Graduation

He woke at six.

He lay in the bed in his room in the north wing of Columbia Palace and looked at the ceiling, at the crack in the corner, which was still there, and listened. A blackbird on the railings. A bus, a long way off, on the Axis, going somewhere early. The house, which was very quiet, because it was six in the morning, and which smelled, faintly, through the door, of coffee, because Bridget was in.

He had been home five days. He had not yet got used to it. On the first morning he had woken at six and lain there for a full minute listening for the river, and it had not been there, and he had not known where he was. On the second morning he had put his hand out of the bed to see if the radiator was warm, and it was not, because it was June, and because the radiator in his room in the north wing had not worked since 2019 and nobody had ever fixed it, and he had lain there with his hand on the cold iron and laughed.

He got up. He wound his father’s watch.

He put on the suit.

---

Bridget had the eggs on the table.

The second piece of toast at his elbow. The kitchen exactly as it had been. The long scrubbed pine table a foot from where it used to be. The range. Bridget at the sink with her back to everybody. The clock over the door, four minutes slow.

He had stood in the kitchen doorway on Sunday night at eleven, off the aeroplane, off the Axis, with his suitcase with the brass plate and two belts and a rope from a lambing shed, and looked at the clock for a long time, and Bridget, at the sink, had not turned round, and had said, it’s four minutes slow, and he had said, I know, and she had said, I didn’t fix it, and he had said, I know you didn’t, and she had said, I thought about it. In January. I had the man in. He had it off the wall. And I said put it back, and had turned the tap off, and turned round, and looked at him, and said, you’re thin.

“You’re up,” said Bridget now, to the range.

“It’s graduation.”

“I know what it is.” She put a cup of coffee at his elbow. “I’ve been up since four. I’ve done the cake.”

“There’s a cake?”

“There’s always a cake,” said Bridget, and turned back to the range, and then, without turning round, in a slightly different voice: “Is Sergeant Castellanos driving you?”

“Yes.”

“Last time.”

“Yes.”

Bridget did not say anything for a moment. She stood at the range with her back to him.

“He had breakfast here,” she said. “The first morning. In 2025. When you started at Ellicott. Sat at that end. Didn’t say a word. Ate everything.” She moved something on the range. “Six years. Every morning he’s brought you to that door and I’ve had a cup of coffee for him in the hall and he’s never once come in the kitchen again.” She turned round. “I’ve put a cup out. In the hall. Same as always.” She looked at him. “Tell him it’s the last one.”

---

Castellanos drove.

The dark blue car with no flag on its wing, down the Axis under the trees in full leaf, the Monument white at the end of it in the morning sun, the tourists already at the railings behind them looking up at the Standard, which was flying, because the King was in residence, for the first time since August. The lights on Tenth Street. The same lights. The same tree on the corner of Tenth and Constitution that had been there every school morning for six years, with the same crack in the pavement round its roots.

Castellanos did not say anything all the way down the Axis.

Frederick did not say anything either.

At the lights on Tenth Street, red, the car stopped, and Castellanos sat with his hands at ten to two on the wheel and looked straight ahead through the windscreen, and the light was very long, and neither of them said anything, and then it went green.

At the gates of Ellicott, Castellanos stopped the car.

He did not say sir.

He sat with his hands on the wheel and looked through the windscreen at the gate, the iron gate, open, with the families going through it already in their best clothes at eight in the morning, and the sign over it, ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL, FOUNDED 1847, and the low wall by the bike racks where Theo had sat on the last day of junior year with an envelope.

“Six years,” said Castellanos.

“Yes.”

“Every school day. From the north wing door to this gate.” He did not look round. “I counted, last night. In the kitchen. With Sergeant Kimura. She made me.” He breathed out. “It’s one thousand and sixty-one mornings.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I drove you here on the morning you became King,” said Castellanos. “At a quarter to eight. You didn’t know yet. Nobody knew yet. It was a Tuesday. You had geometry at two.” He looked at the gate. “And I drove you home again that afternoon at four and you’d been King for two hours and you got in the back of the car and said, Sergeant, I’d like to go to the hospital, and I said yes, sir, and that was the first thing you ever asked me as King.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’ve never told anybody that.”

“I know.”

“I’m telling you now,” said Castellanos, “so it’s said.”

Frederick took the box out of the inside pocket of his jacket.

It was small. Dark blue leather. Square. He had been carrying it since Monday. It had come from London, from the Central Chancery, by the bag, with a letter, and the letter had said that the King had been pleased, on his own initiative, without the advice of any minister, in his personal gift, to appoint Sergeant Raymond Castellanos of the Royal Protection Service to be a Member of the Royal Victorian Order, for personal service to the Sovereign, and that the insignia was enclosed.

He held it out.

Castellanos looked at it. He did not take it.

“Sir,” he said. “No.”

“It’s not a question.”

“Sir, I can’t.”

“You can’t refuse it,” said Frederick. “It’s the only one that’s mine. Everything else is the country’s. The country decides. Committees. A list.” He held the box out further. “This one’s mine. It’s the only thing in the whole system that’s mine to give, to anybody I like, for any reason I like, and nobody can say no.” He looked at Castellanos. “So I’m giving it to you. For one thousand and sixty-one mornings. And you can’t say no.”

Castellanos looked at the box for a long time.

“I could,” he said at last, slowly, “put it in a drawer.”

“You can put it in a drawer.”

“And never wear it.”

“You can never wear it.”

Castellanos took the box.

He did not open it. He held it in both hands in his lap, on top of the steering wheel, the way Mrs Haverfield had held the Maundy purses at Gloucester, and looked at it, and did not open it, and did not say anything for a long time.

Then he put it in the inside pocket of his dark suit, against his chest, where he had put a folded page from the back of a blue notebook over the middle of the ocean five days ago, and buttoned the jacket.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Castellanos looked through the windscreen at the gate.

“There’s a cup of coffee,” said Frederick. “In the hall. At home. Bridget’s put it out. Same as always.” He opened the car door. “She says to tell you it’s the last one.”

Something happened in Castellanos’s face. It happened slowly, from the inside, the way it had happened in a bar in Soho at half past twelve when Jack Fennell told him about the goat, and this time it did not stop.

“Have a good last day, sir,” said Ray Castellanos.

“You too.”

Frederick got out.

---

The gym was full by nine.

It was the gym where the desks had been in rows for finals, two hundred and forty of them between the painted lines, a year ago, with the clock on its stand. There were no desks now. There were chairs, hundreds of them, in rows on the floor, for the graduates, and more in the stands, which had been pulled out from the walls on their rails, for the families, and a stage at one end under the scoreboard with a lectern on it and a table with the diplomas on it in rolls tied with ribbon, red and white, and a banner over the stage that said CLASS OF 2031.

The English form was in the stands.

All thirty-one of them. They had flown in on Thursday. On an ordinary aeroplane, with crisps, all together, because, Will said on the telephone on Wednesday night, we can’t let you graduate without us, you graduated from Coln without you, it’s only fair. They were in the stands on the left, in a block, in their Coln Abbey blazers, which they had been told they need not wear and had worn anyway, a block of navy among the summer dresses and the suits, and Will was at the end of the front row with Hattie beside him, and Kit beside Hattie, and Freya Lomax, who was not in the form and had come anyway, because somebody has to make sure Hartigan doesn’t faint, beside Kit.

They had brought a banner.

It was a bedsheet. It was painted. It was held up between Will and Kit, along the front of the stand on the left, and it said, in letters a foot high, in Hattie’s hand: WINDRUSH. And underneath, smaller: (AND COLN AND EVENLODE AND LEACH). And underneath that, smaller still, in different paint, in Gaz’s unmistakable capitals, which had clearly been added at the last moment in the village and carried four thousand miles: HANOVER IS RUBISH.

With one B.

---

His parents were in the stands on the right.

At the front. In the middle. On two ordinary folding chairs among the families, because his mother had said, in May, from London, on the telephone, we will sit with the families, we are a family, we will not sit anywhere special. His father in a dark suit with the hazel stick across his knees. His mother in grey. Niamh behind them. Dame M behind Niamh, very upright, with her glasses on their chain, who had flown home on Tuesday on the Household’s aircraft, alone, because she said somebody had to keep the rule, and somebody had to be the one who did not get the nice aeroplane, and it might as well be the one who had made it.

Behind them, the Hartigans. Peter and Anneliese and Kate, who had put the cardboard sign with HANOVER and the rabbit on it across her knees. Behind the Hartigans, Señora Ruiz, in her best coat, with the green folder on her lap. Beside Señora Ruiz, Mr Paredes, in his cap that said POMONA. Beside Mr Paredes, a very small, very old woman in a dark dress with a walking stick, whom Frederick did not recognise, sitting very upright, looking round the gym with an expression of mild disapproval at everything in it.

And at the very back of the stands on the right, at the top, against the wall, a broad grey-haired man in a dark suit, with a woman beside him and three grown children, two sons and a daughter, all of them in their thirties, sitting in a row, watching the floor.

Not watching the stage. Watching their father, at the back, in his last hour on duty.

---

The graduates filed in at ten.

Two hundred and thirty-eight of them, in gowns, dark blue, with caps, in alphabetical order, through the double doors at the end of the gym, to the chairs on the floor, and the band, which was the Ellicott band, played something slow and very slightly out of tune, and the families in the stands stood up.

He was between Hall and Hartley.

He walked in between them. Hall, Hanover, Hartigan, Hartley. Theo behind him. He walked in the line in his gown and his cap, which was too small, and which he had been told by Dame M was the correct size and was not, and sat on the folding chair between Hall and Hartley, and in front of him, at the end of the row, in a chair facing the graduates, beside the stage, in the brown jacket, with the roll book on his knee, sat Mr Abernathy.

He had the roll book.

Frederick had not believed it. He had seen it at the airport on the thirtieth of August at the head of a crocodile and not believed it then either. He looked at it now, on Mr Abernathy’s knee, the brown one, with the cardboard corners, and felt the thing settle in him again that he had not known was loose.

---

The principal spoke. Then a woman from the Board. Then a girl from the class, who was valedictorian, and spoke about the future, at length, and was very good, and said we forty-one times, Inés told him afterwards, I counted.

Then Mrs Okonedo.

She was not on the programme. She stood up from the staff row at the side of the stage, in her dark dress, with her hands folded, and walked to the lectern without being asked, and the principal, who had been about to stand up, sat down again.

She did not look at her notes. She did not have any.

“I have taught chemistry at this school for twenty-two years,” said Mrs Okonedo, in her small upright voice, without lowering it. “I hand back marks face up. I have done so for twenty-two years. I have been asked by the Board to stop, eleven times. I have not.”

The gym was quiet.

“A year ago, in this gym,” said Mrs Okonedo, “a student in this class got seventy-three in his chemistry final. I wrote, under the mark, equilibria, understood.” She looked out across the graduates. “I told him at the time that seventy-three meant only that. That it did not mean anything else, and that it should not.”

She paused.

“I was wrong,” said Mrs Okonedo.

The gym was very quiet.

“It meant that a boy who had been told all his life that he was good at everything, and who was not good at chemistry, sat in my room at lunch on eleven Thursdays and was not good at it until he was. And then wrote it down. Correctly. In a gym. And never once asked me for a mark he had not earned.” She folded her hands on the lectern. “In December, from England, he answered a problem I sent him. Without being asked. On the back of the envelope. Left-handed, because he had broken a finger playing a game called rugby.” She looked down the rows of graduates. “He got it right.” She paused. “That is what seventy-three means. It means you come back and do the problem when nobody is marking it.”

She went and sat down.

Nobody clapped. Nobody knew whether you were supposed to.

Then, in the stands on the left, among the navy blazers, Kit Barraclough stood up, and began, very slowly, to clap, and then everybody was.

---

Mr Abernathy gave the address.

He had been asked by the principal in March, and had said no, and been asked again in April, and had said no, and then, in May, from England, had written a letter to the principal that said, in its entirety, yes, ten minutes, no slides.

He stood at the lectern in the brown jacket with the roll book under his arm.

He did not put it down.

He spoke for nine minutes. He spoke at exactly the speed he read the roll. He did not raise his voice and he did not lower it and he did not look at his notes, because he did not have any, and he did not once, in nine minutes, look at the stands on the right, where his wife was sitting in the second row in a raincoat in June, with her hands in her lap.

He said that he had taught at Ellicott for forty years. He said that he had read the roll every morning at a quarter past eight for forty years, at the same speed, every name, and that a colleague of his had worked out, in a barn in Gloucestershire, that this was about two hundred and twenty thousand names. He said that he had never once, in two hundred and twenty thousand names, read any of them faster or slower than any other.

“I was asked once,” said Mr Abernathy, “by a parent, why I didn’t read the names more warmly. With more feeling. Why I read them like a list.” He looked at the graduates. “I said, because it is a list. It’s a list of who’s here. That’s all a roll is. It’s a list of who’s here, this morning, in this room.” He paused. “And I’ve never found anything more important to say about anybody than that they were here.”

He looked down at the roll book under his arm.

“I’m going to read it,” said Mr Abernathy. “One last time. The senior class. Not all two hundred and thirty-eight. Just mine. The homeroom. Thirty-one.” He opened the roll book. “At the usual speed.”

He took out his pen.

He did not look up.

“Abara,” said Mr Abernathy.

And from the floor of the gym, in her gown and her cap, a girl said, “Here.”

“Bassett.”

“Here.”

The gym was absolutely silent. Two thousand people in the stands and on the floor, families and teachers and the English form in their navy blazers and the Duke of Cumberland and the Queen of Sweden on two folding chairs at the front, listening to a man of sixty-four in a brown jacket read thirty-one names off a list at exactly the speed he had read them every morning for four years.

“Castañeda.”

“Here,” said Inés.

“Devane.”

“Here,” said Devon.

“Hanover.”

Frederick said, “Here.”

Mr Abernathy did not look up.

“Hartigan.”

“Here,” said Theo.

“Paredes.”

“Here,” said Lucía.

He read all thirty-one. To the end. Zelinski. Here. And closed the roll book, and put the cap back on his pen, and looked up, for the first time, at the gym, at all of it, the stands and the floor and the banner that said CLASS OF 2031 and the bedsheet that said HANOVER IS RUBISH, and then, at last, at the second row on the right, at his wife.

“Well,” said Mr Abernathy. “Same as ever.”

He sat down.

---

The names were read in alphabetical order, all two hundred and thirty-eight, by the principal, at the lectern, and each graduate went up the steps onto the stage when their name was read and crossed it and was given a roll of paper tied with ribbon and shook the principal’s hand and went down the other side, and their family, somewhere in the stands, made a noise.

He crossed the stage like everybody else.

He had asked for that. He had asked in March, by letter, from Gloucestershire, to the principal, and the principal had written back and said that of course he would cross like everybody else, and that the school had never considered anything different, and that he had asked the question in the same words in which the principal’s own son had once asked whether he would be allowed to be an ordinary boy on a school trip, and that the answer was the same.

“Frederick Hanover,” said the principal.

Not George. Not His Majesty. The name on the roll.

He went up the steps.

He crossed the stage. He took the roll of paper. He shook the principal’s hand.

And in the stands on the right, at the front, in the middle, on an ordinary folding chair among the families, his father stood up.

He did it slowly. He did it with the hazel stick, pushing himself up from the chair with his free hand, the way he had stood up at the head of the long table at the New Inn on Christmas Day to make a toast, and Niamh, behind him, half rose and sat down again, and his mother did not put a hand on Niamh’s arm, because she was standing up too. And his father stood at the front of the stands in the gym at Ellicott High School with the stick, eighty-four years old, two years and nine months from the sea, and did not clap, and did not shout, and did not wave.

He stood.

That was all. He stood for his son’s name.

And the Hartigans, behind him, stood. And Señora Ruiz stood, with the green folder held against her chest. And Mr Paredes stood. And the very small very old woman beside Mr Paredes, whom Frederick did not recognise, stood, very slowly, with her stick. And on the left, in the navy blazers, the English form stood, all of them, under a bedsheet that said HANOVER IS RUBISH. And then the whole gym, both stands, the families, the teachers, two thousand people, stood, for one name, read at the same speed as all the others, in a gym where, at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday in October two years and eight months ago, in a geometry class, a boy of fifteen had become King and gone home at four to the hospital.

He stood on the stage with the roll of paper in his hand.

He did not know what to do. Nobody had told him. There was no rule.

So he did what his father did. He lifted the roll of paper about an inch, toward the stand on the right, and put it down again.

On time.

---

Afterwards, on the grass outside, in the sun, in the crowd, in the noise, everybody was everywhere at once.

Señora Ruiz found him first.

She came through the crowd in her best coat with the green folder under her arm at a speed that parted the families like a ship, and stopped in front of him, and looked up at him, in his gown and his cap that was too small, with an expression of the most profound and comprehensive outrage.

“Swedish,” said Señora Ruiz.

“Señora.”

“I said we would discuss it at your graduation.” She opened the green folder. “This is your graduation.” She took out a sheet of paper. It was covered in her handwriting, both sides, close, in Spanish. “I have prepared some questions.”

He looked at the sheet.

“Señora, there are forty questions on this.”

“Forty-one,” said Señora Ruiz. “There is one on the back.” She turned it over. At the bottom of the back of the sheet, on its own, underlined twice, in Spanish, was a single line: Will you teach me?

He looked at it.

He looked at her.

“I am fifty-four,” said Señora Ruiz. “I have taught Spanish for twenty-six years. I have three languages. I would like a fourth. Before I am sixty.” She closed the folder. “Your mother says it is very difficult and has nine vowels.”

“It’s not that difficult.”

“Then you will teach me,” said Señora Ruiz. “On Saturdays. In September. In my kitchen. I will make lunch.” She put the folder under her arm. “And I am still furious with you. For four years. For the rest of my life.” She looked at him for a moment longer, and then, very briefly, very fiercely, put both her arms round him in his gown, in the crowd, in the sun, and let go, and said “Felicidades,” and went away through the crowd at the same speed she had come.

---

Mr Ferrante found him second.

He was standing at the edge of the grass by the gym door with his hands in his pockets, in his scarf, in June, watching the crowd, the way he had stood at the top of the west stairs on the first day of every year.

“Mr Hanover.”

“Sir.”

“I wrote to them,” said Mr Ferrante. “The Register. On Monday. With a copy of the letter. Thomas Gale, carpenter, 1800, Hampshire Record Office.” He did not take his hands out of his pockets. “They wrote back on Wednesday. Very politely. They said they would look into it. They said these things take time.” He looked at the crowd. “They said it would be corrected in due course.”

“When?”

“When its date comes,” said Mr Ferrante. “That’s what they said. When its date comes.” He thought about it. “I don’t know what that means. I don’t think anybody does. I think it means that somewhere, at some point, in an article about daily life in the Columbia District, 1801 will quietly become 1800, and a footnote will appear, and nobody will notice.” He looked at Frederick. “Except us.”

“Except us.”

Mr Ferrante took one hand out of his pocket and put it, very briefly, flat on Frederick’s shoulder, the way he had at the door of the gym after finals a year ago, and took it away.

“The Register will be corrected,” said Mr Ferrante. “It’s a very small thing.” He looked at the crowd. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

---

Theo found him third.

He came through the crowd with his gown open and his cap in his hand and his face doing everything at once, with Kit behind him in his navy blazer and Freya Lomax behind Kit, and stopped in front of him, and held something out.

It was a form. Several pages. Stapled. With a crest on the top, which Frederick recognised, because it was the crest of the medical school at the university in New Westminster, on the river, a red cross on a white star.

It was half filled in.

“I started it in May,” said Theo. “In the drying room. At Coln. After Kit got his letter.” He looked at the form. “I filled in my name and my address and my school and my grades. And then there’s a box. A big one. Why do you want to study medicine?” He turned the page. “And I couldn’t fill it in. I’ve been trying since May. I’ve written it eleven times. I’ve crossed it out eleven times.” He looked up. “Because I wanted to be a paramedic since I was thirteen. And now I don’t. And I don’t know how to say why in a box.”

Frederick looked at the box. It was empty. It had eleven faint lines through it where something had been written in pencil and rubbed out.

“Write the vicar,” said Frederick.

Theo looked at him.

“In the cake tent. At the fête. When you were kneeling down. You said, I want to know why. Not what to do. Why he went down. What his heart did.” Frederick gave him the form back. “Write that. That’s the box.”

Theo looked at the form for a long time.

Behind him, Kit Barraclough said, “Told you,” and Freya Lomax said, “Told you,” at exactly the same moment, and looked at each other, and Theo looked at both of them, and then at Frederick, and his ears went slowly scarlet.

“Maybe,” said Theo.

---

Inés found him last.

She was standing at the edge of the crowd with her gown over her arm and her book under it, and beside her, holding her arm, the very small, very old woman in the dark dress with the walking stick, whom Frederick had not recognised in the stands, and recognised now.

“This is my grandmother,” said Inés. “From Reseda. She came on the bus. On her own. Two days. She wouldn’t let anybody drive her.” She looked at the old woman. “Abuela, este es.”

“I know who it is,” said the old woman, in Spanish, looking up at him. “I’m old, not blind.”

Frederick bowed his head.

“Señora.”

The old woman looked at him for a long time, up and down, the way Mrs Haverfield looked at people, the way Señora Ruelas looked at people, the way, he had begun to think, every old woman in every country in the world looked at a boy she had decided to have an opinion about.

“She told me,” said the old woman. “On Monday. In my kitchen. Oxford.” She lifted her chin. “I am very proud.”

“So am I, Señora.”

“She says it is in England.”

“Yes.”

“A long way.”

“Yes.”

“She says you were in England. For a year. In a village.”

“Yes, Señora.”

The old woman considered this.

“Tell me the truth,” she said. “You have been there. You know.” She leaned on her stick and looked up at him with her dark eyes, very sharp. “Does it have earthquakes?”

He looked at Inés.

Inés was looking at the ground, very hard, with her mouth doing something very small at one side.

“No, Señora,” said Frederick. “It doesn’t have earthquakes.” He thought about it. “It has rain. And a river. And bells. And a woman of a hundred on a wall who will tell her to write to you every Sunday.”

The old woman looked at him a moment longer.

Then she nodded, slowly, satisfied, as if he had answered a question she had been asking everybody for months and nobody had answered properly.

“Good,” she said. “Then she will be safe.” And patted his arm, twice, with a small dry hand, and turned to her granddaughter, and said, in a voice of great finality, “I want cake.”

---

He did not decide anything.

That was the thing. Everybody asked him. On the grass outside the gym in the sun, in the crowd, the principal and the woman from the Board and the Hartigans and Mrs Okonedo and the English form and a reporter from the Evening Star who was not Harold Quayle and was very much younger and had been told by the Household that he might ask one question, and asked it: what next, sir?

University. The Realm, or Britain. A year with the forces. A year of something.

He did not know.

He said so. To all of them. To the reporter from the Evening Star, who wrote it down, and looked at what he had written, and looked up, and said that’s all, sir?, and Frederick said that’s all, and the reporter looked at him for a moment and then said, Mr Quayle said you’d say that, and put his notebook away.

He did not know what came next. He had not decided. He had been King since he was fifteen and had known, every day of it, exactly what came next, because somebody had written it down in a box in pencil the night before, and he had spent a year in a valley where nobody wrote anything down, and he did not know, and for the first time in his life he did not mind.

At the edge of the crowd, by the gym door, Kimura was standing with her hands in her pockets.

Not at the back of the room. At the edge of it.

She looked at him across the grass.

He did not ask how many out of ten. He did not need to.

---

In the blue notebook that night, in the north wing, at the desk, with the window open and the sound of a bus a long way off on the Axis and no river, he wrote:

Graduation. 1,061 mornings. The box. A drawer. The last cup. HANOVER IS RUBISH, one B. Seventy-three means you come back and do the problem. Two hundred and twenty thousand names. Here. Dad stood. Señora Ruiz wants Swedish. The Register will be corrected. Theo’s box: the vicar. Inés’s grandmother: does it have earthquakes. No. Not decided.

And under it:

That’s all right.