The Cold Song (12 page)

Leopold sat quietly next to Jon, staring at the stupid mutt. It wouldn’t stop barking and Jon thought of their neighbor. He knew that Emma, who lived in the adjoining house, was at home during the day, working on her dissertation. She was
bound to be hearing all of this. The house wasn’t just drafty, the walls were paper thin as well. You could hear everything your neighbors did.

“Julius, is that your dog’s name?” Jon asked quietly.

“Yes …”

“Wouldn’t Brutus be better?”

“What … I don’t … what do you mean?”

That was as far as she got. Because at that moment Leopold growled, bristled, and got to his feet. He lunged at the smaller dog, picked it up between his teeth and shook it from side to side. Irene screamed and hauled on its leash, the mutt whined, Jon made a dive at Leopold and managed to drag him away and up the stairs to his study in the attic.

“Stupid mutt!” he muttered. “Fur ball! Ratty little runt.”

Jon patted Leopold and scratched him behind his ear.

“Not you,” he whispered and closed the door.

The big mongrel gave him a doleful look.

“You’re a good dog, Leopold, but stay here, okay?”

He opened the door again and went back downstairs, expecting to find the ground floor transformed into a battlefield with blood and bits of stupid little dog splattered everywhere, but all was well.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea,” Irene said when she caught sight of him on the stairs. She was cradling her dog in her arms, like a baby. He saw her looking around.
What the hell are you gawking at? Our stuff? Siri’s and my stuff? My children’s stuff?
Jon picked up Liv’s drawing from the floor, it was lying halfway under a boot, and smoothed it out. The pink girl smiled. So did the yellow sun.

“I think I’ll go now,” said Irene. “This was probably not a good idea.”

Jon cleared his throat, folded the drawing, and put it in his trouser pocket.

“Couldn’t you stay a little while?” he said. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

He hoped she would say no. That she would leave now. She had said she was going, and so she should honor that. But she nodded and said, “Coffee would be nice—and maybe some water for Julius. It scared him, being attacked like that.”

She moved in close to him. She smiled. She still had the tubby little rat cradled in her arms, like some sick parody of a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and child.

“Maybe you should keep that dog of yours under better control,” she said softly, and stroked his cheek. “He could be put down for less, you know.”

But now there was Karoline. The one he had been exchanging text messages with this particular summer, and also the summer before and the summer before that. Karoline who had a summer house just down the road with her husband, Kurt. Karoline whom he had known since he was fifteen.

Not an arts journalist, but a dentist. Fortunately not a book person at all. Karoline didn’t have opinions about books, not his books, not other people’s books. This was one of the things he liked most about her.

Karoline and Jon had been neighbors many years ago, when he was a kid. And best pals. And teenage sweethearts. She
had short fair hair, long pretty fingers, was very athletic, very good-looking. The problem with Karoline was that she was boring—
humorless
. But she thought
he
was funny and that mattered more.

He had introduced her and her husband, also a dentist, to Siri and Siri had treated them to a fine dinner at Gloucester. The two couples had hit it off right from the start and began doing the sort of things together that grown-up couples do with other grown-up couples and even talked about how easy it was, how uncomplicated, how great it was to make new friends after forty. It was rare for Jon and Siri to get along so well with others as a couple.

Once they had tried socializing with another set of Mailund neighbors. There was this couple, a little younger than they, who had bought the summer house practically next door to Jenny’s house. That couple had a son. Christian was his name. But oh, his parents were always arguing. And they were always renovating their house, starting projects they couldn’t or wouldn’t finish, among other things a hideous veranda outside their bedroom, and their entire outside area looked a mess.

Siri and Jon began making excuses for why they couldn’t meet up or have dinner. It was too exhausting. The arguing. The mess. The junk. Their overall hopelessness. Jon remembered feeling sorry for the boy, though. He was their only one. They didn’t have any other children. But then he remembered how he would see Christian rummaging around his parents’ garden and in their shed finding old planks and nails and broken pottery—all kinds of forgotten treasures—which he
obviously knew how to make something of. This was a comfort, Jon thought. The boy would be all right.

It was an art: to be able to be adults with other adults, effortlessly. But Jon and Siri and Karoline and Kurt managed just fine. At least for a while. They invited each other to little gatherings, went for long Sunday walks in the forest and on the beach, and even tried arranging joint outings with their respective children. The Mandls were very outdoorsy.

They too had a son, Gunnar, who was a few years younger than Alma, but the same age as Christian, and there was a grown-up son too, Morten, from a previous marriage, but he wasn’t around all that much.

Gunnar made it very clear that he wanted nothing to do with the Dreyer-Brodals.

Once Jon overheard Gunnar whisper to his father, “I don’t want us to be with these people, Dad.”

Jon ran the words over in his mind.

I don’t want us
.

I don’t want us to be with these people
.

These people
.

From a ten-year-old boy.

But despite this—children behaving in such a way that embarrasses the parents and the parents pretending not to notice—the Dreyer-Brodals and the Mandls tried planning things to do together with the children, things that were always canceled at the last minute.

Once there was a plan to do a picnic at the beach, and again Jon overheard Gunnar: “No fucking way!”

“You do not …” Kurt hissed back, looking desperately around to see if Jon or Siri had heard or seen anything. “You do not use that kind of language … okay?”

Jon turned around and stared out the window and pretended not to have heard anything.

Siri and Karoline were discussing what kind of food to buy. They had all met at the grocery store by coincidence one late afternoon and, in a matter of minutes and a little too enthusiastically, come up with this idea of a picnic—and yes, right away.

“Listen, Dad,” Gunnar continued. “Alma is weird … She’s a freak, you know … that’s what Simen says. He knows her. She made him dress up like a doll and brushed his hair and treated him like … she’s a freak, Dad. They all are. We don’t want to hang out with them.”

Excuses were made and plans to go on a picnic “very soon” were immediately agreed upon. Jon was always relieved when the couples-and-kids things were canceled. He didn’t much like the couples things either. What he was interested in (he pondered the word
interest
and how he felt that he really wasn’t interested in anything at the moment and wondered if that was a result of the sadness he felt) was this: that he could text
Thinking of you
anytime it suited him, the convenience of being able to fuck her pretty much under anyone’s nose, and that she thought he was funny.

Jon eyed Leopold. And then he texted:
I’m taking the dog for a walk. Meet me?

Back came the prompt reply:
Yes
.

And then he wrote:
Do you have a little time? Do you have to get back right away?

And right back:
No. I have time
.

Jon looked at his computer screen again.

Must elaborate!

He clicked his way out of the document and stroked Leopold’s soft ears. Then he looked out the attic window. There was mist and rain in the air. Milla and the kids were still out picking flowers. Milla had on a woolen jacket. She hopped and danced about, clumsy and heavy, he noticed that she had a big ass. She was an oversized child who had started leeching onto him.
Have to put a stop to that!

He turned to the dog. “Come on, Leopold, time for a walk.”

Leopold jumped up and loped after him down the stairs. Siri was in the kitchen on the ground floor; she called out when she heard him on the way down.

“Are you all done writing?”

She met him at the bottom of the stairs, gazed at him with that mystified look of hers.

“No, but the dog needs to get out too, you know,” he replied.

Her dark hair was pulled up into a loose knot. She was wearing a thin summer dress, the white one that he liked so much. The front door was open onto the garden, it had grown dark outside. The air was both cool and damp. Siri looked as if she’d been crying—her eyes always shone after crying.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Out with the dog,” he said again. “Somebody has to take the dog out.”

Siri lowered her eyes.

“I’m just worried about the party,” she said. “I’m afraid it might rain.”

“Well, then it’ll just have to rain, won’t it?”

He wondered if she knew that Jenny had been drinking.

“It’s my mother’s seventy-fifth birthday,” she said, “it
can’t
rain.”

“No … well, we’ll just have to wait and see,” Jon said. He pulled Leopold out the door and made to shut it behind him. She ran after him.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Out with the dog, Siri,” Jon said. “Leopold’s dying for a walk. I’ll be back in half an hour. Or an hour. Is there anything you want me to help you with when I get back? You need me to slice things? Carry anything?”

Siri shook her head, stood in the doorway, shivering slightly in the mist-damp breeze. She looked up at the sky.

“It might clear up” she said.

“I think it will,” he said and stroked her hair. “I’m quite sure it will, Siri. I think it’s going to be a great party.”

ALMA SAW HER
father walking down the hill with Leopold in tow. Where was he off to now? Out buying bread. Out buying milk.

She didn’t care. No one cared. And here everyone was getting ready for the party. Grandma didn’t want to celebrate her birthday. But you could scream I DON’T WANT TO at Alma’s mother and she would carry on as though nothing had happened. Alma’s mother wanted to have this party and that was all that mattered.

Jenny said, “Alma, tonight we’ll get out of here. Once the party’s in full swing we’ll take the car and run away from it all, we’ll take a couple of deck chairs, some food, and something to drink and we’ll sit on the beach and look out to sea, and the thicker the fog gets, the harder it rains, the better.”

“We’ll get wet,” Alma said.

“We’ll take umbrellas and fix them to the deck chairs and pretend they’re parasols,” Jenny said, “and then we’ll let it all come down.”

JENNY OPENED BOTTLE
number two and cursed the fact that she had not succeeded in putting a stop to all of this. Goddamn it! Who were all these people who were coming to her house? Jenny wanted none of it. Irma wanted none of it. But Siri hadn’t listened to anyone.

“Of course you have to have a celebration,” Siri had said. “Of course your birthday has to be commemorated, Mama!”

Siri had actually used the word
commemorate
. As if Jenny were some precious inanimate thing in a glass cabinet.

Jenny drank her wine and shot a glance out the window. She rested her eyes on her youngest grandchild, little Liv of the tousled blond locks. From there her eye moved to the lumpish, moon-pretty teenager whose name she could never remember.
The nanny!
Couldn’t Jon and Siri look after their children themselves? Jenny had not had any help in the house. Jenny had not even had a husband. Her husband had run off to Sweden. Jenny had done it all on her own. She bent down to scratch the lump on her toe. It was hard, like a walnut, not squashy like a cyst or growth, like the one they removed from her breast ten years ago, which had turned out to be benign. She wondered if she’d even feel anything if she jammed something into it—the thing on her toe—a piece of broken glass or a pair of scissors.

This was just a thought. She had no intention of jamming anything into anything. She got up. She could bend down and get up like she was a twenty-year-old girl, still quick and limber. But write a speech—that she could not do.

It grew darker as she stood there, she smacked her lips, tried to draw the fog to her with her eyes, to dissolve herself in it and become one with it.

“Her name’s Milla,” Siri had said. “But she’s also called sweet pea.”

“Sweet what?”

“Sweet pea.”

The grass was cut and the house scrubbed. Irma had spent seven whole days on her hands and knees, scrubbing the broad floorboards with carbolic soap. The week before she had washed down the ceilings and walls. The week before that, drawers and cupboards. She had left the windows to Siri.

Jenny shook her head.

Irma was good to have around the house. No fuss with her. Took care of all the odd jobs now that Ola, Jenny’s neighbor and friend, was too old for that. Maintained the house. Mowed the lawn. And, above all, Irma left her in peace.

Jenny went on standing there, looking out the window.

And Irma had set out long trestle tables in the garden and on the tables were the freshly ironed white cloths that Siri had carried in and out, then in again and then out again, so they wouldn’t get wet when it rained, and on the freshly ironed white cloths were glass vases filled with the flowers that Liv
and Alma and Milla had picked in the meadow behind the house. The trees were hung with lanterns, which was good, because even though it was summer and the nights normally were bright, the fog was rolling in over Mailund, getting thicker and thicker as the afternoon wore on.

The fog mingled with the aroma of dishes that Siri had been preparing in the kitchen, slipped around the serried ranks of wine bottles, the plates, cutlery, and glasses standing at the ready on the big white-clothed table under the apple trees, stole under the doorsteps and windowsills and through every cranny of the old house, drifted through the bedrooms and living rooms and kitchen and out into the garden again and over the meadow behind the house where Liv and Alma and Milla had picked flowers, but Liv had not acknowledged the fog, even though it had acknowledged her, and not until she and Alma and Milla had picked a whole bucketful of wildflowers did it begin to drizzle again and the fog blended with the scent of the rain and summer evening and Jenny’s perfume, because now the birthday girl was almost ready to come down the stairs and greet her guests, and the fog melded with the light from the lanterns hanging in the trees and from a distance the garden might almost have seemed to be hovering several feet above the ground.