Gotland

by Fiona Capp

  It was a bad hour for thinking about anything but I couldn’t stop. I kept seeing Cassie’s face, all sympathetic, wide-eyed smiles. I should’ve told her to spit it out, to say what she really meant. Or told her that it was none of her business, that she had no right to presume. By nodding politely and saying nothing, I’d only confirmed her suspicions and no doubt her conviction that she’d done the right thing. Cassie the dutiful school captain had always done the right thing.

  The right thing. It made me want to scream. If only I knew what it was. The right thing for Kate, for David, for myself. The right thing for Sven. Did it even exist? Perhaps it did and I was unable to see it. That night on the moat when David asked me to marry him, he had promised absolute freedom. And he had meant it. Even though we both knew there was no such thing.

  After the restaurant, Sven and I had come back to his place for a drink and I’d crashed on the spare bed but now I couldn’t sleep. How, I wondered, could it be that deeply private events became everyone’s business? That they could take on a life of their own, sent down computer wires and through social networks until no amount of denial was enough. The more I thought about it, the more impossible any action seemed. What was it David had said once? No sacrifice to the god of politics was ever enough. Or perhaps it was ‘gods’. I could imagine a whole press gallery of them, insatiable, gnashing their teeth, and gnawing on the bones of those foolish enough to have thought they had what it took.

  David had always been the one who took the risks, and I’d been happy for it to be that way: to be the quiet one in the background while he did what he had to do. All I asked in return was the freedom to stay in the background. The freedom!

  Suddenly I heard a click. Opening the study door, I peered into the darkness of the living room. A light had gone on under Sven’s door. I waited and listened. When there was no more movement, I felt my way forward, navigating around a large armchair and a coffee table. In the centre of the living room I stopped and stared at the light under his door. I wondered if he was waiting for me. No, he would be thinking of Maeve. Holding this thought in my mind, I turned towards the hallway where the path was clear. I was almost out of the room when my knee knocked something sharp and I let out an involuntary cry.

  His door opened. ‘Esther!’ He appeared in the lighted space, tying his robe. ‘Are you all right?’

  I pulled my baggy cardigan across my chest, aware that my legs were bare. I told him I couldn’t sleep and hoped that I hadn’t woken him.

  He said he’d been awake for hours. He noticed that I was shivering. ‘I could build a fire, if you like. We could watch a movie.’

  I looked at him, his eyes puffy, his face crumpled and unguarded. Nakedly hopeful. I didn’t feel like a film but I didn’t want to go back to my cold, empty bed either. I offered to make hot chocolate while he prepared the fire. Downstairs in the kitchen, the sight of the floodlit cathedral made me wonder what it was like here in winter and whether I could bear those endless nights.

  Sven was kneeling by the fireplace. I put his hot chocolate on the mantelpiece and crouched down beside him, hands clutching my mug.

  ‘There’s an art to it, isn’t there?’

  He placed small twigs around scrunched-up balls of newspaper and pine cones. ‘Outdoors there is. But it’s easy inside. All this wood here’ – he gestured to the pile of wood next to the fireplace – ‘is soft wood from pine trees. Burns easily, especially the sap. You’ll hear it crackle and pop. The most important thing is patience. No lasting fire can be built in a rush.’

  He struck a match and put it under the balls of newspaper and, immediately, blue and yellow flames flared up, igniting the twigs.

  ‘When I was a boy, I used to think that once the paper and kindling had caught, all I had to do was pile on the logs. And then I got frustrated when the fire went out. But you learn,’ he said, blowing gently on the smouldering matter. ‘You learn how to wait. And that waiting pays off.’

  He sat back on his haunches and studied his handiwork, his profile illuminated by its glow. I looked at his lived-in face and wondered why so many people want to erase these traces of life. An ethereal yellow flame began to build as he fed it with larger twigs, nurturing the fire until it was leaping from a solid foundation of glowing embers. Only then did he take the logs he had split and stack them in a neat grid.

  It was getting too hot to stay close. I wanted to ask him about this business of waiting and how you knew when to act. How you weighed up the risks.

  Once the fire had taken off, we settled on the big leather couch. I folded my knees to one side so I could curl my feet under my body. Sprawled at the other end, his striped pyjamas visible under his robe, Sven looked like an overgrown boy. We both stared at the fire that had taken hold of the logs, the sap spitting, the flames surging upwards in a satisfying roar. Restless spirits released from the paper and the wood.

  ‘It was worth the wait.’

  He looked at me keenly. ‘Was it?’

  I kept staring at the fire, sleepy yet aroused. Deliciously drugged. ‘Puts you under a spell, doesn’t it?’ I said, hoping he would understand what I was trying to tell him. ‘You can’t drag your eyes away.’

  There would be a point, on the ferry later that day, when I would look back at the island and find it gone – as in the myth. Sunk under the sea. An ache gripped my throat. I could feel the loss of it already. The wrench. And the emptiness that would follow.

  Sven chose a movie set on the island. It was all very Swedish, even if it was made by a Russian. A grey sky, a brooding sea. A mute boy. An isolated Chekhovian house. Two jets overhead. Nuclear war …

  I woke with no memory of having drifted off. A rug had been thrown over me and Sven was sitting opposite, his head slumped on one wing of the chair. When I sat up, the couch creaked and his eyes snapped open, as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all but merely waiting for me to wake.

  The room was still dark except for the planetary glow of the embers in the fireplace. I remembered the movie and asked him how it had ended.

  He looked at me with a weary smile. ‘The mute boy speaks.’

  Perhaps it was Sven’s deadpan voice. Or the words themselves and all they brought back. Or because I was barely awake and light-headed. Or maybe it was just the gleam in his eye. Something between us had shifted and loosened. I felt my lips twitch at the corners. He, too, had a funny look on his face, his cheeks bulging from the pressure within. You’d think we’d been smoking dope. I let out a snicker, and then a stifled snort from Sven set me off. He was still holding out, his face growing redder as his hands slapped the sides of the chair. And suddenly it was all too much, the absurdity of the moment, the tension of the last few days, everything he felt but couldn’t say, and he let out a kind of helpless roar. It wasn’t a knowing laugh like David’s, a laugh confident that the world laughed with him. More an involuntary reflex, utterly infectious; a surrender of all control. By now, we couldn’t have stopped even if we’d wanted to. Laughter bred more laughter in an intoxicating, hysterical flood.

  When I toppled off the couch and hit the floor with a bump, I shrieked, and we both spiralled off into more fits. Eyes streaming, bodies convulsing. Sven crawled across the floor to me and we lay on our backs, possessed. I had never laughed so much or so hard in my life. Or with such abandon. It felt so achingly good.

  Sven was trying to say something but couldn’t get it out. Every time he went to speak, it was as if he had the hiccups. Only wilder. Words so distorted and broken they were percussive and glottal, crazy music all of their own. I kept trying to ask him what he wanted to say but my mouth and lips wouldn’t obey.

  Eventually the laughter ran its course, gave way to the occasional giggle and guffaw. We lay side by side, acutely aware of each other. Too overwhelmed, too exhausted to speak. Wondering what next. The cathedral bells chimed the half hour.

  He rolled onto his side to face me. ‘Come to bed with me.’

  The embers in the fireplace
crackled faintly.

  ‘No,’ I said with a slow smile, propping myself up on my elbow and bending to kiss him with a confidence I didn’t know I possessed. A long, deep kiss that told him all he needed to know. Even as I kissed him I marvelled at this other Esther, who was so certain of herself, who was so unafraid of what kind of lover she might be or the parts of her body that might sag. ‘Put some more wood on the fire. I like it here.’

  Once again I watched him kneeling by the fire, only this time the waiting was over. He had pushed the sleeves of his dressing gown up to his elbows and I could see his strong forearms, the hairs like animal down lit up by the glowing coals. I could see the muscles flexing as he prodded the embers, added kindling to re-awaken them, and then some pine cones and split logs.

  As soon as the flames were licking the wood and the cones were popping, he turned to me. By this time, I’d removed my cardigan and begun undoing the shirt I had slept in. Sven put his fingers over mine, turning his attention to the tiny, pearly buttons. There was charcoal on his hands from the fire, the eternal smell of carbon and pine needles and dust.

  We lay in the glow of the blazing flames, our fingers moving blindly, jubilantly seizing handfuls of muscle and flesh.

  This is Sven. Sven!

  For the first time in thirty-five years, I was touching a man other than my husband. And he was touching me. And it felt momentous in a way that I couldn’t possibly explain or justify. It simply was. I was done with the mind and with weighing things up. My body had taken command and I could only obey, astounded by the brute force with which it made its demands, careless of what the consequences might be. I had known love and the happiness of motherhood and the good fortune of a comfortable life, but I had never known this desperation, this hunger for something so forbidden, something that could bring so much pleasure – and so much pain.

  As Sven moved down my body, the stubble of his cheek grazing my belly, it hit me. How fearfully I’d approached the business of living. Like a learner driver forever moving through a familiar landscape, forever knowing what lies ahead – the houses, the footpaths, the fences, the roads; my existence a cautious passage along known, mapped routes. And all the time, it was like living in an elaborate maze, except that I couldn’t see it. Until that road had veered unexpectedly, taken a wild turn, leaving me shocked to find what lay beyond. A world of open fields and rocky outcrops and great forests full of dark green light and towering trees and lichen-covered branches that blocked out the sun.

  And now deep in that forest, I was quite possibly lost but it didn’t matter. For I knew this place in my bones, even if I had only been here in dreams.

  21

  MELBOURNE

  October 2010

  I hadn’t expected David to be at the airport. The last I knew he was caught up in Canberra. I’d told Kate I’d hop in a taxi and be home in time for breakfast.

  The arrivals doors slid open to reveal the usual eager crowd of people waiting for relatives and friends. They were just a blur in my peripheral vision as I pushed the trolley straight ahead, hoping there wouldn’t be a queue at the taxi rank, when a familiar voice jolted me out of my trance. I stopped and searched the faces and found Kate, waving and beaming. Then I saw David, standing behind her, dressed in another suit I didn’t recognise, looking crisp and composed and more prime ministerial than ever.

  As I pushed the trolley towards them, the crowd parted, realising who I was heading to. The closer I got to Kate and David, the stranger their expressions became. Amusement tinged with alarm. Kate surged forward and wrapped her arms around me and said, ‘Mum, I missed you!’ People were watching our reunion with indulgent smiles. I turned to David and he enfolded me, a little stiffly, and said, ‘Welcome back, Est. Let’s get out of here.’ We headed for the nearest door and into the government car waiting outside.

  Once we were on our way, I saw David and Kate exchange glances.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  Kate laughed, running her eyes over my faded jeans and hooded jacket spattered with food stains. ‘Mum, I hate to tell you this, but you can’t go out looking like that any more. The whole show is already on the road.’

  I stared at my jeans and then back at Kate. Then I realised she was talking about the election campaign.

  David fiddled with his cufflinks, grinning awkwardly. ‘I’m afraid she’s right, Est. You know it doesn’t matter to me. You could wear a sack and still look eminently –.’ He stopped and mouthed the word ‘fuckable’. In his normal voice he went on: ‘But there’s no getting away from it now. We’ve got to look the part.’

  I wasn’t ready for all this. I turned to the car window. Outside it was a typical Melbourne day, the sky overcast and threatening rain. I told myself I ought to be grateful that no one had any idea. All they saw was the woman they’d always known, looking a little flustered and tired but essentially the same. If anything, on the surface I appeared too much my usual self: hair unruly and clothes unpressed. The surface, it seemed, was all now. I’d read in a British paper about how their government’s PR machine released details of the prime minister’s wife’s outfits – brand names, fabric descriptions – whenever she made a public appearance.

  For some reason, an image came into my head, an image of Sven and me standing naked in the cold waters of the Baltic, and I had to close my eyes to hold in the tears, still feeling the surging motion of the plane, as when you step off a ship onto dry land.

  As the car purred up the freeway, David asked what Gotland was like and how Rosalind was getting on, but it was obvious that his mind was elsewhere. Later that afternoon, he was off to Sydney for the start of a series of orchestrated rallies and public meetings and appearances at factories and schools that would eventually take him all over the country. Jasper, he said, had a schedule worked out for me.

  It was as if we were all on one of those airport conveyer belts and there was no getting off it, no changing direction or choosing your route.

  When we were almost home, David checked his watch, then looked at me. ‘Sorry, Est. Love to hear more about your trip but I can’t stop.’

  I could see the tension around his mouth and the strain in his eyes. He was feeling the pressure already and there were still four weeks to go. We both knew what would happen. He would work frantically to meet deadlines or commitments, pushing himself to the limit and beyond, and then he would collapse with exhaustion and get sick. ‘Be careful, David. Be careful.’

  The car pulled up outside our house. David, Kate and I got out. David took my suitcase from the boot and carried it into our bedroom. I heard Kate go down the hallway to the kitchen.

  David put down my suitcase. ‘I better go.’

  As calmly as I could, I said, ‘So when can we talk?’ Then, unable to resist, I added, ‘Perhaps I should make a booking with Jasper.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he snapped.

  There was a tense silence. I saw his eyebrows arch, as though he was arguing with himself, then he put his hands on my shoulders. ‘I’ll get a later flight. Be here for dinner. Kate’s going out so we’ll have the place to ourselves.’

  He stroked my cheek with the tips of his fingers, as if seeing me for the first time. ‘You look …’

  For a moment I thought he was going to say ‘in love’. It shows, being in love. But you’ve got to be looking. Maybe he saw it, maybe he didn’t.

  ‘… different.’

  Kate prepared blueberry pancakes while I sat at the kitchen table in a jet-lagged fog. She wanted to know all about Ros and the fire at her chambers. Gotland came a distant third.

  It had been a shock to arrive at Ros’s flat in London and find her in bed coughing and coughing. By evening she could barely breathe and let me call an ambulance without protest. It was pneumonia. I ran errands for her while she was in hospital, cleaned up her flat, stocked the pantry and fridge, made phone calls and sat by her bed. Ros just stared out the window and said something about the sulphuric sunsets over the ro
oftops and how lucky she was to have a good view.

  She slept, woke briefly and slept. Friends and colleagues came and went. There was no time for just us. No time for talking. When she was asleep, I would sometimes stroke her shaved scalp. It was bristly now, the hair pushing through the skin. I saw her scratching it in her sleep. Or perhaps she was feeling for what used to be there.

  When I wasn’t thinking about the past, about Mum and Dad and Ros and what kind of family we were – uniquely unhappy as Tolstoy would have it – I found myself thinking about Sven and about our final night. And about how it felt to know him, to have discovered this new world, this other way of being, and to realise that I wasn’t as trapped after all. That Gotland would always be there even if everything still felt unreal, as if I’d found the entrance to a parallel universe. I wanted to hold on to this feeling for as long as I could because I knew that reality would come crashing through soon enough.

  Ros came home from hospital the day before I left. I told her I would change my flight and stay another week. But that evening David rang to say the election had been called and that he had to go to Canberra immediately. We agreed Kate would be fine on her own but Ros said no: Kate had her exams soon, she needed me. Ros had made up her mind. I was going. At least I knew her friends would look after her.

  When I’d finished telling Kate about Ros, we talked about her exams, the little tricks – like skipping – to get you through the endless study unlike any period of study she would know again. And how I always ate a Mars Bar before an exam.

  I listened to myself talking away and marvelled at how easily we slip back into familiar roles. How we pack away our other selves when they’re not required.

  ‘Regular breaks sound good,’ Kate mused. ‘Forget the skipping. Chocolate is absolutely necessary. And not only before an exam.’