A Summer of Drowning Page 9

  So it felt awkward, knowing that Frank Verne was sitting on the chaise longue in the studio, right above our heads, asking questions in that soft, too intimate voice of his – and as I set about making the coffee, I was torn between trying to hide that fact and the urge to warn Kyrre that this stranger might suddenly appear at any moment. I was torn, and I felt guilty, because I knew how hurt the old man would be if I kept something from him. Finally, when I had set out cups and a plate of Danish biscuits, I turned to Kyrre, who was standing by the window, with his tool bag at his feet, and because I didn’t know what to say, I said the one thing I ought not to have said. ‘Did Mother know you were coming?’

  Kyrre smiled wryly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been meaning to come for days –’

  ‘Oh. She didn’t say –’

  ‘Ah. Well. We didn’t set a time. Not exactly.’

  ‘I see. Well, I could go and get her, if you like. She’s in the studio.’ I considered for a moment, then I decided. ‘She has a visitor right now, but that won’t take long.’

  This surprised him, of course, but he barely showed it, and he didn’t give in to the temptation to ask who the visitor was. Which was quite a feat, under the circumstances. ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ he said quickly. ‘Don’t disturb her. I’ll just get on with this –’

  ‘It’s only a journalist,’ I said – which was true, after all, though I already knew it wasn’t quite. Or, if it was, it wasn’t what only a journalist usually meant. Journalists were not unknown in the house, but they were always confined to the dining room, or the day room at the front where they could enjoy the best views of the garden. Now, Mother was prepared, not only to allow Frank Verne into the studio, but also to extend him subtler, unprecedented privileges, and I didn’t want Kyrre to have to see that.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll just get on with this,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll be off. I have some errands to run, anyhow, down the coast.’

  He finished his coffee and set to work – and I followed him through to the room at the back, that untidy, loam-scented garden room where the washing machine sat in the furthest corner, surrounded by clay pots and bags of compost. This was another room that outsiders rarely saw and it showed a side of Mother that the journalists never remarked upon. It was a mess, a chaos worthy of Kyrre’s own house, and it was the room he felt most at home in, I think, when he came up to help out around the place. This was where the machines that kept us running were stored, this was where we stacked logs for the stove on days that were so cold we didn’t want to go out to the woodpile, and this was where Mother did her potting and sowing, on an old table covered with crocks and empty seed packets and piles of dry peat, set off to one side by the door. Kyrre made his way through the maze and set to work. He didn’t say anything for a while, other than to himself, muttering away under his breath and giving out odd, almost soundless little whistles. I listened. Upstairs it was quiet. Eventually, with a great air of coming round to it, Kyrre spoke. He liked to add gravitas to any occasion, but this time he had a real tragedy to work with. ‘What a terrible thing that was, with Harald Sigfridsson,’ he said. He was on his knees by the dryer now, peering into the drum.

  ‘What thing?’ I said – but even before he answered, I knew what he was going to say.

  ‘You haven’t heard?’ He seemed surprised by that, though it wasn’t surprising at all. In the summertime, when school was out, Mother and I would go for days without seeing anyone, so our only source of information was the Saturday-morning tea parties, when Ryvold or Harstad would bring us up to date on whatever local news and gossip they thought might interest Mother. He looked up. ‘Harald drowned,’ he said. ‘Just like his brother.’

  I had known what he was going to say, somehow, I swear I had, but I was still shocked when he said it. Because it was impossible, of course: two brothers drowning, within days of one another. How could that happen? What could that mean? ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not …’ Suddenly, I felt as if I would burst into tears – which shocked me even more, because those boys were nobody to me. I hadn’t really known them. It should have been a story to me, a local tragedy, cause for curiosity and the casual pity we feel for those left behind. It shouldn’t have been personal. ‘When was this?’

  Kyrre shook his head, though whether in sorrow or because he was surprised at how far from the world we lived up here, I couldn’t tell. ‘Two days ago,’ he said.

  And, yes, I have to confess that I was shocked, not just because this had happened – though it was horrible enough, two brothers dying within days of one another – but because I had gone so long without knowing. Now, for all I knew, the undertaker’s men might be preparing Harald for the funeral, washing the body, dressing him in his best clothes, applying make-up to his face so the mourners would remember him as he had been. Or would he be interred in a closed casket? Maybe that was what they did – I had no idea how people were buried. I had never known anyone who died. Would he be set down next to his brother? I didn’t know if Mats’s funeral had taken place yet; maybe he was still in the mortuary, awaiting further investigations. I didn’t know what happened in these matters, either, or not what happened in real life anyhow. All I knew was what I had seen on television. I could imagine Mrs Sigfridsson wandering about her house, going from one room to another, looking in at the boys’ treasured possessions – not touching them, just looking, as if, by some effort of magic or will, she could cancel out their deaths by leaving everything exactly as it had been the last time they were there. She would go about, taking note of what she saw – things they had made at school when they were little, books they had read, the CDs and shirts and old diaries that had accumulated over the years, the stamp albums or collectors’ cards they had set in pride of place on a shelf or a desktop, and had never got around to putting away. The pile of shoes and worn trainers in the bottom of a cupboard. The old comic books under a bed. I could picture her standing in the light from a bedroom window, like a character in an old Dutch painting, and I could imagine how unbearable it was for her, that lost tenderness and the banality of those ordinary possessions, but it wasn’t real, it was a scene from a film, one of those stock moments when the detective, having informed the victim’s mother that her child has been found dead in a shallow grave out in the woods, is obliged to watch and wait, while the news sinks in. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. They can’t both …’

  Kyrre shook his head. ‘It was exactly the same,’ he said. ‘The same boat even. You’d have thought …’ His voice trailed off and he looked out towards Malangen through the side window. The water was silvery, with just the odd streak of grey where a light wind gusted over the surface. ‘Something is wrong here,’ he said. ‘It’s not right.’ He looked at me, as if he expected me to guess what he wanted to say next. I couldn’t, though; or, if I could, I didn’t want to let it form as a thought in my head, because it was too ridiculous and, anyway, it seemed obscene, somehow, to make a fairy story out of this. ‘Something happened to those boys,’ he said after a moment. ‘There’s more to this than meets the eye –’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said – because, now, I knew exactly what he was doing. That was one of his favourite expressions and it always preceded some leap of the imagination that, more often than not by the most dubious means, connected the world we inhabited with the old world that had supposedly disappeared, the world of magic and spirits, where nothing ever was what it seemed and an unknown force was concealed in every discarded biscuit tin or empty bottle washed up on the strand. Usually I didn’t mind – I liked those old stories most of the time and, even as a child, I knew they had a function, something to do with how we thought about time and what we took for granted – but on that particular afternoon, I couldn’t take it. I closed my eyes, as if to block out his voice and, at that, he stopped talking. I waited a moment, then looked at him. ‘This is horrible,’ I said.

  He didn’t say anything, but I could see that he was surpr
ised – and I knew he had misunderstood. How, I wasn’t sure – maybe he thought I was attached to Harald in some way, maybe he thought I was just being proper – but I had no desire to find out or to set him right. I just wanted to stop the conversation out of respect for the dead or, maybe – and I’m sure he suspected this – out of some sudden, misplaced fear. Some superstition. I thought about Mrs Sigfridsson again, and I wondered what she would do, now that her boys were dead. They hadn’t stood out much, they hadn’t been clever or talented, they were just a couple of shy kids who went around together all the time, and tried not to be noticed. And to that extent, they weren’t so very different from me. They didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics, they weren’t any trouble, they would be remembered for a short while then quietly forgotten. Nobody really knew them well enough to mourn them – and in that they weren’t so unlike me either. The only difference between us was that I didn’t have a brother. I imagined Mrs Sigfridsson wouldn’t forget them, but then, she didn’t have anyone else to distract her from her grief. Her husband wasn’t on the scene and she had no other children – and that, too, was disconcertingly familiar. I wondered how Mother would have felt, if it had been me. How would she take it? Would she be able to stay on in our grey house above the Sound, surrounded by her exotic garden? Would the Saturday-morning tea parties continue? Would she be able to go on painting the world that had taken me from her?

  Kyrre was watching me, his eyes fixed on my face. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t heard about this before now,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s talking about it.’ He snorted, and went back to his work. ‘Though they don’t understand, of course,’ he said.

  ‘Understand what?’

  He didn’t look up. He’d found something interesting inside the dryer. ‘They think it’s just a coincidence,’ he said. His voice sounded echoey and hollow. ‘They think it’s just bad luck.’ He lifted his head and his voice sounded normal again. Like an old man, talking. ‘They can’t see that those boys were chosen,’ he said.

  ‘No they weren’t,’ I said. I was annoyed that he’d got back to his favourite subject. ‘That’s just silly.’

  He gave me an odd, hurt look, then – and he was about to answer, when a laugh rang out from somewhere above. Not the studio, I realised immediately. The landing. Kyrre’s head dropped again and he started rummaging around in his tool bag.

  ‘I’ll go tell her you’re here,’ I said, but I didn’t move and, a few seconds later, I heard the front door open and close. At the same time, Mother said something, and Frank Verne laughed again – a surprisingly loud, deep laugh that wasn’t just polite, or even amused. It was the laughter of someone who was happy, and didn’t mind that it showed. Happy in a way that, had he known anyone was listening, he might have wanted them not to hear, though I couldn’t be sure of that. Not with this man. He wasn’t a suitor, he was something else. Something dangerous. Kyrre must have heard it too, because he kept his head down and pretended to be absorbed in what he was doing. He didn’t want me to see his face – though whether it was jealousy he was hiding, or disappointment, or embarrassment for the man who had just walked out the door and away, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, with the woman Kyrre had silently adored for over a decade, I couldn’t say.

  That night, we had dinner together in the dining room: Mother, Frank Verne and me. They had spent the day walking about the meadows and Mother had shown off her garden, talking about the weather and the light, the colours, her early career, the quiet she had found in the north. I’d watched them walking up and down the beach from my vantage point on the landing, trying to work out, from their gestures and their body language, what it was that had passed between them the day before. Because something had passed between them. I had no idea what it was, but it worried me that, in the space of a single day, Mother had become subtly different. Happier, more relaxed, less preoccupied. It was as if this Frank Verne wasn’t a stranger at all, but an old friend she had just rediscovered, after decades of silence and isolation. When anyone came to interview her, she always talked quite freely about her work and her ideas, but it was talk for talking’s sake, more of a smokescreen than anything else. She couldn’t find it in herself to deceive, I think, so she overwhelmed her visitors with anecdotes and theories, till they had no other choice than to fall back on the stories they had meant to write all along. None of that talk was ever very revealing. But for some reason, Frank Verne had presented her with a challenge. She wanted to tell him something he could use in his story, she wanted to open up to him. The problem was, there was nothing to open up. She really was what she had pretended to be, the day before: a painter obsessed with her work, with no other real interests than her garden and her books. There was nothing else – or if there was, I didn’t know about it.

  They walked for a long time – it was a warm, clear day, and utterly still, though the forecast promised rain – then they made their way back up through the meadows towards the house. I saw them coming and I could see how close – how intimate – they had become, just from the way they walked together, from the way Mother looked at him and the way their bodies drifted back and forth, almost touching then moving apart again, the whole thing a game they were playing, enjoying themselves, drawing it out, seeing what might come of things. I saw it all from the window – and I didn’t want to get drawn into it. I wasn’t quite sure what I was afraid of getting drawn into – I didn’t think it was romance, or sex, which may have been naive of me – but I wasn’t so foolish as to think I could really be a part of it. Besides, I felt guilty about Kyrre Opdahl. I didn’t know why he had been upset when he heard Mother go out with Frank Verne, but I knew he had been hurt, and it had taken considerable effort for him to leave the house without letting me see how hurt he was. But why? I knew how fond he was of Mother, but I couldn’t imagine he was jealous in the usual way, because I didn’t think his fondness for her went that far. He had always contrived to appear so remote from such things and, in spite of his appearance, he had seemed old to me from the very beginning. Not old like an old man, but old like the carved rocks in Mother’s garden, old like the weather, or the tides – old, and at the same time, perpetual and unchanging, part of the scenery, part of nature. He was too old, in that way, to stoop to such things as love, or infatuation, and too old to be jealous, too – but I could see why he might be concerned, or suspicious, and I knew how far he lived from the world, and how little he thought of the men Mother made tea for every Saturday morning. I didn’t credit him with anything but noble intentions, in other words – and because of that, I felt guilty. Guilty towards him, and then guilty towards myself, because I hadn’t chosen to be part of the secret that Mother and Frank Verne had forced me to keep, the secret that, somehow, his being there involved something more than a mere interview.

  They had been for their walk, then; but some time during the afternoon, they had gone shopping too and now, as they came bustling into the kitchen, worryingly familiar and at ease with one another, like a couple, I thought – and that was how it seemed: a couple who had known each other for years – they brought out smoked trout and fish from the market, more wine, a chocolate cake and, last but not least, the ubiquitous gjetost, that sweet rich cheese that foreigners always have forced upon them, along with stories about how newborns are weaned on it, because it’s the best thing in the world after mother’s milk, or how it’s traditional for the first and last meal you have in a house to consist of bread and gjetost, and maybe a glass of akevit. Though I’m not sure how traditional that really is. Maybe it’s something Mother made up. That’s something she does, not just for guests, but for herself. She’s only lived in the north for fifteen years, but she likes to pretend she’s been here all along, that the island is in her blood, that she’s been eating the food and observing the traditions since she was a girl. I wouldn’t have been surprised, that evening, if we’d had reindeer stew, or maybe whale meat, just to give our guest a traditional Arctic experience �
� and it turned out that I wasn’t far wrong. In fact, thinking about it later, when the house was quiet, I realised that she had chosen the hardest dish for a foreigner to pronounce, so they could play with the word, passing it back and forth like a token of something – their new friendship, I supposed, or possibly an unexpected romance. They weren’t interested in food that evening, they wanted to talk. Or rather, to play. Sjørøye allowed them to do just that.

  ‘So what’s this fish again?’ Frank Verne asked, as Mother served up.

  ‘Sjørøye.’

  He tried to say the word, and failed so badly that it had to be deliberate.

  Mother said it again. ‘Sjørøye.’ She looked at me and smiled. She was keen to include me in all this – which, for some reason, left me feeling sorry for her. Frank Verne tried again, then they both laughed. Mother turned to me. ‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Is it hopeless?’

  I smiled, but what I really wanted was to leave them to it. ‘Practice makes perfect,’ I said.

  Frank Verne turned to me. ‘You say it,’ he said.

  ‘Sjørøye.’

  He tried again, and almost got it right.

  ‘Sjørøye,’ I said.

  ‘And what’s that in English?’

  I turned to Mother. I had no idea.

  ‘Sea char,’ Mother said. I was surprised by this, and suspected her of having looked it up in advance.

  Frank Verne laughed. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘That really helps a lot.’ He turned back to me, aware that the game had gone as far as it could go, and a little further. ‘So, Liv,’ he said. ‘What’s it like living out here?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. I knew what was coming. Not much for young people to do. Did I ever get lonely? What did I do to pass the time? Did I have a boyfriend? I didn’t mind. I was resigned to it, and the answers came pretty much automatically.