Drowned (9 page)

“I promise.”

I give her a hug, she throws her arms around me.

“We’ve been trying for such a long time. Ever since I moved here, virtually. He thought there was something wrong, but it’s just taken a while, it’s perfectly normal,” she says, her face half buried in my hair.

“I didn’t know …” I say. “I didn’t know you were trying.”

“I’d like to wait a little while, I’ve got so much going on at work right now. But Gabriel really wants a baby. He …”

She lowers her eyes.

“What?”

“He’s almost become obsessed by it. He’s not feeling too good at the moment, all this business with his book … There seems to be no end to it and he’s
never satisfied with it. And … he’s getting older, of course.”

I nod.

“I suppose it’s only natural,” she goes on. “But … I’ve had two miscarriages.”

“What?”

“Very early on, I mean it’s not uncommon … but he got so angry.”

“He got angry with you?”

“Not with me, maybe. But angry. Furious, almost.”

“Stella …” I begin without any idea of how I’m going to finish the sentence, I want to say something kind, that it’s not her fault, even though I know that she knows that and it sounds childish, but it’s the only thing I can come up with.

“It’s not your fault.”

Suddenly she has tears in her eyes.

“But what if it is?” she says quietly. “What if there’s something wrong with me, and it will never work out? There’s nothing wrong with Gabriel anyway, because I do get pregnant … it just doesn’t seem to want to stay inside me, somehow.”

She is crying now.

“Stella …” I say again, pulling her close, she weeps against my shoulder and I pat her hair, I feel awkward, I ought to say something wise and comforting but I don’t know what. It feels as if the situation is
upside down: the fact that I am consoling her when she has always taken care of herself, and then I think it isn’t like that at all, because she has never consoled me, I have never wept on her shoulder. She shows that she cares by making demands on me instead, I think, she believes it’s as easy for everyone else as it is for her, you just make a decision and get things done: science options in school, part-time work in a market garden, disciplined academic studies with no dropped points or missed assessments, boyfriend with a permanent job and a place of his own. This business with Gabriel is the first illogical thing she has done, the first thing that doesn’t seem to have been part of a plan that was as straight as an arrow. And at the same time she entered into this illogical relationship with the same purposefulness she applies to everything else, convinced that it will work: a relationship with a considerably older man, the new job, the move to Skåne, the garden she has made exactly as she wants it. She has been talking about renovating the house too, doing up the kitchen and the bathroom, redoing the tiling, replacing the floors. Gabriel has opted out of the discussion, he’s too comfortable, I should think it probably annoys him.

I stroke Stella’s hair and she stops crying after a little while, she seems almost ashamed at having behaved with such a lack of control, and in public too.
She glances around to check if anyone is looking at us, digs a handkerchief out of her purse and blows her nose, tidies her hair.

“Do I look terrible?”

“No, of course not.”

She gives a wan smile.

“I really want to wait before I talk to Gabriel about this. So don’t say anything to him. About any of it.”

“No, I promise,” I say again.

Peter rings in the evening, his voice loud and clear over the telephone even though he’s so far away, in Barcelona for the time being, they’re going to carry on along the coast, perhaps go down to Gibraltar. He sounds happy but slightly awkward, I can hear voices in the background, some of them female, the sound of high heels on a tiled floor, a woman laughing, he says he’s in a restaurant.

“Are you having a good time?” I ask.

“Absolutely. You’d like Barcelona.”

“I’m sure I would.”

I don’t know what to say to him. The realization that it has only been a few weeks since we last saw each other but he has almost disappeared from my mind already is liberating. I don’t even miss him when I hear his voice, I think, I don’t care who that laugh belongs to.

“So how are things with you?” he says in that new, polite tone of voice.

“Fine. I’m not doing much, really. Reading and eating, mostly.”

“Sounds good. Like a real summer holiday.”

The thoughtfulness in his voice doesn’t sound genuine to me, the fact that he’s trying to pretend just makes me feel uncomfortable, I don’t want to pretend any longer, and I don’t want to talk to him anymore, I clear my throat.

“Listen, Stella’s just shouted to me, she wants some help with dinner. So … you take care.”

“You too.”

We hang up at exactly the same time, very quickly, both equally relieved, perhaps.

Stella and I walk through the forest on our way down to the lake, over shiny tree roots and last year’s fallen leaves. The trees around us are tall, it’s like walking in a great hall of trunks, a cathedral with a ceiling made of treetops. I look up at the sky, blue flickering among the green, I see a bird way up high, sitting motionless on a branch and watching us. It is hot even in the shade beneath the trees, the air seems to be standing still.

By the side of the path there are mats of glowing green sorrel, I break off a few leaves and push them in
my mouth. The taste is sour, just as I remember from the forest where we played when we were little, but I find it difficult to swallow the leaves when they grow soft in my mouth, I spit them out. Stella looks at me, her expression amused.

“You can use them in salads,” she says.

I wrinkle my nose, she smiles.

The water in the lake is still and dark. Stella doesn’t want to swim by the little sandy beach, but by some rocks a little farther on, it’s nicer getting in there, you avoid that feeling that the ground is giving way beneath your feet. She has wound up her hair in a shiny knot on top of her head, and in her strapless swimsuit she looks like a film star, timeless, elegant. I feel clumsy beside her but I forget that as soon as the water envelops me, it feels fresher today, it’s warm enough to be pleasant from the start, but yet it’s cooling, I lie on my back, close my eyes, the surface of the water is almost body temperature. I feel so drowsy I’m afraid of nodding off, I can feel my head sinking farther beneath the surface the more I relax, the sounds around me become muted, slow. The water is the same color as syrup, or resin, I run my finger across the surface, it looks almost viscous, as if it has thickened, is in the process of setting. If the temperature were to drop suddenly Stella and I would end up like insects caught in a piece of amber, I think, like the people in Pompeii, trapped inside the syrup-colored
frozen water of the lake instead of ash. The archaeologists could hack us out of the yellow ice one day, study us, the thought makes me smile.

A short distance away Stella’s head is bobbing up and down, she swims out to the middle of the lake, turns and swims back, repeats this several times, I lose count of her lengths. Her strokes look slightly awkward, as if she is not entirely comfortable with them, but her expression is determined. Suddenly she is beside me, treading water, breathing heavily.

“This is fantastic exercise,” she says between breaths. “You really do use your entire body.”

I nod. Her movements produce small eddies of cooler water around us, I feel the gooseflesh on my arms, then a few seconds later they are smooth again as the blazing sun quickly warms up this new water too. Stella gazes over toward the shore on the far side of the lake, screws up her eyes, and points.

“Have you seen them?” she says. “I told you the water lilies would be flowering now.”

I turn my head and there they are, a host of water lilies, like a floral cover on the surface of the water, it seems almost unbelievable that I didn’t see them when I was here on my own. They move gently, even though the water looks completely still, perhaps there are currents down below tugging at their stems, they look indolent, majestic, like torches that have been
slowly brought to the surface, up toward the light, blooming quietly and with dignity among the green pattern of their leaves.

“Can you pick them?” I say. “Take them home and put them in a vase?”

“Not in a vase, maybe. But it ought to be possible to put them in a bowl of water. Shall I go and get one?”

It’s a long way to swim to the other side, perhaps she’s overestimating her ability. I shake my head.

“I find them slightly revolting.”

Stella laughs, pushes back a strand of hair that has escaped from the knot and fallen down over one eyebrow. Then she turns and swims back toward the rocks. A short distance out there is a large rock hidden just beneath the surface, the water swirling around it as a kind of warning. Stella heaves herself up onto it, waves to me, it looks weird, as if she’s actually sitting on the water. I laugh, wave back, swim toward her.

“You look like the little mermaid,” I say.

She laughs too, slips back into the water, we swim back to the shore together.

When we have dried ourselves with our faded towels we spread them on the rocks and sit down side by side. The stone is smooth and pleasant, like in the archipelago. I fiddle vaguely with some alder cones, Stella drinks water directly from an old juice bottle
she has brought with her, swallowing great big gulps, then she takes a deep breath.

“I think I’m going to start swimming in the fall,” she says. “In the mornings, before I go to work. The pool is right next door. I’d like to be a really good swimmer. And it makes you strong.”

I steal a glance at her body. She is smaller and daintier than I am, I’ve always envied her that. She doesn’t look as if she needs to take up swimming to keep in shape, and there is no sign of a rounded tummy yet. I spot a mark on her inner thigh, just below the edge of her swimsuit. It’s a round mark, about the size of a shirt button or a small coin, dark against her smooth, pale skin, a livid dark red, almost purple. When she notices that I have seen it she quickly covers it with her hand, looks up at me, I think she looks as if she has been caught out, slightly embarrassed.

“What’s that?” I ask.

She shakes her head, smiles anxiously.

“I’m so clumsy, I burned myself,” she says.

“On what?”

“I dropped a cigarette.”

She’s nowhere near as good at lying as I am, and the thought that I am better than her at something is quite satisfying. There is something different about her tone of voice, something strained, besides which it’s a poor explanation. It could easily be a burn, but
a dropped cigarette would never make such a perfect round mark. And she would have had to have been smoking dressed in only her underwear. I give a little smile, she looks at me with an unconvincingly relaxed expression.

“But you don’t smoke, do you?” I say.

She looks away.

“Sometimes. At parties.”

I drop the subject because it is obviously upsetting her. It amuses me slightly to have hit upon a sore point, even if I find it difficult to understand why. Perhaps there’s something she finds embarrassing behind it, but dropping a cigarette on your leg is hardly something to be so embarrassed about. But then it occurs to me that she might have done it on purpose, that she might have burned herself. I’ve only read about that kind of thing in magazines, and at first the idea seems alien, but the more I think about it, the more logical it seems. Stella, who is such a controlled person, always so conscientious—isn’t that the kind of woman who does those things, is she punishing herself for some reason? I swallow, afraid of where my thoughts are heading: Stella weeping in my arms in the palace park, her “What if it’s my fault,” perhaps it’s only a short step from there to punishing herself in a purely practical way.

I suddenly feel ill, I glance at Stella, who seems perfectly calm now, perfectly happy in the sun on the
warm rocks. She passes me the bottle of water, rolls over onto her stomach, closes her eyes.

When Stella is at work and Gabriel has gone into town I go up the stairs, up to the first floor, into the bedroom. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I haven’t been able to get the mark on Stella’s thigh out of my mind. I want proof, one way or the other. At the same time I am trying to persuade myself not to make too big a deal of it, to take it easy—even this kind of thing could be a one-off, I think, a really bad day, I don’t have any problems imagining that, even if I could never do something like that myself, but then Stella and I are different in that way too: her anger has always been more explosive, found more dramatic ways of expressing itself than mine. Perhaps she did it out of sheer defiance, a kind of regression to her teenage years, perhaps she regrets it with hindsight, thinks she overreacted and is embarrassed, perhaps that’s why she doesn’t want to talk about it.