The Lemon Table (6 page)

Her silence, and her turned back, alarmed him. This was not what he had planned. He had not even managed to call her Barbro, casually, as if from long ago. What had she once said? “I like a man to tell me what he knows.”

“The church was built in the middle of the nineteenth century,” he began. “I am not sure exactly when.” She did not respond. “The roof is made from copper extracted from the local mine.” Again no response. “But I do not know if the roof was constructed at the same time as the church, or if it was a later addition. I intend to find out,” he added, trying to sound purposeful. Still she did not reply. The only voice he heard was Gertrud’s, whispering, “The club-button of the Swedish Tourists’ Union.”

Barbro’s anger was now with herself as well. Of course she had never known him, never known what he was really like. She had merely indulged a girlish fantasy all these years.

“You are not dying?”

“I’ll last as long as any fir tree on the Hökberg.”

“So you are fit enough to come to my room at the Stadshotellet.” She said it as harshly as she could, contemptuous of the whole world of men, with their cigars and mistresses and logs and vain, stupid beards.

“Mrs. Lindwall …” All clarity of mind deserted him. He wanted to say that he loved her, that he had always loved her, that he thought of her most—no, all of the time. “I think of you most—no, all of the time,” was what he had prepared to say. And then, “I have loved you from the moment I met you on the steamboat. You have sustained my life ever since.”

But her irritation made him lose heart. She thought he was just a seducer. So the words he had prepared would seem like those of a seducer. And he did not know her after all. Nor did he know how to talk to women. It enraged him, that there were men out there, smooth-tongued men who knew what best to say. Oh, get it over with, he thought suddenly, catching her irritation. You’ll soon be dead anyway, so get it over with.

“I thought,” he said, and his tone was rough, aggressive, like a man bargaining, “I thought, Mrs. Lindwall, that you loved me.”

He saw her shoulders stiffen.

“Ah,” she replied. The vanity of the man. What a false picture she had carried of him all these years, as a person of discretion, tact, of an almost blameworthy inability to put his case. In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.

Still facing away, she answered him as if he were little Ulf with one of his childish secrets. “You were mistaken.” Then she turned back to this abject, grinning dandy, this man who evidently knew his way to hotel rooms. “But thank you”—she wasn’t good at sarcasm, and searched briefly for a subject—“thank you for pointing out to me the deaf-and-dumb asylum.”

She thought about taking back the cloudberry jam, but judged it unseemly. There was still a train she could catch that evening. The idea of staying the night in Falun revolted her.

FOR A LONG TIME
Anders Bodén did not think. He watched as the copper roof took on a darker hue. He removed his damaged hand from beneath the bedclothes and used it to make his hair disorderly. He gave the pot of jam to the first nurse who came into the room.

One of the things he had learnt in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped—it was his only hope now—that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying, would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.

When the heart breaks, he thought, it splits like timber, down the full length of the plank. In his first days at the sawmill he had seen Gustaf Olsson take a piece of solid timber, drive in a wedge, and give the wedge a little twist. The timber broke down the grain, from end to end. That was all you needed to know about the heart: where the grain lay. Then with a twist, with a gesture, with a word, you could destroy it.

AS NIGHT FELL
and the train began to skirt the darkening lake on which it had all begun, as her shame and self-reproach weakened, she tried to think clearly. It was the only way to keep the pain at bay: to think clearly, to be interested only in what really happens, in what you know to be true. And she knew this: that the man for whom, at any single moment of the last twenty-three years, she would have left husband and children, for whom she would have lost her reputation and her place in society, with whom she would have run away to God knows where, was not, and never would have been, worthy of her love. Axel, whom she respected, who was a good father and breadwinner, was much more worthy of it. And yet she did not love him, not if what she had felt for Anders Bodén was the measure of things. This, then, was the desolation of her life, divided between not loving a man who deserved it, and loving one who did not. What she had thought of as the mainstay of her life, a continuous companion of possibility, as faithful as a shadow or a reflection in water, was no more than that: a shadow, a reflection. Nothing real. Though she prided herself on having little imagination, and though she took no account of legends, she had allowed herself to spend half her life in a frivolous dream. All that could be said for her was that she had kept her virtue. And what sort of claim was that? Had she been tested, she would not have resisted for a moment.

When she thought about it in this way, in clarity and truth, her shame and self-reproach returned, but the more violently. She undid the button of her left sleeve, and unwound from her wrist a length of faded blue ribbon. She let it drop to the floor of the carriage.

AXEL LINDWALL
threw his cigarette into the empty grate when he heard the trap approaching. He took the valise from his wife, helped her down, and paid the driver.

“Axel,” she said, in a tone of bright affection, once they were inside the house, “why do you always smoke when I am not here?”

He looked at her. He did not know what to do or say. He did not want to ask her questions in case that made her tell him lies. Or in case that made her tell him the truth. He feared them equally. The silence continued. Well, he thought, we cannot live together in silence for the rest of our lives. So, eventually, he answered, “Because I like smoking.”

She laughed a little. They were standing in front of the unlit grate; he still held her valise. For all he knew, it contained all the secrets, all the truths and all the lies he did not want to hear.

“I returned sooner than I thought.”

“Yes.”

“I decided not to spend the night in Falun.”

“Yes.”

“The town smells of copper.”

“Yes.”

“But the roof of the Kristina-Kyrka blazes in the setting sun.”

“So I have been told.”

It was painful for him to watch his wife in such a state. It would only be humane to let her tell whatever lies she had prepared. So he allowed himself a question.

“And how is … he?”

“Oh, he is very well.” She did not know how absurd this sounded until she had said it. “That is to say, he is in the hospital. He is very well, but I suspect this cannot be the case.”

“Generally speaking, people who are very well do not go to hospital.”

“No.”

He regretted his sarcasm. A teacher had once told his class that sarcasm was a moral weakness. Why did he remember that now?

“And …?”

She had not realized until now that she would have to account for her visit to Falun; not its incidentals, but its purpose. She had imagined, when she left, that on her return everything would be quite changed, and that it would merely be necessary to explain this change, whatever it might be. As the silence prolonged itself, she panicked.

“He wishes you to have his stall. At church. It is number 4.”

“I know it is number 4. Now go to bed.”

“Axel,” she said, “I was thinking on the train that we can become old. The sooner the better. I think things must be easier if you are old. Do you think that is possible?”

“Go to bed.”

Alone, he lit another cigarette. Her lie was so preposterous it might even have been true. But it came to the same thing. If it was a lie, then the truth was that she had gone, more openly than ever before, to visit her lover. Her former lover? If it was the truth, Bodén’s gift was a sarcastic payment by the jeering lover to the wronged husband. The sort of gift that gossip loved and never forgot.

Tomorrow the rest of his life would start. And it would be changed, quite changed, by the knowledge of how much of his life up till then had not been as he thought. Would he have any memories, any past, that would remain untainted by what had been confirmed tonight? Perhaps she was right, and they should try to be old together, and rely, over time, on the hardening of the heart.

“WHAT WAS THAT
?” asked the nurse. This one was starting to become incoherent. It was often the case in the final stages.

“The extra …”

“Yes?”

“The extra is for gunshots.”

“Gunshots?”

“To awaken the echoes.”

“Yes?”

His voice toiled as he repeated the sentence. “The extra is for gunshots to awaken the echoes.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bodén, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then I hope you never find out.”

AT THE FUNERAL
of Anders Bodén, his coffin, made from white fir cut and seasoned within a gull’s cry of the town’s crossroads, was placed in front of the carved altar brought from Germany during the Thirty Years War. The vicar praised the sawmill manager as a tall tree which had fallen beneath God’s axe. It was not the first time that the congregation had heard this comparison. Outside the church, stall number 4 stood empty in homage to the dead man. He had made no provision in his will, and his son had moved to Stockholm. After suitable consultation, the stall was awarded to the captain of the steamboat, a man conspicuous for his civic merit.

The Things You Know

1

C
offee, ladies?”

They both looked up at the waiter, but he was already advancing the flask towards Merrill’s cup. When he’d finished pouring, he moved his eyes, not to Janice, but to Janice’s cup. She covered it with her hand. Even after all these years, she didn’t understand why Americans wanted coffee immediately the waiter arrived. They drank hot coffee, then cold orange juice, then more coffee. It didn’t make sense at all.

“No coffee?” the waiter asked, as if her gesture could have been ambiguous. He wore a green linen apron and his hair was so gelled that you could see every comb-mark.

“I’ll have tea. Later.”

“English Breakfast, Orange Pekoe, Earl Grey?”

“English Breakfast. But later.”

The waiter moved off as though offended, and still without making eye contact. Janice wasn’t surprised, let alone hurt. They were two elderly ladies and he was probably a homosexual. It seemed to her that American waiters were becoming more and more homosexual, or at least more and more openly so. Perhaps they always had been. It must, after all, be a good way to meet lonely businessmen. Assuming that lonely businessmen were themselves homosexual, which wasn’t, she admitted, necessarily the case.

“I like the look of the poached egg,” said Merrill.

“Poached egg sounds nice.” But Janice’s agreement didn’t mean she’d be ordering it. She thought poached egg was lunch, not breakfast. There were a lot of things on this menu that weren’t breakfast either in her book: waffles, home-style pancakes, Arctic halibut. Fish for breakfast? That had never made sense to her. Bill used to like kippers, but she would only let him have them when they were staying at a hotel. They stank the kitchen out, she’d tell him. And they repeated all day. Which was largely, though not entirely, his problem, but still. It had been a matter of some contention between them.

“Bill used to love a kipper,” she said fondly.

Merrill glanced at her, wondering whether she’d missed some logical step in the conversation.

“Of course, you never knew Bill,” said Janice, as if it had been a solecism on Bill’s part—one for which she was now apologizing—to have died before he could meet Merrill.

“My dear,” said Merrill, “with me it’s Tom this, Tom that, you have to stop me or I’m off and running.”

They settled down with the menu again, now that the terms on which breakfast was to be conducted had somehow been agreed.

“We went to see
The Thin Red Line
,” said Janice. “We enjoyed it very much.”

Merrill wondered who “we” might be. “We” would have meant “Bill and I” at one time. Who did it mean now? Or was it just a habit? Perhaps Janice, even after three years of widowhood, couldn’t bear to slip back into “I.”

“I didn’t like it,” said Merrill.

“Oh.” Janice gave a sidelong glance to her menu, as if looking for a prompt. “We thought it was very well filmed.”

“Yes,” said Merrill. “But I found it, well, boring.”

“We didn’t like
Little Voice
,” said Janice, as an offering.

“Oh, I
loved
it.”

“To tell you the truth, we only went for Michael Caine.”

“Oh, I
loved
it.”

“Do you think he’s won an Oscar?”

“Michael Caine? For
Little Voice
?”

“No, I mean—generally.”

“Generally? I should think so. After all this time.”

“After all this time, yes. He must be nearly as old as us by now.”

“Do you think so?” In Merrill’s opinion, Janice talked far too much about getting old, or at least older. It must be on account of being so European.

“Or if not now, he soon will be,” said Janice. They both thought about this, and then laughed. Not that Merrill agreed, even allowing for the joke. That was the thing about movie stars, they managed not to age at the normal rate. Nothing to do with the surgery either. They somehow remained the age they were when you first saw them. Even when they started playing maturer characters, you didn’t really believe it; you still thought of them as young, but acting old—and often not very convincingly.

Merrill was fond of Janice, but always found her a little dowdy. She did insist on greys and pale greens and beiges, and she’d let her hair go streaky-grey which didn’t help. It was so natural it looked false. Even that big scarf, pinned across one shoulder in some kind of a gesture, was greenygrey, for God’s sake. And it certainly didn’t call for pants, or at least, not pants like those. A pity. She might have been a pretty thing once. Never a beauty, of course. But pretty. Nice eyes. Well, nice enough. Not that she did anything to draw attention to them.