Stockholm

There were two boxes on the aeroplane.

They sat on the seat opposite him in the small grey aircraft of the Swedish air force that had come to Kemble airfield to collect him, because his mother had said that if he was going to spend a weekend in her country he would arrive in it as her guest and not as anybody else’s, and the Household in London had been told, and had not argued. One box was red, with a gold crown on the lid and THE KING in gold letters underneath. The other was red, a slightly different red, with a different gold crown and no letters at all.

The first was London’s. The second was the Realm’s.

He had learned the difference in September. He had not known, before, that there would be a difference. At home there had been one box, every night, the Realm’s, and he had read it and signed it and initialled it and sent it back, and that had been his evening. Here there were two, every night, and the London one he read and signed, because he was in Britain and he was its King and there was nobody else who could; and the Realm one he read, every page, and initialled, in pencil, read, and did not sign anything in it at all, because he was not in the Realm, and the Governor-General was, and the Governor-General signed.

He had thought, in September, that this would make him feel less like the Realm’s King. He had been wrong. It made him feel more like it. Reading every page of a box he could not sign, every night, for no reason except that he wanted to know what was in it, felt like something he had chosen; and nothing about being King had ever before felt like something he had chosen.

He signed the London box over the North Sea, with his right hand, which was out of its strapping now, slowly, because the finger was still stiff.

He read the Realm box over Denmark.

His mother, across the aisle, watched him do both, and said nothing, and when he had finished and put the pencil back in the lid of the second box she said, in Swedish, “You read the whole thing.”

“I always read the whole thing.”

“So did your father.” She looked out of the window at the sea going grey below them. “Every page, for fifty-six years. He said it was the only way to find the page they hoped he would not read.” She looked back at him. “There was always one.”

---

He spoke Swedish with her all weekend. She had told him he would.

In Stockholm we will speak Swedish, she had said, at the Palace, at Christmas, at the end of the long table. All the time. You will not speak one word of English from the moment the wheels touch the ground until the moment they leave it. I will not let you.

What if I don’t know a word?

Then you will find another way to say it, his mother had said. As your father does.

He had spoken Swedish with her all his life. She had spoken it to him when he was a baby and in the north wing kitchen at Columbia Palace and in the car and on the telephone, always, as her own language, and he had answered in English for most of it, and then in a mixture, and then, round about eleven, for reasons he had never been able to explain, in Swedish, all of it, whenever it was just the two of them. Nobody else at Columbia Palace spoke it. It had been theirs. It had been, he thought now, looking at her across the aisle of a Swedish air force aeroplane over Denmark, the first thing he had ever had that was private.

He had never spoken it in Sweden for longer than an afternoon.

The wheels touched the ground at Stockholm at four in the afternoon in the dark.

“Welcome,” said his mother, in Swedish, as the aeroplane slowed, and he said, in Swedish, “Thank you,” and that was the last English either of them said until Sunday.

---

Stockholm was water.

He had been before, three times, but as a small boy, and in summer, and what he remembered was boats and a palace and his mother’s hand. This was February, and dark by four, and the city was built on islands, fourteen of them, his mother said, in a lake that ran into a sea, and the lake was frozen at the edges and black and moving in the middle, and the islands were joined by bridges, and on the bridges and along the quays the lamps were lit and their light lay on the black water in long gold lines that shook.

It was very cold. It was a different cold from England. England’s cold was wet and came at you sideways off the river and got in at your collar. Stockholm’s cold was dry and came straight down out of a black sky full of stars and was simply everywhere at once, like the silence on the wold under snow, so that the inside of his nose froze when he breathed in, and his eyelashes stuck together, and his mother laughed at him and said, that is how you know you are home.

“It’s not my home.”

His mother looked at him sideways in the car.

“It is half your home,” she said. “I am not going to argue with you about which half.”

---

On Saturday morning she took him to her school.

It was a large plain building of yellow stone on a street in the old part of the city, with tall windows and a heavy door, and it was a Saturday, and there was nobody in it but a caretaker, who opened the heavy door for them and stood back and said good morning to the Queen in Swedish as though she came every week, and she said good morning to him by his name, Lars, as though she had last seen him yesterday.

“He was here when I was here,” she said to Frederick, on the stairs. “He was nineteen. He used to let us in early when it was cold.”

She walked him through it.

She did not walk him through it as a Queen walks through a school. He had seen her do that, a hundred times, in the Realm: the walk, the stops, the questions, the smile at the end of the corridor for the photographers. She walked him through it as a woman walks through a house she grew up in, touching things. The banister at the bottom of the stairs, worn pale by a century of hands. The door of a classroom on the second floor, which she opened, and stood in the doorway of, and did not go in. A radiator under a window at the end of a corridor, cream, old, enormous, which she put her hand on.

“It worked,” she said. “Every one of them worked. We used to sit on them in winter, in the breaks, in a row, like birds on a wire.” She took her hand away. “I was here every day for twelve years. Every school day. My father drove me himself on the first day and then never again. After that I came on the tram.”

“On the tram?”

“On the tram. With everybody. Number seven. He wanted the Swedes to see me grow up. Every day, on the number seven tram, in a school coat, with a bag. They saw me go to school with my homework not done. They saw me come back with a bad mark. They saw me at fifteen with a terrible haircut. They saw me at seventeen crying on the number seven because a boy called Henrik had said something.” She looked down the corridor. “He said that if they saw me grow up, they would not mind when I was Queen. He said they would think of me as somebody they had known on a tram.”

“Did it work?”

His mother thought about it.

“Last month,” she said, “a woman of my age stopped me in the street outside the Palace and said, Christina, you still have that coat. I do not still have that coat. I have not had that coat since 1989.” She smiled. “So yes. I think it worked.”

She looked at him for a moment in the empty corridor.

“That is why I let you go to Ellicott,” she said. “Your father wanted tutors. At the Palace. A small room and the best minds in the Realm. I said no. I said, he will go to school, an ordinary school, with ordinary children, every day, and the Realm will see him do it, and then when he is King they will think of him as somebody they knew on a bus.” She put her hand on the radiator again. “And then he was King at fifteen, and I thought I had made a terrible mistake.” She took her hand away. “And then you went to school the next morning. And I knew I had not.”

---

At eleven Ebba Lindqvist met them at the school door.

She was his mother’s Private Secretary, and had been her friend since they were fourteen, at this school, in the classroom on the second floor, and she was a tall thin grey-haired woman with very sharp blue eyes and a long black coat and a telephone in her hand that she did not look at once all weekend, and she said good morning to the Queen and then to him, in Swedish, and then looked at the Queen and said, in Swedish:

“No.”

His mother stopped on the step.

“I have not said anything yet.”

“You are going to say that you want to go to the bakery on foot,” said Ebba Lindqvist. “Through the old town. On a Saturday. In February. With the King. Without telling anybody.” She put the telephone in her pocket. “No.”

“It is four streets.”

“It is four streets on a Saturday when the old town is full of people,” said Ebba Lindqvist, “and you will be recognised on the first one, and on the second one there will be telephones, and on the third one there will be a crowd, and on the fourth one I will have to ring the police, and the police will ring me, and I will have to explain to the Chief of Police that the Queen of Sweden decided to walk four streets to a bakery with the King of fourteen countries because she wanted a cinnamon bun.” She looked at the Queen steadily. “No.”

His mother looked at her for a long moment.

Then she turned to Frederick.

“This,” she said, “is the only person in Sweden who has said no to me in front of anybody since 2010. She has done it four times a week for twenty years. I have never once won.” She turned back. “Ebba. We are walking.”

“Yes,” said Ebba Lindqvist, with a sigh like the end of a long sermon. “I know. I have already rung the police.”

---

The bakery was on a corner of a narrow cobbled street that went steeply uphill between tall old houses painted in ochre and rust and yellow, and it was small and warm and smelled so strongly of cardamom and cinnamon and butter that the smell came out of the door and met them halfway down the street like a dog.

They were recognised on the first street. Ebba Lindqvist had been right. By the third street there were perhaps forty people walking behind them at a polite distance, not crowding, not shouting, just walking, the way people walk behind a band, and some of them had telephones out, and some of them did not, and an old man at a window on the second floor of one of the ochre houses leaned out and called down, good morning, Christina, and his mother called back, good morning, Mr Ek, without looking up, as if she did this every Saturday, which, Frederick began to suspect, she once had.

The woman behind the counter of the bakery was about seventy-five, tiny, with white hair in a bun and flour up to her elbows.

She looked up when the door went.

She looked at the Queen of Sweden in her long coat with snow on her shoulders standing in the doorway of her bakery, with forty people behind her in the street pretending not to look in through the window, and the King of fourteen countries behind her in a borrowed hat.

“Two cardamom,” said the woman behind the counter, “and you will want the end one, because it is the biggest, and you will say you do not, and you do.”

“I do not,” said his mother.

“You do,” said the woman, and took the end one out of the window with a pair of tongs, and put it in a bag. “You have said you do not since 1981. You were seven. You came in with your father and stood exactly there and said I do not want the big one and then you cried when he gave it to somebody else.” She took another. “And this one is for him.” She looked at Frederick over the counter for the first time, sharply, up and down, the way Mrs Haverfield did. “He is too thin.”

“Everybody says that,” said Frederick, in Swedish.

The woman behind the counter stopped with the tongs in the air.

She looked at him.

“He speaks Swedish,” she said, to the Queen.

“He speaks Swedish,” said the Queen.

“He speaks it like you,” said the woman behind the counter, in a different voice, “when you were seventeen, on the number seven tram, crying about Henrik.” She put the tongs down. She looked at Frederick for a long time, over the counter, with the flour up to her elbows. “He sounds like a boy from here.”

His mother did not say anything. She was looking at the cinnamon buns in the window.

The woman behind the counter picked up a third bun, the second biggest, and put it in the bag with the other two, and folded the top of the bag over twice, and held it out to Frederick, not to the Queen.

“For the tall one,” she said. “With the Page. In the newspaper. Who fell down under the tree.” She pushed the bag across the counter. “Tell him it is from Agneta. Tell him Agneta says he should eat more.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Frederick.

He paid. With coins. Swedish ones. He had practised.

---

On Sunday afternoon they went to Drottningholm, and the lake was frozen.

Drottningholm was a palace on an island in the lake west of the city, low and long and yellow and white, with a formal garden in front of it under snow, and the lake came right up to the edge of the garden, and the lake was white. Not black, like the water in the city. White. Frozen right across, from the palace to the far shore, a great flat white plain with the dark trees standing round its edges and the sky over it pale and huge and turning pink in the west at three o’clock.

There were people on it. A great many of them. Skating, in long slow lines, far out across the ice, with their hands behind their backs, swinging from side to side, one leg and then the other, so smoothly that they did not seem to be moving at all, only to be getting smaller.

His mother sat on a bench at the edge of the ice and took off her boots and put on her skates.

They were not her old ones. Her old ones were in his bag. They were the ones she had given him at Christmas, white leather gone yellow, with the blades rusted at the edges and the laces replaced, and she watched him take them out, and sit down on the bench beside her, and look at them.

“I can’t skate,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’ve never skated. Not once. At Columbia Palace they wouldn’t let me in case I broke something.”

“I know.” She laced her own skates, quickly, tightly, without looking, the way you tie something you have tied ten thousand times. “That is why we are here.”

He put them on. They fitted. They had been hers when she was his age and he was her height now, almost exactly, and they fitted him as though they had been waiting.

He stood up.

He fell over.

He fell over straight away, before he had even reached the ice, on the frozen gravel at the edge of the path, flat on his back, with his legs in the air and the old yellow skates pointing at the pink sky, and lay there.

Above him, against the sky, his mother’s face appeared, upside down, looking at him.

“Good,” said the Queen of Sweden. “Now you have done the worst part.”

---

She taught him for two hours.

She taught him on the ice at Drottningholm in front of the palace where she had grown up, in front of a lake full of Swedes who had seen her grow up on the number seven tram, while Ebba Lindqvist stood at the edge of the ice on the shore in her long black coat with her telephone in her pocket, and Castellanos stood beside Ebba Lindqvist with his hands folded, and Kimura did not stand anywhere, because Kimura had borrowed a pair of skates from the boathouse and was out on the ice, at a distance, going round in long slow circles with her hands behind her back, watching, and every so often going past at a speed that was clearly intended to be noticed.

He fell over eleven times. He counted. He fell forward and backward and sideways. He fell on his knees and on his elbows and once, spectacularly, on his face. He fell over in front of perhaps two hundred Swedes on a frozen lake on a Sunday afternoon, and not one of them laughed, or took a photograph, or came over, and it was not until the ninth fall that he understood why.

They had seen this before.

They had seen a girl of seven fall over on this ice in front of this palace, again and again, in these skates, while her father stood on the shore, a long time ago. They were not looking at a King falling over. They were looking at Christina’s boy learning to skate on the lake where she had learned, and they were leaving them to it, because it was not theirs to watch.

On the tenth fall his mother skated over and stood above him again, upside down against the sky.

“You are thinking,” she said.

“I’m trying not to fall over.”

“That is what I mean. You are thinking about not falling over. You are thinking about it so hard that there is no room left in you for skating.” She held out her hand. “Your father was the same. He tried to fly an aeroplane by thinking about not crashing. His instructor told him, in 1966, stop thinking about the ground. It is not going anywhere.” She pulled him up. “Stop thinking about the ice. It is not going anywhere.”

“What do I think about?”

His mother considered this, standing on the ice, holding his hand, in the pink light.

“Think about something you want,” she said. “Something that is a long way off. And go toward it.”

He thought about it.

He thought about a crossroads in the snow with a post in the middle of it and a boy with a dog saying what is this. He thought about four thousand miles, which Jack had looked up. He thought about June. He thought about something he did not have a word for yet that he had promised to tell an old woman on Twenty-Second Street about when he did.

He let go of her hand.

He did not fall over.

He went forward. Not far. Perhaps twenty yards, slowly, badly, with his arms out and his knees bent and his whole body leaning forward like a man walking into a wind. But he went forward across the white ice toward the far shore and the dark trees and the pink sky, and he did not fall over, and he did not think about the ice, and at the end of the twenty yards he stopped, more or less, and stood there, swaying, and turned round, very carefully, all of him at once, like an owl.

His mother was standing where he had left her with her hands pressed together in front of her mouth.

Kimura went past at speed with her hands behind her back.

“Six,” said Kimura, in passing, in English.

“No English,” said his mother, without taking her hands from her mouth.

“Sorry, ma’am,” said Kimura, already thirty yards away, and then, from further off, over her shoulder, in very bad Swedish that she had clearly learned for this exact moment: “Sex!”

Which meant six. And also, in English, something else.

Every Swede within forty yards on the ice at Drottningholm fell over.

---

On the aeroplane home, over Denmark, in the dark, with the two red boxes on the seat opposite, his mother said, in English, the first English for two days, because the wheels had left the ground:

“Who were you thinking about?”

He looked out of the window.

“On the ice,” said his mother. “When you let go. I said think of something you want, a long way off, and you let go of my hand, and you went.” She was looking at him. “You were not thinking about the far shore.”

He did not answer.

His mother waited. She was very good at waiting. She had waited, he knew, for four days in September two years ago for a telephone to ring. She could wait for this.

“There’s someone,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“In the village.”

“Yes.”

“You knew.”

“I am your mother,” said the Queen of Sweden, “and I have played gin rummy with a woman of ninety-nine every Thursday since Christmas, who has told me nothing, nothing at all, in eleven hours of cards, and has looked at me the whole time with an expression that I have only ever seen before on the face of Agneta at the bakery when she is putting the end bun in the bag.” She looked at the two boxes on the seat. “Of course I knew.”

“I’ll tell you. Properly. Both of you. In London. When I’m ready.”

“I know you will.”

“Not yet.”

“I know,” said his mother. And then, after a moment, looking out of her own window at the dark over Denmark: “Is he kind?”

Frederick looked at her.

She had not said he. Nobody had told her he. He had not told anybody, ever, in his life, he.

She did not look round.

“Yes,” said Frederick. “He’s kind.”

“Good,” said his mother, to the window. “That is the only thing. That is all I wanted to know.” She closed her eyes. “Wake me at Kemble.”

---

In the blue notebook, in the boot room, at midnight, he wrote:

Stockholm. Swedish all weekend. Mum’s school. The number seven tram. Ebba says no. Agneta says eat. The lake at Drottningholm. Fell over eleven times. Then I didn’t. Kimura said sex. Mum asked if he was kind.

She said he.