I let go of the chain. The water carried me up, and as my head reached the surface I sucked the air greedily down.
‘Kind of transcendent, no?’ said Millicent.
‘It was beautiful. You are beautiful.’
We kissed, and she put her hands gently on my shoulders, nuzzled against my neck.
She inhaled deeply and held the air in her lungs, turned over in the water, raised a leg and slipped away from me. I breathed in and followed her downwards.
I found her at the same place on the chain. We brought our faces close to each other and kissed. Bubbles leaked from the side of Millicent’s mouth. Don’t laugh, I thought. We don’t want to drown.
Millicent pulled herself down the chain, kicking with her feet. Then she wasn’t there.
I didn’t panic. I followed her on down the chain, hand over hand.
Sharp bolts of cold water to chest, face and groin. Everything mud-dark. Everything winter. Calm, I thought, you must be calm. I looked up and could not see the surface.
I pulled myself further down the chain. Calm hand over calm hand. Slow, I thought, be very slow. You cannot breathe deeply because you cannot breathe, but you can remain calm. Millicent is there. She is there, and she is waiting for you.
My hand found her hand before I could see her, an edgeless form in the darkness. I brought my face very close to hers, found the outline of her eyes and read in them that all was well. She smiled, brought her fingers to my face, kissed me. I held her very tight for a moment and she wrapped a leg around mine. Then I felt her uncurl from me and her shadow passed before me and disappeared.
The sounds: metal chainlinks tightening; distant cracks and clicks; an alien pressure against my eardrum. A wave, I thought. Is that what a wave sounds like this far under?
I let go of the chain. I was light, I had no up, no down. For a moment I wondered, should I kick? Calm, I thought, you must be calm.
Then the pressure against my eardrums lessened, and the coldness of the dark water was below me. I saw again the sun through the surface. There was Millicent too, and then there was I, my head above the water, breathing again, laughing again.
‘You OK?’ said Millicent.
I nodded. ‘You?’
She smiled, and set off for the shore.
We sat naked on the rocks, drying ourselves in the strange Nordic sunlight. People swam and played in the water. A small boy fished. Light-skinned Norwegians cooked sausages on portable barbecues. Dark-skinned Norwegians grilled lamb over charcoal.
‘We should have brought towels,’ I said.
‘This is better,’ said Millicent. ‘I like us naked together.’
There was a missed call on my mobile from a number I didn’t recognise. There was a voicemail from the same number, which I didn’t listen to, and a text from Max, sent from Arla’s phone.
Arla told me she’s eaten ice cream every day since she was fourteen. She says you and Mum probably think that is immature, but it’s actually mature, because that’s when she says she started being an adult. Instead of ice cream, can I have a PlayStation, and can I have it now? Also, Mr Ashani was looking for you.
‘Your son is weird,’ said Millicent when I showed her the text.
‘My son.’
‘The weirdness he gets from you, Alex,’ she said, resting her head on my shoulder. ‘Obviously.’
‘Yes, because nothing about you is weird, Millicent. Obviously.’
‘None of the kids here seem weird,’ she said after a while. ‘They all seem remarkably well-adjusted.’
‘That’s because it’s the middle of the summer, and we’re at the beach. And you don’t see the ones sitting at home with the curtains closed.’
‘It’s a low-crime society. And if you go to jail, they give you time off in lieu of holiday.’
‘You think I should serve out my sentence here?’
‘You aren’t going to jail, Alex. No one is. Get real.’
‘So why bring it up? I thought we’d come away to forget. Live in the moment, or something. Jesus.’
‘We did.’
‘How was the funeral, by the way?’
‘The funeral was very formal. Sad.’
She was quiet, and looked out over the fjord again. I felt bad and apologised, and we let it drop.
The small boy caught a fish. We watched as he put his hand into its gill opening and twisted its head back, breaking the spinal cord. He dropped the fish gently on to the rock beside him, where it lay flicking randomly, its nerves firing their last useless volleys, its body twitching uselessly, like a last brief memory of life.
The boy cast out his line again, waited for his lure to sink.
‘How old do you think that kid is?’ asked Millicent.
‘Seven? Eight?’ I said.
‘Max couldn’t do that when he was eight. He can’t do it now. These kids are so … attuned.’
‘Max doesn’t have to know how to kill fish. He needs to know how to stay out of fights and entertain girls at parties. He’s good-weird, not bad-weird. He doesn’t smoke crack and he hasn’t got anyone pregnant. He’s perfectly attuned to London life.’
‘He’s eleven.’
‘You know what I mean. He’s not stupid, and he’s not easily led. He’s his own person.’
‘Do you think he’d like it here?’
‘There’s a leading question,’ I said.
‘It’s just a question, Alex.’
I turned to look at her. Her eyes were shining. She tilted her head, half-raised an eyebrow.
‘The answer’s no,’ I said. ‘Absolutely, definitely not.’
‘No, what?’
‘We are not moving to Norway.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting that,’ she said, but there was hurt in her voice.
‘You sort of were, Millicent.’
‘Oh, OK, look … I’m not seriously suggesting …’ The muscle in her cheek twitched, and her nostrils flared slightly. ‘Alex, can’t you just go with the idea for a moment? Be a bit playful? Humour me, and not go all dark?’
‘I like it here too,’ I said.
‘Maybe we could give him a bit more of what these kids have?’
‘Maybe you could teach him how to trap and skin a rabbit?’ I said. ‘Pass on the fieldcraft you learned growing up in LA.’
She laughed and touched my arm. ‘So we’re city people. These people are city people too. But they have this.’
Grey-blue woodsmoke carried whispers of grilled lamb and grilled fish. The fjord shimmered, electric and unreal. I thought of looking up through the water, breath held, thought of Millicent in a thousand brilliant shafts of light.
‘Ineluctable modality of the visible,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I love you, and I’m glad we came here. It’s making me want to be a better person.’
‘Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say,’ said Millicent. ‘Maybe it’s that simple.’
‘Let’s stop smoking,’ I said.
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Sure.’ And just like that, we stopped.
We found a pub that made its own beer and served it in pint glasses. We stood and watched the cigarette smokers in the doorway, backlit, beautiful in the haze.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked Millicent.
‘Like an outsider.’
‘Missing it?’
‘No … Yeah. A little. But this is surprisingly OK.’
‘It is, isn’t it.’
We drank more. Winter-dark Steamer. Unfiltered IPA.
Max rang.
‘Hey, Max.’
‘Where are you, Dad?’
‘In a bar.’
There was a disapproving pause. ‘Are you and Mum drunk?’
‘No, Max, no, we’re not drunk. We’re just out having a good time.’
‘Why?’
I looked at Millicent. She shrugged, went to the bar. ‘We’ve been sorting a lot of thing
s out, Max.’
‘What things?’
‘We’re better friends again, your mum and I.’
Another pause.
‘I thought you’d be glad, Max.’
Max said nothing, although I thought I heard him sigh heavily.
‘And we’ve decided to stop smoking.’
‘Really stopped, or just decided?’
‘Stopped. Completely stopped. Aren’t you proud of us?’
‘Dad, are you drunk?’
‘I’m not drunk.’
‘You don’t sound drunk, but what you’re saying is manipulative.’ He stretched out the word, as if he were testing it. Man-i-pu-la-tive. I wondered if this was shrink-talk, something from his sessions with Dr Å.
‘Manipulative how, Max?’
‘You’re trying to make me say good things to you. You think instead of talking about how you are making me feel bad I should be nice to you, because you say you’ve stopped smoking.’
‘I have stopped. We both have. I thought you’d be pleased.’
Millicent returned with beer.
‘I’ve decided something too.’
‘What, Max?’
‘I’ve got something to show you. It’s about Mum, and what she did. Bye.’
‘Max,’ I said, ‘are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’ A complex accusation in a simple platitude.
‘I’m glad you’re fine, Max.’
Max sighed. ‘Bye, Dad.’
‘Bye.’
Max hung up.
‘So, what did they do today?’ said Millicent.
‘He’s fine. He told me.’ Millicent looked pained. ‘That’s good news,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it? Given how things could be?’
‘I guess,’ she said.
Is there any more, I wanted to say to her, anything that I don’t yet know? Because I don’t think I can take any more revelations. I need this to be our new beginning and our new reality. Because I’m happy now, and couldn’t bear to lose that happiness for a second time.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Alex?’ But I shook my head and raised my glass.
On we drank, and on: Oslo Pils and summer beer; honeyed ale and stout; porter – a very creditable porter; another round of IPA. We did not smoke. We did not once consider smoking. But we did watch the smokers; we watched, nostalgic, as strangers became friends over a cigarette in the impossible Nordic light.
The voicemail was from Caroline – I checked when Millicent was at the bar. Caroline didn’t say much: she could hear from the ringtone that I was abroad; she would call back. But there was a warmth to her voice that I hadn’t expected. Perhaps she isn’t going to be a problem for me after all.
Caroline, then.
Somewhere, almost out of sight now, is a remembered landscape. In that landscape there is no tiny house in Finsbury Park, and no Max, and no Millicent. It’s a younger, more vital me that picks his way through the bars of this desolate landscape: and in that looming, infinite London I am a charmer and seducer of women.
Caroline brought me up short, though. I had met her at a vodka party in a small brick-built country house in Somerset. Friend of a friend of a friend.
‘I do love to see the English upper-middle classes at play,’ I said. ‘Hello, by the way, I’m Alex.’
‘Caroline. My party. And I am not an upper-middle.’ Ringlets and freckles, small breasts: very posh.
‘Aristocrat?’
‘Not that it should matter.’
‘It’s all right, Caroline, I’m a bohemian,’ I said, trying to kiss her.
‘Does that line work with other girls?’
‘Only the real nobs,’ I said, pulling her to me.
‘You’re a disgrace,’ she said, biting my lower lip. ‘And you have those big, sad, beautiful eyes. Are you sure you’re a real bohemian?’
We had spent the rest of the night in the cornfield, fully clothed. I remember my surprise as she came, my tongue in her mouth, her cunt pressed hard against my belt buckle through her bias-cut dress. Caroline had shown no embarrassment afterwards, had invited me back the next weekend. I had declined. London, I had said. Much more my kind of place.
I was an idiot. I courted Caroline, I slept with her, and I dumped her. I liked her well enough: she was pretty and funny and clever, and she knew how to behave around my London friends. She hadn’t turned her nose up at my squalid little flat. But I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, and didn’t want to be weighted down. She went home one weekend to her brick-built house in the country, and I brought home a Daisy, or a Mirabelle, or a Chloe.
I didn’t hide the evidence from Caroline. I didn’t change the sheets. It was time she knew. She had silently and with great deliberation put her clothes back on, staring at me all the way. Then she collected her shoes from beside the door and returned to sit on the bed.
‘The trouble with you, Alex, is that there’s something broken in you. And you think, because of your brokenness, that you can behave like a complete shit, and that I’m fair game. And that brokenness is a real problem for me, because unfortunately it makes you something close to irresistible. And I don’t know what wrong you think you’re righting by hurting me, but I don’t deserve this.’
‘No, Caroline, you deserve a viscount.’
‘Oh, piss off. Grow up. I’m not the one with a problem.’
‘Because you’re slumming it here with me?’
‘No. Because you behaved as if you liked me, and that has moral consequences. I liked you back.’ She gave an angry little laugh. ‘It was more than that, actually, Alex. Much, much more than that.’ She was willing herself not to cry. But it was only later that I realised she was telling me she loved me.
‘How dare you, you know? You use the accident of my birth as a stick to beat me. I’m just English and stuck-up, and so are my friends, and that gives you free rein. Whereas I had thought, stupidly as it turns out, that you could see past that to something more like who I was. I thought you liked me, Alex. But really you don’t, do you?’
‘I do like you, Caroline.’
‘Your actions suggest my reading over yours, don’t you think?’
She pulled on her shoes and crouched down, negotiated the complex strapwork by touch, staring directly at me. I made to speak, but she stopped me with a shake of the head.
‘Don’t, Alex. Please don’t talk because you’re too good at it and I can’t let myself listen to you. The truth is that I’m nothing like the person you seem to think I am. I’m just as lost as you are. And I thought because you seem vulnerable and sensitive underneath that prickly Scottish carapace that you were sensitive to me and had seen something of yourself in me, and you aren’t, and you didn’t, and I’m completely and utterly heartbroken.’
She had walked out of my flat then.
I wondered for a long time what had made me treat her so badly. I didn’t much like her friends, but I liked her, far more than I’d realised. And she loved me. She had as good as told me so.
Caroline politely answered my phone calls, and just as politely refused to meet me. After a month I understood that she meant it, that she really was telling me no. I had humiliated her, and she would not forgive that.
I waited for Caroline on the street at the end of the working day. She asked me to leave, and went back inside the gallery where she worked. I could see her making a phone call, and shortly after that she came out and stepped straight into a taxi.
The non-molestation order stopped me cold. No one wants to be the man who is cruel to women. I spent months in desperate isolation. I slept with two women. One Claire, one Janet: both firmly within my class. Both times we agreed in advance that it was sex and nothing more. Clear boundaries, no expectations, from the start. For the first time in years I was honest with the women I slept with. I had never felt less fulfilled in my life.
And yes, I sought out a shrink, though it didn’t much help.
I will say this for myself, though: when Caroline forced me to face what I had d
one I stopped in my tracks. I paid attention. And I realised that I had allowed some angry and resentful shadow in my troubled Scottish soul to blind me to a simple truth: that Caroline had loved me, and that I had loved her.
And then came Millicent, and she was the saving of me.
PART THREE
19
No police officer ever explained to me why they had to make the arrest in the middle of the night. We’re obedient people: we do what we’re told. There was no flight risk.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Max hugged me as I walked in through the door. He gave Millicent a dutiful kiss, then returned to the kitchen. Arla was letting him cook fish, and he stood quietly, spatula in hand, turning the fillets over in the hot oil. He looked up at Arla, who glanced down at the pan.
‘You did good, Max.’
Max nodded, and smiled. Arla put a hand on his shoulder. There was an intimacy between them that surprised me.
‘You’ve tidied up,’ I said.
‘We did. We tidied up. A little,’ said Arla.
‘It was rank,’ said Max.
‘It looks good,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘That’s OK. Have you really stopped smoking?’
‘Yes. Yes, I really have.’
‘Mum too?’
‘Don’t we smell a little better, honey?’
Max ignored Millicent. ‘Can we have wine with the food, Dad? Arla lets me.’
Millicent and I looked at Arla.
‘A half-glass,’ said Arla. ‘Fifty-fifty with water.’
‘Like in France,’ said Max.
‘Do you even like wine?’ said Millicent.
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