‘It was. I was twenty and I had lost both parents. I wasn’t handling it well – I was drinking. I felt alone. After eight years I had almost fit in the States and suddenly it felt like a foreign country again.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Sigurbjorg. ‘I was born in Canada, but my family are Icelanders and I live here. I sometimes think everywhere is a foreign country. It’s not really fair, is it?’
Magnus glanced at Sigurbjorg. She was listening. And she was the one member of his family who had shown any sympathy during that awful couple of days. She was the one he had felt closest to, perhaps because of their common North American experiences, perhaps simply because she had treated him like a normal human being.
He wanted to talk.
‘I needed some kind of family, other than just my brother Oli. All Icelanders do, you know that. It might be OK for Americans to live out their lives alone, but it wasn’t for me. I had lived with Grandpa and Grandma for a few years and I guess I thought they would welcome me back after what had happened. I thought they’d have to. And then they rejected me. More than that, they made me feel like I was responsible for Mom’s death.’
Magnus’s face hardened. ‘Grandpa said Dad was the most evil man he had ever known and he was glad he was dead. That brought back all the pain of those last years before Dad took me away with him to America. I was glad to leave and I swore I’d never come back.’
‘And now you’re here,’ said Sigurbjorg. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘I guess I do.’
‘Until you met me?’
Magnus smiled. ‘I do remember how sympathetic you were to me, even if the rest of the family wasn’t. Thanks for that. But do me a favour. Don’t tell them I’m here.’
‘Oh, they can’t do anything to you now. Grandpa must be eighty-five, and Grandma’s not much younger.’
‘I doubt they’ve mellowed in their old age.’
Sigurbjorg smiled. ‘No, they haven’t.’
‘And, from what I remember, the rest of the family was just as hostile.’
‘They’ll get over it,’ said Sigurbjorg. ‘Time has passed.’
‘I don’t see why they were so angry,’ Magnus said. ‘I know my father left Mom, but she made his life hell. Remember, she was an alcoholic.’
‘But that’s the whole point,’ said Sigurbjorg. ‘She only became an alcoholic after she discovered the affair. And it was from that that everything else followed. Your father leaving. Her losing her job. And then that awful car crash. Grandpa blames your father for all that, and he always will.’
A noisy group of two men and a woman sat down next to them and began to discuss a TV programme they had seen the night before.
Magnus ignored them. His face had gone blank.
‘What? What is it, Magnus?’
Magnus didn’t reply.
‘Oh my God, you didn’t know, did you? Nobody told you!’
‘What affair?’
‘Forget I said anything. Look, I’ve got to go.’ She began to stand up.
Magnus reached out and grabbed her hand. ‘What affair?’ The anger surged through his voice.
Sigurbjorg sat down again and swallowed. ‘Your father was having an affair with your mother’s best friend. She found out about it, they had a god-awful row, she started drinking.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Magnus said.
Sigurbjorg shrugged.
‘Are you sure it’s true?’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Sigurbjorg. ‘But I suspect it is. Look, there must have been other problems. I used to really like your mother, especially before she started drinking, but she was always a bit neurotic. Given her parents, that’s hardly surprising.’
‘It is true,’ Magnus said. ‘You’re right, it must be. I just find it hard to believe.’
‘Hey, Magnus, I’m really sorry you heard this from me.’ Sigurbjorg reached out and touched his hand. ‘But I’ve got to go now. And I promise I won’t tell the grandparents you’re here.’
With that, she ran away.
Magnus stared at his coffee cup, still a quarter full. He needed a drink. A real drink.
It wasn’t far to the bar he had drunk in the night before, the Grand Rokk. He ordered a Thule and one of the chasers all the other guys at the bar were drinking. It was some kind of kummel, sweet and strong, but OK if gulped down with the beer.
Sigurbjorg had just turned his world upside down. The whole story of his life, who he was, who his parents were, who was right and who was wrong, had just been inverted. His father had never blamed his mother for what had happened, but Magnus had.
She had driven away his father. She had ignored Magnus through drink and then abandoned him through death. Ragnar had heroically rescued his sons, until he had been cruelly murdered, possibly by the wicked stepmother.
That was the story of Magnus’s childhood. That was what had made him who he was.
And now it was all false.
Another beer, another chaser.
For a moment, a calming moment, Magnus flirted with the idea that the affair was a fiction invented by his grandfather to justify his hatred of his father. One part of him wanted to go along with that idea, to try to live the rest of his life in denial.
But in his time in the police department Magnus had seen enough squalid family disintegrations to know that what Sigurbjorg had told him was all too plausible. And it would explain the depth of his grandfather’s hatred.
He had assumed that his father’s refusal to blame his mother for the mess she had made of all their lives was nobility on his part. It wasn’t. It was a recognition that he was partly responsible. Wholly responsible?
Magnus didn’t know. He would never know. It was a typical family mess. Blame all over the place.
But it meant that his father was a different man than he thought he was. Not noble. An adulterer. Someone who abandoned his wife when she was at her weakest and her most vulnerable. Magnus had known all along that if he really thought about it he would have realized that his father must have started his affair with Kathleen, the woman who became his stepmother, while she was still married to someone else. So Magnus hadn’t really thought about it.
It was true that Icelanders had a more relaxed view of adultery than the prudish Americans, but it was still wrong. Something that lesser mortals might dabble with, but not Ragnar.
What else had he done? What other flaws had he concealed from his sons? From his wife?
Magnus’s beer was still half full, but his chaser was empty. He caught the shaven-headed barman’s eye and tapped the glass. It was refilled.
He felt the liquid burn his throat. His brain was fuzzing over pleasantly. But Magnus was not going to stop, not for a long time. He was going to drink until it hurt.
That was how he drank in college, after his father died. He got wildly horribly drunk. And the following morning he would feel wretched. For him, that was half the reason why he drank, the feeling of self-destruction afterwards.
He had lost most of his friends then, other than a few hardened drinkers like himself. His professors were dismayed, he went from close to the top of his classes to scraping along the bottom. He almost got thrown out of the university. But no matter how hard he tried, he didn’t quite manage to destroy his life totally.
Unlike his mother, of course. She had succeeded very well.
It was a girl who pulled him out of it, Erin. Her patience, her determination, her love, that made him realize not that he was destroying himself – he knew that already, that was the point after all – but that he didn’t want to destroy himself.
After college she had gone her way, teaching in inner-city schools in Chicago, and he had gone his. He owed her a lot.
But now he wanted to drink to his mother. He raised his beer glass. ‘To Margret,’ he said.
‘Who’s Margret?’ said a tall man in a black leather jacket, on the stool next to him.
