Drowned (11 page)

She nods. “What time is your train?”

“Around seven. Ten past, I think.”

“We can have dinner before you go, can’t we?”

“That would be good.”

I can see her for a long time, I watch her cut across the lawn and head off toward the main road. She’s probably going down to the lake, that’s where she usually goes. I read a few more lines in my book, when I look up again she has disappeared.

Gabriel gets home a while later, muttering something about the fact that they haven’t picked up the car yet. He hasn’t mentioned either his outburst of rage or the broken telephone, he must think I didn’t notice anything. I’m no good at dealing with anger, I’m not used to it.

“This is really good,” I say, holding up the book as he passes me on the patio. He stops.

“That’s great, I knew you’d like it.”

I feel happy when he smiles at me.

“
There are sins it may be to discover, / There are deeds it may be to delight. / What new work wilt thou find for thy lover, / What new passions for daytime or night?
” I read, he laughs.

“That’s cool. Is it ‘Dolores’?”

“Yes.”

“
I could hurt thee—but pain would delight thee
.”

He is looking straight at me as he speaks the line, I swallow.

“Is that what it says?”

He nods.

“I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

Behind him the air above the lawn is quivering with the heat, it looks like melted glass. There are hardly any insects in the air now, I realize I can’t even hear any birds, perhaps they’ve moved into the forest, trying to find a cooler spot. It’s as if the whole of nature is trembling before the heat, surrendering to it.

“Isn’t Stella home yet?” says Gabriel.

“Yes, she’s gone for a walk.”

He nods.

“Do you know where she went?”

“Down to the lake, I think.”

Suddenly he is standing behind me, he places his hands on my shoulders and lets them slide down my bare arms, I close my eyes, I feel my skin turn to gooseflesh at his touch. He gathers up the hair at the back of my neck in a bunch, lifts it up and tugs at it experimentally, playfully at first, then harder, forcing my head back until I am looking straight up at the sky, flat and dark cobalt blue, he leans over me, gazes at me, I
could hurt thee—but pain would delight thee
, his eyes are dark now.

“You ought to come inside with me for a while,” he says.

The back of my neck is hurting, and the roots of my hair, I try to nod even though it’s impossible, but he seems to be able to tell, he quickly lets go of my hair, disappears through the door leading into the living room. I get up from the sofa and follow him.

Part Two

T
he train is on time today as well, but now the flat landscape is gray, there is mist in the air. The dampness makes my hair curl and it quickly finds its way under the collar of my coat, making me shiver even though it is probably not particularly cold.

Gabriel is late, there isn’t a soul in sight at the station. I read the placards advertising the evening papers on the wall of the closed newsstand, the tips and puzzles in the magazines: holiday buffet menu, crochet patterns, free crossword pullout. When Gabriel finally arrives he seems to be totally unaware that he is late.

“Oh no, have you been waiting?” he says, sounding surprised.

“We did say twenty past.”

“Sorry, I thought we said twenty to.”

“It’s fine.”

He gives me a hug, pulling me close and holding me tight. I bury my face in his scarf and inhale his smell, it’s the same smell as in the summer. It is sweet, almost too sweet, bordering on nauseating, but I like it, it makes me feel safe. It’s as if it makes the world shrink to the small area around him pervaded by that smell. I don’t want to let go of him. He is wearing a dark coat that looks new and expensive, it suits him. I tell him, he smiles and says I’m lovely.

We don’t say anything in the car. The landscape is completely different now, the fields that were yellow last summer are black, torn up, they look wounded, as if someone has raked them with nails as long as talons. One field is flooded after all the rain we have had during the fall, it has turned into a small lake with two swans gliding around like glowing patches of white. It is almost impossible to make out a horizon, land and sky merge into a gray mist. It’s warm in the car, foggy with condensation.

“How’s your assignment going?” asks Gabriel.

“What?”

“Rossetti?”

“Oh … I’ve hardly done any work on it at all. What about your book?”

“It’s finished.”

I look at him.

“I finished it at the end of September.”

“Right … and were your publishers happy with it?”

He gives a small smile.

“They love it. They’re going to try to get it out pretty quickly, by the spring.”

“Wow. Congratulations.”

He nods absentmindedly, his index fingers drumming on the wheel as he increases the speed of the windshield wipers, the rain is coming down more heavily now.

This is not the colorful fall Stella talked about when we were at the palace, not the picture-postcard, crisp October fall with high, clear air and vivid colors she thought I should come back for, that fall has been and gone. This is late fall, raw and rainy. I can no longer smell the rotting leaves, it is no longer possible to tell that it was once summer. The entire landscape is in a state of torpor, it has resigned itself, let go. No fall colors, only brown and gray, no leaves left on the trees, they are lying on the ground now, sodden in the puddles, crushed, a mush of fallen leaves, covering the lawn. I know you’re supposed to rake them up, even if I can’t remember why. Is it because the grass can’t get any air if you don’t? Or light? I think the
leaves can keep the grass warm this winter, perhaps it might be happy under there, nice and cozy beneath its blanket of leaves.

The garden is in the process of decay. The sunflowers look like scarecrows now that they have gone over, their seed heads black and wet, their leaves straggling and shriveled. I pull on Stella’s Wellington boots that are in the back porch and take a walk around the garden, noticing the tomatoes that ripened but were never picked, their split skins exposing the dried flesh, rhubarb with leaves as big as umbrellas, the stalks so thick they are presumably inedible. They taste best before they get too big, as far as I remember, then they become bitter, woody. The pods of the sugar snap peas are swollen and lumpy, distorted, also too big for anyone but the worms to eat. Only the parsley is still green, glowing amid all the brown and gray, tiny drops of water have collected in its curly leaves. I break off a piece and push it in my mouth, it has the harsh taste of iron. A few sparse marigolds are still flowering stoically in the borders.

In the greenhouse most of the plants are dead. Those that are still alive are overgrown, they should have been cut back or thinned out. Only the trees in pots appear to be thriving: the palms, the lemon tree, and the big angel’s trumpet. I stick my index finger in the angel’s trumpet pot, the soil is dry. It looks a
bit droopy but healthy, Gabriel must have watered it. I fill the watering can underneath the potting bench and pour water into each pot until it overflows. As if I thought it might be possible to fix them in retrospect; it is a childish idea. But I don’t stop pouring, I stare at the water flowing out of the holes in the bottom of the pots, running across the floor in little black rivulets, disappearing down the cracks between the paving stones.

“I’m thinking of moving away from here for a while,” says Gabriel when we are sitting in the living room in the evening. He has made tea and sandwiches, lit a fire in the old tiled stove, and put a record on the stereo, it feels lovely, almost like the summer.

“Where will you go?” I say.

He shrugs his shoulders.

“I don’t know yet. Abroad, maybe. I thought I could come back here in the summer, but right now I think I need to be somewhere else for a while.”

“So … when are you moving?”

My voice sounds small. He doesn’t appear to notice.

“As soon as I can. As soon as I find a place to live.”

I feel the tears overwhelm me without any warning, all at once my eyes are burning and then I am weeping, sobbing violently, totally out of control, I
can see the tears falling from my eyes and dripping onto my legs, which I have drawn up under me on the sofa, it looks like rain, almost unreal. My whole body shakes as I gasp for breath.

Gabriel looks at me in surprise.

“Hey …” he says, he sounds so kind, so calm, and suddenly I am in his arms and he is holding me, I cling on tight, I have no intention of letting go. He strokes my hair and I lay my head against his shoulder, my face against his neck, breathing in the smell of him and sobbing even harder because of it. He smells so warm, he is holding me properly now, his arms around my back, and he mumbles that of course I can come and visit him whenever I like. He is wearing a lamb’s wool sweater and I push my hands up inside it, I would really like to crawl right underneath it, stay there. The shirt he has on is easy to undo, and he doesn’t protest. He pulls off his sweater and I part his unbuttoned shirt and lay my cheek against his chest, curling up in his arms.

He reaches for a checked blanket lying on the arm of the sofa, spreads it over me, and I pull it over my head until I am in a kind of snug haven against his chest, I can hear his heart beating and it is warm under the blanket now, Gabriel’s arms around me, his skin, his smell, his breathing, calm and even. Take care of me, I think, take care of me, I have stopped
crying now, my body feels heavy and weary, I want to go to sleep, just like this, and I do.

I wake up on the sofa with a stiff neck. Gabriel has fetched the duvet from the guest room and spread it over me along with the blanket, but I am still frozen. It is raining outside, a slow and monotonous November rain, dripping from the roof onto the window ledges.

Gabriel doesn’t seem to be home. My head feels woolly, as if I had a hangover, but I didn’t drink at all yesterday. It’s the weeping, I can still feel it in my sinuses and behind my eyes, I press my eyebrows gently with my hands. The inside of my head feels tender, sore. I wind the duvet around me, go into the kitchen, and switch on the coffee machine. The floor is cold, I should have brought a pair of slippers. It’s almost eleven o’clock in the morning but it isn’t all that light outside, it’s a uniform gray, a flat, nondescript light. Yesterday the automatic exterior lighting came on just after two o’clock in the afternoon. Anders and Karin in the house across the field have put Christmas lights in one of their trees, a spindly fruit tree completely enveloped in little sparkling lights, you can see it from the balcony. Gabriel showed it to me yesterday when we went for a walk around the house
and he said everything is more or less the same here really, and the bedroom upstairs was big and empty and the floorboards creaked in a way I don’t remember at all from the summer and I thought no, nothing is the same here. And the fruit tree was shining from across the field.

I pour my coffee into one of the blue-and-white cups. There is an unopened carton of milk in the refrigerator and I think that Gabriel must have bought it for me, he remembered I take milk in my coffee. He drinks his black. I flick through the newspaper on the kitchen table without reading a single article, the letters in the headlines seem to be moving around in front of my eyes. Perhaps I’ve cried so much I’ve damaged my eyes. Maybe protein from my tears has stuck to them, in lumps that will stay there forever and make me go blind eventually. I have to knock wood, I rub the thick surface of the kitchen table hard with my fingers, I blink rapidly several times. I am perfectly normal. There is nothing wrong with my eyes.

I see something moving outside the kitchen window, at first I think it’s a branch but then I see it’s Nils. I open the window and speak to him and he immediately runs to the front door, I can hear him meowing. When I let him in he rubs himself against my legs. He’s wet, his entire coat is covered in little drops of
water, he looks as if he is studded with diamonds. I tear off a sheet of paper towel and gently wipe his back, he looks at me in surprise.