The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

But it was mainly to do with me, of course.

  My life had been badly mismanaged, I was informed. I hadn’t dealt with it as one ought to deal with one’s life, I hadn’t taken it seriously enough. But I was pretty well suited to be a television performer, she was the first to acknowledge that, and I recall that we laughed about it. On the whole it would be an advantage if the television authorities could use cartoon versions of newsreaders, Gudrun thought: it is not good for anybody to sit staring at a camera, knowing that a million anonymous viewers are sitting on their sofas and gaping at your face. Evening after evening. I actually passed on her suggestion to one of my bosses, but as expected it fell on stony ground.

  We continued to meet regularly even after my depression had died down and dispersed. The meetings covered getting on for two-and-a-half years, reducing eventually to just once or twice a month towards the end; and I know that nobody has contributed more to my understanding of myself than this Gudrun Ewerts.

  ‘You have been living all your life on other people’s terms,’ she said. ‘Since your little sister’s death, at least. You have been living a mirror image of yourself – do you understand what I’m saying? If you bury your own free will in a desert, you can’t expect it to survive.’

  I know that she came into my mind as I was walking along the windy beach at Miȩdzyzdroje, that dear old therapist of mine; when I was walking in a sort of dream after having closed that heavy door. Maybe it’s not all that surprising, and I have the impression that I smiled at her. Or at least, at her memory: she has been dead for more than ten years, and it must have been a strange sort of smile.

  *

  But the relationship between me and my daughter never improved. She became an introverted child, learned to occupy herself far too soon, and the contact between us was always inadequate. It was as if we were playing the roles of mother and daughter, and without a doubt we were skilful actresses, both of us. Unfortunately the same sort of relationship applied to father and daughter – perhaps even more so. Throughout the whole of her childhood Synn was in charge of her own life: she looked after her school work and her relationships with her friends in exemplary fashion – or at least without any interference from us – and she kept her secrets to herself. I have no idea when she started her periods, nor when she lost her virginity. Two weeks after taking her school-leaving exam she moved to France, and I remember thinking that I had been a sort of hotel-keeper rather than a mother. I’d had a guest in the same room for nineteen years, and now she had moved on.

  I never discussed this with Martin – there wouldn’t have been any point. The other hotel guest, Gunvald, had moved out only six months before his sister.

  When I write about this it feels as if it isn’t true. It can’t have been as bad as that, I’m sitting here and making it all up. I lay awake night after night, worrying about it – surely that was the case? I thought about them and was convinced that I loved them.

  Ah well, there are some people who believe that telling lies is the only way of getting close to a sort of truth.

  *

  We arrived at the hotel in Kristianstad at about seven o’clock. It was a grey morning, foggy. I had slept in the car for a few hours, but Martin was so tired that he couldn’t see straight. He drank three cups of coffee, and after our substantial breakfast and a shortish walk with Castor we continued to Ystad, where we drove onto a ferry to Świnoujście shortly before lunch.

  The crossing took six hours. Martin slept more or less all the time; I sat in a deckchair beside him and tried to solve the crossword puzzle in the Svenska Dagbladet, as it was a Friday and I had managed to buy the newspaper in a kiosk on the way to the harbour. Castor lay stretched out at our feet. I recall that there were not many passengers, and I was soon overcome by a strong feeling of being abandoned. Almost a loss of identity. Who was I? Where was I going? Why?

  Those are not useful questions for a fifty-five-year-old woman to ask herself, especially in circumstances in which there is no chance of finding an answer. After a while I realized that the best way of imposing a check on my increasing angst would be to ring Christa and exchange a few words with her: but by the time this insight dawned on me we were already so far out to sea that there was no mobile signal.

  Instead I started thinking about a speech Martin had once given, in which he declared that there was no great difference between the concepts of ‘potato’ and ‘angst’. There were characteristics that could be ascribed to angst, and characteristics that could be ascribed to potato: some were the same, others were different. And that was that. It was in connection with a dinner to celebrate the awarding of a doctorate to one of his colleagues, a dry-as-dust lecturer in semantics. I recall that the comparison gave rise to much amusement around the table, and that Martin was immensely proud of his ingenuity. Without acknowledging it with so much as a smile, of course. Personally, I had no idea what he was talking about.

  We met at the Monkeyhouse a hundred years ago, Christa and I. We worked under the same roof – and as often as not within the same cramped walls – for several years before we got to know each other. Our friendship began at the end of the nineties when she divorced her husband, a not exactly unknown actor with an enormous ego. Christa was far from well, and indeed felt so bad that some days when she came to work she needed to take two sleeping tablets and then go and hide away in order to avoid a complete breakdown.

  She used to say: ‘Maria, I’m on the edge of complete breakdown – please sit by me and hold my hand until I fall asleep.’

  And I would sit there, in one of the Monkeyhouse’s small rest rooms, holding one of her hands in both of mine while she wept, spoke, started slurring her words and eventually fell asleep. That would happen several times a week for at least three months, and how on earth we managed to conceal the situation from our bosses is still a mystery.

  But you get to know one another in such circumstances, and we have continued to be close. Christa is the person I would like to scatter my ashes when I finally die: I’ve already chosen her in fact – and she me, but I don’t know if she’ll remember. About a year after her difficult divorce we went on a trip to Venice together, just the two of us, and one night after a long and wine-soaked evening in a restaurant we stood on one of the bridges over a deserted canal and exchanged promises to that effect. Whichever of us survived longest would look after the other’s ashes and make sure they ended up in the right place. I assume that what we had in mind was the black waters in the city where we were at the time, and that by scattering our ashes there we would be assured of eternal life – but we never talked about it afterwards. Obviously, we were a little drunk at the time . . .

  Unfortunately I didn’t have Christa by my side after that incident in Gothenburg. She was on a reporting mission in South America with her new husband, a photographer, and they didn’t get back to Stockholm until August. We had exchanged a few e-mails and spoken on the phone once or twice, but we didn’t meet face to face to discuss the matter until a few days after I had been in Gothenburg and interviewed the woman who may or may not have been raped. We had lunch at the Ulla Winbladh restaurant, and sat there talking for three hours. But to be honest, I felt somewhat disappointed when I left.

  And to be even more honest I don’t really know what I had expected; but we hadn’t met for over six months, and if truth be told . . . well, if it were told, our friendship had cooled off a little over the last few years. We had not been colleagues since the autumn of 2008. We had met increasingly infrequently, and kept in touch by e-mail, a few times a month and occasionally more often. Short factual reports, no more than that – ironical and rather playful, which is the simplest way of writing when it doesn’t concern real life. Or rather, when it does.

  Right now, of course, it concerned rather a lot of important things – or so I tried to convince myself, and if I didn’t get in touch for several weeks after leaving Stockholm Christa would suspect there was something fishy going on. Despite everything. Or at leas
t would think it was odd – surely there are internet cafes in Morocco just as there are everywhere else in the world? We had spoken on the phone three days before Martin and I left.

  As I sat there on the ferry with my unsolved crossword puzzle, I had the feeling that I had drifted away from her, and that it was my fault. The thought made me sad. I had never managed to be the sort of woman who always has half a dozen close friends on call, and I can live with that. But maybe my relationship with Christa had never been for real either? Whatever that means. For real? I don’t know. Angst or potato?

  It’s remarkable how geographical changes can stir up so many other different things. It was as if everything I had been and thought and believed had to do with that house in Nynäshamn. And with the Monkeyhouse. Gunvald’s comments that time and the horrible image of the mirror came to mind in any case, and out there in the middle of the Baltic Sea it suddenly dawned on me that there was nobody out there who could give a toss. About what would happen to me. Or to Martin. We had lived our lives, had been in the premier league for a few years, danced in the headlines for a few months, and then we had fled. And the rest is silence. Or the big sleep, if you prefer Chandler to Shakespeare. Eugen Bergman had an interest, of course, but that was professional rather than brotherly love. Our children? Huh. Christa? I doubted it.

  Perhaps I underestimate the significance of the circle of academic friends that Martin had assembled over the years, but that is not for me to judge. I have been underestimating things and making wrong choices all my life.

  The fact that I saw no point at all in exchanging such thoughts with the man snoring by my side spoke volumes, of course. I remember leaning down and stroking Castor for quite some time, and that he responded by licking my right ear clean, as he usually does.

  But I venture to suggest that something deep down inside me woke up during that voyage over the Baltic Sea. Something that ought to have been left to sleep in peace. But if you insist on riding your high horses, it no doubt becomes a case of your will versus fate, your choices and motives. Needless to say I can’t find the words to pin it down more specifically, apart from what I have already said: so much was left behind in the Monkeyhouse, and that damned family home in Nynäshamn. Thirty years of hard-fought life experiences – how petty they seem on a sunny day at sea.

  It took only half an hour to drive from the ferry terminal at Świnoujście to Professor Soblewski’s house. It was a large, old wooden mansion in a beech wood not far from the sea. It had been built in the thirties by some Nazi bigwig or other, and during the Communist years had served as a summer residence for party functionaries. This was explained by our host while we were drinking champagne on the terrace. He didn’t explain how he had come to acquire the property. He was in his seventies, well-mannered and quite charming. His thirty years younger wife, or perhaps partner, was called Jelena and spoke only broken English and German, and so conversation was somewhat halting. But I was used to that – two academic men talking and chuckling, two wives trying to smile.

  I am not sure about the point of our visit to Professor Soblewski. Perhaps Martin had filled me in, but I wasn’t listening attentively enough. In any case he had explained at an early stage that we would take this route through Europe rather than the more obvious westerly one: Rødby-Puttgarden-Hamburg-Strasbourg . . . and so on. I know that Soblewski had been a member of the group that used to gather on Samos in the seventies, and in view of Martin’s past experiences – and what was the alleged purpose of the whole journey – I assumed that our visit had to do with Herold and Hyatt. In one way or another.

  But I may be wrong. Soblewski is a big name in the literary history world, and although I had never met him before, Martin had been in frequent contact with him over the years. We have half a dozen of his books at home in Nynäshamn, one of them even in translation: Under the Surface of Words.

  In any case we had a long and slightly strained dinner, just the four of us – and needless to say the strained aspect referred only to the two ladies present. The men had no difficulty at all in keeping the conversation going, and two carafes of red wine plus a few glasses of vodka helped matters along. Jelena drank vodka but not wine: the reverse was the case for me. The food and drink was served by a sombre-looking woman with a limp: Professor Soblewski informed us that she was a distant relative who had been ill-treated by life.

  After the coffee, I asked permission to withdraw – which was granted. As I lay in the large double bed on the upper floor, waiting for sleep to swallow me up, I could hear the voices of Martin and Soblewski in the room down below for several hours. They were arguing and discussing, and sounded very enthusiastic, occasionally even aggressive: but I have no idea what they were talking about. Not then, and not now, seventeen days later. I think it was almost half past two when Martin tumbled into bed beside me. He was enveloped in a cloud of vodka.

  11

  The fifth of November. Thirteen degrees. Fog.

  We went northwards on our morning walk, towards what is called the Punchbowl and Wambarrows. Wambarrows is one of the highest points on the whole moor, but visibility today was no more than thirty or forty metres and the world was hiding away. We followed a well-trodden path, which was very muddy in parts and difficult to cope with; and in order to avoid the risk of getting lost we turned round after half an hour and followed the same route back. No wild ponies loomed up out of the mist, just the usual screeching pheasants. And the occasional crow. I’m grateful for the fact that Castor has no trace of any kind of hunting instinct: it would be difficult to wander around as we do with a different kind of dog. But he trotted along as usual, ten metres behind on the way out, ten metres ahead on the way home.

  We also came upon ‘that woman’s grave’, as Mr Tawking put it. Surrounded by a circle of low, windswept trees is a small metal plate on a wooden stake: In memory of Elizabeth Williford Barrett, 1911–1961.

  Nothing more. It didn’t look like a grave. I thought it was probably where her ashes had been scattered in this private little memorial grove.

  Who was she? And why this barren spot? No more than a hundred metres from Darne Lodge. She only lived to be fifty years old, and I thought I ought to find out more about her. Not today, but in due course. She is my nearest neighbour after all.

  I had lit a fire before we set off, and the house was warm when we got back. I had my breakfast in peace and quiet while reading the first thirty pages of Bleak House. It’s difficult to grasp that the description of a London fog in the opening chapter is a hundred and fifty years old. It could just as well have been written today. I haven’t read all that much Dickens, but Martin has always rated him highly. Maybe I’ll make it routine to read thirty pages of Bleak House every morning: that would make it last for a month, and then I can go to the antiquarian bookshop in Dulverton and buy a new Dickens. Why not? I need to build up my day-to-day existence around practical rituals – now is a time to proceed prudently, not to dismantle everything.

  When I look out of the window and compare my Exmoor mist with Dickens’s nineteenth-century fog it feels as if it were a living being, just as he claimed. A sophisticated and intelligent enemy intent on encircling, penetrating and swallowing up everything. As patient and methodical as a virus, it needs bodies with as much energy as the sun to defend themselves in the long run, and needless to say the environment Castor and I have done our best to create will submit eventually. But I think that in fact it is just a variation on the old, familiar theory about the incorruptibility of life and death and the forces of nature, and I persuade myself that I should not succumb to passing whims. And concentrate on outliving my dog, as I have said before. Make decisions and stick to them. Fog or no fog.

  Shortly after eleven o’clock we got into the car and set off for Exford. That is a village slightly larger than Winsford: two local pubs instead of one, a separate post office and general store, and with plenty of overnight accommodation for passing visitors. We bought a newspaper, then continued north-we
stwards over the moor: I suspected that this was the part of the moor that Mark Britton had referred to. But there were no views at all of the Bristol Channel and Wales which were allegedly visible on a clear day.

  Then the road sloped steeply down into Porlock, before following the coast to Minehead. I had consulted the map carefully before setting out, and stopped occasionally in order to establish exactly where we were.

  Minehead is a real town – no doubt a tourist destination of significance in the summer, but comparatively deserted at this time of year. We parked the car, then walked along the main street – The Avenue – to the sea. We found a launderette, where I eventually managed to fill and start two machines after various problems, and not far away was an open internet cafe. I bought tea and scones, and with Castor under the table I opened our mailboxes for the first time since we left Sweden. First my own, and then Martin’s. I must admit that my heart was racing. I hadn’t taken our own computers with me, but was sitting at one of the cafe’s six slightly old-fashioned setups: I had the impression that this is what one was supposed to do, even if I had seen youngsters with their own computers linked in to up-to-date connections at Starbucks and Espresso House. But I had failed to find either of these coffee temples in sleepy Minehead.

  My inbox contained no fewer than thirty-six new messages, thirty-one of them general and of no interest, but five personal ones. Among the latter were two invitations to autumn parties, one from colleagues at the Monkeyhouse, the other from a friend and former colleague from Skåne who organizes a Martinmas party every year in her home in Söder in Stockholm – I’ve been receiving the same invitation every year since 2003, the only time I accepted. Since this year’s party had already taken place I didn’t bother to reply. The other three personal messages were from Synn, Violetta – who is living in our house in Nynäshamn – and Christa. None of them was more than three lines long. Violetta had a query about rubbish collection, that I was able to answer forthwith. Synn just wanted to know that all was well and wondered where we were – the sending date was eight days ago. I wrote a polite but non-committal reply to the effect that we were doing fine, had arrived in Morocco, and hoped that everything was satisfactory in New York. Christa wrote as follows: