In the Name of Love (13 page)

‘I know.’

‘You’ve heard it?’

‘No.’

‘But you’ve read it somewhere.’

‘We all think about it.’

‘It pulls me down. Why the hell do people tell stories like that?’

Her voice had gone up. A note of anger or of anguish? He felt a need to reassure her. What came was banal, he realized that even as he said it.

‘You’ll get to know plenty of young people soon. You’ll go to parties, meet chaps your own age. Just give it a little time.’

‘Jesus! Parties are a pain in the ass. Everyone impatient to hear the sound of their own voice. Don’t laugh. I mean it.’

‘You’re in terrific humour.’

‘Even better than that Sunday, huh? How did you get to the stage you’re at? That’s what I’d like to know.’

‘Before I brick up the door?’

There was a silence. He was about to say goodbye when she asked, ‘Did you really think I was going to bed with you tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Then why did you say what you said when I hadn’t even brought up the subject?’

‘To stop the cocktail party chatter.’

‘DeeJay,’ she said. ‘You know, you’re getting there. Maybe we’ll have another lesson one of these days. If this woman priest doesn’t get me first.’

After that she hung up. Of course, by now they were more or less on speaking terms.

The following morning he went upstairs to see how Gabriel was managing. Gabriel had his music plugged in and at first didn’t hear him. He’d finished the smaller room. In the large room, which was Dan’s bedroom, the walls and ceiling were ready for the first coat of paint. Gabriel had taken down the bathroom door. It was laid on a trestle and he was honing the tenons of the top rail before fitting them into the styles. Dan moved into his line of sight.

‘Everything all right?’ He had to shout the words. After a fractional hesitation, Gabriel nodded. Dan waited, but Gabriel had already bent to the work he was doing, slipping the top rail snugly into place and tapping the styles to lock it. He glanced up again then, took out his earphones and held them in one hand as though about to say something. But he didn’t seem to know where to start. Instead he nodded, mumbled that everything was fine and put the earphones back in.

Dan went down and sat before the computer. The letters emerged, lay static on the screen. Dead words, dead phrases. Upstairs the tapping and sanding went on until there was silence. Footsteps crossed the floor, descended. The front door opened, closed. Dan went to the living-room window and watched Gabriel turn into the lane where the pick-up waited, looking neither left nor right. His dark face was set in its unchanging expression. Something radiated from his movements though, like heat from firebricks. Some repressed energy. Or aggression.

The day Gabriel Rabban was to finish Dan drove into Norrtälje to get cash to pay him. Norrtälje was crowded with shoppers and he was late leaving. By the time he got home Gabriel had gone. The brushes and rags were gone too. The last tin of paint, half finished, stood in the porch. He’d also dismantled the double bed and installed it upstairs in the bedroom. Dan decided to take his evening walk over to Bromskär to thank him and give him his money.

Dusk had begun to fall when he got there. There were no lights on in the house but through the window as he arrived Dan could see Gabriel. He was smoking and working on a bicycle that was turned upside down on the kitchen table. A girl sat watching. She looked over at the window and at once pulled at Gabriel’s arm. Gabriel’s head went up. Then suddenly he moved very fast. He pushed the girl towards the stairs, and, to Dan’s astonishment, picked a heavy hunting rifle from inside a cupboard as a woman appeared and crossed the kitchen to the door. In accented Swedish she called, ‘Who there?’

‘Dan Byrne. I have Gabriel’s money for him.’

A few seconds later the bolt shot back. The woman looked up at him.

‘This is what I owe Gabriel,’ he said, the notes in his hand. ‘I thought I’d drop around and give it to him.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Is good.’ She reached out and took the money. She looked young to be the grandaunt of a boy Gabriel’s age. Maybe in her mid-fifties, Dan thought. Her face was smooth, a few light wrinkles at her eyes, a hint of shallow lines across her forehead. She nodded but made no move to invite Dan in. Then, without another word, she closed the door. As he left he heard the bolt shoot home behind him.

On the way back the south wind carried the laughing shouts of young islanders from the football field. After the dark isolation of the farmhouse, their voices sounded warm, almost brotherly. Why Gabriel Rabban thought he might need a rifle when answering the door out here was beyond any guess Dan could make and he stopped thinking about it.

All next day warm air continued to blow from the south, bringing the worst rainstorm so far. The storm began with the wind bellowing through the chimney and shaking out the trees for hours in the evening. That night the downpour started. When Dan got up next morning the garden was flooded. Water flowed down the lane like a torrent.

By noon the clouds had thinned out. They passed over his head as he stood in the kitchen doorway, their ragged edges streaked with purple. Then suddenly it had all moved on – the clouds, the wind, the torrential rain. The air was still and light. The last patches of snow in the forest had been washed away. The magic of the Nordic spring filled the world around him.

He walked out into a final burst of sunlight and saw the colours in the field behind the house shift out of pastel into brilliance. The grass was sulphur green, the sky flamed in crimson. He told himself: nothing outside of you can hurt you. You say your heart aches? Too bad. It’s your own doing.

The next morning he decided to start spring cleaning. And to improve his eating habits. From now on he would draw up shopping lists, give priority to spring vegetables, fresh fruit, whole-wheat bread, hard cheeses. He would cook at least one proper meal a day.

And so his life went on until one early June evening Lena Sundman knocked on the door and asked if she could use his telephone. She also asked him if he believed in fate.

‘Well, the universe goes on and doesn’t seem to have any choice in the matter. Is that what you mean?’

‘Never mind. My car’s broken down again.’

‘Here?’ He felt slightly ashamed of the note of disbelief that had crept into his voice.

‘On the way back from Bromskär. It must be a sign.’

‘Of what?’

‘You’re having dinner?’

‘I’m about to.’

‘What is it? Smells delicious. Don’t let me interrupt. I just want to use your phone. I have to ring the garage again.’

When she’d explained to them where her car was she told Dan that judging by the smell he seemed to be a talented cook.

‘What is it?’ she asked again, walking into the kitchen, lifting the lid of the pot on the range.

‘
Kalops
,’ he told her.

‘God, I haven’t seen that since Aunt Solveig made it. Can I take a tiny taste?’

‘Help yourself.’

She flashed him her smile. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind? I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.’

‘So. Stay to dinner.’

She went upstairs to wash her hands. When she came down he asked her how she was going to get back to Herräng.

‘That
is
a question.’

‘I’ll ring for a taxi as soon as we’ve finished.’

‘Otherwise I’d have to spend the night.’

He poured her a glass of wine.

‘Don’t take it so nonchalantly, DeeJay. I might be hot stuff in bed.’

‘How would you know?’

‘You see? You can do it when you want. How would I know? Am I fool enough to believe what men say to me? That’s what you mean, isn’t it? I’ll have to think about it.’

He asked her if she’d been to see the farmhouse when she was over at Bromskär.

‘From the outside. I knocked on the door but that poison pygmy wouldn’t let me in.’

‘You mean Gabriel’s grandaunt?’

‘Yeah. You’ve met her?’

‘Briefly.’

‘Did she talk about the place?’

‘No.’

‘What
did
she talk about?’

‘Nothing. I was there to pay Gabriel. I gave her the money and left.’

‘She didn’t invite you in either? That’s probably because she knows you and I talk. That woman truly hates me. If it weren’t for her I might be able to reach an agreement with the old man.’

‘Have you tried talking to him on his own?’

‘He has no own. She’s the one who runs things. Him and Gabriel and the girl included.’

During dinner she talked about life in Gothenburg. All Dan knew of the west of Sweden was from a distant summer holiday when Carlos was a baby. Smooth-rocked coasts and sudden North Sea storms, ships and shipyards. Lena Sundman had a different picture.

‘Drunken sailors,’ she said. ‘Unless you have money to go places, that’s all you’ll meet. They’re either maudlin or hard as all fuck. There’s no in between.’

‘You went there alone?’

‘Yeah. We lived in Kungsbacka. I ran away when I was fifteen.’

‘Didn’t you have to go to school?’

‘I was a few months short of my sixteenth birthday. After that as far as school was concerned I was free.’

‘But how did you manage?’

‘By learning to bruise egos quicker than a cook can crack eggs.’

‘At fifteen?’

‘The age of consent.’

She didn’t give any more details and Dan didn’t ask for them. After dinner, she insisted on washing up.

‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it later on.’

He went to the hall to ring for a taxi but they were both out, one on its way to Stockholm, the other in Norrtälje. When he came back Lena was at work in the kitchen.

‘You don’t know your luck,’ she said. ‘Washing up is the one domestic chore I like.’

She’d pulled out drawers to see where things went.

‘What was your life before you came here?’ she asked him as she looked.

‘Better.’

‘You were happy?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t want to talk about it.’

‘No.’

‘Okay. Just tell me how you can live alone. I mean really alone.’

It was getting late. He put the pepper and salt in the cupboard. Threw out the paper napkins, put the cork in the wine bottle. He was clearly going to have to drive her home.

‘There must be a secret to it,’ she said.

‘What’s stopping you from finding out for yourself?’

‘The thing is, alone – would you mind putting those dishes away as I dry them? Make more room – alone you get afraid you might give up. You know?’

‘Give up?’

‘Melancholy.’ She moved again, scraping what was left in the pot into a bowl she covered with a saucer. She’d already found her way around his kitchen. ‘Or what is it?’

‘Lena—’

‘When I was young, before the social security people gave us a two-room flat, my mother and I lived on top of each other. A single room and kitchenette.’

His arm brushed against her as he reached over to take the bowl and put it in the refrigerator. She kept on talking. ‘Her in the room. Me in the kitchen.’

‘Lena—’

‘That’s probably why I hate, really hate dirty dishes, glasses, knives, forks, anything left out. In the kitchen.’

‘Lena!’

Finally she looked at him.

‘Why did you come here? It’s a hell of a walk from Bromskär in the dark. You could have phoned the garage from some house closer.’

‘But I don’t know them. I know you. Anyway I wanted to see how well I remembered the island. You know? Nostalgia. For my carefree childhood. Or something.’

‘Lena, what do you want from me?’

‘I thought we could get to know each other better.’

‘How?’

‘Not what you’re thinking. You’d be distracted. Your hands all over my anatomy. Out of breath, too. You wouldn’t be able to concentrate on finding the real me.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Believe me, my anatomy is no joke.’

She was looking at the papers in one of the kitchen drawers she’d opened. ‘Your wife? She photographs well.’ She held the photograph up to the light. ‘She was very pretty, wasn’t she?’

‘She was pretty.’

‘Beautiful? No? Those eyes. And that smile.’

To change the subject, he told her how he’d set the camera on the timer in Hyde Park one day and run to jump into the boat beside her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘congratulations. You almost made it.’

The photograph showed the reflection of a jetty sharp as ink in the still water. Reeds grew out of their mirror images. Above them a face laughed at him as he jumped, framed by the empty sky behind.

‘You left London for
here
?’ Lena said. ‘Couldn’t she have stayed there with you instead?’

‘She had her father to take care of. It was the first holiday she’d ever been on. Not even a holiday, a school study trip for her final year.’ He didn’t say that she had been caring for her father since she was nine. Shopping, cooking, washing.
Abuelito
, as Carlos called him, spoke no Swedish and, like many South-European men of his generation, he scarcely knew what the inside of a grocery shop or a kitchen looked like.

‘How long ago was the photo?’

‘Long ago.’

‘How long?’

‘Over thirty years.’

She looked at it again. ‘You know what age I was then?’

‘Not even born. I know.’

She put the photograph back in the drawer.

‘I’ll drive you to Herräng,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

In the car she did the talking. She told him she was trying to find work in Stockholm. Only she had to do it fast, her money was running out. And she didn’t want to go on living with her aunt in Herräng.

Dan only half-listened as he drove onto the first ferry and didn’t notice there’d been a silence until she said, ‘Don’t worry, DeeJay, I’m not going to ask you for a loan.’

‘What I have wouldn’t do you any good.’

She asked him how much he made a month from his translations. He told her.

‘Jesus Christ! That’s less than I make. When I’m working.’

‘I live very simply. And I don’t pay any rent. You don’t want to go back to Gothenburg?’

‘I have the farm to think of. I’m not going to let those people get away with sitting out there as if it was theirs. Aunt Solveig said I was her granddaughter, the granddaughter she’d never had. We used to bake buns and bread together. And I went fishing with Uncle Fritjof. They both wanted me to have the place when I grew up. I have letters to prove it.’