Lucia

Theo came back on the Thirty-Two.

He came back at twenty-six minutes past five on Friday the twelfth of December, which was the last day of his first term at medical school, and he got off at Garfield and Ninth with his rucksack and a box file under his arm and the stethoscope round his neck, which he had evidently forgotten was there, and his father, in the cab, said “Exact fare” to nobody, as the doors closed, and drove away towards the depot.

Frederick was on the pavement outside Eight Bars, waiting.

They looked at each other.

Theo looked different. It was hard to say how. He was thinner, a little, and paler, and he had the expression of somebody who had spent six weeks learning the names of things inside people and could not now stop seeing them, and he looked at Frederick on the pavement, and at the sign, EIGHT BARS, with the trombone painted on it, and at the window, where his own face, red to the ears, holding a jug of Mumme, looked back at him from a T-shirt that Mrs Merriweather had pinned up on the inside of the glass in October and refused to take down.

“I learned the kidneys,” said Theo.

“How were they?”

“Complicated.” Theo looked at the T-shirt. “Is that still there?”

“She won’t take it down.”

“I’ll take it down.”

“You won’t,” said Frederick. “She’ll take it out of your wages. She’s taken four hundred and nineteen pounds out of mine.” He held the door open. “Also there’s a jar.”

“What jar?”

“You’ll see.”

Theo went in, and saw the jar, by the till, the second pickled-onion jar, with THEO on it in Mrs Merriweather’s small handwriting and not the King, see Rule Twelve under it, and three weeks of coins and notes in it, nearly to the top, and stood in front of it for a long time with his box file under his arm, and then turned round and said, in a voice of total bewilderment:

“But I haven’t done anything.”

“That’s the point,” said Kimura, from her stool, without looking round. “You’re not him.”

---

The Duke did his last shift that night.

He had done six weeks. He had done every Friday and Saturday and, from the third week, a Wednesday as well, when the crowd for him alone had grown so large that Mrs Merriweather had put a second man on the door. He had pulled, by Mr Abernathy’s count, kept on beer mats in a shoebox under the stool, eleven hundred and four pints, at forty-five degrees, without looking, and had been awarded an A minus for every one of them except two, which had been awarded an A, on nights when he had looked. He had captained the Eight Bars team through the second and third rounds of the Cup and into the quarter-final, by means of the word Wait, which he had said eleven times in four matches and which had broken, Kimura’s beer mats recorded, six opposing players, two of them twice. He had been photographed by Mrs Merriweather forty-one times, and there was a whole stretch of the wall behind the bar now, between the optics and the cellar door, where he appeared in his apron and his rolled sleeves in a long row of black frames, never looking at the camera, never looking at the glass, always looking at the room.

At a quarter to one, at closing, he took off the apron and folded it in four and put it on the counter.

“Theo,” he said.

Theo, who had been behind the bar since half past five and had dropped three glasses and given change for a twenty from a ten twice, came down the bar.

“Sir.”

The Duke pushed the folded apron across the bar to him.

Theo looked at it. It was the old white apron, the long one, with the faded crest in the corner and the laundry mark.

“Sir, I can’t. It’s yours. It’s from the mess.”

“Cranwell,” said the Duke. “Yes.” He found the next part. “Too big. For me. Now.” Which was not true, and they both knew it. He looked at Theo. “Wear it. Badly.” And then, after a moment, with something that was nearly a smile: “Like. Him.”

He put on his tweed cap and walked to the door, without the stick, and went out into Garfield Street, where a car was waiting, and Theo stood behind the bar holding the apron in both hands, and Frederick, beside him, said, “Well, now you’ve got to,” and Theo said, “I know,” and put it on, and it came down past his knees.

---

His mother arrived at four on Saturday afternoon with a van.

He had known she was coming. She had told him on Sunday, at lunch, in the north wing kitchen, in the voice in which she announced things that had been decided in Stockholm. Saturday is the thirteenth. Lucia. I will do Lucia at the bar. Bridget will help. Your father will carry. And then, to his father, in Swedish, You will carry, and his father had said, in Swedish, which had come back to him in pieces after the sea and was now very nearly whole, I will carry, and that had been that.

So at four o’clock on Saturday the thirteenth of December the Queen of Sweden got out of the passenger seat of a small white van on Garfield Street, in a long grey coat and gloves, with her hair under a scarf, and Bridget got out of the driver’s seat, and the Duke got out of the back, and the three of them began to carry things into Eight Bars.

They carried a crate of saffron buns, golden, each one twisted into the shape of an S with a raisin in each curl, three hundred of them, baked in the north wing kitchen between five in the morning and noon by Bridget and the Queen together, with the radio on. They carried two crates of ginger biscuits shaped like hearts and pigs and goats. They carried a vat of mulled wine, nine litres, dark red, with almonds in it and raisins and cinnamon sticks and cardamom and orange peel, which the Queen had made from her grandmother’s recipe and which smelled, as soon as the lid came off, of every Christmas Frederick had ever had. They carried a casserole the size of a bath, which had in it potatoes and cream and onions and tiny salted fish, sprats, laid in rows, and which the Queen said was called Jansson’s temptation and was eaten on Christmas Eve in every house in Sweden, and was going to be eaten tonight on Garfield Street, because it is Lucia and that is close enough. They carried a box of white candles. They carried a white dress.

They carried, last of all, very carefully, in a cardboard box lined with tissue paper, a crown.

It was a ring of green leaves made of something like wire and felt, with seven white candles standing up out of it, and Frederick, who had seen it on the heads of girls in white dresses walking down the aisle of the Storkyrkan in Stockholm in most Decembers until he was six, knew exactly what it was, and looked at the box, and at his mother, and at the ceiling of Eight Bars, which was low, and black, and made of wood.

“Mamma,” he said, in Swedish. “Who’s wearing that?”

“Mrs Merriweather’s niece,” said the Queen. “She is twelve. She has a beautiful voice. She has been practising the song for three weeks with Señora Ruiz, who speaks Swedish now, a little, on Saturdays, as you know, because you taught her.” She lifted the crown out of the tissue paper. “The candles will be lit.”

“The ceiling’s wood.”

“Yes.”

“The fire marshal comes on Saturdays.”

“I have spoken to the fire marshal,” said the Queen of Sweden. “He has views. I have views. We will see.”

---

The fire marshal came at six.

He was the same fire marshal who had come on the first Friday with a clicker, a large man of about fifty in a yellow jacket called Captain Szymanski, and he had come every Friday and most Saturdays since, and stood by the door counting, and had become, in his way, a regular, though he had never once had a drink. He came in at six with the clicker and saw the crown on the bar in its box with the seven candles, and the box of white candles beside it, and the Queen of Sweden standing beside both of them with her gloves off, and he stopped.

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Captain.”

“I said no.”

“You said,” said the Queen, “that you would need to see it.”

Captain Szymanski looked at the crown for a long time. Then he looked at the ceiling. Then he took a small notebook out of the pocket of his yellow jacket and wrote something in it, and looked at the crown again.

“Seven candles,” he said.

“Seven.”

“Lit.”

“Lit.”

“On a child’s head.”

“On the head of Hannah, who is twelve,” said the Queen, “and who will walk from the back door to the end of the bar, which is thirty-four feet, in front of two hundred people, singing, and then stand still for the second verse, and then walk back. It will take four minutes and twenty seconds. She has done it in the north wing corridor eleven times. The ceiling of the north wing corridor is also wood. It is from 1795.” She put her gloves together. “Captain. In Sweden, on this night, in every school and every church and every hospital and every office, a girl walks in the dark with candles on her head. She has done so since my grandmother was a girl. No ceiling has caught fire in my lifetime.” She paused. “I do not say that this is a guarantee. I say that we will be very careful, and that if you wish to stand beside her with an extinguisher, you are welcome.”

Captain Szymanski considered the Queen of Sweden.

“I’ll need a bucket of sand,” he said at last, “by the cellar door, and a blanket, and the extinguisher, and I’ll walk behind her.”

“Thank you.”

“The whole way.”

“Of course.”

“And the lights off,” said Captain Szymanski, “for the full effect,” and wrote it down, and went back to the door, and clicked.

---

The revolt began at seven.

It began, as Frederick had known it would, with the wine.

The Queen served it herself, from the vat, which had been set up on the end of the bar by the hatch, next to Kimura, in small glass cups with handles that Bridget had brought from the north wing and that had come, she said, from the Swedish legation in 1911 and had not been used since 1987. The Queen put a few raisins and almonds in the bottom of each cup with a teaspoon, and ladled the hot wine over them, and set it on the bar, and the regulars of Eight Bars, who had come in out of the December cold and been told it was free, and were therefore prepared to try it, picked up the little cups and drank.

Mr Delgado, the retired postman, whose back had recovered, was first.

He drank. He stopped. He looked into the cup. He fished out an almond with his finger and looked at it.

“There’s nuts in it,” he said.

“Almonds,” said the Queen. “And raisins. You eat them at the end with the spoon.”

“In wine?”

“In glögg.”

Mr Delgado looked at the Queen of Sweden, and at the cup, and at the almond on the end of his finger, with the expression of a man who has delivered post in the Fourth Ward for thirty-eight years and has never once been asked to eat a nut out of a drink.

“Ma’am,” he said, with great courtesy, “with respect, that’s not how a drink works.”

And down the bar, as if he had given a signal, the revolt spread. A woman from the laundromat said the saffron buns were yellow, which they were, and that she did not trust yellow bread. A man from the Lamplighter, who had come over for the Cup and stayed, said the ginger biscuits were too thin to be biscuits, and broke one to prove it. The Jansson’s temptation, when Bridget lifted the lid, was looked at by forty people in total silence, and a voice from the back said, quite clearly, “Are those fish?”, and another voice said, “In with the potatoes?”, and Marcus, who had been about to play, put the trombone down on the pallet and went to look, and came back, and said to his mother in a low voice, “Mom, there’s fish in the potatoes,” and his mother said, “I know, darling, it’s Swedish.”

The Queen stood behind the vat with the ladle in her hand and looked at the revolt.

Frederick, behind the bar, beside Theo in the long white apron, watched his mother look at it. He had seen her face like that once before, in a photograph from 1986 that hung in a corridor at Drottningholm: a girl of twelve in the gallery of the Riksdag, sitting very straight and very still, being quiet because her father had told her to, and watching everything.

She did not say anything. She put down the ladle. She went round the end of the bar to Mr Delgado, and took the cup out of his hand, and the teaspoon, and stood beside him, and drank the rest of the glögg in the cup, standing up, and then, with the teaspoon, very neatly, ate the almonds and the raisins from the bottom, one by one, and put the cup back on the bar in front of him, empty.

“Like that,” said the Queen of Sweden.

Mr Delgado looked at the cup.

She ladled him another one.

He drank it. Slowly. He drank it all, standing at the bar, while the Queen watched, and then he picked up the teaspoon, and looked at the Queen, and looked at the bottom of the cup, where the almonds and the raisins were, soaked dark red with wine and warm.

He ate them.

He put the spoon down.

He did not say anything for a moment. Then he held out the cup.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Could I have another?”

---

At half past nine they turned off the lights.

Captain Szymanski turned them off himself, at the switch by the door, and Eight Bars went black, completely, for the first time since September, except for the green light over the fire exit and the little red light on the till, and two hundred people stood in the dark in the Fourth Ward, on a Saturday night in December, with saffron buns in their hands, and waited, and did not talk.

The back door opened.

Hannah came through it. She was twelve, in a long white dress with a red sash, and on her head was the crown of green leaves with the seven white candles in it, lit, seven small flames in the dark, and she walked very slowly, with her hands together in front of her, the way the Queen had taught her in the north wing corridor, and behind her, a yard behind her, in his yellow jacket, with a fire extinguisher held in both hands like an offering, walked Captain Szymanski.

She sang.

She sang in Swedish. She sang the song every girl in Sweden sang on that night in the dark, the old song about the night going heavy round the house and the shadows and the light coming in with candles in her hair, which Frederick had last heard sung in the Storkyrkan when he was six with his hand in his mother’s hand, and which Señora Ruiz had taught Mrs Merriweather’s niece over three weeks of Saturdays in the north wing kitchen from a sheet he had written out for her himself. Hannah’s Swedish was the Swedish of a girl from the Fourth Ward who had learned a song from a Spanish teacher who had learned it from the King. It was, Frederick thought, very nearly perfect.

She walked the thirty-four feet to the end of the bar, singing, with the seven flames, and Captain Szymanski behind her, and stopped, and stood still for the second verse, and the light of the candles went up onto the black wooden ceiling and down onto the faces of two hundred people who had revolted about almonds, and lit them, and none of them was talking.

Mr Delgado, at the bar, had his little glass cup in both hands and was not drinking it.

The woman from the laundromat had a saffron bun in her hand, half eaten.

At the end of the bar, by the vat, the Queen of Sweden stood with her hands folded, very straight, very still, and watched the girl with the candles on her head, and her face, in the light of seven candles, was the face of a girl of twelve in the gallery of the Riksdag, being quiet, watching everything, and it was wet.

Behind her, in the dark, with his hand on the back of a chair, his father said, very quietly, in Swedish, the whole of the first line of the song, without stopping.

---

Hannah walked back through the back door at nine thirty-four and twenty seconds, and Captain Szymanski walked behind her, and closed the door, and there was a short silence, and then he turned the lights on.

The bar of Eight Bars stood blinking in the light.

Then the woman from the laundromat said, in a voice that carried, “Is there any more of that potato?”

And there was.

There were three hundred saffron buns at four o’clock. By closing, there were none. There were nine litres of glögg, and Bridget made another four in the north wing kitchen and sent them over in a taxi at eleven. There was a casserole of Jansson’s temptation the size of a bath, and at a quarter to one Mrs Merriweather was scraping the last of it out of the corners with a spoon for Mr Delgado, who had asked for the recipe, in writing, and been given it by the Queen on a beer mat, in Swedish, which he could not read, and kept.

Kimura’s beer mat that night had only one entry.

Lucia. No fire. Detail drank 4 glögg, being errors (King put the almonds in the wrong cup). Detail ate the almonds.

And under it, in the same blue biro, smaller:

Detail had a nice time.