The Endless Summer

by Madame Nielsen

  Some days later, the stepfather had sold off the first piece of land, at an utterly ridiculous price, as she heard from the daughter on one of the neighboring farms with whom she some mornings took the bus into town where the neighbor’s girl went to one of the ordinary state schools. The stepfather used the money from the sale to invest in a detective who, on the two days a week when the mother drove into the provincial capital in order to attend her courses at the university, discreetly and without any of her fellow students or lecturers or professors at the Faculty or the Institute for Interdisciplinary Aesthetic Studies ever noticing anything, tailed her and subsequently, twice a week, reported back to the stepfather and, moreover, listened in to each and every incoming and outgoing conversation on the estate telephone. Who told you that? asked the young boy. My mother, said the girl. And how did she know? She just knew, said the girl, my mother knows things like that, you can’t hide anything from her. What’s more, the stepfather had admitted as much, again at the dining table, one evening in late autumn, the mother had—again with absolute calm and without putting down her cutlery and without looking at him—said that the telephone in the house was being tapped, she could hear it, and moreover she was being tailed every time she went to town, she had noticed the same man several times, a perfectly run-of-the-mill man like you, she said and looked at him for a second, without anger, quite calmly, in front of a newsstand where he was pretending to examine a tabloid poster, and another time in the parking lot of the university campus, where he fumbled for a long time, far too long, she said and again looked at the stepfather and this time with a faint, almost compassionate or charitable smile, with the keys to his car. Yes, said the stepfather, it had proven necessary, he could no longer trust her. No more was said. They ate their dinner, and the mother and daughter rose from the table, cleared the dishes and washed up, and the mother put the two little brothers to bed, while the stepfather first remained seated, for what seemed like an eternity, in his place as master of the house at the head of the far too long dining table with his forearms resting on each side of the void left by the long-since cleared-away plate, and stared ahead as if he was trying, in his own self, to embody one of the painted portraits of the male heads of the family that should have bedecked the walls here in the dining room of the manor house, but of which there was not a single specimen for the simple reason that he was not the latest generation in a renowned lineage of Rosenkrantzs, Ahlefeldts, Billes, or Brahes, but just the son of an enterprising businessman in a mid-Sealand market town, a man without any kind of education who had worked his way up from the bottom and who had never had his portrait painted and had not even been photographed on his own but always in the bosom of his family with his wife and two sons or surrounded by business associates in front of a site or after a lunch at which an important collaboration agreement or deal had been reached, and afterward he eventually got up and walked through the hall and out onto the main staircase and stood in the gloomy dulling yellowish glow from the lamp above the door and smoked a cigarette, and then another one, and another, while the gundog sat at his side like a figure on a coat of arms. To begin with, every evening, when he came in after his day-long inspection of the estate buildings and fields, he had always changed for dinner, first out of his squire’s outfit and later out of his hunting getup into a simpler and more comfortable evening ensemble—slacks, shirt, and shoes—but, after the brief exchange of words across the dining table about telephone tapping and “the tail,” he no longer changed his clothes when he came indoors after the day’s hunt, just put on a different pair of hunting boots, not yet used and still shop-window-shiny, which clicked discreetly on the old wooden floor when he stepped into the dining room, as if, in the state of emergency in which the family and estate found themselves, it had also, unfortunately, proven necessary to be in a state of preparedness, in full uniform and ready to launch into action whenever the special intelligence agency raised the alarm. But neither he nor the mother passed further comment on the state of alert or the brief exchange of words about telephone tapping and “the tail,” and over the next many months nothing happened. They continued with their normal and peculiar lives; the girl went to school and spent time with her friends, who with the exception of one were not classmates from the private school but daughters from the surrounding smaller farms with whom she traveled every morning on the bus into town; the mother took care of the horses and the two small brothers and two or three times a week she drove into the provincial capital to attend her courses at the university; at the very last minute, without telling anyone, the stepfather had sold the entire harvest to one of the other landowners in the region, the girl at least hadn’t heard a word about it, suddenly one morning a whole convoy of agricultural machinery came rolling in a slow thunder along the country road at the end of the long avenue of elms, then fanned out across the fields, combine harvesters as big as ferries sailing through the dry golden corn and raising a firmament of dust in their wake, and a good many smaller machines she didn’t know the names of because she’d never lived in the countryside, not in Denmark at least, but had grown up, for the first six or nine years, with her grandparents in a little colony of northern Europeans in a mountain village on the Canary Islands, and later in a perfectly ordinary detached house in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of a small town on the island of Sealand. On a couple of occasions she had seen the stepfather exchange a few words with one of the drivers or helmsmen at the edge of one of the fields, and just once a big jeep had pulled into the yard and a middle-aged man—who wasn’t in “uniform” but was wearing a pair of high, dusty, and well-worn leather boots, some kind of breeches or plus fours, and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up, but even so, and in an utterly more credible way than the stepfather, didn’t just look like but was an authentic squire, a landowner—had gotten out and held a long conversation with the stepfather, at times leaning over a lot of documents and maps, probably of the estate, which he had spread out on the dusty hood of the jeep. Apart from that, the stepfather had behaved as if he had nothing whatsoever to do with either the harvest or the fields; early in the morning, he disappeared into the forests with his gundog, and it wasn’t until after dark, once the combines, which often carried on long into the night, had switched on their work lights and now really did look like ferries or maybe more like tankers on their way across an endless and dark and completely calm sea, that he stepped in through the main entrance, changed into his “indoor boots” and sat down to dinner—alone, the mother and daughter and two little brothers had long since left the table—removed the lid from the serving dish and tureen and ate the cold leftovers. A few weeks later, the convoy of agricultural machinery rolled off below the low luminous September skies, leaving the fields perfectly harvested and, for a while at least, you might believe that the estate management was in the best of hands. And for the rest of the autumn and the early winter, the stepfather’s conduct was actually what you would expect of a squire: he participated in the hunting season and did his duty in keeping game stocks on the estate hunting terrain and in the forests at an appropriate level. He behaved in a proper manner except that he never—as a genuine squire would have done—organized the shooting parties that would have been necessary for the management of wildlife; he always went out on his own, his only company being the faithful gundog, and he never returned with any large game, just a bunch of pheasants now and then, a brace of partridges, or a mallard. One evening in late February, he hadn’t changed into his “indoor boots,” but had walked into the dining room and sat down at the table wearing his dirty hunting boots. The elder of the two little brothers had run in and come to a halt, staring at the trail of dust and hardened mud from the doorstep to the seat at the head of the table, and said “wow, you dirty the floor, Daddy!” but neither the stepfather nor the mother had reacted, and the remainder of the evening meal had passed exactly as usual. When the mother and the daughter had risen to clear the table after the meal, the stepf
ather had asked them to leave the dishes where they were for the time being and go into the large sitting room instead as there was a matter he would like to talk over, a matter that concerned them all. The girl looked at her mother, and the mother lifted the smallest brother from the chair, took both boys by the hand and walked in front of the girl to the largest of the sitting rooms. They sat down on the big sofa, which raised a bit of dust, having been neither used nor brushed for months, and stared into the empty fireplace, in which a fire had not yet been lit during the time they had lived on the estate. After a couple of minutes the stepfather came in, still wearing his hunting outfit and the dirty hunting boots, but now also holding his best gun. He locked the door behind him and then also the door to the adjoining rooms, put the keys in his trouser pocket, stood in front of the fireplace and looked above their heads at the slightly paler patches on the wall where the former owner’s many paintings had hung. It now appeared, he said, that he was right, he had not been able to trust the mother, her so-called studies at the university had not been the real reason she had started going into town several times a week, and that really went without saying because why did she suddenly want a university education, an utterly useless one into the bargain, that would never lead to a real job; the reason she had started going into town was that she had taken a lover. The mother didn’t say a word, she looked at him, calmly, protractedly. Then she said his name. She looked down and almost imperceptibly shook her head and took the two little brothers’ hands and placed them in her lap. For a long time it was quiet. Then the stepfather said that she didn’t need to worry, he hadn’t gone mad, it wasn’t something he just sensed or “imagined.” He had proof. Again she simply looked at him, protractedly, calmly, but without saying a word, not even his name. There was no hurry, he said, he had plenty of time, as far as he was concerned they could stay here for as long as necessary, the boys hadn’t started school yet. What do you mean? she said. You know very well, he said, you just have to say it. What is it you want me to say? she said. Nothing in particular, he said, you just have to say it like it is. She uttered a little sound, a snort of air out through her nose, almost as if she was laughing, and shook her head and looked down. That I was right, he said, I couldn’t trust you; as if you don’t have enough, as if you want for anything, two little boys, a horse, and eight hundred eighty-six acres of land, and one more into the bargain, not even from an earlier marriage, but just the result of a drunken screw. That is enough! she burst out in a very clear voice, shrill as the shattering of crystal glass, and held her breath for a long time and exhaled again slowly, and again and in a very calm voice said his name, which now sounded less than ever like the name of a squire, but just like the name of a naughty boy or a wimp. It’s up to you entirely, he said, I’ve got plenty of time. Could you not at least sit down, she said. I am a landowner, he said, and while that is so, I have a mind to walk and stand and sit exactly on and in my property whenever I choose. She nodded slowly and looked down and nodded again. What is it you want? she said quietly. Nothing, he said, you just have to say it like it is. I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said. The stepfather laughed, a curt, loud, hysterical laugh. Yes, she said, yes yes, of course I know what you’re talking about. It just doesn’t have anything to do with reality. She raised her head and looked at him for a long time. Then, for the third time, she spoke his name.