Part 10 (1/2)

Did she think he should have knocked? Had yet another displacement taken place without his noticing?

'This is my fault, too, Barbro,' he said.

And realised at once what a b.l.o.o.d.y stupid thing it had been to say.

'I mean, I know it's my fault.'

She stared at him, her eyes quite black; the pupils must have been enormously enlarged. Her mouth was tightly shut and colourless. He realised he couldn't tell her. What should he say? I was involved in a peculiar thing; it was at the Sulky, you know, that little hotel at the end of Rdhusgatan. It was the strangest thing that's ever happened to me, and then things turned out this way. That's why I seemed to sadden.

But he didn't say it, for he already knew she wouldn't ask what it was he had been through. She would just look. Her pupils were as large as crowberries now. He had to touch her instead and do it now, take her.

He really had thought he was going to do it. Then the moment when it was at least possible had gone. She twisted round, lay down with her back to him, her body quite still under the covers, her face invisible.

Then he did a h.e.l.l of a stupid thing. He took hold of her when it was wrong, although he knew it. He sat heavily down on the bed and put his hands on her shoulders, pulling her up round towards him. Her body twisted unnaturally because she neither cooperated nor resisted. He ran his lips over her hair and forehead, felt the knitted eyebrows, sought her mouth, and at that moment her arms shot out and she pushed him away, making a sound like a groan or a grunt.

At first he thought it was because he smelt of whisky; then came the true, profound humiliation. He knew he had been frightened of this all his life. In one way or another. He got up and went over to the door. She didn't move.

Talking c.r.a.p about the forest and the river and the guilt of the west. I have a double chin and sandals. That's all. Stomach, belly. That's it.

But she was in a bad way. Perhaps worse than she realised. He stood for a moment with his hand on the doorhandle, looking at the hump under the duvet. Not a strand of hair was visible. He felt calmer now. It was as if he were looking at a patient.

'Which one of you thought up that joke?' he said.

'What joke?'

'That he was to pretend to be your son?'

'I don't know. He did, probably.'

He was lying on the bed with the star pattern of the net curtain on his bare brown skin. There was sun in the room, body heat and moisture. The scent of him that used to come to her in her sleep rose from the bed, although nothing there was moving. A new pattern appeared to prevail, the light picking out other strands of hair among the ash blond. A movement could endanger the equilibrium in the room. Nor did it seem a movement as she slid down and the moist skin on his upper lip met her tongue, but more like a displacement of time, a slow movement of a wave bringing them together after weeks of cold and haste and hours of terror.

She whispered, 'Dan, Dan', thinking, I oughtn't to, anyhow not now, for the cottage is bright with sunlight and there are windows in all directions. Mia had spotted the Volkswagen Beetle when she woke. It had been driven down behind the barn on the opposite side of the road. They had rushed down from Aagot f.a.gerli's house to see if he had come.

But Mia had immediately gone out again. Perhaps it was the memory of that time. She ought not to have such memories, let alone be given any more. It's only natural, Dan said. Annie thought she could just see Mia's face up on the slope, hidden by birch scrub, then appearing again. But thinking was not possible now, sorting out what was good or not good. 'How did you find us?' she whispered, and he said it was the rucksack they had left on the steps. He had recognised it. The striped woollen rucksack from Crete.

'Why didn't you want to open the door?'

She said it into his ear at the very moment he entered her and she felt her nerves tingle. A tree of light branched all over her body. She forgot the question, but repeated it when he let her rest in a moment of calmer breathing, in restraint, while he whispered: 'Don't move, don't move.' And then: 'Open the door?'

For he knew nothing.

'Were you asleep? In Nirsbuan? It was you, wasn't it?'

She had no desire to talk much about it, not now anyway, and she couldn't bring herself to describe that terrible walk all over again. Nor did she need to, he said. Everything was all right now. Everything was just the way it should have been when she got off the bus. He said she enclosed him like a tight, soft, wet glove and so everything was all right now and she had no need to wonder. But she did think one thing was strange.

'But I knocked on the window.'

He knew nothing about that, but probably because he had been asleep, sound asleep.

'Why didn't you meet the bus? Did you think Mia and I were coming on the old Midsummer Eve?'

That was it. Nothing that had happened had anything to do with them. She had just happened to walk past. It was like being a witness to a train crash. It had nothing to do with you, but was simply terrible. They were free now.

She had been ensnared. A fish in a net. A thousand stupid things, people, regulations, papers and things, things, things. Like the car battery. In the winter it had to be taken out, carried indoors and left on the draining board, if it was more than ten degrees below zero and if the car was to start at a quarter to seven.

The child minder took tranquillisers because she needed to lose weight, but the truth was she couldn't even vacuum-clean without them. So on some days her face was like a pale moon with spots, and she had to be sent home. For Annie it was back to the car, the road, the black ice, lamplight. And at college. 'Sit down and draw now, Mia. I'll get you some biscuits.'

Eight lessons with biscuit crumbs and chalk dust and the smell of sweaters and exhalations, Mia wanting to pee and being bored, her chatter dispersing whatever concentration there had been in the cla.s.sroom, if any.

Dan had come to the college during the revolution. The revolt, anyhow. It had been slightly ridiculous, because he was so slim and his words so powerful. Beautiful little body, dark stubble. He never cared what he ate.

To revolt. That presumably really meant to roll round. Just as we rolled round. It hurt a little at first. 'Isn't it a little nice as well?' he whispered. Oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d.

At first in town, at an artist friend's of his. Those friends. Sometimes a three-week acquaintance: share everything, Kropotkin. But this one was the kind who still bought crisps. Cans of beer, bottles of turpentine, bags of potato crips, flattened tubes of paint, paint on cardboard plates, stained mattress. To revolt! With a pupil.

Grandmother Henny babysat in Karlbergsvagen, thinking Annie was on a course. Then Mia and she had begun to stay overnight in Malarvg, the second winter. That was the car battery. But Dan as well.

Out there, though, the atmosphere had turned grey around them. The revolt was sluggish in a county college of great brutes who wanted to be policemen and put rebels up against the wall. And little girls wanting to be nurses and dental receptionists and put on plasters and mend people as well as rebels.

In the corridor it always smelt of cake baking and hairspray. The pupils exchanged magazines and drank lager. Dan was a storm petrel but the storm was a long time coming. They were still was.h.i.+ng their nylon s.h.i.+rts and hanging them up to dry.

She would never have broken free. Although three colleagues had ceased talking to her, she would never have had the energy, never dared (Mia!), if he hadn't come in one morning when Mia was asleep and crept under the covers and made love wonderfully and sweetly as if in a summer cottage.

She would never have broken free if Mia hadn't woken, seen them and run out, still quite silent but crying, and met Arlen, who taught social studies.

'Dan's hurting Mummy!'

Then it was the princ.i.p.al, his light office with its tapestry pictures and woodwork bowls.

'Your presence here is no longer a matter of course.'

Trembling chin. The ballpoint to hold on to. He was more terrified than she was. G.o.d, how she had longed for a reprimand, a few gobs of words, real language! These academics on the staff, councillors and female volunteers.

Dan was like a dog shaking itself, not even wet. But my life.

It was the test. He must realise that.

Mia didn't want to come. That was already quite clear when they started driving up. She curled herself up into a ball in the back, put her hands over her face and said something inaudible in a sharp little voice. Anna asked Dan to stop.

'Want to go back home.'

Annie tried to explain, but she wouldn't listen.

'Want to go home. Want to go home.'

She was speaking doggedly behind her hands. Annie got out and went to sit in the back with her.

'We're going up to Starhill now. We're not going to Nirsbuan at all. And we can take another road to Starhill. We won't be going past where we walked before. We're going to live up there. There are other children there.'

Dan had started driving again while Annie was talking. Mia threw herself backwards, arching her back and screaming.