Groaning, white and puffy-eyed, she wakes. Her eyes are bewildered slits against the light. She doesn’t know where she is. Slowly he sees everything come back to her as she looks round Enid’s room, taking it in.
‘Oh, God, I feel terrible.’
‘Drink your coffee.’
He holds the cup carefully under her mouth so she can sip. She drinks it with her eyes shut, holding her head as if it hurts her. When half the coffee is gone she flops back on the pillow. Her eyes are clear, narrow, accusing.
‘Has she gone?’
‘She’s gone into town. I met her going out,’ he says steadily.
‘I don’t mean Enid. I mean that woman. Vicki. Has she gone, or is she still in my bed?’
Jesus. Vick. At once knows what she has seen.
‘I thought it would be a nice surprise for you when I came back early,’ says Nadine.
‘I made you toast. It will get cold,’ he says stupidly. His head rings. What does she know – what does she not know?
‘I’m going to get washed,’ says Nadine.
‘Darling–’
‘No. I’m going to get washed. I need a bath, really.’
She gets out of bed very carefully, holding on to the bedstead. Her dress is rucked and spoiled. She pulls it over her head, drops it to the floor, kicks it aside and steps unsteadily towards the door.
‘Be careful! You’ll fall.’
Kai follows Nadine down the stairs, watches her bare feet pad down each stair, follows her into the bathroom. She bends down, rinsing the bathtub with cold water, then lights the geyser pilot. It coughs, roars into flame and begins to spurt white-hot water.
‘I can never get this bloody thing right. I wish Enid was back, she’s much better with it.’
She leaves the bath to fill and bends over the washbasin, scrubbing fiercely at her teeth. When she stands up again, she turns dizzy and catches at Kai’s arm. ‘Go and make me some more coffee, Kai. I feel awful. Enid gave me some sleeping-pills.’
Once he’s out of the room she feels better. She runs in cold water and steps into the bath. The hot clean bath feels delicious. She’ll wash her hair. It smells of trains and drinks and stale nights. She’ll wash it all away.
When Kai carries in the coffee, she’s lying in the bath, her back arched, dipping her hair. She puts out a wet hand for the cup and he sits on the dirty-linen basket by the bath. He watches her tensed, bare body, streaming with water, the stomach muscles flat and tight under her skin, her breasts going shallow. How young she is. His hands remember the dead weight of Enid. Nadine sits up, pours shampoo into the palm of her hand and massages it into her hair.
‘I’ll move out,’ she says, shampooing hard.
‘But why – there’s no need for you to do that. Vick’s a friend, an old friend, that’s all. There’s nothing in it.’
She stares straight out at him from under her cap of white bubbles. ‘A friend,’ she levels at him.
He puts his hand on the side of the bath. It is trembling. He watches it, watches her noticing it.
‘Darling Nadine, she is a friend. She is one my business friends, you know that. She should not make you unhappy.’
His English slips, making her tender. Or does he know it works like that? She glances at him sharply.
‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘I love you.’
There’s sweat on his forehead. He looks very ill – why didn’t she notice that before? His fingers are tight on the rim of the bath.
‘You aren’t well, Kai,’ she says. ‘It’s all this running around. It’s destroying everything.’
‘Yeah,’ he says eagerly. ‘Yeah, you’re right. This business is killing me. Let’s go away, Nadine.’
His words pour through her, sweet as victories. He has never looked at her like this before. There’s something seriously wrong and he’s confiding in her, not Vicki. Maybe he’s telling the truth, there was nothing in it, just two old friends and too much to drink. He looks – frightened. She thinks of the wads of new money, the phone calls, the men Enid talked about, the ones who got rid of the squatters. Business. If things aren’t going well, he might have good reason to be frightened.
‘Darling Nadine, why don’t we go away now? Straight away? We can go to my country. I know a place there. Just us together. We can pack and go today. Tony’ll look after things here.’
She pats the lather on her hair, thinking. Time for ourselves. Time to be together. Just us. Darling Nadine. Her veins are warm with his words. And if we have time together we can sort things out. All that business in London – Tony – Paul Parrett – we can talk about it.
‘I’ll take you to my friend’s summer-house, Nadine. We can stay as long as we like. We can go now – we can go today. Say you’ll come.’
He doesn’t touch her, but he leans close, his face closing out the world, full of hunger. Of course she’ll come.
‘But won’t we need a lot of things? What about tickets? Do I need a visa?’
He shrugs, relaxing. ‘We’ve got money. What else d’you need?’ A touch of the old Kai.
‘Right.’ She leans back and sloshes water on to her hair. ‘Did Enid say what time she was coming back? I’ll have to say goodbye to her.’
She’d been going to talk to Enid. But Enid’s never liked Kai. Nadine knows what she’s going to say, and knows she doesn’t want to hear it now. The frowsty night, the witchy secrecy of Enid’s room: her clear statements; her stories; that stretching memory; no, Nadine doesn’t want any of that now.
‘You know what she’s like,’ says Kai. ‘She’ll have wandered off somewhere. She might not be back all day.’
Nadine frowns. It seems odd that Enid’s gone off like this, but never mind. ‘I’ll get ready. You go and pack.’
He smiles, kisses her wet head and goes out. Joy rises in her, coming from nowhere. As long as she doesn’t look outside the frame of now, she’s safe. Concentrate on now. Clean hair, clean jeans and top, leather jacket. Her face looks exactly the same as it usually does in the mornings. No one would guess all that had happened the night before. They are going away, she and Kai, the two of them. No Tony, no Vicki, no house, no cinema, no business. Only Kai and a wad of new money that will fly them through the air, fill them with food, whisk them into taxis, hire them cars. All they’ll hear will be the noise of money making things happen.
They stand outside the house with their two expensive leather bags at their feet. The sun is warm and gay on the steps and pavement, but already there’s a crisp edge to it. Autumn’s on its way. The plane trees above them rustle. Kai has ordered a taxi and it’ll be here in a minute.
‘Fuck,’ says Kai. ‘I forgot to write a note to Tony.’
‘You could ring from the airport.’
‘No. I must leave him a contact number in Helsinki.’
She doesn’t question anything. She stands in the sun, drinking in the air which tastes like cider, smiling dreamily downwards and watching for the taxi to appear round the corner of the square.
Kai walks past the notepad and pen by the telephone, leaps up the stairs to the spare room and opens the door. She is still there. He grips the body under buttocks and shoulders and carts it out to the landing. Looking up the attic stairs, he gauges the angle of fall. He can’t remember exactly how she lay. Now he has to look at her: the nodding flopping head, the skinny shoulders. And yet there seems so much of her. He puts her down at the foot of the stairs and begins to arrange her, hands forward, foot skewed to one side. She still moves quite easily: she hasn’t started to stiffen up yet. There’s something dark dribbling out of her nose. It smears the back of his hand and he wipes it off frantically, then steps back. She seems to subside a little, like an artist’s model relaxing into her pose. He backs off, goes into the bathroom and washes his hands hard, turning them over and over, applying soap to each finger. Then he leaves the bathroom and goes down the stairs without looking at Enid, though he can’t quite get the shape of her out of the corner of his eye
. It’s like something lodged there.
The breeze is blowing up Nadine’s freshly washed hair. She waves to him, points to the taxi turning at the corner and backing to their kerb. She picks up her bag, but he takes it from her and smiles, opening the taxi door, pushing in their bags, letting Nadine step in first. The taxi whirls them away on its practised wheels, and the last thing he sees is the sun glinting on his shut front door before they leave it all behind.
Twenty
So here we are. Here I am, alone with Kai, the way I always wanted to be. There is no telephone and nobody will call. It’s eight o’clock in the morning, cool and quiet. Here, autumn is coming fast. When we left England it was late summer and the air was warm. It was months since I’d needed to put on a jacket or a thick jersey. Now I’m wearing a cable-knit oiled wool jumper which Kai found packed away in a wooden chest in the bedroom here. It’s all right for me to wear it, he says – this is just old stuff which the Linnas keep here all year round. A couple of heavy jerseys, two pairs of waterproof trousers, a pair of fisherman’s waders, a long coat. It was all neatly folded and the clothes smelled of pinewood as we shook them out. I pulled the big jersey on over my leggings and wondered what the people were like who last wore these clothes. The jerseys had been washed before they were put away. The Linnas were old friends of Kai, he said, but he hadn’t seen much of them for years. Matti was a teacher and Marja was a paediatric nurse. Good people. Kai knew Matti when they were students. Marja probably bent down, filling the chest, while the children skipped round the veranda waving the buckets they’d been told to put in the car. There’s a photo of the children on the wall. Their skin is smoothly tanned and their hair is white.
The summer-house was packed up for the winter when we arrived. Matti and Marja wouldn’t be coming back until spring. The place looked as if it had been put to bed, to sleep for months under the snow. We drove for hours and hours to get here. We’d flown from London to Helsinki and spent the night in a hotel there, then we flew on to Tampere the next morning. Kai bought a car in Tampere. He paid cash. He changed a lot of money at the airport. He didn’t want to go to a car-hire firm, but he knew a man in Tampere who sold second-hand cars. We went to his flat, and his wife told us we’d find him in a bar near by. It was full of men and smoke: short grey men in bright jackets with sports logos on them. They stared at us. We went round to the man’s garage and there was a yellow Saab with 100,000 kilometres on the clock. Not at all the kind of car Kai usually drives, but he gave the man cash. It must have been plenty, because he shook my hand as well as Kai’s, and wanted us to come for a drink with him, but we didn’t. I was prickly with irritation, not knowing what people were saying or even what their names were. But another side of me relaxed into Kai’s shadow and was glad not to think of anything.
The Saab was a good car, built for rain and blizzards. You could see the point of it as soon as we got out of Tampere. We kept driving north-east, and soon there wasn’t much traffic on the roads. All the summer visitors were back in the cities, Kai said, and the summer-houses were shut. I was tired because I hadn’t slept well in the hotel in Helsinki. It was too hot in our room, and some engineers came back drunk at two o’clock in the morning and made a row in the corridor. I wanted to look round Helsinki the next morning, but Kai said he’d had enough of cities. ‘Let’s get away from everything,’ he said. It seemed a pity not to stay and look at the harbour, and the boats leaving for Tallinn and St Petersburg. I’d always wanted to go to St Petersburg. It was hard to believe that now it was only a hundred and fifty miles away, and if we got into a train and headed east we’d soon be in Russia. Kai bought me a map of Finland so I’d know where I was, and where we were going. It kept shocking me slightly when I heard him speaking Finnish, even though it was only to the hotel receptionist and the waitress at dinner and people like that. I’d never heard him talking his own language except on the telephone. I couldn’t understand a word of it. It wasn’t like not understanding German or Italian, where some of the words swim out of the blur because you know them from war films or operas. There weren’t any handholds at all. It wasn’t till then that I really understood how brilliant Kai’s English was. He could walk in and out of the two languages as if they were rooms in his house.
I’ve never seen such quiet roads. Sometimes a track led off into the forest, to a logging camp. Otherwise it was just forest, dark and quiet. I kept falling asleep, jerking awake, falling asleep again. It felt as if we’d been driving through the forest for ever, not speaking to each other. Kai had the radio on and it played long mournful songs with plenty of accordion. His favourites. He sang along in Finnish some of the time.
The tan on my feet looks yellow in this morning light, not brown. It’s too cold for sandals, and there’s been a heavy dew. Lucky I packed my Doc Martens. If I knew which ones to pick, I could go into the forest and gather mushrooms for breakfast; but I only know field mushrooms. Kai says that people here take mushrooms into the chemist’s for identification, if they aren’t sure what they’ve picked. There isn’t a chemist anywhere near here, though. No shops, no lights, no litter blowing along the ground, no advertisements, no sound of traffic. Just forest and water. We stopped at a town about twenty-five miles from the summer-house, on our way, and bought our stores in the little supermarket. It was a tiny town, more like a village, centred on the railway station. A group of kids was hanging over the railway bridge, gazing down the tracks until they disappeared into the forest. It was a quiet grey afternoon and the kids stared up at us, long and slow, then back down the track again. The girl on the till in the supermarket kept looking at Kai’s leather jacket until he said something to her which made her laugh. She was asking where he got it, he said. She liked the design. She had a good eye, I thought, remembering what that jacket had cost. I had my own leather jacket in the back of the car, slung over the seat. The wind ran over my arms and I thought I’d put it on, next time we stopped. It was nice being in the car. It was our own world with nobody else in it. I didn’t even want Kai talking to the girl on the till. Once we were alone, really alone, we’d work out everything that’d been happening.
Kai bought a trolleyful of tins and packets, and a sack of potatoes. He’d bought beer and vodka back in Tampere. I went and got some fruit: little scaly apples and grapes which had been in their plastic nests much too long. We dumped everything in the car and set off again. I felt as if I was going on holiday with my parents, the way you do when you’re a kid, not knowing how long the journey is going to be or where you’re going. Not really believing that the journey will ever end, and not really wanting it to. Just being taken.
‘When will we get there?’
‘Soon.’
There’s a small double bed and two bunks in the bedroom. The Linnas and their kids sleep all in one room when they’re at the summer-house, though Kai says they sleep out on the veranda too, if the mosquitoes aren’t too bad. There’s timber stacked under a tarpaulin behind the house, so I think they’re planning to build an extension, perhaps another bedroom. Marja and Matti built this place themselves. It’s the kind of little house in the forest which you think you could live in for the rest of your life. You know it so well, because of all the fairy stories about little houses deep in the forest. But in fairy stories something happens. A witch or a prince knocks at the door and everyone’s life changes. Here, nobody knocked. No one would come here until spring now, except for the hunters.
The bed is too small for us. Kai isn’t sleeping well. He tosses and kicks off the duvet. He groans and I try to wake him because I know he’s having a nightmare, but he throws me off and I have to listen until he starts making little sounds in his throat as if he’s choking and then he wakes and grabs for me. He’s sweaty and trembling. I think he’s ill. It’s cold at night and later on I wake up too, time after time, because he’s been throwing himself about in the bed again and the duvet’s fallen on to the rug.
I’ve moved across to the bottom bunk now. It’s
tiny, but fine for me as long as I don’t sit up suddenly and crack my head on the slats of the top bunk. I curl up against the pine walls. There are knots in the wood, and I expect the Linnas’ children trace out patterns of eyes and noses with their fingers before they go to sleep. Or perhaps one child stays awake later than the other, and he shuts his eyes and smells the wood and listens to the wind in the birches by the house and pretends this is a ship sailing through the forest. I used to wonder what Lulu imagined at night, what she dreamed, but she could never tell me. Sometimes she whimpered and cried. Perhaps the boy dreams of wolves. Kai hasn’t seen the Linna boys since they were babies. I don’t know when he telephoned the Linnas to ask if we could use the summer-house. The key was under a stone by the sauna door, wrapped in a plastic bag, and Kai knew where everything was. We’ll pack it all away again, when we leave.
You can’t see far from the veranda. There are no horizons. Just trees, and water. It’s an area of small lakes, nothing like Lake Saimaa in the east, Kai says, but the lake looks big enough to me. And it’s deep; it has that slaty shine you only get on deep water. There’s a little path down through the birch trees, from the summer-house to the lake’s edge. The Linnas have their little jetty there, and there’s a grey sandy bit of beach. The kids have been digging castles. The sand has nearly collapsed back into shape, but not quite. In the mornings the grass and moss is wet with dew. The Linnas keep a boat, but that’s put away for the winter too. There are a couple of rods, and when we first came Kai said he’d do some fishing, but he hasn’t. I’d like to fish. Birch leaves are falling into the lake already, very slowly, one by one, so that you find them floating there in the mornings, then they sink down. There’s a sharp smell in the air, the smell of autumn. In the middle of the day it still gets quite warm, and I spread out some cushions on the veranda and shut my eyes and let the sun run over my face. There are big dewy cobwebs on the veranda every morning. Sometimes I sit for a long time and watch the spider working her way round the web. Some days it is so still that every twig and leaf is reflected upside-down in the water. You can watch and watch until it feels as if the water and the forest are talking to each other in words you can’t quite hear and would never understand anyway. They lean close to one another, brushing against one another with sounds I’m too human to catch. I’ve never been anywhere so still. In England there’s always machinery operating far off, or a road not quite out of earshot, or the RAF splitting the sky overhead. But here every birdsong has its own space.
Burning Bright Page 22