2
‘Dying? Who said you were dying, Dad?’
‘I did.’
‘But that’s ridiculous! You’ve got years and years left … lots of springs to look forward to,’ said Julia Davidsson. ‘Besides, you’ve made it out of an old people’s home alive – how many manage that?’
Gerlof said nothing, but he was thinking about the steel trolley with Torsten Axelsson’s body on it. He remained silent as his daughter drove on down towards the coast and into the village of Stenvik.
The sun was shining through the windscreen, making him long for butterflies and birds and everything else the warm weather would bring. His zest for life raised its sleepy head within his breast and blinked in surprise, and he had to make a real effort to sound gloomy when he eventually spoke.
‘Only God knows how much time I have left, and He is allowing it to pass all too quickly … but if I’m going to die, I want it to be here in the village.’
Julia sighed. She stopped the car on the deserted village road and switched off the engine. ‘You read too many obituaries.’
‘Correct. They keep the newspapers going.’
Gerlof’s last comment was meant partly as a joke, but Julia didn’t laugh. She simply helped him out of the car in silence. They walked slowly towards the gate of the family’s summer cottage, which lay in a grove of trees in Stenvik, just a few hundred metres from the sea.
He would be alone here most of the time, Gerlof was well aware of that, but it meant he would avoid all the illness back at the home. The residents with their pills, their oxygen cylinders and their constant harping on about what was wrong with them had started to get on his nerves. His former girlfriend, Maja Nyman, had become increasingly unwell, and now spent most of her time in bed in her room.
It had taken almost a month to persuade Boel and the rest of the management team at the home to agree to let him move back to Stenvik, but eventually they had realized that Gerlof would be making room for somebody else who actually
Gerlof’s mind was perfectly clear, even if he could barely move sometimes. There wasn’t much wrong with his head or his teeth – it was just his arms, legs and the rest of his body that could do with a makeover.
This day at the end of March was the first time this year he had been back to the village on the coast where he had been born and had grown up. He was back on the land the Davidsson family had owned and worked for centuries, and back at the cottage he had built for himself and his wife Ella some fifty years earlier. Stenvik was the place he had always come back to during his years at sea.
The snow had almost disappeared from the garden, leaving a sodden lawn that needed raking.
‘Last year’s grass and last year’s leaves,’ said Gerlof. ‘Everything that has been hidden by the winter is reappearing.’
He held tightly on to Julia’s arm as they walked across the pale yellow grass, but when she stopped at the bottom of the stone steps he let go and made his way slowly up to the door, leaning on his chestnut stick.
Gerlof was able to walk, but was glad of his daughter’s help; he was glad too that Ella was no longer alive. He would have been nothing but a burden to her now.
He took out his key and unlocked the door.
The musty smell of the cottage rushed towards them as he opened the glass door: cold, slightly damp air, but no hint of mould. It seemed that the slates on the roof were still in good condition. And as he stepped inside he noticed that there were no little black deposits on the wooden floor. The mice and shrews liked to spend the winter in the foundations, but they never came into the rooms.
Julia had come over to the island for the weekend to help him move into the cottage and get it sorted out. Spring cleaning, she called it. It was Gerlof’s cottage, of course, but it had been used as a holiday home for his two daughters and their families for many years. When the summer came they would somehow have to rub along together in the little rooms.
When they had taken Gerlof’s things inside, switched on the electricity and opened the windows to air the cottage, they went back out on to the lawn.
Apart from the screaming of a few gulls down by the shore, the village had seemed completely deserted on this Saturday morning, but they suddenly heard thumping noises from the far side of the village road, echoing across the landscape like loud hammer blows.
Julia looked around. ‘There’s someone here.’
‘Yes,’ said Gerlof. ‘They’re building over by the quarry.’
He wasn’t surprised, because last summer when he was down in the village he had noticed that all the bushes and undergrowth had been cleared from two large plots over there, and a caterpillar tractor was busy flattening the ground. He presumed somebody was building even more cottages that would stand empty for most of the year.
‘Do you want to have a look?’
‘If you like.’
He took his daughter’s arm again, and Julia led him out through the gate.
When Gerlof built his cottage at the beginning of the 1950s, he had had a view of the sea to the west and had just been able to see the tower of Marnas church in the east, but at that time there were plenty of cows and sheep grazing the land. Now the animals were gone and the trees had come back, their crowns forming an increasingly dense canopy around the cottage. As they crossed the village road, Gerlof caught only a brief glimpse of the ice-covered sound to the west.
Stenvik was an old fishing village, and Gerlof could remember a time when rows of gigs and skiffs lay drawn up out of the water along the gently curving shore, waiting to be rowed out to the fishing nets further out in the sound. Now they were all gone, and the fishermen’s cottages had been converted into holiday homes.
They turned off on to the gravel track leading to the quarry, where a new white sign proclaimed ERNST’S ROAD.
Gerlof knew who it was named after: Ernst had been a quarryman and a friend of his, and the last of the villagers to work in the quarry before it closed for good at the beginning of the sixties. Now Ernst was gone too – only his road remained. Gerlof wondered whether anything might be named after him some day.
As they approached the quarry, which lay behind a grove of trees, he saw that Ernst’s red-brown cottage was still there right by the edge, all closed up. Some second cousin and his family had inherited it when Ernst died, but they had hardly ever been there.
‘Goodness,’ said Julia, ‘I see they’ve been building here as well.’
Gerlof tore his gaze away from Ernst’s cottage and noticed the two new houses she was talking about. They were on the eastern side of the quarry, a couple of hundred metres apart.
‘They only cleared this last summer,’ said Julia. ‘They must have built them during the autumn and winter.’
Gerlof shook his head. ‘Nobody asked my permission.’
Julia laughed. ‘They don’t bother you, do they? I mean, you can’t see them, because of the trees.’
‘No, but even so. They could show a bit of consideration.’
The houses were built of wood and stone, with shining picture windows, whitewashed chimneys and roofs made of some kind of black slate. The scaffolding was still up at one of them, and a couple of joiners in thick woollen sweaters were busy nailing wooden panels in place. Outside the other house a large white bath stood in the garden, still wrapped in plastic.
Ernst’s cottage, to the north of the new houses, looked like a little woodshed in comparison.
Luxury homes, thought Gerlof. Hardly what the village needed more of. But here they were, almost finished.
The abandoned quarry lay like a wound in the ground, five hundred metres wide and filled with large and small lumps of reject stone that had been broken off and cast aside in the quest for the fault-free stone deeper down.
