Half Past Three in Stockholm

The alarm went at a quarter to six, under his pillow, and said BUTTE.

He was awake. He had been awake since five, waiting for it, and when it went he did not put his thumb on it at once. He let it go on for a little, because he had not heard it since October and found that he had missed it.

Tyler was asleep. He had come off wood at five, as he had said he would, and lay on his back on the bed by the window with the controller going up and down on his chest; and on the two screens above him the fire in the forest was burning higher than Frederick had ever seen it, with the snow coming down slantwise through the light of it and the figures in furs standing well back, the way people stand back from a fire that a great many of them have built up on purpose, for something.

He dressed by the light of it.

He took the maroon jumper down off the shelf, where the card was still under it in her small upright hand, For October. M., and put it on. He did not put on the coat. He took the butterscotch out of the coat’s pocket and put it in his jeans. Then he took down the white cricket hat, a soft old thing gone the colour of weak tea at the band, which had been on the shelf beside the jumper since the twenty-seventh of November, and put it on, and looked at himself in the dark glass of the door: a maroon jumper and a cricket hat, at ten to six on a February morning in the middle of the Valley. He looked like nothing that had ever been King of anything.

---

The knock came at six, two knuckles.

Rhys was in the corridor in a fleece zipped to the chin with a torch in each hand and the pack on his back, from which the clear plastic tube came round over his shoulder to its valve on his chest.

“It’s forty-six degrees, Rhys.”

“I know, sir.” Rhys looked down at the valve. “I just put it on.”

Sam was behind him with his hands in his pockets and the black umbrella hooked over one arm.

“Habit,” said Sam, before he was asked.

There was no grey backpack. The box would come across the road later, in somebody else’s hands. Sam had his telephone instead, already open, with a line of white Swedish on a black screen saying that the broadcast would begin at three o’clock, and in the pocket of his jacket, coiled, the long orange lead of a power strip.

“Tyler was awake at five,” said Sam. “He said there’s always an old guy.”

---

Mr Luna was at the desk.

It was twenty-five past six. His shift had ended at six, and the day porter had come on at six, the sophomore with her hair up in a pencil, and was sitting at the end of the desk with her coffee in both hands, looking at the side of his face as at a man who has declined to go home for reasons she has not been told. He had his jacket on over the cardigan, and the western and the thermos on the desk in front of him, as he had them every morning when he left. He had not left. On the clipboard, under 6 a.m. 66, there was a line the law did not require: 6.25 a.m. 66.

He looked at the three of them over his glasses, and at the hat.

“Nice hat,” said Mr Luna.

“It’s from Gloucestershire.”

“Looks it.” He looked at the clock over the door. “Butterscotch?”

“In my pocket. For the top.”

Mr Luna nodded slowly, and picked up the pen.

“Go on, son,” he said.

---

The Avenue was dark and empty and cold.

In August the pavements had given back the day all night, like a row of ovens with their doors left open. Now the cold came up off the paving through his shoes, and his breath went up under the street lamps, and Rhys’s beside it, and Sam’s; and a street-sweeper went by on the far side with its orange light going round, and a tram went past at the top of the Avenue, lit and empty, towards the bridge. He put his hands in his pockets, because Theo had said to.

At the top of the Avenue there was the butte, and at the gate there was somebody.

The green board on its post said PATH OPEN, and under it, in white, SUNRISE 7.26; and under the board, in the green light, small and upright in a dark coat, with her hands folded in front of her and a paper bag in them, the way a woman stands at a bus stop for a bus she does not intend to catch, was Kimura.

He had not seen her since October. He had seen a blind go down an inch.

“Sergeant.”

“Sir.” She looked at the path going up into the dark above the gate, and at the road behind them, and then at him, briefly, and at the hat for slightly longer. “Morning.”

She held out the bag. It was warm. There were two rolls in it, from the bakery on the Avenue that opened at six for the people who worked at six.

“Eat something,” said Kimura. “You’ve been up all night, and you’re about to do this on a butterscotch.”

He stared at her.

“Mr Luna,” he said.

“He rang at eleven. He said you’d got something for the top and nothing for the bottom.” She considered the road. “I’ve had his number by my telephone since August. He’s rung it four times. He’s been right every time.”

He ate both rolls, standing at the gate in the cold, in the cricket hat, while Rhys looked at the path and Sam at his telephone and Kimura at the road; and he had not known he was hungry.

“I’m not coming up, sir,” said Kimura.

“I know.”

“You don’t need a sergeant at the top of a hill.” She took the empty bag back from him and folded it once and put it in her pocket. “Rhys has the torches. Sam has Stockholm. I’ve got the bottom.”

He went through the gate with Rhys ahead of him and Sam behind, and at the first bend he turned round, and she was still there under the board, small and upright, looking at the road.

---

They went up in the dark.

The torches made two small rooms of light, and the steps came up into them one at a time: the old ones first, cut in the rock and worn hollow in the middle like the steps of a church, and then the concrete and the maroon rail, zigzagging across the face. He did not touch the rail. When he put out a hand to the rock at a turn it was cold. In August it had been warmer than his hand, as though something under the hill were breathing.

Halfway up, the path crossed the top of the A, and Rhys’s torch went over the edge of it where the paint had lifted from the stone and showed its layers end on, like the pages of a book, maroon and darker maroon and nearly brown and nearly pink and, deep down, the thin line of white; and on top of them all, still with a little gloss on it in the torchlight, the coat of the eighteenth of October.

“That’s ours,” said Rhys, quietly.

At three minutes to seven, on the steep part above the A, the black screen in Sam’s hand went white and gold.

---

The top was small and cold and empty. The old man’s stone on the east side had nobody on it.

Below them the Valley was still lit, all of it, to the edge of the world, in its long straight lines of orange lamps, with the lake black to the north and a tram on the bridge, and an aircraft going out from the airport with its lights on. To the east the sky over the mountains was going grey.

They stood by the old man’s stone, and Sam held the telephone out flat on his palm, face up, like a man holding a compass, so that all three of them could look down at it.

It was the Hall of State. He had stood in it at fourteen in a blue suit at his mother’s left and been told not to fidget: long and very high and white and gold, with the galleries down both sides on their columns, and at the far end, under its canopy of blue and silver, the silver throne made for the first Christina, which nobody sat in. The Riksdag was in its rows, and the government at the front, and the galleries were full of uniforms and the diplomatic corps and women in hats they had not wanted to wear. In front of the throne, on a low dais covered in blue cloth, there was a table with a paper and a pen on it, and beside the table two chairs.

One was gilt, with blue velvet, and was not green.

The other was plain, with a straight back and no arms, and he knew it by its back. It was the chair from the white drawing room with the tiled stove.

On the left of the dais, behind the gilt chair, three paces from the wall, in a black coat buttoned to the throat, quite still, stood his cousin.

“He’s not moving,” said Rhys, very low, as if the Hall could hear.

“No,” said Frederick. “He’s good at it.”

---

They came in at nine minutes past seven.

He heard it first, a sound out of the small loudspeaker like wind going over a field, which was eleven hundred people standing up. Then the camera found them at the doors, and he watched his mother and his father come the whole long white and gold length of the Hall of State between the standing rows, on each other’s arms, and could not tell which of them was holding up the other.

His father had the stick in his outside hand and his mother’s arm through the other, and they went at his father’s pace, the pace of a man who has been told he may walk this far and intends to walk all of it; and his mother went beside him in dark blue with the sapphire at her shoulder, upright, at exactly the same pace, as if it were her own. The camera did not cut away. It went with them the whole length of the room in a single shot, the way a camera follows a thing it has been told it will not get again; and on the top of a butte in Arizona three men watched it on a telephone the size of a hand and did not say anything at all.

At the dais his father let go, and went up the single step helped by nobody, because he would not be, and sat in the gilt chair. Alexander, three paces behind it, did not move.

His mother sat down in the plain one.

---

She did not speak. She had spoken on the ninth. A man at a lectern read something in Swedish in the voice of a man reading a minute, and Frederick did not listen to it, because he was watching her hands. She picked up the pen.

She signed in ink.

She put the pen down beside the paper, exactly parallel to its edge; and the Prime Minister, a tall grey man, came up the step and bent and signed under her, his signature going uphill, and went back down. It was sixteen minutes past seven.

“Is that it?” whispered Rhys.

“That’s three sixteen,” said Sam. “It’s half past.”

They waited. Eleven hundred people in Stockholm waited, standing, in silence, and three on a butte in Tempe waited with them, and the sky over the mountains went from grey to the pale clean yellow of the inside of a lemon, along the whole line of the ridge, which stood up black against it, ragged at the top like torn paper.

At twenty past seven he unwrapped the butterscotch and put it in his mouth.

“The porter’s?” said Rhys.

“Yes.”

Rhys nodded, as at a point of procedure correctly observed.

At twenty-six minutes past seven, by Sam’s watch, the tables said that the sun had risen over Tempe. The edge of the ridge caught fire along the top, a thin line like the edge of a coal, and the sky above it went white; and the sun did not come.

“It’s not up,” said Rhys, in real alarm, as though a thing in the schedule had failed.

“Mountains,” said Sam. “I said.”

---

At twenty-eight minutes past he looked down at the telephone for the last time.

His father was sitting in the gilt chair with both hands on the head of the stick, and as Frederick watched, he took his left hand off it and turned his wrist and looked at his watch, very carefully, the way he had looked at the departure boards at Paddington for sixty years; and then he put his hand inside his coat and took out an envelope, folded, and unfolded it on his knee, and looked at something written on the back of it, and folded it again, and held it.

Three paces behind him, his cousin lifted his eyes, without moving his head, to the clock above the doors at the far end of the Hall, and Frederick knew that he was subtracting twenty seconds.

His mother sat in the plain chair with her hands in her lap, and did not look at the camera.

Then he did what she had told him. He turned his back on the telephone and the Hall of State and everybody in it, and went to the edge of the summit on the east side, past the old man’s empty stone, and stood with his hands in his pockets and his face to the mountains, and looked at the sun.

---

It came at half past seven.

It came where the line of fire was brightest along the ridge, a little south of east: first an edge, very thin, so bright at once that it was not a colour at all; and then the whole upper curve of it, clearing the Superstitions in a few seconds, as though it had been waiting behind them for four minutes with its engines running; and then the light came across the Valley towards him. It came across the grid of lamps, which went pale under it street after street from the edge of the world inwards, and across the roofs, and across the lake, which went from black to bronze from end to end in one long flash, and up the side of the butte, and reached his face.

It was not hot. In August the heat had come with the light, like the door of an oven opening. Now there was nothing in it but light, cold and very clear, and he felt it on his face anyway, and took off the cricket hat so as to feel it properly.

Behind him, out of the palm of Sam’s hand, very small, very far away, a man’s voice said something in Swedish.

He did not need to hear it. It was the Speaker, at a lectern under a clock that was twenty seconds fast, saying that Sweden’s King was Georg, the fifth of the name; and then, louder, the old formula, han leve, long may he live.

And then, out of a telephone on a hill in Arizona, the size of a fingernail, from eleven hundred people in a white and gold room five thousand miles away:

Hurra.

Hurra.

Hurra.

Hurra.

“Four,” said Sam, under his breath.

“Is it supposed to be four?” whispered Rhys.

“It’s four in Sweden,” said Frederick, to the sun.

---

The sun went on coming up. It cleared the ridge, small and white and far away, and the shadow of the butte lay out behind them across the town to the river, and the roofs came up out of the blue into their own colours one by one. Out of Sam’s hand a band began, and voices with it, a long slow tune he had stood for all his life at his mother’s left; and Rhys made a small uncertain movement behind him, as though to stand to attention on the top of a hill in a fleece with a drinking tube on his chest.

“Should we…?” said Rhys.

“No,” said Frederick. “I’m not present for the purposes of it.”

Sam made a sound in his nose and stopped it.

He came back to the stone then and looked down at the telephone, because it was over and she had said there would be nothing in it to see, and he wanted to see the nothing.

The Hall was singing. The camera had gone up to the gallery on the right and was moving slowly along it, across the uniforms and the hats and the ambassadors holding printed sheets in front of them and mouthing; and it stopped, for a moment, on a young man in a dark suit at the end of the front row who was holding no sheet at all, and was singing every word of every verse, clearly, a little louder than the Riksdag.

“Who’s that?” said Rhys.

“Lukas.”

“He knows all the words.”

“He wanted to know what you win at a Hall of State,” said Frederick.

Rhys looked at the small bright figure in the gallery.

“He’s winning,” said Rhys.

Then the singing ended, and the Hall was still; and his mother stood up out of the plain chair with one hand on the table, and his father out of the gilt one with his hand on the stick and on her arm, and they came down the single step and turned and went away down the long white and gold room towards the doors, at his father’s pace, on each other’s arms, the whole length of it, and the camera went with them and did not cut.

She did not look back. She never did.

The doors at the far end opened, and they went through, and the doors closed.

---

He stood on the summit of Hayden Butte in the sun with the cricket hat in his hand and looked at the Valley.

It was a Wednesday morning at twenty-five to eight, and forty-six degrees going on fifty, and the lamps were all off now. The trams were going over the bridge. A man was walking a dog on the path round the lake. The lights went green and red in long straight lines down the Avenue, and the sprinklers on the campus lawns threw their small bright arcs, and a hundred thousand students turned over in a hundred thousand beds, and five million people, every one of them, did not know, or knew and did not care, that on the top of the hill in the middle of them a young man in a maroon jumper had just become King of Sweden while he was looking at something else.

Nobody looked up.

Except, at the foot of the butte, in the long blue shadow it threw across the road, a small upright figure at the gate under the green board, with its hands folded in front of it. Everybody else in the Valley who was looking at anything that morning was looking at the sun. It was looking up at the top of the hill, where its work was, and had been looking there, he understood, the whole time.

“Sir,” said Rhys, behind him.

He turned round.

Rhys was standing by the old man’s stone with his face arranged, and failing, in the sun, with his eyes very bright; and Sam beside him with the telephone still lit on his palm and his round glasses full of the light.

“Fifteen,” said Sam.