Moreton-in-Marsh

In Sweden, his mother said, mothers were celebrated on the last Sunday in May, when it was warm, and there were flowers everywhere, and you could sit outside.

“In England,” she said, on the telephone, on the Thursday before, “they do it in the middle of Lent. In March. When it is raining.” She paused. “I think that tells you everything you need to know about the English.”

“Are you coming?”

“Of course I am coming,” said his mother. “I have been told by the woman on Church Lane that if I do not come to church on Mothering Sunday in her village she will never play cards with me again.” Another pause. “She says the children give out daffodils. She says she has had a daffodil every Mothering Sunday since 1934 and she intends to have one this year and she would like me to have one too, so that she is not the oldest woman in the church who is given one.” A longer pause. “I said I am not old. She said you are to me.”

---

She came down on the 08.21 from Paddington on Sunday morning, on her own, without Ebba Lindqvist and without the Household and with only one of the detail, a quiet woman called Okafor who sat three seats behind her and read a newspaper, and she got off the train at Kemble in a long dark green coat and a hat, and Frederick was on the platform, and she kissed him on both cheeks, and looked at him, and said, “You have grown again.”

“I haven’t.”

“You have. Since February. Half an inch. Dame M will say so.” She took his arm. “Church.”

---

St John the Baptist was full again. It was always full now; it had been full since November, Sue Fennell said, since the King started singing bass in it, because people came from Bibury and Hatherop and Quenington to hear him get the second verse wrong. The children were in the front pews, a row of them, small, in their best clothes, with a basket of daffodils at the end of every row that had been picked that morning, Sue said, from the bank by the bridge, without asking, which is how you get daffodils.

His mother sat in the second pew beside Mrs Haverfield.

Frederick watched them from the choir stalls, between Mr Purvis and Mr Treadgold, through the whole service. The two of them side by side in the second pew. The Queen of Sweden in her dark green coat with her hat on her knee and her back very straight. Mrs Haverfield in her coat and headscarf with Ernest under the pew and her chin up. They did not look at each other once during the service. They did not need to. They sat the way two people sit who have sat at a card table every Thursday since Christmas and know each other’s silences.

At the end of the service the vicar came down to the front and said that it was Mothering Sunday, and that in the old days it had been the day when people who worked away from home were let go back to their mother church, the church they had been christened in, and to see their mothers, and that it had become, over the years, a day for mothers more generally, and for anybody who had been a mother to anybody, and that the children would now give out the daffodils.

The children got up out of the front pews with their baskets.

They went along the pews. They gave a daffodil to every woman in the church. To Sue Fennell in the choir stalls, who took it without looking at it and put it behind her ear, which nobody had ever seen her do. To Mrs Ellis. To Mrs Dunning from the shop. To the old women and the young women and the woman from the detail, Okafor, in the back pew, who looked at the small boy holding the daffodil out to her with an expression of complete bewilderment, and took it, and said thank you, in a voice that was not her professional one at all.

The smallest of them was Poppy, from Halloween, in a red coat.

She came along the second pew with one daffodil left in her basket, and stopped in front of Mrs Haverfield, and held it out.

Mrs Haverfield took it.

“Thank you, Poppy,” said Mrs Haverfield.

Poppy looked in the basket. It was empty. She looked at the Queen of Sweden, sitting beside Mrs Haverfield, with nothing in her hands. She looked back at the empty basket. Her face began, slowly, to crumple.

Mrs Haverfield looked at the daffodil in her own hand for a moment.

Then, without saying anything, she held it out sideways, along the pew, to the woman beside her.

His mother looked at it.

“I have had ninety-seven of them,” said Mrs Haverfield, to the altar, not looking round. “I can spare one.”

His mother took the daffodil.

She held it in both hands in her lap for the rest of the service, which was another four minutes, and did not look at it, and did not look at Mrs Haverfield, and Frederick, in the choir stalls, watched her face, and saw, for the first time in his life, his mother try very hard not to cry in a public place and very nearly fail.

---

They had lunch at the New Inn, the two of them, at the table by the window that looked out at the bridge, because his mother had said, in the porch, I would like to have lunch with my son on Mothering Sunday, just the two of us, which I have not done since he was eleven, and Sue Fennell, overhearing, had cleared the table by the window of two farmers who had been sitting at it since twelve and moved them to the bar without explanation.

His mother put the daffodil in her water glass.

She looked at it.

“My mother never let me be cold,” she said, in Swedish.

He looked up.

“At Solliden. In the summers. On Öland. It is an island in the Baltic. Very long and very flat, with windmills, and the wind comes across it from the sea all day and all night and it is cold even in July. And my mother was from Heidelberg and she had never in her life been anywhere as cold as Öland in July, and she was frightened of it, for me.” She turned the glass round, slowly, so that the daffodil turned. “So she would not let me be cold. I had to wear a jumper at all times. In July. In the sun. A jumper and a coat if there was a wind, and there was always a wind. All the other children ran about on the beach in their swimming things and I sat on a blanket in a jumper.” She smiled. “Every summer for fourteen years. In a jumper.”

“Did you mind?”

“Of course I minded. I minded terribly. I thought she was the most unreasonable woman in Sweden.” His mother looked at the daffodil. “And then I had you. And you went to school on a bus in the Columbia District in January, in a coat that I thought was too thin, and I stood at the window of the north wing every morning and watched you go and thought, he will be cold, he will be cold, and I understood my mother for the first time.”

He did not say anything.

“That is what being a mother is,” said his mother. “It is standing at a window watching somebody be cold and not being allowed to go after them with a jumper.” She picked up her fork. “And then one day they are seventeen, in England, in a lambing shed at two in the morning with their arm inside a sheep, and nobody even tells you until afterwards, and you find out from the woman on Church Lane at cards on a Thursday, and you are so proud you cannot speak, and you also want very badly to go up the hill with a jumper.”

“I had a blanket. Mrs Ellis brought a blanket.”

“I know. I telephoned her and asked.” His mother ate a piece of lamb. “She said you were warm. She said she checked.” She looked at him across the table by the window. “I like Mrs Ellis very much.”

---

On Tuesday his mother went back to London, and on Tuesday evening she came back again, on the 17.51 from Paddington, with Señora Ruiz.

Señora Ruiz had flown in on Monday. She had been staying at the Palace since Monday night, in a room on the second floor near the Duke and the Queen, and had been, Niamh reported on the telephone at four, a great success with everybody except the Master of the Household’s deputy, whom she had found on the Monday night moving a chair in the Duke’s sitting room to dust under it and had addressed, in Spanish, at some length, until he put it back. She came off the train at Kemble behind the Queen with a small suitcase and a large handbag and a folder under her arm, the same folder, Frederick saw at once, the green one, the one she had held on her knee on a bluff over the Pacific two years ago with the record of fifty-eight sophomores in it, and she looked at him on the platform, and then at the station, and the fields beyond it, and the sky.

“It’s green,” said Señora Ruiz, in Spanish.

“Yes, Señora.”

“Everyone said it would be green and I didn’t believe them.” She looked at the fields. “It’s ridiculous. It’s like a painting of a field. Nobody would believe it if you painted it.” She looked back at him. “You’re thin.”

“Everyone says that.”

“Everyone’s right.” She took his arm on the other side from his mother. “Where’s the barn? I want to see the barn. Rosa Ruelas’s grandmother sent me a letter and told me you were a donkey and I want to see where.”

---

His father came on Wednesday.

He had decided in February. He had decided it at four o’clock one afternoon, on the telephone, in the middle of the Paddington arrivals, when he had got to the 10.21 to Hereford, calling at Oxford, Charlbury, Kingham, Moreton-in-Marsh, and stopped, and there had been a long silence on the line, and then he had said, very clearly, that one, and Frederick had said what about it, and his father had said, play, and then, after a breath, alone.

It had taken six weeks.

It had taken six weeks of the Household saying no, and Niamh saying no, and the detail saying no, and Dame M, which Frederick had not expected, saying nothing at all and then going to the Master of the Household’s deputy and saying, Niamh reported, the Duke of Cumberland is eighty-four years old and has been King of fourteen countries and fallen into the North Atlantic and he would like to buy a train ticket and sit on a train, and if this Household cannot arrange for a man to sit on a train then I do not know what this Household is for. And it had taken his mother saying to all of them, at dinner, at the end of the long table in the small dining room that was not small, he is going alone, and that is the end of it, and if any of you so much as stands on the platform at Paddington I will hear about it.

So he went alone.

Which is to say: he went alone, on the 10.21 from Paddington to Hereford, calling at Oxford, Charlbury, Kingham and Moreton-in-Marsh, in coach D, in seat 17, by the window, with a ticket that he had bought himself, at the machine on the concourse, with the help of the man from the information desk who had been coming out to talk to him about the board since September. And Sergeant Thomas Brannigan, of the Duke’s detail, who was very large and held the George Cross and had been taught by the Duke in a hospital corridor what to do with his hands, sat in coach C, in the seat nearest the connecting door, reading a newspaper upside down, for an hour and twenty-six minutes, and was not there.

Frederick was on the platform at Moreton-in-Marsh at a quarter to twelve.

---

He had been let out of school. Dr Ord had let him out. He had gone to her study on Monday and explained, and she had looked at him over her desk with her face like a well-kept knife and said, you want to meet your father off a train, and he had said yes, and she had said, in school hours, and he had said yes, and she had looked at him for some time and then said, Mr Hanover, in thirty years I have refused a great many requests from boys to leave school in school hours, and I have never once been asked to let one go to a railway station to meet his father, and I find, rather to my surprise, that I do not know how to refuse it, and had written him a note.

So he stood on the platform at Moreton-in-Marsh at a quarter to twelve with Castellanos at the far end by the footbridge and Kimura at the other end by the waiting room, both of them not looking at him, and looked at the board.

It was a small station. Two platforms, a footbridge, a waiting room with a fire in it that had not been lit since about 1960, a ticket office with a man in it reading a book. A board hanging from the canopy, black, with orange letters, that said:

11.47 HEREFORD. ON TIME.

He looked at it.

He thought about his father on the other end of a telephone every day at four o’clock since September, reading arrivals off a printout. He thought about a man standing at the barrier at the end of platform nine at Paddington in the rain in a tweed cap in September working out in his head that the 16.42 from Kemble was two minutes late. He thought about a boy of six at a round window under a roof watching the trains go over a bridge into Victoria at four o’clock every day and telling nobody.

He thought that he had never once, in his whole life, waited on a platform for a train with his father on it.

11.47 HEREFORD. ON TIME.

At 11.46 he heard it.

A long way off, down the line, toward Kingham, a horn. Then the sound of it on the rails, coming. Then the yellow nose of it round the curve, under the bridge, slowing, long and white, four carriages, coming into the platform with a long falling sigh of brakes, and stopping, with the doors in front of him.

Coach D.

The doors opened.

People got off. A woman with a pushchair. Two students with rucksacks. A man in a suit with a laptop bag. An old couple with a dog. They went past him up the platform toward the footbridge, in a stream, talking, not looking at anybody, and the doors of coach D stayed open, and for a moment there was nobody else, and he thought, he’s not on it, and his stomach turned over the way it had turned over in the blue room at the Palace in September at one in the morning, missing a clock.

And then there was a stick on the step.

A hazel stick, with a brass ferrule, on the step of coach D, feeling for the edge.

And then a foot, the left foot, in a polished brown shoe, coming down very carefully onto the step beside the stick. And then the right foot. And then, very slowly, holding the rail by the door with one hand and the stick with the other, his father came down out of the train onto the platform at Moreton-in-Marsh in a tweed cap and a dark overcoat and a scarf, and stood there, on his own, on the platform, eighty-four years old and two years and six months from a raft, and let go of the rail.

He looked up the platform. At the board. 11.47 HEREFORD. ON TIME. He looked at it for some time, carefully, end to end.

Then he took a piece of paper out of the inside pocket of his overcoat, folded small, and unfolded it, and looked at it, and looked at the board again, and then at the clock on the canopy, which said 11.47, and then, at last, along the platform, at his son.

He did not wave. He did not smile.

He lifted the hazel stick an inch off the platform, and put it down again.

On time.

---

Behind him, coach C emptied, and a very large man in a dark coat got off it carrying a newspaper upside down and walked straight past the Duke of Cumberland on the platform without looking at him and went up the steps of the footbridge two at a time and stood at the top of them looking at the sky.

His father did not turn round.

“Brannigan,” said his father.

“I didn’t see him,” said Frederick.

“No.” His father looked at the board. “Nobody.” A breath. “Did.”

He came along the platform. Slowly. With the stick. The left foot dragging very slightly on each step, the hand on the stick steady, the face calm, looking at the station, at the footbridge and the waiting room and the ticket office with the man in it reading a book, the way he had once looked at the instrument panel of an aircraft, carefully, so as to know it later. He came the whole length of coach D. He did not stop.

He stopped in front of his son.

“Hello, Dad.”

His father looked at him.

“Ticket,” said his father, and held it up. A small orange rectangle of card. LONDON PADDINGTON TO MORETON-IN-MARSH. OFF-PEAK DAY RETURN. SENIOR RAILCARD.

“You’ve got a railcard?”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“February.” His father looked at the ticket with immense satisfaction. “Third.” A breath. “Off.”

Frederick looked at the ticket. He looked at his father, standing on the platform at Moreton-in-Marsh with a Senior Railcard, having bought a ticket from a machine with a third off, which he had clearly calculated, to the penny, and had been waiting six weeks to show somebody.

He laughed.

He could not help it. He stood on the platform and laughed out loud, and the man in the ticket office looked up from his book, and his father looked at him laughing with an expression of great dignity that lasted perhaps four seconds, and then his face went, from the eyes outward, all at once, and he was laughing too, on the platform at Moreton-in-Marsh, silently, with his shoulders, leaning on the hazel stick, with the tears coming out of his eyes, and the 11.47 to Hereford pulled out beside them with a long rising whine and went away up the line toward Evesham, and neither of them noticed it go.

---

In the car on the way back to the valley, with Castellanos driving and Kimura beside him and Brannigan in the dark car behind, his father sat in the back beside his son with the hazel stick across his knees and looked out of the window at the Cotswolds going past. The stone villages. The walls. The fields on the high wold, green now, the lambs in them, white, everywhere, in every field, a thousand of them, running about in the sun on their stiff new legs as though the world had been invented that morning for them to fall over in.

“Lamb,” said his father, after a while, looking at them.

“Yes.”

“Yours,” said his father. “Which?”

“I don’t know. They all look the same.”

His father looked at the lambs for a long time.

“No,” he said. “They.” A breath. “Don’t.” And then, after the longest breath of the day, with his face turned to the window and the fields going by: “Nothing.” A breath. “Does.” A breath. “If you.” A breath. “Look.”

Frederick looked out of the window at the lambs.

“Tonight,” said his father.

“Tonight’s the first night.”

“Donkey.”

“Yes.”

His father turned his head from the window and looked at him for a while.

“Ears,” said his father.

Frederick stared at him.

“Who told you about the ears?”

His father lifted one finger off the stick and pointed, very slowly, at the front of the car, where Kimura, in the passenger seat, was looking straight ahead through the windscreen with an expression of the most perfect innocence.

“Ten,” said his father, to the back of Kimura’s head. “Out.” A breath. “Of.” A breath. “Ten.”

Kimura did not turn round.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, to the windscreen.