Walking Into the Night (16 page)

49

She stood by the bedroom window, watching the moon glide from behind the clouds above the sleeping town. Somewhere he might be watching it, too, though where she didn’t know.

It was three months since he had left; his hat was on the table by the front door when she awoke and his keys lay beside the hat. She opened the door and looked out; the morning was quiet. As the pale sun swept the darkness from the street, a wisp of cloud blushed in the east. His scent was still in the hall, he must have left only minutes ago.

She rearranged the dried flowers in the yellow vase, but left the hat and keys lying on the table. She had protested when he bought the vase because it was expensive but he had refused to listen. She remembered him saying that she would only have to glance at the flowers in this vase for them to open their petals. There was dried lady’s mantle in it now and she tweaked one or two stalks gently before opening the front door for a second time to look down the street.

It wasn’t until later that day, after Stefan had come to ask where he was, that she had looked in his wardrobe. She was alone upstairs; Einar and Maria were at school, Katrin was with the twins in the kitchen. She had been standing in the same place as now, by the bedroom window, when it occurred to her to open the closet. A shirt had fallen onto the floor and she bent down to pick it up and replace it on its hanger. It looked forlorn hanging there alone and she hastened to close the door again.

Stefan came just after midday to ask where he was.

“He didn’t mention anything about leaving. But this letter was lying on my desk when I got to work this morning.”

He handed her the envelope. She didn’t open it at once but went out onto the doorstep, as if to see what the weather was like. It had rained a short while before, a shower that had disappeared as quickly as it had come, and the street was wet, large droplets still hanging from the naked rowan by the gate.

“You missed it,” she said at last.

“Sorry?”

“You missed the downpour.”

He nodded.

“There’s nothing in it except a report on the company,” he said. “It even includes bank-account numbers and balances for business both here and abroad. I don’t understand why he’s left it behind . . .”

She took the letter from the envelope and ran her eyes over it, before refolding it. Names and addresses, figures, instructions and advice, explanations of various kinds. His handwriting was always a pleasure to behold, elegant and unaffected, in blue ink on a pale sheet. She paused only at the last few lines:

“You’re to continue to run the company just as we have been doing. Get in touch with everyone I’ve done business with, regardless of whether you’ve dealt with them before. I’ve arranged for you to have signature authority. Your monthly wages will be raised from today. Report regularly to Elisabet about how business is going and confer with my friend Halldor, the bank manager, about the household expenses and family finances. He will be available to assist you if necessary.”

He watched her read, in case he could learn what was going on from her expression. But she didn’t look up until she had folded the sheets once more; then she handed him the envelope, smiled and said as she went to the window:

“Thank goodness you missed the downpour, Stefan. Perhaps you should be off before it starts raining again.”

She made sure he had disappeared down the street before she locked the door and began to weep.

50

“He’s away on business,” she answered, when asked. But by now most people had stopped asking, apart from Einar and Maria, who wanted to know when he was coming home. “Soon,” she told them. “If you think about him, he’ll be with you.”

She seldom left the house. Eyes followed her. In this little town everybody knew everything about everyone. People slowed down when they saw her, put their heads together. With pitying expressions. That was the worst. She had stopped going to concerts. But sometimes friends came round and played with her at home.

The bed was too big. She had considered replacing it or moving to another room but thought better of it. She slept little; retired late and woke early. When she reached out her hand it touched nothing but emptiness. During the day the northern sun was pale and hesitant. The nights were cold. She left the window open at night in case the spring should whisper her a message. But all was quiet, all except her own heartbeat and the creaking of the mattress when she turned over in bed yet again.

Sometimes she got up during the night to watch the children sleeping. She could see him in them, especially in Einar. She caressed his cheek, sometimes speaking to him quietly. He lay still, not even moving when she touched him. She was sure her words were not wasted.

51

He sprinted home from the jetty, tripped on a stone and went flying onto the gravel, but got right up again, forgetting to dust the dirt off his pants. The sun was at its zenith, the sky blue above the mirror-like sea, a shadow passing slowly over the slopes of Mount Esja. He had been watching it since early that morning but still couldn’t work out which cloud was casting the shadow, however often he scanned the sky. He hadn’t mentioned this mystery to his companions as he wasn’t sure if they’d understand its significance.

He continued at a jog. The boys’ insults echoed in his head, though they had fallen silent now and returned to their fishing. He didn’t look back until he was halfway up the hill: they had shrunk and the world had grown at the same rate, the road behind him had lengthened and the ocean spread out as far as the eye could see. Yet nowhere could he spy a ship.

The argument had started after they had caught ten flounder.

“Four for me, three each for you,” said Einar.

“No, four for me, three each for you,” countered one of his companions.

The third boy didn’t join in until it became clear that neither of his friends was going to back down. He didn’t actually know who had caught four flounder and who three, but backed Einar’s opponent because he was bigger and anyway lived next door to him. Einar grabbed four fish from the jetty, shoved them into the bag he’d brought along, and made to march off home with it and his tackle.

“You’re not moving an inch with my fish,” said the boy, stepping in front of him.

Einar struck him with the bag. The boy hit back. A moment later they were lying grappling in the street. When they stood up the boy was holding the bag.

“Give it to me!”

“You’re not getting it.”

“I’ll tell my dad . . .”

“You haven’t got a dad. Your dad’s gone away.”

Einar backed away. His friends were merciless, crowing in chorus:

“Einar’s got no dad, Einar’s got no dad . . .”

He took to his heels.

His mother was sitting at the piano when he flung open the front door and dashed into the sitting room. She didn’t stand up but turned and looked at him. He came to a halt in the middle of the room, panting, his face wet with sweat.

“Is something wrong, Einar dear?”

“I haven’t got a dad. He’s left us.”

She slapped his face. Not hard, yet nothing had ever hurt him as much. She had never laid hand on him before and he touched his cheek in disbelief and began to sob. She buried her face in her hands and ran out of the room; Katrin came in and comforted the boy.

“You must never say that,” she said. “Never say that to your mother again.”

It was good to watch the ships come and go from the jetty. Since his father had vanished he had made his way there every day, after lunch in the winter when he finished school, but now as soon as he woke up in the morning. Sometimes with his friends. Sometimes alone. More often alone these days. Whenever a passenger liner sailed into the bay, he put down his fishing line and went to welcome it. At first he waited, hardly able to contain his excitement, as the passengers disembarked, but no longer. Now he expected nothing.

He gathered up his line, crammed it in his pocket, and headed for home. Halfway up the slope he looked round as was his habit, in case he should glimpse a ship on the horizon, then plodded onwards. The summer passed, leaves fell aimlessly from the trees, whispering nothing to him on their way to the earth.

52

A new day, but time stood still. The pigeons cooed on the roof, a man walked down the street, shuffling his clogs. Then all was quiet. Things she had heard before, she heard now, but they sounded different. The cathedral bell tolled, a car approached from the harbor, one of only three in the country, climbing wheezily up the hill. Katrin put away the crockery in the cupboard, humming until the silence swallowed the notes.

The anticipated footsteps were never heard and she no longer looked up from her embroidery when someone walked past. Now there was no sign that the comings and goings outside the house disturbed her concentration as she stitched lavender flowers and a church tower onto the cushion cover. Her eyes followed the needle and did not waver when she heard a knock at the door. Katrin let in the visitor.

Her uncle came to a halt in the middle of the room.

“Sit down, Tomas,” she said, continuing to sew.

He had grown a little frailer of late, yet the cane he carried was mostly for show. He hung it on the back of a chair before sitting down, dusting some lint from his sleeve. He had always been a fancy dresser.

He asked after the children. She smiled.

“No change since last week.”

“And Einar?”

“He’s growing.”

“Gudrun and I,” he began, then hesitated an instant before carrying on. “Gudrun thinks Einar’s not very happy.”

“Really? And what does she suggest?”

“You know we’re all worried about you and the children. You not least, dear.”

“No one need worry about me, Tomas. I’m fine.”

“It’s impossible to help people who won’t accept help,” he said. “You should face up to facts.”

She finally looked up, ceasing her stitching.

“I’m not worried about anyone except the people who are worried about me,” she said. “This morning I was awakened by a snow bunting.”

He rose to his feet and looked over her shoulder at the flowers and half-completed tower; there were windows running its length, yellow as if reflecting the sun.

“You’ve never cared about worldly things,” he said then, “but I can no longer avoid discussing them with you. It may be that Stefan knows something about accounting, but he can’t run a company. Things are going badly. Trade has shifted back to Europe since the war and other people have acquired the agencies. Stefan imported too much at the end of the war without having secured enough buyers for the goods. Both timber and iron. At much too high a price. Now he’s stuck with the inventory. The customers have gone elsewhere. It was Kristjan they wanted to deal with. Not some subordinate who suddenly thinks he’s the boss. I don’t understand . . .”

He fell silent.

“What is it you don’t understand, Uncle?”

“I don’t understand how Kristjan could have thought for a moment that Stefan would be able to manage the company.”

“He’ll sort it out when he comes back.”

“Dear,” he said, “it’s been a year. You must face facts.”

“How time flies,” she said. “And I haven’t offered you anything to eat or drink.”

“Arrangements will have to be made. You owe money to the bank. You. The company.”

“From what I remember, Stefan said the company was doing well.”

“When was that?”

“Last year.”

When he didn’t say anything she added: “My attention tends to wander when people start talking about this sort of thing. I’m sure Kristjan left everything in good order.”

Tomas sat down beside her.

“I think it’s time I told you a bit more about how he left the business. At first I wasn’t sure Stefan had got it right and it took a while to get to the bottom of things. I didn’t want to discuss it with you as you’ve had enough to contend with. But I can’t avoid it any longer. You need to know the truth, dear. Kristjan took a large sum of money with him.”

She picked up a ball of wool and twisted it between her hands.

“There must be some explanation.”

“Well, I don’t know what it would be, dear. It was a lot of money. He kept it in the safe in his office. Goodness knows why.”

She turned to him.

“How bad is it?”

He seemed unprepared for the question and scratched his cheek before muttering:

“Well, arrangements will have to be made.”

“What do you have in mind, Uncle?”

“The company will have to be sold to someone who can run it.”

“But when Kristjan comes . . .”

“You can’t delay any longer. The company’s in both your names. Thank God you have power of attorney.”

She ran her finger along the embroidery, stopping at a blue well by the church tower. A stitch had come loose in the middle of the well.

“You’ve stopped saying he might be dead. Is there a reason for that?”

He hesitated before answering her.

“Someone thinks he saw him on a street in New York. The purser from the
Gullfoss.
He came to see me yesterday. He wasn’t sure if he should tell me. He saw a man who wasn’t unlike Kristjan. But the man was on the other side of the street with traffic in between. Then he vanished.”

“It was kind of you to tell me this, Uncle. Now I can go.”

“Go where?”

“There’s not much left,” she said, looking down at her needle-work. “The picture’s almost finished. Yet it’s as if something’s missing,” she added pensively, then came to herself and looked up. “I’m thinking of giving this picture to Gudrun before I leave.”

He didn’t seem to know what to make of her; he shuffled his feet, then repeated under his breath:

“Arrangements will have to be made. I can’t see any other way—arrangements will have to be made.”

When he had gone she laid aside her embroidery.

53

She had made arrangements.

Reykjavik faded into the distance as the ship steamed out into the bay: the lake where young people skated in the winter, the milliner next to the cathedral, the two pharmacies, the company she had sold. Barely twenty thousand inhabitants. One missing.

The people who had tried to dissuade her from leaving were standing on the docks, waving to the ship, at least Gudrun was, but her husband had stuck his hands in his pockets to warm them; there was a nip in the air.

She had left the twins behind with Katrin. They were lying on the floor playing with toy soldiers when she said goodbye to them. They hardly looked up from their game and asked no questions, though she hugged them for an unusually long time, kneeling beside them on the floor. She had her coat on; one of them laughed and tried to pull off her hat.

“The poor dears,” said Gudrun.

She waited until Katrin had left the room.

“Are you sure you can trust her with the children? You know what she’s like.”

“And just what is she like, Gudrun?”

“This trip is madness. I can’t understand how you could think of it.”

The ship was sailing to Bergen, Norway. There they would wait for two days before heading west, over the Atlantic. She inhaled the sea breeze, watching the houses dwindle and the sky draw near. Maria hummed. Einar was silent.

“There’s our house,” Maria said suddenly. “Look, Einar, there it is.”

A white house with a red roof watched them from the hill, the curtains pulled back, eyes on the other side of the windowpanes which reflected the sky. Then it was as if the house were freed from the earth and merged into the veil of cloud above the town, floating up into the air, vanishing.

The shrill cries of seabirds pursued them. Einar saw the jetty where he was accustomed to sit and gaze out to sea; the shed wall above, in whose shelter one could stand and dream. Then the jetty and the shed were lost in the vastness, while the sea rose and fell, the waves rushing like carefree children up the rocks before plunging back down into the sea.

“I didn’t mean you should sell everything immediately,” her uncle had said. “Think what you’re doing. There’s no need to rush into anything. It was only yesterday that I mentioned this to you. I wanted to warn you so you’d know where you stand. This sort of thing takes time. You’ll make a worse mess if you charge ahead like this.”

She wouldn’t be deflected. She was going on a trip. She had checked the sailing times and made arrangements to buy a passage for herself and the two older children. When her uncle tried to talk her out of it, she said she had been in touch with the bank manager and asked him to sell the company.

“I should never have mentioned what that purser said. He thought he’d caught a glimpse of a man. In the distance. And now you’re planning to sell everything you own and go off after a willo’-the-wisp with the children. You’re not right in the head, dear.”

She handed him the embroidery.

“I’ve finally finished this. Please, would you do me a favor and give this little gift to Gudrun?”

“Elisabet, let me help you. I can’t just stand by and watch you charge off into the unknown.”

“The unknown is here. I don’t need to go anywhere to find it. But I know he’s waiting for me. I know he needs me.”

“I don’t want to say anything to hurt you but in the unlikely event that it was Kristjan in New York, why do you think he hasn’t got in touch?”

She smiled faintly.

“I know him. He’s lost his way. I need to help him back.”

They took rooms at a pensione down by the harbor in Bergen. It was raining and the fjord was hidden by fog. On the second day she was told that the ship which was to have taken them to New York had developed engine trouble. The next crossing would not be for three weeks.

She cut out pictures from the newspapers of people sitting and walking, of boats afloat on rivers, of palaces, horses and bridges, arranging them on the table in their room and making up stories about the people who lived in the palaces, about the boats which sailed up the rivers in front of the palaces and the man who stood on the bridge and watched the boats. “He’s called Napoleon Bonaparte,” she said. “He’s going to save the world.”

The sea breeze buffeted the house; they heard the neighing cry of a capercaillie when she opened the window. She kept her money in a bag which she never let out of her sight unless Einar was there to keep an eye on it. When she went for a walk with Maria, he stayed behind in their room. As soon as they came back, he went out.

He walked the same way every day, along the shore and up a hill where an old mill was beginning to break free from the wintry ice. The redpoll had arrived and the dunlin, too; he recognized them at once and cheered up when he spotted them. It was like meeting old friends.

The hillside was wet and black with the thaw; his shoes squished as he walked toward the mill. Beyond was the sea. Boats casting their anchors. The way to his father lay over the waves.

The days passed slowly. The delay was making a hole in their funds; she hadn’t envisaged having to pay their keep for three weeks in Bergen. Einar knew this and tried to hold back at mealtimes. She noticed and bought more than he could eat. It kept on raining. The mill was silent, streams trickled down the hillside with a quiet purling.

The way out lay like a path through the waves of the fjord. He had seen it. The wake of a dream. When he woke up one morning, the ship had docked.