Bottoms up? We were in Sweden, he should be saying ‘Skål!’ Skål is the same as ‘shawl’. Seeing that the Princess was a poor foreigner who didn’t understand us Swedes properly, I said, ‘Shawl to you!’ and all three of us understood.

The fat man ordered himself another schnaps. He stared dreamily into his glass. ‘In Göteborg lives a guy with a big cellar – he’s got everything there, whisky, brandy and cognac, red and white wine and champagne. But, instead of drinking it, he’s saving it all! I think that’s rilly turrific!’ With that, he knocked his own glass back.

By now the days were passing, and we had listened to endless conversations, and heard innumerable people saying what Swedes always say, at everry possible juncture, ‘Yasso . . .’ and ‘Nedo’, and all the other things people say when they have nothing to say. Our fat man had guided us to many beautiful places, through wonderful rich forests. ‘Here are some fine-looking trees!’ he would say. The Princess was beginning to jib a little.

‘He’s laughing all the way to the bank,’ she said. ‘My dear lovely Pops, we’re no Rockefellers. Now put your foot down once and for all and tell him what we want!’

What now? Our fat man was walking ahead of us, pensive, but pretty well pleased with the world. He banged the pavement with his stick and was thinking hard; you could tell from his broad back how hard he was thinking. Then he growled because he had thought of something.

‘We’ll go to Mariefred,’ he said. ‘That’s a little place . . . it’s all right! We can go there tomorrow!’

The Princess shot me an ominous look. ‘If we don’t find anything there, Poppa, I’ll stick you in a children’s home, and go off and join my boss in Abbazia. That’ll concentrate your mind!’

But the next day we did see something.

Mariefred is a tiny little place on the shores of Lake Maelar. The landscape was quiet and peaceful, with meadows and trees, fields and forests – but no one would have paid any attention to it, had it not been the site of one of the oldest castles in Sweden: Castle Gripsholm.

It was a radiantly clear day. The red bricks of the castle glowed, its round domes seemed to erupt into the blue sky. But the building was solid, weighty, seigneurial. Bengtsson waved the guide away, he would show us round himself. We went into the castle.

There were many fine paintings inside. They did nothing for me. I can’t see. There are visual types and aural types; I can only hear. A variation of an eighth of a tone in a conversation will still be with me four years later, but a painting is just something colourful. I don’t know anything about the architectural style of this castle – I only know that if I were to build one for myself, I would build it like that.