by Lars Mytting
Another blank came onto the market in 1955, the pattern just as extraordinary as the previous had been, and there was a lengthy bidding war lasting more than an hour. The merchant had by then spent vast sums on lawyers, and stubbornly insisted that he would soon deliver on all orders. But no more samples were put on the market. Nonetheless the shipment – which the merchant claimed would consist of almost three hundred stock blanks – would have been one of the most valuable consignments of wood in history.
The blanks were known by various names. Some referred to them as “the Walnut from the Sixteen Trees of the Somme”, or the “Somme Walnut” in memory of the fallen soldiers. But among stockmakers, the wood was referred to as “Daireaux Walnut”, in honour of the original name of the forest and the family who had owned it.
12
“WHY AREN’T YOU EATING,” SHE SAID.
On the table was an untouched jug of water and two glistening burgers with wooden skewers piercing the crisp, golden buns. The pale yellow cheese had melted onto the raw onion and coarsely minced meat.
“Because of the grip on the shotgun,” I said.
“What?”
I reached my arm across the table and grabbed her wrist.
“The gunsmith talked about the grip of the stock on a side-by-side shotgun. It should feel like the wrist of a lady.”
“And?”
“You’re no servant,” I said, squeezing her wrist as I had in bed on the ferry. “You’re the granddaughter of Duncan Winterfinch.”
There was a long and awkward silence. “I knew that you knew,” she said. “But I’m glad you didn’t say anything until now. That you let me be . . . Gwen Leask.”
I shifted in my chair, moved my foot so that it touched the weapon case on the floor. If I had sold the shotgun, I thought, it could be full of money.
“How did you come up with Leask?”
“Oh, it’s a common name in Shetland,” she said and twirled her fork slowly in her hand. “John Leask runs a removal company in Lerwick. Their lorry passed by just before you asked my name.”
“So you’ve been lying to me all this time?”
“Oh, please,” she said, wiping her mouth. “I didn’t know about the walnut. Believe me. I knew there was something about Haaf Gruney, but I didn’t know what.”
“Come on! I don’t believe that at all.”
She behaved as she had at the Raba, concentrated on chewing when she wanted to hide her expression.
“Nonetheless it is the truth. Grandfather had his secrets, I knew he was haunted by something. The island was ours but he was evasive when I asked why he let that strange man live out there, a man who, according to rumour, was a murderer. He was angry with Einar, but until today I had no idea why. It’s because Einar kept the walnut for himself.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Why would he have decided to live right under your nose?”
Her eyes narrowed. All of a sudden we became the ambassadors for the inherited outrage of two families.
“Could the wood be somewhere on Haaf Gruney?” I said to smooth things over. “He did make the gun stock, after all.”
Gwen pushed a gherkin to the side of her plate, cut off a piece of bread. Using her fork, she mopped up the gravy with the bun. I wondered how much she had tidied up the story too, to make it more appetising.
“Impossible,” she said. “Once, when Einar was away, Grandfather arranged for a crew to search the entire island. They were at it for four days. Smashed open the locks, dug holes in the earth, even removed the panelling from the walls. I asked him what he had been looking for. His reaction was strange, and evasive. And he wasn’t the kind of man you asked twice.”
“Why didn’t your family clear out the buildings on Haaf Gruney when Einar died?”
She looked at her plate, waved her knife and fork aimlessly before placing them on the table and wiping her mouth. By the time she looked at me again, she had discarded her snootiness.
“Because I . . .” she began. “Oh, dear Lord, this is going to sound so childish, but I’ve been planning this for years. I was waiting for you.”
“You were waiting for me?”
Gwendolyn reached across the table and placed her hand on mine. “Yes, you – Edward Daireaux Hirifjell.”
She told me how her sheltered life had crumbled when her grandfather lost his balance at the top of the stairs, fumbled for the railing, fell down and died. The sheriff gave them a copy of the deed for the freehold, namely Haaf Gruney, on which it stated that a certain Edvard Daireaux Hirifjell, born in 1968 and therefore the same age as her, would inherit that right when Einar Hirifjell died.
Gwen had gone out and looked at the island through a pair of binoculars. There was peat smoke rising from the chimney, and she thought about the strange coffin maker she had occasionally seen near the ferry terminal, but had never spoken to. Did he really have an heir? It was then that she first began to imagine what I might be like, and how I looked.
A few years later, word arrived that the hermit of Haaf Gruney was dead. She had been living in Edinburgh at the time and went up to the funeral hoping to meet me. But the only person she met at Norwick was a quiet old man who drove a Norwegian-registered Mercedes. Gwen told him that the Winterfinch family owned Haaf Gruney, and asked whether I would be making a claim for the freehold. “That will be up to my grandson,” Bestefar had answered in broken English, before getting into the car and driving off.
This made Gwen even more curious. She took Zetland and stood on the shore of Haaf Gruney for the first time. She asked herself why her grandfather had had the island searched. This was before Agnes Brown had tidied up, so the buildings were still unlocked. Gwen went into the workshop where Einar had made the coffins and began to go through his belongings. But it felt wrong, so she left. A couple of days later she returned, but by then someone had been there and changed the locks, which aroused her curiosity even more.
Her lawyer suggested contacting me in Norway, to clarify everything. But Gwen thought, No, let’s wait. Dispute his right, nothing more. He’s related to the man who was hiding something from Grandfather. If I cut all ties to him, the final clue will be lost. Best let the matter stew. Edward Daireaux Hirifjell will come.
“So yes, I admit it,” said Gwen. “I hoped that you would show up, slip up and leave some clue for me.”
“That is cynical,” I said.
“Not really,” she said. “I didn’t know that your mother and father died in Authuille. But what about you? Why didn’t you reveal your true colours? Why did you shuffle around sheepishly, pretending to lap up every little thing Gwen Leask said? Tell me that, Monsieur Daireaux!”
She pronounced my name in impeccable French, better than I could have, and it felt as though she owned more of my past even than I did. Hearing my family name spoken like that fanned the embers of the biggest question of all, and I sat thinking about the forest my mother’s family had owned. I wondered what it looked like now?
“Hello? Nothing to say to that?” she said.
“Yes,” I said calmly. “Because I was beginning to prefer spending time with you more than digging up the past.”
For a moment she was silent. She stuck her fork into a lonely little potato glistening with fat and speckled with herbs, and put it in her mouth. She cut the gherkin in half and ate that too. I copied her, let the taste of vinegar sit on my tongue for a long time before swallowing.
“I enjoyed it,” she said. “Being Gwen Leask. Driving around in that vulgar car of yours, wandering about at night. Maybe I was already in love with you without realising it.”
Her eyes had that glimmer of dreaminess, like the moment we first met. Now, I thought, now the sea we’re sailing on is beginning to get rather deep.
“After Einar’s funeral I went back to Edinburgh,” she said, “but I began to spend my holidays in the stone cottage. I liked the thought of a distant soul living in the dreamland of Norway, someone who would be drawn here sooner or later.
You became a small, unopened box of chocolates in my life. I had almost forgotten about the whole thing when the shop assistant called me out of the blue. That very evening I saw you rowing across the inlet.”
She was different now. More attractive, as though the rigid features of her mask had slipped off.
“I had convinced myself that you were sleazy, that you were trying to swindle me. But you were handsome. Distinguished, in a way. With intentions that clashed with my own. You surprised me. I have never met a man who would drag a dead sheep onto land.”
I cleared my throat and thought about my journey home. Gwen Leask and Edvard Hirifjell had travelled to Edinburgh. Gwendolyn Winterfinch and Edouard Daireaux would be making the return trip.
“One question,” I said. “What will you do if you find the walnut?”
“That depends on Einar’s reasons for hiding it.”
She called a waiter, said no to tea and asked for the bill. She glanced at her old watch and calculated the time for the journey home, told me there wouldn’t be enough time to drop by her flat.
“What’s the hurry?” I said.
“The gunsmith made my grandfather sound like a greedy timber merchant who had accidentally stumbled upon something valuable.”
“Well, greedy or not, he—”
“There’s one question that has not been asked,” she interrupted.
“And that is?”
“Why Captain Duncan Winterfinch was so obsessed with securing the sixteen walnut trees from the place where he and the rest of the Black Watch had fought in 1916.”
*
She was not in bed. I turned over and said “Gwendolyn?” to an empty room.
The cottage was dark. That night had been much more intense, as though we wanted to wrench the innermost secrets from each other. Dig out the lies and see what remained. Part fear and part confusion, released in sweat and indefatigable desire.
Her alarm clock showed a quarter to three. I went into the living room, past the messy coffee table with the music magazines. In the dark of night I saw a light on the top floor of Quercus Hall. We had agreed not to go there until morning.
Back in the bedroom I glanced at the fancy clothes that were strewn across the floor, found my old clothes in the suitcase. I crossed the garden in the pale moonlight. The sea was calm at the cliffs below. The waves rolled in sluggishly, only visible as hazy movements. It was raining again. Not an intense shower, just big, warm drops.
The front door was ajar. Tall and wide, it slowly eased open. The room inside gradually revealed itself as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. A large hall with a double staircase leading to the second floor. But it was not in the grand style I had expected of a manor house. Straight, clean lines and a high ceiling, but economical. Large floor tiles with a compass rose in the centre. Space for probably twenty people in the vestibule. Tall doors of carved wood.
Behind a curtain I found the light switch. A row of globe pendants lit up, suspended from the ceiling by thin metal tubes. Square patches on the walls showed where paintings had once hung. I walked up the stairs. The banister curled like a fat snake of glistening mahogany, the uprights were in the shape of elongated hourglasses. A dark corridor lay ahead of me. I could not find a light switch, but further along I saw a line of light coming from the bottom of a door.
“Gwen,” I said.
No answer. The door was locked, so I continued walking along another unlit corridor. I smelled mould and old leather as I walked down another set of stairs and noticed a soft glow coming through a frosted-glass door.
When I opened it I was greeted by fresh air; I realised I had stumbled upon one of the secrets of the house.
An internal garden. Large and lush, and damp with rain. It was so overgrown that it was almost impenetrable. Tall, exotic trees stood like pillars amidst round, broadleaved bushes. I was struck by what I had been missing in Shetland, something Duncan Winterfinch had, but that Einar was denied: the sound of raindrops falling on the foliage of large broadleaves.
“He used to stand up here and watch me,” she said.
The voice came from above. I craned my neck and searched for her while drops of water ran down the leaves and fell onto my forehead. I followed the row of windows along the walls that surrounded the garden and spotted her on a veranda that jutted from the first floor. I moved some branches aside and took high steps through the underbrush to a spiral staircase in the corner.
“It’s practically a greenhouse,” I said.
“No,” she said and leaned over the railing. “It’s an arboretum. A botanical garden for trees. Eighteen different species of wood. Originally there was a glass roof to maintain a warmer climate, but it was shattered in 1933. The shards rained down on the gardener and almost killed him.”
She guided me to another spiral staircase that led to the second floor, where an internal veranda ran all the way round. From there we could look into the treetops. The longest branches brushed softly against the railing. It was like being in a tree house in the middle of a forest. The waves from the sea were barely audible. Beyond the walls, the wind could probably get so strong that the salt spray would damage anything that tried to grow. But in here everything was shielded; the walls held the plants in a gentle embrace.
“We have always lived off trees,” she said. “Off them and with them. For seven generations the Winterfinch family have been selling timber. From the rainforests, from the Russian taiga, from Norway and Sweden. For decoration, for furniture, for buildings. In our 1901 catalogue, we stocked seventy-eight different types of wood.”
She walked to the edge of the veranda, bent her knees a little and bounced up and down to make the floor yield. Not a creak was heard.
“Oak?” I said.
“Yes. Oak has been with us since the beginning, and oak is what made us our fortune. Some say Winterfinch Ltd deforested Britain, but that’s nonsense. Only war can strip a country of its trees. And oak especially. The only wood good enough for a warship. For a standard seventy-four cannon ship, thirty-seven hundred oak trees are needed. When H.M.S. Victory was completed in 1765, it took fifty-seven hundred fully grown oak trees. The navy’s chief administrator of shipping timber was Gregor Winterfinch. He personally inspected every single plank on Victory. The documents are in the cellar. One of the signatures belongs to Admiral Nelson.”
“I’m beginning to realise that you Brits are different from Norwegians,” I said.
“You were too lax in establishing colonies. Gregor founded the family business, and in 1770 he began to import timber from the Baltic Sea coast. Soon he became one of the country’s leading timber merchants. From 1858 to 1893 we were the largest of all. Offices in every major port of the empire. We imported everything from ship timber to the most precious woods for making jewellery boxes and walking sticks. Half of all British joinery sold in guineas was made from our wood.”
“What is it with guineas?” I said. “The gunmaker used that expression too.”
“Mass-produced goods were priced in pounds. But everything made according to the customer’s own specifications was paid for in guineas. A standard table – priced in pounds. A bespoke dining table – in guineas. A mass-produced Lee-Enfield – pounds. A Dickson Round Action made to measure – guineas. Racehorses, oil paintings—”
“But what’s the difference?”
“Oh, practically nothing. We haven’t used guineas in coin or note form since 1816. But a guinea is worth a pound and a shilling. There was a tradition that the master took the pound while the apprentice took the shilling.”
A breeze reached the treetops and made the leaves rustle. Some flies were buzzing about.
“Grandfather was not meant to inherit the company, in fact. Stanley was the eldest brother. Grandfather went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and imagined an exciting life for himself in the colonies. But Stanley died of malaria after visiting the office in Georgetown. When Grandfather took over, he was already weakened by the war. One of his
first great mistakes was to build this house.”
“Mistake?”
“They started in 1921 and gave up in 1928. Now come with me,” she said impatiently. “Let’s go inside.”
We walked through three echoing halls, illuminated only by the greyish gleam of the summer night, and entered a windowless corridor that was as long as a schoolhouse. She snorted in irritation that the light switches had “failed again”, and we felt our way along until she stopped in front of a door, her movements barely visible in the darkness, like a black cloth folded over another black cloth.
“I idolised my grandfather,” she said. “Behind this door is a room that was once the safest place I knew. I always thought he had his reasons for being the way he was. But then you arrived. Forced me to ask myself whether those reasons were quite good enough.”
She stretched out her arm. In the dark I saw the luminous hands of her watch form a narrow angle. It was five past three. “You stared at this watch when we met,” she said.
“Because it’s a man’s watch,” I said. “I wondered if you were engaged.”
“This watch was in Authuille, in the place you disappeared,” she said and opened the door. “But fifty-five years earlier.”
She entered the dim room. The first thing I noticed was a worn depression in the middle of the floor, like some kind of metal mechanism had spun in circles there.
Then a ghost passed through me, I had a fleeting sense of déjà vu, but it disappeared before I could latch on to any memory. It was the smell that had roused me. There was a scent of age and furniture polish in the room, but underneath that, like the deep tone of an organ, there was a sharp, earthy fragrance.
“That smell,” I said. “What is it?”
She drew the curtains. Ran an index finger along the windowsill and wrinkled her nose at the dust.
