Drowned (20 page)

My heart is pounding now.
Where shall we go then
for pastime, if the worst that can be has been done
, we have to be together. His grip on my wrists, I want it, in a different way from her. She says it herself, after all, I think, it’s as if her presence is all it takes to annoy him, more than mine, I can learn what to do, there’s nothing odd about that, you just avoid irritating him, avoid provoking him. The pictures are flickering through my mind now, when I see Stella down at the lake she is not alone, she is not trying to hold her breath underwater and misjudging the situation, she does not slip and bang her head on a rock, he is there with her, he is the one holding her head down, staring at her under the water, watching her hair billowing slowly beneath the surface, her dress opening out like a flower around her body, like a water lily, a lily, wasn’t that what he said.
I am sometimes afraid of him when he’s angry
, I won’t make him angry.

He suddenly shouts from downstairs that dinner is ready, I hadn’t even noticed he was home. He sounds pleasant, normal, I don’t know what to do with the diary, I am still holding it in my hand as I walk down the stairs, I have to ask him, I have to say something, he has to explain and I have to explain and then we can move on. I understand, I will say, I understand that you got angry with her, and not just angry, you were disappointed, upset, I understand that. Tell me what happened, I will say in my nicest voice, he likes
telling me things. He likes the fact that I am a good listener. I put the diary down on the bureau in the hallway, sit down at what has become my place at the dining table, he smiles at me.

We eat in silence. I am afraid of saying things in the wrong way, I repeat sentences in my head, I will say that secrets bind people together. I will say that I understand. He has made a pasta gratin, ham, Feta cheese, a salad, simple everyday food, but delicious, everything he makes is delicious. We drink wine, the kitchen clock on the wall ticks loudly, I have never thought about it before, never noticed how loud it is, it bothers me.

“Is that clock new?” I have to ask even though I know it’s a completely unfeasible idea.

“No.”

“I just didn’t recognize it, that’s all. Or rather, I didn’t recognize the sound.”

I spear a piece of tomato with my fork, chew it for so long that it has completely dissolved in my mouth before I swallow it. If we are going to be together he has to know that I know, I think. That I believe things will be different now, that I am convinced things will be different. That I am better for him than Stella. I have known it all along, I have known it ever since she told me about him for the very first time, he has known it too, I think, perhaps he realized it straightaway, that first evening last summer, there was something about
his expression when we first said hello, he held my gaze, held on to my hand.

“I’ve read Stella’s diary,” I say.

He raises his eyebrows, looks at me.

“Oh?”

“It says you hurt her.”

He shakes his head.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Not in the diary you read. She had another one.”

He looks surprised for a moment, but seems to recover himself quickly.

“So what did she write in the other one?” he says.

“Everything. Everything she didn’t write in the one she knew you used to read. How she really felt. The fact that she was afraid of you sometimes when you got angry, and how angry you were about her miscarriages. And that you hurt her.”

“I did nothing to her that she didn’t want me to do. You understand that, surely?”

“It says you did.”

I realize as I am speaking that I am not saying what I had intended to say at all, but he is not reacting as I expected him to react either, he is so defensive.

“I might have been a little careless on the odd occasion, given her the odd bruise by mistake … but never more than that,” he says. “If she wrote anything different, then I’m sure it was just fantasies. She had quite a lot of fantasies like that.”

I shake my head.

“No, obviously you don’t want to believe that.”

He gives me a wry smile.

“But the two of you are more similar than you think. She liked it, just as you like it. Although you do seem to like it more.”

“She was intending to leave you,” I say. “If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, she would have left you.”

“Is that what she wrote?”

“Yes.”

He has gotten up from the table, his glass clinks on the draining board as he puts it down. The clock on the wall is ticking loudly now, I think it sounds irregular, some seconds are far too long, as if the hand is hesitating before marking each second, unsure whether it wants to continue into the future or not.

“She would never have done that. She knew she was mine.”

I am still looking down at the table, my fingertips tracing the lines of the ornate pattern on the cloth. There must be something wrong with the clock. Gabriel ought to change the battery.

“Do you hear me?”

He sounds a long way off now. Daffodils, narcissi, tiger lilies in the pattern on the cloth, I touch the anthers of the tiger lilies, thinking of the lilies behind the greenhouse, of that first evening when I arrived
here in the summer, how clean the air felt, how vast the sky was in all directions, it was utterly still, a perfect summer’s evening. Stella showed me around, the greenhouse, the tiger lilies, the bluebells growing in the remains of the stone wall, she told me not to go too close, she said there were adders among the stones. When we were little we went to visit friends who had rows of tiger lilies in their borders, Stella and I touched the anthers, got rusty brown pollen all over our fingers, it was like pigment, difficult to wash off later, it stained our skin.

I think about his hand around my wrists, the weight of his body on mine, the firmness of his grip. He knows exactly how strong he is. I am suddenly disgusted by myself when I think about how much it aroused me, the feeling of not being able to free myself, of being totally at his mercy.

“What actually happened?” I say, quietly at first, and then I realize this is precisely the question he ought to answer, and I say it again, “What actually happened?” My voice is more confident now, it’s a question I should have asked before, as soon as they found her, or even last summer when I realized things weren’t right between Stella and Gabriel, I can hear Gabriel’s voice now, he tries to talk over the top of me but I shake my head, “You were with her, weren’t you?” I say, “Did she look like a flower afterwards? Under the water?”

He yells at me, telling me to calm down.

“You’re hysterical,” he roars. “You’re just like your sister.”

That shuts me up. I feel the tears spring to my eyes.

“No I’m not,” I whisper, I don’t know if he hears me. I feel feverish now, exhausted and frozen, the room seems to be spinning around, not just the floor but the walls, the cooker, the window overlooking the garden, the door leading into the living room, the cooker again, the door leading to the hallway, the windows, I can just see the apple tree at Anders and Karin’s through the bare fruit trees in the garden, it is misty outside, I can only just see it, the cooker, the door to the hallway again.

“Marina,” he says in his soft voice over by the sink, it’s as if I am hearing him from a distance. “Stop making a fuss now, darling.”

I recognize the look in his eyes, it’s the same as it was in the bedroom when he got angry because I was wearing Stella’s cardigan, it’s a look that seems to be full of anger and concern at the same time. He takes a few steps toward me, and I jump up from the chair and run toward the door, it feels as if the whole room is tilting now, like a ship in choppy waters, I grab hold of the doorpost for support then carry on out through the hallway, through the curtain, the back porch, Stella’s boots are standing there, I quickly push my
feet into them. My hands are shaking as I clumsily unlock the door, I hurry outside and down the steps, out onto the lawn, I can hear Gabriel on his way out of the house, I hear the rattle of the bamboo curtain, all the little wooden tubes dancing as he pulls it to one side.

“Marina!” he shouts, I keep on going, right to the end of the lawn, I know exactly where I’m going. A small ditch separates the garden from the field next door, I step over it easily, the exterior lights reach this far but after a few steps the darkness wraps itself around me. The field is muddy and wet, my feet slip and slide. It is a mild evening, there is a fine drizzle in the air, almost standing still, the air is milky, thick. I hear Gabriel call my name again, he seems to be in the garden still but I don’t turn around, I keep on going, stumbling, it is so dark, the sky high above me, velvet black and studded with stars beyond the mist, like a wet curtain between me and space. I can see the apple tree at the end of the field, the glow of its lights flowing out into the wet air, its outline is blurred but it is clearly visible, like a lighthouse on the horizon. I fix my gaze on it. It’s not far, it didn’t take me long to walk there when I went up the road and it’s a shorter distance across the field, as the crow flies, I remember the first time I heard that expression, Stella explained it to me when I was little, the
shortest distance between two places, the route a bird would take. I remember picturing it in my head, the same picture that still comes back to me whenever I hear the expression: a bird plunging down the steep slope leading to the water at my parents’ house, speeding across the water and the cornfield on the other side, it is always summer in my mind, the air is always clear, the corn yellow and ripe, there was no bridge, you had to go all the way around, it was closer as the crow flies.

It is quiet, the darkness is immense all around me, I can hear only the sound of my own breathing, and my steps in the mud, I haven’t the strength to run anymore. My feet squelch with every step, Stella’s boots are slightly too big I realize now, perhaps half a size, I used to inherit her boots when we were little, and her shoes, always half a size too big. We picked flowers on the morning of midsummer’s eve every year to make into garlands, this is an early memory, old, I was little, it was me and Stella and Mom, we wore our best dresses with our Wellington boots because there might be snakes, you never knew if there might be snakes. That was by a field too, the horizon far away and there were cornflowers and red clover and daisies at the edge of the field, our best dresses and our Wellington boots, a little bit too big, flapping at my heels, the smell of rubber and freshly ironed
cotton and an early summer’s morning. The garlands soon wilted, the white petals of the daisies, slimy and drooping, the red clover lasted best, tough stems, hard to break, Mom taught Stella the names of the flowers and Stella taught me.
Trifolium pratense
, am I crying or is it the rain? Every step takes an eternity now, my whole body is exhausted, I want to lie down here, simply sink to the ground, my dress is like a wet membrane around my body, a wet carapace that has stuck fast to me, like the cocoon butterflies have to wriggle out of before they can fly away on wings that are brand-new, delicate, trembling. Stella and I found a caterpillar in the garden once, fat and furry on a branch, we put it in a jar, a big jar that had once held gherkins, several kilos of gherkins that we had eaten with our Sunday dinner and our bubble-and-squeak, and we looked up the caterpillar in a book about insects: the tiger moth, it overwinters as a caterpillar known as a woolly bear, the book said it eats willow, we searched out a tree in the forest and fed it and it took big bites of the leaves, we could hear it munching as it ate, we giggled as we listened to it. Then it turned into a chrysalis, a white cocoon on one of the branches, we kept the jar in the garden shed along with the lawn mower and wood for the stove and fishing rods and a hammock and a croquet set. This was in the spring, a chilly March, April maybe, still
frosty at night, the moss on the lawn beneath the lilac bushes was white in the mornings, crunching underfoot when you walked across it, leaving darker footprints where the frost had melted beneath the soles of your shoes. The caterpillar was gone one morning, the jar was empty, Stella said it had turned into a butterfly and flown away and I wondered how it had managed to get out of the jar, the air holes in the lid were so small. It was many years before she told me it had died, that it had turned into a butterfly and died in the jar, wriggled out of its cocoon and been ready to fly away, but it had been unable to get anywhere, perhaps it had died of exhaustion during its attempts to find a way out of the jar, it had been lying motionless on the bottom of the jar one morning, she and Mom had found it before I woke up and agreed not to say anything to me.

The tree is suddenly closer. Am I moving my feet? I have to look down, I can hardly see my boots, I am so tired, I want to lie down now, curl up somewhere warm. Perhaps I would be able to retain my body heat if I were to lie down on the ground right here and curl up, I could wait for morning, wait for someone to find me, wrap me in a blanket, speak to me gently and tell me that everything will be all right.

Suddenly I hear Gabriel’s voice, I hear him calling my name across the field, he sounds far away but it’s
difficult to tell, the dampness in the air muffles every sound, insulates, wraps itself around the sound waves like wadding and cotton wool. Perhaps he is closer than I think, perhaps he is right behind me, following the sound of my footsteps and my breathing, he will soon be right behind me, he will place his hand on my shoulder. He is strong, his firm grip on my wrist, his body on top of mine, heavy, I wouldn’t be able to free myself even if I really tried. I peer behind me, trying to see something, a movement, an outline, trying to listen for footsteps. But everything is quiet, empty, my breath turns to vapor as it comes out of my mouth, it is suddenly chilly, the air is clearer and the contours of the apple tree are sharper now, is there snow in the air? The first snow? It is December now, I have lost track of the days, and the weeks in fact, I don’t know how long I’ve actually been here, or how long I’ve been in this field, ten minutes? An hour? I should be colder, it’s strange that I’m not. The new chill in the air sharpens my brain, I take a deep breath, look up, the sky is clear and full of stars now. The North Star shines bright and cold, almost immediately above Anders and Karin’s apple tree, around it I can make out constellations I thought I had forgotten, I suddenly remember their names: the Great Bear and the Little Bear, the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, Cassiopeia, Dad taught me, he had a star chart, we used to stand on
the balcony at home looking up, the clear winter evenings were best, the entire sky was a vast sparkling dome above us.