Midsummer Eve

I went down by train, because the King had told me that it took five hours and twenty minutes and changed at Alvesta, and I wanted to see what he had seen.

It was Midsummer Eve, and the train out of Stockholm was full of families going home to wherever their families were, with bags of new potatoes and boxes of strawberries and bunches of birch leaves for the maypoles, and children with flowers already in their hair, and a man two seats down with an accordion in a case on the seat beside him that he did not play, to everybody’s relief, until Nässjö. My protection officer sat opposite me and read the football. Everybody in the carriage recognised me. I saw them do it, one after another, the small start and then the long, careful, entirely Swedish look out of the window. Nobody said a word, all the way to Alvesta, and a woman with a very large suitcase asked me to help her lift it down at the change, and I did, and she said thank you, and that was all.

I sent the King a message from the platform at Alvesta, through Lindqvist, because I had no other way of sending him one. It said that he was right and that it was the most Swedish thing that had ever happened to me too.

The answer came back before the Kalmar train had left. Lindqvist had typed it, but I could hear him in it. Then we have both been to Alvesta, which I believe makes us a party. E.

---

You cross to Öland from Kalmar by the bridge, which is six kilometres long and for most of that very low over the water, so that halfway across you seem to be driving on the sea. Then you are on the island, which is long and flat and green and grey, with stone walls running across it in straight lines and old wooden windmills standing up out of the fields like men who have been told to wait, and a wind off the Baltic that the Crown Prince had warned me about and that I had not believed. By the time we reached Borgholm it had begun to rain.

Solliden is a white house in the Italian style, which nobody on Öland has ever forgiven, standing in a garden on the slope above the sound with the ruin of the old castle on the ridge behind it. Its windows look across the water to the mainland, and on Midsummer Eve the garden was full of people, perhaps forty of them, none of whom were there in any capacity whatever. They were the Court at Solliden, on its one day off: the gardeners and their families, and the people who keep the house, and the staff who had come down from Stockholm, and their children, and a few neighbours from Borgholm who had been coming to Midsummer at Solliden since the Queen’s father’s time and who looked at me, when I came in at the gate, exactly as the train had.

The woman who met me at the gate was called Elsa. She keeps the house, with her husband Nils, and she has done so since before the Crown Prince was born, and she took my coat and looked at my bag and said, “You’ve brought something.”

“She said to bring nothing.”

“She always says that,” said Elsa. “What is it?”

It was a jar of herring. It was my brother’s herring, the good herring, in his own pickle, which he makes in October in a bucket in his garage and which my mother says is the only herring in Gothenburg worth the name. Lasse had sent it up to Stockholm on the overnight bus on Thursday, when I told him where I was going instead, with a note that said Show them how it’s done. I could not arrive at a house on Midsummer Eve with nothing in my hands. Nobody from Hisingen could.

Elsa took the jar, and held it up to the light, and nodded slowly, as a jeweller nods, and carried it away into the house.

---

The Queen was on the terrace, in a cardigan and a raincoat and a pair of green rubber boots, with a wreath of flowers in her hair that the Crown Prince told me afterwards had been made by Elsa’s granddaughter and was the worst wreath in the history of Solliden, and that his mother had refused to take it off. She had the blue notebook. She saw me, and came across the wet flagstones, and held out her hand, and then wrote.

You came. Good. Herring is in the kitchen. Do not make a speech.

I said that I would not make a speech.

She wrote again. Elsa says you brought something. I said NOTHING. She looked at me with her son’s eyes. Then she wrote underneath, smaller, Thank you, and went back to the edge of the terrace to watch the maypole.

They were raising it on the lawn below. It lay in the wet grass, dressed all over in birch leaves and flowers, with its two hoops hanging from the crossbar, and Nils was at the foot of it giving orders, and on the ropes were two gardeners and Major Fenwick in a pullover and the Crown Prince in a yellow raincoat that was too short in the arms. The King was sitting at the edge of the lawn on a garden chair under a large black umbrella, which, I am happy to report, was his own, and as I watched, the maypole began to go up, wobbling, and the King leaned forward under his umbrella and called out in Swedish, “Left a bit.”

It went left a bit. It went up. It stood. Everybody on the lawn cheered, and the Crown Prince let go of his rope and threw both arms in the air and was nearly brained by the hoop, and the rain came down harder, and nobody went in.

There was a small wooden dance floor laid on the grass around the foot of the maypole, of the kind that every village in Sweden puts out at Midsummer, and by four o’clock it was wet and slippery and full.

---

I am not going to describe all of Midsummer at Solliden, because most of it was the same as Midsummer everywhere else in Sweden, which was, I think, the point of it. There was a fiddler, a gardener’s brother from Färjestaden, and there were the old ring dances round the pole that everybody knows and nobody admits to knowing, and there was the one in which grown men and women hop round in a circle with their hands at their ears and their knees bent, pretending to be frogs, and singing that the little frogs have no ears and no tails.

I saw a Marshal of the Court do that. Admiral Per-Olof Strand, retired, in a fawn cardigan that I had not known admirals were issued, went round the maypole at Solliden on Midsummer Eve with his hands at his ears and his knees bent, in the rain, with absolute gravity, as if it were in the Ceremonial, and for all I know it is. Ebba Lindqvist went round behind him. So did Elsa’s granddaughter, and Major Fenwick, who made a very large frog, and Pearce, who came out of the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up to do it and went back in again to the herring as soon as it was over. So, I am sorry to say, did I. Sir Edmund Stanier did not. He sat under a tree with The Times, which was wet, and told me afterwards that he had no standing on Öland whatever and that it was the most restful afternoon of his year.

The Crown Prince did the frogs with his hood up and an expression of terrible suffering, because he was fourteen, and he did all of it, every hop and every verse, because he was his mother’s son, and when it was over he came and stood beside me at the edge of the floor and said, “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You laughed. Through your nose.”

“So did you,” I said, and he grinned at me from under his hood, and then stopped grinning, because the fiddler had changed his tune, and the people on the floor had begun to step back off it to the edges, all of them, quietly, as if somebody had told them to, though nobody had.

---

At Midsummer at Solliden she dances once round the maypole, badly, with Frederick, and then leaves the floor. I had read that, I suppose, somewhere, years ago, in a newspaper that had been unable to buy a photograph of it. I had not thought about what it would mean to watch it.

She came down the steps from the terrace in her raincoat and her rubber boots and her terrible wreath, with the notebook in her pocket, and walked across the wet grass to the edge of the floor, and held out her hand to her son. He looked at it. He looked round at all of us, at the forty people standing in the rain round the edge of the boards, and at his father under his umbrella, and at me. Then he pushed his hood back, and took his mother’s hand, and they stepped onto the floor together.

She could not sing. She had been told not to, and so she did not, and the song that goes with the dance has words that everybody in Sweden knows, and she mouthed them, every one, the way the President of Finland had mouthed the formula at the table in the Hall of State, without a sound. And so the Crown Prince sang them for her. He sang them loudly, in a voice that was still deciding what it was going to be, with the American edge on every r, so that she would not be the only one not singing, and we all heard him do it, and nobody joined in, because it was his.

She danced badly. I want to be accurate about this, as Lindqvist would be. She danced really very badly. She was out of time from the first step and never got back into it, and she went the wrong way at the turn and was brought round by her son with one hand, and she trod on his foot at least twice, in rubber boots, and he did not stop singing either time. They went once round the maypole in the rain. It took perhaps a minute. Then she let go of his hand, and patted his arm, and stepped off the floor onto the grass, and walked back to the terrace and sat down, and the Crown Prince stood alone by the maypole for a moment in his short yellow raincoat with his face bright red, and then the fiddler struck up something else and everybody poured back onto the boards around him and he disappeared among them.

Everybody applauded. Nobody had a telephone out. I looked. I do not know whether that is a rule at Solliden or only a habit, and I did not ask. I have no photograph of it, and if I had one I would not give it to you.

---

I sat down beside the King after that, on a second garden chair that Pearce brought out for me, under the edge of his umbrella.

“Will you dance, sir?” I said.

“No,” said the King. He was watching the floor, where his son was being swung round by Elsa’s granddaughter. “Nobody has designated me.”

The Crown Prince came off the floor a few minutes later, soaked, and stood in front of us dripping.

“Mamma could designate you,” he said to his father.

“She could,” said the King. “But then she’d have to watch.”

The Crown Prince considered this, and appeared to find it unanswerable, and went away to the kitchen to find his mother’s herring.

---

We ate in the long room of the house, with the doors open onto the terrace and the rain coming down outside in the light that does not go away at Midsummer, at two tables pushed together, all forty of us. There was herring, five kinds, though not the Union’s five, because these were Elsa’s, and Lasse’s in a dish of its own in the middle with a little card beside it that somebody had written in a forward-leaning hand: Hisingen. There were new potatoes with dill, and sour cream and chives, and eggs, and salmon, and crispbread, and strawberries with cream at the end, and small glasses of aquavit, and before each glass there was a song, as there always is.

The first song is always the same one. It is the one that everybody in Sweden learns before they learn to read, and it begins Helan går, and its second word, which is the word for sing, begins with the sound that no foreigner in the history of the world has ever been able to make.

The King sang it. He sang the whole song in Swedish at the long table at Solliden with his glass in his hand, in his careful, clear, Hanoverian voice, and when he came to the second word he made the sound at the back of his throat, the strange soft rushing sound, and he very nearly made it right.

At the head of the table the Queen took the pencil from her notebook, and wrote on her napkin, and passed it down. It came by way of Lindqvist and Strand and me. I did not unfold it, but it was not folded, and I read it, because I am not as well brought up as he is.

It said: Bättre.

Better.

He read it, and folded it carefully in four, and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket, where the grey book had been, and drank his aquavit.

---

She gave me a page of my own before I left. She tore it out of the notebook at the table, during the strawberries, and gave it to me without a word, and I have it here on the kitchen table on Kungsholmen as I write, beside the napkin with the crown on it, and I am not going to give either of them back.

It said: Thank you for defending me against the Speaker. You are not a monarchist. That is why it worked.

I asked Lindqvist afterwards, on the terrace, whether that was what the Union’s ministers meant when they said that the Queen’s having no vote was the reason the Union worked.

“No,” said Lindqvist. “But it’s the same reason.”

The Crown Prince caught me at the door of the long room, with strawberry on his chin.

“Did you find out?” he said. “If ours is taller than your brother’s?”

“Yes. By about two metres.”

“Tell him it doesn’t count,” said the Crown Prince, “because we had an admiral.” He wiped his chin with the back of his hand, and looked at the floor, and said very quickly, in English, “On Saturday, when she can talk again, I’m going to ask her. The thing. You know.” He looked up. “Don’t tell her.”

I have not told her. I have told you. I have a feeling he will forgive me that as well.

---

I am going to end with what the King said at the gate, because it was the last thing that anybody said to me that week, and because I wrote it down on the train afterwards, before I wrote anything else, on the back of the Union Council’s agenda for the common market in electricity, with the strawberries on the table in front of me.

He walked me to the car himself. There is no protocol at Solliden; it is a private house, and a man may walk a guest to his gate. He held his umbrella over both of us, and it was not quite big enough, and the rain came down on the stone walls on either side of the drive and on the windmill on the ridge, and behind us somebody in the long room had begun another song. Strand came down the drive after us with a paper plate wrapped in a white napkin that had a crown in one corner, and gave it to me at the car, and said, in the third person, that the Prime Minister would want something for the train.

“Sweden has the presidency again in 2032,” I said, while my protection officer put my bag in the boot. “Five years.”

“So it does,” said the King. “I shall be eighty-five.” He considered it. “I shall come and sit at the end of the second row. And she’ll say it herself, and I shall hear every word.”

“You’ll have to come early.”

“I always come early,” said the King. “It’s a form of listening.”

The protection officer opened the car door. I had the strawberries in one hand and my bag in the other and the rain on the back of my neck, and I asked him the thing that I had been wanting to ask since Thursday noon, and had not, because I had been afraid that the answer would be only that he was a man who read things.

“Why did you read them, sir? The Rules. Really. Nobody else did.”

He did not answer at once. He stood with the umbrella over us, looking back up the drive at the white house with its doors open and the lights on in the long room and the singing coming out of it into the rain.

“I came to hear her say it,” said the King. “I always read what she’s going to say before she says it. Every speech, for eighteen years. Not to check it. It isn’t mine to check. I only read what’s published, and the formula has been published since 1951.” He turned the umbrella a little against the wind. “That way, when she says it, I needn’t listen to the words. I know the words. I can just listen to her.”

He held the car door for me, which a King of fourteen realms may do at a private gate on Öland, because there nobody has designated him anything at all.

“And on Wednesday, when she couldn’t say anything,” he said, “I didn’t know what else to do. So I went on reading.”