Håkan Nesser - The Living and the Dead in Winsford

On one occasion, and as far as I can ascertain it is the only time, he finds himself alone with Bessie Hyatt. It’s only for an hour, but he devotes four pages to that hour. One doesn’t need to be an exegete in order to understand why.

They go for a short walk together. Bessie Hyatt is going in search of a certain herb that grows quite some way up the mountainside, and Martin goes along to keep her company. He never mentions which herb they are looking for, but he describes Bessie’s movements as ‘her girlish enthusiasm’, and her mop of long hair fluttering in the evening breeze is described as ‘a sail that has finally caught sight again of its Ithaca’. On the way back home, with a bunch of herbs in each hand, Bessie treads awkwardly on a stone and twists her ankle: Martin has to support her during the rest of the walk. When they return to the terrace darkness is falling and lanterns have been lit; Herold and Gusov are involved in a game of chess which is apparently a fight to the death. Whoever loses must drink three glasses of ouzo without blinking.

And Doris and Gisela are singing a Cohen song, accompanied on the guitar by Finn Halvorsen.

‘Sisters of Mercy’.

It was not until this evening that Mark Britton turned up again at The Royal Oak. I have just left there, I can’t get to sleep, and that’s why I’m sitting here writing this. I had just been served my starter, grilled salmon with capers — it has become a favourite of mine — when he came into the room, and just as on the previous occasion I was reminded of my old religious studies teacher, Wallinder. I seem to recall that the similarity occurred to me later rather than at the time, but in any case the impression was even stronger this evening, due to the fact that he’d had his hair cut. Mark seemed more neat and tidy than I remember him looking, and Wallinder was always neat and tidy to his very fingertips. I remember his name now.

He caught sight of me immediately, gave me a friendly smile and hesitated for a moment. Then he came over to my table, and asked if I was busy working or whether he might join me. I felt grateful for the fact that he hadn’t gone to sit somewhere else. It was more than a week since I’d had something that could be called a conversation with another person: Alfred Biggs at the Winsford Community Computer Centre, and to be honest that hadn’t been much of a conversation either.

‘Of course you may. Please sit down.’

‘You’re sure I won’t be preventing you from enjoying your meal?’

‘Of course not. Are you going to eat as well?’ He said that he was; and then he added that he was pleased to see me here again. I explained that I was now in the habit of sitting here most evenings, but I hadn’t seen him since that last time.

He shrugged, and gestured towards my notebook, which I had closed when my starter was served. ‘So you work even when you’re eating, do you?’

‘Revising and checking,’ I said apologetically, and he nodded seriously as if he knew what I was talking about. As if he had seen into my mind again. He stroked Castor, then went over to Rosie at the bar and placed his order. I finished my salmon and realized that I was feeling a bit nervous. I assumed it was because of that face in the window, but wasn’t sure. Nevertheless, I took up the matter when he came and sat down again.

‘I think I walked past your house the other day.’

He looked at me in surprise. I noticed that he was wearing the same pullover as last time, but with a lighter coloured shirt underneath it. His eyes were the same shade as his jumper, and I thought I could detect a trace of unease in them.

‘You don’t say. And how do you know it was my house?’

I suddenly felt in a bit of a quandary. Ought I to explain that it was Alfred Biggs who had told me? Admit that I’d been talking to him about the face in the window?

‘It’s a bit further up the hill towards Halse Farm, isn’t it?’ I asked by way of diversion. ‘There’s a path going past it from the part of the moor where I’m living, and we walked along it one morning. Castor and I. I must say. .’

‘What must you say?’

‘I must say it’s very beautifully situated. And. . remote.’

He didn’t repeat his question about how I knew it was his house, and I was grateful for that.

‘That’s true,’ was all he said. ‘We live there, Jeremy and I.’

‘Jeremy?’

‘My son.’

I wondered if I ought to mention that I had seen him, but Mark had suddenly become subdued, as if he had no wish to talk about his personal circumstances. Or at least as if he were wondering whether he ought to. I had a clear memory of Alfred Biggs saying that it was ‘a sad story’, and began regretting the fact that I had said anything at all about the house. I felt that I had been tactless, and that it was because I was becoming increasingly unused to talking to other people.

But then he cleared his throat, leaned forward over the table and lowered his voice.

‘If I tell you a bit about my personal circumstances, can I reckon on something similar from you in return?’

‘If you start the ball rolling,’ I said without giving myself time to think it over. ‘So you live alone with your son, do you? How old is he?’

‘Yes, Jeremy and I live on our own,’ said Mark, taking a klunk of beer. ‘We have been doing for quite a few years now. That’s the solution I chose in the end, and not a day has passed since then without my regretting it.’

He smiled briefly to indicate that it was a truth with modification. ‘But I would have regretted it even more if I hadn’t taken care of him.’

‘Taken care of him?’

He nodded. ‘He’s twenty-four. And not exactly normal, to make a long story short.’

‘If you make long stories short I shan’t tell you anything about myself.’

He smiled again. ‘All right, if that’s the way you want it. It happened one winter evening nearly twelve years ago. On the way between Derby and Stoke — we were living just outside Stoke at that time.’

I nodded and waited.

‘Me and my wife Sylvia and Jeremy were on our way home late one evening. We crashed with a lorry. I was driving. Sylvia died in hospital a few hours later. Jeremy was badly injured and was in a coma for two months. I escaped with a broken wrist.’

‘I’m sorry. Please forgive me, I didn’t know. .’

He assumed a facial expression I couldn’t pin down. Somewhere between resignation and confidentiality perhaps, I don’t know. In any case, at that moment Barbara came in with our food — Mark had given the starter a miss, and so we were neck and neck in that respect at least.

And then, as we slowly worked our way through our boiled cod with potatoes, asparagus and horseradish sauce, he continued the tale. Jeremy eventually came out of his coma at the hospital after eight weeks — while he was lying there unconscious he had somehow managed to celebrate his thirteenth birthday. His bodily injuries eventually healed, but something had also happened to his brain. He could hardly talk, his motor functions were almost non-existent, he had frequent fits and seemed not to understand any but the simplest of instructions. He couldn’t read, couldn’t write, didn’t seem to know whether he was coming or going. Nevertheless Mark took him home and survived the first two years with the aid of an assistant who came to help several hours every day. Jeremy had improved, Mark explained, but only very slightly. He continued to have fits — it was apparently some kind of epilepsy — and on several occasions Mark was forced to take him to the hospital in Stoke. The doctors recommended that Jeremy should be placed in some kind of institution; Mark was very much against that, but by the time Jeremy reached the age of fifteen and started showing signs of aggressive resistance he felt obliged to give way. The boy was placed in a home not far from Plymouth, and was moved after a year to another home near Lyme Regis in Dorset, where he stayed until he was nineteen. Meanwhile Mark had bought and moved into that house on Exmoor: he didn’t explain why, merely said that he wanted to get away from the Midlands. He stressed that there was no question of Jeremy being ill-treated at the home, but ‘in the end I just couldn’t bear seeing him sitting there. And so I took him home once and for all.’