A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  On the fourth day, I couldn’t stand being indoors any more, so I took myself out and away. Mother had been concerned for me, when I first got back, but I think she saw it as a good sign, my wanting to be outdoors. Besides, she was still busy, even though the work for the new show had gone to Oslo, and she was too preoccupied with work to realise that, if I was spending so much time out of the house, it wasn’t because I’d been homesick and needed to reconnect with the meadows and the birch woods, but because I needed to avoid her for a while. Or maybe she did and was carefully hiding the fact, because – of course – she would have been just as concerned about saying or doing something that would make me feel bad. Or no: that wasn’t it. What I really mean to say is that she would have been careful not to give me the chance to do or say something that would cause pain, not to her, but to myself – because she was still in control, she had already considered and decided what must be done, whatever might unfold between us after my time away. Of course – and she was right, I have no doubt – I was the possible weak link, the awkward teenager, the clumsy child. That was what all the kindness and care were about, in those last days of the summer: she didn’t want me to make a mistake and upset myself. And how could I fail to appreciate that? The last thing I wanted was a meaningful conversation about Arild Frederiksen’s death, or one of those awkward silences in which everything goes awry. What I wanted, in fact, was to be left alone, because I didn’t want anyone, least of all Mother, to see that I hadn’t quite recovered from whatever it was that had plagued me during those two or three days in England – because, for a short time, it appeared that I had come close to losing my mind and, though I felt better now, I was afraid that, at any moment, I might slide back into the panic that had overtaken me in the art gallery.

  Meanwhile, it seemed that the summer – the true summer – was coming to an end. That true, warm, tragic and at the same time almost miraculous summer was disappearing, day by day, and I didn’t want to miss a moment of what was left. I wanted to walk in the meadows and sit out among the birch woods when the night gloaming seeped out from the interior; I wanted to stand on the shore and watch the big boats slowly make their way to the open sea; I wanted to go to Hillesøy and gather kråkebolle on the rocks, or pick handfuls of cloudberries at what sometimes felt like the edge of the world, alone and silent but for the shorebirds and an occasional gust of wind. I didn’t want to be indoors, and I didn’t want to be with people. I certainly didn’t want to have anything to do with Martin Crosbie. Or not at first, anyhow. During those first few days, I kept well clear of the hytte on the shore; I did everything I could to remain unseen – and unphotographed – and I didn’t spy. And then, unexpectedly, without meaning to, I saw him. I don’t suppose I had expected to avoid him forever, and it wouldn’t have come as a surprise, if he’d been alone, but he wasn’t alone, he was with the huldra – and I could see right away that they were together. It was ridiculous, not only that he and Maia had found each other, but also that it had happened so quickly – yet as soon as I saw them, I knew it was true. They were out on the meadows, walking side by side: not actually touching, but together in a way that was unmistakable, the way people from school would be together, in couples, when you saw them on the street in Tromsø, not touching, not doing anything, but linked, of one mind, in their own shared space. That was how Martin and Maia seemed, when I saw them that day. I didn’t know, then, how long they had been in that separate world, but it was obviously a new thing, something that still pleased and mystified them – or should I say, something that still pleased and mystified Martin, who was, no doubt, amazed at a turn of events that had brought him together with this beautiful, strange girl from the north, something he had never expected, and couldn’t have hoped for. Yes, this affair was new: it had started on the very day I had left for England and, from that first moment on, it had blossomed.

  Blossomed. Not the right word, perhaps, yet it did have that inevitable quality to it, like a flower opening. A rose, say, or one of Harstad’s Arctic poppies, turning perpetually to gaze into the sun. As soon as I saw them together, I knew that something was going on – which was odd, because they really weren’t doing any of the things that lovers do when they think they are alone. They weren’t touching each other, they didn’t stop halfway along the strand to kiss or gaze meaningfully into one another’s eyes, and there was a distance between them, a distance that was so correct, so very precise, you would have thought they had measured it out beforehand. On that first sighting, I could see that Martin was talking, turning every now and then to glance at Maia as they walked, and every now and then she would turn towards him, almost but not quite looking into his face, before turning away and gazing out across the Sound. She wasn’t being evasive, however; if anything, she seemed comfortable: happy to be there, perhaps, happy and even hopeful of something – and it was almost touching to see how happy Martin Crosbie was, walking on the shore with this pretty girl, who could have been one of the girls in his library of images, fresh from school and warmed by the summer sun, the beautiful innocent of his lonely fantasies. I didn’t think, then, what I had thought before. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, because, at that moment, I could see that something had changed in him. Naturally, the question of whether they were sleeping together crossed my mind, but only for a moment. On that visit to the hytte when I found the pictures, I’d assumed that his interest in those girls was sexual, plain and simple, but now I wasn’t so sure. It all looked so innocent, so – romantic. And that was why I gave him the benefit of the doubt: because he looked like a man in love – as if a man in love couldn’t also be dangerous, as if a man in love couldn’t cause anybody any harm.

  At the time, though, I didn’t give Martin’s new romance much thought. All I wanted was to be left alone, so I could devote myself to not thinking about anything. So, considering my need for solitude, it seems odd that I would have sought out company, especially the company of Mother’s suitors, but on the first Saturday after I got back, for reasons I wasn’t quite sure about, I invited myself to the morning tea party. I’d sat in before, of course, but I’d quickly get bored and leave, and the suitors had tolerated me, because they knew that I never stayed long. That morning, however, I lingered for much longer than usual, because Ryvold wasn’t there, and that was odd. Ever since he’d first arrived in the group, he had come every week, without fail. He was a permanent fixture and, though it was never acknowledged, the truth was that everything revolved around him. There were times when he didn’t say very much, but what he did say, or what he might say in certain circumstances, had always set the tone of the discussion – and I can see now that Mother depended on him for whatever pleasure or entertainment she got out of those mornings. She loved Rott, I think, the way you love a puppy, but Ryvold came as near as any outsider could come to being real in her world – and that morning, as the suitors gathered around the table, Ryvold was conspicuously absent.

  He had been absent the previous week, too, while I was away. Nobody had thought anything of it at the time – one of the others thought he’d seen him getting out of a taxi outside the airport in Tromsø, and they had agreed to assume that he’d probably had to go away suddenly on business. It would have to have been very sudden, though, because Ryvold wouldn’t miss a Saturday morning without letting Mother know that he couldn’t come. Nobody would have imagined him failing to appear without some kind of explanation – but now, for the second week running, he had.

  And now, for the first time ever, I was a full member of the Saturday-morning tea party. Not just a drop-in visitor on the way to something else, but a stubborn presence in the suitors’ midst. There were four that day: Rott, Harstad, a very thin, rather distinguished-looking man named Nilsson who didn’t come very often, and a man with very blue eyes and oddly gull-like features whose name I didn’t even know, though I’d seen him a couple of times walking up the front path. They couldn’t figure out how to deal with me, not after the first twenty minutes or
so had passed and I still hadn’t made my excuses and left. It was as if I was there in Ryvold’s place, come to sit in for him during his unexplained absence, and that made them restless and ill at ease. Mother didn’t know why I was lingering either, but she was enjoying the discomfiture of her guests, a discomfiture that became more and more obvious, the longer I stayed in my chair.

  The conversation was general, at least to begin with. Nobody mentioned Ryvold, of course. Polite interest was shown in my plans for the future – what was I going to do, now that I had finished school? How did the exams go? Was I going away to college or had I something else planned? – but I didn’t mind that, for once. I was curious about Ryvold, curious about what he had said the last time he had come to the house. I had forgotten to tell Mother, at the time, about that unscheduled visit – the discussions about my trip to England had distracted me – and now it was too late to explain. Not that I would have tried to, with the suitors present. I hadn’t suspected, when Ryvold came to the house, that he had come to say goodbye. Yet, apparently, he had and, as we all sat round the dining table, eating Danish biscuits and napoleon cake – it takes great artfulness and physical tact to eat a napoleon cake in public, something Rott had never realised, though he’d eaten enough of them – I could see that Mother was perplexed. Not so much by his absence, which I’m sure she still believed would be explained, sooner or later, as by the question of how to get through another Saturday-morning gathering without him.

  The conversation was general, and it was dull: when conversation is general, it usually is. I kept waiting for someone to mention Ryvold, but nobody did. I looked at Mother. Was she annoyed by his unexplained absence? Did it even matter to her, one way or another? She didn’t seem upset; if anything, she appeared to be enjoying the situation. As time passed, though, her interest flagged. Everybody was uncomfortable by then, and not just because I was lingering beyond my allotted time. No: they were missing Ryvold. It bothered them that they didn’t know where he was, or when he would be back – and it soon became obvious that they missed him, each man in his own heart, because they didn’t know how to conduct themselves in his absence. Without Ryvold there, setting the tone, each of them was afraid that he would do or say something foolish. Yet they continued stolidly to pretend that nothing unusual was happening. Eventually, I couldn’t bear it. I looked around the table at them all, then I turned to Mother and said, quite casually, ‘I wonder where Mr Ryvold is?’

  She looked surprised. She studied my face for a moment, as if she was trying to work something out, then she shook her head. ‘Nobody knows,’ she said. ‘He’s simply vanished from the face of the earth.’ She smiled. ‘Isn’t it curious?’ she said, to the suitors as much as to me, though she wasn’t really talking to any of us. She had taken my question as a provocation, a tiny piece of childish theatre – which it no doubt was – and she was delighted.

  The others were far from delighted, however. In fact, Mother’s response made them more uncomfortable than ever. Nobody said anything and nobody looked at me and, for a long moment, there was silence – that moment when, as the French say, un ange passe. An angel passes. Though I suppose that expression denotes a natural, easy silence, rather than the awkward hiatus that lasted for just too long, before it was broken by Rott, who craned forward suddenly and, obviously overcome by the allure of the last napoleon cake sitting lonely on its willow-pattern cake stand in the middle of the table, lifted it carefully, between thumb and forefinger, and transferred it to his plate with a tiny and almost imperceptible sigh.

  The tea party was still in session when I left, but I couldn’t imagine it continuing for very much longer. Mother was bored, and though she was too gracious a hostess to let her guests see it, she wanted them gone so she could get back to the studio. I had realised, by then, that she was surprised at how much she missed Ryvold and I think, looking back, that she had already started wondering why she bothered with these Saturday mornings. With Ryvold there, they had been pleasant; without him, they were awkward and dull. And I believe that did surprise her. It surprised her that, in some area of her life, no matter how inconsequential, she had come to rely upon someone else.

  As for me – well, I would have liked to know more about what was going on, but it was obvious that I wouldn’t learn anything by lingering at Mother’s table, so I excused myself and went off to spy on Martin Crosbie and his girl. I thought I would find them walking on the shore, or sitting on the lawn by the boathouse, having tea or eating ice cream, but when I got to the meadows, the hytte looked to be deserted. Martin’s car wasn’t parked in the usual place, and there was no sign of activity, other than the seabirds floating in above the meadow and then out again, over the beach beyond. I wondered if Martin had taken Maia on an outing, maybe over to Andøya; or maybe they had gone on the trip north he’d talked about. It was a grey day, but it was dry, and I remember being aware of that effect I liked so much on certain late-summer afternoons, the sense that the land had started to separate out into distinct zones of light and dark, a patch of deep shadow here, an unlikely glimmering there, near blackness along the line of the narrow stream that ran by the edge of Kyrre’s field and trickled out on to the beach below, a faint shimmer streaked through the grass around the boathouse, where the meadow met shingle. It happens like that, sometimes, on days when there is no sun, yet the cloud cover is high and thin, and it makes the whole world look like one of Mother’s paintings, or the landscape in a fifties movie. It’s as if the land can’t decide whether it’s in colour or black and white and so settles for something that is neither one nor the other.

  I’ve always loved the meadows in late summer, when the wildflowers are all in bloom, more or less together, and everything – plants, butterflies, shorebirds, the minor nations of animals and insects – everything that lives here is hurrying to grow and multiply before the cold returns. There’s something miraculous about these short summers, the way life continues, laying up just enough fat and seed to carry it through another dark time. Everything works together, and nothing is lost. It still surprises me, now and then, to think that Mother goes to such lengths to grow the big, showy flowers that populate her inner garden – the peonies and opium poppies, the wild roses, the penstemons and delphiniums that barely flower against the south wall before they are gone, the black-eyed Susans and marguerites that have to be renewed every few weeks – I can’t believe she would work so hard at that, when the meadows are here, all around us, full of the wildflowers and grasses that belong to this place. It would seem more logical if the garden featured in her art but, apart from the odd watercolour, it’s the world outside our perimeter that haunts her canvases, the world of wind and salt water and rock-splitting frosts that she works so hard to exclude from the half-acre plot that immediately surrounds us. I don’t know why that is: to me, the garden is really another room of the house, an outer sunroom whose decor can only be maintained by endless expense and painstaking work. It’s so unlike Mother; so profligate. Even in the summer, things die all the time and are constantly having to be replaced, while in winter, almost everything dies, and very little of what survives one summer makes it through to the next. Yet when Mother was choosing an emblem for one of her catalogues, she chose the Arctic poppy, the flower she has often said, in exhibition notes and to curious journalists, is her favourite. A plant that belongs here, yet probably wouldn’t survive in her overly cultivated plot, a plant that lives out in the open, turning around and around to follow the midnight sun, in a patch of moss and stones, somewhere on the Finnmarksvidda. She is, as Ryvold used to say, a mass of contradictions, this woman – though I’m not sure that he is right when he would add, as he always did, that this is why we love her.

  I don’t want to suggest that I dislike the garden, however. It’s beautiful, of course it is, and I often find myself carrying one of the sunroom chairs out into the rock garden, to sit amid the colours and scents that Mother works so hard to contrive. It’s just that I prefer being o
ut in the open, out on the meadows with the salt wind blowing up from the shore, out with the birds and the clouds and the line of the horizon. For me, Mother’s garden is too sheltered. Too sheltered, and too enclosed, hemmed in by the birch woods and the carved rocks that rise on the north and west side. You can’t really see into the distance – or rather, in those places where you can see, it feels like a calculated illusion. A vista. Out in the open, I can turn and and see the whole world stretching away to the horizon and, at the same time, I feel myself in heaven’s eye.

  I could see all around me, but I didn’t see Maia until it was almost too late. I’d assumed that, because Martin’s car was gone, she would be gone too, but as I made my way across the upper meadow, I saw her – just a flicker of movement at first, then a human form, crossing the space between the lush meadow and the stark line of the shore. I didn’t think she had seen me – though later, when I took the time to reflect on the moment, I couldn’t help thinking that she’d probably noticed I was there long before I was aware of her, and had chosen to pretend she was alone. And if that was true, then she was showing me something. I can’t swear to it, but I think she wanted me – or not me, so much, as some random witness – to see that she had changed. And it was true, without a doubt: something really was different about her. That game she had played, that old tomboy bluff, was gone, replaced now by an immense, dark calm. Or not calm, so much as the air of someone who has seen the worst and feels the relief of knowing that it isn’t as bad as she had expected. A relief – and a sudden realisation that, now, she could do anything she liked. Once, she had seemed lost – an unwanted child, reduced to anger and pride and the limited satisfaction of putting a brave face on it; now, she had seen how magical it was, this feeling of having nowhere to go. Something was different – and, for a moment, I was frightened for her. She had lost her bounce, it was true, and she had started to relax – but she was relaxing into something terrible, and she was going about the world in a state of complete indifference to whatever might come, a wild girl with dream patterns and faint, dark animals etched on her skin, a creature who had passed beyond fear and was, therefore, beyond saving.