“Houses often have a nickname,” said Joakim. “We called our place in Bromma the Apple House.”
“This doesn’t have a name, at least not that I’ve heard.” Nyberg stepped down from the bottom stair and added, “On the other hand, there are plenty of stories about this place.”
“Stories?”
“I’ve heard a few… They say the wind increases off Eel Point when someone sneezes in the manor house.”
Both Katrine and Joakim laughed out loud.
“We’d better make sure we dust often, then,” said Katrine.
“And then, of course, there are some old ghost stories as well,” said Nyberg.
Silence fell.
“Ghost stories?” said Joakim. “The agent should have told us.”
He was just about to smile and shake his head, but Katrine got there first:
“I did hear a few stories when I was over at the Carlssons’ having coffee… our neighbors. But they told me not to believe them.”
“We haven’t really got much time for ghosts,” said Joakim.
Nyberg nodded and took a few steps toward the hall.
“No, but when a house is empty for a while, people start talking,” he said. “Shall we go outside and take a few pictures while it’s still light?”
Bengt Nyberg ended his visit by walking across the grass and the stone paths in the inner courtyard and quickly inspecting both wings of the house-on one side the enormous barn, with the ground-floor walls made of limestone and the upper story of timber painted red, and across the courtyard the smaller, whitewashed outhouse.
“I assume you’re going to renovate this as well?” said Nyberg after peeping into the outhouse through a dusty window.
“Of course,” said Joakim. “We’re taking one building at a time.”
“And then you can rent it out to summer visitors!”
“Maybe. We’ve thought about opening a bed-and-breakfast, in a few years.”
“A lot of people here on the island have had the same idea,” said Nyberg.
Finally the reporter took a couple of dozen pictures of the Westin family on the yellowing grassy slope below the house.
Katrine and Joakim stood beside each other, squinting into the cold wind and the two lighthouses out at sea. Joakim straightened his back as the camera started clicking, and thought about the fact that their neighbors’ house in Stockholm had merited a spread of three double pages in the glossy monthly Beautiful Homes the previous year. The Westin family had to make do with an article in the local paper.
Gabriel was perched on Joakim’s shoulders, dressed in a green padded jacket that was slightly too big. Livia was standing between her parents, her white crocheted hat pulled well down over her forehead. She was looking suspiciously into the camera.
The manor house at Eel Point rose up behind them like a fortress made of wood and stone, silently watching.
Afterward, when Nyberg had left, the whole family went down to the shore. The wind was colder than it had been, and the sun was already low in the sky, just above the roof of the house behind them. The smell of seaweed that had been washed ashore was in the air.
Walking down to the water at Eel Point felt like arriving at the end of the world, the end of a long journey away from everyone. Joakim liked that feeling.
Northeastern Öland seemed to consist of a vast sky above a small strip of yellowish-brown land. The tiny islands looked like grass-covered reefs out in the water. The island’s flat coastline, with its deep inlets and narrow points, slipped almost imperceptibly into the water and became a shallow, even seabed of sand and mud, which gradually sank deeper, down into the Baltic Sea.
A hundred yards or so away from them, the white towers of the lighthouses rose up toward the dark blue sky.
Eel Point’s twin lighthouses. Joakim thought the islands on which they were standing looked as if they were somehow man-made, as if someone had made two piles of stone and gravel out in the water and bound them together with bigger rocks and concrete. Fifty yards to the north of them a breakwater ran out from the shore-a slightly curved jetty made of large blocks of stone, doubtless constructed in order to protect the lighthouses from the winter storms.
Livia had Foreman under her arm, and she suddenly set off toward the wide jetty leading out to the lighthouses.
“Me too! Me too!” shouted Gabriel, but Joakim held him tightly by the hand.
“We’ll go together,” he said.
The jetty split in two a dozen or so yards out into the water, like a big letter Y with two narrower arms leading out to the islands where the lighthouses stood. Katrine shouted:
“Don’t run, Livia! Be careful of the water!”
Livia stopped, pointed to the southern lighthouse, and shouted in a voice that was only just audible above the wind, “That one’s mine!”
“Mine too!” shouted Gabriel behind her.
“End of story!” shouted Livia.
That was her new favorite expression this fall, something she had learned in preschool. Katrine hurried over to her and nodded toward the northern lighthouse.
“In that case, this one’s mine!”
“Okay, then I’ll take care of the house,” said Joakim. “It’ll be as easy as pie, if you all just pitch in and help a little bit.”
“We will,” said Livia. “End of story!”
Livia laughed and nodded, but of course for Joakim it was no joke. But he was still looking forward to all the work that was waiting during the course of the winter. He and Katrine were both going to try to find a teaching post on the island, but they would renovate the manor house together in the evenings and on weekends. She had already started, after all.
He stopped in the grass by the shore and took a long look at the buildings behind them.
Isolated and private location, as it had said in the ad.
Joakim still found it difficult to get used to the size of the main house; with its white gables and red wooden walls, it rose up at the top of the sloping grassy plain. Two beautiful chimneys sat on top of the tiled roof like towers, black as soot. A warm yellow light glowed in the kitchen window and on the veranda; the rest of the house was pitch black.
So many families who had lived there, toiling away at the walls, doorways, and floors over the years-master lighthouse
keepers and lighthouse keepers and lighthouse assistants and whatever they were called. They had all left their mark on the manor house.
Remember, when you take over an old house, the house takes you over at the same time, Joakim had read in a book about renovating wooden houses. For him and Katrine this was not the case-they had had no problem leaving the house in Bromma, after all-but over the years they had met a number of families who looked after their houses like children.
“Shall we go out to the lighthouses?” asked Katrine.
“Yes!” shouted Livia. “End of story!”
“The stones could be slippery,” said Joakim.
He didn’t want Livia and Gabriel to lose their respect for the sea and go down to the water alone. Livia could swim only a few yards, and Gabriel couldn’t swim at all.
But Katrine and Livia had already set off along the stone jetty, hand in hand. Joakim picked Gabriel up, held him in the crook of his right arm, and followed them dubiously out onto the uneven blocks of stone.
They weren’t as slippery as he had thought, just rough and uneven. In some places the blocks had been eroded by the waves and had broken away from the concrete holding them together. There was only a slight wind today, but Joakim could sense the power of nature. Winter after winter of drift ice and waves and harsh storms on Eel Point-and still the lighthouses stood firm.
“How tall are they?” wondered Katrine, looking toward the towers.
“Well, I don’t have a ruler with me-but maybe sixty feet or so?” said Joakim.
Livia tipped her head back to look up at the top of her lighthouse.