Drowned (10 page)

Stella has kept a diary for as long as I can remember. I used to envy her the discipline she had even as a child: she really did write something every single day, even if it was only a brief entry. When we were little I used to be allowed to see what she’d written sometimes, then it all got more and more secretive and she started to hide her diaries, even though I
would never have tried to find them and read them. I think it’s unpleasant, knowing too much about other people, I’ve never understood that particular urge. I’ve always been surprised at the shameless curiosity of others: my friends rummaging in the drawers of my desk when they were left alone in my room when I was younger, or my first landlord in Stockholm who rented me a small, furnished one-room apartment full of stuff, and almost seemed to expect that I would go through drawers and photo albums, bundles of papers and videotapes.

There is no problem finding Stella’s diary now, it’s in the drawer of her bedside table along with a few bits and pieces: lip salve, some pens, tissues, and a packet of condoms, which makes me feel uncomfortable about my snooping, but I take out the diary anyway. It’s covered in a shiny, Asian fabric with a pattern of blossoming fruit trees and birds against a pale-blue background, the same kind of notebook Stella used to have when she was little. I open the first page, it is dated just about twelve months ago, August last year, it must have been immediately after Stella and Gabriel came back from their holiday in Italy. All the entries are short, in Stella’s neat and clearly legible handwriting:
Planning meeting with parks committee, decided to get rid of hyacinths outside town hall. Out for a meal with G after work
is the first entry.
Ordered bulbs, lots of yellow + broom for Slottsgatan and the
square. Spoke to Sara, we might go there for the weekend in a few weeks
. It goes on in the same way: mostly notes about work, and a few details about what has happened at home, but in the same matter-of-fact tone.
G and I went to IKEA, bought shelves for the bedroom and storeroom. Sore throat, hope I don’t get a cold before the conference next week
.

I put the book back in the drawer, surprised at the impersonal tone. Perhaps she no longer feels the same need for a diary, I think, perhaps she makes those notes about her everyday life because of some inherent sense of obligation. I close the drawer, smooth down the bedspread.

Gabriel barbecues in the evening, catfish, he shows it to me triumphantly before putting it on the grill. Ever since I arrived he has been saying that he ought to cook catfish because I’ve never had it, Stella makes potato salad with her own potatoes and radishes and red onions and herbs, she is proud of the fact that she grows so much herself. “If war breaks out we’ll be self-sufficient,” she often says, even if that isn’t strictly true. I can hear her through the living room as she clatters about in the kitchen, muttering about blackfly on the dill, I hear Gabriel speak to her as he comes in to fetch something and they laugh together, a muted laughter that sounds intimate.

I am leafing through an old art book I found in one of the bookcases in the living room, its cardboard cover is yellowed and its color pictures of early Renaissance paintings are dull and faded, Italian frescoes with a somewhat tentative perspective. I wonder if the colors in the book were once sharper, if they were vivid red and blue when it was first printed, or if they have always looked like this, if it wasn’t possible to print brighter colors at that time.

Gabriel makes a big thing of the fish when we’re eating, it does look beautiful, patterned with lines from the grill, and it tastes good, although I don’t think it’s anything special.

“What do you think?” he says when I’ve taken the first bite.

“Delicious,” I say.

“Try it with a little squeeze of lemon.”

He passes me a dish of lemon wedges, I squeeze a few drops of juice over my piece of fish, taste again, nod to him. Then I empty my wineglass, gulping it down. It’s good wine, easy to drink. I reach for the bottle and top up my glass, Stella is talking about some occasion when Gabriel made a complete mess of his catfish and they both laugh, I’m not listening. We have a secret, I think, a secret is a confidence and confidences mean something, they bind people together. This guilt is like a tie, I think. We have
exchanged guilt as others exchange rings. We carry it together now, the knowledge of a betrayal.

He is still not looking at me, he is looking at Stella, he seems particularly attentive to what she says, laughing when she tells him about something that was in the paper, they have so much fun with the local paper that makes news out of nothing, particularly during the summer when nothing happens; articles about people showing off their enormous record-breaking vegetables and amusingly shaped potatoes, a story with a happy ending about a hamster that disappeared then returned to its owner, they laugh together. The feeling in my stomach is new, it is jealousy and something more, it feels like nausea, like a distant childhood memory of having fallen and gotten the wind knocked out of me so that at first I can’t get any air, I am breathing but nothing happens, perhaps something inside me has locked in some kind of cramp, the nausea washes over me when he looks at Stella with his most loving expression, full of tenderness, he’s never looked at me that way. He has looked at me in other ways, dark, aroused, it’s not enough, when I see how he looks at Stella I know it’s not enough for me, not anymore. Look at me, I think, look at me with that loving expression, look at me and stop laughing. But he doesn’t stop.

The living room is like a jewelry box, I think as I stand on the thick Oriental rug, it is dark red, its pattern like prisms, diamonds, and the crystal chandelier on the ceiling glitters like an old lady wearing row upon row of necklaces. And then there are the books, shelf upon shelf, the pictures, the squashed-down sofa, the tiled stove, a bank of pelargoniums, I would be envious of anybody who got to live in a house with a room like this, does she appreciate it? Maybe she thinks it’s too cluttered, that it attracts the dust. She hasn’t said much about the house apart from the odd comment about things that don’t work, and then that business of wanting to renovate the kitchen and bathroom, maybe she really wants to live somewhere else, preferably in Stockholm of course, or maybe in Malmö, just spending the summer here, and perhaps the odd weekend during the rest of the year.

I run my fingers over a row of book spines, wondering whether I ought to read one of them. On a stool there is a pile of Stella’s books, books about flora and gardens, I pick one up, it is older than the rest. The
Countryman’s Reference Book, compiled with the assistance of numerous specialists
, it is heavy, bound in dark-brown leather with the title in gold on the front. I flick through it from the back: threshing, thistles, sowing, root vegetables, rhubarb, pears, parasites, I stop, glance at the illustrations. They are disgusting
yet fascinating, making me think of the clumps of blackfly on the nasturtiums, I skim through the text:
Parasite: refers to a plant or animal that acquires its nutrition from another living organism, which is then referred to as the host plant or host animal. Holoparasites occur in only a few cases among the higher plants in Sweden. As a rule they cause damage to the host by depriving it of nutrition, producing unhealthy growths, or destroying the tissues which have been attacked, thus leading to sickness and death
, the room is stuffy, we ought to open the windows more, but perhaps it wouldn’t make any difference on days like this, or in summers like this, with its sticky, motionless air, we could have all the windows and doors wide open and it still wouldn’t be any cooler or fresher.

Suddenly Gabriel is standing in the doorway, I close the book.

“What are you doing?”

“I thought I might try and find something to read.”

He nods, walks over to one of the bookcases and seems to be looking for a particular book, I am aware of his smell, I close my eyes briefly and think of the greenhouse, his kisses, his grip on my arms, I can feel my cheeks begin to burn immediately.

“Here.”

He passes me a small, thick book bound in blue leather.
Selections from the Poetical
Works
of Algernon
Charles Swinburne
, it says on the cover. The pages are fragile and yellowed, their edges uneven. Someone must have used a blunt knife to slit them open.

“I think you’d like it. And it fits in well with your assignment.”

“Do you like it?”

He clears his throat.

“It’s hard to find anything more elegant than this,” he says. “And at the same time it’s also hard to find anything more pathetic. Do you understand?”

His expression is different now, softer, his voice too, and at last he is looking at me in the way I want him to look at me. I nod, thinking that this is the way I want it to be, I want him to take out more books, hand them to me, look at me with that kind expression, wanting me to understand. I think that I really do want to understand.

I hear him talking on the telephone in the kitchen. He is leaning over the draining board, doodling absentmindedly on the notepad he and Stella usually use for the shopping lists. He can’t see me, but I can gaze at him from behind, his shoulders, his arms where the sleeves of his T-shirt end. The fingers of one hand are drumming impatiently on the draining board, I realize he’s waiting for something on the phone. Then he clears his throat.

“Yes, I called earlier,” he says. “It’s about the insurance.”

He is silent for a moment, listening.

“But I’ve already keyed in the fucking client number,” he says in a tone that is both irritated and weary. “Surely that’s why they’ve put me through to you?”

He sighs, leafs through a bundle of papers in front of him and begins to read out a long sequence of numbers.

“No, four, seven.
Four, seven
.”

He runs a hand through his hair, it’s something I’ve seen him do many times now, it seems to be a reflex action. I like to see him do it, no doubt he’s done it all his life, he probably started when he was a teenager and has done it ever since, not so much out of vanity these days as out of habit. He has said that the car insurance policy guarantees that someone will come and pick up the car if there’s something wrong with it, he’s already called several times but no one has come.

He sighs again.

“What do you mean, they couldn’t find us?”

He listens, puts down the pen he is holding in his hand.

“But why didn’t you call then? No, I realize that. But the person who was supposed to be picking up the car, why didn’t he call? Or she? Why didn’t someone ring?”

He picks up the pen again.

“Are you completely fucking incompetent? Do you want me to send you a street map?”

He listens, making a few unsuccessful attempts to interrupt the person on the other end, mumbles “yes” now and again before saying in a quiet and controlled voice: “Right. Thank you very much.”

There is a faint beep as he presses the button to end the call, he hurls the telephone down on the draining board.

“For fuck’s sake!” he yells. “
Fucking idiots!
”

He almost spits out the last two words, I hear the phone slide into the sink, landing with a rattling noise. He disappears from my field of vision.

“Fucking idiots!” he yells again, then I hear a bang, the sound of something breaking, plastic cracking, scattering all over the kitchen. A little button with a “5” on it bounces out into the hallway and lands almost at my feet, I quickly back away, quietly parting the bamboo curtain in the doorway, slinking into the little porch with its potted plants and out onto the lawn, leaving Gabriel and his anger in the kitchen.

When Stella gets home from work it’s still only early afternoon, there isn’t much for her to do in the middle of summer. I am sitting reading on the sofa on the patio. It’s the hottest day so far, they were talking
about it on the radio, record temperatures in several places around the country. The weather is all they talk about on the news, it’s the hottest summer since records began sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century. A few clouds are building up on the horizon, but the sun is still shining mercilessly.

“Do you think we’re going to have a thunderstorm at last?” says Stella, squinting up at the clouds.

I shake my head.

“They didn’t mention anything about a storm.”

I am finding it difficult to concentrate on the book even though I think it seems good, I feel restless, I flick back and forth between the poems. A thunderstorm is what’s needed, a discharge of electricity and a decent downpour. Stella sticks her finger into several plant pots with a troubled expression, she looks pale in her light dress, her forehead is shiny.

“How are you feeling?” I say.

She shrugs her shoulders. “Okay. I think I might take a walk.”

“Do you want some company?”

She shakes her head.

“No, you carry on reading. Is Gabriel home?”

“He was going over to Anders’s place to pick something up.”