‘I should have called,’ he said, sotto voce now, as he made his way down the hall – and I followed him, thinking he was upset, or disappointed. But then, when he turned round, I saw that, for no reason that I could understand, his face was illumined, suddenly, lit from within in a way I would never have expected, his eyes bright, something far away in his mind emerging into the plain light of day and brightening everything. It was like when you’re walking past a lonely house out on the point, some rainy evening, and somebody indoors switches on a lamp, turning the windows to a pale, thin gold. Everything is touched with warmth, then; the darkness feels smaller and more local, all at once, softened and warmed and hjemlig. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘It’s all a little up in the air.’ He smiled. ‘It will be a while before things are settled.’ I wanted to ask what he meant by things being settled, but before I could, he turned away, with that same bright look on his face, and, walking quickly back through the garden, made his way down through the birch wood to the road below.
I can’t remember, now, exactly how it was decided – but it was decided, two days after Ryvold’s strange visit, that I should go to England. I also accept that I was party to that decision, though I only agreed because I had no other choice. Somehow, Kate Thompson had got hold of our number and had telephoned – and it was only by chance that neither Mother nor I were there to pick up. She left a message, of course – why wouldn’t she? – and it was this message that set things in motion. It took a whole evening for me to get to the place that Mother had arrived at the moment she heard Kate Thompson’s voice, talking about Arild Frederiksen as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, on her answering machine, but it was inevitable, the moment she played the message back to me, that I would choose, once and for all, to lay the matter to rest – and the only way to do this was to go to England. Not to make friends with my new father, or to fit in with some fantasy Kate Thompson had of a happy reunion, but to make them both understand that I had no desire to be reunited with anyone. I would satisfy their curiosity about me – was it theirs? or just hers? – and they would see that I had no curiosity about them, and that would be that. I felt sure that that would be enough, as soon as the decision was made, just as I felt sure that the letters and the calls would continue if nothing was done. And I couldn’t allow that, for Mother’s sake. She was perfectly calm about it, of course, but I knew she felt intruded upon, and she wanted to put a stop to things, now that they were escalating to the level of phone calls. I also knew that she was only pretending to be calm about it all, in order not to put any kind of pressure on me. Which meant, of course, that I was the one who had to make the choice to go, even though I knew there was no choice because, for everyone’s sake, my going was inevitable. So I made the choice. I made it that very night and, by the next morning, flights and a hotel were booked for the following weekend. Kate Thompson had offered to pay for the trip, on Arild Frederiksen’s behalf, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, she found the name of a small hotel, booked my flights and worked out a schedule of train journeys to take me to my destination – which, according to Mother’s old guidebooks, was a provincial market town in the English Midlands – with the minimum of inconvenience.
Two days later, the man from Fløgstad’s arrived to take delivery of the pictures for Mother’s forthcoming exhibition – and, that very same morning, I had my last conversation, if it could be called a conversation, with Martin Crosbie. He had been out walking, I suppose, and he must have seen the van – and maybe it had occurred to him, then, that this was a perfect excuse to find out what, if anything, I had told Mother about the pictures on his laptop. Or maybe he had come to the house with a plausible story already prepared, ready to make out that I had misunderstood what I’d seen, that those pictures were part of a project he was working on; maybe he would just point out that such photographs were neither pornographic nor in any way criminal – and I had to admit that, taken singly, they wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows. The girls in the pictures had ranged in age from around fourteen to as old as twenty; they had all been fully dressed, and there was nothing overtly sexual about any of them – no lewd poses, no fetishes or scanty clothing. Had he been challenged, he could have argued, with complete conviction, that he had done nothing wrong. He could have said that, for him, those images represented some abstract quality – beauty, say, or innocence – and his only crime was a certain old-fashioned love of the pure and the unsullied. Like his hero Lewis Carroll, he was a shy, reserved man, sufficiently repelled by the vulgarity of modern life to seek refuge in a dream-world that he knew no longer existed, but which gave him solace, nonetheless. Perhaps he would even admit to being a sad case, someone not quite as worldly as the next man, but he would still maintain that he had done nothing wrong. Except, of course, he must have guessed by then that I knew otherwise – and it was a shock to see him by our gate, talking to Mother as if they were old neighbours meeting on the road for a casual chat. That made me angry – but what made me angrier still was his expression, a look of relief that suggested he had, at that very moment, confirmed in his own mind that nothing had been said, and I hurried to where they were standing, wanting to do or say something that would wipe that look off his face – only Mother stopped talking the moment I appeared and turned to me with a smile I didn’t recognise. ‘Good morning, Liv,’ she said, her voice bright and airy. ‘You know Mr Crosbie, I think?’
I nodded at Martin. ‘Good morning,’ I said. I wasn’t bright, and I certainly wasn’t airy, but my resolve had suddenly vanished and I came over as nothing more threatening than a grumpy teenager, interrupting the grown-ups’ small talk.
Nevertheless, Martin permitted himself a brief, questioning look – a look he probably imagined Mother was unaware of, as if Mother was ever unaware of anything – before he decided that I wasn’t going to make things difficult. He smiled. ‘Your mother was just telling me about your removals man,’ he said.
I frowned. ‘What about him?’
Martin’s face darkened again, momentarily, and he looked unsure of himself, though I couldn’t tell whether he was wondering if he’d taken too much for granted, in thinking I wouldn’t make a scene, or if he thought he might have spoken out of turn in mentioning the man from Fløgstad’s. He looked at Mother.
Mother smiled sweetly. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mr Crosbie,’ she said. ‘Liv knows all about it –’
‘All about what?’ I said. I couldn’t believe she had told our ridiculous story to Martin Crosbie, within minutes of their meeting – a story that I had always considered a private matter, a piece of dark fun that she had concocted to amuse me, when the house was invaded for a day by this tall, sullen man – and I couldn’t keep the annoyance out of my voice, that she had betrayed our privacy so easily. ‘I wouldn’t believe everything you hear, Mr Crosbie,’ I said. ‘You of all people should know how deceptive appearances can be.’
At that, Mother turned slowly to look at me – and I realised that she had already worked everything out. Not the detail of the pictures, of course, but everything else – because, of course, it was obvious that something was going on. She knew how long Martin had been at the hytte, and his sudden appearance on that particular morning was something of a giveaway to someone like her. No doubt she had guessed right away that something was wrong from the way he was acting, and the immediate tension that had developed when we saw each other. Yet her knowing was no comfort to me; on the contrary, I could see that she was doing what she always did in such situations – she was playing a game. She was toying with us – or at least, she was toying with him, and, as if the game had been devised purely for my entertainment, she was making me an accomplice in that game, in what I could only take for a perverted show of familial loyalty. ‘I was telling Mr Crosbie about the murder,’ she said. ‘How he killed his wife with an axe –’
‘That’s not what happened,’ I said. I was angry now, angry that Martin had crossed the line th
at divided my world from his, angry that Mother was playing one of her games, making light of things and expecting me to join in, when she didn’t really know the circumstances. ‘That’s just a story you made up.’ I looked at her and she looked back, interested by the vehemence of my response, though not, I think, terribly concerned.
Martin, on the other hand, was totally confused now – and more concerned than he had any right to be. Obviously, he was beginning to regret having come; but then, how could he not have done? He’d needed to find out what I would do, after all. After so many anxious days, alone in the hytte and wondering what stories I might tell about him, he had watched the van turn into our drive and he had used it as an excuse for a fishing expedition. And Mother had sensed all this, or something like it, the moment he introduced himself. Now, apparently chastened, she thought for a moment before resuming the conversation with a half-smile playing about her mouth – though this time the smile was genuine. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s just a story.’ She turned to Martin. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Crosbie,’ she said. ‘We don’t get many visitors out here, and we have to find ways of entertaining ourselves on the long winter nights.’ She craned her neck a little and peered into the interior of the van. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s very nice to have met you, but there’s still a good deal of packing to do, so if you don’t mind, I’ll go and see how it’s coming along.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m sure Mr Opdahl is looking after you,’ she said. ‘But if you ever need anything, do let us know.’
Martin Crosbie forced a smile, but he was far from happy. For a moment, he stared at her, unsure of what to say – and it was obvious that he felt he ought to say something – then he shook hands and, with a shy, sideways glance at me, turned and started off down the path. Mother stood a little longer, to watch him go; then, after he had passed the gate and was out of earshot, she turned to me. ‘Poor man,’ she said. ‘I rather wonder what you see in him.’
I shook my head. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said.
‘Isn’t he the one you’re always popping out to visit?’ she said. She gave me an amused look, as if she had caught me out in a lie.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. ‘I’ve only spoken to him twice in all the time he’s been here.’
‘Well, good,’ she said, before I could say any more – and I could see that she was only playing to cover up something else, something that was serious for her. ‘Maybe you had better keep it that way.’ Then she turned and walked back to the house, where the supposed axe murderer had just appeared in the doorway, presumably because he needed instructions or clarification on what to do next – though I couldn’t help thinking, given the curious expression on his face, that he knew we had been talking about him, and he wanted us to understand that he didn’t care in the least, and that, while he was here, away from his own world, anything other than his work was utterly irrelevant to him.
I was shocked, that day, by the assumption Mother had made about me and Martin Crosbie – even if it was part of a game she was playing. When I think about what happened later, and the effect it apparently had on me, it surprises me even more to realise how little I really did know about the man. I’d had those two encounters with him, when we’d spoken for a while about nothing; I’d watched him go about his business in a desultory way, but I hadn’t learned anything at all about his life. I had no facts, no background story, no information about where he had come from or what his usual life was. After my discovery at the hytte, I’d gone out of my way to avoid him, but that hadn’t been enough to prevent my wondering what he might be up to and I’d started to have ugly fantasies in which he would be watching me, camera at the ready, whenever I went out into the garden or walked down to the shore. I didn’t know why he took the pictures I’d seen on his computer; I didn’t know if he was nothing more than a sad fantasist who liked to creep about taking pictures of young girls or whether he was an out-and-out predator, for whom the photographs were only a first step in some larger plan. That never seemed very likely but, looking back, I can’t be sure of anything. He could have been a hopeless romantic whose imagination had gone slightly astray, a latter-day Dodgson with a database of stolen images and a wry, self-deprecating manner that couldn’t quite conceal his keen sense, not only of his own absurdity, but also of the grotesque and puzzling existence of others. Whatever his conscious intentions, whatever reasons he thought he had for taking them, I like to think now that his secret cache of photographs had no more than a ritual significance for him – but, again, I can’t be sure. We want to think well of the dead, for reasons that I’ve never fully understood, and I want to think better of him, now, than I did at the time, because whatever his vice, whatever his weakness, it was that, and that alone, that led the huldra to him. First, she brought him a little happiness, and then she killed him. Maybe that was the only way his story could end, and maybe it was the best he could have hoped for. A moment of happiness that must have taken him completely by surprise, then nothing. What was it like for him, to receive as a gift the one thing he’d always imagined he could only ever obtain by theft and deceit? It must have been hard to believe at first, but I think he did manage to believe it, before the gift was taken away, and the huldra showed her true form, waving to him from the lit shore, while he stepped willingly into the dark.
Mother drove me to the airport. I had hoped to go without a fuss, to keep the whole thing a secret, but as we made our way into Tromsø that morning, we met Kyrre Opdahl coming the other way and, as usual, he stopped for a chat. He liked that – I think Mother liked it too – it was one of his favourite things to do, to stop in the road and roll down his window to talk to somebody he’d met on the road, whether it was another driver, or someone out walking. It made him think of the old times, I suppose, when things were less hurried. That day, he was on his way back from the store at Straumsbukta with another week’s worth of supplies, but he’d also dropped by a friend’s house – a friend who lived just half a mile from Mrs Sigfridsson’s – to pick up a clock that needed mending. Naturally, he spotted the suitcase on the back seat immediately. ‘Off somewhere?’ he asked, giving Mother a quizzical look. He seemed disappointed, betrayed even, that she hadn’t told him about the trip.
Mother laughed and shook her head. ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘Liv.’
‘Ah.’ Kyrre allowed himself that soft little gasp of his, as he nodded and looked at me, but he didn’t say anything else.
‘She’s going to England,’ Mother continued, still obviously amused. ‘To visit her father.’
That shocked me. I had assumed she wouldn’t want to talk about him. After all, she had been pretending he didn’t exist for years. As far as I knew, she had never once mentioned his existence to Kyrre, who was too polite to enquire – and whenever anyone else had asked who my father was, she had always changed the subject, or clammed up. ‘She won’t be gone long,’ she added, turning to me. ‘Just a couple of days.’
Kyrre looked at me too, trying hard to conceal his own surprise. ‘England, eh?’ he said, then he shook his head. ‘Well, I’m sure it’s very nice, though I can’t say I’ve ever been.’ He smiled sympathetically, as if a trip to England was more or less the same as a visit to the dentist’s. ‘I’m not much of a one for travelling,’ he said and, then, after a moment’s recollection, he shook his head. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I did go to Narvik once.’ He checked his rear-view mirror to be sure the road was empty behind him. He had started to enjoy the moment – his young friend was going off to a foreign country, and he was there to explain that it was no big deal, leaving the island – so he didn’t want any interruptions, and he knew Mother well enough to know that, had he picked up on her remark about my father, she would have politely closed down the conversation and driven away.
I shot Mother a meaningful look, but she ignored me. ‘Narvik?’ she said.
Kyrre nodded. ‘Just for a weekend,’ he said.
Mother kept a straight face. ‘Well,
’ she said, ‘I’m sure it’s a very interesting place.’
Kyrre set his mouth and thought for a moment. ‘Maybe it is,’ he said. ‘But I can’t say I enjoyed it.’
Mother laughed, but she didn’t say anything – and though they lingered another minute or two, the conversation was already over. No further mention was made of my father, or of my going away on my own for the first time, though Kyrre gave me a long look, just as he and Mother prepared to drive their separate ways, and he made me promise to send him a postcard.
THE FISHERMAN’S HOUSE
AS THE PLANE rose and tilted away, I dipped my head and peered out of the window, thinking I should have been able to see Mother walking back to the car, but all I could make out was the green light off the land below and then, off to one side, a yellow windsock, swelling with the breath of the old Sámi wind god, Bieggaålmaj – an ordinary thing, but also a small item of local theatre, filling with light and ozone and summer wind. For a moment, it seemed as if time might stop; then the plane turned south and everything below began to dwindle: houses and supermarkets and roadside cafes set out in mapped impermanence over the earth, an impermanence that nobody ever thought about, though they lived it every day – and some of them were glad, I think, that nothing they did or made was ever really finished, or theirs for certain. Nothing they did would last; nothing was there for good. People like Kyrre Opdahl, and maybe Ryvold too, in his own way, stayed or chose to live here because they knew that, here, only the stories lasted. The stories, and the land from which the stories came. As different as they thought they were from one another, those two solitaries would not only have agreed that the stories are all there is, and that everything else is illusion, they would also have said, as Ryvold said once to the assembled company one Saturday morning, that the individual stories, the separate lives that we think we are living and the accounts we give of them, are continually assumed into one larger narrative that belongs to nobody in particular, but includes, not just everything that happens, but everything that might have been.
A Summer of Drowning Page 16
