The Summer House

by Philip Teir

  Philip Teir is a Finland-Swedish writer considered one of the most talented young novelists in Scandinavia. His poetry and short stories have been featured in anthologies including Granta Finland. His first novel The Winter War was a WHSmith ‘Fresh Talent’ pick. He lives in Helsinki, Finland.

  The

  SUMMER HOUSE

  PHILIP TEIR

  Translated from the Swedish

  by Tiina Nunnally

  A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the

  British Library on request.

  The right of Philip Teir to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2018 Philip Teir

  Translation copyright © 2018 Tiina Nunnally

  This work has been published with the financial assistance of

  FILI (Finnish Literature Exchange)

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First published in Swedish as Så här upphör världen by Schildts & Söderströms and Natur och Kultur, 2017.

  Published by arrangement with Partners in Stories Stockholm AB, Sweden

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London WC1X 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  eISBN 978 1 78283 392 5

  THE BOY AND HIS MOTHER retreat to the car when the storm comes in. It’s August. A green Toyota near the Finnish coast, parked on a hill in the woods. It’s raining. The water makes furrows in the mud surrounding the car and runs down into the woods and the blueberry bushes.

  The boy is thinking that his mother is making too much of things, that they’re hiding out here because she likes adventures. They could just as well have stayed indoors to wait out the thunderstorm.

  ‘The tyres don’t conduct electricity,’ says his mother. ‘The safest place to be is inside a car. The tyres are made of rubber, you know. We’ll sit right here until the sun comes out. It won’t be long,’ she says, even though he can see that the cloud cover is thick and grey. Impossible to see through.

  He asks if they could listen to the radio. His mother hesitates, explaining that it might lead the thunder to the car, that it might entice the lightning to strike them. Then she switches on the radio.

  ‘This is the safest place to be,’ she tells him again.

  She thinks he’s scared of the thunder, but it doesn’t really bother him. The lightning doesn’t bother him either, or the rain out there, for that matter. All that water rushing around the car and through the mud.

  He’s thinking about something else. About what happened when she was talking on the phone earlier in the kitchen. A shift occurred. He could hear it in her voice, in the way she answered. He could tell she was lying. He could hear it in her tone of voice, and it was as if he saw his mother in a new way. He knew that from now on, everything would be different. He didn’t know how, only that things would not be the same. Something was going to change in their life, and change would make matters worse.

  He’d been sitting behind her at the kitchen table while she cooked, watching as she intermittently picked up the mobile to check for something. He looked at her back, which was turned to him as she stood there in the kitchen and stared at the phone. Suddenly he could see it so clearly – the fact that she was her own person and not just his mother. In the way she moved he could see the person she had once been, her life before he was here. When she turned to him and smiled, he could see that she was worried, and he thought about all the things she might be worried about that had nothing to do with him.

  But now the radio is on, and music is playing. She seems to be listening to the music. He looks at her and feels happy, so he listens too. Outside the rain is falling, but inside the car a moment still exists when everything is the way it used to be.

  She leans forward to turn up the volume so the music drowns out the rain. And now the thunder returns: a dull rumbling somewhere beyond the chimney, up on the slope, away from the woods. It sounds as if someone is walking up there with a wheelbarrow full of rocks. That was what his maternal grandfather used to say jokingly: God is pushing a wheelbarrow full of rocks. And about the rain, he’d say: God is taking a piss.

  He doesn’t know how long they sit there, but he counts at least ten seconds between the lightning and the thunder.

  Gradually the thunder fades, moving away towards the sea. His mother opens the door to go back inside the house, but the boy wants to stay in the car for a while by himself.

  He turns off the radio and listens. Now all he hears is the sea a short distance away, a steady roaring sound. He opens the car door and gets out to walk down to the road, where he begins making big grooves in the soft sand. He makes channels for the water, which runs towards the ditch. He breaks off a piece of bark and lets it sail away.

  He kneels down in the mud, feeling the wet sand between his hands and on his toes as the rain runs down his forehead.

  That’s when he sees the woman. Her feet are muddy, she has no clothes on. She walks stiffly along the road, moving past as if she doesn’t see him.

  Contents

  Part One: The Family

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two: The Others

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three: Nature

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  part one

  the family

  1

  JULIA WOULD TURN THIRTY-SIX in the autumn, yet she had never truly managed to escape her mother’s voice. Even when Julia hadn’t spoken to Susanne in a long time, her voice was still present, issuing at a high frequency and from up above – since her mother was a tall woman – and she always seemed to be in the middle of an opinion, in the middle of a statement.

  ‘A person certainly doesn’t have to shower me with praise for me to like her.’

  ‘I’ve subscribed to that women’s magazine for twenty years, and it’s full of useless information, but I plan to continue reading it to the bitter end.’

  ‘Have you put on weight? That’s not meant as a criticism; your weight has always fluctuated a bit.’

  Even now, as Julia sat in the tram on her way home from work, she could hear her mother talking in the back of her mind, rather like a verbal form of tinnitus, a constantly churning opinion machine. She could hear Susanne saying that she ought to write every day; that she needed to think up activities for the children (Susanne’s repeated refrain was that Julia’s kids seemed lethargic and didn’t get out enough); that she needed to think about her career, the mortgage, her weight; but above all she ought to devote herself to Susanne, since
Julia’s mother considered herself to be the natural centre of the family.

  Julia got off the tram, feeling as if she wanted to give her whole body a shake, the way a wet dog does when it comes inside. She tried to remind herself that her summer holiday was starting today, and she had all sorts of things to think about other than her mother.

  She opened the door to the flat to find that no one was home. For a second she wondered if they’d left without her. Erik had said he would fetch the children at eleven, but she hadn’t been able to get hold of him all day. The car should be already packed, and they should be on their way soon if they were going to get there by evening.

  Julia wanted to air out the summer house and change all the bed linen before bedtime. She wondered whether they should give everything a good dusting as well, since no one had been out to Mjölkviken in a long time. Presumably she’d also have to scrub the refrigerator before they could fill it with food.

  She rang Oona, who had been helping out with the children during the summertime weeks while she was working.

  ‘No, Erik hasn’t phoned. Should I send the kids home?’ asked Oona. Julia could hear the sound of a piano in the background. It was probably Alice playing.

  Oona, who was in her sixties, was from Estonia. She had moved to Finland long ago because of a man and now she lived alone. She had become a constant part of their lives, mostly by chance, because Alice had taken piano lessons from her, and Anton had occasionally gone to Oona’s flat with his sister.

  ‘Yes, do that,’ said Julia. ‘We have to leave soon.’

  ‘Will you be away all summer?’ asked Oona.

  ‘We won’t be home until early August.’

  It struck Julia that she should have taken Oona a present. That was the custom when summer arrived. A tin of biscuits, a flower bouquet, or maybe several pretty ceramic cups made by Arabia. But Julia had never been the type to organise a collection for gifts for the children’s teachers. She had always left that task to other parents. How was she supposed to know about such customs, let alone keep track of them?

  She ended the call and tried to ring Erik. He didn’t pick up, so she sat down on the sofa to wait.

  Anton was the first to come in the door. He’d gained weight during the spring. It was as if his ten-year-old body was preparing for a growth spurt. The doctors had said he’d be even taller than his father, which was something he loved repeating to his friends. Anton didn’t know that Julia sometimes eavesdropped when he invited friends home, but she did. She would listen to the ten-year-old boys trying to impress each other with all the things they thought they knew about the world.

  ‘Have you heard anything from your father?’ she asked.

  ‘He phoned,’ said Anton. ‘He said he’d be home later.’

  ‘So what did you do today?’

  Anton shrugged. ‘We played Monopoly. But Oona never dares take any risks, so I won both games,’ he said.

  ‘What did Alice do?’

  His sister had now come into the front hall and tossed her jacket on the floor.

  ‘She played piano and was really annoying,’ said Anton.

  Alice came into the living room without saying anything. She merely sat down on the sofa next to Julia, holding her mobile phone in her hand.

  ‘Would you like to help me pack the car?’ asked Julia.

  ‘Do we have to?’ said Anton.

  She went out and drove the car up to the front entrance. The kids reluctantly helped carry the suitcases out, and the boot was soon filled.

  When they were finished, Alice and Anton sat down on the sofa, keeping their shoes on, as if ready to leave at any moment. They asked their mother where Pappa was, and Julia told them he was still at work. It was the best answer she could come up with.

  She asked the kids whether they were hungry.

  ‘I’m not hungry. I want to get going,’ said Anton. ‘Why isn’t Pappa home? I hate waiting.’

  Anton threw himself sideways on the sofa, bumping into his big sister.

  ‘Hey!’ said Alice. ‘Mamma, I can’t stand listening to him whine. Anton, could you please shut up?’

  Anton slugged her on the shoulder.

  ‘Why’d you do that? Mamma, did you see what he did?’

  Julia sighed.

  ‘You’re such an idiot,’ said Anton, making a point of covering his face with his hands as he fell back against the sofa cushions.

  Julia proceeded to clean the flat, trying to block out the sound of the children so as not to get annoyed. She scrubbed the bathtub, made the beds, and threw out all the food left in the fridge.

  As she walked through the hall, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and was surprised to realise she looked good in a rather stern sort of way. So this was how a single mother looked, this was how she would look from now on, when they became a family of three. She went into the living room and sat down next to the kids, immersing herself even more in her fantasy.

  ‘Want to show me what you’re looking at?’ she said to Alice.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  Julia leaned forward and looked. Alice was making a photo collage on her phone. There were three selfies, which she was turning into weird faces by swiping her finger under the eyes so the only thing visible was the whites of the eyes.

  ‘Is that what you’re all doing now?’ asked Julia.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Alice, shrugging.

  ‘Why don’t we take a selfie of the three of us?’ Julia suggested.

  ‘Mamma,’ said Alice.

  ‘Let me do it,’ said Anton.

  Erik came home at two, stressed and talkative, as if trying to avoid the fact that he was late. ‘My mobile ran out of juice, and we had a meeting that went longer than expected. But I rang Oona to let her know. I wasn’t sure when you’d get off work today.’

  Julia sighed.

  ‘I don’t want to fight about this. I’ve packed up the car and cleaned the whole flat. I emptied the dishwasher and the fridge, and now I’m totally sweaty.’

  ‘Does it really matter whether the place is clean when we get back?’ he asked.

  She was always struck by how real Erik was when he was at home, as if there were two Eriks: one she could be cross with in her fantasies, and a real Erik, who talked to her and had opinions that required her attention.

  ‘Well, I suppose not, but we need to leave now if we’re going to get there by evening,’ she said.

  ‘It stays light almost all night. It won’t matter whether we get there at seven or nine,’ he said, kissing her on the forehead. She accepted his touch with the sense of relief that comes from familiarity, a comfortable place where everything seems logical and simple because that’s how it has always been. She pushed aside the ambivalent feeling of alarm and tension that still lingered inside her, a feeling that appeared whenever she wasn’t able to get hold of Erik or she didn’t know where the children were, a feeling she couldn’t control because her thoughts were always going where they shouldn’t. It was rather like dreaming in an awakened state; her brain was doing the work it really should be doing as she slept, processing the day, preparing for disasters.

  They turned off the lights in the flat, unplugged the refrigerator, and checked one last time that nothing was switched on. Then they left. Anton jostled Alice as they went down the stairs.

  Erik got into the driver’s seat. He pulled out onto Manneheimvägen. The kids sat in the back, each with a laptop so they could watch films. Alice had been given some money to go to the shop to buy sweets and croissants for herself and her brother. Now she had them carefully lined up on the suitcase that lay on the seat between them. She would turn thirteen this summer and would soon enter secondary school. Then she would dress all in black and listen to music nonstop. Julia sometimes had trouble seeing herself in Alice, maybe because she’d grown up in a small town with mopeds and girls who used hairspray and secretly smoked behind the school building. An environment in which no one made particularly high d
emands of life, their plans often reaching only as far as the next weekend. Alice took everything much more seriously – school, her feelings, her style of dressing. It seems so much harder to be a child in this age of the internet, thought Julia, when everything has to be constantly documented and displayed.

  The drive to Jakobstad used to take six hours, including time for breaks – they always stopped at the same place in Jalasjärvi – so Julia figured they should arrive around nine o’clock.

  They had never stayed at the summer house before. It had stood virtually empty for the past fifteen years, up in the woods. It was a big, dark, timbered house situated a couple of hundred metres from the shore. Erik was the one who had finally persuaded her that they should spend the entire summer there, in spite of her objections. He had argued that the children had never had a proper holiday out in nature. Until now they’d always chosen to spend their summers in Helsinki or Stockholm, with only brief visits to Jakobstad.

  ‘They need to get away from all these screens,’ he’d said, and Julia had found it hard to argue with that.

  The house was next to a small lake, or tarn, and was certainly big enough for their family. The ground floor had a living room, kitchen and bedroom. The kids would sleep upstairs in the attic. Julia’s maternal grandfather had bought the place in the seventies when summer houses on the bay were still cheap and the Mjölkviken area was undergoing development, with newly built tennis courts and one-storey villas with big picture windows facing out to sea. It was a time when factory executives and middle-class families from the Ostrobothnian area of western Finland suddenly wanted to live as if they were on the Riviera.

  Julia had written about the summer house in her first novel, titled Mjölkviken, which had been published five years before. It was the story of a young girl’s summer days, largely based on her own childhood. The book had received fine reviews, considering it was a first novel. It had been quickly translated into five languages, and was nominated for the prestigious Runeberg Prize. Yet she had never spent any time in Mjölkviken as an adult. She’d made only one trip there in the winter-time, taking the children along to show them the house and the sea.