In the Name of Love Page 3

  What’s he at? Dan asked himself. Is he mocking me? To the man he merely nodded, then went on searching through the rubble. But the man didn’t go. Neither did he try to hide his curiosity, looking around at the broken furniture, the tools of everyday living that lay in the snow. Dan went on throwing aside lumps of cement and stone to get out whatever could be saved – documents, books, a stapling machine, a pair of matching bookends that Carlos once carved in school and gave him for his birthday. Then, just as the man was saying that the house had been there since long before he was born and nothing like this had ever happened, Dan saw the cardboard box. He picked it up and placed it behind him. The man put out his hand and gave his name, Sune Isaksson. Dan took it. ‘Dan Byrne,’ he said and went back to his searching. The man watched in silence for a while longer. ‘One hell of a mess you have here!’ he said cheerfully. ‘Well, you know where I live now. Drop by if you need anything.’

  As he went out to the lane, a taxi pulled in. The taxi driver picked his way through the rubble with a bunch of tiger lilies. He said he’d had to ask in the island shop to find the house. ‘Something happen to your roof?’ Dan nodded silently. There was a note with the flowers. He could barely make it out in the fading light. Thanks for the lift. Some day when you’ve nothing better to do ring me and tell me I’m terrific in a pirate shirt. Lena. There was no surname, just a phone number.

  He worked on until dark, then took the cardboard box and the flowers and the note with him and put them on the kitchen table. Of course it had a touch of panache – not just the note but the gesture. Sending flowers by taxi when they could as well have been sent by Interflora. Well, no. Not as well. But he had no intention of replying.

  He went upstairs to see what was left of the bedroom. One part of the ridge beam had hit the wardrobe that stood between the windows. Dan made his way across through the debris and carefully pulled out a small holdall.

  Back down in the kitchen he began with the cardboard box, emptying the pile of blue envelopes onto the table. He stoked up the fire in the kitchen range and dropped the letters in one by one, trying not to see the dates as they went. London–Stockholm. Stockholm–London. The longing they expressed had seemed so intensely private then, though what, under the sun, could have been new in them? The affinity of flesh for flesh. They had solemnly promised each other, in youth, that the last one left would burn them all. It had been almost a joke, a hundred years away, on the brink of nothingness. The edges curled and paled as the flames enclosed them, the words, the molecules of ink and paper, disintegrating into gas and ash. His chest ached.

  Once he’d started he made himself go on. He opened the holdall and took out the little jeweller’s box the undertaker had given him. It held her engagement and wedding rings, rings which had been her mother’s in Spain. Then he took out the big black bin bag into which he had emptied the contents of her dressing-table drawer when he’d left the flat in Stockholm. Then came the shoe box with the letters of condolence, many of them from people he had never heard of, patients who thought of her as a friend, people she worked with at the hospital, others who remembered her from years back. He took them all out and piled them on the table. And he began to burn them too, without looking to see who they were from. When he had finished he opened her handbag and, for the first time ever, looked inside. The trace of her perfume almost undid him. Two sets of keys, one to their former flat which he should have given the new owner, the other to this house. A packet of paper handkerchiefs. Her small pocket agenda. He riffled through the pages, knowing there wouldn’t be anything personal there, no trace of what her moods or thoughts had been. Even as a schoolgirl she had never kept a diary. The hastiness of her handwriting, the contractions she habitually used flowed into each other, the cross of a ‘t’ carried over to start the first syllable of the next word. It was her way – quick, concentrated, full of movement. The last entry was on 6 June: D 12.00 Bakf. Op. On 6 June 1984, two days before she died, she met him (D) at 12.00 for an early lunch in the restaurant annexe (bakfickan) behind the Opera House (Operan) and afterwards they went shopping for things they needed out here – dishcloths, towels, sheets… The following morning they took the boat and less than forty-eight hours later she was dead.

  He picked up one of the earlier pocket agendas that she’d kept in her drawer, let his married life flash by – meals, weather, work, dinners, trips with friends, moments of sudden flurry in the rhythm of the years that flowed. The happiest scenes that came back unsolicited were simple, even banal. Crossing the park together to the shops she took his arm, hugged it as if in a sudden thought that remained unspoken. Only her face was visible. Clots of snow heavy as wet ash brushed past her eyelids when she looked up at him. In the grocer’s they picked vegetables, apples, a huge chunk of a single cheese, walnuts, breathed the smell of coriander and cardamom. The Baltic evening shone black as polish about the street lamps when they came out. Beyond, at the edge of the trees, he saw their kitchen window lit up, the redwood of the cupboards, the copper wall tiles that glowed through the dark, distant as a camp fire beyond the black branches.

  Those thousands of days and nights that passed, what, if anything, did they add up to? A couple who agreed, disagreed, argued, laughed, loved, shared winter nights with friends, wine stains on the tablecloth, glasses everywhere. In the sudden quiet after the last of the guests had gone they slept like children, without thought. Inconsequential, inexplicable days. What else? They’d gone to the theatre, had supper after, seven or eight of them in a pokey restaurant, argued and laughed until late in the night. Interludes in a sea of work. Their living room caught a glimpse of Lake Mälaren, their bedroom overlooked Pontonjär Park. The usual furnishings, the usual fittings. Not once did it occur to him that it was all preparing to blow apart. There should have been a countdown. But it struck like lightning, a sudden flash and she was gone. The ship sailed on without her.

  He thumbed through the pocket agendas for a few more years before giving up and putting them back in the holdall. The box with her rings went in next. Maybe Carlos’s friend Zoë would wear them in New York one day. The notion of such continuation was strangely comforting. Then, in a flash that pierced him, he saw Connie dancing – naked except for those rings – in the bathroom of their flat in town, the scowl Michael Jackson made famous looking back at her from the mirror as she turned and twisted and belted out Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, No One Wants To Be Defeated, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It. A Saturday morning one summer long ago. In a few hours they would take the boat to another island where they’d spend the weekend with a couple of friends. He remembered flicking past their initials a moment ago in one of Connie’s agendas, G+C and, underneath, the date and the words Första bad! Kul! Meaning the season’s First swim! and Fun! G was for Giovanni, an Italian doctor working in the same hospital as Connie, and K was for Kerstin, a fashion designer and old school pal of Connie’s, who had introduced them. Preparing dinner with Giovanni Dan had looked up through the kitchen window and seen Connie and Kerstin walk down to the sea in long bathrobes. The bathrobes were beautiful, bought in Venice. Giovanni had a certain grandeur in his hospitality. He also had a fine baritone voice which broke into song now as he too looked out the window – Quanto è bella, quanto è cara! – while the women disrobed and dove in. Their voices floated up, talking, laughing. Back on the jetty their bodies glistened red in the evening sun. Connie looked up and, seeing the men in the window, waved. Barefoot she climbed the grassy path, the wet bathrobe over her arm. Her body, with its slim waist, its sway of hips and breasts, was as beautiful as anything Dan had ever seen.

  She was still a schoolgirl when they’d met in London, eighteen years old to his nineteen in 1956. Once she’d gone back with her class to Stockholm the pale blue envelopes began to arrive, waiting on the little table in the hall when he got home. He’d take each one with him upstairs and, before opening it, wash his hands, scrubbing off the cement dust, the diesel oil, the smells of the building site.
He lived in a cheap bedsit in Ealing then, saving money from his labour to travel through Europe and Africa the following year, before going home to start university. Each evening he sat at the little table, writing long letters back to her.

  Two months later he took a fortnight’s leave from the building site and hitchhiked to Stockholm. That autumn he left for good and went to stay. By now Connie had begun her first-year studies at Karolinska Hospital. On her days off she showed him the city. The old central island, still a near-slum then, had courtyards where strange bushes grew from cracks in the broken paving and, in one of them, with the sun slanting down its yellow seventeenth-century walls, she crouched beside him to examine a head of brilliant red petals. Her hand rested on his calf as she leant forward. And then, still holding on to his calf, she looked up at him with a smile that paralysed his brain. Without thinking, he heard his voice ask her if she would marry him. At once she said, ‘Yes,’ and, with her heart-stopping smile still in place, politely added, ‘Please.’

  4

  Despite the roof collapse he continued to tap out his translations on the same boxy IBM PC, faxed off urgent jobs and sent the rest with the postman in the morning. At four thirty he stopped, drank tea and went for his walk, two hours minimum whatever the weather. Sometimes, not often, he saw a face he thought he recognized, someone seen in the island shop, come towards him on a forest trail. With a friendly wave he turned off, disappearing into the trees.

  The insurance company sent out an inspector – a young man with a machine-cropped beard. ‘You live alone here?’ he said, looking at the empty landscape and the forest around them. ‘All year? It’d drive me crazy.’ He gave the go ahead for the repair work. The local mason said he could start in early March. One way or another he and his mate would be finished before Easter.

  The man who claimed to be Dan’s nearest neighbour came back unannounced. A tap on the kitchen door and before Dan had time to react the man stepped in. He stood a moment, his body rigid as though with a stab of pain. Seen under the bare light bulb his bald head looked huge, close to animal. Then, still without a word, he sat down at the end of the kitchen table and flexed his fingers while he took a deep breath. Dan looked at him.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Do you happen to have alcohol in the house?’

  ‘Would whisky do?’

  The dome of the man’s skull shone as he moved his head back and slowly swallowed the glass of whisky. He said no to the offer of a refill and then, out of the blue, began to talk about his children. He said he’d just been to Copenhagen to see them over the weekend. Dan didn’t know what to make of him. It seemed clear though that he was in pain, even if the pain had now been dulled.

  After that Isaksson returned once or twice a week, resting on his way home from the ferry or from the island shop. That he was interrupting Dan’s work didn’t seem to occur to him. His skull gleamed pale as marble underneath the bulb. He gossiped about the island and tried to lure Dan into being more forthcoming about his own doings.

  ‘Your wife worked in a hospital?’ he said one day.

  Dan didn’t bother asking him how he knew. Probably everyone on the island knew. He said, ‘Södersjukhuset. Physiotherapist.’

  ‘Ah! I had a lassie once – you don’t know half the muscles in your rump until an expert begins to loosen them up. Or a simple neck massage. God, how I miss her!’

  ‘Connie’s patients were mostly elderly.’ Dan heard the defensiveness in his own voice and thought: Jesus Christ! What now? He remembered how she liked to teach them to coax out the forgotten pliancy of their old limbs. How she enjoyed talking with them, listening to their life stories, their memories. Often she became friends with them. His brain slewed round when he thought of this. Sune Isaksson’s watery eyes stayed on him. The whisky glass looked diminished in his big hand as he lifted it and sipped. He put it down. ‘If ever you need somewhere to kip in Stockholm you can have the keys to my place.’ Dan told him he didn’t go into Stockholm any more.

  Another time Isaksson talked about his divorce. ‘A dragged-out slagging match,’ he said. Against his wife’s opposition he had ended with legal right of access to his sons. ‘Three weeks in the summer and two weekends a month.’ So every second Friday morning he took the early bus and the two ferries and then the bus from Norrtälje to Arlanda airport, a four-hour road trip, before he joined the weekend queue to check in and fly to Copenhagen, arriving in the evening. He and the children spent much of the weekend watching TV in his hotel room. They ate potato chips and peanuts from the minibar. Drank Coca Cola.

  ‘You fly to Copenhagen to watch TV with your children?’

  ‘There are series and stuff Jytte says they mustn’t miss.’

  ‘What? Pippi Longstocking with Danish subtitles?’

  ‘Football too. And ice hockey. Otherwise they can’t keep up during the breaks at school, Jytte says.’

  Dan asked him if he didn’t ever say no, and do something else.

  ‘To Jytte? We fought all through the last years of our marriage. Day and night. Now we’ve got to the stage where we’re admitting it wasn’t necessarily all the other’s fault. Not a hundred per cent and not all the time. Worth gold, that. I’m not going to risk ruining it.’

  ‘A marital truce based on TV and potato chips.’

  ‘Truce is probably taking it a bit far. More a cease-fire, I’d say. We can talk to each other now on the telephone without automatic screams. Under certain conditions.’

  ‘Does she watch TV with them too and eat potato chips? When it’s her weekends?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You haven’t asked her?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t ask her about things like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s moved in with a Danish journalist. Cultural affairs. What they watch, where they go. No. There are limits.’

  His marriage had been in trouble long before the divorce, he said. ‘It took us a few years to discover we were incompatible in everything but sex. By then we had the kids.’ It finally came apart when a woman friend who started to comfort him told Jytte what they were up to. Not directly, she was too sophisticated for that. More in the form of intimations, allusions. Elliptical phrases. Metaphors. The language of literature. ‘Jytte brings out the cultural side of people. It’s always been her strong point. Theatre, books, stuff like that. I could never keep up.’

  His sporadic affairs after the divorce had mainly been with younger women at the Institute of Technology where he worked. Secretaries, assistants. Usually married. Though some time ago he’d stopped.

  Nothing of what he said surprised Dan any longer. Some­times it felt as though they were prisoners together in a cell the night before execution. But he felt no desire to return the confidences.

  ‘We were interested in the same thing,’ Sune Isaksson told him once, talking about these young women at the Institute. ‘Lust and its satisfaction. I’ll say this for Freud, he got the sex part right. The strongest drive we’re born with is battened down everywhere by social taboos and look where that’s got us.’

  ‘But you were their superior?’

  ‘No, no. Never from my own staff. And only women with experience. I mean they were married, for God’s sake. Or living with someone. On equal life terms as it were. Even if age separated us.’

  ‘But they must surely have seen you as outranking them at work.’

  ‘What do you mean outranking?’

  ‘The aura of authority. The fast walk along the corridor. Your own parking slot. A bigger room, a bigger desk. With a corner window. Do you have a corner window?’

  Sune gave his laugh, a bellow blast from deep in his chest. ‘Fuck off,’ he said good-naturedly.

  ‘All those innocent girls,’ Dan said, ‘drowning in your wake as you sailed through their lives.’

  ‘No more innocent than the fence beauties at ice-hockey matches. Have you noticed them?’

  ‘I’ve never seen an ice-hocke
y match.’

  ‘Sexual hand grenades. Let’s not deny them their right to enjoy their bodies, for Christ’s sake. It takes them fifteen years to get to the age of consent.’

  He sipped his whisky, placed the glass on the table, put his hands on either side of it, palms down. His eyes gleamed. But he didn’t look well. Under the ruddy skin Dan sensed a discolouring not unlike the nicotine discolouring smokers used to have.

  ‘Well,’ he said when he saw Dan’s eyes lift to his bald skull. Why the insight came just then Dan did not know though once it did it explained everything – the long absence from work, the sallow unhealthy skin, the sudden pains. On days when Sune Isaksson didn’t shave his skull he used the fisherman’s cap to hide the hair that was beginning to grow back. The chemical therapy was over, abandoned. The approach of death he could deal with. The patchy hair was unbearable. Slowly he sipped his whisky and continued to rest unmoved within himself the way deeply confident people are inclined to do.

  Not long after, while in Norrtälje to replace some of the ruined furniture, Dan ran into Anders Roos again. Anders thanked him for picking up the girl.

  ‘She used to live out there on your island. A farmhouse.’

  ‘I think we saw it. In the dark.’

  ‘I guess it wasn’t dark when she set out. Talking of houses, my wife’s been asking when you’re going to come to ours. Why not come now and you’ll meet her. I have to pick up some papers out there anyway.’

  ‘I should be getting home.’

  ‘No, seriously. Madeleine really wants to meet you. She knows you’re one of my oldest friends. And it intrigues her, your living alone out there on a rocky island. Just a quick coffee, then I have to get back to meet someone in the showroom.’

  Their house, about fifteen minutes outside town, was a graceful yellow building in the gustaviansk style of the late 1700s. His wife was out gardening. Anders went to tell her Dan was there.