The Bus Driver's Son

The boathouse had been his since he was six.

Nobody had given it to him. It stood at the bottom of the garden where the lawn ran out into reeds, a long low wooden building with a green roof that had gone black, its front open to the Heiliger See under a sliding door that had not slid since before he was born, and in the summer he was six he had found that if you went in by the side door and sat on the edge of the landing stage inside, with your feet over the water, nobody could see you from the house, and nobody thought to look. He had gone there the day he was first told about the reform of 2015, though he had not understood it, and the morning after his father died, at five, in the dark, before anybody was up. Lukas knew. Nobody else.

He went there at half past six on Friday because he had not slept and the dome was locked.

The rain had stopped in the night. The lake was flat and grey and steaming a little in the cold, the way it did in April when the water was warmer than the air, and the mist lay on it in a thin sheet that the ducks went through without noticing. Inside the boathouse it smelled of tar and wet wood and the lake. The old skiff was on its rack along the side wall, upside down, where it had been all winter, with its oars laid along its keel, and above it on the wall were the hooks where his father’s racing scull had hung, and did not hang now, because his father had given it to the school in Berlin in the autumn before he died and said he would buy another, and had not.

He sat on the edge of the landing stage with his feet over the water, in his coat, and looked at the mist, and did not think about anything, and failed.

---

The side door opened at five to seven.

He did not turn round. He knew it was not Lukas, because Lukas came into rooms without any sound at all, and whoever this was had a step he did not know, heavier, unhurried, the step of somebody who has walked into a great many cold buildings early in the morning and does not expect any of them to be warm.

“Lukas said you’d be here,” said Theo. “He said if you weren’t in the dome you’d be in the boathouse, and the dome’s locked, because he tried it.”

“He shouldn’t have told you.”

“He didn’t want to. He made me promise I’d say he didn’t want to.” Theo came down the boards and stood beside him, looking at the mist. He had a coat on over his pyjamas, and a pair of somebody’s boots that were too big, and his hair was standing up on one side. “Can I sit down?”

Alexander moved along the edge of the stage, a little. Theo sat down beside him, with his feet over the water, the boots dangling, and they sat.

It was the first time they had ever been alone together.

Alexander realised it after a minute. He had known Theo for five months and spent seven days in his company, one in November and six in this house, and in all of them there had been somebody else in the room, Frederick, or Lukas, or the two mothers, or three thousand people at Arlington. He did not know what Theo was like with nobody watching. He found, sitting on the edge of the landing stage, that he had assumed Theo was exactly the same, and that he was probably right.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“Dad’s on the early shift. Half four, four days out of five. You get used to it. The kettle goes and then you’re up whether you want to be or not.” Theo looked at the lake. “Is that steam?”

“The water’s warmer than the air.”

“Huh.” Theo considered it. “We get that on Lake Michigan. In the fall. Dad calls it the lake smoking.” He was quiet for a moment. “He’d like this. Dad. He likes water you can’t drive on.”

They sat. A duck came out of the mist, looked at them, and went back into it.

---

“He didn’t sleep,” said Theo.

Alexander did not say anything.

“Freddie. He didn’t sleep. I know because I didn’t either, because he was in the bed by the window and I was in the one by the door and he lay on his back all night with his eyes open, and when he does that you can hear it. I don’t know how. You can hear somebody’s eyes being open.” Theo pulled one of the boots back on properly. “He wouldn’t tell me what you said. Lukas came in after dinner and sat on the end of his bed and looked at him, the way Lukas looks at things, and Freddie said, Don’t, and Lukas didn’t. And then he told us he’d asked you a question and you’d shut the door, and he’d said a thing about your uncle, and you’d said a thing back, and he wasn’t going to say what, ever, to anybody, and he’d like it if we didn’t ask. So we didn’t.”

Alexander looked at the water.

“I said a thing I can’t take back,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Theo. “I figured.”

He did not ask what it was. He sat with his hands between his knees, the way he had sat in the front row on the crest after the twenty paces, and looked at the mist, and Alexander understood that he was not going to ask, now or ever, and that it was not politeness, it was something else, something Alexander did not have a word for in either language, and had seen only once before, in a kitchen, in the way Mrs Hartigan had cut his uncle’s meat without asking.

“Can I tell you some stuff?” said Theo. “About him. You can tell me to shut up.”

“Tell me.”

---

“On the twenty-fourth of October,” said Theo, “he came to the flat. The Tuesday. The day the doctors said about your uncle’s words. You know about that.”

“Yes.”

“He came for dinner, like always, and he ate it, all of it, and the cabbage twice, and afterwards, when everybody else had gone to bed and we’d done the dishes, he told me. At the table. With a sour sweet in his hand he wasn’t eating. What your uncle was going to ask. He told me before he told anybody outside the family. Me. At the table, with the plates put away.” Theo was quiet for a moment. “And I didn’t know what to say. I’m a bus driver’s kid from the north side. I didn’t know anything about abdications. I knew he was going to be King one day and that was it, that was like knowing the sun was going to come up, it wasn’t a thing you thought about. And he’d just told me it was going to be soon, and I didn’t know what you’re supposed to say, so I said, Okay, Freddie. Eat your dinner.”

Alexander turned his head and looked at him.

“That’s what you said,” he said. “At the table. On the Eleventh. To him.”

“Yeah.”

“I heard it. I didn’t know what it meant.”

“Nobody does,” said Theo. “Except him and me. It means: I heard you, and I’m still here, and I’m not going to make it into a thing. The first time his plate was empty, he’d eaten it an hour before, so he ate the sweet. The second time he ate his dinner.” He shrugged. “That’s all I had. It turned out to be the right thing. I didn’t know it was going to be. I just didn’t have anything else.”

The mist was lifting off the lake, very slowly, in pieces, so that the far shore came and went, a line of trees and a white house, and then nothing.

“Second thing,” said Theo. “His face.”

“His face.”

“When he’s wrong. You know what it does?”

“Nothing,” said Alexander. “It does nothing. That’s the face. The crest face.”

“No,” said Theo. “That’s the face for when he’s right and it’s costing him. That’s the crest. The one for when he’s wrong is different. It goes polite.” He said the word as though it tasted of something. “He gets polite. Thank-you-very-much polite. Like a waiter in a good restaurant who thinks you’ve ordered the wrong wine. He did it last night. Lukas brought the cake up, from his mum’s, and Freddie said, Thank you very much, Lukas, that’s very kind. To Lukas. And then he said thank you to me. For nothing. For being in the room. He’s never said thank you to me for anything in three and a half years, he just takes the last roll and says Theo like it’s a complaint. And last night he thanked me for being in the room, very politely, with his eyes open, and that’s how I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That he thinks he’s wrong,” said Theo. “About whatever it was. The kitchen table. He thinks he’s wrong. He’s thought so since March. He told me in March, on the Wednesday, the morning after he’d done it, at the lockers. He hadn’t slept that night either. He said, I asked her, Theo. For civics, and I said, Was it civics? and he said, No, and he went to geometry.” Theo looked at him. “He’s known since March. He’s been waiting for you to be angry since March. And then you weren’t, all week, you were fine, we went on a bus and walked up a hill that wasn’t a hill and you lost at cards, and he thought he’d got away with it. And then he asked you a question, and you were.”

Alexander said nothing for a long time.

“He shouldn’t have asked the question,” he said, at last.

“Probably not,” said Theo. “But you know why he did.”

“Why?”

“Because it was the thing he’d been saving,” said Theo. “The and then what. The one you said he could have. He told me. Three and a half years he’s been asking everybody that, the teachers, the Governor-General, his dad, me, the man who reads the news, and he’d kept that one for you, because he said you were the one person who’d actually have an answer, and he wanted to save it for when it mattered. And yesterday he thought it mattered. So he spent it.” Theo looked at the water. “Wrong day. Wrong room. He knows.”

---

“Third thing,” said Theo, “and then I’ll shut up.”

“You don’t have to shut up.”

“I do, a bit. I’ve been talking for ten minutes. Mum says if I talk for more than ten minutes at a time somebody should check I’m all right.” He took a breath. “He’s never said sorry first. Ever. Not once. Three and a half years. Not to me, not to his mum, not to Dame M, not to Mrs Pruitt that time he told her the proof was wrong and it wasn’t. He doesn’t know how. It’s not that he won’t. I don’t think anybody ever showed him. I think when you’re him, from when you’re little, everybody says sorry to you first, all day, for everything, sorry, sir, sorry to disturb you, sorry, Prince Frederick, and you never get to go first, so you never learn. He says it second. Every time. If somebody else says it, he says it straight back, like that.” Theo made a small movement with his hand, a ball coming back over a net. “Like tennis. He can return anything. He just can’t serve.”

Alexander looked at him.

“So you think I should say it first.”

“I don’t think anything,” said Theo. “I’m a bus driver’s kid. I think you’re both Kings and you’re both fifteen and you’re both the worst at this of anybody I’ve ever met, and I’ve met my sister.” He stood up. The boots clumped on the boards. “I think you don’t have to say sorry first. I think you just have to be somewhere he can say it second. That’s all. Somewhere you’re both in the same place and it’s quiet and nobody’s watching and he doesn’t have to come and find you. He’s no good at coming to find people. You saw what happened when he tried.”

“Where?”

Theo looked at him for a moment, with the face, Alexander thought, that he probably had in mathematics when he had got the answer before the teacher and was deciding whether to say.

“Don’t know,” said Theo. “Somewhere.” And then, at the door, with his hand on it, without turning round: “You’ve got good ducks.”

He went out. The side door banged in the wind behind him, and did not shut properly, and stood open an inch.

---

It was a long day.

The house had sixty rooms, which Alexander had never counted until that Friday, when he went through most of them, one after another, so as not to be in any of the ones Frederick was in. He had breakfast early and alone. He heard Frederick come down to the breakfast room as he was going out of the other door, and heard him say, “Good morning. Thank you very much,” to the woman who brought the coffee, very politely, in a voice like a waiter’s, and went up the back stairs.

At eleven his mother found him in the library, in the window seat Frederick had sat in on Thursday, and looked at him, and he waited for her to say something, and she did not. She took a book off the shelf, a book she could not possibly have wanted, a history of Brandenburg agriculture in three volumes, and sat down at the long table with it and read it for twenty minutes without turning a page, and then put it back and went out, and touched his shoulder on the way past, once, through his jumper, very lightly, and took her hand away. It was the first time she had touched him since Tuesday. He thought that anything she might have said had a vote in it, and that she was keeping the terms she had made for them as though they were hers as well.

At lunch there were six of them at the table and nobody talked about anything that mattered. His aunt talked about the weather in Stockholm. His mother talked about the asparagus, which would be early this year. Frederick sat at the far end, between Theo and his mother, and passed things, and said thank you, and did not look down the table once, and Alexander did not look up it, and they managed it so well, between them, for the whole of the soup and the whole of the fish, that by the pudding he thought that if anybody had been watching who did not know, they would have thought the two of them had never met.

Lukas watched him the whole way through, from across the table, and said nothing.

After lunch the sky began to clear from the west.

He saw it from the window of his study, where he had gone back at last because there was nowhere else left. It came over the far side of the lake in a long clean edge, grey on one side and pale blue on the other, as though somebody had drawn it with a ruler, and moved east over the water all afternoon, slowly, until by four the whole sky over the Neuer Garten was the hard thin blue of an April evening coming, and the wind had dropped, and the lake under the window had gone still.

He knew what that sky meant. He had known it since he was six. He stood at the window and looked at it, and thought about the dome, and the log, and the red torch, and the stove, and did not go.

---

Lukas found him at seven, in the study, with the door open.

He stood in the doorway. He had the flask under his arm and the knitted hat with the flaps sticking out of his coat pocket, and he did not come in.

“It’s clear,” he said.

“I saw.”

“It’s going to stay clear. All night. The forecast says so, and the forecast is right, for once, because I’ve checked three of them.” Lukas looked at him. “Ten o’clock. The dome. I’ll do the shutter.”

“Lukas.”

“That’s not a thing,” said Lukas. “It’s a forecast. Forecasts don’t count.” And he went away down the corridor before Alexander could answer, and Alexander heard him stop at the top of the stairs, and knock on a door, and say something low, in English, and heard Theo’s voice answer, and then the door shut, and the two of them, behind it, began to laugh, very quietly, the way people laugh when they have arranged something and are not going to tell you what.