Bettina.
Are you there? I never thought you’d go first. I miss you, you know. I don’t think anyone knows, not even the children, how much I love you, loved you.
And you answer. I can hear you telling me that I must be strong, not show what I feel, you see what happens if you give in. Axel, the wind whispers, and the wind is your voice, your breath against my neck.
Bettina.
My Danish beauty. Refined and unrefined at the same time. I first saw you in the summer of 1958, when I was working as a foreman at the Madsborg estate on Jutland, there to get some experience of farming.
You were working in the kitchen that summer. A perfectly ordinary girl, and we would swim in the lake together. I’ve forgotten the name of the lake, but it was on the estate, and I brought you back home after that summer and I remember Father and Mother, how they were dubious at first, but gradually gave in to your charm, and Skogsa succumbed to your cheerful temperament.
And you, how could you, Bettina? How dare you give in to cancer? Were you sad that our income wasn’t enough to keep the castle in good condition? It would have eaten too much into our capital, all the millions that were needed.
I don’t want to believe that. But I can feel guilty, the guilt you feel when you hurt the person you love most of all.
Pain. You had to learn all about pain, and you told me there was nothing worth knowing in those lessons.
The paintings on the walls here are your choices. Ancher, Kirkeby. And the portrait of my ancestor, Erik, and all the other wonderful fools and madmen who went before me.
You died at the castle, Bettina. You would have hated having to leave it, and I’m ashamed for your spirit now. No matter how gentle you could be, you could be just as hard when it came to defending what was yours.
Most of all you worried about the boy.
Among your last words: ‘Look after Fredrik. Protect him. He can’t manage on his own.’
Sometimes I wonder if he was listening at the door of your sickroom.
You never know with him. Or maybe don’t want to know. Like everyone else, I love my daughter, and him, my son. But I’ve always been able to see his shortcomings, even if I didn’t want to. I’d rather have ignored them and seen his good qualities instead, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. I see my son, and I see almost nothing but his failings, and I hate myself for it. Sometimes he can’t even seem to control his drinking.
The clock on the bureau strikes six and Axel stops by the sitting-room window. Something breaks out of the darkness below and someone walks through the park. A person dressed in black. The same man he thought he saw earlier?
Axel pushes the thought aside.
I knew it was a mistake, he thinks instead. But I still had to do it: letting Fredrik, my firstborn, the next Count Fagelsjo, look after our affairs, giving him access to our capital when my soul turned black after the cancer won. He never wanted to be at the castle, never wanted to manage the small estate and forest that were left, because it was now more profitable to take the EU subsidies for set-aside land than rent it out.
Didn’t want to. Couldn’t. But he ought to have been able to handle the money.
He’s got financial qualifications, and I practically gave him free rein.
But everyone has their good and bad sides, their faults and shortcomings, he thinks.
Not everyone has enough of the predator in them, enough of the merciless power that seems to be needed in this world. Father tried to get me to appreciate the responsibility that comes with privilege, how we have to assume a position of leadership in society. But in some ways he belonged to a bygone age. Certainly, I led the work out at Skogsa, I was respected in the finer society of the region, but a leader? No. I tried to get Fredrik and Katarina at least to appreciate the value of privilege, not to take it for granted. I don’t know that I succeeded.
Bettina, can you tell me what I can do to make Katarina happy? And don’t try that same old tune again. We had different opinions about that, as you know.
Be quiet, Bettina.
Be quiet.
Let me put it like this: Was the bloodline diluted with you, Bettina?
He has sometimes wondered this when looking at Fredrik, and Katarina too, occasionally.
The green Barbour jacket sits tightly across Axel Fagelsjo’s stomach, but he’s had it for twenty-five years and doesn’t want to buy another one just because the kilos stick a bit more easily than they used to.
Things must run their course, he thinks as he stands in the hall.
We Fagelsjos have lived more or less the same way for almost five hundred years. We set the tone for the area, for this city.
Sometimes he thinks that people around here are imitating the life he and his family have always had. The first water closet in Ostergotland was at Skogsa, his grandfather wore the first three-piece suit. They have always shown the way, and the business and political communities understood this, even if that’s all history now.
There was no invitation to the county dinner this year.
In all the years that the county governors held dinners for the most prominent people in the county, there has always been a Fagelsjo among the guests. But not this year.
He saw the picture taken at Linkoping Castle in the
But no one from the Fagelsjo dynasty.
He pulls on his thick black rubber boots.
I’m coming now, Bettina.
The calfskin gloves. What leather!
Axel thinks that things will probably sort themselves out anyway. Hears Bettina’s voice: ‘Protect the boy.’
I did protect Fredrik. I did what was necessary, even if, in theory, the bank could have been held responsible.
The memory of Bettina’s face fades.
Maybe I should have let things go to hell with the boy, Axel thinks, as he presses the cold button of the lift to go downstairs and out into the lonely dawn.
5
No other engine sounds like that of the Range Rover: elegant yet powerful. And the vehicle responds nicely when Jerry Petersson presses the accelerator. Maybe that was how the horses of former centuries responded when long-dead counts pressed their spurs to the flanks of their sweating steeds.
No horses here now.
No counts.
But he can always get a few horses if he meets a woman who likes them, they have a tendency to like horses, women. Something of a cliche, but this cliche was also a reality, like so many others.
Jerry Petersson sees banks of fog drifting in across the fields, coming to rest beside the pine forest over to the east. The dog is sitting beside him in the passenger seat, letting its perfectly balanced body move in time with the vehicle’s suspension, its eyes searching the landscape for something living to chase after, stand over, help to bring down. Jerry Petersson runs a hand through its coarse, damp fur. It smells, the dog, but it’s a smell that suits the countryside, with its raw, penetrating authenticity. A beagle, a male, that he has named Howie after Howard Hughes, the Hollywood madman of the thirties who is said to have founded the modern aviation industry, and who, according to legend, ended up a recluse in a castle outside Las Vegas, dependent on blood transfusions.
Jerry once read a biography of him and thought: if I ever buy a dog, I’m going to name him after an even bigger madman than me.
