I can still remember how tenderly his lips met mine. He was quivering like a butterfly, and I felt like a fine and delicate flower gently unfurling. At times I still feel like that inside, fine and delicate.
No, I don’t regret meeting your father. I fell deeply in love with him, and I still am in love with him. Somehow that makes it all worthwhile. Even as I lie here today, big and heavy. Even the business with your granny. And Carl. And all the mess. The dirt that I pretend I can’t see. Everything.
It’s all too much to take, but this is the only place I want to be. Here, with you and your father. He’s a good man, Liv. I know you know that. But I want to make sure you remember it.
I don’t know how it’s going to end. After all, I only know what you tell me, and I have a feeling that you don’t tell me everything. That things are going wrong. I have a hunch that things happen outside this bedroom which I mustn’t be told about. Things should never have been allowed to get to this point. And yet I can’t regret my love for him.
Perhaps he’s not sick at all. Perhaps it’s me. Perhaps I’m sick, because I don’t regret anything.
Sometimes I think of your father as a butterfly trying to fly in the face of time and so he’s now pupating. But perhaps so am I.
Happiness
To begin with, Else Horder and the young woman felt a lot of sympathy for one another. Maria was welcomed warmly with tea and home-baked cakes, and Mrs Horder gave the impression that the two of them would get along just fine. Maria had no doubt that the widow was an honest woman, and she had never felt luckier than when she moved into the white room with the family on the Head.
The room was simple and nice, with pale curtains and white-painted wooden walls. Maria was pleased that there was no hessian on the walls or pop-star posters on the ceiling, as there had been in the last attic room she had been put up in, when she was working behind the till at a bakery. In just a few days she had got fed up with staring up at the long-haired men on the posters, not to mention the bizarre smell that lingered in the attic room. It was very different from the smells of the bakery, and even more remote from the bookshop of her childhood. She wasn’t into hessian and beat music, and perhaps that explained why she had been attracted to life on the island.
Here someone had put a vase of autumn flowers on the desk and the bedlinen had such a wonderful scent of fresh air and spruce that she fell into a most pleasant sleep after her first day of work.
She even enjoyed the furniture. All of it was made by the old carpenter, Else Horder had told her, and Maria was genuinely impressed. Everything was neatly measured and planed and sanded, and the drawer in the small desk opened without resistance when she gently pulled it out. It was empty, and she put her pens and notebooks inside it before unpacking the rest of her luggage. She lacked for nothing in the white room, except for a bookcase for her many books, which she stacked carefully against the wall. She found space under her bed for her sewing box and rolls of fabric.
Nevertheless, Maria couldn’t help noticing that neatness wasn’t a dominant feature of the small farm. The farmhouse – with the kitchen, pantry, hallway, bathroom and big living room, as well as the master bedroom and two smaller rooms on the first floor – wasn’t exactly messy, but there were lots of things to keep track of and, not least, clean. It was obvious that Else Horder could no longer manage the task herself.
However, the barn, the workshop and the outdoor areas were in a far worse state. Things were lying about everywhere, everything from timber and furniture and old engine parts to sinks and tractor tyres and the components of a horse cart. Most of it looked as if it had been lying there for a long time and was unlikely to be of any possible use.
She had occasionally seen such places from a distance, houses surrounded by junk, and every time she had wondered: who could cope, living in a place like that?
Maria didn’t dare ask Mrs Horder why the family hadn’t got rid of these things long ago. It was a simple matter of loading it on to the pickup truck and making a few trips to the junkyard. All right, several trips. Seeing the mess bothered her because, now that she was part of the household, she felt a degree of responsibility for the place, not least towards the customers who would visit the workshop from time to time.
On the other hand, the workshop was exclusively Jens’s domain, and that was messier than anywhere else, so perhaps there was no point trying to clear anything up. In time Maria came to see that it was primarily Jens who couldn’t let go of the junk. His mother had long since given up the battle.
So, in that respect, Else Horder and Maria Svendsen were quite similar. Because Maria might also like neatness, but soon she liked Jens even more.
She was strangely drawn to him from their first meeting. They greeted one another only briefly, but she recognized his introversion and immediately felt a kind of kinship with him. A spontaneous empathy. His eyes were so dark she thought they must be black. Or was it the pupils filling them out? His hair and moustache were dark brown, his skin fine and smooth, his body slim and strong. She wanted to make him a shirt and imagined how it would fall over his shoulders and chest. Perhaps she might ask him if she could one day. Then she would have to take his measurements.
On her fifth day with them she ventured into the workshop while Else Horder was resting. The widow had told her that she was in great pain, but not where, and judging by her loud snoring, it wouldn’t appear to be something that interfered with her sleep. Maria was obviously concerned that Jens’s mother suffered such unbearable pain, yet she was already starting to find Mrs Horder’s illness somewhat baffling.
Maria had brought Jens a pot of coffee and a slice of freshly baked cake in the hope that it would be welcome. She feared being regarded as intrusive more than anything else. The door was ajar and, as she didn’t have a free hand with which to knock, she carefully pushed it open with her shoulder. He was standing by the lathe, completely absorbed in his work, and didn’t notice her. She stopped for a moment and watched him. Studied his hands. They looked more like the hands of an artist than a carpenter as he ran them over the chair leg he was turning.
The floor below him was littered with sawdust and wood shavings that looked like the curling leaves of a corkscrew willow.
Maria cleared her throat. And then she cleared it again. At long last he looked up, with a rather startled expression. She immediately regretted disturbing him. But then he smiled and beckoned her closer, and next thing he ran to the kitchen for an extra cup. She could hear his footsteps on the gravel as they jogged there and back, and her heart beat a little faster. She stood still with the tray while he pushed some stuff aside and pulled out a crate to serve as a table. Then he found another stool behind some sacks in a corner and wiped it with his sleeve. Soon they were sitting alone but comfortably amid the aroma of coffee and fresh pinewood, looking bashfully at one another as their pupils widened.