I killed it. For the time being, I’d killed it – let’s say I shut the sty. I could still hear it rumbling away crossly . . . then the glasses were singing again, very, very quietly, like the hum of a mosquito.

‘Poppa,’ said the Princess, ‘do you think it would be all right to wear the blue suit I brought with me?’

I was back with her; we were sitting on the same planet again, rolling through the universe together. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do.’

‘Is it suitable?’

‘Of course. It’s quiet and discreet, should be perfect.’

‘You shouldn’t smoke so much,’ she intoned with her deep voice, ‘or you’ll be sick again, and who has to put up with the consequences? Me. Put your pipe away.’

As her son, I put the pipe away, because that’s what my mother wanted. Quietly I laid my hand in hers.

5

The big house in Läggesta had been built by masons – who else. Craftsmen; quiet, thoughtful men, who look three times before they do anything. It’s the same the world over. When it was finished, they plastered the walls, and some of the rooms were painted, many more were papered, all differently, and according to their instructions. Then they had gone away phlegmatically. The house was finished; it didn’t matter what happened in it now. That wasn’t their affair, they were only the builders. The courtroom where people are tortured was, to begin with, a rectangle of brick walls, smooth and whitewashed. A painter had stood on his ladder and whistled cheerfully as he painted a grey stripe right round the room, as he had been told to; as far as he was concerned, it was a piece of craftsmanship . . . and now, all at once, it was a courtroom. People build theatres for future scenes with complete detachment; they erect a stage and wings, they construct the whole theatre, and then others play their sad comedies there.

The child lay in bed, thinking.

Thinking . . . A long time ago, when she still had a father, she always used to play at ‘thinking’ with him. Her father had laughed so; he had a marvellous laugh.

‘What are you doing?’ the child would ask.

‘I’m thinking,’ her father would say.

‘I want to think too.’

‘Fine . . . you think too!’ And he would earnestly pace up and down the room, with the child following him in an exact imitation of her father’s posture, with her hands clasped gravely behind her back, and wrinkling her brow the way he did . . .

‘What are you thinking?’ her father would ask.

‘I’m thinking – a lion!’ the child replied. And her father would laugh . . .