I bought pounds sterling for my euros in several small bureaux de change just as I had planned, and amassed over £8,000 without needing to show any kind of identity documentation. That ought to last for a few months — whatever I got up to when I reached Exmoor, I wasn’t intending to be extravagant; and surely it would be possible to change money in other places in this island kingdom if necessary, not just in the capital.
But the night before we set off on our westward journey I didn’t sleep a wink. All kinds of old detritus floated up to the surface from the murky depths of my memory: I was without a doubt being attacked by the life I was just taking my leave of. Or had already left, to be honest. It was as if all those memories and all those years were trying to drag me back to places and circumstances where I no longer belonged. Mind you, where I belonged now, to be precise and accurate, was also a question I couldn’t just answer and forget about and fall asleep. And how I was going to be able to drive us out of London in one piece the next day without an hour or two’s sleep in my body. . well, that was something that felt more and more difficult for every sleepless minute that ticked by.
In the end — at some point after four in the morning — I was exposed to an episode that drove aside everything else, and refused to leave me in peace: Vivianne’s lover. I didn’t understand why.
Vivianne was Martin’s elder sister. I write was, because she has been dead for many years. She threw herself out of a window on the sixteenth floor of a hotel in Singapore — or she might have been pushed, or it might have been an accident. It was the twenty-eighth of February 1998. She had rather a lot of alcohol in her blood, something that wasn’t exactly unusual in the final years of her life, and if I understood it rightly the police investigation was put on ice after a few weeks because there were no suspicions of any crime having been committed.
But the story of her secret lover happened twelve years before that, about a month before Olof Palme was murdered.
16
A thousand pages, he had said.
It took some time for me to get an idea of the actual amount, but I was inclined to reduce Martin’s estimate by about a half. But of course, it all depended on how you counted the pages. A handwritten page, even if it is A4 size, is not the same as a typewritten or printed page, and quite a lot of what I assumed was his ‘material’ was handwritten, in four thick notebooks of a kind that I recall Martin being very enthusiastic about when we first met, and for several years afterwards. Thick oilcloth covers with a hundred and forty pages in each book — I think he ordered them specially from Germany. On the unlined flyleaf at the beginning of each one he had noted meticulously the place and the time of writing: Samos, July-August 1977. Samos, June-July 1978. Samos, July 1979. Taza, July-August 1980.
The first two books were more or less full. The third was a little more than half-full, and the fourth, from Morocco, roughly a third full. But he only wrote on the right-hand pages, it should be stressed. Martin has never liked writing on one page to leak through onto the other side, as it were. An empty page should be an empty page. I knew that he had taken a portable typewriter with him on his last trip to Samos and the one to Taza the following year, and assume that he had used this at least in part for the sort of diary entries he seemed to have been making on these later journeys.
But this was unclear as yet: before I even started to read the contents, I tried to estimate the scope. If I was going to examine the project as a whole, I had every reason to adopt a methodical approach.
Perhaps I also had Eugen Bergman at the back of my mind; I think so. A situation could well develop in which it would be useful if I knew a little about it, even if I were grateful for the fact that Martin always stubbornly refused to discuss the content of his work while it was in progress. That had been the situation for as long as he and Bergman had been working together: the publisher wouldn’t think there was anything odd about his not being informed in detail about how work was progressing while Martin was in North Africa.
But it seemed more or less inevitable that I would have to conduct a certain amount of e-mail correspondence in my husband’s name.
With Bergman and with others.
With G? That felt bizarre, and I decided not to think about that in more detail.
In the work chest — the large brown suitcase that contained exclusively books, writing tools and desk utensils — I found a bundle of almost three hundred typewritten pages in a file marked Writings. This material was not dated — not systematically, at least — and I had the impression that it comprised both fair copies of diary entries, and original texts. There were no page numbers, but when I leafed through it I saw that there were occasional headings and dates, and here and there also changes and additions made in pencil. There were also copies of photographs in some places, evidently produced by an ordinary photocopying machine on typing paper. I glanced quickly at a couple of them: the quality was awful, and they both depicted a small group of people sitting on chairs round a table. Martin appeared in both of them. It seemed possible that a tall woman standing in front of a white wall in the background of one of them was Bessie Hyatt. A mop of hair, large white tunic and bare legs — yes, I was convinced it was her.
In addition to the handwritten and typewritten material I eventually found a file on Martin’s computer entitled Taza, and as I knew that he didn’t start using a computer until the beginning of the nineties I assumed — without opening the file — that it comprised fair copies of earlier pages, or something he had written later. I didn’t find any other documents that seemed to deal with those summers, and didn’t bother to look any further into that particular aspect.
Now that I had acquired a certain degree of familiarity with the material, I immediately started to feel distinctly sceptical about the project as a whole. What was the point? What was I going to get out of it? What would anybody get out of it? Wouldn’t it be better if I spent all my time reading Dickens instead? Or something else, goodness only knows what. Surely I could deal with Bergman in some other way when it became relevant? In so far as there was any point in considering a future. I let Castor out for the evening’s last peeing session, and poured myself a glass of port to help me reach a conclusion.
In the end I decided to take the first of the diaries for bedtime reading. As a trial, without committing myself to continuing along those lines, but to give it a chance even so. Perhaps I thought I owed him that in a way, maybe it had something to do with the unhealthy feminine efficiency we women are alleged to have: but I’m quite sure this would not be a truthful description of my motives. Let’s face it, one tells lies mainly for one’s own peace of mind.
The first obvious problem I came upon was Martin’s handwriting. I had been used to it for over thirty years, but sometimes that didn’t help. I also know that he himself had difficulties at times in understanding what he had written, especially if it was something he had just scribbled down hastily in a notebook or on a loose scrap of paper. In his diary of the stay in Samos, 1977, it was obvious that he had made an effort to write neatly or at least legibly in the beginning, but after a few pages it was impossible to read some words, even when one considered them in context.
Besides, it was all rather uninteresting — I couldn’t help but feel that. The date, getting up, breakfast, the weather, conversations with somebody or other. A walk, a swim, an attempt to describe nature. Name-dropping — there was a distinct whiff of that, even if the people concerned were not anybody I knew about, apart from Hyatt and Herold, and he rarely talked to them, not in the first week at least. And he only refers to them from a distance, as it were. ‘Bessie sat in the shade of the plane tree all morning, writing.’ ‘Tom went off in the boat and there was no sign of him all day. He came back at dusk with a dozen reddish fish.’ It is noticeable that he admires them, especially him. In the summer of 1977 Bessie Hyatt’s sensational debut novel hadn’t yet appeared — if I remember rightly, that is: I think it came out in the autumn or the winter of that year — but Tom Herold was already a sort of icon. Comparisons with the likes of Byron were not uncommon. Somewhat jokily (one assumes) Martin describes him as ‘The Childe Herold of our time’, and it is presumably not just the similarity in the name he is referring to.