Wilful Disregard (12 page)

Now she was looking out over the paved square, but there was light, there were sap-filled patches of green, what little was planted there plus all the shoots forcing their way through cracks and holes to make their way up to the sun and growth. It was all fresh, nothing past its prime.

Hugo asked how she was, cautiously as if he suspected the answer might have something to do with him, but he evidently wanted to ask anyway. She replied that she was in the final phase of her marathon training. Just the same way as he had used her running in that dreadful way back in February, she used it against him now.

But he wanted to be more intimate and get past the small talk. He sat down, took off his jacket and asked what training in the final phase involved. She didn’t think he was interested but answered out of politeness that she went for five runs a week, one of them a two-hour run at an easy pace, the others pushing herself to varying degrees. It was your pulse rate that was important and that morning she had done interval training for forty minutes in total.

He asked why she wanted to run marathons. His eagerness and the way he was enquiring into details felt compensatory; he thought he ought to make an effort, take the initiative. Ester was nonplussed. Their liaison had been rent apart long before and it all seemed rather belated.

But wasn’t this what the girlfriend chorus had said, that one day in three months’ or three years’ time he might turn up at her door with a bunch of flowers and have thought things through properly? Hope took a crazy little leap inside her.

She replied that she ran marathons because it was interesting. There was no other way of finding out or investigating what happened to your body and head after thirty kilometres and then after thirty-five. It was a sort of study.

Hugo said that as studies went, it sounded taxing. To him, the dividend seemed hard-earned and negligible.

‘But clearly I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Since I do it.’

His coffee came. He nodded his thanks.

‘I didn’t really mean to come in here. But I saw you sitting here, so I did.’

She put Chekhov in her bag.

‘Is it as good as I remember it?’ he said.

‘Very good. Exceptional, in fact.’

‘Thank you for your letters,’ he said. ‘They were sensitive, elegant.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘One of them was simply beautiful.’

The other one had contained some reproaches in the form of questions interspersed with the tokens of love.

‘I don’t remember what I wrote,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Sorry I didn’t answer them.’

‘Are you?’

‘I should’ve answered. But I’ve had so much work on all spring. And it isn’t over yet.’

She could sense the effort it took for him to say that. And she realized he wanted absolution from his guilt because he had extended a hand, and that he now thought it up to her to grant it to him. She had never known anybody, in fact, who had admitted their guilt and also been able to bear it.

Well-dressed people crossed the square with foodie treats for the weekend in bags from the Östermalmshallen market.

Ester would not allow him to discharge his debt by playing down the pain his actions and lack of replies had caused her. She resisted hard when the reflex action of making things easy for him tried to kick in. Having not offered him the relief he sought, she fully expected some kind of accusation or spiteful comment to follow.

And it did. He said:

‘You knew I was seeing another woman.’

‘No. I didn’t know. You never told me about her and you denied it when I asked. It was no thanks to you I managed to work out that she existed. And naturally I thought you’d left her when you came to me. I thought that was why you came then rather than earlier. I thought you were waiting to settle old business. I thought that was what one did unless one was a bigamist. It’s OK being a bigamist of course, but you have to make it clear. But until further notice, one at a time is presumably the implicit ground rule.’

‘But that would mean breaking up!’

‘Yes?’

‘But that’s so awkward and such a hassle.’

He sounded genuinely perplexed.

‘Well the alternative turned out pretty awkward and bothersome too, for me.’

‘All this having to talk about everything and be honest and transparent, it’s only a convention,’ he said. ‘A suffocating totalitarian imposition, a restriction we inflict on one another. To demand that a person with whom one has had physical contact give up everything from that moment on is tyranny. To demand that, after this physical contact, he never again be allowed to keep anything for himself is not only petty bourgeois, but also indicates a total lack of respect for the freedom of the individual, which you generally esteem so highly.’

Ester found that it hurt both to blink and to swallow.

‘I can’t contradict you,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately.’

‘Must be the first time.’

He laughed. But she didn’t.

‘I can’t contradict you in any way except to say that one party’s freedom is sometimes the other’s distress.’

It was a lovely afternoon, the kind you only get in May. The wind caressed the sun umbrellas, making the fabric ripple indolently; it was warm, almost hot, yet still fresh as it breezed in through the open window. The weather was pleasant enough to sit outside but Ester preferred both eating and reading indoors.

‘Who is she?’

‘Who?’

‘The woman you meet up with as regularly as clockwork but conceal and never talk about?’

‘We’ve known each other decades.’

‘What does she do?’

‘Teach. History and social sciences.’

‘Secondary level?’

‘Upper secondary.’

‘She lives a long way from here?’

‘It’s nice to get away.’

‘To hide from everything and everyone. Have a secret life so you can keep everyone at a mental distance, even her. If you have more than one woman, or man, you need never be really close to anyone. Never be on equal terms, never lay yourself open to anything, you can manipulate power so you never end up the subordinate but have always got someone else to go to. A sort of existential hedging of bets.’

‘I like it on the train.’

‘A person who starts lying about the little things is soon lying about everything, about his whole life. And is forced to live behind a screen.’

‘I’m not lying. Not telling the whole story isn’t lying.’

‘Don’t you want to live with her properly?’

‘She wants that. Wants me to move down there with her.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘When I’m eighty perhaps.’

‘Does she know you’ve got other women?’

‘I’m sure she does.’

‘I’m not, unless you’ve actually talked about it. People don’t. There’s no way of knowing. You ought to tell her.’

‘Why hurt people?’

He stroked his chin, starting from his cheeks, and it made a rasping sound.

‘What were you imagining when you just gave up on me last winter, overnight?’

‘You’ve got your life ahead of you,’ said Hugo. ‘I haven’t.’

The age difference, well, it was a valid argument she supposed, and the only one she could not do anything about. It was the first explanation he had given her that was the result of some reflection.

For a very brief space of time she had a presentiment that one day she would be thoroughly tired of this story and indifferent to its outcome. She sensed that she would look back in amazement on her struggle and the fact that she had thought him worth it. And on that day she would thank her lucky stars at having escaped his company. It was a fleeting thought among others. She found him pitiful, planted there so heavily on his chair, admitting his own vulgarity, his cheerless life and his fear, which he attempted to ennoble into broad-mindedness.

Two women sat down at the empty table next to them. One of them was telling a story and the other was laughing loudly, lapsing into silence for the next bit and then bursting out laughing again. The one talking seemed satisfied with the merriment but embarrassed by the shrillness of the laugh, trying to get her companion to tone it down by speaking more mutedly herself.

Ester and Hugo looked at the women.

‘You never laugh like that when I tell you something,’ he said.

He stroked Ester’s arm and she felt the beating of her heart.

‘I’ve never had reason to,’ she said.

‘Mm, because we have a more serious relationship.’

He looked at her, clear-eyed and with no ulterior motive. One of the cafe staff wiped a table, another placed an espresso in front of a woman in a suit, who unfolded a copy of the
Financial Times
.

‘We haven’t got a relationship, have we?’

‘But we’re serious. We would have a serious relationship if we did have one. And anyway, we
have
laughed together, a lot.’

‘Yes we have, actually.’

The only weapon of someone who loves is to stop loving. However messy and demanding their love may have seemed to its object, it goes against the grain to be deprived of it, even though the object may never have wanted it in the first place. It is the balance of power that is shifted by the new indifference, and the fear of appearing foolish and ordinary in the eyes of the one who formerly did the loving.

‘Do you remember that time we were round at my place last winter?’ she said.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Do you remember what we had to eat?’

‘You served chicken. In a creamy sauce.’

‘Crème fraiche with white wine and Gruyère cheese.’

‘Not all that many plants in there.’

He made a self-satisfied little sound. She noted the way he was deliberately reeling her in by means of those precise little references to their shared past, and was glad.

‘It had a reddish colour.’

‘There was paprika in it,’ she said. ‘How interesting, you remember with your eyes. You really are a visual artist through and through. I remember with my ears, and with my eyes only if they see the printed word. And a few other body parts, I remember with those as well.’

His jacket, way too warm for the season, was on again because they were about to go. The fact that he had taken it off was all part of the effort and compensation for all the coats previously left unremoved, she thought.

‘I don’t only remember with my eyes, either,’ he said.

Don’t do this, thought Ester. Don’t drag me into this again. I’m just starting to break free.

But she loved the way his eyes glistened when he was talking about memories of their encounters and she felt very close to him.

‘It was paprika that made it look red,’ she said again.

‘It was delicious. Didn’t I bring a chair with me, too? Have you still got it?’

‘I sit on it every day.’

‘Well it’s good to know I made some kind of contribution, at least.’

‘I’ve never understood why you went to bed with me three times after months of prevarication and then just disappeared. I’ve never understood how you could do that, and why you would never talk to me about it when I asked you to.’

He averted his head and his gaze followed a decrepit couple who were walking very slowly, supporting each other.

‘There’s no point my trying to explain. You already know the answer to all my questions and you’ve got all your objections ready.’

‘It’s a shame you see it that way. I’m very curious to hear your thoughts on the subject and I’d really like to hear your version. But maybe I interpret events differently from you. And maybe that’s what you want to spare yourself?’

They were standing in Östermalmstorg, down by the turning area where Humlegårdsgatan meets Nybrogatan. She held out her hand as if for a handshake. They had never shaken hands since the first time they met, back in October. With some hesitation he took her hand, since the gesture had something distanced and final about it.

He made sure they were looking each other in the eye and said:

‘I shall really think about this, Ester. This you and me thing, us.’

She heard him say it. She didn’t mishear. She wanted to ask him to repeat it and wished she had recorded it, but she hadn’t imagined it. She had heard correctly.

‘What did you say?’

He looked at his watch. It was time to part. He had to get back to his life and she to her non-life. With it being a long weekend, she presumed he would be making the trip to see his woman.

‘I’m just going to the off-licence,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

She thought: This is the time to walk away and not look back.

She went with him to the off-licence. It was very busy. While they were waiting for his turn in the queue she asked what he was doing this weekend; it extended over four days.

He said he was going up to Borås.

It could be stupidity or a pure reflex action that made him resort to that fib again after he had just told her about the woman down in Malmö. But Ester thought: What he’s telling me now is that I needn’t imagine that other relationship is hugely important; that there’s a chance and I should hold on and wait.

She did not think of the way one can lie out of respect, misjudged but humane, of the way – out of fear of the other’s anguish and insistent dependence – one can say lots of things one doesn’t mean, to be kind, to spare a tormented individual from the brutal insight of how she is rated, and from the self-evident fact that one does not want that other person near, not in the way she wants. Nor did she think that he was saying what he said because it is disagreeable to talk of one’s intentions and actions in front of people who offer silent or explicitly moral verdicts on everything, based on emotions and justified by that exacting weakness, and then to have to supply a volley of common-sense reasons for them.

‘I shall go to Leksand as well,’ he added, and it sounded like a relief to him to be able to say it.

The queue numbers ticked forward. She wondered which observations it would be wise to refrain from just now. This was how he had talked at the beginning of their association, Leksand, Borås, as if the travelling itself would impress her, make him seem exciting and independent, as if such places drew attention to the absence of awkward ties in his life by conveying how freely he travelled, and alone. He was like a child who by saying ‘Leksand, Borås’ instead of ‘Malmö, banal relationship’ believed himself to be saying: I haven’t done anything! I’m innocent!