Authors: Marika Cobbold
The waif had plumped up and her cuts had healed yet it was she, not he, who had ended the relationship. Gabriel had not come running back to me but he did still phone once a fortnight. I always imagined that these calls occurred at times when he found himself unaccountably out of sick old people, injured birds and kittens up trees, and was at loss as to what to do next. I would tell him that I was tickity boo and tum tiddily tum and never ever better. He would sound satisfied; another unfortunate had been ticked off his list, and then he’d hang up before I changed my mind and told him how I really felt. It was only a week since we had last spoken but after some hesitation I picked up the phone and dialled his mobile. I called him sufficiently rarely for him to sound concerned as he picked up. ‘Eliza, is everything all right?’
I told him everything was fine. There was silence as he waited for me to tell him more. So I said that actually I wasn’t completely fine and that I would like very much to see him. I never asked to see him. He was just finishing off at the hospital, he said. Then he would be right over.
I remembered that I was wearing my baggy grey dress and went up and changed into a somewhat less baggy grey dress. I added a short string of large fake pearls that, as my friend and colleague Beatrice had agreed when I had showed it to her, might have been taken for Chanel if Chanel made cheap-looking pearl necklaces. I reapplied some lipstick and then I went downstairs to wait.
The doorbell rang and I rushed down the stairs, pouncing as if he were prey. He filled up the doorway with his height and the width of his shoulders. He swept his cycling helmet off and raked back his fair hair. His cheeks were pink from exercise. He exuded life and warmth. We kissed, a brush of lips on cheeks.
In the kitchen I pulled out one of the cornflower-blue painted kitchen chairs for him and poured us some red wine. I wondered if he thought about the day we’d got those chairs. We had been wandering around the architectural salvage yards in Hackney looking for fire surrounds and old tiles. The four chairs, spindle-broken and white-chipped, had been huddled together outside at the back. One even missed a leg. But I had felt certain that deep down they were good chairs, they just needed someone to bring them out of themselves. Gabriel had not been convinced but it had been the month anniversary of our wedding and he had been in the mood to agree with pretty well everything I wanted to do. It had taken me the best part of two weeks to restore the chairs, working in the evening and at the weekends, but the result had been well worth it: four French café chairs, two blue and two the yellow of the chair in Van Gogh’s painting.
‘My godfather called,’ I said as I sat down opposite him. ‘And you look exhausted.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Are you talking about Rose’s father?’
I nodded. ‘It’s been twenty-five years. Well, give or take.’
‘Right,’ Gabriel said.
‘You really do look tired.’
‘I told you I’m fine.’
‘Well, I think you look tired.’
‘Do you want me to be?’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe. It would show you’re human. I know human is overrated but it would give us a connection at least. As in you’re human, I’m human; wow, whoever would have thought it.’
‘It upset you to hear from him?’
‘Well, yes it did. He was very nice and friendly so it wasn’t that.’
‘Then what?’
‘It’s just that it’s brought everything back.’
‘I thought you’d dealt with all that.’
‘I had. Sort of.’
‘So the call shouldn’t have upset you like this.’
‘I know. But try telling that to the call.’
‘What?’
‘You said the call shouldn’t have upset me so I said . . . oh never mind. I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘It’s not a bother. I’ve meant to pop around for ages. So did he say why he was getting back in touch after all this time?’
‘He said it was Rose.’
‘Rose?’
I pulled a face. ‘I know. Is he senile, do you think?’
Gabriel shrugged. ‘I would need to examine him in order to establish that.’
‘Insane?’
‘Same answer, I’m afraid. Did he sound insane or senile to you, apart from the bit about Rose?’
I was not a weeper as a rule but suddenly, and to the surprise of us both, I was crying. It was the shock of the call that did it, that and Gabriel sitting there as if he belonged, the glass of wine in his hand, his legs outstretched, cutting the kitchen floor in half. But at the sound of crying he straightened up like a soldier at reveille and reached across to take my hand. Next he got up to find some tissues. There were none in the kitchen so instead he tore off some kitchen roll and handed it to me. I dabbed at my eyes and blew my nose. I got up and threw the ball of paper in the bin and then I washed my hands.
‘Have you eaten yet?’ I asked. He shook his head. ‘Would you like to stay for supper?’ He said he would. I asked him if pasta and tomato sauce was OK. He said it was, which was lucky as that was all I had. That and parmesan cheese.
Saving lives was hungry work and Gabriel ate a whole plateful of the pasta in near silence before saying, ‘You shouldn’t be worried about meeting your godfather. It’s pretty normal, as you approach the end of your life, to want to tie up the loose ends. I see it all the time at work on the wards. It’s as if they have a mental list of I’s to dot and T’s to cross before they feel they can let go.’
I thought how it would be to be thought of simply as a loose end in Ian Bingham’s life. Being a loose end sounded relatively benign, and eminently solvable. I reached across and topped up our wine glasses.
He put his fork down and took my hand. His fair hair fell in a wave across his forehead and his blue-grey gaze was fond and my heart beat faster. ‘You’re not drinking, are you, Eliza?’
I withdrew my hand and straightened up, about to inform him that if what he meant was, was I drinking too much, the answer was no. But just as I was about to speak it occurred to me that maybe I should take on a sad dishevelled look and tell him, eyes downcast, that yes, yes I was, but that the love of a good man would most probably cure me of my filthy addiction now as it had done in the past.
I sighed. ‘No, I’m not. Not at all. But thank you for asking.’
‘Good.’ He smiled at me the way I’d seen him smile at patients, reassuring, caring yet detached. ‘Now, what would you like me to do? To help, I mean.’
I smiled back at him. I could do detached myself. ‘Nothing at all. I just needed someone to talk to who knew the history.’
The cab that Uncle Ian had booked to meet me at the airport was white with a yellow go-faster stripe and a cartoon chauffeur in 1950s uniform emblazoned on the side. They were the official taxis, Uncle Ian had told me, sounding like my mother. Any others might rob me or at least lose their way and end up taking me to Borås. Borås, by the sound of it, had to be a downtown rough-hewn bad-boy kind of place, I thought. I would Google it once I was back home. As we drove out of Gothenburg and into the snow-covered countryside I thought of Grandmother Eva, Uncle Ian’s mother, who had been Swedish. She had helped bring Rose up after Rose’s mother left. I had been very fond of her and she, although she obviously loved Rose the best, seemed to have had the space to love me too. In that I believe she was typically Swedish: even-handed.
Eva Bjorkman told us stories of dark woods and of meres as deep and as black as night. She told us of the Huldra, the Lady of the Forest who would lure handsome young men deep into the woods using her beauty and the magic of her voice. Sometimes the Huldra made love to the young men and rewarded them with untold riches but sometimes she abandoned them to the deep impenetrable forest from which no human could find their way out unaided. You knew you had been snared by the Huldra when she turned her hollow back on you and showed her tail, which was sometimes that of a cow and sometimes that of a fox. Rose and I had fought over who, in our games, would be the Huldra as opposed to the hapless swain. Rose, with her perfect beauty, looked the part but my singing had been just a little bit better and singing was a good way for a Huldra to lure. Then again my hands and feet were large, which was more the mark of a swain, hapless or not, than a temptress. We had ended up taking turns wearing the old white nightgown donated by Grandmother Eva although we never did manage to work out how to make our backs hollow. However, we had found an old fox’s brush in the dressing-up box in Eva’s attic and once we’d tied it to the back of a belt the rear view was pretty impressive. As Eva had said, the tail was definitely the most important give-away for a Huldra.
I smiled at the memory of when life had been both simple and full of promise as I sat there in the back of the cab driving me to Uncle Ian’s house some thirty miles outside of town. He had moved from the house that he had inherited from his mother, the house I had visited as a child. This new place was not far away, however, and as the car stopped at a crossroads I recognised the small white painted church with its green copper roof and tumbledown graveyard.
The sun sat low above the pine trees, not quite reaching the forest bed but casting pebbles of golden light across the snow that covered the ground like whipped egg white. Every window in every house was lit by a Christmas light. Rose and I had lights just like that for our bedroom windows, wooden with seven electric candles forming a chevron. Rose’s had been white and mine had been red. I wondered what had become of them.
The car took another left off the main road and drove down what was little more than a track through the fields. We turned a corner, the car slowed and we had arrived.
Three wooden buildings, dragon-blood red, with white-painted window frames and pine-green doors, were grouped round a slate stone courtyard swept clean of snow. Behind them was the forest. The driver got out of the car, opening the passenger door on the way to the boot. I stepped out, but gingerly, as if the ground were burning. I realised that the driver was speaking and I turned round and apologised. As I brought out my wallet my hands shook.
A door opened and a woman stepped out from the porch, waving. ‘Eliza.’ She placed the accent on the ‘i’ just as Eva had done. I squinted against the sun and then I waved back.
The woman was tall and lean but sturdily built. Her steel-grey hair was cropped short and even in mid-winter her skin was tanned. ‘The snow’s come early,’ she said. Then she put out her hand and took mine in a firm grip. ‘I’m Katarina. He’s inside, waiting for you.’
Our feet cracked the thin layer of frost on the stones as we walked across to the main house. I realised I was holding my breath and I let it go in a puff of steam. If there were such a thing as judgement day, I thought, was this what it would feel like?
‘So, Sweden,’ I said, ‘population 9,208,034. But then you probably knew that?’
Katarina turned with a polite smile. ‘No, no, I didn’t. Not down to that exact number, anyway.’
We stepped inside into a hall painted golden yellow. A striped rag-rug in red and green lay spread across the floorboards.
The metropolitan area of Stockholm is home to around 22 per cent of the population of the country. In Gothenburg the city proper is home to a population of 508,714 with 510,491 in the urban area and total of 920,283 inhabitants in the metropolitan area
. White lace curtains like bridal veils draped the windows and there were pictures, some watercolours and some pencil drawings, on most of the available wall space. I put my suitcase down but kept hold of my handbag. By now my heart was pounding against my chest like a crazy person against the walls of a padded cell and no one could hear a thing. I continued to focus on the decor. Getting immersed in your surroundings, ‘being fully in the now’, was another trick, or ‘coping mechanism’ as they called them at the clinic, for those occasions when what I really wanted to do was to jump screaming from a tall building or drive a car into a tree at a hundred miles per hour. It had worked so far; that and not keeping a car or going near tall buildings. So as I approached the moment of facing Rose’s father once more I focused on the decor. The first thing to note was that it was nice. What exactly made it so nice? Perhaps it was the use of colour, joyful combinations a child might use in a drawing before they learnt that pink didn’t go with red. Maybe it was simply the very un-beigeness of it all that was so pleasing.
‘Would you like to freshen up first?’ Katarina asked.
I thought about it. Did I want to delay the inevitable by taking a small detour, the scenic route to the gallows, or was it best just to get it over with? I turned to her with a smile. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
I followed as she led the way through the small library and into a large rectangular room with windows on three sides. I imagined my feet on backwards so that with every step I was actually getting further away.
‘And here is the sitting room,’ Katarina said. This room was painted in a warm apricot pink and the wooden-framed sofa and two of the chairs were upholstered in pale blue and white striped cotton. The curtains were of the same white lace as in the hall and the floorboards were of the same golden pine. The rugs here were finer, though. Chinese silk in gold and shades of blue from sapphire to dove. There was a tiled stove and a fire warmed the room. The tiles were Delft-blue and white in a delicate flower and bow pattern I recognised as Gustavian. Katarina cleared her throat and the tall figure in the wingchair by the window turned to face me. I heard the soft click of a door shutting and we were alone.