A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  I sat up and looked at the clock on my bedside table: it was eleven fifty-five precisely, which meant that they had been there for almost an hour, and I was still in the house, when I should have been long gone. Usually, I spent Saturday mornings with Kyrre Opdahl, dreaming over a mug of coffee in his ramshackle kitchen while he worked on some ancient clock or outboard motor that nobody else could fix, sitting out by the boathouse watching the ferries and cargo ships go by on their way to Nordkapp or Russia, or maybe tidying his little summer cottage, his hytte, for the next batch of tenants – it didn’t really matter where it was, as long as it wasn’t here. I would stay out until the suitors were gone and, then, when I got home, I would pretend that the dining room had been empty all along. There would be no sign of the intruders, by then: Mother would have cleared the plates and wiped the crumbs off the table before going up to her studio to continue work on whatever she was painting and I would have the place to myself again. The hallway, the dining room, the staircase would be utterly still, preternaturally quiet. Quiet, and empty, and apparently uncontaminated.

  The suitors. That was my name for them, not hers: suitors, like those men in the Greek myth, come to beguile, or charm, or just outwait Penelope while her lost husband wandered the wine-dark sea trying to find his way home. Mother had read that story to me when I was a child, along with all the other classic tales of heroes and Vikings and seventh sons of seventh sons that she loved so much – and I think she was a little bemused when life began to imitate art and these men started turning up with their stories and gifts, patient men who had waited years in this subarctic settlement for someone like her to arrive. Angelika Rossdal. The renowned artist who had turned her back on the big wide world and come north to live as a recluse on this remote island, but also just happened to be the impossible beauty they had been waiting all their lives to fall hopelessly in love with. Some of the men who frequented our house over the years were married, some came to Mother’s Saturday-morning tea parties for a month or two, then drifted away, dismayed by her beauty and remoteness, but the core group – Harstad, Ryvold, Rott – came every week, no matter what, and sat hopeless and spellbound at her table, romantics of the old school, whose only real fear was that their prayers might be answered. The core group were all bachelors of one sort or another, and they were all from elsewhere, men who had chosen to live in the far north for their own reasons, whether from shyness, or some exaggerated need for quiet, or because they were escaping from some answered prayer further south. Mother did nothing to encourage them, though I have to say that she did nothing to put them off either. On the contrary, she never betrayed the least sign to anyone of what she might or might not have been feeling. She merely served her visitors tea and cakes, listening as they competed to bring stories that might win her approval, sidestepping their occasional attempts to engage her on some more intimate level and, when they left, returning to her work as if there had been no interruption. By that summer, the ritual had been going on for years – so long, in fact, that it had become a formal arrangement – and I think Mother was not only surprised by that, but also bewildered by their attentions, just as Penelope must have been when her admirers continued to wait, day after day, year after year, while she wove and then unwove her great tapestry in the light and in the dark.

  And yet, considering how fascinated they were by this mysterious woman, considering how curious they were about her ideas on painting and literature and life in general, it was interesting – interesting to me, at least – that none of them ever enquired as to where I figured in the great scheme of things. She was a single woman with a teenage daughter, but nobody ever asked who my father was, or where he might be now – and that struck me as odd, even though I knew that, had they enquired, she wouldn’t have told them a thing. After all, she hadn’t even told me any more than the bare minimum. She had said, in response to repeated questioning when I was younger, that she’d met a man – whose name, she told me, was irrelevant – at a party in Oslo and they had been together for a short time; then he had moved unexpectedly to Argentina and they had fallen out of touch. According to this version of events, the man had left to pursue his own interests and she had decided, for the good of all concerned, to bring me up on her own – and though it may seem odd, I accepted her story at face value. Naturally, it bothered me for a while that she wouldn’t even tell me his name, but she was adamant about that, and once Mother decides something, nobody in the world can shift her. ‘That’s all in the past,’ she would say. ‘And besides, we’re fine as we are, aren’t we?’ And I had to admit that we were, indeed, fine as we were. Once, I overheard the suitors talking about me, saying how difficult it must be to grow up in the shadow of such a remarkable woman, and I spent a whole afternoon wondering about that, before deciding that what they had said was ridiculous. I didn’t see myself as growing up in my mother’s shadow. I was living in a world of my own making, a space that Mother had marked out and then left for me to define as I wished. She lived exactly as she chose, and I always knew that her work came first, but that only gave me the freedom to live as I chose, and to choose what came first for me – and I never once doubted that she was right. We were fine. We had the house, we had the whole island, in fact. We had enough quiet and space to live our own lives as we wanted, not somebody else’s version of how life should be, and we were more or less self-sufficient. We were perfectly able to look after ourselves and we didn’t need a thing from anyone.

  It wasn’t just that Mother didn’t need other people, though; it could also be said that, because she was so involved with her work, they were more or less irrelevant to her. She didn’t ask for company, she tolerated it – and, over the years, a fixed and, to her mind, satisfactory routine had been established, allowing for a minimum of human contact with a band of men that she could quite easily control. On Saturdays, from eleven o’clock till two in the afternoon, the suitors would arrive and they would all sit in the dining room, drinking tea, eating the cakes that Mother ordered in from the store at Straumsbukta, carefully studying one another across the table – and, all the while, they would talk. Endlessly, tirelessly, almost never falling silent, taking turns or talking across one another to lay out their tales and theories and items of human interest, while Mother listened, sifting out details and fragments and shreds of random information and quietly storing it all away for later. I couldn’t stand it. Usually, I made myself scarce before they even arrived, and Mother knew why, though she didn’t mind, as long as I wasn’t too obvious. That morning, however, because I had stayed up half the night, sitting at the window and staring out for hours at the first summer gloaming, I had slept in and, now, just before noon, the suitors were nicely settled in, the tea things spread out before them, the Danish china, the sandwiches and petits fours, the wafers and chocolate biscuits and, in pride of place, the big willow-pattern plate laden with those napoleon cakes that Rott liked so much. I could picture him in my mind’s eye: Rott – horse-faced, lank-haired, always half smiling, an ageing schoolboy in a fisherman’s sweater, watching with undisguised pleasure as Mother set out her store of treats. Looking back, I realise that Mother really did love Rott, after a fashion – though not as a suitor. She kept her love a secret, of course, because she kept everything secret; that was her nature. Nevertheless, though the cakes she carefully laid out on Saturday mornings were for everyone, in reality they were intended for Rott and I am sure the others knew that. I am sure, in fact, that she intended them to know. She wanted her kindness to him to be infectious; she wanted them to love him too – because if ever a man needed to be loved, it was Rott.

  Now it was noon. That morning, Kyrre Opdahl would be at the hytte, just below our domain of garden and birch woods, making things ready for his first guest of the year and wondering where I was. I had promised to help. I always helped, not just because I was fond of that foolish old man, but also for reasons of my own, and I didn’t like the idea of being late. I got out of bed and went to the window
to see if his van was in the usual place, parked at the end of the track by the hytte, which is clearly visible from the upper level of our house – and at that moment, as I looked out across the meadows towards the shore, I realised that it was summer. True summer, not just white nights, the months of snow, then thaw, then snow again, finally over. Sugar snow, drift snow, dirty snow that lingers underfoot, even into the first weeks of midnight sun. Spring snow. There are people who cannot take living this far north, because of the long winter darkness, and there are others who cannot bear the endless, mind-stopping white nights of insomnia and wild imaginings, but for me, the worst time is the season of dirty snow, when the sky is bright, but the earth is still frozen underfoot, a false summer of white skies and cold earth when nothing seems to fit. We have a name for the dark time and a name for the white gloaming of high summer, but there is no name for this season, even though it happens every year, a slight, yet significant unseemliness on the land that, at its worst, amounts to a barefaced mockery, like a red dress at a funeral. That year, our unnamed season of snow and sullen light had lingered too long, but now, in what felt like an instant, it was over – and even if the change was subtle, there was no mistaking it. I opened the window. The freshness was almost overwhelming. The night before had been hard and silent; now there was a softness to the air, a new sweetness of grasses and wildflowers, and mountain water gathering in the meadows. I could hear bird calls and wind-sifted murmurs from Mother’s garden, far-sounding cries from the meadows by the old ferry dock, and a low drone from the shipping channel beyond. Common birds, meadow birds, shore birds; the faraway putter of a motorboat; an engine buzzing further up the coast, towards Mjelde. It’s always a surprise, in the first days of summer: all this noise and activity begins and yet, when you go to a window and look out, it seems there’s nothing there but space and light. This is the time when visitors start coming to Kyrre Opdahl’s summer cottage, the only other dwelling place that’s visible from our house and, that morning, the first of those visitors was about to arrive. I could see, by the van parked outside the hytte, that the old man was already at work, clearing and tidying and setting out his welcome box of coffee and tea bags and fresh bread, putting milk and some gjetost in the little fridge, checking there was gas for the stove and a stockpile of logs and kindling in the woodshed. And by now, he would be worried about me, because I wasn’t there and that old man could always find a reason to worry.

  I pulled on some jeans and a sweater, then I walked out onto the landing and paused at the top of the stairs to listen. From inside my room, I hadn’t been able to make the voices out, but here, directly above the open door to the dining room, I could hear everything. I wasn’t usually much interested in their conversation, of course – but that morning was different and I lingered a minute or two, trying to figure out why. Down below, Harstad was talking, in response to something Rott had just said.

  ‘There’s nothing suspicious about it,’ he was saying. His voice sounded unusually sharp. Normally, he was quite soft-spoken, but then his usual topics of conversation had to do with his garden, or with some new plant he’d acquired from a friend who worked at the university. ‘Even on a fine day, the currents are treacherous. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘But what on earth was he doing out there in the middle of the night?’ Mother put in softly, to keep the peace. ‘In a stolen boat? All by himself?’ I could see her in my mind’s eye, looking around at the assembled company, the perfect hostess from eleven till two, when they would all leave, almost exactly to the minute. ‘You have to admit, Amund, that does seem odd.’

  ‘Word is, he was always a little strange,’ Harstad said. ‘A bit of a loner –’

  Mother laughed at that cliché, but she didn’t pursue it. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’ll have to wait and see. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more to this than meets the eye.’

  There was a longish silence, though not an uncomfortable one. Silence did sometimes fall upon those Saturday gatherings, and Mother always lingered over it a while, observing the moment as if it were some unexpected blessing. She liked silence and she mistrusted those who were uncomfortable with it, which made such occasions dangerous for the likes of Rott, who seemed incapable of sitting quietly. After a few seconds, though, the quiet was broken – tactfully, and with all due ceremony – by one of the others in the room, someone who had not spoken till now. ‘Where did they find him?’ he asked, his voice only just audible. It was Ryvold. He didn’t say much, but when he did, there was always a suggestion in the words he spoke, or in the way he spoke them, that he had been lagging behind. Going at his own pace. Thinking.

  There was another silence, then Harstad answered. ‘At Straumsbukta,’ he said. ‘Not far from where he lived. But they think he drifted down from somewhere up this way.’

  That unaccustomed quiet descended again, then someone – I suppose it would have been Mother – got up and started moving about. There was a rattle of crockery and the sound of a kettle boiling and, though the conversation only stopped for a moment, I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying through the background noise. Still, I was a little intrigued by what I had heard – obviously, someone had drowned, and in a stolen boat, which was surprising in a place like Kvaløya – but I didn’t know, then, who they were talking about and, by itself, the story wasn’t enough to make me linger. Besides, I didn’t want to be any later than I was to see Kyrre. I could have gone down to the kitchen to fix some coffee and toast, just to listen in for a while before I made my escape – because I was curious, and the rising scent of something warm and buttery was making me hungry – but I knew Kyrre would at least have coffee on the go down at the hytte and, whatever the story was, I could be sure that he would know as much as anyone about what had happened. So I sneaked down quietly, hoping that no one would hear, and I slipped out through the front door, crossing the garden and closing the gate behind me. Then I hurried down through the stand of birch trees that Mother had planted there, between the gate and the road, and out into the sunshine, to the cool, lush meadows that led to the shore.

  I have very few memories that I would be prepared to call my own. I have snapshots, sketches, fragments of stories and unfinished anecdotes, but none of them fit together and, when I try to retell them, they seem false, like something invented, or borrowed. For the first three years of my life, we lived in Oslo, but I don’t remember anything at all from that time. All I know is this island – Kvaløya, latitude seventy degrees north, far in the Arctic Circle, the place Mother chose when she decided to change everything and start her life over again. Back in Oslo, she was pretty successful and, though she wasn’t as well known as she is now, she was heading that way. At that time, she had a reputation mainly as a painter of portraits. She had a large apartment, interesting friends, professional standing – all the things she’d thought she wanted when she was growing up. Then, one day, she decided to move to the Arctic Circle. She didn’t really have a reason: she had never even been to the Arctic, and she didn’t know a soul north of Trondheim. But then maybe that was why, once she had made up her mind, she chose to come here, to a place she had never even heard of before she spread the map out on her drawing board and scanned what, at the time, must have looked like remote, empty places: long archipelagos of bird-haunted islands, the white yawn of the Finnmarksvidda, the fjords and coastal towns she knew from old paintings and children’s books. For a time, she had considered moving to Røros, where Harald Sohlberg spent much of his life. Sohlberg was then, as he is now, her favourite painter, an influence on her work that she talks about whenever she gives interviews (which she does far more often than might be considered normal for a supposed recluse). In the end, however, that probably seemed too obvious. So, instead, she chose Kvaløya, because it was far enough away from everything she knew and, if you really believe what she says in interviews, because she liked the name. There are other Kvaløyas, but this is the one she chose and, once she got here and saw this stre
tch of coast, and this high grey house looking out over Malangen, she knew she would never leave. I must have been with her on that first journey to our new home, but I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t remember living in Oslo either, and I don’t remember leaving. For me, it is as if I have never been anywhere else and, on the handful of trips we have made to Bergen and Oslo and, once, when I was twelve, to London, those other places didn’t seem real.

  No: Kvaløya. Tromsø. Sommarøy. Hillesøy – for me, these are the real places, the home places. I picture my mother on the day she decided to come north, studying the map in her studio at the heart of the city, and I imagine her reading the names aloud to herself, like the promise of some parallel country where everything is as it has always been. There’s something different about time here, the old stories persist in the wood of the boathouses and the ferry docks, time drifts and founders in the pools of summer grass and willowherb that grow along the roadsides. All you have to do is choose the right day, the right weather, and you come upon a hidden place in the morning light where time stopped long before you were born. Or you turn off on some narrow path through the meadows and arrive at the secret country those names describe, somewhere in the sunlight of the 1960s. Of course, time still exists – it’s out there in the world where other people live, but it’s only an idea. It’s purely theoretical. Out there, in the busy world, the clocks are ticking, but we are mostly alone on our Whale Island and, whether it’s white night or winter dark, there’s not much here to betray the passing of clock-time. That was why Mother chose this particular grey house on this particular stretch of road between Mjelde and Brensholmen – she wanted not to be away from other people so much as to be unburdened of time, and the only way to do that is to live apart. The one neighbour we have on this stretch of shore, other than Kyrre Opdahl’s house, is the tiny hytte, one of those little summer dwellings people used to keep for hunting or fishing, let out now, to summer guests, but it’s not really a house, it’s just a cabin hunkered down on its own patch of grass and weeds by the shore. It’s closer to the sea than we are, almost as close as the little hut where Kyrre keeps his old boat and various leftover pieces of machinery and netting, and it seems to belong, half to the water and half to the land, just as that boathouse does.