‘I can’t accept payment from you any longer,’ she said at our last meeting. ‘It would be unethical.’
We didn’t meet again after that. Those friends with the different points of view went their different ways, and I assume that’s the way it is as far as therapists are concerned. They meet people who have lost their footing, help them back to their feet, support them, then take the props away — it can take time, months and years, but when it’s over the patient staggers off and the therapist goes to the waiting room where other lost souls are sitting and suffering.
I could have done with Gudrun Ewerts after that business with Magdalena Svensson at the hotel in Gothenburg, I know that. But she died at the beginning of 2006; I actually attended her funeral. There were at least three hundred people in the church, and I wondered how many of them were former patients.
Anyway, I have thought quite a lot about my relationship with Göran, my elder brother: that was a button Gudrun often pressed. If siblings don’t have much in the way of contact when they are young, they are not going to have much when they are grown up: that is not exactly a contentious conclusion. And when I occasionally manage to transport myself back to my young days, to the feelings and moods that might well have possessed me at that time, they are as elusive and unreliable as feverish dreams; but if I try to penetrate them even so, all these years later, the only conclusion I can draw is that I didn’t like him. No, I didn’t love my elder brother, I really didn’t.
But that is all there was to it. There is nothing more sinister behind it, he never did me any harm, he never bullied me. He was just irrelevant to me. Presumably because I was irrelevant to him. I have no special memories of him, nothing we did together, nothing he said on a particular occasion, nothing at all. He was present more or less like those distant relatives who usually appear on the fringe of old family photographs. He was always there, he was always in the vicinity, but nothing he ever said or did or got up to is preserved in my memory. I realize that it is a bit remarkable. Perhaps it is even most remarkable, which is what Gudrun always used to say.
Anyway, nowadays he is a secondary school teacher with two children and a wife he will never leave. She might leave him, but I don’t think that will happen either. In May, when those headlines had started appearing, he telephoned me and stressed that I knew where to find him if I needed him.
He rang again when Magdalena Svensson withdrew her allegations of rape, and expressed the relief of both himself and his family.
That was a bit much.
It’s understandable that Martin and Göran have never had much to say to each other. We celebrated Christmas twice with his family when the children were small, once at our place and once at theirs.
The experiment was never repeated.
And if Rolf hadn’t died? If I’d never become pregnant with Gunvald? I don’t know, how could I know?
When I ask myself just what it is that has gone so wrong, I can find no answers. Perhaps it’s just that things were meant to be that way. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Martin once said that the main reason why human beings have been provided with such big hearts is so that they can feel unhappy.
I contemplate Castor as he lies stretched out in front of the fire and think that on that point — for once — I’m inclined to think that my husband was right.
23
The seventeenth of November. Eight degrees. Rain and wind in the morning.
Several days have passed now. And more especially nights, as it’s getting darker. Light can’t manage more than eight hours per day in these parts at this time of year, while darkness holds sway for sixteen.
It’s the anniversary of Gun’s death. I sat for a while with a burning candle this morning, thinking about her. It all seemed very distant, almost an old illusion. I don’t know if I really remember her now, or if it’s no more than images of my remembering her in the past. Copies of copies.
Anyway, I have begun to settle down into a sort of rhythm. The good thing about habits is that as you follow them, you don’t have to make decisions. We go for a walk every morning, Castor and I, either southwards towards Dulverton or northwards, up towards the Punchbowl and the abandoned stone quarry. If it’s not too windy we sometimes go on up to Wambarrows, the highest point of this part of the moor — 426 metres above sea level, according to the map — where those scanty, overgrown Roman remains are to be found.
But we don’t normally go such a long way before breakfast; instead we save the longer walks until the early afternoons. Often two hours or more. The other day, for instance, we went as far as the remarkable church in Culbone: St Beuno’s, named after a Welsh saint from the seventh century. It is said to be the smallest parish church in the whole of England, and it is hidden away among dense greenery close to a waterfall in a place where you wouldn’t expect to find any buildings at all. It took us an hour to get there: we started from Porlock Weir on the coast, and followed the path tended by the National Trust, which runs alongside more or less the whole of the coast of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Incidentally, it was somewhere in Culbone parish that Samuel Coleridge wrote his poem Kubla Kahn — after an evening spent high on opium, according to legend — and if Martin had been with us we would no doubt have spent several hours looking for the farm where the great poet spent that remarkable night.
A bit further inland is Doone Valley, where we have also explored quite a lot and visited pubs in all three of the old villages Oare, Brendon and Malmesmead. A woman and her dog: we are welcome wherever we go. I have also succumbed to temptation and bought R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone — a Romance of Exmoor and started reading it instead of Dickens, despite the fact that I’m only halfway through Bleak House. Lorna Doone is a must, I was told by the hundred-year-old lady in the antiquarian bookshop in Dulverton: you can’t possibly live on Exmoor for more than a week without starting to read John Ridd’s ‘A simple tale told simply’.
So when we get back home after the day’s excursion, irrespective of which muddy paths we have been plodding along, we spend a few hours in the late seventeenth century: it feels remarkably close, in contrast to my dear departed sister. I have no difficulty in imagining the lives and motives of John Ridd and Lorna Doone, no difficulty at all. But as I don’t have a television set and have very little idea of what is happening in the world out there, time takes on a different character. Dawn-daylight-dusk-night; minutes and hours become more important than days and years. There is an old radio in the cottage, but I’ve only tried once to switch it on — and found myself tuned into a station reproducing something strikingly scratchy by Elgar, that was all.
Cooking has been somewhat neglected, I must admit. This last week I have had dinner at The Royal Oak in the village three evenings out of seven. I’m already regarded as a regular there: Rosie or Tom always go out of their way to bid me welcome, Castor always gets a saucer of treats, and the few customers who are already there when we arrive — usually Henry, always Robert, and two evenings out of four an elderly gentleman whose name I don’t know who is disabled and has his Permobil parked outside the entrance — all smile at me and wish me good evening and comment that the weather has got worse.
I’ve got into the habit of taking with me Martin’s notes from Samos when I go to The Royal Oak. Doing so no doubt confirms my status as a woman writer. I sit at my usual table, eat away and concentrate hard on my reading while Castor snoozes at my feet. It’s not a difficult role to play, either for me or for him, and the others leave us in peace. I feel that I am respected and I always drink two glasses of red wine, not enough to prevent me from driving back up Halse Lane through the autumnal darkness. I think I have managed to create around me an appropriately protective layer of egocentricity. We get home between a quarter to ten and ten, and I always switch off the bedside lamp before eleven.