In the Name of Love (3 page)

‘Do you want to go and see the people living there?’ he suggested.

She shook her head.

‘You came all the way out here just to look at a farmhouse?’

‘I used to live there. All my meaningful life.’

‘How long have you known Anders Roos?’

‘How long… What did you say your name was?’

‘Dan Byrne.’

‘Let’s not make cocktail party chatter, Dan Byrne. It’s not the moment.’

He started the car, put the engine in gear.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Driving you back to the ferry and getting myself home.’

‘You’re going to dump me just like that?’

He turned the car in an opening in the forest and drove back.

‘Do you think it might be possible,’ she said slowly, ‘to borrow your telephone? For maybe half a minute? Naturally I’ll pay the cost.’

He drove on to Fridsdal. The house stood dark and alone.

‘This where you live?’

‘Yes.’

‘On your own?’

She shivered as they got out. He told himself to ignore it but of course he couldn’t. He put his parka on her shoulders and pulled the hood up over her head. She gave him one of her smiles, quick and bright as a magnesium flash. ‘A gentleman,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’ It didn’t do anything to endear her to him. He put on the hall light.

‘You been living here long?’

‘I thought we were skipping the cocktail party chatter. The phone’s over there.’

‘Wow! You catch on fast, don’t you? Jesus fuck, it’s almost seven. I’ll have to ring my aunt as well. Tell her not to wait with dinner. That okay?’

‘Maybe you better get on to the taxi people first. The number’s on the list beside the phone.’

‘Don’t go hostile on me, Dan Byrne. I’m not thinking of staying the night.’

‘Do you want me to ring them for you?’

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Seriously. Anders wonders about this too. Doesn’t it ever make you afraid? Sitting alone here every night?’

‘I’ll ring for the taxi.’

‘Afraid you’ll go nuts, I mean?’

He was dialling the number and didn’t answer.

‘Well,’ she said. Her eyes, seen full under the hall light as he turned to her, startled him. They were pale blue and seemed almost feral, like a Greenland dog’s. For some reason he saw her now as dangerous. The taxi driver’s wife told him her son was out with a client and her husband was at his dinner.

‘I’m afraid it’s an emergency.’ He didn’t even hesitate. ‘We need a taxi now.’

Alone after the taxi had gone he dismissed all thought of her and her predicament. There was too much attitude, too much brazenness about her to arouse much sympathy. Whatever she’d wanted to see in Bromskär was none of his business. She was a survivor, he told himself, he’d been right to send her off into the snow. She’d manage.

When he had eaten, washed the dishes, put them away, he rang Carlos in Massachusetts. Carlos didn’t ask him what he’d done for Christmas because they never had done anything. Carlos’s Spanish grandfather,
abuelito
, a strong presence in their Stockholm home, refused to celebrate any of it, not even 6 January, the traditional Spanish gift-giving day. They weren’t a religious family and, although
abuelito
and Dan had both been baptized, Connie wasn’t and neither was Carlos. The God-man’s spell had been broken,
abuelito
said.
El hechizo del hombre-dios
.

They talked about a trip Carlos had made to New York early in December to see a young woman he’d met at a party in Cambridge. She still lived with her parents. They weren’t strictly religious but they kept up the traditions and they’d all celebrated Chanukah together. Carlos said he’d really enjoyed it, the ritual of lighting one more candle each evening, the traditional foods. It was a New York thing, a matter of keeping up the customs.

‘We never did that,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Lack of interest, I suppose.’

‘Didn’t mamma show any interest in Judaism?’

‘No.’

‘What about my grandmother?’

‘Well, I can’t say.’ Dan wasn’t sure why the questions troubled him but they did. Carlos had never asked anything like this before. He said his new friend’s name was Zoë. She worked as a fabric designer, had her own firm in uptown New York, with two employees. And she was only twenty-three. That was what was great about America. ‘What bank would back an unknown twenty-three-year-old in Europe?’ He’d enjoyed the Chanukah food, the latkes and the slow-cooked brisket beef, the doughnuts filled with jelly, all sorts of side dishes. ‘The whole caboodle,’ he said in American-accented English and he laughed again. In Swedish he added soberly, ‘It’s probably in my blood.’

‘Your mother’s blood was Moroccan Sephardic. I don’t know if they do latkes and doughnuts down there.’

Carlos was silent for a moment.

‘Does talking about this disturb you?’ he asked.

‘No, no, of course not. It’s just that I don’t think your mother’s family was particularly religious. If anything the opposite.’ He stopped a little abruptly. What did he know of Connie’s family? Her mother, Carlos’s grandmother, had died in Barcelona in 1937, a victim of Mussolini’s bombs. Her father had escaped and finally made it to Sweden in 1948, still a militant atheist and anarchist.

Carlos asked him if he was getting out more, seeing people. Dan told him he’d met Anders Roos in Norrtälje.

‘We ran into each other one day in the street. He’s living there now.’

‘
Farbror
Anders?’ Carlos said. ‘That’s good. He can introduce you to people, help you get back into social life.’

‘I don’t drive into Norrtälje very often.’

Carlos was silent again. Then he said he’d decided to sit the New York bar exam in the autumn. The news came as a shock to Dan. The plan had been for Carlos to come back to Sweden after his doctorate, maybe work for an NGO like the ones he’d worked for as a law student in Uppsala. Now he said it was time to move on. It was time to earn a proper living. ‘Who can tell?’ he said. ‘I might get married one day, have a family. I need to be better prepared.’

Dan did not know why he felt so troubled. We send our children out into the world and hope that angels watch over them, whether we believe in angels or not. It was the New York part of it, probably. Otherwise marriage, a family, that was all good news, including this young woman who was, he now realized, much more than a friend.

‘Are you all right?’ Carlos asked him.

Dan said yes. He said he was glad Carlos was doing so well. ‘Will you still be back in the summer?’ he asked.

The hesitancy in his own voice troubled him.

‘Of course I will!’ Carlos said. ‘Or early autumn, after my bar exam. Zoë too. She hasn’t been to Europe yet.’

‘Maybe I can meet her then?’

‘For sure,’ Carlos said. ‘She wants to meet you too. Sometime in late September. I’ll get back to you about the exact date.’

‘Who knows, she may take a liking to Stockholm. It’s a beautiful city. And everyone speaks English there now.’

Carlos laughed. ‘Not a chance. Zoë loves New York. She says everywhere else seems anaemic in comparison.’

Dan was furious with himself when he put the phone down. He didn’t used to be like this: insecure, grasping, clutching at his son as though he were a lifeline. It was, of course, the worst form of egotism parading as concern. Carlos had a lot of his mother in him – he was naturally cheerful, open, life-loving. He would make a wonderful father. As for himself, Dan wondered, not for the first time, if Carlos saw him as dull. There must have been moments when he’d wished for another kind of father – more outgoing, more like his mother.

Still wondering if he had somehow been a disappointment to his son, Dan went to bed.

A few hours later he was startled out of sleep by a roar from above. The ceiling was cracking. The ridge beam broke through it. He jumped from the bed and heard the splintering sound when the beam hit the floor. The house shuddered as though in an earthquake. By the time the rest of the roof collapsed the wall had cracked and he could no longer get the bedroom door open. A slab of masonry from the attic hung a few centimetres above his shoulder. Part of it broke off. Dumbly he saw a furrow open from his elbow to his thumb and, though he felt nothing, blood also began to drip down the back of his head and around his throat. He watched it run along his chest. The air became too thick with dust to breathe. Holding his nose and mouth he stared at the crack as it widened in the wall beside him and when it had widened enough he climbed through it.

In the basement he pulled on a shirt, a sweater and a pair of old gardening trousers that had been lying since autumn on a shelf behind the washing machine. Even down there the air was full of dust. He tied a wet dishcloth around his mouth and nose and went back up. In the ruined bedroom he began to clear what he could of the debris that had fallen through from the attic, dumping it on the snow outside the smashed window so that the bedroom floor wouldn’t collapse beneath the extra weight. The electricity in the bathroom still worked and the water ran hot when he tried the tap.

After first light people started arriving. Some thought the noise was an explosion. Others a fighter plane breaking the sound barrier. A solidly built man of about his own age, wearing a fisherman’s sock-cap, hung on after the others left.

‘The snow load,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you see it?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘It’d been there for days.’

Dan didn’t answer.

‘You’re going to need a few stitches in that head of yours.’

‘What are you? A doctor as well as an engineer?’

The man gave a deep belly laugh. ‘What I am is your nearest neighbour. I live in the little house on the spit beyond the church. Where you go walking. Alone. In the dark. You’ve been here over two years and you don’t even know who your nearest neighbour is?’

What’s he at? Dan asked himself. Is he mocking me? To the man he merely nodded, then went on searching through the rubble. But the man didn’t go. Neither did he try to hide his curiosity, looking around at the broken furniture, the tools of everyday living that lay in the snow. Dan went on throwing aside lumps of cement and stone to get out whatever could be saved – documents, books, a stapling machine, a pair of matching bookends that Carlos once carved in school and gave him for his birthday. Then, just as the man was saying that the house had been there since long before he was born and nothing like this had ever happened, Dan saw the cardboard box. He picked it up and placed it behind him. The man put out his hand and gave his name, Sune Isaksson. Dan took it. ‘Dan Byrne,’ he said and went back to his searching. The man watched in silence for a while longer. ‘One hell of a mess you have here!’ he said cheerfully. ‘Well, you know where I live now. Drop by if you need anything.’

As he went out to the lane, a taxi pulled in. The taxi driver picked his way through the rubble with a bunch of tiger lilies. He said he’d had to ask in the island shop to find the house. ‘Something happen to your roof?’ Dan nodded silently. There was a note with the flowers. He could barely make it out in the fading light.
Thanks for the lift. Some day when you’ve nothing better to do ring me and tell me I’m terrific in a pirate shirt.
Lena
. There was no surname, just a phone number.

He worked on until dark, then took the cardboard box and the flowers and the note with him and put them on the kitchen table. Of course it had a touch of panache – not just the note but the gesture. Sending flowers by taxi when they could as well have been sent by Interflora. Well, no. Not as well. But he had no intention of replying.

He went upstairs to see what was left of the bedroom. One part of the ridge beam had hit the wardrobe that stood between the windows. Dan made his way across through the debris and carefully pulled out a small holdall.

Back down in the kitchen he began with the cardboard box, emptying the pile of blue envelopes onto the table. He stoked up the fire in the kitchen range and dropped the letters in one by one, trying not to see the dates as they went. London–Stockholm. Stockholm–London. The longing they expressed had seemed so intensely private then, though what, under the sun, could have been new in them? The affinity of flesh for flesh. They had solemnly promised each other, in youth, that the last one left would burn them all. It had been almost a joke, a hundred years away, on the brink of nothingness. The edges curled and paled as the flames enclosed them, the words, the molecules of ink and paper, disintegrating into gas and ash. His chest ached.

Once he’d started he made himself go on. He opened the holdall and took out the little jeweller’s box the undertaker had given him. It held her engagement and wedding rings, rings which had been her mother’s in Spain. Then he took out the big black bin bag into which he had emptied the contents of her dressing-table drawer when he’d left the flat in Stockholm. Then came the shoe box with the letters of condolence, many of them from people he had never heard of, patients who thought of her as a friend, people she worked with at the hospital, others who remembered her from years back. He took them all out and piled them on the table. And he began to burn them too, without looking to see who they were from. When he had finished he opened her handbag and, for the first time ever, looked inside. The trace of her perfume almost undid him. Two sets of keys, one to their former flat which he should have given the new owner, the other to this house. A packet of paper handkerchiefs. Her small pocket agenda. He riffled through the pages, knowing there wouldn’t be anything personal there, no trace of what her moods or thoughts had been. Even as a schoolgirl she had never kept a diary. The hastiness of her handwriting, the contractions she habitually used flowed into each other, the cross of a ‘t’ carried over to start the first syllable of the next word. It was her way – quick, concentrated, full of movement. The last entry was on 6 June:
D 12.00 Bakf. Op.
On 6 June 1984, two days before she died, she met him (
D
) at
12.00
for an early lunch in the restaurant annexe (
bakfickan
) behind the Opera House (
Operan
) and afterwards they went shopping for things they needed out here – dishcloths, towels, sheets… The following morning they took the boat and less than forty-eight hours later she was dead.