A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  After a moment, though, something in her expression changed, and she sat back in her chair again. Something had occurred to her – some private memory, or half-concealed realisation – and now the scrutiny was done with, and so was the anger. Now there was just – not sadness exactly, but something like it. Resignation, perhaps. A feeling that there was no point any more in telling what she knew, because, now, Arild Frederiksen was gone. She had loved him, of that there could be no doubt, but I was beginning to suspect that he had loved her less than she had hoped or wanted – and that, I realised, was her personal sadness, that was her secret shame. She had loved him, but he had been too much of an Aquarius to love her back. Or to love her as much as she had wanted. I looked at her hands. There were no rings. I realised this, I understood it, at that moment – and at that moment, I think, she saw that I had understood. I thought that she would be angry, then, or upset, but she wasn’t. Instead, she gave a soft laugh and shook her head – and it wasn’t a pretence. It wasn’t a cover. She’d had years to get used to her condition, years to learn how to give up on false hopes, years to relinquish the story she had hoped would unfold with Arild Frederiksen – and she had got used to it, she had given up her fondest hopes, and she had done so, I suspected, with enough grace that she could feel proud of herself. No doubt she had even managed to convince herself that, by giving up the most obvious thing, she was gaining something far subtler and richer; no doubt she had told herself that the romance she had hoped for was banal, or unsustainable, and that what she had won was far better. More honest. More realistic. ‘He was a good man,’ she said. ‘If you had been able to meet him, you would have been able to see –’

  ‘I’m sure he was,’ I said.

  ‘But you didn’t get to meet him,’ she said. ‘And I think it would be good – for you, as well as him – if you would let me tell you something about him. Since your mother …’ She pulled herself up and reconsidered. She didn’t want to drive me away, I could see that, and she genuinely believed that I needed to know about this man, this father, but that wasn’t the main reason she wanted to keep me there. She wanted to repair something that, in her opinion, needed to be repaired, but the main reason for this conversation was that she wanted to talk about him. She needed to talk about him – and, no matter how good her intentions might have seemed to her, I couldn’t help thinking that she had chosen me for this conversation because she had nobody else. I had no proof of this – I knew nothing about her, or the life she and Arild Frederiksen had lived together – but I suddenly had an overwhelming sense of loneliness, a sense of a sad, slightly dismayed couple, washed up in a quiet, moderately comfortable backwater and doing their best to fill the days with purpose and interest. I had a vision of Arild sitting at home with his typewriter, while Kate went off to yoga, a raincoat over her leotard, and I knew – I don’t know how I knew, because I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought before we sat down in the hospital cafe, but I knew that they had come together, not because of something they had shared, but out of a common sense that their best days were over, a common feeling that whatever they had wished for in life hadn’t quite materialised. ‘I thought you’d want to know what he was like,’ she said, with a slightly defeated air that, because I didn’t think it was put on for my benefit, I couldn’t help sympathising with.

  I nodded. What I felt wasn’t the agreement or curiosity she thought she had won; no, what I felt was resignation. ‘I read the book you sent,’ I said. ‘He obviously travelled a good deal.’

  That must have sounded lame to her, but she didn’t let it show. ‘All over the world,’ she said, allowing herself a faint, somewhat tentative smile, as if she thought I might want her to apologise for something – for detaining me, I suppose – then she launched into a story that she had obviously thought about for some time, a prepared narrative that was so obviously designed to show Arild Frederiksen in the best possible light that I couldn’t help but find it touching. ‘Every journey was supposed to be the last,’ she said. ‘I was always waiting for him to come home. But it was something he felt he had to do. He was trying to change the world, in his own way. Or maybe not to change the world, but he wanted to make something happen. To give something to people …’ She looked at me – and for a moment it was as if she wanted to ask if I was one of those people. No doubt she had already drawn her own conclusions with regard to Mother.

  ‘That must have been lonely,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘It was,’ she said. ‘But I had no complaints.’ She was lying, of course – she had been miserable, I was sure of that – but she was proud of him and it was part of who she thought she was, who she wanted to be, that she never once questioned his decisions. And I could see, too, that she was happy now, because, now, she was telling the story she wanted to tell, the story of a selfless man who worked tirelessly for the environment, a man who could wander for three days through bandit country, without food and with only a limited supply of water, in search of the giant buttercup of the high Andes, a man who, when Salvador Allende was assassinated, had to walk out of Chile over the mountains, crossing into Argentina under cover of night, with a backpack full of rare seeds and herbarium specimens. The man who had zigzagged back and forth through war zones in search of endangered tulip species and talked his way out of captivity, or worse, in the no-go areas of countries that didn’t even exist any more. The man who had been praised, not just for his heroism, or for the contribution he had made to our understanding of remote ecosystems, but also for the modesty and self-effacing humour that informed his not quite best-selling, but once fairly popular, accounts of his various journeys and of the people and plants he had encountered. ‘He took so many risks,’ she said. ‘He was shot at, he went for days without food and water. Once, he was arrested by some warlord and he spent several days in a narrow cell with nothing but a pocket chess set to divert him. He’d lost the white queen, apparently, and he had to play without her, memorising her position on the board as he went along. He had nobody to play with, so he played against himself, and that was how he passed the time …’ She smiled. ‘He didn’t tell me about that for ages afterwards. He could have been killed and he just sat there, remembering where the white queen was, playing chess against himelf.’ She looked at me, expecting, or at least hoping, for some kind of response.

  I shook my head in more or less genuine wonder. ‘That’s … remarkable,’ I said.

  She accepted the compliment on his behalf, then continued with her account. ‘He said once that the reason he wrote was that he wanted to take us all into a deep forest and leave us there, so we could see how beautiful it was. He wanted to carry people off to remote islands and the slopes of active volcanoes so they would stop what they were doing and start to care about the world. He wanted them to switch off the television and the piped music and see what was real. The plants were just a pretext.’ She smiled happily, and I think for that moment she was close to forgetting that the man she was describing was dead. ‘I know it’s corny,’ she said. ‘And it’s definitely a bit Age of Aquarius. But he really did care. He wasn’t in it for money, he didn’t want to be recognised. Well, not in the usual way …’ She stopped talking and then, delicately, in the way somebody might do it if they were alone, she selected a sugar cube from the bowl in front of her, and lifted it to her lips. She held it steady for a moment, then she put it in her mouth and sat back in her chair. And this time, when she closed her eyes and sat for a time in complete silence, it wasn’t me she was shutting out, it was everything.

  I didn’t speak. I thought of leaving her there – what difference did it make now, my seeming impolite? At the far end of the corridor, the light had dimmed on the hospital gardens and it looked like it might rain again, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to be gone. ‘I think –’

  Before I could say anything else, Kate Thompson sat forward and began speaking again in a soft, but oddly argumentative voice. ‘Of course, he got depressed sometimes,’ she s
aid. ‘That’s what you Scandinavians do, isn’t it?’ She thought for a moment, searching for the right word. ‘You brood,’ she said, but she wasn’t satisfied and I could see that she was talking about something that she didn’t want to fully acknowledge but refused, at the same time, to gloss over completely. She pulled back again and smiled understandingly, as if, whatever his condition was, I almost certainly shared it. ‘He was a good man,’ she said again. ‘But he went through so much, and he risked his life, many times, for his work. It tired him out and it made him unhappy, because nothing changed. He always said you had to keep going, you couldn’t give up, no matter how hopeless it seemed. But he was exhausted.’ She looked to see if I was following her. To see if I even knew what that kind of exhaustion meant. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘all of a sudden, he came home. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t make any promises. He just walked about the house, looking at all the stuff he’d brought back from all the different places he had been to. Shaman masks. Stone carvings. Old maps. It was like he’d come home and suddenly realised that his house was a museum …’ She looked at me again, not to see if I was following, but to reassure herself that she was holding my attention. Because, if she wasn’t, then I didn’t deserve this story. I was just one of those others, the ones who didn’t change, the ones who stayed at home and watched TV while the forests and the meadows and the mountain slopes were destroyed forever. And, even though I had wanted to get away, even though I didn’t really like her, I was following. It was the one real story she had, I suspected, and though she hadn’t quite got to whatever was interesting or tragic or life-affirming about it, I sensed that something of that nature was coming. Some decisive moment, some twist maybe, was on the horizon. What she was afraid of was that, whatever that twist or turn in the narrative signified for her, it might mean nothing to me.

  ‘Yes – he was a good man,’ she said, yet again; but this time even she noticed that she was repeating herself and she didn’t say anything else. For a minute or more, she sat quietly, staring at the sugar bowl. I thought she was working on her story, finding the right way of coming to the significant detail or plot segment that would make me understand. The moment of revelation, the point at which everything changed. I could see that what she was about to say mattered to her in ways that I didn’t begin to appreciate and, so, I waited. But nothing happened. I’m sure she started out with the plan of continuing with her account but, somewhere in the midst of that chain of thought, something shifted and, for some reason, she decided not to tell me the rest of the story – or at least, not yet. She wanted to make me wait. She wanted me to come back. It was a gamble, she knew that, but it was a gamble she had to take, because it was also a test. She sat upright and looked at me. ‘Well now,’ she said. ‘I have talked long enough, and I’m sure you must be …’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sure you’re hungry,’ she said, in a tone that made the very idea of food seem outlandish, or quixotic. ‘I have some things I need to do, but maybe after …’ She hesitated, then she made up her mind to trust me. ‘Maybe this evening, you could come to dinner,’ she said.

  I didn’t want to have dinner with her, but I couldn’t refuse her invitation. Not in so many words. She was letting me go, and if I didn’t come back, there was nothing to be done about it and she would know that I wasn’t worthy of Arild Frederiksen’s memory. And I thought, at the time, that she probably wanted me to come back, but that there was also a part of her that didn’t. Maybe she had said all she needed to say. Maybe she wanted me to be unworthy. Either way, I couldn’t refuse her invitation; though I felt sure that I couldn’t accept it, either, so I didn’t say anything.

  She smiled. At that moment, I think, the outcome was irrelevant to her anyway. ‘I have some things at the house that he would want you to have,’ she said. ‘You have my address, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She waited, but when I didn’t say anything else, she plucked another sugar cube from the bowl and stood up. ‘If you can make it,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you around seven.’ She slipped the sugar cube into her mouth and, before I could answer, or even get out of my seat, she turned and left me to the half-empty coffee cups and what was left of the sugar.

  It didn’t come to me until later that she had been dismissing me by walking out like that. Or, rather, that she had been rehearsing a dismissal that might come to be necessary, if I failed to keep my appointment. At that moment, however, I didn’t even know if I would go to dinner with her or not, because I hadn’t decided yet and I didn’t give it another thought because, at that moment, all I could think about was food. It hadn’t been long since breakfast and I had eaten well that morning – certainly more than I usually ate at home – but, as soon as Kate Thompson disappeared, making her way back to some dim upper room where someone official would no doubt require the appropriate forms to be signed, and the necessary personal items to be taken away, I realised that I was very, very hungry. They say that exposure to death makes you feel more alive and, though I can’t really say that I’d been directly exposed to anything much, I was overcome, as soon as I was alone, not only with a ravening hunger, but also – I am not quite sure exactly how to put this – with a sense of excitement, an almost feverish sensation of urgency. All I wanted was to get out into the open air and find something to eat. I didn’t want the damp sandwiches wrapped in cling film that the cafe had to offer, I didn’t want the slices of gelatinous apple pie laid out on shelves in the cooler on waxed paper plates, or the transparent cartons packed with pale carrot wedges and slick pastes, I didn’t want bags of crisps and packets of mini crackers, I wanted fresh apples and newly baked bread; I wanted sweet, creamy cheeses; I wanted cloudberries, soused herrings, gulls’ eggs, gjetost. Most of all, I wanted sjørøye.

  I stood up. I felt a little dizzy, but it was a pleasant dizziness, like the feeling you have when you lean far out over the side of a fast-moving boat and, as I made my way back along the corridor, gliding through a tide of people who, like me, were on their way home from visits or outpatient appointments, glad to be free and empty-handed, going out all together into the fresh, damp air, I decided that I would do as Mother had suggested and make a holiday of what was left of the trip. I took a taxi into the centre of town, found an old-fashioned greengrocer’s shop and bought a bag of apples, which I ate immediately, one after another, while I wandered about the high street, searching for a place to buy cheese. Finally, I came to a tiny delicatessen, with a narrow shopfront that gave on to a long, dim space full of bottles and jars and wicker baskets packed with crusty bread and boxes of oatcakes and panini and, for almost the entire length of the shop, a high marble-effect counter piled with cheese rounds and boxes of apples. It was the first shop I’d found selling real food, but there was only one other customer there and the assistant – a tall, dark-haired man with the slightly self-congratulatory air of a superior tour guide – waited patiently while I wandered about, choosing one thing, then another: more apples, a chunk of Comté, a half-dozen crusty rolls, some herrings in dill sauce, a few thick slices of cured ham. Finally, I was satisfied that I had enough for a decent lunch. They even had gjetost. As he was taking my money, the man smiled and asked if I was Swedish.

  ‘Norwegian,’ I said.

  ‘Ah.’ His smile broadened. ‘That would explain the gjetost,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘It’s a little too sweet for my taste,’ he said.

  I nodded. I suddenly felt very calm. Very calm and strangely happy. ‘But it’s supposed to be sweet,’ I said, as I watched him wrap the sliced ham in waxed paper. ‘That’s what makes it gjetost.’

  He laughed at that and handed me my purchases. ‘Enjoy,’ he said.

  * * *

  I ate my food in a little park near the slow, charcoal-coloured river that ran along the edge of the town centre. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still heavy and dark and nobody much came by as I sat on a wooden bench in the shelter of a willow tree and w
orked my way through the contents of my bag. Even though I had finished off the first batch of apples, I was still hungry and I didn’t stop till I had consumed everything, breaking the cheese and rolls into pieces and fishing the herrings out of their pot with my fingers. Then, as soon as I had eaten the last of the gjetost, I realised that I hadn’t bought anything to drink. I had been so hungry for food, it hadn’t occurred to me to pick up a bottle of mineral water or orange juice in the delicatessen, though I had seen them set out in rows on a cold shelf by the counter.

  I dumped the rubbish and leftovers into a bin and headed back towards the high street. I had seen a poster on a noticeboard earlier for the town museum and art gallery and I remembered Mother telling me once that if I was in a strange place and couldn’t find a good cafe, the best alternative was an art gallery, because they usually had decent coffee and the surroundings were less shabby than you might find elsewhere. I didn’t know if there was any truth in this, but I was in a strange place and far from home, so far that I felt – sentimentally, no doubt – that taking Mother’s advice was the next best thing to having her there. I can’t explain it, quite, but at that moment I felt guilty towards her. I didn’t know why I felt guilty, but I did – and I remembered the sensation I’d had the night before, when I’d heard her voice on the answering machine, and she had seemed so far away and unlike her usual self. And I know, if I say it like this, it’s not exactly right, but the feeling I had, the feeling of guilt, was similar in some way to the sudden understanding I’d had as a child – I can’t remember how old I was, maybe six, maybe younger – the sudden realisation that she, my perfect mother, would die one day, and I would continue without her, in her house, in her garden, with her things all around me. Until that moment – I don’t recall the exact details, but I have a sense of our being out walking, at the end of the summer – until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me to think of her dying, though I knew that people died, and I was shocked by the certainty of the fact. I recall looking up and seeing her there – she was searching for something in the long grass, off to one side, with her back to me – and the inevitable fact of her mortality hit me like a blow to the throat, so I wanted to catch hold of her and pin her down, to keep her from slipping away – and yet, at the same time, there was something beautiful about it. I didn’t really know, then, what she had done when she moved to Kvaløya. I didn’t know that she had left her old life behind to start again in the north, with no one to turn to and nowhere to go back to if it all went wrong, but I sensed her solitude and, at that moment, I felt that solitude and the fact of her coming death were somehow linked – and that was what made it beautiful. I knew that, even though she was going to die, she had chosen something lonely and difficult and, though I didn’t know what it was, her choosing it seemed beautiful to me.