The Islanders (37 page)

Two hours later we had the place habitable. The stove was alight, filling the house with the sweet scent of burning birch, and the water jacket around the firebox was piping heat around the house. Alvasund warmed up some canned soup and we drank it sitting together on the couch, staring into the glowing fire.

We had found some maps of the fjord which showed that Ørsknes was a distance inland from the sea, with another fishing settlement called Omhuuv lying further along the same shore, closer to the mouth of the fjord. A larger-scale street map revealed that it was probably not going to take long to explore the town. There were just the two main streets, with a compact maze of side streets like the one where the house was situated. The harbour and wharf buildings ran for most of the length of the waterfront. We could hear the winches and cranes, even through the stone and doubly insulated wooden walls of the house.

We walked around the town before sunset, wrapped up against the icy north-east wind. It seemed to gain strength as it passed along the narrowing fjord. Alvasund showed me the building where she believed Yo had kept her studio – it was now a net store – but many decades had passed since the artist had been there. Her studio could have been in any one.

As we walked back towards the house we spotted a restaurant close to the wharves. The place was open, so we ate dinner there. Some of the other customers looked at us curiously a few times, but there was no hostility in their interest. Alvasund and I were learning to relax with each other, and several times we stopped talking and sat and ate in silence, glancing warmly at each other across the table.

Afterwards, we returned through the now dark streets, looking for the house, hearing our own footsteps echoing in the deserted streets. We glimpsed dim lights behind the curtained or shuttered windows of many of the houses, but there was little other outward sign of occupation. It was starting to snow, a thin, cold downfall, blown along on the turbulent Goornak. We leaned against each other, holding on as we slithered along the increasingly slippery paths.

I was assuming nothing about what might happen when we went to bed, but the knowledge that there was only one bed in the house had quietly illuminated the evening for me. I could not forget Alvasund’s unexpected laughter when we first discussed this trip, the smiling implication of us travelling together, and the easy affection we had shared in the restaurant.

But the night before, when we stopped at the hotel in the mountains, had been a surprise if not a disappointment. The moment I switched off the car’s ignition Alvasund had leapt out and run through the swirling snowstorm into the building. She returned with the news that we could stay, and started pulling her bags out of the car. Once inside the building I discovered we were to be in separate rooms, but I did not ask, and Alvasund did not tell me, if this was at her own request or if those were the only ones available. That is how I had spent the previous night, comfortably enough, warmly enough, but alone in a single narrow bed.

Now we were in Ørsknes, in a house where it was plain we would be sharing a bed. Once inside the house, with our warm outer clothes removed and the fire stirred up into a burst of new radiance, we made some tea. We sat together, as before, staring at the fireglow. Alvasund had picked up a tourist guide in the restaurant so we now knew where the Yo tunnel was located and how we could find it. We made plans to visit it the next day.

With the tea finished Alvasund stood up quickly, said she would like a shower and asked me if I wanted to take mine first or after her. I opted to go first.

Afterwards, I went up the narrow steps, crawled on to the mattress, and pulled the quilt around me. I was full of anticipation, my senses tingling, my appetite and readiness for her growing. As soon as I was in the bed she came up the steps to join me. She was still in her clothes and stood where I could see her. She undressed with her back towards me, stripping unsensationally to her underwear, then pulled on a wrap and went downstairs to the cubicle. I could hear the water flowing through the pipes, the shower running below, the sound of the splashing changing as she moved around. I stared at the small pile of clothes she had left on the floor beside our bed.

After a silence I heard her do something to the wood-burning stove, then she turned out the lights on the ground floor and came back up to the bed. She was wearing the wrap, with her hair hanging damply about her shoulders.

She kneeled forward on the edge of the mattress, pulled out the bolster from where it had been laid, and placed it along the bed, down the middle, dividing it in two.

‘You understand, Torm, don’t you?’ She was patting down the long, heavy pillow, making sure it extended the full length of the bed.

‘I think so,’ I said, kicking the thing where it had rolled against me. ‘I can see what you are doing. Is that what I have to understand?’

‘Yes. Don’t touch me. Imagine there is a sheet of glass between us.’

She towelled her hair briefly, then slipped off the wrap. For a moment she was naked, standing there, within my reach, but she was already crawling forward, sliding under the quilt beside me. The bolster lay between us.

She turned out the light, pulling on the cord that dangled from the rafter above.

I turned it on again and sat up. I leaned over towards her. She was already lying with the quilt pulled tight up to her face. Her eyes were open.

‘Torm –’

I said, ‘I wasn’t assuming anything, but you’re acting as if you think I was.’

‘It’s obvious. What you’re expecting.’

‘Everything we did today – was I wrong?’

‘We’re just friends, Torm. That’s how I want it to be. If you assume that, that’s OK.’

‘What if I want that to change? Or you do?’

‘Then we’ll both know. Please, for now just treat me as if we have glass between us. Everything is visible, but nothing can be reached. This was something I learned at college, about an audience and a stage. There’s an invisible wall between the actors and the audience. You look and you see, but there’s no real interaction.’

I said, protesting, ‘A stage effect isn’t the same thing at all!’

‘I know. But for now, just for now, for tonight.’

‘You want me to be your audience.’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

I thought about that. She suddenly seemed to me rather naïve, adapting a concept some drama teacher had explained, but applying it inappropriately. I reached up and turned off the light, aroused and annoyed. Moments later I switched it on again. She had not moved and her eyes were still open. She blinked.

‘You say I can look at you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me look now.’

Amazingly she smiled at that and without another word pushed down the quilt to expose herself. I raised myself on my elbow again, stared at her lying there so close to me, her neat, compact body, quite bare, frankly naked to me. She kicked the quilt completely away with one of her feet, then moved slightly, revealing everything of herself.

Almost at once it felt intrusive and somehow pointless to be looking at her like that, so I turned away. Still she did not pull up the quilt to cover herself but I turned off the light. Moments later I felt her move under the quilt again. She fidgeted a few times and finally lay still. I tried to relax too, lying back with my head on the large soft pillow. I was breathing hard but I tried to still myself, to be calm. The bolster lay between us.

It was almost impossible for me to sleep but I think Alvasund did fall asleep more or less straight away. Her breathing was steady, almost inaudible. She barely moved.

Of course what she had done had thrown me into a whirl of thoughts, desires, inhibitions, frustration. What was she up to? She appeared to like me, but somehow not enough. She let me look at her, seemed to invite it and even enjoy it, but I was not allowed near her, kept back in a kind of imaginary auditorium. I was dazzled and aroused by the brief glimpse I had had of her, the way she lay there close to me, relaxing her arms so her breasts were revealed, and parting her legs a little. She wanted me to see her, or at least would allow it.

She was not the first naked woman I had seen, nor was she the first I had been in bed with. I assumed she must know that, or could guess it. During my four years away from home, growing up rapidly, enjoying new freedoms, I had had girlfriends and lovers, and there was Enjie, one of the students, a young woman reading Economics in another department of the college. Enjie and I had shared an enthusiastic physical relationship for several months. Nor was Alvasund an object of long-held desire, because she had barely been in my thoughts since I left Goorn. Her return to my life had been completely unexpected. However, she was attractive to me, becoming more so, I was enjoying being with her, and –

There was a sheet of glass between us.

I knew about glass, but the glass I knew about was not for looking through, nor was it a barrier. On the contrary it was a medium of transient, non-fixed effect, used to control or enhance an electronic flow at some frequencies, while at others it functioned as an insulator or compressor. Her metaphor did not work for me.

I was awake for much of the night, sensing her physical closeness, knowing that were I to move just a short distance, or to throw an arm towards her across the bolster, or to allow one of my hands to slip beneath the damned thing, she would be there, close beside me, reachable, touchable.

But I did not. I listened to the constant wind, scouring across the roof just a short distance above me. I must eventually have slept because when I was next fully awake it was daylight. Alvasund was not in the bed beside me. She had already dressed and was downstairs doing something in the kitchen. I dressed quickly and went to join her. Neither of us said anything about what had happened, or not happened. I touched her hand to say hello, and she put an arm around my shoulder in a brief but affectionate hug.

I supposed that now, for the time being at least, it was my sort of glass between us, not just hers.

The wind was less bitter that morning, so we decided to walk up to the site of Yo’s tunnel. According to the leaflet Alvasund had found it was only a short distance from the town centre. It involved a steep climb along a fairly wide track with a frozen, crumbly surface, iced up in several places, loose with stones in others. A layer of snow covered much of the way.

We soon found the site of the tunnel, which had been created so that the opening could not be seen from below. As we climbed we suddenly came upon it, a short section of tunnel leading back from the rocky wall and then falling sharply downwards, curling away from the light. The tunnel was huge. A truck or other vehicle could have passed through it. Guard rails had been erected at knee and thigh height.

We stood and stared down into it. Alvasund seemed moved by the sight of it, but to be candid it left me unimpressed. It was a large hole in a mountainside.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Alvasund said eventually.

‘Yes, I do, I think.’

‘Jordenn Yo is really important to me,’ Alvasund said. ‘As an artist, as a kind of ideal, a personal role model. She stood for everything I want to be. She lived for her work, and in the end died for it. Almost every installation she completed was managed in the face of objections, bans, threats. She was thrown into prison several times. Of course, everyone prizes her work now, as if none of that happened. Any island where she worked shows it off as if it was their idea. But in reality she was always being harassed by the same sort of people then, the ones who run islands now. This is one of the tunnels she wasn’t able to finish. She later disowned it, said it had been ruined by the Hetta authorities. Can’t you see what she meant?’

‘What would it have been if she had finished it?’

‘Longer and deeper . . . it was supposed to reach the far side of the hill. What’s unique about this one is there’s a vertical spiral down there somewhere.’

We stared at the entrance for a while longer, then turned and skittered carefully down the slippery track, returning towards the town.

‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘Have we done what you came here to do?’

‘I don’t know. I’m waiting to hear about the job offer, if it still exists.’

‘Are they here in town, or do you have to make contact with them somehow?’

‘I said I don’t know.’

‘We could always come back and look at the hole again,’ I said. ‘Nothing else to do.’

The way back took us straight from the mountain track to a steep flight of stone steps, thence down to one of the town streets. We passed through the central area. I was hoping we might see a shop open or perhaps a café, somewhere we could buy a newspaper then sit and warm up for a while. As we approached the house a young man appeared. He was about to pass by without noticing us, but Alvasund reacted to him at once.

‘Marse!’ She let go my hand, raising her arm in a warm greeting. She walked quickly towards him.

He responded to the sound of his name, looking at her with a startled expression. He quickly averted his eyes and looked as if he were about to stride on past us, but when Alvasund said his name again he acted as if he had recognized her all along. He lifted a gloved hand in welcome. It was a brief gesture, almost a warding off.

He said, his voice muffled by a thick scarf he wore across his mouth, ‘Alvie . . . is that you?’