Book Nine: Junior Year Part Three: Winter Characters
Chapter Twenty
The Green Book
Frederick. New Westminster. Monday, 10 December, to Thursday, 20 December 2029.
In December 1972 Nixon ordered eleven days of heavy bombing of Hanoi and Hải Phòng over Christmas to force the last terms, the heaviest bombing of the war; the new King's first Christmas broadcast did not mention it.
The green exercise book had eleven pages left at the back.
He counted them in the school library on Monday in the free period after lunch, at the table by the atlases, with the radiator under the window ticking and nobody else at the table. Eleven pages. The Privy Council at the front, from September last year. The drafts at the back: the first message, coming, not with you; the permission slip’s sentences, copied in afterwards so they would be somewhere; the four for Pomona. And now this.
Last year’s Christmas message had been his mother’s, as Regent, read from the Blue Drawing Room with the fourteen flags behind her, and he had stood at the side of the room out of shot and listened to her say my son and I. This year there was no Regent.
He wrote at the top of a clean page: Christmas.
He looked at it for twenty minutes.
Mr Ferrante set the assignment on Tuesday.
“Write me a document,” he said, at the board, in chalk. “One page. A proclamation, a letter, a speech, an order, anything that one person might write to a great many. Real or invented. Due Friday the twenty-first.” He turned round. “And on the back, answer the question.”
Nobody needed to ask which question.
“Who’ll hear it,” said Mr Ferrante, “and who won’t, and what you’ve done about the ones who won’t.” He put the chalk down. “Mr Hanover, you may not hand in anything that’s going to be broadcast. It’s unfair on everybody else.”
The room laughed. He did too.
“Sir,” said Inés, from the desk by the door, without putting her hand up.
“Miss Castañeda.”
“Can we hand in something that wasn’t heard?”
Mr Ferrante looked at her for a moment.
“That’s the best kind,” he said. “Yes.”
At lunch on Wednesday he asked them.
He had not meant to. He had the green book on the table by his tray, open, with Christmas at the top of a page and three lines under it crossed out, and Marcus saw it and said is that your homework, and he said no, and then, because it was not and because they were there, he said what it was.
They looked at the page.
“Keep it short,” said Theo, at once. “Your dad said short. Last year. On the telephone.”
“Say something about Bruno,” said Marcus. “Everybody likes a dog.”
“You can’t say Bruno on the radio to fourteen realms,” said Priya.
“Why not? He bit the mailman twice. That’s a story.”
“Say something about the trains,” said Lucía. “Grandpa will listen. He listens every year. He says the King always sounds like a man reading a timetable and it’s the best part of Christmas.” She thought. “He means it nicely.”
“Don’t say a difficult year,” said Priya. “Everybody says a difficult year. My grandmother says if she hears a difficult year one more time she’s going to switch to the carols.”
He wrote it down. Short. Trains. Not a difficult year. He did not write Bruno.
Inés was at the end of the table. She had sat there since the first week of December, at the far end, with Lucía beside her, eating an apple and not saying anything. She was not saying anything now. She was looking at the page.
“What would you say?” said Frederick.
She looked up.
“Don’t say we,” said Inés.
Everybody at the table went quiet.
“Every Christmas,” said Inés. “On the television. Every year of my life. We have all. We have come through. As a family, we.” She put the apple down. “You weren’t in Ventura. You were in Santa Monica, and then you were on a lawn, and then you went home on an aeroplane. That’s fine. That’s what happened. But it’s not we.” She looked at him. “If you say we, my mom’s going to turn it off. She turned it off in September when the Governor said it.”
Nobody said anything.
“You can say you,” said Inés. “Or I. Either. Just say which.”
She picked the apple up again.
He wrote seven drafts.
The first three had we in them. He had not noticed until he went back through with a pencil looking for it. Eleven times in three drafts. We have seen. We have learned. We are. He crossed every one out and the drafts did not make sense without them, which told him something.
The fourth was I. All of it. I was in Santa Monica, I saw, I am grateful. He read it back and it was about him.
The fifth was you. You carried. You stayed. You came. It was better. It was also a little like a teacher handing back homework.
The sixth was too long.
The seventh he wrote on Monday the seventeenth, at the table by the atlases, in the free period, in twenty minutes, without stopping, and when he had finished there were two pages left at the back of the green book and he did not need either of them.
He read it once and changed one word. Still, for now.
They recorded it on Thursday the twentieth in the library at Columbia Palace, at four.
Not the Blue Drawing Room. He had asked for the library: the long table, the Charter put away for the afternoon, the brass lions on the end of it, the window over the garden, bare and grey, the bookshelves. A camera on legs and a red light and three people from the ABC who moved very quietly, and Rosalind Aird in the corner with a clipboard.
He sat at the end of the table with the page in front of him and his hands flat on either side of it.
At ten to four the library door opened.
His father, in the wheelchair, with Niamh behind him. Niamh put the brake on just inside the door, out of the camera’s line, and stood back. His father sat with the stick across his knees and looked at the room, at the camera and the lights and the red bulb on top, at the table, at his son.
Fifty-six of them. Every Christmas from 1972. In a room in London, at a desk, with a camera on legs and a red light, and three people moving very quietly, and a page.
Rosalind Aird looked at the Duke, and then at Frederick.
“Sir,” she said. “Shall we wait?”
“No,” said Frederick. “He’s come to listen.”
The red light came on.
“Hello,” he said. “This is the King.”
It did not go thin. It had not gone thin since a gym in Santa Monica.
“This year I have been to one coronation, one State Opening, the Tomb at Arlington, and chemistry, and I want to tell you about none of them.
“I want to tell you instead about the people I met this year who were carrying somebody. A nurse on a staircase. A man with a wheel. A sergeant with a spanner under a water tank. A girl with a cool box. A crew in a helicopter over Oxnard who went down a cable for a dog. Most of you will never meet them. I did, for a minute each, because I happened to be near. You have them too, wherever you are, people like that, and most of them have not been thanked, because nobody happened to be near.
“Some of you had the year I had. A great many of you did not. Some of you are still in tents on the Crown’s ground in California, and will be at Christmas, and I know it. Some of you lost your house, or your work, or somebody, and nothing I say on the radio will change that, and I am not going to pretend it will.
“The trains run. The six-oh-two from Pomona runs on time. That is not nothing. It is also not enough. Both of those things are true at Christmas.
“So I will not tell you what kind of year it was. You know what kind of year you had. I will only say thank you, to those of you who carried somebody, and that I hope next year somebody carries you, if you need it.
“Happy Christmas.”
He stopped. He did not say his name. He had never seen why Kings said their name at the end of a message, when everybody knew.
The red light went off.
Nobody in the library moved.
Rosalind Aird had her clipboard against her chest. The three people from the ABC were looking at the floor.
His father, by the door, in the wheelchair, had not moved either. He was looking at the page on the table in front of Frederick, from across the library, the way he had looked at boxes for fifty-six years, as though he could read it from there.
Frederick got up and went to him.
“Papa.”
His father looked up at him. The breath, and the hold.
“No,” said his father. “We.”
It took Frederick a moment.
“No we,” he said. “There isn’t one. In the whole thing.”
His father looked at him. Then he did something he had not done since before the sixth floor: he laughed, out loud, once, short and rusty, the sound from the apron.
“Fifty. Six,” said his father. A breath. “Never. Managed.”
He put out his hand, slowly, palm up, and Frederick gave him the page. His father held it on his knee, on the rug, and looked at it, all the way down, every line, with his finger moving along under them. It took a long time. Nobody in the library said anything while he did it.
At the bottom he stopped.
“Ferrante,” said his father.
“What about him?”
His father handed the page back with the look of a man about to be very gently rude.
“Hand. In.”
He did not hand it in. Mr Ferrante had said nothing broadcast.
He handed in, on Friday the twenty-first, a single page in his own handwriting: a letter, invented, from a woman of eighty-one on Twenty-Second Street in Santa Monica to a boy whose name she did not know, which began you are too thin and ended I got down. On the back, under the question, he wrote one line.
She heard. Most didn’t. I don’t know what I’ve done about them yet.