The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  I met her once again, purely by chance. She was standing in Sergels Torg, Stockholm, handing out leaflets for a Christian organization – The Pure Life. I couldn’t resist asking her how things were going for her nowadays: it was three or four years since that memorable evening in the Monkeyhouse.

  ‘I’ve moved on,’ Alice explained. ‘I think you should do so as well. Take this – we have a meeting this evening in the City Church.’

  She handed me a leaflet, and said that she’d been living in Stockholm for about a year now. She had become too much of a celebrity to stay on in Sorsele, she maintained, and since she had met Jesus – and the pastor in charge of the organization, to whom she was now married – her life had taken on a deeper meaning.

  She thanked me from the bottom of her heart for allowing her to take part in that television programme. If she hadn’t had the opportunity to tell all and sundry the truth about what had happened to Ragnar, this miracle would never have taken place.

  ‘Never give up,’ was the last thing she said to me. ‘When things are at their worst and you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, He is with you, and He will comfort you.’

  Her eyes were blazing. I have often thought about her. Especially lately, this last month, since we were walking into the wind on that Baltic beach in Poland and my life branched off in a new direction.

  About what it must feel like behind blazing eyes like those.

  How she must have felt as she sat there on the television sofa, waiting for her turn to speak.

  20

  The ninth of November. Ten degrees at half past eight. Grey and misty when we went for our morning walk, but an hour later the sun had broken through. Nevertheless I’ve decided to stay here working until noon, and then we’ll go for a walk by the sea if the weather holds.

  When I write ‘working’, what I mean is reading the material from Samos and Morocco. I have the feeling that we really must make progress with that: I don’t know where that feeling comes from, but perhaps it’s just a little splinter under a fingernail that one has to get rid of. I’ve been reading so much Dickens these last couple of days that he can wait his turn now. I’ve put the packs of playing cards back in the drawer where I found them.

  So I made another cup of coffee and sat down by the window with the diary from that first summer on Samos. Bit the head off every feeling of doubt and uncertainty, and started reading. Make decisions and stick to them . . . When Eugen Bergman gets in touch it will be as well if Martin has at least some idea of what he’s been doing.

  Three hours later I’d got as far as 1 August 1977. There is a week left before he is due to return to Sweden, and it’s possible that all kinds of things will happen then. Martin is still writing in his restrained, neutral style – as if he thinks that one day somebody else will read the text, probably a young woman with intellectual ambitions. I can’t help having that impression, nor can I help it that here and there some things that he writes are impossible to understand. But it is only occasional words, nothing of significance for the meaning overall.

  The most important thing that happened towards the end of July – and there is no need to read between the lines in order to understand this – is that he pays a visit to the Herold/Hyatt house. It is not just Martin, but the whole of the so-called writers’ collective, and it evidently turns out to be quite an impressive occasion. There are about twenty people present, and they eat a succession of fancy Greek dishes prepared by the staff at the nearby taverna, who also act as waiters and waitresses, at least at the beginning of the festivities. The guests sit at a long table on the terrace with views over the pine-clad hillside and the sea. There is guitar- and bouzouki-playing, singing, poems are read in every language you can think of, animated discussions take place, a manifesto written and masses of wine drunk. ‘Retsina,’ Martin goes out of his way to stress, ‘that’s the only drinkable wine you can get down here.’ He writes that it is absolutely blooming magical, and he’s not referring to the wine. Marijuana is also smoked, but not by Martin.

  The reason – if there needed to be a reason – for Herold and Hyatt inviting all the guests to their house is that the first reactions to Bessie’s debut novel have started flowing in. There is still a week or so to go before the book is due to be published in the USA, but her publisher has informal contacts and can already inform Bessie that the reviews are going to be brilliant. Not to say sensational. Tom Herold gives a speech in praise of his young wife, and declares facetiously that a year from now he will be forgotten, but Bessie Hyatt will be as resplendent as a modern-day Pheme on the uppermost pinnacle of Parnassus.

  Those are the exact words that Martin wrote, and then he comments that the choice of that particular goddess is rather odd. Pheme is above all the goddess of scurrilous gossip in Greek mythology: he points out that he seems to be the only person present who reflects on that fact, and that he will take the matter up with Herold in due course. In any case, he adds, Bessie doesn’t seem to have taken the reference amiss. On the other hand, she may well not be familiar with all the details of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses. But Martin is.

  The party continues until dawn. Martin writes that he eventually joins a little group discussing Cavafy, and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. These learned discussions seem to go on for ever – with the Russian Gusov sitting in a corner and annoying everybody with his ignorance; also present are the two lesbian artists and the French poets Legel and Fabrianny. Plus the cheerful Nietzsche specialist Bons. Martin devotes over two pages to the comments and points of view expressed in these discussions, and concludes his account of this long day and night by describing how a group of eight or ten persons trudge down to the beach and bathe naked as dawn breaks. He notes once again that it is absolutely blooming magical, but then crosses the phrase out when he realizes that it is a repetition.

  He also writes – in the same unemotional style – about an outing a few days later to a place called Ormos Marathokambos, if I’ve managed to decipher the spelling correctly. A trip undertaken on four Vespas. There is a driver and a passenger on each of the scooters, and on the way back home he has the one and only Bessie Hyatt sitting behind him. By now her book has appeared, and the reception was just as overwhelming as her publishing contacts had predicted. In a week she will fly over to the USA for a PR tour. Martin writes that ‘he drives along the dusty country road towards the setting sun with the young American genius’s arms around his waist,’ and that it makes him feel ‘remarkably exhilarated’. Good God! I think: but that’s exactly what he put.

  It is not clear whether Herold was also present on the outing. I decide to save the last ten pages, the rest of the notes about 1977, until the evening, load Castor into the car and set off for a different sea.

  We took the attractive route via Simonsbath again, and before we got to Lynmouth we stopped at a place called Watersmeet. We clambered down some steep steps into a deep ravine dug out by the River Lyn: the village gets its name from the fact that it is at the confluence of the West Lyn and East Lyn rivers. I was feeling irritated, thanks to reading Martin’s confounded diary. I kept trying to tell myself that it was about happenings thirty-five years ago, and that it was the year before we first met: but it didn’t really work. He was twenty-four years old that first summer in Samos, and he ought not to have written like a pretentious grammar school pupil. Is this what he had sounded like when we sat together at that party in Gamla Stan? I couldn’t believe that was the case. Or perhaps we were different people at that time, both of us. If I had been able to read these notes then, what impression would I have got? Would I have fallen for them? Would I have even considered marrying him? How much did Rolf’s death and my general state of fragility mean for my decision? For my life?

  Good questions, I thought as I wandered along with Castor under the green arches of the trees lining the cheerfully babbling brook. There it came again, the cheerfully babbling brook, but it didn’t give me the same degree of satis
faction on this occasion. Not by a long way. There seem to be moments when one feels in harmony with Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, but this was not one of them. At the same time, however, there was something inside me that was rather pleased by my irritation. When had I last felt irritated? Not during the past month, in any case; perhaps not for six months. If I were to dress up the situation in a way reminiscent of that twenty-four-year-old I didn’t want to think about, I could perhaps maintain that a pile of rotten old junk had been set alight in a forgotten corner of my comatose soul – and there was good reason to feel gratitude for that: something had awoken.

  Be that as it may, we walked quite a long way along the bank of one of the two rivers, and when we came to a bridge after about forty minutes we crossed over it and wandered along the opposite bank back to Watersmeet. We climbed up the steep steps to the road and the car, and drove to the little seaside town of Lynmouth.

  We had a late lunch at one of the pubs down by the harbour without speaking to a single soul. We bought a few essentials in the neighbouring town of Lynton, including a pair of Wellington boots, then returned home over the moor to Darne Lodge.

  A day in the life, I thought once again. I read the old diaries of my husband, who is probably dead. I go for a walk with my dog. I buy a few essentials.

  Before long I shall regard cutting my nails or brushing my teeth as an event of significance.

  I tried to rekindle my irritation once more – it seemed to have been blown away by the wind. As I had enjoyed it – the irritation, that is – and as it had no doubt been caused by the Samos diary from 1977, I decided to continue reading it. The rest of that first summer. Then a few chapters of Dickens, four games of patience, and then bed.

  I duly did all that, and when I was about to let Castor out for his final evening walk, I noticed something lying there just outside the door. It was that dead pheasant again.

  Or possibly another one, but just as dead. I dropped the glass I was holding in my hand, it shattered as it hit the stone paving, and I realized that once again I had forgotten to buy that torch.

  21

  The tenth of November. Cloudy with sunny intervals and a strong wind from the south-west. Eleven degrees in the morning. I took the dead pheasant with us in a plastic carrier bag when we went for our morning walk, and threw it into a clump of thorn bushes on the way to the Roman remains at the top of Winsford Hill. I tried not to think about it – the pheasant, not the Roman monument – but it was not easy. How come that it had ended up outside my door twice? I had convinced myself that it was the same bird, in fact. Some animal must have dragged it there, I thought – on the second occasion at least, at some time yesterday evening. But what animal? There are presumably foxes around here even if I haven’t seen one, but why would a fox kill a pheasant and then leave it completely untouched?

  Another bird? Various birds of prey soar overhead on the moor, but even if I don’t know much about their habits it didn’t seem very likely. Birds don’t attack other birds, surely? Not in that way, at least.

  A person? I dismissed the thought.

  Instead, as I struggled into the powerful headwind with Castor hard on my heels, I began thinking about that face in the window. The pale young man and the gesture he had made over his throat. What had he actually meant by that? The significance in itself was obvious enough, of course – but in this case? Was it some sort of bizarre joke? Was there an intention behind it? Something serious? Who was he? Perhaps a madman who lived in that isolated house and made the same gesture to everybody he saw? Or at least, everybody who walked past his home: there were presumably not very many who did.

  I also thought about the two deaths that had taken place in Darne Lodge. Two suicides with more than a hundred years between them. Irrespective of how many normal people had lived in the house since the latest act of self-destruction, it felt macabre. But on the other hand, wasn’t every aspect of my stay here macabre? Perhaps that wasn’t the right word, but something like that in any case. Something on its way out of the real world. But then, where exactly is the borderline between what we call real and what we call unreal? I had only slept in that house for eight nights by this time, and already I was beginning to experience . . . well, what exactly?

  Some sort of menace? Something warning of danger, something telling me that if I wasn’t careful I would find myself in a right mess?

  Rubbish, I thought. Figments of the imagination.

  Then again, what had I expected? I had divested myself of my old life on that Polish beach: I had put an end to it just as conclusively as one breaks a bone off a chicken. Absolutely everything had changed, nothing was the same as before. Isn’t that the fact of the matter? If you wanted, you could argue that it was Martin who had set everything in motion when he raped that waitress in the hotel in Gothenburg – or left his sperm on her stomach, at least. What I did in the bunker had simply been a natural reaction, albeit a bit on the late side, albeit a bit drastic and very much unplanned – something done in a flash, as they say. But nevertheless one thing had led to another, and there was a clearly linked series of causes and effects for the left side of the brain to revel in . . . Yes indeed, there was a lot that one could maintain and think about in the back of one’s mind, surrounded by this open, peaceful moorland with bracken, cheerful-looking gorse and surly-looking heather, mud, grass and wild ponies: but when all was said and done, the biggest problem, the distressing point, was my own mind which simply couldn’t calm down and rest. Couldn’t stop producing all these words and half-baked analyses, futile and would-be wise, non-stop, every day, every hour and every minute until at the predestined moment my heart stopped pumping oxygen-laden blood into these highly overrated rantings.

  The real world, I thought. I need some kind of context, otherwise I shall succumb unnecessarily. A dog isn’t enough.

  And so I made up my mind to visit the Winsford Computer Centre during the afternoon. What had Margaret Allen said? Between eleven in the morning and six in the evening?

  It was Alfred Biggs who was on duty. He was a mousy little man wearing clothes that were too big for him. As if he had shrunk after buying them, or inherited them from an older brother who had died in some war or other a long time ago. His spectacles with black plastic frames were also too big: I had the impression that he was trying to hide behind them, and that his smile was shy and somewhat introverted.

  ‘You must be that writer,’ he said when we had introduced ourselves. ‘Margaret told me about you.’

  ‘Is she not here today, then?’

  ‘No, Saturdays are mine. Margaret only works here two days a week. She works at the library in Dulverton as well.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, she said that.’

  ‘But I live more or less next door. I’m retired, so I have all the time in the world.’

  ‘I’m pleased that I can come here occasionally – I don’t have an internet connection where I’m living.’

  ‘You’re always welcome. That’s the point of this place. If we’re not open, all you need to do is to knock on my door – that red one just round the corner.’

  He pointed in the direction of the church.

  ‘So this is Castor, is it?’

  Castor heard his name and stretched his nose out towards Alfred Biggs, who stroked him cautiously on the head. He smiled again, and I tried to assess it. There was something odd about his teeth. Something his lips did their best to conceal. He showed me where I could sit, and asked if I would like a cup of tea. Just like the previous occasion, there was nobody else in the room; I accepted and made a mental note to bring with me some sort of biscuits the next time I came.

  When I had received my cup, I sat down to check our e-mails – first mine, and then Martin’s. Alfred went back to his book. Castor settled down under my table.

  There was only one message in my inbox. Katarina Wunsch. The title was: London? I swallowed, then opened it.

  Hi there Maria! Something very odd happened a few week
s ago when my husband and I were in London, and I really must ask you about it, no beating about the bush. We met a woman in Hyde Park and I was quite certain it was you. We said hello but she spoke English and said it was some kind of mistake. It was very awkward. My husband and I talked about it afterwards, and I simply can’t get it out of my head. Was it really not you? It feels so odd – forgive me if I’m being presumptuous. Love, Katarina.

  I don’t know how she had got hold of my new e-mail address, but I assume she’d got it from the Monkeyhouse. I don’t know how easy or difficult it is to find out information like that, but in any case I thought it over for quite a while before writing the following reply:

  Hi Katarina! Great to hear from you, it’s been ages since the last time. But I really have no idea who that woman might have been. One thing is clear, of course: it wasn’t me. Martin and I have been down here in Morocco for quite a while now. He’s busy with some writing project or other as usual, and I’ve accompanied him mainly in order to avoid a Swedish winter. We’ll be staying here until May next year. I hope all is well with you and yours – let me know if you bump into me again! Love, Maria.

  I hesitated for a while before writing that last sentence, but thought I might as well demonstrate that I was taking it lightheartedly. I sent it off and went over to Martin’s inbox.

  Seven new messages. Four from people who were presumably colleagues of one kind or another, brief messages not requiring an answer – not immediately, at least. One was from a student complaining about the mark he had been given for an essay: it was several pages long, I’d had more than enough after about half of it and trashed it.