Book Ten: Senior Year Part Three: Trinity Characters
Chapter Twenty-seven
Eighteen
Frederick. Coln Saint Aldwyns and London. Friday, 2 May, to Sunday, 11 May 2031.
His father, elderly, formal and constitutionally severe, was demonstrative toward his son in private: he wrote to him, noticed when he was tired, and did not invariably convert a question into a lesson.
His father put the watch on his wrist at a quarter to seven in the morning, in the room at the end of the corridor in Windrush, with Theo asleep in the other bed and the river going outside the window and the light coming up over the valley.
His parents had come down the night before. They had come on the 16.42 from Paddington, together, because there was no rule about trains, and had taken the two rooms over the New Inn again, and at half past six in the morning his father had walked up the lane from the village to the school with the hazel stick and Niamh a step behind and Castellanos a step behind Niamh, a mile, along the river, in the dew, which was the furthest he had walked since the sea, and had come up the stairs of Windrush, one at a time, all of them, and knocked on the door.
Frederick had opened it in his pyjamas.
His father had not said happy birthday. He had come in, and looked round the room, at the two beds and the two desks and the wardrobes that did not match and the radiator and the wall above Frederick’s desk with the map on it and the columns and the card with two sheep on it, and had sat down on the end of Frederick’s bed, and taken the watch off his own wrist.
It was an old watch. Steel, plain, with a white face and black numbers and a leather strap gone dark with wear. He had worn it every day of Frederick’s life. He had worn it in the raft. It had been on his wrist when the crab boat found him and on his wrist in the hospital and on his wrist every afternoon at four at the end of the kitchen table reading the arrivals, and Frederick had never seen him without it.
“Fifty,” said his father.
“Fifty years?”
“Years.” His father turned the watch over. On the back of it, engraved, very worn, there was something Frederick could not read. “My.” A breath. “Father.” A breath. “Gave.” He held it out. “Eighteen.”
Frederick held out his wrist.
His father put the watch on it. He did it himself, with both hands, slowly, the left one not quite as good as the right, the strap through the buckle and the pin through the hole, one notch tighter than his own, and pulled it straight, and turned his son’s wrist over, and looked at the watch on it, and then up at his son.
“Wind,” said his father. “Every.” A breath. “Morning.”
“I will.”
“Before.” A breath. “Anything.”
“I will.”
His father nodded. Then he did something he had not done since Frederick was very small, so small that Frederick had forgotten it until it happened: he put his hand on the top of his son’s head, flat, the whole palm, and left it there for a moment, and took it away.
From the other bed, Theo, who had been asleep, said, without opening his eyes, “Happy birthday, Freddie,” and turned over.
The Realm marked it at noon in New Westminster, which was five in the afternoon in Gloucestershire.
He heard it on the radio behind the bar at the New Inn. Sue Fennell had found the station, on the internet, on a laptop that Jack had borrowed from Gaz, and put the laptop on the bar beside the pumps with the volume as high as it would go, and at five o’clock exactly, through it, very faint, very far away, from the top of Charter Hill on the other side of the Atlantic, came the guns.
Twenty-one of them. One every five seconds. The way they were fired for the King’s birthday every year on the Hill, from the old battery above the river, and had been since before he was born. He had heard them every second of May of his life. He had stood on the terrace at Columbia Palace and counted them. He had never heard them from four thousand miles away, through a laptop on a bar, in a pub full of people who had stopped talking.
Boom.
The whole New Inn was silent. Mr Purvis had taken his cap off.
Boom.
He counted. Everybody in the pub counted. He could see them doing it, their lips moving, Gaz and Little Rob at the end of the bar, Mrs Haverfield by the fire with her chin up, his mother beside her, his father in the chair with the hazel stick across his knees, Mr Abernathy and Mr Ferrante on the settle against the wall, Will and Theo and Kit and Lucía and Inés and the whole of the senior class of Ellicott High School and the whole of the English form, and Sue Fennell behind the bar with her arms folded, counting.
Boom.
On the twenty-first, the laptop went quiet, and somebody on the radio in New Westminster said something about the King, eighteen today, and Sue Fennell reached over and turned it off.
“Right,” she said, into the silence. “That’s them done. Now us.”
And she brought out the cake.
The party went on till eleven. It was the best party he had ever been to. He thought that while it was happening and he thought it afterwards. There was a cake from Bridget, who had sent it from New Westminster by air in a box with THIS WAY UP written on every side, including the bottom, and it had arrived the right way up, and it was chocolate, and it said 18 on it in white icing and nothing else. There was a song, which Mrs Haverfield started, in her thin high clear voice, and the whole pub took up, badly, and at the end of it, instead of dear Frederick or dear Your Majesty or dear King, the English form sang dear Fred and the Americans sang dear Hanover and the village sang something in the middle that was both and neither, and everybody laughed.
There were presents. A book from Mr Ferrante, about the history of Gloucestershire, with a photocopy of a letter of 1800 tucked into the front of it. A box of shortbread from Dame M with a card in it that said Sir. Eighteen. Do not eat these all at once. M.R. A bottle from Rennie, sent down from Downing Street with a driver, which Sue Fennell confiscated at the door and said he could have at closing time, because you’re eighteen now, love, but you’re eighteen in my pub. A drawing from Poppy, in crayon, of a donkey, with pink ears.
And from the cricket team, presented by Gaz in a speech of tremendous length and almost no content, a bat.
It was old. It was a village side bat, from the cupboard in the pavilion, with the handle bound in tape and the face gone brown and cracked, and on the back of it, in black marker pen, every member of the Coln Saint Aldwyns first eleven had signed their name, and under the names somebody had written, in capitals: FOR HANOVER, WHO IS RUBBISH. FROM THE VILLAGE.
“It’s the worst bat in the club,” said Gaz, sadly. “We thought you’d want it.”
Jack was behind the bar all night.
That was the thing. Frederick noticed it at about eight, and then could not stop noticing it. Jack was behind the bar pulling pints and drying glasses and saying there you go to everybody, the way he did, loudly, cheerfully, all evening. He sang the song. He laughed at Gaz’s speech. He came out from behind the bar with the cake when Sue told him to and put it down on the table in front of Frederick and said there you go, Hanover and went back behind the bar.
He did not once come and sit at the table.
Frederick sat at the table by the fire with his parents and Mrs Haverfield and the cake and the bat and the watch on his wrist, and Jack was ten yards away behind the bar, and might as well have been in Leeds.
At ten o’clock Frederick went out to the yard behind the pub.
Jack was there. By the barrels, in the dark, with a crate of empties at his feet he was supposed to be stacking, and was not.
“Hey,” said Frederick.
Jack did not look round.
“You should be inside,” said Jack. “It’s your party.”
“It’s your mum’s pub.”
“It’s your party.” Jack kicked the crate. “Your mum’s in there. Your dad’s in there. Nan’s in there. Your whole class. My whole village. Your Prime Minister sent you a bottle.” He kicked the crate again. “And I’m behind the bar.”
Frederick did not say anything.
“I’m behind the bar,” said Jack, “at my own boyfriend’s eighteenth, in my own mum’s pub, pulling pints for people who’ve all known since Halloween, and I can’t come and sit next to you.” He turned round at last. His face was red in the light from the kitchen window, and not from the cold. “Because nobody’s said. Because it’s private. Because you’re the King and there’s no rule but there’s a sort of rule, and everyone knows it, and everyone keeps it, and I keep it, I’ve kept it since November, I’m good at it.” He stopped. “And I didn’t know until tonight how much I mind.”
“Jack.”
“I mind, Hanover.” His voice did something. “I said I didn’t. At Ready Token. I said all I wanted to know was that you didn’t know either. And that was true. In January. In the snow.” He looked at the barrels. “But it’s May. And you’re eighteen. And in six weeks you go home. And I’ve never once stood next to you in a room full of people. Not once. Not at the play, not at Christmas, not tonight. I’ve stood behind a bar and I’ve stood at the back and I’ve stood two fields away while your sergeant pretends not to watch.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand, angrily. “And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being the thing you go round the bonfire to. I want to be in the room.”
Frederick stood in the yard.
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. He thought about Inés on the bench by the war memorial. You hide. About everything.
“You’re right,” he said.
Jack stared at him.
“You’re right,” said Frederick. “I’ve been hiding. Not just about you. About everything. Inés said so, in April, on the green, and I told her she was right, and then I went on doing it.” He looked at the light from the kitchen window. “I don’t know how to stop. I’ve never been anywhere where I didn’t have to. I don’t know what happens if I do.” He looked back at Jack. “But I don’t want you behind the bar.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not good enough,” said Jack, and his voice cracked in the middle, loudly, in the yard, so that somebody in the kitchen stopped clattering. “That’s what you said in the snow. I don’t know. And I said that was fine. And it was.” He picked up the crate of empties, for something to do with his hands, and put it down again. “It’s not fine any more. Not tonight. Not on your birthday.”
He went back inside.
Frederick stood in the yard by the barrels.
After a while the back door opened again, and he thought it was Jack, and it was not. It was his mother. In her long coat, with a glass of wine in her hand, which she put down on a barrel, and stood beside him in the dark, and did not say anything.
“You heard,” he said.
“The whole kitchen heard.” She looked at the barrels. “Sue heard. Bridget’s cake heard.” She was quiet for a moment. “He is right, älskling.”
“I know he is.”
“I know you know.” She picked up the wine and drank some of it and put it down again. “Your father kept me in the yard for eighteen months. In 2007 and 2008. Letters, and four meetings, and at every one of them I was at the end of the table. Two fields away.” She looked at him. “Nobody had said. There was no rule. There was a sort of rule. Everyone knew it and everyone kept it. And one night in London, at a dinner at the Palace, in front of eighty people, I stood up from my place at the far end of the table and walked the whole length of the room and sat down in the empty chair next to him. Without asking.” She picked up the wine again. “He was so angry he did not speak to me for the rest of the dinner. And in August he asked me to marry him. In a rowing boat. And I said I would answer in a letter.”
Frederick looked at her.
“I am not telling you what to do,” said his mother. “I am telling you what I did. In case it is useful.” She finished the wine. “Happy birthday. You are eighteen. You do not have to ask anybody for anything any more except the people you love.” She kissed his cheek. “Go inside. It is cold.”
He did not go inside. Not then. He stood in the yard until eleven, and when he went in the party was ending, and Jack was behind the bar washing glasses with his back to the room, and did not turn round, and Frederick went up the lane to the school in the dark with Theo and did not sleep.
In the blue notebook, at three in the morning, he wrote:
Eighteen. The watch. Dad’s hand on my head. Twenty-one guns through a laptop. Dear Fred, dear Hanover. The worst bat in the club. Jack in the yard. He’s right. Mum walked the length of the room. I stood in the yard.
On the Monday it was the May Day bank holiday, and the Coln Valley Morris danced on the green, and Jack, who had not spoken to him since Friday, dragged him in.
He did not see it coming. Nobody could have seen it coming. He was standing at the edge of the green at eleven in the morning with Theo and Will, watching six men in white shirts and black breeches with bells strapped below their knees and ribbons on their hats and a white handkerchief in each hand, all of them over sixty except one, leaping about in two lines on the grass to a tune on an accordion played by Mr Treadgold, very fast, half a beat ahead, and he had his hands in his pockets, and Jack came across the green from the New Inn with his face set and a bundle under his arm, and stopped in front of him.
“Put these on,” said Jack.
It was a set of bells. On leather pads, with straps. And a hat with ribbons on it. And two white handkerchiefs.
“I don’t know how.”
“Nobody knows how,” said Jack. “Gaz doesn’t know how and he’s been doing it since he was twelve.” He held out the bells. “Old Ted’s done his knee. They’re one short. They need six. You’re six.”
“Jack.”
“You said in the yard you didn’t know what happens if you stop hiding.” Jack’s face did not change. “Put the bells on. In the middle of the green. In front of everybody. In a hat with ribbons on it.” He held them out further. “That’s what happens.”
Frederick looked at him.
Then he took the bells.
He danced the morris on the green at Coln Saint Aldwyns on the first Monday in May in a hat with ribbons on it and bells on his shins, between Gaz, who did not know how either and had been doing it since he was twelve, and a man of seventy-four called Arthur who had been dancing it since 1971 and shouted left at him on every turn. He did not know the steps. He had never seen the steps. He waved the handkerchiefs when everybody else waved them and jumped when everybody else jumped and turned the wrong way four times, and on the fourth time he turned into Gaz and they both fell over in the middle of the green in a jangle of bells, and the whole village, standing round the green with their drinks from the New Inn, roared.
He got up.
He went on.
Somebody took a photograph. Several people took photographs. One of them, it turned out, was a woman from Bibury whose cousin worked on a newspaper in Cheltenham, and by Thursday it was in the Evening Star in New Westminster, at the top of Harold Quayle’s column, a blurred photograph of a tall boy in a hat with ribbons, mid-air, with a white handkerchief in each hand and bells on his shins and an expression of total, helpless, ecstatic concentration, and underneath it Harold Quayle had written:
WHERE IS THE KING? Your correspondent no longer feels he needs to ask.
At the end of the dance, when the accordion stopped and the six of them stood in two lines on the green breathing hard with their handkerchiefs at their sides, Jack was standing at the edge of the green with his arms folded.
Frederick walked across the grass to him in his bells.
He walked the whole width of the green. In front of everybody. The whole of the village, on the green and outside the New Inn and on the churchyard wall, where Mrs Haverfield was sitting with Ernest, watching with her chin up; the class, the English form, Mr Abernathy and Mr Ferrante on the bench outside the pub, Castellanos by the war memorial, Kimura on the bridge. He walked across all of it, jangling, in a hat with ribbons on it, and stopped in front of Jack, and stood beside him.
Not opposite him. Beside him. Shoulder to shoulder. Facing the green, with everybody on it.
That was all. He did not do anything else. He stood beside him, in front of everybody, in his bells, and did not move away.
Jack did not look at him.
After a while, Jack unfolded his arms.
After a longer while, Jack said, quietly, to the green, “That’s a start.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not enough.”
“No.”
“It’s a start,” said Jack, and something in his face let go, very slightly, at one side, and he did not look round, and did not move away either.
On Saturday the tenth Jack came to London.
His father had asked. In March, in the sitting room at the top of the Palace, with the clock four minutes slow: I would like to meet the boy properly. Not Christmas. Not leaves. Properly. Here. And it had taken until May, because of the play and Easter and Winchester and the morris, and because Jack had said, when he was told, the PALACE?, and then had not said anything else for a whole evening, which Sue Fennell said was a record since he learned to talk.
So on Saturday Jack came up on the 08.21 from Kemble, in a suit that had belonged to his father, which was too big, and a tie that had belonged to his grandfather, which was too old, and stood on the platform at Paddington at a quarter to ten with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the iron roof like a man who has been told about a cathedral and finds it is real.
The Duke met them at the barrier.
He was in the tweed cap. He had the hazel stick. He had a printout from the station in his inside pocket, folded small, and he stood at the barrier at the end of platform eleven, where the 08.21 from Kemble came in, with Niamh beside him and Brannigan a long way behind, and watched the train come in, and looked at it carefully from one end to the other, and then found Jack in the crowd coming down the platform, in his father’s suit, and looked at him the same way.
Jack stopped in front of him.
“Sir,” said Jack.
The Duke looked at him.
“Four,” said the Duke.
“Sir?”
“Minutes.” The Duke held up four fingers. “Late.”
Jack looked at the four fingers. He looked at the board. He looked back at the Duke.
“That’s not my fault,” said Jack. “That’s the train.”
“Train,” said the Duke, with tremendous satisfaction, “is.” A breath. “Never.” A breath. “Late.”
“You just said it was four minutes late.”
“Leaves,” said the Duke, and turned round, and began to walk back up the concourse toward the car, and Jack stood at the barrier looking after him with his mouth open, and then, slowly, the grin came up, all of it, from the bottom, for the first time in a week.
“He’s winding me up,” said Jack.
“Yes.”
“Your dad. The King. The old King. He’s winding me up.” Jack watched the Duke go up the concourse with the stick, past four hundred people from Swindon and Reading and Didcot Parkway who did not look at him once. “Since Christmas. He’s been waiting since Christmas to do that.”
“Since September,” said Frederick. “He’s been timing the 16.42 since September.”
Jack looked at him.
“I love him,” said Jack, with great simplicity, and went after the Duke up the concourse at a jog.
They argued about the Underground all afternoon.
They argued about it at lunch, in the small dining room that was not small, at the end of the long table, while the Queen of Sweden ate her soup and watched them with an expression of deep and silent contentment, and Niamh at the far end of the table timed it. They argued about it in the garden, walking round the lake, slowly, the Duke with the hazel stick and Jack beside him with his hands in the pockets of his father’s suit, while Frederick walked behind them with his mother. They argued about it at four o’clock, in the room at the top of the house with the round window, which the Duke took Jack up to without asking anybody, up the narrow staircase with the rope for a rail, one step at a time, with Jack behind him with his arms out an inch from the Duke’s back the whole way, exactly the way Frederick had done in March, without being told.
“It’s a train in a hole,” said Jack, at the round window, kneeling on the dusty boards beside the old wooden chair.
“Oldest,” said the Duke.
“I don’t care if it’s the oldest. It’s a train in a hole. You can’t see anything. You go in at one end and come out at the other and in between it’s just dark and a man saying mind the gap.” Jack looked out of the round window at the trains going in over the bridge to Victoria. “A bus, you can see where you’re going. You can see the town. You can see people. You can see Nan on the wall.”
The Duke looked at him for a long time.
Then he lifted the stick and pointed it at the round window, at the bridge, at a train going in over it, slowly, in the afternoon light.
“Six,” said the Duke. “Me.” A breath. “Here.” A breath. “Every.” A breath. “Day.”
Jack looked at the window. He looked at the old man on the chair with the stick.
“You watched the trains,” said Jack slowly. “From here. When you were six.”
“Yes.”
“Every day.”
“Four.” A breath. “O’clock.”
Jack was quiet for a moment, on his knees on the dusty boards.
“I watched the buses,” he said. “From Nan’s window. On Church Lane. When I was six. Dad’s bus. The 860. Coming round the corner by the pub.” He looked at the bridge. “Every day. Four o’clock. The last run but one.”
The Duke turned his head and looked at him.
Neither of them said anything for some time. At the round window under the roof of Buckingham Palace, an old man on a chair and a boy on his knees, looking out over the roofs of London at the trains going in over a bridge to Victoria in the afternoon light.
“Bus,” said the Duke at last, very quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Fine,” said the Duke. And then, after a long breath, with enormous reluctance, as though conceding a county: “Too.”
At eleven o’clock that night they climbed out.
It was Jack’s idea. Frederick would say afterwards that it was Jack’s idea, and Jack would say afterwards that it was Frederick’s, and the truth was that it was neither of theirs, it was something that happened in the blue room on the second floor at half past ten when Jack was sitting on the end of the bed with four posts in his grandfather’s tie, and said, I’ve never been to London before, and Frederick said, you’ve been to London all day, and Jack said, I’ve been to your house all day. I’ve never been to London. Not the real bit. Not at night, and looked at the window.
There was a back staircase. There was a door at the bottom of it into a corridor, and a door at the end of the corridor into the mews, and the door into the mews had a lock that Frederick had watched a footman open in September with a key that hung on a hook beside it, and the key was still on the hook.
They went down the back staircase in their socks with their shoes in their hands.
They went along the corridor. They took the key off the hook. They let themselves out into the mews, a long cobbled yard behind the Palace with stables along one side and garages along the other and lamps on brackets, very quiet, at eleven at night, and at the end of the mews, at the corner, the flower stall, with its shutters down and a light on in the window of the flat above it, where a man called Brendan from Galway lived with a dog called Biscuit, and the light went off as they passed, as if somebody had been watching from behind the curtain and had decided, tactfully, not to.
They put their shoes on in the street.
They ran.
The bar was in Soho, down a side street off a side street, under a sign that had no name on it, only a painted picture of a moon, in a basement down six stone steps. It was small and dark and warm and full of people and music and a smell of beer and something sweet, and nobody looked up when they came down the steps, because it was a Saturday night in Soho and nobody in Soho on a Saturday night looks up at anything.
“Bloody hell,” said Jack, at the bottom of the steps, with deep reverence.
They went to the bar.
The barman was about thirty, with a beard and a tea towel over his shoulder and tattoos up both arms, and he was serving four people at once, and he said what can I get you without looking at either of them.
“Pint,” said Jack. “Of whatever’s on.”
The barman pulled it.
“And you?” he said, still not looking, to Frederick.
“The same, please.”
The barman looked up. Briefly. At a tall boy in a jumper in a basement in Soho. Young. Very young. Too young-looking by a mile.
“ID?” said the barman.
Frederick put his hand in his pocket.
He had no ID. He had never had ID. He had never had a passport; nobody had ever made him one, and at Heathrow in August an officer had written on the letter from the school instead. He had, in his pocket, a five-pound note, and some coins, and a bus ticket from the 860.
“I haven’t got any,” he said.
“Then you’re having a lemonade,” said the barman, without unkindness, and poured one, and put it on the bar, and turned away to the next person, and Frederick picked up the lemonade and stood at the bar in a basement in Soho with a lemonade, and Jack beside him with a pint, looking at him, and both of them started to laugh.
“Lemonade,” said Jack.
“I’m eighteen.”
“I know you’re eighteen. He doesn’t know you’re eighteen.” Jack drank some of his pint. “You look about fourteen in that jumper.”
The barman came back.
“Four-eighty for the pint,” he said. “Two for the lemonade.”
Frederick put the five-pound note on the bar.
The barman picked it up without looking at it. He turned to the till. He opened it. He was about to put the note in it.
He stopped.
He stood at the till with the drawer open and the five-pound note in his hand and looked at it. At the little window of clear plastic in the corner. At the face in the window, very small, looking slightly to the left. Looking cross.
He turned round slowly with the note in his hand.
He looked at Frederick.
He looked at the note.
He looked at Frederick.
“Oh,” said the barman.
“Hello,” said Frederick.
“Oh, no,” said the barman, and looked at the lemonade on the bar, and then at Frederick, and then, slowly, with mounting horror, at the lemonade again. “I gave the King a lemonade.”
“It’s a very good lemonade.”
“I ID’d the King.” The barman put both hands flat on the bar. “I asked the King of England for ID.”
“Of Great Britain,” said Jack helpfully. “And England. Separately. And thirteen others. It’s complicated.”
“He was eighteen last week,” said the barman, to nobody, in a kind of anguish. “It was on the news. It was on every news. There was a cake.” He looked at the five-pound note in his hand as if it had personally betrayed him. “I saw the cake.”
“Lemonade,” said a voice from the far end of the bar.
They both turned round.
At the far end of the bar, in the corner, at a small round table under a lamp, with two glasses in front of them that were nearly empty, sat two people in ordinary clothes. One was a broad grey-haired man in a dark jumper with his hands folded on the table. The other was a woman of about thirty with a short black fringe and a way of looking at a room as though it had just told her a joke.
Castellanos and Kimura were off duty.
They had been off duty since eight o’clock, when the night team had taken over the house, and they had come out, the two of them, for a drink, which they did, Kimura said afterwards, about once a month, to a bar nobody would ever think to look for anybody in, and they had been sitting at the small round table in the corner under the lamp for two and a half hours, and they had watched two boys come down the six stone steps and go to the bar and order a pint and be refused a pint and get a lemonade, and the barman realise, and they had not, until this moment, moved.
Castellanos looked at Frederick across the bar for a long time with his face doing nothing.
Kimura looked at the ceiling.
Then Castellanos stood up. He picked up his glass. Kimura stood up and picked up hers. They walked across the small dark crowded bar in Soho, not hurrying, between the people, and stopped at the bar, beside the two boys, one on each side.
Nobody said anything.
The barman looked at the four of them with the five-pound note still in his hand and an expression of a man who has had a long night and can feel it getting longer.
“Sergeant,” said Frederick.
“Sir,” said Castellanos.
“You’re off duty.”
“I am off duty, sir.” Castellanos looked at the lemonade. “I was having a drink. With Sergeant Kimura. In a bar that nobody would ever think to look for anybody in.” He looked at Frederick. “And the King walked down the steps.”
“We didn’t know you were here.”
“No, sir,” said Castellanos. “That was apparent.”
Frederick waited.
He waited for the car is outside. He waited for sir, I think it would be best if. He waited for it the way he had waited, every day for eight months, for somebody to come round the corner of a wall and take him back.
Castellanos put his empty glass on the bar.
“Same again,” he said to the barman. “And a pint for him.” He nodded at Jack. “And for him.” He looked at Frederick for a long time. “What’s the first thing you ever drank, sir? Properly?”
“Nothing. I’ve never had anything.”
“Then he’ll have a whisky,” said Castellanos to the barman. “A small one. A good one. Scotch. He’s eighteen. It was on the news.” He took out his wallet. “And keep the five-pound note.”
The barman looked at the note in his hand. At the face in the little window, looking cross.
“I’m framing this,” said the barman, and put it in his top pocket, and poured.
The whisky came in a small heavy glass with a thick bottom, about an inch of it, gold, in the lamplight.
Frederick looked at it.
“Go on,” said Kimura, on his other side.
He drank it.
It was like being hit in the mouth by a bonfire. It went down his throat and into his chest and spread out, hot, everywhere at once, like the Coln at six in the morning on the second of September but the other way round, and his eyes watered, and he coughed, and put the glass down on the bar, hard, and stood there with his hand over his mouth.
Jack was looking at him with an expression of pure delight.
“Well?” said Jack.
“It’s horrible.”
“It’s whisky. It’s meant to be horrible.”
Frederick picked the glass up again. There was a little left in the bottom of it, a quarter of an inch, gold. He looked at it. He drank it.
It was still horrible. He finished it anyway.
“The King,” said Jack, very loudly, to the whole bar, holding up his pint, “is the LAW,” and nobody in the bar had the faintest idea what he was talking about, and several of them held up their glasses anyway, because it was Soho on a Saturday night and that was what you did, and the barman, behind the bar, with the five-pound note in his top pocket, put his face in his tea towel.
They stayed until closing.
The four of them. At the small round table in the corner under the lamp, which Castellanos and Kimura had gone back to and the boys had followed. Castellanos bought the next round, and Kimura bought the one after, and Frederick had a lemonade for the rest of the night, because one whisky, he said, was enough for one lifetime, and Jack had three pints and told Castellanos about the goat.
Frederick still did not know what happened with the goat. He was laughing too hard by the end of it to follow. But Castellanos, at the end of it, sat back in his chair in the corner of a bar in Soho with his hands folded on the table and his face doing nothing, and then, very slowly, from somewhere a long way inside, for the first time in all the years Frederick had known him, Ray Castellanos laughed. Out loud. Briefly. Like a door opening and closing in a wind.
Kimura stared at him.
“Sergeant,” she said.
“I didn’t,” said Castellanos.
“You did.”
“I didn’t,” said Castellanos, “and you will not mention it,” and picked up his pint.
At half past twelve, at closing time, on the pavement at the top of the six stone steps, in the cool of the London night, Jack Fennell, three pints in, in his father’s suit and his grandfather’s tie, turned round in the street and took Frederick’s face in both his hands and kissed him, under the painted moon on the sign with no name on it, on a pavement in Soho, in front of two sergeants of the King’s protection detail and anybody in the street who cared to look, which was nobody, because it was Soho at half past twelve on a Saturday night and nobody in Soho looks at anything.
“Room,” said Jack, against his mouth.
“What?”
“I’m in the room.” Jack let go of his face. “That’s all. That’s all I wanted.” He looked at the street, at the people going past who did not look at them, at Castellanos and Kimura on the steps not looking at them either. “I’m in the room.”
They walked back. The four of them. Through the streets, in the dark, in the cool, at one in the morning, past the shut shops and the open bars and the people on the pavements, and nobody looked at any of them once.
On the walk, Kimura fell into step beside Frederick.
“Escape,” she said. “Ten.”
“We walked straight into you.”
“I know you did. I’m marking the escape, not the destination.” She put her hands in her pockets. “Back staircase in your socks. The mews key. Out past the flower stall. Brendan turned his light off, by the way. I saw it. He’s a good man.” She walked for a while. “As an escape, ten. As a choice of bar.” She looked at Castellanos, ahead of them, walking beside Jack, listening to something about Gloucestershire bowling with his head on one side. “As a choice of bar, one.”
“Why one?”
“Because it was ours,” said Kimura, “and now I have to find a new one.”
The door into the mews was unlocked. The key was on the hook.
Dame M was in the hall at the bottom of the back staircase.
She was sitting on a hard chair at the foot of the stairs in a dark dressing gown with her glasses on their chain and a book on her knee, which she was not reading, under a single lamp, and she had clearly been sitting there for some time, and she looked up when the door from the corridor opened, at the four of them coming in from the mews at five past one in the morning, the King and a boy from the Bibury road in his grandfather’s tie and two sergeants of the protection detail who were supposed to be off duty.
She looked at all four of them in turn.
She looked at the King last.
She did not say anything about the time. She did not say anything about the key, or the mews, or the back staircase, or the socks. She closed the book on her knee, and stood up, and looked at Frederick over her glasses, and sniffed, once, very slightly, in his direction.
“Whisky?” said Dame M.
“One,” said Frederick. “A small one.”
Dame M considered this.
“Scotch?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said Dame M, and picked up her book, and went up the back staircase to bed, and did not say another word about it, then or ever.