‘What are you looking for?’ says Henry. ‘Trolls?’
Vendela nods, but her father laughs.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, the trolls keep away during the day. They can’t tolerate sunlight. They only come out when the sun has gone down.’
He glances around and goes on, ‘But before the people came, this was the kingdom of the trolls. They lived here by the sea. And the elves, who were their enemies, lived further inland. There was just one occasion when the elves came down to the trolls. They met here at the quarry, and the blood flowed that day. The ground was stained with red.’
He points towards the rock over in the east. ‘The blood is still there … Come and see.’
He leads Vendela down into the quarry and across to the vertical rock face. He bends down and points to a reddish layer running through the pale stone, just above the ground.
She looks more closely and sees that the layer is full of dark-red clumps.
‘The place of blood,’ says Henry, straightening up. ‘That’s all that remains of the battle between the trolls and the elves … petrified blood.’
Vendela realizes that the queen of the elves must have led the battle against the trolls, but she doesn’t want to look at the blood any more.
‘Do they still fight, Daddy?’
‘No, I think they’ve called a truce now,’ says Henry. ‘Perhaps they’ve decided that the trolls will stay underground beneath the place of blood, and the elves will stay on the alvar – that way they don’t have to meet.’
Vendela looks up at the top of the quarry and thinks they ought to build a palace up there, with tall windows and walls made of stone. She would like to live there, between the kingdoms of the trolls and the elves.
Then she looks at her father. ‘Why were they enemies, the trolls and the elves? Why did they fight?’
Henry merely shakes his head. ‘Who knows … I suppose they each thought the others were just too different.’
8
Per and Jesper had to travel several kilometres to find a shop where they could buy food on Friday evening. When they finally reached Stenvik, they drove through a village full of dark, closed-up summer cottages.
Per turned on to Ernst’s Road by the quarry, and saw that at least there were lights showing in the windows of the two newly built luxury houses. Each house had a big shiny car parked in front of it. Suddenly he recognized one of them as the Audi that had almost run Jesper over. The damage to the car was still clear to see, but all the blood had been washed away.
So the man and woman he had met in the car park had built a house here in the village. They were his new neighbours.
‘A new car,’ he said. ‘That might not be a bad idea … both for us and for the environment.’
Jesper turned his head. ‘Are you going to get a new car, Dad?’
‘In a while. Not right now.’
His own Saab had worn-out shock absorbers, and it squealed and creaked over the potholes and hollows on the gravel track. But the engine was pretty good, and Per had no intention of being ashamed of his car.
Nor of Ernst’s cottage – even though it resembled nothing so much as an abandoned builders’ hut this evening, with its low roof and small, dark windows. The cottage had stood in the sun and wind by the quarry for almost fifty years and really needed scraping down and painting, but that could wait until next summer.
Per had last visited the island to check on the cottage at the beginning of March, and the alvar had been covered in snow. The snow was almost gone now, but the air still wasn’t much warmer – at least not after the sun had gone down.
‘Do you remember Ernst, our relative?’ he asked Jesper as he pulled up in front of the house. ‘Do you remember coming to visit him here?’
‘Sort of,’ said Jesper.
‘So what do you remember?’
‘He worked with stone … he made sculptures.’
Per nodded and pointed in the darkness towards a little shed to the south of the cottage. ‘They’re still in his workshop … some of them. We can have a look.’
He missed Ernst, perhaps because he had been the complete opposite of Jerry. Ernst had got up early every morning to work with hammers and chisels down in the quarry. He had worked hard – the resounding clang of steel on stone was one of Per’s childhood memories – but when Per and his mother had come to stay, Ernst had always had time for him.
His old doormat bore the word WELCOME.
When they opened the door of the summer cottage they were met by the faint aroma of soap and tar, traces of the former owner that had not completely faded away. When he switched on the light, everything looked just as Per had left it in the winter: flowery wallpaper, rag rugs with brown coffee stains, and a worn, shiny wooden floor.
In the main room was a seaman’s chest that Ernst had made, with a carving on the front showing a knight on a horse chasing a scornfully grinning troll into his mountain hideaway. On a block of stone behind the knight a fairy princess sat weeping.
The chest could stay, but when Per got some money he intended to start changing the furniture.
‘We’ll get some air in here,’ he said to Jesper, ‘and let the spring in.’
With the windows ajar, the rooms were filled with the soughing of the wind. Fantastic. Per tried to feel pleasure in the cottage he had inherited, both as it was now and as it would one day be.
‘It’s only a couple of hundred metres to the shore on the far side of the quarry,’ he said to Jesper as they carried their cases into the little hallway. ‘We’ll be able to swim there a lot in the summer, you and I and Nilla. It’ll be cool.’
‘I haven’t got any swimming trunks,’ said Jesper.
‘We’ll get some.’
The twins each had a small bedroom to the left of the kitchen, and Jesper disappeared into his room with his rucksack.
Per stayed in the little room behind the kitchen with a view over the northern section of the quarry and the ice-covered sound. This could be his study over the summer.
If he lived another twenty or thirty years he would still have this house, he was sure of it. And the children could spend as much time here as they wanted.
A telephone started ringing while Per was in the bedroom unpacking his clothes. For a few seconds he couldn’t remember where the old phone was, but the sound seemed to be coming from the kitchen.
The phone was on the worktop next to the cooker; it was made of Bakelite, and had a dial. Per picked up the receiver.
‘Morner.’
He was expecting to hear Marika, or the confident voice of a doctor with news about Nilla, but he heard nothing but a rushing noise on the line, a poor connection with the mainland.
Eventually somebody coughed, then came a quiet, weak voice – an old man’s voice.
‘Pelle?’
‘Yes?’
‘Pelle …’
Per took his time before answering. Since his mother had died, there was only one person who called him Pelle, and besides, he recognized his father Jerry’s hoarse voice. Thousands of cigarettes and too many late nights had worn it out. And last spring, after the stroke, his voice had become slurred and lost. Jerry could still remember names – and telephone numbers; he rang Per at least once a week, but much of his vocabulary was gone.
Per had redirected the phone line from his apartment in Kalmar through to the cottage, despite the risk that Jerry might ring.
