As I sat there on the ferry with my unsolved crossword puzzle, I had the feeling that I had drifted away from her, and that it was my fault. The thought made me sad. I had never managed to be the sort of woman who always has half a dozen close friends on call, and I can live with that. But maybe my relationship with Christa had never been for real either? Whatever that means. For real? I don’t know. Angst or potato?
It’s remarkable how geographical changes can stir up so many other different things. It was as if everything I had been and thought and believed had to do with that house in Nynäshamn. And with the Monkeyhouse. Gunvald’s comments that time and the horrible image of the mirror came to mind in any case, and out there in the middle of the Baltic Sea it suddenly dawned on me that there was nobody out there who could give a toss. About what would happen to me. Or to Martin. We had lived our lives, had been in the premier league for a few years, danced in the headlines for a few months, and then we had fled. And the rest is silence. Or the big sleep, if you prefer Chandler to Shakespeare. Eugen Bergman had an interest, of course, but that was professional rather than brotherly love. Our children? Huh. Christa? I doubted it.
Perhaps I underestimate the significance of the circle of academic friends that Martin had assembled over the years, but that is not for me to judge. I have been underestimating things and making wrong choices all my life.
The fact that I saw no point at all in exchanging such thoughts with the man snoring by my side spoke volumes, of course. I remember leaning down and stroking Castor for quite some time, and that he responded by licking my right ear clean, as he usually does.
But I venture to suggest that something deep down inside me woke up during that voyage over the Baltic Sea. Something that ought to have been left to sleep in peace. But if you insist on riding your high horses, it no doubt becomes a case of your will versus fate, your choices and motives. Needless to say I can’t find the words to pin it down more specifically, apart from what I have already said: so much was left behind in the Monkeyhouse, and that damned family home in Nynäshamn. Thirty years of hard-fought life experiences — how petty they seem on a sunny day at sea.
It took only half an hour to drive from the ferry terminal at Świnoujście to Professor Soblewski’s house. It was a large, old wooden mansion in a beech wood not far from the sea. It had been built in the thirties by some Nazi bigwig or other, and during the Communist years had served as a summer residence for party functionaries. This was explained by our host while we were drinking champagne on the terrace. He didn’t explain how he had come to acquire the property. He was in his seventies, well-mannered and quite charming. His thirty years younger wife, or perhaps partner, was called Jelena and spoke only broken English and German, and so conversation was somewhat halting. But I was used to that — two academic men talking and chuckling, two wives trying to smile.
I am not sure about the point of our visit to Professor Soblewski. Perhaps Martin had filled me in, but I wasn’t listening attentively enough. In any case he had explained at an early stage that we would take this route through Europe rather than the more obvious westerly one: Rødby-Puttgarden-Hamburg-Strasbourg. . and so on. I know that Soblewski had been a member of the group that used to gather on Samos in the seventies, and in view of Martin’s past experiences — and what was the alleged purpose of the whole journey — I assumed that our visit had to do with Herold and Hyatt. In one way or another.
But I may be wrong. Soblewski is a big name in the literary history world, and although I had never met him before, Martin had been in frequent contact with him over the years. We have half a dozen of his books at home in Nynäshamn, one of them even in translation: Under the Surface of Words.
In any case we had a long and slightly strained dinner, just the four of us — and needless to say the strained aspect referred only to the two ladies present. The men had no difficulty at all in keeping the conversation going, and two carafes of red wine plus a few glasses of vodka helped matters along. Jelena drank vodka but not wine: the reverse was the case for me. The food and drink was served by a sombre-looking woman with a limp: Professor Soblewski informed us that she was a distant relative who had been ill-treated by life.
After the coffee, I asked permission to withdraw — which was granted. As I lay in the large double bed on the upper floor, waiting for sleep to swallow me up, I could hear the voices of Martin and Soblewski in the room down below for several hours. They were arguing and discussing, and sounded very enthusiastic, occasionally even aggressive: but I have no idea what they were talking about. Not then, and not now, seventeen days later. I think it was almost half past two when Martin tumbled into bed beside me. He was enveloped in a cloud of vodka.
11
The fifth of November. Thirteen degrees. Fog.
We went northwards on our morning walk, towards what is called the Punchbowl and Wambarrows. Wambarrows is one of the highest points on the whole moor, but visibility today was no more than thirty or forty metres and the world was hiding away. We followed a well-trodden path, which was very muddy in parts and difficult to cope with; and in order to avoid the risk of getting lost we turned round after half an hour and followed the same route back. No wild ponies loomed up out of the mist, just the usual screeching pheasants. And the occasional crow. I’m grateful for the fact that Castor has no trace of any kind of hunting instinct: it would be difficult to wander around as we do with a different kind of dog. But he trotted along as usual, ten metres behind on the way out, ten metres ahead on the way home.
We also came upon ‘that woman’s grave’, as Mr Tawking put it. Surrounded by a circle of low, windswept trees is a small metal plate on a wooden stake: In memory of Elizabeth Williford Barrett, 1911–1961.
Nothing more. It didn’t look like a grave. I thought it was probably where her ashes had been scattered in this private little memorial grove.
Who was she? And why this barren spot? No more than a hundred metres from Darne Lodge. She only lived to be fifty years old, and I thought I ought to find out more about her. Not today, but in due course. She is my nearest neighbour after all.
I had lit a fire before we set off, and the house was warm when we got back. I had my breakfast in peace and quiet while reading the first thirty pages of Bleak House. It’s difficult to grasp that the description of a London fog in the opening chapter is a hundred and fifty years old. It could just as well have been written today. I haven’t read all that much Dickens, but Martin has always rated him highly. Maybe I’ll make it routine to read thirty pages of Bleak House every morning: that would make it last for a month, and then I can go to the antiquarian bookshop in Dulverton and buy a new Dickens. Why not? I need to build up my day-to-day existence around practical rituals — now is a time to proceed prudently, not to dismantle everything.
When I look out of the window and compare my Exmoor mist with Dickens’s nineteenth-century fog it feels as if it were a living being, just as he claimed. A sophisticated and intelligent enemy intent on encircling, penetrating and swallowing up everything. As patient and methodical as a virus, it needs bodies with as much energy as the sun to defend themselves in the long run, and needless to say the environment Castor and I have done our best to create will submit eventually. But I think that in fact it is just a variation on the old, familiar theory about the incorruptibility of life and death and the forces of nature, and I persuade myself that I should not succumb to passing whims. And concentrate on outliving my dog, as I have said before. Make decisions and stick to them. Fog or no fog.