hour, and had not touched the four minutes, which nobody ever touched.

“You changed the clock,” he said.

“I changed the hour, pet,” said Bridget. “The minutes are the minutes. They’re not my business.”

His mother was at the end of the long table with the newspapers in their pile, unopened, and her coffee, and her telephone face down beside her plate. She looked up when he came in.

“Five,” she said.

“I know.”

“It’s one o’clock in London.” She looked at her telephone without turning it over. “Your father always said the week the Atlantic got narrower was the best week of the year, because the call came at eight there instead of nine, and he could go to bed an hour earlier afterwards.” She drank her coffee. “He never did. He always sat up. He said it was the only hour of the week when nobody could give him anything to sign, because everybody in London thought he was on the telephone.”

Frederick sat down.

“Was he?”

“For about forty minutes,” said his mother. “And then for about two hours he sat in his study with the door shut and read whatever you’d talked about. If you’d said the Head of the Potomac, he’d read about the Potomac. If you’d said Ottawa, he’d read about Ottawa.” She put the cup down. “I used to ring him at half past ten their time to make him go to bed, and he’d be sitting there with a book about rowing he’d never once opened before, and he’d say, Christina, did you know there’s a thing called a catch.”

Frederick laughed. It surprised him. He had not expected to laugh at breakfast on a Sunday.

“There is,” he said. “There’s a catch. It’s the bit where the blade goes in.”

“I know,” said his mother. “He told me. Every week. For three years.” She almost smiled. “Eat your porridge. Church.”

---

They went to the cathedral, by the side door on the north transept, where the verger met them and nobody else did, and they sat in the stall on the south side of the choir with the brass plate on it that said nothing at all.

He had been dreading the prayers. He had not said so to anybody. He had lain in the dark at six doing the time zones and thought, between Manila and Stockholm, the prayers, and had felt his stomach go small. He knew what would happen. The words had not changed since 1840, except for the names, and the names had changed on Tuesday at two o’clock, and the Dean would say them in his weather voice from the stall opposite, and Frederick would hear them go up into the vaulting, and he did not know what he would do.

The Dean said them.

“For the people of Los Angeles, and of the valleys to the east of it,” said the Dean, first, before anything, “for those who are lost, and those who are looking for them, and those who are digging; for the teams who have come to them from across the sea; and for all who wait for news.”

“Lord, hear our prayer,” said the cathedral, louder than it said it for anything else that morning, and Frederick thought that it was right that it had come first, before his name, and was glad the Dean had thought so too.

“For George our King,” said the Dean, in exactly the voice he used for the weather and the harvest and the sick of the parish, “that he may be given wisdom beyond his years, and friends beyond number, and the grace to be young.”

Frederick sat very still.

“For Christina the Queen, who is Regent in his name.”

A breath.

“And for Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, our King these fifty-six years, that he may be restored in body and in mind, and may know himself held in the prayers of all who were his peoples, and are his still.”

“Lord, hear our prayer,” said the cathedral.

He did not grip the edge of the stall. He had thought he would. He sat in the stall with his hands in his lap and listened to his own name, the new one, go up into the vaulting and come back down, and settle, and then his mother’s, and then his father’s, the old one, with the new title in front of it, and he found that what he felt was not what he had expected. He had expected it to feel like a coat in a shop. It felt instead like hearing somebody read your name off a list in homeroom: a fact, in a voice that did not find it surprising.

The grace to be young. He did not know who had written that. He thought it was probably the Dean. He thought it was the strangest thing anybody had prayed for on his behalf in his life, and the best, and he did not know what it meant, and decided that he would ask Mr Ferrante, and then decided that he would not.

Beside him his mother put her gloved hand flat on the pew between them, the way she had a week ago, and left it there until the end of the hymn.

---

At a quarter to four Castellanos drove him to the hospital.

It was getting dark already. That was the other thing about the clocks. Yesterday at a quarter to four it had been afternoon; today at a quarter to four the light was going out of the sky over the city, which was turning the colour of a bruise in the west, and the shops along Canal Street had their lights on, and the car’s headlights were on, and he looked out of the window at the dark coming down on the city an hour early and thought that the trains would be in the dark now, all of them, by the time he read them. Every arrival he read his father from now until March would come in under the hospital in the dark.

“Mr Castellanos.”

“Sir.”

“What time is it in London?”

Castellanos looked at the clock on the dashboard.

“A quarter to nine, sir,” he said. “Since this morning.” And then, after a moment, because Frederick had not said anything: “The old time, sir.”

“Yes.”

“Sunday,” said Castellanos, to the windscreen, not as a question, exactly as he had said it a week ago.

“Yes,” said Frederick. “I promised him. Last week. I said I’d set him a hard one next Sunday.”

Castellanos drove for a while.

“Is it hard, sir?”

“It’s the hardest kind,” said Frederick. “It’s the kind that looks hard and isn’t.”

Castellanos considered this, at the lights.

“Those are the worst, sir,” he said. “In my experience.”

---

His father was in the chair by the window. The window was going dark, and the lamp was on in the room, so that he could see the two of them in it, his father in the chair with the blanket and Frederick coming in at the door behind him, and beyond the reflection, very faint, the lights of the railway below, red and green, and the long dark line of the tracks going away north.

He sat on the end of the bed. The clock above the door said four minutes to four.

His father turned his head. It took him a while, as it always did, but less of a while, Frederick thought, than a week ago. His father looked at him, and then at the clock, and then back at him, and Frederick knew that his father knew what day it was and what hour, because the look had the waiting in it again, the same waiting it had had on the twenty-ninth.

The red hand swept round to the top.

Four o’clock. Nine in London.

“Papa,” said Frederick. “It’s four. I said I’d set you one.”

His father’s eyes did not move.

“It’s a hard one,” said Frederick. “The old kind.” He took a breath. “A Bill. Introduced in the Landtag at Hanover. It’s about a ship. The ship is registered at Manila. It’s carrying a cargo to Rouen.” He stopped. “It passes. Both readings, and the committee. Which Crown assents?”

He had built it on the stairs at the palace, that morning, after church. He had built it the way his father had built his, every Sunday for years: three realms in it and a fourth that you might think of, the Philippines for the ship and Normandy for the port and Hanover for the Landtag and Britain, perhaps, for the sea in between, so that a person who did not know the rule would go round and round the four of them and not find the way out. The rule was simple. It was the first rule. It was the one his father had taught him when he was six, on the telephone, the very first Sunday: it doesn’t matter what the Bill is about, or where the ship is going, or whose flag it flies. It only matters whose Parliament passed it. A Bill passed by the Landtag at Hanover was assented to by the Crown in right of Hanover. The ship and Manila and Rouen were only there to make you look somewhere else.

It was the hardest kind. It looked hard and was not.

His father looked at him.

It was the long look. Frederick knew it now. He sat on the end of the bed with his hands between his knees and did not move and did not help and did not fill it up, and the red hand went round, and outside in the dark a car went past on the hospital road with its tyres hissing, and his father looked at him, and Frederick watched him go to the back of the long room to fetch the word.

His father’s mouth moved.

It moved and found nothing. It moved again. Frederick watched it go into one pocket and another and another, patient, and then, after a while, not patient. Something changed in his father’s face. It was small. It was a tightening at the corner of the mouth, the side that worked, and a line between the eyebrows that had not been there before, and his right hand, on the blanket, closed, slowly, into a fist, and opened, and closed again.

“Man,” said his father.

Frederick sat very still.

“Man… la. Man.” His father’s voice was rough and wrong, the word coming out in pieces, and his father heard it come out wrong, Frederick could see him hear it, and the line between the eyebrows went deeper, and the right hand came up off the blanket, an inch, two inches, and came down again on it, not hard, but not soft either, flat, the way you would bring your hand down on a desk. “No.” Very clear. “No. Not.”

It was the first time Frederick had seen him angry.

He had been told. Everybody had told him. The physicians had said it, in the corridor, in September, in the soft careful voice physicians used: that sometimes, when the words would not come, there would be anger, and that it was not anger at anybody, it was anger at the words, and that he must not take it to himself. He had nodded. He had not believed it, because his father had never been angry in his life, not once, not in any room, not with anybody; his father had been the calmest person in every room Frederick had ever seen him in, the man who read a document one clause at a time and put it down square to the edge of the table. And here was his father, in a chair by a dark window, with his hand coming down flat on a hospital blanket, because a word he had known for sixty years would not come out of the back of the room.

Manila. He had gone to the ship. He had gone the wrong way, the way the question was built for you to go, and he knew he had gone the wrong way, and could not turn round.

“Papa,” said Frederick. “It’s all right.”

His father’s hand stayed flat on the blanket.

“It’s all right,” said Frederick again. “It’s a stupid one. I made it too hard. It’s not fair. I’ll give you another one.”

“No.”

It came out very clear. His father was looking at him, and the line between the eyebrows was still there, and the hand was still flat, but it was not anger in his face now, or not only anger. It was something Frederick had seen in it a thousand times, on a thousand Sundays, down a telephone line he could not see it through and had known was there anyway: the face of a man who has been set a question and is not going to be let off it.

No. Not give me another one. Not it’s all right. No. He wanted this one.

Frederick waited.

He waited a long time. He waited until the red hand had gone round three times, and four, and his father’s face had smoothed out, slowly, the line going, the corner of the mouth easing, and his hand on the blanket uncurling, the fingers loosening one by one, and his eyes, which had been on Frederick the whole time, going away from him, very slightly, to the window. To the dark glass, and the two of them in it, his father in the chair and his son on the end of the bed, and behind them, faint, the railway lights.

His father looked at the window for a long time.

Then he looked back at Frederick, and his mouth moved, and this time it did not go to the back of the room at all. It was there already. It came out on the first try, low, rough, quite clear.

“Yours,” said his father.

---

Frederick did not say anything.

He could not. He sat on the end of the bed and looked at his father and could not say anything at all, for a long time, while the word sat in the room between them.

It was wrong. It was the wrong answer. The answer was Hanover. A Bill passed by the Landtag at Hanover was assented to by the Crown in right of Hanover, and that was the rule, the first rule, the one his father had taught him at six, and yours was not the name of any Crown in any of the fourteen, and if his father had said it down the telephone on any Sunday before the twenty-fourth of September Frederick would have said, no, Papa, Hanover, and his father would have said, good, and set him a harder one.

And it was right. It was the rightest thing his father had said in six weeks. It was right in a way that the rule had never been right about anything. Whatever Bill it was, wherever it was introduced, whatever ship and whatever port and whatever Landtag or Congress or Oireachtas or Estates at Rouen, it did not matter any more, not one of them: the Crown that assented to it was his. Every Crown was his. Since Tuesday at two o’clock, in geometry, the answer to the question his father had asked him every Sunday for nine years was the same answer every time, and it was the one his mother had given him at the kitchen table on the twenty-seventh when he had asked which Crown assents, and she had held up her right hand and said yours.

His father had not gone round the four of them. His father had gone straight through the middle and out the other side, to the only answer that was left.

Frederick looked at him. His father was looking back, with his hand open on the blanket now, palm up, and his face quite calm again, the corner of his mouth on the right side very slightly up.

He thought about 2027. About the two Sundays his father had lost, and said afterwards that he had lost on purpose. Frederick had never believed him. He had thought it was a thing fathers said. He looked at his father now, in the chair, with his hand open and the corner of his mouth up, and did not know, and would never know, whether yours had been the wrong answer found because the right one would not come, or the right answer chosen because it was better than the one he had been asked for, and he thought that it did not matter, and that both of those were true at once.

“That’s not the answer,” said Frederick. His voice did the thing in the middle, and he let it. “Papa. The answer’s Hanover. It’s the Landtag. It’s the first rule.”

His father looked at him.

“But it’s right,” said Frederick. “What you said. It’s more right.” He swallowed. “You win.”

His father shut his eyes.

It was not tiredness. Frederick knew the difference now; he had known it since Saturday. It was what his father did now instead of nodding. It meant good. It meant that will do. And Frederick decided, the way he had been deciding all autumn in this room, that it also meant, this once, the thing his father had said down the telephone in 2027 after the second Sunday he had lost, when Frederick had protested that it was not fair, that he could not possibly have known the answer, that his father must have been letting him win.

I wasn’t letting you win. I was finding out whether you’d notice.

He noticed.

He leaned forward and put his hand in his father’s open one on the blanket, and his father’s fingers closed on it, not hard, all the way, and they sat like that in the dark room with the two of them reflected in the black window, and the red hand went round.

---

At a quarter to five he read his father Monday’s trains.

It was dark outside. All of them would come in under the hospital in the dark tonight, and all of them would come in in the dark until March, and he read them anyway, in order, the six-fourteen from Richmond and the six-forty from Baltimore, the fast one, and the seven-oh-two from Philadelphia, calling at Wilmington, and at exactly a quarter to five, in the dark, the long train from the north came in under the window with its lights on, all its windows lit, a long bright line going past below them in the black glass, under their two reflections, as though it were running through the room.

His father’s eyes were shut. His hand had not let go.

At five the nurse put her head round the door, and saw, and went away.

---

His mother was at the kitchen table at nine, when she came back, with her gloves in her hand.

“How was he?”

“He got it wrong,” said Frederick. “I set him a hard one. He got angry. Then he got it wrong.” He looked at his mother down the length of the long table. “I’m going to tell you what he said. I didn’t tell you last week. I’m telling you this week.”

His mother put her gloves down. She did not say anything. She waited, the way his father waited.

“I asked him which Crown assents to a Bill at Hanover about a ship from Manila going to Rouen,” said Frederick. “It’s Hanover. It’s always just Hanover. The rest is to trick you. And he couldn’t find it. He tried Manila. And then he looked at the window for a long time, and then he said yours.”

His mother was very still.

“It’s the wrong answer,” said Frederick. “And it’s the right one. It’s the one you said. On the twenty-seventh. When I asked you.”

His mother looked at him for a long moment across the long table, under the clock that said four minutes to nine and meant nine, five hours behind London, where it was two in the morning and nobody was sitting up in a study with a book about rowing.

“Did you tell him he was wrong?” she said.

“Yes. And I told him he won.”

“Good,” said his mother.

She picked up her fork. Then she put it down again, and put her hand over her eyes, and sat like that for a while, at the end of the long table, and Frederick did not say anything, and Bridget’s radio on the dresser played something with a choir in it, very low, and after a while his mother took her hand away and picked up the fork again and ate what Bridget had left for her, without looking at it, and said, to the plate, in Swedish:

“He lost on purpose, you know. In 2027. Both times. He told me.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “He told me too.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That he was finding out whether I’d notice.”

His mother laughed, once, short and surprised, into her plate.

“He told me,” she said, “that he was finding out whether you’d mind.”

They looked at each other down the long table, the two of them, at nine o’clock on a Sunday night in November, five hours behind London, with the clock four minutes slow above them and the dark outside.

“Both of those,” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said his mother. “Both of those are true at once. Go to bed.”