So, when I saw her that day, I confess that I was afraid for her – yet, at the same time, I couldn’t help thinking there was something a little sinister about her too. Seeing her in that place, in that eerie play of light and dark, I could almost understand Kyrre’s suspicions, even though I tried to keep in mind that what he had called the dark cast in her was mostly put on, an effect striven for and achieved by a combination of self-belief and the gullibility of others. Maybe, at one time, Maia had discovered in herself a certain shadow quality, a fleeting hint of tender malevolence that she had enjoyed enough to linger upon; maybe, looking into a mirror on some white midsummer night, she had seen something she liked, something that seemed immune to the ordinary neglect she must have suffered at home. I can well believe that, sensing a hint of the devil in her reflection, she had decided – consciously, or not so consciously – to cultivate it. But it wasn’t real – and, that day, it didn’t seem to me anything like what Kyrre thought it was. Oh, I don’t doubt that there was malice in her – how could she have lived in that house all her life, and not be soured a little? But it wasn’t enough to do real harm. Or that was what I wanted to believe, seeing her there, alone on the meadows. That malice, that sinister quality, was play-acting, I told myself, and as she held the pose for just a minute too long, I shook my head and turned away, saddened and ashamed for her – and I didn’t look back once, all the way up the track and across the road to Mother’s bordered domain. I didn’t look back, in fact, till I got to the stand of birch trees, at which point I turned, just slightly, and glanced over to where she had been standing, out of the corner of my eye, only to find that she had vanished.
I wondered where she had gone, but I didn’t look back again and I didn’t think she had disappeared, as if by magic, as she had the last time we’d met. Now, I thought, she was only hiding, playing a trick, trying to catch me out, and I told myself that she was harmless, just a girl who had discovered a convincing pose, partly – mostly – by living up to what others saw in her. I didn’t look back again, because I didn’t want her to see me looking – and yet, for ten, maybe twenty yards of that walk back up the track, I could feel something behind me, something dark and heavy hovering at my shoulders, like some great bird of prey about to strike, and I have to admit that this feeling was both vivid and frightening. Of course, that bird of prey was nothing more than the product of my own imagination, I knew that; but knowing it did not diminish the fear I experienced, if only for a few thrilling seconds – which goes to show, not only how well she had learned to play her chosen role, but also how superstitious I had become. That was Kyrre Opdahl’s doing, of course, and as I walked up our drive and opened the inner gate that led to Mother’s gaudy and improbable garden, I remember wondering why I had fallen into this complicity with him, like some loving child who doesn’t know how else to please an eccentric, even half-mad grandparent, other than by sitting obediently by the fire of an evening and listening to his tales of sprites and devils, going into a strange and frightening place for no other reason than that he was going there, and this was the only way to show him that he was loved.
We went out to the end of the earth today. It isn’t far, just a short drive to the far side of Kvaløya, then over the bridge and the causeway, out to the furthest point on Hillesøy, where we always find kråkebolle, half smashed on the rocks, powder green and white, or touched with pale blush pink, the urchin inside long gone, gulped down by the gull that had plucked it from a pool then let it fall to smash the hard shell on the rocks below. Mother did a study of one of those sea urchins, when she first came here, carrying the broken shell back to the studio and setting it out on a white tablecloth and, somehow, she managed to make it seem newly shattered, the breaks clean and a glisten of entrails inside, entrails and salt and water, at once thick and translucent, like oyster milk. She did a good number of still-life pieces when we were first here and, though I barely noticed at the time, I think, now, that that was how she made the transition from portraits to landscape. So it’s interesting that she hasn’t shown those pictures. Many are little more than sketches, of course, but there are some finished works – almost all of them of damaged things, like these broken urchins, or a nest of broken eggs she found on the shore, just below Kyrre’s hytte – that stand alongside anything she has done.
Today, however, she didn’t go looking for urchins or broken shells. She simply walked to the end of the earth and stood a while, looking out over the water. It’s our private name: the end of the earth; we use it whenever we speak of this place, an entry in the common ledger of word games and in-jokes that any family shares and it’s an expression – a reinforcement, no doubt – of our shared fondness for the days when we first arrived here, a woman and a child come to a strange place where they knew nobody and had no certainty of a future, days when this spot, as far west as a person could walk, really was the end of the earth. Or it was, at least, to my child’s mind, and I was the one who gave it the name, thinking partly of a real place and partly of the true remoteness in some old fairy story, where ships sailed off the edge of the sea and strangers appeared, washed up on the shore, from the next world but one. For the first year or two, we came here often, and I know it was a place where Mother found refuge, or solace, or whatever it was she needed to work out how she would proceed. After that, it was there when we wanted it, no longer necessary, but still touched with significance, like a ruined castle, or a place of pilgrimage.
Mother is more alone than ever, now that Kyrre Opdahl and Ryvold are gone, but that seems not to trouble her. If anything, she is happier – and I feel closer to her, now, in that solitary happiness. Before, I was her child: I depended on her. She couldn’t quite leave go of the world, for my sake; she had to live as if she still belonged there, in case circumstances forced her back. Of course, I was one of those circumstances because, for as long as I was growing up, she didn’t know what I would choose and, now that I am past the point of asking her to do so, I am quite certain that she would have gone back in an instant, and without a word of argument – if I had. On the other hand, now that I have chosen, and we have both relaxed into an unspoken agreement that we will stay here for the rest of our lives, she betrays no sign whatsoever that she is glad, or relieved, that this is the case.
In the old days, Mother used to bring us out here. Now, I am the one who suggests it, and I am the one who drives us, leaving the car by the last, lonely house – the one with the ruined boat shed off to one side, its walls stripped back to bare timber by the wind. From there, a narrow track – one of those paths that twists and winds through the scrub and rock, following intentions more animal than human – leads away to the far side of a low knoll and, from a perilous edge-line splashed by a cold tide, a view of empty sky and a sea that ranges from near-black to the blue of crushed velvet. I don’t know what Mother is thinking when we come out here – and I don’t ask – but, every time, a brief and no doubt absurd notion passes through my mind, the notion of how all this was before we were here, not just Mother and me, but everyone – humanity, people, that self-designated world which, for so long, would have drawn us back to it, had we been willing to go. It’s a notion of some inconceivable Before: the seas empty of ships, the land of houses and roads, the shore from here to Africa one long, uninterrupted flock of feeding birds, sandpipers and terns and oystercatchers, curlew, godwit, ibis, vast herds of reindeer and elk wandering from feeding ground to feeding ground, all the way to Siberia, the birch woods bright and articulate with song, wolverines and wolf packs calling to one another over the high snow. I can’t really imagine that time, I know, and it’s only a notion that comes flickering through my mind for the briefest of intervals before it is gone, but I regret that lost state, and I regret the lost connection with it that the old stories seemed to perpetuate. For as long as we believed those stories of trolls and sea-trows, they offered us jagged and uneven trails back to that time, and somehow, here and there in the fabric of the tale, memories of
a place we never saw – could never, by definition, be party to – came ghosting through our heads. Now, though, the stories we tell – or, at least, the story that I have to tell – seems merely curious, a grotesque and utterly unconvincing account of a series of tragic coincidences, told by a solitary woman who, by her own admission, has a history of seeing things.
I went back to spying gradually, possibly because it was familiar territory and, after my trip to England, I needed familiar things. To be honest, though, I wasn’t really that interested in Martin and Maia’s domestic arrangements. I saw them together on the meadows, I saw them get into his car and drive off together, I saw them sitting out late in the evening, when it was obvious that Maia wasn’t about to go anywhere else, but I didn’t care, now, if they were lovers and, truth be told, I have to confess that I was a little disappointed in them, for not continuing with the old, tragic story that I’d had in mind. Nevertheless, I continued to spy on them, off and on, as the summer wound to its end. I needed a distraction, I suppose: I had come back from England quite determined to put Kate Thompson out of my head, but that was proving harder to do than I’d expected. I’m not saying that I was terribly upset by Arild Frederiksen’s death – but I did feel – what? Touched. Tainted. Yes, that was it: at some point during my conversation with Kate Thompson, I had allowed myself to feel sorry for her and, even if this pity didn’t last, even if it had dissipated the moment she walked away, the memory of that ghastliest of emotions bothered me. At the same time, I knew that I wasn’t genuinely concerned about her. No doubt she had gone home that evening – after delivering a note to the hotel, perhaps – and she had stood in her kitchen with a glass of wine, cooking a meal that I wouldn’t turn up for, and judging me, judging Mother, for our lack of kindness. But it wasn’t that that bothered me – it was the implication that Kate felt – or rather, knew – that Mother had deceived me in some way, if not with actual lies, then by a series of careful omissions. Which was preposterous, of course. For even if Arild Frederiksen hadn’t abandoned her when she was pregnant with me, as I had always assumed, even if he had been the good man that Kate Thompson had presented in her account of him, it was still the case that Mother hadn’t lied. It naturally occurred to me that I had known Mother all my life and had never been given cause to think of her as deliberately deceitful, whereas Kate Thompson was someone I neither knew nor liked – but the thought wasn’t enough. Not without faith. Even though the doubt had endured for no more than a matter of seconds, it had arisen, and the sour taste of it was there all through the trip home on a half-empty plane; crossing the snowy mountains, then watching the western islands slip by below, I’d found I didn’t quite know what to believe. Of course, I was exhausted by then, and upset by the mysterious note and the strange imaginings that had gone through my mind and, even though I had tried to put it all down to lack of sleep, the confidence that I’d always had in the few things I depended upon – Mother, my sense of home, the history that she and I shared – had been badly shaken. That was why I needed a distraction – and the only thing I could think of was to fall back on the things I’d always done to distract myself. I spied on Martin. I looked at pictures. I went walking. It didn’t occur to me that I was waiting, until the thing I had been waiting for arrived; but I knew, as soon as I saw Kate Thompson’s parcel, that I had been expecting it all along. I was only surprised that it had taken so long.
Mother took delivery of the mail that day, so she had seen it too, but she didn’t say anything. She just left it on the kitchen table, so I would find it, and went off to the studio. She had been extraordinarily tactful about the trip, anyhow: we hadn’t touched on the subject once since the drive home and I felt sure that she wouldn’t bring the matter up again, unless I did – which, of course, I had no intention of doing. The parcel was quite large, and I knew it contained the things that Kate Thompson had mentioned, the ones she had decided Arild Frederiksen would have wanted me to have. I didn’t want those things, I didn’t want them in the house and I didn’t want Mother to have to see them – and, to begin with, I considered throwing the parcel away, or maybe burning it. After a long moment’s hesitation, however, I decided to get it over with and I carefully undid the wrapping and removed the contents, one by one. There were five items in all, and each was more beautiful than the last – in spite of everything, I could see how beautiful they were, and I was just as taken with them as Kate Thompson had presumably hoped I would be. They were things Arild Frederiksen had no doubt picked up on his travels, things that he had been given as tokens of friendship, perhaps, or had bartered for in mountain villages or crowded bazaars in South America or Mongolia. A red enamel box, with an exquisitely detailed painting of a bird on the lid; a piece of carved bone or tusk, worn smooth with age, on which I could only just make out three rowing boats full of hunters or fishermen; a small painted mask, too small for anyone but a child to wear, with a black-and-white zigzag pattern across the cheeks; a clay figurine of a running horse, which looked like it could have been a thousand years old. The last object, a piece of what I took to be jewellery, was the most beautiful of all, though I couldn’t quite make out what it was. It might have been a fragment of some larger piece. It was a flat object, about three inches square, and it was made of solid silver, with six parallel slivers of a blue stone – lapis lazuli, I thought – not so much set in the metal as growing through it, so it seemed more the result of a natural process than deliberate craftsmanship. I was taken aback by how beautiful it was, by how it felt to hold it and by the beauty of the work, and as I stood there in our kitchen, wondering what to do with it, I couldn’t help thinking how much Mother would have liked it. Of course, I couldn’t give it to her – and I was angry, then, that Kate Thompson had given it to me, because it was so precious, and she would have known how difficult it would be to get rid of it. But then, she didn’t want to give me something I could get rid of: she wanted to insinuate Arild Frederiksen’s existence into my life with this talisman, she wanted him to be a part of the fabric of my days, so I would never be able to forget him. Once I had everything unpacked, I went through the items, and then through the packaging to see if she had sent a letter, or even a note, but there was nothing – which was a surprise at first. And then it wasn’t. There was nothing for her to say, now: the contents of the parcel said everything. They were mysterious – there was nothing to say where they had originated, or how Arild Frederiksen had come by them – and they were too beautiful to throw away, so, at the very least, she had presented me with a problem. And I really didn’t know what to do – all I could think of, when I heard Mother moving about above me, and then, slowly, starting down the stairs, was that these beautiful things had to be concealed from her, and I quickly put them back into their wrapping and carried them out to the garden room, where I put them inside a large plant pot that had been sitting in the far corner of the highest shelf for years, undisturbed.
I thought about Kate Thompson’s package all the rest of that day, but I still couldn’t decide what to do with it. The idea passed through my mind that I could give it to Kyrre Opdahl, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that he might show it to Mother. The thought of taking it all down to the Sound and throwing it into the water was one I considered for a long time, but I couldn’t quite resolve to throw away something so beautiful as that piece of jewellery. I had to get it out of the house, though – so I waited till Mother went off on her walk the next day and I went out to the garden room, took the parcel from its hiding place and was just about to carry it out into the garden – I had it in mind that I would dig a hole, out at the edge of the birch woods, and bury this secret treasure trove by one of the carved stones – when I heard the front door open and a man’s voice calling out along the hallway. ‘Hello. Is anybody home?’ the voice said, and then I heard the man stop and listen. He was alone and he sounded nervous or wary and, to begin with, I didn’t recognise him. Then he called again, and I put the package back into the pot and walked t
hrough to the hallway, where I found Ryvold, who seemed just about to turn and leave, possibly relieved that he’d found the house empty. There was a package on the hall table, that hadn’t been there before: it looked like a small box in a plain brown wrapping similar in colour and texture to the paper that Kate Thompson had used. As soon as he saw that I had noticed it, Ryvold picked it up and held it out to me. ‘I brought something for your mother,’ he said, as if he felt he needed to explain himself.
‘She’s not here,’ I said, not taking the box. This was getting to be too familiar a scene and I wondered if he really had expected to find her at home ‘But come into the kitchen and wait. She’ll be back soon.’
The idea of waiting seemed to worry him. ‘I don’t have much time,’ he said.
A Summer of Drowning Page 23
