the furniture any more.’ She scratched the back of his neck. ‘And he looks at me, he really does. Don’t you, poppet?’
Ally stretched up and licked her throat.
Max shook his head. ‘Eyes don’t heal themselves, I’ve never heard of that happening. I don’t think sight can just come back …’
‘Yes, it can,’ said Vendela. ‘
‘Really?’
Vendela put the poodle down on the stone floor. ‘It’s healthy here,’ she said. ‘I think it’s the water and the earth … There’s so much lime in the ground.’
‘Right,’ said Max, getting up from his chair and heading towards the hallway. ‘I’m going to put the summer tyres on the car. Can you make me a snack to take with me later – some pasta salad?’
Vendela went into the kitchen and put the water on to boil. In a couple of hours she would be alone in the house. She was looking forward to it.
But the Easter weekend had gone well; they had eaten good food, and Vendela had helped Max with the proofreading of his cookery book. Now, on Sunday evening, he was getting ready to leave the island for a five-day promotional tour of southern Sweden; he would be away until Friday. He would talk about his previous self-help books and, of course, would give as much publicity as possible to his forthcoming venture,
‘Anticipation,’ he said. ‘You have to create the anticipation.’
He was stomping around the house, excited one minute and irritated the next, but Vendela knew he was always like that when he was due to go off and meet the public. There was so much that could go wrong; perhaps nobody would turn up, or his microphone might not work, or the organizers might have forgotten to order his books or arrange the venue. He was always more relaxed when he came home from his tours.
In the beginning Vendela had gone with him and they had enjoyed intimate dinners in various city hotels, but now they had an unspoken agreement that she would stay at home.
Once the pasta started boiling she went back into the living room, and stopped dead. There was a milky- white puddle on the dark stone floor. Vendela realized what had happened and hurried off to fetch some kitchen roll before Max saw the puddle, but it was too late.
His call came as she stood by the sink: ‘Vendela!’
She went back, her expression blank. ‘What is it, darling?’
‘Have you seen what he’s done on the floor? Your dog?’
Now he was
‘Yes, I’ve seen it.’ She hurried in with kitchen paper in both hands. ‘He’s just got a bit of an upset tummy.’
She knelt down. Max stood behind her, his back ramrod straight as he watched her clean up the mess. ‘It’s not the first time.’
‘No. But he does eat grass sometimes, it could be that,’ said Vendela. ‘But he’s been much better this last week.’
Max said nothing, he just turned away. Vendela wiped up the last of the mess and got to her feet. ‘There, all gone!’
The front door slammed; Max had gone out. Ally had crept under the kitchen table and was lying with his paws over his nose as if he were ashamed of himself, and she bent down. ‘Don’t do that again, poppet.’
Max had enjoyed spending time with Ally through all the years he could take the dog for long walks, or throw sticks and balls for him to fetch. But now Ally wasn’t very well, he was obviously worthless.
She would go out to the stone with another coin this very evening. She would stay and pray – not only for Aloysius to get better, but also for Max to start liking the dog as he was, young or old, cute or ugly, healthy or sick. He was their Ally, after all.
‘We’re not finished yet, poppet,’ she said, straining the pasta through a colander. ‘We’ll show him!’
Oland 1957
When the winter storms come, the fresh snow drifts to form metre-high frozen waves out on the alvar. Vendela can no longer walk across it, so for several months she has to take a long detour in order to get to school.
At the end of March the sun comes back and her father gives her a pair of boots made by the old village cobbler, Shoe-Paulsson. The stitching is poor and they let the water in, but she can walk across the alvar again between the melting snowdrifts.
She can go to the elf stone.
That spring Vendela takes her mother’s jewellery, piece by piece, and on her way to school she leaves each item as an offering to the elves. Her father doesn’t seem to notice that things are going missing; when he isn’t working in the quarry, he’s too busy looking at the starlit sky and working out the orbits of the man-made satellites. The farm is going to rack and ruin, and he seems to have forgotten the Invalid, but none of this bothers him.
Vendela places the pieces of jewellery in the hollows on the stone, and they disappear. Sometimes they stay there for a few days, but sooner or later they vanish. She never sees them again.
When she makes a wish it is almost always granted, sometimes in the strangest ways.
She wishes for a best friend in her class, someone who is hers alone and who doesn’t care about the farmyard aroma surrounding her. Two days later, Dagmar Gran asks if Vendela would like to come to her house after school. Dagmar’s family is rich; they have a big farm near the church with several tractors and more than forty cows – so many that they are known only by a number rather than a name. Vendela can’t go, because she has to see to Rosa, Rosa and Rosa, but she asks if she could perhaps come over a bit later on. Dagmar says that’s fine.
The following week Vendela asks the elves if they could sort out something other than boiled eel for dinner; Henry has discovered cheap eels from the east coast, and has cooked them for ten consecutive days by this stage.
‘We’re having chicken tonight,’ says Henry that same evening. ‘I’ve just wrung the neck of one of them.’
Once she and Dagmar Gran have become best friends, Vendela asks if she can move to an empty seat next to Dagmar, but fru Jansson says that she is the one who decides where her pupils will sit, and Vendela is to sit by the window, next to Thorsten Hellman, who needs someone who has a calming influence on him.
So the next day Vendela stops at the elf stone and places a fine gold chain in one of the hollows. Then she wishes for a new teacher, someone nicer and kinder than fru Jansson.
Three days later fru Jansson catches a cold and stays at home. The cold turns into a chest infection which almost kills her, and she has to go to a sanatorium on the mainland. She is replaced by froken Ernstam, a young supply teacher from Kalmar.
The pupils pick spring flowers by the roadside and give them to fru Jansson’s husband, who is the school caretaker. Vendela curtsies extra deeply and says quietly that she hopes fru Jansson will soon be better.
On her way home that day she dare not even look at the elf stone.
33
Jerry Morner’s belly was large and white and not remotely muscular. It had swollen with the consumption of wine and cheese and Cognac, year after year. And for the last week it had had a long dressing across it, but Per pulled it off on Easter Sunday morning. With one quick yank.
Jerry grunted on the kitchen chair, but didn’t move.
‘There,’ said Per, folding up the dressing. ‘Does that feel better?’
Jerry grunted again, but Per thought the wound in his stomach looked as if it had healed. It had knitted together, and now there was just a pink line.
‘Do you remember what happened?’ he asked.
