The days that followed were dull and overcast. The land was very still and the sky was a cool, washed grey, so it felt as if summer might end at any moment. Still, it wasn’t cold, and the rain went over pretty fast, which made for ideal wandering conditions. On days like that, people usually didn’t opt for strolls on the beach or through the meadows; instead, they visited friends and sat around their kitchen tables, drinking coffee and talking. Now that Frank Verne was gone and the weather had changed, Mother barely showed her face. When she did come out, for meals or coffee, she didn’t talk about my father, or the letters, she just did what she had to do, in near silence, and went back to work. Not that I minded. I had finally given up worrying about what I was going to do with myself – all of a sudden, my supposed future felt like a not very good trick that I had been taken in by for far too long – and I was settling into a long, solitary summer of watching the terns come and go, or sitting on the landing with a book or a pair of binoculars, while the world slipped by around me. I did all I could not to think about Martin Crosbie – though, looking back, I can see that this change was linked in some way to what I had discovered about him. Of course, I kept reminding myself that it had nothing to do with me that he took photographs of young girls and stored them on his computer. I kept reminding myself that it wasn’t a crime. He wasn’t a real sex pervert, like the ones in the newspapers; he wasn’t some child molester from the old cautionary tales; he was just a fantasist. Besides, the girls in his picture files all seemed to be in their late teens, which meant that, legally at least, he was doing nothing wrong. I resented his having photographs of me in his possession, photographs I hadn’t agreed to, but then, I could hardly criticise him, when I’d done the same thing to so many of Kyrre’s tenants. That I considered his pictures different – mine were purely observational, after all – didn’t mean that I could find it in myself to confront him about them. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. It had nothing to do with me, what he did – and yet, looking back, I can see that finding the pictures changed something for me. I felt that I had misplaced something, I suppose, and I was troubled by that – but I also felt that I had been freed from an invisible influence that had been working on me for weeks, ever since the run-up to exams.
Frank Verne was gone, away back around the world to his deadline in New York, or wherever he came from, and the house was peaceful again, but I couldn’t stay indoors. I didn’t go far, and I avoided the hytte – there were so many tracks and deer runs leading down to the shore, and the meadows were so open and empty, I’d never had any trouble avoiding people, and there were so few people, anyhow. They say that, when you move north, you start to appreciate your fellow humans more, because this far north, you don’t know when you might have to depend on a neighbour, or even a passer-by – and I think that’s true, but it’s also true that one of the best ways to appreciate other people is to see them only occasionally. Most of us, on the island certainly, enjoy our own company. We have a knack for being alone and we appreciate a certain tact in others, the tact that two solitary walkers observe, say, when they meet by chance, and have to negotiate the situation without giving offence and, at the same time, without getting bogged down in feeling that they have to keep one another company. Often, when I see another wanderer in the distance, I find a way of changing course without seeming to avoid him and, often enough, the stranger observes the same strategies, so we skirt around one another in the most natural and, at the same time, the most carefully calculated of games. But later that following week, when I came across Ryvold on the strand about two miles west of our little stretch of beach, I was too preoccupied, too lost in my own thoughts – or, maybe, in my own freedom from the usual thoughts that had plagued me for so long – that, just like the time I’d met Martin Crosbie in the rain, I almost bumped into him. Which would have been annoying, I think, had it been anyone else. I didn’t really know Ryvold, and he seemed to view me with a distant, rather casual affection – I think the best word here would be avuncular – but that day he seemed genuinely pleased by our encounter. I didn’t know if I was just as pleased to see him, but I wasn’t annoyed and, for one reason or another – mine or his, I couldn’t have said – we missed the chance to part after the first polite exchange, and we ended up walking on together, talking and falling silent, then talking again, like two old friends who meet by chance and find that they still feel comfortable with one another. I think, in fact, that we did feel comfortable together that day, and I wasn’t unhappy to have met him – but at the same time, there was no common ground between us, no mutual friends or interests, no shared memories. Nothing, after a while, but Mother – and Ryvold was too careful a soul, and too considerate a human being, to follow that path very far.
So we talked about art – which was, of course, a way of talking about the one person we had in common without actually talking about her. Ryvold, it turned out, knew a good deal about art – perhaps he was a failed artist himself, which might have explained his fascination with Mother – and, once he got started, he was quite interesting on the subject. As always, though, there was something a little too theoretical about him, something too abstract. When he liked a painting, he didn’t just like it, he wanted to understand everything about it. He wanted to see it from every possible angle, and he wanted to connect it up with everything else that was in his head, with the entire, Byzantine system of what he knew and thought about. Which meant that he made everything far too complicated for his own good. Still, he provided a distraction that day, and I was in need of a distraction. It seemed that, before I met him, he had been thinking about where painting had originated – about how art had come to be – and for him, that was a serious question, one he pursued with me, in the absence of any other topic of conversation.
‘Leon Battista Alberti says that it was Narcissus who invented painting,’ he said. ‘He says, “What is painting, if not an attempt to embrace, through art, the very surface of the pool in which we are reflected?”’ We had stopped at the water’s edge, and stood looking out over the Sound, for all the world like two Sunday painters who have come out without their easels. Ryvold picked up a stone and tried skipping it across the water. It failed with a loud, slightly vulgar plop. He laughed at himself.
I laughed too, to be polite. I wanted to find my own stone and skip it halfway across the channel, but I was afraid that, if I did, and it worked, he would think I was showing him up on purpose. ‘I’m not sure I follow …’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s odd. There are plenty of theories about the origin of painting. The Greeks thought it came from drawing a line around a shadow, drawing a line around a shadow on the wall when somebody you loved was about to go away, so you would have something to remember them by. But Alberti is the only one who credits Narcissus with the discovery.’ He bent down and scooped up another stone. ‘So,’ he said, ‘why Narcissus?’ He asked the question, then he bent slightly, to get a good angle – and I could tell, from the way he spoke, that this mattered to him. He took this stuff seriously – which was ridiculous, maybe, but I also enjoyed it, in a way. It felt old-fashioned, like observing some half-remembered tradition. He swung back his arm and cast the stone – and this time it skipped, five, maybe six times before it disappeared, silently, some way out over the water. He straightened up to watch it go, with unashamed satisfaction. Then he turned to me. ‘What do you think?’ he said.
I didn’t think anything; yet all of a sudden, it seemed important to be taking the question just as seriously as he did. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Narcissus fell in love with a reflection …’
Ryvold nodded, then he contradicted me. ‘Yes, but he didn’t know it was a reflection,’ he said. ‘Not at first. Ovid goes to some lengths to explain that he didn’t know it was himself he was seeing – not to begin with. He loved what he saw – and then, later, he saw that what he loved was actually himself. He was the one he could see in the pool, along with all the other things – the sky, the trees, the world all about
him. And maybe that was what made him so happy – he had thought he was alone, looking at a world that was separate from him, a world of other things, and then, all of a sudden, he sees that he is in that world. He is real. Before, he didn’t know if he was real –’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘It seems a bit far-fetched to me.’
He nodded. ‘Of course it does,’ he said. ‘That’s because we’ve always seen the story of Narcissus as a story of youthful vanity and self-love. But you have to remember that Narcissus was the one who rejected Echo because she did nothing but repeat back to him what he had only just that moment said. She agreed with him all the time – which you’d think would make her the perfect woman for someone who is in love with himself – but he’d have none of that.’ He grabbed another stone – a large, flat, almost black one – and skipped it out over the water – and now that he had succeeded, I felt free to join in. And that was how we continued our absurd conversation, skipping stones and talking about Narcissus.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe he just doesn’t want Echo because he’s too self-obsessed.’ I remembered the story, Mother had read it to me years before, and we’d discussed it in school once, taking the usual, psychoanalytical line. ‘Maybe he rejects her because he is waiting for someone better –’
‘And who would that be?’
‘Himself,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘But that came later,’ he said. ‘When he sees the beautiful young man, when he first falls in love, he doesn’t know it’s himself. He doesn’t know who it is. It’s only later that he discovers the truth – which might have embarrassed anyone else. Anyone less alone. And it’s only when he discovers the truth, and sees that his self is an object in a world, like all the other objects, that he becomes a painter. Because, for the first time, he is part of the world, and art is his way of confirming that. A way of saying that he is in the world, in the world and of it. Echo mouthing back to him his own speech – that was a sad joke, a parody. Now, though, he’s surrounded by the unexpected and the unpredictable. Now, everything is surprising – and now, of course, he is mortal. If he had stayed apart, he could have lived forever. That was what the gods had promised at his birth. But now, when he sees himself and knows he is part of the world, he has to die –’
I suddenly thought of Mats and Harald. ‘And he falls into the water,’ I said. I looked at Ryvold. Was he thinking of the boys, too?
He heard the question in my voice, then, and he dropped the stone he was holding and looked at me – but I could see that he didn’t know what the question was. All he heard was a tone. He had forgotten the boys altogether – or rather, he had left them behind, in the factual world. Here, everything was theory, and he was surprised by the look on my face. He was surprised – and then he thought he understood and tried to explain. ‘He doesn’t fall into the water,’ he said. ‘He falls into his own reflection. Because he leans in to see himself and leaning in means you fall. He could have leaned back, to see the wider picture – and that’s what painters do, when they’re good painters. Wouldn’t you say?’
I nodded. I didn’t want him to see the thought of those drowned boys in my face. I wanted to keep him there, in his theoretical world, thinking too much. ‘And then,’ I said, ‘he turns into a flower.’
Ryvold laughed again. He had a good laugh and I realised, now, that I hadn’t heard it often enough in our house. ‘A flower,’ he said. ‘Yes. He’s transformed into a flower, and that’s another kind of immortality. But it could have been anything – a flower, a swan, a deer – it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you become, what matters is the transformation. You can’t live forever, nobody can. Even the gods die. But you can change, and that’s how the world continues.’
‘So what does this have to do with painting?’ I said – and now it was a genuine question. Suddenly, I really did want to understand what was going on in his head, because I knew that, in some odd, tangential way, it had something to do with Mother.
Ryvold looked at me, then he turned and gazed out over the water. In anyone else, it would have seemed a romantic gesture, a piece of theatre, but in him it was just – him. He seemed not to have any sense of himself at all. It was as if he didn’t really exist, or not as a man. He was theoretical, a series of questions and propositions, like a book about colour, or perspective. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘All I know is that, for a short while, Narcissus sees himself in what he loves.’ He turned back and gave me a shy, slightly embarrassed smile. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I slip into professor mode sometimes. I can’t seem to help myself.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘It’s interesting.’
He smiled. What we were talking about had to do with Mother, and we could both see that now, and each of us knew that the other knew as much. We had been talking about her all along. We always did. Ryvold’s smile stayed in place, but it softened, and there was a sadness in it from one moment to the next. ‘It doesn’t last long,’ he said. ‘Narcissus falls into his reflection, just as we always knew he would. And then he becomes a flower, and we weren’t expecting that at all.’ He thought for a moment. ‘But then, that’s how the stories work,’ he said. ‘They remind us that anything can happen. Everything changes, anything can become anything else – and there’s nothing supernatural about it.’
I thought about Kyrre Opdahl, then. He wouldn’t have gone along with all this thinking, but he would have agreed, in his own way, with that last remark. Or rather, he would have agreed and, at the same time, begged to differ. He would need a qualification, an acknowledgement that, whatever else, the world was stranger than we gave it credit for. Stranger – and more dangerous. I picked up a last stone and skipped it out across the water. ‘That depends on what you mean by supernatural,’ I said.
Some time passed. I can’t recall, now, how long it was, but then, you never remember, looking back, how much time passed during a period when nothing much happened. Of course, there were events, of a kind, but they weren’t enough to break the sense I had of waiting for something. I didn’t know what it was, though. It could have been a purely personal matter – more news from Kate Thompson, another talk with Mother about whether I would go to England – but I didn’t think that was it. Not at the time. Perhaps I was waiting for another boy to drown. Or maybe it had to do with Martin Crosbie, I don’t know. I just knew that the story that had begun with Mats’s drowning wasn’t finished yet – that there was more to come. I wasn’t thinking about Maia, particularly, though I did catch sight of her, once more, down on the shore, and I wondered how she was getting by. I think I still felt sorry for her, then – some of the time, at least. But I also think that, during that strange summer, I felt sorry for everyone. For the boys. For Mrs Sigfridsson. For Kyrre Opdahl. For Ryvold. I felt sorry for them all – and all the time I was waiting for something to happen. Something that would bring the story to a close. Something that would provide an explanation to the mystery – though what the mystery actually was, I couldn’t have said.
At some point during that slow, grey time, Frank Verne’s article arrived. I think Mother was surprised to see it so soon and something in it must have troubled her. I was there when the post was delivered and I watched as she opened the package, took out the large, very glossy magazine and sat down at the kitchen table to read it. I don’t know what she was expecting, but it soon became obvious that something wasn’t quite right. Of course, Mother has always been able to conceal her true feelings – so much so that, for years, I suspected her of having almost no feelings at all, other than a passion for her work and a vague fondness for her only child – but there was one moment, one tiny glimmer of something in her face when she closed the thick, beautifully produced art journal and looked up at me with a smile.
‘God, what am I doing?’ she said. ‘I haven’t got time for this now.’
I looked at her. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What does it say?’
She stood
up – and I noticed that she kept hold of the magazine, rather than leaving it on the table, which was what she would normally have done. ‘Oh, the usual,’ she said. She did it very well, she was almost convincing, but I could see there was something there, behind the facade. Naturally, I was mistaken about what it actually was: I thought, at the time, that she was missing him, that reading his words had upset her, because she had been half in love with the man and now he was gone. She had been doing so well at forgetting Frank: in the days after he left, she hadn’t mentioned him once and, as far as I knew, there had been no communication between them. So I assumed that this piece – which he appeared to have sent himself, by express mail – was the first reminder she’d had of his visit. She had been doing so well, and now she had suffered a temporary setback. She had almost forgotten him, and she was annoyed with herself, now, for feeling again what she felt when he was there, or maybe with him, for having sent this reminder. Though that didn’t sound like Mother, when I thought about it. It sounded more like some romantic heroine out of a novel.
A Summer of Drowning Page 14
