But then he cleared his throat, leaned forward over the table and lowered his voice.
‘If I tell you a bit about my personal circumstances, can I reckon on something similar from you in return?’
‘If you start the ball rolling,’ I said without giving myself time to think it over. ‘So you live alone with your son, do you? How old is he?’
‘Yes, Jeremy and I live on our own,’ said Mark, taking a klunk of beer. ‘We have been doing for quite a few years now. That’s the solution I chose in the end, and not a day has passed since then without my regretting it.’
He smiled briefly to indicate that it was a truth with modification. ‘But I would have regretted it even more if I hadn’t taken care of him.’
‘Taken care of him?’
He nodded. ‘He’s twenty-four. And not exactly normal, to make a long story short.’
‘If you make long stories short I shan’t tell you anything about myself.’
He smiled again. ‘All right, if that’s the way you want it. It happened one winter evening nearly twelve years ago. On the way between Derby and Stoke — we were living just outside Stoke at that time.’
I nodded and waited.
‘Me and my wife Sylvia and Jeremy were on our way home late one evening. We crashed with a lorry. I was driving. Sylvia died in hospital a few hours later. Jeremy was badly injured and was in a coma for two months. I escaped with a broken wrist.’
‘I’m sorry. Please forgive me, I didn’t know. .’
He assumed a facial expression I couldn’t pin down. Somewhere between resignation and confidentiality perhaps, I don’t know. In any case, at that moment Barbara came in with our food — Mark had given the starter a miss, and so we were neck and neck in that respect at least.
And then, as we slowly worked our way through our boiled cod with potatoes, asparagus and horseradish sauce, he continued the tale. Jeremy eventually came out of his coma at the hospital after eight weeks — while he was lying there unconscious he had somehow managed to celebrate his thirteenth birthday. His bodily injuries eventually healed, but something had also happened to his brain. He could hardly talk, his motor functions were almost non-existent, he had frequent fits and seemed not to understand any but the simplest of instructions. He couldn’t read, couldn’t write, didn’t seem to know whether he was coming or going. Nevertheless Mark took him home and survived the first two years with the aid of an assistant who came to help several hours every day. Jeremy had improved, Mark explained, but only very slightly. He continued to have fits — it was apparently some kind of epilepsy — and on several occasions Mark was forced to take him to the hospital in Stoke. The doctors recommended that Jeremy should be placed in some kind of institution; Mark was very much against that, but by the time Jeremy reached the age of fifteen and started showing signs of aggressive resistance he felt obliged to give way. The boy was placed in a home not far from Plymouth, and was moved after a year to another home near Lyme Regis in Dorset, where he stayed until he was nineteen. Meanwhile Mark had bought and moved into that house on Exmoor: he didn’t explain why, merely said that he wanted to get away from the Midlands. He stressed that there was no question of Jeremy being ill-treated at the home, but ‘in the end I just couldn’t bear seeing him sitting there. And so I took him home once and for all.’
I found myself breathing a sigh of relief.
‘Anyway, that’s the way it is,’ he said. ‘He hardly ever goes out. He sleeps fourteen hours a day, and sits in front of his computer for ten. But it seems to work. Who says that people have to go to the cinema, go shopping for food and go on holiday? Eh? Read books? Mix with other people? Who says that?’
But there was more hope than resignation in his voice.
‘And I can leave him on his own. He doesn’t do silly things any more.’
‘You mean he used to?’
He shrugged. ‘It happened. He could be a danger to himself. But that’s not the case any more. I’m sitting here now, for instance, as you may have noticed. And I often go for walks over the moor, as I think I said last time. No, he needs help with practical things such as washing clothes and preparing food, that kind of thing, but he doesn’t mind being left on his own.’
‘Do you talk to him? I mean-’
‘He understands what I say. Not everything, but as much as is necessary. He never answers, of course, but he understands that it can be helpful if he does as he’s told. If he’s been a good boy when I get home this evening, for instance, he’ll get a reward. A Crunchie.’
‘A Crunchie?’
‘Yes, a chocolate bar. It’s his absolute favourite. I have a secret store in the car. If he ever found it he’d probably eat himself to death.’
I thought about all that while Barbara came to clear away our used plates.
‘But that means you can never go away, does it? Not for more than a short time.’
He shook his head.
‘Not without help. But luckily I have a sister. And if necessary I can arrange for him to spend a week at that place in Lyme Regis. But I try to avoid that. . Although I have to admit that I spent a week in northern Italy last year. I managed both Florence and Venice. Anyway, that was my life in thirty minutes. May I offer you a glass of wine while I listen to yours?’
I didn’t need the stipulated half an hour, but managed to occupy twenty minutes. While Mark had been talking I had managed to think up a story I thought sounded quite credible, and that I ought to be able to remember in future.
I had been married and I had two grown-up children. I had been divorced for seven years, had worked behind the scenes at Swedish Television for over twenty years, and had started writing books around the time I got divorced. Three novels so far: they had sold sufficiently well in Scandinavia for me to take a year off and devote myself exclusively to writing. Which I thought was an enormous boost. What were my books about? Life, death and love — what else?
He laughed good-humouredly at that, then asked if any of them had been translated into English. I told him they hadn’t — Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, but that was all so far.
But what I talked about more than anything else was my childhood — and in some strange way, after only a short while, I almost felt as if I were sitting in Gudrun Ewerts’s old room in Norra Bantorget again. Mark was leaning forward over the table on his elbows, watching me speak all the time with his piercing blue eyes almost the same colour as his pullover. And I spoke. About Gunsan. About my home town. About my poor parents. About Rolf and Martin, although I used a different name for the latter, and I recall that for a moment — no longer than that, but even so — I was convinced that I would be able to tell him the truth. That I could tell him what had really happened.
I didn’t do so, of course, but I knew that beyond all doubt there was something about this man and his restrained sorrow that attracted me. When we said goodnight outside The Royal Oak shortly after ten o’clock, I found it difficult not to give him a hug.
But I didn’t do that either, and now, a few hours later as I lie in bed with Castor over my legs and am about to put a full stop after the evening, I think about how I talked so much about me and my life. I must have had a great need to do so. The story about his son and that tragic accident was still lingering on inside my mind, of course, but I also realized that we hadn’t discussed something we had talked about on the previous occasion. His ability to see what was hidden. The missing husband, the shadow, the sun-drenched house in the south and all the rest of it.
Once again it had become quite stormy during the evening. The wind was howling around the eaves, and there was a hint of snow in the air. I felt a little depressed, more depressed than I had been for several days, I don’t know why.