A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  Sometimes – and sometimes it would rain for days, nonstop. Sometimes it rained so hard, I could hear the raindrops bouncing off the roof, a monotonous, yet strangely pleasant sound that lulled me, not so much to sleep as to a waking torpor not entirely dissimilar to the state meditators achieve, a state of physical suspension combined with a heightened attention to the subtlest details of colour, or sound. On those days, I would sit in my room, or on the chair on the landing for hours, doing nothing, thinking about nothing, free of intentions and unconcerned about what I was supposed to do with my life, plugged into some abstract current of attentiveness that seemed to include, not just me, but everything around me. I wouldn’t be listening to the rain, I wouldn’t be listening or paying deliberate attention to anything, but I would find myself included in that sound, inseparable from it, and from everything it touched and shaped – and then, suddenly, after three or four hours of this, when nothing had altered in any noticeable way, I had to get up and go out, no matter how wet it was. It wasn’t restlessness that drew me out, it wasn’t impatience with the weather, it was more a feeling of being filled to overflowing, of needing to go out and dissipate some of the charge that had gathered in my hands and behind my eyes. One moment I would be sitting in a chair, with an unread book in my lap, the next I would be downstairs in my coat and boots, with no sense of having decided anything, the wind blowing in through the open door, the sweet, cold scent of the rain in my face.

  That was how it was a few days after Kyrre told me about Harald: I’d sat all morning through a rain that sounded like it would never end, then I’d not been able to stand it any more and I’d pulled on a coat and headed out into the downpour and across the meadows towards the shore. I was preoccupied, I suppose, with Mother and Frank Verne, or maybe with what had happened to the Sigfridsson boys, so I didn’t see Martin Crosbie on the path until the very last moment. I’d observed him going about the meadows now and then since we’d talked, but I hadn’t taken much of an interest and, that day, trailing down to the shore in the thick, sweet rain, I have to confess I’d almost forgotten he even existed. So when I looked up and saw him standing there, rain dripping from his hair and running down his face, I was surprised – and I could see that it amused him, once again, to have caught me off guard. He let that amusement show, for a moment, but then he realised – or thought he realised – that something was wrong, and his manner changed. ‘Hello,’ he said – and, though I didn’t really want company, I said hello back. He smiled – and I saw, in that smile, too much sympathy, too much of an assumption of fellow feeling. ‘So what are you doing out in all this rain?’ he said.

  ‘I could ask you the same thing,’ I said.

  He smiled at that. I thought he would have liked me to be more girlish. More of a child. He wanted someone younger than him to behave accordingly, so he would know that he was the grown-up. Well, that was what I thought, then. ‘Oh, I don’t mind it,’ he said. ‘I’m almost grateful,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It reminds me of home.’ He smiled. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I’m still not used to all this light. I thought I wouldn’t notice so much, but it’s completely thrown me.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, back on familiar ground. ‘I guessed you hadn’t been sleeping, the last time I saw you.’ I thought about the last time I had seen him. Had he been drunk, or was it just sleeplessness? Or was it a little of both? ‘It’s not an uncommon problem,’ I said.

  He seemed puzzled. ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Insomnia.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said. He seemed genuinely surprised by the suggestion, though it was obvious that he hadn’t been sleeping well. I could see it in his eyes. ‘No. It’s not that. I’ve been sleeping, off and on, and I don’t sleep that well at the best of times. But I get enough rest. It’s just that –’ He broke off and looked up at the sky. ‘I don’t know. It’s so odd. This light. It wasn’t that I didn’t know. I was even expecting it. Only I was expecting something different.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘Strange, isn’t it, how you can read a description in a book, or see a film, and still be surprised by everything?’

  ‘Everything?’ I was wondering what else surprised him.

  ‘But it’s not really the light, or the place that surprises me,’ he said, as if he were reading my thoughts. ‘It’s me. It’s how I am here. Though, to be honest, I’m not really sure that I’m here at all. Maybe I’m just dreaming the whole thing …’

  ‘Well, don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘If you were just dreaming all this, then I’d just be someone in your dream, and I can assure you, I’m quite real.’

  He laughed softly. There was a hint of sadness to that laugh, a concealed memory of happier times come back to haunt him. ‘That’s what Alice says to Tweedledum,’ he said. ‘In Alice in Wonderland. Or is it Through the Looking-Glass? I always get them mixed up.’

  He gave me an enquiring look and I shook my head. I knew what he meant – though it wasn’t Wonderland, it was the Looking-Glass World where Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and they show her the Red King, asleep under a Tree, and Alice cries when they tell her that she’s only a sort of a thing in his dream. Which always amused me, because I knew I wouldn’t have cried. Not at all. I knew I was real, just as Alice should have known that, if anything, she was the one who was dreaming it all: the Red King, the crow, those silly overgrown boys, the wood where things have no names. They were in her dream – and that was what should have troubled her. I liked those books, but I knew Wonderland best, and I liked it better than all that stuff with chessmen and things reflected. Reading those books, having Mother explain things to me, listening to the words over and over again, was how I learned English. Mother had read Alice in Wonderland to me when I was quite little, from a book she’d bought in England, an old illustrated edition published by Ward, Lock & Co. in 1916, and I’d made her repeat it again and again, learning whole sections by heart and repeating them back to her, much to her delight. It’s been years since I even looked at those books. All those books from childhood, stories from all around the world, fairy tales from France and Spain, the battle of the Kauravas and the Pandavas from a beautifully illustrated copy of the Mahabharata that Mother had picked up in a secondhand bookshop in Lincoln, the old Norwegian legends of trolls and ghostly women – it’s been years, but I still remember the pictures in that old Alice book, all those manic animals in fancy dress. Father William in his blue jersey and fishing boots, balancing a surprised-looking eel on the end of his nose, the frog footmen in their pink frock coats and three-cornered hats. I remembered it all, and I wanted to say so, but I wasn’t sure I really did understand what Martin Crosbie meant, because those Alice stories never made me feel dreamlike or insubstantial. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  ‘Well,’ I said, looking up in to the rain. ‘I don’t think this is a dream.’ I realised how lame that sounded, but I didn’t know what else to say: at one level, it seemed that it ought to be a game, all this talk of dreams and disappearances, but at that moment, it was hard to tell.

  He nodded, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned and looked out towards the Sound, with an odd quizzical smile. The thought struck me, then, that he was right, and his problem wasn’t insomnia. His problem, whatever it was, had nothing to do with the light, or this place, or how far he was from home. He’d had it before he came here, and I suddenly realised that he knew more about its true nature than he pretended. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he said. ‘But I can’t help thinking it would take just the barest exertion to melt away. To simply walk out into this meadow and vanish into thin air.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. The word ‘exertion’ bothered me. ‘But why would you want to?’

  He turned back to me – and at the same time, he switched into another mode, a kind of patient normality. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m talking nonsense. That’s something I do quite often.’

  I shook my head. He was putting a brave face on it, but I coul
d see that he was spooked. He was embarrassed, of course he was, but there was something at his back and, because he could feel it, he wanted to talk it into submission. I knew that feeling, though for me it was probably friendlier than it was for him. Mostly it had to do with listening – in a hard wind, you can hear all kinds of things out on the meadows, or along the shore. Voices calling from somewhere close by; odd, fleeting animal sounds in the grass; a baby crying just a stone’s throw away, in some drift of sand or shadow that you would never find, no matter how long or how hard you looked. I would hear those noises for days on end; sometimes they would seep into the house and wake me suddenly from the half-sleep of these white nights – but they were strongest down on the shore, where the hytte sits out on its spit of land jutting into the Sound, a place better suited to terns and oystercatchers than to human habitation. I could imagine that he’d been hearing all kinds of things down there, in the wind, and in the stillness, when he couldn’t sleep and, at three o’clock, in the summer light, he’d managed to convince himself that he would never sleep again. There would have been times when he really believed that what he was hearing was some terrible creature with a life and intentions of its own; even on those bright, clear nights, nights that were always so idyllic in the tourist brochures, there would be odd rustlings, a far whistle, an elusive singing out across the water. I’ve lived here all my life and I’m sure, now, that I will never leave, but they still catch me out from time to time. I still have nights when I believe, in my bones, that I will never sleep again, and I still hear phantoms at the window, singing me out to perdition. I don’t know what I would do without them. ‘You have to take care,’ I said. ‘Really. These white nights take some getting used to.’

  He let out a short, hard laugh, then he shook his head. ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Really. I’ve always been a little –’ He thought for a moment, then gave up on whatever he was about to say. He smiled. ‘Don’t you ever get bored, here?’ he said. ‘There can’t be that much to do –’

  ‘I’m not bored,’ I said.

  ‘So what is there to do?’ He brightened – a forced, wholly artificial brightness. ‘I suppose you’ve got a boyfriend tucked away somewhere?’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Have you?’

  He laughed – and now the brightness seemed almost real. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We can’t just stand here getting all wet. Why don’t you come back to the house and have some tea?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Maybe another time.’

  ‘Oh, please do,’ he said. ‘I’ve got cake.’ He was still smiling, but there was a seriousness in his eyes that made me think twice about refusing him again. I didn’t want to have tea with him, of course. At that moment, though, I wasn’t sure what I thought about him: there was some dislike, I know, but I can’t deny that I was beginning to wonder if he might not be a worthwhile subject for observation after all. I think, even then, that I sensed something in his character – an absurd flaw, or some extreme of desire or sentimentality that he was only able to conceal because it was so unlikely – and that interested me. Interested me enough, in fact, that I was beginning to soften, not to him, but to a possible story. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t stay long …’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said – and it was obvious that he was genuinely pleased that I had accepted his invitation. He even allowed himself a soft, happy laugh, but I could see that, behind the laugh, he felt something else. Loneliness, perhaps, or fear – and though I can’t explain it, what struck me then, as he turned away and started back towards his little house in the shore, what struck me like a premonition, was that something bad was going to happen to him and that, in some dark part of his mind, he already knew it was coming.

  True to his word, Martin Crosbie had cake. He had shortbread, too, which he had brought from England, and a box of petits fours, all set out on the table, as if he had been expecting someone all along – and maybe he had. Maybe we hadn’t met by accident, after all. Maybe he had seen me coming down the track and hurried out into the rain to meet me. But why? Why go to such lengths to get me to come and have tea with him? As we stood in the doorway of the hytte, shaking off our wet coats, I could see through to the tea things all set out on the table by the window, and I remember thinking that, if Martin Crosbie was the kind of person who didn’t enjoy his own company, he had made a big mistake coming to Kvaløya – which only goes to show what an innocent I was. Because I felt sorry for him, then, a little. He was so keen to be a good host, so thoughtful and attentive, as we had our tea and sat, he presumably feeling as damp and uncomfortable as I did. The trouble was that, once we were inside, he didn’t seem to have much to say for himself and, for a long moment, we just sat there in silence, trying not to feel awkward. Then, casting around for something to talk about, I noticed a book on the table. It was the same play by Ibsen that he had been reading before, when he had pretended to be reading T. S. Eliot, but it wasn’t the same edition. This one was in Norwegian. En folkefiende.

  I looked at him in surprise. ‘So you speak Norwegian?’

  He seemed puzzled for a moment, then he noticed that I was looking at the book. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That.’ He smiled – apologetically, I thought. ‘I’m trying to learn,’ he said.

  ‘Trying to learn?’ It was my turn to smile. ‘From Ibsen?’

  ‘Why not? He’s the master, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But En folkefiende is not the best place to start.’ We had studied the play in school and, though the language was clear enough, it was too difficult for a beginner. ‘Haven’t you got something easier?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘I’ve got Rosmersholm and this,’ he said. ‘I bought them in a shop near a glacier, somewhere in the western fjords.’ He reached over and picked up the book. ‘I’ve read it in English,’ he said. ‘Now I’m trying to follow it in the original. I read it, then I write out the words, and then …’ He opened the book to the final pages and held it up, like an actor in a run-through. ‘Sagen er den,’ he said, ‘ser I, at den staerkeste mand i verden, det er han, som står mest alene.’ He looked at me, not trying to hide the fact that he was rather pleased with himself. His accent was atrocious. ‘Now: that means – “So you see, the strongest man in the world” – which is him, Stockmann – “is the one who stands most alone.”’ He smiled. ‘Right?’

  I nodded to show that I was impressed – and I was, in a way. It was the strangest approach to learning a language that I had ever come across, but I don’t think he was very interested in actually learning to speak Norwegian. He was playing a game, filling the time – and what better way to fill the time than this clumsy and painstaking process? ‘So,’ I said, ‘you liked En folkefiende. I suppose you must have done, since you got all the way to the end. What about Rosmersholm?’

  He didn’t answer for a moment, then he snapped the book shut and sat back in his chair. ‘I haven’t started that yet,’ he said. ‘Is it good?’

  ‘I like it,’ I said. ‘But my favourite is Vildanden.’

  His face lit up. ‘The Wild Duck,’ he said.

  ‘Akkurat!’ I said. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘I’ve read it,’ he said. ‘But only in English.’

  I laughed. He seemed to think that reading something in English didn’t quite count, whereas working word by word through the original and cobbling together a version of it in his head did – bad pronunciations, misunderstandings and all.

  ‘I’ll get that one next,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s the best, if it’s your favourite.’ He was happy now, it seemed, though there was an odd quality to his pleasure, a faint, but discernible feverishness. He looked around. ‘Would you like some more tea?’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Another cake?’

  ‘I’m fine, really.’

  He stood up and walked over to the fridge in the little kitchen area near the door. ‘I have Solo,’ he said. ‘If you’d prefer.’

  I didn
’t say anything, or not right away. For a while there, while we were talking, I had forgotten the premonition I’d had earlier, but now it came back to me and I felt even more strongly that something bad was going to happen. Only I didn’t know what and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure if this bad thing would happen to Martin Crosbie, or if he would do something bad to someone else – someone as innocent or as desperate as he was. He opened the fridge and took out a bottle. ‘Would you like some Solo?’ he said.

  I didn’t like Solo much – it was too sweet – but for reasons that I suspect had something to do with pity, and maybe something to do with fear, I didn’t want to refuse him. Though it wasn’t him I was afraid of: I was afraid for him because, at that moment, I saw in his face a desperation that was utterly unexpected. A desperation – and a fear, too. He was afraid of something – only I didn’t know what and maybe he didn’t know either. I nodded. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That would be nice.’

  The second letter came the next morning, while I was out of the house. Frank Verne was gone by then. He’d stayed that one night, then he and Mother had met one more time in Tromsø before he went back to wherever he belonged, to write his piece. I wondered how Mother would take that, but I needn’t have bothered. Within hours, she was in the studio, totally absorbed in her work, for all the world as if nothing had ever happened. Of course, I came to understand later that I was mistaken when I concluded that she was unaffected by Frank Verne’s departure, but I didn’t know that then. I always took Mother at face value – and I think, at the time, I felt that I had a right to do so, because I was her daughter. It was an absurd position to take, but it didn’t seem so to me, because I wasn’t aware of taking it. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I was more concerned about Kyrre Opdahl than I was about Mother and, that morning, I had gone down to his house further along the shore, to return an old children’s book he had lent me. I’d hung on to it for months, not actually reading it but looking at the pictures, which showed someone’s idea of a perfect old-fashioned Christmas, complete with candles and holly wreaths and bowler-hatted lamplighters on cold, grey streets, just before the snow. It was a Danish book, Peters Jul, from the middle of the nineteenth century; Kyrre had seen me leafing through it one day at his house and insisted I take it home.