by Lars Mytting
I gutted and scaled the fish, went into the kitchen and did not find her there. I called out for her. No reply.
I went out to the steps and saw her clothes on the smooth stones. Her hair floated around her shoulders when she popped up from the water, like an otter.
I took off my clothes and swam out, felt a gentle current take hold. Stretching out my arms, I floated on my back, and she did the same, like a compass with two needles.
*
“Edward,” she said the next day. “I have to go to Edinburgh to sort out some things. And I’d like the marina to lift Zetland and take a proper look underneath. I could take her to Lerwick, and then you could pick me up from the ferry in two days’ time.”
“We could take the car all the way to Edinburgh, like last time,” I said.
“That would be somewhat . . . difficult. I have to go to a board meeting, my mother will be there too. She’s meeting me in Aberdeen.”
That was odd. Gwen had often told me how her mother was both unwilling and too busy to collect her grown-up daughter in the middle of the day. But it seemed she didn’t want to trail a Norwegian elkhound about amongst prized English setters. I ought to have cut the tie then and told her I needed to go back to Norway. But then she picked up the keys to the stone cottage.
“You can stay at the cottage,” she said. “Do what you like. Take the keys. I have nothing to hide.”
“And here, take the keys for Haaf Gruney,” I said and gave her the extra set I had got from Agnes Brown.
*
The red telephone box was fresh and shiny in the rain. Behind the glass panes a dull, yellow light shone.
I sat in the car feeling terrible. I stared at the dry-stone walls, counted the stones one by one.
It was like the time I had to put down Flimre, our old cat. I loaded the gun, stroked him. How innocent he was, present in the life he wanted to live despite no longer being able to eat. I drew out the time, slow seconds remembering our years together, his eyes suddenly realising there was an executioner in me.
Hesitate and let time pass, give up and put the gun away.
Keep on living, keep on stroking the soft fur.
But then I picked up the gun again quickly, before my own disbelief in what I was doing got the better of me. I pointed the barrel of the .22 at his head and fired. Watched as his body was thrown to the ground, and held him in my hands as the cat’s life shuddered to an end.
After half an hour of denial, I climbed out of the car. In a brief break between waves of regret I grabbed the receiver and dialled the number for Hirifjell.
“There you are, at last,” she said. She talked about everything she had done on the farm, how much she liked it, the flowers in bloom, the food she had eaten that day. “You said you were not going to be the same,” she said, talking non-stop so that I couldn’t get a word in. “I’ve changed too. I dyed my hair.”
Then it petered out.
We searched within ourselves for the right thing to say.
“Hanne,” I said. “Dear Hanne. I asked if you could check in on the farm. The fact that you’re living there, that’s totally fine. But—”
“But what?”
“I don’t think we should be there together when I come home.”
For a long time she was quiet.
Then I heard a girl crying at Hirifjell. A girl holding a heavy receiver in front of a chest of drawers on which was the photograph of Mamma and Pappa. Three of the four people I had really been happy with, and still I did not know if Gwen could be the fifth.
*
The next day I stood among the gulls at Holmsgarth and watched the Aberdeen ferry glide slowly towards me. Ten minutes later she walked out of the terminal building and down the steps in a dove-grey outfit with newly styled hair. I only wished it was Hanne there, Hanne with her honest smile.
But here was Gwen, and the rope which tied me to Hanne split faster than I had believed possible, a thin thread which snapped when Gwen threw herself at me and I took her full weight in my arms. She kissed me on the mouth and weakly I allowed myself to hope that we were a couple, that my betrayal of Hanne would be justified by true devotion to Gwendolyn Winterfinch.
Perhaps I should have been more surprised that Gwen did not smell of salt water but of coal, like the chimney smoke in Lerwick that seeps into your clothes.
My own betrayal must have overshadowed any suspicion. Because while she was away I had let myself in to Quercus Hall, where I spent hours searching through the private archives.
*
I dropped to one knee in the drizzling rain with a slender Dickson Round Action. It felt alive, responsive. The steel was cold, the wood just as cold, but somehow felt warmer. I opened it, dropped two heavy orange cartridges into the chambers. The sound of a reversed sigh as they slipped in, followed by a metallic click as the brass head struck the steel of the barrel. Two Eley Grand Prix no. 2 from the box in Einar’s wardrobe.
Two shots which would ring louder than any other shot. Two shots to see how Gwen would react to a reunion with the walnut which divided us.
I heard the squawking of the geese. They had changed direction, a sign that the seasons had changed too. A small flock slipped over the grassy ridge of Fetlar, crossed the inlet and approached. Some climbed high on the wind, but two kept low and came so close that I could pick out nuances in their plumage. When I could hear the flapping of their wings, I raised the shotgun.
Never had I felt anything like it. The gun I had inherited from Pappa was like a piece of driftwood in comparison. The Dickson danced, slipped into position as though it was a part of my body. The slender barrels followed the bird, and I barely needed to think for the gun to take care of the rest automatically. The recoil was little more than a report to the shoulder that the gun had been fired, and I saw the feathers fly as the shot struck home. The goose flapped its wings once more and swooped diagonally downwards, in more or less the same direction as its original flight, before crashing to the ground already dead. My thumb ran down the beautifully cut steel, the spent shell was ejected in an arc, with a trail of gun smoke.
Gwen walked bare-legged in front of me.
“Brilliant shot,” she said.
“The report would have carried a long way,” I said. “When is the hunting season here?”
“Who would anyone complain to? The owner of the land hereby gives you permission.”
I placed the shotgun on a flat stone and let her comment go. We were just two people in the mouth of an inlet which had yielded up food; I wasn’t the one with dirt under my nails and she wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, we were just us, hungry and cold, with a goose which steamed as I cut it open.
But the unease forced its way in. The night in Quercus Hall had been fruitless. I had not managed to wrest more secrets from the archive room; I had simply studied the war map and felt the need to travel to France grow, to leave everything and travel south.
Gwen looked away from the entrails and my bloodied hands. Her eyes fixed on the shotgun. In the morning sunlight the wood had taken on yet another appearance, like a painting which becomes more difficult to understand the longer you look at it, until you are forced to accept that it is unreadable.
“You should put some clothes on,” I said.
*
Gwen picked at her food, moved her fork in strange, elliptical lines across the plate. The freshly fried goose tasted of almost nothing. A smell of weapon oil had settled faintly in the room. I had cleaned the shotgun before we ate, and Gwen held the cellar hatch open while I slipped it into a dry hiding place.
“I should have hung it for a few days, this one,” I said, chewing.
“Or a few weeks,” she said mutely and pulled a fibre from her teeth.
I asked myself when we were going to argue about what we really should be arguing about.
“By the way,” she said. “I was up by the crag. Saw something strange over on Unst. Someone has painted a white X on the boathouse.�
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15
TOO LATE. GEIRA WAS ALREADY HALFWAY ACROSS THE inlet. My fingertips were still white from the fresh paint on the boathouse. A brush had been left on a stone.
Gwen had taken me across in Zetland, still in a grumpy mood. I had forced myself to finish eating before telling her that I wanted to photograph the lighthouse on Muckle Flugga in good light, a task so tiresome that I was certain she would not want to join me. We parted with a sullen agreement to meet in the stone cottage that evening.
I stared at the stern of the ferry as the Commodore idled. But Unst was like Saksum. There were only two or three places where you needed to look.
*
She got up from the bench outside the cemetery in Norwick. Her white hair shone, she had it up and was dressed in a black loden cape with red lining. A thin silver armband on her wrist. She seemed more frail than the last time I had seen her.
“I forgot about the key in the coffee tin,” she said. “Did you find it?”
“The key?” I stood with my hand on the car door.
“Einar rented a storage shed in Lerwick. The key was in a tin in the larder.”
“What was in the shed?” I said, walking over to her. “Do you have any idea?”
“Materials, I would think.”
“Might it be a load of wood?” I said.
“Could be. I assumed it was planks and boards he brought off the Bergen ferry.”
I should have sat with her on the bench, out of politeness, but I was impatient. I experienced a shabbier version of what Einar must have felt; if a missing key made me so uneasy, how the need to find a lost lover, and a lost daughter, must have eaten away at him over the years.
“You’re restless,” she said. “I can see it. You want to go across and look for the key, don’t you? Do you know why I painted the cross?”
“Wasn’t it because of the key?”
“A short time ago,” Agnes Brown said, “I was told something by the doctor. So if there’s room on the boat, I would like to see Haaf Gruney once more.”
*
We opened up the boathouse and pulled out Patna. A white-haired lady dressed for the weather, and I like a phantom of a forty-year-old love. I wondered if Gwen would see us and follow.
“You are too polite,” Agnes said suddenly.
I continued rowing and shook my head, puzzled.
“You didn’t ask about the doctor’s message.”
She pulled the cape around her. Her eyes wandered to my hair.
I began to tell her about the walnut Einar had hidden from Winterfinch. She nodded patiently at first, but then she began to look uncomfortable, as though she were waiting for a particular revelation. There should have been no harm in Einar telling her everything, but he had not. Yet another reminder that he had not appreciated her. I regretted having spoken.
A wind raced across the sea and rippled the water. Gulls flew high above us. Haaf Gruney drew nearer with each pull of the oars, and all the time I kept my eye on the shining white cross on the boathouse.
She could tell what I was thinking.
“What would you do,” Agnes said, wriggling to get more comfortable, “if you found the wood and managed to sell it for all that it’s worth?”
“Maybe buy back the farm in France. If that’s what Mamma would have wanted. But I suppose I’ll never find out.”
We came ashore and walked through the rocks and yellow tufts of grass. An older lady stepping cautiously over slippery stone. All she saw was an emptiness. I looked nervously over towards Unst. At any moment Zetland could plough a white furrow through the sea.
“I would like to find a way to thank you properly,” I said.
She drew the cape around her and looked down at the stone buildings. “Back home in Ørsta I don’t have much family. I don’t know many people here anymore either. So I have one wish – that you sing Kjærlighet fra Gud by my coffin.”
*
“That one up there,” she said, pointing at a shelf. Behind a cracked iron pot was a red and white tin – Norwegian Ali coffee.
“I bought it when I was in Førde one time,” she said. “Thought it would cheer him up. He pretended to be pleased, but he had no feelings left for Norway.”
I reached for the coffee tin. There was no rattling when I shook it. “There’s no key in here,” I said, removing the lid.
“That’s strange.” She looked down at the tarnished metal. “I checked it was there when I locked up the last time.”
I stood on a stool, picked up the iron pot, moved aside unlabelled green bottles, opened another tin. Found no key.
“The address of the storeroom was on it,” Agnes said. “Imprinted in the metal.”
Her gaze moved around the room. She peeked into the kitchen and saw the goose carcass and two plates with food remnants. They were probably the same plates Einar and she had eaten from.
But she did not ask who my guest was. I was hardly able to admit the name to myself: Gwendolyn Winterfinch.
What had she said a few days ago? The kitchen could probably use a good clean.
I got down from the stool and thought about the day she had returned, supposedly from Edinburgh. But she had had the smell of Lerwick coal in her clothes.
How sly was she, really? Tell me this is a coincidence, I prayed. Tell me that she’s sitting in the stone cottage right now, that when I knock everything will be like it was before. That she found the key and left it somewhere when she was tidying up. Let Gwen simply be a young girl holding her grandfather’s hand, who had to let it go for good when he died.
“Agnes, where’s the storage lock-up?”
“In Gremista Brae, near Holmsgarth.”
“Gremista – what’s that?”
“A small industrial area.”
*
It was a warehouse for everything rough and rusty associated with fishing boats. Five long, windowless, corrugated-iron sheds. Ring here for service, was written in felt-tip on a scrap of paper. An arrow pointed downwards at a dirty buzzer.
The guard was younger than me, a red-haired youth in a grey Beaver-nylon boiler suit. A long-handled Maglite hung from his belt along with an enormous ring of keys.
“I’m here to pick something up,” I said, “something Einar Hirifjell stored here.”
“Do you have the key?”
“Unfortunately I don’t, but here’s my passport. If we could work something out. I’m his next of kin.”
The boy led me towards a shed, reached through a sashed window and pulled out a curled-up record book. Shook his head, went inside and found another. He reminded me of the type who directed ferry traffic.
“What are you here to pick up?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what you are picking up?”
“Presumably a shipment of timber. Some materials he had stored here.”
He flipped through the record book.
The last couple of hours had not been good for the nerves. I had asked if Agnes wanted a lift back to Lerwick, but she said she would take the bus, as usual. On the ferry landing I stood thinking about what Gwen and I had agreed. To share equally.
Then I had gone to the stone cottage, thinking through how I would ask about the key.
But Gwen was not there. Her footprints led through the grass up to the cottage, but the blades had risen again. I had run down to the boathouse. Zetland was gone. A faint smell of exhaust indicated that she had left only recently, but in the inlet there was no boat to be seen.
“Nobody by that name has anything here,” the security guard said.
“You’re sure that—”
“Sorry. Nobody with that name.”
He handed me back my passport. I just stood there while my thoughts whirled.
“What about Oscar Ribaut?” I said.
I could see his scepticism grow. He leafed through the yellowed pages again, stared at one for a while. He stepped away from me to exchange a few crackling words on
his walkie-talkie.
“Do you have a sister?” he said, turning back.
“Me? No. Why do you ask?”
“I spoke to the woman who’s normally on duty. She said Ribaut’s lock-up hadn’t been opened for years.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “so Oscar Ribaut actually had something stored here?”
“Still has. He paid the rent for ten years up front. And there’s a clause here too; if you don’t have the key, you can answer three questions to be let in. But there might be no point – a few days ago someone came to look at the items.”
“And who was that?”
“A young woman, apparently. Nicely dressed. Edinburgh dialect. She had the key.”
So she had thrown herself around my neck having betrayed me. The strength within her that could master rough seas, that made her open up Zetland’s throttle fully, her entire inherited determination must have bubbled to the surface when she found the key.
But had we not been together for days afterwards? I wanted to feel anger, and contempt, but all I could picture was her innocent face on the veranda of the arboretum.
“So she took everything?” I said. “The girl.”
“Don’t know. I wasn’t here that day.”
“The clause,” I said. “What was it? The three questions.”
He glanced at the yellowed page.
“Eh. The first is whether you’re wearing clean underwear.”
“Is this a joke?”
“It says I have to ask the question!”
“Well, they’re from yesterday. Was that the right answer?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t say.”
“And then, what’s the next question?”
“Whether your name is Edvard Daireaux Hirifjell. But I see from your passport that you have two of the names at least.”
“Yes, yes. And the third?”
He stared at the sheet for a long time. “I can’t pronounce it. It’s in German or something. Waa hitter preston soh confirm die hem i Sachum?”
In my head I tried to spell out the words on a board.