The Eleventh

On Friday Mr Abernathy had a cardboard tray on the desk.

He had it every year on the last school day before the Eleventh: a shallow box from the Legion with paper poppies in rows, the red crêpe kind with a black centre and a green plastic pin, and a tin with a slot in the lid. He read the roll. At the end he put the pen away and pushed the tray an inch towards the front of the desk, and that was the announcement.

They went up one at a time. A quarter each. The tin rattled.

Frederick had a silk poppy at home in a small box on his desk, made by the Legion for the King, with a pin that would not come undone in wind. Dame M had put it there on Wednesday.

He went up with a quarter. Mr Abernathy did not look at him. He looked at the quarter going into the slot.

“Hanover.”

“Sir.”

“Mind the pin. They come undone in wind.”

---

On Sunday he wore the paper one.

Dame M looked at it at the north wing door at nine, on the lapel of the dark coat, where the silk one should have been. She looked at it.

“The Legion will be gratified, sir,” she said. “They make the silk ones for the King and they have never once been sure he wanted them.”

“Mr Abernathy says they come undone in wind.”

“Then I shall stand behind you on the crest,” said Dame M, “and watch it.”

---

The crest at Arlington in a cold grey wind off the river. Fifty degrees. The white amphitheatre behind the Tomb. The chain at twenty paces. The sentry on the black mat, red coat, dark blue spiked helmet, twenty-one steps, the pause, the turn, the rifle moved from one shoulder to the other, twenty-one steps back.

He had done it before. That was the difference.

Last year every inch of it had been the first time: where to stand, how far, how long, whether to look at anything. This year he knew. The front row on the left. His mother beside him in a black coat. Behind them, two rows back, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition side by side as they were once a year, not talking. And at the end of the front row, a yard behind his left shoulder, in the dark blue coat with the scarlet facings, Theo.

Theo knew too. He did not look round to check where he was. He stood with his knees not locked, as the Regiment had told him last year, and his gloved hands behind his back, and looked at the Tomb.

The cousin who had been in the front row last year was in Königsberg, eleven weeks from his own crown. He had sent his wreath to Government House on Friday, as the rule said.

The paper poppy moved on Frederick’s lapel in the wind and stayed where it was.

---

The order of 1921. A priest at the side of the plaza reading it in a plain voice the wind took. O God, Our Help in Ages Past. Lead, Kindly Light. Abide with Me.

He sang them this year. He had not, last year. He did not know why he did now, except that he knew the words and had stopped wondering whether he was allowed.

His mother sang. Theo sang, at the end of the row, at the top of his voice, a little flat.

In Flanders Fields last, before the silence. Four minutes. A Canadian doctor’s poem from a war the Realm had not yet joined, which the Realm had sung on this crest for a hundred and eight years.

If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow.

The last chord went off down the hill on the wind.

Eleven.

---

The silence came over the crest like weather. Thousands of people on the slopes below, and the city across the river, and the whole Realm on the radio, and nothing.

He did not look at the crack in the lid. He knew where it was. He looked at the third line.

BROUGHT HOME FOR ALL THOSE WHO WERE NOT.

He thought about who was not. The ones in Belgium, under the stones there. The airman who had been here and was not now, because they had found his name. And a name on no stone in the Realm at all: a pilot he had never met, whose voice he had heard once in his mother’s study with the door shut. Very calm, very fast, in the dark, over the sea, to Gander. Three words, and his aircraft’s name, and nothing.

Squadron Leader Claire Holloway of the Royal Air Force. And beside her, Flight Lieutenant Owen Price. Not brought home. Not anybody’s to bring. They were in the sea east of Newfoundland with the aircraft, and their names were on stones in churches in England he had never seen, and they were not the Realm’s and not in its Book and had no right to be in this silence, and they were in it.

The paper poppy moved in the wind.

The bugle.

---

The Book was carried up and laid open on the lid at the page of the newest names. Then the wreaths.

The Crown’s first. He had done it before. He knew the weight of it now, the frame of wire under the leaves, how to hold it so the ribbon did not catch. Twenty paces alone on the paving beside the mat, at the pace you would walk to somebody’s door. The wreath down against the foot of the Tomb. Count to seven. Up. Turn. Twenty back to the chain, where Theo was standing two paces from it and one to the left, knees not locked, looking at the back of his head.

He did not hurry it. He did not slow it either. Last year he had been afraid of both.

Behind him, in their order, the governments, the services, the schools’ wreath, carried by a girl of about ten from a school in Oxnard, in a blue coat, who walked the twenty paces as though she had been practising on a lunch tray in a hall, which perhaps she had. The polities. The High Commissioners. The family chosen by the Legion.

Then the voice.

---

The Legion had chosen a woman of seventy-eight from Hazard, in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Her name was Dolores Pruett. She had been a nurse in the Army in Indochina in 1969 and 1970, at a hospital at the coast, and the programme said so in one line and nothing else.

She came to the front of the plaza with a sheet of lined paper that shook in the wind and in her hand, and put on her glasses, and could not find the first line, and took them off and put them on again.

“I’m not a speaker,” she said, into the microphone, too close, so that it popped.

Nobody moved.

“I was at the hospital at Vung Tau. Ward Six. Burns.” She looked at the paper. “They asked me to say something about the ones who didn’t come home. But I never knew those. Mine came home. I sent them home. On aircraft, in the night, wrapped up. Hundreds. I don’t know what happened to any of them after.” She stopped. “That’s what I wanted to say. That a lot of us never know. You put somebody on an aircraft and it goes, and you never know if it got there.” She folded the paper. “That’s all. I’m sorry. Thank you.”

She went and sat down.

It was the worst-delivered speech he had ever heard, and in it, and in the sentence about the aircraft, he could not breathe for a moment, and beside him his mother’s hand found his arm and stayed there.

The Act of Remembrance. Everybody, the whole crest, in unison, the third line, in the wind.

Brought home for all those who were not.

The Last Post.

---

That night at nine he made the coffee, although it was Sunday and they had never had it on a Sunday, because he was flying in the morning and they would not have it on Monday.

He carried the two white cups down the stone corridor. Castellanos was not on the chair. He was standing by the north wing door with his coat on, waiting, as though he had known.

“Sit down,” said Frederick.

Castellanos sat. Frederick sat on the step. The paper poppy was still on his coat; he had not taken it off.

They drank.

“Good,” said Castellanos.

The gravel, the lamp, the trees. The Monument, floodlit, and the river beyond it, and across the river, on the crest, where he could not see it, a single low lamp at the foot of the steps and a sentry walking.

“Sir,” said Castellanos, after a while. “You asked to be asked again. After the Eleventh. Before you go.”

“Yes.”

“The Private Secretary asks again.” Castellanos looked at the gravel. “The Royal Air Force asks whether you’d rather they used another word. Coming home. On the nineteenth.”

Frederick looked into his cup.

A woman from Kentucky with a sheet of paper. You put somebody on an aircraft and it goes, and you never know if it got there.

Fifty-six years. Every crossing. Hundreds of times: the word on a strip of paper in a dark room, and the controller saying it, and the aircraft landing, and nobody remembering, because it was ordinary. And then once.

“Tell them to use it.”

Castellanos looked up.

“Tell them thank you, and to use it.” He put the cup down on the step, square. “It was my father’s word for fifty-six years before it was the last thing anybody heard. It was Squadron Leader Holloway’s word. Every time she flew him. Hundreds of times.” He looked at the Monument. “I’d like it to have a next time. One that lands.”

Castellanos was quiet.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll tell him tonight.”

“Sergeant.”

“Sir.”

“Will you be on it?”

“I’ll be on it, sir,” said Castellanos. “I’ll be on all of them.” He finished his coffee and stood and put the white cup down beside Frederick’s, square, the two of them side by side. “Good night, sir. You fly at nine.”

“Good night.”

He sat on the step a while longer after the footsteps had gone down the corridor. The wind had dropped. He reached up and took the paper poppy off his lapel, carefully, by the green plastic pin, and looked at it. It had not come undone. He put it in the inside pocket of his coat, where it would go to London.