The Timetable

Columbia Palace, New Westminster Wednesday 1 November, after ten

Dear Alexander,

It was not a man in a sash. It was a woman in a hat, and she was Norwegian, and she did not say diminutives were for the nursery, she said they were common. And you did not laugh until you had to be taken out. You laughed until you were sick on her shoes, and then you had to be taken out. I have waited since we were seven to put that in writing. Otherwise you have it exactly right.

Dame M brought your letter up last night at half past seven, after the Council, on a tray, by itself, which is how she brings things she has decided are important and is not going to ask about. A man from your Embassy had brought it in a car at six and would not give it to anybody but her. She says he looked as if he had been told he would be shot if he did. She kept it back until the Council was over, because, she said, it was the first thing that had come for me all day that wasn’t for the King.

I should say the obvious thing, since you will have heard it long before this reaches you. I am King. It happened at two o’clock yesterday afternoon, in geometry. We were doing the angle in a semicircle, which is always a right angle wherever you put the point, and at two Mrs Pruitt’s computer made the noise it makes when the office sends something. She read it and went a bit pink, and said, “Frederick, could I have a word outside?”, which is what she says when you haven’t done the homework. In the hall she said, “The school’s just had an email. It’s two o’clock. I’m supposed to tell you.” Then she didn’t know what else to say, and neither did I, so she said, “Do you want to come back in?” and I said yes, because we were in the middle of the proof. Theo looked up when I sat down, and I nodded, and he went back to his book. At ten past two Dr Brooks, who is the principal, came on the loudspeaker, which she does for fire drills and snow, and said it to the whole school in about four sentences, and that I had gone back to my class and she would like everybody to stay in theirs. Everybody did. Mrs Pruitt waited until she had finished and then said, “Right. Where were we,” and we were at the point on the curve. That was all. There is nothing to do when it happens and nobody whose job it is to tell you, except, it turns out, a geometry teacher with an email.

I stayed till the end of the day and went to the hospital at four, as always. When I got home Dame M was at the door, and she said, “Your Majesty,” and then, “I’m sorry, I had to say it once,” and went away again. At six I sat at the Council in the same chair as before, and I still didn’t speak, which nobody told me to do and nobody told me not to. Then a man read a paper on the steps, and a great many people said God save the King, and I was upstairs and heard it through the window, and it was the strangest thing that has ever happened to me, and I’ve had an autumn.

I read it in the bath, which was my first bath as King. I don’t know why I’m telling you that. I read it twice, once fast and once slowly, and then I got out and sat on the floor in a towel and read the part about the five weeks a third time.

Nobody has told me that. I want to say so first, so that you know it landed. For five weeks everybody has told me I am doing very well, and last night they started telling me I am doing very well as King, which I had been for about four hours. The Governor-General has told me. Dame M has told me, in the voice she uses for the Navy. The man at the school gate who checks the passes has told me. Mamma has not, which is how I know she thinks what you think, and is waiting.

I don’t know if I’ve been in my shape. Some days yes and some days no, and I can’t tell which from the inside, exactly as you said. The day they found the wreckage Mamma came to school to tell me herself, and I asked to finish the period, and everybody has said since that it was very brave. It wasn’t. It was geometry, and I wanted to know if I’d got the angle. I had. I don’t think that was Haltung. I think it was geometry.

So, thank you. That’s the first thing.

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The second thing is your three things. I’m going to take them in order, because you put them in order, and because I am eight months older than you and supposed to be the one giving advice, and instead you have given me three, so I am going to have to give you one back or it won’t be fair.

Mamma. I asked her last night, the way you said, before she could get into the habit, which in her case meant before the first morning. It was Tuesday. I went down to her study at eleven, because neither of us was going to sleep, and said I wanted to see everything she decides in my name. Not to decide it. To see it. We speak Swedish, which helped, because my Swedish is worse than my English and I can’t make things sound clever in it, so it came out exactly as plain as it was.

She took her glasses off and looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “Who told you to ask that?”

I said nobody.

She said, “That is not true, and I am not going to ask who, and the answer is yes.”

She is going to put the papers on the kitchen table on Tuesday evenings and we’ll go through them, and I’m not allowed an opinion until the second Tuesday. She said it was the first sensible thing anybody had asked her since September. Then she put her glasses back on.

I don’t know who she thinks it was. I’m not going to find out. We are a family that doesn’t ask things, which I’ll come back to.

The record. You said that here there is no Council, only my mother and an Act. There is a Council, actually. It’s the Privy Council, and I sit at it. For a month I wasn’t allowed to speak at it, which you will agree is worse, and last night I was allowed and didn’t. On the day she was sworn I sat at the table under section 4 of the Regency Act, which is the part about me, and afterwards I asked the Clerk for a copy, and I’ve marked it in two colours, red for what she can do and blue for what she can’t. There is a great deal more red. I could have told you that without the pens.

I took notes that day, but they were notes of what other people said. I hadn’t thought of writing down what I think and putting a date on it. I’ve started. It’s a green school exercise book, and the first page says 1 November. The realms were right to do it together and not one at a time. F. That’s all so far. It isn’t very interesting, and I hope it stays not very interesting.

The oath. It isn’t until May. Mamma has taken hers, the Regent’s, and mine wait until I’m sixteen, and the coronation is after that, in London, on a date nobody will tell me. But I don’t need a clock. I’ve got a timetable. I can do the arrivals at Union Station for any day of the week, from the six-fourteen from Richmond to the last train in from Boston at eleven fifty-two, and if I start at the beginning it takes about an hour and a half, and nobody can see me doing it. You can have your clock. I’ll have the five-forty from Baltimore. I’ll think of you when it comes in.

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The third thing is Papa. It’s harder, so I’m going to say it plainly, because otherwise I’ll make it a joke and you’ll know I’ve done it.

I go to the hospital every day after school, from four to five. I do my homework by the bed, and in the last quarter of an hour I read him tomorrow’s arrivals out of the timetable, so he knows what’s coming. I started in the first week, when he couldn’t hear anything and the nurses thought it was odd. Then he woke up, and now he waits for it. He knows us. He knew me the first morning. He has some words. They come out in the wrong order, or they don’t come, and he gets angry with them, and he was never angry with anything before. He was always the calmest person in any room. You will have read what I said for him. He said it to me first, and then I said it to everybody, and it was the worst minute of my life, because it was true and it was his.

He is the Duke of Cumberland now. Nobody in the hospital knows what to call him, so they call him sir, and I think he likes it better than anything else he has been called this year.

Today I read him your letter.

Not all of it. The part about the Tiergarten. The drawers, and the fourteen, and the very large desk. I didn’t know about it. He never told me. He used to ring me every Sunday at four and ask me which Crown assents to what, and he told me everything about the Crowns that way for years, and he never once told me he’d walked you round the Tiergarten in the rain for an hour so you would laugh. I read it to him slowly, the way I read the trains. When I got to the end he turned his head on the pillow and looked at me for a long time, and then he said, very clearly, the clearest word he has said all week,

“Desk.”

Then he laughed. Not much. But he did.

I went out into the corridor and stood at the window for a bit, and the man from my detail stood at the other end of the corridor and looked at the ceiling, which is what they do. Then I went back in and finished the trains.

I wanted you to know that he heard it, and that whatever is happening to him he knew what he’d said to you in February, and he was pleased you’d kept it. I’m going to keep it too. I need a desk now, not one day. Fourteen drawers, fifteen with Sweden. Theo says his dad knows a man who sells second-hand office furniture, and that nobody would ever think of looking for a King’s desk there.

There is one other thing Papa said to me, the last Sunday, that I haven’t told anybody. I’m not going to tell you either. But it was good, and I wanted you to know there is one.

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Now mine, so it’s fair.

You wrote that you don’t know why you don’t want Charlotte to know. That is a half-answer, and you know I can’t leave those.

I think you do know. You told me once, two summers ago, and then told me to forget it, and I didn’t. You think it should be hers. And she would be kind about this, and her being kind is the thing you can’t bear, because you think she has been kind about the wrong person having it for fourteen years.

And then what?

I mean it. Say you go on thinking it should be hers. You are still the Emperor on Monday morning, and she is still your sister, and now she is your Regent as well. Charlotte has never said it should be hers. You are the only one who says it. She is running two Crowns for you and writing to me about a novel neither of us will give in on, and I don’t think a person who is angry about a Crown has the time to argue about a novel. You don’t know what she wants. You know what you think she should have, which is a different thing.

I’m not saying tell her. I won’t tell her; I promised. I’m saying that you’ve built a whole thing on what she hasn’t said, and you are the person who has just told me to write down what I actually think, with a date on it, so that nobody can say later that I thought something else.

That’s all. You can tell me I’m wrong. You’re allowed. You’re an Emperor, and I’ve only been a King since yesterday afternoon, which I don’t think is long enough to argue with you.

One more thing, and then I’ll stop being serious. Since two o’clock yesterday afternoon you have been second in line to my fourteen Crowns, behind your mother. I looked it up. I am writing it down once, with a date on it, the way you said, so that it is on the record that we both know, and that we are never going to talk about it.

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Some other things, quickly, because Dame M has been past the door twice and she doesn’t walk past doors by accident.

I told Theo. Only Theo. You said to find one person, and you told Lukas, so we’re even. Theo says thank you to Lukas, and that he asked his mother about the shoes, because she’s a nurse and stands up for a living, and she said the shoes are not the problem, the knees are, and you must never lock them. He says Lukas is to come to the flat if he is ever in New Westminster, and that he will have to eat what’s on the table, because everybody does. He also says to tell you that he calls me Freddie and he is not going to stop for anybody, including the Crown, which is me now, and if you have a problem with it you can write to him. They made him a Page of Honour last night. He says it means standing next to me on three days a year and not laughing, and he doesn’t think he can do the second part.

The Prime Minister came to see me the day after Papa was lost, and we talked for twenty minutes, and we agreed not to tell anybody what about, so I won’t. After my first Council he sent me a note that said Welcome to the table. It is the worst seat in the room and the best view. I wrote back and asked whether he had read section 4. He wrote back one word, which was Twice. I think I like him. Until September he sold atlases in a bookshop near Charter Hill. I asked Mamma last week if I could go and buy one. She said that a Prince in a hat is still a photograph of a Prince. I haven’t asked her what a King in a hat is.

Write from Potsdam. I want to know what you see. I’ve never looked through a proper telescope. There is one at Solliden that belonged to Elsa’s grandfather, and Nils said you could see Russia with it. You couldn’t. You could see Kalmar.

Yours, with every formality, of which I have had a great many more since two o’clock yesterday,

Frederick

P.S. I have signed it Frederick, and not George R. I am going to go on signing it Frederick to you until I’m forty. After that we’ll see.

P.P.S. You said you didn’t know what to say to a boy whose father is stopping slowly. You did. You told me what he said to you. That was the thing to say.