Outranked

In Sweden he was not the King.

He had always known it, the way he knew he had been born in the Karolinska and not in New Westminster: a fact about himself so old that he did not think about it. His mother was the Queen of Sweden. He was the Crown Prince, and the Duke of Öland, which was an island in the Baltic that he had been to twice, and in Sweden, alone of all the countries in which he had stood behind a bar that year, there was somebody above him. There had been somebody above him in Malaya, of course. But in Malaya it had been a king he had met on Monday. In Sweden it was his mother.

“You will serve the Queen first,” said the Marshal of the Realm, on Saturday, at the Palace, in Swedish, with a folder. “Before anybody. Before His Majesty the Duke. Before the Prime Minister, if she comes, which she will. Before the guests.” He turned a page. “The Queen will enter. The Crown Prince will be behind the bar. The Queen will approach. The Crown Prince will bow. The Queen will order. The Crown Prince will serve. The Queen will thank the Crown Prince. The Queen will withdraw to her table.” He closed the folder. “It is all perfectly clear, Your Royal Highness.”

“Has it been done before?”

The Marshal of the Realm looked at him over his glasses.

“No,” he said.

---

The bar was a cellar.

It was in the Old Town, under a tall narrow house of ochre plaster built in 1637, down a flight of stone steps worn into a dip in the middle by three hundred and ninety-five years of feet, and it was called Källaren, which meant The Cellar, and nothing else, because, the landlord said, it had never needed anything else. It had a vaulted brick ceiling, white-washed, so low at the edges that Theo hit his head on it at four o’clock on Saturday, and again at ten past, and a long oak bar along one side, black with age, and candles on every table, even in June, even at four in the afternoon, because the cellar had no windows and never had.

The landlord was called Herr Lindqvist. He was about sixty-five, with a white beard cut very short and a waistcoat, and he was not, he said at once, on the step, any relation to Ebba Lindqvist, who had been the Queen’s friend since she was fourteen, although he was asked about it, he said, about once a week, and had been since 1988, and had stopped minding.

“You speak Swedish,” he said, on the step, in Swedish.

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“My mother’s Swedish,” said Frederick. “I’ve spoken it since I was born. I was born here.”

Herr Lindqvist considered this.

“Then you will have no excuse,” he said, and went down the steps.

---

He did not.

It was the strangest night of the year, Saturday, and the strangest thing about it was that it was easy. He stood behind the black oak bar of Källaren under the vaulted ceiling with the candles, and people came down the stone steps in ones and twos and families, and ordered in Swedish, and he answered in Swedish, his mother’s Swedish, the Swedish of the north wing kitchen on Christmas Eve and Drottningholm in the summers and the letters from Ebba Lindqvist read aloud at breakfast, and it came out of him without thinking, the way English did, and he did not apologise once.

“En öl.”

“Stor eller liten?”

“Stor.”

And he pulled it, at forty-five degrees, the side not the bottom, and put it on the bar on a mat, and they paid, in kronor, and he gave the change, and the coins in the change had a face on them that was not his, for the first time all year, in any country. It was a woman of about forty, in profile, looking right, with her hair pinned up, and round the edge it said CHRISTINA II SVERIGES DROTTNING, and he gave her out, coin after coin, all evening, to Swedes who looked at the coin and then at him and then, in the candlelight of a cellar from 1637, smiled.

“It’s your mum,” said Theo, at nine, behind the bar, holding a coin up to a candle.

“Yes.”

“Does that feel weird?”

Frederick thought about it.

“It feels,” he said, “like being at home.”

---

National Day was Sunday.

His mother did the ceremony at Skansen, on the hill above the water, in the afternoon, in the open air, as she had done it every sixth of June since 2010, when she had been thirty-six and new and had stood at the lectern in a blue dress and been so frightened, she had told him once, that she had read the first paragraph of her speech twice without noticing. She handed out the flags to the associations, one by one, blue and yellow, on their poles, and a choir sang, and the band of the Life Guards played, and the crowd on the hill was about forty thousand, and his father was in the front row, in a chair, in a dark suit, without a stick, and stood when she came in, and stood when she left, and the newspapers noted it.

Frederick did not go. He was the Crown Prince, and the Crown Prince always went to Skansen, and the Marshal of the Realm had a folder that said so; but this year he was behind a bar in the Old Town at four o’clock, getting ready, because the Queen of Sweden was coming to it, at five, and the Crown Prince was serving.

At five past five, the door at the top of the stone steps opened.

---

She came down the steps on his father’s arm.

She was in the blue dress. Not the blue dress from 2010; another one, but the same blue, the blue of the flag, with the order on its ribbon across it and a hat, small, with nothing on it, and his father was beside her in the dark suit, walking the steps of 1637 one at a time, without a stick, slowly, the left foot finding each step before the right one came down, and the Marshal of the Realm behind them with the folder, and behind him the Prime Minister of Sweden, a tall fair woman who had been Prime Minister for six weeks and looked, coming down into a cellar to watch the Crown Prince serve a drink to the Queen, as though she wished she had been Prime Minister for slightly less.

The cellar was full. It stood up. It had been told not to, by the Marshal of the Realm, in advance, in a notice on the door, and it stood up anyway, because it was the Queen, and it was National Day, and it was Sweden.

His mother reached the bottom of the steps.

She looked round the cellar. At the vaulted ceiling and the candles and the black oak bar and the people standing at the tables. At Herr Lindqvist, at the end of the bar, in his waistcoat, who bowed. At Theo, at the other end, in the Cranwell apron, who had hit his head on the ceiling eleven times since Saturday and had a bruise. At Kimura, on a stool by the stone steps, at the edge, in a suit.

Then at her son, behind the bar.

She came across the cellar. She came across it at exactly the speed the folder said, which was slow, and stopped in front of the bar, on the other side of it, and stood.

He bowed. From the neck, as the folder said, a Crown Prince’s bow, to his sovereign.

“Ers Majestät,” he said. Your Majesty.

“Kronprinsen,” said the Queen of Sweden. The Crown Prince.

Neither of them smiled. That was the rule. Not the folder’s rule. Theirs. They had agreed it on Saturday night at the Palace, at a quarter past one, in the kitchen, in their dressing gowns, eating the last of a cake. We will not laugh, his mother had said, in Swedish. Not once. Not even a little. We will do it exactly as the Marshal says. It will be the most correct thing that has ever happened in a bar. And he had said, what if Pappa laughs?, and his mother had looked at his father, at the other end of the kitchen table, in his own dressing gown, with cake on his fork, and his father had said, in Swedish, which had come back to him whole now, every word of it, as it had not yet in English, I never laugh, and they had all three of them laughed until his mother had had to put her head on the table.

That had been Saturday. This was Sunday.

“Vad önskar Ers Majestät?” said the Crown Prince. What does Your Majesty wish?

The Queen looked at the taps.

She looked at them for some time, gravely, as though they were a list of candidates for a bishopric.

“En snaps,” said the Queen of Sweden. “Och en liten öl.” A schnapps. And a small beer.

The Marshal of the Realm, behind her, made a very small sound.

It was not in the folder. The folder said a glass of white wine. The Marshal had arranged it with the Palace in April; the white wine had been chosen, a Swedish one, and was in the cold store at the end of the bar with a white napkin round its neck. A schnapps was not in the folder. A schnapps was what you drank at midsummer, in a field, with herring, singing, not in front of the Prime Minister on National Day.

The Crown Prince did not look at the Marshal.

He took down a small glass, a schnapps glass, the size of a thimble, with a long stem, and a bottle from the shelf, cold, clear, with caraway in it, and filled the glass to the brim, exactly, without a drop over. Then he took a small glass and pulled a beer, at forty-five degrees, the side not the bottom, straightening it as it filled, a finger of head, and put them both on the bar on a mat, side by side, the thimble and the beer, in front of the Queen of Sweden.

“Var så god, Ers Majestät.” Here you are, Your Majesty.

The Queen looked at them.

Her face did not move. His face did not move. Behind her, his father’s face did not move either, and Frederick did not dare look at it, because if he looked at it he would see the thing at the very corner of his father’s mouth that he could feel, without looking, was there.

The Queen picked up the schnapps. She drank it. In one, as you did, the way you did at midsummer, with the head back, and put the thimble down, and picked up the beer, and drank about a third of it, and put it down, and looked at her son.

“Tack, Kronprinsen,” she said. Thank you, Crown Prince.

And then she opened the small blue bag on her wrist, and took out a coin, and put it on the bar.

---

It was a ten-kronor coin. It had a woman on it, in profile, looking right, with her hair pinned up.

The Marshal of the Realm made a second very small sound.

The Queen of Sweden pushed the coin across the black oak bar of Källaren with one finger, slowly, past the thimble and the beer, until it was in front of her son.

“För er,” she said. For you.

The Crown Prince looked at the coin.

He looked at his mother’s face on it, at forty, in silver, looking right. He looked at his mother’s face above it, at fifty-eight, under a small blue hat, perfectly still. He thought about Rule One, the King shall not be tipped, which the committee had adopted in the back room of Eight Bars in September, three in favour and one abstaining, and about the Treasury, and the pickled-onion jar, and Rule Twelve, and he thought that none of it applied, because none of it was about Sweden, and he was not the King here, and the Household’s rules were the Household’s, and this was his mother.

“Tack, Ers Majestät,” he said, and took it, and put it in the pocket of his apron.

The Queen of Sweden turned round, and walked, at exactly the speed the folder said, to her table, and sat down, and the Marshal of the Realm, behind her, closed his folder very quietly, as though putting it to sleep.

It was not until she was sitting, and the cellar had sat down, and the Prime Minister had been served a glass of white wine with a napkin round its neck, which she had not asked for, that Frederick looked, for the first time, at his father.

His father was standing beside his mother’s chair with one hand on the back of it. His face was perfectly still. But the thing at the corner of his mouth was there, very small, the way it had been at Coln on the window seat with Mrs Haverfield, and at the oche in November, and on the tarmac at New Westminster with a suit from 1974, and when he saw his son look at him, he did not smile. He winked.

---

The dartboard was in the corner.

Frederick had not noticed it. It was in an alcove at the back of the cellar, under the lowest part of the vault, where nobody could stand up straight, and it had been there, Herr Lindqvist said, since 1961, and was used on Thursdays by a club, the Källaren darts club, which had produced in its time three champions of Sweden.

His father had noticed it.

His father noticed it at about a quarter to six, when the cellar had gone back to being a cellar and the Prime Minister had left, and the Queen was at her table with Herr Lindqvist, talking about Ebba Lindqvist, to whom he was not related, and he got up from the table and went to the alcove, stooping under the vault, and looked at the board, and then took out of the pocket of his dark suit, where they had evidently been since Skansen, his darts, with the brass barrels and the red flights.

“Who,” he said, in Swedish, to the cellar. “Plays.”

There was a silence.

Then a woman stood up at a table by the stone steps. She was about forty, in jeans and a sweater, with short grey hair, and she had been sitting with two other women over a beer since four o’clock, and Herr Lindqvist, at the Queen’s table, said, very quietly, oh no, and the Queen said, who is she?, and Herr Lindqvist said, that’s Margit Holm. She’s been champion of Sweden four times. She was champion of Sweden last year.

Margit Holm walked across the cellar to the alcove, stooping under the vault, and took a set of darts out of her back pocket, black, with silver flights, and looked at the Duke of Cumberland.

“Five hundred and one,” she said. “Double out.”

“Yes,” said the Duke.

---

It took eleven minutes. She threw first. She threw a hundred, and a hundred and forty, and a hundred, the way Mrs Pruszynski had thrown in Division Four in November, like a sniper, and she was on a hundred and sixty-one after nine darts, and the Duke was on three hundred and two, and Theo, standing by the bar with Frederick, said very quietly, he’s going to say it.

The Duke went to the line.

He stood there. He held the dart. He did not throw.

Margit Holm, at the side of the alcove, with her black darts in her hand and four championships behind her, watched him not throw. She watched him not throw for ten seconds, and twenty, and thirty, and at about thirty-five seconds Frederick saw her shift her weight, and look at her darts, and take a breath.

“Vänta,” said the Duke of Cumberland. Wait.

He said it in Swedish. He said it quietly, to the board, the way he said it in English in Eight Bars on a Thursday, and Margit Holm heard it, and her face changed, and the cellar went silent, and he waited, for forty seconds, forty-five, under the vaulted ceiling, in the candlelight, with the whole of Källaren holding its breath and the Queen of Sweden at her table with her hand over her mouth.

Then he threw. Treble twenty, treble twenty, treble twenty.

Margit Holm needed a hundred and sixty-one. She did not get it. She got forty-one, and stood looking at the board as though it had been replaced, while she was not looking, by a smaller board.

The Duke needed a hundred and twenty-two. He took it in six darts.

He went back to the line, and took out his darts, and put them in the pocket of his suit, and turned round, and held out his hand, and Margit Holm shook it,, the way Mrs Pruszynski had, and looked at him, and said, in Swedish, what did you say?

“Vänta,” said the Duke.

“Why?”

His father thought about it, under the vault, stooping, with his hand still in the champion’s.

“Alla har så bråttom,” he said. Everybody is in such a hurry. And then, which he had not said in Eight Bars to Mrs Pruszynski, because in November he had not had the words, he said, in Swedish, in a whole sentence, all of it, without stopping:

“I spent three years not being able to hurry. It turns out it was practice.”

At the Queen’s table, the Queen of Sweden took her hand away from her mouth, and Frederick saw, in the candlelight, that she had stopped keeping her face still, at last, at about a quarter past six on National Day, and that it was wet, and that she did not care who saw.