fatal ordeals at the mercy of the elements.
“Not everyone. Some survive. Fortunately.”
“Is that why you read these books about death in the mountains and avalanches?”
“What do you mean?” Erlendur said.
“Because some people survive?”
Erlendur smiled.
“Maybe,” he said. “Are you still living with your sister?”
She nodded. She said she expected to need to consult a lawyer about the divorce and asked Erlendur if he knew any. She said she had never needed a lawyer’s advice before. Erlendur offered to ask at work, where he said lawyers were nineteen to the dozen.
“Have you got any of that green stuff left?” she asked, sitting down on the sofa.
With a nod he produced the Chartreuse and two glasses. Remembered hearing once that thirty different botanical ingredients were used to achieve the correct flavour. He sat down beside her and told her about them.
She told him she had met her husband earlier that day, how he had promised to turn over a new leaf and tried to persuade her to move back in. But when he realised that she was intent on leaving him, he had grown angry and in the end had lost control of himself, shouting and cursing at her. They were in a restaurant and he had showered her with abuse, paying no heed to the customers watching in astonishment. She had stood up and walked out without looking back.
Once she had related the day’s events they sat in silence finishing their drinks. She asked for another glass.
“So what should we do?” she asked.
Erlendur downed the rest of his drink and felt it scorch his throat. He refilled the glasses, thinking about the perfume on her that he had noticed when she’d walked past him at the door. It was like the scent of a bygone summer and he was filled with a strange nostalgia that was rooted too far back for him to identify properly.
“We’ll do whatever we like,” he said.
“What do you want to do?” she asked. “You’ve been so patient and I was wondering if it is really patience, if it isn’t just as much… that somehow you didn’t want to get involved.”
They fell silent. The question hung in the air.
What do you want to do?
He finished his second glass. This was the question he had been asking himself since he first met her. He did not consider himself to have been patient. He had no idea what he had been, apart from trying to be a support to her. Perhaps he had not shown her sufficient attention or warmth. He did not know.
“You didn’t want to rush into anything,” he said. “Nor did I. There hasn’t been a woman in my life for a long time.”
He stopped. He wanted to tell her that he had mostly been by himself, in this place, with his books, and that her sitting on his sofa brought him special joy. She was so completely different from everything he was accustomed to, a sweet scent of summer, and he did not know how to handle it. How to tell her this was all he had wanted and yearned for from the moment he saw her. Being with her.
“I didn’t mean to be stand-offish,” he said. “But this sort of thing takes time, especially for me. And of course you’ve… I mean, it’s tough going through a divorce…”
She could see that he felt uncomfortable discussing this sort of thing. Whenever the conversation took that direction he became awkward and hesitant and clammed up. As a rule he did not say very much, which may have been why she felt comfortable in his presence. There was no pretence about him. He was never acting. He probably would have had no idea how to behave if he wanted to try to be different somehow. He was totally honest in everything he said and did. She sensed this and it offered her a security that she had lacked for so long. In him she found a man she knew she could trust.
“Sorry,” she smiled. “I wasn’t intending to turn this into some kind of negotiation. But it can be nice to know where you stand. You realise that.”
“Completely,” Erlendur said, feeling the tension between them easing slightly.
“It all takes time and we’ll see,” she said.
“I think that’s very sensible,” he said.
“Fine,” she said, standing up from the sofa. Erlendur stood up as well. She said something about having to meet her sons, which he did not catch. His thoughts were elsewhere. She walked over to the door and while he helped her put on her coat she could tell he was dithering about something. She opened the door to the corridor and asked if everything was all right.
Erlendur looked at her.
“Don’t go,” he said.
She stopped in the doorway.
“Stay with me,” he said.
Valgerdur hesitated.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t go.”
She stood motionless and took a long look at him. He walked up to her, led her back inside, closed the door and began taking off her coat without her offering any objection.
They made love slowly, smoothly and tenderly, both of them feeling a little hesitation and uncertainty which they gradually overcame. She told him that he was the second man she had ever slept with.
As they lay in bed he looked up at the ceiling and told her that he sometimes went to the east of Iceland, to his childhood haunts, where he stayed in his old house. There was nothing but bare walls, a half-collapsed roof and little indication that his family had ever lived there. Yet relics of a vanished life remained. Patches of a patterned carpet that he remembered well. Broken cupboards in the kitchen. Windowsills that little hands had once leaned upon. He told her it was nice to go there, to lie down with his memories and rediscover a world that was full of light and tranquillity.
Valgerdur squeezed his hand.
He started to tell her a story about the ordeals of a young girl who left her mother’s house with no exact idea of where she was going. She had suffered setbacks and was weak-willed — understandably perhaps, because she had never been given what she longed for most of all. She felt something lacking in her life. Felt a sense of betrayal. She ploughed on headlong, driven by a strange self-destructive urge, and sank deeper and deeper until she could go no farther, bound up in her self-annihilation. When she was found she was taken back and nursed to health, but as soon as she had recuperated she disappeared again without warning. She roamed around in storms and sometimes sought shelter where her father lived. He tried his best to keep her out of the tempestuous weather, but she never listened and set off again as if fate held nothing in store for her but destruction.
Valgerdur looked at him.
“No one knows where she is now. She’s still alive, because I would have heard if she had died. I’m waiting for that news. I’ve ventured into that storm time and again, found her and dragged her back home and tried to help her, but I doubt whether anyone really can.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Valgerdur said after a long silence.
The telephone on his bedside table rang. Erlendur looked at it and was not going to answer, but Valgerdur told him that it must be important for someone to call so late at night. Muttering that it must be Sigurdur Oli with some stupid brainwave, he reached over.
It took him a while to realise that the man on the other end was Haraldur. He was calling from the old people’s home and said he had sneaked into the office and wanted to talk to Erlendur.
“What do you want?” Erlendur asked.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” Haraldur said.
“Why?” Erlendur asked.
“Do you want to hear it or not?” Haraldur said.
“Calm down,” Erlendur said. “I’ll drop by tomorrow. Is that all right?”
“You do that, then,” Haraldur said, and slammed down the telephone.
