Boxing Day

The snow had stopped in the night, and in the morning the whole valley was white and still and blue in the shadows, and the sky over it was clear for the first time since September, a hard pale winter blue with nothing in it at all.

Jack was at the churchyard gate at ten with Ernest on his lead.

He had a woolly hat on and a scarf that somebody had knitted, badly, in Coln Saint Aldwyns colours, which were, as far as Frederick could tell, every colour that had been left over, and his face was red with cold and he was stamping his feet in the snow by the gate and he had the grin on before Frederick was halfway down the lane.

“Have you got it?” said Jack.

Frederick held up the map in its pink cover.

“Right,” said Jack. “You lead.”

“I’ll get lost.”

“You won’t. It’s drawn on.” Jack nodded at the map. “I drew it. In red. It’s got arrows. A dog could do it.” He looked down at Ernest, who was eating snow. “Well. Not him.”

---

So Frederick led.

He opened the map out at the churchyard gate, with his gloves off, in the cold, the way he had seen Mr Ferrante do on the coach with the map of 1779, and found the church, and found the red line going up from it, and followed it.

Up across the field behind the churchyard, which was white and smooth and untouched, so that their boots and Ernest’s paws made the first marks on it, deep, blue at the bottom. To the stile, which had a cap of snow on it a foot high, which Jack knocked off with his arm. Over the stile, into the next field, which was Purvis’s, and was marked on the map in red capitals PURVIS, and in which there were no bullocks, because it was December and the bullocks were in a barn somewhere being warm and nursing a grudge. Along the wall. To the gate. Through the gate. Up the lane between the high banks, where the snow had drifted against the hedges in long curling waves like the sea frozen in the act of breaking. Out at the top onto the open wold.

He stopped.

He had been up here in September, lost, in the grey, with the stubble shining wet and the sky low. It was not the same place. It was nothing like the same place. The whole wold was white, from the walls at his feet to the edge of the sky, mile on mile of it, rolling away in long smooth curves like a sheet laid over something sleeping, and the walls ran across it in long grey lines with the snow along their tops, and here and there a clump of trees stood up out of it, black, and far off a farmhouse with smoke going straight up into the blue, and over everything the light, so bright off the snow that it hurt, and the silence, so complete that he could hear Ernest breathing.

“Oh,” said Frederick.

“Yeah,” said Jack.

They stood at the top of the lane and looked at it.

“I come up here every Boxing Day,” said Jack. “If it snows. It hardly ever snows. It’s snowed four times since I was born.” He looked out at the white. “Dad brought me the first time. On his shoulders. I was three. I don’t remember it. He says I said where’s it gone.”

“Where’s what gone?”

“Everything,” said Jack. “The fields. The walls. Everything I knew. All white.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. “He says I cried. And then I stopped crying and said can we keep it.”

---

They walked along the track toward Ready Token, side by side, in the snow, with Ernest going ahead in long leaping bounds like a dolphin, disappearing completely into the drifts and coming up again white to the ears.

Frederick held the map. He did not need it. The track went straight between its two walls to the crossroads, and there was nowhere else to go. He held it anyway, open, in front of him, with his gloves off, and his fingers going numb, because Jack had drawn on it, and he wanted to look at the red line while he walked along it.

They did not talk for a while. It was the third time he had known Jack not talk. He was beginning to understand that it meant something, that Jack’s silences were rare and deliberate, like the Duke’s sentences, and you waited for them to finish.

At the crossroads, Jack stopped.

There was the post in the middle with the little round metal disc on it, pointing in a direction that was not any of the four, with a cap of snow on top of it like a hat. There were the four tracks going away between their walls in four directions, all white, all identical, all empty.

“You were here,” said Jack.

Frederick looked at the map. There it was, in red biro, at the crossroads: YOU WERE HERE.

“I was lost,” said Frederick.

“You were. Properly.” Jack looked at the post. “I came round that corner and there you were. Standing in the middle like you were waiting for a bus. With Ernest sat on your feet.”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“I know. It was all over your face.” Jack’s breath went up in a cloud. “I thought, that’s the most lost person I’ve ever seen. And then I thought, he’s got an American coat. And then you said Hanover.” He shook his head. “I said unlucky. I said you sounded like a butler.”

“I didn’t mind.”

“I know you didn’t. That’s the thing.” Jack turned and looked at him. “That’s the thing I keep thinking about. You didn’t mind. Anybody else would’ve minded. Anybody else, some lad from the village says you sound like a butler, they’d say do you know who I am.” He looked at Frederick in the snow at the crossroads. “And you just let me. For a mile and a half. You let me go on about cricket and Tom Windsor and the goat.”

“I don’t know about the goat.”

“I know. I haven’t told you yet.” Jack looked away, at the white wold. “I’m going to ask you something.”

Frederick waited.

“What is this,” said Jack.

He said it to the snow. He did not look round.

“What is it. You and me. Because I know what I want it to be, I’ve known since September, since the lane, since you said still Hanover, though, please, like it mattered to you what I called you. I know what I want. But I don’t know what you can have.” He kicked at the snow. “I don’t know what a King’s allowed. I don’t know if there’s a rule. There’s probably a rule. There’s a rule for everything with you, there’s a rule for which aeroplane your mum and dad go on.” He looked at the post with the disc on it. “And I don’t know if it’s just for the year. Because you’re here till June and then you’re going back to the Realm, which is four thousand miles away, I looked it up, and I’m here, and I’m always going to be here, I’m going to be in this valley till I’m Nan’s age, probably, on that wall.” He stopped. “So I’m asking. What is it.”

The crossroads was very quiet.

Frederick folded the map, carefully, along its folds, the way it had come, and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, against his chest, beside the place where a pale blue letter had been a fortnight ago.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Jack did not move.

“I don’t know what it is,” said Frederick. “I’ve never done this. I’ve never had anything that was just mine. Everything I’ve ever had, somebody’s had to say yes to. Somebody’s had to check.” He looked at the four tracks going away into the white. “But I know there isn’t a rule. I asked.”

Jack turned round.

“You asked?”

“Not about you. Not your name. I’d never say your name to anybody you didn’t want me to.” He looked at Jack. “But I asked my mother. In London. In October. Before Bonfire Night. Before anything. I asked her if there was a rule about who a King was allowed to.” He stopped. “To like.”

“What did she say?”

“She said no,” said Frederick. “And then she said, there is a rule about who a King is allowed to marry, and you are seventeen, and you are not going to marry anybody for a very long time, and when you do I will have opinions. And then she said, there is no rule about who you are allowed to like. There never has been. Your father liked a Swedish girl who could not cook and was a better shot than him, and everybody said it would be a disaster, and it was not.” He looked at Jack. “And then she said, is it somebody in the village? And I said I couldn’t tell her. And she said good.”

Jack stared at him.

“Your mum,” he said, “the Queen, said good.”

“She said it meant I’d found something I wanted to keep private, which she said was the first thing anybody needed to learn, and the last thing anybody in my family ever did.”

Jack was quiet.

Somewhere out on the white wold a crow went over, black, very slow, saying something to itself.

“And the year,” said Jack. “June.”

“I don’t know about June.”

“Nor do I.”

“I know I don’t want it to be just the year,” said Frederick. He had not known he was going to say it until he said it. “I know that. I know that’s not a thing I can promise. I know it’s four thousand miles. But I don’t want it to be just the year.”

Jack looked at him for a long moment at the crossroads at Ready Token in the snow.

Then the grin came. Not all of it. The beginning of it.

“Right,” said Jack. “Right. Well. That’s all right, then.” He pushed his hands deeper into his pockets. “That’s all I wanted to know. I don’t know what it is either, if it comes to that. I just wanted to know you didn’t know as well.” He looked down at Ernest, who had come back from a drift and was sitting on Frederick’s boot. “We don’t know, Ernest. Neither of us. Isn’t that good?”

Ernest looked up at him and sneezed.

“He agrees,” said Jack.

---

They went back down a different way. The way the second red line went, down a long white field toward the trees above the school. Halfway down it Jack stopped and scooped up a handful of snow and threw it at him, hard, from about four feet, and it hit him in the side of the head, and he stood in the field with snow down the back of his collar and the King of fourteen countries had never in his life been hit in the head with a snowball by anybody, because nobody had ever dared, and he turned round slowly and Jack was already running.

He caught him at the bottom of the field. He did not know how. Jack was faster on a cricket field, but Jack was laughing too much to run straight, and Frederick had played on the wing all term, and he caught him at the gate above the school and put a whole double handful of snow down the back of his collar, and Jack yelled, and Ernest barked, and somewhere behind them in the trees, at a distance, a woman’s voice said quite clearly, “Seven,” and they both stopped, and looked round, and there was nobody there.

---

At two o’clock that afternoon, while he was up on the wold, his mother walked up Church Lane in the snow to number nine and knocked on the green door.

He heard about it afterwards from three people, and they all told it differently, and he put the three of them together and thought he had most of it.

Mrs Haverfield had opened the door, in her cardigan and slippers, with Ernest, who had been brought back by then and had been put in front of the fire to dry and had come out to see who it was.

She had looked at the Queen of Sweden on her doorstep in a long grey coat and a fur hat with snow on her boots.

“Yes?” said Mrs Haverfield.

“I have come,” said the Queen, “to say thank you for waving.”

Mrs Haverfield had looked at her for some time.

“You’d better come in,” she said. “You’ll let the heat out.”

---

Sue Fennell said that the Queen had been in number nine Church Lane for four hours, and that when she came out it was dark and she was laughing and she had had, by Sue’s estimate, from the look of her, at least two gins.

Niamh said that the Queen had come back to the New Inn at a quarter past six and gone straight up to the Duke’s room and sat down on the end of his bed and said, she cheats, and the Duke had said who, and the Queen had said, the old woman, at cards, she cheats, she has been cheating at rummy since 1946, she told me so, she said she has never once been caught, and I watched her for four hours and I did not see her do it once, and she beat me eleven games to two.

And Mrs Haverfield herself told him, on the wall by the churchyard gate the next morning, with her hands on her stick, without turning her head:

“Your mother’s a terrible card player.”

“I know.”

“She holds them like a fan. Like a lady at a ball.” Mrs Haverfield made a small noise. “You can see every card she’s got. I told her. I said, you hold them like that, I can see every card you’ve got. She said, in Sweden we trust each other.” Mrs Haverfield made the noise again. “I said, this isn’t Sweden, this is Church Lane.”

“Did she change how she held them?”

“No,” said Mrs Haverfield, with deep approval. “She didn’t. She said I’m not going to start hiding my cards at fifty-six for a woman who cheats.” She looked at the church for a while. “She’s coming back next Thursday.”

“Next Thursday she’ll be in London.”

“Then the Thursday after.” Mrs Haverfield lifted her chin. “She said she’ll come down on the train. Every Thursday she can. She said, I have a whole Court in Stockholm and a whole Household in London, and not one of them will tell me I am a terrible card player.” She looked at Frederick sideways with her pale clear eyes. “I said, well, you are. She said, I know. That is why I am coming back.”

---

On New Year’s Eve the New Inn was full again.

It was full by nine. By eleven it was so full that people were standing in the doorway and in the lane outside, in the snow, which had come again in the afternoon, lighter, and was lying on the shoulders of the people in the doorway like lace. Sue Fennell had the fire up as high as it would go and the radio on behind the bar, tuned to London, and Bridget, who was flying home on the first of January, had made something hot in the iron cauldron that had hung in the fireplace since the seventeenth century and was ladling it out to anybody who held a cup in front of her, saying, to each of them, mind, it’s hot, in exactly the tone in which she had said you’re thin to Frederick on the green.

His father was at the table by the fire with the hazel stick across his knees.

He had been there since eight. He had been sitting very upright in the chair with his hands on the stick and watching the pub, the whole of it, the farmers and the old men and the card players and Gaz and Little Rob at the end of the bar and Mr Purvis in his fangs, which he had put back in for the occasion for reasons he declined to explain, and Mrs Haverfield in the corner with a small glass of something, and the Queen beside her, holding her cards like a fan; and his face, Frederick thought, watching it from across the room, was the face from the barrier at the end of platform nine. A man looking at something very carefully, end to end, because it was arriving.

At five to twelve Sue Fennell turned the radio up.

The whole pub went quiet. In the Realm, on New Year’s Eve, nobody went quiet; the Realm counted down out loud from ten in every bar and on every street corner and on the Axis in front of the Monument with a quarter of a million people, shouting, and then shouted, and then the fireworks went up over the river. Here they listened. A hundred people in a pub in a valley in the snow, listening to a radio behind the bar, and on the radio, from London, very faint, a long way off, the sound of a crowd, and then a bell.

The bell in the tower at Westminster.

The first stroke.

On the first stroke Sue Fennell said, quietly, “Happy New Year,” and the whole pub said it back, and on the second stroke everybody was kissing everybody else, and on the third stroke Gaz had picked Little Rob up off the floor, and on the fourth stroke Mr Purvis had lost his fangs, and somewhere about the seventh stroke the whole pub had joined hands, crossed over, in a great ragged circle that went round the fire and the tables and out through the door and into the lane, and was singing.

Frederick did not know the song.

He knew the tune. Everybody in the world knew the tune. He did not know the words, and nor, it was clear, did anybody else in the New Inn, because they sang the first verse loudly and confidently and then, at the second verse, fell into a great collective mumble, out of which, here and there, a single word rose clearly, like a fish jumping, and fell back.

He was holding Jack’s hand on one side and Mrs Haverfield’s on the other.

He had not chosen it. The circle had made itself. Mrs Haverfield’s hand in its woollen glove was very small and very hard, like a bird’s foot, and she was singing, in a thin high clear voice, every word of every verse, correctly, the only person in the pub who was, and looking straight ahead at the fire.

Jack’s hand was big and warm and was squeezing his so hard it hurt.

Across the circle his father was sitting in the chair by the fire with the hazel stick across his knees, because the circle had gone round him and left him in the middle of it, like a man in a ring of standing stones, and on one side of him his mother had his hand, and on the other side Mick Fennell had his other one, and his father was not singing, because he could not, but his mouth was moving, very slightly, with the tune.

And then the song was over and everybody was cheering and letting go and somebody had opened the door wide and the snow was blowing in and the radio behind the bar was playing something else and Sue Fennell was saying mind the floor, mind the floor, and in the middle of all of it Mrs Haverfield, who had not let go of his hand, pulled it, quite hard, so that he bent down to her.

“Young man,” she said, in his ear.

“Yes, Mrs Haverfield.”

She looked up at him with her pale clear eyes. Then past him, at Jack, who was being lifted off the ground by Gaz.

“He’s a good boy,” said Mrs Haverfield. “He’s loud, and he’s daft, and he can’t sit still, and he’s never read a book in his life. And he’s a good boy.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.” She held his hand very tight. “I’ve known since the bus. Since you said thank you for the ride.” She let go. “Happy New Year, sir.”

“Happy New Year, Mrs Haverfield.”

“Mind you look after him,” said Mrs Haverfield, and turned away into the crowd with her stick, very small, and was gone.

---

In the blue notebook, at one in the morning, in the room over the bar, with the pub still roaring underneath and the snow coming in past the window, he wrote:

Boxing Day. The wold under snow. Ready Token. Jack asked what this is. I said I don’t know. He said that was all he wanted to know. Snowball. Seven. Mum and Mrs Haverfield. Rummy. She cheats. New Year. Nobody knew the words except Mrs Haverfield. Mind you look after him.

And under it:

2031.