Gotland

by Fiona Capp

  With all the distractions of university life – meeting David, finishing my degree and then getting married a few days before my graduation – I managed to push all this to the back of my mind. Over the years, the panic attacks slipped into the distant past. It wasn’t until it became clear that David had a real chance of becoming prime minister that I realised how much I still needed that garden. Predictably, the panic attacks started up again and I was helpless to stop them. Thoughts of my grandparents’ garden had lost their magical power. All I could see when I tried to conjure it up were bulldozers and everything laid waste.

  It was around this time that Ros suggested we go away together – instead of me coming to see her in London as usual – and that a good place to get away to was Gotland. We’d been talking for years about visiting her old friend, Sven, who lived on the island, but I’d always found reasons not to go. ‘We both really need a holiday, Est,’ she said. Ros had just finished her treatment for breast cancer and was desperate for a change of scenery. It didn’t occur to me that she might have other reasons for wanting to go back to Gotland. That she might be seeking out something her life lacked and that her illness had brought into sharp relief.

  When she first told me about this island in the middle of the Baltic Sea, it meant nothing to me, just as I imagine it means nothing to most people outside that part of the world. The fact that it was her idea triggered instant resistance. She made it sound as if she was in possession of a special secret and was one of the lucky few. And that she was doing me a favour by telling me about it. The more she went on and the more she teased me about being a stick-in-the-mud who went to the same old places whenever I travelled, the more I dug in my heels.

  It was true I was unadventurous. Although I visited Ros in London every other year, I rarely ventured much beyond Covent Garden where she lived. We might go to see a play in the West End or a concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields. I was happiest just walking through the nearby parks or sitting in the pubs. I liked things to be familiar, to feel that I had a personal connection with wherever I was. And that I knew what lay around the next corner. When I tried to explain this to Ros, she said that if this was the case, I had no excuse. The uncanny thing about Gotland, especially for someone from the other side of the world, was its familiarity. The more time you spent there, the more you felt you’d come home. It was too hard to explain why this was, she said. I had to find out for myself.

  4

  GOTLAND

  September 2010

  It was Ros’s idea to meet at Heathrow and take the plane to Stockholm together. Our flight didn’t leave for two hours, which gave me space to prepare myself. It always took us a while to adjust to each other, although this time it would be harder. At least, initially. I was hoping that once we’d got over the awkwardness of her bald head, things would be different. We’d finally leave behind the hang-ups of the past and accept each other for what we were.

  I like wandering around airport terminals, looking in luxury shops I’d normally never set foot in, studying the other travellers; enjoying that feeling of being suspended in time. I was a late starter – in my mid-twenties – when I took my first flight, and perhaps for this reason, the whole ritual still gave me a thrill. When we were kids we didn’t have the money to fly. Our father pretended he didn’t believe in going on holidays. We might do day trips to the beach or the countryside and stay overnight at a cheap guesthouse, but that was as far as it went. We were the lucky ones, Dad used to say. We didn’t need to go somewhere else because we had my grandparents’ place. ‘How many other children have a garden like that to play in?’ And so I grew up pitying those kids who had to travel any distance to get to their own private elsewhere. All I had to do was cross the railway line, wander through the golf links and over the creek and I was there.

  I felt my mobile phone vibrating in my pocket. It was Ros, she was caught in traffic but there was no reason to panic, she said. She’d be there in plenty of time for the flight. I found myself thinking about recent Skype conversations we’d had, how she’d refused to switch on her camera. Her voice would be so crisp she might have been in the room with me but I would be talking to a blank screen.

  The first time it happened I was sitting in the study in the dark. Through the window behind the computer I could see a sickle moon hovering above the garden shed, cradling its veiled belly.

  ‘I can’t see you,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh.’ I pictured great hanks of long red hair against a white pillow case. I couldn’t imagine what Ros would look like without her hair. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Wretched. It’ll pass.’

  I didn’t know anyone else who still said ‘wretched’. It had been one of our mother’s favourites.

  ‘Isn’t the treatment finished?’

  ‘Almost, but who knows? Anyway, it’s a bore, Esther. A deadly bore. Tell me what’s going on there.’

  It was two days after Gerald’s funeral. The party had voted that morning to make David leader. When I told Ros, I heard a noise that might have been a cough or a strangled laugh or a stifled urge to vomit. After a moment, she said she hoped he was happy now. She’d always had her suspicions about David.

  I told her that he didn’t go after it. That he’d been crushed by Gerald’s death. He was even wondering whether he would stay in politics. Then the heavyweights came to him and said they had the numbers. They said the party needed him because it had been drifting too long. He was the fresh face, the one with new ideas, the vision – the usual stuff. They told him it was what Gerald would have wanted and that’s what clinched it. The media was loving it, everyone was taken by surprise.

  ‘Except you,’ I added.

  A rat crossed the back fence. Almost every week the cat left a disembowelled gift on the doormat or on the garden path. And now stencils of rats were appearing all over the suburb.

  ‘That’s because I saw it coming.’

  ‘You think I don’t know him.’

  ‘Don’t be so touchy, girl. I’m just telling you how things look from here.’

  Girl. It was what our father had called me.

  When I didn’t answer, Rosalind added, ‘Listen, Esther, I’m really pleased for David. It’s an honour and I’m sure he deserves it. But what matters to me is you. You never wanted any of this.’

  After a day at David’s side, smiling for the cameras at the press conference and making conversation at the lunch afterwards, I was too tired to think about it. When David had gone into politics I told myself that I would adapt. I’d get used to him being a public figure, I’d get used to the long absences and the all-consuming nature of his job. My friend, Isabelle, whose husband has been in politics much longer than David, once said to me, ‘You don’t ever really reconcile yourself to it. You just knuckle down and put up with it.’ Over the years, there were times when I thought I’d achieved a kind of acceptance, but I could never quite silence the niggling voice that kept asking why things had to be this way. For instance, if politicians really cared for the family values they were always banging on about, surely they would change the way their work and parliament were structured so they could spend more time with their families and actually live the values they so zealously espoused, wouldn’t they? When I said this to Isabelle, not long after David had entered politics, she gave me a pitying look and said, ‘You weren’t cut out for this game, were you?’ Of course, I’m not so naïve any more, I know things are not going to change any time soon, but I still can’t seem to resign myself to it. My mother always said I was stubborn. Something in me resists.

  Until now, I’d coped by keeping my head down, keeping unorthodox views to myself and getting on with my life. Obviously, that wouldn’t work any more. But how could I complain to Ros with what she was going through?

  People had started gathering at the boarding gate. I found an empty seat nearby and, having psyched myself up for Ros’s shiny scalp, I paid no attention when a woman with a mane o
f pre-Raphaelite hair topped with a black beret sat down beside me. I kept reading my book, occasionally glancing at my watch, until the woman turned to me and said with an unmistakeable smile, ‘You are a dill, aren’t you?’

  ‘God, Ros!’ I yelped, jumping up to hug her, and was immediately conscious of her bones, how thin she had become.

  ‘What do you think?’ She fanned out the ends of her hair with her fingertips.

  Looking at her, it amazed me that I hadn’t picked her. The wig, although more flamboyantly red than her own hair, had the same springy waywardness. It reminded me of how she used to wear it at uni, long and loose with nothing to restrain it but a hand-woven bandana. When she started working, she’d tied it back in a bun or had it cut and styled shorter so that she looked presentable in court.

  ‘Stunning.’

  She seemed pleased. ‘I know I said I was going au naturel. But you get sick of people staring. When I saw this wig, I couldn’t resist.’

  We didn’t talk much on the plane. I could feel Ros holding me at a distance, as if she wasn’t yet ready for conversation. When we were girls, I longed for her to confide in me; for shared secrets. But it never happened. Ros was always sailing ahead and couldn’t seem to slow down or drop her guard. At least not with her little sister. Even when she was upset. I would hear her keening wordlessly but if I dared ask what was wrong, she’d lash out like an animal caught in a trap.

  It wasn’t until that afternoon when we were finally on the ferry and moving imperceptibly – apart from the occasional shudder of the engines – out into the milky grey of the Baltic Sea, and Ros was armed with a glass of sparkling wine, that she showed any desire to talk. The ferry was the size of a small ocean liner and seemed all the more cavernous inside because it was virtually empty. We sat facing each other by a window while the autumn sun made fish scales on the water.

  Ros unknotted the crimson scarf from around her neck. ‘Kate sounded happier the last time we spoke. Has she got a boyfriend?’

  I said she had boys who were friends. The big thing was that she had found something she loved doing. I explained about the street art and Kate’s exhibition but didn’t mention an incident with the police and David’s reaction. It would only have reinforced her opinion of him.

  ‘Good on her. Doing something she loves.’ She repeated the phrase and looked out the window. The idea seemed to unlock something inside her. As she began to talk, it was obvious she’d been doing a lot of thinking since she’d been sick. ‘All those years I spent at school and uni and work trying to be the best. Top of the class, top of my year, showing the boys in chambers I could mix it with them.’ She let out a harsh sigh. ‘There was no doing it for the love. I don’t even know why I chose law. Probably because I had the marks. If I hadn’t been so squeamish I guess I would’ve done medicine, just because I could have. Thank God I didn’t.’ She raised the reddish brown lines that stood in for eyebrows, as if to say, There, I’ve said it.

  I didn’t know how to respond. This was the girl who’d been dux of the school, won a postgraduate scholarship to Cambridge and went on to become the youngest woman in Britain to be made Queen’s Counsel. Until her death, our mother kept a scrapbook full of articles about Rosalind’s achievements. Our father talked of her as ‘our bright, shiny daughter’ with a kind of awed disbelief in his voice, as if he couldn’t work out how he had raised such a wonder. Not that he did much of the raising. And strangely enough, it was this fact – our father’s aloofness – that lay at the heart of Ros’s ambition and her disillusion, it seemed. (It occurs to me now that it might also explain her lifelong attraction to unavailable men, those who were married or fucked up.)

  ‘I don’t get it, Ros. You did it so effortlessly.’

  ‘A lot of effort went into making it look that way.’

  ‘But why?’ Being driven to excel was not a problem I’d ever had.

  I could see her thinking, absentmindedly touching her wig to make sure it was still in place.

  ‘Hard to know when you’re that age. You just feel compelled. Having a father who was more interested in the form guide than in anything you did, perhaps?’

  It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I found out what our father was doing in his study every evening, and that he wasn’t just visiting his mother at the nursing home on Saturday afternoons. And where all the money had gone. As for the poetry our mother insisted he was writing, after his death we found notes for a planned song cycle of fifty interconnected poems and some attempts to get it started. He never got much past the third verse of the first poem. So many words were crossed out and replaced with others. Perhaps it was the scale of the whole thing that paralysed him. Or perhaps he had deliberately set himself this impossible goal.

  I told her that Dad had been proud of everything she’d done, that he just wasn’t very good at showing it, and that he’d often talked to me about her.

  There was a flash of girlish uncertainty in her eyes before the adult erased it. ‘Oh, he was a different person after Mum died. But by then it was too late, wasn’t it?’

  For some reason I remembered an argument I’d overheard Ros having with our mother when she was still living at home. She was shouting Mum down in a way I’d never heard her do before. Saying she couldn’t wait to get out of this ‘madhouse’, this ‘absolute loony bin’ and away from all of us. No one understood her, no one cared. Everyone took what she did for granted. That kind of thing. I listened from the self-imposed prison of my bedroom. Sensitive as I was to any accusations of craziness, I could understand why she wanted to get away.

  It was the first time in years that I’d thought about the incident. I wondered if Ros had any memory of it.

  ‘Oh no, I didn’t, did I?’ She laughed, appalled, when I told her. ‘The stupid things you say when you’re young and furious. I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I do remember something else from around that time, though. You know that Van Gogh jigsaw you were obsessed with? The missing piece – I took it. You were getting all this attention from Mum and Dad. I used the vacuum cleaner to suck it up.’

  ‘I blamed Mum!’

  Ros and I were almost screeching with laughter now.

  To think that she had been envious of me. I was the struggler, she was the brainy one. The good thing was that we were really talking now, and laughing. It made me realise how anxious and trapped I’d been feeling lately.

  As if afraid of my teariness, Ros said briskly, ‘I hope Kate’s coming over as soon as her exams are done. I’ll cover the airfare. And of course she can stay with me as long as she wants.’

  ‘Ros, you don’t –’

  ‘Est, listen. I opened up an account for her when she was born. I didn’t tell you because you would’ve made a fuss. Once she’s eighteen, it’s hers. Hardly a fortune but enough if she wants to travel. It’s up to her though. She can spend it any way she likes.’

  Ros had always been a good friend to Kate. She didn’t have children of her own and for years I’d taken small-minded pleasure in the fact that I had done something Ros hadn’t. All I could hope now was that it hadn’t been too obvious.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be over in a flash.’ I smiled. There was no point trying to thank her; she would only get annoyed.

  The main reason Ros hadn’t had children, I suspected, was the kind of men she fell for. Rock musicians who were always on tour, academics who worked half the year in another country, married diplomats who wanted a bit of excitement on the side. Her last lover had walked out on her the day after she was diagnosed with cancer.

  Ros insisted that she wasn’t angry any more. She couldn’t afford to be. She needed all her energy for getting better. And she did seem remarkably composed, although with Ros you could never tell.

  ‘I’m out of the woods now,’ she said emphatically. ‘God, it was dark in there.’

  ‘I’d like to say I can imagine.’

  ‘Don’t even try.’ The day after the che
mo stopped, she told me, she sat in a deckchair on the patio and wept. ‘I can’t tell you how good it felt just to soak up the sun. All that delicious warmth bringing me back to life.’

  She closed her eyes, reliving that feeling. Out the window, the Baltic slipped by in a soft, silvery haze.

  I watched her as she dozed, her head slumped slightly to one side, her cheeks slack. For all the carefully applied foundation and rouge, there was a greyish tinge to her skin. Why had she stayed away all those years if her job wasn’t everything to her? She had good friends in London and had made a name for herself, and yet the city itself, she often said, left her cold. When Mum was dying, she insisted that Ros not be told. She didn’t want her to feel obliged to put her brilliant career on hold. We all lived in awe of Ros. We all boasted about her. When Ros realised how bad things were with Mum, she dropped everything and came immediately. And when Mum died two days later, Ros was shattered. Somehow, we had all collaborated in keeping her in exile when all she wanted was for us to call her home.

  Had it really been like that? Or am I choosing to see it that way because I want to believe she paid too high a price for her success?

  The engines of the ferry began labouring and churning. Out the window, the island loomed. I hadn’t realised we were so close. Too close. It was too sudden. Ros and I had only just started talking. There were so many things I wanted to ask and tell her. Once we were on the island, we would spend our time with Sven, and Ros would revert to her social self – breezy, ironic, elusive. I had seen it happen before.

  As for Sven, Ros had been friends with him for so long that I felt I knew him, even though we’d never met. He was the one male in her life who’d remained constant when all those boyfriends of hers had come and gone. And yet, when I thought about it, I didn’t really know much about him at all. I knew that Ros had met him when she was a student at Cambridge. They had lived in a shared household. Sven had been travelling around Europe and was working on a road gang to make some money before he moved on. Ros told me he used to come home smelling of tar and that ever since, the odour of tar made her think of him. When I asked her why the friendship had outlasted so many others, she said it was quite simple – that he was the brother she’d never had. Which meant, it suddenly occurred to me, that he would be my brother, too. It was an idea I’d never entertained before – having a brother – and for all my regret that Ros and I hadn’t had more time alone together, I was intrigued about this long-lost brother and what he’d be like.