Paddington

Every day at four o’clock, London time, he had rung his father.

He had rung from the telephone in the porters’ lodge, because his own did not have a signal at the bottom of the valley unless you stood on the third step of the Windrush stairs and held it against the window, and Castellanos had said that a King standing on a stair holding a telephone against a window was not a thing he was prepared to explain to anybody. So at four o’clock every afternoon for four weeks he had gone to the lodge, and the porter, a silent man called Mr Gage who was said to have been at the school since the Suez crisis, had gone out of his own office without a word and shut the door behind him, and Frederick had dialled the number, and Niamh had answered, and said he’s here, he’s been ready since half past three, he’s been looking at the clock, and then there had been a rustle and a breath on the line, and his father.

And his father had read him the arrivals at Paddington.

Every day. Off the sheet Niamh had written out over the speaker telephone, and then off the board itself, because Niamh, it turned out, had taken him to Paddington on the second day in London in a wheelchair and he had refused the wheelchair at the entrance and walked, with the stick, the whole length of the concourse to the departures board, slowly, with eleven people from the Household behind him at a respectful distance pretending to be travellers, and had stood under it for twenty minutes reading it, and come home, Niamh said, like a man who’s been to Mass. Since then he had read the board. Every day. Off a printout that somebody in the Household had arranged to be sent to the Palace from the station at a quarter to four.

Today, on the telephone, at four, he had read the board, and when he got to 16.42 KEMBLE he had stopped.

“That,” said his father, on the line. “One.”

“I’m on that one.”

“Yes.” A breath. “Platform.”

“I don’t know what platform.”

“Nine,” said his father, with great satisfaction, as though he had personally arranged it.

---

The 16.42 from Kemble was a long white train with a yellow nose, and it came into Paddington at a quarter to seven on Friday evening in the rain, under the enormous iron roof, which went up and up overhead in arches of glass and iron like the inside of a whale made by an engineer, with the pigeons going about in it like thoughts.

He came down the platform with Theo and Castellanos and Kimura and a small bag, among four hundred people from Swindon and Reading and Didcot Parkway, all of them going home on a Friday night, all of them looking at their telephones.

At the end of the platform, by the barrier, among the people waiting, with Niamh on one side and a large man from the detail on the other, in a dark overcoat and a tweed cap and a scarf, holding the stick in his right hand and nothing at all in his left, stood his father.

Frederick stopped walking. Somebody behind him walked into him and said sorry and went round.

His father had not been to a railway station to meet anybody since before Frederick was born. He had not, as far as Frederick knew, been to a railway station in his life except to get on a train, at the far end of a red carpet, at a time arranged by somebody else. And now here he was at the barrier at the end of platform nine at Paddington at a quarter to seven on a Friday night in the rain, eighty-three years old, two years from the sea, in a tweed cap, standing, with no wheelchair anywhere in sight, among a crowd of people holding up their telephones to film the board, and nobody was filming him, because nobody had noticed him at all.

He was looking at the train. He was looking at it very carefully, from one end to the other, the way he had once looked at the instrument panel of an aircraft.

Then he saw Frederick.

He did not wave. He did not smile. He lifted the stick, about an inch, off the floor, and put it down again. Frederick knew exactly what it meant. It meant: on time.

---

“Two,” said his father, in the car.

“Two what?”

“Minutes.” His father looked out of the window at the rain on the Westway with deep contentment. “Late.”

“It was on time. It came in at a quarter to seven.”

“Sixteen. Forty-two.” His father held up two fingers. “Arr. Eighteen. Forty-three.” He tapped the two fingers on his own knee. “Forty. Five.” He looked at his son, sideways, with his eyebrows up. “Two.”

“You worked that out on the platform?”

“Yes.”

“You stood there and worked it out.”

“Yes,” said his father, and turned back to the window, and Niamh, in the front seat beside the driver, said without turning round, “He’s been doing it for a fortnight. Every train. He stands at the board with a pencil. There’s a man on the information desk who comes out to talk to him now. They’ve got a system.”

---

The Palace was very large and very quiet, and he had been in it before, for six days in November, but he had been in it then as a boy about to be crowned, with a hundred people in every corridor and a bedsheet six yards long on the floor of the room upstairs to practise with, and he had not been in it, he realised, as a person who lived anywhere.

His father had lived in it for fifty-six years.

He knew that. He had always known it, the way you know the date of a battle. His father had come to the throne in 1972, at twenty-five, and had lived in this building, and Windsor, and Stirling, until the September two years ago when he had gone up into the sky over the Atlantic and come down into it. Every corridor in it had been his. Every room. He had grown up in it as a boy, and lived in it as a King, and left it on a Monday morning in September with a small bag for a private visit to Ottawa, and had not come back.

And now he had.

And now it was his son’s.

It was strange to come up the stairs from the courtyard and be met on the landing by people who bowed to him, and then, a half-second later, after a glance, to his father. He saw the glance. He saw it on every face. It was the look of people who had known one man as the King of this house all their lives and were trying, very politely, to get used to another.

His mother was at the top of the stairs.

She was in a grey jumper with the sleeves pushed up and a pencil behind her ear and a clipboard against her chest, and she looked, Frederick thought, more completely at home than he had ever seen her look anywhere outside Sweden. She kissed him on both cheeks. She kissed his father on one. She looked at the clipboard.

“You are in the blue room on the second floor,” she said. “The one with the window over the garden. Theo is next to you. Sergeant Castellanos and Sergeant Kimura are in the rooms at the end of the corridor, which have been aired, which took four days, because nobody had slept in them since 1994.” She looked at the clipboard. “Supper is at eight. In the small dining room, which is not small. There will be soup.”

“You’re running it,” said Frederick.

“Somebody has to run it.” She took the pencil from behind her ear and made a mark on the clipboard. “There are six hundred rooms in this house, and three hundred people, and every one of them was running it for your father, and they are all very kind, and none of them will make a decision without asking who for, and the answer used to be the King, and now there are two of you and neither of you is here.” She put the pencil back. “So they ask me. And I say the Queen. And then they do it.” She looked at Frederick with her clear grey eyes. “It is very restful. I should have done it years ago.”

“What about Niamh?”

His mother’s face changed slightly.

“Niamh,” she said, “is not run. By anybody. Niamh runs your father, and your father runs nobody, and on Tuesday Niamh told the Master of the Household’s deputy that if he moved the Duke’s chair one more time to dust under it she would put him in it and push him into the lake.” She made another mark on the clipboard. “He has not moved the chair.”

---

Dame M was on the stairs.

She was on the half-landing below the second floor, coming down as he went up to find the blue room, in a dark suit with her glasses on a chain, carrying a single sheet of paper, walking, because the lift was for people who needed it. She stopped when she saw him. She did not curtsey; she had told him in his first week as King that she would curtsey once a day, on the first meeting, and not again, because a Master of the Household who curtseyed every time she passed the King on a staircase would never get anything done.

She curtseyed.

“Sir.”

“Dame M.”

“You have grown,” said Dame M, critically, “about half an inch since August. The Cotswolds evidently agree with you.” She looked at his feet. “The rugby boots.”

“I haven’t played yet.”

“You will.” She looked at the sheet of paper in her hand. “I have come to London for the year at the Queen’s invitation and over the objections of my deputy here, who believes he can run this house without me, which is true, and should be allowed to, which is not.” She folded the paper once. “If you need anything, I am in the room at the end of the corridor on the first floor with the window onto the mews. If you do not need anything, I am in the same room, and you may come and tell me so.” She looked at him over her glasses. “Theo is well?”

“He’s next door.”

“I know where he is, sir. I asked if he was well.”

“He fell over under a tree in Scotland.”

“I read about it,” said Dame M. “In the Scotsman. There was a photograph.” She very nearly smiled, and did not. “I have it on my desk.”

---

He did not sleep well in the blue room.

It was a beautiful room. It had a high ceiling and a window over the garden, which was very large and very dark, with a lake in it somewhere that he could not see but could smell, faintly, through the open inch at the bottom of the sash, and a bed with four posts that was too large for one person and would have been too large for three. The radiator worked. Everything worked. Somebody had put a small vase of white flowers on the desk and a bottle of water and a glass with a paper cover on it, and the sheets had been ironed, and there was not a single crack anywhere in the ceiling.

He lay and looked at the ceiling with no crack in it and thought, quite suddenly, at about one in the morning, about the kitchen.

Not this kitchen. This palace had a kitchen, somewhere in the basement, enormous, with copper pans, he had been shown it in November by a chef in a white hat who had been very proud of it. He did not mean that one. He meant the kitchen at Columbia Palace, in the north wing, with the long scrubbed table a foot from where it used to be, and the range, and Bridget at the sink with her back to everybody, and the clock over the door that was four minutes slow.

He thought about the clock.

It was eight o’clock in the evening in New Westminster now. The kitchen would be dark. Bridget would have gone home. The clock would be ticking over the door in the dark kitchen with nobody to hear it, four minutes slow, and the table would be bare, and the chair at the end of it, his father’s chair, with the cushion Niamh had put on it in December, would be pushed in, and there would be no timetable on the table, and nobody would read the arrivals at Union Station at four o’clock tomorrow, for the first time in a year.

He had not expected to be homesick. He had thought, if he thought about it at all, that he would be homesick for Ellicott, or for the step, or for the Realm, for the river and the dome and the Monument white at the end of the Axis. He had been in England a month and he had not been homesick for any of those things once.

He was homesick for a clock that was four minutes slow.

He lay in the bed with four posts in his father’s house in London and missed it so much that it surprised him, the way stepping on a stair that is not there surprises you, a lurch in the stomach and a sense of the floor having moved.

After a while, through the wall, Theo, in the next room, who could not possibly have known, and who must have been asleep, said in a clear and perfectly conscious voice, “Go to sleep, Freddie.”

He went to sleep.

---

On Saturday his father read him the arrivals at Paddington in person.

He did it at four o’clock in the small dining room, which was not small, at the end of a long polished table that would have seated thirty, with the printout from the station in front of him and a pot of tea that nobody had made too strong, because nobody here knew that it was supposed to be. His mother sat on one side of him and Frederick on the other. Niamh sat at the far end of the table timing it, with her watch held up in front of her face, and Theo sat beside Niamh, because Theo had been told by Niamh in the corridor that morning that he was to sit beside her and help her count, and Theo did what Niamh told him.

His father read.

“Sixteen. Oh-two.” A breath. “Oxford.”

“Platform eleven,” said Niamh, from the far end, without looking up from her watch.

“Sixteen. Oh-nine. Reading.”

He read to the five o’clock from Cheltenham Spa. He had never read so far. He got to Cheltenham Spa and stopped and looked up from the printout at his son across the corner of the polished table, and the look on his face was the look from July, the look of the cat that had knocked the glass off the shelf.

“There,” he said.

“That’s further than you’ve ever read.”

“Yes.”

“At home you got to the five-fifteen.”

“Home,” said his father, and stopped, and looked at the printout, and Frederick saw his mouth try the shape of something, and stop, and try again. “Home.” A breath. “Is.” A longer breath. “Where.”

He did not finish it. He looked at his son. He lifted his hand from the printout, palm up, and turned it slightly, toward Frederick, toward the polished table, toward his wife, toward the tall boy at the end with the nurse, toward the whole long room with its chandeliers and its portraits of men in wigs who had been his ancestors and his son’s, and put it down again.

His mother put her hand on his arm, briefly, and took it away.

“Fifty-three minutes,” said Niamh, from the end of the table, looking at her watch. “That’s a record.”

---

On Sunday the men from Bay Bulls came to lunch.

It had been arranged since July, by his mother, through the Household and through the Governor-General’s office at Ottawa, and nobody had told the newspapers, and nobody had told the newspapers so successfully that the five men from Newfoundland had been brought from Heathrow on Saturday afternoon in an ordinary car and put up at an ordinary hotel near Victoria and walked across the park to the Palace on Sunday morning at half past twelve in their best clothes without a single person on the Mall having any idea who they were.

It was two years to the day.

Two years ago, on the twenty-ninth of September, in the late morning, a crab boat called the Kathleen Marie, out of Bay Bulls, south of St John’s, heading home from the crab grounds and outside the search, had come upon a life raft with five people in it, and her skipper had radioed Halifax. One of the five had been his father.

They came into the small dining room which was not small in a row, the five of them, in jackets and ties that had clearly been bought for the purpose, or borrowed, with their hands at their sides as if they did not know what to do with them, and stopped just inside the door, and looked at the chandeliers, and the portraits, and the long polished table laid for ten, and the windows over the garden, and then all at the same moment at the old man standing at the head of the table with a stick.

The one at the front was about sixty, short and very broad, with a face the colour of a brick and a white beard cut close and a pair of hands that looked as though they had been made for something heavier than a knife and fork. Frederick knew his name. Everybody in the Realm knew his name. Gerard Kavanagh, thirty-one years fishing out of Bay Bulls, whose boat was named for his mother, who had spoken to a reporter once, on the quay, and to nobody since.

Gerard Kavanagh looked at the Duke of Cumberland.

The Duke of Cumberland looked at Gerard Kavanagh.

Nobody said anything. His mother, by the window, did not move. Niamh, by the door, did not move. Theo, beside Frederick, had stopped breathing.

Then his father let go of the stick.

He did it on purpose. Frederick saw him do it. He leaned it very carefully against the edge of the table, so that it would not fall, and took his hand away, and stood, without it, at the head of the long polished table in his own house, eighty-three years old, two years to the day from a raft, and walked.

Six steps. Down the side of the table, past the end of it, across the carpet, to the door. Niamh, by the door, took one step forward and then, with a visible effort, stopped. Six steps, slow, the left foot dragging very slightly on each one, the hands at his sides, and the face perfectly calm, as though he were walking down a platform to look at a train.

He stopped in front of Gerard Kavanagh.

He held out his hand.

Gerard Kavanagh looked at the hand. Then he took it, in one of his own, which was about twice the size, and held it, and did not shake it, and the two of them stood there, holding hands, in the doorway of the small dining room.

“Skipper,” said his father.

Gerard Kavanagh’s face did not move. His eyes were very bright.

“Sir,” he said.

“Kathleen,” said his father. A breath. “Marie.”

“She’s grand, sir.” Kavanagh’s voice was thick and slow and came from somewhere a very long way out at sea. “She’s in the water at home. Painted her in May. New engine.” He swallowed. “Mother’s ninety-one. She sends her love. She said to say she’s lit a candle every Sunday. For the two years. She said to say she’ll keep on.”

His father held his hand.

“Tell,” said his father. “Her.” The longest breath. “Light.” The lips trying the shape. “Is.” And then, slowly, carefully, one word at a time, like a man laying stones in a wall: “Seen.”

Gerard Kavanagh nodded. He went on nodding. He did not let go of the hand.

Behind him, the four men from his crew stood in a row with their hands at their sides, looking at the carpet, and one of them, the youngest, who could not have been more than twenty-five, took a handkerchief out of his borrowed jacket and blew his nose, enormously, like a ship’s horn, and said “Sorry, sir,” and the Duke turned his head and looked at him and said, quite distinctly, “Don’t,” and the young man laughed, and the laugh broke whatever had been holding the room, and everybody moved.

---

Lunch was roast beef, and the men from Bay Bulls ate it as though they had been at sea for a month, and talked, once they had started, all at once, about the crab grounds and the price of crab and the new engine and the weather off the Grand Banks in September and the helicopter, which the youngest one, whose name was Declan, had been on the deck to wave in, and the noise of it, and the downdraught, and the way the Duke had looked up at it from the stretcher, like he was checking the paintwork, sir, said Declan, I swear to God.

His father, at the head of the table, listened to all of it. He said almost nothing. He did not need to. He sat with his hands on either side of his plate, and his face was the face of a man listening to music.

Halfway through the pudding, Gerard Kavanagh, who had said almost nothing either, put down his spoon and looked across the table at Frederick.

“You’re the lad,” he said, “wrote the statement.”

“Yes.”

“We will never forget what they did.” Kavanagh looked at his plate. “My mother had it put up. On the wall of the church. In a frame. Beside the window.” He picked his spoon up again and looked at it. “I’ve never known what to say about it. I’ve never known what to say about any of it. Thirty-one years at sea, you see a lot of things in the water. Boxes. Birds. Once a piano.” He turned the spoon over. “Never seen a King.”

He ate a piece of pudding.

“He was the calmest one in the raft,” said Gerard Kavanagh. “That’s the thing I’d tell people. If I told people. I don’t. But that’s the thing.” He looked up the table at the Duke, who was looking at him. “Four days in the water and he was the calmest one. He was holding the steward’s hand. The girl. She was keeping a list, in a little book, and he was holding her other hand so she could write.” He looked back at Frederick. “When we got them aboard, the first thing he did, he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t hardly move, he pointed at her book. He wanted to make sure we’d got the book.”

Frederick had not known that. He looked up the table at his father.

His father looked back at him. He did not say anything. He lifted one hand from beside his plate and pointed, very slightly, with one finger, at Frederick, and then at the window, and then, with the same finger, very slowly, made a small mark in the air, like a pencil on a page.

Frederick did not know what it meant.

Then he did. He thought about the blue notebook on the desk in Windrush, with one line in it for every day since the thirtieth of August.

Keep a list, his father was saying. So somebody will know.

---

The men from Bay Bulls left at four, walking back across the park the way they had come, in their best jackets, in a row, and nobody on the Mall had any idea who they were.

At the door of the small dining room, last of them, Declan, the youngest, turned round, and looked at the Duke, and said, “Sir. Can I ask you something?”

His father inclined his head.

“In the raft,” said Declan. “Before we came. Did you think you were going to die?”

His mother, by the window, went quite still. Niamh, by the door, made a small movement.

His father looked at the young man for some time. Then he reached out, for the stick, which was leaning against the edge of the table where he had left it two hours before, and took it, and leaned on it, and looked at Declan from under his eyebrows with an expression that Frederick knew from fifty-three minutes of the Paddington arrivals, and a hundred afternoons at four, and a kitchen four minutes slow.

“No,” said his father. “Train.”

Declan stared at him.

“Train,” said his father again, patiently, and lifted two fingers. “To. Catch.”