A Treacherous Paradise (7 page)

By then she had been taught all the things she needed to know by the old cook Mörth, who couldn’t resist groping her but stopped immediately when she thrust his hand away. Then he would wait until the following day before trying again. Even if she disliked the fact that he wouldn’t leave her alone, he really did his best to teach her how to prepare good food for the crew. He urged her to keep track of essential stores, and which of the harbours they visited would be most suitable for restocking. He made a map and drew up a list for her, and she realized that without Mörth she would never have been able to prepare herself properly for the voyage.

Forsman took her to one side after he had presented her with the hymn book. He seemed embarrassed, almost emotional, as if he had been drinking. Which she knew he hadn’t been.

‘I hope all goes well for you,’ he said. ‘May God watch over all you do. But I’m also on call if needs be, I promise you that.’

Her farewells to the stone-built house and its occupants were short. But Berta and she had made a pact: it was holy, they assured each other, and must not be broken. They had vowed to write to each other until they met again. They had learnt to read and write together, and now it had become clear that there was a purpose behind it all. And if it turned out that Hanna never returned to Sundsvall, at least they would be able to meet in the letters they exchanged.

Forsman accompanied her to the ship. A man in uniform she had never seen before was waiting for them at the top of the gangplank. He was young, barely more than four or five years older than she was. He was wearing a peaked cap and a dark blue tunic, was fair-haired, and stood at ease with a burnt-out pipe in his hand.

Hanna stepped out on to the gangplank. When she arrived on board, the unknown man was waiting for her.

She curtseyed, then regretted it. Why on earth should she curtsey to one of the sailors?

She heard heavy steps behind her. It was Forsman, coming on board with the captain.

‘Third Mate Lundmark,’ said Captain Svartman. ‘This is our cook, Hanna Renström. If you look after her well, perhaps you will get some decent food on the voyage.’

Lundmark nodded. His smile made Hanna feel insecure. Why did he look at her so intently?

But now she knew who he was, at least.

There was a light breeze blowing over Sundsvall’s harbour that April day. She closed her eyes and listened to the noise of the wind and the waves. The forest, she thought. The waves sound just like it did up there in the mountains when there was a wind blowing. Irrespective of whether the wind was cold or warm.

She suddenly longed to be with Elin and her brother and sisters. But there was no going back, just now there was only this steamship with its cargo of aromatic, newly sawn planks, about to set off for Australia.

‘Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark,’ said a voice right next to her. It was the third mate who had stayed behind while the captain and Forsman headed for Svartman’s cabin. ‘Lars after my father,’ he continued. ‘Johan after my paternal grandfather, Jakob after my elder brother who died, Antonius after the doctor who once cured my father’s blood poisoning. Do you know who I am now?’

‘I’m called Hanna,’ she said. ‘I only have one name. That has always been enough for me.’

She turned on her heel and went to her own cabin. Apart from Captain Svartman, she was the only member of the crew who had a cabin to herself. She sat down on the bunk bed with the hymn book in her hand. When she opened it up, she found two shiny one-krona coins inside.

She went back on deck. The mate was no longer there. She stood by the railing until Forsman emerged from the captain’s cabin.

‘Thank you for the money,’ she said.

‘Money is a good way of helping the word of God to fruition,’ said Forsman. ‘A bit of travel money won’t do you any harm.’

He stroked her awkwardly on the cheek, then left the ship on the gangplank which swayed noticeably under his weight.

The whole ship seemed to lean on one side as it bade farewell to its owner.

NINE HOURS LATER,
on 23 April 1904, the steamship
Lovisa
weighed anchor and set off for Perth.

The ship sounded a farewell with its foghorn. Hanna stood by the rail aft, not far from her cabin, but had the feeling that she was still standing down there, on the quay.

She had left a part of herself behind. She didn’t know who she now was. The future – uncertain, unknown – would reveal that to her.

She stood behind her cabin, under a projecting roof, and looked down at the swirling foam whipped up by the propeller. Drifting snow, she thought. Now I’m on my way to a world where it never snows, where there are deserts, and the dry sand whirls around in temperatures that are beyond my comprehension.

Suddenly the saw that the mate was standing beside her. Looking back, what she first noticed about him were his fingernails. They were clean and neatly cut, and she recalled how Elin used to sit crouched over her father’s nails, devoting endless effort and tenderness to her efforts to make them neat and clean.

She wondered who cut the third mate’s nails. She understood from something Captain Svartman had said that Lundmark was unmarried. Svartman had also asked her if she had a fiancé waiting for her to return home. When she said she hadn’t, he seemed to be pleased. He had muttered something about preferring that not too many of his crew had close family connections.

‘In case anything happens,’ he had added. ‘All the sea offers us is the unexpected.’

Lundmark looked at her with a smile.

‘Welcome aboard,’ he said.

Hanna looked at him in surprise. It was Forsman speaking. Lundmark had imitated his voice with astonishing accuracy.

‘You sound like him,’ she said.

‘I can if I want to,’ said Lundmark. ‘Even a third mate can have a shipowner’s voice hidden away inside him.’

A distant call from the bridge cut short their conversation. The black smoke from the funnels was sinking down on to the deck. She had to turn away to prevent it from making her eyes hurt.

Hanna had a fifteen-year-old boy by the name of Lars to help her with the preparation of food. He was also sailing for the first time. He was an orphan, and scared stiff. When he shook hands with her, she could feel how he was ready to snatch his hand away from her if she were to squeeze it too tightly.

Captain Svartman had asked for pork and brown beans this first day of the voyage.

‘I’m not superstitious,’ he’d said, ‘but my best voyages have always started with my crew being fed with pork and beans. There’s no harm in repeating what has already proved itself to be a good thing.’

In the evening, when she had made all the necessary preparations for the next morning’s breakfast and sent the mess-room boy to bed, she went out on deck. They had now left the archipelago behind them, and were heading southwards. The sun was setting over the forests on the starboard side.

All at once Lundmark appeared by her side again. They stood there together, watching the sun as it slowly vanished.

‘Starboard,’ he said without warning. ‘There’s a reason for everything. It’s an odd word, but it means something even so. Star has nothing to do with stars, it comes from “steer”. In the old days a helmsman would stand with a steering oar in the aft of the ship, and he would have it on his right because then he could use his right arm to move it, and a man’s right arm is usually stronger than his left. So the right-hand side was called “steerboard”, and that gradually changed into “starboard”.’

‘What about “port”?’ she wondered.

Lundmark shook his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I’ll find out.’

It soon became a habit. Every evening Hanna and the third mate would stand there talking to each other. If it was raining or very windy, they would shelter under the projecting roof of her cabin.

But she never had an answer as to why it was called ‘port’.

THIS IS AMAZING,
she thought. Every morning when I wake up my bed has moved on. I’m in a different place from where I was when I went to sleep.

But something else about her was beginning to change as well. She had started looking forward to her meetings with Lundmark. They talked tentatively about who they were, where they had come from, and she didn’t flinch one evening when he suddenly put his arm round her.

They were in the English Channel at the time, edging slowly forward through a bank of fog that loomed up in front of them like a wall. Foghorns were sounding eerily from various directions. They made her think of a flock of animals that had broken up, and was now trying to reassemble. Captain Svartman was always on the bridge whenever they passed through fog, and he had ordered extra lookouts to stand guard. Occasionally black ships with slack sails or ships with smoking funnels would appear out of all the whiteness and glide past, sometimes far too close, making Svartman shake his head in disapproval and give orders to slow down even more. For two days and two nights they were almost motionless. All accessible lamps and lanterns were kept burning on deck, Hanna found it difficult to sleep and frequently left her cabin, but she was always careful not to get in the way.

The next day Captain Svartman asked Hanna to look for the mess-room boy who had disappeared. She found him in the food store, hidden away. He was trembling with fear. She comforted him and took him out on deck, where Svartman pressed a lantern into his hand.

‘Work cures everything,’ he said.

A few days later the fog started to disperse. They increased speed again. Hanna heard talk of something called the Bay of Biscay, through which they would soon be passing.

One evening Lundmark suddenly started talking seriously about himself. He was the only child of a merchant in Timrå who had gone bankrupt and afterwards was scarcely able to keep squalor and famine at bay. His mother was a taciturn woman who could never reconcile herself to the fact that she had only managed to bring one child into the world. She regarded it as both disappointing and shameful.

He had always longed to go to sea. Was always running down to the shore to watch ships coming and going. At the age of thirteen he had signed on as an apprentice on a small cargo boat plying between Sundsvall and Söderhamn. His mother and father had tried to stop him, and even threatened to send the sheriff’s officer after him if he went through with it. But when he persisted they seemed to become resigned to the inevitable, and allowed him to do what he had decided was to be his future.

Before falling asleep that night she thought about what the third mate had told her. He had spoken to her in confidence, something that hitherto only Berta had done.

The next day he continued with his story. But he also began asking her about the life she had led before coming to Forsman’s house and then to the ship she was now sailing on. She didn’t think she had anything much to tell him, but he listened attentively even so and seemed to be genuinely interested.

And so they continued their conversation, every evening if the wind wasn’t too strong or Captain Svartman hadn’t ordered Lundmark to carry out some extra duty or other outside his normal routine.

Hanna realized that her feelings for Lundmark were different from anything she had previously experienced in her life. They couldn’t be compared with those she had shared with Elin and her siblings, nor even the close friendship she had formed with Berta. She spent every moment of the day looking forward to his arrival behind the galley: longing for their meeting.

One evening he presented her with a little wooden sculpture of a mermaid. He had bought it in an Italian port on a previous voyage, and thereafter took it with him on all the ships he signed on to.

‘I can’t possibly accept it,’ she said.

‘I want you to have it,’ he said. ‘I think it looks like you.’

‘What can I give you in return?’ she asked.

‘I have everything I need,’ said Lundmark. ‘That’s the way I feel at the moment.’

They stood there in silence for a while. Hanna wished him goodnight and went to her cabin. Later, when she peered through the door she could see him still standing there by the rail. He was gazing out over the sea as darkness fell. He had his legs apart, and his officer’s cap in his hand.

The following morning she was sitting in the galley, descaling a freshly caught fish which was to be the sailors’ dinner. A shadow fell over her. When she looked up it was Lundmark standing there. He went down on one knee, took her hand which was full of glistening fish scales, and asked her to marry him.

Until that moment they had done nothing but talk to each other; but everybody else on board had regarded them as a pair, she knew that, since none of the other men had approached her at all.

Had she been expecting this to happen? Had she been hoping it would? No doubt she had occasionally had such a thought, the idea that she was sailing together with him, not with a ship laden with timber. Despite the fact that she had only met him when the ship was about to leave Sundsvall.

She said ‘Yes’ without hesitation. She made up her mind in a flash. He kissed her face, then stood up and left to attend the meeting the mates had with the captain every morning.

They stopped in Algiers in order to take on board more coal – Hanna knew by now that this was called ‘bunkering’. The Swedish consul, a Frenchman who had once visited Stockholm in his youth and fallen in love with the city, found an English Methodist minister who was prepared to marry the couple. Captain Svartman produced the necessary documents and was a witness to the marriage together with the consul and his wife, who was so moved by the brief ceremony that she burst into tears. Afterwards the captain took them to a photographer’s and paid for a wedding photograph out of his own pocket.

That same evening she moved into Lundberg’s cabin. The second mate, whose name was Björnsson, moved into the ship’s cramped hospital cabin – Hanna would retain her own cabin, Captain Svartman was reluctant to take it away from her. But if anybody on board fell seriously ill, it would be used to accommodate them.