Prep

Mr Abernathy read the roll at a quarter past eight in a room with a fireplace in it.

It was a real fireplace, stone, with a carved coat of arms over it that had been chiselled half away by somebody in the seventeenth century who had disapproved of it, and an iron basket in it that had not had a fire in since about 1950, and a smell of very old soot that came out of it on damp mornings and lay along the floor. The room had been the abbey’s chapter house. It was eight-sided, and the windows were pointed, and the desks had been brought over from Ellicott in a container in July and set out in rows, thirty-one of them, so that the room looked exactly like the homeroom at the end of the east corridor on the first floor would have looked if somebody had picked it up and dropped it into the Middle Ages.

Frederick’s desk was by the window, three from the back. Theo’s beside it.

Mr Abernathy came in at a quarter past eight in the brown jacket, without the tweed cap, and sat down at the front, under the coat of arms, and opened the roll book, and took out his pen.

He did not look up.

“Abara,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Here.”

“Bassett.”

“Here.”

Frederick listened to it. He had heard this roll read in this order at this speed every school morning for four years. He had heard it on the morning after Santa Monica, and on the morning after the Eleventh, and on the morning after a coronation, and it had never once been read faster or slower than this, and it was not being read faster or slower now, in an eight-sided room in Gloucestershire, with a fireplace and the smell of soot and, outside the pointed window, a man on a small tractor mowing a lawn that had been mown by somebody on that spot for eight hundred years.

“Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Here.”

“Hartigan.”

“Here.”

At the end of it Mr Abernathy closed the roll book and put the cap back on his pen and looked up at them, at the thirty-one of them, in their own clothes, at their old desks, in the chapter house of an abbey, and then round at the room, at the windows, at the fireplace, and up, at the carved coat of arms with half its face gone.

“Well,” said Mr Abernathy. “Same as ever.” He stood up. “Chemistry is in the old dairy. Don’t get lost.”

---

Ellicott’s courses went on as they would have gone on at home. That had been the agreement. The Ellicott staff who had come, which was Mr Abernathy and Mr Ferrante, and the English staff who had been lent, taught the Ellicott syllabus for the senior year in English rooms to American students who would sit Ellicott’s finals in an English gym in May, and send them home, and be marked in New Westminster, and graduate in June in the gym at Ellicott in front of their families, as if they had never left.

On top of that, each of them took one English subject. One. With the English.

Frederick had taken English Literature.

He had not been sure why, when he chose it in the spring off a list. He thought afterwards that it was because it was the one that seemed least like anything he would ever need, and he had spent his whole life being taught things he would need, and it seemed like something he might be allowed to do once, for no reason, before it was too late.

The English Literature set was seventeen English sixth-formers and him, in a room at the top of Leach with a sloping ceiling and a window looking down the valley, taught by a thin elderly man called Mr Crane who wore a bow tie and read aloud with his eyes shut.

The book was Persuasion.

“Jane Austen,” said Mr Crane, on the first morning, with his eyes shut. “Her last finished novel. Published after her death. A woman of twenty-seven is persuaded, at nineteen, by the people who love her, not to marry a man of no fortune and no family, and eight years later he comes back.” He opened his eyes. “With a fortune.”

“Is it a romance?” said a girl at the back.

“It is about,” said Mr Crane, “the consequences of taking good advice.”

He looked round the room. His eyes landed on Frederick, at the end of the second row, and stayed there for a moment with an expression of mild scholarly interest, as though Frederick were an unusual footnote.

“Mr Hanover,” said Mr Crane. “Have you ever been given good advice and taken it?”

Seventeen English sixth-formers became extremely interested in their copies of Persuasion.

“Every day, sir,” said Frederick.

“And has it made you happy?”

Frederick thought about it. The room waited.

“It’s made other people happy, sir,” he said. “Mostly.”

Mr Crane looked at him for some time.

“Chapter one,” said Mr Crane at last, and shut his eyes again. “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage.” He opened one eye. “He means a book listing all the baronets in England. With himself in it. He reads it to cheer himself up.” He shut the eye. “I imagine, Mr Hanover, you have something similar.”

“There’s a book,” said Frederick. “But I’m at the front of it. So I don’t read it.”

The girl at the back laughed, and stopped, and then laughed again, and Mr Crane, with his eyes shut, very faintly, smiled.

---

Mr Ferrante was teaching history to the English.

This had not been the plan. The plan had been that Mr Ferrante would teach Ellicott’s senior history to the Ellicott seniors and spend the rest of his time in county record offices with his map of 1779 and be happy. But the head of history at Coln Abbey had broken her leg in August falling off a bicycle in Brittany, and Dr Ord had asked Mr Ferrante, in the corridor on the first Tuesday, in the voice of a woman who does not ask questions she does not know the answer to, whether he would consider taking her Upper Sixth set for a term or so.

So now three mornings a week Mr Ferrante, who had taught the history of the Realm for twenty-six years to the Realm’s children, stood at the front of a classroom in Coln and taught the history of England to the English.

Frederick heard about it from Will.

“He’s terrifying,” said Will, at lunch, with a sort of awe. “He came in and said, right, the Wars of the Roses, and Charlotte Pemberton said, we did those in Year Eight, and he said, you were told about them in Year Eight. Now you’re going to do them.” Will ate a potato. “Then he said the Tudors were basically a successful criminal family with a good press office and we all just sat there.”

“He says that about everybody.”

“He said it about Henry the Eighth,” said Will. “In England.” He shook his head. “Then he said the most important thing that happened in the whole fifteenth century was a change in the price of wool, and drew a graph. On the board. Of wool.” He ate another potato. “I’ve never been so interested in anything in my life.”

At the far end of the long table, Mr Ferrante was eating his lunch alone with a book propped against the water jug, as he did at Ellicott, and as Frederick watched, a small group of English sixth-formers from the Upper Sixth set came past with their trays and slowed down as they passed him, the way you slow down passing a man who has done a card trick, and one of them, a girl with a plait, said, “Sir, about the wool,” and Mr Ferrante looked up over his book with an expression of such naked delight that Frederick had to look away.

---

On Saturday the bus.

It left the village from a stop by the war memorial on the green, and it went to Cirencester, and it was the only way to Cirencester unless you had a car or a bicycle or a great deal of time. It came four times a day. It was called, according to the timetable in a glass case on the side of the bus shelter, which somebody had decorated in marker pen with a picture of a snail, the 860.

It was due at ten past ten.

At ten past ten Frederick, Theo, Will, Kit, Lucía and Inés were standing at the stop by the war memorial, with Kimura a little way off by the memorial itself reading the names on it with her hands in her pockets, and there was no bus.

At twenty past ten there was no bus.

“It’s always late,” said Will.

“How late?”

“Depends.” Will looked up the lane. “Depends on Mrs Haverfield.”

“Who’s Mrs Haverfield?”

Will nodded across the green, toward the churchyard gate, where on the low stone wall by the lych-gate the old woman sat in her coat and headscarf with her hands on her stick, with the small rough-haired dog at her feet, Ernest, asleep, and was watching them. She had been watching them, Frederick realised, since they arrived at the stop.

“She’s ninety-nine,” said Will. “She gets the bus on a Saturday to do her shopping, but she doesn’t get on at the stop, she sits on the wall till it comes, and then she waits till it’s actually stopped and the doors are open, and then she gets up, and walks across the green, and the driver has to wait for her, because, well.” He shrugged. “It’s Mrs Haverfield. And then she wants to talk to him. All the way. About everything.”

“Why doesn’t she just wait at the stop?”

Will looked at him as though he had asked why the river did not just stay in one place.

“Because,” said Will, “she’s Mrs Haverfield.”

---

At twenty-five past ten the bus came round the corner by the pub.

It was small, single-decker, green and cream, with COTSWOLD COUNTRY down the side and 860 CIRENCESTER in orange letters over the windscreen, and it came round the corner by the New Inn at a speed that suggested it was trying to make up time and knew that it could not, and pulled up at the stop with a hiss and a long shudder, and the doors folded open.

The driver was a heavy, grey-haired man of about sixty in a short-sleeved shirt with a badge on it, with large forearms and a large, comfortable, weathered face and a pair of reading glasses on top of his head.

“Morning,” said the driver. “Cirencester. One-ninety single, three-forty return, kids under sixteen a quid, no change for twenties, and don’t put your feet on the seats, I’ve just done them.” He looked at Will. “Morning, Will. Your dad all right?”

“Fine, Mr Fennell.”

“Ewes all right?”

“Fine.”

“Good.” The driver looked at Kit. “You’re new.”

“Leeds,” said Kit.

“Can’t help that,” said the driver, kindly. He looked at Theo, and up at Theo, and up a bit further. “Mind your head, son.”

Theo minded his head, and got on, and paid, and went down the bus. Lucía and Inés paid and went down the bus.

Frederick got on.

He held out the exact fare in coins, warm from his hand. He had practised. He had practised with Will in the common room on Thursday night, with the coins in a row on the table: a return to Cirencester, please, a two-pound coin and a pound and two twenties, in that order. He had practised the coins. He had not practised anything else.

“Return to Cirencester, please,” said Frederick.

The driver took the coins without looking at them, and dropped them in the tray, and looked at the ticket machine, and pressed a button on it, and the machine whirred and spat out a ticket, and the driver tore it off and held it out, and looked up from the machine at the passenger, as he must have done ten thousand times on this bus at this stop by this war memorial in his life.

He saw the passenger.

He did not move.

He sat in the driver’s seat of the 860 with the ticket in his hand held out in the air between them, and looked at the face in front of him, and then, for some reason, down at the coins in the tray, where the same face lay four times over in profile, and then up again, and the colour went out of his face in one movement from the top down, like a blind being drawn.

“Oh,” said Mr Fennell.

“Good morning,” said Frederick.

“Oh,” said Mr Fennell again, and then, in a much smaller voice, a voice that seemed to come from a long way inside the large comfortable body, “Oh, Christ.”

He did not say anything else. He sat there.

“Could I have the ticket?” said Frederick.

Mr Fennell looked at the ticket in his own hand as though he had never seen a ticket before. Then he held it out further. Frederick took it.

“I can’t charge you,” said Mr Fennell.

“I’ve paid.”

“I know you’ve paid.” Mr Fennell looked at the coins in the tray in a kind of anguish, as if they had been put there by somebody else. “That’s the King’s money. You’ve paid me in you.”

Behind him, in the bus, there was a silence of the very particular kind made by four teenagers trying not to laugh.

“It’s everybody’s money,” said Frederick. “Really.”

“Not on my bus it isn’t,” said Mr Fennell. “I’ve got a.” He stopped. He looked at the floor of the bus. He went, if possible, even paler. “I’ve got a book,” he said. “At home. A scrapbook. Since you were born. Every picture. Every one. Out of the paper. The christening. The first day at school. The.” He swallowed. “The coronation, I’ve got four pages of the coronation, I’ve got the one of you coming out of the Abbey with the little lad holding the train, I’ve got it framed.”

From the back of the bus, Theo said, quite loudly, “Hi.”

Mr Fennell looked down the bus, and saw Theo, six foot two, sitting on the back seat with his knees up round his ears, waving.

He put his face in his hands.

---

It was a quarter to eleven before the 860 left the village. Mrs Haverfield had got up off the wall when the doors opened, as Will had said she would, and walked across the green, very slowly, with Ernest on his lead and her stick, and had climbed the step onto the bus with the driver’s help, and had looked at Mr Fennell, who still had his face in his hands, and then at Frederick, who was standing in the aisle beside the driver’s cab because there did not seem to be anywhere else to stand, and then back at Mr Fennell.

“Michael,” she said. “What on earth is the matter with you?”

“Nan,” said Mr Fennell, through his hands.

“Sit up. You look like a pudding.”

Mr Fennell sat up.

Mrs Haverfield looked at Frederick. It was the first time he had been close to her. She was very small, much smaller than she had looked on the wall, and her face under the headscarf was so lined it looked like a map of somewhere with a great many roads, and her eyes were pale blue and absolutely clear and missed nothing at all.

“You’re him,” she said.

“Yes, madam.”

“Madam,” said Mrs Haverfield, and made a small noise. She looked him up and down. “You’re taller than your grandfather.”

“Did you know my grandfather?”

“I met your grandfather.” She sat down on the front seat, the one marked for the elderly, with Ernest at her feet, and arranged her stick against her knee. “He asked me the way to Bibury. In 1951. I was twenty. He leaned out of the car window in the lane by the church and said excuse me, is this the way to Bibury, and I said no, it’s the other way, and he said thank you very much, and the car turned round in Mr Purvis’s gate, and that was that.” She looked at Frederick sharply. “It was the other way.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“I’ve told that story every week for seventy-nine years. Michael’s heard it a thousand times.” She settled her handbag on her knee. “There was a little boy in the back of the car. In a sailor suit. He waved. I didn’t wave back. I was twenty and I thought I was too old for waving.” She looked at him. “That was your father, I suppose.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “He’d have been four.”

Mrs Haverfield looked out of the bus window at the green for a moment.

“Well,” she said. “I should have waved.” And then, to the driver, in quite a different voice: “Michael, are we going to Cirencester or are we going to sit here all morning looking at His Majesty?”

Mr Fennell started the engine.

---

Cirencester was a small grey town with a church in the middle of it too big for the town, like a man in a coat too big for him, and a market place in front of the church full of stalls under striped awnings selling vegetables and cheese and second-hand books and cheap phone covers and a great many things made of wool. Frederick walked round it with the others for two hours and nobody looked at him once, because it was a Saturday morning in a market town and everybody was looking at the vegetables.

At one o’clock Will took them to a stall at the corner of the market place under a green awning that sold pasties.

“You’ve got to have a pasty,” said Will.

“What’s a pasty?”

Will looked at him with the same expression Jack had used for cricket.

“It’s Cornish,” said Will. “Well. It’s supposed to be. From Kernow. It’s pastry, folded over, with meat in, and potato, and swede, and onion, and pepper, a lot of pepper, and you hold it by the crimp.” He showed him the crimp, the thick plaited edge of the pastry along the top. “The miners used to hold it by the crimp with their dirty hands and eat the rest and throw the crimp away. That’s the story. It’s probably rubbish.” He bought six. “Here.”

Frederick held it by the crimp. It was heavy and hot and the pastry was golden and slightly flaky and smelled of pepper and gravy and something underneath that was sweet.

He bit into it.

He stood at the corner of the market place in Cirencester in the September sun with the church too big for the town behind him, and the pastry came apart in his mouth, and the meat inside was soft and peppery and the potato had soaked up the gravy and the swede, whatever swede was, was sweet and soft, and it was so hot he had to breathe out round it, and it was, he thought, without any question, the best thing he had ever eaten in his life.

“Oh,” said Frederick.

“Good, isn’t it,” said Will.

“It’s.”

He could not find a word. He ate some more of it instead. Beside him Theo had already finished his, and was looking at Frederick’s with an expression of great hope.

“No,” said Frederick.

“You didn’t even know what it was.”

“I know what it is now.”

Kit Barraclough, eating his own with the crimp in one hand and his glasses steaming slightly, looked at the King of fourteen countries standing in Cirencester market with gravy on his chin, holding a pasty with both hands as though somebody might take it from him, and said, with great satisfaction, to Theo, “He’s going to be useless now.”

---

On the 860 home, at a quarter past four, Mr Fennell said nothing at all for the whole of the journey. He drove. He drove very carefully, more carefully than Frederick had ever seen anybody drive a bus, taking the corners in the narrow lanes as though the bus were full of eggs. At the stop by the war memorial he opened the doors and sat looking straight ahead through the windscreen while they all got off.

Frederick got off last.

At the bottom of the step he turned round.

“Mr Fennell.”

Mr Fennell looked at him.

“Thank you for the ride.”

Mr Fennell opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he reached down beside the driver’s seat and tore a blank ticket off the end of the roll in the machine, a long thin strip of white paper with COTSWOLD COUNTRY 860 printed along the top and nothing else, and held it out through the door.

“Would you sign it?” said Mr Fennell.

Frederick looked at him.

“You’ll put it in the scrapbook.”

“I’ll put it in the scrapbook,” said Mr Fennell, with the simple dignity of a man admitting to a crime he is proud of, “and I’ll never show anybody but my wife, and when I die our Jack can have it, and he won’t care, he doesn’t care about any of it, he thinks I’m daft.” He held the ticket out. “Please.”

Frederick took the ticket, and took a pen out of his pocket, a cheap blue ballpoint from the Ellicott drawer, and put the strip of paper against the side of the bus by the door, and under the words COTSWOLD COUNTRY 860 he wrote, very small: Return. F.

He gave it back.

Mr Fennell took it, and looked at it, and folded it once, very carefully, and put it in the top pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, behind the badge, and buttoned the pocket.

“Our Jack,” said Frederick.

Mr Fennell looked up.

“Jack’s your son?”

“You’ve met our Jack?”

“On Wednesday. On the footpath. He walked me home.”

Mr Fennell looked at him for a long time, from the driver’s seat of the 860, with his hand on the buttoned pocket.

“Did he,” he said at last. “Did he now.” And then: “He never said.”

“He was walking Mrs Haverfield’s dog.”

“Our Nan’s dog,” said Mr Fennell, slowly, as though a great many things were arranging themselves in his head in an order he did not like. “He walks Nan’s dog every day. Up to Ready Token and back.” He stared through the windscreen. “And he never said.”

The doors closed. The 860 pulled away from the war memorial, slowly, very slowly, and went round the corner by the New Inn, and Frederick stood on the green and watched it go.

Across the green, on the churchyard wall, Mrs Haverfield had resumed her seat, with Ernest at her feet and her bag of shopping beside her, and she was watching him, with her chin up, and her pale clear eyes.

He lifted his hand to her.

She lifted hers back.