In the Name of Love (5 page)

‘Anders tells me you’re so dedicated to your island you almost never leave it,’ Madeleine said when they were introduced. The statement seemed so odd that Dan presumed at first she was confusing him with someone else. She glanced down at the cup of coffee he had left untouched on the table when he rose to greet her, and when she looked up again her dishevelled hair fell across her cheek. With a practised movement she pushed it back behind one ear, a gesture Dan found touching. ‘Oh please, do sit,’ she said. Then she added, ‘I shan’t, I must go and change.’

But she didn’t go. Instead she took Anders’s cup from his hand and sipped the coffee before giving it back. As she did, Dan realized she was pregnant. The bulge was very faint but momentarily unmistakable. He looked up to see a clear intelligence in her eyes as she regarded him.

‘You’ll stay for lunch?’ Anders said. ‘I have to run back into town with some papers but I’ll be straight out again.’

‘No, really. Thank you but I can’t.’

‘You’re sure?’ his wife asked. He told her he was sure.

In the days that followed he found himself intrigued by the fact that Anders had married two such different women. For himself the thought of another wife was unbearable. Not because there was no one like Connie but because he could not again become as he had been when he fell in love with her. Realizing that she had fallen just as deeply in love with him had given him immense confidence, made him so sure of the future that the possibility of losing her had not occurred to him. And yet it was she who spoke the first words of commitment. Had she not, it might have taken months before he dared make such a statement. Why? His nature? His boys’ boarding-school upbringing? His parents’ reserve? Any or all of these. But once Connie had said ‘I love you’ a barrier had burst inside him. He’d told her everything he had felt since the first evening when she’d stopped him on a London street to ask directions. It came pouring out – her beauty, her laugh, her smile, her soaring soul.

‘Why you not say?’ she demanded. ‘In London I am not sure you are serious!’

‘Not even when we made love?’

‘Oh a man will love with a cat and it mean nothing to him.’

‘I don’t want ever to make love to anyone again but you. Ever.’

‘This is true?’

‘Yes!’

‘Then do it now!’

‘What?’

‘Make love to me!’

‘Here?’

‘Yes, here. Now.’

And she pulled him with her as she went down on the leaves and grass between the dense trees with the sound of the city traffic faint behind them.

The insurance company agreed to cover the smashed upstairs furniture and what had been irrecoverably damaged of the household linen and his clothes, but only after a deduction of 10 per cent for each year of use. Because he had no savings, Dan had to buy with care, seeking out second-hand furniture. There’d been office equipment in the small bedroom – the room they had spoken of as Carlos’s. It too was reimbursed. Thankfully he didn’t need to replace his computer – it had been in the kitchen where he preferred to work. Somehow it felt less solitary working there.

There was only one shop to buy office equipment in Norrtälje. Dan finished his purchases in a morning and went for lunch afterwards before the drive home. In the softly falling snow outside the restaurant he saw a woman standing beside a man, his arm around her shoulders as they studied the menu. Briefly she turned her head and pressed her lips against his bare fingers. As they entered the restaurant Dan kept his gaze away from them. When he left the sun was out, the street was busy with lunchtime shoppers. So many different faces. All filled with light and beauty.

Another day in Norrtälje he caught sight of Anders Roos coming out of his showroom. He considered turning down a side alley, but why? He knew why. Because Anders was a ghost from his former life. It was too late. Dressed in a tailored black overcoat with a fur collar and a Russian-type fur hat – Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in
War and Peace
– Anders had already turned and seen him.

‘Dan! Hang on!’

He came across the street smiling. ‘What are you doing back in town?’

Dan began to explain about the new computer he’d been looking at. Then he stopped.

‘Why am I telling you this?’

Anders laughed. ‘Because you’re back in the land of the living. You can tell me more over lunch. You’ve been to the Italian place? Down by the water? Used to be where we had the shop before I married Madeleine.’

He meant the expensive textile shop he’d run with his mother. When his mother died he’d taken over. Now he owned the antique showroom on the corner to the square instead. All this he had told Dan the first time they met.

‘I’ve had lunch,’ Dan said.

‘On your own? Why didn’t you let me know you were in town?’

Together they walked down the busy street. Anders said this new Italian place had the best service in Norrtälje.

‘Simple food but well done. They’ll serve you a minestrone and a toasted carpaccio sandwich in seven minutes flat.’

‘That’s a recommendation?’

‘Better than the place you went to. Where did you go?’

They’d stopped outside the restaurant. Madeleine and he used to live in the flat above, he said. When Madeleine’s parents split up they let her and Anders have the house outside town in return for looking after it.

‘They’re generous people. Her father stood guarantor for the bank loan for the showroom.’

The apparent naïvety in all this was what gave it its charm and Dan knew better than to mock it. Anders Roos was more successful by far in the art of living happily than most men he knew.

‘Here, come in from the cold a moment,’ Anders said. ‘There’s something I want to ask you.’

The doorman held up the restaurant door, regarding Dan without judgement but taking him in just the same: the worn raincoat, the thick polo-neck pullover, the threadbare corduroys, the boots. Countryman’s gear. Anders slipped off his overcoat, handed it to the waitress who’d come up to take it. Underneath he wore an elegant wool suit and a pin-striped shirt. Soft leather shoes. He put a hand on Dan’s elbow.

‘I’ve been thinking about you, old friend. How are you? Really?’

Standing aside as people went past them, Dan struggled to answer. How was he? Anders and he had known each other long and well – fragments came back, dinners with candles shining through the dark glass of wine bottles, skiing the Austrian Kitzsteinhorn the first season it opened – Anders knew about such things, where the best-value hotels were, where to get tickets for shows that were sold out.

‘How am I? I don’t know. How do I seem?’

‘Lean. Healthy. Ready to live. Like a coiled spring. Does my saying that bother you?’

‘No. Surprises me, though. That’s not how I feel.’ He paused. ‘Or maybe it is. I don’t know any more.’

Anders made a move with his hand, indicating to the waitress the table he wanted. She nodded, returning his smile. Clearly no words were needed. ‘Dan, I’m going to say something that may offend you. But I’ve been thinking of it for quite a while. And I talked about it with Madde after you left last week. You intrigue her, you know. She has the impression that days go by out there without you saying a single word, even seeing another human being.’

‘There’s a man drops in now and then, a distant neighbour. I’m not sure why.’

‘Does he disturb you?’

‘No, no.’

‘Listen, what I wanted to say, I grew up here, I lived here before I met Eleonora and moved to Stockholm. I know plenty of people. Single women, divorced women – everyone is divorced nowadays, it’s no one’s fault. Will you permit me to introduce you to a few?’

‘This conversation is beginning to embarrass me, Anders.’

‘All right. But there are normal physical needs we all—’

‘No!’ Dan touched his friend’s arm and said more gently, ‘Thanks. Really. But the answer is no.’

‘Well, how about taking up tennis again? There are some attractive women in the club. You wouldn’t have to talk to them. Just get used to seeing them.’

Dan shook his head.

Driving home he put the exchange out of his mind. Anders would know women, of course. Women had always been drawn to him. Not so much because of his looks – he was a pleasant-looking man but not exceptional – as because of the quality of attention he paid to what they found important. Dan had many times witnessed how quickly and naturally women took to him. Growing up alone with his mother might have had something to do with it. Maybe it gave him an instinct that other men lacked. But Dan’s life was different now. And, simple though it was, it was miraculous compared with the way he’d lived through the year after Connie died. He had grown used to being alone. Quick fixes didn’t interest him. Nor did taking up old habits like tennis. He and Anders used to play every Saturday morning. Afterwards they’d go to a
konditori
for coffee. Anders was an easy man to talk to. Sometimes he’d break off to chat up a young woman sitting near by. It came easily to him and Dan could not recall a single instance of anyone taking offence. Phone numbers were sometimes exchanged but always for a practical reason, so Anders could pass on a useful address or some other information. Dan now wondered if he had been naïve all those years to think it just innocent talk. What were the rules for situations like that? How did you learn them? He’d been lucky – he’d met Connie when they were both young and he had never needed to develop the seduction techniques Anders mastered so effortlessly. But why go over such things now? It was something about Anders’s ease of contact with the pretty waitress in the Italian restaurant. Another woman attracted to Anders. And so…? But the ferry was in. He joined the queue and drove on board.

Later that month, on one of his last shopping trips to Norrtälje, he walked round a corner in the centre of the town and came face to face with Madeleine Roos. They were so close they both had to draw back to avoid colliding. Startled, she said, ‘Oh it’s you.’

‘I’m here to finish off some shopping.’

Her dark eyes were watching him, waiting for him to say something more. He asked her if she had time for a coffee. She gave a tiny movement of her head, a hardly visible ‘No’. Several seconds passed before she said she had to collect an elderly neighbour she’d driven in to the dentist.

‘She broke a tooth,’ she said. ‘This morning.’

It was, of course, a pointless thing to say but her saying it somehow helped. They stood there in the middle of the pavement with people passing on either side. Then suddenly she said she had to go, and she did.

He turned after a few steps and watched her walk away in her sensible shoes, with her back very straight the way Connie used to walk when she was carrying Carlos, though Madeleine Roos’s pregnancy was barely visible yet. As though sensing someone was staring at her she stopped and turned. Embarrassed, he swung away and hurried on into a crowd of noisy children.

Then, another day, a Wednesday, when he was back to replace the last of his ruined clothes, he saw her again. This time she wore a dark grey maternity suit. Almost simultaneously they said what a coincidence it was, although, since the centre of the town was small and they were both shopping for clothes, they could hardly have missed each other. A group of kids walked past, all wearing much the same jeans and sneakers, girls as well as boys, most with diminutive rucksacks on their backs. She looked at them, observing their movements, and Dan wondered if she was thinking of the child she carried, how he or she would turn out. He even thought she was going to say something about it but when she looked back at him she tossed her head, as though all that was light years away. Wondering if he could invite her for a coffee again he said, ‘Well, we can’t stand here all day. How—’

‘No, of course not. I have to go, I have an appointment,’ she said and she walked on at once. This time he went after her.

‘Do you have time for a coffee, do you think? After your appointment?’

‘It’s my yoga class. It takes an hour.’

‘I have a few errands to do in town anyway.’

She glanced uncertainly down towards the wooden footbridge that crossed the river here. Two women were walking in their direction, both carrying shopping bags. They recognized her and then they looked at Dan. She pushed her hair off her face. The faint breeze coming up from the harbour blew it straight down again. She let it hang there and said hello to the two women as they passed. At that moment she seemed to make up her mind.

‘My yoga class is near here on Posthusgatan. There’s a good
konditori
not far away overlooking the river. Tösse’s. Do you know it?’

‘No, but I’ll find it. Shall we say in an hour or so?’

In Tösse’s they ordered plain black tea. He asked her about her yoga. Patiently she explained how she’d started last year and found that it helped her both mentally and physically. She was working on her Master’s and also as a replacement teacher at the local secondary school. Yoga was her way of replenishing herself.

‘Do you mind my asking what your thesis is about?’

‘Swedenborg and the Destruction of Babylon.’

‘The last judgement?’

‘Of the Papists. When the Mohammedans and Gentiles have been taken care of.’

‘Sounds wonderful.’

‘From an eschatological point of view. Rome as the habitation of demons, the home of every foul spirit, the cage of every unclean and hateful bird. To quote some of the gentler phrases. But tell me about your life on the island, that’s much more interesting.’

And, to his surprise, he told her.

Later, on the way home, he had a feeling that there was something about her he was failing to grasp. Not a helplessness – he sensed that she was anything but helpless behind her mild façade. Not anything physical either. She was an ordinary woman in her thirties with dishevelled hair and a calm face. Not beautiful, not in the way Connie had been beautiful.

When he woke in the morning the feeling had gone.

Nevertheless, finding himself back in Norrtälje the following Wednesday, he walked up Posthusgatan to see if she was coming out of her yoga class. When she did she walked quickly away, towards the square. He followed her. He knew it was a strange thing for a middle-aged man to do and, if she noticed, it was going to be difficult to explain.