‘She was also raped, my sister,’ said Magdalena, blowing her nose into a paper tissue. ‘That was five years ago. We have that in common. But she never reported the man who did it. That’s why she encouraged me.’
She suddenly sounded like a schoolgirl. A secondary school pupil who had been caught pilfering or playing truant. Just for a second the image of her and Martin’s naked bodies in a hotel bed flashed through my mind’s eye: it looked so absurd that I had difficulty in taking it seriously.
Was it possible to take something like this seriously? What does seriously mean?
‘She said you should always report the perpetrator, otherwise women will never be liberated. Will never be rehabilitated. . Or something like that. And so I did report him. She came with me to the police station. Her name’s Maria, by the way — just like you.’
I nodded again. ‘So you and your sister have that in common, do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maria and Magdalena.’
‘Yes — what’s special about that?’
I brushed the thought to one side. ‘But then you retracted your accusation later?’
‘Yes. I did.’
‘Why?’
‘It became too much.’
‘Too much?’
‘Yes, with the newspapers and all that.’
Our coffee and tea were served, and we sat without speaking for a while.
‘Forgive me,’ I said eventually, and now I really did feel like a stern headmaster questioning a pupil at his secondary school for girls about some petty offence or other. ‘Forgive me, but I don’t really understand. Are you saying that you really were raped by my husband?’
She thought for a moment. Then she said: ‘I was drugged.’
‘Drugged?’
‘Yes. That must have been what happened. I was away with the fairies. And afterwards I could hardly remember anything about it.’
‘Couldn’t remember? But didn’t you say that-’
‘I woke up in his bed. And I had his sperm on my stomach.’
I drank my espresso in one gulp. Concentrated my gaze on the back wheel of a bicycle leaning somewhat untidily against a green wall, and felt that I really ought to throw up.
‘It must have been in a drink. . That drug.’
I gesticulated, inviting her to continue.
‘I finished work at nine o’clock that night, but a few of us stayed behind in the restaurant. One of my workmates, another girl, had a birthday, and we’d planned it as a surprise for her. .’
She fell silent and produced another tissue. I thought that this detail must have been reported in the media, but I’d evidently missed it.
‘Are you suggesting that my husband put some drug or other into your drink, then enticed you into his room and then. . Well? Is that it?’
‘Somebody must have done it,’ said Magdalena. ‘They were sitting at the table next to ours. And we started talking to them, sort of. .’
‘You started talking to them?’
‘Yes.’
‘So there was a group of them, was there?’
‘A few men and women. About your age.’
I wondered who the others could have been. Most probably colleagues of Martin’s, some academics he’d met at the conference. But it didn’t matter, hardly anything mattered.
‘It wasn’t simply that you got drunk, then?’ I asked.
Magdalena Svensson started crying. We sat there in the cafe for another ten minutes, but I couldn’t get any sense out of her.
In the train back to Stockholm there was just one thing she had said that I couldn’t get out of my mind.
I had his sperm on my stomach.
It was when I got back home to Nynäshamn late in the evening after that conversation with Magdalena Svensson that Martin informed me about his plans for the winter. I felt a little bit like a being from outer space, and didn’t have anything much to say. Nor did I mention what I had been doing earlier in the day.
5
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, before daylight had deteriorated too much, that we set out on our first longish walk over the moor.
By ‘longish’ I mean in this connection just under two hours. I had bought various maps and descriptions of walks at the antiquarian bookshop in Dulverton, but on this occasion I didn’t bother to plan a particular route. I just felt the need to start becoming acquainted with the moor before darkness fell — and Castor was evidently of the same opinion as he immediately took the lead, always a sign that he thinks a walk is going to be interesting and worth doing.
We set off from Darne Lodge, I climbed and he jumped over the stone wall, and then we followed one of the several well-worn paths heading westwards. It was extremely muddy in places, but I was wearing my splendid new walking shoes bought in Queensway, Bayswater, three days ago, and Castor is never put out if the ground is a bit on the sticky side. What he can’t cope with is when the going is hard and littered with sharp stones — just like me, in a figurative sense.
We had only walked a few hundred metres when we came to something marked on the maps as a sight worth seeing — the so-called Caratacus monument: a small shelter protecting a memorial stone from Roman times. The inscription is illegible to the uninitiated, but the stone is thought to have been raised to honour a local chieftain who led valiant resistance against the superior occupying forces.
We continued southwards, parallel with the Dulverton road even though we only had occasional glimpses of it. I thought somewhat casually about the concept of ‘resistance’, then and now. Superiority and inferiority, male and female: but I soon lost the thread — it seemed out of place in this landscape. I still don’t know what is appropriate and what is inappropriate here, but what I can say is that there is a marked sense of desolation and a peculiar kind of silence on the moor. Apart from when you disturb a pheasant, or a flock of them — there are hundreds of pheasants on Exmoor — and the colourful males at least seem incapable of flying without screeching loudly. After a while we also happened upon a little group of the famous wild Exmoor ponies. They looked both dishevelled and strong — and clearly needed treating with respect. I have read that they wander about up here all year round, and live their lives from birth to death in these spartan surroundings. They more or less ignored us. Castor restricted himself to observing them from a safe distance, and then we continued our leisurely stroll. To an untrained eye like mine, the moor is a sort of self-sufficient entity — that is the overwhelming impression it makes. It is barren and monotonous, perhaps somewhat secretive, and motionless as a petrified ocean. Nothing but low, bushy vegetation succeeds in forcing its way up from the infertile soiclass="underline" heather, ferns and gorse, some of it constantly in bloom. Here and there the landscape is intersected by valleys carved out over the centuries by brooks and streams wending their way to the Exe or the Barle. But in these hollows the vegetation is abundant and dripping with moisture: we soon found ourselves in one of them, filled with beech and oak, alder and hazel — I’m not sure of the various species, and resolved to buy a comprehensive reference book as soon as possible. I recognize holly, moss and ivy, clinging stubbornly and methodically to trunks and branches. Water trickles under dense rhododendron thickets, and the smell of decay is everywhere.
I made all those observations during the first thirty or forty minutes of our walk, as we were making our way down a slope on a very muddy path, apparently used recently by both sheep and ponies: it seemed to be the very same slope we had contemplated from our bedroom window that morning. And sure enough, one of the very rare signposts indicated that the path went all the way to Winsford. However, when we came to somewhere apparently called Halse Farm, which must presumably have given its name to the road up to Darne Lodge, we decided to turn and go back home. It was four o’clock, and dusk was already beginning to falclass="underline" no doubt it would be best to walk all the way to the village the next morning or afternoon. Neither I nor Castor would want to be stranded in the dark in this magnificent, bewitching landscape. The word bewitching really does seem to be an accurate description.