On the balcony Gabriel’s computer is switched on as usual, surrounded by piles of books and papers and the dolphin ashtray. I touch it gently, stroking its back, the brass feels cool against the palm of my hand. There is an art book underneath the ashtray, Une étude sur la peinture symboliste it says on the cover, a little bit of a yellow Post-it note is sticking out between two pages and I open the book there. A painting of a young woman covers almost the whole double spread, it is similar to the cover of Gabriel’s novel but there are no flowers floating on the surface of the water in this picture, no bushes and no greenery surrounding her. I am not very good at French but I have no problem understanding this title: Drowned.
I quickly close the book, turn around, and give a start as I see myself in the full-length mirror. Not so that you would get us mixed up, but almost, I think as I feel my heart beating hard and fast, I find it difficult to get my breath as I fumble with the buttons of the cardigan, they are small and round and mother-of-pearl and my fingers can’t get hold of them properly. When I have managed to undo the top two buttons I pull the cardigan over my head in something approaching a panic and throw it in a heap on the floor, it lies there like a quarry brought down, rendered harmless. I fold my arms over my chest to avoid seeing my body in the mirror, I stand there for a while trying to breathe deeply and calmly until my heart slows down and I am able to put on my own sweater with trembling hands.
It is quiet in the house now, it feels different from the summer, the sounds I hear are new. The house clicks and creaks and at night the wind blows and the rain hammers against the window ledges, loud and persistent, a branch scrapes against something, rasping and banging, dull and repetitive. I curl up under the duvet, making myself as small as possible. There are drafts everywhere, Gabriel says the place really needs renovating properly if it’s going to be possible to live here all year round, it needs proper insulation. He mentioned it in the summer and I thought he was exaggerating, that it wasn’t really a problem, you’d just need an extra blanket at night. But now I have an extra blanket at night, and I realize he was right.
He sleeps alone up there now, on one side of the big double bed in the room where the apple trees in the garden cast long shadows on the ceiling. Every time I picture him there, and wonder if he is sleeping or lying awake like me, I see myself beside him in the bed. Very close to him, just like on the sofa when I fell asleep with my head resting on his chest. And then I have to push the thought away at once, I am sick in the head, abnormal, disgusting, and then all the other thoughts come crowding in like a film rolling through my mind: they pulled her out of the lake, I have imagined it a hundred times, a thousand times, the serious faces of the people on the rocks by the lake, the police, Gabriel. I can see eels in her hair, it is a horrible picture and I try to keep it at bay, but it always comes back: the eels in the lake, around her face, among her curls down at the bottom. Sometimes I see her with eels instead of hair, writhing, slippery, thick, shiny sausages all over her head and down over her shoulders. I always imagine that her eyes were closed, that she looked as if she was sleeping. And that she looked as if she was sleeping when she was lying there on the bottom too, while the eels were building their nests in her hair. She was afraid of snakes, she would have been so frightened if she had woken up and realized what was happening.
Gabriel has started to go for long walks during the day, I see him crossing the misty fields: a black silhouette slowly moving along the gravel road, he stops, looking at something or lost in thought, he stands in the same spot for a long time, following a crow with his gaze. I am upstairs, still sorting out Stella’s things, I have gone through the bathroom cabinets. “Take whatever you want,” Gabriel said again, but I have thrown almost everything away. All that expensive makeup, the creams, the shampoo, little tablets of soap, bath oil, it’s almost filled an entire bag. I have kept a bottle of Stella’s perfume because I couldn’t bring myself to drop it in the bag, and two small unopened boxes containing Dior nail polish, still sealed in plastic film. She must have bought them on some trip, duty free, I find it difficult to imagine her buying such expensive nail polish in an ordinary shop. I picture her standing at the perfume counter at the airport thinking she’s on holiday now, maybe there’s a chance for her nails to grow before she has to start digging again, she chooses two bottles almost at random, thinking that she will sit on the balcony of her hotel room in the evenings, drinking a glass of wine, watching the sun set over the water and painting her nails, which are finally showing above the tips of her fingers like tiny, rising half moons. Perhaps it was when they went to Italy, they were there last summer. Somewhere on the Amalfi coast, a small town with a pretty name, they sent me a postcard.
Stella didn’t have many books or records, I keep a few of each: a couple of New Order albums, it was Erik who listened to them originally, the records might even have belonged to him. Stella always adopted her boyfriends’ taste in music in spite of the fact that she wasn’t particularly interested in music herself, or maybe that was why. She had almost no fiction, instead I pick out some of her botanical books: all the volumes in the series The Flora of Scandinavia and Rousseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany, which I know she loved. I pack them in a box along with one or two other things that I find in her closet: school yearbooks, a shoe box full of photographs, an old jewelry box I know my grandmother gave her when she was little. It contains some necklaces in a tangled heap, tarnished silver, gold chains with pendants in the shape of hearts and four-leaf clovers, the kind of thing you get when you’re christened or confirmed. I put pile after pile of magazines into another box, perhaps they can be given away. Old fashion magazines, interior design, gardening, several of them are foreign, with beautiful glossy covers featuring English gardens. There is a pile of old catalogs, page after page of seeds and perennials, shrubs and fruit trees. I drop them into the garbage bag along with the bathroom stuff.
“How’s it going?”
Gabriel’s voice makes me jump. He is standing in the doorway, he is wearing his outdoor shoes and his coat, his hair looks damp.
“It’s hard work.”
“Do you want some help?”
“No, it’s okay. But thanks.”
He smiles at me, nods.
“I’m going to do some shopping. Would you like to come with me? Or is there anything you want from the store?”
I shake my head.
“I’d really like to get this finished. But maybe you could get some fruit? Satsumas?”
He nods again.
“Do you remember where Stella bought these?”
I show him the little boxes containing the nail polish, he looks thoughtful.
“I bought them for her. When we were going to Italy. But she never used them.”
“I might keep them.”
“Actually, I think she said she was going to give them to you.”
He gives me another little smile, then disappears down the stairs.
I watch him cut across the lawn to the car. He is using Stella’s car these days, he still hasn’t gotten the engine of his car fixed, it would be expensive. Hers is newer, small and silver-colored and almost silent when you’re sitting in it, as if it’s padded.
There are yet more gardening magazines on the shelf of Stella’s bedside table, I put them in the box with all the rest. The contents of the drawer are the same as back in the summer, I pick up the pale-blue shiny book, flick through it halfheartedly. Arranged with M that she will come later in the summer I read before closing it quickly. What do you do with a dead person’s diary? I can’t throw it away, all her thoughts and notes, it just feels so wrong. I leave it in the drawer, Gabriel can decide.
In the evening I paint my nails. I have opened the boxes, one bottle is a pearly pink and looks summery, the other is a deep, dark red, and that is the one I choose. Gabriel came back from town with several kilos of satsumas, the sharp kind I like best, and I have already lost count of how many I have eaten: five, six, maybe
seven. One thumbnail is already stained yellow from peeling them, it looks the same as it did under the water in the lake in the summer, the disgusting yellow water. I brush the expensive nail polish decisively over my thumbnail and it covers perfectly, giving a beautiful, even finish. I am sitting on the bed in the guest room. I have hung Stella’s white cardigan on a hanger on the outside of the closet, it hangs there like a little work of art, white on white with its mother-of-pearl buttons gleaming indolently. There are no flowers on the bedside table now, nor in the window, the room is bare, the walls are white and the floor covered in a white glaze. It feels like a cell, the way I imagine it looks inside a convent. There’s a convent nearby, we drove past it in the summer, Gabriel pointed it out and said it was one of the strictest orders. Once you step inside the high stone walls surrounding the convent garden you never come out, not even when you die. The nuns are buried in the little churchyard that forms a part of the garden.
The nail polish dries quickly, becoming hard and shiny. I used to have terrible nails, they were soft and split and broke and were uneven. Now they grow quickly and are strong, I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m eating better now. I drum them on the bedside table, enjoying the rapping sound as I look around the room. There ought to be something on the walls in here: a picture, a painting, anything, these bare walls are unpleasant. I think of one of Rossetti’s paintings, the one depicting the annunciation. The walls in that room look almost the same as these: white, like a convent. Mary has crawled up onto the bed and is cowering in one corner, she looks afraid, defensive, the angel is offering her flowers, they are also white, lilies.
Rossetti moved out into the country when he got older. Perhaps it was a house like this one, with a big garden and lots of flowers. He and Swinburne lived there together, took care of each other, acquired animals, exotic animals, although I don’t know which ones. It doesn’t matter, it’s a good story. I imagine they had a giraffe in the garden, I can see it grazing the tops of their English apple trees.
I really ought to try to finish my assignment. Art history isn’t as much fun as it was at the beginning, when we had long lectures in dimly lit rooms, with hour after hour of slides. I felt as if the rest of the world disappeared as I learned about the different orders of Greek columns, mosaics and frescoes, the archaic smile, I can almost lose myself now in the memory of it: the lecturer’s pleasant voice and how old-fashioned it felt, the fact that someone was standing there telling me about ancient Greece and all I had to do was listen and learn it all for the assessments, I got almost everything right in most of them. It’s not as much fun now, there’s so much theory. Suddenly the book on Gabriel’s desk comes into my mind, the Post-it note on the page with the drowned woman. Perhaps he had thought of using the picture for the cover of his first novel. I try to remember if the book was there in the summer but it’s impossible, the entire desk is covered in great piles of books and papers.
Suddenly he is standing in the doorway and I jump, he smiles at me.
“I seem to keep scaring you.”
I give him a little smile.
“You have to stop creeping up on me like that.”
“I’m not creeping up on you.”
He catches sight of Stella’s cardigan on the closet door, he goes over to it, runs his hand over the soft angora.
“Are you keeping it?” he asks.
“I don’t know, it just felt wrong to shove it in a plastic bag.”
He nods.
“You ought to wear it.”
“Really?” I say dubiously.
“Yes. I think it would suit you.”
It’s an unpleasant thought after the panic I felt when I tried it on, and wouldn’t it be a bit strange, I think, a dead person’s clothes, what do you do with dead people’s clothes? Shove them in garbage bags while you’re still crying, give them away, do people ever regret it? There’s something so intimate about clothes.
I make no comment, instead I hold out my hands to show Gabriel.
“Look.”
He screws his eyes up slightly, doesn’t seem to grasp at first what he’s supposed to be looking at, but then he sees the bottle of nail polish on the bed and takes hold of my wrist, examines my fingers.
“Wow.”
His grip is firm. I try to withdraw my hand but he holds on to it, looking into my eyes. I wouldn’t be able to free myself even if I really tried, I think, and the thought excites me, I have to look away, I’m afraid he will be able to see it in my expression.
My cheeks are burning as he lets go of my hand. He clears his throat.
“I was going to make a cup of tea, would you like one?”
“Yes please.”
“A sandwich?”
I nod.
When I hear him filling the kettle in the kitchen I pull up the sleeve of my sweater and examine my wrist. I can’t see anything, but it seems to me that I can still feel his grip and I flop backwards onto the bed, lie there on my back, close my eyes.
I dream of Stella that night. I am in a park full of green plants, no flowers, just dense, dark greenery: huge chestnut trees, cypresses, poplars, and silver fir, box clipped into tall walls and ivy creeping across the gravel on which I am standing, it is growing before my eyes, trying to reach my feet. It is twilight and the shadows are long, the air is raw and damp, it smells of fall, of decay.
Suddenly I see Stella’s coffin on a bench a little way off, I hurry toward it, quickly, before the ivy has the chance to catch up with my feet, winding its way up my ankles and around my thighs. In my dream I know exactly how it feels, how tough the stems of the ivy are: long, strong fibers like ropes around my body, as if I have experienced it before. I can hear Stella’s voice in my head, “That’s poisonous, every part of it is poisonous,” but ivy isn’t poisonous, is it? Not in Sweden. I think I must ask her, and when I lift the lid of her coffin she is smiling at me and for a second it seems as if everything is a mistake, I have only dreamed that she is dead, but when I ask her she doesn’t answer me. “Is it poisonous?” I say several times as I watch the ivy getting closer, she lifts one of her hands and her nails are long now, longer than mine. It isn’t only hair that continues to grow after death, nails do too. I see Stella and Gabriel in my mind’s eye, she drags her long nails down his back and he groans, takes hold of her wrists and presses his body hard against hers. Her hair is long too now, he could wind it around his hand, pull her head back, and the curls find their way over the sides of the coffin, crawling like the ivy, like the black roots of the alders in the lake, like shoots longing to find a foothold.
I have kicked off the covers in my sleep and I am so cold I am shivering when I wake up. Gabriel is sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, he nods to me when I walk in.
“Okay?” he mumbles.
“I didn’t sleep too well.”
I look out of the window as I pour coffee into one of the blue-and-white patterned cups that belonged to Gabriel’s grandmother. It is beautiful old china, Swedish, from the beginning of the twentieth century. Gabriel has a complete service, he could serve eighteen people with several courses and still have enough. He uses the plates and cups every day, the rest is in a large display cabinet upstairs, pile upon pile of different-sized plates and serving dishes and a big soup tureen.
Outside the window the garden is gray and looks damp. Gabriel has hung some fat balls in a lilac bush that has lost all its leaves, and there are lots of little birds all around them. This is the same weather as we had for Stella’s funeral, the weather has been the same all through the fall. Gabriel seemed distant then too, he hardly spoke to anyone, not even to me, nor I to him, I felt ashamed of myself afterward but I was afraid of his voice, it was so terrible to hear it: small and thick with tears, just as he sounded on the telephone that evening when he rang and told me she was dead, I was the first person he called.
“I think I’ll go for a walk,” I say.
“Mm.”
He looks ti
red too, there are dark circles beneath his eyes and he is staring down at the paper without reading it.
Wet leaves stick to Stella’s boots as I walk across the lawn. The great tits in the lilac bush take off in a flock as I approach, the air is full of the sound of their beating wings. I carry on out onto the gravel road, across the fields. One field has not been plowed like the rest, it is full of long grass that has turned yellow, it is wet and slimy. Perhaps it has been left to lie fallow. I clamber over the ditch and walk out onto it; after only a short distance it feels as if the landscape is endless, nothing but fields in front of me as far as the eye can see, a patchwork quilt, softly embedded in misty air. I close my eyes and turn my face up to the sky, it is quickly covered with a film of moisture.
As I am about to step back onto the gravel I see that there are rosehips growing in the ditch. They are beautiful, their red berries glowing against the black branches, and I think I might pick some, but there are too many thorns. I prick my forefinger as I try to snap off a twig and a bright-red drop of blood oozes out, I stick my finger in my mouth, the faint, clean, metallic taste of blood, of iron, rust. I should have brought a pair of pruning shears, there are some hanging in the hallway. Stella never left home without them.
I spin around as I hear footsteps on the road behind me. It’s Anders with a dog on a lead, it is slender and dark gray, it might be a whippet. It slinks around his legs, looks at me attentively, sniffs the air. For a moment I imagine that it is picking up the scent of my blood, but my finger has stopped bleeding now.
“Hi,” I say.
Anders nods to me. I clamber out of the ditch, almost slipping, I can’t get any purchase on the long, wet grass with my boots.
“So you’re out for a walk,” he says.
“Yes.”
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