In the Name of Love (9 page)

He got up again and went back to the entrance hall and stood a moment before the closet door but he didn’t open it. Instead he put on his anorak and boots and went out. Walking fast along the coast he remembered a garden party on an island that last summer before Eleonora left, when he found himself standing beside her, each of them holding a plate in one hand, a fork in the other. There was talk and laughter all around and yet, as so often, he couldn’t think of anything in particular to say to her. It seemed to be enough that they stood side by side. She smiled as they watched Anders listen to some young woman with his characteristic intensity, holding his head a little back as though reading her face. His hair was still dark brown then, as brown as his eyes. A descendant of immigrants invited to Sweden from Belgium in the 1600s because of their ironworking skills. That was Anders Roos. A generous and charming man.

‘Anders says he hardly won a point yesterday,’ Eleonora broke the silence to tell Dan. The phrase was so typical of their noncommittal dialogues that Dan had almost laughed. He and Anders had started to play tennis together once a week. Dan had been a schools champion before his labouring days in London, and, even when he took it easy, Anders, an average club player, rarely managed to win a game. They both enjoyed their Saturday mornings just the same.

‘Where did you learn to play so well?’ Eleonora asked.

‘School.’

‘
Really
? That’s what you spent your time doing there?’

Dan smiled. He liked the way she teased him, as though they were siblings.

‘Sports were taken seriously,’ he said.

‘Like us then. Tennis, golf, bridge and riding, those were the accomplishments a girl was supposed to need in life. Sounds like we went to the same sort of place.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Mutatis mutandis.’

‘No,’ she answered, laughing, ‘I can hear we didn’t.’

Then one day she was gone. Without a word of goodbye.

He had reached the little fishermen’s church and he went to the cemetery see to Connie’s grave. An old woman putting flowers in a jar in front of a headstone looked up. He recognized her. She had once told him how she’d lost her husband and two sons, drowned when their fishing boat went down in a storm coming across from the Gulf of Finland. The bodies had never been found, only the boat.

Now, seeing him alone, she came across and gave him some of the flowers from her jar. While he laid them carefully down she gave a soft murmur of approval. When he turned he saw a fox watching them. The fox’s face was calm, beautiful. In silence he and the fox stood looking at each other. There was something strange about the encounter and for a long time neither gave way. The old woman had gone back to her family’s grave and didn’t seem to notice. Then soundlessly, the fox padded across the graveyard lawn and vanished into the trees on the other side.

Going past the presbytery he saw the priest’s wife look out her kitchen window and wave. Was it an invitation to come in? If so, he was incapable of accepting. Even to himself he couldn’t say why. He gave a friendly wave back and walked on. The last time they met she had told him that the best memories were the small, unassuming moments, that they were what formed a marriage. Her words had often returned to him in the years since then. That was the day he drove out from Stockholm to tell the priest that Connie had wanted to be buried on the island.

Over two years had passed and he hadn’t yet put up her headstone with her name and the dates, a life bookended and finalized. The small good things the priest’s wife had spoken of – she was right, of course – they were what had brought him moments of happiness in the line of sterile days. Many were so small as to be almost unnoticeable, like the evening when Connie had caught his eye across a crowded dinner table and winked at him. Now as then the gesture took him fiercely in the chest. Love, he had always believed, was better expressed by behaviour than by words. After all, any third-rate actor could say ‘I love you’ and sound as if he meant it. ‘Well, words count too,’ Connie used to insist at the beginning. ‘But,’ he would tell her, ‘it’s obvious I love you. I love you more than anything on earth. You know that.’ He said it seemed shallow to repeat something to her that she already knew. It embarrassed him. After a time she gave up and said, ‘You are as you are, my Irishman, and I love you anyway.’

Another dinner came back. Sitting in someone’s summery garden. Several of the guests were Connie’s friends from the hospital. A woman spoke of a moral dilemma about a man at work who had started an affair with a younger colleague. ‘His wife’s a friend of mine. She’s really nice. She hasn’t a clue of course.’ She looked around at the faces. ‘Should I warn her in some way? I don’t know how.’ Giovanni, sitting opposite, said, ‘No, be cool. Let people get on with their lives. Nobody owns anybody else.’ Kerstin, Giovanni’s wife, who sat beside Dan, reached over to entwine her fingers in his and lift both their hands for everyone to see. ‘Still think it’s cool?’ she asked her husband. Giovanni laughed. ‘If I have to be cuckolded, better it be by a man I respect than by some shit.’ He was on form that night, his rich eyes gleaming, his laughter low and musical. Driving home Dan said, ‘You have some great colleagues. You must have a lot of fun at work.’ ‘
Dienst ist dienst
,’ Connie said severely, ‘
und schnaps ist schnaps
.’ ‘What the hell does that mean?’ ‘German wisdom. Work is work and Irish whisky is Irish whisky. Don’t ever mix the two.’

Home at last, at three o’clock in the morning, came an unexpected gift. In bed she touched him, straddled him, made love with a wild abandon, letting her breath come fast and jagged. Afterwards she was exhausted. She lay on top of him still panting, a film of perspiration on her body. When she rolled off she gripped his hand hard. They fell asleep like that and found, when they woke side by side to bright sunshine a few hours later, that they still held hands. ‘Fuck that business of not owning anyone,’ Connie said fiercely. ‘You’re mine.
Mine!
Do you hear? And anyone who tries to interfere had better watch out for her eyes.’

Yet another memory, an evening when he had cooked a special dinner to celebrate the anniversary of their very first meal together years before in a London pub. She got home so late that Carlos and he had long since left the table. When she came in he sat with her in the kitchen while she ate. She seemed empty, exhausted. He said nothing about the significance of the date.

Later, when they went into the living room, she switched on the television at once. He understood that she needed the distraction although, when he raised his eyes from his book, she was staring at the wall to one side rather than at the screen. After a while she snapped off the programme, got to her feet and went to the bathroom. When she came out a long time later she went straight into the bedroom. He heard her close the door as he sat with his now unreadable book. They normally said something, like ‘Bedtime for me,’ or ‘Coming to bed?’ Routine marital phrases whose varying tonality could easily be given meaning. He waited a long time to let her fall asleep but when he went in she was lying with her face swollen and her eyes red. She held out her arms to him. When he embraced her she began to cry again. ‘My poor darling,’ was, at first, all he could think to say. Then he told her, ‘I love you, Connie. I love you very, very much.’ The strength of her small body pulled him so tight he had difficulty breathing. He put his hand down to lift her nightdress and stroke her buttocks. ‘Come in me, Dan,’ she whispered. ‘Please, please come in me.’ Afterwards, lying with their arms about each other, he said, ‘You know, when first we met and I fell in love with you I thought it was with my whole being. But it can’t have been because I love you more than ever every day. It’s true, I swear.’

All the following week she came home early, prepared favourite meals for what she called ‘The two men in my life,’ once telling them ‘I don’t deserve either of you, but I have you anyway, so maybe there’s a God after all.’ ‘Hey,’ Carlos said, ‘let’s not go over the top with the religious stuff. And next week it’s my turn to cook.’ She smiled and said ‘Great!’ Now Dan felt sure that if he looked again at the diary for 1981 he would see the nameless entries repeated week after week until the abrupt halt sometime that autumn when Eleonora Roos stopped ringing and shortly after disappeared without saying goodbye.

On the way home from the graveyard he collected his post in the lane. In addition to work it included a scalloped card saying
Lock in this date!
in bright red letters. It took him a moment to place the name. A young ad agency he’d done a translation job for. Their second anniversary. At home he dropped the card in the wastepaper basket. The air around him stood very still. Forgotten plants in their pots wilted on the window ledge. Aloud he told himself: ‘Be patient.’

At eight o’clock next morning Gabriel Rabban knocked on the door. Dan showed him upstairs where the walls and ceil­ings of the two bedrooms and the bathroom needed to be plastered and painted. He was tempted to ask how long it would take, simply to test Gabriel’s ability to assess the work, but it seemed a small-minded thing to do and he said nothing more.

Apart from that simple exchange, no talk occurred between them for the rest of the day. Gabriel worked until one, when a single honk from the pick-up in the lane told him either his grandaunt or his granduncle, Nahrin or Josef, was there.

On the third morning, intrigued by the total silence above him, Dan went up to see what was going on. Gabriel sat on the floor, his legs outstretched, earphones in his ears and his head moving to whatever rhythm came from the Sony Walkman on his lap. A long ruler and a measuring tape lay beside him as he studied a piece of paper. It took him a moment to realize Dan was there. He didn’t get up or unplug his earphones, but he did raise his eyes questioningly. Dan waited and in the end Gabriel switched off the music player, removed the earphones and said he was almost finished calculating the quantities.

‘Is there a problem?’ Dan asked.

‘No.’

‘It seems to be taking a lot of time.’ At once he regretted the phrase. He didn’t want their relationship to be like this. ‘No, take whatever time you need,’ he said. ‘It’s important to get it right.’

Gabriel nodded and waited a moment to see if Dan had anything more to say before he put the earphones back in and switched on the Walkman as he continued to study whatever was on the sheet of paper.

An hour or so later he came down to the kitchen where Dan sat working. He didn’t offer to show Dan the calcu­lations he’d been making, merely said he’d need money to buy the plaster and the paint. His grandaunt would drive him to Norrtälje next day and they’d bring the stuff here. Dan hesitated a moment, then went to the cupboard in the entrance where he kept his cash. Wordlessly Gabriel took the notes and stuffed them into the back pocket of his low-slung jeans.

The following evening Dan came back from his walk to find four huge cans of paint and six sacks of plaster stacked under tarpaulin outside the kitchen door. The following morning when Gabriel arrived Dan went out to see him. Gabriel regarded the sacks with intense absorption, as though wondering what on earth he was going to do with them now. When Dan said good morning he muttered a reply, then waited for Dan to say whatever else he had to say. By now it was clear that he would tolerate no supervision. Dan went back into the house and got on with his own work.

In the days that followed he gradually got used to the noises – the footsteps, the clatter of tools, the scraping. There were also long silences. Twice he went up to exchange a few words, but Gabriel, taking the earphones out, said no more than yes or no in response and waited for him to go. Dan realized that he was, of course, an old man in the eyes of this boy, a man of fifty who wouldn’t even recognize the music being relayed in those permanently inserted earphones, let alone who was performing it.

That afternoon Sune Isaksson looked in and asked how it was going. When they climbed the narrow stairs to inspect Gabriel’s work Dan could hear Sune’s breath wheeze behind him. It was not something he had noticed before.

‘Does it get too noisy for you?’ Sune asked at the top.

‘Practically soundless. He’s plugged into his music all the time.’

‘So you’re getting on okay?’

‘Sure,’ Dan said. He didn’t mention that he found something a little spoilt about Gabriel, a sort of brattish defiance that he had originally set out to overcome but had now given up in the face of Gabriel’s lack of response. Instead he showed Sune Isaksson the smooth plaster finish on the first wall. ‘He takes his time, but what he does is thorough. I have no complaints.’

‘If he’s slow, all the better,’ Sune says. ‘It’ll keep him occupied for longer.’

The insurance company was paying by the square metre and not by the hour but Dan merely nodded.

Downstairs Sune sat like a squat peasant at the end of the table and said, ‘This means more to his family than you can imagine.’

‘How long is he going to stay?’

‘As long as he’s needed. That’s their way. He’s a member of Josef’s clan.’

Dan took out the whisky bottle and poured them each a drink.

‘How are you, Sune? Really?’

‘I
feel
fine. But I do miss women. Badly. If I don’t do something about it my hormones’ll kill me before the cancer does. That’s something we’ve got to remedy.’

‘How?’

‘You know, when I was young a fox’s fur was worth more than a week’s wages for a farm labourer. But foxes were hard to catch. Except during the mating season. Then it was easy. Lust is stronger than the instinct for survival. Am I wrong or did Freud say that?’

Dan walked back with him. When they reached his house they stopped a while to admire the brilliant sunset, a blaze of carmine and orange across the flat sea.

‘The aesthetic mastering the elemental,’ Sune said. ‘Is that the gift we get out here?’

He looked at Dan as though surprised by the extravagance of his own question. Then he sighed. On the way home Dan was struck by the thought that in another age or in a more southerly country, he would surely have embraced Sune Isaksson before taking his leave.