Britt-Marie Was Here (26 page)

Sven isn’t wearing his uniform when he steps out of the pizzeria, so she hardly notices him until they’re just a few feet apart. He looks at the BMW, looks at Britt-Marie, and clears his throat.

“Hello, Britt-Marie,” he says.

“Hello,” she says, surprised.

She holds on to her handbag very hard. He digs his hands deep into his pockets like a teenager. He’s wearing a shirt and his hair is water-combed. He doesn’t say it was for her sake, and before she has time to say anything irrational her common sense blurts out:

“That’s my husband!”

She points at the BMW. Sven’s hands sink even deeper into his jacket pockets.

Kent stops the car when he sees them, gets out with his stick swinging self-confidently in one hand. He reaches out to Sven and his handshake is a little longer and harder than it needs to be.

“Kent!” Kent crows.

“Sven,” Sven mumbles.

“My husband,” Britt-Marie reminds him.

Sven’s hand goes back to his jacket pocket. His clothes seem to be rubbing uncomfortably.

Britt-Marie’s grip on her handbag gets harder and harder, until her fingers hurt, and maybe also some other parts of her. Kent grins jauntily.

“Nice kids! That curly-haired one wants to be an entrepreneur, did he tell you?”

He laughs in the direction of Omar. Britt-Marie looks down at the ground. Sven is grim when he looks up at Kent.

“You can’t park there,” he notes, moving his elbow towards the BMW without taking his hand out of his pocket.

“Oh, right,” Kent says dismissively, tiredly waving his hand at him.

“I’m telling you you can’t park there and we don’t let teenagers drive cars around here. It’s irresponsible!” Sven says insistently, with a ferocity Britt-Marie has never seen in him before.

“Relax, will you?” Kent grins, with a superior air.

Sven is vibrating. He points through the lining of his jacket with both index fingers.

“Either bloody way you can’t park there, and it’s illegal to let minors drive your car. You just have to accept that, wherever you come from. . . .”

The last words are spoken at a much lower volume. As if they
have already started regretting themselves. Kent supports himself against his stick and coughs, slightly at a loss.

He looks at Britt-Marie, but she doesn’t look back at him, so he peers at Sven instead.

“What’s the matter with you—what are you, a cop?”

“Yes!” says Sven.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” laughs Kent, immediately sobering up his face and straightening his back and making a scornful salute.

Sven blushes and fixes his gaze on the zipper of his jacket. Britt-Marie’s breathing speeds up and she steps forward as if she’s about to move between them physically. In the end she just puts her feet down hard in the gravel and says:

“Please Kent, why don’t you just move the car. It is actually in the middle of the soccer pitch.”

Kent sighs, then nods mischievously at her, and holds up both hands as if someone is threatening him.

“Sure, sure, sure, if the sheriff insists. No problem. Just don’t shoot!”

He takes a few demonstrative steps forward and leans over Britt-Marie. She can’t remember the last time he kissed her on the cheek.

“I checked into the hotel in town. Bloody rathole, you know how it is in places like this, but I noticed there was a restaurant opposite. It looked okay, under the circumstances,” he says so Sven will hear. When he says “circumstances” he makes a superior sort of gesture at the pizzeria and the recreation center and the road. He revs the engine more than he needs to when he moves the car. When he’s done, he gives his business card to Omar, because Kent likes giving people his business card almost as much as he likes telling people what his belongings cost. The boy is deeply impressed. Britt-Marie realizes that she doesn’t know at what exact point Sven turned around and left, only that he’s gone now.

She stands alone outside the pizzeria. If something within her has been knocked down and shattered, she tries to tell herself, it is all her own fault, because these feelings she has inside should never have been set free in the first place. It is far too late to start a new life.

She has dinner with Kent at the restaurant in town. It has white tablecloths and a menu without photographs and seems to have a serious attitude about the cutlery. Or at least it does not treat it like a joke. Kent says he feels alone without her. “Lost” is the word he uses. He seems to be taking her seriously, or at least he isn’t treating her as a joke. He’s wearing his old, broken belt, she notices, and she realizes this is because he did not find his usual one that she mended just before she left. She wants to tell him it’s lying neatly rolled up in the second drawer of the wardrobe in the bedroom. Their bedroom. She wants him to shout out her name.

But all he does is scratch his beard stubble and try to sound unconcerned when he asks:

“But this copper, then . . . is he . . . how did you become . . . friends?”

Britt-Marie does her utmost to sound similarly unconcerned when she answers:

“He’s just a policeman, Kent.”

Kent nods and blinks with emphasis.

“You have to trust me when I say I know I made a mistake, darling. It’s over now. I’ll never ever have contact with her again. You can’t punish me for the rest of my life because of just one false move, right?” he says, and softly grabs her bandaged hand across the table.

He’s wearing his wedding ring. She can feel the white mark on her finger. It’s burning and denouncing her. He pats the bandage, as if not even reflecting on why it’s there.

“Come on now, darling, you’ve made your point. Loud and clear! I understand!”

She nods. Because it’s true. Because she never wanted him to suffer, only that he should know that he was wrong.

“You obviously think this thing with the soccer team is ludicrous,” she whispers.

“Are you joking? I think it’s absolutely fantastic!”

He lets go of her hand as soon as the food comes, and she immediately misses it. Feels like you do when you come out of the hairdresser after having more hair taken off than you wanted.

She places her napkin neatly in her lap, pats it tenderly as if it were sleeping, and whispers:

“Me too. I also think it’s fantastic.”

Kent lights up. Leans forward. Looks deep into her eyes.

“Hey, darling, let’s put it like this: you stay here until the kids have played in this cup that the curly-haired one was going on about today. And then we go home. To our life. Okay?”

Britt-Marie inhales so deeply that her breath starts faltering halfway through.

“I would appreciate that,” she whispers.

“Anything for you, darling,” says Kent with a nod, and then stops the waitress to ask for the pepper mill even though he hasn’t tried the food yet.

It’s normal food, of course, but before common sense puts the brakes on, Britt-Marie briefly considers telling Kent about how she has tried tacos. She wants him to know that there have been a lot of things going on in her life lately. But she stops herself, because it probably doesn’t really matter now, and anyway Kent wants to tell her things about his business affairs with the Germans.

Britt-Marie orders French fries with her food. She doesn’t eat French fries because she doesn’t like them, but she always orders
them anyway whenever she goes with Kent to restaurants; she always worries that he won’t have enough food to satisfy him.

While he’s reaching across the table for her fries, Britt-Marie peers out of the window and for a moment she has a feeling that there was a police car in the street. But this could merely have been a figment of her imagination. Ashamed of herself, she looks down at her napkin. Here she is, a grown woman, with fantasies of emergency vehicles. What would people think?

Kent drives her to soccer practice and waits in his BMW until it’s over. Bank is also there, so Britt-Marie lets her take care of the training while Britt-Marie mainly just stands there holding on to the list. When it’s over, Britt-Marie can hardly remember what they did, or if she even spoke to the children, or said good-bye to them.

Kent drives her and Bank and the dog back to Bank’s house. Bank and the dog hop out without asking how much the car cost, which seems to upset Kent terribly. Bank accidentally taps her stick against the paintwork and it’s almost certainly not deliberate the first two times. Kent fiddles with his telephone and Britt-Marie sits waiting next to him, because she’s very good at doing that. Finally he says:

“I have to go and see the accountant tomorrow. There are big things in motion with the Germans, you know, big plans!”

He nods persistently, to show just how big the plans are.

Britt-Marie smiles encouragingly. She opens the door at the same time as the thought strikes her, and as a result she asks without really thinking it through:

“What soccer team do you support?”

“Manchester United,” he answers, surprised, looking up from his telephone.

She nods and gets out.

“That was a very nice dinner, Kent. Thank you.”

He leans across the seat and looks up at her.

“When we’re home we’ll go to the theater, just the two of us. Okay, darling? I promise!”

She stays in the hall with the door open until he’s driven off. Then she sees the ancient women in the garden opposite staring at her while leaning against their walkers. She hurries inside.

Bank is in the kitchen having some bacon.

“My husband supports Manchester United,” Britt-Marie informs her.

“Might have bloody known,” says Bank.

Britt-Marie doesn’t have a clue what that’s supposed to mean.

B
ritt-Marie devotes the next morning to cleaning the balcony furniture. She’ll miss it. The women with the walkers on the other side of the road emerge to pick up their newspapers from the postbox. In a sudden fit of wanting to seem sociable, Britt-Marie waves at them, but they only glare back at her and slam the door.

Bank is frying bacon when she comes downstairs, but obviously she hasn’t turned on the extractor fan. It must be nice for Bank, thinks Britt-Marie, not to be bothered about the smell of burnt pork or concerned about what the neighbors might think.

Hesitantly she places herself in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen. As Bank seems unaware of her presence, she clears her throat twice, because she has a feeling that she may, after all, owe her landlady an explanation.

“I suppose you feel you’re owed an explanation about this whole business of my husband,” she says.

“No,” says Bank firmly.

“Oh,” says Britt-Marie, disappointed.

“Bacon?” grunts Bank, and pours a lick of beer into the pot.

“No thanks,” says Britt-Marie, not at all disgusted by this, and goes on:

“He is my husband. We never actually divorced. I just haven’t been at home for a while. Almost like a holiday. But now I’m going home, you have to understand. I understand very well that perhaps you don’t understand this sort of thing, but he is my husband. It’s certainly not an appropriate thing, to leave one’s husband at my age.”

Bank looks as one does when one doesn’t want to discuss Britt-Marie and Kent’s relationship.

“Sure you don’t want any bacon?” she mutters.

Britt-Marie shakes her head.

“No, thank you. But I want you to understand that he’s not a bad man. He made a mistake, but anyone can make a mistake. I’m sure he had masses of opportunities to make a mistake before, without ever doing it. You can’t write off a human being forever, just for the sake of a single mistake.”

“It’s good bacon,” says Bank.

“There are obligations. Marital obligations. One doesn’t just give up,” Britt-Marie explains.

“I would have offered you eggs if there were any eggs. But the dog had them. So you’ll have to make do with bacon.”

“You can’t just leave each other after a whole life.”

“So you’ll have some bacon, then?” Bank establishes, and turns on the extractor fan.

You might infer from this that she’s more bothered about the sound of Britt-Marie’s voice than the smell of fried bacon. So Britt-Marie stamps her foot on the floor.

“I don’t eat bacon! It’s not good for the cholesterol. Kent has also cut down, I can tell you. He was at the doctor in the autumn. We have an exceedingly capable doctor. He’s an immigrant, you know. From Germany!”