The Crown Prince

The Speaker of the Riksdag arrived at the palace at half past eleven to offer his assistance in person.

I should describe Anders Wahlgren, because he will be in this account more than he would like and less than he intended. He is sixty, a Moderate, and has sat in the Riksdag for Uppsala since 1994. He was elected Speaker last October, in the same week that I became Prime Minister, as part of the arithmetic by which a parliament with no majority decides who gets which chair; we got the Government and his side got the Speaker, and both sides went home thinking that they had been cheated, which is how you know an agreement is fair. He is a good Speaker. He is scrupulous, and courteous, and knows the Riksdag Act better than anybody alive, and he is quite sincerely devoted to the constitution, in the way that some men are devoted to a sailing boat that they have never been allowed to take out. He wrote his doctoral thesis at Uppsala on the regencies of the eighteenth century. He has been waiting ever since, I think, for one of his own.

He came in a dark suit with a red tie, carrying a slim leather folder, and he shook hands with everybody in the anteroom of the Hall of State, where the people organising Thursday had gathered to look at the room in which it would fail. There were about a dozen of us: Strand and two of his protocol officers, the Union secretariat’s head of protocol and her deputy, the two lawyers from the Ministry of Justice, Tove, me, and a man from the Life Guards’ band with a folder of his own who had come to ask about the fanfare and did not seem to know how to leave.

The Speaker said that he had come because he had heard, he would not say from whom, that there was some uncertainty about the formula, and that he wished everybody to know that he was entirely at their disposal.

“We are looking for somebody to say three sentences,” I said.

“Of course,” said the Speaker. “Of course. A very proper difficulty.” He opened his folder and closed it again. “And who is being considered?”

Nobody was being considered, because we had run out of people. And it was then that the deputy head of protocol of the Union secretariat, a cheerful young Norwegian with a lanyard, said brightly, in the tone of somebody who has thought of the obvious and cannot believe that nobody else has, “But what about the Crown Prince? He is the heir. He speaks Swedish. Surely the Crown Prince could read it for his mother?”

There was a pause. I saw Lindqvist, by the door, close her eyes for a moment, the way you close your eyes when somebody begins to reverse a lorry towards a wall.

“An excellent suggestion,” said the Speaker. “The Crown Prince. Excellent. I think we should certainly ask the Crown Prince.”

I noticed the way he said it, and did not understand it, and should have.

---

The Crown Prince was in the middle of a Swedish lesson, and was fetched.

He came in about ten minutes later, with his tutor a step behind him, and I saw him close for the first time. He is fourteen, and was fourteen in the way that boys are at fourteen, which is to say that he seemed to have been assembled that week from parts of different sizes and not yet told which ones to use. He was already taller than his mother and not yet taller than his father, and he was in a pair of jeans and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pencil behind his ear, and he had his mother’s eyes and his father’s way of standing still while he looked at a room, as if he were reading it.

His tutor was Marianne Hellström, who has taught him Swedish three hours a week since he was six. She was a woman of about sixty in a linen jacket with her reading glasses on a cord, and she looked at the anteroom of the Hall of State, and at the dozen people in it, and at the Speaker of the Riksdag, as if all of them had failed a test that she had set them and been too polite to mark.

“We were reading Strindberg,” she said, to nobody in particular. “The People of Hemsö. The funny one.”

“We’d got to the wedding,” said the Crown Prince. “Everyone’s drunk.”

Strand stepped forward, and bowed, and addressed him in the third person, which is a thing I had not imagined anybody doing to a boy in rolled-up sleeves with a pencil behind his ear. “Would the Crown Prince,” he said, “be willing, in view of the Queen’s indisposition, to pronounce the formula at the Joint Session tomorrow, on his mother’s behalf?”

The Crown Prince looked at him, and then round the room, and then at the Speaker, for rather longer.

“I’d rather not,” he said, in Swedish.

There was a murmur. The Speaker made a small, regretful, encouraging noise.

“And I can’t,” said the Crown Prince. “It’s in the Instrument of Government. Chapter Five. Nobody can serve as head of state or as regent until they’re eighteen, and if I read it for her I’d be serving as something, even if it was only for forty seconds.” He took the pencil from behind his ear and turned it over in his fingers. “I looked it up last night. When Mamma started writing notes. I thought somebody would ask.”

The younger lawyer had already opened the constitution on her telephone. She read it, and looked up, and said that the Crown Prince was correct.

“And then I looked up the next bit,” said the Crown Prince. “In case.”

He looked at the Speaker. The Speaker looked at his folder.

“The next bit?” I said.

“The bit about who it goes to,” said the Crown Prince, “if it can’t be me, and there isn’t anybody else in the royal house. Which there isn’t. There’s only me.” He put the pencil back behind his ear. “It’s quite interesting. Can I go back to Strindberg now?”

His Swedish is very good. It has an American edge on the r’s, which Marianne Hellström has been fighting for eight years and which comes out, she told me later, when he is pleased with himself, and it was coming out then.

The Speaker cleared his throat and said that the Crown Prince was perfectly right, of course, and showed a most admirable grasp of the constitution, and that he would not dream of pressing him. Then he said that he must return to the Riksdag to consult, though he did not say whom, and shook hands with everybody again, and left, carrying his folder rather close to his chest.

“What’s the next bit?” I said to the younger lawyer, very quietly.

She showed me, on her telephone. I read it. I said a word that my father used on the docks when a container came down wrong, and Marianne Hellström looked at me over her glasses, and I apologised to her and not to anybody else.

---

The Crown Prince did not go back to Strindberg straight away. His tutor said that he might have a quarter of an hour of air, because it was the first fine day of the week, and he looked at me and said, in English, “Do you want to come outside? There’s a bench.”

There is a bench in the inner courtyard, a stone one against the north wall under the windows, which is meant for the guards and which the guards, it appeared, let him use. We sat on it in the sun. Above us the four walls of the palace went up and up, yellow-grey and very orderly, and the guard at the gate looked at us and then very carefully did not.

“Sorry I was rude to the Speaker,” said the Crown Prince.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Yes, you did. You laughed. Through your nose.” He showed me. It was a good imitation. “Mamma does it too. It’s the only way she laughs at Court.”

I asked him whether he minded being proposed for things.

“Everybody always proposes me,” he said. “For everything. I’m the only one who’s always free. I’m fourteen. I’m not on anything.” He considered this. “Last year someone wanted me to launch a ship in Karlskrona. Then they found out I’d have to be a member of something, so they got an admiral.”

“Did you want to?”

“I wanted to see the ship. I didn’t want to throw the bottle. You only get one go.” He squinted up at the windows. “It’s like the formula. You only get one go, and everybody’s watching, and if you get a word wrong they write it down for a hundred years.”

We sat for a bit. A pigeon came down onto the cobbles in front of us and inspected them and found them unsatisfactory.

“You know they’re two different things,” he said. “Mamma’s and Pappa’s.”

“Their kingdoms?”

“Their monarchies. People think it’s the same job twice, and it’s not.” He spoke slowly, working it out, the way his father had spoken to me at breakfast, as if he wanted to get it right more than he wanted to get it said. “Pappa’s is fourteen of the same thing that aren’t allowed to touch each other. Every one of them is separate, and he has to be fourteen people who never talk to each other, and he’s really good at it. He reads everything. He always knows which one of him is in the room.” He moved his hands apart on the stone. “Mamma’s is one thing that isn’t allowed to do anything. She opens the Riksdag and listens to you on Tuesdays and that’s it. She’s not allowed to want anything. She’s really good at that.”

“Which is harder?”

“Hers,” he said at once. “His is like doing fourteen jobs. Hers is like not doing one, all the time, in front of people.” He frowned. “And I’m going to have to do both. One day. In different rooms.”

I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing, which I am told is the correct response at Court and which I have never in my life been good at.

“She was going to be really good tomorrow,” he said, after a while. “She’s practised for two weeks. She’s done it three times before and she says she’s always been rubbish, so this time she practised. And Pappa came early. He’s never heard her do it. He was always somewhere else, in the other years, being King of something. This year he moved everything so he could be here on Tuesday, and he was going to sit at the end of the second row and listen to her.” He picked at a thread on his jeans. “He bought a new tie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“No,” I said. “But I’m still sorry.”

He looked at me sideways, and nodded, as if I had said something correctly for once.

---

“She used to read to me,” he said. “In Swedish. Every night, when I was little, wherever we were. Selma Lagerlöf. Astrid Lindgren. Nils Holgersson twice. Even when she was in Stockholm and I was in New Westminster she’d do it on a screen.” He was quiet for a moment. “Then when I was eleven I asked her to stop, because I was eleven, and everybody at school would have died. And she stopped. Just like that. She said all right.” He looked at his hands. “And now she can’t read to anybody, and I sort of wish I hadn’t asked her.”

“You could ask her to start again,” I said. “When she’s better.”

“I’m fourteen,” said the Crown Prince, with enormous dignity, as if I had suggested that he ride a tricycle down the Slottsbacken. Then he said, “Maybe,” and then, “Don’t tell her.”

I have not told her. I have told you, which I suppose is worse. I hope he will forgive me. I think he would say that it’s not my fault, but that I’m still sorry, and he would be right.

---

At about ten past twelve a door opened in the wall behind us and Marianne Hellström’s head looked out of it and said that Hemsö would not wait for ever.

The Crown Prince stood up, and then he did not go. He looked down at me on the bench, with the sun behind him, all elbows and good manners, and asked me in Swedish a question that nobody else asked me that week, and that I have thought about since more than I would like to admit.

“Do Prime Ministers get Midsummer off?”

“This one does,” I said. “I’m going to my brother’s. On Hisingen, in Gothenburg. He drives a crane at the port where our father used to work, and he has a garden the size of this bench, and on Midsummer Eve he puts up a maypole in it about as tall as you, and all his neighbours come and we eat herring in the rain, and he sings.”

“Is he good?”

“He’s terrible.”

The Crown Prince looked pleased. “We go to Solliden,” he said. “On Öland. Mamma dances once round the maypole, with me, and then she sits down. She’s terrible too. It’s the tradition.” He thought about it. “Nobody’s allowed to take a photograph.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s terrible,” he said, as if that were obvious, and it was.

He went to the door, and at the door he turned round once more, and said, in English this time, with the American edge very marked, “Pappa’s in the library, by the way. He’s been there since breakfast. He asked for some book nobody’s asked for in about seventy years, and it’s got pages that haven’t been cut, and he’s cutting them. With a knife. The librarian’s so happy she had to go and sit down.”

Then he went in to his Strindberg, where everybody was drunk at the wedding, and I sat on the guards’ bench in the sun for another minute, and did not wonder, as I should have, what book a man would ask for in a palace library that nobody had asked for since about 1951.

My telephone buzzed. It was Tove.

Speaker’s office has asked Riksdag clerk for the constitution’s regency chapter, she wrote. Paper copy. Annotated. Also asked for a room with a lectern. What does he want a lectern for?

I told her that I thought he had a speech.

Of course he has a speech, wrote Tove. He’s had that speech since 1994.