Drowned (12 page)
He goes and lies down on the sofa in the living room, where it is still warm from my body, curling up on the blanket. I want to lie down beside him, I want to curl up too and stay under the duvet, but I have to start sorting out Stella’s things, I can’t stay here indefinitely. They’ve let me start the C-course in art history even though I haven’t finished my assignment from last semester yet, they made an exception, special circumstances. I cried in the senior tutor’s office, I have cried everywhere. I miss seminars these days, I have been given permission to take slightly more time off than is really allowed, but I have to promise to read, it’s for my own good, I mustn’t get too far behind because otherwise it will be difficult to catch up. My books are in the guest room, not even unpacked, I ought to make a start tonight, I won’t get any more of my student loan if I don’t achieve a certain number of points this semester, that’s a horrible thought.
When I get upstairs I can see the apple tree sparkling across the field. Perhaps they’ve forgotten to switch the lights off, or else it’s so dark outside that they come on automatically even though it’s the middle of the day. The sky is gray, the color of lead, as if there were snow in the air, but the temperature is well
above freezing and the only thing that comes is rain. The lawn felt spongy yesterday, sodden. It will turn into a bog if it carries on raining.
Stella’s clothes are still hanging in the big closet in the bedroom. There’s not a great deal, she didn’t keep anything she had no use for, I quickly go through the closet: jeans, sweaters, a few winter coats, shoes, some dresses, the suits she used to wear when she had a meeting in the council offices, negotiating budgets, things she didn’t really want to do. Gabriel has told me to take whatever I want and put the rest in bags so that he can give it away to charity, but I don’t want to keep anything. Everything smells of Stella, it’s as if the entire closet is impregnated with her cool perfume, I shove the clothes into plastic bags, I just want rid of them. The only thing I can’t bring myself to push into a bag is her white angora cardigan. It hardly smells of anything, perhaps a faint hint of fabric conditioner with an apple scent, perhaps slightly musty, she probably hadn’t worn it for a long time. I run my fingertips tentatively over the soft white wool, it’s so beautiful, silky and fluffy, like stroking a pet. In front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom I pull off the sweater I am wearing and cautiously put on the cardigan instead, it feels lovely against my skin, I can understand why she liked it. I stretch, let down my hair, which I had gathered in a knot at the back of
my neck, look at myself from different angles. We’re a little bit alike, I think. Not so that you would get us mixed up. But in ways that are more difficult to pin down, something to do with posture, proportions.
On the balcony Gabriel’s computer is switched on as usual, surrounded by piles of books and papers and the dolphin ashtray. I touch it gently, stroking its back, the brass feels cool against the palm of my hand. There is an art book underneath the ashtray,
Une étude sur la peinture symboliste
it says on the cover, a little bit of a yellow Post-it note is sticking out between two pages and I open the book there. A painting of a young woman covers almost the whole double spread, it is similar to the cover of Gabriel’s novel but there are no flowers floating on the surface of the water in this picture, no bushes and no greenery surrounding her. I am not very good at French but I have no problem understanding this title:
Drowned
.
I quickly close the book, turn around, and give a start as I see myself in the full-length mirror. Not so that you would get us mixed up, but almost, I think as I feel my heart beating hard and fast, I find it difficult to get my breath as I fumble with the buttons of the cardigan, they are small and round and mother-of-pearl and my fingers can’t get hold of them properly. When I have managed to undo the top two buttons I pull the cardigan over my head in something
approaching a panic and throw it in a heap on the floor, it lies there like a quarry brought down, rendered harmless. I fold my arms over my chest to avoid seeing my body in the mirror, I stand there for a while trying to breathe deeply and calmly until my heart slows down and I am able to put on my own sweater with trembling hands.
It is quiet in the house now, it feels different from the summer, the sounds I hear are new. The house clicks and creaks and at night the wind blows and the rain hammers against the window ledges, loud and persistent, a branch scrapes against something, rasping and banging, dull and repetitive. I curl up under the duvet, making myself as small as possible. There are drafts everywhere, Gabriel says the place really needs renovating properly if it’s going to be possible to live here all year round, it needs proper insulation. He mentioned it in the summer and I thought he was exaggerating, that it wasn’t really a problem, you’d just need an extra blanket at night. But now I have an extra blanket at night, and I realize he was right.
He sleeps alone up there now, on one side of the big double bed in the room where the apple trees in the garden cast long shadows on the ceiling. Every time I picture him there, and wonder if he is sleeping
or lying awake like me, I see myself beside him in the bed. Very close to him, just like on the sofa when I fell asleep with my head resting on his chest. And then I have to push the thought away at once, I am sick in the head, abnormal, disgusting, and then all the other thoughts come crowding in like a film rolling through my mind: they pulled her out of the lake, I have imagined it a hundred times, a thousand times, the serious faces of the people on the rocks by the lake, the police, Gabriel. I can see eels in her hair, it is a horrible picture and I try to keep it at bay, but it always comes back: the eels in the lake, around her face, among her curls down at the bottom. Sometimes I see her with eels instead of hair, writhing, slippery, thick, shiny sausages all over her head and down over her shoulders. I always imagine that her eyes were closed, that she looked as if she was sleeping. And that she looked as if she was sleeping when she was lying there on the bottom too, while the eels were building their nests in her hair. She was afraid of snakes, she would have been so frightened if she had woken up and realized what was happening.
Gabriel has started to go for long walks during the day, I see him crossing the misty fields: a black silhouette slowly moving along the gravel road, he stops, looking
at something or lost in thought, he stands in the same spot for a long time, following a crow with his gaze. I am upstairs, still sorting out Stella’s things, I have gone through the bathroom cabinets. “Take whatever you want,” Gabriel said again, but I have thrown almost everything away. All that expensive makeup, the creams, the shampoo, little tablets of soap, bath oil, it’s almost filled an entire bag. I have kept a bottle of Stella’s perfume because I couldn’t bring myself to drop it in the bag, and two small unopened boxes containing Dior nail polish, still sealed in plastic film. She must have bought them on some trip, duty free, I find it difficult to imagine her buying such expensive nail polish in an ordinary shop. I picture her standing at the perfume counter at the airport thinking she’s on holiday now, maybe there’s a chance for her nails to grow before she has to start digging again, she chooses two bottles almost at random, thinking that she will sit on the balcony of her hotel room in the evenings, drinking a glass of wine, watching the sun set over the water and painting her nails, which are finally showing above the tips of her fingers like tiny, rising half moons. Perhaps it was when they went to Italy, they were there last summer. Somewhere on the Amalfi coast, a small town with a pretty name, they sent me a postcard.
Stella didn’t have many books or records, I keep a few of each: a couple of New Order albums, it was
Erik who listened to them originally, the records might even have belonged to him. Stella always adopted her boyfriends’ taste in music in spite of the fact that she wasn’t particularly interested in music herself, or maybe that was why. She had almost no fiction, instead I pick out some of her botanical books: all the volumes in the series The
Flora of Scandinavia
and Rousseau’s
Letters on the Elements of Botany
, which I know she loved. I pack them in a box along with one or two other things that I find in her closet: school yearbooks, a shoe box full of photographs, an old jewelry box I know my grandmother gave her when she was little. It contains some necklaces in a tangled heap, tarnished silver, gold chains with pendants in the shape of hearts and four-leaf clovers, the kind of thing you get when you’re christened or confirmed. I put pile after pile of magazines into another box, perhaps they can be given away. Old fashion magazines, interior design, gardening, several of them are foreign, with beautiful glossy covers featuring English gardens. There is a pile of old catalogs, page after page of seeds and perennials, shrubs and fruit trees. I drop them into the garbage bag along with the bathroom stuff.
“How’s it going?”
Gabriel’s voice makes me jump. He is standing in the doorway, he is wearing his outdoor shoes and his coat, his hair looks damp.
“It’s hard work.”
“Do you want some help?”
“No, it’s okay. But thanks.”
He smiles at me, nods.
“I’m going to do some shopping. Would you like to come with me? Or is there anything you want from the store?”
I shake my head.
“I’d really like to get this finished. But maybe you could get some fruit? Satsumas?”
He nods again.
“Do you remember where Stella bought these?”
I show him the little boxes containing the nail polish, he looks thoughtful.
“I bought them for her. When we were going to Italy. But she never used them.”
“I might keep them.”
“Actually, I think she said she was going to give them to you.”
He gives me another little smile, then disappears down the stairs.
I watch him cut across the lawn to the car. He is using Stella’s car these days, he still hasn’t gotten the engine of his car fixed, it would be expensive. Hers is newer, small and silver-colored and almost silent when you’re sitting in it, as if it’s padded.
There are yet more gardening magazines on the
shelf of Stella’s bedside table, I put them in the box with all the rest. The contents of the drawer are the same as back in the summer, I pick up the pale-blue shiny book, flick through it halfheartedly.
Arranged with M that she will come later in the summer
I read before closing it quickly. What do you do with a dead person’s diary? I can’t throw it away, all her thoughts and notes, it just feels so wrong. I leave it in the drawer, Gabriel can decide.
In the evening I paint my nails. I have opened the boxes, one bottle is a pearly pink and looks summery, the other is a deep, dark red, and that is the one I choose. Gabriel came back from town with several kilos of satsumas, the sharp kind I like best, and I have already lost count of how many I have eaten: five, six, maybe seven. One thumbnail is already stained yellow from peeling them, it looks the same as it did under the water in the lake in the summer, the disgusting yellow water. I brush the expensive nail polish decisively over my thumbnail and it covers perfectly, giving a beautiful, even finish. I am sitting on the bed in the guest room. I have hung Stella’s white cardigan on a hanger on the outside of the closet, it hangs there like a little work of art, white on white with its mother-of-pearl buttons gleaming indolently. There are no flowers on the bedside table
now, nor in the window, the room is bare, the walls are white and the floor covered in a white glaze. It feels like a cell, the way I imagine it looks inside a convent. There’s a convent nearby, we drove past it in the summer, Gabriel pointed it out and said it was one of the strictest orders. Once you step inside the high stone walls surrounding the convent garden you never come out, not even when you die. The nuns are buried in the little churchyard that forms a part of the garden.
The nail polish dries quickly, becoming hard and shiny. I used to have terrible nails, they were soft and split and broke and were uneven. Now they grow quickly and are strong, I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m eating better now. I drum them on the bedside table, enjoying the rapping sound as I look around the room. There ought to be something on the walls in here: a picture, a painting, anything, these bare walls are unpleasant. I think of one of Rossetti’s paintings, the one depicting the annunciation. The walls in that room look almost the same as these: white, like a convent. Mary has crawled up onto the bed and is cowering in one corner, she looks afraid, defensive, the angel is offering her flowers, they are also white, lilies.