Håkan Nesser - The Living and the Dead in Winsford

‘I don’t want to talk about this. Not ever, not with anybody.’

That was the first thing — and generally speaking the only thing — that Martin said during the taxi ride to New Jersey the following afternoon. I could see that he was on the point of bursting into tears and had the impression that if I hadn’t had my sensitive stomach to think about I ought to have taken hold of his hand and said that I had forgiven him, irrespective of what there was to forgive him for. But I didn’t. He was still wearing the suit from Fifth Avenue, but it was hard to tell that it was only two days old. It looked more like twenty years old, and it also concluded its short life in a rubbish basket at the airport. Later I found a receipt indicating that it had cost 1,800 dollars, which was roughly the same as the price of the hotel room. But I took it for granted that this was also a part of our agreement: that we shouldn’t keep going on and on about the whole affair.

But the remarkable thing, the reason why I keep recalling those four days in New York, is the sudden feeling of tenderness that overcame me with regard to Martin. When I collected him from that police station in Greenwich Village, when we sat in silence on the back seat of the taxi, looking out through our respective windows, when he was in the toilet at the airport, changing his clothes. I ought to have been absolutely furious with him, even if it’s not for me to require people to live up to great heights; but the feelings that actually filled me were the precise opposite. True enough, this hung-over wretch was a fifty-year-old literature professor; but he was also a little boy who had gone astray, and if I hadn’t still been plagued with the after-effects of my stomach upset, I might well have told him so. That I really did feel sympathy for him. That there was something there reminiscent of what is called love — during those brief hours of our long marriage.

Perhaps it might have made him feel happy if I’d said something.

Perhaps it might have changed something.

Anyway, I told Christa about it a few days later, of course I did. Not that feeling of tenderness, just the rest of it. I remember her laughing, but I noticed that she did so because the situation demanded it, and I suspected she had been through similar experiences in her own life.

‘I expect you know the difference between a fifteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old man?’ she asked rhetorically in order to maintain the arms-length tone of the conversation. ‘Forty kilos and enough money to put their daft dreams into practice.’

I have sometimes felt that life is in fact about as half-baked as that summary suggests. And that we really shouldn’t go on and on about things.

I myself celebrated my fiftieth birthday a few years later. I travelled to Venice without Martin — that was a present I had asked for, and the family duly obliged. When my daughter asked why I wanted to go there on my own, I told her I’d had a secret lover in Venice for many years, and that shut her up.

I could see that she wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that I was joking.

I could also see that she hoped I wasn’t joking. That made me sad, extremely sad.

But I didn’t go there alone in fact. Christa was with me for four of the five days I spent in that magic city, and I’ve already mentioned that business of ashes in the canal.

But that feeling of tenderness in New York: where did it come from? Where did it go to?

Rain is pelting against the bedroom window, and dawn is the colour of old meat. Castor is fast asleep down by my feet; I wish it were possible to teach a dog how to light a fire, so that I could for once get up without almost freezing to death. We have fallen asleep and then woken up for forty nights in Darne Lodge by this time, and I no longer wonder where I am when I open my eyes in the morning.

I live here with my dog. In a remote, stone-built cottage that was once built for a wayward son who needed a roof over his head. He enjoyed it so much that he eventually hanged himself. I lie in bed for a while, wondering exactly where. There are substantial roof beams both here in the bedroom and out there in the living room: perhaps he hung up there, swinging back and forth, from a beam directly over his bed? In which case the bed must have been located somewhere different from where it is now, which is not impossible. The room is quite large in fact, at least thirty square metres. It is the ridiculously low ceiling that makes it feel smaller: it strikes me that he must have used quite a short length of rope, otherwise his feet would have been touching the floor.

On the other hand, I think eventually. . on the other hand I’ve read about people hanging themselves from door handles and radiators. Nothing is impossible for a chap with an inventive turn of mind. And the fact that no more than two people have hanged themselves in this house in over two hundred years is a circumstance one ought to regard as something positive. Bearing in mind the moor. Bearing in mind the rain, the mists and the darkness.

I get up. Light a fire, sit down at the table and note down today’s weather details in my diary. Tuesday the eleventh of December. Six degrees at a quarter to nine in the morning. A strong wind from the south-west and rain looking as if it’s never going to stop falling.

A group of ponies suddenly appear some way away on the moor as the darkness begins to lift. They seem to have got stuck in the mud. I sit watching them for a while, but they don’t move at all. I go for a shower, then get dressed. My last-but-one pair of knickers — I really must go to Minehead today and do some washing. I lift the cover off Castor and explain the situation to him.

He gives an enormous yawn, and licks my ear. I remind him that I love him. I keep my fear under lock and key.

About ten hours later all the day’s chores have been completed, and I take out the brown suitcase. Maybe this will be the last time. In any case, I must work my way through the rest of the diary this evening. It’s no more than ten pages. I have no idea about the typewritten pages or what is on the computer.

The last I read about Taza was that final act from the twenty-ninth of July: Tom Herold was roaring like a wounded lion and Bessie Hyatt had thrown herself into the swimming pool.

I thumb my way through to the thirtieth.

‘It’s beginning to feel ominous,’ Martin writes.

I can’t help acknowledging that. This morning I discussed yesterday’s events with both Grass and Soblewski, and they are just as worried as I am. Moreover something new emerged which makes the situation even more tense. Soblewski has had a private conversation with Herold and been informed that the great poet is sterile. He’s incapable of creating children, which is why his first marriage collapsed. Which also means. .

He doesn’t go into what that means because it is obvious anyway. Herold is not the father of the child that is growing in his wife’s stomach, Bessie really does have a lover — or at least has had sex with another man. Martin doesn’t believe there is any truth in the suggestion that she was raped by the Arab Ahib, nor do Grass and Soblewski, it seems. It’s too much like a back-to-front Othello , and all three seem to recall noting several loans from that Shakespearean drama in yesterday’s performance.

Martin summarizes the conversation with Grass and Soblewski in one-and-a-half pages, then comes a blank line and the rest of the entry of the thirtieth of July is about what happens during that evening.

Which is not very much, it seems. There is none of yesterday’s drama. Herold and Hyatt act almost like a newly married couple: she sits on his knee for most of the meal, or at the very least extremely close to him, and they caress and kiss each other with a total lack of modesty. Martin writes that ‘they behave like a pair of turtle doves, it seems they just can’t wait to get undressed and crawl naked between the sheets together — I really don’t know what to think.’ The atmosphere seems to be infectious, for Martin notes that Doris Guttmann appears to have fallen for the ever-present Russian Gusov. The evening is characterized by an affectionate, not to say erotic mood, and they leave the table unusually early. Even the French couple seem to be besotted with each other, and the same trio as during the morning — Martin, Grass and Soblewski — are left alone at one corner of the table. They sit there for a while, drinking single malt whisky and chewing olives, evidently disappointed by the events of the evening. Needless to say Martin doesn’t write that he feels disappointed, but I can tell by the tone of what he puts that he is. In his final free-standing line he sums it all up: