Now I was experiencing a similar sensation, combined with a suspicion that some kind of betrayal had been, if not enacted, then at least contemplated, that morning at the hospital. I couldn’t have said what form that betrayal might have taken, but I knew it was there and I wanted to go quickly and find a museum cafe, where they had decent coffee and the kind of cakes that would smell of dough and burnt sugar, just like our dining room on a Saturday morning. It took me a while to find the place but, when I did, I remembered why I had noticed the poster earlier. It wasn’t a large gallery, and I couldn’t imagine it was a very important one, but, as luck would have it, on that particular day, in that particular town, a travelling exhibition had just opened, and the poster I had seen – now I recalled that it had stood out among the others on that noticeboard, because it was new and bright, while the others had been weathered and faded – the poster I had seen announced the opening, only a few days before, of an exhibition called Wild Reckoning: Art and Nature from 1850 to 1939. Rather a dusty, academic-sounding title, no doubt – I wondered for a moment why those particular dates were significant – but I was intrigued. I ran up the steps to the gallery and got inside just as it began raining again; then, in the ornate, brick and marble foyer, which must have dated from the mid-Victorian era, I bought my ticket from a pretty Asian girl in a red scarf and a dark blue blazer, politely refused the offer of an audio guide, and made my way into a long, high-ceilinged room where the first set of pictures had been hung.
What do we mean by ‘wild’? What is it in the natural world that seems alien to us, alien and yet, at the same time, essential? What is it we are missing, when we go into the woods? Why do we feel so nostalgic for landscapes we have never inhabited?
I read the first few lines of the exhibition guide the Asian girl had given me with my ticket, then I folded it carefully and put it away. It was immediately obvious that Wild Reckoning was one of those exhibitions that seek to inform and, at the same time, provoke serious thinking about what art is all about and I couldn’t be bothered with that. I wasn’t interested in art history – though, as I walked from exhibit to exhibit, I was surprised at how many of these images I already knew from Mother’s books – what I wanted was the atmosphere these pictures created, en masse, an atmosphere that reminded me of home. The paintings were mostly minor works by artists whose names were only vaguely familiar, but that didn’t matter; in fact, what I liked most was their quietness, the fact that they were, on the surface, nothing more than representations of some anonymous meadow or pine wood that, for reasons that no one else would ever understand, had beguiled the painter enough to halt him in his tracks, at the edge of a wet field, or on a windy beach, and hold him there for hours, his fingers numbed to the bone, as he worked to capture something that, for most people, was neither here nor there. There were several rooms, each with a larger painting at its centre, and I walked slowly from space to space, absorbing the fields of reimagined colour and light all around me, until, finally, after a series of minor Impressionist orchards and gloomy English seascapes, I was brought to a sudden halt by a large, brooding canvas that had been given pride of place in the last room of the exhibition. I knew it immediately, of course, but I had never seen it in all its glory and I was stunned by how beautiful it was. I was stunned, yes, and not just by its beauty but also by the fact that this painting, one of Mother’s two or three favourite works of art, should be here, of all places – and the dizziness I had experienced earlier returned, even though I saw, immediately, that it was this, exactly this, that I had been expecting all along.
I looked around. Nobody else was there, not even a security person, but in the middle of the room, there was a low bench, on which some previous visitor had left a grubby and slightly scrunched-up exhibition leaflet. I walked over immediately and sat down, then I looked back to the exhibit. It was an oil painting, by Harald Sohlberg, of a small house at the edge of the sea, an isolated white hytte glimpsed through pine woods, its windows illumined with a soft, golden light, its roof almost black, like the pines and the dark water beyond. Had it been done by anyone else, this would have been taken for a night scene, but Sohlberg had painted the sky – a distant-seeming sky, far beyond the inky reach of the Sound – in a pale, eerie blue, an almost powder blue, like the gloaming of summer’s end, and the little white house, with its faint gold lights, looked like it was part of a theatre set, impermanent, provisional and only temporarily inhabited. The sign on the wall gave the name and date of the work in Norwegian, Et Hus Ved Kysten (1907), and then in English, The Fisherman’s House (1907), which wasn’t entirely accurate as a translation, though it was close enough. It was a work I had seen often, a work I had known for as long as I could remember – Mother had a framed print of it, from an old National Gallery exhibition, on her studio wall – and to find it here, in this English market town, on this particular occasion, struck me again as utterly absurd. It was like being haunted – by Mother, of course, and by the landscape I had only just left and was already missing, but also by the Sigfridsson boys and by the white nights of home, full of shapes and spirits that were, I suddenly understood, quite alien to those who had never dwelt in the north. Under the picture label was a rectangular printed display card, with some basic facts about Sohlberg’s life and career; it came as a surprise, in fact, to see how basic it was. Obviously, whoever had curated this exhibition had assumed that few visitors to the gallery would be in any way familiar with Sohlberg’s works, and it reminded me of Mother’s old complaint, that nobody abroad knew anything about Norwegian art, other than The Scream. But what was worse still, what would have annoyed her more, was that whoever had written the copy for this exhibition had decided to portray Sohlberg as an obsessive, solitary figure who had turned his back on his contemporaries, so that, by the time he died he was alone and forgotten.
I don’t know how I sat there, gazing at Et Hus Ved Kysten, but I do know that, no matter how hard I studied the painting, I wasn’t really seeing it – or not, at least, as a work of art. I wasn’t looking at a canvas, I was looking at an illustration – an image, not of something Harald Sohlberg had imagined but, in spite of the pines and the shape of the land, so much rounder and gentler than the far side of Malangen, a scene that corresponded almost exactly with the image of Kyrre Opdahl’s hytte that I had seen in my nightmare of the night before. I sat there for fifteen minutes, or longer even, but I wasn’t in that gallery, in that English market town any more, I was home. Not just home, on Kvaløya, but home in my own head, in the place where dreams happened. I was in a place that nobody else could ever see, and I was completely alone there.
It was some time before I emerged from this reverie and, as soon as I did, I became aware of a feeling that I was being watched. I looked around. There really was nobody else in the room – and there had been almost nobody in the gallery from the moment I came in – and yet the feeling didn’t leave me, even though it was obvious that I was alone. Which, in itself, was odd: in the previous rooms, there had been a member of staff, someone in a grey uniform sitting on a folding chair in the corner, pretending not to be there while I walked around looking at the paintings, but in this room there was no one. There was no one. I was completely and assuredly alone, but the sense of being watched was, if anything, stronger now than it had been before – and I have no explanation for this, because it was a trivial matter, but I felt a sudden and acute sensation of fear, or panic, and I walked quickly back to the arch between this last room and the one before – into a space that was just as empty as the space I had left – and then into the one before that, where two attendants, a middle-aged man and a young woman, were standing in front of one of the paintings, talking. They turned quickly when I came in and it was immediately obvious that I had interrupted something – from the look of it, a secret romance, though they seemed so mismatched, the man in his fifties and slightly paunchy, with dry-looking reddish hair and very pale skin, the woman not much older than me, her thick dark hair pinned
up to expose her neck, making her seem even more slender than she was. They didn’t go together, but it was obvious that, whatever they had been talking about, it was an intimate matter, something so private that they would never have discussed it unless they were sure they were alone. Now, trying to hide the awkwardness of my having interrupted a conversation that he probably considered inappropriate – he had a married person’s air about him – the man took a step towards me. ‘Can I help you?’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I was just looking for the cafe.’
He smiled. It was a surprising smile, one that lit up his face, utterly transforming him from the plain creature he had seemed a moment before – and I could almost see what the girl saw in him. ‘Go back to the foyer,’ he said. ‘Turn left just before the main doors and you’ll see it right away, just opposite the cloakroom.’
I nodded and glanced at the younger attendant. She smiled happily too, as if to show that she didn’t mind my having been included, for a few irrelevant seconds, in the story that they were caught up in. Whatever that story was. ‘Thank you,’ I said, then I turned to the man and thanked him too. I didn’t know why but, even though I knew nothing of their circumstances, for one fleeting moment I felt sorry for them and, to avoid their noticing that fact, I turned and walked quickly back to the entrance and out into the rainy street, without stopping for coffee. I didn’t see anybody in any of the rooms as I passed through – and I realised with some surprise that, apart from the staff, I really had been alone in the gallery for some time. No one had been watching me. I had imagined it.
Yet even outside, away from the confined space of the gallery, I couldn’t shake off the sensation of being observed. I looked around. A group of men had just come out of a large, mock-Tudor building opposite, and one or two them turned to look at me, no doubt wondering why I was standing alone in the rain, which was fairly heavy now, and I began walking quickly, not at all sure of where I was going. I glanced at my watch. It was four o’clock – which surprised me, because it seemed no more than an hour since I’d had my picnic in the riverside park. I walked on and, with each step, the rain got heavier. I didn’t know what to do. It was still daylight, but the sky was low and dark, and the rain made everything so grey that there were lights on in some of the shops. The street was empty, apart from the gang of men by the Tudor building – which I now realised was a bar – and a few women with umbrellas, hurrying to get home and out of the rain. I looked for a taxi rank. I needed to get back to the hotel, to get dry. I remembered Kate Thompson’s invitation, but I had already decided against going to her house – had decided, without a second thought, that I didn’t want Arild Frederiksen’s things. No: all I wanted to do was get inside away from the rain and the sense of being looked at – so I gathered myself together and hurried to the far end of the street, towards the little delicatessen I had visited earlier. If I couldn’t find a taxi before I got there, I thought, I would ask directions from the man who had served me earlier. He had seemed friendly and, at that moment, I felt the need of someone I could trust. By now, I had left the gallery and the Tudor bar far behind, but all the way to the little shop, I still felt that someone was there, watching me from close by and, several times, I stopped walking and looked around. No one was there. I was tired, of course, and I reminded myself that it had been a difficult morning, so it wasn’t surprising that my mind was playing tricks on me. Yet, no matter what I told myself, no matter how thoroughly I scanned the street and the shopfronts around me, I felt sure that somebody was there, just out of the corner of my vision – and, once again, I felt something close to panic, a panic that increased, for no good reason, when I remembered that I hadn’t spoken to Mother since I’d left home.
I found the delicatessen. I could see the man I had spoken to earlier, clearing away the cheeses and baskets, while another man, whom I hadn’t seen before, stood at the till, apparently cashing up – but I didn’t have to go in because, just as I was about to open the door, a taxi drew up alongside me and a very tall, thin woman got out. As she exited the car, calling goodbye in a tone that suggested that she and the driver knew one another, I stepped over to the passenger-side window and signalled to the driver. The woman looked at me – I saw from her expression that I was much wetter than I had thought – then she turned back to her friend. ‘You’ve got a wet one here,’ she said.
The driver studied me through the window. ‘I’ve had wetter,’ he said.
For some reason, this amused the woman, and she laughed outlandishly; then, leaving the door open for me, she ran into the delicatessen out of the rain, while I ducked down and slipped into the back seat. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I really am pretty wet.’
The driver smiled at me through the rear-view mirror. ‘Not a problem, love,’ he said. ‘Now. Where would you like to go?’
By the time I got out of the taxi, I was close to exhausted. The driver talked all the way, asking where I was from and whether I was on holiday, and I’d managed to keep up my end of the conversation, pretty much, but it had become more and more difficult as the journey went on and, what with the rain and the traffic, it had taken some time to get back to the hotel. By then, I just wanted to go to my room, have a bath and get some sleep – but all the way back from the centre, even while this conversation had been going on, I had been convinced that the person who had been watching me before was now waiting in the hotel lobby and, to begin with, I was reluctant to go in, standing in the gravel courtyard where the taxi had left me and getting steadily wetter and wetter as I forced myself to accept how ridiculous that notion was. I had no idea who had been following me. For several moments, when I was still on the high street, I had imagined it was Kate Thompson: I decided that she had only pretended to dismiss me at the hospital and that she had tailed me when I left, tracking me to the delicatessen and around the art gallery, an invisible presence stalking me from place to place, watching my every move, unable to surrender the right to judgement that she thought she had won. But that was absurd. Why would she do such a thing? What was in it for her? At that very moment, she was probably at home, in her kitchen, sipping on a glass of white wine and chopping leeks for the dinner she already knew I wouldn’t turn up for. Besides, even while I was still allowing myself to suspect her, I knew, way down in the dark of my mind, that she wasn’t the one – I knew, for certain, because, as soon as I’d felt myself being watched, a name had come into my head and though it was even more preposterous to imagine that it was Maia who had tracked me from the park to the art gallery and then from room to room, studying my face as I stopped before the Sohlberg before she vanished, into thin air, it was her name that had come to me. Which really was beyond belief, I told myself, as the rain trickled through my hair and ran down my face, and I continued to stand there getting soaked, just three steps from the shelter of the hotel lobby. Three steps and a flight of stairs from my room, I thought. All I had to do was walk through that door.
Finally, a couple came out of the hotel and hesitated a moment in the doorway, the man wrestling open a huge umbrella while the woman looked me up and down with something that seemed more like amusement than concern. Oddly enough, she looked very similar – in the grey light of the rain – to the woman who had got out of the taxi, just fifteen minutes earlier and, though I knew that it wasn’t the same person, it seemed to me that the two women could have been sisters. She looked at the man, who had now raised the umbrella over their heads, and then back at me. ‘Are you all right?’ she said – and her voice sounded just like the other woman’s voice. ‘Are you looking for something?’
I shook my head and forced a smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was miles away.’
‘Well, you’d best get in,’ the woman said. ‘You’ll get drenched out here.’
I nodded, but they were already moving away. I heard the man say something, then the woman laughed, and I knew that she was laughing about me, but I didn’t care. I didn’t mind the rain either, bu
t I went inside because, now, the spell that had held me there in the rain was broken.
The lobby was empty, but I could hear a woman, or perhaps a girl, talking somewhere, off in a back room where only the staff could go. I wondered if Mother had called while I was out, but I didn’t want to stop and find out. I wanted to get to my room right away and shut the door behind me. I wanted to get out of my wet things and have a hot bath, then lie on the bed watching television till sleep came. I started for the stairs – but then the young woman who had been on duty the night before, the one with the Irish-sounding voice, emerged from the back room and saw me. ‘Miss Rossdal?’ she said. Her voice was higher and lighter than it had seemed the night before, almost a sing-song, and when I turned, it was apparent from the expression on her face that she had just been talking to someone she liked, and hadn’t quite regained the more formal attitude she usually assumed for her job. The person she liked was still in the back room, and she had only just left that person – maybe it was a friend, or a colleague she particularly liked, though I found myself suspecting, for no good reason, that this person was her lover. When she saw that she had my attention, she picked up something from the desk behind reception and held it out. It was an envelope. ‘There’s a message here for you,’ she said.
A Summer of Drowning Page 20
