Seventeen

He woke at six.

The light was already up. May. The crack in the corner of the ceiling, the shadow under it gone, because the light came from the window now and not from the snow. Somewhere along the Axis a blackbird.

Seventeen.

He lay and looked at the ceiling and tried to feel it, the way he had tried in a geometry room at two o’clock a year and a half ago to feel something else, and could not find it anywhere. He was exactly the same as yesterday. He supposed that was what birthdays were.

A year ago this morning, at ten, in the library, with the Charter open between the brass lions, he had said the oaths in his own voice, all of them, and his mother had stopped being Regent at the end of the last word. A year in his own right. He had done the boxes every night. He had read the Speech. He had walked a hundred and twenty-three yards.

He got up.

---

On the dresser in the kitchen, beside the cake tin, there was another tin.

He had never seen it. Round, dark green, with a picture on the lid of a castle on a hill that was not any castle he knew, and a dent in the side. Bridget was at the range with her back to him.

He sat down. Eggs. Toast. The second piece at his elbow. Milk.

He looked at the green tin.

“It’s not for now,” said Bridget, to the range. “It’s for four o’clock.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a tin,” said Bridget.

---

At a quarter past eight Mr Abernathy came in and sat down and opened the roll book and took out his pen and looked at the room over his glasses for perhaps a second.

“Abrams.”

Nothing. He never did. Not on Halloween, or the thirty-first of October, or the morning after a coronation, or the first day back after a list in the newspaper with his own first name in it. He read the roll.

“Hanover.”

“Here.”

The pause after it was exactly the same as after every other name.

At the end he closed the book and put the pen away.

“Radiators are fixed. Don’t touch them. The end.”

And then, as the room got up, without looking at anybody, in exactly the same voice, to the long windows over the playing field:

“Many happy returns, Hanover.”

Thirty-one people stopped where they were.

Mr Abernathy picked up the roll book and went out of the room.

---

“He said it,” said Theo, on the stairs. “He said it. Out loud. To the window. In four years he has never said anything to anybody that wasn’t the roll or the radiators or I’d prefer not.” He went up a step. “Marcus is going to need to lie down.”

“It’s because I’m seventeen.”

“It’s because you didn’t put me on the list,” said Theo, “and he knows, and he can’t say that, so he said this.” He stopped on the landing. “That’s my theory.”

He took something out of his blazer pocket and held it out.

A small flat package in brown paper, tied with string. Frederick took it.

“Don’t open it here,” said Theo. “Open it at four. With your dad.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s for both of you,” said Theo, and went on up the stairs to chemistry.

---

The letter from Potsdam was on the silver tray at lunch, by itself.

Alexander’s hand. Small, upright, very even, like a printed thing.

Dear Frederick,

It is clear here tonight, and I am in the dome, and Lukas is on the floor. Arcturus is up in the east, very orange, the way it was a year ago tonight when I wrote to you and did not finish. I have finished since. You know that. You were there.

I wanted to tell you a fact, because you like facts. Light from Arcturus takes about thirty-seven years to reach us. So the light I am looking at tonight left it in 1993, when your father had reigned for twenty years and nobody had thought of either of us. And the light that left it tonight will get here in 2067, when we are fifty-four, and somebody else will be looking.

I find that a comfort. I do not know if you will.

Happy birthday. You have done a year. So have I, nearly. Neither of us has become one of them yet. I am checking. I assume you are.

Alexander

P.S. Lukas says happy birthday. He said it in German, and then he said it again in English, which for Lukas is a speech.

---

At six the Prime Minister came, because it was Thursday.

Down the Axis at a quarter to, with the satchel, looking in the windows. Into the small study at six exactly. Four things, without a paper. The Lakes. A treaty. The Coast Service. And the Reconstruction Bill, which had gone back to the Lords for the third time on Tuesday and was, he said, very nearly home, sir, and I’ll tell you when it is, and not before.

He did not mention the date.

At the door, with his hand on the handle, he stopped, as he always did now.

“Many happy returns, sir,” said Lord Whitlock.

Three words. Then he went down the stone stairs and out, and from the window Frederick watched him walk back up the Axis in the May evening under the new leaves, looking into every window as he went.

---

But that was at six. At four there was the kitchen.

His father at the end of the table in the chair with the brake on, in a jacket, not the dressing gown, for the first time since the abbey. His mother at the side of the table, in the chair she never sat in at four. Niamh in the doorway. Bridget at the range.

The blue book on the table by his cup. The summer timetable would come on the twentieth; he had checked; his father had checked.

Bridget turned round from the range with the green tin in both hands and put it on the table in front of him and took the lid off and went back to the range.

A cake. Round, pale gold, glazed, with a crust of sugar on the top that had cracked as it cooled, and a smell coming off it that he knew at once.

“Lemon,” said Frederick.

“From Pomona,” said Bridget, to the range. “He sent a box. It came on Monday. With too many stamps on it and a note that said for the cake.” She turned the tap on. “I don’t know how he knew there was going to be a cake.”

“He’s a motorman,” said Frederick. “He knows the times.”

“The tin was my mother’s,” said Bridget, to the window over the sink. “It’s for birthdays. It’s had one in it every year since 1971.” She turned the tap off. “I’ve not used it here before.”

Nobody said anything.

He opened Theo’s package.

Brown paper, string. Inside, a single card, white, ruled, the kind you buy in packets of fifty. On it, in Theo’s handwriting, which leaned forward as though it were in a hurry:

ARRIVING. THURSDAY 2 MAY.

7.04 a.m. GEORGE. From Stockholm, 2013. Via New Westminster, Los Angeles, London, Königsberg. All stations.

And underneath, smaller:

17.

He looked at it.

Then he gave it to his father.

His father held it on the table under his hands and read it. Slowly. With his finger moving along under the line. Via New Westminster, Los Angeles, London, Königsberg. At All stations the finger stopped.

“Seven,” said his father. “Oh. Four.”

“That was the Capitol. In the autumn.”

“Time,” said his father. “You. Born.”

Frederick stared at him.

“Was I?”

At the side of the table his mother said, quite quietly, “Four minutes past seven in the morning. On the second of May. At the Karolinska, in Stockholm. Your father was in the corridor. He had been in it since three.” She looked at the card. “How did Theo know?”

“I didn’t know,” said Frederick. “I didn’t know it was the same as the Capitol.”

“Theo asked me,” said his mother. “In March. At the Hartigans’ door. I thought he wanted it for a horoscope.”

---

His father put the card down on the table, square, beside the lemon cake in the green tin.

He looked at Frederick.

The long look. The reading one. From the top of his head, seventeen this morning, to his shoes.

And then he did not take a breath.

That was the thing. Frederick saw it. Every word since September of the year before last had come out of his father the same way: the breath, and the hold, and the lips trying the shape, and then the word, alone, and then another breath. For nineteen months. In a corridor, at a window, on the steps of a throne. One word at a time, like stones put down across a stream.

His father did not take a breath. He opened his mouth and said it, all of it, at once, low and rough and quite clear, in one piece, the way anybody says anything:

“I am so glad you were born.”

---

Nobody in the kitchen moved.

Niamh in the doorway had her hand flat against the frame. His mother had gone very still. At the range, Bridget had turned round, which she did not do, and was standing with a tea towel in both hands, looking at the Duke of Cumberland.

His father looked faintly surprised. He looked at his own hands on the table, as though they had done it.

Then he looked back at his son, and his mouth moved at one corner, and he took a breath, a proper one, and let it out.

“There,” said his father.

Frederick could not say anything. He sat in the plastic chair at the corner of the kitchen table, seventeen, with a card from Theo and a lemon cake from Pomona in a tin from 1971 and his father at the end of the table, and could not say anything at all.

So his mother did.

“Cut the cake, älskling,” she said. “Before Bridget does it for you.”

“I would never,” said Bridget, to the range.

He cut the cake.