Memory of Love (9781101603024)

by Olsson, Linda

  Praise from New Zealand for The Memory of Love

  “The emotional weather of the story is changeable and dramatic, with storm clouds sometimes threatening, unpredictable tides and winds of inner conflict, and chance meetings… . It is the storytelling, of course, that is most seductive, with the right balance between the disclosure and holding back of information to keep us reading to the end—appreciating at every twist a writer delighting in her craft.”

  —Sunday Star-Times

  “Olsson’s lyrical style is perfectly suited to the reflective tenderness that characterizes Marion’s narrative voice. The poetry of Olsson’s prose is especially powerful in the evocation of the natural environment, which shapes and defines the characters of the novel. It’s an iconic New Zealand landscape—the sea, the dunes, the shifting light—and Olsson makes good use both of its visual beauty and metaphoric possibility.”

  —Listener

  “[A] tender, loving story … concerned with searching and healing … The narrative steps carefully, echoing the cadences of private, troubled lives. Details are meticulously evoked: lemons from a backyard tree; the white light of a lowering sun. Lives and their wounds are rendered with respect and a total absence of any moralizing. You sense an author of real integrity.”

  —Weekend Herald

  “The clear, uncluttered prose allows the tragedy outlined to speak for itself, and tells us as much about the narrator as the events she describes. Haunting and beautiful, The Memory of Love is a reminder of the fragility of happiness and the impossibility of living without hope.”

  —Otago Daily Times

  Praise for Sonata for Miriam

  “Olsson understands how memory works—the combination of fact and fiction, photographs and moments… . Readers will love this book.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “If we don’t know where we come from, can we really know who we are? That’s the question that haunts … Olsson’s poignant new novel… . Olsson renders luminous prose that lingers over the startling beauty of New Zealand and the blistering truths of the human heart. This is a potent, piercing tale of revelation and regret.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Olsson explores the hard-won wisdom that can come through grief… . Olsson’s dense, magisterial prose pulls the reader in immediately, and Adam’s profound sadness is perfectly handled… . It’s palpable, but never saccharine or overbearing as the narrative builds toward its unexpected conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Praise for Astrid & Veronika

  “Linda Olsson’s novel casts the themes of secrecy, passion, and loss in the shape of a double helix, intertwining the stories of two women… . Natural and vivid, utterly convincing … simply so beguiling.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Linda Olsson evokes, with great precision and beauty, the landscape of a friendship… . Astrid & Veronika is penetrating and beautifully written, and it affirms the power of narrative to transform.”

  —Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

  “Beautiful and deeply affecting. A dreamlike evocation of the power of friendship.”

  —Mary McGarry Morris, author of The Lost Mother and Songs in Ordinary Time

  “Readers of Anne Tyler and Jodi Picoult will appreciate the lyrical prose and expert rendering of the themes of heartbreak and loss.”

  —Booklist

  “What separates this debut from the rest of the crowd is Olsson’s deft writing. Her descriptions are beautiful, capable of both painting the scene and creating a mood… . Booksellers from around the country as well as locally have raved about Astrid & Veronika. It’s easy to understand why.”

  —Portland Tribune

  “Has the hallmarks of an Ingmar Bergman film: a leisurely pace, a chilly Scandinavian setting leavened by rich observations of nature, and characters whose prim, polite facades eventually disappear, exposing years of anger and hurt.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE MEMORY OF LOVE

  © CAROLINE ANDERSSON

  Linda Olsson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1948. She graduated from the University of Stockholm with a law degree and worked in law and finance until she left Sweden in 1986. What was intended as a three-year posting to Kenya then became a tour of the world with stops in Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Japan, until she settled in New Zealand with her family in 1990. In 1993 she completed a bachelor of arts in English and German literature at Victoria University of Wellington. In 2003 she won the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition. Olsson’s first novel, Astrid & Veronika, became an international success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Scandinavia, Europe, and the United States. It was followed by the heartbreaking and moving Sonata for Miriam. Olsson divides her time between Auckland, New Zealand, and Stockholm, Sweden.

  The

  Memory

  of Love

  Linda Olsson

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa

  Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in New Zealand as The Kindness of Your Nature by Penguin Group (NZ) 2011

  Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2013

  Copyright © Linda Olsson, 2011

  All rights reserved

  “From a Survivor.” Copyright © 2002 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950–2001 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60302-4

  CIP data available

  Chapter openers designed by Sara Bellamy

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate
in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For my mother

  The pact that we made was the ordinary pact

  of men & women in those days

  I don’t know who we thought we were

  that our personalities

  could resist the failures of the race

  Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know

  the race had failures of that order

  and that we were going to share them

  Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

  Your body is as vivid to me

  as it ever was: even more

  since my feeling for it is clearer:

  I know what it could and could not do

  it is no longer

  the body of a god

  or anything with power over my life

  Next year it would have been 20 years

  and you are wastefully dead

  who might have made the leap

  we talked, too late, of making

  which I live now

  not as a leap

  but a succession of brief, amazing movements

  each one making possible the next

  ‘From a Survivor’ by Adrienne Rich

  Contents

  Praise for The Memory of Love

  About the author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  1.

  It was Thursday and I was making soup. By now it was an established routine. Greek fish soup this week. I was boiling the vegetables, and steam covered the window above the sink. The kitchen faced the beach with an unobstructed view of the endless sea, which at that moment was just a grey blur behind the film of condensation. I had cleaned the fish, three small snapper, and I was making the avgolemono, the lemon and egg sauce. The lemons were scruffy to look at, but as I cut them the fragrance filled the kitchen. The lemons from the tree behind the house seemed to have more taste and a more intense smell than any I had ever come across anywhere else. I whipped the egg whites, folded the yolks into them and then I added the lemon juice. I chopped the parsley, and it was all prepared. All that remained was to allow the vegetables to boil till they had softened, add the fish, and then at the last minute stir in the avgolemono and parsley. I had time to go and sit on the doorstep for a moment. I kept a hammock and a few rattan chairs on the deck, but I seldom used them. I preferred the doorstep.

  ‘Marianne,’ I said to myself. ‘Marianne.’

  Lately, I had felt the need to taste the name. To listen to it. Retrieve it, perhaps. It was still a strange experience – I didn’t quite own it yet. Or perhaps it was mine but in another, distant time, locked inside another room. I had made it a habit to try it several times every day. I couldn’t quite remember when I began, but it had been some time. I wondered how it would sound to others: a middle-aged woman sitting on the doorstep of her house repeating her own name. But there was nobody around. Just Kasper, my ginger cat; his slowly blinking green eyes looked as if they had seen everything, accepted everything. He sat beside me, close, but not too close, still in his own sphere. As we both liked it, I think. Beside each other, but separate. As always, he sat calm and patient while I did my strange exercises. Or whatever one might have called them.

  ‘Marianne,’ I repeated. It was odd to feel how my body responded to the sound. After all these years.

  It felt hot. The colour was red, and the name burned on my tongue before it lifted off my lips like a flame.

  Marion, on the other hand, fell from my lips light blue, almost grey. Pale and cool. And it dissolved instantly.

  Marion.

  Marianne.

  I stood and walked across the deck and down the stairs onto the sand. The dry grass on the dunes rustled in the light wind. I turned and looked at my house for a moment. The small weatherboard structure had become an integral part of my own physical self and I rarely consciously regarded it. I took a few steps back and looked at it where it sat on the sand in front of me. There was sand inside and out. It no longer bothered me and I had long given up all efforts at keeping it off the floors. I spent most of my time outside and I liked the idea that the distinction between inside and outside had become increasingly blurred. It was as if the house and all it contained was slowly dissolving and would eventually become one with the sand it sat on. These days I walked barefoot across the threshold without wiping the sand off my feet. It had taken me a long time to reach this state.

  I knew that most people would say the house needed paint. But I liked it as it was, polished by the wind and the salt from the sea. It had become a soft grey, in some lights almost silvery, and the boards were smooth and soft to the touch.

  ‘Absolute beachfront’ was what it had said in the brochure. It was a selling point then. Not so any more, I suspected. At least not on this coast with soft and low dunes, only just rising over the surface of the sea. The view had remained the same, of course. Impossible to ignore, even after all these years. The never-ending sea, subtly changing colour and character from one moment to the next. Never the same, yet always the same. Even before any mention of the greenhouse effect and melting polar ice, the dunes had provided a shifting, uncertain base for a house. October storms often swallowed large chunks of sand and washed them out to sea. I didn’t mind the sense of uncertainty. The precariousness of my existence. That lingering subconscious awareness of the slowly rising tide that would one day prise my house off the ground and sweep it out to sea. Or the giant wave that would lift it up in one quick rolling thunder. I preferred that scenario. And I would concede. I had convinced myself that I was ready.

  But till that day I was going to stay put. I walked along the beach every morning. When I had first returned to make my home in this place I had started my walks as something to give my existence some shape and form. Or perhaps as something to cling to. But the tentative, dutiful walks had eventually become purposeful routine, in a way also part of my work. If you could call it that. It was during my morning walks that I gathered my material. Driftwood. Stones and shells. Nuts and seeds. Feathers and bones. All polished by the sea and soft in my hands, each piece in its own way. There had been no particular purpose behind the gathering at first. My eyes would absent-mindedly set on a piece of wood rolling in the foam at the edge of the withdrawing sea and I would bend down and pick it up. Keep it in my hand while I walked on. Or it could be a stone, always more colourful where it lay on the wet sand than dry in my hand. But soft, always. Soothing. Later I had begun to carry a basket, and over time the gathering had become purposeful. It had changed the nature of my walks of course. They were no longer walks, really, but expeditions. Hunts. They continued to occupy my time and my thoughts.

  They called me ‘the artist’. And they called me ‘the doctor’. Or just ‘her’ or ‘that foreign woman’. Making it clear that somehow I was not one of them. To them I had no name, just a designation. It was a kind community though. Non-judgemental, mostly. Perhaps they just didn’t care. To some extent you could be what you wanted to be there. It was as if the place attracted a certain kind of people. Generous and open-minded. Not all, of course; there were ot
hers too. Like anywhere. Those who wanted to take rather than give. But on the whole they were decent people with a natural instinct to leave others to their own.

  I had been thinking about that. This giving and taking. I had come to think that there were two kinds of people: those who produced and created, and those who lived off other people’s labour. Not just in a material sense, and not just here, in my environment. To a lesser degree here than elsewhere, perhaps. No, generally, and everywhere. I wasn’t even sure if one was better than the other. Perhaps both were needed to the same extent. But curiously it seemed to me that the latter – the takers – had somehow taken precedence. The reward seemed to have become higher for those who managed the result of the work of others than for the creators. Surely it hadn’t always been so. I wondered when the balance had shifted and whether it would flow back again.

  There I was, with my feet in the sand, foolishly trying to pretend that I was outside, or perhaps even above it all. That the world could not reach me or impact on my life. But there was no escaping the reality of the rest of the world. I was part of it by my sheer physical presence. This remote place where I existed was connected to the rest of the world in ways that I could not influence. I could ignore the world as much as I liked, but it would still be there and it would continue to affect me and my environment regardless of what I thought or did.

  Behind the house was my small garden. Too elaborate a term perhaps for the small sandy patch where I grew tomatoes, lettuces, onions and herbs. And where my lemon tree lived, thwarted by the constant wind but still yielding its scrawny fruit generously. It must have been very old, older than the house. Older than me, probably. Its short knobbly trunk was wide at the base and carried scars where branches had been trimmed off. There was a grapefruit tree and a feijoa beside it, but they were new companions to the lemon tree. In the early days I had considered planting potatoes and kumara and becoming more self-sufficient. But the idea of being restricted by the demands of a proper garden hadn’t appealed to me. As it was, I could leave it for weeks and little happened. The tomatoes needed watering of course, but their resilience had surprised me when I had had to leave them unattended for several days.