Two seconds later he was on the ground, with his nose pressed firmly against the tarmac a couple of metres from the car. The man had flattened him.
‘Calm down.’ He bent over Max with gritted teeth, his fist raised. He seemed to be focusing on the back of Max’s neck.
His heart. Vendela grabbed the door handle and somehow managed to get the door open; she stepped out into the wind and yelled the first thing that came into her head: ‘No! He’s got a bad heart!’
The man looked up at her, still angry. But the fury in his eyes suddenly died. He breathed out, lowered his shoulders and looked down at Max. ‘Have you calmed down?’ he asked quietly.
Max didn’t reply. He gritted his teeth and struggled to free himself, but eventually he appeared to relax. ‘OK,’ he said.
Vendela stood motionless next to the car. The man let go of Max and straightened his back. He gently took hold of the boy’s upper body and pulled him out cautiously, away from the car.
‘Are you OK, Jesper?’
The boy gave some kind of answer, too quietly for Vendela to hear, but thank God, he didn’t seem to be hurt.
‘Can you move your toes?’ said the man.
‘Yeah.’
The boy started to get up. The man helped him, and led him over to their own car. They didn’t look back, and Vendela had a feeling that she was somehow being excluded.
Max grabbed hold of the Audi’s radiator grille and pulled himself to his feet. He blinked and noticed Vendela.
‘Get back in the car,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of this.’
‘OK.’
Vendela took a deep breath and turned back to the car. She sat down, saw the blood running down the windscreen and almost thought it was beautiful. No, in fact she could admit to herself that it was beautiful. The blood had been smeared across the glass by the windscreen wipers, forming sweeping lines. It looked like two little rainbows in pale pink and dark red, glowing like a neon sign in the sun.
A faint breeze from the sea made the feathers that had stuck to the car dance around and adhere to the windscreen. They were brown and dirty white.
Perhaps they had hit a pheasant, or a wood pigeon.
Whatever kind of bird it was, it had suddenly appeared in front of the car, its big wings flapping, and it had exploded like a balloon on impact. The body had hit the radiator grille hard, bounced up towards the windscreen in a blood-red explosion, then disappeared over the roof. It had left broad lines behind.
The sound of whimpering was coming from the floor next to her seat.
‘Quiet, Ally!’ shouted Max.
Vendela swallowed. It was bad enough when Max shouted at her, but it was even worse when he started on their dog.
‘It’s all right, Aloysius,’ she said quietly.
She opened the door. ‘Are you OK, Max?’
He nodded. ‘I’m just going to wipe the car,’ was all he said.
He was breathless and red in the face, but that was probably just because he was so angry.
The previous summer, Max had experienced a sudden pain in his chest while he was on stage in Gothenburg, giving a talk about his latest book, Self-Confidence to the Max. He had to stop and leave the stage, and his voice was full of panic when he called Vendela. He had taken a taxi to A & E, where he had been examined and given oxygen.
It had been a mild heart attack, according to the doctor, with the emphasis on mild. There was no need for an operation – just rest. And Max had rested more or less right through the autumn, when he wasn’t overseeing the building of the house on Öland and planning his new book. This was to be a different kind of book, less about psychology and more about living the right way and eating well. A cookery book by Max Larsson. Vendela had promised to help him.
There were tissues and a bottle of mineral water in the glove compartment, and she took a couple of gulps before winding down the window.
‘Have some of this, Max.’
He took the bottle without speaking, but didn’t have a drink; instead he poured the water over the windscreen, rinsing the blood away so that it ran down over the bodywork in red stripes. He leaned over the bonnet, his jaw tightly clamped, scrubbing away at the glass.
Vendela wanted to forget the dead bird. She looked over to the right, through the clean side window and out across the alvar. A flat world of grass and bushes and rocks. She longed to be there. If Max wasn’t in too bad a mood after the collision, she might be able to go for a run this evening.
Vendela’s family came from the island; she had grown up on a farm outside Stenvik, which was partly why she had persuaded Max to buy a plot of land here.
Her husband really would have preferred a summer retreat closer to Stockholm, he had said so several times. But when Vendela showed him the location of Stenvik, right on the coast, and allowed him to choose exactly what kind of house they would build by the quarry, he had given in. Their house was an architectural dream by the sea, a fairytale palace of stone and glass.
Aloysius was still hobbling around on his stiff legs, shifting position down on the floor; his anxiety transmitted itself to Vendela, making her feel slightly unwell.
‘Lie down, Ally … we’ll be off soon.’
The greyish white poodle stopped howling, but he continued to whimper, pressing himself against her legs. His big eyes gazed up at her, pale and unfocused. Aloysius was thirteen years old – more than eighty in dog years. He could no longer bend his right front leg, and his sight had deteriorated over the past year. Their vet in Stockholm had explained back in the autumn that Ally would soon be able to distinguish only between light and darkness, and in less than a year he would probably be completely blind.
Vendela had stared at him.
‘But isn’t there anything you can do?’
‘Well yes … there’s always something we can do when it comes to an old dog. And it doesn’t hurt at all.’
But when the vet had started to talk about how a dog is put to sleep, Vendela had swept Ally up in her arms and fled.
It took about twenty tissues to get the car anything like clean. Max poured water and wiped, then threw them in the ditch next to the car park, one after another.
Vendela watched the dripping red tissues tumbling down into the ditch. No doubt they would lie there like dry leaves all through the spring and summer, and the islanders would mutter darkly about tourists leaving their litter. And the inhabitants of the alvar would see the mess too.
Max threw away the last tissue and leaned forward – he seemed to be checking that he hadn’t got any blood on his suede jacket or his jeans. Then he got back in the car, without looking Vendela in the eye.
‘All right?’ he said when he was settled.
She nodded, thinking, Absolutely. It’s just that some days are a little crazier than normal.
She looked over towards the other car, where the man and the boy were sitting. ‘Are you going to have a word with them?’
‘What for?’ said Max, starting the engine. ‘Nobody got hurt.’
Except the bird, thought Vendela.
There was a screeching sound as Max reversed away from the sand box. It had split down one side; Vendela could see a thin stream of sand pouring out on to the tarmac. No doubt the front of the Audi was also cracked.
Aloysius stopped whimpering and lay down again.
‘Right,’ said Max, shaking his head as if he wanted to shake off what had happened. ‘Off we go, then.’
He put the car into first gear and squirted water over the windscreen. Then he accelerated out of the car park.
Vendela turned to see if she could spot the bird’s broken body by the side of the road. But it wasn’t there; perhaps it was lying in the ditch.
‘I wonder what kind of bird it was,’ she said. ‘Did you see it, Max? I didn’t have time to notice if it was a pheasant or a grouse or—’
He shook his head. ‘Just forget it.’
‘It wasn’t a crane, was it, Max?’
‘Forget a
bout the bird, Vendela. Think about the new house.’
The road was completely empty now, and he put his foot down. Vendela knew he wanted to get to the house to carry on with his cookery book. After the weekend a photographer was coming to take pictures of him in the new kitchen. Of course, the actual food would be prepared by Vendela.
The Audi picked up speed. Soon they were zooming along just as quickly as before, as if the collision and the quarrel had never taken place, but Aloysius was still trembling when he pressed himself against Vendela’s leg. He almost always trembled when Max was around.
If he had been younger and fitter, Ally could have gone with her on relaxing outings on the alvar, but as it was he would have to stay at home. Max didn’t enjoy going walking or running either. Vendela would have to venture out on to the alvar alone.
But perhaps not completely alone. After all, the elves were out there.
5
‘Are you OK?’ asked Per for the sixth or seventh time.
Jesper nodded.
‘No broken bones?’
‘Nope.’
They were back in the car. Ten metres away, the Audi was disentangling itself from the broken sand box. Per could see that the spoiler was cracked, as was the right headlight.
The Audi swung around and pulled out on to the main road. The driver kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, but the woman beside him caught Per’s eye for a second before looking away. She had a narrow, tense face, and she reminded him of someone. Regina?
He looked at his son again, his arm around his shoulders. Jesper seemed calm, but the muscles at the back of his neck were trembling.
‘No pain anywhere?’
‘Just bruises,’ said Jesper, with a fleeting smile. ‘I threw myself out of the way of the wheels, but it was really close.’
‘It was horribly close … It’s a good job you’re so quick.’
Per’s smile was tense. He removed his arm from his son’s shoulders, placed his hands on the wheel and exhaled. The anger was gone now, but just a few minutes ago he had knocked another man off his feet, and had been quite prepared to punch him. He would have happily thumped just about anybody, to be honest. As if that would make anything better.
It also occurred to him that Jesper had just smiled at him, the first smile for ages. A sign of spring?
He saw the Audi pick up speed, shining traces of blood still showing on the bonnet. It shot off northwards.
The big car made Per think about all the flashy cars his father had driven – a long series of vehicles Jerry had imported from the USA. In the mid-seventies he had driven Cadillacs, switching to a new model almost every year. People had turned their heads when Jerry came roaring along, and he’d loved every minute of it.
‘What was that move?’ asked Jesper.
‘Sorry?’
‘That judo throw?’
Per shook his head and turned the key in the ignition. He had trained in judo for less than two years and had only got as far as an orange belt, but Jesper seemed impressed nevertheless.
‘That wasn’t judo … I just pulled him down, like tripping someone up,’ he said. ‘You could have done that too if you’d carried on training.’
Jesper didn’t answer.
‘Well, you’ve packed it in as well,’ he said eventually.
‘I haven’t got anybody to train with,’ said Per, pulling out of the car park. ‘I’m thinking of taking up running instead.’
He looked out at the flat landscape beyond the road. The ground looked lifeless, but there was a lot going on beneath the surface.
‘Where will you run, Dad?’ asked Jesper.
‘Just about anywhere.’
6
Burn them, Gerlof, Ella Davidsson had said when she was lying in hospital like a skeleton. Promise me you’ll burn them.
And he had nodded. But his late wife’s diaries were still here, and this Friday he had found them.
The sun had returned to the Baltic, just a week before Easter. Now all that was lacking was the warmth, then Gerlof would be able to spend whole days sitting in the garden. Resting, thinking, and building his ships in bottles. Slender blades of green were beginning to appear among the brown leaves around him. The grass wouldn’t need cutting until May.
The sunshine in the middle of the day was beginning to entice the butterflies out. For Gerlof they were the most important sign of spring. Even as a little boy he had waited to see the first butterflies appear, and to see what colour they were. At the age of eighty-three it was difficult to be filled with the same sense of anticipation as when he was a child, but Gerlof still waited eagerly for the first butterfly of the year.
He was alone at the cottage now; everyday life had resumed after the move, and he ambled around the small rooms, his stick in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The wheelchair waited silently in the bedroom, ready for the day when his rheumatic problems, caused by Sjögren’s syndrome, would take a turn for the worse. At the moment he could still get up and down the stone steps without any problem.
The previous week his furniture had been delivered – the small number of pieces he had wanted to keep from his room at the home – and all the mementoes from his thirty years at sea: the ships in bottles, the maritime charts, the name plates from some of the ships on which he had sailed, and beautiful examples of rope work, dark brown and still smelling of tar.
Gerlof was surrounded by memories.
It was when he had opened the cupboard next to the fridge in the kitchen to put away the log books and charts that he had come across the diaries.
They had been tied up in a bundle on a shelf behind Ella’s little jewellery box and old books by Karl May and L. M. Montgomery. Each one had a number in black ink on the cover, and when he undid the string and opened them, he saw densely written pages in his wife’s ornate handwriting.
Ella’s diaries – eight altogether.
Gerlof hesitated briefly. He thought about the promise he had made Ella. Then he picked up the top book and went out to the wooden seat in the garden, with a feeling that he was doing something dishonourable. He had seen her writing in her diary on the odd occasion, but she had never shown him what she had written, and had only mentioned her diaries on that one occasion, when she was dying.
Burn them, Gerlof.
He sat down, wrapped a blanket around his legs and placed the book on the table beside him. It was twenty-two years since Ella had died of liver cancer in the autumn of 1976, but here in the garden he often had the feeling that she wasn’t gone at all, that she was in the kitchen making coffee.
Ella had always set clear boundaries. For example, she had never allowed her husband in the kitchen, and of course Gerlof had never tried to change her mind. When their daughters Lena and Julia became teenagers at the beginning of the sixties they had made determined attempts to get him to help with the housework, but Gerlof had refused.
‘It’s too late for me,’ he’d said.
For the most part he had been afraid and unsure of himself in the kitchen. He had never learned to cook or do the washing, although he could do the dishes. These days Swedish men seemed to do just about everything; times had changed.
Gerlof turned his head. He saw a small fluttering movement in the long grass beyond the garden. It was the first butterfly of the year. It came flying towards him with the same jerky movements as every other spring butterfly he had seen over the years, flitting here and there with no apparent goal.
It was a Brimstone Yellow. A perfect sign of spring.
Gerlof smiled at the bright butterfly as it reached the lawn in front of him – but stopped smiling when he spotted another butterfly over in the long grass. This one was dark, almost black, with grey and white stripes; he didn’t know the name of it. Camberwell Beauty? Or did they call it the Mourning Cloak? This one was flying in a straighter line, and reached the lawn at almost the same time as the Brimstone Yellow. They fluttered around each other for a few seconds in a spring dance before fli
tting past Gerlof and disappearing behind the cottage.
A yellow butterfly and a dark-grey one, what did that mean? He had always regarded the first butterfly as a sign of what the rest of the year would be like: bright and hopeful or dark and gloomy, but now he wasn’t so sure. It was as if he had hoisted a flag that had got stuck at half-mast before continuing to the top.
When he opened the diary he heard the sound of a car engine. A big shiny car came along the road and turned off on to the gravel track leading to the quarry.
Gerlof caught a glimpse of a middle-aged man and woman in the front.
Probably some of the new neighbours who had built houses by the quarry. Summer visitors. No doubt they would be here only when it was light and warm; they were hardly likely to spend time here when it was freezing cold, chopping down the last of the trees along the coast as his own relatives had once done.
Gerlof wasn’t interested in the couple in the car. He looked down at the diary and began to read.
7th May 1957
Tonight Gerlof will set off on his first voyage of the year to Nynäshamn for oil. He was in Kalmar today getting some measurements done on the ship because he has altered the cover of the hold. Lena and Julia are on board with him.
Today has been sunny. Got to the cottage at six this evening and opened the windows to air the rooms. There was a faint smell of mould, I thought; I tried to get some fresh air in, but in fact it was a pot of juniper berries in syrup that had started fermenting and had exploded into a thousand pieces. Had to start cleaning rancid, sticky purple syrup off the floor, only just managed to cook something (meatballs). The children and Gerlof will be home the day after tomorrow.
Gerlof realized these were holiday diaries. He knew that when he had been away at sea, Ella had often gone up to the summer cottage with their two daughters. Later, when they were older and wanted to go with Gerlof to Stockholm or stay at home in Borgholm, she had come here alone. That was probably why he had rarely seen her writing in them.
The Quarry Page 3