Wilful Disregard (16 page)

She tried turning the idea round and wrote an article on the topic, which she sent to a periodical. Honour culture should not be understood as a deliberate curtailment of freedom but as the result of an observation of something entirely fundamental in human life: the fact that one has no right to run away from the wonderful thing that formed between two people who have come close to each other. Out of this sense of propriety, the old norms of behaviour had developed organically, she wrote, to prevent the suffering that results from lack of clarity and equality. Having intercourse with another person brings responsibility onto the scene, the deeper and more naked the intercourse, the more far-reaching the injunction. Honour culture had understood this and regulated it. Its aim was hardly to sentence two individuals to carry on meeting against their wills just because they had started, the way it was rigidly interpreted today, nor to keep women suppressed and supervised. Those were side effects. The crux of the matter was to induce people not to start associating in the first place if one party knew that he did not wish to be involved with the other but planned to toss her aside.

These codes for the conduct of the flesh and the emotions were not about honour, she wrote. Honour was a rationalization, after the event. It was actually an attempt to protect people from becoming mere playthings for thoughtless others. Do not hold out any prospects to the hopeful party that you know will not materialize!

Over time, the codes had been uncoupled from their original insight and had come to be falsely interpreted as demands for female virtue and decency. But the principles would have been gender-neutral if the world had been, too. They were merely a defence against what the superior position inflicts on the inferior. The holder of the superior position is the one with least to lose. And in order to implant this shield against negligence and thoughtlessness, a detailed structure of regulation was created in which everyone knew what was expected at every stage. Chastity became one component and a spontaneous result, but it was not where all this originated. Honour culture was about entirely different matters. It was instituted as a defence against people wilfully helping themselves to other people.

The article was refused.

January came to an end. People and things advanced through the winter. One weekend in February she was going to another party. She felt little enthusiasm for the event and therefore set off late. In the hall in her shoes, hat and coat she observed with some surprise that her hand was reaching out for a DVD and putting it in her bag. It was a film that had been lying about at home, one that she had borrowed from Hugo exactly a year ago after one of their long sessions at the restaurant near his studio.

Instead of walking to the stop for the part of town where the party was, her legs walked her to the stop for the number 1 bus at the corner of Fleminggatan and Sankt Eriksgatan. She would just return the DVD. She could walk on to the party from there. The film was
Gaslight
. He had said how marvellous it was and wanted her to see it so they could discuss it afterwards. She watched it twice, straight through, so she would be really well prepared with interesting reflections, but the opportunity never arose because very soon after that they went to bed and stopped talking.

She recalled the moment when their warm fingertips met as the film exchanged hands, and the spark that it generated.

She’d have to give it back sooner or later, she thought. She needed to clean him thoroughly out of her system and her apartment. She would just hand over the film and then go. You can send it by post, the girlfriend chorus would have said, so she did not consult any of its members.

Ester got off the bus at Karlavägen, walked the short distance to Kommendörsgatan, rang the bell and was admitted by the same assistant with paint-stained trousers who had opened the door that first time she came to borrow a video artwork and he had not wanted to let her in. That was exactly fifteen months ago. Ambitious, she thought, working alone on a Saturday night. This time he recognized Ester but looked at her with a slightly uncomfortable expression that she could not read. It looked like sympathy. She did not understand why and did not think it could have anything to do with her.

‘You know the way.’

He fluttered an arm in the direction of the stairs.

Hugo Rask was leaning on the bar counter in the kitchen with Eva-Stina and a glass of red at his side. Even on the stairs Ester could hear their laughter. It was Saturday and almost seven o’clock. Two colleagues staying behind at the end of the day’s work, nothing peculiar about that, but Hugo remembered her name now. They did not look surprised when Ester came in, but rather blasé. They were both smoking cigarettes, which he had never done with Ester, except that time at her apartment when he had smoked five. The smoking contributed to the impression of nonchalance. Eva-Stina was not looking sideways this time, but tended more towards the condescendingly forbearing.

‘Here’s that film I borrowed,’ said Ester, noting that her movements and speech were too hurried, giving a self-effacing, servile impression.

He took the film, seemingly not recalling that he had lent it to her or that they had talked about it, put it on a shelf and said:

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’

‘Well I’m on my way to a party, actually.’

Actually, thought Ester. That word again. Am I on my way to a party or not?

A glass was produced and wine was poured. The TV was on and the two of them, Eva-Stina and Hugo, talked with indolent contempt about the programme on the screen. The wine was sour and hard to drink. She didn’t like wine without food, but drank some anyway. Ester, too, made some indolently contemptuous remark about the show and the current offerings on TV, feeling instantly false and disloyal to something indefinite.

‘It’s a good thing that there are bad programmes on television,’ she corrected herself.

In unison they gave Ester a dull, quizzical look.

‘Why do you mean?’

‘Bad programmes with no ambitions are crucial. We need the torrent of crap to sift the nuggets of gold out of. Unfortunately it’s comparison that’s the key.’

‘Do you think it’s because there was so much bad music that Bach wrote his?’ said Eva-Stina.

‘Yes, that was the only way he could see there had to be a better way to put the notes together.’

‘That’s not how I see it,’ said Eva-Stina.

The two colleagues were about to go out for dinner. It did not seem to be an isolated occurrence or something they had decided to do on this particular evening, but part of a natural rhythm.

They all put on their outdoor clothes. Ester hastily drank up her unpalatable wine and noted the distinctive little sound of an empty glass being set down on the counter, the one she had heard so far away in Paris a thousand years ago.

They stood down in the street. It was snowing. It had snowed all winter and all day. Even here in the city it was banked up high.

‘Do you want to come and eat with us?’ asked Hugo.

The fact that he and Eva-Stina belonged together in some way seemed more and more evident, but Ester could not get it into her head that they could belong together in the way she had belonged with him. They were surely just particularly close colleagues; they quite often went out for driving practice, she had just learned, and laughed a lot while they were out driving, laughed at all the ‘hilarious situations’ they got into in the process. Eva-Stina would be taking her driving test before the summer.

If Ester had not found it absurd she would have thought they sounded like a couple in love. Instead she thought that the word hilarious was one of the worst words in the language. It was a word for people who observed that a thing was funny but didn’t find it funny, yet despite this did not become ironic about it.

Her throat constricted at the thought of his having time for driving practice and hilarious situations when he had been telling her for a year that lack of time was what prevented him seeing her.

They stood on the pavement outside the entrance to his building. It was snowing. She thought: How can anyone be so stupid as to believe it’s to do with time when people give time as their excuse? How can anyone be so fundamentally stupid as not to see what’s obviously happening? Nothing is just sheer chance when things change. No. I’m not stupid, it’s not that. I never believed time had anything to do with it. I was just trying to cope with my disappointment, weather it, get through.

Should she go for the meal? She thought it must mean, after all, that he liked her company and that the two colleagues did not have intimate dealings. You couldn’t take your last woman with you when you went out for a meal with the next one. Nobody could be that tasteless.

Wasn’t the question he had just posed in actual fact his way of telling Ester there wasn’t anything between him and Eva-Stina, that she was just an art student who idolized him and whom he was helping with her driving test and giving career advice to?

Otherwise he would surely never have wanted all three of them to go to the restaurant together? It would be too illogical.

‘But perhaps the two of you would rather be on your own?’ said Ester.

‘By all means come along,’ said Eva-Stina.

‘You’ve got to have dinner anyway, haven’t you?’ said Hugo.

‘Yes. I don’t feel like going to that party.’

‘What party?’ he said. ‘Let’s go. I’m quite hungry.’

Then he remembered something, turned and went up to his study. Within a minute he emerged with a slim volume.

‘I got you that book I was talking about. The one I said I thought would suit you.’

He held it out to her.

‘Here. A belated Christmas present.’

She looked at him, looked at the book.

The Unfortunate Consequences of Utilitarianism
, it was called.

‘Was this the one you saw in a shop window?’

‘Yes. Or rather no. I never found that one. Bought this instead. You’re interested in this sort of area, aren’t you?’

‘You too, I rather think.’

‘Er, I suppose so. Yes, of course.’

‘We did an interview on it. It caused a slight stir, as they say. Review in a national daily and all that.’

She read the back of the book.

‘So did you think I ought to do some more thinking about the issues involved?’

She laughed to take the edge off her pointed question.

‘Doesn’t one always need to do that?’

‘Yes. One always does.’

She leafed through the book and saw that it was attractively typeset.

‘Thanks. How thoughtful of you.’

Ester took a surreptitious glance at the second woman, or was she the first? She looked young and unspoilt. No she didn’t, in point of fact. She looked self-assured and crafty, quite calculating even. She stood calmly at his side with her hands in her jacket pockets, fur-edged hood, with an air of someone with self-evident domiciliary rights and a sense of belonging.

The snowflakes landed on their shoulders and didn’t melt. On Eva-Stina’s shoulders they melted instantly. Ester sensed that she ought to go home. But if she went home now she would have yet another dreadful, lonely evening. She did not intend to go to the party and in a strange way, which was actually her normal modus, she was sitting alongside what was happening and watching it, at the same time as being part of it. Thus she was far too curious about how things would develop not to accompany them.

Hugo was stamping his feet and wanted to get going. Ester kept the book open and brushed away the sprinkling of dry snowflakes on the pages.

‘Why have you given me this?’ she said.

‘I saw the book and thought of you.’

‘In what sense did you think of me?’

‘I don’t know. How does one think of people? Let’s go and eat.’

It was apparent from his whole body and the little muscles round his eyes that he sensed something tiresome in the offing, sensed that the easy mood would not last, sensed there were critical opinions of his judgement, sensed general unpleasantness, the dreaded unpleasantness which virtually all his actions were designed to avoid.

‘Perhaps you don’t want it?’ he said, holding out a tentative hand to take the book back.

She pressed it to her chest.

‘I do want it. But I don’t understand what sort of present it is.’

‘No particular sort. I bought one for myself, too.’

She looked at Eva-Stina. Evidently not for her, at any rate.

‘No particular sort of present. What a pity.’

‘People can give each other books. Things aren’t always as complicated as you think.’

‘Yes they are. Everything has added levels of abstraction. Everything that happens can be reduced to energy and matter and everything that is done has its origins in a thought, a feeling, good or bad, but everything comes from something, and everything is of some sort.’

Hugo appeared to wish he were somewhere else as he fixed his gaze on the end of the street, seeming to have grave regrets about the whole initiative, the book, the restaurant, everything. Ester knew she ought to go home, right now.

She stayed and the three of them trudged off through the snow that had fallen in the past hours, which the plough had not yet had time to deal with.

For Hugo Rask there was a table even when the restaurant was full. They bypassed the queue, there was some rearrangement and a table for three materialized.

Ester ordered chèvre salad, Hugo entrecôte with pommes frites, and Eva-Stina had raw minced steak. The food came and they ate. The chèvre was thick and creamy, the steak juicy and tender, the raw mince completely silent.

‘The food’s good here,’ said Hugo.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Ester.

‘How’s yours?’ Hugo said to Eva-Stina.

‘Sure, pretty decent,’ said the second woman, or perhaps the first, who had become rather standoffish and, it appeared, ill at ease.

‘I generally ask them to go easy on the garlic,’ said Hugo.

‘Ah no, you don’t like garlic, I remember that,’ said Ester.

‘Not too much of it.’

‘We talked about it the first time we came here for a meal together.’