The Herring Table

The seating plan for the Union dinner was drawn up by the youngest of Strand’s protocol officers, a fair, serious man of about twenty-six who had spent the morning moving a name card and the afternoon, I gather, lying down. He had a laminated copy of the plan under his arm when I arrived at Karl XI’s Gallery at a quarter to eight, and he showed me my place on it with the air of a man who has stopped caring what happens to him.

“The Prime Minister is here,” he said, and put his finger on it. “And His Majesty is here.”

His finger moved about two centimetres. I looked at the plan, and then at him.

“Next to me?”

“There is no rule,” said the protocol officer, “about where the President’s designate sits at dinner. There has never been a President’s designate before. I could write one. I am not going to.” He tucked the plan back under his arm. “Nobody can object to it more than they have already objected to everything else today. And the Marshal has gone to lie down too.”

So that is how a docker’s daughter from Hisingen came to sit beside the Long King at the Union dinner, at the long table under the painted ceiling in the palace’s great gallery, between the King and the Prime Minister of Iceland, who was charming and told me about cod.

---

Karl XI’s Gallery is about seventy metres long and was built to show visiting Kings that Sweden had won a great many battles, which in the seventeenth century it had, and it is painted with them from end to end. On Midsummer week it is lit by candles and by the light from the windows, which at that time of year does not go away. The table ran the whole length of it, white and silver and full of flowers from Drottningholm, and there were a hundred and forty of us down both sides, and the Union dinner began, as it has every year since 1951, with the herring.

There are five herrings. There is one for each member of the Union, prepared in the manner of that country, and they are served one after another on small plates in the Swedish alphabetical order of the countries, so that the first is always the Danish curried herring and the last is always ours. The Finns serve theirs fried, small and silver, with mashed potato. The Icelanders serve theirs marinated in something with a great deal of dill and a great deal of history. The Norwegians serve theirs in a spiced pickle that the Norwegian Prime Minister, down the table, defended against all comers as the only real herring in the north. Ours came last, with mustard and new potatoes and sour cream and chives, and I have eaten herring every Midsummer of my life and I have never eaten better, and I am from Gothenburg and do not say that about Stockholm lightly.

“You’ll want to know,” said the King, as the Danish herring arrived, “whether I can eat all five.”

“I wondered, sir.”

“I have done it eighteen times,” said the King, “at this dinner and at home, and I have never been ill, and I am the only Englishman of whom that can be said.” He looked at the curry with deep respect. “I’m not English, of course. But I gather that’s what I’m called here.”

I put down my fork.

“Who told you?”

“Nobody,” said the King. “Nobody has ever told me. Everybody at Court is very careful that nobody should.” He picked up his own fork. “I read it in Svenska Dagbladet in the spring of 2010, in a piece about my wife’s accession, and I looked up engelsman in the dictionary to be sure, and I have never mentioned it to a soul, because they’ve all gone to such trouble. You won’t say?”

I said that I would not say.

“Thank you. I thought it was the nicest thing anybody had called me in thirty-eight years, because it meant that here, at least, they’d stopped counting the others.”

---

We spoke Swedish. We had settled it, without saying so, somewhere between the Finnish herring and the Icelandic one, after one last exchange in which I was polite in English and he was polite in Swedish and we both heard ourselves and laughed. After that I spoke Swedish and so did he, and when he did not know a word he did not stop, but went round it, the way you go round a pallet on the quay, and found another way to the same place.

He had read my maiden speech. I want to put that down because I still do not quite believe it. My maiden speech in the Riksdag, in 2014, was about the dredging of the fairway into the port of Gothenburg, and it lasted eleven minutes, and I doubt whether anybody in the chamber listened to more than three of them, and the King had read it, all eleven, in Swedish, with the dictionary.

“Why?” I said.

“Because you were going to be the Prime Minister my wife spends her Tuesdays with,” said the King. “I like to know who she’s talking to. I don’t ask her. It isn’t mine to ask. So I read what’s published.” He considered his Icelandic herring. “I’ve read all of them. Every Prime Minister’s first speech since she became Queen. Yours was the only one about mud.”

“It was a very important mud.”

“I could see that,” said the King gravely. “You said that the ships were getting bigger every year and the river was not, and that a country which could not get its ships into its own port would end by getting its goods through somebody else’s. I thought that was the best sentence in any of them.” He ate a piece of herring. “Did they dredge it?”

“In the end. Late, and over budget.”

“Like a crane,” said the King.

I looked at him. I had said that to nobody in the palace. I had said it, I realised, in my maiden speech, at about minute nine, and I had forgotten, and he had not.

---

He has never been to Gothenburg. He told me so with real sorrow, between the Norwegian herring and ours.

“Christina says it’s the only real city in Sweden,” he said, “and that I’m not to tell anybody in Stockholm she said so. So I’m telling you, because you’re not from Stockholm.” He sighed. “In eighteen years I’ve been to Stockholm and to Drottningholm and to Solliden and once to Kalmar, and never anywhere else, because I’m her husband here and not a visitor, and husbands don’t make visits. They go home.”

“Kalmar?”

“On the train,” said the King, and his face changed altogether, the way my father’s changed when he talked about the old Gothenburg trams. “In 2011. She took me down for the regatta, in an ordinary carriage, second class, with Fenwick and a protection officer and a thermos. It took five hours and twenty minutes and we changed at Alvesta. A lady with a very large suitcase asked me to help her lift it onto the rack, and I did.” He looked at me. “Everybody in the carriage recognised me, Prime Minister. And nobody said so. Not for five hours. It’s the most Swedish thing that has ever happened to me.”

I asked whether he liked trains, which was a stupid question, because his face had already answered it.

He liked them more than anything, I think, except his wife and his son and the reading of documents. He was not allowed to take them. When he was a young man, before 1972, he had gone everywhere by train, he said, and since 1972 he had been allowed one ordinary journey a decade, if somebody arranged it months ahead, and he had made it to Alvesta. He asked me how I went to Gothenburg. I said the X2000 on Fridays, three hours and four minutes, and he asked whether it was true that the X2000 tilted on the curves, and whether you could feel it in the bistro, and whether the quiet carriage stayed quiet, and what happened when it did not.

“Somebody tells them,” I said.

“Who?”

“Another passenger. In a very low voice. Usually a woman from Västergötland.”

“And they stop?”

“Always.”

He was enchanted. He said that he had never heard a better account of constitutional monarchy in his life.

---

It was after our herring, and before the lamb, that I asked him the thing I had wanted to ask him since Tuesday.

“Does it bother you, sir? Being nobody here.”

He did not answer at once. He turned his wine glass round by its stem on the cloth, a quarter turn, and another, and looked down the length of the gallery, at the candles and the battles on the ceiling and the hundred and forty guests, and, at the far end of the table, in dark blue, the President of the Union, who was writing something in her notebook and showing it to the King of Norway, who was laughing.

“It’s the best part of my year,” he said. “In London I am the King of Great Britain from the moment I wake up. In New Westminster I am the King of America, and in Ottawa of New Albion, and so on round the world, each in its own turn, and every one of them needs me to be exactly that and nothing else, all day, and to be careful about it. And then I come here, and I am her husband, and nobody needs me to be anything, and I can read the newspaper with a dictionary and make mistakes in it.” He turned the glass again. “Today was the first time in eighteen years that anybody in Sweden needed me for anything. I found it very alarming.”

“You didn’t look alarmed.”

“I’ve had a great deal of practice,” said the King, “at not looking it.”

I told him then what I had thought on Tuesday, because I had drunk two glasses of the Norwegian aquavit by then and I am a Gothenburger. I told him that I had expected to find him absurd. A man who was King of fourteen countries had seemed to me, from Hisingen, to be thirteen kings more than anybody needs.

He did not seem offended. He seemed, if anything, pleased, as if I had at last said something he could get hold of.

“Fourteen is the right number,” he said. “It’s the number there are. If there were fewer, one of them would have to be pretending to be two.” He considered this. “That’s the one thing a King of several countries must never do. Be one thing pretending to be two. It’s very much better to be fourteen things that have never met.”

---

At the far end of the table the Speaker of the Riksdag was sulking. He did it with great dignity, as he did everything, and with his speech still in his breast pocket, and he had been seated, by the protocol officer who had given up, beside the President of Iceland’s interpreter, who had been told the whole story of the morning by now and had decided that he needed cheering up. She talked to him for two and a half hours about her novel. It was a Danish crime novel set on Bornholm, and I gather that by the end of the dinner the Speaker knew who had done it, and why, and that the murderer had also been a Speaker, which the interpreter had thought he would find interesting.

And then there was the toast.

I did not propose it. Strand had been right about that, as he was right about most things that week except the Rules, and I sat with my glass and did nothing while the lamb was cleared, and I felt the whole table waiting for the toast to the Presidency that has been proposed at this dinner every year since 1951, and wondering why it did not come.

The President of Finland rose.

She did not ask anybody. She tapped her glass with her knife, and the gallery went quiet, and she stood at her place halfway down the table in a dark green dress, beaming, and lifted her glass.

“Friends,” she said, in Swedish. “Neighbours. I am told that the Prime Minister of the presidency country proposes a toast to the Presidency, and the President replies, and that this year neither of those things can happen, because one of them has no voice and the other has very good manners. So I am going to propose a toast that has never been proposed at this table, and I hope that nobody will tell me there is a rule against it, because I have just learned that nobody reads the rules.” She raised her glass higher. “To Article Nine. To the Rules of the Joint Session of 1951, which were written for a Finn with a temperature. And to the only man in the Union who has read them.”

The whole gallery rose, with a scraping of chairs on the old floor, and drank.

The King rose too, because everybody did, and he lifted his glass, and then he did a thing that I did not understand until Strand explained it to me afterwards. He drank to Article Nine. He drank to the Rules of 1951. And when it came to the third part of the toast, which was to him, he lowered his glass and stood quite still, because a man does not drink to himself, and he was not going to start in the one country in the world where he was nobody.

Then the President of the Union rose at the head of the table, in dark blue, without a word, and raised her glass to the President of Finland, and to the table, and drank, and sat down. It was the shortest reply to a toast in the history of the Union, and Strand told me afterwards that it was also the best, and that he would be putting it in the Ceremonial.

Strand himself had appeared at the King’s elbow by then, from wherever he had been lying down. He bent and asked, very quietly, in the third person, whether His Majesty considered that the designation extended to replying to toasts at dinner, and whether His Majesty would wish to say a few words for the President.

“No,” said the King. “Only for that part, Admiral. She designated me for the formula. Nobody has designated me for anything else.”

Strand looked at him with something very like love, and went away.

---

At about eleven, when the coffee had come and the gallery was loud and warm and the windows had gone the deep clear blue that they go at Midsummer instead of going dark, Tove came down the side of the room behind the chairs and crouched beside me and held out her telephone.

“Expressen,” she said. “Their website. It went up ten minutes ago.”

It was a photograph, taken from the press gallery of the Hall of State that afternoon with a very long lens. It showed a hand, which was mine, and a folded page from a small blue notebook, open, which I had been passing back over my shoulder, and on the page, perfectly sharp, one word in pencil: sju, with the sj underlined twice and an arrow pointing to the back of a throat. Above it, in the largest type that Expressen keeps, it said: THE QUEEN CORRECTS THE KING.

“Oh, God,” I said.

“No,” said Tove. “It’s wonderful. Look at it.” She scrolled. There were already four thousand comments, and I read the first dozen, and they were not what I expected. They were from people who had come to Sweden from somewhere else, from Syria and Somalia and Chile and Poland and Iran, and every one of them had at some time been laughed at for the way they said sju, and every one of them, it appeared, had just fallen in love with the King.

“It’s going to be the most popular front page of the year,” said Tove. “And nobody’s going to be able to say we arranged it, because we didn’t, and it’s your hand.” She stood up. “I’m going to say nothing about it whatsoever. Every two hours.”

I showed it to the King. He looked at it for a long time, at the page in my hand and his wife’s arrow and the outline of the throat.

“She draws very well,” he said. “She always has.” He handed me back the telephone. “Do you know, I think I shall get it right next year.”

---

The last thing that happened that night was that Ebba Lindqvist came down the gallery behind the chairs, as Tove had, and stopped beside me, and took a page from the blue notebook out of her pocket, and read it aloud in her level voice.

“‘Solliden tomorrow. Come at three. Bring nothing. Frederick insists. So do I. C.’”

She looked at the page.

“‘Nothing’ is underlined,” she said.

I thought of my brother’s lawn on Hisingen, and the maypole lying on it, taller than him, and Mats, and the good herring and not the Stockholm herring, and I took out my telephone under the table and wrote to Lasse that I could not come on Friday and would come on Saturday instead, and that I was sorry.

He answered within a minute, because he never sleeps at Midsummer.

Who’s more important than my maypole?

The Queen, I wrote.

There was a long pause.

Is hers taller?

I said that I would find out.

At the door of the gallery, when I left, there was a short stout grey-haired man in a dark suit waiting with the King’s coat over his arm, though it was twenty degrees outside and the King would have no use for it. He saw me, and straightened, and inclined his head, and said in careful, deliberate Swedish, with the most English vowels I have ever heard and in the third person of the old Court, “Good evening. Has the Prime Minister had a pleasant dinner?”

“Very pleasant,” I said. “Thank you. You must be Mr Pearce.”

“Pearce, Prime Minister,” said Graham Pearce, in English now, with evident relief. “Just Pearce. I’ve been learning out of His Majesty’s dictionary. He wears them out, you see, every four or five years, and I buy him the new one, and he gives me the old.” He settled the coat over his arm. “I’ve got as far as laundry, and the weather, and how to ask after a Prime Minister. It’ll do me for now.”

“It’s very good.”

“It’s terrible,” said Pearce cheerfully. “But they’re all too polite to say.”