“What?”
Joakim tucked the cuddly toy in the bed, right beside her.
“Foreman had fallen on the floor.”
“Did he hurt himself?”
“Oh no…I don’t think he even woke up.”
She placed her arm around her favorite toy, a two-legged animal made of fabric that she had bought when they were on Gotland the previous summer. Half sheep, half man. Joakim had named the strange creature Foreman, after the boxer who had made his comeback at the age of forty-five a couple of years earlier.
He reached out and gently stroked Livia’s forehead. The skin was cool. She relaxed, her head fell back onto the pillow, then she looked up at him.
“Have you been here long, Daddy?”
“No,” said Joakim.
“There was somebody here,” she said.
“You were just dreaming.”
Livia nodded and closed her eyes. She was already on her way back to sleep.
Joakim straightened up, turned his head and saw the faint glow of the southern lighthouse again, flashing through the blind. He took a step over to the window and lifted the blind an inch or two. The window faced west and the lighthouses weren’t visible from here, but the red glow swept over the empty field behind the house.
Livia was breathing evenly again; she was fast asleep. Next morning she wouldn’t remember that he’d been there.
He peeped into the other bedroom. It was the one that had been renovated most recently; Katrine had decorated and furnished it while Joakim was in Stockholm taking care of the final move and cleaning the house.
Everything was silent in here. Gabriel, aged two and a half, was lying in his little bed over by the wall, a motionless
bundle. For the last year Gabriel had gone to bed around eight o’clock every evening, and slept almost ten hours straight through. The dream of every parent with small children.
Joakim turned away in the silence and crept slowly back along the corridor. The house creaked and knocked quietly around him, the creaks almost sounding like footsteps crossing the floor.
Katrine was still fast asleep when he got back to his own bed.
That morning the family had been visited by a quietly smiling man in his fifties. He had knocked on the kitchen door on the north side of the house. Joakim had opened it quickly, thinking it was a neighbor.
“Hi there,” the man said. “Bengt Nyberg-I’m from the local paper,
Nyberg was standing there on the porch steps with a camera resting on his fat belly and a notebook in his hand. Joakim had somewhat hesitantly shaken hands with the journalist.
“I heard some big moving vans had come out to Eel Point over the last few weeks,” said Nyberg, “and I thought I’d take a chance on you being at home.”
“I’m the only one who’s just moved in,” said Joakim. “The rest of the family have been living here for a while.”
“Did you move in stages?”
“I’m a teacher,” said Joakim. “I had to work until now.”
The reporter nodded.
“We do have to write about this,” he said, “as I’m sure you understand. I know we were informed last spring that Eel Point had been sold, but of course now people want to know who’s bought it…”
“We’re just an ordinary family,” said Joakim quickly. “You can write that.”
“Where are you from?”
“Stockholm.”
“Like the royal family, then,” said Nyberg. He looked at Joakim. “Are you going to do what the King does, and just stay here when it’s warm and sunny?”
“No, we’re here all year round.”
Katrine had come into the hall and stood next to Joakim. He glanced at her, she gave a brief nod, and they invited the reporter in. Nyberg shambled over the threshold, taking his time.
They chose to sit in the kitchen; with its new equipment and polished wooden floor, it was the room they had done the most work on.
When they were working in there in August, Katrine and the man laying the floor had found something interesting: a little hiding place under the floorboards, a box made of flat pieces of limestone. Inside lay a silver spoon and a child’s shoe that had gone moldy. It was a house offering, the fitter had told her. It was meant to ensure many children and plenty of food for the inhabitants of the manor house.
Joakim made coffee and Nyberg settled down at the rectangular oak table. He opened his notebook once again.
“How did this all come about, then?”
“Well… we like wooden houses,” said Joakim.
“We love them,” said Katrine.
“But wasn’t that a big step… buying Eel Point and moving here from Stockholm?”
“Not such a big step,” said Katrine. “We had a house in Bromma, but we wanted to swap it for a house here. We started looking last year.”
“And why northern Oland?”
Joakim answered this time:
“Katrine is from Oland, kind of… Her family used to live here.”
Katrine glanced at him briefly and he knew what she was
thinking: if anybody was going to talk about her background, then it would be her. And she was rarely prepared to do so.
“Oh yes, whereabouts?”
“Various places,” said Katrine without looking at the reporter. “They moved about quite a bit.”
Joakim could have added that his wife was the daughter of Mirja Rambe and the granddaughter of Torun Rambe-that might have got Nyberg to write a much longer article-but he kept quiet. Katrine and her mother were barely speaking to each other.
“Me, I’m a concrete kid,” he said instead. “I grew up in an eight-story apartment block in Jakobsberg, and it was just so ugly, with all the traffic and asphalt. So I really wanted to move out to the country.”
At first Livia sat quietly on Joakim’s knee, but she soon got tired of all the chat and ran off to her room. Gabriel, who was sitting with Katrine, jumped down and followed her.
Joakim listened to the little plastic sandals, pattering off across the floor with such energy, and repeated the same refrain he’d chanted to friends and neighbors in Stockholm over the past few months:
“We know this is a fantastic place for kids too. Meadows and forests, clean air and fresh water. No colds. No cars churning out fumes… This is a good place for all of us.”
Bengt Nyberg had written these pearls of wisdom in his notebook. Then they went for a walk around the ground floor of the house, through the renovated rooms and all the areas that still had tattered wallpaper, patched-up ceilings, and dirty floors.
“The tiled stoves are great,” said Joakim, pointing. “And the wooden floors are incredibly well preserved…We just need to give them a scrub from time to time.”
His enthusiasm for the manor might have been infectious, because after a while Nyberg stopped interviewing him and started to look around with interest. He insisted on seeing the
rest of the place as well-even though Joakim would have preferred not to be reminded of how much they hadn’t yet touched.
“There isn’t actually anything else to see,” said Joakim. “Just a lot of empty rooms.”
“Just a quick look,” said Nyberg.
In the end Joakim nodded and opened the door leading to the upper floor.
Katrine and the reporter followed him up the crooked wooden staircase to an upstairs corridor. It was gloomy
