“What’s the matter?” Her father stared at her in astonishment.
“Your phone’s ringing, I’ll get it.”
She ran to his workroom. She closed the door carefully behind her and had to calm herself down a little before lifting the receiver with a trembling hand. It might not be him. Perhaps it was the home help saying she was ill. Or perhaps it was Emma, or someone with the wrong number.
“Liland,” she said quietly.
There was a moment’s silence. His voice sounded uncertain, as if he was scared of being made to look foolish. Or perhaps he sensed danger.
“Yes, it’s about an Opel Manta. I want to speak to Liland.”
“Speaking.” For an instant she was totally overwhelmed by the sound of his voice. “So you’re interested?”
“It’s more you that’s interested. But I thought it was a man.”
“Does it make any difference?”
“No, course not. So long as you know what we’re talking about.”
“Oh, God!” She gave a small laugh. “Why, we’re talking about money, aren’t we? Most things are for sale, if the price is good enough.” She’d adopted a hearty tone. It was easy.
“Yeah, yeah, but the price’ll have to be really good.”
“It will be, provided the car’s as good as it looks.” Her heart was thumping wildly under her sweater. He sounded sulky; she realized that she couldn’t stand him.
“The car’s tip-top. Just a tiny oil leak.”
“Okay, that can be fixed. Can I have a look at it?”
“Course. You can see her tonight if you want. I’ve been over her with the vac and tidied inside. But you must give her a test drive.”
“I wasn’t exactly going to buy without giving it a test.”
“It’s not definite I’m going to sell.”
Both were silent, and she listened to the hostility that quivered on the line between them without quite knowing where it came from. As if they’d both hated each other for a long time.
“It’s ten past seven now. I’ve got a couple of things to take care of first, but could you be in town for half past nine, for example? D’you live in town?”
“Yes,” she said curtly.
“What about — at the bus station?”
“Fine by me. At half past nine. I’ll see you when you arrive, I’ll be by the kiosk.”
He hung up, she stood for a time listening to the dial tone. Her father was shouting from the kitchen. She stared at the handset and marveled at how unaffected he was. As if nothing had happened. That was it. For him it really was over. He’d put it behind him. Now he was interested in money. But she had been, too. She shuddered and went out again, slid behind the kitchen table. Things were happening almost too fast now, she must gather her wits, but her heart was thumping away and she knew she had more color in her cheeks than usual.
“Well?” said her father expectantly. “Don’t they want to speak to me?”
“He had the wrong number.”
“Oh? That took a long time to find out.”
“No, he was just talkative. A pleasant sort. Asked if I wanted to buy his car.”
“Nah. You’d better leave that to others. When you want a new car, you ask Jostein for help.”
“I’ll remember that.”
She filled her cup and stared out at the maple again. The tear in the bark really was ugly. It resembled nothing so much as a large, suppurating wound.
30
She waited in the dark. There wasn’t a breeze anymore, the wind came in capricious squalls over the roof of the bus station, and her ponytail slapped about her ears, which were freezing now, because her hair wasn’t hanging over them and warming them as it usually did. Her thoughts wandered, here and there, back to the time when they’d been girls. Suddenly she saw her so clearly in her mind’s eye, an image from a summer, perhaps they’d been eleven at the time. Maja was wearing that American bathing suit she’d been so proud of. Her uncle had bought it for her, the uncle who was on a whaler and always came home bearing exciting gifts. Sometimes a little of his bounty even showered down on Eva as well. Boxes of chocolates and American chewing gum. The bathing suit was bright red and amusingly crinkly. It had elastic criss-crossing it and this made the material crinkle into tiny bubbles. No one else had a swimming suit like it. When Maja came out of the sea, the bubbles were full of water and even bigger, and made her look like a huge raspberry. This was the image she gazed at now, Maja coming out of the water, the water running off and splashing around her feet, her hair even darker because it was wet, wearing the best swimming suit on the entire beach. Again and again Maja comes up from the water. She grins and displays her white teeth, for she knows nothing about the future and how it will all end.
The money was now safely stashed in her father’s cellar. She’d practically slung the tin in a corner, where it looked almost as valueless as it had done in the workroom at the cabin. Her father never went down there, he couldn’t manage the difficult cellar stairs. Nobody else went there either, unless his home help went down for something, but she didn’t think so. Home helps didn’t do either attics or cellars, it said so in their terms and conditions.
The bus station was the ugliest building Eva knew, a long gray concrete box with empty windows. She’d parked around the back, down by the railway lines, now she leaned against the kiosk and looked up at the bridge from where she knew he’d come. He would turn right, disappear behind the bank for a moment, and then glide up to the front of the kiosk. He wouldn’t come out and introduce himself, he wasn’t that sort, just remain sitting in the car, push his nose under the windshield and peer up at her, maybe give a quick nod, a sort of signal that she could come. She’d have to sit next to him with only the gear stick between them. You sat quite close together in a car, she thought, so close that she’d catch his smell, and his voice would be directly in her left ear. That terse, unfriendly voice. She cleared her throat nervously as she formulated her opening line. Maybe one to make the blood freeze in his veins? She rejected the idea and stared at the cars passing regularly with a brief swish over the bridge above. They couldn’t wait to get out of the windswept town. Everyone had an objective, no one strolled about at random, not on an evening like this.
The buses rumbled good-naturedly over by their stops, and people dived into their brightness and warmth. There was something nice about the red buses. The trusty driver bent over his steering wheel, giving a lazy nod each time a few coins jingled into his hand, and the faces behind the windows, autumn-pale with eyes that stared, unseeing. On a bus you were in no-man’s-land, left to your own thoughts, all you did was sit and vibrate in the warmth. All at once she felt the urge to sit at one of those windows, take the bus around the town and see how everyone found their own secure bolt-holes. Instead she stood here getting cold, rubbing herself with icy hands in the gloves that were far too thin, waiting for a murderer. When he suddenly turned the corner, Eva let out all the air she had in her lungs. From then on they filled and emptied in a special rhythm, one that nothing could influence, it was like being inside an iron lung. It was vital to keep concentrating, she mustn’t let it slip, mustn’t say too much, just feel her way cautiously. He was slowing down, she saw him put the car in neutral and lean against the window. His expression was doltish and vaguely skeptical. She opened the door and sat down. He was grasping the gear stick, as if this was a toy he wasn’t going to share with anyone, as if sending out a warning. Then he nodded quickly.