The River

The skiff was in the water when he got there.

Somebody had taken it down off its rack along the side wall of the boathouse, where it had lain upside down all winter with its oars along its keel, and turned it over, and carried it to the end of the landing stage, and put it in, and it lay there now at the foot of the steps in the still water inside the boathouse, low and dark and old, with its varnish gone grey at the gunwales and a puddle in the bottom of it that somebody had been at with a sponge and given up on. The oars were in the rowlocks. A cushion that had come from the house, from the window seat in the library, was on the stern seat.

Frederick was sitting on the landing stage beside it, with his feet over the water, where Alexander had sat on Friday morning.

“Half past six,” said Frederick, without turning round.

“It’s twenty-five past.”

“That’s early.” He stood up. He had changed. He was in an old jersey Alexander did not know and a pair of canvas shoes, and he looked, standing on the edge of the landing stage in the green light that came off the water through the open front of the boathouse, more like himself than Alexander had seen him look all week. “It leaks. Lukas says it’s always leaked. He says it leaks exactly enough and no more, and that if it ever stops leaking you should worry. Theo and I carried it down at four. Theo says it’s lighter than the wardrobe.”

“What wardrobe?”

“Long story. It involves Mr Hartigan and four flights.” Frederick looked at the skiff. “You sit in the back. On the cushion. I row. You don’t do anything.”

“I can row.”

“I know you can row. That’s not what this is.” Frederick held the skiff steady at the foot of the steps with one canvas shoe on its gunwale. “Get in.”

Alexander got in.

---

The front of the boathouse had been open since before he was born. Frederick took the skiff out through it in four strokes, slowly, feeling for it, and the skiff came out of the green shade under the roof into the evening, and the whole of the Heiliger See opened in front of them, long and still and gold, with the sun going down behind the trees on the far side and laying a road across the water straight at them.

Frederick rowed badly for a minute.

Alexander watched him do it. He watched him dig the blades too deep and catch the water late and pull with his arms, and frown, and stop, and sit with the oars out flat for a moment, looking at them as though they had said something rude.

“These aren’t sweeps,” said Frederick.

“No.”

“Nobody told me.”

“It’s a skiff. You’ve got two.”

“I know I’ve got two. I’ve got two and they’re short and they’re the wrong shape and they’re fixed in those things.” He looked at the rowlocks. “In the eight you’ve got one, and it’s four metres long, and you hold it with both hands, and you don’t think about the other side, because somebody else is doing the other side. This is like being the whole boat.”

He tried again. He got it on the third stroke, or nearly: the blades went in square and came out clean, and the skiff moved, properly, and he did it again, and again, and found a rhythm, slower than he would have liked, Alexander could see, and stayed in it, and the boathouse went away behind them, and the bank went away on either side, and they were in the middle of the lake with nobody near them at all.

Nearly nobody. Away to the north, by the reeds, the house’s old motor launch was idling with its engine off, and in it sat Kessler, with a fishing rod he had never held before in his life, and beside him Castellanos, in a borrowed coat, looking at the sky.

“They’re fishing,” said Frederick, without looking round.

“Kessler doesn’t fish.”

“Castellanos doesn’t either. He’s from Tucson. He says there isn’t any water in Tucson, only pictures of it.” Frederick pulled. “They asked if they could come in the skiff. Mamma said no. Your mother said no. Kessler said it was a security matter. Your mother said that if two Kings could not row across a lake in her garden without a security matter she would like to know what the garden was for, and Kessler went and found the launch.”

Alexander looked at the launch.

“My mother said that?”

“In German. Lukas translated. Lukas said she said it in the voice.”

---

They did not talk for a while after that.

Frederick rowed, and Alexander sat in the stern on the cushion from the library window seat and did not do anything, as he had been told, and watched Frederick row. It took him perhaps five minutes to understand what he was being shown.

Frederick was not rowing anywhere. He was not going to the far shore, or the Marble Palace, or the reeds. He was rowing up the middle of the lake, slowly, in a long straight line, with the sun going down behind him on his right and the road of gold on the water on his left, and his face, which had done nothing on the crest and been polite on Friday and been simply his face in the dome, had gone somewhere else. It was not doing anything. It was not holding anything. His eyes were on the stern of the skiff, on a point somewhere past Alexander’s shoulder, the way a man in an eight watches the back of the man in front, and he pulled, and leaned, and slid forward, and dropped the blades in, and pulled, and the skiff went on up the lake, and the lake went by, and as far as Alexander could see he did not think about anything at all.

Alexander knew that face. He had worn it himself, at the eyepiece, on a Thursday in March, at two in the morning, five weeks after his father died, when Lukas said the moons had moved.

“This is it,” he said.

Frederick did not stop rowing.

“This is it,” he said. “Half past six. On the river at home there are seven others and a cox shouting in a voice like a goose and it’s four degrees and somebody’s always sick. And I don’t hear any of it. For an hour I don’t hear anything. Nobody can get to me in an eight. You can’t hand a King a folder in an eight. There isn’t anywhere to put it.” He pulled. “You showed me yours. That’s mine. I wanted you to see it.”

Alexander looked at him.

“Feierabend,” he said.

“I looked it up,” said Frederick. “After your letter. In November. I thought there must be an English word. There isn’t. There’s knocking off. That’s the nearest. Theo says knocking off, at home. Mr Hartigan comes in from the depot and says that’s me knocked off, and puts his feet up.” He pulled. “It’s not the same. Yours is better.”

“It’s only a word.”

“It’s a better word,” said Frederick, and rowed.

---

It was in the middle of the lake, with the sun nearly on the trees, that Frederick stopped.

He did it without any warning. He brought the blades out of the water and laid them flat, feathered, so that they skimmed the surface, and the skiff ran on for a few metres by itself and slowed and lay still, and the drips came off the ends of the oars in two small rings, and Frederick sat with his hands on the looms and looked at them.

“She said I could tell you one sentence,” he said.

Alexander did not move.

“This morning. On the path. She talked for a long time and I’m not going to tell you most of it. Some of it was about the letters. Some of it was about my father, who was her brother before he was anything else, which I’d never thought about properly. Some of it was about the other thing, the line, which she said once, very plainly, and then never again, and which I’m not going to tell you either, because it’s hers.” He looked at the oars. “And at the end, by the reeds, I said something, and she stopped, and she put her hand on my arm, and then she said I could tell you one sentence of all of it, if I wanted, and that I could choose which. She said it should be one I chose and not one she gave me, because she’d read enough of what I wrote to you to know I’d choose better.”

The skiff turned very slowly on the still water, a few degrees, and the sun came round from behind Frederick’s shoulder and lay on the side of his face.

“I’ve chosen,” said Frederick.

He looked up from the oars, at Alexander, in the stern, on the cushion.

“She said: I read them to find out whether he still laughs. He does. Only to you.”

Alexander sat very still.

He did not say anything. He looked at Frederick, and past him, at the house on its lawn above the boathouse, with the light going gold on its windows, and the dome above it on its rise among the trees, small and pale, with the iron gallery round it where he had stood that morning with a cup of cold coffee and watched his mother put her hand on somebody’s arm. He thought about her reading. Not on the Tuesday, when she had told them. Before. In the week of the Bundesrat, at the desk in Berlin, with the box open, and the ribbon untied, reading every one of Frederick’s letters, one after another, not for the advice, not for Hanover, not for anything that had a vote in it. Reading for the place where her son laughed.

He did not know what to do with his face. He found that he did not have to do anything with it. There was nobody to see it except Frederick, and Frederick had seen worse, and was looking at the oars again.

“Thank you,” he said.

“It wasn’t me. It was her.”

“You chose it.”

“I chose it,” Frederick agreed. And dropped the blades in, and pulled, and the skiff went on.

---

“You owe me a because,” said Frederick, after a while.

The sun was on the trees now. The road of gold had gone red and was breaking up, and the far shore was going dark, and on the near shore a light had come on in the house, in the breakfast room, and then another.

“I know.”

“Since November. About Charlotte: no. Full stop. No because. I noticed. I said I noticed. You said I’d have to wait.” Frederick pulled, slowly. “I’ve waited. It’s April. I’m on a lake. I’ve got blisters on the wrong bit of my hands and I’m not going to be able to hold a pen on Monday. Tell me the because.”

Alexander looked at the water going past the side of the skiff, dark now, with the light on it in small broken pieces.

“I told her once,” he said. “That it should be hers. In February, the week after. In her flat, which I’d never been in, which I didn’t go into, because I said it on the landing, at the door, with my coat on. She didn’t answer. She looked at me and she didn’t say anything, and then she said, Do you want some tea?, and I said no, and went. And neither of us has said it since.”

Frederick rowed.

“And the because is,” said Alexander, and stopped, and found it, and said it the way it was. “If I tell her again that it should be hers, and she doesn’t want it, then I’ll have taken the one thing she’s chosen. Everything else was chosen for her. The reform. The order. The Council. The regency. Me. Every single thing that’s happened to her since she was ten was decided by somebody else, and the only thing in the whole of it that she’s ever chosen for herself is not wanting it. Not saying. Being a doctor. Living in a flat the size of a lift. If I keep telling her it should be hers, I’m telling her she ought to want it. And then even that’s not hers. That’s the because.”

The oars came out of the water and went in again.

“And if she does want it?” said Frederick.

“Then she’ll say so. She’s never said so. She’s never once, in fourteen years, said so. Not to me, not to Papa, not to anybody.” Alexander looked at the light in the breakfast room. “She’s allowed not to. That’s the whole of it. She’s allowed not to, and I’m the only person in the world who could take that away from her, by asking. So I don’t. That’s why it’s no. No because in the letter, because the because was about her, and I didn’t want to write it down where it could be read.” He was quiet for a moment. “Which it was.”

Frederick rowed three strokes without saying anything.

“That’s a good because,” he said.

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

“It’s still good.”

---

The launch had started its engine by the reeds and was coming down the lake towards them, very slowly, at a distance, the way a dog comes back when it has been told to stay and has decided that enough time has passed.

“There’s one more thing,” said Alexander.

Frederick looked at him.

“If the Landtag gives it the two-thirds. After Easter. When the last of it’s done, and it’s in force.” He held the edge of the stern seat with both hands, underneath, by the edge. “It lets the King choose the day. By declaration. Through the Regent. Any day after it’s in force.”

“That’s got a vote in it.”

“It’s not advice. It’s a date.” Alexander looked at him. “Thursday the third of May.”

Frederick stopped rowing.

He did not lay the blades flat this time. He simply stopped, with the oars in the water, so that the skiff checked and slewed a little and lay still, and the water ran off the looms on to his knees, and he did not notice. He looked at Alexander for a long moment across the length of the skiff.

“Why?”

“Because you go first.”

Frederick did not say anything.

He did not say anything for so long that the launch, coming down the lake, slowed, and stopped, and sat on the water fifty metres off with its engine idling, and Castellanos, in the bow, looked at the sky with great attention. Frederick sat on the rowing seat with the oars in the water and his blistered hands on them and looked at Alexander, and his face did a thing Alexander had never seen it do, not on the crest, not in the study on Thursday, not in the dome, and then it did not do it any more, and he looked down at his hands.

Then he took the oars out of the water, and squared them, and dropped them in, and pulled, and turned the skiff, slowly, a stroke at a time, until its bow was pointing back down the lake towards the boathouse and the house and the lights in the windows, and rowed.

He rowed all the way back without saying anything at all. It took twenty minutes. It was nearly dark when they came in under the roof of the boathouse, into the smell of tar and water, and the skiff bumped gently against the foot of the steps, and on the landing stage, with a storm lantern from the house that somebody had found in a cupboard, were Theo and Lukas, sitting with their feet over the water, waiting, as though they had been there the whole time, which, Alexander thought, they probably had.

Frederick shipped the oars.

He held up his hands in the light of the lantern, palms out, and looked at them. There were blisters on the heels of both thumbs, red and shining, in the wrong places.

“Skiff oars,” he said. “Nobody told me.”

“I told you,” said Lukas. “At four. You said you’d rowed for three years.”

“I have.”

“Not in that,” said Lukas. “Nobody has rowed in that for three years. It leaks.”

“It leaks exactly enough,” said Frederick, and climbed out on to the landing stage, and held the skiff for Alexander, with one canvas shoe on the gunwale, the way he had held it at the start, and Alexander got out, and the four of them stood on the landing stage in the lantern light in the smell of the lake, and nobody said anything about anything that had happened on it, and nobody needed to.