The First Tuesday

Mrs Pruitt came in with the proofs under her arm and a purple cardigan over an orange one, and put the proofs down on the desk with a slap that made Felix jump, and looked at the class over the top of them.

“I said I’d be horrible,” she said. “I want you to know that I kept my word. I was horrible to every single one of you. I was horrible until half past eleven last Tuesday night and then I had a cup of tea and was horrible again.” She picked up the pile. “Some of you will be upset. Good. Being upset about a proof is the first sign of understanding it.”

She went round the room handing them back face down. She did not hand them back in alphabetical order, or in order of marks; she walked up and down between the desks the way she walked when she was explaining something, and put each one down on its owner’s desk as she passed, without stopping, so that nobody could tell anything from the order or from her face.

She put his down on his desk without stopping.

He turned it over.

It was covered in red. His two sides in pencil, the diagram drawn three times, every line of it, and over all of it, in the margins, between the lines, round the diagrams, Mrs Pruitt’s red pen, small and fast and slanting, the handwriting of a person who has been horrible until half past eleven and then had a cup of tea. Beside the first diagram she had written Why three? and beside the third Draw it once and believe it. Halfway down the first side, where he had written it is obvious that, she had crossed out obvious so hard the pen had gone through the paper, and written above it NOTHING IS OBVIOUS. SAY WHY. At the bottom of the second side, where the proof ended, she had drawn a small, neat, unmistakable right angle in the corner of his triangle, the little square he had forgotten, and written beside it You forgot to show me the thing you were proving. You knew it. I didn’t.

And at the very bottom, circled: 41/50. Good. Not beautiful yet.

He sat and looked at it.

He had been afraid, all week, without putting it into words, that this would be the thing that changed first: that a woman who had stood in the hall with him on Tuesday would go home with a pile of proofs and not be able to be horrible to his. That she would give him fifty, or write excellent at the bottom, and he would never know whether it was true.

She had crossed out obvious so hard the pen had gone through the paper.

“Freddie,” said Theo, beside him, under his breath.

“What?”

“What did you get?”

“Forty-one.”

Theo looked at his own, which was one side long and had a mole at the bottom in a waistcoat. Mrs Pruitt had drawn a small red arrow to the mole and written beside it Moles are chemistry. Wrong room. +0. At the top she had written 34/50 and under it You understand this better than you think and worse than you say.

“I got thirty-four,” said Theo. “And she’s insulted my mole.” He looked at Frederick’s page, at the hole in the paper where obvious had been. “She’s insulted you more, though. She went through the paper on you.”

“I know,” said Frederick, and found that he was smiling so widely that Mrs Pruitt, at the front, glanced at him, and then at the proof on his desk, and then away, and went very slightly pink, and said to the whole room, “Priya got forty-six and I was still horrible to her. Nobody is safe. Open your books.”

---

It was dark by a quarter to five.

The clocks had gone back on Sunday, here, at last, a week after London, and now the afternoons ended in the middle of the trains. When he came in at four there was still light over the railway, grey and thin, and by the time he had done the chemistry it had gone, and the window behind his father’s bed had turned black and become a mirror. He could see the room in it. The bed, and the chair, and the tray table, and the blanket, and his father propped on the two pillows, and himself on the end of the bed with the timetable open on his knee. The two of them, small and yellow, in the black glass, with the railway lights coming through them from underneath, red and green.

His father was angry today.

Frederick had seen it twice in the last week: his father going to fetch a word and not finding it where he had left it, and instead of waiting, a low sound in his throat, the right hand coming down flat on the blanket, the face going dark red and turning to the window.

It happened at half past four. Frederick had said something about Mrs Pruitt and the proof, about obvious and the hole in the paper, because he thought his father would like it, and his father had liked it; he had seen it go in. And then his father had wanted to say something back. Frederick saw him want to. His father’s mouth moved, and moved again, and found nothing, and moved, and his eyes went from Frederick’s face to the window and back, searching, and then the sound came, and the hand came down on the blanket, hard, so that the cup on the tray table jumped and rattled on its saucer, and his father turned his face to the black window and shut his eyes.

Frederick sat very still.

He did not say it’s all right. He had said it the first time, and his father’s face had got darker, and he had understood that it was not all right, and that saying it was would be a kind of lie, and his father had never lied in his life and did not want to be lied to now. So he did not say anything. He sat on the end of the bed and looked at the two of them in the black glass, and waited.

After a while his father’s hand opened on the blanket.

“Go on,” said his father, to the window. Rough and low and clear. Two words. Go on.

Frederick took out the timetable.

“Wednesday,” he said. “Tomorrow.” He read them in order, the six-fourteen from Richmond and the six-forty from Baltimore, the fast one, and the seven-oh-two from Philadelphia, and the seven-twenty-five from Harrisburg, and his father’s eyes stayed shut and his face slowly went back to its own colour. When he got to the eight-ten from New York he said, “The Senator. It’ll be on time tomorrow. It’s only Tuesdays,” and in the black glass he saw his father’s mouth move at the corner, and he went on.

---

Theo opened the door before he knocked.

“You’re late.”

“It’s six.”

“It’s six and one minute. Mum’s at the oven with her watch.” Theo stood aside. “Shoes.”

His hair was very short. It had been short for a week, since the man Mrs Hartigan had rung on Tuesday night had cut it at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning before school, and Theo had come into homeroom looking like a boiled egg with ears, and had said, before anybody could say anything, I know. I’m a Page. It’s the law, and it was not the law, and nobody said so.

Frederick took his shoes off and put them on the rack.

The kitchen was hot and steamed and smelled of something with caraway in it. Mr Hartigan was at the end of the table with the crossword. Mrs Hartigan was at the stove. Kate was at the table too, which she usually was not until the last moment, with her work lanyard still round her neck and her phone face down beside her plate, and she looked up when he came in and said, “Hello, Frederick,” which she had always said, in exactly the way she had always said it, and he said, “Hello, Kate,” and that was that.

“Theo,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Potatoes.”

“I’ve done the potatoes.”

“You’ve done half the potatoes.”

“I’ve done the half that were dirty,” said Theo, and went back to the sink, and picked up the peeler, and stood there in his school shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his boiled-egg head bent over the bowl, peeling.

Mr Hartigan looked up over his glasses.

“Frederick.”

“Mr Hartigan.”

“There’s a Page of Honour at my sink,” said Mr Hartigan, “peeling my potatoes. I want you to know I’ve written to the Household about it.”

“You haven’t,” said Theo, at the sink.

“I’ve thought about writing to the Household about it,” said Mr Hartigan, and went back to his crossword. “Which in this house is the same.”

Frederick sat in his place, the chair with the cushion tied on. Mrs Hartigan said grace in German, quickly, and put the food on the table, a stew with dumplings and caraway and the potatoes Theo had peeled, half of them, and the other half Mrs Hartigan had peeled herself while nobody was watching, and they ate.

---

“Saturday,” said Mrs Hartigan, after a while.

Theo put his fork down.

“Thursday,” said Theo. “Thursday first. Thursday’s the practice. In the dark. At the cemetery.” He looked at Frederick. “In the dark, Freddie. At a cemetery. Who decided that?”

“The Watch. They do everything in the dark. The night walk’s the point.”

“The night walk’s not the point for me,” said Theo. “I’m not walking all night. I’m walking twice. Once behind you, and once on my own, with the school’s thing.” He looked at his plate. “The wreath. On my own. Twenty paces. In front of everybody.” He said it flatly, the way his sister said things. “I’ll drop it.”

“You won’t drop it.”

“I’ll drop it, and it’ll roll, and it’ll roll down the steps, and a man in a red coat with a gun will say behind the chain, now, and I’ll have to go and get it off the grass in front of the whole Realm, and Oma will see it.”

“Theo,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“I’m only saying what’ll happen.”

“You won’t drop it,” said Mrs Hartigan, “because you’ll hold it the way I showed you, with both hands, underneath, at the bottom, like a tray of glasses. You’ve carried trays of glasses at every christening in this family since you were seven and you’ve never dropped one.” She put another dumpling on his plate. “And your knees.”

“Not locked.”

“Not locked. If you lock your knees you’ll faint. I’ve seen soldiers faint at funerals because nobody told them. You stand like you’re waiting for a bus. Soft.” She looked at Frederick. “You too.”

“Yes, Mrs Hartigan.”

“Kings faint. I’ve seen one do it on the television, in London, at something with a lot of horses.”

“That was the heat,” said Mr Hartigan, without looking up.

“That was his knees,” said Mrs Hartigan.

Kate, at the end of the table, had been watching her brother. She had not said anything all through supper. Now she said, not to anybody in particular, quite quietly:

“Did they ask him?”

Everybody looked at her.

“The wreath,” said Kate. “The school one. On his own. Did they ask him, or did they tell him?” She looked at Frederick. “You said you’d tell them. To ask first.”

“They asked him,” said Frederick. “Dame Margaret asked me on Monday who should carry it now, and I said Theo, and she said she’d hoped I’d say that. And then they came and asked Theo and your mother. Properly.” He looked at Theo. “Didn’t they?”

“The lady with the folder,” said Theo. “Again. She brought biscuits this time.”

“She asked Mum first,” said Kate, as if confirming something on a form.

“She asked Mum first,” said Theo. “And Mum said ask him. And I said yes. On one condition.”

“What condition?” said Mr Hartigan, from the crossword, with interest.

“That if I drop it nobody says anything,” said Theo. “Ever. Not on the radio. Not in the paper. Not Oma.”

“She wrote it down?”

“She wrote it down. She underlined it.”

Kate looked at her brother for a long moment. Then she looked at Frederick, and nodded, once, very slightly, the way Dame M nodded, and went back to her stew, and Frederick understood that she had asked him something at this table ten days ago, ask first, me as well, and that this was the first time anybody had answered it.

---

He was home by twenty to eight.

His mother was at the end of the long table nearest the stove, where she always sat, and in front of her, instead of the newspapers, there were folders.

Not many. He had imagined fourteen piles in fourteen colours, rising to the level of the clock above the range. There were seven. They were laid out side by side along the table in a neat row, each one squared to the edge, the way his father put down papers, in different colours, buff and green and blue and red and one grey one that was so thin it might have been empty. The red one was the thickest. It said CALIFORNIA AND THE MARCH on the front in Dame M’s capitals, and it had been the thickest every night since Thursday. And at the end of the row, a little apart from the others, on its own, the plain buff folder from the night of the thirty-first that said the first thing done in your name.

His mother had her glasses on. She looked up.

“Sit,” she said, in Swedish. “Did you eat?”

“Stew. Dumplings. Caraway.”

“Then you’ve eaten more than I have.” She moved the first folder an inch towards him. “Homework?”

“Done. At the hospital.”

“All of it?”

“All of it. Mrs Pruitt gave me forty-one.”

His mother looked at him over her glasses for a moment.

“Out of?”

“Fifty. She went through the paper. On obvious.” He sat down opposite her, in the chair Frederick had sat in on Friday the twenty-seventh with the cake. “She said good, not beautiful yet.”

His mother’s face did something small.

“Then she’s a good teacher,” she said. “And you’re a good student. And neither of you is finished.” She put her hand flat on the row of folders. “Seven. That’s the week. Every realm that had anything for me to sign in your name, and some that only wanted me to know something. The first week is the week they send you the easy things, to see if you’ll read them.” She almost smiled. “They’re seeing if I’ll read them too. I will. So will you. That’s the arrangement.”

“Can I have an opinion?”

“No.”

“Not even a small one?”

“Not even a small one. The second Tuesday. The fourteenth.” She held up one finger, the way she had in her study on the thirty-first. “Today you read. You ask me which, about anything, and I tell you. And you don’t tell me what you think, because you’ll think it at once, and you’ll be wrong at once, everybody is, and I’d rather you were wrong to yourself for a week first.”

“All right.”

“Good.” She opened the first folder.

---

It took an hour and a half. He would not have believed, before, that seven folders could take an hour and a half. She went through them in order, one at a time, and for each one she told him which realm it came from, and what it was, and who had advised her, and what the advice had said, and what she had done, and why, and then she turned the folder round and pushed it across the table to him and let him read it, all of it, every page, without saying anything, until he had finished and pushed it back.

From Britain, a commission appointing a judge of the High Court in London, on the Lord Chancellor’s advice, two pages long, with his name at the top of it, George the Fifth, by the Grace of God, and her own name at the bottom, Christina, Regent. He read his own name four times. It did not look like his.

A list from South Africa of fourteen people to be given a medal for something to do with a flood, which had been settled at Cape Town and sent to her only so that she would know.

From Normandy, a resolution of the Estates at Rouen thanking the new Duke for nothing in particular, in French, very beautifully written, which did not need signing and which she had shown him, she said, because it was the only thing that week that had made her laugh.

From Brunswick, a letter about forestry.

From Britain again, two more things, neither of them interesting, which she said were the most important of the week, because they were the kind that would happen every week, and he had better get used to them.

And from the Realm, the grey folder, the thin one, which was not empty. It had three pages in it.

“This one,” said his mother, “isn’t signed yet. The Minister of Defence brings it to me next week. He told the Commons about it before your father decided. It’s the Navy.” She pushed it across. “Read it. All three pages. I’ll be quiet.”

He read it.

It was letters patent for the Board of Admiralty. He knew about the Board, a little, from the debates in the library; everybody had thought it was going to be abolished, and he had read a speech in October by somebody who wanted it abolished, and a speech by somebody else who wanted it left alone, and he had thought they were both a bit boring. It was not being abolished. It was being given powers instead. He read that part carefully. The Board would decide the Navy’s flag officers, and its ships, and its money, by voting; the civilians on it would vote as well as the admirals; the First Naval Lord would still be the senior member. Three pages of old type, with a great many whereases in it.

And in the middle of the second page there was a sentence.

The dissents of the Members shall be recorded in the minutes of the Board.

He read it twice. Once fast and once slowly.

Then he read it a third time. He did not mean to. His eyes went back up the page to the start of it and read it again, and he felt something go through him that was like the moment in the hall on Tuesday when the room had gone up behind the door, a kind of sudden loud recognition, as though somebody he knew had walked into a room full of strangers.

The dissents of the Members shall be recorded.

It was Alexander’s sentence. It was the thing in the first letter, the second of the three things, the record: if they do something in your name that you think is wrong, ask for your view to be written down; they cannot refuse; it is the only power we have. It was here. In the middle of the second page of three, in old type, among the whereases, in letters patent for the Navy of the United Kingdom of America, written by somebody in the Ministry of Defence who had never heard of Alexander and had never read his letter and had got there, by themselves, from wherever Alexander had got it from. If an admiral said no, it went in the book.

He looked up.

His mother was watching him. She had not said anything. She had her hands folded on the table, on top of the Brunswick forestry, and her glasses on, and she was watching his face, and he knew that she had seen it, the thing going through him, and that she knew he had found something, and that she was not going to ask what.

He opened his mouth.

His mother raised one finger.

He shut his mouth.

“Second Tuesday,” said his mother, mildly.

“I know.”

“You were going to say something.”

“I was going to say something,” said Frederick, “and I’m not going to.” He pushed the grey folder back across the table, carefully, square to the edge. “It’s good, though. Isn’t it. Can I say that? That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact about a sentence.”

“That,” said his mother, “is an opinion wearing a fact’s coat. Second Tuesday.”

He laughed. He could not help it. And she very nearly did, and took her glasses off, and rubbed her eyes, and put them on again.

He took the green exercise book out of his bag.

He opened it at the front, where the record was, the page that said 1 November. The realms were right to do it together and not one at a time. F., and under it, in the dated way, the way Alexander had said, he wrote:

7 November. The Board’s dissents are to be written down. I am not allowed to say what I think of that until the 14th. F.

His mother was watching.

“What are you writing?”

“Homework.”

She looked at him over her glasses for a long moment.

“That,” she said, “is the only homework in this house I am not allowed to see,” and went back to the Navy, and did not ask again.

---

She went up at ten. She stood, and squared the seven folders into a pile, and the buff one on top, and took them under her arm, and at the kitchen door she stopped and looked back at him, at the end of the long table under the clock that was four minutes slow.

“You read every page,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Nobody required it.”

“I know.”

“Good,” said his mother, in English, and went.

He sat for a while. Then he went out into the stone passage, towards the back stairs, and Dame M was there.

She was standing by the window in the passage, under the light, with her hands folded in front of her and the small silver oval tray, and on the tray, by itself, a long cream envelope with an F. in the top left-hand corner in a small hand, and on the back, he knew without turning it over, an eagle, embossed, very sharp.

She had been standing there, he thought, until his mother had gone up.

She did not say anything about it. She held out the tray. He took the envelope. Neither of them said who it was from, or why she had waited in the passage and not brought it into the kitchen, or what she thought of the bag, or of the Embassy man who would not drink his tea, and he understood, taking it, that they were never going to, and that this was now a thing that Dame M did, and had decided to do, without anybody ever having said a word.

“Dame Margaret.”

“Sir.”

“Can I ask you something? It’s not about this.” He held up the envelope. “It’s about the river.”

Dame M waited.

“The second eight,” said Frederick. “I row at five. On Wednesdays and Fridays, before school. I was allowed it when I was the heir. I don’t know if the King’s allowed it.” He thought. “Nobody’s said I’m not. Nobody’s said I am. I’d like to go tomorrow. I’d like to know if I can, before I go, not after.”

Dame M looked at him for a long moment.

“I shall find out, sir,” she said, and went away along the passage towards her office, and he heard her door, and then, faintly, her telephone.

He went up and read Alexander’s letter at his desk, twice, and the part about the chamberlain who could not finish his sentence three times.

At a quarter to twelve Dame M knocked on his sitting-room door.

“The detail has spoken to the Protection Service, sir,” she said, “and the Protection Service has spoken to somebody whose name I was not given, and the answer is that the King may continue to row in the second eight of Ellicott High School. On the river. Not at a regatta, which was the rule before. And not,” said Dame M, with no expression at all, “in the bow.”

“Nobody’s ever suggested the bow.”

“No, sir. I gather it was felt that it should be said.”

“I row at five.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dame M. “I told them so. They seemed relieved.” She paused. “Mr Odum has been informed. He said, I am told, about time, and asked whether that meant you would now be late less often.”

“I’m never late.”

“No, sir,” said Dame M. “I told him that too. Goodnight, sir.”

“Goodnight, Dame Margaret.”

She went. He sat at his desk with Alexander’s letter open in front of him and the green exercise book beside it and the clock on his mantelpiece, which was right, saying ten to twelve, and he thought that nothing had changed, and that now it was a decision, and that those were not the same thing, and that both of them were true at once.