The Fourth Duty

“How was school?” said Peter Hartigan, with his mouth full, at the end of the table nearest the window, in his shirtsleeves, his bus company jacket over the back of the chair.

He said it to Theo, as every evening. Then, before Theo could answer, he turned his head quite deliberately and looked down the table.

“Freddie. How was school?”

Forty-four suppers at this table, by Theo’s count, in the room that was kitchen and sitting room at once, with the window looking four floors down onto the yard of the bus depot. He had been asked whether he wanted more potatoes. Whether the King of Hanover was obliged to eat sauerkraut. Whether he had ever in his life washed up, and when he said no, a tea towel, held out by Anneliese Hartigan without comment. Never that.

“Fine,” said Frederick.

“Fine how?”

Kate put her fork down. Theo did not look up from his plate, and the corner of his mouth had gone in.

“We did the Charter in history. Mr Ferrante made us read the first article aloud round the room, a sentence each, and I got the sentence about the Crown. Everybody waited to see what I’d do with it.”

“And what did you do with it?”

“I read it. The same as everybody read theirs. Then Inés read the next one, about the post roads, and nobody waited for her at all, and I think she was relieved.”

Peter Hartigan looked at him, chewing.

“Good.” He went back to his dinner. “Theo. How was school.”

“Fine.”

“Fine how?”

---

Kate came home on Sundays now on the number twenty-two from the college on the river, with a bag of washing and news of the girl from Ohio, Bethany, whose rabbit was called Professor and lived under the bed in a box that said TEXTBOOKS. The residence had a rule about animals. Bethany’s position was that Professor was not an animal but a member of the family.

“He ate my anatomy notes on Wednesday. The whole of the forearm.”

“Bones or muscles?” said Anneliese Hartigan at the stove, without turning.

“Muscles. Flexors. The ones you can’t remember anyway.” She looked at Theo. “You’d know. You’ve done forearms.”

“One forearm. Once. On a playing field. With my T-shirt.” He ate a potato. “I didn’t learn the names. I just pressed.”

A short silence. Anneliese Hartigan turned round with the pan and looked at her son the way she had on the apron in June, reading the brown under his fingernails. She put the pan on its mat and sat down.

“The names come afterwards. The pressing first. Anybody can learn the names.” She gave him more red cabbage without asking. “Eat that.”

He ate it.

---

At half past seven the doorbell went.

Nobody rang the Hartigans’ bell on a Sunday. It was broken. The woman from the second floor who wanted her parcels knocked. It had gone anyway, which meant somebody had pressed it hard enough and long enough to make it work.

Peter Hartigan looked at his wife. Anneliese Hartigan looked at Frederick.

At seven, on the terrace at Columbia Palace, a sergeant of the Guards had taught him to know who was at a door from the way they stood and knocked and waited. In nine years he had not been wrong.

“It’s Dame M.”

---

She stood on the landing in a grey suit, sixty, very upright, a leather folder under her arm, not breathing hard. Behind her the lift stood open with its light on, because it worked, and she had not used it.

“Good evening, Mrs Hartigan. Mr Hartigan.” A slight inclination past them into the room. “Sir.” And to Theo, exactly as at this door last October with the warrant: “Mr Hartigan.”

Theo stood up.

“You walked up,” said Anneliese Hartigan, looking at the lift.

“The lift is for people who need it, Mrs Hartigan. I don’t yet.” A pause. “I’m sorry to come on a Sunday, at supper. The Household wished the question to reach this table before anybody else’s, and I was told this afternoon that a paper in London means to print on Tuesday that it already has.” She looked at the plates. “I’ll wait outside until you’ve finished, if you’d prefer.”

Anneliese Hartigan considered her, and stood back from the door.

“Come in, Dame Margaret. Sit down. There’s cake.”

---

The only rule at the Hartigans’ table that Frederick had ever heard said aloud, he had heard once: at the first supper, at twelve, looking at a dumpling and not knowing whether he could ask what it was. Anybody who sits at this table eats what’s on it, Freddie. He had eaten it, and liked it, and never asked about anything on that table again.

Dame M sat at the end nearest the door in the chair Kate pulled out, folder on her knee. Anneliese Hartigan put a plate in front of her with a slice of the apple cake with crumbs on top, a fork, a cup of coffee, and sat opposite.

He had known Dame Margaret Roper since he was three: Master of the Household for all of it, and a captain in the Navy for twenty-two years before. He had watched her decline food at four state dinners, two garden parties, a reception for the Governor-General and a lunch with the Japanese Ambassador. Once, at two in the morning on the twenty-sixth of September last year, in the stone corridor of the north wing, a biscuit, standing up, as though it were a duty.

She picked up the fork.

She ate all of it, slowly and properly, crumbs and apple and base, in small pieces, while the Hartigans and the King of fourteen realms watched in perfect silence. She put the fork down square and drank some coffee.

“That is the best apple cake I have eaten since my mother’s.”

“It’s my mother’s. From Milwaukee. The recipe.”

“Then that explains it,” said Dame M, and opened the folder.

---

One sheet of the Household’s thick white paper with the crest, the same as the warrant, addressed to Mr Theodore Hartigan, Page of Honour. She laid it face up beside his empty plate and sat back.

Theo read it where it lay. Frederick, at the other end, could not have read it and did not try. He was holding his fork very tightly, and put it down.

“What does it say?” said Kate.

“It says,” said Theo slowly, “the Household asks whether I’d serve at the coronation. On the seventeenth of November, at Westminster. As one of the pages who carry the train.”

“There are four,” said Dame M, in the voice she kept for facts. “Four pages of honour for the train of the Robe of State, at the coronation and in the procession after. The other three are boys of about your age from London, sons of people who serve in the Household there, as has been the custom since before anybody can remember. The Household would like the fourth to be you.”

Theo looked up.

“The Household in London. Asked for me.”

“There is no Household in London, Mr Hartigan. Not as distinct from this one. There is one Household. It serves the King in every one of his realms. It is the Household that brought you your warrant, and the one that sent me up four flights of stairs tonight.” She looked at him. “When the King is in London it is in London. When he is here, it is here. Some of it is always in both. The people arranging the coronation sit in London because the coronation is there. The question of who carries the King’s train is not London’s question. It is the Household’s. And the Household is asking you.”

“Did he ask for me?”

He looked at Dame M, not at Frederick.

“No. He has asked for nothing about the coronation in four months, except whether his father can sit where he can see the altar, and whether the order of service can be printed in a type large enough for an old man to read without his glasses.” She did not look at Frederick either. “The Household thought he would want it. It has been wrong about what he wants before. It has never yet been wrong about what he would want without asking.”

---

Frederick stood up. Everybody looked at him, and he knew exactly what he was going to say, which did not often happen.

“I’m going to wait outside. It’s your question. If I’m in the room, it’s mine, whatever anybody says.” He looked at the paper by Theo’s plate. “My mother told me in March, about a vote in Hanover: it isn’t your question, and now you’ve asked it.” He took his jacket off the back of the chair. “So I’ll be on the landing. When you’ve decided, come and tell me. Whatever it is.”

“Freddie.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you mean it. Sit down.”

“No,” said Frederick, and went out and shut the door quietly behind him, and stood on the landing by the open lift, and put his shaking hands in his pockets.

---

At the end of the landing by the stairs was a tall narrow window of wired glass. On the sill, a spider plant in a yoghurt pot, an empty saucer, a paperback with no cover. Below, the yard of the depot: forty or fifty red-and-cream buses in rows under the lights, every blind set to NOT IN SERVICE, and a man in a high-visibility jacket walking slowly between the rows with a torch.

Behind the door, the shape of voices. Peter Hartigan low. Anneliese. A long silence. Kate, quick, going up at the end. Theo. Three or four words from Dame M. Theo again, longer. He did not listen for the words. He had decided at seven, on the terrace, without anybody telling him, that the one thing a person in his position must never do was listen at doors, because everybody would let him.

The man with the torch reached the end of a row and started back up the next.

Westminster. Once, at eleven, forty minutes from a gallery with his father: a great grey cold height, light coming through the windows in coloured bars onto the stone. A robe he had not yet tried on, coming in October in three boxes with three people from London and a tape measure. Its train, six yards of crimson, and four people behind him holding it up the whole length of the nave and down again, while the abbey and fourteen realms looked at the King and nobody looked at them.

Theo, behind him, holding it.

He wanted it so much he could not breathe properly, and he stood at the window and did not breathe properly, and was glad with his whole self that he had not been asked.

---

At ten past eight the door opened and closed behind him. Footsteps along the landing, not fast, that he had heard on the stairs at Ellicott every morning for four years. They stopped beside him.

“That’s Mr Lasko,” said Theo, after a while. “With the torch. Night foreman. Dad says he checks every bus every night for things people have left. He’s got a cupboard full of umbrellas. Once he found a wedding ring and it took him three months to find whose it was.”

“Did he?”

“He found her. She’d thrown it out of the window of the number nine on purpose, because of her husband. So he gave it back to her and she threw it in the river.” Theo watched the torch. “Dad says Mr Lasko didn’t mind. His job was to find it. Not to tell her what to do with it.”

A pause.

“I said yes.”

Frederick shut his eyes.

“On one condition. Like the last time. Dame M wrote it on the back of the paper in front of Mum.”

“What’s the condition?”

“That nobody calls it an honour.”

Frederick opened his eyes.

“Not the Household. Not the Palace. Not the papers in London on Tuesday. Not the Archbishop. Not you.” Theo looked down at the depot. “It’s a job. Holding a thing up so it doesn’t drag. There’s a rehearsal schedule and a fitting and a man from the Household in London who’s going to teach us to walk backwards down some steps without falling over the robe. That’s a job with stairs.” A pause. “I’ve already got one thing that’s mine and isn’t an honour. I’m not having this be the thing that isn’t.”

“What did Dame M say?”

His voice went, and he made it stop. “She said she could promise the Household would never use the word, and she couldn’t promise the newspapers. And she said if I wanted she’d write that down too, that she’d promised one and not the other, so I’d know which one to be angry at.” He looked sideways. “I said the Household was enough. She wrote it down and signed it. M. Roper. Then Mum gave her another bit of cake, and she ate it.”

“She ate two?”

“Two. Kate’s going to tell the whole college. Nobody’s going to believe her.”

---

Down in the depot Mr Lasko stopped at a bus near the end, opened its doors by hand and climbed in. The torch went along the windows from inside, seat by seat, and stopped. He came back down with something small, held it up to the torch, put it carefully in his jacket pocket, shut the doors, and went on.

“Umbrella?”

“Too small. Glove. Or a phone. Somebody’ll come for it, or they won’t. He’ll keep it either way.”

“Theo.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you say yes because it was me?”

Theo looked down at the buses in their rows.

“I said yes because Dame M walked up four floors, and ate two bits of cake, and said there is one Household and it’s asking you like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. And because Mum said it was mine and Dad said it was mine. And Kate said if I said no she’d never speak to me again, and then she said she didn’t mean it, and then she said she did a bit.” He looked at Frederick. “And because you went out on the landing, so it would be mine.”

“And me?”

“And you. Obviously. Underneath all of it. Don’t be stupid.” He turned from the window. “But don’t tell Dame M. It’s not in the condition.”

---

Dame M came out at half past eight with the folder and the signed sheet inside it, Anneliese Hartigan in the doorway behind her. She looked at the two of them by the window, and at the lift with its light on.

“Good night, sir. Mr Hartigan.”

She went to the head of the stairs and stopped with her hand on the rail and looked back at Theo.

“There will be a fitting, Mr Hartigan, in October, in the library at Columbia Palace, with the King’s. They will measure you for the livery the pages wear at Westminster, which is not the livery you wear here.” A very slight pause. “It involves breeches.”

Theo stared at her.

“Breeches.”

“White ones. To the knee. With buckles on the shoes.”

She went down, not fast and not slowly, four floors without stopping, and the block door opened and closed, and from the street, faintly, a car door.

In the doorway Kate had begun to laugh.

“White ones. To the knee.” She leaned on the frame. “I’m coming to London. I don’t care what anybody says. I’m going to stand at the front with a camera.”

“You’re not allowed a camera in the abbey.”

“Then I’ll stand outside and wait,” said Kate, and went back in, and they heard her say Kniehosen, Mama, and her mother say something short in German, and then, unmistakably, Anneliese Hartigan laughing too.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

“Yeah.”

“If anybody in the whole of the fourteen realms ever calls this an honour, you’re to tell them it’s a job with stairs.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“Promise.”

“I promise. Properly.”

“Good,” said Theo, and went in. Frederick followed and sat at the end of the table nearest the window, and Anneliese Hartigan put a slice of apple cake in front of him without a word, and he ate what was on it.