by Håkan Nesser
In any case, we didn’t talk much about Taza. Not before Bessie Hyatt’s suicide, and not after it. Quite a lot was written about Herold and Hyatt during those years, and an English company even began making a film about their lives – with two relatively prominent actors taking the leading roles – but the project eventually came to a halt for some unknown reason. Possibly a shortage of money, or possibly a threat of legal action from Tom Herold’s lawyers.
But Martin never published anything about it, not a single word, and when I asked him about that long afterwards – more by chance than out of real interest – he simply answered that he was bound by certain promises. No, he didn’t answer, he implied – looking back now, I’m quite sure that is the fact of the matter.
Tom Herold kept both his life and his reputation. He continued living in Morocco – but not in Taza – until the beginning of the twenty-first century, when he moved back home to England. He published over twenty collections of poetry, three novels and a sort of posthumous autobiography, which appeared six months after his death in 2009. He also directed and produced two self-indulgent long films during the nineties; but his fame reached its peak for a broader and non-literary public in May 2003, when he decapitated a young burglar in his Dorset home with the aid of a thousand-year-old Arab scimitar. As the burglar was armed with both a knife and a gun, Herold was cleared of any criminal offence by the subsequent trial.
He also managed to fit in another short marriage – between 1990 and 1995 or thereabouts. The woman in question was a young Moroccan by the name of Fatima: but there were no children from this relationship either.
For the whole of his life Tom Herold was constantly being written about, despite the fact that he deliberately avoided publicity. He never gave interviews, not even when he was being hounded by writers and journalists of all conceivable persuasions. Especially after the suicide of Bessie Hyatt he was subjected to what can only be called a witch-hunt. He was accused in several contexts of being guilty of his young wife’s death, and there was much speculation about the use of drugs and various occult rituals. But Herold never commented at all about the relationship between himself and his wife. Needless to say, when his posthumous memoirs were published almost thirty years after Bessie’s death, expectations were very high. It was unclear if he had given permission for the book to be published before he died, or if it was his publisher who had taken the matter into his own hands. Herold had no heirs at all, and had not made a will. He was killed by a malignant colon cancer, and according to his few friends his final years had been characterized by pain and melancholy.
In any case, The Sum of My Days was a failure, from both a literary and a commercial point of view. The reviews were consistently lukewarm, and those who had been hoping for sensational revelations, especially in connection with his years together with Bessie Hyatt, were disappointed. The so-called memoirs turned out to be mainly a series of neutral observations of nature without much in the way of subtlety or finesse. The only chapters with a more personal touch were about some summers in his childhood, spent on a farm in Wales in the company of a female cousin. Bessie Hyatt was mentioned by name twice in the whole book, and their marriage that inspired so much speculation and gossip was allocated about three-and-a-half pages. Moreover, most readers thought the book was badly edited, and although Herold was such a familiar name in large parts of the world, there was never any question of its becoming an international success.
Thirty years after Bessie Hyatt’s death, her two novels – Before I Fall and Men’s Blood Circulation – had achieved worldwide sales of over twenty-five million copies. Roughly speaking that is about ten times as many as Herold could manage.
‘I understand,’ Eugen Bergman had said that October afternoon in Sveavägen. ‘And how extensive is your material, approximately?’
‘A thousand pages,’ said Martin with a shrug. ‘Give or take a hundred. And I need six months to get it into shape. Maybe more, but let’s say six months to start with.’
‘Hm,’ said Bergman.
‘Morocco,’ said Martin, giving me a look that was intended to mean we were in agreement. That we had discussed the matter, and were in the same boat. The same unsinkable flat-bottomed rowing boat of marriage in heavy seas. There was no end to the images implied, and I suddenly felt sick.
‘I still have quite a few contacts down there, and it’s always an advantage to be in the right place.’
‘Hm,’ said Bergman again, heaving himself up from his desk chair and walking over to the window, where he gazed out for a while at Adolf Fredrik Church. Swayed back and forth in a way that one has to call characteristic. Hands clasped behind his back. Hair all over the place. It was a lovely autumn day out there. Martin signalled to me that I should say nothing, and I looked around for somewhere suitable if I found I really did need to throw up. I decided on the waste-paper basket at the side of the desk.
‘And what about Bessie Hyatt? Those years?’ He muttered that in a low voice, almost as an afterthought, without turning round.
‘Of course,’ said Martin in his typically quiet, non-committal tone of voice. ‘That’s what it’s all about after all, isn’t it?’
He could just as well have been commenting on how to cope with heartburn, or what kind of roof would be most appropriate for his outside loo. I started to feel less like throwing up. Bergman went back to his desk and put on his glasses. Pushed them down to the tip of his nose and looked at us as if we were a picture puzzle he was on the point of solving. Or something like that.
‘Okay, I understand that you need to get away from here. What with that mad woman, and all the rest of it.’
Thus spake Eugen Bergman, publisher, pataphysicist and good friend for half a lifetime.
And so on as described before.
It was a simple plan: when we met Bergman it was over a month since Martin had proposed it, and I had agreed without much thought. Perhaps that was a mistake on my part – yes, of course it was: not the fact that I didn’t think much about it, but that I said yes. Afterthoughts of one kind or another wouldn’t have done much good; it was a situation that called for instinctive reactions and intuition, not for logical or emotional calculations.
And perhaps I made the wrong decision. Completely and utterly wrong.
But that meeting with Magdalena Svensson was fresh in my mind, I can blame that.
‘Let’s disappear from the face of the earth for half a year,’ said Martin. ‘Let’s grant ourselves that luxury.’
‘What do you mean exactly?’
He pretended to think it over while eyeing me with that innocent look of his which had been a trump card for so many years, but no longer was. ‘I mean . . . I just mean that we should go away for six months without telling a soul where we’ve gone to.’
‘Really?’
‘Apart from the fact that we’re going to Morocco, perhaps. Telling a few people that, at least. They can send post to Marrakesh or Agadir. Poste restante. That still works, and we can pick it up when it suits us. If we need to be in contact with the outside world we can always find an internet cafe. No mobiles, I’m so damned fed up with mobile phones. Just you and me . . . Time to think things over and heal wounds, and whatever else you want.’
‘Have you any special place in mind?’ I wondered. ‘A particular house, or anything like that?’
He had been back to Morocco not all that long ago. The end of the nineties, if I remember rightly – an assignment commissioned by the university, some Sufi poets or something of the sort, and he had tagged on a week’s holiday as well. Maybe he had met Herold, maybe not. We’d never spoken about precisely what he had got up to, I don’t really know why. Perhaps there was some kind of crisis at the Monkeyhouse at the same time. Or in the Sandpit. Both institutions generally imploded a few times every year.
‘There are several possibilities,’ he said. ‘I have a few contacts down there.’
‘And those thousand pages?’ I asked, because he had told
me that as well.
‘Of course.’
‘And you’re going to write about them? About Herold and Hyatt?’
‘Why not?’ said Martin, adopting his non-committal expression once again.
I thought about that promise of silence he had made, thirty years ago by this time, and assumed that death had rendered it no longer relevant. Herold’s death. I didn’t follow it up.
‘What have you thought about doing with the house?’ I asked instead. ‘And Castor?’
‘We can let out the house,’ said Martin. ‘Or just leave it, whichever you prefer. And we can take Castor with us. He has a doggy passport, getting him into Morocco would be no problem, and I don’t think getting him out of Sweden would present any difficulty either. If it did, we could do a spot of smuggling – we’ve done that before, after all.’
He had already worked out answers to any possible questions.
‘Are you sure you didn’t rape her?’ I asked. ‘Sure that she had sex with you willingly?’
He had an answer to that as well. I didn’t mention that I had been to Gothenburg and spoken to his victim.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it’s not a bad idea.’
‘When a hurricane’s blowing you have to take shelter,’ said Martin.
And so we had made our decision. I recall that the only feeling I could manage to muster was that it didn’t matter.
7
We got up late. Or at least, I did. Castor is not the type who gets out of bed simply because he’s opened his eyes.
I had a quickish shower. The cramped bathroom is cold and damp. And there is an odd smell that suddenly reminded me of a pair of old Wellington boots in my childhood (they were always standing in the area between the veranda and the kitchen in the home of my classmate Vera: for a year or two I used to spend about four days a week in their house. They must have belonged to her father, those boots – he was a large, big-nosed and generally unhealthy person). The water for the shower is heated up by a gas flame as it runs through the pipe: a primitive arrangement that doesn’t work very well, but I suppose it’s better than nothing. Maybe I don’t need to have a shower every morning, as I have done for the whole of my life so far. In any case, it seems more sensible to get a fire going first and warm up the rest of the house. I’m learning a lesson: cold and damp give rise to distress and feelings of hopelessness.
We had breakfast, and made plans for the rest of the day. I let Castor out for a three-minute peeing excursion. Stood in the doorway, watching him. He wandered indifferently round the yard a few times: apparently there wasn’t much here worth sniffing at – not even the dustbin over by the stable block was worth investigating this morning, it seemed. He eventually peed on both sides of the only tree, a big, lop-sided larch. That was evidently the right place: he’s used it every time since we came here. I sometimes wonder what goes on inside his head.
Northerly wind. Grey-blue sky. I decided I should buy a thermometer, if for no other reason than to enable me to make more or less accurate weather forecasts every morning. Fire – shower – breakfast – weather: they seemed to be suitable hooks on which to hang up our existence.
I guessed it was about eight degrees today, and noted that figure down. The fourth of November. I also wrote that I was fifty-five years old, three months and four days.
Then a walk, of course. Dogs are made for taking exercise – or at least, African lion-hunting dogs are. I decided on Tarr Steps, a place that’s mentioned in all the guidebooks I’ve thumbed through so far and it’s only a ten-minute drive from here. In the direction of Withypool. It’s an old stepping-stone set-up over the River Barle, as I understand it; from the Middle Ages or thereabouts. There are footpaths to explore on both sides of the river, and a cafe that might be open.
Then some shopping, followed by dinner at the village pub, in the early evening. A good plan. A day in the life . . .
Or perhaps the other way round – that would involve a different kind of truth. A life in a day. The way you live one day can be repeated every other single day. Until the end of time. Is that why I’m here? The simple plan? I must stop asking questions like that.
*
Tarr Steps turned out to be protected from the wind, but on the other hand it started raining – as unwelcome as news of a death while you’re busy solving the daily crossword puzzle. Mind you, it held off until we had walked a fair distance along the river bank, and met two elderly women each with a retriever. The dogs greeted one another politely, as did the women and I, and I had begun wondering whether to continue along the path as far as Withypool. That is less than two hours’ walking time from Tarr Steps, and there is a pub there.
But the rain forced us to beat a retreat. We crossed over a ford and began retracing our steps along the other side of the river: after two-and-a-half hours in all we were back at our starting point. The cafe was open, but I felt too wet and muddy to go in. We sat in the car, I took out my mobile and checked the situation: no signal. I switched off. Maybe I ought to find a place where there was a signal and then sit there for a while every other day.
At most. Perhaps once a week would be enough – presumably you would need to switch on, then ring somebody or receive a call in order for it to be traceable? But I don’t know.
Martin’s mobile as well. I ought to force myself to do that, the sooner the better, no doubt. And I mustn’t forget our computers. For that’s the way it is, despite everything: I must make contact with people, face up to facts, send the occasional e-mail, show signs of life. Our children, Eugen Bergman. My brother. Christa . . . Yes, of course, I really must see to that. Pretend that we are still going strong in the good old sense of that term, and that there’s no need to worry about us.
Perhaps contact Christa first of all, that would seem logical.
But I decided to put it off until tomorrow. There is no great hurry yet. It takes time to get to Morocco. I started the car and began driving back to Darne Lodge.
I ran through the plan for the day again and adjusted it as necessary: an afternoon in front of the fire. Tea and a sandwich. A thick book – I had bought an old copy of Dickens’s Bleak House at that antiquarian bookshop. Nine hundred pages, that seemed about right.
Then, as evening approached, down to The Royal Oak Inn.
Decisions and action. To the end of time.
But they are not easy, those times spent in the car without having decided where to go to. Dulverton, Exford or Withypool. Or to the sea.
Or to any bloody place, come to that. They would all be equally sensible or senseless. And it wouldn’t matter one way or another, it wouldn’t matter at all. Perhaps it would be easier if we were in jail, I wondered this inhospitable morning. If we had narrower horizons, and there was somebody taking care of us. We need a plan, I thought, both me and my dog. We need a path to be following during the whole of the winter.
Or a jigsaw puzzle with five thousand pieces. Why not?
I had anticipated these bleak moments, of course I had: during the whole of that hazy journey through Europe I had been aware that this would happen – but what good did foreseeing it do? We know we are going to die one of these days, but how are we helped by knowing that as a fact?
And I must stop judging Castor in accordance with the same criteria I use for myself. No doubt there is a difference in our ways of thinking about which I haven’t the slightest idea. Or perhaps this is exactly what dogs spend all their time thinking about?
Muddy Paws Welcome
Castor stood up on his hind legs and sniffed at the notice. It was a quarter past seven. Voices could be heard from inside the pub, a man and a woman – a bit casual, slow, tired, like an elderly couple who have been talking to each other for very many years. We went inside and looked around. The woman’s voice was that of the barmaid: a copy or perhaps a sister of the woman I had met in the village shop the previous day, rosy-faced and as tough-looking as a kettle-holder. The man, also in his sixties, was sitting in front of a s
teaming plate of dinner and a glass of beer at one of the window tables.
Checked flannel shirt. Thinning hair and somewhat skinny, an Adam’s apple like a bird’s beak. The most noticeable thing about his face was his spectacles.
‘Aha, a stranger!’ he said.
‘Welcome,’ said the barmaid. ‘Both of you. It’s a bit rough out there.’
I felt a quick rush of gratitude. For the fact that they started talking to me. But that’s what people do in this country, and my existence was thereby confirmed. Castor’s as well. He wagged his tail a few times, walked over and rubbed up against the man with his nose, who stroked his head gently. The way one should – no hard pats: it was clear that he’d dealt with dogs before. I felt grateful for that as well.
‘My dog Winston died last spring,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got round to acquiring a new one.’
‘You have to finish mourning their loss first,’ said the woman. ‘They are worth that kind of respect.’
‘Absolutely right,’ said the man.
‘Absolutely right,’ I said. The image of Martin on the beach flashed before my mind’s eye, but I shoved him to one side.
‘You’re passing through, I take it,’ said the woman.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’m renting a house just outside the village for the winter. Darne Lodge, maybe you know it?’
The man shook his head but the woman nodded. ‘Up there?’ she said. ‘Above Halse Farm, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s the place.’
‘For the winter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t it old Mr Tawking who looks after it?’
‘Mr Tawking, yes, that’s right.’
