Notes

The laryngologist was a woman from the Karolinska with a lamp strapped to her forehead, and she had the manner of somebody who has looked down a great many throats and found nothing in any of them to respect. She had looked down the Queen’s at half past six, and at seven she told the rest of us what she had found there, standing in the middle of the Queen’s sitting room with the lamp still on, so that whoever she looked at was briefly lit.

“Acute laryngitis,” she said. “The cords are swollen. They will recover if they are rested. Rested means not used. Seventy-two hours.”

“From now?” said Strand.

“From half past six.” She turned the lamp on him. “Not a word. Not a whisper. Whispering is worse than speaking, because people think it doesn’t count, and it does. No singing. No humming. No clearing the throat. If Her Majesty wishes to attract attention, she may knock on the table.”

The Queen knocked on the table.

She was in an armchair by the window in a grey cardigan, with her feet on a stool and a rug over her knees that she clearly resented, and she had on her lap a small blue notebook with a pencil clipped to its cover, the kind that you buy in packets of ten from a stationer’s. Lindqvist keeps a stack of them in her desk, I learned that morning, because the Queen makes lists. She was not making a list now. She tore a page out and held it up, and Lindqvist took it and read it aloud to the room in her level voice, as if it were a minute of a meeting.

“‘I can do everything in writing.’”

“Ma’am,” said Strand.

The Queen wrote again, and tore again, and held it up.

“‘Everything,’” said Lindqvist. She looked at the page. “In capitals.”

The laryngologist said that she would come back at six, and that Her Majesty was to drink warm water and nothing with lemon in it, and that if she heard that Her Majesty had spoken she would know, because she always knew. Then she switched off her lamp and left, and the room seemed darker and a good deal less frightened.

Seventy-two hours from half past six on Wednesday morning is half past six on Saturday morning. The Joint Session was at noon on Thursday. Midsummer Eve was Friday. I did the sum, and so did everyone else in the room, and the Queen watched us do it, and wrote something, and tore it out, and this time did not hold it up but folded it and put it in her cardigan pocket. Lindqvist told me afterwards what it said. It said Damn, in English, which the Queen uses for swearing because she says it does not count.

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The Treaty of Kalmar was signed in 1949 and runs to thirty-one articles, and I had read every one of them in October, on the train to Gothenburg, because I read every treaty Sweden is party to on the train to Gothenburg. It takes three hours and four minutes and nobody bothers you between Hallsberg and Skövde. The twelfth article says that the Joint Session shall meet once a year at the seat of the Union, and that the President shall open the Session. It does not say how.

By eight o’clock there were two lawyers from the Ministry of Justice in the Queen’s sitting room, sent for by me, and they disagreed, which is what I had sent for them to do. The elder, a man with a white beard and a cycling helmet that he carried under his arm like a second head, said that to open a session was an act and not a sentence, and that a written declaration signed by the President and read out by somebody else would satisfy the Treaty. The younger, a woman with very short hair who had been a clerk at the Supreme Administrative Court, said that the Treaty must be read with the instruments made under it, and that everybody knew the Session was opened by the spoken formula, and that if the Treaty meant “open” in some other sense it would have said so.

“Everybody knew,” said the elder. “Show me where it is written.”

“In the Ceremonial,” said Strand.

He had brought it. The Ceremonial of the Joint Session is a blue binder about four centimetres thick, which the Court drew up in 1952 and revised in 1987 and again in 2011, and which says, for every minute of the Session, who stands, who sits, who walks through which door, and in which order. Strand opened it on his knee to a page marked with a ribbon and read aloud, in the voice in which I imagine he once read the orders of the day to a submarine flotilla.

“‘At noon the President rises and pronounces the formula. The fanfare is sounded. The President resumes her seat.’”

“‘Her’ seat?” said the elder lawyer.

“The 2011 revision,” said Strand. “The 1952 text said ‘his’.”

“And where does the Ceremonial get it from?”

“From the Rules,” said Strand. “The Rules of the Joint Session, adopted by the Union Council in 1951 under the Treaty. The Ceremonial contains everything in them that concerns the ceremony. It is the Rules, for all practical purposes.”

I asked whether we had the Rules. Strand said that the Union’s secretariat had them, naturally, in its library, and that the Ceremonial had been drawn from them with great care by his predecessor’s predecessor, and that he had never in eleven years needed to consult them, because they concerned the conduct of the Union’s business, and the business was not his. The ceremony was his. I accepted that. It seemed perfectly reasonable. I want to put it on the record now, before anything else happens in this account, that it seemed perfectly reasonable to me, and that I am a former chair of a port committee and have read a great many rules, and I did not ask for them.

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We spent the next hour on ways for a woman without a voice to say three sentences.

The Secretary-General of the Union could read the formula for her, said the elder lawyer, who liked his own theory. Strand said that the Secretary-General was the Union’s servant and not its President, and that a servant could not open his master’s session, any more than a steward could launch a ship. The elder lawyer said that stewards launched ships all the time. Strand said that they did not, in his navy.

The Queen could rise at noon, said somebody from the protocol office, and stand in silence for forty seconds, and sit down, and the Session would be understood to be open. The younger lawyer said that it would be understood to be a minute’s silence, and the newspapers would ask who had died.

“There is a recording,” said Tove.

She had come over from Rosenbad at half past seven with two coffees and a croissant for me, which she had eaten on the way, and she was standing by the door with her telephone in her hand, because she had to tell the press something at ten and had nothing yet.

“Of what?”

“Of the rehearsal. Last week, in the Hall. Ebba filmed it, so that the Queen could hear what she sounded like.” She held up the telephone. “It’s very good. Forty-one seconds. You could play it through the speakers at noon and she could stand up.”

There was a silence.

“The Joint Session of the Scandinavian Union,” said Strand, with real pain, “cannot be opened by a telephone.”

The Queen wrote something, and tore it out, and held it up.

“‘Why not?’” read Lindqvist.

Strand looked at the Queen, and the Queen looked at Strand, and for a long moment I thought that I was about to see an admiral of the Swedish Navy weep. Then the Queen wrote again.

“‘Joke,’” read Lindqvist. She looked at the page. “With a full stop.”

The Speaker of the Riksdag telephoned me at nine, on my own mobile, to ask whether there was anything he could do. He said that he had heard, he would not say from whom, that the Queen was unwell, and that he wished me to know that he was at the Government’s disposal, and the Court’s, and the Union’s, at any hour, in any capacity, and that I had only to ask. I thanked him. I said that the Queen had a cold. He said that he was very glad to hear that it was only a cold, and that he would be in his office all day, and all evening, should anything constitutional arise.

I should have recognised it as a threat. In my defence, I had not had any breakfast.

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The Queen saw to that. At about half past nine she wrote a note, and gave it not to Lindqvist but to me, and this one I read myself. It said, in a hand that was quite small and quite neat and slanted forward like somebody walking into a wind: Take her to breakfast. He has been up since five.

Lindqvist took me. The breakfast room was down a corridor and round two corners in the Queen’s apartments, a long pale room with a stove in the corner and windows on the inner courtyard, and the King was at the end of the table with Svenska Dagbladet open in front of him and a dictionary at his elbow, and a cup of tea, and a pencil.

He stood when I came in. He was taller than he had looked on television, and older close to, and he had very pale blue eyes in a long brown face and a way of looking at you as if you were the one document on the desk that morning that he had been waiting to read. He did not hold out his hand until I had held out mine. Then he took it, and bowed very slightly over it, and said in Swedish, “Prime Minister. Good morning. Thank you for coming to see my wife.”

I answered in English, because I thought it would be polite. He answered in Swedish, because, I understood afterwards, he thought that it would be. We went on like that for some time, each of us being polite in the other’s language, and it was Lindqvist who stopped it, by saying in Swedish that the Prime Minister’s coffee was getting cold.

There were two other men at the table, who got up when I came in and sat down when the King did. One was Sir Edmund Stanier, his Private Secretary, a pink, quiet, beautifully barbered man of about sixty with The Times folded to the crossword. The other was his equerry, Major Thomas Fenwick, who was younger and larger and had the air of a man who has been asked to guard something he has not been told about. Neither of them had any standing in Sweden whatever. Sir Edmund told me so, as I sat down, with every appearance of pleasure.

“We have no standing here, Prime Minister,” he said. “None at all. We may not direct the Queen’s programme, or see her papers, or ask her officers for anything that her officers do not wish to give. It is the most restful week of the year.” He filled in a clue. “I recommend it.”

The King had been sent a note too. He showed it to me. It said, in the same forward-leaning hand, Do not fuss.

“I have not fussed,” he said, in Swedish. “I have been reading the newspaper.”

He had. He reads Svenska Dagbladet every morning when he is in Sweden, Sir Edmund told me, and has done since 2009, all of it, from the leader to the shipping, with the dictionary, and pencils every word that he does not know in the margin, and looks it up, and does not look it up a second time. The dictionary was a big Norstedts, Swedish and English, and very worn. Major Fenwick carries it. I asked whether that was in the Major’s commission. The Major said that it was not in the commission but that it was in practice, and that it weighed a little under two kilos, and that he had carried worse.

“The Queen tells me you have come to discuss the Session,” said the King.

“I have come to discuss how a Queen who can’t speak can open it, sir.”

“Yes.” He folded the newspaper. “I spoke to her last night, you know. On the telephone.”

He told me about it, in Swedish, carefully, and I understood that he wanted me to understand it, so I will put it down as he said it. Every evening at nine o’clock London time, wherever they are, he telephones her. He reads her the previous day’s debates in the House of Commons, from the official report, translating into Swedish as he goes, and she corrects him. He has done it for eighteen years. It began, he said, as a way to learn the language, and became a way to hear her voice, and is now, he said, simply what nine o’clock is.

“Last night it was ten o’clock here,” he said, “and nine in London, and we were in the same palace, at opposite ends of it. I rang her from my study on the house telephone. Pearce thinks this ridiculous. I read her an hour of the Commons on the fisheries bill. She corrected me twice.” He put the pencil down exactly parallel to the dictionary. “The third time she tried to correct me she couldn’t. I heard her try. And then I heard her put the telephone down, and a few minutes later Ebba rang to say that she had lost her voice. So I am afraid I may have done it, Prime Minister. Fisheries are very hard on the throat.”

“It was the cold,” said Lindqvist. “Not the fish.”

“You’re very kind, Ebba.”

“I’m not kind. I’m accurate.”

He smiled at that. Then he looked at me, and said, quite simply, as if it were the most ordinary suggestion in the world, “I could read it for her, of course. On Thursday. The formula. I have read to her every night for eighteen years. She would only have to correct me afterwards.”

I opened my mouth. I am a Social Democrat and not a monarchist, and I had not yet been briefed on this point, and I want to be honest about what I was about to say, which was “Yes, sir, thank God.”

It was Strand who answered. He had come in behind us with the Ceremonial under his arm, and he stood at the end of the table and looked at the King with an expression that I have since seen on the faces of surgeons telling families what they did not want to hear.

“Your Majesty,” he said, and then, because he could not help it, “His Majesty will forgive me. His Majesty attends the Session as the Queen’s Consort. The Consort Act gives His Majesty a style and a precedence in Sweden and nothing else. No office. The Queen’s Consort may perform no act of the Swedish Crown, and on Thursday the Queen does not even sit as the Swedish Crown, but as President of the Union, and the Queen’s Consort has no place in the Union at all. If His Majesty read the formula, the Union would be opened by the King of fourteen other realms, who has been invited into the Hall on the express understanding that he imports nothing. It would be,” and here he searched for the word for a long moment and found the worst one he had, “importing.”

There was a short silence in the breakfast room. Major Fenwick looked at the dictionary as if it might help. Sir Edmund filled in another clue.

“Quite right,” said the King. “I quite understand. Forgive me, Admiral. I spoke as a husband, and I’m not one, on Thursday. I’m a guest of the Presidency.” He looked at Strand with great kindness. “End of the second row, I’m told.”

“Beside the Speaker of the Riksdag, Your Majesty.”

“I shall look forward to it.”

He went back to his newspaper. Strand went away, carrying the Ceremonial like a wounded man carrying his own arm, and I drank my coffee, which was cold, and ate a piece of bread with cheese on it, which Lindqvist had put in front of me without asking, and was ashamed of myself for having wanted to say yes.

At the door, as Lindqvist and I left, the King looked up from the newspaper and said, to nobody in particular and in English, “Ebba, would the library be open this morning? There’s something I should like to look at.”

“The library is always open to Your Majesty,” said Lindqvist.

“So it is. Thank you.”

I thought he wanted a novel. I was wrong about that, as I was wrong about most things that week.

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At ten o’clock Tove told the press that the Queen had a summer cold and was resting her voice on medical advice, and that the Joint Session would take place on Thursday as planned. It was a good statement. It said nothing that was untrue, and it said nothing.

At five past ten my mother telephoned. She had heard it on the radio. She wished me to tell the Queen to take honey and ginger in hot water, not too hot, and not to talk, and to wrap her throat in a wool sock at night, a used one, because a used sock was better, everybody knew that.

“I can’t tell the Queen to wrap her throat in a used sock, Mamma.”

“Then tell the Marshal,” said my mother, “and let him tell her.”

I did not tell the Marshal. But at the end of the morning I found that I had written down honey and ginger on a page of my notebook, under the Treaty’s twelfth article, and I gave the page to Lindqvist on my way out, and she read it in her level voice, and said that she would see that it was done, and that the sock was out of the question.