A Summer of Drowning Read online

  I love the boathouse. It’s like a tabernacle: Kyrre puts as much work into it as he does into the hytte; he gives his narrow, well-weathered boat a fresh coat of red and blue paint every year, he takes the engine apart and cleans every single component and he keeps the interior of the thing spotless, but you never see him out on the water. He’s too old for that, he says – though he doesn’t look much more than fifty, and he’s as fit as a fiddle. I suppose the truth is, he’s lost the habit of doing things for pleasure. He only has time for work. He could have retired a long time ago, and nobody knows what he does with the money he earns from his various enterprises, but then, as he always says, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t keep busy. Sometimes he gets depressed in the winter, when it’s too cold for real work, but in the summertime he lets out this hytte and a couple of other properties further up the coast, near Brensholmen. His own house is a short walk from here, just out of sight through the birch woods, but even that is little more than a storehouse-cum-workshop, a sprawl of boxes and tools and half-constructed machines that runs from the kitchen, where he spends most of his time, along the hall and into the large spare room that looks more like a chandler’s workshop than a bedroom, threading through the ordinary details of his domestic life till it’s impossible to tell one from the other. He’s old now, so he says; but he’s as active as he ever was and, except for the few occasions when he sits down with me to drink coffee and tell me his stories, he never rests.

  As busy as he is, however, he’s never too busy for Mother, and she relies on him for all manner of practical support. He supplies the logs for our stove; he helps in the garden; he mends things when they go wrong; he picks up our groceries and the art materials Mother has shipped up from Oslo or Bergen. He was the one who drove me into Tromsø every weekday, all through my school years, and I can still picture him as he was on that first morning, an immense, steady man with birdlike features and very close-cropped hair, climbing out of the driver’s seat and coming round to the back of the car to open the door with great ceremony and let me in, a shy schoolchild suddenly transformed into the Princess Royal. He was absurd, of course – he reminded me of the cockerel in a picture book I had – but I could see that he was also proud and dignified, a man with an inner life, whose sense of importance wasn’t confined to his own corner of existence, but spread out to touch the lives of everyone he met, even if they didn’t quite see the significance of the occasion. He was also my own personal storyteller, someone who charmed and frightened me, in more or less equal measure, all the time I was growing up.

  Kyrre’s hytte is down by the beach, across the road and the meadow beyond, but it’s clearly visible from my bedroom window and from the landing where I would sit back then, keeping watch on the Sound and on the comings and goings of Kyrre’s tenants. It’s just a few feet from the waterline, when the tide is high and a summer guest can stand on the lawn to watch the terns as they hover above the shallow water, waiting for the glint of silver that will send them diving into the wash, like tiny lightning bolts, flashing in and out of the lit waves and returning with a sliver of a fish clasped tightly in their beaks. I call the hytte a dwelling place, not a house, because it’s so simple: a living room with a stove and a picture window looking out across the Sound, a tiny kitchen, two plain bedrooms furnished with bunks and narrow wardrobes at the back, where the shadows and the rain-scent of the meadows are always present, even on the finest days. According to Kyrre’s brochure, this hytte can sleep two adults and up to three children but, quite often, the summer guests are solitaries, men, for the most part, who have come north looking for quiet. Mostly, they are Norwegians, but occasionally there will be an Englishman or a German and, three years ago, through a long wet July, a Canadian philosopher sat at the window facing the Sound, listening to the rain bouncing off the roof and thinking about Kierkegaard. Or so Mother said. She had encountered him in a downpour one afternoon, while she was out on one of her solitary rambles, and she had invited him to tea but, to her great amusement, he had politely explained that he was too busy.

  Mother doesn’t make a habit of inviting Kyrre’s guests round for tea, though, and she was probably glad when he declined her offer. It would have been a novel experience for her, of course: to be refused. Usually she was the one who did the refusing. Declined, refused, denied, withdrawn – these are the words that best describe her relations with the outside world, not just in her work, but in her personal life as well. She refuses to become an art celebrity, just as surely as she refuses the suitors, and yet, no matter how final these refusals are, it only brings her more critical success, and higher prices for her paintings. That surprised her at first, I think, because I know that her withdrawal wasn’t calculated, but it wasn’t long before she saw that she could use it to her advantage. And the truth is, nobody would ever deny that her remoteness – the mythic seclusion, the supreme integrity – is central to her artistic success. I know, now, that the suitors who came to our house back then were aware that it was precisely the impossibility of winning her heart that drew them back, week in, week out, year after year. They admired her painting, just as they admired her beauty – but what they admired most was her gift for refusal. A gift that would be mistaken for a pose, perhaps, were it not for the fact that, more than anything else, it is herself that she refuses – and that, above all, has always been her secret. That is her power. To turn away from the busy world is interesting, up to a point – and she didn’t become the artist she is today until she left Oslo and committed what many people considered professional suicide – but to refuse oneself is exemplary. To become nothing, to remove yourself from the frame – that is the highest form of art. Mother was always aware of this and the discipline of it extended into everything in her life – even into her dealings with Kyrre’s summer guests. She has always played a part, but the part she plays is her true self. You only have to know her work to understand that.

  Throughout my teenage years, however, I made a hobby of Kyrre’s guests. Some I befriended, and I spent an occasional long afternoon in the room that faces the Sound, or on the tiny lawn that sits between the hytte and the beach, listening to their stories over coffee or bottles of Solo, but the majority I chose to observe in silence, watching from afar as they enjoyed the Arctic landscape, or the solitude they had come here to find. Watching – or, as Kyrre would have it, spying – which was probably fair. For several years back then, I was a spy of sorts, one of life’s observers. I would watch the summer guests from my bedroom window, tracking their movements through the binoculars Mother gave me for my thirteenth birthday and trying to work out what they were thinking. Occasionally, I’d even take photographs, using the zoom lens on my fancy camera – another birthday gift – but it never seemed prurient or intrusive and, when all’s said and done, mere watching struck me as a harmless activity, so long as the subjects had no idea that they were being observed. Every year, the guests would come and, every year, I decided which of them were interesting enough to be the subject of my observations and which would be ignored. I never bothered with the families who came from time to time and they weren’t about the place that much anyway, they just used the hytte as a base, driving back and forth to Tromsø and points north, or setting out mid-morning with picnic baskets and fishing nets for excursions to Sommarøy. I never bothered with them, or with the couples who came, thinking they’d found some empty landscape where they could be romantically alone together. No: it was the solitaries who interested me, the ones who were looking for the only miracle they could ever believe in – that miracle where time stops, or at least slows for a season, and the living, usually so haunted by clockwork, are permitted a fleeting glimpse of perceptible happiness. I liked those people as much as I liked anyone in those days and I wished them well. That was the main reason why I spied on them, I think. It was because I wanted them to be happy.

  I found Kyrre Opdahl in the little shed next to the hytte, wiping cobwebs and birdshit off
the deckchairs he supplied for his guests, so they could sit out at 3 a.m. and read by the midnight sun. That cliché. He knew I was there, of course, but he didn’t look up. He never did. That was a game he liked to play, pretending he hadn’t noticed that you were back, so you could both pretend you’d never gone away. A very subtle form of courtesy that was probably quite bewildering to people who didn’t know him. ‘Hey hey,’ I said. I scanned the room for something to do, but he was almost finished.

  He looked up then. ‘Good afternoon,’ he murmured. His face was streaked with dust and gossamer. ‘That was good timing.’

  ‘Really?’

  He smiled. ‘I was just about to take a break,’ he said. ‘So you’re just in time to put the kettle on.’

  Nobody knew how old Kyrre Opdahl was. He seemed to have been there for centuries, so much a part and parcel of the island that he could disappear into it at will – or that’s how I saw it, at least, when I was a little girl and he was my steady companion, driving me to school in the mornings and returning to fetch me in the afternoons, a rock-like, impassive, yet hopelessly courteous throwback to another time, old even then, his hair clipped short, his eyes a surprising, almost charcoal grey. And all my life, he had been the keeper of stories. Some people thought of him as an absurd, superstitious old man, a sad leftover from an age when, in all seriousness, people here would gather around a fire and recite tales of the huldra, who came out of the earth or the sea tides in the form of an unbearably beautiful woman in a red dress to claim any unwary man she chanced upon. Or they would frighten the children with stories that seemed almost true, stories about the fisherman far at sea who finds a baby in his nets and brings it aboard, still living, its eyes a dark mica glitter, its voice so beguiling that, even though he knows the creature means him harm, he cannot help but take it home. After a while, people didn’t tell those stories any more, but they couldn’t quite suppress them either and, occasionally, through a gap in the usual conversation, or when a couple lay sleepless in their bed, the talk would drift dangerously into strange territory – a hint here, a half-joking suggestion there, and, before they knew it, mischief had got so far in that everything would change. A man’s eye would stray, a wife would turn cold, and a word, or a look, would lead to terrible violence or abandonment. There would always be an explanation, of course – a rational explanation – but under it all, in the nerves and in the blood, that other know ledge haunted them – and people like Kyrre were the keepers of that knowledge. They were the ones who unlocked the doors to the spirits nobody believed in; they were the ones who passed through the house in the small hours, like the sleepwalker in some old vampire film, opening the windows just wide enough for the terror by night to slip through.

  Not all of Kyrre’s stories were old ones, though. For people like him, there was no old time – it was all present, all continuous. What happened now, in the plain light of day, was part of an eternal mystery, a story in which the living and the dead, the mad and the sane, the substantial and the ghostly, were interchangeable – and that afternoon, as we sat drinking coffee, the story he told was both matter-of-fact and magical. The story of a boy I knew and a local tragedy as old as the earth itself, in which the names of the participants barely mattered. At the time, he didn’t know where this story would go – but as he talked, I remembered the feeling I’d had on waking, that feeling of dread that I had dismissed too readily. Something really was wrong, only I hadn’t known what. Nobody had.

  He didn’t begin until we had gone through to the hytte and, even then, he must have thought he was just passing the time. ‘I suppose you heard about Mats Sigfridsson?’ he said, as he washed his hands.

  I have to admit, my heart skipped a beat then. I didn’t know what had happened to Mats, but I knew someone had drowned and it wasn’t much of a leap to put the two things together. I put down the coffee pot. ‘What about him?’ I said.

  Kyrre turned. ‘You haven’t heard?’ His face was calm, but I could see he was thinking, wondering how to proceed.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, trying to sound as neutral as possible. ‘What happened?’ I picked up the coffee pot and started to pour. After all, Mats Sigfridsson was nothing to me. He was just a boy in my class at school. He wasn’t a friend, or a boyfriend; if anything, I had always thought of him as a little odd. It alarmed me to see how, whenever he was parted from his brother, he fell into a strange, apathetic state, troubled in his soul, remote from the rest of the world, and almost frighteningly alone. It bothered me when I turned round in class and caught him staring at me, or perhaps through me, as if I were thin air. I wouldn’t want to make too much of it, but there had been times when I’d caught sight of him sitting in the back corner of a classroom, gazing out at the world with a remote, slightly puzzled air and I’d found myself thinking of him as a kindred spirit, because at least he liked the quiet, and he preferred his own company. I rarely had anything to do with him, it was true, yet there were occasions when we passed each other by with care and an odd, slightly troubled curiosity – like woodland animals, say, who meet by chance in a clearing and navigate passage, watchful, curious and, at the same time, slightly awed. I don’t know what interested me about him, and I had no good reason to believe he took the same more or less friendly interest in me. I just suspected that he was a boy who could have understood how I saw the world, if I’d ever been able to get close enough to explain.

  I’m not talking about a romance here, of course. He wasn’t attracted to me, and I certainly wasn’t attracted to him. The fact is, I was never very big on attraction back then, or on any of the usual stuff people my age were supposed to obsess about. I had a couple of close calls in my mid-teens, but by that summer there was no question about it, just as there is no question of it now: no romance, no little secrets and late-night confidences over the phone, and no sex either. In truth, the whole idea of romantic love just leaves me cold. I’m not repelled by it, or anything like that. I’m not repressed or lonely or frigid, I’m just not interested. At that time, I couldn’t help thinking that it was all a trick – that love was one of the things I was supposed to want, like clean, volumised hair or a new stereo. Attraction just felt like another product they were trying to sell me – and it still does. I’ve not met him yet, is what I always say when people ask me if I have anyone special, or if I’m seeing anybody, though what I’m tempted to answer is that, surely, it’s none of their business. At such times, I wonder: how did it come about, that people feel so free to enquire into the deepest secrets of another person’s life? Have you got a special friend? Do you have a boyfriend right now? What am I supposed to say? What does anybody say? Yes, but I’m not sure if I love him, and even if I did, I’m pretty certain it won’t last. Or, No, it’s just sexual, we get together twice a week to do things to each other’s bodies, in that curious way people have, of not being able to let one another alone. As it happens, I’ve been a somewhat sceptical party to something like both those scenarios, but I was never very convinced. So it’s safe to say that I wasn’t attracted to Mats, and I couldn’t say I even knew him – but I was sad to hear that he was dead and, for an odd, slightly confused moment, I felt as if something had been taken away from me.

  Of course, Kyrre Opdahl was no fool, and he must have seen that I was affected by the news, but he was also a lifelong storyteller, and he had to finish what he’d started. It was a good story, after all, a proper mystery in some ways – and I am glad, looking back, that it was Kyrre who told me what had happened. He didn’t know much more than Rott or Harstad, of course – and at that stage, he hadn’t begun to formulate his sinister explanation of events. Mats Sigfridsson had gone out in a boat by himself, the boat wasn’t his, it was a calm night, so there had been no obvious reason for his falling overboard, or whatever he’d done. Kyrre knew that much; but that was nothing, really. All this was just the facts. Yet even then – perhaps because it was Kyrre who was telling it – the story somehow promised more than the mere facts
suggested. It was like one of those tales people in the old days made into legends, stories about wraiths and seal people and mermaids, all of them dark warnings about what the woods or the sea or the mountains can do, if you don’t show them enough respect. Neither of us acknowledged it that day, but I think it was in both our heads: the drowned boy, the suggestion of something still to be told, the little, local puzzle that contained within it a kernel of the wider mystery – we didn’t say so, but we both knew there was more to come.

  Though it has to be admitted that it was me, not Kyrre, who thought of Maia first – thought of her, in fact, that afternoon, drawing her out of the Grunnlovsdag crowd and into the light, a dark-eyed, mocking girl with a loose tomboy walk who had always been the outsider, the one who came and went as she pleased and didn’t give a damn about anybody, the one, among all those basically decent, but deeply worried kids at school, who so very obviously wasn’t worried about anything, an imp of a girl who had somehow slipped into the Sigfridsson brothers’ private world and settled there, where nobody else had ever been permitted to go. It was me who thought of her first and, even if I did have second thoughts about her, even if I tried to put my suspicions aside, it was me who introduced her into the story, when I told Kyrre what I had seen on Grunnlovsdag – and, though it didn’t detain us for long, he lingered on that one detail for a moment, the germ of a new story already beginning to form at the back of his mind, where all the stories begin, shadowy and undefined, the first step in a logic that had nothing to do with reason.