Benny & Shrimp (17 page)

We’re seeing less and less of each other.

She can’t borrow her friend’s car any more; the friend seems to have got rid of it, so either I have to go and fetch her or she has to catch a bus. There’s only one, at 19.30 on weekdays. That means she’s here at half past eight, and by ten I should be getting to bed. And I can rarely pick her up before about eight, so it gets just as late. If I sleep over at her place, I have to get up at five.

An hour and a half, once or twice a week. Not
counting
the weeks she’s away.

When what we need is a clear run of a couple of days to get under the jokey surface. I mean, you can’t just come out with “Have we got any future together?” when she’s standing in the hall, hanging up her coat.

I forgot the weekends. Then she’s here for a whole
day sometimes. That’s when we quarrel. Or avoid
quar-relling
, which is almost as exhausting.

But I miss them, all the same – she’s been away at conferences and courses and all sorts of other nonsense these last three weekends. Blowed if I won’t have to start seeing her at the cemetery again.

I took her to a party, here in the village. It was a kind of experiment, I suppose. Things were a bit frosty between her and Violet, but the other villagers, most of them over fifty, seemed to take to her. She was talking to some of them so eagerly that I started worrying she was suggesting books for them to read, but apparently they were talking about village history. Genuine
interest
on both sides can never do any harm – and what’s more, I know my neighbours are quite touchingly
concerned
to see me safely settled. The way we see it, when the last farm goes, the village dies – we all feel that way, deep down. It becomes just another outlying outpost of the town.

I remember sitting there glumly over my beer,
imagining
Rowan Farm as a holiday home for some
executive
in a computer firm.

Then we were invited round for coffee by Aunt Alma and Uncle Gunnar, Mum’s old friends. On the Sunday.

“Oh, I’m afraid I can’t! I’ve got to fly to Uppsala at three tomorrow afternoon!” Desirée said.

What can I say?

On my own in the cowshed, I keep coming back to the thought that there are three ways to go from here, and I’ll have to make up my mind soon.

One: I try to get Desirée to uproot herself and move here. She hasn’t the least intention of doing that, I know – she’d be annoyed if I even asked.

Two: I sell the farm and move into town and keep the coffee hot for when she gets back from Uppsala. I haven’t the least intention of doing that.

And three: I look reality in the eye and give up the whole impossible business. Then I try to find a more suitable woman, who’d be prepared to spend more than three hours a week with me. Because the fourth
alternative
, which I don’t even want to contemplate, is
staying
a bachelor into old age. Like Bosse, who folk still call Nilssons’ lad, though he’s forty-six. He’s single and lives at his parents’ farm with his old mother, keeps a few beef cows and works half the week at the
agricultural
supplier’s. He’s had a huge satellite dish installed, gets envelopes through the post marked “Discretion guaranteed” and lives for capercaillie hunting. He has no other interests, as far as I know. He drops in at Rowan Farm occasionally on some unlikely errand and stays for three hours, and if Desirée happens to be here, we both sigh behind the curtains when we see his car turning into the yard.

No, at all costs avoid getting like Bosse … I’d do
anything
to escape that. And now we’re coming to the crunch.

Perhaps Desirée senses a swarm of ageing bachelor angst buzzing in the air when she comes to visit me. She’s aware of all the expectations and sets her face against them and just wants to be a playmate. Little
Shrimp, hardly out of childhood, not afraid of being alone in her busy, urban life.

Whenever – increasingly rarely, now – I get her to myself, in my bed, I feel as if I’ve got a stone sinking in my belly. Because she’s just as dizzyingly white, warm and graceful as ever, and I tell her: “It’s your fault if I die prematurely! Unmarried men have a poor prognosis, you know, statistically speaking!” And as she ties herself in knots with the effort of avoiding giving me an answer, she doesn’t realise the bell’s ringing for the last act.

Naturally, I tried to make it look like a polite social call. I took flowers, expensive tulips, and a packet of best Darjeeling.

She opened the door but kept the chain on. When she saw who it was, she let me in, though without enthusiasm. She didn’t seem averse to my being there, merely distracted. Like someone who’s really a bit too busy to have visitors.

“Hello, Inez!” I said. “It’s been quite a while! How are things with you?”

“What? That can’t be particularly interesting
information
for you, can it?” she asked, not unkindly.

It seemed to me that Inez now thought life too short for small talk. So I decided there and then not
to beat about the bush.

“Well, yes, it is a bit!” I said. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Your way of looking at life, and how wise you must be. I’d like you to let me share a little of it.”

“Hmm?” she said noncommittally.

“There must have been a time when you had to make a choice,” I said. “Now I’ve got to make one, too, and soon. It would be interesting to know what your
thinking
was. How you came to choose your archives rather than first-hand experience. Do you see?”

Two red patches suddenly flared on her cheeks; she got up and put the tulips in an old-fashioned crystal vase she dug out from the back of a kitchen cupboard. I could see her climbing on a chair to reach it. Then she came in and sat down again, took off her glasses and shot me a look of annoyance.

“What makes you think I had any choice? Of course I didn’t have any choice when it came to first-hand experience! My parents were missionaries in Tanzania; I was brought up by an unmarried aunt. She was a
terribly
messy and disorganised person, incidentally! When I got a place at library school, it came as a huge,
intoxicating
liberation for me. Being free to organise things the way I wanted. In systems. Of course, I could have chosen to experience things myself. Gone on
chinapainting
courses and group tours. That’s never appealed to me in the least! I went on to work at the library for thirty-seven years, voilà tout! And you may as well know that I’m not interested in having ‘friends I can
confide in’. Do you see?”

“If you throw me out, Inez, I’ll go home and open a computer file on you!” I said. That produced a little smile.

Then we talked for nearly an hour. She made us each a cup of my Darjeeling, though the strength she brewed it, it might as well have been a Tetley’s teabag.

“What I need from you is a word of advice,” I said. “Just an extra pair of eyes. Sharp eyes like yours. What did you mean when you told me that Benny was either totally wrong or the only conceivable one?”

She got up, went over to the filing cabinet and
rooted
around until she found my file.

“Hm… I’ve only observed you together on three occasions,” she said. “The latest one was just after Christmas, before I retired. I don’t need to go into how totally wrong he is, I’m sure you’re all too well aware of it. His clothes… and you do choose the way you want to look, consciously or unconsciously. But the other thing. All those feelings I could see. On both sides. Your husband seemed a likeable chap, but you
didn’t
stop work when he came in. You didn’t drop things and you didn’t pretend not to know him, not even at the very start. You somehow didn’t think it worth the
bother
. But this other one – you were almost rude to him. And then he held onto that book you gave him as
tightly
as if it were a much-loved puppy. Well, there’s not much more I can say, because I’ve no experience in these matters. But I’ve seen it before and it never lasts,” she added, almost with relish.

“The only conceivable one?” I persisted.

“I said it because you were different. I’ve never seen you like that before. And now you’ll have to excuse me; I’ve got a lot to do.”

She showed me her latest project. She’d started
collecting
and filing promotion leaflets, sending away for special offers, entering competitions and keeping a record of the results.

“But I don’t like it when they write to me as “Dear I. Maria Lundmark,” she said sternly.

Inez knows who she is, and they need to learn that. There’s got to be some sense of order to things.

Why the hell does everything have to be so bloody impossible? I thought that one day, when I’d forgotten to check which cows were on heat because I was
chatting
away on the phone with Shrimp. Two grown-up people about the same age, one house, a town nearby, two jobs. Live together, commute, do up the house… have children. Sleep together every night, see each other more than three hours a week.

I could picture it all so vividly that I glossed over all the obstacles we’d run headlong into before. I simply decided it was time for action at my end and started planning some alterations to the house.

The house at Rowan Farm is a pretty big one. A large kitchen, one smaller room, a sitting room and a big
entrance hall. Two bedrooms upstairs and a loft that could be used if I got it insulated. We could make the smaller room downstairs into a workroom for her… the only thing in there is Mum’s big weaving loom; it seems quite a while since I was last in there. My bedroom for us, Mum’s room for the children… and no doubt we can squeeze in her bloody bookshelves somehow.

Then I tried to work out whether we’d be able to afford a car for her. If she sells her flat and hasn’t got the repayments to think about… realistically, she won’t be able to work full time, and she’ll probably take a few years off when the first one’s born… or do a bit of part time, if she really wants to. There’s no nursery in the
village
… but maybe Violet would do a bit of
childminding
…

I went on like that, and yeah, it gave those last weeks a golden glow, before all hell broke loose with the stress of the summer months. I was so absorbed in my
calculations
that I completely forgot Shrimp. Then one day – she was in the middle of some theatre festival for kids, and rather reluctantly came out by bus – I told her I’d got something important to say. I parked her on the chaiselongue, fetched my papers and sketches and
calculations
and launched into it.

She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t say anything at all. The only sound she made was a quiet moan when I got to the bit about part-time work, kids and Violet child-minding. When I’d finished, there was dead silence for a moment.

Then Desirée said her piece.

She reminded me about that bitch I had, the one who tried to climb the walls, frantic to get out.

I’ve done my best to try to forget what she said. It was all about how she couldn’t see herself –
visualise
, she said – spending the rest of her summers taking
picnic
baskets to the edge of fields, or on her own in some boarding house with any children there happened to be. Said that she loved her job and had had to struggle to get where she was. That she couldn’t be in charge of a
children’s
section if she was working half the hours, and a part-time librarian’s wage would hardly be enough to run a car – she’d have to ask me for extra if she so much as wanted to go and get her hair cut. And that she’d rather have an abortion than have Violet as her childminder.

By that point, it was all over as far as I was
concerned
.

She wittered on about how we were jogging along quite nicely as we were and we could always wait and see – and I hadn’t the energy to say no.

Then she started talking about the importance of paternity leave and all the places she wanted to go on summer holidays. I didn’t even ask her if she’d ever heard of a dairy farmer on paternity leave who was free in the summer. I just sat there nodding, like an old wind-up toy.

She rang the next day and said she realised she’d been a bit harsh; she blamed pre-menstrual tension. But she was going to come out and bring something really nice for our dinner on Saturday evening.

It was the first time she’d ever done anything like that. Little Shrimp, she can’t even see it’s all over. And I’m steeling myself to tell her.