‘But I’ve just had one,’ he protested, sounding like Ivar. He was told to have another one and meekly followed Gerald upstairs. ‘You,’ she said in English, turning to me. ‘You shall take the child outside to play so that he does not run between our feet all day.’
‘But it’s raining,’ I protested, sounding as pathetic as Bertil.
Fru Sparre had learnt the first lesson in world domination well: reduce your subjects to the status of children. ‘There are rain clothes,’ she said and disappeared into the kitchen.
I looked mournfully after her. ‘Come on then, Ivar, we’d better go.’
I had just donned a long blue oilskin coat and a bright-yellow sou’wester when there was a knock on the door and Pernilla stepped in, pulling back the hood of her red raincoat. ‘I’ve come to help,’ she announced, bending forward and shaking out her hair. I looked around for Fru Sparre; she’d soon sort her out. And there she was, coming out of the kitchen herding Kerstin and Olivia off towards the dining-room ahead of her. She stopped as she spotted Pernilla and her face softened.
‘Hello Sparrhök.’ Pernilla grinned, tossing her head and flipping her hair back over her shoulders.
I looked at her admiringly. She dared to call the Higher Being by a nickname even if it was a butch one like Sparrowhawk. To my amazement, Fru Sparre smiled. ‘How are your parents, my dear? Professor Lindholm’s back still playing up?’
I shook my head sadly. How could I hope to compete with a woman who made even Fru Sparre smile. I grabbed Ivar’s hand and walked out into the rain.
Wiping the water from my eyes and removing my mascara at the same time, I looked at Ivar. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Canals,’ Ivar said. Dressed from head to foot in tartan oilskins he was already on his way to the shed. He emerged from there carrying two small buckets and two plastic spades, one blue and one red.
‘Canals?’ I repeated.
‘You dig them and make all the water run down them and then you make dams and all sorts of things. It’s really good fun.’ He tramped off towards the gate.
‘Can’t we stay in the garden?’ I asked him.
‘You like staying in the garden, don’t you? You don’t like going out much?’ Nothing escaped that child, I thought. ‘Ulla said you were an agorogo… agorof… someone who doesn’t like to go out.’
‘Agoraphobic,’ I interjected. ‘And I’m not. Let’s go.’
‘You see, if I dig canals in the garden I could get into trouble. I might be sent to bed before The Flintstones.’ He opened the gate. ‘Or I might not get my Saturday sweets…’ He shrugged his little shoulders, the palms of his hands raised to the sky. ‘Anything could happen.’ He gave me one of the buckets and the blue spade. ‘So you don’t have this phobia thing?’
‘A phobia is being scared of something there’s no need to be scared of. It’s called an irrational fear.’ Ivar looked at me blankly so I tried it again in Swedish. This seemed to confuse him further, so I just told him, ‘I’m not scared of going outside, I simply prefer not to sometimes.’
‘That’s good,’ Ivar said. ‘My mummy says scared women are a bad example. That’s why I have to be extra brave,’ he added with his own logic.
‘What about scared men?’
Ivar stopped and thought for a moment. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I expect they’re allowed.’ The rain flooded the brim of my sou’wester, dripping down the back of my neck and down my face over the tip of my nose. The street and the harbour below were deserted other than for a solitary Snipa boat, its captain invisible beneath the bright blue awning. A little ghost vessel out to fish. I followed behind Ivar, past the small yellow-painted school and the long, low, red vicarage, down Church Street and up Smugglers’ Alley, past the old burial ground and up to the small road that ran along the cliff-edge at the eastern side of the island. ‘Are you allowed to go this far?’ I asked him.
‘If I’m with you, I am,’ he said, slipping his small rain-washed hand into mine. The simple gesture of trust in me, of confidence in my superior status as an adult, made me walk taller in spite of the pouring rain. A few yards further along the road Ivar freed his hand and stopped, looking around him before squatting down in the middle of the road. ‘Here’s a good place to start,’ he said, jabbing at the wet dirt with his little plastic spade. I watched him as he dug and scraped, huffing and puffing with the effort.
‘But Ivar, if you dig these trenches in the road someone could come along and trip up and hurt themselves.’
Ivar squatted back on his heels and looked up at me through the rain. ‘They won’t if they look where they’re going.’
‘But sometimes people don’t. What then?’
‘Then they’ll have to be brave and pick themselves up again. Anyway, Mummy says you should always look where you’re going.’
I crouched down next to him. ‘And what about your father, what does he say?’
‘He says things like “Where people live affects them more than anything and yet no one is prepared to spend any money”,’ Ivar parroted, word perfect and without looking up from his work. I scraped at the sandy road surface with my blue spade. Ivar worked his way down the hill. After a while he looked up. ‘You’re not digging very hard.’
I looked at the five feet or so of water-filled trenches running down the street. ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Maybe I’m not suited to this kind of work?’
‘Daddy also says that all work is hard and boring at times, but that if you want to get to the good bits you have to do the bad bits first.’
‘So what’re going to be the good bits?’ I asked, looking up at the dark-grey sky.
Ivar put out his little hands, palms raised. ‘Opening the dams, silly.’
My hair was plastered across my cheeks and I could have sworn my gumboots were leaking. Knees creaking, I got to my feet. ‘I don’t care what Fru Sparre says, I’m going home. Are you coming?’
‘We haven’t finished yet. You should always finish what you’ve started.’
I sighed and joined him. ‘Where do you want it, this dam?’
‘There,’ Ivar stabbed at a pot already filling with water. ‘I’m going to make it’ – he paused and looked at me with eyes just like his father’s – ‘huge!’
We dug in silence for what seemed like a very long time. ‘We’ve only done it for ten minutes,’ Ivar said soothingly when he found me looking at my watch yet again. ‘And anyway, Fru Sparre wouldn’t like it if you brought me back already.’
‘I thought this place was so safe children were allowed out on their own.’
Ivar straightened his back and looked at me primly. ‘You mustn’t forget that I’m not even seven,’ he said. ‘I might fall into the sea.’
‘Why should you fall into the sea? People don’t just walk along and fall into the sea.’
‘They do. They do here,’ Ivar said.
There was nothing for it but to carry on digging. Soon there was a sizeable puddle before us; Ivar’s dam. And at last he seemed satisfied. ‘All done?’ I got to my feet, my knees creaking.
‘We haven’t done the canal from the dam, silly.’ Ivar laughed heartily at my folly. ‘That’s the most important thing.’ As I knelt down once more, spade in hand, I decided I must be very fond indeed of that little boy. I’d like to see anyone else trying to make me spend my day crouching in mud, with rain cascading down my face and neck, and a small plastic spade in my hand.
‘Ready!’ Ivar shouted triumphantly a few feet down from the dam.
‘Open the slush gate.’ I removed the stone and mud from the side of the puddle. The water gushed out and down the dug trench as Ivar jumped up and down, clapping his hands in excitement.
We were almost home when we caught up with Pernilla and Linus. ‘Whatever have you been doing, Esther?’ She stood before me, immaculate even in the pouring rain, her white Capri pants still miraculously white, her face unsmudged and tanned under the baseball cap pulled down across her forehead. Linus had picked up Ivar, wh
o was busy explaining the wonders of his canals, and was carrying him the last bit up the hill to the house. ‘I tell you.’ Pernilla lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘Chanel’s waterproof mascara is incredible. I don’t know how I’d get through the summer without it.’
I said I could see it would be a tough call, but inwardly I felt small. A messy appearance hid a messy mind and I couldn’t abide mess.
‘I’m glad to see you out of the house and garden,’ Pernilla continued as we walked back together. ‘I was beginning to think you were at risk of becoming agoraphobic.’ She was speaking in her careful Swedish-American English. ‘That’s when you fear open spaces,’ she explained helpfully.
‘Agoraphobic schmobic.’ I sniffed. ‘Of course I’m not. In fact, I don’t know what you’re all talking about. I’ve already explained to Ivar. It’s nothing strange, I’m just a stay-at-home kind of girl at heart, that’s all.’
‘I think you’re having a problem facing up to this one,’ Pernilla singsonged. ‘Ulla told me your mother has spent the last couple of years in bed although she’s physically perfectly healthy, or at least, she was until her fall. Do you think her behaviour has something to do with all of this? I mean, behavioural patterns can be repeated down the generations.’ Pernilla was looking earnestly at me as if behind the carefree glamorous exterior there was a psychotherapist waiting to get out, which, come to think of it, there was. She had told me only the other day that she was planning to do a course in Jungian therapy.
I tried my best not to get irritated. ‘You don’t say?’ We had reached the back door and we slopped inside, dripping water on the pale-blue linoleum. ‘Anyway, my mother has never been saner,’ I said firmly as I divested myself of my oilskins. It didn’t mean much, of course, but there was no need for Pernilla to know that.
Linus burst through the door with a laughing, shrieking Ivar in his arms. He pretended to put Ivar down head first before turning him back the right way up and placing him gently on the floor. I decided that if he said ‘What are you two girls gossiping about?’ I would forget any tender disconcerting feelings I had developed for him and that love would evaporate into the thin air of illusion. It was a test, that was what it was.
‘So.’ He stopped in front of me, his grey eyes bright and his hair dark from the rain and curling wildly round his head. ‘What are you two girls gossiping about?’
My mouth, which was preparing to stay clamped shut and frosty, began to quiver and slowly and against my will, I’m absolutely sure it was against my will, it spread into a wide smile. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I simpered.
I was horrified. Was this love? After all this time wondering and searching, was this it? Was love acting against your nature and your better judgement? Was it closing your ears to the voice of reason? Was love something that turned you into the kind of woman you would throw a bucket of cold water over had she been someone else?
Fru Sparre appeared and with a withering glance in my direction (had she heard or did she just despise me anyway?) she gathered up our wet clothes in her arms. ‘So you’re back already,’ she said to me. ‘With Ivar.’ She turned to Linus. ‘You’ve got the wine?’
‘I’m collecting it at four.’
‘Miss Fisher, you might like to dust the books in the dining-room. They’re very nasty.’
‘Nasty?’
‘Dirt, dust.’
‘Oh, right. I’ll see to it.’ I slunk off to find a duster.
These were holiday bookcases. The books on the shelves were that kind of mix: rows of old detective stories by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Carter Dickson, much read, tattered and smelling softly of mould and dust, the pages stained with dark-yellow spots. There were bound copies of Swedish classics. ‘August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlöf, Vilhelm Moberg, Harry Martinson,’ I read the names of the authors out loud as I turned the books in my hand, dusting them with the brown feather duster that I had found in the scullery cupboard. There was a whole row of P. G. Wodehouse, all in English, and suddenly, tall and snooty in its pale-blue-and-gold binding, a volume of Crime and Punishment in Swedish. I found some children’s books, mostly Just William stories and an ancient copy of The House at Pooh Corner.
Time passed because I was slow about my work, reading a page here and a page there, at random, even wrapping my tongue round the unfamiliar syllables of the Swedish books. I think I understood that in Hemsöborna by August Strindberg a man arrived like a whirlwind, and that in a novel by Selma Lagerlöf a boy called Nils rode on the back of a goose. Then I heard Fru Sparre’s commanding voice come closer and I speeded up my dusting.
I had to go twice to the window to shake the duster, and the damp air made the dust fall heavy to the ground instead of rising on the air in a powder-puff explosion.
I continued my work. I had started on a row of old volumes of Reader’s Digest when I found a little parcel tucked in behind, right at the back of the shelf. Inside the layers of paper was a small book bound in red leather, its spine and cover bare of any inscription. I swept the feathers of my duster over its front and back, then opened it to blow across the top of its pages. They were handwritten and I opened the book fully. It was a diary of some sort, had to be, with the dates filled in at the top of each new page. The writing was large and round, and the ink was always blue. The first entry was from the thirtieth of May nineteen sixty-five. Bertil was mentioned and as I flicked through the pages I saw Linus’s name too, and Ulla and Gerald, even Fru Sparre. I made a mental note to look more closely at the diary later, before wrapping it up again and putting it back where I’d found it. Last I dusted the photographs – there were four of them, in carved wooden frames. A couple of them were of people I had never seen, but there was one of Olivia, a younger, lighter Olivia, her arm tucked under Bertil’s, her face turned upwards towards his. They were smiling. Another showed Ivar as a plump baby held in his father’s arms and with a blonde young woman, wholesome-looking, pretty in a pointy-featured kind of way, standing next to them. Lotten, I assumed. Linus preferred blondes. You would have thought he’d have learnt his lesson first time around and that now he’d be happy to settle for a nice dark-haired witch, but oh no, he had to go running after Pernilla.
It was raining still. Linus must have gone out again because I bumped into him in the hallway and he was soaking once more, water dripping from the sleeves of his grey-green fisherman’s jersey. I was about to say you’re wet, when I decided not to. He probably knew already. It made me think just how much time we spend stating the obvious to each other: ‘You must be tired,’ we say to the friend who’s just flown in from Australia. ‘Did that hurt?’ we ask solicitously of someone who’s just walked into a low beam. Or ‘That looks heavy’ to the man who, legs buckling, is passing with a load of packing cases in his arms.
‘I’m a bit wet.’ Linus smiled apologetically.
Then again, stating the obvious was a pretty good way of opening a conversation, I decided quickly. I smiled back at him. ‘You are, aren’t you, poor thing.’ My voice sounded like someone else’s, someone fluffy and cute and dimpled. Who was this woman? Love was a disease and as it progressed it changed me, distorted me. Soon I would wake up and be a different person entirely. It was the speed with which love struck that surprised me, the invasiveness of it. There I’d been, much the same as always, and there I was now, covered in attraction, ridden with the aches and pains of love. How had it happened? Why? And at my age.
‘I’d better get out of these wet clothes,’ Linus said. ‘Before Fru Sparre gets me.’ He squelched off.
On my way from seeing Audrey, a smaller, fainter Audrey whose voice had been reduced to a soft whine and whose plump prune cheeks sagged, I stumbled over Ivar. He was lying flat on his stomach on the floor outside the kitchen, scribbling in a notebook. ‘I’m going to be a journalist when I grow up. Just like Lois Lane.’
‘I’m a journalist,’ I said. ‘But not quite like Lois Lane, not lately, anyway. More like…’ I thought for a moment
‘… Enid Blyton.’
‘I didn’t know Enid Blyton was a journalist.’ Olivia stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her large hands on her red apron.
‘Who was a journalist?’ Ulla had had a nap and now she joined us ready for battle.
‘Enid Blyton,’ Olivia said.
‘Enid Blyton was an author of children’s books.’ Ulla sniffed. ‘Surely you know that.’
‘I didn’t mean that Enid Blyton was…’
‘I cannot understand how anyone can have failed to have heard of Enid Blyton’s children’s novels,’ Ulla nagged. ‘Famous Five, Secret Seven…’
I escaped back to the cottage. It was time to get ready for the party anyway. Going through my drawers and the white-painted wardrobe I wished, maybe for the first time in my life, that I were more like my mother. Audrey was a woman who thought travelling light was an equation by Einstein. She would have brought just the right outfit for an evening like tonight, an evening spent in a wooden house on an island in the company of the man you loved and the woman he loved. As it was, I had a pair of black cotton trousers and one grey and one black cardigan. I also had my Posy-type dress, and of course some jeans and shorts. I rooted round the shelves and drawers. Surely I had packed something else. Oh yes, a tweed jacket. Why? I chucked it to one side. Then I picked it up and hung it back in the wardrobe. I was fond of that jacket. And it had been very expensive when I bought it five years ago. I looked at my watch. It was almost six. The shops were open until at least seven. The party started at six thirty so if I hurried, I could make it. I rushed out into the rain, down the hill and on to the promenade. There were several shops selling clothes along the harbour front and, blinded by the rain, I dived inside the first. Summer clothes, sorbet clothes, I touched the sleeve of a tomato-red man’s sports jacket. The minutes ticked by as I moved around the shop. There was nothing here for me. The next place was no better, full of hearty shorts and those brightly patterned polo shirts the Swedes seemed so fond of. At last, in the third shop I found the dress I wanted. Actually it was a frock: white with large cornflower-blue flowers strewn across it, tight-bodiced and wide-skirted. I found the right size and held the dress up in front of me in the mirror, there was no time for trying anything on. It looked as if it would fit and the colours suited me. I paid and hurried from the shop, the bag in my hand. I was pleased with myself. I had bought a frock and in no time at all. I had, in fact, been decisive. I clutched the carrier to my chest. Linus had never seen me in a pretty dress.
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