A Summer of Drowning Read online

  ‘Don’t bother with the rhymes,’ he’d said. ‘They’re nothing. But the pictures are worth a look.’ He liked to lend me picture books, because he knew how much I loved those old illustrations, but also because he wanted me to take an interest in art for its own sake, and not just because I was a painter’s daughter. ‘You have a good eye for these things,’ he would say, when he handed over some old book or print he’d found rummaging through one of the big blanket boxes he kept in his spare room. ‘Have a look and let me know what you think.’

  That spare room had been special to me ever since I was a little girl. It was dim and large and full of strange treasures, like the secret cave in an old enchanter’s tale. Kyrre Opdahl had lived alone for a long time and, over the years, he had collected a vast array of strange and sometimes beautiful junk – old engine parts and the inner workings of clocks, naturally, but that was just the beginning. In that spare room, where I was free to rummage whenever I felt like it, I would find boxes full of ancient Christmas decorations, hand-painted or stubbled with fat tinsel; there were timetables for long-forgotten ferries, jars of nails and odd nuts and bolts that he couldn’t bring himself to throw away, tangles of copper wire and old fishing line, shoeboxes crammed full of doll and puppet heads from when he used to make and repair toys. There were glass floats and tin boxes full of fishhooks and lures; in one battered old blanket box there was a pile of sun-bleached albums and faded envelopes crammed with old newspaper clippings and grainy black-and-white snapshots of people I had never seen before, people who probably corresponded to the names in the old graveyard in Tromsø, ancient faces so deeply lined and weathered that it was hard to know if they were women or men, stiff boys looking out to the camera in their Sunday best, trying to look blasé, pretty girls about to grow into older sisters or aunts. Best of all, there was the long shelf of children’s books, some of them rare and probably valuable, others foxed and tattered. It didn’t matter what state they were in: they sat side by side, and Kyrre cared for them equally, though not so much that he had ever minded my taking one away for weeks or months at a time, even when I was too young to know how important to him they were. Peters Jul wasn’t the best book he had lent me, by any means, but it did contain a beautiful grey-and-white street scene of snow-covered roofs and church spires in which tiny figures went about their daily business in a field of perfect whiteness, untroubled, isolate and immune to the passing of time. That was what I liked about those books, I think: there was no time in them.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, when he saw the book in my hand, making a show of being surprised that I’d remembered to return it. I knew he never thought of these books as loans, but I made a point of bringing them back in perfect condition. ‘Peters Jul.’ He took it from me and held it at arm’s length, studying the cover with an affectionate smile. ‘Did you like this one?’ He perched his glasses on the end of his nose, like some comedy grandfather in an old film, then opened the book and started to read.

  ‘Det er den danske moder,

  hvem bagen bliver sendt;

  og, hvorom vi vil bede,

  det ved hun vist omtrent –’

  He broke off. ‘Do you remember this?’ he said.

  ‘Nar hun blot den vil vise

  sin datter og sin pog,

  da bliver rigt og proegtigt –’

  I shook my head. ‘But you told me not to read the rhymes,’ I said.

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He peered over the top of the book solemnly. ‘And, of course, you did exactly what you were told to do,’ he said. ‘As always.’

  I smiled. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You know I always take your advice.’

  He pursed his lips, then he continued reading.

  ‘Hvert billed I vor bog,

  og, dersom hun vil laese

  den simple, ringe sang,

  ja, sa far verset vinger

  ved hendes stemmes klang;

  thi end bestadnig gaelder

  de gamle, gyldne ord –

  ‘I remember your mother reading this to you,’ he said. ‘When you were very little.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ I said.

  It came out a little too sharply, but he didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he just smiled. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘When you first came here. She always had a beautiful voice, your mother.’

  I really didn’t believe him. I had no memory of Mother reading children’s books to me, other than English classics like Lewis Carroll and Dickens’s Christmas novels. When she read in Norwegian, she had always chosen grown-up stories of Vikings and Greek myths and legends from her own library. She had never babied me and she had never read homely old verses about mothers and their babies. ‘Why would she be reading to me from a Danish book?’ I said. ‘This is far too sentimental for her –’

  He closed the book suddenly with a snap. ‘Akkurat,’ he said. ‘But she read them, just the same.’

  I was tempted to ask him, then, about what had happened between them when he stopped coming to the house so often, but he’d suddenly become wrapped up in some thought that had passed through his mind. Some thought, or some memory. ‘What is it?’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘Hm?’

  ‘You were remembering something …’

  ‘Ah.’ He smiled and shook his head. Not sadly. Not at all sadly, I thought. ‘No, I wasn’t remembering anything specific,’ he said. ‘It’s just that … I always think of her, when I read these verses.’ His eyes were bright, and he looked happier than I had seen him in a long time. Happy, like some old believer, coming from church of a Sunday morning. ‘Those old, golden words carry on still, even now.’

  I shook my head. ‘You told me not to read the words,’ I said – and I immediately felt ashamed, for some reason, as if I had uttered some kind of obscure blasphemy.

  He wasn’t listening though. ‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’ he said – and I saw that he was far away, thinking of Mother, in another time and place, but I had missed my chance and now I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know anyhow.

  * * *

  When I got home, there was a small, very neat parcel on the kitchen table. It was wrapped in the old-fashioned way, with thick, textured brown paper and white string. It contained a book: Walking to Patagonia, by Arild Frederiksen. It wasn’t inscribed, but an envelope had been tucked inside, between the cover and the plain dark endpapers. Inside was a single typed sheet from Kate Thompson, exactly like the letter that had gone before, the one difference being that this one contained a request – a request so carefully expressed that it seemed not to be asking for anything at all – that I would consider visiting this same Arild Frederiksen, who was still in hospital. I know this can’t be easy, Kate Thompson wrote, and I can’t expect you to just drop everything and come right away, but it would make all the difference to him if you could come soon. I am happy to arrange somewhere for you to stay and I’ll pay the airfare, of course, but if you could find the time to come, it would mean so, so much to him.

  I put the letter back in its envelope and slid it back into the book. I wasn’t really surprised, I suppose. I had known, from the first, that this was all leading to something, and what else would that be, if not a meeting? What did surprise me was that the request had come so soon, especially considering the fact that I hadn’t replied to Kate Thompson’s earlier letter. What surprised me even more was her assumption that I would want to see my father, that I would be curious, at the very least, to know what he was like. Yet I wasn’t curious. Not in the least. I didn’t want to know anything about him. I turned the book over in my hands. It was a heavy, cloth-bound hardback, with a wrap-around colour illustration on the dust jacket showing a flock of birds – I couldn’t make out what they were – over a wide, empty landscape and, on the inside back cover, there was a photograph of the author in black and white. Arild Frederiksen was, or had once been, a boyish, overconfident man of around thirty, his dirty-blond hair rather long and brushed back from his face
in a style that reminded me of pictures I had seen of French intellectuals in the 1960s. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t serious either. He looked like someone who was trying not to laugh at the idea of posing for an author’s photograph. But none of that mattered, compared to the very obvious family resemblance I saw in his face to the face I saw every day in the mirror, and I knew, with a little rush of horror, that there could be no doubting that he was my father. No doubting it at all, and that was what made me take the letter to Mother.

  Mother was in the garden. She had been painting continuously since Frank Verne’s departure; now, she was taking a break in the long rock garden to the south side of the house, picking out weeds, enjoying the sun, a woman utterly at ease in her world. The rock garden was her favourite place, perhaps because it had taken so much time and effort to build. This was where the most beautiful flowers grew, in a planting scheme that ran from warm, sulphur yellows and golds through the orange of Turkish poppies and rock roses to fire-red and purple morning glories. Some years, the wind would ruin the effect, and there would be nothing but wisps and ghosts of colour in the deeper recesses between the limestone slabs, but that year it was almost perfect, in spite of Mother having been so busy in the studio. These days, now that her tastes have changed and she has come round to Harstad’s way of thinking, there are more alpines here, tiny saxifrages from high scree country and Arctic poppies perched in cool niches among the rocks, but the odd, self-seeded exotic still reappears from time to time, clinging on for a few weeks before it melts back into the stones, never to be seen again. Seed can sit dormant for years in this soil, waiting for the right conditions to prosper, and it’s something Mother and I do together, nowadays, watching for surprise blossoms and pointing them out to one another over breakfast or morning coffee. That’s a big change from how things were before, and I couldn’t say exactly when it began but, looking back, I can’t help thinking that it has something to do with the events of that summer. We came together that year, even when it seemed like we were losing everything. Frank Verne. Kyrre Opdahl. The suitors. What others saw, in me, as innocence, and what they saw, in her, as beauty. To my mind, of course, she still is as beautiful as ever, but now that she’s a real recluse, it’s beauty in a different form. A private beauty, not unlike what I choose to think of as my private form of achieved innocence.

  I found a large, wide boulder at one end of a series of rocks that ran east to west through the garden and down to the carved stones by the birch wood, like a mountain range in miniature. That was the warmest spot in the garden and I often sat out there, especially on days like this, when it was warm after rain and that sweet water and loam scent was in the air. Mother was moving back and forth among the rocks, digging weeds from the gravel and pausing every now and then to nip out a dead flower head. She was wearing a big floppy sun hat that looked like it had been handed down for generations from mother to daughter – which was another illusion, I know, because I’d been with her when she bought it, in a fancy shop in London, on a trip she had arranged for my twelfth birthday. But then, that was what always happened with anything Mother possessed. Things aged when she used them: clothes, books, jewellery, even her brushes and tubes of paint developed a shadowy, straw-coloured patina, like objects left out in the sun. It was one of the minor miracles that happened around her, miracles that nobody ever saw but me. She would borrow one of my shirts for a day, and it would come back in altered form, that film of gold and time ingrained in the fabric. A glossy art book would arrive in the mail smelling of new paper and gum and a week later I would find it on the kitchen table, subtly tempered and looking as if it had been there for decades.

  I didn’t know how to lead into the conversation I needed to have, so I did what I usually did back then: I sat a moment, wrapped in meaningful silence, then plunged straight in. Mother was used to it, of course. Mostly, she found it amusing, which was something I also knew, but even that made no difference. I do it still, on occasion. I’m just no good at beating around the bush. ‘Do you remember, years ago,’ I said, ‘when I asked you if you loved my father?’

  She looked up from her work and gave me a wary smile. ‘I do,’ she said. She seemed about to say more, so I waited a moment, but she didn’t speak. She did, however, straighten up and then, with too deliberate, almost exaggerated, care, set her trowel down on the nearest large rock. Then, still smiling, she gave me her full attention. It was an encouraging smile now, though perhaps not inviting. She was ready to hear what I wanted to say, and she wanted me to see that, though I could also see that she would have preferred to let the matter go.

  ‘You said it wasn’t something you thought about,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t understand what that meant,’ I said, as if I were asking her to re-explain a maths problem I hadn’t quite grasped.

  ‘Well … I hadn’t thought about it, until you asked. Though if I had, the answer would have been no.’

  ‘You didn’t love him?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t love him. But I really hadn’t thought about it before you asked.’

  ‘Then, did you ever love anyone? I mean …’

  She laughed. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘And the answer is yes, once upon a time, a very, very long time ago, I did.’ She leaned in closer and I thought she was about to tell me the whole story, in all its sad, or beautiful, detail – and once again, I waited, but she didn’t say another word.

  ‘So what happened?’ I said, after a moment.

  ‘Nothing, really,’ she said. ‘It didn’t last very long, and I didn’t get the chance to find out if it was what I thought …’ She smiled again, then she stood up. ‘I was just about to stop for a coffee,’ she said. ‘Would you like some?’

  I nodded. I knew she wasn’t being evasive – on the contrary, she wanted me to see that she was taking this conversation seriously and giving it its proper due, rather than rushing into it, as I had done. This was to be a serious discussion, and though she didn’t want to have it, she knew that I did. Maybe she needed a moment to think, or to consider her own feelings a little; I didn’t know because I had no idea what she thought or felt, or even if she thought or felt anything at all when she wasn’t working. She took off her hat and looked up at the sky. ‘It’s going to stay fair all day,’ she said; then she led me into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

  The word most often used when people talked about Mother in those days was beautiful. And it’s true: even though I saw her every day, I could still be surprised by how beautiful she was, even when she hadn’t slept for days. She looked tired that day, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t beautiful the way women in magazines are beautiful, she had the kind of beauty that fatigue only exaggerates, and it was obvious then, even to me, that she would only get more beautiful as she got older. Yet, even though she knew how others saw her, even though every magazine article about her mentioned how beautiful she was, she never thought about it. She never had the air of being looked at that some beautiful people have; she never stopped to see herself in a mirror, or in the regard of those who admired her so openly. There was no self-portrait among her works; as far as I knew, she had never attempted one. She had shelf after shelf of books about portraiture, and many of her favourite painters – Titian, Rembrandt, even Sohlberg – had painted themselves over and over again, but I don’t think the idea had even once occurred to her.

  She didn’t say anything until the coffee was safely brewing. Then she set two cups down on the table, put the coffee pot exactly halfway between them and sat down. She looked out of the window, smiled at something she saw there, in the garden, or perhaps out across the Sound, then she turned to look at me. ‘This is about the mail, I suppose,’ she said. There was no emotion in her voice; she was perfectly matter-of-fact; but I didn’t read this as indifference. Rather, I knew she wanted to keep everything calm and put me at ease. She wanted me to know that she didn’t mind – about my keepin
g the first letter secret, and about anything that might happen because of what I had read there – not that she didn’t care. She picked up the coffee pot and began to pour, serving me first, then herself. ‘What does he want?’ she said, rather too quietly.

  ‘It’s not from him,’ I said. ‘It came from a woman called Kate Thompson. I think she lives with him.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She sent me a gift –’

  ‘What kind of gift?’

  I shook my head. ‘A book,’ I said. I didn’t say it was one of Arild Frederiksen’s books, but I’m sure she guessed as much. She leaned forward, placed her elbows on the table and, cradling her coffee cup in both hands, brought it to her lips. ‘Now she wants me to go and visit him,’ I said, all of a sudden, though I hadn’t intended to. I hadn’t wanted to rush things – though I could see, immediately, that she had guessed this was coming. ‘He’s sick, apparently. He’s in a hospital. She thinks it will help … if I visit.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ I said. I was a little shocked that she thought I had replied to Kate Thompson’s letter without discussing it with her – because it seemed all right, or almost all right, to keep the arrival of the letters a secret, but, for me at least, to have responded in secret would have been a betrayal. ‘I haven’t written back,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to –’

  She inclined her head slightly. ‘Yes,’ she said, breaking in to show she understood, then she gave me a fond, and surprisingly tender, look. There was something like pity in that look, though it wasn’t quite pity – yet it wasn’t just fondness, either. ‘But you know you have to say something,’ she said. ‘It would be rude not to.’