Out Stealing Horses (11 page)

'Sit you down,' I say, and without waiting for an answer fetch a plate from the corner cupboard and lay it with cutlery, napkin and glass. I pour him a beer and help myself too. A few snowflakes on the window and it would look like Christmas. He sits down, and I can see him stealing a glance at my white shirt. I do not mind what he is wearing, the code I follow is for me alone, but I realise that whatever it was he had come to say, I have not made it any easier for him. I sit down and urge him to help himself, and he takes a piece of fish and two potatoes and a little sauce, and I dare not look at Lyra, for that was just about what she would have had. We begin to eat.

'That's good,' Lars says. 'Did you catch it yourself?'

'I did,' I say. 'Down by the river mouth.'

'There are plenty of fish there. Perch in particular,' he says. 'But also pike just by the reeds, and sometimes trout if you are lucky.' And I nod and go on eating, patiently waiting for him to get to the point. Not that he would need a special purpose to come here and have supper. But finally he takes a big gulp of his beer, wipes his mouth on the napkin before laying his hands in his lap, and then he clears his throat and says:

'I know who you are.'

I stop chewing. I think of my face as it was in the mirror just now, does he know who
that
is? Only I know who that is. Or does he remember the newspapers from three years ago with me in a big photograph, standing in the middle of the road in the icy rain, and blood and water running from my hair and my forehead and down my shirt and tie, and the glassy, bewildered expression in my eyes facing the camera, and right behind me, barely visible, the blue Audi with its rear end in the air and the front well down the rocky slope. The wet, dark mountain wall, the ambulance with its back doors open and a stretcher carrying my wife; the police car with its blue light flashing, the blue blanket round my shoulders, and a lorry as big as a tank across the yellow centre line, and rain, rain on the cold, shining asphalt where everything was reflected double as I was seeing double of everything in the weeks that followed. All the papers carried that picture. Perfectly framed by a freelance photographer who sat in one of the cars that were queueing up in the half-hour after the crash. He had been on his way to some boring assignment and instead won a prize for the picture he took in the rain. The low grey sky, the splintered barrier, the white sheep on the hill behind. All of that in one shot. 'Look this way!' he cried.

But that is not what Lars means. Maybe he has seen one of those pictures, it is entirely possible, but that is not what he means. He has recognised me, as I have recognised him. It is more than fifty years ago, we were just children then, he was ten and I still fifteen and still frightened of everything that went on around me, which I did not understand even though I knew I was close enough to reach out my hand as far as I could, and then maybe reach the whole way and know the meaning of it all. That at least was how it felt to me, and I recall running from the bedroom with my clothes in my hand that summer night in 1948, realising in a sudden panic that what my father said and how things really were, were not necessarily the same, and that made the world liquid and hard to hold on to. A void opened where I could not see over to the other side, and out there in the night, a mere kilometre downriver, maybe Lars lay awake and alone in his bed trying to keep hold of his world, while the shot whose trajectory he could not possibly grasp still filled each cubic metre of air in the small house until he could not hear anything but that shot when people talked to him no matter what they said, and it was the only thing he would hear for a long, long time.

Now more than fifty years later he sits directly opposite me at the table and knows who I am, and I have nothing to say to that. It is not an accusation, though it rather feels like one, nor is it a question, so I do not need to answer. But if I do not say anything it will all get terribly silent and difficult.

'Yes,' I say, looking straight at him. 'I know who you are, too.'

He nods. 'I thought so.' He nods again and picks up his knife and fork and goes on eating, and I can see that he is pleased. That was what he wanted to say. Nothing more, nothing in addition. That, and a confirmation he has now received.

For the rest of the meal I feel slightly ill at ease, trapped in a situation I have not brought about myself. We eat without exchanging many words, just lean forward and glance out the window at the yard where darkness is falling quickly and silently, and we nod to each other and agree that the season with us is in fact the one it is; it gets dark quickly now, doesn't it, and so on, as if that were something new. But Lars seems content and finishes up everything on his plate, and he says almost merrily:

'Thanks very much. It was good to have a proper dinner/ and looks ready to go, and then when he does it is with a light step down the road without the torch, while myself I just feel heavier, and Poker trots along after him towards the bridge and their little cabin and is slowly swallowed up by the night.

I stand by the door a while, listening to the footsteps on the gravel until they too fade out, and a little longer even, and then I hear the faint slam through the dark as Lars shuts his door and see the light come on in the window down there in the cabin by the river. I turn and look around to all sides, but Lars' light is the only light I see. There is a wind starting up, but I stay where I am gazing into the darkness, and the wind rises, it comes rushing from the forest, and I feel cold in nothing but my shirt, I shiver and my teeth start to chatter, and finally I have to give up and go in and shut the door.

I clear the table in the kitchen, two plates on the cloth for the first time in this house. I feel invaded, that's what it is, and not by just anyone.

That's what it is. I fetch Lyra's bowl from the larder and fill it with dry shop-food and carry it back and put it on the floor in front of the wood stove. She looks at me, this is not what she had expected, she sniffs at the food and only slowly starts to eat, swallows each mouthful with demonstrative gloom, and then turns to look at me again, a long look, with those eyes, sighs and goes on, as if she were emptying the poisoned chalice. Spoiled dog.

While Lyra eats I go into the bedroom and take the white shirt off, hang it up on a hanger and pull the working shirt over my head and a sweater and go into the corridor and take the warm pea jacket off its peg and put that on too. Find the torch and whistle for Lyra and go out on the doorstep in my slippers and change into boots. It's blowing hard now. We walk down the road. Lyra first, with me a few metres behind. I can just make out her pale coat, but as long as I can see it, it's like a direction indicator, and I do not switch on the torch, merely let my eyes grow used to the darkness until I stop straining them to catch a light that went out long ago.

When we get to the bridge I stop for a moment where the rails begin and look over at Lars' cabin. The windows are lighted, and I can see his shoulders in the yellow frame and the back of his head without a grey hair yet and the television on at the far end of the room. He is watching the news. I don't know when I last watched the news. I did not bring a television set out here with me, and I regret it sometimes when the evenings get long, but my idea was that living alone you can soon get stuck to those flickering images and to the chair you will sit on far into the night, and then time merely passes as you let others do the moving. I do not want that. I will keep myself company.

We leave the road and go down beside the narrow river on the path I usually take, but I do not hear the water running, the wind soughs and rustles in the trees and bushes about me, and I light the torch so as not to trip on the path and fall into the river because I cannot hear where it is.

When I get to the lake I follow the edge of the reeds until I come to the spot with the bench I have put together and dragged down here, so there is somewhere to sit and watch life at the mouth, see if the fish are jumping and the ducks and the swans that nest here in the bay. They don't do that at this time of year, of course, but they are still here in the morning with the brood they produced in the spring; the young swans as big as their parents now, but still grey and it looks peculiar, like two different species swimming in a line, alike in all their movements, and no doubt they think they are the same, while everyone can see that they are not. Or I can just sit here letting my thoughts fumble vaguely around while Lyra goes through her usual routine.

I find the bench and sit down, but naturally there is nothing to be noticed or to look at right now, so I switch off the light and stay there sitting in the dark, listening to the wind rustling in the reeds with a shrill brittle sound. I can feel how worn out I am after this day, I have kept going for much longer than I usually do, and I close my eyes and tell myself I must not fall asleep now, just sit here for a bit. And then I do go to sleep and wake up all frozen through with the deafening wind around me, and the first thought I have is that I wish Lars had not said what he said, it ties me to a past I thought was well behind me and pulls aside the fifty years with a lightness that seems almost indecent.

I get up from the bench, my body stiff, whistle to Lyra, which is not so easy with numb lips, and then she sits there already close to the bench whimpering softly as she presses her snout against my knee. I switch on the torch. It is blowing massively, there is chaos in the light from the torch when I swing it round, the reeds lie flat on the lake, white foam on the water, and there is a howling sound from the bare treetops bending over and whipping to the south. I crouch down to Lyra and stroke her head.

'Good dog,' I say in English, and it sounds pretty silly, like something from a film I once saw, maybe
Lassie
from the cinema-going of my past, it would not surprise me, or I was dreaming something I have forgotten now, and these words lingered on. It was not from Dickens, though, I cannot recall any 'good dog' in his books, and in any case it is silly. I straighten up again and pull the zip of my jacket up to my chin.

'Come on,' I say to Lyra, 'we're going home,' and she bounds off in sheer relief and storms up the path with her tail in the air, and I follow, not quite that nimbly, my head sunk in my collar and the torch in a tight grip.

8

I can clearly remember
that night in the cabin when my father was not in bed as he had said he would be. I went out of the bedroom and into the main room and dressed quickly in front of the stove. As I bent over it, it was still warm from the evening before and I listened to the night all around, but there were no sounds that I could hear other than my own breathing, which was much too quick and strangely hoarse and heavy in a room that seemed too large to take stock of although I knew precisely how many paces there were from wall to wall. I forced myself to slow my breathing down, drew the air all the way in and let it carefully out again while I thought: I have had a good life up to this night, I have never been alone, not really, and even if my father had been away for long spells, that was something I had accepted with a confidence that had been blown away in the course of a single day in July.

It was a long way off, the blazing hot day, when I opened the door and went out to the yard in my long boots. No-one there and almost cool, but not dark now, it was a summer's night, and above me the clouds split and opened up as they swept at great speed across the sky, and the pale light came flickering down so I could easily make out the path to the river. The water flowed more swiftly now after the drenching rain, running higher up the boulders along the banks, and it swelled and rocked with a faint shine of silver, I could see it from some way off, and the sound of the river running was the only sound I heard.

The boat was not in its place. I waded a few paces out into the stream and stood there listening for the sound of oars, but there was only the water sweeping round my legs, and I could see nothing either up river or down. The timber piles were there, of course, and their scent was strong in the humid air, and the crooked pine with the cross nailed to its trunk was there, and the fields were there on the other side from the river bank up to the road, but only the clouds in the sky were on the move, and the flickering light. It was a weird sensation to be standing in the night alone, almost the feeling of light or sound through my body; a soft moon or a peal of bells, with the water surging against my boots, and everything else was so big and so quiet around me, but I did not feel abandoned, I felt singled out. I was perfectly calm, I was the anchor of the world. It was the river that did that to me, I could immerse myself in water up to my chin and sit not moving, with the current pounding away and pulling at my body, and remain the person I was, still be the anchor. I turned to look up at the cabin. The windows were dark. I did not want to go back inside again, there was no glow there; the two rooms deserted and empty and the duvets damp and the stove gone out and certainly chillier now than it was out here, I had no business in the cabin now. So I waded ashore and started walking.

First I walked up among the fresh tree stumps to the narrow gravel track behind our land and walked down between the trees to the south instead of north the way we usually did, to where the bridge was and the shop, and it was not hard to find the route now as there were no clouds and the night was light again, like white flour everywhere, a filter I could see quite clearly and maybe touch if I wanted to, and then of course I couldn't. But I tried. I spread my fingers out as I walked between the dark tree trunks, like down a corridor of pillars, and let my hands slide through the air, slowly up and then down again in the powdery light, but I could not feel anything, and everything was as it always was, like any night at all. But life had shifted its weight from one point to another, from one leg to the other, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for.