and gave it to Emily as a supplement to her language booklet.
After they had left Fritzes and gone several blocks along the canal, Craig suddenly stopped. ‘Why are we going all the way back to the hotel to join that mob for dinner? Why don’t we eat out alone, together? I know exactly the place. It’ll charm you.’
‘How can we after walking out on them this afternoon? The Nobel committee might consider it rude-’
‘But nothing formal’s been planned. There’s nothing special on the programme.’
‘And my uncle-’
‘I’ll phone him. I’ll tell him I’m taking you to dinner, and I’ll have you back safe and sound in a few hours. How’s that?’
‘I’m not sure-’
‘I am. Let me ring him.’
‘All right.’
They walked another block, until they found an outdoor public telephone booth. Emily gave Craig two ten-ore pieces, and he closed himself inside the booth while she waited beyond the glass pane, smoking.
Craig got the operator, and she put him through to the Grand Hotel, and the Grand Hotel connected him with Professor Stratman’s suite.
Craig identified himself, and Stratman asked immediately, ‘How is Emily?’
‘Never better. I’m looking at her right now through a window of the booth. She was worried that you might be concerned, so I offered to ring.’
‘You are thoughtful. So-you gave us the slip today.’
‘I’d seen it all, and Emily wanted to shop. She just bought a copy of
‘For me, you do not have to make up stories, my laureate friend.’ Stratman’s chuckle came over the wire. ‘I see I would have lost my bet. Your case was not hopeless. She accepted your apology.’
‘Yes, Professor.’
‘And now you are-how do they say?-on the wagon.’
‘Definitely.’
‘I wish you luck.’
‘I’ll need it. I was really calling because I want to take Emily to dinner, and she wondered-’
‘You tell her Uncle Max is all right. The Count is coming over to take me, with the Farellis and Garretts-and also your sister-in-law-to eat in the Winter Garden. You go and have your good time.’
‘How was my sister-in-law?’
‘Like the Queen of Hearts,’ said Stratman.
It was not until Craig had hung up, and was leaving the booth, that he understood Stratman’s allusion. Stratman had meant Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts, who had been furious, and who had ordered that Alice ’s head be cut off.
They had gone down the steep stone staircase, through the winding narrow passageway, until they emerged into the long cellar grotto, hewn out of rock. This was the Old Town ’s most renowned and beloved ancient restaurant, known to Swedish bohemians as Den Gyldene Freden and to visitors as The Golden Peace.
Now they sat at a tiny table against the rock, across from each other, while an attractive waitress in a white- and-coral apron took their order for dry martinis. After the waitress left, Emily looked about, filled with wonder. At this early evening hour, the quaint restaurant was only half filled with customers, informally dressed, but already gay and noisy. The room quietened somewhat when a respectable-looking troubadour, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and dark suit, appeared at the cellar entrance and began to play the lute and sing the old songs of Carl Mikael Bellman.
‘Well,’ said Craig, ‘what do you think?’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Emily. ‘I’m glad you brought me here. Is it as old as it looks?’
‘Older. Remember when we were driving through what used to be the King’s hunting-grounds today, and Mr. Manker pointed out the place where Carl Mikael Bellman lived? Well, Bellman made Den Gyldene Freden. He was its leading customer. He came here every night and wrote his lyrics, and sang them, and got drunk and wild. They say he used to dance on the tables. That was back in the 1770’s, so it’s old enough. In modern times, Anders Zorn, the painter, bought the restaurant and restored it as a sort of artists’ hangout, which it is now. Notice how wide these chairs are? Zorn’s doing. He was fat, and used to get caught in the old chairs, so he had these made to his specifications and installed. Eventually, Zorn turned the restaurant over to the Swedish Academy, and I think they still get part or all of the profits. The first time I came here, after the lute player and orchestra were through, some customer pulled his guitar out from under the table and began to strum, and everyone in the place joined in a community sing.’
The waitress set the martinis before them, and Craig said, ‘
‘Did your wife come here with you?’ Emily asked.
‘Oh, yes. She loved it, naturally. But one visit was enough. She wasn’t an on-the-town type. Are you?’
‘Heavens, no.’
‘I didn’t think so. I’m not, either. But Harriet liked to collect quaint restaurants. She liked to go once, and that was it. When she was a student at Columbia, she lived in Greenwich Village a while. I don’t believe she ever got over it. Whenever we went into a city, she would try to find its Greenwich Village.’
‘How did she like living in a small town?’
‘Very much. But had she lived, I don’t think we would have stayed there. She was a homebody, but always at civil war with her arty side. She was satisfied to stay inside, if she knew Greenwich Village was available somewhere outside.’
‘And you?’ asked Emily.
‘I’m not Greenwich Village at all. I was headed in that direction once- Taos, I thought, or Monterey -but I was saved in the nick of time. In those days, I wanted to write, not talk about it. No, I’m not Bohemia. I’m grass roots. What are you, Emily?’
She revolved her drink slowly in her hand. ‘I’m wherever I am. I merge with the landscape. What is outside doesn’t matter, because I live inside myself.’
‘Are you satisfied?’
‘Who is ever satisfied? I’m content. I manage.’
‘That’s a big thing,’ said Craig. ‘That’s a kind of peace.’
‘So is dying, I suppose. Don’t envy me. I’m a vegetable. Can you envy a vegetable?’
He smiled. ‘Yes, I can.’ Suddenly, he could not allow last night’s lie about his way of life remain a deceit. ‘You see, I don’t even have a vegetable’s peace. At least, not recently. Last night, before the banquet, you wanted to know how I lived, and I wanted to impress you. I gave you the country squire routine. Not true, I’m afraid.’
‘What is true, Andrew?’
‘Well, no laments, no dirges, on a night like this, in a happy place with a pretty girl. But-’
He hesitated and then was silent.
‘I want to know,’ she said.
‘For three years, I haven’t worked and haven’t lived. Until this trip, I haven’t been fifty miles out of Miller’s Dam. I haven’t gone back to recreations, haven’t had a date, haven’t written so much as a letter.’ As he spoke, he automatically expurgated the drinking and the suicidal guilts. ‘I wake up and don’t know the day or the weather or if there is a bird or flower left alive. I go through each day eating Leah’s cooking, and holding books I don’t read, and playing cards with Lucius Mack, and falling asleep. At least, a vegetable grows. I’m a fossil.’
‘Is it all your wife?’
‘It used to be. I’m not so sure of that any more. I haven’t thought of her too much in the last year. But the inertia remains. Well, at least until today. I felt alive, today, and growing again. I think I mean that as a compliment to you.’
Emily was shy, but not coy, and she said simply, ‘Thank you, Andrew.’
‘I know I chattered on a good deal about her and us and our honeymoon today. But it wasn’t longing that inspired my monologue. It was being alive, in the streets, with a woman again, someone before whom I wanted to
