Part 21 (1/2)

But why not? She couldn't understand, and she held him off, grabbing his upper arms and forcing him up so that she could see his face.

'You're a teacher so of course you would have gone up and asked what had happened and put yourself at the disposal of the authorities.'

His mockery was now friendly. She remembered the interrogation down in the Stromgrens' kitchen and thought he was mistaken about her. But not entirely.

They had not wanted to get involved. He said Petrus and Brita were worried about the girls. If the Starhill commune were mentioned in the papers because they had been questioned by the police, that wouldn't be good for the custody dispute. Nor was it good that people had died close to Starhill, and it would be best not to know anything whatsoever about what had happened.

One of them had had the idea of going down to Roback and pretending they had been there all night. The children had slept there, hadn't they? It would seem credible that the adults had also done so. But Dan and Barbro had to go on to Bjornstubacken because the VW Beetle was up there. Barbro couldn't have been in Roback. She didn't know Yvonne and had no good reason to be there.

So Dan and Barbro had set off eastwards where the path divided and had continued down to the bridge and Bjornstubacken. The others had left the path and gone down towards the Kloppen. It had been difficult for onis and Brita to walk on unbeaten tracks, but then they had found the path along the lake and followed it to the outlet at the Roback and had turned up at Yvonne's. She had been in complete agreement that they had done the right thing.

His p.e.n.i.s was between her thighs, trying to nudge its way in. She felt it as a round head, puppylike, with an innocent forehead. She had no desire to reject his playfulness, nor could she. But it was strange that while he moved inside her, she was thinking about that light night when she had been drifting about in the marshlands looking for the paths.

He was not that big, but swelled inside her and her own desire also swelled for every soft thrust, her walls tightening and loosening again, a.s.suaging the memory of her terror, diffusing it, melting it down into a blurred recollection of confusion.

If he had asked why she had walked across unfamiliar and treacherous ground instead of trying to find somewhere to stay in the village, she would not have had an answer. She had answered in a muddled way when the police had asked her, almost lied, in any case kept some things quiet.

We didn't want to expose our confusion, she thought, not even to each other, though we ought to have. He had not told the truth about Midsummer Eve because he was ashamed. He hadn't gone to Nirsbuan expecting me to go there at all. He thought I was staying in Roback with Yvonne.

He had had a guilty conscience because he had done nothing about the cottage. We were to live there, he had promised me that. So he went there to see if he could do something about it in a hurry.

Dan always has so many irons in the fire. He promises too much. Dan, so delicious, so intensely warm and delicious, moving inside me, slowly, who is inside me and as confused and ashamed as I am.

'It doesn't matter any longer about Nirsbuan,' she whispered. 'I wouldn't want to live there, anyhow. Not now after what's happened. It's better here with the others.'

'Are you frightened?'

'Sometimes.'

He tickled her with his tongue in the cleft in her upper lip. It was a game she recognised. In the end he used to get her to put her legs round his back and make a violent movement towards him. But her desire was splintered, coming and going.

'Don't think, don't think,' he whispered.

'Just one thing. When you were at Nirsbuan. I can't understand how you got into the cottage?'

'Not difficult. The Brandbergs always hang the key under the eaves.'

Later, when summer was on its way out and the haymaking over, Mia wanted to sleep in the hay. They took blankets and pillows up with them to the loft in the barn. Annie herself had helped fill it with the fine meadow hay from the pastureland. They lay enjoying the scents, which might have been mint, white clover and maiden pinks. The bright yellow of the b.u.t.tercups faded in the darkness and the columbines grew brittle. She and Lotta and Mia rustled and giggled beside each other. Mia didn't want to go back to bed that night, but slept in the hay. As you and Dan did, she said.

But Annie hadn't slept that night when it was raining, though she said nothing about it now, just fell in with Mia. Not until towards four in the morning did Mia start complaining of the cold. Annie carried her down and put her into her own bed, and Lotta followed with the blankets and pillows and the Moomin book, which they hadn't been able to read because it had been too dark up in the loft. The summer was drawing to an end and it was no longer so brilliantly light at night.

No, she hadn't slept at all that night with Dan, although they had stayed there until three in the morning. He had slept, his breathing calm as he lay curled up in the curve her body formed round his back. She had hardly dared move for fear of waking him.

She had lain there seeing Nirsbuan before her eyes. The door of the cottage. The metal bar and the padlock that no one had unlocked. There was no other way of remembering it. That was what it had been like.

The man looked like a satyr the goatee, the moist red lower lip. Was that why the villagers said he kept a harem?

A herd of goats had faced Birger on his way up. He hadn't dared turn his back on the big billy goat and had had to make grotesque twists and turns to keep it ahead of him. The billy goat was a s.h.a.ggy grey and yellow, his horns coa.r.s.e and curved, a dark-spotted s.c.r.o.t.u.m weighing at least a kilo dangling between his hind legs. The goats were inquisitive, staring fixedly at him, pressing round him on the path so he didn't dare sit down to rest. Once up there, he was exhausted, a st.i.tch in his side and blisters here and there.

Marta had told him they had already had a visit from the social services and he wondered who had had the energy to get up there. Marta had shown him the large headline in the local paper: FIRST CHILD BORN AT STARHILL.

Below it had been a photo of the parents. The man with the cloven beard was holding the child. He was wearing a kind of bobble hat. The woman sat beside him on a porch entwined with hops. Two women, a small boy and a dog were sitting in the gra.s.s below the steps. Annie Raft could not be seen in the photo. Round the corner of the house peered a face which he thought was a boy's. Then he realised it was the little girl he had examined at the Stromgrens'. She had had her hair cut and he thought she looked thin.

The memory of the little face he had seen at Oriana and Henry's came back to him. The greyish light of a summer's night in the room had been deceptive and he'd thought she had been abused, but then he'd seen the swellings were caused by insect bites. Looking at the photo, he was uncertain. The small face was blurred, thin, resolute. How was she? Did she get enough to eat up there?

The social worker had told them the baby was healthy. But had they looked at the girl? Marta didn't know.

The goat-man had no cap on now. He received Birger with a friendliness that made him ashamed of having acquired papers from the company to say he was allowed to fish in the two small lakes below Starhill and spend the night at the club cottage. He had been afraid they would be suspicious if he came for no particular reason. He remembered Annie Raft, her remoteness during that first questioning.

The Starhill crofter really had four womenfolk, which must have been what the villagers meant. No man put in an appearance and the diabetic man and his woman seemed to have gone.

They had come to his surgery a week or two earlier, the man pale and complaining of headaches. His skin was cold and moist and he had begun to get small sores on his feet that refused to heal.

The woman had sat in the waiting room in her long woollen skirt, a kerchief on her head pulled right down over her forehead, hiding her hair. She had said nothing and had scarcely even looked up from her knitting, but she had spread a strange atmosphere in the room. Eight people were waiting and not one of them said a word, nor did they touch any of the tattered magazines.

Birger fetched her in to ask about their diet and way of life at Starhill and she told him that the man had had severe insulin troubles. One day during haymaking he had almost gone into an insulin coma. He seemed ashamed to mention it himself. She had had the presence of mind to put out a bowl of the soft goat's cheese for him and he had gobbled down the lot and recovered. Otherwise they ate mostly potatoes and goat's meat, milk and cheese, just the things he ought to be very careful about. Besides, he was supposed to take light and regular exercise, not do heavy physical labour. Birger advised him to move back to Nynashamn, his original home town.

'And when it comes to hash and that sort of thing,' he had said, 'you must realise yourselves that it's just not on in this situation.'

Thank heavens they hadn't got angry. They were probably too tired. She just said quietly that they had nothing to do with that kind of thing that was those people down in Roback.

He knew Yvonne in Roback had been caught when she had crossed the border with a stash of marijuana. She and her two lodgers, a couple of strays considerably older than she, had been charged. She maintained that they had only been on their way to a party and she hadn't sold anything. The court had been inclined to believe her. For one thing, they were friendly with some Norwegian petty rogues in a village just over the border, and for another, the marijuana was of very poor quality, according to the police. In fact, hardly saleable.

The police had found hemp plants flouris.h.i.+ng in a mountain crevice below Starhill when they searched the terrain after the murders, by the Lobber. Then the customs people had begun checking on Yvonne whenever she crossed the border in her old Volkswagen bus. She maintained the commune had nothing to do with growing it, but the police suspected one of the men up there. Birger didn't believe it was the diabetic. He and his woman had seemed much too wretched. Their faces remained with him, hers thin and sunburnt, his pale and flabby. Marta had arranged a draught in the surgery after they had gone, to rid it of the strong smell of goat they had brought with them.

He couldn't smell it up here. One of the women was conspicuously beautiful, with very fair hair but dark eyebrows and eyelashes, dark-blue eyes and a marked cupid's bow. She was severely overweight and must have found it as difficult as he had getting up to Starhill.

That might be a solution for me, he thought. A plump woman. Swayingly fat. A meeting between two lots of generous flesh, our angular cores embedded. She must have dark hair down there. And those beautiful eyes and thick eyelashes, her mouth, the contours of her upper lip, which seemed all the clearer and finer because the rest of her face had flowed out into the fat. b.u.t.tocks fitting tightly together, huge thighs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s weighed down and swinging towards the midpoint of the earth.

The man with the divided beard was talking eagerly about cheese mould. The billy goat is in me, Birger thought. The satyr. This man's only interested in goat's cheese.

He knew people as far away as Byvngen were divided into two camps, one considering the commune should be eradicated like vermin, and the other thinking they ought to be allowed to stay. They were putting a derelict place in order and bringing some life into the area, letting animals into the forest, which the company could well have done, mowing the pasture where the wild Silvatic.u.m geranium and the poisonous monkshood were taking over and the scrub creeping in.

Without thinking about it, he had joined the tolerant camp. He was used to doing that with Barbro. He reckoned they could stay as long as they didn't neglect the children.

Up here, he couldn't take a stand, his att.i.tude vacillating. He was angry when he saw the ramshackle clubhouse and wondered whether they knew it wasn't insulated. How would they cope with the winter? When the fat woman called Marianne leant over and poured herb tea into his mug, he was uneasy. She didn't smell of goat, but of milk and cotton fabric and warm skin. The divide between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s was deep and narrow. In confusion, he raised his eyes and looked out over the pastureland. In three directions he could see the mountain ridges, the dark-blue precipices, the patchy, still snow-covered peaks which looked like grouse b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the thaw, the s.h.i.+fting green and blue slopes of marshland down towards the forest. The sky was blue-white, sizzling in the hot air above the pasture.

He wondered what it would be like to live alone here with four women and have their quiet voices and gentle movements around him all day. The murmur of the stream and the wet swaying tussocks in the marsh down towards the lakes. The feel of water.

He couldn't think of it in any other way: the feel of water running through the ground, flowing and trickling over it. The meadowsweet had firm whitish-pink buds in their panicles and he could smell that they were just beginning to come out. Filipendula ulmaria. Soon they would sweep sweetly over the fields. At night when he was out on call, he sometimes had to drive off the road and sleep for a while. When he woke and got out to relieve himself, that scent lay floating like bands of something ambiguous and intoxicating in the smell of the marsh. Elks would stand there munching in the mist, half-asleep perhaps in the fragrance. You lived in it here and walked every day on the oozing ground, inhaling the smell of the marsh and seeing it ferment and brew as the clouds of morning mist swirled above it.

That angular Annie Raft had become calmer here. She had also had her hair cut short and was wearing a pair of incredibly ragged, faded jeans instead of that long skirt. Her trousers and extremely short hair made her look modern among the others. She kept out of the way quite a lot, but didn't seem to have any objection to his talking to the little girl.

Mia told him that she didn't drink goat's milk, but her mother had had dried milk brought up for her. And Party Puffs. Birger didn't quite know what they were, but they sounded sweet. He was told that her mother had had her hair and her own cut short so that it was easier to wash. He felt relieved. Mia dragged kid goats round and showed him a dead shrew her kitten had caught. She was thin, but looked quite healthy and was sociable.

He had quailed slightly at asking the mother whether she would like him to prescribe vitamins for Mia and the boy who belonged to the beautiful Marianne, but his suggestion was not taken ungraciously.

He went fis.h.i.+ng in the evening and as he came out of the birch woods, he could see the long marshlands sloping down towards the lakes. The lakes were on different levels and from this high point just north of Starhill, he could see two of them like steps of water, reflecting the sky and taking their light from it, but the dark-yellow, metallic shade seemed to come from their own depths. The sh.o.r.es were already dark the light receding rapidly now. He could see the frost-scorched sedge marshes s.h.i.+fting in red and brown and a great many shades of yellow, their scent so unique and bound to those colours that the open channels in the marsh really seemed to be fermenting and steaming in reddish and golden brown. On the nearest marsh were a few poles from some long-ago haymaking.

Even right up here, he thought. Wherever they could harvest the meagre blades of gra.s.s. Everywhere inland further north. The realm of the sedge.