Solliden or Here

“Where would you like Christmas to be?” said his mother.

The kitchen, at breakfast, on the last day of term. Bridget at the range. His father at the end of the table in the chair with the brake on and a cup of tea he was lifting with both hands. Frederick at the corner in the plastic chair, which nobody had suggested moving and which had become, in a fortnight, where he sat.

He looked at her.

Every Christmas of his life had been decided. Stockholm, most years, at the court, because his mother was its Queen. London some years, for the broadcast. Here, twice, when his father had come for it. He had been told where in October, every year, in a sentence that began this year we will.

“Me?”

“You,” said his mother. “Stockholm has asked. The court would like us there, for Christmas Eve, as it always does. It has asked nicely and it has not asked twice.” She drank her coffee. “Your father would like what you would like. I would like what you would like. You are the King. And you are seventeen in May and you have never once been asked where you would like to spend Christmas, which is a failing of mine and not of the Crown’s.”

His father put his cup down.

“Here,” said his father. “Or. There.” A breath. “Both. Good.”

He looked at the window over the sink, grey, with the garden behind it.

Stockholm in December: the palace on the water, candles in every window, the Christmas Eve table that went the length of a room, the smell of oranges and cloves. He had loved it. He had been eight, and nine, and eleven.

His father at the end of this table, in a chair with wheels, a fortnight out of hospital. Two aircraft, an hour apart. A cold house on an island in the Baltic.

“Here,” said Frederick. “If Stockholm won’t mind.”

“Stockholm will mind,” said his mother, “and say it does not. It guessed already. The Marshal of the Realm said on the telephone on Sunday that the court had assumed as much and would think less of the King of Hanover if he did not.” She put her cup down. “So we will have Sweden here. The kitchens are sending a box.”

---

The box came on the twenty-third by the Household’s courier flight, from Stockholm, and was very large, and smelled through the cardboard of cloves.

Inside: candlesticks, brass, seven-branched, for the windows. Straw goats, small and large. A great many packets of saffron. Ginger biscuits in a tin with a painting of a sleigh on the lid. A ham, wrapped in muslin, that Bridget regarded without touching. And a card, in a cook’s hand, on the kitchens’ paper: For the King and his father, who are both too thin. From the kitchens, Stockholm Palace.

Bridget read the card over his shoulder.

“Everybody says that,” she said.

“Everybody’s right,” said Frederick, and Bridget looked at him very sharply, and went back to the range.

---

Christmas Eve was the day, the Swedish way. Not Christmas morning. The evening of the twenty-fourth, with everybody at the table.

His mother made the potatoes herself. Jansson’s temptation, a dish of potatoes and onions and cream and tinned sprats from the box from Stockholm, layered in Bridget’s largest dish, which Bridget surrendered at three in the afternoon with the expression of somebody signing away a child.

“Sprats,” said Bridget, watching. “In cream.”

“Anchovy,” said his mother. “It is called anchovy in Sweden. It is not anchovy. It is sprats. Nobody in Sweden knows why.” She laid the last row. “You will like it.”

“I will not,” said Bridget.

“You will,” said his mother, “and you will not say so, and you will have a second helping when you think nobody is looking.” She put the dish in the oven. “That is what everybody in Sweden does with it. You will fit in very well.”

His father, at the end of the table, made a sound that was very nearly a laugh.

---

At four it began to snow.

He saw it first. He was at the window of the morning room with his father, who had asked to be there, in the chair, with the rug, looking at the garden, which was grey and bare and going dark. Something moved across the glass. Then something else. Then the air over the garden was full of it, large and slow and wet, the first snow of the winter, coming down out of a sky the colour of a pigeon onto the grass and the wall and the bare trees.

His father leaned forward in the chair.

He watched it. The flakes settling on the grass and not melting. The wall going white along the top. The trees.

“Never,” said his father.

Frederick looked at him.

“Fifty. Six. Years.” The breath. “Never. Snow.” Another breath. “Here.”

Every visit in summer, or September, or November, for a night at a time. Fifty-six years of Kings in this house, and he had never once seen it snow in New Westminster from a window of Columbia Palace.

“Do you want to go out?”

His father looked at him.

“Niamh,” said his father, which meant Niamh will say no.

“Niamh’s making the saffron buns with Mamma,” said Frederick. “She’s covered in flour. She won’t know for ten minutes.”

His father’s eyes went to the kitchen door and back.

They went out of the garden door at seven minutes past four, by the kitchen clock, which meant eleven minutes past, with two blankets and his father’s dark coat buttoned to the neck and a scarf of Bridget’s, and Frederick pushing the chair over the paving of the terrace, which was already white, leaving two thin dark lines behind the wheels.

He stopped at the edge of the terrace where the steps went down to the grass.

The snow came down on them. On his father’s white hair and his face and the rug on his knees. On Frederick’s hands on the handles. The garden going white under it, the wall, the trees, and beyond the wall the lamps coming on along the Axis, orange in the falling white, and the Monument, floodlit, with the snow going across it in the light.

His father lifted his face to it.

He sat in the chair at the edge of the terrace with his eyes shut and his face up and the snow coming down on it, and did not move.

From the kitchen door behind them, after about ten minutes, a voice, Irish, with flour in it:

“Sir.”

His father did not open his eyes.

“Two. More. Minutes,” said his father.

Niamh, in the doorway, with flour on her hands and her apron, looked at the two of them at the edge of the terrace in the snow, and went back inside, and left the door open.

---

The ham was eaten. The potatoes were eaten. Bridget had a second helping when she thought nobody was looking, standing up at the range with her back to the table, and his mother saw, and said nothing, and caught Frederick’s eye, and he looked at his plate very hard.

The candles in the windows, seven to a stick. The straw goat on the dresser beside the radio, looking at the cake tin. His father at the end of the table with a glass of something Swedish and red that Niamh had said was permitted, one, small, and had measured.

At nine his mother read the Christmas story in Swedish, from the old Bible from Solliden, the way it was read at the court, and his father listened with his eyes half shut, and at the end, very quietly, said the last line with her, in Swedish, which he had not spoken since before the sixth floor.

Och frid på jorden.

His mother stopped and looked at him across the table.

His father looked back.

Frederick looked at the candles.

---

On Christmas Day at three they listened in the kitchen.

The radio on the dresser beside the straw goat, turned up for once. His mother at the table. His father at the end. Bridget, who was not supposed to be there on Christmas Day and had come at noon to check the range, at the sink. Niamh in the doorway. Castellanos, who was not on duty and had come at a quarter to three because he said he had left a pen in the corridor, by the door to the corridor, with his hands behind his back.

This is the King.

He did not know where to look. He looked at the radio.

It was very strange to hear. His own voice, in his own kitchen, from a small brown box, saying a sergeant with a spanner under a water tank, while the actual range was warm on his left side and the actual snow was on the actual garden through the window. He heard the place where he had changed now to still. He heard himself not say his name at the end.

Happy Christmas.

The carols.

Nobody in the kitchen said anything for a while.

Then Bridget, at the sink, with her back to them, said:

“There was no we in it.”

Everybody looked at her.

“I listened for it,” said Bridget, to the window. “I always listen for it. Every year. Every one of them on this radio since I was a girl, and I’ve never heard one without it.” She turned the tap on, and off. “That’s all.”

---

On Boxing Day he went to the Hartigans’ for an hour, at four, in the dark blue car, with snow on the pavements, and climbed four floors because the lift had a notice on it.

They were at the table. Theo, Kate, Anneliese, Peter. A plate of something with almonds on it. The window over the bus depot white with frost.

“Lucía rang,” said Theo, before he had his coat off. “This morning. She’d had a text from Inés.” He looked at Kate. “Tell him.”

“Why me?”

“Because you were there when she said it and I was in the bathroom.”

Kate rolled her eyes.

“Inés said,” said Kate, “that her mom watched it. Yesterday. In her aunt’s flat in the Heights, on the television. All the way to the end.” She put a piece of the almond thing on a plate and pushed it across the table to him. “And she didn’t turn it off.”

He sat down.

Anneliese Hartigan put a cup in front of him without asking.

“Eat that,” she said, and he ate what was on it.