by Lars Mytting
“I remember a lot from when I was four,” she said.
The waiter arrived with the starters. Caraway flatbread dripping with oil, small ceramic bowls with orange and green sauces. I glanced at her, copying her method. When the flavours hit my tongue I was enraptured. Food with such complexity.
I suspected Gwen of hidden complexities too.
She had gone to the cloakroom to put on some make-up, barely visible, and changed seats when she returned. Now she sat with her back to the wall, on a banquette. The wallpaper was ornate and deep-red, and above her hung a painting of a tiger hunt with elephants.
“I still don’t understand it,” she said. “What are the chances of someone who would abduct a child being there, of all places? Even if the opportunity did present itself. It must be one in a million.”
“There’s something about that place,” I said. “That place in France.”
She looked at me. Quiet. Serious. Expectant.
The hell with it, I thought, I’m going to hoist the flag.
“During the war,” I said, “my grandparents were notified that Einar had been shot in France, somewhere near to where my parents died.”
“Where was that?”
“North of the Somme.”
She broke off a piece of the bread and dipped it into the dark paste, which turned out to be aubergine chutney.
“Yes, but where exactly,” she said, chewing slowly.
“Authuille. Do you know where that is?”
She swallowed exaggeratedly, signalling that the answer would soon come. “Of course. Everyone who listened in their history lessons knows about Authuille. It’s near what’s known as Blighty Valley, one of the most important British fronts during the Battle of the Somme. Authuille was bombed to hell. Have you been back there?”
“To Authuille?” I shook my head. “I’ve never been anywhere but here.”
“Will you go?”
I fiddled with the ashtray. “I think so,” I said. “Even though I had hoped to find the answers here. But all there is here is stone.”
She looked away and I hastened to fill the void, so that it did not seem like a deliberate pause.
“And you,” I said.
She just smiled, the same canny smile as when she made a comment about me getting married in Karmøy.
I had to stop myself staring at her. Gazing at her.
“And you, what was it like growing up with your grandfather?” she said.
I told her a little about the farm, and that the nearest record store was six miles away, six Norwegian miles. But just as she had her layer of make-up, I had my own mask. Saksum was infinitely far from the Raba Indian Restaurant in Lerwick. Everything I chose to reveal to her was filtered through a fine-mesh sieve, like I was making juice with a tub of unwashed berries. By the time I had finished summarising the life of Edvard Hirifjell, the sieve was bulging, not with a mush of twigs, ants and pine needles, but with Front Fighters, silence and scowls outside the general store. I did allow the story about my mother to slip in halfway through, however. I had wanted to speak openly, for my own sake. Just to see how it felt.
I told it as if it was something I had known my entire life, that she was born in Ravensbrück and grew up in Reims, and that she came to Norway and was visited there by Einar.
“She changed her name,” I said. “But I don’t even know why she chose the name Nicole.”
“What was the connection between them?” she said. “Between your mother and Einar.”
“I don’t really know, other than that he worked in France in the thirties. As a cabinetmaker.”
“Do you speak French?” she said.
“A little. My mother spoke to me in French.”
“Il me semble que ce soit un bon souvenir,” she said. That’s a fine memory.
I cleared my throat, murmured the response to myself as I attempted to rediscover the melody of a half-forgotten language.
“Oui, en effet. Mais c’est aussi tout ce dont je me souviens d’elle.”
*
When the main course arrived, it was as if I had plunged into a hot bathtub and emerged with my eyes opened to a better world. Every fibre in my body seemed to be caressed and pampered. Small, dimpled pots on a brass stand with a tea light underneath. Swollen raisins swimming in a creamy sauce, sprinkled with coconut, skewers of reddish-orange, beautifully cooked meat. The waiter turned a bowl upside down over a white porcelain platter and revealed a dome of light-yellow rice mixed with grated carrot. Then two flatbreads arrived, straight from the oven, sizzling and glistening with fat and leaving behind the sweet, anaesthetising fresh-baked smell at the table.
I tucked in, and it was heavenly. Tastes and fragrances abounded, every mouthful was so good that I knew I would eat too much, and I allowed myself to. The morsels of chicken were spicy, I was sweating, and I wanted to sweat. It was like music building to a crescendo.
I looked at her across the steaming platters. She ate a little, and she ate elegantly.
Then the music changed. Until then it had been unmemorable, but now a song came on that I had despised back home. “Forever Young”. Snobbish girls from Vinstra would play it at parties, rich kids would blare it from their new cars.
And I did not recognise myself; it was as if my shell had fallen off.
The song had a vulgar chorus with irritating sound effects and jarring echoes, but now that my defences were down it flowed into me, an intimate song, and I looked her in the eyes without saying anything, as if we were making a pact right there and then, a fragile pact with unknown consequences.
Let us die young or let us live forever.
It was plastic where real music was steel, a facade where there should have been a brick wall, but I heard it again. Passionately. I realised that this was one of those rare instances when music latches on to a moment. One I would remember for five years, if not ten. And I saw that she realised it too.
*
Then she disappeared.
This girl who said so very little about herself, who believed she had Norwegian roots – like most families in Shetland – and who wanted to return to Aberdeen “when summer is gone”. As I scraped the last mouthfuls from the metal dishes, she got up without saying a word and gave me a hug. She mumbled that she was going to the bathroom, but the next moment she was standing outside in the street, with one hand raised and her fingers slowly waving goodbye. Then she slipped into a narrow alley and all that was left was the sheen on the paving stones.
I sat alone for fifteen minutes. Paid the bill. I didn’t go looking for her.
Something had happened, something I could not decipher. Shetland was not a place where people raced out of their house as soon as a foreigner approached. But Gwen Leask had made sure to be in the vicinity, so that she could appear as if by chance when I arrived.
I walked along the empty streets of Lerwick and up to the small fort from which old cast-iron cannons pointed across the harbour. In the old days they had protected the herring trade, as an illuminated sign explained in both Norwegian and English. For once the weather was dry as I traipsed about looking through shop windows, at goods designed to withstand both the sea and the weather.
The city clung to everything old. Here it was still the chemist’s job to sell cameras and film, a remnant from the time when people mixed the developing chemicals themselves.
I passed Hotel Kveldsro, at which Bestefar had stayed after the funeral. Wherever I turned, I saw traces of something Norwegian. Every second boat along the pier had a Norse name. Nefia, Hymir, Glyrna.
Back to the Commodore, my trusty, shiny-blue travelling companion. As I inserted the key in the lock, a thought occurred to me.
I soon found my way to St Sunniva Street, where a light shone in the flat above Agnes Brown’s hair salon.
5
NOBODY ANSWERED WHEN I KNOCKED, BUT THE DOOR was unlocked. I pushed it open and poked my head into the hall. A grey raincoat, an umbrella. Women’s wellies. The clothes o
f someone who lived alone.
“Hello,” I called, but there was no movement behind the corrugated glass pane of the inner door. Further inside the house I heard a faint melody. Someone was – humming?
I walked along the hall to a narrow staircase. “Anyone home?” I heard the humming again, coming from above, where someone was softly padding about.
I went upstairs and came into a narrow kitchen. The washing-up had just been done, the room smelled of lemon and there was a solitary plate steaming on the drying rack. A red kettle sat on the stove, a cup of tea on an edition of Møre-Nytt.
“Hallo,” I tried, this time in Norwegian.
The humming picked up again, apparently from another room: “Kjærlighet fra Gud”.*
“Hallo,” I said, much louder now, and went back to the stairwell, where I saw the slight figure of an old woman disappear through a doorway.
Should I leave, come back tomorrow? No, she would be just as hard of hearing then.
I followed her down another even narrower staircase, where old magazines were stacked on the steps alongside the wall. I emerged in a bare cellar and followed her through yet another door into a large room, where she switched on the lights.
The smell of burned dust stung my nostrils as I stared into Agnes Brown’s disused hair salon. The sight that greeted me was nothing like the glimpse I had from in the street. But this was an interior I had seen before, in the catalogue from the art-deco exhibition in Paris in 1925.
The salon was lit by a row of rectangular lamps, like street-lights lining an avenue. The bulbs emitted a warm glow through orange glass decorated with frosted tulips bending on their stalks. Tall mirrors in front of each chair reflected the light. At first it appeared as though the floor was tiled in a checked labyrinth pattern, but I soon realised that it was made of timber, with the contrasts created by slender blocks from different wood types.
Now the light was on her. Long white hair, a simple black dress. Surrounded by bottles of congealed hair lotion.
She went past the light-blue hair dryers into a corner where there were – six heads on a table? She ran her hand over each of them. Six plaster of Paris mannequin heads with wigs, the hairstyles straight out of black-and-white films. The humming stopped, as did the wistful, dream-like movements, and she picked up something from the table and tilted her head, just as Hanne had when she put in the earring. The hearing aid beeped when she had it in place. Then she spotted me in the doorway.
For an instant she froze, then took a step towards me and said in a Vestland dialect: “Edvard. That is your name, isn’t it?”
Surrounded by the intricate designs, she wiped a little dust off one of the tulip lamps and gazed at me.
“I tried to ring,” I said. “From Norway. But maybe you didn’t hear?”
She glanced at the telephone. “Occasionally I come down to use it, to ring my sister in Måløy. Or to call the taxi service. But I do not want the telephone upstairs. I do not care for telephones.”
The same was true for me, after all. “Was it you who decorated his grave?” I said, running my finger along the frosted pattern on one of the lamps.
She turned to the plaster mannequins. “Yes, that was me.”
“I’m here to find out what happened in 1971,” I said.
Agnes Brown had nothing to say to that. She appeared to be around seventy, and was beautiful in the way that a piece of expensive old furniture is beautiful.
“I am from Ørsta,” she said suddenly. “Took my apprentice exam in Molde. I was Agnes Storeide before I married. He was a sailor from Lerwick, died in 1940. Torpedo.”
“So it was you who told my grandfather Sverre that Einar was dead. Sverre is dead now too,” I said. “I came to let Einar know.”
“I thought that might be the case, that Sverre would have to die before you could come.”
“Why did Einar have an entry under Lerwick 118 in the telephone directory?” I asked, stepping closer.
She seemed not to hear me. “What do you think it’s like,” she said after a while, “to wait twenty years for a call to come, and to top it all off it’s not even meant for you?”
Agnes crossed the floor and adjusted her hearing aid. In a dark corner at the very back of the room there was a solitary stool made of enamelled white cast iron which shone in the street lights. “Gentleman’s chair,” she said. “Sit down. Then I can try to remember.”
The dry leather creaked.
“Einar sat here, the first time I cut his hair in 1943.”
Agnes Brown rummaged through a small chest of drawers. She turned on a verdigris brass tap whose pipes clanged as it spat out rusty water, and rinsed a pair of scissors. I looked at her curiously, and she grabbed a faded nylon cape and tied it around my neck. She put on a blood-red apron, placed both hands on my shoulders, and our eyes met in the crackle-glaze mirror.
“You look like him,” she said. “I suppose that’s not so strange.”
Then, without ceremony, she began to cut my hair. Rapid, precise movements. Soon she put the scissors down, picked up a cut-throat and began to shear the back and sides, long strokes with the razor that made the roots quiver. She caught the hair in her hands, rubbed it between her fingers briefly before dropping it on the floor, as though judging its properties, and then began her story.
*
Einar had entered the salon in the spring of 1943, greeted her politely in decent English and asked for a coupe Lyon, with the hair set in stiff curls across the forehead. It had been popular in France in the late thirties, but Shetland was not a place where young men asked for fashionable haircuts. As a rule, they wanted their hair cut just well enough so they could remove their hat in church. At the time Agnes was one of two employees at the salon, which was run by an ageing barber from Glasgow. The furnishings consisted of peeling painted-wooden walls, rickety drawer units and a haphazard collection of mirrors.
Einar was so different from the fishermen who usually came to the salon. Lively and sinewy, familiar with French fashions and big-city habits. His accent was curious, and when Agnes realised that he was Norwegian, they switched languages without revealing their names. Shetland was teeming with Norwegians, and the young hairdresser and the light-footed man did as war conditions demanded, revealing little about themselves because there were ears listening all the way from Berlin.
She assumed that the hairstyle was a disguise for someone planning to travel to occupied France. Einar looked pleased with it as he strolled out with the door jingling behind him, and Agnes saw no more of him. When at long last the war was over, she took on the business, employed another hairdresser and concentrated on women’s styling. Something happens when a hair salon expands from one to three ladies’ chairs; it becomes the centre for local gossip, and soon Agnes overheard something that could only refer to the sinewy Norwegian.
One of her customers had been a cook for a wealthy merchant on Unst. She had been fired, and now she could indulge in slandering her employer. She said that he had invited a Norwegian to the house during the war, apparently a master cabinetmaker. The wholesaler and the cabinetmaker had found something in one another, not least because they both had a real appreciation of fine woodwork. Because the wholesaler was not just anyone. It was Duncan Winterfinch, fifth-generation timber merchant and head of a powerful family business in Edinburgh. They had moved the secretariat to their summer home on Unst for fear that their head office would be bombed.
Winterfinch and Einar had sat through the night in the drawing room, enjoying pre-war tobacco and forging plans. They had tea and sandwiches brought in at all times of the day. Eggs too, despite rationing. And nothing could create greater resentment than servants being forced to serve servants. They listened at the doors, tiptoed through the corridors, pieced together snatches of conversation which would be aired under a hair dryer on St Sunniva Street. It was clear that the two were devising some shady plan, because they went silent whenever anybody entered the room.
In 1943,
with his newly styled hair, Einar had disappeared. In the months that followed, Winterfinch had become more and more uneasy. He would keep asking about a telegram that never arrived. He had always been a cantankerous man, not least due to old war injuries; one arm had been amputated, and bullet wounds in both legs meant that he had to use a wheelchair from time to time. It was during one such period in the autumn of 1944 – the pain was playing havoc with him – that he received a telephone call which infuriated him so much that he broke a window in his office. Nobody could discover what it was about. But immediately after the war, a similar scene played out.
The Norwegian had appeared at the door demanding to speak to Duncan Winterfinch. At first the butler did not recognise him; he was worn and frail, his body emaciated, his face drawn. The meeting had been brief. Winterfinch was furious, and within earshot of the servants he hurled abuse at the Norwegian, yelling that Einar had “broken the agreement and got the entire family killed”.
He screamed so loudly that it echoed across the fields, and the next day all of Unst knew about the incident. Those words would cling to Einar for eternity.
What nobody had expected was to see Einar rowing out to Haaf Gruney, Winterfinch’s property, and begin to use the houses there. Winterfinch had asked his butler to prepare a boat, he was carried on board and they set course for the island. The wheelchair was useless out there, so he had to be carried over to the stone buildings, growing ever more irate, and a fresh, bitter quarrel played out. Einar ignored Winterfinch as he would a hysterical child, turning instead to his butler and showing him a registered title deed stating that he had the right to live on Haaf Gruney, unconditionally and in perpetuity.
Winterfinch’s retinue turned back with the matter unresolved; the one-armed man was so exhausted with rage that all he could do was gasp for air. But his reaction did not appear to have been provoked by the loss of a paltry sum of money. It seemed that Winterfinch had lost something precious, and he lapsed into a woeful, dejected silence, muttering something about “the poor widows”. The next morning he fired the cook and three other servants, and for several days thereafter he kept to his office, from which all that could be heard was the squeaking of his wheelchair.