The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  Plus an effective fireplace. Thank God for that. Castor was stretched out on the sheepskin in front of the fire as if it was the most natural place for him to be in the world. I assume he is still wondering what has happened to Martin, but he shows no sign of doing so. None at all.

  In the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom I found the two electric fires – which I have to pay Mr Tawking extra for if I use them – and plugged in one in each room. I turned them both up to maximum heat output, in the hope of creating a reasonable temperature inside the house without having to keep a fire going. And perhaps also get rid of some of the mould.

  I drank my tea without sugar or milk, and ate half a dozen rusks and an apple – all that was left of my emergency rations. Then I made a superficial survey of the cooking utensils in all the cupboards and drawers, and started writing a list of what I needed to buy. A grater, for instance, a frying pan and a pasta saucepan, a decent bread knife; and by the time the clock said half past nine – we had woken up shortly after seven – I had also carried in everything from the car. And crammed stuff into wardrobes and drawers.

  It’s going to work, I made so bold as to tell myself. I do one thing at a time, and it works. Castor was still stretched out in front of the fire, completely at ease as far as I could tell, and I thought how interesting it would be to get inside his head for a short while. So interesting to be a dog instead of a person, even if only for a few moments.

  When I had finished unpacking and the other chores, I stood out in the yard for a while and tried to sum up the situation. The mist had not dispersed much, despite a fresh wind blowing in from the higher parts of the moor to the north. Visibility was still not much more than a hundred metres in any direction, and instead of going out for a walk, which is what I had intended at first, we got in the car and drove down to the village to do some shopping.

  *

  Only a small part of what I reckoned I needed was available in the local shop – Winsford Stores. However, the owner, a chubby lady about sixty-five years of age, was very helpful and explained that if I drove to Dulverton I would definitely be able to acquire most things. She was probably longing to ask me who I was and what I hoped to do in her little Winsford; I had an equally unspoken response at the ready, but we didn’t get that far this first morning. Instead she gave me detailed instructions about how to get to Dulverton. There were two possibilities: either take the A396 alongside the River Exe, through Bridgetown and Chilly Bridge; or the B3223 up into the moor, then down into Dulverton alongside the River Barle, the other main waterway over Exmoor. We consulted a map, which I bought from her, and agreed that it would be a good idea to take the former route there, and the latter back. Especially if I was living here on the moor – something I didn’t really admit to doing, for whatever reason. I paid for the various goods I had chosen, including a dozen speckled eggs supplied that very morning by Fowley Farm, which was only a stone’s throw away from the shop: according to all sensible judges they were the most delicious and nutritious in the whole of the kingdom. I thanked her for her help and wished her a very good day. She wished me the same, and I bore with me her warmth and helpfulness most of the way to Dulverton.

  Half an hour later I parked outside The Bridge Inn next to an old stone bridge over the Barle. Without doubt Dulverton is a market town that can supply everything a modern person can possibly need – or an unmodern one, come to that. After strolling around the town for ten minutes – under a greyish white sky with no trace left of the mist, and even a suggestion that the sun was about to break through the clouds – Castor and I were able to establish that the place had not only restaurants, but also a police station, a fire station, a pharmacy, a library, and a variety of shops, pubs and teashops. There was even an old antiquarian bookshop, which we couldn’t resist paying a visit to, as a notice pinned to the rickety door announced that four-footed friends were especially welcome.

  We did the shopping at a leisurely pace, then went for a little stroll by the cheerfully babbling brook that was the Barle – oh, I am so pleased to be able to write ‘cheerfully babbling brook’, I think it enables me to redress matters somewhat – and I found it difficult to understand where all the water was coming from. To round things off we ate some venison pie with a large helping of peas at The Bridge Inn – well, Castor had to be satisfied with a handful of doggy treats produced willingly from a store under the counter.

  I noted that there is a considerable difference between being a single middle-aged woman and a single middle-aged woman with a dog. Castor’s company, as he lies there under my table in the pub, gives me some sort of natural dignity and legitimacy that I find difficult to explain. A sort of undeserved blessing that one can make the most of. I would not be able to cope with the situation I find myself in were it not for his reassuring presence and support – certainly not. Nevertheless I am of course very unsure if everything will end up happily, whatever that cliché might mean, even with this formidable companion by my side. But at least it helps me to get by in the short term. Minutes, hours, perhaps even days. Presumably that is also how a dog thinks and makes its way through life. One step at a time. They obviously have an advantage on that score.

  In fact he was Martin’s dog to start with. Martin was the one who insisted that we needed a pet when the children had flown the nest – and by a pet, he meant of course a dog, nothing else. He grew up with lots of pooches around the house; in my well-organized childhood there was no room for such extravagances, I don’t really know why. I had to make do with unreliable cats and a handful of aquarium fish that soon died off, that was all. Oh, and a brother as well. Not to mention a younger sister – I would prefer to write my way around her, giving her as wide a berth as possible, but I can see that it wouldn’t work.

  He’s seven years old, getting on for eight, Castor. A Rhodesian ridgeback. I had never heard of them when Martin first brought him home. I think he had a vague dream of the dog lying at his feet in his study at the university, and perhaps also accompanying him when he delivered his lectures. But of course, that never happened. I was the one who took Castor on courses, and to the vet’s. I was the one who looked after all the practical details involved in owning a dog, and I was the one who took him for long walks every day.

  Because I was the one who had time.

  Or to be frank, who made the time: but there was never any argument about it. I enjoyed doing it, it was as simple as that. To go wandering through woods and fields for a few hours every day with a silent and loyal companion, with no other aim than doing just that – walking through the countryside in silence – well, after only a few weeks that was an occupation I came to regard as the most important and meaningful aspect of my life.

  Perhaps that says something about my life.

  When I drove back to Darne Lodge – following the elevated route over the moor – the mist had dispersed altogether and the views extended for miles. I wound down the side window and thought I could just about make out the sea in the distance, or the Bristol Channel at least, and I was overcome by a feeling of being very solitary, totally insignificant and passed over. In many ways it is easier to live somewhere without horizons, in the mist and in a confined space. At least I am well aware that I need to stick to simple and practical activities, to make decisions and stick to them, as I said before – otherwise everything can go to pot. When everything, every step and every action and every undertaking has no broader significance, when you might just as well be doing something else rather than what you are actually doing at the moment, and when you can’t help but think about that – and when the only thing that might possibly have some point seems to be linked with the mistakes and misdeeds one was guilty of in the past – well, then madness is lying in wait just round the corner.

  Living on the moor involves an attractive but dangerous freedom, I’m beginning to understand that already. I stopped in a lay-by and let Castor move from the poky back seat to the front passenger seat. He loves being there, puts h
is nose over the air intake and thus creates for himself an ethereal range of scents.

  Or he pokes his whole head out through the side window, like dogs do in the countryside. There is nobody in the whole world who knows that we are here.

  I’ll say that again: there is nobody in the whole world who knows that we are here.

  4

  Early in the morning of the tenth of April my husband raped a young woman in a hotel in Gothenburg. Her name was Magdalena Svensson, twenty-three years old, and she had been working at the hotel as a waitress since the beginning of the year. She reported the incident to the police after about three weeks mulling it over, on the second of May.

  Or perhaps he didn’t actually rape her. I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t there.

  Martin was interrogated, spent a night and a day in police custody and was then released on bail.

  Just over two weeks later, on the eighteenth of May, a tabloid newspaper became aware of the situation – the fact that the well-known polemicist, author and professor of literature, Martin Holinek, had been charged with rape – and by the following week the whole of Sweden knew about it. Magdalena Svensson talked about what had happened that night to a large number of media outlets, and for five days running it made the headlines in the evening tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet. My husband refused to comment and was given sick leave by the university; but it was widely discussed on the radio and television and in the press. But above all it was a hot topic on social media: in one blog, for instance, another woman claimed she had also been raped by ‘that sleazy professor’ – in a hotel in Umeå almost a year ago. He was alleged to have been ‘as randy as a bloody chimpanzee’ – an expression she had obviously borrowed from an earlier case involving a French banker and politician – but she had not got round to reporting the incident because she was afraid. Two other women wrote in their blogs that they had also been raped by different professors, and comments were as numerous as grasshoppers in Egypt.

  To crown it all one of the commercial television channels offered me and Martin 50,000 kronor if all three of us would agree to take part in one of their evening discussion programmes. By ‘all three’ they meant the rape victim, the rapist and the rapist’s wife. They considered it to be a matter of considerable public interest. We declined the offer. We never discovered whether or not Magdalena Svensson accepted. Or at least, I didn’t.

  On the tenth of June Miss Svensson withdrew her rape accusation, and for a few days the incident had new wind in its sails in the media. There was speculation about her having been threatened, about the rapist having bought himself free in accordance with time-honoured practice, and various other theories similar in nature. A demonstration against men who hate women attracted two thousand people to Sergels Torg in Stockholm. Somebody posted a condom full of shit through our letter box.

  To be fair, a handful of voices made themselves heard in Martin’s defence – the usual ones. But he held fast to his decision to make no comment. So did his lawyer, despite the fact that he is one of the leading members of his fraternity in Sweden and normally can’t keep his mouth shut.

  The preliminary investigation was abandoned, and the whole matter shelved.

  I didn’t have much to say about the matter either, but when the uproar was at its height I counted more than twenty photographers and journalists camped outside our house in Nynäshamn. Late one evening Martin fired two shots of his elk-hunting rifle through the window, straight up into the heavens over the forest. The press mob had something to report now, and promptly disappeared in the direction of Stockholm to leave us in peace for a while. Being a star reporter and having to hang around outside a house in Nynäshamn is no sinecure.

  I recall Martin trying to look pleased with himself as he put his gun away. ‘So there!’ he said. ‘Shall we have a glass of wine?’

  But he sounded anything but upbeat, and I declined the offer. For some reason he was never prosecuted for shooting a gun inside a built-up area.

  We spoke about what had happened – or perhaps hadn’t happened – only once, and never again. That was my choice, on both counts.

  ‘Did you have sex with that woman?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I had sex with her,’ said Martin.

  ‘Did you rape her?’

  ‘Most certainly not,’ said Martin.

  That was the day it was first written about in the newspaper: I hadn’t been able to bring myself to ask before then, even though I knew about it. Neither of our children was in touch that evening. None of our friends either. I thought the telephones were remarkably quiet.

  Apart from calls from unknown numbers, of course; but we didn’t answer those.

  ‘That woman up in Umeå,’ I did get round to asking a few days later when it was being widely discussed. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Surely you don’t believe what she says?’ said Martin.

  One of the things that felt remarkable throughout the summer – much more remarkable than difficult, I ought to stress – was that I couldn’t make up my mind what the truth was. I suppose it was somehow outside my range of comprehension, I couldn’t really grasp it, and what you don’t understand is not something you can pin down. At least, that’s what I tell myself was the situation. I used to wake up in the morning and after the first few seconds of blankness the situation I found myself in would hit me. I would realize why I was feeling so tired and melancholy – and then as I tottered to the bathroom on unsteady feet I would feel like an actress who had ended up in the wrong film. The wrong film altogether, and twenty-five years too late.

  Both Martin and I had been unfaithful once before, and on each occasion we had managed to hold our marriage together. He was first, and then it was me as a sort of revenge. It was while the children were still at home, and it’s possible that we might have reached different decisions if they had flown the nest. But I don’t know, and it’s difficult to speculate about it. In any case neither of us would have continued the relationship with the new partner if such a possibility had presented itself. That is something we have convinced both ourselves and each other about during the years that have passed since it happened. Sixteen years and fourteen, to be precise. Good Lord, I blush in embarrassment when I recall that I was forty-one years old when I went to bed with that young recording technician. He could have been a mate of Gunvald’s, if Gunvald had knocked around with types like him.

  After the worst was over, from about the middle of June or thereabouts, I noticed that I really did want to know what had happened. I needed to know exactly what my husband had been doing with that waitress in the hotel.

  That night.

  The problem was that it was too late to ask Martin. An invisible borderline had been passed, a sort of ceasefire had been proclaimed, and I felt I had no right to tear it up. I am not all that interested in sex any longer: somewhat lazily I had assumed it would be sufficient for Martin to masturbate in the shower and imagine he was penetrating some willing accomplice’s pussy. But in fact it wasn’t quite as easy as that.

  Ask for a divorce? I would be fully entitled to do that, of course. But it didn’t appeal to me. There was something basically banal about such a reaction: after all, we had been married for thirty years, we had been living parallel lives with a sort of shared mutual understanding, and we had booked a shared grave at Skogskyrkogården cemetery.

  But in the end I phoned her. Magdalena Svensson. I found her details on the Eniro website. She was at home in Guldheden, Gothenburg, and answered on her mobile.

  We met three days later, on the twentieth of August, in a cafe in the Haga district. It was an exceptionally warm day, and I had taken a morning train from Stockholm. As I arrived a bit early, I decided to walk all the way from the central station, and felt unpleasantly sweaty when I reached the cafe. Moreover a vague feeling of disgust had grown up inside me; I doubted whether what I was about to do was sensible, and very nearly turned back as I approached Haga. I had my mobile in my hand, was ready to ring
her number and explain that I had changed my mind. That I didn’t in fact want to speak to her, and that it was best if we both forgot all about the whole business.

  But I didn’t. I pulled myself together.

  She was sitting at an outside table under a parasol, waiting for me. She was wearing a light green dress and a thin, white linen scarf, and even though I recognized her from the pictures in the newspapers, it was as if I were meeting a quite different person. She was young and pretty, but not especially sexy. She looked shy and uneasy – but considering the circumstances that was perhaps not so odd.

  She stood up when she saw me. She obviously belonged to the fifty per cent of the Swedish population who recognized me. I nodded to her to indicate that I had identified her, but it was only when we shook hands and introduced ourselves that I was struck by the paradoxical hopelessness of the situation. Either this cautious little creature had been raped by the man I had been living with for the whole of my adult life, in which case one had to feel sorry for her. Or she had voluntarily agreed to have sex with my husband, in which case there was no need to feel sorry for her in the slightest.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  Apart from saying her name, those were the first words she spoke: I thought she was going to continue, but she said nothing more. It seemed to me that if she had been sitting there waiting for me – the older woman who had been betrayed – she ought to have had time to think of something more pregnant to say than that she was sorry. That television programme that never happened would have been a bit of a disaster.