The Living and the Dead in Winsford (5 page)

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

Apart from saying her name, those were the first words she spoke: I thought she was going to continue, but she said nothing more. It seemed to me that if she had been sitting there waiting for me – the older woman who had been betrayed – she ought to have had time to think of something more pregnant to say than that she was sorry. That television programme that never happened would have been a bit of a disaster.

‘So am I,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t come here to tell you how I feel.’

She smiled unsteadily without looking me straight in the eye.

‘Nor have I come to hear about how you feel. I just want you to tell me what happened.’

We sat down.

‘If you have nothing against that,’ I added.

She sucked in her lower lip and I could see that she was close to tears. It was not difficult to work out how all those quotations from her in the newspapers had come about. Journalists had telephoned her, and she hadn’t had the sense to replace the receiver.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. ‘It must be awful for you. I didn’t think about that.’

When, I wondered. When didn’t you think about it?

‘How old are you?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer.

‘Twenty-three. I shall be twenty-four next week. Why do you ask?’

‘I have a daughter who is five years older than you.’

‘Really?’

She didn’t seem to understand my point – nor did I, come to that. A waitress came to our table. I ordered an espresso, Magdalena Svensson asked for another cup of tea.

‘I understand that this is difficult for you,’ I said. ‘It’s hard for both of us. But it would make things easier for me if I got to know exactly what happened between you and my husband.’

She sat in silence for a while, scratching her lower arms and trying not to cry. Her lower lip was sucked into her mouth again, and it was almost impossible not to feel sorry for her. So that’s it, I thought. He did rape her.

‘It was my sister,’ she said.

‘Your sister?’

‘Yes. She was the one who persuaded me to go to the police. I regret doing so. Nothing has got any better. I’ve felt so awful all summer, I just don’t know what to do.’

I nodded. ‘Same here,’ I said.

‘She was also raped, my sister,’ said Magdalena, blowing her nose into a paper tissue. ‘That was five years ago. We have that in common. But she never reported the man who did it. That’s why she encouraged me.’

She suddenly sounded like a schoolgirl. A secondary school pupil who had been caught pilfering or playing truant. Just for a second the image of her and Martin’s naked bodies in a hotel bed flashed through my mind’s eye: it looked so absurd that I had difficulty in taking it seriously.

Was it possible to take something like this seriously? What does
seriously
mean?

‘She said you should always report the perpetrator, otherwise women will never be liberated. Will never be rehabilitated . . . Or something like that. And so I did report him. She came with me to the police station. Her name’s Maria, by the way – just like you.’

I nodded again. ‘So you and your sister have that in common, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maria and Magdalena.’

‘Yes – what’s special about that?’

I brushed the thought to one side. ‘But then you retracted your accusation later?’

‘Yes. I did.’

‘Why?’

‘It became too much.’

‘Too much?’

‘Yes, with the newspapers and all that.’

Our coffee and tea were served, and we sat without speaking for a while.

‘Forgive me,’ I said eventually, and now I really did feel like a stern headmaster questioning a pupil at his secondary school for girls about some petty offence or other. ‘Forgive me, but I don’t really understand. Are you saying that you really were raped by my husband?’

She thought for a moment. Then she said: ‘I was drugged.’

‘Drugged?’

‘Yes. That must have been what happened. I was away with the fairies. And afterwards I could hardly remember anything about it.’

‘Couldn’t remember? But didn’t you say that—’

‘I woke up in his bed. And I had his sperm on my stomach.’

I drank my espresso in one gulp. Concentrated my gaze on the back wheel of a bicycle leaning somewhat untidily against a green wall, and felt that I really ought to throw up.

‘It must have been in a drink . . . That drug.’

I gesticulated, inviting her to continue.

‘I finished work at nine o’clock that night, but a few of us stayed behind in the restaurant. One of my workmates, another girl, had a birthday, and we’d planned it as a surprise for her . . .’

She fell silent and produced another tissue. I thought that this detail must have been reported in the media, but I’d evidently missed it.

‘Are you suggesting that my husband put some drug or other into your drink, then enticed you into his room and then . . . Well? Is that it?’

‘Somebody must have done it,’ said Magdalena. ‘They were sitting at the table next to ours. And we started talking to them, sort of . . .’

‘You started talking to them?’

‘Yes.’

‘So there was a group of them, was there?’

‘A few men and women. About your age.’

I wondered who the others could have been. Most probably colleagues of Martin’s, some academics he’d met at the conference. But it didn’t matter, hardly anything mattered.

‘It wasn’t simply that you got drunk, then?’ I asked.

Magdalena Svensson started crying. We sat there in the cafe for another ten minutes, but I couldn’t get any sense out of her.

In the train back to Stockholm there was just one thing she had said that I couldn’t get out of my mind.

I had his sperm on my stomach.

It was when I got back home to Nynäshamn late in the evening after that conversation with Magdalena Svensson that Martin informed me about his plans for the winter. I felt a little bit like a being from outer space, and didn’t have anything much to say. Nor did I mention what I had been doing earlier in the day.

5

It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, before daylight had deteriorated too much, that we set out on our first longish walk over the moor.

By ‘longish’ I mean in this connection just under two hours. I had bought various maps and descriptions of walks at the antiquarian bookshop in Dulverton, but on this occasion I didn’t bother to plan a particular route. I just felt the need to start becoming acquainted with the moor before darkness fell – and Castor was evidently of the same opinion as he immediately took the lead, always a sign that he thinks a walk is going to be interesting and worth doing.

We set off from Darne Lodge, I climbed and he jumped over the stone wall, and then we followed one of the several well-worn paths heading westwards. It was extremely muddy in places, but I was wearing my splendid new walking shoes bought in Queensway, Bayswater, three days ago, and Castor is never put out if the ground is a bit on the sticky side. What he can’t cope with is when the going is hard and littered with sharp stones – just like me, in a figurative sense.

We had only walked a few hundred metres when we came to something marked on the maps as a sight worth seeing – the so-called Caratacus monument: a small shelter protecting a memorial stone from Roman times. The inscription is illegible to the uninitiated, but the stone is thought to have been raised to honour a local chieftain who led valiant resistance against the superior occupying forces.

We continued southwards, parallel with the Dulverton road even though we only had occasional glimpses of it. I thought somewhat casually about the concept of ‘resistance’, then and now. Superiority and inferiority, male and female: but I soon lost the thread – it seemed out of place in this landscape. I still don’t know what is appropriate and what is inappropriate here, but what I can say is that there is a marked sense of desolation and a peculiar kind of silence on the moor. Apart from when you disturb a pheasant, or a flock of them – there are hundreds of pheasants on Exmoor – and the colourful males at least seem incapable of flying without screeching loudly. After a while we also happened upon a little group of the famous wild Exmoor ponies. They looked both dishevelled and strong – and clearly needed treating with respect. I have read that they wander about up here all year round, and live their lives from birth to death in these spartan surroundings. They more or less ignored us. Castor restricted himself to observing them from a safe distance, and then we continued our leisurely stroll. To an untrained eye like mine, the moor is a sort of self-sufficient entity – that is the overwhelming impression it makes. It is barren and monotonous, perhaps somewhat secretive, and motionless as a petrified ocean. Nothing but low, bushy vegetation succeeds in forcing its way up from the infertile soil: heather, ferns and gorse, some of it constantly in bloom. Here and there the landscape is intersected by valleys carved out over the centuries by brooks and streams wending their way to the Exe or the Barle. But in these hollows the vegetation is abundant and dripping with moisture: we soon found ourselves in one of them, filled with beech and oak, alder and hazel – I’m not sure of the various species, and resolved to buy a comprehensive reference book as soon as possible. I recognize holly, moss and ivy, clinging stubbornly and methodically to trunks and branches. Water trickles under dense rhododendron thickets, and the smell of decay is everywhere.

I made all those observations during the first thirty or forty minutes of our walk, as we were making our way down a slope on a very muddy path, apparently used recently by both sheep and ponies: it seemed to be the very same slope we had contemplated from our bedroom window that morning. And sure enough, one of the very rare signposts indicated that the path went all the way to Winsford. However, when we came to somewhere apparently called Halse Farm, which must presumably have given its name to the road up to Darne Lodge, we decided to turn and go back home. It was four o’clock, and dusk was already beginning to fall: no doubt it would be best to walk all the way to the village the next morning or afternoon. Neither I nor Castor would want to be stranded in the dark in this magnificent, bewitching landscape. The word
bewitching
really does seem to be an accurate description.

When we got back to Darne Lodge we spent a few hours dealing with household chores. Yet again I feel linguistic uncertainty when I use the pronoun
we
. Obviously I was the one who lit the candles and the fire, and who chopped up greens and onions and slices of lamb for the stew I eventually ate myself. I was the one who did the washing up, wiped clean various drawers and cupboards, and packed away my clothes in the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in the bedroom. Castor’s only contribution was to eat his evening meal – Royal Canin Maxi for dogs over twenty-six kilos – and lap up rather noisily the water in his usual metal bowl. He spent the rest of the late afternoon and evening on the sheepskin rug in front of the fire.

Needless to say my urge to cling on to the plural form is not all that difficult to understand. I have lived under the same roof as my husband for over thirty years, and that has left traces deep down in the grammar of my language. Perhaps it is just that I’m scared. A
we
has so much more weight than a mere
I
, even if it is only a dog that justifies its use. And it is the elder twin sister of Independence – Loneliness, the one who carries herself awkwardly, has skin scarred by scurf and very bad breath, who I have to kill and bury. Over and over again; that’s life. She is the monstrous enemy, for both Castor and myself – I don’t know why I started going on about this. Bugger it all! To hell with all this nonsensical analysis! I believe in individual human beings. I
must
believe in individual human beings.

As an antidote I drank two glasses of the excellent port I had bought in Dulverton, and took out my computer. Martin’s can stay inside his black briefcase for now, the one with that irritating sticker from Barcelona. I suppose I’ll get round to opening both of them eventually, the briefcase and the computer: but this evening didn’t seem to be the right time. I established that there was indeed no internet connection here, as I had already been told. If at some future point I feel the need to link up with the outside world – for reasons that I can’t really imagine at the moment – I can either drive to Minehead on the coast, where there are several internet cafes, or to the library in Dulverton. Or at least, I assume that’s what I would need to do: perhaps there are possibilities closer at hand. Attempts to use both my mobile and Martin’s in various parts of the house were also in vain: I decided that tomorrow I would try the location Mr Tawking had mentioned – that grave on the other side of the road. In no circumstances am I going to try to phone anybody – or to send an e-mail or a text message: but it could be interesting to know if anybody has been trying to contact us.

There again, perhaps it would be risky to activate my mobile. I don’t really know how they work. But if somebody should try to contact us – I mean
really
try – somebody like Interpol or a detective or somebody like that, then they will find us sooner or later, of course. But the point is that it should never occur to anybody that they should start searching. Because there is no reason to do so.

After the second glass of port wine and when the fire began to die down, I let Castor out to do his business. He disappeared into the pitch darkness, and as it was getting on for five minutes before he reappeared, I had time to imagine all kinds of things that might have happened to him, and worry unnecessarily. The whole plot is certainly no more than a thousand square metres, but it would have been easy for him to clamber over the old stone wall, if he had wanted to.

Then we went to bed. It was no later than a quarter past ten, but the darkness and the house itself – and the rain which soon began pattering on the slate roof and on the evergreen bushes outside the window, rhododendrons there as well if I’m not much mistaken – somehow reduced the concept of time to a . . . to a totally insignificant theoretical construction. Before falling asleep I also began thinking about the house for the first time – about its history: how old it was, what function it used to have, who had lived there over the years and indeed the centuries, and why it was located just here in splendid isolation on the moor. There is a real farmhouse not all that far away, in the direction of Winsford, just above Halse Farm, and it’s possible that Darne Lodge was originally a part of that smallholding. Outside the lodge is a boarded-up stable block that I haven’t yet bothered to explore, and I suppose I can find out more details from Mr Tawking if I feel that I really want to know. Or down at The Royal Oak, which I have not yet visited.