I was mistaken in these assumptions, as it turned out, but I didn’t discover this until much later. That morning, she left the kitchen with the magazine tucked under her arm, casually, as if absent-mindedly, taking it upstairs with a cup of coffee to read later, when she had finished the work that she ought to be doing. I didn’t believe that act for a moment – but my curiosity wasn’t sufficiently aroused to pursue the matter. My assumption worked for me and I suppose I thought, if I left the subject alone, Frank Verne would soon be put back into some dim room in her memory, along with all the other things she didn’t feel the need to recall. It didn’t even occur to me to try and find out what the article said, because I assumed that it was just another piece about the beautiful reclusive painter from the far north. I couldn’t imagine Mother revealing anything of herself to anyone, but I was mistaken in that, too, because it seems she told Frank Verne things she had kept secret all her life.
She had told him those secrets, for reasons only she understood, on those long walks they took, or over the dinner table after I had gone to bed, and Frank Verne had written it all down. He had won her trust, and let her tell the story she kept from everyone else, then he had published it all in a magazine, for anyone to read. It wasn’t an exposé, though. It wasn’t about betrayal, or deceit. He had written that story because he felt it needed to be written; more: he had written it because he believed she wanted that particular story to be told, and anyone could see, reading the piece – which ran to several pages – that it wasn’t so much a work of journalism as a love letter in disguise. I didn’t read it until much later, and I saw that immediately. It was a secret, possibly perverse, declaration of love, and I couldn’t understand why he had done it that way, because by then I had realised that there was no need for secrecy. No need for perverse declarations from a remote distance, followed by silence and self-refusal, because they loved each other. So why didn’t they just say so and act accordingly? I knew it had nothing to do with me. I think, if I had been able to believe that their being together would make Mother happy, I would have accepted the situation, more or less gracefully. But it didn’t have anything to do with me and I didn’t understand why they would play this particular game, other than from sheer perversity. Refusal. Denial. Mother’s game, I had always thought – but now she had met her match.
It was a very tender match, however. Frank Verne’s profile was well written and never unsympathetic to its subject, and nothing very surprising, certainly nothing at all shocking to a casual reader, was revealed. It was shocking to me, of course, all those months later, when I finally got to read it, because it told me things about Mother that, at first, I didn’t believe. It talked about a childhood that she had never mentioned, a world that I had never glimpsed, people and places and a self – my mother’s self – that I had never suspected. The picture it painted was of a shy, withdrawn child who spent her days alone, walking in the woods or reading fairy tales, a child who never talked and never wanted to make friends, a child who was never happy unless she was off by herself. The memories of this childhood that Frank Verne chose to dramatise were minor, ordinary events, yet they were all strangely sinister: Mother at eight, standing in a pool of wildflowers with an old honey jar, catching bee after bee till the jar was full, then sealing it up and carrying it home to set down on the windowsill in her bedroom, so she could listen to the angry buzzing as she sat late into the evening, reading, or sketching; Mother at ten, finding an injured bird and nursing it to health, or what she thought was health, then carrying it to a nearby cliff and throwing it out into the wind, where it hung for barely a moment before plunging to the rocks below; Mother at fifteen, going into a pharmacy and asking for all kinds of embarrassing medicaments – foot powder and wart-removal cream and pills for diarrhoea, in an effort to set aside her shyness, not because she wanted to be more at ease with people, not because she wanted to be able to make people like her, but to teach herself that it doesn’t matter how other people see us. All that matters is the private self, the thing you are before you are the person that others make you out to be. Later, she realises that she is beautiful, and she hates it. She doesn’t want to be looked at, she wants to be the one who looks – which is why she becomes a painter of faces, because she can look at people with complete detachment and see both what they would like to reveal and what they are desperate to keep hidden. Then, not long after I am born, she moves north in search of something larger and wider, something she refuses to think of as landscape, or abstraction, though it seems to sit perfectly between the two.
Later, when I read that passage, I thought about the unfinished painting on the landing and I wondered what she had seen in me that made her give it up. What had I wanted to reveal? What had I been desperate to hide? And which of them had forced her to set her brushes aside and take the canvas down from the easel? That was what occurred to me at first – and then I wondered why she had taken the painting and hung it on the landing, so I would see it every morning when I went down to breakfast. What was the nature of that gift? I thought about all these things later, but during that summer, after Mother had tucked the magazine away in one of her hiding places up in the studio, and we had continued with the usual business of our day, I assumed that she was missing Frank a little, and was maybe annoyed with herself for being distracted from her work, and that it would all blow over soon enough. Which, at the time, it gave every appearance of doing – and now, when I look back, it seems to me that, for a while at least, there was nobody in the whole world but us, two women in a silent house, navigating the usual, but now slightly altered, paths between things that could be spoken aloud and things that we were both more or less aware of, but had decided were better left unsaid.
Of course, we weren’t alone. We had neighbours. We had the suitors. Martin Crosbie was still in residence down below, though I rarely saw him. After I discovered his collection of photographs, I avoided the hytte on my walks in the birch woods around our house, or heading down along the Brensholmen road and following the track that ran past Kyrre Opdahl’s house to where it met the Sound, further up the shore. I saw Kyrre from time to time, and some days I would go and sit with him in his kitchen, while he worked on an old engine or a broken clock, just as I had always done. Only it wasn’t quite the same as before – and I knew it wasn’t, though I couldn’t have said why. I couldn’t have asked him to tell me, either. He still told me stories, and he talked sometimes about the huldra, but he didn’t talk about the Sigfridsson boys and Maia any more. For he was done with that. Now, the story was fully formed in his head, and he was beginning to put together his plan to rid the land of its curse, even if it meant losing himself altogether.
So we weren’t alone – but, in the house at least, we were apart. Then, one day – not a Saturday – somebody came to the front door and knocked. I was alone in the kitchen – Mother had been working till the small hours and was sleeping, now, in her room at the back of the house – and for a moment I was startled. I don’t know who I thought it was – maybe Martin Crosbie come up from the hytte to explain away his deleted photographs, maybe Frank Verne come from New York to whisk Mother off to a new life – but I really was spooked, all of a sudden, and I was relieved when Ryvold appeared in the hallway, peering in tentatively to see if anyone was home. I was relieved – and maybe I was glad to see him, though it was a Wednesday, and he shouldn’t have been there.
I had been up for hours, which wasn’t unusual. It was normal, in summer, for me to stay awake half the night, lying in bed with a picture book, or sitting by the window staring out over the lit meadows. I would try to sleep, and then I would get hungry, or restless, and I’d need to be up and about. That morning I’d got up, put the kettle on, made breakfast – I’d even listened to the radio. I hadn’t made any particular effort to be quiet, even though I knew Mother was in bed. I never did, partly because I didn’t like that feeling of creeping around the house like a thief, or a guest who has outstayed her welcome, but mostl
y because there was almost no risk of my waking Mother. Her room was away at the back of the house, beyond the studio, and besides, after a long night’s work she always slept so deeply that the thought of disturbing her never even entered my head. And I really disliked the idea, I disliked and was actually rather repelled by the idea of sneaking around. There is something so theatrical about it, when someone tiptoes downstairs and out the front door, clutching her shoes in her hand – it’s just play-acting. It’s an excuse for that person to look at herself and see the girl with her secret in some film or a novel. The subject. The heroine. That was what I thought then, anyhow. I much preferred to go about my business in the normal way, as people do when they are not watching themselves, when they are not self-conscious.
So that morning, I had been doing what I did on any other summer morning: I woke and dressed, put on my shoes, walked to the end of the landing and looked in through the half-open door on Mother, who lay stretched out on the bed in a deep slumber, her head turned into the pillow, her left arm outstretched in that odd way she has, as if reaching out for something that is definitely present – in her dream, at least – but just beyond her grasp. I am fairly sure that I lingered a moment at her door that day, as I sometimes did, struck with a sudden, almost sisterly affection for this woman, who was, at that moment, elsewhere, in another world, as another self, someone I could never see or touch or even imagine. Looking back, I understand that I found this a comforting notion, no doubt because the remoter self of her dreams made her waking self seem, by contrast, less faraway and, so, more knowable. Yet, as I watched her sleep, I also felt guilty, because I had to admit that I felt happier about my mother when she was asleep than when she was up and about. Awake, she seemed – what? I’m not sure if this is exactly the right word, but – too perfect, too self-contained, too still. She was a mother, of course, always practical and supportive and concerned for my well-being, but she was, first and foremost, an artist, and there was something too careful, something almost textbook about her motherliness. And the fact was that, no matter how hard she tried to be a good parent to me, she was by nature a solitary, a woman who lived in a space of her own, just a few degrees to the left of the world that other people inhabited. I loved her, of course, just the way she was; I certainly wouldn’t have changed her. And I was a solitary too, in my own way. Still, it was difficult at times, like when you are a child and you take apart a mechanical toy, some car or train or wind-up bird that, in the natural course of events, breaks down, or starts to develop eccentricities, odd mannerisms that you feel – with the certainty of a bright child – can easily be fixed with a little logic and application. So you take the thing to pieces, expecting its inner machinery to be differentiated and complex, a tiny piece of precision engineering whose workings will be clear and defined, but what you discover is a crude, flimsy mechanism, not obviously sufficient to the movements for which it was designed and beyond all hope of restoration. What you find, in fact, is next to nothing. The thing is, this toy, this machine, works by some kind of miracle, it has nothing to do with cogs and wheels and springs at all, it’s just some mysterious and nebulous tension enclosed within a tin shell, a tension that, once disturbed, can never be regained. And that was how it was with Mother, except that the obvious simplicity, the obvious lack of machinery was on the outside, and the miracle – the movement, the music, the dancing figures – was concealed within. On the outside, there was nothing, or only the perfect, final version of the human being that she had decided long ago it would be right to become. On the inside, however, something was going on, tiny cogs and wheels were turning, something was happening that those who knew her, myself included, could only guess at. That was why I liked to watch her sleep: because once or twice, without her knowing, she gave something away, a hint, a smile, a few murmured words that suggested, if not indecision, then at least some process that was still happening, some wish or fear or trace of longing that had not yet been dispensed with.
I was glad to see Ryvold, and I got up to invite him in, when I turned and noticed him shyly peering round the door, but it was a moment before I noticed his expression. Once he saw I was there, he came in and through the hall to the kitchen doorway – on Saturdays, when the suitors came, the door was never locked and they would walk in and call, to announce that they had arrived – but he had an odd, lost look on his face, a lost look, or perhaps the look of someone who was worried about something – something that, if asked for an explanation, he wouldn’t be able to spell out, either because he didn’t have a precise answer, or because the reason for his anxiety was too private, or too indelicate, to give away. I waved vaguely at a chair, and asked if he wanted coffee. He didn’t answer, but stood in the middle of the room, looking around as if searching for something – and I realised that he was wondering where Mother was. He had come to see her, of course, and whatever was troubling him had something to do with her.
‘Mother’s asleep,’ I said. ‘She was working all night again.’
‘Ah.’
‘But sit down anyhow. There’s fresh coffee in the pot.’
‘Well,’ he said, hovering a moment before finally sitting down on the chair nearest the door. ‘I don’t want to disturb you …’
I laughed. ‘No danger of that,’ I said. ‘I’m just idling.’ I poured him a cup of coffee and set it down on the table. ‘And no danger of disturbing Mother, either. When she’s been up all night, like this, she sleeps like a log.’ I shot him what I hoped was a reassuring glance. ‘So you needn’t look so worried,’ I said.
He seemed flustered by this. ‘Worried?’ he said. ‘Oh no. No – I’m not … worried …’
I laughed again. ‘Well, you look worried,’ I said.
‘Worried?’ He seemed uncertain now, not so much about whether he was worried, as about what the word itself actually meant. He considered a moment. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not – worried. It’s just …’ He took a sip of his coffee, but, really, he was taking a moment to gather himself, because there was something he wanted to say and, though it was Mother he wanted to talk to, he was considering saying it, whatever it was, to me. Considering, but still unable to decide. Then he smiled. It was a smile I had seen before on the occasional Saturday morning when I’d been drawn into Mother’s tea party, a smile that signalled withdrawal – withdrawal, though not retreat, a considered choice not to impose himself on the company by saying too much. Saying – or revealing. It wasn’t that he was secretive, or protective of his privacy, or not primarily, at least. It was just that he didn’t want to be a burden to others, in even the most insignificant way. And, all of a sudden, I understood his obsession with the Narcissus story, how it wasn’t just theoretical to him, but exemplary. It was something to live by. He could take pleasure in finding himself in a world, but he wanted to be sure – it was critical for him to be sure – that nobody else had to feel they were party to that discovery. Which is different, yes, from self-effacement, because self-effacement is a disguised attempt to be seen, and what he was after was a subtle form of absence. Which, in turn, was why I had always liked him, and why I had always been suspicious of him, because, for a completely different set of reasons, he was quietly doing the one thing I thought was worth any effort. And now, here he was, putting the whole enterprise in danger. Or almost putting it in danger. He had been right at the brink and now he was pulling away, a soft, almost penitent smile on his face. ‘There’s a possibility that I’ll have to go away for a time,’ he said. ‘So I thought …’ He stood up. ‘But it’s not that urgent,’ he said. ‘It can wait.’ He laughed. ‘It’s not that urgent at all,’ he said – to himself, mostly.
I stood up too, then, but he was already turning towards the hall, with that same strange look on his face. ‘Why don’t you wait a moment?’ I said. ‘She’s been asleep for hours, so she’d be wanting to get up soon anyway –’
He shook his head. ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘Let her sleep for as long as she needs. I’ll come back l
ater.’ His face dimmed again and he stood looking at me. He seemed oddly penitent but, at the same time, he was eager to go. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’
I waved my hand. His fastidiousness was beginning to bother me now and – though it was a question that had never occurred to me even to ask before that moment – I suddenly understood why he had never married. He was someone who had to live alone, someone who found it difficult to be with others for any length of time, because he only had one mode – that discreet art of withdrawal which had, no doubt, taken him years to perfect. He had no other strategies for getting along with people and, though his colleagues probably saw this as the mark of a gentle, erudite, considerate soul, I was suddenly able to see right through it. Not because I was so very perceptive, but because I was so like him. He had been living in that one mode for so long, he had almost forgotten about it, but I was a near-beginner, and for me it was painfully obvious. ‘So,’ I said, ‘when are you leaving?’
‘Oh, it’s a while still,’ he said. ‘I’m just … It’s not all decided yet.’
That was an evasion, of course, and I knew it. I also knew, as soon as he said it, that there was a chance he wouldn’t come back – but, for his sake, more than mine, I kept up the pretence. ‘And how long will you be gone?’
He smiled. It was an apologetic smile, but the apology was only an attempt to conceal his sadness, and it didn’t altogether work. The sadness didn’t show, of course, but I could see that it was what was being concealed. ‘That’s not certain either,’ he said. ‘It might not be very long at all …’
He didn’t say any more – but I knew what the other half of the unfinished sentence was, and I nodded, to show that I understood. ‘Well,’ I said, finding – to my own mind – just the right level of formality, ‘I’ll tell Mother you were here.’ I fought the urge to offer my hand, in token of the farewell that this exchange was in danger of becoming. And, oddly enough, I thought he was doing the same thing.
A Summer of Drowning Page 15
