School portraits / One relocation spring, from offer letter to first day
One Right, Two Children
A relocation package with a single Guaranteed Placement Right, a set of twins, and a decision no parent should be asked to make.
The relocation package from Hugo Lindqvist’s firm was generous in the way of Swedish banks, which is to say it was itemised. Flights, shipping, a serviced flat in River Valley for three months, and, on its own line, one Guaranteed Placement Right at Tanglin Trust School. Hugo read that line in Stockholm and felt something go cold that was not the weather. The right covered one child for seven years, and they had made two children at once.
Elsa and Oskar were six. Hugo’s wife, Ingrid, read the school’s terms on the flight to Singapore while the twins watched the same film on two screens with a one-second delay, which is how they had always done everything. The right could not be traded or sold back. It lapsed at expiry. A sibling needed a separate right for the same priority. “So we need two,” said Ingrid. Hugo said the firm had offered one, and that the firm, when he had asked about a second, had used the phrase “exceptional and non-standard” in a way that meant no.
There was a second route, and it was the normal one. Tanglin reviews applications every year, with the Head of School and Head of Admissions deciding who gets an offer, who goes into the pool for that year and who is unsuccessful. It had stopped running a chronological waiting list, and it had stopped offering sibling priority. Ingrid read that last part aloud twice. So one twin would walk in on a right that cost more than their car, and the other would take their chances with every other six-year-old in Singapore, and it would make no difference to the second twin that the first was already in the building.
Which twin. Hugo and Ingrid did not say this out loud for a week. They said things like “well, Oskar’s reading is further on” and “Elsa is better in a new room,” and the twins, who heard everything with a one-second delay, began to behave with suspicious virtue. Oskar tidied. Elsa ate a vegetable. In the serviced flat, in the heat, the Lindqvists realised they were being auditioned by their own children for a part they had not announced.
Ingrid ended it. She wrote the names on two pieces of paper, folded them, and made Hugo pick one out of the Swedish Post bag they had brought the documents in. He picked Elsa. He has never told Elsa. He has never told Oskar either, which is harder, because Oskar is the one who got in anyway.
Both applications went in with two years of reports, as the school asks. Elsa, on the right, had to meet the normal admissions criteria like everybody else, and did. Oskar went through the review in the ordinary way and, some weeks later, with no help from anybody’s employer, got an offer too. Ingrid cried in the serviced flat. Hugo rang the firm to ask whether the right could now be returned, and was reminded, politely, that it could not.
They started together in August on Portsdown Road, in the same uniform, on the same day. Elsa has since learned that she is the one with the paperwork, and refers to herself at dinner, when the occasion demands it, as “the expensive one.” Oskar, who took the ordinary route, has not yet worked out what that makes him. Hugo is in no hurry to tell him.