veritable love letters (with an unnecessarily large number of stamps on them); he called (without getting further than some poor royal secretary, of course); he sent presents in the form of Swedish silversmith products, which were the king’s favourite things (and in this way he supported the not entirely honest father of five who had the task of registering all incoming royal gifts). Beyond this, he went to tennis matches and nearly all of the functions one could imagine the king might attend. This meant many expensive trips and admission tickets, yet Ingmar never came very close to meeting his king.
Nor were the family finances fortified when Henrietta, as a result of all her worrying, started doing what almost everyone else did at the time – that is, smoking one or more packets of John Silvers per day.
Ingmar’s boss at the accounting department of the post office was very tired of all the talk about the damn monarch and his merits. So whenever junior clerk Qvist asked for time off, he granted it even before Ingmar had managed to finish formulating his request.
‘Um, boss, do you think it might be possible for me to have two weeks off work, right away? I’m going to—’
‘Granted.’
People had started calling Ingmar by his initials instead of his name. He was ‘IQ’ among his superiors and colleagues.
‘I wish you good luck in whatever kind of idiocy you’re planning to get up to this time, IQ,’ said the head clerk.
Ingmar didn’t care that he was being made fun of. Unlike the other workers at postal headquarters in Södertälje, his life had meaning and purpose.
It took another three considerable undertakings on Ingmar’s part before absolutely everything went topsy-turvy.
First he made his way to Drottningholm Palace, stood up straight in his postal uniform, and rang the bell.
‘Good day. My name is Ingmar Qvist. I am from the Royal Mail Service, and it so happens that I need to see His Majesty himself. Could you be so kind as to notify him? I will wait here,’ said Ingmar to the guard at the gate.
‘Do you have a screw loose or something?’ the guard said in return.
A fruitless dialogue ensued, and in the end Ingmar was asked to leave immediately; otherwise the guard would make sure that Mr Postal Clerk was packaged up and delivered right back to the post office whence he came.
Ingmar was offended and in his haste happened to mention the size he would estimate the guard’s genitalia to be, whereupon he had to run away with the guard on his tail.
He got away, partly because he was a bit faster than the guard, but most of all because the latter had orders never to leave the gate and so had to turn back.
After that, Ingmar spent two whole days sneaking around outside the ten-foot fence, out of sight of the oaf at the gate, who refused to understand what was best for the king, before he gave up and went back to the hotel that served as his base for the entire operation.
‘Should I prepare your bill?’ asked the receptionist, who had long since suspected that this particular guest was not planning to do the right thing and pay.
‘Yes, please,’ said Ingmar, and he went to his room, packed his suitcase, and checked out via the window.
The second considerable undertaking before everything went topsy-turvy began when Ingmar read a news item in Dagens Nyheter while hiding from work by sitting on the toilet. The news item said that the king was in Tullgarn for a few days of relaxing moose hunting. Ingmar rhetorically asked himself where there were moose if not out in God’s green nature, and who had access to God’s green nature if not . . . everyone! From kings to simple clerks at the Royal Mail Service.
Ingmar flushed the toilet for the sake of appearances and went to ask for another leave of absence. The head clerk granted his request with the frank comment that he hadn’t even noticed that Mr Qvist was already back from the last one.
It had been a long time since Ingmar had been entrusted to rent a car in Södertälje, so first he had to take the bus all the way to Nyköping, where his honest looks were enough to get him a decent second-hand Fiat 518. He subsequently departed for Tullgarn at the speed allowed by the power of forty-eight horses.
But he didn’t get more than halfway there before he met a black 1939 Cadillac V8 coming from the other direction. The king, of course. Finished hunting. About to slip out of Ingmar’s hands yet again.
Ingmar turned his borrowed Fiat round in the blink of an eye, was helped along by several downhill stretches in a row, and caught up with the hundred-horsepower-stronger royal car. The next step would be to try to pass the car and maybe pretend to break down in the middle of the road.
But the anxious royal chauffeur speeded up so he wouldn’t have to endure the wrath he expected the king to exhibit should they be passed by a Fiat. Unfortunately, he was looking at the rear-view mirror more than he was looking ahead, and at a curve in the road, the chauffeur, along with Cadillac, king, and companions, kept going straight, down into a waterlogged ditch.
Neither Gustaf V nor anyone else was harmed, but Ingmar had no way of knowing this from behind his steering wheel. His first thought was to jump out and help, and also shake the king’s hand. But his second thought was: what if he had killed the old man? And his third thought: thirty years of hard labour – that might be too high a price for a handshake. Especially if the hand in question belonged to a corpse. Ingmar didn’t think he would be very popular in the country, either. Murderers of kings seldom were.
So he turned round.
He left the hire car outside the Communists’ meeting hall in Södertälje, in the hope that his father-in-law would get the blame. From there he walked all the way home to Henrietta and told her that he might have just killed the king he loved so dearly.
Henrietta consoled him by saying that everything was probably fine down there at the king’s curve, and in any case it would be a good thing for the family finances if she were wrong.
The next day, the press reported that King Gustaf V had ended up in the ditch after his car had been driven at high speeds, but that he was unharmed. Henrietta had mixed feelings upon hearing this, but she thought that perhaps her husband had learned an important lesson. And so she asked, full of hope, if Ingmar was done chasing the king.
He was not.
The third considerable undertaking before everything went topsy-turvy involved a journey to the French Riviera for Ingmar; he was going to Nice, where Gustaf V, age eighty-eight, always spent the late autumn to get relief from his chronic bronchitis. In a rare interview, the king had said that when he wasn’t taking his daily constitutional at a leisurely pace along the Promenade des Anglais, he spent the days sitting on the terrace of his state apartment at the Hôtel d’Angleterre.
This was enough information for Ingmar. He would travel there, run across the king while he was on his walk and introduce himself.
It was impossible to know what would happen next. Perhaps the two men would stand there for a while and have a chat, and if they hit it off perhaps Ingmar could buy the king a drink at the hotel that evening. And why not a game of tennis the next day?
‘Nothing can go wrong this time,’ Ingmar said to Henrietta.
‘That’s nice,’ said his wife. ‘Have you seen my cigarettes?’
Ingmar hitchhiked his way through Europe. It took a whole week, but once he was in Nice it took only two hours of sitting on a bench on the Promenade des Anglais before he caught sight of the tall, stately gentleman with the silver cane and the monocle. God, he was so grand! He was approaching slowly. And he was alone.
What happened next was something Henrietta could describe in great detail many years later, because Ingmar would dwell on it for the rest of her life.
Ingmar stood up from his bench, walked up to His Majesty, introduced himself as the loyal subject from the Royal Mail Service that he was, broached the possibility of a drink together and maybe a game of tennis – and