The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  15

  There was no internet connection in my room in The Simmons Hotel, but there was a computer available for guests to use down in the lobby. Much to the annoyance of some younger guests, I spent almost two hours on it that first morning in London. It took me that long to find Darne Lodge just outside the village of Winsford in the county of Somerset. I must have checked up on over a hundred possible places to rent in the south-west of England: my reason for homing in on that area had to do with the fact that many years ago we had rented a house outside Truro in Cornwall – Martin, the children and I. We stayed there for a whole month, and I recall it as the happiest holiday we ever had during all our years together. Gunvald and Synn were in their early teens, but it worked well even so and I know that when we had our evening meals in the cramped little kitchen in our stone cottage after the day’s outings, we felt a sense of togetherness and fellowship that I had never felt before. Perhaps it was imagined rather than real, but it’s difficult to judge matters like that. I also remember that Martin and I enjoyed a really excellent sex life down there in Cornwall. Incidentally it was the summer before the winter in which Martin had his affair with another woman.

  And I can’t be certain that the affair hadn’t started before the summer.

  I’m not sure exactly how I thought that previous holiday could be of significance for the current circumstances, but I suppose I must have been looking out for the possibility of linking up with something in the past that had positive vibrations. In any case it had more to do with emotions than with rational thought, and I was aware that I had visions of a little cottage in south-west England in the back of my mind even before we left Berlin.

  The description of Darne Lodge provided no contact information via the internet, only a telephone number. I borrowed the telephone from the sleepy Hungarian receptionist, and Mr Tawking answered after only one ring. As if he had been sitting there, waiting for somebody to phone him. After five minutes we had agreed on a rent for six months, and it was a done deal provided I paid a deposit into his bank account before the day was out.

  ‘Before the day is out?’ I wondered.

  ‘Before the day is out,’ said Mr Tawking. ‘People are generally queuing up for the privilege of living in my house.’

  I doubted that, both at the time and later, but I accepted the condition. Castor and I went for a walk through the park down towards Kensington, and eventually found a bank where, after some discussion, I managed to make the payment to Mr Tawking without my needing to produce a credit card or any personal details – well, in fact I gave the new name I had adopted, Maria Anderson, and a fictitious address in Copenhagen.

  I also changed some money and acquired £1,500 in sterling; and I thought I ought to do the same in several of the small bank branches along Queensway before we set off on our journey westwards – suitably split up into a number of smallish transactions which would not raise any eyebrows.

  I mustn’t leave any traces. Incognito. When we emerged into the sunshine and the hustle and bustle of Kensington High Street I was suddenly possessed by a surprising degree of optimism. I was making decisions and carrying them out. I was coming across problems and solving them. I gave Castor a liver chew, and promised him that I would stay alive at least as long as he did.

  My optimism was changed into its opposite about twenty minutes later, next to the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens.

  ‘Maria?’

  I saw immediately who it was. Katarina Wunsch. Now working for Swedish Radio in Luleå, but we had been colleagues in the Monkeyhouse until the turn of the century. We were not all that close, but had been working together for rather a lot of years. She was with her husband: I didn’t remember his first name, but we had met several times.

  And now here they were in London. A brief holiday visit, perhaps, or maybe to do with work – how could I know? I had half a second in which to react.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘But . . . ?’

  Her surprise was total. She stared at me, then glanced at her husband for confirmation.

  Confirmation that the woman with the dog they had almost literally bumped into in Kensington Gardens really was Maria Holinek, who . . . who they had known for many years. Granted that we hadn’t met since about 2005 or thereabouts, but still? Surely there couldn’t be any doubt about it? The woman wasn’t exactly an unknown face, and they had even heard about the dog. No doubt they had read all that awful stuff in the papers in the early summer, just like everybody else. But could it really be . . . ?

  I obviously don’t know what thoughts were whirling round inside the heads of Katarina Wunsch and her husband, whatever his name was, but it wasn’t hard to guess. And it felt as if something inside my own skull was about to burst.

  ‘Are you not . . . ?’

  ‘I’m sorry. There seems to be a mistake here.’

  I really did manage to come out with that sentence. I actually told a lie. I didn’t faint, and I didn’t sink down into the ground. Mr Wunsch cleared his throat in embarrassment and took hold of his wife’s arm.

  ‘I apologize. We thought you were somebody else.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Somebody we used to know. So sorry.’

  They both produced a stiff smile, and continued on their way.

  ‘No worries,’ I said to their backs, but they didn’t turn round. I put Castor on his lead and hurried out onto Bayswater Road.

  Then I sat down at a pavement cafe in Westbourne Grove and tried to calm down. Tried to analyse what had happened, and to guess what the Wunsches had said to one another after our surprise meeting.

  Surely it was her?

  Without a doubt, I’d say.

  What on earth was the matter with her?

  Could it be . . . Could it have something to do with that business of her husband? That we read about last summer. Rape. Good Lord, how little we know about other people!

  I simply didn’t know. I couldn’t make up my mind. Maybe I had got away with it, despite everything? There was a minimal chance. After all, there are duplicates and doppelgängers in this world, people who are almost exactly like other people even though they are not twins. Perhaps the Wunsches had concluded that they were mistaken, and that the woman they had bumped into was somebody entirely different?

  But I was quite clear about one thing: if the Swedish police were ever presented with a dead body belonging to the well-known literature professor Martin Holinek, and news of it leaked out into the press – which it would, of course – the Wunsches would have no difficulty in recalling their meeting with that woman in Kensington Gardens. The woman they had no difficulty in recognizing, but who denied she was who she was.

  And they would now have a very obvious explanation for it.

  I also realized that I ought to be careful when feelings of unvarnished optimism began to overcome me. I needed to raise my guard, to be more cautious. Perhaps I ought to change my hairstyle and dye my hair? But it was a bit late for that now . . .

  I left the cafe, urged Castor to stay close to me, and walked back to the hotel under a cloud of irritation and despondency.

  We spent one more day in London. I actually did have a haircut, but didn’t have it dyed. And tried to understand how I could have been so naive as to think that I – with a face recognizable to half the Swedish nation – would be able to wander around unhindered in a city like London which is visited every day by . . . well, goodness only knows. Ten thousand Swedish tourists? Quite apart from the hundred thousand or so Swedes who live here already.

  This final day in the big city was grey and cloudy, with the usual characteristic, drizzly rain: but nevertheless I bought a couple of pairs of sunglasses, each of which covered about half my face.

  And also a broad-brimmed hat and a fluffy shawl. I was presumably thinking about that photograph I’d seen of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, drinking coffee in a cafe in Uppsala. Or at least, that’s what a literature lecturer in Uppsala likes to believe, a
nd has told Martin and me about it at least twice.

  I bought pounds sterling for my euros in several small bureaux de change just as I had planned, and amassed over £8,000 without needing to show any kind of identity documentation. That ought to last for a few months – whatever I got up to when I reached Exmoor, I wasn’t intending to be extravagant; and surely it would be possible to change money in other places in this island kingdom if necessary, not just in the capital.

  But the night before we set off on our westward journey I didn’t sleep a wink. All kinds of old detritus floated up to the surface from the murky depths of my memory: I was without a doubt being attacked by the life I was just taking my leave of. Or had already left, to be honest. It was as if all those memories and all those years were trying to drag me back to places and circumstances where I no longer belonged. Mind you, where I belonged now, to be precise and accurate, was also a question I couldn’t just answer and forget about and fall asleep. And how I was going to be able to drive us out of London in one piece the next day without an hour or two’s sleep in my body . . . well, that was something that felt more and more difficult for every sleepless minute that ticked by.

  In the end – at some point after four in the morning – I was exposed to an episode that drove aside everything else, and refused to leave me in peace: Vivianne’s lover. I didn’t understand why.

  Vivianne was Martin’s elder sister. I write was, because she has been dead for many years. She threw herself out of a window on the sixteenth floor of a hotel in Singapore – or she might have been pushed, or it might have been an accident. It was the twenty-eighth of February 1998. She had rather a lot of alcohol in her blood, something that wasn’t exactly unusual in the final years of her life, and if I understood it rightly the police investigation was put on ice after a few weeks because there were no suspicions of any crime having been committed.

  But the story of her secret lover happened twelve years before that, about a month before Olof Palme was murdered.

  16

  A thousand pages, he had said.

  It took some time for me to get an idea of the actual amount, but I was inclined to reduce Martin’s estimate by about a half. But of course, it all depended on how you counted the pages. A handwritten page, even if it is A4 size, is not the same as a typewritten or printed page, and quite a lot of what I assumed was his ‘material’ was handwritten, in four thick notebooks of a kind that I recall Martin being very enthusiastic about when we first met, and for several years afterwards. Thick oilcloth covers with a hundred and forty pages in each book – I think he ordered them specially from Germany. On the unlined flyleaf at the beginning of each one he had noted meticulously the place and the time of writing: Samos, July–August 1977. Samos, June–July 1978. Samos, July 1979. Taza, July–August 1980.

  The first two books were more or less full. The third was a little more than half-full, and the fourth, from Morocco, roughly a third full. But he only wrote on the right-hand pages, it should be stressed. Martin has never liked writing on one page to leak through onto the other side, as it were. An empty page should be an empty page. I knew that he had taken a portable typewriter with him on his last trip to Samos and the one to Taza the following year, and assume that he had used this at least in part for the sort of diary entries he seemed to have been making on these later journeys.

  But this was unclear as yet: before I even started to read the contents, I tried to estimate the scope. If I was going to examine the project as a whole, I had every reason to adopt a methodical approach.

  Perhaps I also had Eugen Bergman at the back of my mind; I think so. A situation could well develop in which it would be useful if I knew a little about it, even if I were grateful for the fact that Martin always stubbornly refused to discuss the content of his work while it was in progress. That had been the situation for as long as he and Bergman had been working together: the publisher wouldn’t think there was anything odd about his not being informed in detail about how work was progressing while Martin was in North Africa.

  But it seemed more or less inevitable that I would have to conduct a certain amount of e-mail correspondence in my husband’s name.

  With Bergman and with others.

  With G? That felt bizarre, and I decided not to think about that in more detail.

  In the work chest – the large brown suitcase that contained exclusively books, writing tools and desk utensils – I found a bundle of almost three hundred typewritten pages in a file marked Writings. This material was not dated – not systematically, at least – and I had the impression that it comprised both fair copies of diary entries, and original texts. There were no page numbers, but when I leafed through it I saw that there were occasional headings and dates, and here and there also changes and additions made in pencil. There were also copies of photographs in some places, evidently produced by an ordinary photocopying machine on typing paper. I glanced quickly at a couple of them: the quality was awful, and they both depicted a small group of people sitting on chairs round a table. Martin appeared in both of them. It seemed possible that a tall woman standing in front of a white wall in the background of one of them was Bessie Hyatt. A mop of hair, large white tunic and bare legs – yes, I was convinced it was her.

  In addition to the handwritten and typewritten material I eventually found a file on Martin’s computer entitled Taza, and as I knew that he didn’t start using a computer until the beginning of the nineties I assumed – without opening the file – that it comprised fair copies of earlier pages, or something he had written later. I didn’t find any other documents that seemed to deal with those summers, and didn’t bother to look any further into that particular aspect.

  Now that I had acquired a certain degree of familiarity with the material, I immediately started to feel distinctly sceptical about the project as a whole. What was the point? What was I going to get out of it? What would anybody get out of it? Wouldn’t it be better if I spent all my time reading Dickens instead? Or something else, goodness only knows what. Surely I could deal with Bergman in some other way when it became relevant? In so far as there was any point in considering a future. I let Castor out for the evening’s last peeing session, and poured myself a glass of port to help me reach a conclusion.

  In the end I decided to take the first of the diaries for bedtime reading. As a trial, without committing myself to continuing along those lines, but to give it a chance even so. Perhaps I thought I owed him that in a way, maybe it had something to do with the unhealthy feminine efficiency we women are alleged to have: but I’m quite sure this would not be a truthful description of my motives. Let’s face it, one tells lies mainly for one’s own peace of mind.

  The first obvious problem I came upon was Martin’s handwriting. I had been used to it for over thirty years, but sometimes that didn’t help. I also know that he himself had difficulties at times in understanding what he had written, especially if it was something he had just scribbled down hastily in a notebook or on a loose scrap of paper. In his diary of the stay in Samos, 1977, it was obvious that he had made an effort to write neatly or at least legibly in the beginning, but after a few pages it was impossible to read some words, even when one considered them in context.

  Besides, it was all rather uninteresting – I couldn’t help but feel that. The date, getting up, breakfast, the weather, conversations with somebody or other. A walk, a swim, an attempt to describe nature. Name-dropping – there was a distinct whiff of that, even if the people concerned were not anybody I knew about, apart from Hyatt and Herold, and he rarely talked to them, not in the first week at least. And he only refers to them from a distance, as it were. ‘Bessie sat in the shade of the plane tree all morning, writing.’ ‘Tom went off in the boat and there was no sign of him all day. He came back at dusk with a dozen reddish fish.’ It is noticeable that he admires them, especially him. In the summer of 1977 Bessie Hyatt’s sensational debut novel hadn’t yet appeared – if I remember rightly, that is
: I think it came out in the autumn or the winter of that year – but Tom Herold was already a sort of icon. Comparisons with the likes of Byron were not uncommon. Somewhat jokily (one assumes) Martin describes him as ‘The Childe Herold of our time’, and it is presumably not just the similarity in the name he is referring to.

  He also describes the practicalities of life in the collective. They sleep on simple mattresses lying on the floor in a large building with about a dozen small rooms: that fits in with what Martin told me when we first met. A shared shower room, shared toilets – he thinks the building had previously been used by the military, and as some kind of children’s home or children’s holiday camp. The house that Herold and Hyatt live in was evidently where the permanent staff used to live, or people with varying leadership status. It is situated some distance away on a hill, and the famous couple apparently tend to keep themselves to themselves – there is no mention as yet of going to visit them in their home. For all the others there is a large shared kitchen and also a taverna a couple of hundred metres away by the road leading down to the beach. He mentions the rent: apparently they pay Hyatt and Herold a few hundred drachmas a week via somebody called Bruno. A paltry sum, according to Martin.

  He also writes that Finn hasn’t yet arrived, although he had promised to spend the whole summer there. I know that Finn is Finn Halvorsen, a Norwegian and a good friend of Martin’s – and in fact the person who had told him about the notorious collective, and invited him to stay there.

  But there is not much in the way of reflections at the beginning of the diary: not pregnant reflections, at least. As I read it I have the impression that Martin feels somehow overwhelmed, despite the fact that he is leaning over backwards to avoid revealing that. By the place itself: the blue Mediterranean, the white beaches, the cypresses, the scent of thyme – but perhaps above all by the people surrounding him: free-thinking hippies and citizens of the world, young men and women who seem to lead a voluntary and unrestrained bohemian existence in the classical Greek island setting without thinking that what they are doing is in the least remarkable. That they seem to have a right to it.