In the Name of Love (10 page)

Shortly after this, maybe a day or two, Anders rang for no apparent reason. He wondered, he said, how things were going. His tone, so genuinely concerned, made Dan wretched. He was shamed by his own pain, by the middle-aged grimace in his head, the booby trap of images that memory had become. A month from now Connie would be dead for three years. He abhorred playing the part of the jealous husband. Meanwhile Anders was making a proposal.

‘Dan, let’s get together. It’s ages since I’ve seen you. Let’s have a drink. Or lunch. Or dinner. Whatever suits.’

Dan couldn’t think of an answer. Anders’s enthusiasm rose.

You know what? Why don’t we go for a walk? Like we used to talk about doing?’

‘A walk?’

‘How about tomorrow?’

‘Anders, I have to work.’

‘Okay, let’s make it the weekend then. Sunday morning? Someone’s told me of a good place.’ He described a spot on the road before Grisslehamn and said they could meet there, then walk on by the water and have lunch. Typically, he didn’t wait for an answer before saying he’d spoken to Madde about it.

‘She can’t come right now of course but she’ll be glad to hear we’re doing something. You need to get off that island now and then, Dan. You’ll let an old friend tell you that, I hope? And it won’t do you any harm to meet some new people. Now listen, stop objecting. There’s a path there that’s beautiful at this time of year, I haven’t seen it myself but someone who knows the area told me. We’ll get a good walk and then have lunch.’

‘Anders, I have—’

‘We all have, Dan. A million other things to do. But Madde wouldn’t forgive me if I let you off on this one. I haven’t seen you in ages! I’m looking forward to it!’

Unable to concentrate after the call Dan took his walk early. Once again, a brilliant sunset bled across the last patches of snow. He walked to Bromskär jetty and back. Coming home through the forest he lost his way. He knew he was going in the right direction, though. He had just passed the farmhouse where Gabriel lived and he knew there was another house with an orchard close by, an abandoned house that had been closed up since he first came here.

He caught the smell of burning wood and then, ahead in the dusk, he saw a smouldering bonfire. A man stood throwing branches on it. He had a dog with him, a big handsome crossbreed which jumped up and advanced, growling at Dan. The man did nothing to call it off until Dan was close enough for him to see. With the sort of city arrogance that unfailingly irritated the islanders, the man continued to stare as Dan walked past.

‘Wait a minute,’ he called. ‘You’re the Irishman everyone talks about?’

Dan turned. The man came closer. His attitude was friendlier now. ‘People here aren’t often impressed by outsiders but they talk of you. I’m glad of the chance to say hello.’

‘I’m—’ Dan started but the man said, ‘I know. You’re Dan Byrne. I’m Johan Ek. I’m new out here.’

‘You are?’

To Dan’s surprise the man caught the edge of irony and met it head on.

‘Look, I’m sorry about the dog. But there are more strangers on these islands than there used to be. And some of them seem to have difficulty understanding the law. The right of public access to private land is old as the hills in Sweden but it doesn’t mean you can walk up to people’s houses and look in their windows.’

Dan was about to move on when the man said, ‘It’s getting a little chilly. Feel like coming in for a drink? Or a coffee?’

‘Thank you, but I have to get home.’

‘Well, no doubt we’ll see each other around. I’m out most weekends now that the weather’s improving. If ever you come by this way again, give a knock.’

In the island shop that same weekend Dan asked the girl at the cash desk how long Johan Ek had had the house near Bromskär headland.

She regarded him as though searching for the reason behind this sudden curiosity. Her hair was newly trimmed, showing a white neck at the back. Dan waited. She was biting the nail of her small finger.

‘The Axelsson place?’ she said at last. ‘He bought it last autumn. You didn’t know?’ Her surprise was exaggerated. Dan knew she was preparing to make this a story she might tell customers. The Irishman who goes walking to the graveyard at night. ‘Do you know who Johan Ek is?’

Sad to disappoint her, he told her yes, he’d seen Ek’s name in the papers in the old days. A high-profile criminal lawyer who spoke readily to the media. As she bagged his packet of ham, his loaf of bread and his small box of eggs, she said there was all sorts of stuff going on now. Her teeth had a faint blue tinge, probably from drinking cheap wine.

‘What sort of stuff?’

‘People going about at night. His dog was found dead yesterday morning. Somebody’d shot him.’

‘In the dark?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it may not be the same people.’

The next morning the postman said, no, they still didn’t know who had shot the dog.

‘It must have been an accident,’ Dan said.

‘Accident? Shooting season’s long over. No one out with a gun now unless they’re looking for trouble. And that dog was shot between the eyes. There was none of that sort of thing here before.’

‘Before what?’

‘Oh not you,’ the postman said. ‘Not you.’

Sune Isaksson said the ‘Selavas affair’ had begun to divide the island. To some people their coming from nowhere and getting the farm was fine. They’d lost everything in Iraq. Now their luck was changing. Others said Solveig Backlund’s will would be contested. It might even turn out to be forged. That, in fact, was the latest rumour.

‘A rumour started by who?’

‘Ah! Does one ever really know the answer to that question?’

‘Come on, Sune! You have your own idea about where it came from. Let’s hear it.’

‘What? And start another rumour? No. No.’

He was standing in the doorway, apparently oblivious to the cold April air that came in. His shoulders had lost something of their heaviness but they were still wide enough to fill the opening. He looked well. His skin colour was fresh and his broad face had a solidity about it that made him seem dependable. The afternoon clouds behind stood still, a relief after a day of gusting winds.

Dan put out two coffee mugs and two glasses. Sune closed the door and sat down.

He swallowed a mouthful of coffee. ‘Swedish medium roast. The world’s best.’ He sipped the whisky and said, ‘It’s my birthday at the end of the month. Open house. No need to dress up. It wouldn’t hurt if you brought a couple of shapely skirts along though.’

‘I don’t know any shapely skirts.’

‘Well, it’s time to start searching. And don’t look at me like that. You have two weeks to find them. Drive into Norrtälje and try the bars. No, try the cafés where the women go after shopping. These spring weekends there’s bound to be a few Stockholm women out, taking time off from their husbands. All you need are a couple of them who’d like a little fun while the going’s good.’

‘Sune, you have very outdated views on married women.’

‘Hell no! They talk a lot but there’ll always be women who want to enjoy life while their men slog up the ladder.’

When Dan arrived at the meeting place Anders had described he found Lena Sundman already there, sitting in the same old Volvo. She wore black glasses although the sky was overcast.

‘Well, well,’ she said.

They shook hands through the window.

‘You’re waiting for Anders Roos?’ Dan asked her.

‘Isn’t that why we’re here?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She asked him if he knew what restaurant they were going to. She didn’t remember any restaurant around here that overlooked the water. ‘The only thing that overlooks the water anywhere around here is the goddamn paper mill in Hallstavik,’ she said. Dan asked about the car. She said it had been fixed but it was a waste of money. ‘It’s like umpty years old. My aunt stopped driving in the sixties when her glaucoma got bad and it hasn’t been used since.’

Together they watched Anders’s car pull in. He went around and opened the door on the far side. A woman leant halfway out. Lena Sundman pulled the glasses down her nose to get a better look. By now it was clear that the woman was having some difficulty coming through the door opening. Anders took her hand while, at the same time, she pulled something behind her. When she finally emerged, she was holding a small dog in her arms. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Lena Sundman breathed. ‘What now?’

The woman stopped and turned with a proprietary air to wait for Anders to catch up. He introduced her as Ulrika, without saying anything more. With the dog in the way, shaking hands turned out to be tricky so they stopped trying. Anders smiled reassuringly and suggested they all go in Dan’s car which still had its snow tyres on.

‘Just where is it we’re going?’ Lena Sundman asked him.

‘Ah!’ Anders said. ‘That’s Dan’s and my secret.’

Lena looked at him sourly but she didn’t say anything more. Anders either decided to ignore her expression or didn’t notice it. He helped Ulrika get the dog onto her lap in the back seat and got in beside her. Lena Sundman sat in front with Dan. Anders directed him to a forest road.

Dan heard the other two talk while he drove, letting their voices float, with no attempt to structure the sound. He realized that he had nothing against driving all the way in silence, and in a sense it was silence although the two in the back talked on. After a while, though, Lena Sundman broke it by asking him what he actually did on the island.

‘This cocktail party chatter time?’ Dan asked her.

‘Hey, you don’t forget, do you?’

Dan didn’t answer.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you what
I
do. What I do is want to model clothes but at the moment it’s perfumes.

‘You model perfumes?’

‘I present them. At congresses. Fairs. When the occasion arises. In Gothenburg. Where businessmen can buy presents for their wives. Or whoever.
You
know.’

Dan hadn’t the faintest idea but he let it be. The other two talked on behind. Lena Sundman yawned. Her hands were stuck in the pockets of her fur-lined pilot jacket. As she looked out at the bronze trunks that slipped past beside them she eased one shoe off with the toe of the other and put her stockinged feet on the dashboard, then looked at Dan. He realized it was time he made an effort.

‘Apart from presenting perfumes at congresses and fairs when the occasion arises,’ he said, ‘do you do anything else?’

‘Eat. Sleep.’

‘All day?’

‘Don’t let it obsess you, it’ll sap your brain.’

‘You already used that line. To the boy at the petrol station.’

‘I told him it’d stunt his growth. Not the same thing.’

She looked away again, at the scudding trees, a face clear as a teenager’s that would not want to give a damn, one corner of her mouth turned up, slangy, defiant, an edge of some tough sensuousness that Dan thought would have made him wary if he’d been a young man involved with her.

They left the car near the coast and began their walk with the late-morning sun out now, warming their backs. Anders talked to the lady with the dog about a snowstorm he was caught in once in the forest here. They were young, he said, he and his girlfriend of the time. The car, his mother’s, stalled in a snow drift. They had to keep the engine going for the heater. Sometime around four o’clock in the morning the petrol ran out. Snow and silence and fifteen degrees below zero. No houses anywhere they knew of. ‘Later that year, when I did my military service up north, I learnt the first thing you do is conserve the fuel. You siphon a little off to start a fire about thirty metres away. Keep breaking off branches and throwing them on. A blaze as big as a house. Sooner or later someone will see it. In the meantime it keeps you warm.’

Ulrika asked him what happened that night.

‘We held hands when our teeth began to chatter and she cried a while. We said if we were going, we’d go together. Then we fell asleep. At first light, a man came through the forest on cross-country skis. He asked us what the hell we thought we were doing, stinking out the place by letting our car run half the night. His wife had had to get up and close the ventilator strip under their bedroom window. Next time, he said, go do your canoodling someplace else. My girlfriend began to cry again. After that he was sorry. He took us to his house, about fifty metres away through the trees. His wife gave us cardamom cake and hot coffee. Their living-room windows overlooked the main road to Stockholm.’

‘And the girlfriend?’ Lena Sundman asked him.

‘She’s married now. Two children. She still says it was the night of a lifetime.’

‘Some life!’ Lena Sundman muttered. If Anders heard her he didn’t make any comment. She wore padded khaki trousers that, like the jacket, could be army surplus though they were probably weren’t.

They had to walk two and two now, following a path close to the water. The surface was rough with jagged stones and for a while keeping their eyes on where they put their feet took their attention. The only sound came from their boots and from the remnants of shore-ice shifting beneath the sun. There was a sign saying they were entering a natural reserve and that dogs had to be kept on a leash. Anders had manoeuvred a little so that he was walking beside Dan, with Lena Sundman ahead and the lady with the dog behind. They walked on in silence for a while. By now Dan realized that Ulrika had been brought for him to meet. It was clear that Ulrika realized it too. It wasn’t like Anders to be so clumsy and it got worse.

‘I’ve been wanting you to meet Ulrika,’ he murmured.

Dan looked straight ahead. What the hell am I doing with these people? he asked himself. Anders didn’t seem to be the same man he had known in Stockholm. Then he remembered that the Anders he had known in Stockholm was the man who had had an affair with Connie. He had already decided not to dwell on that. Why couldn’t he let it be?

After a while the path broadened again and they walked all four together.

‘Do you live on an island out here too?’ Ulrika asked Lena.

‘I’m staying with a relative in Herräng.’

‘Lena lives in Gothenburg,’ Anders said.

‘And what do you do there?’ Ulrika asked.