What Sweden Costs

Rhys watched the Commons the way other people watched football.

Nobody in Palo Verde Hall had known this until a quarter past twelve on Wednesday, when he came into the lounge with his laptop under his arm and a lead in his hand and asked Priya, who had the remote, very politely, whether he might have the television for an hour. Priya was on the sofa with a textbook on the kidney and a bag of pretzels. She looked at the lead.

“For what?”

“Treasury questions,” said Rhys.

Priya looked at him for some time.

“Is that a show?”

“It’s the House of Commons,” said Rhys. “Half past two on Charter Hill. Half past twelve here.” He was already on his knees behind the television, fitting the lead into the back of it, with the face of a man setting up an altar. “They do Treasury on Wednesdays every fourth week. It’s the best one. They’ve got the most numbers.”

Priya gave him the remote, slowly, the way you give a dog back a thing it has brought you that you did not throw.

---

By twenty-five past there were nine of them.

There was Rhys, on the floor in front of the television with his back against the sofa and the order paper open on his laptop on his knees. There was Sam, in the armchair, with three kinds of sandwich on a paper plate that he had bought at the shop next door and was eating in a fixed order, egg, then ham, then cheese. There was Frederick on the end of the sofa, and Priya at the other end with the kidney, and between them Tyler, who had come down for a Glacier and had been told by Rhys that this was a sport and had stayed to find out whether it was. Diego from the second floor was in the doorway. The girl from Yuma was on the arm of the armchair. Two sophomores Frederick did not know had come in for the microwave and not left.

And in the corner, on the hard chair by the scorpion poster, in a Sun Devils cap on backwards, with his knees together and his hands between them, was Pruett.

Frederick looked at him.

Pruett did not look back. He looked at the television, where a long green room full of people in dark suits was standing up and sitting down in no order that Frederick could see, with an expression of fixed and terrible attention, like a man in a waiting room who has just heard his own name read out and is not yet sure it was his.

“Why’s he here?” said Frederick, low, to Rhys.

“I don’t know, sir.” Rhys did not look round. He scrolled the order paper. “Fred.” He scrolled again, and stopped, and was quiet for a moment, and then looked round after all, at Pruett, and then at Frederick, with his eyebrows up into his fair hair. “Oh,” said Rhys. “Oh, that’s good.”

---

“Okay,” said Tyler. “What’s happening.”

“Questions to the Chancellor of the Exchequer,” said Rhys. “And his ministers. The Treasury.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“That’s not the Chancellor. That’s the Exchequer Secretary. She’s junior.” On the screen a woman in grey with her hair cut short like a boy’s had come to the long table in the middle of the green room and put a black folder on a wooden box and opened it. “The Chancellor takes the first few and then she takes the rest. You can tell which are hers. They’re the ones with arithmetic in.”

“And they just ask her stuff.”

“Members put questions down in advance. They’re on the paper. Then on the day the Speaker calls them, in order, and the Member stands up and says the number, and the minister reads the answer.” Rhys turned the laptop round so that Tyler could see the order paper, a long column of numbered paragraphs in small type. “And then the Member gets a supplementary. That’s a second question. Nobody knows that one in advance. That’s where you find out.”

“Find out what?”

Rhys considered this with great seriousness.

“Whether she knows the portfolio,” he said, “or just knows how to say they’re reviewing the matter.”

Tyler looked at the green room for a while.

“Who’s winning?”

“It’s not…” Rhys stopped. He looked at the screen. “The government,” he said. “So far. On points.”

“Sick,” said Tyler, and opened his Glacier, and sat back.

---

Question four was about a bridge. Question five was about the rate at which the Realm lent money to the polities to build bridges, and the Member who asked it had a great many figures and the minister had more, and Sam stopped eating his ham sandwich halfway through and leaned forward in the armchair and did not lean back until it was over. Question six was withdrawn, which Rhys said meant somebody had got an answer in the corridor.

“Seven,” said Rhys, and put his hand flat on the laptop, and did not say anything else.

On the hard chair by the scorpion poster, Pruett had gone the colour of the wall.

The Speaker said a name. Frederick did not catch it. A man stood up on the benches behind the minister’s, on the far side, about halfway back: a large man in a brown suit with a red face and a great deal of white hair, who stood up the way a tree would stand up if it had to, all at once and with some noise, and held on to the bench in front of him with one hand.

“Number seven, Mr Speaker,” said the man in the brown suit.

He sat down.

The woman in grey stood up at the box. She looked at her folder, though Frederick did not think she needed to. She looked up at the man in the brown suit across the long green room.

“Nothing, Mr Speaker,” she said.

And sat down.

---

For a moment nothing happened in the House of Commons.

Frederick saw it on the television over the lounge of Palo Verde Hall, two thousand miles away: the long green room, and the rows of dark suits, and a kind of pause going along the benches, the way it goes along a row of people at a play when an actor has forgotten his line and they are not yet sure whether it is part of the play. A man on the front bench opposite looked at his own order paper. A woman behind him looked at the man in the brown suit. The man in the brown suit sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the minister with his mouth slightly open, like a man who has put a coin in a machine and heard it drop all the way to the bottom.

Then the House laughed.

It went up all at once from every bench, a great rough roar of it, the sound of four hundred people in a room who had not expected to laugh that afternoon and had been given something; and it went on, and somebody on the back benches slapped his knee, and a man on the front bench beside the minister put his face in his hand, and the minister sat with her folder closed on her knee and looked at nothing whatever, with no expression, in the way of a person who has done a thing exactly right and knows that the worst thing she could possibly do now is look as if she knows it.

“Order,” said the Speaker. “Order.”

In the lounge, Tyler sat forward on the sofa.

“What?” he said. “What was the question?”

“Nobody heard the question,” said Priya, with the kidney in her lap. “He just said seven.”

“So what’s nothing?”

“That’s the answer.”

“To what?”

Rhys turned the laptop round, without a word, and held it up for the room, and put his finger on the paragraph, and read it out in the voice of a man reading a lesson in church.

“Seven. The Member for Flagstaff and the High Country. To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what the cost has been to the public funds of the Realm, since the first of February, of His Majesty having become King of Sweden.”

The lounge was quiet for a moment.

Then everybody in it, all nine of them, the two sophomores who had come in for the microwave and the girl from Yuma and Priya with the kidney and Diego in the doorway, turned round on the sofa and the chairs and looked, not at Frederick, but at the corner by the scorpion poster.

Pruett had taken his cap off. He was holding it in both hands, in his lap, like a man at a funeral.

“I wrote to him,” said Pruett. “After the Charter. On the first.” His voice had gone up, very high and careful. “Brennan said.”

---

On the television the man in the brown suit was standing up again, holding on to the bench.

“I’m obliged to the minister,” he said, when the House had let him, in a voice like a gravel lorry going slowly downhill, “for the brevity of her answer, which in my thirty years in this place is without precedent on the Treasury bench.” There was another laugh, a smaller one, and he waited for it, the way a man waits for a train to pass. “I put the question down on behalf of a constituent. A young man. A first-year student at the University of the March.” On the hard chair, Pruett closed his eyes. “Who wrote to me after a lecture, to ask what it costs us. And I’d like to be able to tell him. So can I ask the minister whether nothing is the figure. Is that the figure, or is it the figure so far?”

He sat down.

The woman in grey stood up again at the box. This time she did not look at the folder at all.

“I’m grateful to the Honourable Member,” she said, “and to his constituent, whose question it plainly is.” She had a dry voice, flat and unhurried, from somewhere north. “The Crown of Sweden is paid for by Sweden, under Swedish law, out of a civil list that is voted by the Riksdag and audited in Stockholm, and I am told by people who have seen it that it is audited very thoroughly indeed. Not a pound of it comes from the Realm, and not a krona of Sweden’s comes the other way. The Realm’s contribution to His Majesty’s being King of Sweden is precisely what it was before the first of February.” She paused, very slightly. “Which is nothing. And I can tell the Honourable Member that it is the figure, and not the figure so far, because it is set down in the law of two kingdoms, and neither of them is in the habit of changing it on a Wednesday.”

The House began to go again.

“If he would like it in writing,” said the minister, over the beginning of it, “I’ll gladly place the figure in the Library.” She closed the folder. “It won’t take up much room.”

---

The House went up like a struck match.

Frederick had heard it laugh before, from the gallery, and he had never heard it do this. It was not the laugh a House does for a joke. It was the laugh a House does when it has been told something true in a way it can repeat in the bar, and it went on for so long that the Speaker said Order four times, rising, and on the fourth stood up out of the chair altogether, and even then the man in the brown suit was still shaking where he sat, with his hand over his eyes, and the front bench beside the minister had given up and was laughing into its order papers, and somewhere on the benches opposite somebody was calling, over and over, delighted, More! More!, which Rhys said afterwards was not in order either.

In the lounge of Palo Verde Hall, nine people and a King laughed with it.

He had not meant to. It came up in him from somewhere a long way down, at the sight of four hundred people on Charter Hill told that the thing which had cost his family the most in his lifetime had cost them nothing, and laughing at it, as though it were the best news they had had all week, which perhaps it was. Priya had the kidney over her face. Diego was holding on to the doorframe. Sam had put down the cheese sandwich, which in Sam was a breakdown. Rhys was lying on his back on the carpet with the laptop on his chest, saying “Library,” at the ceiling, “Library,” as though it were the name of a woman he loved.

And in the corner by the scorpion poster Pruett sat with his cap in his lap and his face in his hands, and his shoulders going, and nobody could tell, for some time, which it was; and then he took his hands away and he was grinning so widely that it looked as if it hurt.

“He said constituent,” said Pruett, to the room. “He said young man.”

“You’re in Hansard,” said Rhys, from the carpet. “You’re in Hansard for ever. They’ve kept it since 1785.”

“I’m not named.”

“You’re a constituent,” said Rhys, with deep reverence. “That’s better. That’s how everybody’s in it.”

---

Tyler had not laughed.

Frederick noticed it when the room had come down, and the green room on the television had gone on to question eight, which was about pensions and which nobody in the lounge would ever hear. Tyler was sitting on the sofa between him and Priya with the Glacier in both hands, looking at the television, with the face he had in the forest when a thing he did not understand had happened to the fire.

“So it costs nothing,” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

“The Sweden one.”

“Yes.”

Tyler thought about it for a while.

“So what do you actually do?” he said. “For Sweden. Like, actually.” He turned his head and looked at Frederick, and put the bottle down on the carpet between his feet, and put his hands on his knees. “I’m listening.”

The lounge went quiet in the particular way it had learned to.

Frederick thought about it.

He thought about what his mother had done for twenty-three years from other people’s countries: opened the Riksdag every autumn, and sat through a budget to the end, and seen the Prime Minister on Tuesdays, and read every paper the Court sent her, and been there, which in Sweden was very nearly the whole of it, and was the part that cost. He thought about a woman in a plain chair on every screen in a dining hall saying I have asked it to wait a little longer. He thought about a letter from a man called Holmqvist saying, in a great many careful Swedish words, that it would.

“Less than anywhere,” he said.

Tyler waited.

“I open the Riksdag. That’s their Parliament. Once a year, in the autumn. I see the Prime Minister sometimes. I read things.” He looked at the television, at the green room going on without them. “And mostly I’m their King, so they don’t have to have somebody else. That’s the main thing. That’s what it’s for.”

Tyler considered this for some time.

“And it costs nothing.”

“It costs them. Not us.”

“And you do, like, almost nothing.”

“Almost.”

Tyler nodded slowly. He picked up the Glacier again, and drank, and looked back at the television, satisfied, the way he looked at a screen when a thing on it had been explained to him and was, on examination, fine.

“Sick,” said Tyler.

---

His mother rang at one, which was eight in the evening in London, and he took it on the step under the narrow window.

She was laughing before he had said anything.

It was not the real one. It was a careful one, held down, coming out round the edges of something, and under it he could hear that she was holding very still, and a soft sound like a cushion being held tighter.

“Do not make me laugh, Fredde,” said his mother, in Swedish.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You were going to.” He heard her breathe, carefully, round the place where the man with the clean hands had been. “They have given me a pillow to hold when I laugh. Or cough. You hold it against your chest, here, and it stops the bones from complaining.” A pause. “It is in the shape of a heart, Fredde. It is red. It is the most vulgar object I have ever owned and I have owned a state coach.”

He sat on the step and laughed, and heard her hold the pillow tighter.

“You saw it.”

“Ebba found it. On the computer. She came in with it held out in front of her like a cake.” Another breath, careful. “Your father has watched it six times. He watched it the first time and laughed so much that Brannigan came in from the hall, because he thought it was the other thing. Then he watched it again to show Brannigan.” A pause. “Ernest.”

“Nothing,” said his father, from somewhere near her, with enormous satisfaction.

“Yes, Ernest.”

“Library.” A breath. Then, delighted, with the whole of it: “Room.”

“He has been saying room since half past seven,” said his mother. “I think it is going to be the word of the month. Last month it was envelope.” She was quiet for a moment, holding the pillow. He could hear the clock, and below the clock nothing, which meant she was downstairs, in the drawing room, on the sofa, because the man with the clean hands had forbidden the stairs and therefore the green chair, and she had not forgiven him. “She was right, you know. The minister. It is true.”

“I know.”

“It is the first entirely true thing that has been said about Sweden in that room in my lifetime.” A breath. “It costs them nothing. It costs Sweden what Sweden decides. That is how I left it. That is how I wanted it to be left.” Another breath, longer, and he waited for it, and it came back, and it was a little shorter than it had been at Christmas, and he noticed, and she knew he had noticed. “And the boy. The student. Is he real?”

“He’s real. He’s from Prescott. He’s in my Charter.”

“Then tell him,” said his mother, “from a woman holding a red pillow in London, that it was a very good question, and that he is to go on asking what things cost all his life, and to be rude about it.” A pause. “Not to you. To the others.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Puss, Fredde. Go away. You are making me laugh and it is very bad for me.”

---

He told Pruett at dinner.

He told him in the queue for the hot counter, where Pruett had been since six, it seemed, telling people, and had found that nobody needed telling, because the clip had gone round the university by two o’clock and had been watched, Sam estimated, by eleven thousand people in the March before tea. Pruett listened to all of it with his tray held flat against his chest.

“She said rude?”

“Yes.”

“The Queen of Sweden said I should be rude.”

“She isn’t the Queen of Sweden any more.”

Pruett looked at him.

“Oh,” he said. “Right.” And then, after a moment, with great care, as a man works his way along a ledge: “So who’s…”

Frederick waited.

“Oh,” said Pruett again, and went the colour of the wall, and took a plate of something from the hot counter without looking at what it was, and walked away with it very fast.

---

At ten Sam knocked on the door of 312, and stood in it, with his laptop open on one arm like a waiter’s cloth.

“They’ve put it up,” said Sam.

“What?”

“The record. The day’s sitting.” He turned the laptop round. “Rhys wanted to know if they wrote the laughing down.”

It was Hansard: a long page of small grey type, the whole of the afternoon on Charter Hill, every word anybody had said in it, the bridge and the polities’ bridges and the pensions, set down in order as it had been set down every sitting day since 1785; and Sam had scrolled it to the place.

The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury: Nothing, Mr Speaker.

[Laughter.]

Frederick read it twice.

“They did,” he said.

“They did,” said Sam. He looked at it with deep professional satisfaction, the way he looked at a column that agreed. “It’s in the record now.” He closed the laptop. “One word. Nothing.” He considered it. “Best line in the ledger.”

He went back along the corridor to 316, and Frederick heard him say, through the door, “They did,” and Rhys, from inside, say “Yes,” as though somebody had scored.

On the bed by the window, in the forest, Tyler said into the microphone, to Finland, quite seriously: “No, it costs nothing. It’s in the law. Of two kingdoms.” A pause. “I don’t know, man, it was on TV. Who’s on wood?”