by Lars Mytting
“But where do you get materials from?” Agnes had asked him.
“It comes to the island all by itself,” he said. Haaf Gruney was situated in a location where the ocean currents carried driftwood from both Russia and the Norwegian coast, and occasionally hardwood from America.
Agnes explained how Einar never lost faith that Isabelle’s child would contact him, and they had an understanding that if anyone telephoned for him, she would go to Unst and paint a white X on the boathouse facing Haaf Gruney. Then he would take the boat across immediately.
A white X. I remembered the flaking white paint on the boathouse entrance. “Did many people call?” I said.
“No. In twenty years, not a single person telephoned for Einar Hirifjell. His sorrow was great enough to drag us both into the depths, and my only hope was that an answer would come soon. Even if it confirmed that the girl was also dead. But who was I to build my hope on the death of a child?”
Occasionally she glimpsed a sign of affection in Einar. She had often dreamed of fixing up the run-down hair salon, and one day he turned up out of the blue asking if she could close the shop for a few days. He brought in materials, covered the windows with brown paper and locked the door. Agnes heard him working long into the night. The next morning he arrived with chairs and a counter he had already made, and she saw the hint of a smile.
On the Sunday afternoon his hammer fell silent, and he led her down to a salon worthy of an exclusive shopping district in Paris. The interior was in a distinct and straightforward art-deco style, simply executed but filled with beautiful ornaments, and a row of handsome lamps to give the hairdressers good light to work by.
“This is me,” he said. “The real me.”
The most beautiful piece was a chest with thirty small drawers for scissors and other equipment. The face of each drawer was inlaid with white mother of pearl, and when they were all closed they formed the outline of a tulip, identical to that on the lamps.
“It is all driftwood,” Einar said. “Like you and me.”
It was the first time he had evidenced any feelings for her. Agnes embraced him, but it felt like putting her arms around a Vigeland statue. After dinner he had stayed the night, but the next day he had gone back to Haaf Gruney.
The furnishings in the salon became an attraction. She could not help losing herself to a man who created something so beautiful. For this reason she could never bring herself to sell the salon, and she got used to being a switchboard for a conversation that never happened. Each year Agnes renewed his entry in the telephone directory, each year she renewed the hurt of her own life being wasted along with his.
And so the years passed. Until 1967, when the telephone rang and Agnes Brown set down her scissors with a foreboding that this call would be different.
*
The line had crackled with an entirely different background noise to the usual local calls. A woman speaking terrible English in a formal, loud voice stumbled through every word. She appeared to be reading from a piece of paper, until she mentioned a name: “Einar Hirifjell.” Agnes could hear from her dialect that she was from Gudbrandsdalen. “Speak Norwegian, for God’s sake. I’m Norwegian as well,” she said, interrupting the staccato reading.
“Tell Einar that Nicole Daireaux is here. In Norway. Back home at Hirifjell.”
The person gave her telephone number and hung up, and Agnes was left holding the receiver without managing another word. Nicole Daireaux, Isabelle’s mother, had she not been hanged in 1944?
For the first time in her life, Agnes failed to complete a haircut. She abandoned the customer in the chair and took a taxi to Unst.
Einar had hidden a tin of oil paint and a brush under a rock, and she painted the white cross on the doors of the boathouse. She stood for an hour in the gusting wind and rain and stared out at the barren island. Four times a day, to coincide with the bus schedule, Einar would take a break from his cabinetmaking, climb a small hill and look across to the boathouse, and on that day she saw him appear long before the bus was due. She had waved frantically, and before long Einar had arrived in the boat, having rowed hard. He stood there gaping when she told him where the call had come from.
“Hirifjell?” he said at length. “Nicole?”
He crossed the road and hurried down to the telephone box by the ferry dock, and when he emerged he was confused and distant. “I have to go to Norway,” he mumbled.
Later she saw him in Lerwick, making for the Bergen ferry in the old grey car he owned. He simply disappeared. Not a word of thanks, not a telephone call explaining what had happened in Norway.
“I hated Einar at that moment,” Agnes said, “hated him for not including me in something I had been involved with for twenty years.”
She cancelled his listing in the directory and told herself he could go to hell. She saw nothing of him for four years, but heard from others that he came to Haaf Gruney now and then, and that he had once had a visitor there.
And then one evening in December 1971 she caught sight of him in Lerwick. He looked worse than ever. He had apparently begun to drink, and was staggering out of a seaman’s café near the harbour, looking like a cormorant after an oil spill. Agnes knew that a man could go to ground in Lerwick in less than a month, and Einar appeared to be heading on a steady course in that direction. The gale whipped his hat into the sea as he roamed streets soaked by Atlantic breakers and torrential rain. In the end only Captain Flint’s would let him in. While everyone else stayed at home in the days over Christmas, Einar lurched about on Lerwick’s slick flagstones.
Once more Agnes gave him shelter. By then he was so filthy that it was difficult to see what was skin and what was clothing. Whether his afflictions came from sorrow or guilt it was hard to say. In the case of Einar Hirifjell, she could not separate one from the other. It was New Year’s morning before he was capable of speech.
He told her then that Isabelle’s daughter had travelled to Norway, believing that Einar lived at Hirifjell. Having cleared up what Einar called “a major misunderstanding”, they had regularly exchanged letters and she had even visited him. He described those years as the best of his life.
But then Nicole and her husband had died in an accident, and this brought Einar to his wits’ end. It was clear to Agnes that Einar felt a huge sense of guilt over what had happened. But the only thing he wanted to talk about was the fact that her son – that I – was alive.
On January 2, 1972, Einar had rowed across to Haaf Gruney, and this time he was there to stay. He never touched another drop of alcohol, and for the rest of his life he built coffins. He had the materials brought over on the Bergen ferry, and through the seventies Shetlanders were buried in coffins made of Norwegian pine.
A few years later Agnes closed the salon and went to Norway to live with her sister, but her restlessness led her back to Shetland. She would row out to Einar now and again, observing each time how the white cross she had painted in 1967 became ever more weather-worn. She cut his hair, they had dinner, and she would stay overnight on Haaf Gruney before taking the bus home to the flat above her former salon.
When the boat tipped over and Einar died, he was put in a simple spruce coffin he had left for the purpose in the boathouse. He had already chosen a spot in the cemetery in Norwick, where the weather wore down the gravestones after only a few years. On the lid of the coffin he had carved OSCAR RIBAUT, as though desperate to convey the name to someone.
Agnes sent word to Sverre, who came to the Shetland Islands with a gravestone in the boot of his car, but otherwise showed no particular interest, neither in the island nor for Agnes’ story.
Agnes Brown paused. I gazed at this elderly white-haired lady and wished I could do something for her. My thoughts strayed to Hanne. Perhaps her devotion was the same, greater than I was capable of recognising.
Then Agnes described the stranger who had turned up at Einar’s funeral. An elegantly dressed girl of seventeen or eighteen, who came alone and seemed
out of place. The girl pulled Sverre aside, but he shook his head and seemed as silent and as heavy as the gravestone he had brought with him. Agnes was wrapped up in her own grief and paid little attention to this stranger, but during the ceremony she detected something in the young girl’s features. She had seen her many years earlier in Lerwick, hand in hand with an older man. At first she had been horrified at seeing the old man let her lead them out into traffic, but then she recognised him and saw that he had no choice. It was Duncan Winterfinch, the one-armed man, holding hands with his grandchild.
When Agnes rowed out to Haaf Gruney after the funeral to tidy up and clean, she discovered that someone had been poking around in the buildings. She changed the padlocks to a set she had bought in Ørsta, rowed her last trip on Patna and locked up the boathouse. She put the keys on Einar’s old ring to have them sent to Bestefar at Hirifjell. As she left Unst, she walked past Quercus Hall and noticed that the girl at the funeral had moved in to the stone cottage.
As Agnes described her, I knew she had to be Gwendolyn Winterfinch, Duncan Winterfinch’s grandchild.
7
“YOU’VE HAD A HAIRCUT” SHE SAID.
“Yes. At St Sunniva Hairdressers.”
“Quite . . . individual. Nice, though.”
She stood in the doorway of the stone cottage with both hands on the door frame. She was wearing a dark-green felt skirt with small checks and a high-necked black pullover. Her eyes flickered, as though she had focussed on something and had been interrupted. In a matter of seconds something had hardened inside her; she now stood silent and arrogant.
A cosy warmth leaked from the room through the open door, the kind of warmth a house can exude when a fire has been burning all night. But it swept past me and disappeared into the grey weather. She had everything on her side: the ownership rights, the language, maybe even the truth.
“Nice to see you again,” I said.
She looked down. Then past me and up towards Quercus Hall, which towered on the edge of the cliff. She said nothing, as though embarrassed that I was there.
“Have they arrived?” I said. “The Winterfinch family?”
She said that they had not. Over her shoulder I could see into a small living room and heard a refrain from the record she had bought in Lerwick. I searched for the right words and said: “Can you let me inside Quercus Hall?”
“What? I would lose my job. They don’t even like it when I have visitors here at the cottage.”
I took a step backwards. So she was maintaining the bluff.
The cottage was faced with rounded stones that had turned light grey where the sun had warmed them. The surrounding wall was overgrown with moss, tall and thick, and offered protection against the sea wind. A tangle of flowers grew in the narrow garden between the stone wall and the house.
Still she did not invite me in, nor did she initiate a conversation. She radiated none of the heat of the room behind her.
“Duncan Winterfinch,” I said. “When did he die?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I’ve discovered that Einar kept something hidden from him.” I looked her in the eyes and added: “The inheritance my mother was looking for. This must be what Winterfinch sent Einar to collect in 1943.”
She shrugged. “I see. And who told you that?”
“Someone who knew Einar well.”
I said nothing more. It must be a hazardous spot to be in, pretending to be an employee who shows no concern for a dead man’s former obsessions. If she expressed any interest at all in the inheritance, her cover would be blown.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose I could let you in here. Come on then.”
*
She put a couple of thick, reddish-brown logs from a polished copper bucket onto the fire. The fire flared. Oak. It seemed that timber merchants did not burn peat, not even their “housekeeper”, who did not seem to be taking care of the house. The cupboard doors were open, the bed was not made, there was washing-up to be done.
It was cosy and inviting, and I was on my guard. All that was missing was the smell of Indian food to make me sink into the same infatuated candidness as I had at the Raba. There was a deep, red-striped sofa in the living room surrounded by piles of music magazines. One of them had collapsed. Record Collector, New Musical Express. A double album was open on the table next to the steaming teapot.
“Where did you go?” I said. “After dinner.”
“Had to catch the last bus.”
She turned down the volume on the stereo. The record player was a Linn Sondek; a hi-fi enthusiast in Saksum would have to spend six months of benefits on one of those. A three-piece Audiolab amplifier. Two wide Quad electrostatic speakers. A system that befitted the five hundred or so L.P.s that filled the shelves.
“Are you a music critic?” I said.
She studied her nails. “Just interested. The records – they’re not mine.”
I took off my anorak. Before I rowed across, I had scrubbed myself with soap and changed my underwear. But even now I could invoke the tastes and aromas from dinner at the Raba. My skin still smelled different, from all the unfamiliar spices that slowly seeped out of my pores.
“Weren’t you going to Edinburgh?” she said.
“Yes. But the ferry doesn’t leave until tomorrow. Tell me, do you normally fly down there?”
“No, of course not. I take the ferry too.”
“What’s the Winterfinch family really like,” I said. “They just seem like a big mass when you talk about them, like some kind of clan.”
She began to straighten up the magazines, kneeling down with her bum resting on her shiny shoes. A skirt suited her better than trousers. The back of her hair was cut in a U-shape, leaving her black roots visible above the exposed nape of her neck. I felt an urge to stand close behind her, brush my nose against her hair to see if the subtlest of touches would overpower her brain, draw out her true self.
“They are a clan,” she said, standing up with an armful of magazines. “An old family. But . . .”
“You don’t want to speak about your employer,” I said.
“Exactly,” she began, “it’s—”
“—not done,” I said.
For how long would she keep up this facade? And why was she hiding behind it?
“So have you worked out what the inheritance is?” she said.
“I have, yes,” I said.
We looked at each other, as if we were each focussing a Leica of our own. Either she hadn’t realised I was lying, or she was a better liar.
“And you know where to find it?” she said.
I shook my head.
She put the magazines down on a shelf and stood with her back to me, her hands on her hips.
“But . . . you do want to find it?” she said after a pause and turned around.
I nodded. And I asked myself what price I would have to pay for that.
*
A little later I rowed back to Haaf Gruney and walked around the island until it got dark, on my own with the night and the sea.
Gwen and I had listened to “The Cutter and the Clan”, and became once again who we had been at the restaurant: two false identities, but the only ones we could use with each other. She told me about her favourite bands, Runrig and Big Country, and when the needle lifted off the record, the silence weighed heavy in the room. We waved an awkward goodbye, said “See you around.”
She must have seen right through my bluff, realised that I needed her to reveal more, but it was as though we wanted to start a game and could not find the dice. But I also noticed that it was easier this way. As long as we kept everything on a superficial level, I would not risk discovering the truth about my parents. This was about an inheritance – about money, gold bars, whatever it was. A small detour around the big questions.
A detour I had been taking all my life.
I strolled up to the bluff from which Einar had had a view of the boathouse. A sorrow from my teen
age years resurfaced, when I blamed myself for never having grieved properly for Mamma and Pappa.
I admired Einar’s grieving, his reaction. He had suffered openly and genuinely in 1971, and he had taken on the torments that should also torment me. I was just like Sverre. He had said goodbye to my parents, got up from their graveside after breaking down, taken my hand, and then turned his back on them and got on with his life.
But the difference, I thought as I stood out on the rocky knoll, was that Einar had known them. My grief, no matter how hard I tried to rouse it, was no more a colourless blanket; it could apply to anyone at all, and so my longing was not true either. It became a snowflake in the air that drifted past without anyone noticing.
*
The next day I was back on Unst and drove to the telephone box. I realised it must be the same one Einar had used when he called home to Norway in 1967, as uncertain as I was now.
I dug some coins from my pocket, took a deep breath and dialled a number in Saksum. It was a number I had called many times, whenever things got tough.
Her father answered and I listened to his usual ambiguous “I see” when I said my name. We had one thing in common: we were happy to avoid speaking to each other. “It’s him,” he muttered, and I heard Hanne say “Oh” as she came on the line.
I was familiar with that “Oh” – it implied a great deal. At this exact moment it would mean I’m angry with you and you need to suffer a little.
“Are you back from Sørlandet?” I said.
“I didn’t go.”
“Einar died years ago,” I said.
“Oh.” Her tone softened a little. “Are you back home then?”
“I’m still in Shetland.”
“Oh, come on, Edvard.”
“I am in Shetland,” I said and opened the door of the telephone box. “Can you hear the gulls screeching? I’m on an island called Unst.”
She said nothing. There was a faint, electrical crackling on the line.
“This is the man who’s hardly been to Oslo,” she said.
