The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  Room service rapped on the door before I could say anything and I had to attend to the usual ceremony of pointing out a table—by the window—signing the chit, wishing him a good morning.

  “Come and eat.” In the light by the window her hair was more sable than black, rich as a bear’s winter pelt. I wondered how it would look flung back in pleasure. We sat opposite each other at the tiny table and though they did not touch, I felt the heat of her bare leg on mine. We pulled off lids.

  “Bacon!”

  And eggs, and juice, and toast. “I thought you might like something familiar and comforting. It’s Danish bacon—more like Canadian than American. Less fatty.” I realized I was in danger of babbling and poured coffee for us both. We ate quietly.

  “I called Annie. She’s fine.”

  “Did you tell her to be careful?”

  “I didn’t have to. As soon as she worked out I thought something might have happened to her, she pestered me with questions. I told her I’d explain everything when we got back. She said she’d be careful.”

  “Good.”

  We ate some more. “I was looking through the What To Do In Oslo pamphlets. The National Gallery sounds interesting. I thought we could go this morning. That is, I’d like to go, and I hope you’ll come with me. And maybe later we could get that dinner we should have had last night. Oh, unless Borlaug wants to take us out to celebrate the finalization of the park contract.”

  “He won’t. In Norway one never mixes business and pleasure.” Dornan smiled at me from the back of my mind, and raised his eyebrows.

  Early morning shoppers sipped coffee in the outdoor cafés of Kristian VII’s Gate. Along Universitetsgata, students in bright colours stood on the grass talking in groups of two and three. Everyone looked splendidly healthy. They had probably had more than three hours’ sleep.

  We had to wait outside the gallery for it to open. Julia was restless. She was wearing another silk shirt, this time in deep blue. It pulled to and fro over her shoulders and breasts as she shifted her weight from heels to toes and her briefcase from one hand to the other. Her hair was in a fat braid, tied back with brown velvet that matched her pants, and hanging over her right shoulder. She looked at her watch. “How long will it take to get to Olsen Glass from here?”

  “Fifteen minutes if we take the tram, but allow thirty.”

  The doors opened. In the lobby, she checked her briefcase and looked at the signs. “So the question is, do we do a lightning tour of the whole place or concentrate on one area?” She nodded decisively. “We’ll just do the section on Norwegian painting. This way.”

  We were the only ones in the Norwegian gallery. The first thing that caught her eye was one of J. C. Dahl’s huge paintings of fjord light and water. She stood before it and her restlessness dropped away. She became as still as the deep dark waters of the fjord. Her chest moved gently as she breathed, her eyes unfocused. I knew that if I put my hands on her shoulders, they would be soft and relaxed. This was a Julia I had not seen before: distant, analytical, expert. The minutes passed. Suddenly she cleared her throat and moved on, walking past the works of Tidemand and Gude with a quick glance and a nod, as though confirming a theory. She spent a little longer with a series of etchings depicting barn dances and summer village scenes. “Well, here are some people at last.” She leaned closer, then stepped back, looking from one to another. “I can understand that Dahl wouldn’t want to put people in his paintings—they would be dwarfed by the scenery—but these artists seem to think people do nothing but dance around and put flowers in their hair.”

  She was not really talking to me.

  “Now look at this,” she said, in front of a big abstract canvas of purples and greens. The nameplate read WEIDEMANN. “Even this is about nature.” I wondered how she could tell but I kept my doubts to myself.

  More paintings.

  “Full circle,” she said. “Neo-Romanticism. This painter may as well have been a Romantic who watched television.” We went back to the Dahl that had so interested her. “It reminds me of Hjørdis.”

  Mountainside, cloaked in fir, falling straight into water as smooth and reflective as glass. You knew, looking at it, that it was a mile deep. Lush spring flowers, laughing sky. But changeable, and everywhere bones of rock. Good country in summer, but dangerous if approached without caution and, in winter, utterly isolated from the next valley by mountains suddenly cloaked in ice and mist. Troll country.

  “I’m beginning to understand.” She reached out as if to touch the painting, then drew back. “So…untrammeled. Uncompromising. This is how you all like to see yourselves, isn’t it? The consensus of the national psyche: clear, uncomplicated, immovable as granite.” She looked at me with the same concentration she had directed at the painting. I felt her gaze on my bones, the cant of my eyebrows; weighing the line of jaw and length of neck; noting colour and shadow. “But these paintings don’t tell your story, do they, Aud? These paintings don’t have bad dreams.”

  We stood there for an age, facing one another. A light above one of the paintings began to hum.

  “These paintings show sunshine,” I said. “They show spring and summer, and when there is snow it glitters white and bright.” I held out my left hand. She gave me her right. It was cool; I held it carefully. Neither of us said anything as I led her from the room, down a corridor, through a door.

  “This is the Munch Room.”

  Self-portraits of Munch bleeding from gunshot wounds. Paintings of the sick and dying. And Skrik, with its sky swirling lower and lower, a long bridge whose planks aren’t quite clear because there’s not enough light to see, to make out anything clearly, but that doesn’t matter because the world is grey and you don’t care; wavy lines of nightmare; the face of one so utterly alone they scream to shake the world.

  “This is how it is during mørketiden, the murky time, the lengthening nights of winter. The sky is so low you feel as though you could reach up and touch it, but even if you could, you couldn’t, because everything is so grey you can’t tell where the ground ends and the sky begins. There is wind, but it can’t get through the unreality, the knowledge that it will get darker and darker, day after day. You go to bed at night and pray that tomorrow the cloud will clear and the sun will shine, just for a little while, but you wake up and it’s dark, and it’s raining, and it’s only the first of December.”

  Her hand stirred in mine, then she had my hand in both of hers, was lifting it to her cheek for a moment, letting it go. Neither of us said anything.

  A sudden gaggle of noisy children clustered in the doorway while their teacher marshalled them into pairs. They held hands and giggled and pointed at the paintings. The Munch gallery was once again just a room in a museum.

  “Ask them whether they would prefer an abstract or figurative sculpture park,” I said to Julia in an undertone. She huffed with quiet laughter. The teacher gave us an apologetic look as we left. We smiled at her with sympathy.

  Outside, the students in their bright colours no longer seemed so gaudy, and I found my fatigue was gone.

  The meeting with Borlaug went well but they were still mired in details at one o’clock. They agreed to a forty-five-minute break for lunch. We wandered down Dronningensgate. She stopped outside Café Tenerife. “Do you suppose it would be the act of an Ugly American to eat Spanish food in a Norwegian city?”

  “Have you ever been to Spain?”

  “No.”

  “Then think of it as a two-for-one experience.”

  We ordered a mountain of food.

  “There’s still so much to be decided,” Julia said as she divided the tapas onto two plates, neat as a cat. We both ate ravenously. I was careful not to let my leg touch hers under the table.

  “Do you need me this afternoon?”

  She tilted her head, considered. “No. I think he’s past the shy stage. He’ll ask if he doesn’t understand.”

  I walked her back to the building—she swung the briefcase, the
way an adolescent, caught between girlhood and womanhood, might—and stopped outside the plate-glass entrance.

  “I’ll return at four. Please wait in the lobby, even if you finish early. If you’re ready very early, call the hotel. I’ll check for messages.”

  The concierge at the Bristol had bulging, oyster eyes and an encyclopedic knowledge of business in the city. I told him what I wanted and in ten minutes had a confirmation number for a four-wheel drive Audi and a cellular phone, to be delivered tomorrow at eleven-thirty. I tipped him and asked him to tell the front desk that I might be expecting messages but would be calling in for them from outside the hotel.

  The harbour smelled of sunshine on cold water, the wet wood and diesel fume of boats, and the shrimp the crews cooked and sold from the deck in little white paper bags, heads and shells still intact. When the breeze changed direction it brought the scents of warm city stone, flowers bursting into bloom in the hills and the wildness of spring. I walked faster, drawing the heady mix deep into my lungs.

  Two buskers with guitar and electric violin played some folk tune with fierce underpinnings, careless of the fact that no one seemed to be listening. I stood there awhile, letting the music prod at me and work its way under my skin. They nodded when I tossed some coins in the hat, and launched straight into an idiosyncratic reworking of Grieg.

  Away from the harbour, the streets turned to neoclassical nineteenth century buildings and glass and steel towers built in the last two decades. Fire had done as much damage to Oslo over the years as Sherman did in Atlanta. I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.

  I am used to being alone, used to autonomy, the freedom to stop when and where I want, be as I please. I could walk into a shop, like this one—chat earnestly to the girl behind the counter about a friend’s birthday, and which were the best chocolates she possessed, how much was that gorget; pay for them; ask for them to be wrapped—and the other customers would remain untouched by my presence, I by theirs. No one knew me; there was no one to compare my behaviour in the shop with my behaviour at other times. I could be fluid and responsible only to myself.

  In my imagination, Julia snorted: Very Norwegian!

  The image made me smile as I angled north and east. Half a mile or so from the Olsen Glass building the pavement was torn up and cordoned off. Below street level, a handful of people in cut-offs and work boots sweated away earnestly with pickaxes and shovels. They were young, and all cut from the same mould: plump tan muscles, fair hair, soft cheeks. Archaeology students. What looked like rotting foundations were partly exposed. One man was using a trowel to slice away clay, rasher by rasher, from what looked like a support post. He stretched, saw me watching, and nodded.

  “What is it?” I called down.

  “Remnants of the old city. Fifteenth century, we think.”

  It would be good to jump down into the pit, roll up my sleeves and swing a pickaxe on a spring day.

  “This was a large building—look at the size of this post—perhaps with some kind of ritual or civic function.”

  He seemed hopeful rather than sure. Ritual or civic function. He made it sound so alien, but the men and women who had cut the trees, dug the post holes, woven the hangings, would have had the same concerns as us: hunger, love, irritation. It was probably something utterly prosaic: the fifteenth century equivalent of public toilets, or a tavern, or—given the unchanging nature of humanity—a combination. I could almost see a local burgher, drunk from celebrating the return of some trading ship and a handsome profit, staggering outside, twitching aside his velvet and pissing against the corner post.

  The archaeology student went back to his task, nose just an inch away from the wood.

  The western side of the Olsen Glass building looked like a slab of gold in the slanting sunlight. The entrance and lobby were on the south side. I was five minutes early. I stayed on the pavement.

  When the lift doors opened and Julia stepped out, I watched her through the plate glass. It must have been warm in Borlaug’s office; the top buttons of her shirt were undone, the sleeves rolled above her elbow and her hair pulled up into a topknot. She looked alert and lithe, a dancer with a briefcase in the wrong building. When she turned her head this way and that I saw the movement of smooth muscle under her skin. I stepped inside the door. Her face lit, softly, like a candle.

  “All settled?”

  She patted her briefcase. “Signed, sealed and delivered. The preliminaries, anyway. Ah,” she said, as we hit the pavement, “what a lovely afternoon! I want a bath, a drink, and dinner. Followed by another drink. I feel like celebrating. It’s the start of my vacation.”

  We were sipping our coffee and contemplating a liqueur. Well-fed, well-bred conversation hummed round us lazily. Julia sighed and leaned back. Light poured over her face, dividing at her nose and spilling over her bare shoulders and arms. Her dress, of a heavy grey silk, gleamed like oiled chain mail, and the tiny hairs on her forearms could have been made of platinum.

  “This is when I would kill for a panatella.” Her laugh was low and rich and adult; it fumed under my nose like a fine Armagnac. “No need to raise your eyebrows like that. I gave up smoking six years ago, but this is when I miss it most. And the smell of cigars is delicious.”

  “But, like coffee, they never taste as good as they smell.”

  “True.”

  I lifted my jacket from the back of the next chair and took a flat box from the inside pocket. “Your native guide decided you ought to have a souvenir of Oslo.” I laid it on the heavy linen tablecloth in front of her.

  She touched the velvet lightly. I imagined how it might feel against her fingertips. The moment stretched, then she opened the box. She said nothing. I couldn’t see her eyes. She tilted the open box this way and that so that light ran over the polished pewter. “Aud, it’s beautiful.”

  “Then it should suit you.”

  She lifted it out, draped its supple links over her forearm. It was as though someone had turned woodsmoke into metal and laid it against her skin—which suddenly seemed darker, more mysterious and infinitely alive. “It’s heavy.” She ran it up and down her arm, playing, enjoying the sensation.

  “The maker assured me that it’s been designed for comfort as well as beauty. The swan’s neck is also meant to represent Oslo.” The lines were simple and dramatic, the swan more suggested than actual.

  “I have to try it on.” She stood.

  “The bathroom is that way.” I pointed behind me.

  While I waited the waiter came and asked if there was anything else we wanted. I ordered brandy for me, more coffee for Julia, and the check. I waited some more. No other diners were missing. She was just admiring herself in the mirror.

  The check and brandy came. I paid one and sipped at the other, let it hang a moment at the back of my tongue until it seemed I would swallow more fume than liquid, and then Julia was sliding back into her seat, the gorget lying around her throat: swan’s neck around swan’s neck. She was right, it was beautiful.

  She leaned forward until I could almost have kissed her. Her eyes were brilliant. “You have to tell me why. No flip answers. Why did you buy me this?”

  “I don’t know.” I had said I don’t know more times since I had met this woman than during the rest of my life put together. “I saw it in the shop. The sunlight caught it. I saw it and thought of you.” Thought of you in Borlaug’s office, the way your lip sometimes almost catches on your bottom incisor when you smile, how much I wanted to see you smile. “I thought of how it would look on you. I bought it.” She listened with an odd, patient expression on her face that I could not interpret. I had not given her what she wanted to hear. I did not know what that was.

  She stood suddenly. “Finish your drink. I want to go dancing.”

  We walked the long way round, south along Akershusstranda, the last glimmers of twilight on our faces. The sky was indigo and ink and
the people walking laughed with a shiver of excitement: it was spring, and Friday night in the big city. Julia’s dress slid back and forth over her hips and her gorget gleamed. She seemed on the edge of something—restless, unsettled. As we neared the club, the bass thump thrust a hand in my belly and stirred. My heart accelerated.

  There was a line. The flashing neon sign over the doorway caught on piercings and leather and smooth faces. The music was a wall of sound. Julia lifted her face to it, as though it were the sun. She smiled, then laughed aloud.

  The line moved slowly. Julia hummed to herself, moved with the music. The air felt wild.

  When we reached the head of the line, the man at the door held out his hand.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Sixty krone. And ID.”

  I reached for my wallet.

  “What did he say?”

  “He wants to see ID.” I found my driver’s license.

  “What do you mean, he wants to see ID?” She turned to him, and suddenly all that restlessness was focused. “Oh, come on. Just how old do you think I am?”

  He just held out his hand a bit more emphatically. I gave him my license. He scrutinized it carefully.

  “Oh, that’s just great. How old do you think she is? Sixteen? And I suppose you think we’ve flown all the way to this country and faked ID just so we can get into this club!” Her voice was fierce.