The London House

He had prepared what to say for a month.

He had prepared it the way he prepared everything, with the folder open. He had written it out, in the blue notebook, at the back, on pages he had torn out afterwards and burned in the fire in the Windrush common room one night when nobody was there. He had written it four times. The first time it had been a page and a half long and had sounded like a Speech from the Throne. The second time it had been a page and had sounded like a statement from the Household. The third time it had been half a page and had sounded like a letter of resignation. The fourth time it had been three lines, and he had read it over, in the common room, by the fire, and had thought that it sounded like nothing at all, and had burned that too.

He had practised it on the train. On the 16.42 from Kemble on Friday afternoon, in seat 42, looking out of the window at the fields going past, with Castellanos opposite and Theo beside him, he had said it over in his head, all four versions, one after another, and had not been able to decide between them.

At Swindon Theo had said, without looking up from his chemistry: “You’re doing the counting face.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. You’ve been doing it since Kemble.” Theo turned a page. “Whatever it is. Don’t count it. Just say it.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“Good,” said Theo, who knew exactly what he was going to say, and had never once asked. “Then you’ll say the right thing.”

---

The sitting room was at the top of the Palace, on the second floor, at the back, where his parents had lived since September. It was not one of the great rooms. It was a small square room with a low ceiling and a fire and two sofas facing each other and a window onto the garden, and on the mantelpiece a clock that kept perfect time, which his father had looked at in September and said no, and Niamh had made a man from the Household come and put it four minutes slow, and now it was.

His father was in the chair by the fire with the hazel stick across his knees.

His mother was on the sofa with her feet tucked under her, which she only did when nobody from the Household was in the room, reading a Swedish newspaper.

It was nine o’clock on Friday night. Niamh had gone down to her own room. Dame M had gone down to hers. The detail was at the end of the corridor. There was nobody else on the whole floor.

He sat down on the other sofa, opposite his mother, with the fire between them and his father at the end.

His mother put down the newspaper.

His father looked at him.

Neither of them said anything. They had known, he thought. They had known since he came in at a quarter to eight and kissed his mother and said good evening to his father and sat through supper in the small dining room that was not small and talked about the lamb, and the pancake, and the Privy Council in the beer cellar, and had not once, all evening, mentioned the village, or the New Inn, or anybody in it. They had known from that.

He looked at his father.

His father had his hands on the head of the hazel stick. His face was doing nothing, the way Mr Abernathy’s did at a quarter past eight. He was waiting. He had waited two years for words to come back to him a train at a time. He could wait for this.

All four versions went out of Frederick’s head at once.

“There’s somebody,” he said.

His father did not move.

“In the village. In Coln Saint Aldwyns.” He looked at the fire. “I didn’t mean it to happen. I didn’t plan it. It just.” He stopped. He thought about Ms Roberts in the tithe barn. Bottom’s never known what to say in his life and it’s never once stopped him saying it. “It’s Jack,” he said. “Jack Fennell. Mick’s son. From the bus. Sue’s son. From the New Inn.” He looked at his father. “You met him at Christmas. You argued about leaves.”

His father looked at him for a long time.

The fire made a noise. The clock on the mantelpiece, four minutes slow, ticked.

Then his father lifted one hand off the head of the stick, slowly, and turned it over, palm up, and held it out, a little way, in the air between them, the way he had held it out over the kitchen table at Columbia Palace every afternoon for two years when he had got to the end of the arrivals and wanted something, and did not have the word.

And then he found the word.

“Loud?” said his father.

---

Frederick stared at him.

His father’s face did not change. It stayed perfectly still. Except at the eyes. At the eyes something was happening that Frederick had seen once before, at the end of the long table at the New Inn on Christmas Day, when Jack Fennell had pointed a fork at him and said that leaves were not a reason.

His mother, on the sofa, had put her hand over her mouth.

“You knew,” said Frederick.

His father lifted two fingers off the stick. He tapped them, once, on the wood. Then he pointed, with one of them, very deliberately, at the floor. Down. Through the floor. Through two floors, to the room on the first floor at the end of the corridor with the window onto the mews, where, at that moment, Niamh was presumably sitting with her feet up.

“Niamh,” said his father.

“Niamh told you?”

His father shook his head slowly. He held up the two fingers again.

“Kitchen,” he said. “February.” A breath. “Two.” Another breath. “Nurses.” A longer one. “Four.” The longest. “Hours.” And then, with tremendous dignity, as though delivering a verdict: “Talking.”

“Kate,” said Frederick.

“No,” said his father. “Mother.” A breath. “Kate’s.”

“Mrs Hartigan?”

His father nodded, slowly, with deep satisfaction.

“Mrs Hartigan didn’t know. Kate knew. Kate promised she wouldn’t.”

“Kate,” said his father, “told.” He paused. “Nobody.” He paused again. “Mother.” A breath. “Saw.” He tapped the stick. “Plates.”

Frederick sat on the sofa.

He thought about Anneliese Hartigan, at lunch at the New Inn on the Thursday of half-term, at the other end of the long table by the fire, talking to Kit about nursing, not looking at the bar once. Not once. He had noticed it at the time. He had thought she was being tactful about Kate.

She had been being tactful about him.

“She saw the plates,” he said.

“Five,” said his father. “Minutes.” And then, very slowly, the whole of it: “Same as Kate.”

His mother, on the sofa, made a sound behind her hand that was not quite a laugh and not quite anything else.

---

“Is it all right?” said Frederick.

He had not meant to ask it. He had meant to say it, the way you say a thing that is true, and then let them say what they said. But it came out as a question, in a voice that was younger than he had heard himself sound in a long time, younger than the boy in the geometry class at Ellicott at two in the afternoon on the thirty-first of October.

His mother took her hand away from her mouth.

“Älskling,” she said. “I asked you on the aeroplane if he was kind. You said yes.” She looked at him across the fire. “That is the only question. It is the only one there has ever been. Everything else is somebody’s rule, and I have spent my whole life deciding which rules I keep.” She picked up the Swedish newspaper again, and folded it, and put it on the arm of the sofa. “I keep that one.”

His father had not said anything.

He was sitting with his hands on the hazel stick looking at the fire. He looked at it for some time. Then he looked at his son.

He lifted the stick off his knees, and held it out, across the gap between the chair and the sofa, the handle first, the way you would hand somebody a walking stick you wanted them to take.

Frederick took it.

He did not know why. He took the handle of the hazel stick that Mick Fennell had cut from a hedge at the top of the valley and dried in the shed behind the bus garage and shaped to a hand, and held it, and his father let go of the other end, and sat back in the chair, empty-handed, and looked at him.

“His,” said his father. “Father.” A breath. “Made.”

“Yes.”

“For me.”

“Yes.”

His father nodded slowly. He looked at the stick in his son’s hand.

“Good,” said his father. “Man.” And then, after a breath, and a long hold, and the lips trying the shape twice, the whole sentence, slowly, like a man laying the last stones on the top of a wall: “I would like to meet the boy properly.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Not,” said his father, “Christmas.” A breath. “Leaves.” A breath. “Properly.” He held out his hand for the stick. “Here.”

---

On Saturday afternoon his father showed him the window.

He did not say he was going to. He got up out of the chair in the sitting room at three o’clock, with the hazel stick, and went to the door, and looked back at his son on the sofa, and lifted his head, a quarter of an inch, which meant come, and Frederick came.

They went along the corridor on the second floor, slowly. To the end of it. To a narrow door that Frederick had walked past a dozen times since September and never opened, because it looked like a cupboard. His father opened it.

It was a staircase. Narrow, wooden, steep, going up, with a rope for a handrail.

“You can’t go up that,” said Frederick.

His father looked at him.

“Dad. It’s a ladder. There’s no rail. Niamh would.”

“Niamh,” said his father, with infinite patience, “is.” A breath. “Out.”

He went up the staircase.

He went up it the way he had gone down the Back Walk at Stirling, one step at a time, with the stick on the step above and his free hand on the rope, stopping at every step, breathing, and Frederick went up behind him with his arms out an inch from his father’s back the whole way, the way Castellanos had held his arm an inch from the Duke’s hand on the steps without rails, not touching, and it took four minutes, and his father did not once reach back for him.

At the top there was a small room under the roof.

It was empty. It had a sloping ceiling and bare boards and dust, and nothing in it except an old wooden chair with a rush seat, and one window, small, round, like a porthole, set low in the wall under the slope of the roof, so that you would have to sit on the chair, or kneel, to see out of it.

His father sat down on the chair.

He leaned forward on the stick and looked out of the round window.

Frederick knelt beside him on the dusty boards and looked out too.

Over the roofs. Over the trees at the edge of the garden, bare, and the high wall, and the road beyond the wall, and the roofs beyond the road, grey slate, chimneys, a long way of them, going south; and there, beyond all of it, at the very edge of what you could see, low down, a long dark line with movement on it, and a bridge, iron, across a river you could not see, and on the bridge, at that moment, very small, a train, going slowly in.

“Victoria,” said his father.

“The station?”

“Yes.” His father watched the train. “Six.” A breath. “Me.” Another. “Here.” He lifted one finger off the stick and touched the glass of the round window, very lightly, where the train was. “Every.” A breath. “Day.”

“You came up here when you were six. To watch the trains.”

“Yes.”

“Every day.”

“Four,” said his father. “O’clock.”

Frederick looked at him.

His father did not look away from the window. The train had crossed the bridge and gone in behind the roofs. Another one was coming out the other way.

“Nobody,” said his father. “Knew.” A long breath. “Ever.” He watched the train go out across the bridge. “Not.” A breath. “Mother.” A breath. “Not.” And then, very slowly, turning his head at last from the window to look at his son, kneeling on the dusty boards beside him: “Your.” A breath. “Mother.”

“Why are you telling me?”

His father looked at him for a long time. Then he turned back to the window.

“Private,” said his father. “Thing.” A breath. “Mine.” He watched the train. “Now.” A pause. “Yours.”

They sat there for an hour. At four o’clock, by the clock on the mantelpiece downstairs that they could not hear, his father took the printout from Paddington out of his inside pocket, folded small, which he had been carrying all afternoon, and unfolded it on his knee, and read the arrivals, out loud, slowly, to the round window and the trains going in and out across the bridge to Victoria, which were not on the printout and did not need to be.

He got to Cheltenham Spa.

Then he folded the printout and put it away, and looked at his son.

“Ladder,” he said.

“I know.”

“Down,” said his father, “is.” A breath. “Worse.”

---

Niamh came back at six with a bunch of tulips.

She came in through the door of the small dining room that was not small, where they were having tea, in her coat, with her cheeks red from the cold, and a bunch of yellow tulips in her arms in brown paper, and stopped in the doorway when she saw them all looking at her.

“What?” said Niamh.

“Nice tulips,” said Frederick.

Niamh went slowly pink.

“They were on special,” she said. “At the corner. By the mews. The flower stall.”

“The man at the flower stall,” said his mother, without looking up from her tea, “has been sending the Duke flowers every Monday since October. Free. With a card.” She turned a page of the Swedish newspaper. “The card always says for the Duke, with best wishes. And then underneath, in very small writing, and for Niamh.”

Niamh went from pink to scarlet.

“His name is Brendan,” said his mother, to the newspaper. “He is fifty-two. He is a widower. He was born in Galway. He has been at that stall for thirty years. He has a daughter who is a solicitor in Croydon and a dog called Biscuit.” She turned another page. “Dame M had him looked into in November. She looks into everybody who sends flowers. She said he was the most respectable man she had ever looked into and that it was very disappointing.”

“Ma’am,” said Niamh, from the doorway, in a strangled voice.

“Put them in water, Niamh,” said the Queen of Sweden. “They are very nice tulips.”

From his chair at the head of the table, his father, without turning round, lifted the hazel stick an inch off the floor, and put it down again.

Niamh looked at it.

“Don’t you start,” said Niamh, and went to find a vase.

---

He told Will on Sunday night, in the boot room, at ten o’clock, among the forty pairs of rugby boots and the single enormous sweater on the back of the door that nobody had claimed since 2011.

He had not planned to. He had come down to the boot room after the train back from Paddington to do the London box, and Will had been there, sitting on the bench under the racks in his socks with his boots in his lap, scraping the mud off them with a knife, because Windrush had a house match on Tuesday and Mr Pryce inspected boots. And Frederick had sat down beside him on the bench with the London box on his knee and not opened it.

“Will,” he said.

“Mm.”

“I’ve got to tell you something.”

Will went on scraping the boot.

“It’s about Jack,” said Frederick. “Jack Fennell. And me. We’re.” He stopped. He did not know the word. He had not known the word at Ready Token and he did not know it now. “We’re together,” he said. “Sort of. Since November. I wanted you to know. Because you’re my.” He stopped again. “Because I wanted you to know.”

Will stopped scraping.

He looked at the boot in his lap for some time. Then he looked at Frederick, beside him on the bench, with the London box on his knee, with an expression of enormous, patient, sheep-farmer’s kindness, the expression with which he had looked at Kate Hartigan standing in the middle of three hundred ewes.

“Fred,” said Will.

“Yes.”

“Obviously,” said Will.

And went back to scraping the boot.

---

Jack rang at half past eleven.

Not on the mobile. On the telephone in the porters’ lodge, which Mr Gage had gone home from at eight, and which rang and rang in the empty lodge at the bottom of the drive until Kimura, who had a key, came up the stairs of Windrush in her coat and knocked on the door of the room at the end of the corridor and said, through it, sir, it’s for you, in a voice that suggested she had a fair idea who it was and was going to be extremely tactful about it.

He went down in his dressing gown. He stood in the dark lodge with the receiver against his ear.

“Hanover,” said Jack.

He sounded strange. Not loud. Frederick had never heard him sound not loud on a telephone.

“Jack. Are you all right?”

“I told Dad,” said Jack.

Frederick stood in the dark lodge.

“I told him tonight. After the last run. In the kitchen. Mum was there. I didn’t mean to, I was going to wait, I was going to do it properly, I had a plan.” A noise that was nearly a laugh. “And then he came in off the last run and sat down at the table and took his shoes off like he always does and said your Hanover’s going to London again this weekend, is he, like he always does, your Hanover, he’s been saying it since Christmas, your Hanover, as a joke. And I just said yeah, Dad, he is my Hanover, actually.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“And he went quiet,” said Jack. “Dad. For ages. He just sat there with one shoe off. And Mum was at the sink and she’d stopped. And I thought, that’s it, I’ve done it now, I’ve broken him.” He breathed out. “And then he said.”

He stopped.

“What did he say?”

“He said, is he still coming back for the cricket in August,” said Jack, and his voice did something on the line that it had done once before, at the end of the bar at the New Inn on Christmas Day, at three o’clock. “And I said yes. And he said, right. And then he put his other shoe back on. For no reason. He’d just taken it off. He put it back on. And he went out to the shed.” A breath. “And he was out there twenty minutes. And when he came back he’d been crying, and he said he’d got sawdust in his eye, and Mum said Michael, there’s no sawdust in the shed, you swept it on Thursday, and he said well, there was some, and then Mum started crying, and then I did, and then Nan rang.”

“Mrs Haverfield rang?”

“Mum had texted her. While Dad was in the shed. Three words.” Jack laughed, properly this time, on the line, wet and loud. “And Nan rang the house phone at eleven o’clock at night, which she never does, she thinks telephones after nine are for deaths, and Dad picked it up, and she said.” He stopped, and laughed again. “She said, Michael, I told you so in September, and put the phone down.”

Frederick leaned against the wall of the dark lodge.

“Is your dad all right?”

“He’s fine. He’s better than fine. He’s in the front room now with the scrapbook. He’s got it out. He’s going through it.” Jack’s voice went quieter. “He said to tell you. He said, tell your Hanover his dad’s stick wants oiling, the ferrule, every spring, I’ll show him.” A pause. “That’s the whole message. That’s Dad saying it’s all right. That’s the most he’s ever said about anything.”

“I know,” said Frederick.

“Did you tell yours?”

“On Friday.”

“What did they say?”

He thought about the sitting room at the top of the Palace with the clock four minutes slow. His mother on the sofa with her feet tucked under her. His father in the chair by the fire, with his hand held out over the gap, palm up, finding the word.

“My dad said loud,” said Frederick.

There was a silence on the line.

Then Jack Fennell, in the kitchen of a cottage on the Bibury road, at half past eleven on a Sunday night, with his father in the next room going through a scrapbook, laughed so loudly that Frederick had to hold the receiver away from his ear, and went on laughing, down four thousand yards of telephone wire from the Bibury road to a dark lodge at the bottom of a drive, until Frederick was laughing too, in his dressing gown, against the wall, with nobody to see.