He made her promise to come back. It was all he could do. He could see clearly now how afraid she was. The last thing he wanted to do was turn her away by seeming prejudiced, he thought as he accompanied her back through the church.
As he stood at the altar and watched her walking down the central aisle, he remembered what it was he had dreamt about her last night. He turned at once and went back into the sacristy.
14
Tuesday 2 October
AXEL ATE LUNCH in his office and tried to work. He had a pile of documents to get through. A couple of social security forms and four references that had to be sent out in the course of the day. He sat there with the documents and his unopened lunch box on the desk in front of him. Miriam was sick. At least that was what she’d told Rita on the phone. At first he was relieved. It wasn’t the first time one of his students had shown a more than professional interest in him. Usually he didn’t mind. On the odd occasion he’d been careless enough to encourage it, but he had never before allowed it to develop. Miriam was going to be absent for the remainder of the week. The need to call her crept up on him. He sat with his mobile phone in his hand, put it down again. He should never have touched her. It would not happen again.
He managed only one of the social security forms during his lunch break, and as soon as he was finished with the day’s last patient, he put the phone on voicemail and set about the rest of the documents, as well as test results from the last four days. He made a note of the ones requiring further attention. Mostly trifles and probably false readings. Some possibly serious. And one that he sat studying in his hand. Cecilie Davidsen, the results of the biopsy test on that lump in her breast. Findings consistent with invasive glandular carcinoma stage III. Multiple mitosis, severely atypical and glandular metastasis. It was less than a week since the patient had come to see him. He had realised at once that the tumour was malignant and that same week had arranged for a mammography. Being on friendly terms with the right people helped, as did a reputation as a good general practitioner.
He opened her notes and found her number, picked up the phone. A child’s voice at the other end.
– Is your mother there? he asked.
– Who are you?
– I’m… I have a message for her.
The child called for its mother; a little girl, he could tell, about Marlen’s age. He replaced the receiver.
In the taxi, the image of Miriam again. She had a tiny freckle on her chin, directly below her ear. And another one just like it on the side of her neck. When she was listening, her eyebrows would rise quickly and quiver a few times before sinking again. He glanced at his watch, not sure whether he would have time to see his mother in the nursing home before catching the boat. You must always pay your dues, Axel. For his father, there was only one real sin here in life. Judge Torstein Glenne had come across so many people who had stolen, betrayed, killed. The only real sin is to lie. Everything else can be forgiven as long as you own up and make amends. When you lie, that’s when you’re really done for. It puts you on the outside. That is what Brede seems incapable of understanding.
Axel asked the driver to wait, opened the gate into the garden. The Davidsens had a big garden, with apple trees and a raspberry hedge, and something that looked like clematis covering the whole of the front of the house. He rang the doorbell and heard a dog barking and someone calling inside, then the door was opened and a girl was standing there. She had a thin braid on each side of her head and a small, red, turned-up nose, and he realised this must the girl who had answered the phone twenty minutes earlier. She was holding a cocker spaniel by its collar, not much more than a puppy.
– I’d like to talk to your mother.
She looked at him and seemed afraid. The dog too; it pulled free and ran off.
– You’re the person who rang, she said, not releasing him from her gaze.
He nodded.
– You hung up. When Mummy came, there was no one there.
– It was better to come here and talk to her, he said.
Just then Cecilie Davidsen appeared behind her daughter. She was wearing glasses; her hair was browner than last time and combed forward at the temples. It was the fashion, but it didn’t suit her. In her hand she was holding a book, an arithmetic primer for nursery school he noted. When she recognised him, her pupils widened and her face seemed to collapse.
– Is it you … was it you that rang?
He felt clumsy and helpless, and only now realised what a mistake it had been to come in person, bringing this news into her home.
– I’ve got a visit to make in the neighbourhood. I thought I might just as well call in.
She held the door open for him. All the colour had drained from her face. The girl put her arms around her waist and buried her face in her pullover.
The messenger, thought Axel Glenne as he stepped over the threshold of the large villa in Vindern carrying the results of a test done on a tissue sample full of cells multiplying out of control and spreading death around them. There was a smell of dinner in the hallway, stronger in the living room. Meat and melted cheese, rice perhaps. He waited until the girl had been sent to her room with the puppy and the arithmetic book and a biscuit in her hand.
– It’s about your tissue sample, he said, though he could see that the woman sitting opposite him knew exactly why he had come.
15
Thursday 4 October
MARLEN’S FRIENDS HAD been invited for six o’clock. Axel had to drop his bicycle ride; he’d promised to get home early and arrange things. An hour before the party, he went and picked up the fizzy drinks and the pizza. The night before, Bie had baked a chocolate cake, buns, tea cakes and made a jelly. She was on an assignment in Stockholm and wouldn’t be back until the celebrations were over. She was happy enough to be missing all the racket and grateful to Axel for standing in. He’d asked Tom to help with the preparations, and his son had grunted something that might have been a yes, but a few moments later Axel had seen the back of his black leather jacket disappearing through the garden gate.
While he laid the table with the paper tablecloth and the paper plates and blew up the balloons, Marlen sat underneath playing with the present he had given her that morning. She wanted a dog, or at least a cat. She couldn’t have either because she was allergic. A pig was rejected for the same reason, though from a medicinal point of view, the reasoning was doubtful. So he’d bought her a tortoise. It was good for everybody. It didn’t moult, didn’t need to go walks every hour of the day and night, was easy to feed and didn’t need contraceptive pills or vaccinations, didn’t pee on the carpets, and obeyed house rules without making a fuss. Marlen at once announced that it was her best friend. After a few trial baptisms she finally named it Cassiopeia, after another tortoise in a book Axel had read to her, and with that the creature also had its own constellation up in the night sky. Weeks ago Marlen had decided that all the birthday guests should come dressed as some kind of animal. She was going to go as Cassiopeia’s big sister, to which end Axel had fastened a brown plastic bowl to her back and pushed all her long hair inside a woollen hat. Now she was lying beneath the table babbling away in tortoise language and waiting for the first guests to arrive.