Dead Water (17 page)

The sun is high enough to warm him now. Eric will go visiting. It is expected of him. He squeezes the notebook into the pocket of his coat. He steps outside and his eyes fill with thin, insipid light. It will be good, after nearly a year, to see the professor again, even if their talk must come round, sooner or later, to the
Italia
. Absently, he presses his hand against his coat, feeling the notebook there. His missing toes tingle.

To the east of Svolvaer, at the head of a small inlet, the Oslo government leases a cottage for the use of visiting officials: men from departments to do with meteorology and fisheries. At high tide the sea comes up almost to the house. The water is brilliantly clear. Where Eric’s shadow falls across it, reflections are banished, revealing jellyfish-like pink balloons, starfish, darting crabs, pebbles woven with golden weed.

Footfalls in the shingle serve, better than any bell, to alert the house to a visitor’s arrival. As Eric approaches, Jakob Dunfjeld opens the door. Eric follows him into the warmth of the kitchen. There is the stove and a kettle steaming. The room is unlit and there are lamps on the table waiting to be filled. Beyond the window a field rises steeply to a line of trees. The grass looks buttered in the sun’s declining light. Nets lie in the sun. The fields here are too steep for horse and wagon and the farmers use nets to gather in their hay.

He wishes he did not have to go through it all again. That daring mission for which he is known. His failure and spurious fame. There is a malign satisfaction to be got from telling people about Dalebø’s death and disappearance in four feet of water. ‘He may as well have slipped in the bath.’ Afraid of his own motives, Eric more often maintains an aggressive silence.

A patch of deeper darkness detaches itself from the wall by the window. A young woman, bright, confident. She extends her hand and the professor says: ‘You’ve met my daughter, of course.’

‘I remember you,’ says Vibeke. ‘Are you actually wearing the same jumper?’ The sleek symmetry of the young woman’s face is so striking Eric finds it impossible, afterwards, to remember anything else about her. ‘Your housekeeper kept hugging me and weeping. She smelled of liquorice. Not sweets. I think it was booze.’

This comes as a complete surprise to Eric: how a few years will carry a child into adulthood. Yes, he has met the professor’s daughter before, on a previous visit: a polite, contained little girl.

‘Daddy says you’re going to take us sailing. He got me all excited but now he says I have to go diving for him. I have to pay for my pleasures by helping him set up his apparatus. If the octopuses eat me I am counting on you to have him arraigned.’

How old is she – sixteen? She seems already to have leapt into the surety of her twenties.

‘Do you really wring out whales to get the oil? You know, like dishcloths? I find it hard to know when Daddy’s teasing me.’

A bread board. Dishes and a tureen. A plate of berries gathered from the hill behind the house. Eric watches Vibeke move about the room. There is a confidence to her movements. ‘Do start, please.’ Her face has matured in an unexpected way. The flesh around her eyes has retained its childish fullness: a hint of Lappish ancestry. A drop of Arctic wildness under the skin.

Eric takes Lothar Eling’s notebook from his pocket and lays it on the table. Vibeke recognizes it. She feels her way into her chair. The professor comes over with the coffee pot and sees the book lying on the table between his daughter and his guest. He looks from one to the other of them, nonplussed. Vibeke reaches across the table and picks up the notebook. She pulls it free of its waterproof pouch. Eric studies her hands. Long, delicate fingers, the nails short, the tips a little flattened. Strong at the joints. A climber’s hands. Eric recalls what Professor Dunfjeld has told him: how Vibeke has taken to climbing the ring of mountains surrounding their home city of Bergen.

‘Thank you,’ she says. She does not look at him. She says to her father: ‘This is Lothar’s. This is the book I gave him.’

Eric finds his voice: ‘It found its way into my bag after I was rescued from Foyn. I didn’t know who to give it to. That’s not true. I could have found someone. His mother is still alive. The Geographical Society. Something made me hang on to it.’ He has never felt more in the wrong, though he can’t imagine why.

*

It appears an easy business, reaching the ice. Hopping boulders, bounding across stretches of shingle and gravel, surely Eric Moyse and his new mountaineering pupil will reach the foot of the route with ease?

Eric knows better. He explains to Vibeke Dunfjeld the miseries of that obvious route. The broken and slimy terrain. ‘There’s no real floor. Just a litter of smashed stone.’ In summer the ferns grow taller than a man. You forget your feet and in seconds something underfoot comes along to ruin your whole year. A birch root. A hole.

He points out the better path: a green and greasy granite wall. It’s a drear prospect from a distance but at close quarters it gives up a line of obvious handholds and axe placements.

Vibeke folds her arms, contemplating it. Contour the slab and climb down to the ice. The descent is steep and exhilarating, over broken slabs and down a chimney in the rock, flared just enough to give the pulse a kick.

Eric, already on the ice, leans on his axe and watches as Vibeke Dunfjeld slips into position, her body falling as neatly into the chimney as a keystone drops into an arch.

He lets Vibeke lead the ascent of the glacier. She is faster than he is, a natural with the axe, carving steps with easy, effective strokes. For Eric, the loss of three toes has made walking a precarious business and he is more than happy to follow. For an hour and a half they toil up the snow bank in the shelter of damp, high walls. It is exhilarating at last to reach the saddle, to sit on a rock and look across open water to the chain of mainland peaks: blue fangs set in a green gum of sea ice.

‘Daddy told me last night, it takes a thousand years for water to pass from the Pacific to the Atlantic.’

‘Really?’

‘I thought you’d like that.’

‘Good grief.’

They are sitting in full sun, confident of the weather, though there are clouds out to sea – shreds left behind by last night’s rain. Beneath the clouds the waves are a deep red that is almost black. Flecks of mica, close to the horizon, are reflections off the cabin windows of fishing boats.

‘Daddy says we may not be coming to the Lofotens any more.’

‘Oh?’

‘He says the work is finished. Now that Eling – well.’

‘Oh.’

‘He says Lothar Eling used dead water to solve the weather. You know, the way a propeller churns up waters of different densities so it can’t go anywhere. Airs of different densities, waters of different temperatures, they do the same thing. It’s all fluid, you see. It all obeys the same laws. There isn’t this big boundary between the ocean and air. At least, there
is
, but it’s only special because it’s the fluid boundary that’s obvious to us. The visible one. The one we can touch. But there are hundreds of invisible boundaries too, up in the sky, running through the ocean, all cluttered up with each other. Waves under the ocean and waves halfway to outer space. One gigantic fluid-dynamical problem. And it never stops. Never. When the sun explodes and boils the oceans into gas, the gas will still be turning over itself, over and over.’

Something else from Eling’s notebook comes to Eric’s spinning mind: ‘
Why the heart will not cease to desire
.’

‘When we get home to Oslo, Daddy’s going to write a paper about it.’

They sit in silence.

‘What will you do in Oslo?’

Vibeke shrugs. ‘Maintain the diary of a great man or two. They will let me attend classes. Some of them will.’

Her father has plans for her. Some carefully chosen study. She can become a teacher. The professor can have no idea how deadly his schemes are. To him, Vibeke’s love of the outdoors must appear no more than a tomboy’s eccentricity, amusing in its way, even admirable, but not very serious when set against the real and pressing business of her future.

‘Miss Dunfjeld.’

She will not look at him.

‘Vibeke.’

Vibeke rests a hand on his shoulder.

Steadily, as the days have passed, maturing into weeks, so Eric has come to hope for this – and it has come. His heart leaps. His face contorts with sudden yearning. Her head is turned away. Her face is hidden behind her wildly curling hair. Is she crying? Crying, to be going away forever? Crying, to be leaving him? He leans towards her. He raises a hand to touch her hair. He thinks that he might kiss her. So beautiful. So young. He leans in and sees, not twenty feet away, on a snow-covered boulder, a white-feathered eagle.

A male. It sits and preens, its great primaries spread against the sky like hands, then it leans into the wind and is carried off over their heads. Vibeke, letting go of Eric’s shoulder, turns to him, her face aglow with an innocent, ornithological delight.

Eric dissembles well and fast. He has dug snow holes for himself before now, out-waiting Arctic blizzards. He is a master of self-burial. There comes from him not a single outward sign, not a blink, not a breath,
not a fucking hint
, of what has just happened to him.

In the evening, exhausted and chilled through, the pair accept tall glasses of egg-nog and join Professor Dunfjeld by the fire. Vibeke is full of questions tonight, as though making up for all the visits she will not make now, and all the Lofoten summers she will miss. She asks Eric about his explorations, his seafaring, his role as the islands’
nessekøng
.

For all her courtesy – pantaloon gestures that inadvertently parody her father – she is mining him. Vibeke brings to her interviews the same speculative eye she brings to bear on the birds pecking crumbs at her window sill, and the animals sheltering in the hedgerows. What drives her ceaseless questioning? Eric has the strange and morose suspicion that she is going to repeat every word he utters to agents of a foreign power.

Eric’s paranoia has some foundation. Earlier this year, representatives of a new national conglomerate came calling: men who have links to Norway’s Hitler-worshipping Nasjonal Sammling, whose own ventures are capitalized in Germany and who owe their commercial loyalty, ultimately, to IG Farben. No one seriously doubts that another war is coming. Since whale oil is used in the manufacture of plastic explosives, Eric has in effect been selling the Germans precursor ingredients for tomorrow’s bombs.

Of more immediate concern is the decline in the archipelago’s economy. The Lofoten fishing fleet mechanized itself only to expose itself to recession. No one can get spare parts for their faltering engines. A good third of the fleet is laid up. It pains Eric to sit by and watch so many boats rotting at anchor.

This summer, in the pages of the Geographical Society’s bulletin, some student published a fulsomely ungrammatical essay about maritime life in the Lofotens. (Eric imagines a cow-licked disciple of Hans Gude, Grieg’s
Sixty-Six Lyric Pieces
under one arm and
Peer Gynt
under the other.)

In midsummer, small whales come to the VestFjord area. From end of summer to late autumn, shoals of herring, and then the arrival of cod.

Less a work of scholarship, more an upwelling of national sentiment. The pictures were pretty enough, though more suited to Washington’s
National Geographic
(‘the world in your living room’) than Oslo’s sober
Geografisk Tidsskrift
. A woman strings together a fishing net from wool on a wooden spool. Peat cutters. Mown grass is hauled from the steep fields in nets. A crow’s nest is tied to the mast of a fishing boat, a harpoon gun bolted to its bow. These are common enough scenes, familiar from Eric’s boyhood and not too rare among the archipelago’s poorer communities. Taken together, they speak of an aspect of island life that is slowly but steadily disappearing.

Why record nothing of the business proper? The factory ships made of old tankers? The boilers and the great round tanks that squat to the side of every quay?

Returning home from the hunt, a successful gunner is treated to a hero’s welcome – and well deserves it!

‘I would have done it better,’ Vibeke agrees, handing the journal to her father.

For some reason, Vibeke’s dismissal of the article inclines Eric to its defence. ‘How would you have done it differently?’

‘I would have interviewed you, for a start.’

‘Oh?’

‘Or not interviewed you at all. Perhaps I would leave the people out altogether and write about the foxes.’

‘They interest you, do they?’

‘Everywhere else, foxes chase after chickens and people chase after foxes. This is the only place I know where foxes and people rub along.’

This is true. The thickets are so well stocked with willow grouse that the island’s foxes have never developed a taste for domestic fowl. Here, before the fireside, Vibeke has never looked more wild or more unapproachable. Tanned, bright-eyed, her hair tied back in a rough ponytail. A Lapp virgin. An ice princess. She does not look at him. She knows that he is watching her.

‘Stay.’

Vibeke looks up from the fire.

‘At least for the summer. Stay longer if you want. See these islands in winter. In different seasons. Stay for a year. Make something of all this. Don’t go copying out the scrawls of great men. What you’re doing. The climbing. Your observations. It could be something.’ He has run out of words. He has still not declared himself. How can he possibly declare himself with her father slumped there between them, complacent, by the fire? Does she know how he feels? How can she?

Jakob Dunfjeld stretches and yawns. He sets his glass down on the rug. ‘It could be something.’ Is the professor agreeing with him, or making fun of him?

In any event, Vibeke stays.

Years go by.

In Kastrup, on the Danish coast, Eric sits waiting for his flight to be called: the Orange Horror to Poole. When he lands it’s a quick, if uncomfortable, train ride to London and his next meeting.