Drowned (4 page)

“Do you feel as if you have?” he says.

I am slightly embarrassed by his scrutiny, I imagine he must think I look pale, wrong in some way, ugly. But that is not what his expression suggests. I wonder what he’s thinking.

A lock of hair has fallen into his eyes, he pushes it back with his hand and gets a red mark on his forehead. When he looks at his hand and sees that it is sticky with paint, he realizes what has happened.

“Have I got red paint on my forehead?”

“Yes.”

I smile. So does he, slightly embarrassed again. “A lot?”

“No, not really … let me.”

I move a step closer and run my thumb gently over the mark on his forehead. He looks at me, no longer smiling. There is a strong smell of paint, as if the hot, still air is intensifying the smell, making it linger. The lock of hair falls into his eyes again, and I gently push it aside to get at the paint. I can feel his breath against my cheek, he is close now, bending his head toward me so that I can reach. His forehead is brown from the sun, his whole face, his arms, he is wearing a faded black T-shirt and he smells wonderful, warm.

“Has it gone?”

“Yes.”

I hold up my hand to show him, red paint on my thumb and forefinger, and he suddenly grabs hold of my wrist, twists my hand around, and looks at my fingers. It is a rapid movement, decisive, his grip is hard, just like when I met him on that first evening, the firm handshake. Perhaps he isn’t aware of how strong he is.

“Pretty nail polish,” he says.

I did my nails last night, a cool pink, shimmering like mother-of-pearl in the sunlight.

“Thanks,” I say quietly.

My cheeks flush red. He lets go of my hand and smiles at me.

“I think there’s a bottle of white spirit under the sink,” he says. “If you want to get the paint off.”

I rub my thumb and forefinger together, the red pigment in the paint adhering to the fine lines on my fingertips so that the pattern on them stands out, they look like the rings on a tree trunk.

“No, it’s fine. I wondered if there was anything I could do. Cut the grass maybe? Stella said it needed doing.”

“I was going to do it this evening.”

“I’d be happy to do it.”

“There’s no need.”

The grass really is too long. I realize cutting it will be hard work, it’s a big garden, and Gabriel doesn’t
even have a normal lawn mower, just an old manual one that belonged to his grandfather. I remember Stella saying that Gabriel can’t stand things that make a loud noise.

“I feel as if I ought to be doing something to help,” I say. “I mean, I’m doing nothing.”

“Perhaps you could start working on your assignment?”

I sigh and raise my eyebrows in a gesture of weariness, he smiles, his expression thoughtful as he gazes at me, his eyes lingering briefly on my legs before he quickly looks up and out across the fields toward the horizon.

“I have a suggestion,” he says hesitantly. “If you really do want to help with something?”

“Absolutely.”

“Come with me, then.”

Up on the glassed-in balcony the computer is switched on, the screen saver’s cube drifting indolently across the monitor. Gabriel presses a key and a Word document appears. He scrolls back to the beginning.

“Sit down.”

He wheels out the old office chair and nods toward it.

One of the flowers on the angel’s trumpet has come out. It’s enormous and looks tropical, as if it doesn’t belong here on the balcony at all but ought to
be in a jungle somewhere. It gives off a sweet smell, it’s as if the air is perfumed. I feel tired, I ought to drink more, you’re supposed to drink a lot when it’s this hot. Gabriel puts the big ashtray with the dolphin on the floor and opens one of the windows as I sit down on the chair.

There is a low bookcase along the wall at the back of the balcony. Piles of newspapers and magazines are balanced on top of it, along with heaps of papers, files, and books. The bottom shelf is filled by a long row of books with the same pale-gray spine. When Gabriel notices me looking at them, he bends down and takes one out. On the front cover is a picture of a woman lying in a pond, surrounded by flowers. When you have read the book, you know that she is dead.
Ophelia
, it says above the picture.

“Have you got a copy?” Gabriel asks.

“No.”

He holds the book out to me.

“Here, take it. But don’t read it now. The new one is much better.”

He nods in the direction of the screen.

“I wondered if you could have a look at it for me? I’ll print it out for you when I’ve bought a new ink cartridge, then you won’t have to read it on the screen.”

He leaves me at the desk, I hear him walking down the stairs. I look at the text on the screen. Stella hasn’t
read it, I know that, she told me she didn’t even know what his new book was about, she said he doesn’t seem to want to discuss his writing with her. I won’t be able to tell her he’s asked me to read it.

After a while I see Gabriel walking across the grass on his way back to the old henhouse. I think about his grip on my wrist, I can’t get the thought out of my head. I close my eyes, replaying the scene in my mind: the way he takes a firm grip and twists my hand around to look at my nails, his hand holding tightly on to mine.

I watch him until he has painted his way around the corner of the shed and I can no longer see him. Then I begin to read.

Gabriel’s first novel was published just after I started high school, a friend bought it and kept telling me I ought to read it, she lent it to me and I can still remember it lying on top of a pile of magazines next to my bed with its beautiful shiny cover. I read it quickly, the way I read most things in those days, a kind of binge reading aimed at getting through as many books as possible, shoveling down as many as I could in order to tick them off against a list in my head. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have much else to do during those years; with a significant number of books behind me, I could at least feel as if I had used
the time for something sensible. I have only vague memories of Gabriel’s novel but I do remember that I liked it, I remember a cloying sense of love bordering on obsession that was so well written I felt as if I had experienced it myself.

I have been sitting at the computer for several hours when I hear the sound of Stella’s car coming along the gravel road, I get up and take my copy of
Ophelia
downstairs, feeling slightly dizzy from staring at the screen for so long. Through the kitchen window I see Stella getting out of the car and waving to an elderly couple down the road, they wave back, she walks over and chats with them for a few minutes before they turn and head off in the direction from which they came. She’s carrying a plastic bag holding two containers of strawberries when she comes into the kitchen.

“Have you read it?” is the first thing she says.

“What?” I say quickly, thinking that I sound defensive, caught out, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“Did he give you the book?”

She nods toward my hand.

“Oh, that. Yes, yes he did.”

“I thought you’d read it before?”

“I have, but it was a long time ago. I can hardly remember anything about it.”

“It’s about his ex,” says Stella.

“Is she dead?”

Stella laughs.

“Oh no. She dumped him.”

“Oh?”

“He’s not that easy to live with,” she says quietly.

I am shocked by the sudden confidence, Stella almost looks surprised herself.

“Who were those people?” I say in order to break the tense silence that follows. “The people you were talking to?”

“Anders and Karin,” she says, placing the strawberries on the draining board. “They’re our closest neighbors, it’s their house you can see on the other side of the field.”

“What did they want?”

“They were just out for a walk.”

“Along this road? But it ends here.”

“They come by sometimes just to check things out. Make sure everything’s okay.”

“What do you mean, make sure everything’s okay?”

“That’s what people do in the country,” she says, sounding slightly irritated. “When it’s a long way between neighbors. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

She looks at me, her expression challenging.

“No, of course not.”

“What have you been doing today?” she goes on.

“Nothing special.”

“Have you started working on your assignment?”

“No, not yet.”

“Don’t you think you should make a start soon?”

“Yes.”

She nods, looking stern. She can still make me feel like a child. Just like when I failed at something when I was little and she was disappointed in me; she couldn’t hide it then either, she wore the same expression of reluctant indulgence.

“Did you bring in the mail?” she asks.

“I checked earlier, but there wasn’t anything.”

Stella looks cross.

“I’m waiting for some seeds,” she says.

She sinks down on one of the kitchen chairs, she looks tired, she works too hard. The former head of parks and gardens was almost seventy when he retired, half senile, she’s still trying to clear up after him, sort out the paperwork, the admin, the finances. She says she really needs an assistant, someone who could take care of all the paperwork so that she could concentrate on what she’s trained to do, she hadn’t realized the job would involve so much paperwork.

“He bought such horribly ugly containers,” she says. “Great big plastic urns, I don’t know what he was thinking of. Lots and lots of them. They’re piled up in the cellar, huge towers of pots, they look like
something you might see outside a pizzeria. And the sad thing is that there’s a whole lot of old containers there too, big bowls made of iron or bronze or whatever it is … They’ve got grooves on the bottom, they’re the color of lady’s mantle, they’ve gone completely green with the verdigris, they must be from the last century. The trouble is I haven’t got any money now, I’ll have to wait until next year before I can do anything with them. At the moment I’ll be happy if I can scrape together enough for a Christmas tree to go in the square.”

She gives a slightly weary smile.

“Perhaps we could have lunch together one day?” she suggests. “It would make a change for you, instead of hanging around here all the time.”

For once I find it difficult to work out whether she’s simply being kind or there’s something else underlying her words.

“I like being here,” I say, watching her face and hoping for a reaction, a furrow in her brow, something, but her expression remains pleasant, smiling. “But I’d love to meet you for lunch.”

Gabriel and I are sitting on the patio in the evening, we’ve done this almost every night since I arrived, he and I, Stella goes to bed early. We’re both going to
read, we’ve each got a book with us, I’ve chosen one at random from the bookcase in the living room because I like the title. The living room is almost like a library; all of Gabriel’s grandparents’ books and all of his, shelf after shelf covering the walls, apart from one wall that is covered in pictures from floor to ceiling—Japanese woodcuts, quiet Skåne landscapes, a portrait of a woman in a red sweater behind a still life of a bowl of fruit, that’s Gabriel’s grandmother when she was young in the 1930s, painted by someone who is obviously well-known but whose name I have never heard, a friend of the family.

There is a full moon tonight, we have watched it move across the vast sky, it is a harvest moon, burning orange-yellow above the fields of ripe corn. Gabriel is flicking through a book too, although we’re not really reading, either of us. A quarter of an hour passes, perhaps half an hour, then Gabriel brings the speaker out of the living room. He lets me choose a record on alternate evenings, tonight it’s his turn. We keep the volume low, Stella sleeps with her window open. We keep our voices low too, almost whispering sometimes, so that we won’t wake her. Gabriel does most of the talking, telling stories about people he knows or has known, gossiping about authors and journalists. I’ve never even heard of half of them, but he explains patiently, getting up to fetch books from
the living room, showing me photos of the authors inside the covers and telling me about various intrigues. It’s mostly to do with love affairs, infidelity and scandal, or quarrels, usually about work, about different appointments, slander behind people’s backs, or even quite openly; people who seem prepared to sacrifice just about anything for the sake of their careers.

Gabriel was out and about a lot after his last novel was published, it was a great success, the newspapers wrote about him, he appeared on the sofa on a number of TV programs, went to all the parties, knew everyone in Stockholm. These days he is in contact with hardly anyone from those days, he looks sad as he tells me this. His new novel was actually completed several years ago, but his publishers weren’t satisfied and wanted him to make some changes, and he ended up rewriting the whole thing. He’s almost finished it now but he isn’t happy with it at all, he’d really like to rewrite it all over again but it’s impossible, it would never be finished if he did that. He looks sad when he tells me this too.