‘It’ll be strange for Karl,’ I said, ‘with all Dad’s furniture around. It’ll almost be like still being at home.’
‘It’ll be better than that.’ As Axel glanced up at the inn, his face took on a darkness, a kind of discontent, I hadn’t seen before.
‘Will it?’ I said, staring at him. I didn’t think so, and nor, I thought, should he. We were each other’s reason why.
‘Well,’ he said after a while, ‘at least there’ll be one less in the bedroom,’ and he looked at me and then he began to smile.
I would lie next to Axel with my head on his chest, the stream trickling over stones below us. His body had altered, grown. I couldn’t remember Karl without hair on his face and legs. That summer Axel had it as well, though it wasn’t coarse and black like his brother’s. It was finer, softer — almost coppery. Sometimes he was restless now. His face would shadow over and he would shift suddenly, shake me off like sand. I would sit up with my arms around my knees and watch the shallow water run. But I was happiest with my eyes closed and my cheek against his skin and the smell of it as sunlight touched him, the smell of wood-shavings, sea salt, apricot.
It was almost time to climb back through the field to the house, but as usual I didn’t want to go. I didn’t feel like mopping floors or drawing water from the well or boiling sausage. I couldn’t bear to see my father’s teeth lunging at his fork, or his mouth, glassy with grease. I wished there was somewhere else we could go. Then Axel spoke, and what he said was so close to what I’d been thinking that all of me went stilclass="underline"
‘I’ve heard about a place.’
‘What place?’
He began to describe it for me. The valleys were smooth as dust, and pale-pink or, sometimes, silver-grey. There were no walls or fences, and almost no trees. Everything was open. The people’s faces were yellow and wrinkled, like leaves in autumn. Their eyes were narrow. They wore skirts — not just the women, the men, too — and they rode small horses with thick, black manes. The country was high up, but the mountains were even higher — unimaginably high and jagged and dazzling with snow. Up there the sky was always blue, and the air was so pure and clear it hurt your lungs the first few times you breathed it. The castles in those mountains looked like the castles in fairy-tales. They were real, though. Holy people lived in them. From the battlements you could see halfway round the world. You could see so far, in fact, that in the distance the surface of the land began to bend. It was the curve of the earth itself that you were looking at.
‘If only we could go there,’ I murmured.
His face didn’t alter; he didn’t seem remotely affected by what I’d said. I thought it was probably because he’d taken himself there so many times already, with his knowledge of the place, with his own descriptions. He’d already been.
After that, I was always asking him to describe the place to me so I could be there with him. He never tired of it. Sometimes what he told me could have come from an encyclopaedia — how to avoid altitude sickness, what the local music sounded like, why certain flowers could grow high up. Other times he gave me impressions that were arbitrary and vague, like memories. I asked him how he knew about it. He’d seen some pictures once, he said. They were in a magazine that somebody had left at the inn. When he looked for the magazine again, though, it was gone. It didn’t matter, really; he could still remember it. He found some other magazines from the same series, but there was nothing in them that interested him much.
One morning I asked him what the name of the country was. It was strange I hadn’t thought of asking him before. He said he didn’t know. I watched him as he stared up into the branches of the willow tree.
‘The highest mountain in the world,’ he said, ‘what’s it called?’
‘Mount Everest.’
He nodded. ‘It was somewhere near there.’
It was hot, July or August, with a white sky that hurt to look at, and I came up out of the garden with vegetables for that evening’s meal. From the barn I heard my father sawing and I thought of Uncle Felix and the night he died, but the breathing of the saw was out, not in — out as it cut down into the wood, in as it drew back, out as it cut down again. I stopped in the doorway. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw my father bent over the sawhorse, his right arm moving like one of those rods that drive the wheels on a train. I noticed a square frame behind him, low on the floor, and a wide half-moon of blond wood propped up against the wall.
‘Is that a bed you’re making?’
‘Yes, it’s a bed.’ He didn’t pause in his work; his sweat dropped on to the pine and darkened it.
‘It’s for the inn, I suppose.’ My father had been hired to build some furniture — wardrobes for the bedrooms, chairs and tables for a restaurant. Karl and Eva had taken his advice. They were trying to make something of the place.
‘Didn’t you hear yet?’
‘Hear what?’
‘We’re losing Axel.’
I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
My father stopped sawing, straightened up. ‘He’s fixing to get married. This bed’s for the wedding night.’ He ran one hand carefully over the headboard, and his long teeth showed.
‘Married?’ I said. ‘Who to?’
‘The Poppel girl. I thought you knew.’
The white sky beat against my neck. Standing on the line between the darkness of the barn and the brilliance outside, I felt caught between two worlds, adrift suddenly, abandoned. I knew Axel had been seeing Eileen Poppel and, though I sometimes wondered why, I certainly never thought it would come to anything. The Poppel family — scrap-dealers from across the valley. And Eileen, their only daughter. Not exactly what you’d call a catch, though, with her mouth too small and her wrists that you could snap in your hands like kindling, if you’d a mind, and that pale-blue vein wriggling through the thin skin at the edge of her left eye. She looked like, if you shouted at her, she’d just lie down and die. I could feel the white sky burning, burning. Married? Certainly I never suspected it would come to that.
‘At least there’ll be some help for you around the place.’ My father spoke to me from the world he belonged to, a dark world, steeped in wood-chips, sweat, and resin.
‘You mean they’re going to live here?’ I stared at him.
‘Only till they get a place of their own.’
I walked back into the glare below the house. Five shrivelled heads of beetroot nodded in my hand. I wanted to start running, but I didn’t know which way to go. I wanted to burst into flame. Instead, I stood at the kitchen sink with a knife against my thumb and the cold tap dripping, and I skinned the beetroots and sliced their wet, violet flesh on to a plate.
The next morning Axel woke me at the usual time. I followed him out of the house, across the clearing. It wasn’t light yet; the goats shuffled in their pen. Past the shed, along the footpath, down into the field.
Then, halfway across, I stopped. I just stopped and watched him walk away from me. His feet rising, falling, rising. He thought I was still behind him. He didn’t realise. The stupidity of those feet of his.
‘I’m not coming,’ I called out.
He looked over his shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Is it true you’re getting married?’
He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it’s true.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s going to have a baby.’
‘So what?’
‘It’s my baby.’ He began to walk towards me, not looking at me. Looking at the grass.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Stay there.’
He kept walking until I could see the freckles on his face.
‘One last time,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Edie.’ He grasped my wrist and tried to pull me towards him. My arm was horizontal in the air, but my feet hadn’t moved. ‘One last time.’