Lunch

The telephone on the wall of the chemistry lab rang at twenty to twelve, five minutes before the bell, while Mr Abernathy was writing the molar mass of copper sulphate on the board, and Mr Abernathy put the chalk down and answered it and listened and said, “Yes,” and, “Yes,” and, “Of course,” and hung it up.

He did not turn round at once. He picked the chalk up again and finished writing the number, all of it, to two decimal places, and put the chalk down in the tray, and dusted his fingers on the brown jacket, and then turned round.

“Hanover,” he said, in the voice. “The office. Take your bag.”

Frederick stood up.

The room did not go quiet, because it had not been loud; it was chemistry, and the end of the period, and everybody was copying the number. But it went still, the way it had in history when Mr Ferrante said his name, a stillness of pens. Theo, beside him, did not look up. He put his hand flat on Frederick’s lab book, on the open page, so that it would not blow shut when Frederick stood, and kept it there.

“I’ll bring your book,” said Theo, to the copper sulphate.

Frederick put his bag on his shoulder and went out.

---

The corridor was empty, because the bell had not gone, and his footsteps sounded too loud in it, on the polished floor, past the trophy case and the photograph from 1998 with Mr Abernathy in it in the same jacket, and the paper pumpkins in the window of the front office.

He knew the way. He had walked it once before, on the twenty-eighth of September, at about this time of day, from geometry, with the same bag on the same shoulder, and he had known then, walking it, that whatever was at the end of it was going to be one of two things, and he had not known which, and he had walked very slowly so as not to find out. He did not walk slowly now. He did not know why. He walked at the ordinary speed, the speed of a boy who has been sent to the office to collect a form, and he found that his heart was going much faster than his feet, and that there was nothing he could do about either.

Castellanos was outside the principal’s door.

He was standing against the wall with his hands behind his back, the way he stood on the landing at the flat, and he was looking at the ceiling, at a water stain in one of the tiles that was the shape of nothing in particular, and when Frederick came round the corner he looked down from the ceiling and at Frederick, which he did not usually do, and held it, for one second, and then looked back up.

He did not say sir. He did not say anything.

Frederick knocked.

---

His mother was in the visitor’s chair.

It was the same chair. It was a low upholstered chair with wooden arms, in a dull green that had probably been a different green once, and it was in front of the principal’s desk at a slight angle, so that whoever sat in it could see the window, and the last time he had come into this room his mother had been sitting in it with her coat on and her handbag on her knees and her face quite white, and had stood up when he came in, and he had known from the standing up which of the two things it was.

She did not stand up now.

She was sitting in the green chair with her coat off, over the back of it, and her handbag on the floor, and a long envelope on her knees, and she was not white. She looked tired. She looked as though she had been up since five, which she had. And she looked, he thought, standing in the doorway, something else, something he did not have a word for and would look for afterwards and not find, something like a person who has carried a very heavy thing up a great many stairs and put it down and not yet straightened up.

Dr Brooks, the principal, was standing by the window. She was a tall grey woman who had been principal for eleven years and who had shaken his hand on his first day and not since, which he had always been grateful for.

“I’ll be next door,” she said, to his mother, and to him, “Frederick,” and went out, and shut the door, and he heard her say something to Castellanos in the corridor, and Castellanos say something back, and then nothing.

“Sit,” said his mother, in Swedish.

There was another chair, a plastic one, by the wall. He pulled it out and sat on it, opposite her, close, so that their knees nearly touched, the way they sat in the kitchen when she was going to tell him something.

“You’ve come before it’s out,” he said.

“Yes.” She looked at the clock on the principal’s wall. It said a quarter to twelve. “At noon it will be out everywhere at once. It’s four o’clock in London. I’ve got fifteen minutes. I wanted you to hear it from me, and not from anybody else, and not from a telephone in a lunch queue.”

It was his line. It was the line from his statement. He did not know whether she knew she had said it.

“Papa’s decided,” he said.

His mother looked at him. Her eyes were very steady and very blue and she did not look away.

“Yes,” she said. “Your father has decided to give up the Crown.”

He sat on the plastic chair.

He had known. He thought, afterwards, that he had known since the hospital on Tuesday, since them, since I cannot speak for them now, since before he had written a word of the statement; that he had known every afternoon at four and every evening at the kitchen table and on the river in the dark and on the stairs at the flat; that every person who had talked to him for six days had known it too, and talked to him anyway, about moles and Biscuit the horse and the angle in a semicircle, because it was not decided, and it was not theirs to say, and it was not yet true. He had known the way you know that it is going to rain because the light has changed. And it made no difference at all to hearing it.

“When?” he said. His voice came out strange, and he did not try to fix it.

“This morning. At twenty past ten.” She turned the envelope over on her knees. “The last answer came in at six. Ours. Mr Penhallow, who is the Father of the House of Commons and has sat for a seat in Maine for forty-two years, wrote to the Regency Office last night to say that he would bring the bill himself, as a private member, if it came to it, so that the ministry would not have to. And Lord Whitlock wrote at the same time, separately, to say that the ministry would neither carry it nor stand in its way, and that it would do what the law asked.” She almost smiled. “He used his own words again. He seems to have only the one sentence, and it seems to be enough.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen.” She put her hand flat on the envelope. “Dame Margaret took the folder to the hospital at eight. The physicians saw him first, the same as Wednesday, and said that he understood, and could do this one thing. And I read him the answers. All fourteen. In order. Britain first, the way they came.” She stopped. “He listened to every one. He didn’t shut his eyes once. And at the end he said one word.”

Frederick waited.

“Today,” said his mother.

---

The clock on the wall said thirteen minutes to twelve.

“He signed it in the chair,” said his mother. “By the window. The declaration. It’s one sentence long. London drafted it, and every realm agreed to it, so that it’s the same sentence in all of them.” She opened the envelope and took out a sheet, a photocopy, and held it on her knee without giving it to him. “He wrote his name under it. It took him a long time. Almost four minutes, the physician said; she timed it, because they have to record everything. He wrote it all himself. Ernest R. The R was the hardest. He did it twice in the air first, with the pen not touching, and then he did it.” She looked at the photocopy. “It’s very shaky. It’s the best signature I’ve ever seen.”

“And you?”

“I wrote under it.” She held up her right hand, the way she had on Friday at the kitchen table. “By this hand. The terms say that the Regent accepts it, because somebody has to and there’s nobody else who can. A representative can’t. So I wrote, Accepted. Christina, under his, and the date, and it took me four seconds, and it was the hardest thing I have ever written in my life, and I did it with the pen he gave me.” She put her hand down. “You asked me on Friday if I wanted to. I said no, and I would. Both of those were true.”

“Was he,” he said, and stopped. He did not know what he was asking. “When you signed. Was he all right?”

“He watched me do it,” said his mother. “And when I’d done it he put his hand on mine, on the paper, on the two names, and kept it there. That’s all. He didn’t say anything else. He’d said today.” She looked at the clock. “Then he went to sleep, and Dame Margaret took the paper, and it went to London by twelve different hands, and it’s gone. You won’t see it. Nobody will, for a while. This is a copy so that you know it’s real.”

She held the photocopy out to him.

He took it. It was one sentence long, typed, in the middle of the page, with the crown at the top like a cake, and under it, in the middle, a name in a hand he knew and did not know, very large, very shaky, the E going up and up as though it were climbing something and the R at the end of it come down hard, twice-gone-over, like a door shut firmly. And under that, small and straight and quick and blue, Accepted. Christina, and the date.

He held it on his knee and looked at it for a long time, and did not read the sentence, and then gave it back.

“Thank you,” he said.

She put it in the envelope.

---

“There’s a message,” she said. “From him. To everybody. It goes out from the palace at noon, at the same moment as London.” She took a second sheet out of the envelope. “Rosalind wrote it down from him on Saturday, in case, and he changed it on Sunday, and this morning he said it was right. It’s his. Every word. Shall I read it?”

“Yes.”

She read it in English, plainly, the way she read the bulletins.

“To the peoples of my realms.

“I have decided to give up the Crown. I cannot do the work as it must be done, and you should not have to wait for me. My son is young, and he will not be alone. His mother will be with him, as she has been with me.

“I thank you for your patience, these five weeks and all the years before them.

“Ernest R.”

She put it down on top of the envelope.

He found that he was looking at the floor. There was a dark scuff on the principal’s carpet, near the leg of the desk, where the visitor’s chair had been pushed back and forward for eleven years by people being told things.

My son is young, and he will not be alone.

“He said that?”

“He said, Young,” said his mother. “On Saturday. Rosalind asked him what he wanted to say about you, and he looked at her for a long time, and said, Young. And then he said, Not alone. And then he looked at me.” She folded the sheet. “Rosalind put the words in between. He read it on Sunday and he took one out. She’d written he will never be alone. He crossed out never. He said, Not true.” She looked at him. “He doesn’t lie, your father. Even now. Even to be kind.”

Frederick laughed. It came out of him all at once, in the principal’s office, at eleven minutes to twelve, and his mother looked startled and then laughed too, a little, and put her hand over her eyes.

---

“And the terms,” said his mother, when she had taken her hand away. “London’s. Everybody’s. They go out at noon too.” She did not take them out of the envelope. She knew them. “I’ll tell you them in order, and then you can ask me which, about anything, and I’ll tell you.”

“All right.”

“It happens everywhere on the same day. The day the last realm acts. Nobody goes first and nobody is left behind, so that there is never an hour when you’re King somewhere and Papa is King somewhere else. On that day, at six in the evening in London, it happens in all of them at once.”

“Six in London.”

“Two o’clock here, this week. Because of the clocks.” She went on. “You’ll be sixteen for all of it. I mean the age. Sixteen in every realm, now, to reign yourself. Three of them said for years they’d never move from eighteen, and they’ve moved. That’s in the terms. So in May, on your birthday, you’ll do it yourself. Until then I’m Regent for you, the way I am for him. They’ve named me. In every one.”

“Every one.”

“Not Malaya. Malaya follows Britain, and doesn’t need telling.” She took a breath. “Papa will be the Duke of Cumberland. It’s what Ernest the First was before he was King. So that the first one and the last one have the same name.” She stopped. “The last one of his reign, I mean. Not the last.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Mr Penhallow brings the bill in this afternoon. It’s read a first time today. That’s all that happens today, here. The others will do it in their own way, in their own time, tomorrow or the next day.” She looked at the clock. “Nobody knows which day will be the last. Mr Penhallow would like it to be tomorrow.”

The clock said six minutes to twelve.

“And the name,” said his mother.

He looked up.

She did not take anything out of the envelope for this. She said it to him in Swedish, in her own voice, the way she had said Sit.

“The terms say that the heir reigns as King George the Fifth,” she said. “London put it in the gap. Every realm agreed to it. None of them asked why.” She looked at him. “I gave it to London on Friday night, on the back of an envelope from your grandmother, and I didn’t tell them where it came from, and they didn’t ask. They took it.”

He sat very still on the plastic chair.

George. He had said it to her at the kitchen table on Friday with cake in his mouth, trying it, like a coat in a shop. He had not thought about it since. That was not true. He had thought about it on the river, and in the library, and on the stairs at the flat, and in the cathedral when they prayed for Frederick, Prince of Columbia, and he had thought every time, that’s not my name now, or it won’t be, and then, it might never be, nothing is decided, and put it away.

It was decided.

“George,” he said.

“George,” said his mother. “The fifth.” She very nearly smiled. “Hanover has two.”

“They won’t mind.”

“They don’t. I asked Caroline. She said that it was about time the family did something sensible with a name.” His mother picked up her handbag from the floor and put it on her knee, and then put it down again, as though she had forgotten what she wanted it for. “You’ll still be Frederick. For letters. You said.”

“For letters.”

---

The clock said three minutes to twelve. In the corridor outside a door banged and somebody ran, and somebody else shouted walk, and the bell went for lunch, long and harsh, and the corridor filled with feet and voices and lockers, and he sat on the plastic chair in the principal’s office and listened to it go past the door, all of it, the whole school, going to lunch, as it had every day of his life here, and nobody outside the door knew, not one of them, not yet, for three more minutes.

“Mamma.”

“Mm.”

“And then what?”

She looked at him. It was the question. He had asked it all his life, about everything, from the time he could talk. And then what? After the bath. After Christmas. After the first time somebody told him, when he was six, that one day it would be him. His father had always answered it, in order, as far as it went, and when it did not go any further his father had said so. And then I don’t know. And then we find out.

His mother answered it in order.

“And then the last realm acts. And at six in London that day, you’re King. You’ll probably be at school.” She said it flatly, as a fact about the timetable. “And then the Privy Council proclaims it here, at the palace, that evening, and you’ll be at the table, in the same chair, and you won’t have to say anything, because I’ll say it for you, because that’s what a Regent is for. And then you go to bed. And then the next day you go to school.” She paused. “You’ll finish at Ellicott. I’ve asked. Nobody said no.”

“And then what?”

“And then you go to the hospital at four, and read your father the trains.”

“And then what?”

“And then in May you’re sixteen, and you take the oaths yourself. And then you do your homework.” She looked at the clock. It said one minute to twelve. “And then I don’t know,” said his mother. “And then we find out.”

He nodded.

The second hand of the clock on the principal’s wall went up past the fifty and the fifty-five, the way the red hand at the hospital had gone up yesterday, on Sunday, at four, and came round to the top.

Noon.

Nothing happened in the room. Nothing rang. No bell, no siren, no voice. Outside the window, across the schoolyard, the man in the orange jacket was still blowing the same leaves into the same pile. And then, faintly, through the door, from the corridor, from the cafeteria beyond it, from a hundred pockets and bags and lunch trays at once, came a sound he had never heard before and would know for the rest of his life: the small, overlapping, scattered sound of a great many telephones receiving the same thing at the same moment, a buzz and a chime and a buzz, rippling away down the length of the building like rain arriving on a roof.

Then a silence.

Then, a long way off, somebody in the cafeteria said, quite loudly, oh.

His mother reached out and took his hand, on his knee, and held it. She did not say anything. Neither did he.

---

At ten past twelve Dr Brooks knocked and put her head round the door and said that there was a room upstairs that nobody was using, if he would like to sit in it for the afternoon, or a car outside, if he would like to go home, and that nobody would mind which.

“Can I go back?” said Frederick.

Dr Brooks looked at his mother. His mother looked at him.

“To class,” said Frederick. “After lunch. Fifth period. It’s French.” He thought about it. “We’ve got a test back.”

There was a pause.

“He asked to finish the period,” said his mother to Dr Brooks, “last time. In September.” She stood up and put her coat on, one arm and then the other, slowly. “He’ll go back.”

“Theo’s got my book,” said Frederick. “From chemistry. He’ll have saved me a sandwich. He always does if I’m late.”

His mother looked at him for a long moment, with her coat half buttoned.

“Then go and eat your sandwich,” she said, in English, so that Dr Brooks would understand it, and then, in Swedish, so that she would not, very quietly, with her hand on his face for one second and then gone: “You’re going to be good at this. You already are. That’s the worst of it.”

She went out first. Castellanos fell in behind her in the corridor, and then stopped, and let her go on with her own officer, and turned round, and waited for Frederick by the door, looking at the ceiling, at the water stain the shape of nothing in particular.

Frederick picked up his bag and went to lunch.