Betrayal

by Karin Alvtegen

  ‘Oh, how nice. Who gave you that?’

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  How was she ever going to admit to her parents that Henrik didn’t want her any more, without shattering all their illusions about her. She knew that it would hurt them as much as it did her. Maybe even more. Most of all she didn’t want to disappoint them. Not after all they had done for her, all they had managed to give her.

  Which she would not be able to give her son.

  ‘Don’t you know his name? Is he in one of the other classes?’

  ‘No, he was tall. As tall as you.’

  Strange that Linda’s substitute would give presents to the children.

  ‘Was he working at the day-care today?’

  ‘No, he was standing outside the fence by the woods and then he called me while I was on the swing and said he was going to give me something nice.’

  The car slowed without her being aware that she had put her foot on the brake. She pulled over to the kerb, pulled on the hand-brake and turned to look at him.

  ‘Let me see it!’

  He handed her a little brown teddy bear with a red heart on its stomach.

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘Nothing special. He said I was good at swinging and that he knew a playground where there were a whole bunch of swings and a slide that was really long and maybe we could drive out there sometime if I wanted and if you said it was OK.’

  A tight band was being strapped around her chest. She tried to keep her temper and not raise her voice and frighten him.

  ‘Axel, I told you not to talk to grown-ups that you don’t know. And you absolutely must not take anything that any grown-up wants to give you.’

  ‘But he knew my name. Then it doesn’t count, right?’

  She had to swallow, take a deep breath.

  ‘How old was he? Was he like Pappa or was he more like Grandpa?’

  ‘Like Pappa but maybe not quite as old.’

  ‘How old was he then?’

  ‘Maybe seventy-five.’

  ‘Did any of the teachers see you talking to him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Why do you sound so angry?’

  How could she ever explain? The thought that anything might ever happen to him made her stop breathing.

  ‘I’m not angry. I just worry a lot.’

  ‘But he was nice. Why can’t I talk to him?’

  ‘Did you recognise him? Have you ever seen him before?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But he said maybe he would come by again.’

  ‘Now you have to listen to me carefully, Axel. If he comes by again, I want you to go and get one of the teachers so she can talk to him. Will you promise to do that? You mustn’t talk to him alone ever again.’

  He sat in silence, picking at the red heart on the bear’s stomach.

  ‘Promise me that, Axel.’

  ‘All right!’

  She took a deep breath and reached for her phone. All other thoughts were put aside except for the habitual instinct to call Henrik and tell him what had happened. Then in the next moment it struck her that he was on a secret love cruise with their son’s day-care teacher and thought he had more urgent activities to devote himself to than worrying about his son. From now on she was alone, she just had to get used to it. She put down the phone and decided to call Kerstin tonight after Axel was asleep and ask them to pay more attention in future. Or she might consider keeping him away from there until they had got hold of the stranger who knew Axel’s name.

  That problem was solved as soon as she told her parents about the incident. They offered at once to let Axel stay with them for a few days instead. Until they were reassured that the man wouldn’t come back.

  They were sitting in the kitchen with their coffee cups and a freshly baked sponge cake, and everything could have been just as timeless and secure as it used to be whenever she came back to her childhood home. Instead she now sat with heart pounding, filled with guilt and shame over her own shortcomings.

  Axel had sat down by the old, out-of-tune piano in the living room and they could hear him clinking the keys, stubbornly trying to find the right notes to ‘Old Man Noah’, which she persisted in trying to teach him.

  She had to tell them now, while Axel couldn’t hear what awaited him. That his pappa would be moving out, that he wouldn’t be living at home any more. Time after time she tried, but how could she find the words when she was forced to admit her defeat? That she had been rejected. Dumped. That she was undesirable. Not good enough for her man any more.

  She sat there, growing more and more morose the more Axel figured out ‘Old Man Noah’, and she knew that time was running out.

  ‘How are things really?’

  She met her mother’s gaze, realised that she knew something was wrong.

  ‘All right, I suppose.’

  There was a brief silence as her parents looked at each other, that look of total understanding that made all words superfluous, a look that she had wanted to be able to share with someone her whole life.

  ‘Now, we don’t want to interfere, but if there’s something you want to talk about then . . .’

  Her father let the sentence die unfinished and put the ball in her court. She felt her hands shaking and wondered if they noticed. Never in her life had she believed that she would ever have a hard time asking them for help, telling them the truth.

  She swallowed.

  ‘Maybe things aren’t that good after all.’

  ‘No, that’s what we thought.’

  There was silence again. Soon ‘Old Man Noah’ would be finished, and every second was precious.

  Then with an enormous effort she forced out the words.

  ‘Henrik and I are getting a divorce.’

  Her mother and father sat quite calmly, their faces expressionless. But she was having a hard time remaining in her chair. For the first time she had given voice to the words and felt them penetrate her from outside. She had sent them straight out into the universe like a fact that could not be called back. For the first time their import became real. She was one of those who had failed, who had made her son a child of divorce.

  ‘So, it’s that bad.’

  Her father had a worried furrow in his brow.

  His words confused her. Why weren’t they surprised? What had they seen that she couldn’t see?

  Her mother interpreted her reaction, as usual, but it was with sorrow in her voice that she began to explain.

  ‘Well, we might as well be honest. It’s like this: from the beginning we thought that you and Henrik were a little too, what should I say, a little too different perhaps. But you were so sure and wanted him so much, so what could we say? And what right did we have to meddle in your choice of a husband? You’ve always done what you wanted, after all.’

  She lovingly placed her hand on Eva’s and smiled.

  ‘We could see how you two were getting along, and we worried that you would tire of each other in the long run. We didn’t think he would be able to live up to all the expectations we knew you had. That’s not to say that I’m particularly glad that we were right.’

  Eva pulled her hand away, afraid that her mother would feel it shaking. Everything in chaos. She looked around the kitchen, let her gaze rest on the old glass tray on the wall that came from her great-grandmother’s house. Generations of hard-working couples who through their struggles had given her opportunities and led her to this. One generation follows another. Until she came and broke the chain with her failure. The Great Loser who wasn’t good enough for her husband and who would mark her son and the rest of the generational chain and pass down new values for what love and marriage were. Something deceitful and unreliable. Not worth fighting for, or believing in at all.

  Her father put down his coffee cup with a familiar clatter of home.

  ‘How’s Henrik taking it? He must be very upset.’

 
; She looked at her mother, dumbfounded. And then at her father, still so proud of his daughter who took command of her own life, who wouldn’t settle for less than the best, who was worth so much more.

  And an iron curtain dropped in front of the truth.

  ‘Well . . . he’s doing OK, I suppose.’

  ‘What have you decided to do about the house?’

  Be careful what you say now.

  Weak and powerless, the voice from inside the dark tried to make itself heard one last time.

  If you make your bed you have to lie in it.

  Then she turned her head and looked at her father and the voice from the Eva who once existed gave up and fell silent, unable to warn her again.

  And inside herself she prayed to be allowed to meet, for once in her life, someone who would stand by her side and love her, someone she could lean on when she no longer had the strength to fight.

  ‘I’m going to buy Henrik out and keep the house. I’m going to need to borrow some money.’

  Horrid was the word he thought could best describe the remainder of their crossing, even if it was an understatement. The Baltic Sea was smooth as a mirror, but the calm outside was amply compensated for by the tornado that struck him, that tore loose every feeling he thought was firmly anchored in a decision taken. Everything he had known, wanted, dreamed. It was all one big mess.

  The longest half-hour of his life she had spent locked in the bathroom before she burst out, packed her things in a rage and without saying a word slammed the door of their luxury cabin behind her.

  He had remained sitting where he was, looking out the porthole as the archipelago thinned out and Stockholm and home vanished farther and farther out of reach. After a few hours he made his way down to the lobby and changed his return trip reservation to that same night. She had done the same, he learned. He had no idea where she was during the rest of the crossing.

  In Åbo he had changed ferries; as sheer punishment he was given a windowless cabin on a lower deck below the water level, and that’s where he had continued his isolation. Just after midnight there was an urgent knock on his door. She was drunk. Furiously she screamed at him, using all the obscene words he could remember ever hearing, and when he didn’t defend himself the air went out of her. In tears she collapsed on the floor inside the cabin door. But he was unable to console her. For the life of him he couldn’t come up with anything to say. And when she realised his total inability to handle all that had happened, her wrath was reawakened and with a new onslaught of vituperation she left the cabin, slamming the door, leaving him to the confined space with her words hanging in the air. And he realised that he deserved every one of them. He remained sitting among them and spent the next few hours in soul-searching until he could stand it no longer. Because he had been betrayed as well. A judge ought to come down on his side, weighing the punishment he deserved for what he had done to Linda against the sympathy to which he was entitled after Eva’s betrayal.

  It would have been so much easier if everything were black or white. The tightrope he would have been forced to walk with a furious need to accuse her without any of his own guilt. Silence her with her guilty conscience and rob her of every possibility of defending herself. Force her to admit her wretchedness and thereby finally take the power from her. Gain superiority over her.

  Instead he would obsequiously have to attempt to win back her love, persuade her in an ingratiating way, try to convince her to stay with him. Choose his words well and not give her the slightest opportunity of minimising her crime by dumping part of the guilt onto him, by saying that he had behaved no better himself.

  * * *

  It would have been so much easier if he had told her the truth from the beginning. If he had confessed his secret love or passion or whatever it was he felt or had felt. Then they could have continued from the point they were at now, with all their cards on the table. Now it was too late. Now his admission that he had lied cast him into the underworld and from there he could never become her equal. Even if she had done the same thing to him, her verbal prowess would quickly shift all right and truth to her side.

  There was something about Eva that made him feel superfluous. She was so unbelievably strong. Adversity seemed to have the opposite effect on her that it did on other people. She didn’t react normally. For her adversity was a reason, and fuel to become even stronger. In some unfathomable way she always managed to convert a crisis into an opportunity. As he stood by and kept silent and realised that she didn’t need him, that she could solve everything on her own with no need for his help or support. Bit by bit she had stripped him of all responsibility until finally he hadn’t known whether he could handle anything at all. Good God, he wasn’t even allowed to open his own window envelopes!

  With Linda everything had been different. She had openly admitted that she needed him; it was a fantastic feeling to be indispensable. She made him feel like a man. Straight off she admitted that there were things that she couldn’t do or hadn’t mastered, and unlike Eva there was nothing shameful in it for her. On the contrary, she used it to come closer to him, to make them dependent on each other, to help them create an essential togetherness. And he had enjoyed their solidarity. He had fantasised about their life together and how different everything would be. How different he would be. Now he realised how naïve he had been, how simple everything had seemed as long as it was merely a fantasy. He had imagined that he would be able to cut Eva out of his life and his future like an old wart he finally got around to doing something about. That everything would be clean and pure and full of possibilities. An unblemished new start, completely unaffected by everything that had gone before, all the choices he had once made. He realised now with devastating clarity that it could never be that way; he and Eva belonged together forever, whether they wanted it or not. The choices he had already made would follow him for the rest of his life. Axel was one of the consequences. He had only seen the advantages, forgotten to imagine Eva and Axel together with a new man, a man who would spend as much time with Axel as he did. Influence him and the grown man he would one day become. Now that he had got a look at that bastard, the thought was intolerable.

  But the thought of losing Linda was intolerable as well.

  Or of being rejected by Eva.

  Or that she may never have loved him.

  Bloody hell.

  He needed time. Time to understand what it was he actually felt.

  What it was he actually wanted.

  He got up and found the key card. He had to try and get hold of Linda. Whether it was out of consideration or because the walls of the cabin were threatening to suffocate him, he didn’t know. He got her cabin number from the reception, but there was no answer when he knocked. No one was answering her phone either. Methodically he searched through the bars and restaurants on board. What was it he wanted from her? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he had to talk to her. Try to make her understand. She wasn’t on any of the flashing disco floors or in the loud karaoke bars. He stopped in front of a large panoramic window, having lost his orientation, and in all the pitch blackness outside the window it was impossible to discern the direction they were sailing, whether he was closer to the bow or the stern. He found a wall map and made his way back to her cabin. This time she opened the door, squinting at the sharp light in the corridor. She didn’t say a word, just left the cabin door open and backed into the darkness inside. He took a deep breath before he followed her, still not knowing what he wanted to say. Then he closed the door behind him and stood there in the dark.

  ‘Don’t turn on the light.’

  He heard her voice a few metres away and pulled back his hand that had automatically been searching the wall for a light switch.

  ‘I can’t see a thing.’

  She didn’t answer. He heard the sound of a glass being set down on a table. A faint light from the porthole began to materialise and then the contours of a chair. He stood there trying to let his eyes adjust. D
idn’t want to risk tripping over something on the floor. But he had to figure out what to say.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  She didn’t answer this time either. Only a faint snort broke through the throbbing engine noise.

  He stood in silence a long time. The initiative was his but he didn’t know what to say, what words he could use to make her understand.

  ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

  ‘No.’

  He heard her pick up the glass and take a few gulps.

  This was not going to be easy.

  ‘Linda, I . . .’

  He had palpitations now. He felt so much and could explain none of it. She who had been his closest friend. Who had understood him so well. Who had made him feel so good. Who had made him dare.

  He heard her change position. Maybe she was sitting up.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Four words.

  Each by itself or in some other context completely harmless. Utterly without gravity in themselves. Merely a question about what he wanted.

  But at this moment the words coming from her lips were a threat to his entire existence. Now he would be forced to make the choice he would have to live with for the rest of his life. Open the way towards the future he would freely choose, here and now. Now he had a chance. Or did he? That was precisely what he didn’t know any longer, whether he actually had any other choice. And that’s what made it all so hard. He no longer knew. Maybe this was the only alternative. Maybe the decision had already been made, over his head.

  By Eva.

  Again.

  Shit.

  Surely Linda realised that everything had changed, didn’t she? That it wasn’t so easy any more? She couldn’t ask him to make such a big decision without giving him a chance to think or figure out what was going on.

  ‘If you still don’t have anything to say then you might as well leave.’

  There was a coldness in her voice that scared him. He was on his way to losing everything. Both what he had and what he dreamed of having. Both. What would he do then? If he was left all alone.