by Lars Mytting
*
The waiting room in which I had been found was now the garage hands’ break room. At first the four mechanics sitting there told me I was in the wrong place, and then they could not – or would not – show any interest in my errand.
They wore safety boots and oil-stained boiler suits. Free men who did not need to shave or answer to anyone; their fellowship harboured suspicion of an outsider like me.
“What do you want with the doctor?” one said. “He died long since.”
“He helped me when I was little,” I said. “I just wanted to see his office again.”
The men shook their heads. What had happened in the past was of little concern to them.
Bare walls, stools around a Formica table. The Pirelli calendar left open at a summer month. Somewhere near here I had been abandoned. Now there were only overflowing ashtrays, spare parts in the corners and oily floors. I could have entered any room and felt the same. Nothing.
They brushed the ash from their boiler suits and stood up, all but one, an older man with a crooked mouth who sat at the far end of the table. He had not said a word, either to me or to the others, but now he began to talk with a stutter, presumably fearful of being sneered at.
“Doctor Boussat helped me after the war,” he said slowly. “The Gestapo beat me with a baton. I used to be a fishmonger.” He forced out the words. “But as a mechanic, I don’t need to talk very much. Why are you looking for Monsieur Boussat?”
There was no harm in telling him. And then we looked around the room, as though it had once again become a waiting-room – for him too.
“I seem to remember reading something about a disappearance in the newspaper,” he said. “But I doubt you’ll find anything here now.”
It was then that I noticed in the corner a dark-brown chest of drawers in a familiar art-deco style. It had been spared the scratches of engine parts and tools. On top of it was a collection of old Citroën spare-part catalogues. I crouched to look underneath it, but it did not bear Einar’s distinctive signature. Instead there was a small fish, the initials C.B. and the year 1940.
Charles Bonsergent. And this town was smaller than Saksum. The fewer streets a town had, the longer a reputation could survive.
“It was left here after Boussat passed,” the mechanic struggled to say. “We didn’t have the heart to throw it out.”
“It says C.B. here. Could the cabinetmaker have been Charles Bonsergent?”
At first he did not understand, but then he looked at me for an explanation as to how I knew the name.
“Did you know him?” I said quickly.
“No, I wouldn’t say that.” He collected himself for a few moments. “But of course I knew who he was. Le Crotoy is not a big town.”
The mechanic had work to do, but he seemed to be curious as to why I was here.
“Charles was several years older than me. He came from a family of fishermen, but he was a skilled craftsman. He went to Paris and became a cabinetmaker. He was there when the war broke out. Back here, he made furniture for the locals.”
“Was it he who made the furnishings for Docteur Boussat?”
“Quite possibly. I remember they were attractive – everything in the same style as that chest of drawers.”
He was waiting for me to tell him something more, so that our incomplete stories could correspond. I asked if Charles had a friend from Norway. Or one called Oscar Ribaut. The mechanic shook his head, he did not know him that well. I could tell that his curiosity was beginning to wane.
“Charles was only a cabinetmaker in his youth,” he said. “He made nothing else after the war. He was in the resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo. They tortured him, cut off two of his fingers. Something was destroyed inside him, he developed a tremor. Like my lip, but it was in his arms. Not that he gave up. They had a big house where they hid saboteurs right up to the liberation. But that was the end of his fine furniture.”
“Interesting,” I said, knowing that I now had the truth and would have to make peace with it.
I tried to put myself in Einar’s situation. With a child. Dazed by the tragedy. Nobody around him who would understand. Everything turned on its head. Nothing that could be undone. His daughter was dead. His nephew was dead. His grandchild was terrified. Nothing for it but to go to a friend, someone who had helped him before.
It was like a continuation of his escape in 1944, once again out here to Le Crotoy. Perhaps Einar had rung Bestefar himself to relay the message he knew would bring his brother to his knees, and forge a hatred that would last his entire life. He would also tell him that I was safe, that Bestefar had to come here, but not until Monday morning when the doctor’s surgery opened. Feign ignorance so as not to weaken his case as guardian, and not reveal that the kidnapper was his own brother.
Charles Bonsergent made a deal with the doctor, and in doing so ensured that Einar had some time with me. As much time as possible before he had to return to the rock and rain of Haaf Gruney.
The four days were no longer the extent of a mystery; they were a measure of Bestefar’s sense of fairness.
*
The mechanic sat looking at me, and now he broke his silence. “About Charles,” he said. “After the war Docteur Boussat tried to help him, but he was never rid of the shakes. So Charles took over his father’s business and worked as a fisherman.”
“Is any of his family still alive?” I said.
“Docteur Boussat’s or Charles’?”
“Charles’.”
“They must be.”
“But do they live here?”
He shook his head. “They went away. Charles was the last of the fishermen. Odd story, in fact.”
I had slipped into a reverie. The mechanic got up and motioned that he had to get back to work.
“How so?” I said quickly. “An odd story, you said.”
“Well, the first thing the Germans did when they got as far as the coast was to destroy all the fishing boats. Burned or crushed them, so that people couldn’t escape to England or smuggle weapons. After the liberation Charles was the first to start fishing again.”
“But was that so odd?”
“No, it was more the boat. He built a large rowing boat so he could cast out nets near the coast. A boatbuilder showed up to help him. I have no idea where they got hold of the materials so soon after the war. There was hardly a plank of wood even for the crosses at the cemetery. But the boat was a popular sight. People were hungry.”
The mechanic had a pen in the pocket of his boiler suit, and I asked if I could borrow it. I tore open the pack of Gauloises, emptied the cigarettes into my shirt pocket and drew Patna on the reverse side.
“A boat like this?” I said.
He looked at my sketch with his head cocked. “That’s just a perfectly normal boat. Any old boat around here looks like that.”
I crumpled the paper into a small ball and stood up to look out of the window.
“His first boat,” I said, “is it still here?”
“No, he only used it for a while. Sorted out a larger one the following year, a more seaworthy vessel. Just as well, his wife didn’t like the first one. He moored it on the sand banks of the Somme, just where it flows into the sea. An inaccessible stretch, filled with driftwood. I went duck-hunting there in the seventies. It was gone by then.”
I asked why his wife had not liked the first boat.
“There’s a tradition of naming boats after the women in the family. Your wife, your mother or your daughter. Danièle was the name of Charles’ wife.”
“And?”
“People wondered why it had a foreign name on the bow. The boat was called Isabelle.”
*
I left the place where I was found, drove out of Le Crotoy past faded plastic bags flapping in the ditches. Followed the coast up to the Strait of Dover. I had travelled here with one question, and was coming away with two answers.
I pictured Einar at the time of liberation. Th
e Daireaux family had been executed, Isabelle was missing. He must have known that his search for her would take some time. And that Winterfinch would soon be sending people to collect the walnut.
How would he have hidden a large consignment of precious timber, one that he believed belonged to Isabelle?
He would have built a boat out of it.
The last trial of this grief-stricken cabinetmaker, who had also learned to repair boats for the Shetland Bus, was to return to Authuille. Fell the trees with a loyal friend, drag the trunks out of the shelled woods along the safe path and transport everything to the coast.
He and Charles Bonsergent, men who ten years earlier had stood side by side at a carpenter’s bench creating art-deco furniture, now positioned the walnut on the circular saw and cut the best materials they had ever seen. Made them in the shape of gunstocks, but a little larger, so that they could be fitted next to each other in a curved frame.
The wood would dry slowly in the damp coastal climate and would not crack. Einar named the boat Isabelle, so that she might find it if he died and perhaps understand the message that it carried. They set out and cast their nets, pulled in fish, earned money for a larger boat. Flipped Isabelle upside down on a sand bank in the unpopulated wastelands of the bay of the Somme. A wooden boat would need many days for the planks to swell and become watertight again, so there was little danger that it would be stolen.
If I had not wandered off in the woods, Winterfinch would have been reunited with the precious walnut stocks. Instead his life was set on a different course, and he dedicated what was left of it to Gwen. Out on Haaf Gruney, Einar began building coffins. The neighbours, such as there were, grumbled about this eerie sight in the twilight and told him to get another boat. A good reason to bring Isabelle home. The painted letters of her name had faded, and he rechristened it Patna.
I pictured it, two men in their late fifties crossing the Channel sometime in the early 1970s. Probably a fishing boat with a large rowing boat in tow, like a lifeboat. A perfectly ordinary sight. A manageable crossing. Four to five days, maybe, in good weather. Up the coast and across to Shetland. And in the end, some years after Winterfinch had died, Einar ended up underneath Patna.
*
An icy-cold wind blew in from the sea. On the Channel, the waves were white.
I thought about the weather back home in Norway. Snow would soon come. The sheep would be moving into the woods, they would not survive on the mountains in the cold and sleet. A disgrace for a farmer, to be the last person to bring them down.
No time to lose.
12
TWO DAYS LATER I WAS ON THE FERRY TO UNST. GEIRA rumbled onward, powerful and heavy. Visibility was bad, snowflakes hovered in the air, the wind was cold and biting. I felt time pressing on me. If the weather was like this here, the sheep must be up to their bellies in snow at the mountain pasture.
Unst had become like a home to me. I stood at the prow of the boat, eating a chocolate bar from a vending machine whose whims I knew, remembered its particular clang when the coins dropped inside. The same men were at work behind me, wearing the same oilskins.
The Bristol was run down. The steering wheel rattled, the lights on the instrument panel had stopped working, a valve in the engine was making a loud ticking sound.
But as long as it got me to the boathouse, it could have its rest.
*
I ran down. The grass was wet, the stones dark with rain. A storm petrel flew above me. I grabbed the rope along the boathouse and swung towards the gate. The white cross shone against the grey.
The padlock was gone, a wooden stick was wedged in its place. There was no boat inside, just a hollow echo of sloshing water. I looked over to Haaf Gruney. It seemed infinitely far away, the island a deserted grey blot in the mist. As though nothing of what I had experienced had taken place. As though the photograph on Bestefar’s roll of film had never existed.
Soon I found myself standing outside Quercus Hall. I had come across no cars, no people. Even the sheep had kept away. The large house appeared older, and colder. The grass bent in the direction of the wind, a grey-brown leveret bounded towards its hiding place near the foundations.
Again I felt that a long time had passed. Ten, even twenty years.
I walked down towards the stone cottage. There, I finally saw something from the present: a bulging bag of rubbish on the doorstep. A plastic bag from Clive’s Record Shop.
The door was open. Inside it was warm, but she was nowhere to be seen. A portable heater whirred in the living room. There was a kettle on the stove and next to it a cup. She had been sleeping on the sofa, curled in a blanket. I held it to my nose and recognised her smell. A perfumed scent I had last been aware of at Hôtel de la Basilique, which had gradually faded but now embraced me again.
I followed the path back down to the boathouse. The snow flurry picked up, flakes melted on my face. Then I spotted her. Out on the dark sea, oars raised, with Patna rocking in time to the waves.
She wore a black knitted cap. Her hair clung to her cheeks.
“Gwen!” I shouted.
She turned, did not seem surprised to see me. Only distant, dispassionate. From forty metres away I could tell that it was over.
Gwen dropped the oars and began to row. I would give her that, Gwendolyn Winterfinch, she had a natural affinity with boats, she was forged by the Shetland coast. This view of her could be four hundred years old, as old as the wood of the boat she sat in.
She was not rowing towards the boathouse, but towards a large, flat stone below me. Did she want me to climb on board? I heard the splashing of the oars as she pulled Patna level with the stone. I grabbed hold of the tow rope, put one foot in and kicked off with the other. I felt my body become one with the shifting sea.
“Didn’t I tell you not to come after me?” she said quietly before looking up. I could not interpret her expression, it was as though she were struggling with what she should do next.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then why are you here?”
“I wanted to see Unst one last time.” I glanced at the tarred planks on the bottom of the boat, at the oars that had been worn smooth. “Why aren’t you using Zetland?”
“Fancied a row. But maybe you were planning to row to Norway?”
I shrugged. There were only two reasons I had come back to Shetland so quickly: to see her, or to have Patna for myself. But the truth was, this time I wanted both.
“Where are you heading?” I said.
“How about Haaf Gruney? For old times’ sake?”
She was no longer the furious, scorned girl who had left the hotel in France. Now she seemed in control of things, even a little manic, as though she were relieved at having come to some kind of resolution.
“Gwen,” I said, “I think Einar—”
“I saw the lights of your car,” she interrupted. “Never thought you were going to come back. I have no idea what you uncovered in France. But seeing as you’re here, I’m going to give you something that belongs to you.”
She released the left oar and reached into her jacket pocket, handed me something and started rowing again, faster now.
“Even the very first time we met I had this feeling,” she said. “This strange feeling about you and me.”
*
She had given me the wooden dog Einar had made in 1971. It was not how I imagined it; it was smaller and slimmer. But it was exactly like the dog in the photograph, and my hands remembered it too. The feeling of polished wood, the curve of the back, the joints in the legs.
“How in the world . . .” I began, and then I felt the past rushing towards me again. The dog had a push-up base with a spring, and when I pressed it, the head nodded, the legs collapsed, the tail wagged. My fingertips met something familiar carved into the wood. A squirrel hiding its nose in its tail.
“All my life I thought Grandfather had given it to me,” Gwen shouted over the wind. She was short of breath, only spoke between stro
kes, and we were now far from the coast of Unst. “But he got this strange look when I held it, so I kept it in my room at Quercus Hall. I found it the day before yesterday amongst my toys. It is yours. That’s why I couldn’t stand being at the hotel. When I saw the photograph of you and the dog, the truth was impossible to avoid. Grandfather was there when you disappeared in the autumn of 1971, and I was there in the summer house.”
We said nothing for a long time. All that could be heard was the groaning of the oars and the waves lapping at the boat.
“So you did have a summer house?” I said.
“I didn’t remember it at all. After I left, I went to Amiens and had a good cry. Then I rang our business manager. He told me that the house was sold in 1972. He gave me the address and I got a taxi to drive me around. We found it in the end. Inhabited by an unemployed eccentric, it looked run-down and sad. When I stood outside it, I thought I recognised the smell of the earth in the garden.”
Everything was falling into place now. But a deep regret about how I had treated her seeped into me.
“I have a hazy image of sitting on the floor playing with someone. You must have had the toy dog with you. I suppose Einar came at some point, and I must have taken your toy and hid it. Never had to share with anyone before. So it came with me to Shetland.”
I pushed the middle of the base, so that all four legs collapsed and it lay down. By releasing the front it raised its head, like an excited dog when it realises that its owner is taking it for a walk.
“You need not be troubled by your family history,” I said. “Your grandfather saved my life.”
We were approaching Haaf Gruney. The breakers pounded the reef, and soon I would be able to see the buildings. I scanned Patna. The joints, the bottom planks.
I told her that I had been in the woods. That the bruises must have come from Duncan picking me up with his one arm. She listened, but her gaze wandered, it was as though nothing mattered any longer.
