The Hidden Beach

by Karen Swan

  ‘We’re not . . . He hasn’t tried anything on, if that’s what you mean.’

  Nina laughed harder. ‘Ha! It wasn’t, but –’ She began coughing, she was laughing so hard. ‘Ha! Oh God, honestly? I’d ask you to do him a favour and jump his poor bones, but I’m not sure one can say that sort of thing these days, even as a joke.’ Her smile faded and she sighed, looking suddenly sad. She was quiet for another moment, seeming to sink into her thoughts. ‘You’ve been filled in on the accident, I’m assuming.’

  ‘Of course.’ Only thanks to Christer, though. Hanna had effectively let her come here blind.

  ‘So then you know that he’s still not fully recovered, in spite of appearances?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘Good. Because he could do with a little kindness right now. God knows he won’t show any to himself. He’s picking at old wounds, trying to get her back.’

  Bell hitched an eyebrow at her tone. Was she not a fan? ‘If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he’ll succeed. Hanna’s happy with Max.’

  Nina gave a snort. ‘Sadly it’s not. God knows I never liked the woman, but he’s pinned his flag to that mast; he’s convinced she’s the happy ending and he’ll get her, you see if he doesn’t.’

  Bell didn’t reply and they were quiet for a moment – Nina still blowing smoke rings, Bell burrowing her toes even deeper into the earth, the two of them like truants hiding from a teacher.

  ‘Still, you know what they say: where there’s life, there’s hope –’

  Bell bit her lip. Her hope had long gone, been snuffed out like a candle in a storm.

  ‘– And perhaps I should just be grateful that he’s still here to make shitty choices.’ Nina blew a stream of smoke through flattened lips. ‘He died, you know, before he arrived at the hospital. He was in full cardiac arrest when they got to him . . . I’ll never know how they got him back.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Bell murmured, feeling stricken by the thought. He had died? ‘My God.’

  ‘Mmm. And just when you think he got the happy ending and woke up, he discovered his son was calling another man Pappa, and found out that our father had died.’

  ‘Were they close?’

  She nodded. ‘He was everything to Emil, and vice versa. Very much the favourite,’ she added with a shrug. ‘Everything he did was to make our father proud.’

  ‘That’s so sad.’

  ‘Sad’s what he is, though he hides it by being angry instead. Of course, he gets terribly cross with me always checking up on him. He doesn’t like it at all, says I’m fussing.’ Nina splayed her hands wide as if she couldn’t understand it. ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’

  Bell smiled.

  ‘I should go.’ She took a final, deep drag of the beloved cigarette before grinding it out in the earth. She gathered her feet in and levered up to standing. ‘Just do me a favour, okay? Cut him some slack. He loves his boy and just wants to be a father again. God only knows, he’s an optimist in a glass that’s half empty. A foolhardy romantic with all the plans and only half the facts . . . It was nice meeting you, Bell.’

  ‘It – it was nice meeting you.’

  Nina gave another of her amused barks. ‘Ha! Was it?’ She disappeared through the trees as quickly as she had come, Bell staring after her in puzzlement.

  Only half the facts?

  They left after lunch – a fresh but extravagant spread of crispbreads, eggs and smoked fish roe served on the terrace, the view down the garden somewhat blighted by the giant blue helicopter sitting dormant on the lawn. The gardener had spent all morning draping the flowerbeds with lightweight muslins and tethering them to the ground with tent pegs, in the hope of saving them from further decimation when the chopper inevitably took off again. Emil had noticed a pointedness in his endeavours as he stomped around, but Nina remained oblivious, and as she got up to depart there was a look of triumph about her.

  ‘Well, that was a very pleasant morning,’ she said, looking first at him and then at the children. ‘It’s good to see you cousins reunited at last. We have missed you, Linus.’

  ‘Thank you, Aunt Nina,’ his son replied obediently, looking terrified.

  ‘Ha! Such manners. He’s far too polite, you know,’ she said to Emil, kissing him on each cheek. ‘You’ll need to stamp that out of him.’ She shot him one of her sharp-eyed smiles.

  ‘Well, it’s lovely to see you, but next time, please ring.’ He stuffed his hands in his pockets lackadaisically. ‘We might have been out today and your trip would have been wasted –’

  Nina laughed as though that idea was hysterical.

  ‘– And next time, come by boat. It’s obnoxious bringing that thing.’

  ‘It’s efficient, darling. I’ve got dinner in Copenhagen tonight, and I can’t spend an entire day travelling on the water just to check in on my baby brother, now, can I?’

  ‘You don’t need to check in on me,’ he said in a low voice.

  Nina responded with a silent arched eyebrow, and he was aware of Bell looking on with apparent bemusement. He and his sister switched seamlessly between insults and affection with no friction at all; they always had. It had been one of the few constants he had come back to. Her and Måns.

  Hanna and Linus, on the other hand . . .

  It was apparent his son was terrified of him, or couldn’t abide him – possibly even both. Every response was a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and on the boat, having their picnic breakfast that morning, he’d said barely a word and eaten even less. It had been an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, and had left him feeling low even before the forgotten meeting with his lawyers – and especially before she had flown down the stairs in a state of wildness and undress to castigate him.

  He closed his eyes, struggling for the strength to remain patient. Remain calm. Everyone had warned him it would take time for the bonds to be renewed, but he had underestimated the pain that would bring. It was a physical ache – along with all the others he had to endure – constantly having to hold himself back. He wanted to squeeze his son in a hug, ruffle his hair, pinch those cheeks, hold his hand, kiss his temple as he had as a sleeping toddler . . . But he couldn’t. These privileges were forbidden to him. Aside from their initial handshake, there had been no physical contact between them. Nothing at all. Another man – another father – got to love his son; even she, the nanny, was allowed to touch him in ways he couldn’t – squeezing his shoulder, bedtime cuddles – while he was nothing more than a remote stranger with long-ago memories no one else remembered.

  That was the hardest part of it all: the dislocation between how it was for him and everyone else. In the seven years he had been under, they had all moved on without him. He had been, ultimately, disposable, and it was a hard fact to accept, especially because he had woken with the same love and same bonds as seven years prior. For him, it had been but the blink of an eye. One long night’s sleep. Nothing altered, nothing changed. And now, he had to somehow win them all back – like it was a competition. He had to prove himself worthy, better, more than the other guy.

  All under her watchful gaze. Something about her unnerved him – her honest, probing stares made him feel nervous, like she could shine a light into his darkest corners.

  He glanced over, seeing how Bell and Linus waved politely – obediently – as the helicopter rose into the air like a giant dragonfly, the cousins giving bored-again nods through the windows, their phones already back in their hands. The gardener stood by the side of the garden like a touchline referee, racing down the lines any time it looked like a bolt of muslin was going to wrench free; but his system held strong, and no sooner was the helicopter safely clear than he started pulling up the tent pegs and rolling back the cloth again, bringing colour and texture back to the garden scene.

  ‘Well,’ Bell said, into the fresh settling calm. ‘That was an . . . unexpected surprise.’

  ‘You have to expect the unexpected with Nina.’

  She looked back at hi
m with guarded eyes, their argument this morning still unresolved and lingering in the air between them like coloured smoke.

  ‘So . . .’ he murmured, at a loss as to what to do next. He couldn’t do right for doing wrong, it seemed, and his confidence felt battered. ‘It’s a nice day. What shall we do with it?’

  He directed the question at Bell. She had made it perfectly plain nothing would happen without her say-so, and to be honest, he didn’t trust himself to get it right on his own now anyway.

  She looked surprised by the deferral, her mouth parting in a pretty ‘o’. She looked back at Linus. ‘We could kayak? Or go for a swim?’

  Linus shrugged. The idea clearly didn’t thrill him, but the look on his face asked the question, what else were they going to do? He looked bored.

  ‘I know some high rocks we could jump from,’ Emil said.

  Linus’s head snapped up. ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes, but they’re about an hour’s sail from here. They’re about ten metres high, though –’

  His little face brightened. ‘Cliff jumping?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure cliff is quite the word,’ he smiled. ‘But they’re better than anything else you’ll find around here.’

  From the look in Linus’s eyes, it was apparent they had a plan.

  Half an hour later, they were on the water, lifejackets buckled and the old sail boat’s patched sails bellying and flapping as they slipped their mooring and drifted across the lagoon. They passed the smaller day-trip sailboats bobbing along the coastlines, moored in coves and bays for family days out, the tinny sound of music playing on radios drifting over the waves, children’s shrieks as they jumped and splashed from the rocks carrying to the ear and making heads – even his – instinctively turn. He felt a burst of intense emotion as he realized he was part of that scene too – sailing with his son.

  He looked across at Linus, staring down into the water. Its surface was a rich, glossy peacock-blue, occasional flashes of dazzling light catching on the seam of a ripple. The water was so clear, Linus could see a school of tiny silver fish flicking one way, then the other, far down below the boat, his arm dangling over the side and trailing in the water as though he might touch them. Bell, by contrast, was enjoying the warmth on her skin and kept automatically angling her face upwards, like a daisy trying to find the sunlight. Emil tried not to look at her at all.

  They approached Summer Isle, on their starboard side, and he saw how Linus looked up as they passed, his body tensing as he scanned the shoreline for sight of his mother, his sisters, Max, getting ready to wave, to shout . . . The happy expansive feeling in his chest contracted violently and in one sharp movement, he turned the boat away, snatching the view from sight, seeing how his son’s head turned instinctively towards him, unformed protest stoppered in his throat. They sailed clear of the lagoon’s claustrophobic embrace and pointed towards a horizon that stretched out – endless, empty, clear. Almost immediately, he felt released from the archipelago’s rhythms of normality, from home and the long lonely hours, where the mundane imposed itself – what to eat, what to wear, what to do . . . He felt himself breathe more easily again, the immediate threats quenched.

  The horizon was sharp and precise, as though painted around the earth’s waist with a fine nib, and he felt a distinct pride in knowing – without being able to see it – that an equally fine white vein marbled the water behind them too, like a physical marker of his presence back in the world. It was an endeavour the doubters had continually told him could never be, but they had underestimated him. He had already disproved every fact they laid at his feet, he had already beaten every target they set – and still it wasn’t enough for the naysayers who said he could never claim back what he had lost. He wasn’t a fool. He knew he couldn’t claw back time, nor the past. But to say his family was denied to him forever . . . No. They weren’t out of reach. They were tantalizingly close, and growing ever closer . . . He just had to keep believing, keep showing them he was the man they used to love. He wasn’t less now. He was the man he had been before.

  He felt his spirits begin to soar as they sailed for miles in contented quiet through the beautiful desolation of the Baltic, cutting and sluicing, tacking and gybing beneath a soundless symphony of blues. He felt warily happy. It was an alien emotion these days, where pain and loneliness and frustration defined his days. But out here, he was in his element. In the rest of his life, he had to pitch himself against the odds, but out on the water, he merely had to do battle with the elements. It was an arena where he rarely won, of course, and yet he wished he could stay there for days, escape into the solace of an empty sea and feel his hair fly back and his eyes stream, the spray on his face. This was where he felt most alive. Most awake.

  In front and above him, the mainsail was bellied out, taut and curved into a perfect half-ellipse as the keel tore through the water, slicing the sea as though skating over glass, until ahead, creeping into view, came the fractured embrace of the next group of skerries. He approached the ragged scraps of land with masterly ease, the specks of rock breaking up the pristine perfection of the horizon, gulls wheeling far above in scattered flocks and chasing after distant fishing boats as they piloted towards the city. He remembered the route in with dazzling clarity. His own father had always taken him here as a boy. It was one of his ‘quiet pleasures’ – isolation as luxury, when they needed to escape the Board, the press, and even the Sandhamn scene – and he knew exactly which markers to navigate by.

  The rocks here were wild and ragged, jutting high out of the sea like shards of glass. No one lived here and few came this way. The inlet was narrow and only smaller boats with experienced skippers could navigate through safely, but Emil had loved it precisely because of its wildness and isolation, its air of abandonment and danger.

  He turned in at precisely the point his father had taught him to – between the humped rock and the one they called the ‘jagged tooth’ – his mouth already open to announce their joyous arrival. But the words stuck in his throat at what he saw there.

  Linus and Bell sat up as they drifted into the lee of the island cluster, all straightening as they saw it too – a wall of sea mist ahead of them, rising like a steam above the water, perfectly caught within the walls of the lagoon.

  It was a common enough sight out here – the sky could be a cloudless, singing blue overhead, but the scattered dots of land would be all but lost to view as the marine mists rolled and billowed, smothering and obscuring even nearby isles from sight. They usually passed quickly enough, sometimes in just a few minutes, others in an hour, or several.

  Still, this one was dense. The islands’ feathery green-black silhouettes quickly faded from sight, becoming shadowy and crepuscular. Emil took off his sunglasses as the murk enveloped them, his hand hovering lightly on the tiller as they edged in, cutting the speed further as even the warning sticks became difficult to spot. The mist was gauzy and diaphanous from a distance but inside the mass, it was as dense and opaque as a cumulo nimbus; the endless sun was finally blotted out and everything seemed to slide forward a notch, like a car shifting gear – day became evening, summer became autumn. It felt impossible to recall the open brightness and warmth of even a few moments earlier, for it was cool in the gloom, the only sound the boat sluicing through the eerily calm waters of the inlet.

  Bell looked across at him worriedly – possibly even accusingly; perhaps she would say he should have known this was a possibility – but he was oblivious to her censure, his jaw set in a rigid lock, his eyes moving fast as he scanned for the markers that would tell them where they were. Ripping the bottom off the boat out here was a distinctly dangerous prospect. In the space of mere minutes, the over-reaching, buttery sky had dimmed and closed down around them, blotting out the rest of the world so that nothing existed beyond the confines of this boat. Had they been in a bigger vessel, they would have had radar equipment to guide them through, but the two oars on the floor by their feet were the only back-up
system on board here.

  No one spoke. Shapes emerged from the gloom, receding again in the next breath: a bird flapped its wings in a nearby tree, startling Bell so that she gave a little gasp; a ripple creased the water as a fish surfaced, then sank back into the depths. To their left, a vague mass drifted past. Or rather, they drifted past it. Emil could just make out the spiny points of pine trees, higher in the skyline than anywhere else. They were in the right place, at least, and he pushed on the tiller lightly, guiding the boat closer towards the landmass, remembering there were no rocks in front of the island’s apex.

  He glanced overboard, but the dim light made it impossible to gauge depth. He threw the small anchor overboard anyway. If it was too deep, they would drift, albeit slowly, for the currents were gentle inside the lagoon. If not, they could wait here until the mist rolled back and he could get his bearings.

  They all stared out into the miasma. It had fallen as thickly as a velvet curtain, its approach silent as a cat. It almost seemed to dance for them, a living thing that swayed and rolled and breathed. There were no edges to it, no signs of it furling or peeling back to expose the blue beyond. Instead it kept on rolling in in plumes of changing density, a totemic warning stick in the shallows occasionally winking back into focus momentarily, then disappearing again. Even to him, the sense of isolation was eerie. There were no passing boats, no sounds of shrieking children skating across the water, and it could have easily been the middle of November, deserted and abject.

  ‘Should we . . . go back?’ Bell asked him cautiously, her voice low. He knew she was trying not to alarm Linus, who kept looking back at them both, but she, too, was like a doe, all big eyes and run instinct.

  ‘No. We need to just sit tight,’ he replied. ‘It will pass.’

  She turned away again, biting her lip, and he noticed the mist’s dampness was like a sheen on her skin, the wispy tendrils at the base of her neck beginning to darken, the fluttery sleeves at her shoulder beginning to droop.