A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  ‘So what was so odd about it?’ he said. ‘Two boys and a girl – it’s not the first time a pair of brothers fell for the same girl –’

  I shook my head. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s like that.’

  ‘Then what is it like?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I looked around, as if I could find an answer in that little wooden room by the shore, the windows wide open to the first of the summer air and the cries of the terns and the oystercatchers further along the beach. ‘I was surprised to see her with them, but then, there’s probably a perfectly simple explanation, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with …’ I thought for a moment. What did I want to say? Sex? Romance? One of those love triangles they have in the movies?

  Kyrre smiled and patted my hand. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever it’s like, the boy is at peace now.’ He stood up. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it’s not the dead who should be pitied.’

  I nodded. ‘Poor Harald,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what he’ll do without Mats.’

  Kyrre didn’t say anything. He picked up our cups and carried them to the sink, then he came back for the coffee pot. ‘At least he has a friend,’ he said – which confused me. Did he mean Maia? Or was he talking about me? He looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I wonder where my guest is? He’s staying for the entire summer, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ That was a surprise. Usually, they came for a couple of weeks, a month at most. ‘Till when?’

  ‘Till the end of September,’ he said. ‘He’s paid the whole thing in advance. He says he needs somewhere to come and work, to get some peace and quiet.’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I was curious. To the best of my knowledge, nobody had taken the hytte for that long before. ‘Anyway. That’s good, isn’t it?’

  Kyrre nodded. ‘I hope so,’ he said. He didn’t want to tempt providence, I suppose. I had known him long enough to understand that. He wasn’t a man to be caught out taking anything for granted. He worried to keep trouble at bay and, when trouble came, it was just the confirmation he’d needed that he hadn’t worried enough. He gave me one of his baleful looks. ‘It all depends what he’s like,’ he said. I laughed, and he pretended to be offended. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you never know. He could be a monster.’

  When I got home, at around four, the suitors were long gone. Mother was in the studio and the house had that air it sometimes took on, an air of being, if not quite deserted, then at least inhabited only by phantoms. It’s an air Mother has deliberately contrived, I think; from the moment a visitor arrives at our gate, there’s a sense of things being not what they seem, a sense that everything here is based on illusion. Which is fair, because that’s what it mostly is: an illusion, an improbable house and garden that somebody has conjured up out of nothing, in this northern wilderness. Everything Mother creates is a work of art, so everything is, by definition, an illusion. The garden, for example. Every year, after six months of cold and darkness, she raises it from the dead, filling the gaps where things have rotted off with shrubs and poppies and bright annuals, forcing them to quicken and root in the cold ground, thousands of miles from the alluvial plains and sunlit terraces where they belong, red and orange and golden against the fence posts and carved stones that divide the inner, cultivated sector of our land from the zone of calculated wildness just outside. That is how it is, still, even though we rarely have visitors these days, and that was how it was then. It was always a miracle, always an illusion, what she did there: Harstad would bring pots of Arctic poppy and saxifrage seedlings, telling her they were far better suited to the climate than the exotics she favoured, but she would laugh him off and go on with what she was doing. It didn’t matter what it cost, in money or effort. She wanted big colours, she wanted immense, blowsy flower heads and delicate, sweet-scented things that nobody else round here would even consider trying – and, by application and sheer force of will, she made it work. Some years, all her plans would be destroyed overnight, in one big wind or heavy rain, but she simply cleared the plot and started again. Harstad would tell her that our native poppy was just as delicate and just as beautiful as her exotics, but he didn’t understand what she was after, pinching out seedlings and striking cuttings in the garden room year on year, never content, always searching for the blossom that would bring to life one of those deep, wet hues she saw in her mind’s eye, colours out of a Sohlberg painting, or an Italian altarpiece. She didn’t want flowers that were naturally adapted to the climate – had she lived in the Mediterranean, she would have worked just as hard to grow saxifrages and gentians – she wanted what was most unlikely. She wanted the miraculous. Yet, as Harstad once had the temerity to point out, there was something about that garden, as beautiful as it was, that didn’t seem altogether true. It was, he said, an elaborate and terrifying illusion. I’m quite sure Mother was pleased when she heard him say this, even though she knew, without question, that Harstad wasn’t paying her a compliment.

  The house was an illusion too; or rather, it was a series of illusions. Mother always laughs off the idea that she is a recluse, and she pretends to be surprised when interviewers ask about her solitary life. Most journalists don’t observe their subject, she says, they just repeat what they’ve read in the files, but the fact is that this house is designed to hide all those objects and possessions that really matter to her. On the ground floor, the furniture is comfortable, and the kitchen is well appointed, the pictures on the walls are carefully chosen – exhibition posters in the hallway and on the lower staircase, prints and drawings by people she used to know in Oslo and Bergen – and the books on the shelves are exactly the kind of books you would expect in a house like ours, but it’s all hopelessly predictable. Nothing on this lower level reveals the slightest clue about the woman who lives there. Even if a visitor were permitted to climb to the upper floor, there is almost nothing of specific interest there, either, and certainly nothing that might not be found in a professional or academic household in Tromsø, or Trondheim. More books, neatly shelved on a long corridor leading to a locked door at the back of the house; more prints from exhibitions in Bergen and Oslo; a couple of antique sea chests full of art catalogues and guidebooks; a dark elmwood chair on the landing, opposite my bedroom, with a view over the garden and the Sound. The one clue that an artist lives here is the painting that hangs above this chair, and that one painting is unfinished.

  It’s not a particularly impressive work, at first sight. Competent, but not at all typical. I suppose, if it were in a catalogue, it would be described as ‘a study of a young girl’, or some such thing, but it is, I would say, somewhat more significant in the artist’s oeuvre than that would suggest. To a casual viewer, it is nothing more than a portrait of a thirteen-year-old girl in a yellow dress, her face tilted to the summer sky, her long hair almost silvery and her eyes far bluer than they could have been in real life – but, even though it remains unfinished, and even though the figure it portrays could be seen as an abstract personification of girlhood innocence rather than a specific individual, a careful observer would quickly realise that the chosen model is, in fact, the artist’s daughter. Of course, even the most knowledgeable viewer couldn’t tell by looking at it that this was Mother’s last attempt to render a human likeness, begun and abandoned three or four years after she had supposedly given up portraiture for good. A connoisseur of the artist’s work might be interested to see how clearly it foreshadows the ghostly, almost indecipherable figures who sometimes appear in much later paintings, shadows in a landscape, perhaps, yet as much part of that landscape as the trees and the meadow grasses and the stones on the beach, and no more or less significant than any of these things. And it’s true; this unfinished painting is a transitional work, not so much a last attempt at a portrait as a first rendering of the human figure as idea, something nonspecific, almost emblematic. As far as I know, Mother has never been troubled by th
e fact that this first phantom in her work is modelled on me, just as it never seems to have occurred to her that I might be troubled by it – and the fact is, I’m not. Not really. Once upon a time, I had mixed feelings about that picture; now, I barely give it a second glance as I enter or leave my room or when I settle into the old elmwood chair that Mother bought especially for this spot on the landing. Here, on certain days, I can look out over the meadows to the waters of Malangen beyond and think I am quite alone in the world. When I’m there, by myself, I barely give the painting a second glance, and I don’t see the girl it depicts as me any more, even though the likeness is unmistakable. For Mother, everything is a form, everything is a possible subject, to be observed and transformed by her imagination, and there’s no reason why I should think of it any differently.

  Still, I don’t know why she keeps this half-finished painting there. None of her other works hang in the main part of the house: they are confined to the studio at the far end of the landing, behind closed doors, and nobody ever sees them until they are packed up and driven away by a man who – according to Mother – looks like a murderer and never speaks to anyone but her. That man, whose name I have never learned, works for Dag Fløgstad, the dealer who handles all of Mother’s work, and he’s been coming to the house, driving all the way from Oslo, with an overnight stop at his sister’s in Mo I Rana, for as long as I can remember. He is nothing more than a delivery man, but he is the only one who is permitted to enter Mother’s true house, the house that sits, like a kernel, inside the dream house she has created and, though he is completely unaware of the privilege he enjoys, he is more real to her, in some ways, than the suitors, who come every week and are never allowed past the foot of the stairs, much less through the door to the studio. It’s Mother’s lair, her secret place, an empty, whitewashed space, with a single, north-facing window and no furniture other than a chaise longue and a couple of rickety wooden chairs – this is where her real life happens.

  Nobody else but me. And I am only admitted on special occasions. Once, when I wasn’t just her daughter, but a subject she found interesting, I was admitted every day, and I had to stand still for hours at a time, with my eyes fixed on that wide, north-facing window, while she worked to transform me into an idea, something that would become definitive, and so last forever – or that, at least, was how I saw it, when she caught the ghost of me and set it down on the canvas. I have no idea why she never finished that painting: one day, she simply told me that she didn’t need me to pose any more and, when I asked if it was finished, she said it wasn’t. Not quite. ‘Something isn’t working,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to leave off for a while, and come back to it.’

  Even though she seemed calm, and I had no cause to doubt her, I sensed that this wasn’t the whole story. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  She smiled. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I just need to take a break.’

  I hadn’t been particularly eager to sit for the portrait to begin with but, now that she was setting it aside, I couldn’t conceal my disappointment. Or the sense, right at the back of my mind, of somehow failing to live up to some image she had been looking for. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘can I see it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘When I work it out, you can. But only when it’s finished.’

  But it was never finished and, as far I knew, she did no more work on it. It was the last portrait she did – or rather, the last she did before that summer, when she painted the huldra in a few hurried sittings – and it remained in her studio for months, locked away in a cupboard to which she had the only key. For a while, I wondered what had gone wrong, assuming I was to blame somehow, but she didn’t seem to give it a second thought and, by the end of that long-ago summer, I had pretty much forgotten about it. Mother hadn’t, though. I’m fairly sure she didn’t touch it again, and even a cursory glance reveals that it is nothing like finished – the background is more complete than the figure itself, yet even there, among the summer grasses and wildflowers, there is a sense of something missing which is both obvious at first glance and, at the same time, rather subtle. You can see that something is wrong, but it’s impossible to say what – and the painting is all the more unsettling for that. The girl – not me, myself, but the girl that Mother imagined for the purposes of this particular painting – has a more or less finished face, and you can see that she is wearing a grey dress over a rust-coloured blouse or shirt, but she has no hands and she doesn’t quite fit into her surroundings, while all around her, in the air and in the meadow plants at her feet, there are dozens of gaps and unfinished scribbles that make it seem, not that this is an unfinished painting that could have been completed, given enough time, but that it is an attempt at rendering the unfinished and frighteningly perishable fabric of things, an attempt, whether deliberate or unconscious, to make the viewer see that nothing is permanent. A fairly commonplace, even rather banal philosophical notion – and one that Mother would never think of expressing in so many words – but rather disturbing when it’s made visible, in what seems, at first glance, to be nothing more than a portrait of a young girl. More disturbing still, I suppose, if you are the subject, and the painter is your mother, and I have to think, not only that Mother chose to leave the thing unfinished for a reason – a reason she did not care to explain – but also that later, in the dark hours of the following winter, when I was away at school and she took it out and hung it on the landing, directly opposite my door, she did that, too, for a reason that she at least partly understood, and whose logic she could not resist. I noticed it immediately that same evening, when I came home from Tromsø, and my first impulse was to run downstairs and ask her about it. But I didn’t. I lingered just long enough to see, in this strange, unfinished work, that what Mother was offering me, by hanging it in that carefully chosen spot, was a gift she couldn’t explain, any more than she could resist giving it. A dark gift, perhaps, but a gift nonetheless. An hour later, when she called me down to dinner, neither of us said a word about it, because it wasn’t a gift you discussed, or even gave thanks for. Some gifts are like that. They are given and received in silence, almost in secret and, no matter how inexplicable or strange they may seem, they are never mentioned again.

  I spent the rest of that day looking at picture books. I knew Mother was busy, and I didn’t want to disturb her. I had a quick snack to tide me over till dinner, which might happen at seven, and might not come till nine, then I gathered an armful of books from the shelves in the hall – Harriet Becker, Christian Krohg, Robert Robinson’s Captured by the Norwegians – and I shut myself away in my room. It was a habit I developed that summer, looking at pictures. It didn’t matter what – photographs, illustrations, reproductions of the old masters. I would have liked to read, but I couldn’t. Whenever I tried, I started thinking about what I was supposed to do with my life. Which university, which field of study, which career. All the usual questions for someone my age – questions that didn’t interest me in the least, but seemed suddenly urgent. I had worked hard at school and I had always been a good student, but now, after years of books and grammar and revising for exams, I couldn’t read at all, because I had forgotten how to read without taking notes. All I could do was look at pictures – and there were thousands of pictures to look at. Mother had a huge collection of illustrated books: monographs on her favourite painters, lavish histories of printmaking and photography, several shelves of old children’s stories with beautiful illustrations, art books in Norwegian and English and French, books in languages I didn’t even recognise. She kept the novels and poetry and the leather-bound copies of Ibsen’s plays downstairs, and I would often find her curled up in a chair on some grey winter’s afternoon, immersed in David Copperfield, or Vildanden, but the shelves that lined both walls of the landing, from my room to the door of the studio on either side, contained nothing but picture books. I suppose she wanted them close by, so she could refer to them when she was working, but that su
mmer I almost worked my way through the entire collection, taking them from the shelves five or six at a time and turning the pages slowly, scanning the images of Victorian Christmases and Dutch courtyards, the still lifes with oyster shells and half-peeled lemons, the luminous self-portraits, the landscapes and anatomical studies. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but there were times when I felt that I was on the verge of finding something – not the answer to a specific question, of course, or a clue as to what I should do with my life, but something I couldn’t have identified in so many words, some change in my internal weather, some new atmosphere or mood that would have allowed me to begin thinking about those things on my own terms. For after all, as reluctant as I was to contemplate it seriously, I knew that there would be a future, and I would have to take part in it. Only, I didn’t want to consider it until I was ready, and I didn’t want to do what was expected of me. I wanted to make a free decision – and there are moments, now, when I can look back with something like admiration for the girl I was then, if only because she knew, in any number of surprising ways, that a free decision is far more difficult than everyone pretends.

  The time passed quickly and it was eight o’clock before Mother emerged to cook us a meal and ask me about my day. We hadn’t seen each other since the previous night and while there was nothing unusual about that, I could tell that she was preoccupied. As soon as we had eaten, she vanished back into the studio for what I suspected might turn out to be another night-long session: she was working on something big and, though she hadn’t said very much about it, I knew her well enough to read the signs, and so anticipate, first the obsessive, insomniac, abstracted state that would carry her to the end of that work and, then, when she knew for sure that it was done, the day or two of anticlimax and restlessness that would follow, a mood that she would always try, and never quite manage, to conceal.