The Ninth Day

At a quarter past eight on Monday morning Mr Abernathy called the register.

The brown jacket, cleaned. A smaller white bandage round the palm of his left hand. On the desk not a water carton but the roll book of the ordinary homeroom, thirty names. Sun through the long windows over the playing field, across the desks and the two radiators that had never worked. Outside, somebody marking the lines for sports day with a machine that hissed.

Everybody had been there since eight. Nobody was late. That had never happened in four years, and Mr Abernathy did not remark on it.

“Abrams.”

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

Diaz. Eckhardt. Feeney. Gallagher. Grant. The homeroom voice, level and dry. Each name, the answer, the small mark, the small pause after every name that was for everybody, to give them time. The speed he had read fifty-eight names at, six times, on a playing field in Santa Monica with a gap at the bottom.

“Hanover.”

“Here.”

The mark. He did not look up or slow down or change his voice by a hair.

“Hartigan.”

“Here,” said Theo.

Ibrahim. Jansen. Kowalski. Moreno. Novak. All thirty. Then Mr Abernathy put the pen down square to the edge of the roll book, and took off his glasses, which he had never once done in homeroom, and looked out at the man on the field with the line-marking machine, and put them back on.

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

---

“That’s it?” said Theo at break, on the bench by the bike racks. “He didn’t even look at you. He read it like a normal Monday.”

“Yes.”

Theo looked at him.

“You liked that,” he said slowly.

“It’s the best thing anybody’s done for me since Thursday. Including the Air Force.”

Theo thought about it with his chin on his fist.

“I’m going to tell him you said that.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“I’m going to write it down and fold it in half and give it to Castellanos.”

---

“Sergeant Castellanos,” said Dame M at lunch, without opening her folder, in the voice she kept for things somebody should have dealt with before they reached her, “has been on duty in one capacity or another from half past five on Tuesday morning until now, and declined to stand down on arrival. He will go home at nine this evening, when the night officer comes, because the Master of the Household has told him so in writing.”

“In writing?”

“He does not take it any other way.”

At five to nine Frederick went down the stone corridor of the north wing with two cups of coffee. He had made them at the range with Bridget watching from the sink with her back not quite turned, because he had asked her how and she had told him once and then stood there to see that he listened. White cups from the dresser, no crest, because Bridget said the crested ones were for people who wanted to be looked at and Castellanos did not.

Castellanos was on the chair at the end of the corridor under the lamp, and stood up.

“Sit down. Please.”

He did not. He looked at the cups.

“It’s coffee. I made it. Bridget showed me.” Frederick held one out. “You said in California you drank the worst coffee in the state as a duty. I wanted you to have one that wasn’t.”

Castellanos took it and held it, standing. He was not going to sit while the King stood. So Frederick sat on the stone step of the north wing door with his own cup in both hands, and after a moment Castellanos sat on the chair.

It was good. He had not known whether it would be.

“This is good coffee, sir.”

“It’s Bridget’s. I just poured the water.”

“Then it’s the best in the Realm, and I’ll say so to anybody.”

---

“Sergeant.”

“Sir.”

“On Friday. On Twenty-Second Street. When I was in the gap, you had my ankles. The whole time. I could feel your hands.”

Castellanos said nothing.

“And afterwards, when they brought her out, you sat down on the boards and put your head on your arms.” He looked up. “I’ve never seen you sit down. Not on the bluff or in the gym or on the lawn. You don’t sit down.” He stopped. “I wanted you to know somebody saw it. That’s all.”

Castellanos looked at the far end of the corridor, where the stone floor went round the corner to the kitchen, for a long time.

“Sir. May I tell you something. It isn’t a thing a protection officer tells a principal. I’d like to tell you anyway, and then I’d like it not to have been said.”

“Yes.”

“When I lost you in the gym, I had your collar in my hand. And then I had your collar in my hand and you weren’t in it.” He turned the cup in his fingers. “I went down every street within a mile of that school. I didn’t answer the radio, because I’d have had to say it, and I couldn’t. Not to Kimura, not to the Palace, not to your mother. I’d said four words to your mother nineteen times on Thursday. Alive. Unhurt. Bluff. Holding. On Friday at two I had nothing to say to her. So I didn’t answer.”

Frederick waited.

“Then I came round a corner on Twenty-Second Street and there was a heap where a house had been, and a boy on his front on the boards with his arm in a hole up to the shoulder, and it was you. I could see the size of the gap. I knelt and took your ankles, because that was the only part of you I could reach.” He looked at Frederick. “And I want to tell you the thing I came out here tonight intending never to tell you, sir. If the beams had moved, I’d have pulled you out. By the ankles. Whatever was on the other end of your arm. I’d have pulled you out and let her go. I’d have been right to, and I’d never have forgiven myself, and I’d have done it again.”

The lamp hummed over the door. Down the corridor, Bridget’s radio murmuring in the kitchen.

“I know,” said Frederick.

Castellanos looked at him.

“I knew on the heap. I could feel it in your hands. That you’d pull.” He looked into his cup. “That’s why I could stay in. If you hadn’t had my ankles I don’t think I could have kept my arm in the dark for twenty-two minutes. I kept it there because I knew if it went wrong somebody would get me out.” A pause. “So it was both of us holding on. Her hand and my ankles. I wanted you to know that too.”

Castellanos sat very still.

Then he nodded once, slowly, and drank the rest of the coffee, and stood, and set the white cup down on the step beside Frederick, square. The night officer had come round the corner from the kitchen, seen them, and gone back round it.

“Good night, sir.”

“Good night, Sergeant.”

“I’m told I’m to go home.”

“In writing.”

“In writing,” said Castellanos, and something happened at the corner of his mouth that on any other man would have been a smile, and he went out into the dark, and Frederick listened to his footsteps on the gravel, not fast, not slow, all the way to the gate.

---

The week came in envelopes, more of them than boxes, most from people who did not usually write.

On Tuesday, a short letter from Lieutenant Yeboah in reply to the one that had gone back with his watch. He would be keeping the letter. He hoped His Majesty would not think it improper if he also kept the watch exactly as it was, on Eastern time, because it had been on the King’s wrist from Riverside to Maryland and he did not intend to change it again.

On Wednesday, a letter from the Governor of California on the thick cream paper with the embossed crown. The glass was going in, the porch windows first. Nine hundred people on the lawn, and more in the Royal Parks Service camps in the mountains than she could count. The cardboard sign still on the railings. Mrs Okada asked her to say the cutting was in a drawer. He had written on Monday night, a long letter, and at the end, in a line of its own, asked about a lizard. She had gone to Twenty-Second Street on Tuesday because Señora Ruelas asked her to. Señora Ruelas was staying with her daughter in Culver City and had a cracked rib and a great deal to say about it.

Loose in the envelope, a photograph. A low white garden wall in the sun, roses growing up it, red and pink and yellow with dust on them, and in the middle, very small and brown with its head up, a lizard.

On the back, in pencil, in a careful old hand that leaned to the right:

Para la hermana. De parte de Esperanza Ruelas, que no es tan flaca.

He gave it to Kate that evening at the Hartigans’ kitchen table, where the rule was that anybody eating at it ate what was on it. He put it face down beside her plate and said nothing. She turned it over and looked at it a long time, and turned it back and read the back, and got up and went behind the partition in the bedroom for ten minutes. When she came out she had stuck it on the wall above her bed with four pieces of tape, and she sat down and ate her dinner and said, without looking at him, “Fine. We’re even.”

On Thursday, the Prime Minister, at six in the small study on the first floor, in the chair he always sat in, for forty minutes on the Supplementary Estimate and the reconstruction and the committee. Getting up, he put a single sheet face up on the desk and said nothing about it and went. One clause of the Estimate as voted on Friday, marked in the margin in pencil in a small upright hand that was not a clerk’s. Assistance under this Part shall be assessed on the damage suffered by persons, and not on the value of property held.

He read it twice.

On Friday morning, an envelope for Theo, by hand to the Hartigans’ flat on the Household’s paper. Theo put it on the bench by the bike racks between them at break and waited. From the Master of the Household. The Household had considered Mr Hartigan’s representation of Saturday the second of June, made on the apron of the capital’s military airfield in the presence of witnesses, concerning the terms of his warrant as a Page of Honour. The warrant carried no salary, and this was unchanged. The Household nonetheless recognised a loss sustained by Mr Hartigan in the course of the Crown’s business on Thursday the thirty-first of May, at approximately nine forty-one in the morning Pacific time, at the top of a Ferris wheel at Santa Monica, and therefore enclosed, by way of an honorarium, in full and final settlement, the sum of eleven pounds.

A ten and a one, both new.

“Was this you?”

“I asked Dame M what a hat cost.”

“It was eleven pounds.”

“I know. You told me at Valencia. You said you were going to wear it until you died.”

Theo sat with the letter in one hand and the money in the other, and his face went completely red.

“This is the most showing-off thing you’ve ever done in your life.”

“More than the I?”

“More than the I.” He folded the ten and the one together very carefully into the envelope and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket and buttoned the jacket over it, the way Mr Abernathy had buttoned his over the list. “I’m not spending it. I’m keeping it. In case.”

“In case of what?”

“In case I ever need a raise.”

---

On Saturday the ninth he woke at six, the way he still woke at six, and lay a long time in the quiet, and went down to the kitchen, because that was where the radio was. Bridget put a cup of tea in front of him without asking. He sat at the end of the long table nearest the range and waited, without telling himself what for.

The clock over the range said four minutes to nine, which meant nine.

All week the radio on the dresser had been on, very low. On Tuesday, the Pacific had run again from Los Angeles to the north, slowly, as far as Santa Barbara. On Wednesday, the Sunset Limited had left the yard by the river. On Thursday, at last, the Southwest Chief had gone east from Union Station at six in the evening for Riverside and the desert and Phoenix and Gallup and Winslow and Chicago, on time, every seat taken. A long silver thread on the straight line across the March.

Nobody had said anything about the Pomona line. He had not asked. He had not wanted to be told not yet.

At nine the music stopped, and the little tune before the news, and a woman’s voice from New Westminster, level. The Prime Minister in the Commons. Rain on the Lakes. The death of an actor. From the Commonwealth of California: the search goes on. A road reopened. The Governor at Ventura. And then, in the same level way:

And the interurban’s Pomona line reopened to passenger service this morning, nine days after the earthquake of the thirty-first of May. The first train, the six-oh-two from Pomona to the Plaza, left on time, the authority said, and was full.

Then the weather.

The tea went cold in front of him. He did not move.

At the sink, with her back to him, Bridget did not turn round.

“Is that your train?” she said, to the window.

“Yes.”

“The one the man drove? The one you told me about?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” A moment. Then, still not turning, quite fiercely: “Well, then.”

---

At a quarter past nine the old cream telephone on the wall by the dresser rang, the one with the curly cord that the kitchen used for tradesmen and the Household used for nothing. Bridget said kitchen, and listened, and held it out to him across the room at the full length of the cord, with a face he could not read.

“Switchboard, pet. A call from California. A gentleman from Pomona. He wouldn’t give his name. He said you’d know the time.”

He crossed the kitchen and took it.

“Hello.”

A hiss, and a long way off a kitchen, a tap running, a woman saying something sharp in Spanish, and then close, old, rough, a little out of breath, as though he had come in from the yard to make the call:

“Six-oh-two.”

Frederick shut his eyes.

“On time. Six-oh-two. Not six-oh-three. I was in the yard doing the tree, with the radio on in the kitchen, and I heard it. Same as November. Going west to the Plaza, over the bridge at the Santa Ana, the one that sings. Five cars. Full. You can hear it’s full in the brakes at the crossing.” A breath. “Somebody’s driving it.”

“Did you sit down?”

A silence.

“On the grass. Like a baby. Seventy-three years old. Yoli says I’m a disgrace to the family and she’s going to tell the King.” Another breath. “I’m telling him first.”

“Thank you, Mr Paredes.”

“Did you get the lemons?”

On the dresser beside the cake tin and the radio, in a blue china bowl Bridget had taken down from the top shelf for them, eleven lemons. They had come on Thursday by the ordinary post in a cardboard box with too many stamps on it, addressed in capitals, THE KING, COLUMBIA PALACE, NEW WESTMINSTER, PRIVATE, and Dame M had brought the box up on the silver tray by itself and set it down and said nothing at all. Enormous. The yellowest things in the kitchen. Bridget had made a cake with two of them on Friday and said, to the sink, that she had never had a lemon like it in her life and did not intend to say so to anybody from California.

“Yes. Bridget made a cake.”

“Who’s Bridget?”

“She runs the kitchen.”

“Tell her they’re better in a salad. With oil. Tell her a motorman from Pomona said.” Then lower, as though he had turned away from the woman behind him: “And tell your father. The six-oh-two. Tell him it came back on the ninth day. You said it would, on the radio. You didn’t finish it. But you said it.” Quiet. “Tell him it came back again.”

---

At four o’clock on Saturday afternoon he sat in the chair by the bed on the sixth floor with the blue book on his knee, the sun coming round from the river window, his father on three pillows facing the door.

No homework. It was Saturday. And he did not wait for the last quarter of an hour. His father, of all the people in the Realm, would understand there were days the arrangement could be moved by forty-five minutes.

“Papa. It came back.”

His father looked at him.

“The six-oh-two. From Pomona to the Plaza. This morning. On time, on the ninth day. Full.” He opened the blue book and did not look at it. “The ABC said it at nine, and Mr Paredes rang the kitchen at a quarter past. He was in his yard doing the lemon tree and heard it go by, and he sat down on the grass again, like November. He said to tell you. He said, tell your father it came back again.”

His father’s breath went in, and held. Frederick waited.

The mouth did not move this time. The lips did not try any shape. His father lay with his eyes on Frederick’s face and held the breath a long time, and then let it out, slowly, all of it, the way you let out a breath you have been holding since Friday at two, or since the twenty-fifth of September. His hand moved on the blanket. Not palm up. Flat, across the folded newspaper to the edge of the bed by Frederick’s knee, and lay there still, the way a hand lies on a table when the thing it was waiting for has come.

Otra vez.

“Shall I read you the arrivals? Tomorrow’s?”

Less than a nod.

From the book this time, because the book was on his knee and that was the arrangement. In order, first to last, in the voice from the tannoy at Union Station. Six fifty-eight. The Capitol, from Chicago. Via Pittsburgh. The Crown Limited from Boston. The locals from the Maryland side and the Virginia side. All of them, coming in. At the foot of the page, where the book stopped, he did not stop. He went on from no book at all, in the same voice.

“And at six-oh-two, Pacific time, from Pomona. The interurban. To the Plaza. Via the bridge at the Santa Ana. All stations.”

His father was looking at him, not at the book. The breath, the hold, the lips trying the shape, once, and again.

Frederick waited.

“Again,” said his father.

In English. Two syllables. The word at the bottom of Theo’s map in the queue for the last ride at Valencia, small, in pencil. Nobody had told his father about the map. He had said it the way you say it to somebody who has just read you something you want to hear twice.

Frederick looked down at the blue book. Open at Sunday. He did not need it. He had known it since he was nine.

He turned back to the top of the page.

“Six fifty-eight,” he said. “The Capitol. From Chicago.”

And he read it again.