Dead Water (23 page)

Peder manoeuvres the Dodge hard up against the container and clambers across the cab to get out of the vehicle. ‘Havard? Come on!’ Peder hauls himself on to the bed of the truck, and helps the boy up after him. From there they climb on to the cab roof, and from there on to the container. The steel box vibrates beneath their feet. It does not flex.

Havard surveys the city from a grand height of eight feet. Soldier Field. The Board of Trade Building.

‘How is it?’ Eric stands by the front of the Dodge, where the warmth of the engine takes the edge off the morning’s chill. He is the very picture of anxiety, as though his adopted son and his friend were balanced on a mountain ledge or had climbed upon a berg which might at any moment roll over on top of them.

‘Seems fine.’

‘Havard?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, jump about a bit.’

For ten full minutes Havard and Peder caper about on the roof of the container. They link arms. They dance round and round. The box does not sway, or ping, or flex, or buckle, or bounce. It rings like a bell. Peder sniffs. He calls down to Eric, ‘Of course, we’ll have to drop serious weights on this thing.’

‘Of course.’

The container’s bell-like reverberation sounds the death-knell for a small boy’s dreams of running away to sea. From this point on there will be no more stevedoring, no more trimming, no more ordinary seamanship, no heave, no drag, no thrust, no groan, no weary back or throbbing arm or beer-parched throat, no barrel to roll, no crate to crack open, no cart to pull. The future’s robots now, and cranes, and serial numbers, and coordinates. This is Eric’s mission: to create and command a global trade in boxes and strip the meddlesome component entirely away.

Sunday, 4 December 1960: midday

Fire engines and ambulances criss-cross the streets of Cardiff, braying: animals trapped in a barn. The river Taff is full to overflowing, but Eric Moyse has insisted on being dropped off at the edge of Gabalfa, seized, he now supposes (fed up, wet through, and more or less lost), by a desire to make this visit a pilgrimage of sorts: a penitential slump up to the derelict shrine of his undeclared and unrequited love.

Twenty years too late, Vibeke Dunfjeld has reappeared.

After a spell in prison, and free at last of the attentions of Norway’s mental health system, she vanished from the Norwegian public record only to turn up in Cardiff, widow of a Lofoten merchant seaman who had served here during the war.

Peder Halstad has pieced this puzzle together: more and more he acts as Eric’s eyes and ears, while his employer spends an ever greater part of his life on paper, shaping a commercial empire that grows more abstract by the day.

Vibeke Dunfjeld is a lecturer now. An
ecologist
. She is writing course materials for the Open University. No small accomplishment after years on the margins. Arrest and imprisonment. Self-harm. Hospital. Her father’s surviving friends – one or two well-placed emeritus professors – have taken a discreet hand in her rehabilitation.

Gabalfa is a new estate: a crude mock-up of a future that has yet to emerge from the war’s sticky ashes. Prefabricated houses and kerb stones on the skew. Houses rather less robust than the rorbu cabins – fishing boats, halved and overturned and fitted with a door – that his family once rented out to fishermen in Austvågøy.

Aberporth Road. Bacton Road. It is as though the war, not content with robbing Cardiff of many civic buildings, has gone on in the silence and relative calm of a phoney peace to destroy the city’s very idea of itself. In place of the old buildings, however small they were, however mean, come these dull ideas of houses, Not houses but ‘houses’. Not walls but ‘walls’, flat ‘roofs’ that cannot stand the touch of real rain. These are streets built by weary men. Men for whom contingent gestures are enough.

Eric’s shirt collar feels as though it’s shrunk a couple of sizes. His trousers are sodden and press, cold and clammy, against his thighs as he walks; they hobble him. His shoes are soaked through.

He is at the house now. No amount of abstraction, no amount of theory, can insulate him from this moment. He opens the gate. Crazy paving. A lawn more grey than green under the sky’s woolly overcast. He knocks.

He has imagined this moment to death over the years, to the point of erasure: a needle blunting itself against the bleared grooves of a shellac record. The door opens and here is Vibeke Dunfjeld: a forty-five-year-old Welsh widow, part-time lecturer and ornithologist. The poignancy of this moment – the erosion of a remembered beauty, Vibeke’s once sparkling eyes freighted now with experience and disappointment – barely registers against the crackle and white noise thrown up by Eric’s years of lonely speculation and rehearsal. He has expected so much from this moment over the years, good and bad, that nothing the world actually throws at him can surprise him. This plain, square woman, these thin lips prematurely lined, the glassy, bulletproof quality of these eyes – these things neither surprise nor dismay him. He is aware, most of all, of a tremendous sense of relief. Clearly they are past the time when her sex might have had power over him. At last, after years of waiting, they are strangers!

Every outdoor garment Vibeke possesses is hung from wall hooks just inside the front door; as Eric enters he knocks a coat on to the floor. Rehanging it is a minor test of skill, like a child’s puzzle. He picks his way over unopened envelopes, catalogues, notices for jumble sales, fêtes, public meetings. The hall is carpeted, its mealy colour made even more indeterminate by scuffs of mud and paint. An offcut, the carpet gives out a couple of feet short of the kitchen and a vaguely oriental blue linoleum takes over. There are clothes and undergarments over every chair back and radiator. Vibeke complains that she has nowhere to dry anything on a day like this. Sweaters. A child’s stripy top. Tights. Vibeke has a child, then? Another child? Peder said nothing about this.

In the kitchen dolls slump in a delinquent row against a skirting board. Sheets of foolscap paper cover the kitchen table, spiralled and scribbled over, drawings half-done. Books: Hilda Boswell’s
Treasury of Poetry
, Hilda Boswell’s
Treasury of Nursery Rhymes
. Powder-pink forest sprites with schizophrenic eyes. Of the girl herself there is no sign. She must be at school.

Vibeke sits Eric down at the table, then turns to the sink where she engages in some indeterminate activity halfway between food preparation and washing-up. Eric studies her as she moves about the room: hunched, uneasy in her own skin. ‘I suppose you’ll want tea,’ she says.

The mess filling this place seemed cheery after the bleak and empty street – but now that he is sitting down his impression of comfort is rapidly evaporating. These drawings, swept aside to make room for his tea – these aren’t the child’s. These are Vibeke’s. An adult hand drew these. However disordered, this is an adult’s way of drawing a bird. A face. A hand.

The dolls, slumped against the wall, return his stare.

‘I suppose you have been wondering about Else.’

‘Who?’

‘My daughter.’

‘Else. How lovely.’

Silence.

‘How old is Else?’

‘Eight.’

Eight: that was Havard’s age, at his adoption.

‘Do you take milk?’

He shakes his head. ‘Lemon, if you’ve got it.’

She goes to the fridge and takes from inside the door one of those acidyellow plastic lemons – a Jif lemon, for heaven’s sake, mascot of the postwar shoddy. He says: ‘I have pictures of Havard. If you would like to see them.’ His sodden jacket is hung over the back of his chair: he reaches into it and pulls out his wallet. The snaps are crumpled and water-stained. He lays them on the table.

‘Well,’ she says.

He lays the pictures out on the table. Havard on a camel, with a view of the Sphinx. Havard on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Havard by the Niagara Falls. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I brought these for you.’

‘You should have brought the boy.’

‘The boy?’ Eric thinks about this. ‘Havard?’

‘He must be seventeen.’

‘Yes.’

‘A young man by now.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Why didn’t you bring him? Didn’t he want to come?’

‘I –’ In a rising panic, Eric realizes he has no answer to this. ‘I didn’t think –’

Vibeke goes back to the sink, to whatever it is she is doing, or not doing, or pretending to do. ‘It’s all right,’ she says.

He says to her, ready for anything: ‘It must have been hard for you.’

Her smile is weathered. ‘Hard. Yes.’

‘What did they do? Where you were. Where they kept you. What were they trying to do?’

Vibeke appears genuinely puzzled: ‘I think in the end they just wanted me to be somebody else.’

‘Were you really so crazy?’ A little levity. Nothing wrong with a little levity.

‘They thought so. They had funny ideas about crazy. You wouldn’t agree with them at all.’

‘No?’

‘Oh, no. Do you remember all those letters you used to write to me, about your climbing trips? Your Arctic walks? Weeks, months in the wilderness. Living in the teeth of it. Knowing it by living it. That is what you wanted me to understand.’

‘Was it?’

‘I loved your letters. They inspired me. I tell my students about them. About you.’

So, after all, there has been some way in which he has touched her! He remembers the white eagle. Her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze elsewhere, not on him, never on him. ‘You were right, of course,’ she says. ‘Right about that kind of life. It was right for me. I’m glad I lived that life. In spite of everything, I’m glad.’

Dizzily, Eric tries to make sense of this. Her years of vagrancy are something he’s assumed she would rather forget. Petty thievery. Courtrooms. Jail. On the contrary: she seems to have recast them as something heroic, something she chose – and Eric her mentor, the cause of it all!

Eric studies the inside of his cup. No leaves. No pattern. No future. Tea bags. ‘You’ll have to tell me what happened.’

Vibeke tells her story: how the stateless peoples of the far north were forced south by hunger. ‘The Germans burned everything to the ground. Well, you know this.’ She stole what she needed to survive. She raided bins and cellars and larders. ‘Like a bear in winter!’ Eventually she reached civilization. What was left of it. ‘The government had passed a law against pulling a cart with horses. Can you believe that? They wanted us to be different people. They wanted us to be like them. They beat us into shape.’

‘Yes.’ He looks her in the eye. Out with it: ‘And Havard, they took him away from you.’

‘Yes.’

‘They told me you were cutting yourself.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That. That’s when I was inside.’ She pushes up her sleeves to show him: a cobweb of thin white scars.

He stares at them. He wants to be sick. Her sexual power is gone but in its place comes something tougher. Something horrid. ‘I looked for you.’

‘And you found little Havard.’

‘Eventually. They told me you had had a child.’

‘Yes?’

‘I looked for you. I wanted you. I –’ He stops, dumbfounded. In the struggle to explain, he has finally declared himself, more than thirty years too late.

‘You found my son instead.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you took him.’

‘It was the least I could do. Given the way I feel about you. Given the way I’ve always felt about you. For heaven’s sake, Vibeke, you must know how I felt, it can’t possibly have passed you by.’

Her fractional shrug is all his disappointments rolled into one. ‘Perhaps I have forgotten.’

He is too weary to argue now. Too weary even to mourn the death of this thing he has been carrying around all these years. This love, if that is what it is. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Perhaps it’s best forgotten. It was never... Being older than you, I suppose. I was afraid...’

‘You could have got me out of there,’ she says. ‘If you had loved me, you could have set me free.’

He stares at the backs of his hands. He is as old as the century. He is sixty years old. Sixty! How did he get so old? ‘I loved you. You were – I couldn’t have cared for you. They told me that.’

‘You took their word for it. The doctors. The police. Peder Halstad. You took their advice.’

Eric finds himself in a place where he can see no justice in anything he has done. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I took their advice.’

‘Poor Eric,’ Vibeke croons. She picks up his cup and carries it to the sink and sets about making another pot of her ghastly tea. ‘Never really in love is my guess.’

‘You can think what you like.’ The words are out before he can stop them. It’s no small thing to say to a woman who has spent years of her life in mental hospitals: a delinquent labelled unfit to rear her own child. He closes his eyes, afraid to meet her gaze, aghast at his own stupidity. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘Forgive me. Look,’ he says, as if this were an explanation, ‘I need the toilet.’

Behind the locked door of her bathroom, safe at last, Eric’s steadying breath comes cheaply perfumed: Yardley, Fabergé, Estée Lauder Youth Dew. He studies the shelf above the sink. No ambergris in this line-up. Perfumes that have never seen the inside of a whale’s arse. He looks around him, ever more dizzy, ever more claustrophobic, hunting for something to latch on to. The room’s as generic as a toothpaste advertisement.

He flushes the toilet and unbolts the door. Through the open doorway next to the bathroom comes a puttering: gas running dry in the bottle.

He discovers the sitting room. Here the welter of clutter and rubbish implies some intense, disordered industry. Vibeke has been cutting out pictures of birds and sticking them into scrapbooks. Ordnance Survey maps are spread out over the floor. A Calor gas heater stands in the centre of the room, spitting out a gluey heat. On a table in front of the window, piles of guidebooks and timetables frame a seated figure. A child.

‘Hello.’

The girl turns round. Her face, so serious, reminds him so much of the child Vibeke that he forgets to breathe. ‘Who are you?’ There’s no lightness in his voice at all. No friendliness. The girl climbs off her chair and edges around the room.