The Seating Plan

The Hall of State is the room in which Swedish monarchs opened the Riksdag for two centuries, and it was built to make whoever stood in it feel small, and it still works. It is long and very high and white and gold, with galleries running down both sides on columns, and at the far end, raised on steps under a canopy of blue and silver, stands the silver throne, which was made for the first Queen Christina’s coronation in 1650 and which nobody sits in now. In front of it, that morning, on a low dais covered in blue cloth, there was a long table with five chairs behind it, and a small brass bell, and five glasses of water, and nothing else.

Below the dais the chairs ran in rows across the floor. Strand had been there since seven, moving them.

I arrived at half past eight, and found him standing in the middle of the second row with his hands behind his back, looking down at a small white card on a chair at the very end of it, beside the Speaker’s and directly behind my own, as a man might look down at a mine that he has been told is probably not live.

The card said H.M. the Queen’s Consort. It was in the right place. It was exactly where his diagram had put it on Tuesday. Before the morning was out it would be moved six times, and I am going to give the moves in order, as I gave Tove’s statements, because the whole week seems in retrospect to have been made of lists, and because I think this one tells you more about my country than anything I could write about it myself.

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The first move was at a quarter past seven, before I arrived, and was made by Strand himself, who found the card a centimetre out of true on its chair and put it straight. I said that I did not think that counted. Strand said that it was a move, and that he had made it, and that he counted it.

The second was at ten to eight. A producer from SVT, who was setting up the television camera in the north gallery, came down to say that the end of the second row would be in every wide shot, so that whenever the Queen was on the screen the King would be in the corner of it, and the British newspapers would print the corner. Strand moved the King’s card one place in, and the Speaker’s card to the end.

The third was at twenty past eight, and came from the Speaker’s office, by telephone. The Speakers of the five parliaments sit in the Swedish alphabetical order of their countries, said the Speaker’s office: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden. The Speaker of the Riksdag must therefore sit last, and if a guest were placed between him and the Speaker of the Storting, the alphabet would be broken in front of the whole Union. The Speaker’s office did not say, and I did not need to be told, that the Speaker of the Riksdag also wished to be at the end of the row nearest the dais and the aisle, in case he should be required to rise quickly. Strand moved the cards back.

The fourth was at a quarter to nine. The President of Iceland’s office sent word that she would be bringing her interpreter, as she always did, and that the interpreter must sit within whispering distance of her President, and the only chair within whispering distance of the President of Iceland’s place at the table that was not already somebody’s was at the end of the second row. Strand moved the King’s card to the third row, among the ambassadors, which was the only empty chair in the Hall that was not in the gallery.

The fifth was at ten past nine, and was the British Ambassador.

She arrived early, as I gather British ambassadors always do, a tall courteous woman in a dark suit who walked into the Hall of State, looked at the seating plan pinned on an easel by the door, and went quite white. She found Strand and spoke to him for some time in a low voice, and Strand listened with his head bent, and at the end he nodded, very gravely, as one admiral to another.

“She can’t sit next to him,” he told me afterwards. “She is his Ambassador. She represents His Majesty in Sweden. If the Queen’s Consort sits in the third row beside the British Ambassador, then His Majesty is present in the Hall twice, once in person and once by his representative, and the representative is sitting next to the person, which no ambassador can do.” He considered it. “She said that one of them would have to be absent, and that it could not be the King, because he was the one who had come for the Session.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that it could not be her either,” said Strand, “because she had come for the King.”

So the King’s card went back to the end of the second row, beside the Speaker, directly behind my chair. And the President of Iceland’s interpreter, who had arrived by then and been told all of this, was given a small upholstered stool at the side of the dais, a little below the President of Iceland’s elbow and a little behind it. She sat on it, and said that it was the best seat she had been given in twenty years.

The sixth move was at twenty to twelve, and was made by the King. But I am coming to that.

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The President of Finland arrived at a quarter past eight, three and three-quarter hours early, and was delighted by everything.

Elina Rautio is a tall fair woman of about sixty with very short grey hair and a laugh that carries the length of the Hall of State, which few laughs do. She had been a judge of the Finnish Supreme Court before she was President, and she has the judge’s habit of asking a question to which she already knows the answer, and then being pleased when she is told it.

“Your Queen,” she said to me in Swedish, the beautiful clean Swedish of the Finnish coast, “says that being early is a form of listening. So this year I have come early to listen to her not speak.”

She shook Strand’s hand, and the protocol officers’ hands, and the bandmaster’s hand, and mine twice. She walked the length of the Hall to the dais and looked up at the silver throne under its canopy for some time with her hands in the pockets of her jacket.

“May I sit in it?” she said.

“No,” said Strand.

“I was only checking,” said the President of Finland. “In Finland we have a President who has real powers. It is exhausting. I come to Stockholm every year to sit at a table where nobody can do anything, and I go home rested.” She turned round and beamed at the empty rows. “Is it true that the Speaker wants to be regent?”

“For two minutes,” I said.

“Only two?” She laughed, and the laugh went all the way down the Hall and came back. “Ours would want the afternoon.” She came down the steps and took my arm, as if we had known each other for years. “You know that this has happened before? Not this, exactly. The first Session, in 1951, the first year a Finn was President. He had influenza. A very bad one, with a temperature. They had to write something into the Rules for it, in a hurry, the night before.” She shook her head. “And then in the morning he got up and opened it himself, with a temperature of thirty-nine, because we Finns are very difficult to keep in bed. So they never used it.”

“Used what?”

“I don’t remember,” said the President of Finland happily. “I was not born. It was only a story my grandfather told. Is there coffee?”

There was coffee. She went to find it. I stood at the foot of the dais and thought, for perhaps three seconds, that it would be interesting to know what they had written into the Rules in 1951 for a Finnish president with influenza. Then the bandmaster of the Life Guards came up to me with his folder, and I stopped thinking about it, and I did not think about it again until a quarter past twelve, when I had no choice.

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The bandmaster had two questions, and he had been waiting since Wednesday to ask them of somebody who would answer.

The first was about the fanfare. The Union has no anthem, only a fanfare of about twenty seconds, for trumpets and drums, without words, chosen in 1951 so that no language and no crown and no republic should be favoured over another, and it is sounded at the Joint Session immediately after the President has pronounced the formula. The Ceremonial says so. The bandmaster’s question was what he should do if the President did not pronounce the formula, and whether, if he sounded the fanfare anyway, at noon, the Session might be held to have been opened by the fanfare.

I fetched the lawyers. The elder said that he could find nothing in the Treaty to say that a session could be opened by trumpets. The younger said that she could find nothing to say that it could not. The elder said that it had been done at Jericho. The younger said that it was the walls that had opened at Jericho, and that it would be very difficult for the Government to explain if the walls of the Hall of State fell down.

Strand ruled. There would be no fanfare without a formula. The bandmaster wrote it down.

His second question was the one from Tuesday, and he asked it again, apologetically, with the folder open. The band had God Save the King in the folder, he said, arranged for the Life Guards, from the last British state visit. He did not wish to presume. But His Majesty would be in the Hall, and if by any chance, at any point, for any reason, it should be required.

“It will not be required,” said Strand.

“In case,” said the bandmaster.

“Under no circumstances,” said Strand. “None. If His Majesty hears God Save the King in the Hall of State, His Majesty will be importing it. And he will know who brought it.” He looked at the folder. “Put it at the back.”

The bandmaster put it at the back.

There was a third question, which was not the bandmaster’s but Strand’s, and which was about the dinner that evening. At the Union dinner the Prime Minister of the presidency country proposes the toast to the Presidency, which this year was me, and the President replies to it, which this year was the Queen. Strand’s question was whether a toast could be proposed to which no reply could be given. If it could not, then I should not propose it. If I did not propose it, the dinner would have no toast to the Presidency for the first time in seventy-six years.

“What do you suggest?” I said.

“I suggest,” said Strand, “that the Prime Minister does not propose it, and that she does not mind when the Finns propose it anyway, because they will.”

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The Speaker arrived at half past nine in morning dress.

He had his speech in his breast pocket, where a handkerchief should have been, folded lengthways, and the top of it stuck out by about four centimetres, white and very visible against the black. He came down the Hall shaking hands with everybody he passed, and when he reached me he said that he hoped the Prime Minister had slept, and that the Government’s decision was, he believed, still on her table.

“It’s still on my table,” I said.

“Then the Government has not refused it.”

“The Government hasn’t done anything with it at all.”

“That,” said the Speaker, “is a decision of a kind.” He took his seat at the end of the second row, to see what it felt like, and adjusted the speech in his pocket, and in sitting down nudged the card beside him with his elbow, so that the King’s card was once more a centimetre out of true. Strand saw it from the other end of the Hall. I watched him decide that he would not count it.

The President of Iceland arrived at ten. Sigrún Hallgrímsdóttir is small and dark and quick, and was a marine biologist before she was President, and speaks Swedish and Danish and Norwegian and English with equal precision and no apparent effort, and she brought with her the interpreter, who was a pleasant woman of about fifty with a briefcase and a cardigan.

“You don’t need an interpreter,” I said, when we were introduced, because I am a Gothenburger and say these things.

“No,” agreed the President of Iceland. “But Icelandic is a language of the Union, under the Treaty. If I do not bring her, one year they will forget that it is. So I bring her.” She looked at the stool by the dais with interest. “Is that for her?”

“It’s the best seat in the Hall,” said the interpreter, with deep contentment, and went and sat on it, and opened her briefcase, and took out a novel. She had, as it turned out, nothing to interpret all day, because nobody said anything that was not already in Swedish or in silence. She told me at the dinner that it was the most restful day of her professional life.

At eleven the Kings of Norway and Denmark arrived, together, as they always do, and went straight to the Queen’s apartments. I saw them later, across the anteroom, standing with the Queen by a window, two tall men in morning dress and the Queen between them with her blue notebook open, writing, and both of them bending to read it, and then both of them laughing. I could not hear what they said. I would not tell you if I had. Those two men are her friends, and friendship is a private thing, even in the Hall of State, and especially there.

At ten o’clock, while all this was going on, Tove went out to the press in the Slottsbacken and told them that the Joint Session would open on time.

Nobody believed her. Tove did not believe her. She told me so herself, on her way back in, lighting a cigarette on the palace steps, which is not allowed, and which the guard at the door watched her do with an expression of the purest envy.

“Will it?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Then I’ve told them the truth,” said Tove. “It’s going to open on time, or it isn’t, and either way I said it would.” She blew smoke at the old town. “That’s the job.”

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The Queen came into the Hall at a quarter to twelve, by the side door, alone except for Lindqvist, to look at it.

She was in dark blue, with the star of the Seraphim, and she had the blue notebook in her hand with the pencil clipped to it. She walked the whole length of the Hall without a word, as she had to, and everybody in it stopped what they were doing and stood, and she nodded to us, and went up the steps of the dais, and stood behind the President’s chair in the middle of the table with her hand on its back, looking at the rows of chairs below, and at the galleries, and at the silver throne behind her, empty under its canopy.

Then she wrote something in the notebook, and showed it to Lindqvist, and Lindqvist read it, and for the only time that week she did not read it aloud.

“It’s private,” she said to me, when I asked, which I should not have.

The King came in at twenty to twelve, by the same side door, with Sir Edmund and Major Fenwick a pace behind him. He was in morning dress too, with the same blue sash and the same star that the Queen had given him on their wedding day, and he looked very tall and very thin and very old in it, and quite cheerful. He came down the side of the Hall to the end of the second row, and stood beside his chair, and looked at the card on it.

It was still a centimetre out of true, where the Speaker’s elbow had left it.

He bent, and with one finger, without any fuss, he moved it the centimetre back. That was the sixth move. The card ended the morning precisely where Strand had drawn it on Tuesday afternoon with a pencil and a whale, five moves and a centimetre later.

“Good morning, Prime Minister,” said the King, in Swedish, and sat down behind me.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning, Speaker.”

“Your Majesty,” said the Speaker, with the speech in his pocket, and they sat side by side at the end of the second row, the King of fourteen realms and the Speaker of the Riksdag, and looked straight ahead, like two men on a bench at a railway station waiting for different trains.

I turned round once, a minute or so later, to say something to Tove in the row behind, and I saw that the King had taken out of the inside pocket of his morning coat a small book, bound in grey paper, very old, about the size of a hand, with ragged edges to its pages where they had been cut with a knife. He had it open on his knee and was reading it, and he had a pencil.

I did not ask what it was. It was five to twelve, and the doors at the far end of the Hall had opened, and the heads of state were coming in.