In the Name of Love (15 page)

He had a hard time falling asleep. His being there at all had set off too many unsettling emotions. To begin with he had, he saw now, been bracing himself all the time he drove here. And there was the strange relief he had felt when Lena turned out to have a running nose. And then the mention of Anders’s name had set off thoughts he had been trying to keep out of his mind. Lying in the dark it came to him that Anders had always seemed a happy man. A man people liked to be with. But the relationship between them that once had been simple and good was too muddied now ever to recover. Behind everything would echo the knowledge that Anders had fucked his wife.

Once his mind had started these thoughts it wouldn’t stop. He had such clear memories of Connie’s face, her gestures, her laughter with her head thrown back. All the seductive signals an attractive woman gives out unconsciously. And it seemed that these memories would blight every feeling he might ever have for any other woman. He even began to wonder if his reason for coming here tonight was precisely that, to submerge this bitterness he felt in the sort of heartless lust he had unfairly associated with twenty-two-year-old Lena Sundman. To use Lena as one might use alcohol or drugs. A means of cushioning despair, of dulling the senses.

Next morning Lena was up early. Her eyes were a little red and her voice was thick.

‘It’s just a head cold. Nothing make-up and a nasal spray won’t fix.’

At breakfast he invited her to lunch but she said she couldn’t, she had an appointment.

‘But let’s have dinner,’ she said. ‘I’ll get something on the way home.’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘Let’s go now. Together.’

So they got in his car and drove downtown and shopped in the Hötorgshallen market, standing side by side as they examined the fruit and vegetables. She took her time, asked the butcher if the price was for trimmed or untrimmed and told him to show her the underside of the cut before he wrapped it. Leaving, they each carried a bag. By now they had managed to make a game of it. She took his arm. ‘Well, here we are,’ she said. ‘Saturday morning shopping. You know? Like a dim married couple.’

Her appointment was on the south side. She said it’d tie her up all afternoon. As they were passing the flower seller’s stand on the square Dan saw a hothouse violet someone had dropped. He picked it up and gave it to her.

‘Say,’ she murmured, regarding its bruised petals. She put it in her purse. ‘That’s my lucky charm. I’m going to need it today.’

‘Job hunting?’

‘Yip.’

He carried the two grocery bags and stowed them in the boot of the car. At the flat he took them up in the lift with her and put them on the kitchen table. He thanked her for the dinner offer and asked if he might take it another time. He knew it was a little abrupt and he was impressed when she understood at once. It was a situation she’d had experience of.

‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ was all she asked him.

‘I’m fine now.’

‘Good,’ she said with a smile. ‘Dinner will be something to look forward to next time.’

As he was leaving she said, ‘Say a prayer for me that I get this job. I really need it.’

‘I don’t think my prayers would have any effect.’

‘Maybe those are the kind that work best. Listen, if I do get it I’ll be going to Paris for a week. You want to come? You’d have to pay for your own ticket, your own hotel room, but I think I could offer you dinner.’

Two mornings later the taxi driver from Herräng turned up again – this time with a chocolate cake. The card said:
You won’t believe this, but I baked it myself. My own chubby hands. Can you imagine? The one and only culinary talent I may ever possess. Here’s the good news. I read somewhere they’ve discovered happiness is just a matter of chemical reactions in the brain. With all the money they’re getting, they’ll surely pin it down. How about a walk on Sunday afternoon? I’ve got to do something about my truly lamentable physical condition. If you supply the coffee, I’ll bring the picnic. I’m still waiting for news of my job.

On Sunday Dan tried to work while waiting for her. Sune Isaksson came around and told him that the island’s part-time restaurant was closed for a week for renovation. He had counted on eating Sunday lunch there. Dan offered to heat up some leftovers but Sune said a sandwich would be fine.

He was still there when Lena finally showed up around six o’clock. She had a plastic bag in each hand and said that the bloody car had started to cough half an hour outside Herräng. ‘I could shift between gears one and two and nowhere else. It’s driving me fucking crazy.’

She was wearing old trousers, a pullover and flat-heeled walking shoes. He hadn’t seen her dressed like that before. She looked like the kind of girl you used to see, but never got to speak to, in trendy pubs in London in the fifties, artists’ pubs, pubs theatre people went to. He could hardly take his eyes off her.

As he took her bags she said, ‘Sorry, DeeJay. Looks like it’s going to be dinner instead of our picnic.’ Then she caught sight of Sune. Dan couldn’t see her face but Sune beamed. He made a sign for her to sit beside him. Dan poured them both a glass of wine as he told Lena that Sune had been talking about the artists’ colony that existed here on the island during the forties.

‘Did Solveig or Fritjof ever mention it?’

She shook her head.

‘Of course it was considered pretty scandalous in those days,’ Sune said. ‘As church-going people they may not have wanted to talk about it in front of a child.’

Lena didn’t answer.

He talked on for a while about the group that became known as the ‘Roslag Artists’, then said it was time to head home and prepare dinner. Dan looked at Lena. It was her food, her decision. She remained silent as Sune got to his feet. Dan went with him to the door, offered to drive him home. Sune said no, the walk would do him good.

‘What are you looking at me like that for?’ Lena demanded when he had gone. ‘All right. Maybe it would’ve been kinder to invite him to stay but there are limits.’

‘To what?’

‘That business about his birthday was a load of shit! I asked around. His birthday’s in November. He made it up.’

‘It was harmless.’

‘I don’t like people manipulating me. Just so you know.’

Dan looked at her.

‘It’s
our
picnic,’ she said. ‘Not his.’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh fuck! Now you’re disapproving. Well, you can lay off!’

‘I didn’t mean to sound like that.’

‘Shall I start dinner or not?’ she said. There was a pause. ‘Jesus, sometimes I hear my own voice. You know?
Shall I start dinner?
What a dumb thing to say. The caring little woman.’

Dan moved closer. She kept on talking. ‘I have everything,’ she said. ‘Vegetables, vitamins. Lettuce, carrots. The stuff rabbits don’t eat any more. Wine. Half a chicken.’

There was a nutty kind of gaiety about her now, a wild humour in her eyes. ‘I’d have bought a whole chicken,’ she said, ‘only half was all they had left. Pre-roasted. The man said to put it in the oven, slow heat for ten minutes. Or, failing that, heat it gently over your buffalo-dung fire.’

When he was in front of her she stopped. Something in her attitude, the way she held her head, made him sure she’d prepared herself for this. She must have known that sooner or later they would come to the end of the verbal jousting. They were standing close together now. For a moment he caught the bland odours of youth, the milky smell of her breath. Then he withdrew.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Time for dinner.’

Afterwards, when they were washing up, she asked if she could stay the night.

‘You have a spare room,’ she said. ‘I saw it last time I was here.’

‘What did you do? Make a survey of the place? Anyway, there’s no bed in it yet. And it hasn’t been dusted for ages.’

‘Oh well. If it hasn’t been dusted. Of course we could share your bed,’ she said, ‘only another roll in the hay is not what you need, DeeJay. Not right now. Believe me, I know these things.’

‘Another what? I live like a monk. I don’t even have higher thoughts to console me.’

‘You had whatshername you took home from the party you went to in Stockholm at the beginning of the summer.’

‘Lena—’

‘Don’t you want to know how I know?’

‘I don’t care how you know. Anders Roos told you.’ As he said it he wondered how Anders knew.

She slept on the sofa. Dan slept upstairs, better than he had in a long time. He woke late next morning. When he went down, she’d gone. The bedclothes were folded on the sofa. The kitchen table was laid for his breakfast. A note said:
Three thousand nine hundred and sixty hours since we first met. Do you think if we hit the ten-thousand mark we might splurge and buy champagne?

The following week Anders rang and said he and Madde had just got some very good news. He’d been sitting all morning with the accountant in Norrtälje and both turnover and profits had risen steadily since they set up the business four years earlier.

‘That’s what counts,’ he said. ‘When selling I mean. That it’s a growing concern.’

‘You’re selling?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? That just shows how long it’s been since we’ve seen each other! Madde wants to have the baby in Stockholm and I agree with her. There’s nothing wrong with the hospital here but it
is
provincial. And when the baby comes she wants us to make a fresh start, all three of us.’

Dan was confused. ‘You’re moving to Stockholm?’

‘We already have an option on a flat. It went quickly thanks to Madde’s parents. They’re going to sell the house and give her half the money. We’ve got a bridging loan. We’ll sell the business and set up something new in town. We’ve got plenty of ideas!’

‘Congratulations to you both,’ Dan said. It didn’t come out right but Anders was too preoccupied to notice.

‘You know, I wonder if Madde was ever really happy here. She made the best of it, giving up her research, taking a job as a replacement teacher, but that was already a sacrifice.’

The news that they were moving had come as a brief shock to Dan but he quickly dismissed it. What difference would it make?

Anders was in excellent spirits. Madeleine and he had de­c­i­d­ed on a name for the baby, he said. ‘Kajsa. Isn’t that beautiful?’

‘Katarina?’ Dan said.

‘No. Katarina is Madeleine’s grandmother’s name so we’re going to christen her Kajsa directly. That’s what everyone will call her anyway. Just like you might christen someone Jim instead of James.’

He said the flat they were buying in Vasastan overlooked Vasa Park. And it was, of course, the old university district. Stockholm’s
Quartier Latin
.

‘You know the area?’

Dan said yes. It was where Connie and her father had lived when Dan first came to Stockholm. For all his austerity, Connie’s father had not been a difficult man to get on with. When Connie told him she was going to marry the Irishman sleeping on his sofa he took it with good grace. True, Dan wasn’t Spanish but then Spain wasn’t Spain any more. When Connie was pregnant they all moved to a bigger flat on Kungsholmen Island.

All this flashed through Dan’s mind while Anders talked.

‘—to Paris? Is that true?’

‘What? That I’m going to Paris?’

‘Yes, with Lena Sundman.’

‘Nothing’s been decided,’ Dan said a little shortly. He felt foolish at being so disappointed. So what if Lena had told Anders about their upcoming trip?

‘Well, be careful.’

‘Careful of what, Anders?’

‘I know you won’t mind my saying this, Dan, but she’s in a fragile state.’

‘Oh? Fragile in what way?’

‘Madde and I ran into her at a party in Stockholm last Saturday. She told Madde she was going to Paris soon and that you might be going with her. It was Madde who thought you should be careful. As she said, Lena is a lost young woman looking for something to hold on to. An older man as a mentor maybe. But don’t let it go any further than that.’

Fuck! Dan said to himself. Would Madeleine assume the Paris trip was about casual sex?

‘You know what I mean? Look, all I’m saying is that Lena isn’t someone to jump into bed with just for the fun of it. She’s had a tough life and the last thing she needs now is more men making use of her. That’s all they do, you know. I sometimes wonder whether the sort of man she attracts is capable of thinking of her as anything other than a sexual object.’

‘Anders, do you have any idea what you’re beginning to sound like?’

‘Don’t take it so personally, Dan. I’m just trying to give you advice.’

‘Don’t take it personally? Jesus! How else am I supposed to take it?’

Anders began to laugh. His voice was lighter and the old charm was back. ‘Dan,’ he said, ‘Dan, don’t think I’m blaming you for a second. That really would be rich, coming from me, wouldn’t it? It’s just that Madde is worried about Lena. She says Lena’s an adolescent in so many ways, she’s younger than her years, a kid still searching for a moral base.’

Dan felt a sudden and irrational desire to say, ‘Coming from a man who fucked my wife, yes, that would be rich.’ But he saw the pettiness in it and at once the horror he had of acting the jealous husband surged up in him.

‘I mean, this business of the farm out there,’ Anders said. ‘I’m sure you know about that. She’s talked to Madde and Madde thinks it’s not the money that matters, it’s the roots. The farm is the closest thing to a home she’s ever had. She ran away from her mother when she was fifteen, you know. How she survived in a port town like Gothenburg I don’t even want to think about. The thing she needs now is to get her confidence back. Get to see that men can be friends, not just brutes. She needs to know men like you, Dan, and the more the better. She needs you as a friend she can trust.’

A friend she can trust, Dan thought. But Anders had more to say.

‘I wonder if she doesn’t see you as a sort of substitute father, Dan. I know that sounds trite but it’s exactly what she needs.’

His empathy was radiating now. He said that Lennart Widström was lending Lena one of his company’s flats in town, whenever she needed it.