‘Do you remember the cottage?’ said Per as he pulled up.
Nilla nodded. ‘You said you were going to paint it last summer … Have you done it?’
‘I didn’t get round to it.’
‘And what about the repairs?’
‘When I get time,’ Per said quickly. ‘And we’re going to build a flight of stone steps too. But tonight we’re going to a party.’
‘What kind of party?’
‘A get-together with the neighbours.’
Per got out of the car to avoid further questions. Then he helped Nilla out on to the gravel, and over to the door.
‘I can walk by myself,’ she said, but she clung to his arm as they moved into the hallway and then on to a small bedroom.
‘This is your room,’ he said. ‘It’s nice and clean, and I’ve aired it for you.’
Nilla sat down cautiously on the bed, and Per went to fetch her luggage and the wheelchair.
* * *
Jesper was on the computer in his room, but Per couldn’t find Jerry.
He went out on to the patio in the sunshine. His father was slumped in one of the chairs, with a sunhat tipped down over his forehead and his eyes closed. His briefcase was lying at his feet like an old brown dog.
‘Hi Jerry.’ Per sat down in front of him and placed the newspaper on his knee. ‘Read this.’
But Jerry wasn’t looking down at the paper, he was looking at something over Per’s shoulder.
Per turned and saw Nilla standing in the doorway. Her arms were dangling wearily by her sides, but she was smiling at Jerry. ‘Hi Granddad,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
Jerry just nodded. He raised a hand slowly in her direction, and cleared his throat. ‘Hi,’ he said.
Per was holding his breath. His first instinct was to protect his daughter from Jerry in some way, but that was hardly necessary.
‘Granddad doesn’t say much,’ he said to Nilla. ‘I’ll be in soon … we’ll have something to eat.’
Nilla nodded and went back inside.
Per leaned forward and pointed to the newspaper article. ‘Jerry, it seems as if Hans Bremer was in the house. He’s still missing, according to the police.’
His father was listening, but there was no reaction. ‘Bremer,’ was all he said. Then he pulled up his shirt to reveal the large plaster on his stomach.
Per didn’t need to look, he just shook his head. ‘Jerry, why would Bremer want to harm you?’
Jerry’s mouth worked as he struggled to find the word, and at last it came. ‘Frightened.’
Per nodded. He didn’t want to leave his father, but he was wondering if it was a good idea to take him over to the neighbours’ party.
20
Party time. Other people might have neighbourhood disputes, but the families around the quarry were going to have a neighbourhood party, thanks to Vendela Larsson. There was no need to thank her, but without her it wouldn’t be happening.
At six o’clock she was out on the veranda setting the long festive table with wine glasses and plates. Over in the west, above Kalmar Sound, the sun glowed in shades of red and gold, like a dying fire. In a couple of hours it would be gone. Vendela knew it would be a chilly evening on the veranda, and decided to bring out some thick blankets so that everybody could wrap up warm. And of course they could always turn on the halogen heating.
Max had emerged from his study at the end of his working day, wearing his dressing gown and heading for the sauna. He crossed the stone floor in the main living room quickly on his bare feet, but stopped in the doorway.
‘How did it go?’ she asked.
‘Pretty well,’ said Max. ‘I’ve almost finished the beginning … you can have a look at it soon.’
‘No problem,’ said Vendela, who had actually written the outline for the introduction and given it to him the previous evening.
‘And after that it’s mostly recipes and pictures,’ said Max. ‘I’m sure we can get it done.’
He was always more amenable when he’d been able to spend a few hours in peace at his desk, particularly when he could have a sauna afterwards.
‘Not too hot, Max,’ she shouted as he went into the sauna. ‘Think about your heart!’
Vendela had spent most of the day in the kitchen. There was an assortment of quiches warming in the oven, and the table was ready.
By half past six everything was done. Max was out of the sauna and dressed, and she had managed to get him to carry all the chairs out on to the veranda, and to light the lanterns and candles on the table. Then she had sent him off to fetch the old sea captain from across the road.
He came back after quarter of an hour with Gerlof Davidsson in a wheelchair. Gerlof was wearing a smoking jacket – the fabric was shiny, and it looked at least fifty years old. John Hagman was walking beside him, dressed in a black suit with brown protective patches on the elbows.
Max pushed the wheelchair along the path, but when Vendela opened the door, Gerlof got up slowly and walked in, his back straight. When he stood up he was almost a head taller than Max, Vendela noticed.
‘I can walk. Now and again,’ said Gerlof. Then he handed Vendela a small package. ‘For you – I made it myself this morning.’
‘Oh, thank you!’
Vendela opened the package and was struck by the acrid smell of tar. Inside was a piece of brown ropework, cleverly knotted to form a small mat.
‘It’s a Turk’s head knot,’ said Gerlof. ‘It will bring happiness and good fortune to your home.’
The smell of tar made Vendela feel slightly dizzy, almost as if she’d taken some kind of strong medication, but she smiled at Gerlof.
The other neighbours were quite punctual. The Kurdins, who were an attractive couple, arrived first, with their baby fast asleep in his pram. Christer smiled at Vendela and said they had a beautiful house; he seemed a little more friendly than his tall, ice-cold wife, who was wearing a dark-grey linen dress. Marie Kurdin merely nodded briefly at her hostess, then marched in with her chin in the air.
The Mörner family arrived five minutes later: Per, the father, with his teenage twins. Nilla was holding on to her brother Jesper’s arm. She was small and pale, and took very small steps. Vendela smiled, but she was concerned; was the girl anorexic?
When Per Mörner held out his hand to Max, Vendela saw her husband stiffen. They hadn’t met since the encounter in the car park on Friday. Neither of the men smiled.
‘OK?’ said Per.
‘Sure,’ said Max, quickly shaking hands with him and nodding at the son, to show that everything was fine.
The Mörners had a fourth person with them, someone Vendela hadn’t seen before: a stooping, elderly man with grey, slicked-back hair. He stumbled as he crossed the threshold, and Per Mörner quickly grabbed hold of him. Then he nodded to their hosts. ‘This is my father, Jerry Morner.’
Jerry’s tired eyes stared dully at Vendela’s body as he shook hands; he didn’t say a word, and didn’t really seem to be with them. Under the other arm he was clutching an old briefcase.
Then he shuffled straight through the hall and out on to the newly cleaned floor, without removing either his shoes or coat. Vendela bit her tongue and said nothing. She hurried into the kitchen to fetch the last of the quiches.
Max went over to the drinks table in front of the picture window and offered his guests whisky, dry Martini or fruit juice.
The conversation between hosts and guests slowly but surely got under way, mostly involving comparisons between the various houses. The men did most of the talking, particularly Max and Christer Kurdin, who were keen to compare their newly built houses. Both wanted to have the last word, and Vendela listened to their interweaving voices:
‘Well, yes, I can see you’ve gone for a lot of glass, but I think you’ll find our stone walls will be cooler in summer …’
‘A basement? Well, of course that increases your surface area …’
‘Formica has had its day, it’s well out
of date now …’
‘Harmonious proportions are important, not only the design …’
After ten or fifteen minutes Vendela brought out the last of the food, and Max encouraged all their guests to move out on to the veranda. In the west the sun was hovering just above the black line of the horizon, like a painting in red and yellow. The sea was dark blue and shining.
Max switched on the halogen heating and the metal tubes suspended around the veranda began to glow faintly. The cold evening air was soon almost as warm as in summer.
‘Is everyone here?’ he said, looking around.
‘I think so,’ said Vendela.
Max nodded, tapped his wine glass and raised his voice. ‘Sit down, everyone! Anywhere you like!’
The murmur of conversation died away, everyone made their way to the table and Max smiled at them.
Vendela could see that he had slipped into the role of party host, like a real entertainer. He loved the role; it was his confidence when he was the centre of attention that had made her fall for him, once upon a time.
‘Welcome, everyone.’ Max raised his glass and went on: ‘My dear wife and I have spent all day in the kitchen, and many of the recipes are taken from my new cookery book … so we hope you enjoy what we have to offer!’
21
Gerlof had decided to keep his distance from the new neighbours, but after a couple of glasses of whisky, it was actually rather pleasant on their big wooden veranda.
They had brought out a leather armchair and settled him at one end of the table like a patriarch. Vendela Larsson, their little hostess, had placed a blanket over his legs and he didn’t need to reach for anything – everyone kept passing him food and drink. He leaned back comfortably, sitting next to John on the oiled decking.
Two large glasses of whisky were actually one too many for him, and he hoped someone would offer to push him home in the wheelchair – and preferably not too late. It was already half past eight and the drink was starting to make him feel sleepy, but nobody seemed to be in any hurry to finish eating. They hadn’t even got to the pudding.
‘So, Gerlof … did you and John work with the stone down here?’ asked Per Mörner, nodding in the direction of the dark quarry.
‘Only in the summer when we were little,’ said Gerlof.
‘Before we went to sea,’ John added.
‘Were you quarrymen?’ asked Max Larsson.
Gerlof shook his head. ‘We weren’t strong enough.’
‘Really? Was it hard work, then?’
Gerlof didn’t say anything. He was wondering whether these families from the mainland realized that the quarry was an old workplace, or whether they saw it only as some kind of artistic creation, built up above the shore for their amusement, with charming piles of stones here and there and little pools of rainwater in which they could bathe.
He knew they would never understand the hard work that had been necessary in order to win the struggle against the rock face, hacking out the limestone day after day with nothing but chisels and hammers and crowbars. His friend Ernst had once said that during his forty years in the quarry he must have hacked out more than fifty thousand metres of kerbstones for flights of steps, roads and pavements in the towns all around the Baltic Sea.
And then there were the gravestones. There had always been a need for gravestones, of course, even when times were hard.
‘No, we never became quarrymen.’ Gerlof looked at John. ‘But we were good errand boys, do you remember that? We fetched tools and cleaned up the kelpie hut, and so on.’
‘The kelpie hut?’ said Per.
‘That’s what we called the place where the workers took their breaks.’
It struck Gerlof that he and John might well be the last people in the village who remembered that name. The quarrymen were gone, after all.
Gerlof took a sip of whisky and went on: ‘In the old days people believed that the trolls lived down in the quarry, but I came across quite a different creature when I was little …’
He saw John’s shoulders slump; he had heard this story many times before. But he carried on anyway.
‘When I was eight or nine I found a crane down here, one evening when all the workers had gone home. It was a youngster, lying on the gravel. I don’t know where it came from, but it was too small to fly, and there was no sign of its parents. Perhaps the fox had got them … So I carried it home to our outhouse and laid it down on some hay, and started feeding it with old potatoes. And when it was big enough I let it out – but it refused to fly away. It had grown attached to me.’ Gerlof smiled to himself. ‘It followed me around all summer, like a two-legged dog. And if I got tired of it and tried to sneak off, it flew up in the air and circled around over the village until it found me again. So I had a pet crane for a whole summer, until the autumn came and it flew south with the others.’
Everybody around the table smiled at the story.
‘And when you went to sea,’ said Per, ‘was that a full-time job?’
‘No, because in the winter the cargo ships froze in the sea down in the harbour, so we couldn’t work then,’ said Gerlof. ‘We came ashore in December and took it easy for a few months, when the sea was covered in ice. We would carry out repairs to our ships, check the engine and mend the sails. For the rest of the time we sat waiting for the spring with the other skippers.’ He looked over at the empty quarry. ‘But of course they carried on quarrying the limestone all through the winter, piling it up down by the harbour. Thousands of tons. Then in the spring the sun came and melted the ice out in the sound, and it was time to go to sea again.’
‘Out at sea in the spring breeze,’ said Marie Kurdin. ‘That must have been a fantastic feeling.’
Gerlof shook his head. ‘It wasn’t quite that romantic.’
‘Were there many accidents?’ said Per. ‘Ships running aground, that sort of thing?’
‘Not for us,’ replied John. ‘We never ran aground.’
‘No, not in thirty years,’ said Gerlof. ‘One of our cargo ships sank in a fire, but we never ran aground … But it was hard work being at sea, hard and lonely. I tried to take my wife and daughters along sometimes in the summer holidays, but most of the time John and I were alone on board, day after day. The family had to stay at home.’
He glanced sideways in the direction of the quarry, and thought about his late wife. Obviously he didn’t believe in trolls. But who was the visitor Ella had seen when he was away at sea?
22
Vendela had drunk a couple of glasses of wine, and was at last beginning to relax at her own party, when she suddenly heard a loud voice from the other side of the table. It was probably also under the influence of quite a lot of wine, and sounded particularly sure of itself.
‘No, I don’t pay tax in Sweden,’ said Max. ‘My company isn’t registered here, it would be too expensive … Besides, I don’t believe in the Swedish tax system. All it does is oppress people.’
Max smiled across the table, but Vendela felt compelled to smooth over the situation. ‘Of course you pay tax here, Max.’
He looked at her and stopped smiling. ‘When I have to, yes. But as little as possible.’
Then he raised his glass, as if everyone around the table was a member of the same financial club, until an equally loud voice chipped in: ‘I’m quite happy to pay tax.’
It was Christer Kurdin.
‘Really?’ said Max. ‘And how do you earn your money?’
‘Internet security,’ said Kurdin tersely.
He had also drunk a fair amount of wine; there was an almost empty bottle of white Bordeaux next to his plate, and he was having some difficulty focusing as he looked at Max.
‘I’m sick and tired of people like you,’ he went on.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Max.
‘People like you who try to get out of paying your taxes … I’m sick and tired of all the fiddling.’
Max lowered his glass. ‘I don’t fidd—’
‘I m
ean, you drive on the roads in Sweden,’ Christer Kurdin broke in.
‘What?’
‘I presume you drove across the Öland Bridge to get here?’
Max frowned. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Well, our taxes paid for the bridge,’ said Christer. ‘And the roads. And everything else we all use. Schools. Hospitals. Pensions …’
‘Pensions?’ said Max. ‘As far as I’m concerned, pensions are just a joke in this country. And health care.’
‘Health care is no joke,’ said a voice further down the table. ‘Those who work in the health service do a fantastic job.’
Vendela saw that it was Per Mörner.
‘Exactly, we get a good service for our money,’ said Christer. He looked at Max and went on: ‘Anyway, if everything’s so terrible in Sweden, why stay here?’
Max stared in silence at his neighbour, as if he were trying to work out exactly what kind of people he’d ended up with here on the island. ‘The summer makes it worth staying,’ he said, emptying his glass.
‘More wine, anyone?’ said Vendela.
Nobody answered, nobody seemed to have heard her, so she drank a little more and listened to the hum of conversation. If she closed her eyes it could almost be music, a series of soloists singing around the table.
For a moment she thought she caught a strange smell coming off the alvar, a burnt smell like rubber or sulphur, but it was probably just her imagination. It was dark out there now. It was dark everywhere. Only their veranda was lit up.
Sitting above the quarry this evening was like sitting by the edge of a pitch-black crater. A slumbering volcano.
Suddenly she heard a loud male voice from across the table. ‘Do any of you newcomers know northern Öland? Anyone lived here before?’
It was their young neighbour again. Christer Kurdin was holding his wine glass and looking up and down the table, as if he didn’t mean any harm with his question. Of course he didn’t mean any harm, he just looked curious.
‘Vendela comes from this area,’ Max said tersely.
The Quarry Page 12
