Drowning Rose

by Marika Cobbold

  I switched off. There was only so much good cheer a person could take at any one time.

  I wanted to talk to my mother to ask if, when Uncle Ian had spoken to her, he had told her what he really wanted. And why she hadn’t warned me that Uncle Ian was going to ring me. She warned me about everything else. Terrorists: on Tubes, buses, airplanes. Flu: Bird, Swine, Spanish. Poisoning: food, spider crossing ocean on bunch of bananas, date rape drugs dropped in one’s drink. (The trick to avoiding the latter was to stick closer to your Bacardi Breezer than a starlet to her plastic surgeon.) Radiation: Wi Fi, mobile phone, Radon, Russian assassins. So why had she not tipped me the wink that Uncle Ian was planning to call? But I had to wait as it was only six o’clock in the morning in Sydney and like me, Olivia was not a morning person. In fact, she wasn’t much of a night person either, peaking instead in the few hours between a late breakfast and her afternoon nap.

  I thought about supper but unusually I wasn’t hungry. Instead I brought out my box of broken bits and pieces from its place beneath the kitchen table. With space at a premium, beneath was a very useful place. Next I protected the oak kitchen table top from further damage with a sheet of yesterday’s newspaper. Then I laid out the contents of the box. The challenge, as always, was to construct something that was, if not useful, at least decorative, from the shards of coloured glass and porcelain. I liked it best when the resulting piece ended up being both useful and decorative. It was this dual quality that attracted me to ceramics in general, the ambition it so often harboured of turning the everyday tools of life, plates and cups, pots and jugs, thimbles and boxes, vases and containers, into things of beauty.

  I spent a while arranging the broken bits into different patterns, seeing if an idea would come to me but nothing did. I crouched to the level of the table top and squinted; sometimes interesting shapes appeared that way, but still nothing. No metamorphosis. What was broken tat was still just that. So I put the pieces back in the box. I stared down at the ungrateful shards and for a moment I was tempted to throw the whole thing in the bin but of course I didn’t. You don’t discard something until it’s certain there is nothing left to do. I couldn’t free myself from the thought of the maker of a piece. They might have put their heart and soul into the production. They might have looked at the finished article and felt pride at the thought of their work living on and giving pleasure to others. They might have died soon after making that particular pot, mug, plate, making it the very last thing left behind by a once living being. Or, they might have tossed if off with scant thought before taking the bus back home in time for tea. Either way I didn’t like to take the risk. So I put the box back beneath the table.

  What did Uncle Ian really want?

  I decided to call Gabriel.

  If Uncle Ian asked about how my life had panned out in the twenty-five years since we last spoke I could at least tell him that although I was undoubtedly alive, things had not gone all my way and Gabriel was a good example of that. Gabriel was tall and fair and handsome, a doctor specialising in that most un-telegenic of fields, geriatrics. Gabriel had been born to be head boy. Born to rescue kittens caught up trees and to befriend the funny-looking kid who everyone else gave a hard time. It was all this goodness, this need to help and manage, that had made him fall in love with me, a woman who had spent years not caring if she lived or died, and if asked would admit to a slight preference for dying, a woman who still somehow always managed to get thrown back into the swim of life like the wrong kind of catch. And it had been these same characteristics that had caused Gabriel to leave once it had become clear that there was not much more he could do and that I was floating, if not happily (exaggeration gets you nowhere) but safely enough, in the shallows of existence. That and a waif-like brunette with a history of self-harm and a great deal of ‘cheerful pluck’.

  And I could see his point. ‘Waif-like brunette’ conjured up attractive images of ingénue actresses and who in this world was not drawn to ‘cheerful pluck’? The self-harming, well, I would have thought there might have been a certain ‘been there, done that, bought the T-shirt’ feeling about that for him, but then we weren’t talking about what I thought.

  ‘What can I do?’ Gabriel had said during that endless month when he had been trying to leave our marriage with his belief in his own goodness intact. ‘I’m really worried she won’t cope. I mean, really won’t cope.’

  I had looked up at his handsome anguished face and given a little shrug. ‘Let her die?’

  Of course he had not thought that especially funny and nor, after two seconds’ thought had I, as that is what you could say I had done with Rose. So then I had started crying hysterically and he had wept a little too and we had held each other tight and made love and then the whole damn sorry carousel had started all over again. Until it stopped finally and for the last time.

  That was three years ago. I had adored Gabriel. In truth I still did. For the first few weeks after he had left the pain of the loss was such that I hadn’t been able to sit or lie for more than a few minutes at a time, day or night. Instead I had walked and tapped and hummed and picked and turned and shrugged and muttered. At work I had ended up over-restoring a piece and had been told to take a week off. At home I made a lot of little clay hearts which I then smashed with a hammer before putting back together in hideous and unnatural shapes. But of course, as usually happens in these matters, it got easier. The sound and the fury abated and settled down to a low hum of distress that was, nevertheless, able to rise back into a crescendo at the most inopportune moments. Eventually, once a year or so had passed, there came a kind of peace. The kind that comes when there’s nothing left to fight for.

  And we had remained friends. Ours had been the kind of divorce everyone admired for the civilized manner in which it was conducted. In fact, at the time I could have been forgiven for thinking that what everyone wanted most of all for Christmas that year had been a nice new divorce just like Gabriel and Eliza’s.

  The waif had plumped up and her cuts had healed yet it was she, not he, who had ended the relationship. Gabriel had not come running back to me but he did still phone once a fortnight. I always imagined that these calls occurred at times when he found himself unaccountably out of sick old people, injured birds and kittens up trees, and was at loss as to what to do next. I would tell him that I was tickity boo and tum tiddily tum and never ever better. He would sound satisfied; another unfortunate had been ticked off his list, and then he’d hang up before I changed my mind and told him how I really felt. It was only a week since we had last spoken but after some hesitation I picked up the phone and dialled his mobile. I called him sufficiently rarely for him to sound concerned as he picked up. ‘Eliza, is everything all right?’

  I told him everything was fine. There was silence as he waited for me to tell him more. So I said that actually I wasn’t completely fine and that I would like very much to see him. I never asked to see him. He was just finishing off at the hospital, he said. Then he would be right over.

  I remembered that I was wearing my baggy grey dress and went up and changed into a somewhat less baggy grey dress. I added a short string of large fake pearls that, as my friend and colleague Beatrice had agreed when I had showed it to her, might have been taken for Chanel if Chanel made cheap-looking pearl necklaces. I reapplied some lipstick and then I went downstairs to wait.

  Three

  The doorbell rang and I rushed down the stairs, pouncing as if he were prey. He filled up the doorway with his height and the width of his shoulders. He swept his cycling helmet off and raked back his fair hair. His cheeks were pink from exercise. He exuded life and warmth. We kissed, a brush of lips on cheeks.

  In the kitchen I pulled out one of the cornflower-blue painted kitchen chairs for him and poured us some red wine. I wondered if he thought about the day we’d got those chairs. We had been wandering around the architectural salvage yards in Hackney looking for fire surrounds and old tiles. The four chairs, spindle
-broken and white-chipped, had been huddled together outside at the back. One even missed a leg. But I had felt certain that deep down they were good chairs, they just needed someone to bring them out of themselves. Gabriel had not been convinced but it had been the month anniversary of our wedding and he had been in the mood to agree with pretty well everything I wanted to do. It had taken me the best part of two weeks to restore the chairs, working in the evening and at the weekends, but the result had been well worth it: four French café chairs, two blue and two the yellow of the chair in Van Gogh’s painting.

  ‘My godfather called,’ I said as I sat down opposite him. ‘And you look exhausted.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Are you talking about Rose’s father?’

  I nodded. ‘It’s been twenty-five years. Well, give or take.’

  ‘Right,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘You really do look tired.’

  ‘I told you I’m fine.’

  ‘Well, I think you look tired.’

  ‘Do you want me to be?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe. It would show you’re human. I know human is overrated but it would give us a connection at least. As in you’re human, I’m human; wow, whoever would have thought it.’

  ‘It upset you to hear from him?’

  ‘Well, yes it did. He was very nice and friendly so it wasn’t that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘It’s just that it’s brought everything back.’

  ‘I thought you’d dealt with all that.’

  ‘I had. Sort of.’

  ‘So the call shouldn’t have upset you like this.’

  ‘I know. But try telling that to the call.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said the call shouldn’t have upset me so I said . . . oh never mind. I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

  ‘It’s not a bother. I’ve meant to pop around for ages. So did he say why he was getting back in touch after all this time?’

  ‘He said it was Rose.’

  ‘Rose?’

  I pulled a face. ‘I know. Is he senile, do you think?’

  Gabriel shrugged. ‘I would need to examine him in order to establish that.’

  ‘Insane?’

  ‘Same answer, I’m afraid. Did he sound insane or senile to you, apart from the bit about Rose?’

  I was not a weeper as a rule but suddenly, and to the surprise of us both, I was crying. It was the shock of the call that did it, that and Gabriel sitting there as if he belonged, the glass of wine in his hand, his legs outstretched, cutting the kitchen floor in half. But at the sound of crying he straightened up like a soldier at reveille and reached across to take my hand. Next he got up to find some tissues. There were none in the kitchen so instead he tore off some kitchen roll and handed it to me. I dabbed at my eyes and blew my nose. I got up and threw the ball of paper in the bin and then I washed my hands.

  ‘Have you eaten yet?’ I asked. He shook his head. ‘Would you like to stay for supper?’ He said he would. I asked him if pasta and tomato sauce was OK. He said it was, which was lucky as that was all I had. That and parmesan cheese.

  Saving lives was hungry work and Gabriel ate a whole plateful of the pasta in near silence before saying, ‘You shouldn’t be worried about meeting your godfather. It’s pretty normal, as you approach the end of your life, to want to tie up the loose ends. I see it all the time at work on the wards. It’s as if they have a mental list of I’s to dot and T’s to cross before they feel they can let go.’

  I thought how it would be to be thought of simply as a loose end in Ian Bingham’s life. Being a loose end sounded relatively benign, and eminently solvable. I reached across and topped up our wine glasses.

  He put his fork down and took my hand. His fair hair fell in a wave across his forehead and his blue-grey gaze was fond and my heart beat faster. ‘You’re not drinking, are you, Eliza?’

  I withdrew my hand and straightened up, about to inform him that if what he meant was, was I drinking too much, the answer was no. But just as I was about to speak it occurred to me that maybe I should take on a sad dishevelled look and tell him, eyes downcast, that yes, yes I was, but that the love of a good man would most probably cure me of my filthy addiction now as it had done in the past.

  I sighed. ‘No, I’m not. Not at all. But thank you for asking.’

  ‘Good.’ He smiled at me the way I’d seen him smile at patients, reassuring, caring yet detached. ‘Now, what would you like me to do? To help, I mean.’

  I smiled back at him. I could do detached myself. ‘Nothing at all. I just needed someone to talk to who knew the history.’

  Four

  The cab that Uncle Ian had booked to meet me at the airport was white with a yellow go-faster stripe and a cartoon chauffeur in 1950s uniform emblazoned on the side. They were the official taxis, Uncle Ian had told me, sounding like my mother. Any others might rob me or at least lose their way and end up taking me to Borås. Borås, by the sound of it, had to be a downtown rough-hewn bad-boy kind of place, I thought. I would Google it once I was back home. As we drove out of Gothenburg and into the snow-covered countryside I thought of Grandmother Eva, Uncle Ian’s mother, who had been Swedish. She had helped bring Rose up after Rose’s mother left. I had been very fond of her and she, although she obviously loved Rose the best, seemed to have had the space to love me too. In that I believe she was typically Swedish: even-handed.

  Eva Bjorkman told us stories of dark woods and of meres as deep and as black as night. She told us of the Huldra, the Lady of the Forest who would lure handsome young men deep into the woods using her beauty and the magic of her voice. Sometimes the Huldra made love to the young men and rewarded them with untold riches but sometimes she abandoned them to the deep impenetrable forest from which no human could find their way out unaided. You knew you had been snared by the Huldra when she turned her hollow back on you and showed her tail, which was sometimes that of a cow and sometimes that of a fox. Rose and I had fought over who, in our games, would be the Huldra as opposed to the hapless swain. Rose, with her perfect beauty, looked the part but my singing had been just a little bit better and singing was a good way for a Huldra to lure. Then again my hands and feet were large, which was more the mark of a swain, hapless or not, than a temptress. We had ended up taking turns wearing the old white nightgown donated by Grandmother Eva although we never did manage to work out how to make our backs hollow. However, we had found an old fox’s brush in the dressing-up box in Eva’s attic and once we’d tied it to the back of a belt the rear view was pretty impressive. As Eva had said, the tail was definitely the most important give-away for a Huldra.

  I smiled at the memory of when life had been both simple and full of promise as I sat there in the back of the cab driving me to Uncle Ian’s house some thirty miles outside of town. He had moved from the house that he had inherited from his mother, the house I had visited as a child. This new place was not far away, however, and as the car stopped at a crossroads I recognised the small white painted church with its green copper roof and tumbledown graveyard.

  The sun sat low above the pine trees, not quite reaching the forest bed but casting pebbles of golden light across the snow that covered the ground like whipped egg white. Every window in every house was lit by a Christmas light. Rose and I had lights just like that for our bedroom windows, wooden with seven electric candles forming a chevron. Rose’s had been white and mine had been red. I wondered what had become of them.

  The car took another left off the main road and drove down what was little more than a track through the fields. We turned a corner, the car slowed and we had arrived.

  Three wooden buildings, dragon-blood red, with white-painted window frames and pine-green doors, were grouped round a slate stone courtyard swept clean of snow. Behind them was the forest. The driver got out of the car, opening the passenger door on the way to the boot. I stepped out, but gingerly, as if the ground were burning. I realised that the driver was speaking and I turne
d round and apologised. As I brought out my wallet my hands shook.

  A door opened and a woman stepped out from the porch, waving. ‘Eliza.’ She placed the accent on the ‘i’ just as Eva had done. I squinted against the sun and then I waved back.

  The woman was tall and lean but sturdily built. Her steel-grey hair was cropped short and even in mid-winter her skin was tanned. ‘The snow’s come early,’ she said. Then she put out her hand and took mine in a firm grip. ‘I’m Katarina. He’s inside, waiting for you.’

  Our feet cracked the thin layer of frost on the stones as we walked across to the main house. I realised I was holding my breath and I let it go in a puff of steam. If there were such a thing as judgement day, I thought, was this what it would feel like?

  ‘So, Sweden,’ I said, ‘population 9,208,034. But then you probably knew that?’

  Katarina turned with a polite smile. ‘No, no, I didn’t. Not down to that exact number, anyway.’

  We stepped inside into a hall painted golden yellow. A striped rag-rug in red and green lay spread across the floorboards. The metropolitan area of Stockholm is home to around 22 per cent of the population of the country. In Gothenburg the city proper is home to a population of 508,714 with 510,491 in the urban area and total of 920,283 inhabitants in the metropolitan area. White lace curtains like bridal veils draped the windows and there were pictures, some watercolours and some pencil drawings, on most of the available wall space. I put my suitcase down but kept hold of my handbag. By now my heart was pounding against my chest like a crazy person against the walls of a padded cell and no one could hear a thing. I continued to focus on the decor. Getting immersed in your surroundings, ‘being fully in the now’, was another trick, or ‘coping mechanism’ as they called them at the clinic, for those occasions when what I really wanted to do was to jump screaming from a tall building or drive a car into a tree at a hundred miles per hour. It had worked so far; that and not keeping a car or going near tall buildings. So as I approached the moment of facing Rose’s father once more I focused on the decor. The first thing to note was that it was nice. What exactly made it so nice? Perhaps it was the use of colour, joyful combinations a child might use in a drawing before they learnt that pink didn’t go with red. Maybe it was simply the very un-beigeness of it all that was so pleasing.