Four months later
We set out from Stockholm into the Archipelago on a fine summer’s day. The ferry pushes away from the quay in front of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, where Greta Garbo studied. I love the view of the city receding and my spirits are instantly lifted by the cheerful, determined way the ferry strikes out for the island of Grinda. This beautiful Friday afternoon the whole of Stockholm seems to have taken to their boats and headed for the distant islands of the Archipelago.
It’s a beautiful sight. But we are subdued. I see that our happiness has been fatally undermined. But Nellie has never uttered one word of reproach. She believes fervently that love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds. The Swedish relatives are arriving tomorrow for the blessing of our marriage. A happy occasion.
After what happened to us, I think that we are incubating something like a bacillus, something repulsive and untreatable. I see that, like my eager ancestor with his dreams of Eden, I had a naïve faith in my sense of being protected by my special understanding. I have spent many nights awake. In those waking hours I see my house drenched in blood, the walls spattered. The nights have become difficult for me. I have often had to move from our bed to a sofa or a spare bed. I must endure my personal torment and my regrets alone.
Thank God for Jaco, our Caliban, who turned out to be our saviour. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t appeared? In fact I can guess all too readily.
I have bought the family farm in Potchefstroom and put it in trust for Jaco. The trustees have evicted the cousins. Jaco’s children and his wife have moved onto the farm, to live in the old house where Tannie Marie used to read Pinocchio to me by candlelight. Jaco says he has given up drinking. His firearm licence has been revoked, however. Wynand survived being shot, and did not press charges, partly because I gave him some money to go away. He also had a few misdemeanours on his own record. For one, he was already married. Jaco says the children love the farm. They run around barefoot as often as possible, in the traditional fashion. Jaco is planning to buy Nguni cattle. They are tough.
Nellie has hired the Grinda Wärdshus, which once belonged to the first director of the Nobel Prize. He bought the whole island and built the Wärdshus in 1906 as his holiday house. Nellie likes the idea of people coming from all directions by ferry. It strikes a seafaring note. It was here on Grinda that I was entranced by the celebration of Sankta Lucia. Lucia is also the name of our Lucinda; it means illumination. In mythology Lucinda is the giver of first light.
Our Lucinda went back to California to see her ex-lover and to return little Isaac to his mother. We would have loved to have him live with us; it was heart-rending to say goodbye. He was calm, hugging us, saying goodbye, and at the same time giving the impression that he was ready for the next adventure. Lucinda insisted that he had to go back. She promised to bring him to see us if his mother agreed. To be honest, she said, his mother would be delighted to get rid of him. She wants to be in the game, although Lucinda didn’t tell us what game that might be. I hope it is just a figure of speech.
Bertil is with us. He is still in touch with Vanessa, and he has been talking of going to Cape Town to see her, against his mother’s wishes. In four months he has grown and he has become very handsome. I see girls looking at him. I have a surprise for him: I have paid for Vanessa to come to the Wärdshus. She is already there.
The boat stops briefly at Vaxholm – once the home of King Gustav Vasa – before we head out again. The flotillas of small and large boats are surging out to the islands, many under sail. I have the feeling that the Vikings would have had a similar sense of infinite possibility as they sailed and rowed out to the open sea on their daring and improbable voyages. The sea girdles and cossets the myriad islands and skerries, some so small that they are host to just one or two trees and a clapboard house – usually red – with a dinghy moored out front; others are bigger, clothed with fields and forests and blueberries. The eider ducks paddling inquisitively in busy flocks and the reeds in the shallows suggest that the Baltic is not very saline here.
Nellie says she knows all the best places to swim on Grinda. They have been imprinted by her childhood memories. We will swim together. Perhaps she sees the immersion as being something like a baptism or a washing away of sins.
*
Vanessa is waiting at the dock as planned: a blonde, slender beach girl. Poor Bertil is startled when he sees her. They are too young to handle this level of emotion in public; Bertil kisses her perfunctorily. He looks at Nellie and me, expecting an explanation.
‘It was your mother’s idea,’ I say.
‘In fact it was Frank’s idea but I think it was a good one. Sorry, darling, if we gave you a shock.’
Bertil soon gets over his discomfort. Vanessa takes his hand. Our luggage is ferried to the Wärdshus on a trolley. Vanessa and Bertil walk off hand in hand along a path that opens onto a meadow of wild flowers. The last time we were here I saw that the Swedes have an almost pagan regard for nature. Rocks and tumuli and groves of birch engage them. A small house near the jetty, which doubles as an art gallery, offers paintings of the island and detailed studies of wild flowers and a few pictures of Hydra in the Aegean Sea.
Once we have settled in, Nellie leads me to a beach she remembers. First, it is obligatory to pick up Grinda Loaf at the store, she says. We scramble down through some trees to get to the beach and we swim in the warm, brackish water. Nellie’s swimming style reminds me again of my mother’s; it is graceful and measured. We lie in the early summer sun on the crescent beach eating Grinda Loaf. We are the only two people there. It is an enchanting place. It breathes good will and reason. Eider ducks swim by. They have a neat and bourgeois appearance, mildly quacking once in a while. Nellie says she wants to buy a cottage out here. But in my fickle heart I wonder if it wouldn’t be just a little boring. Perhaps I could learn to sail a boat or practise ice fishing in the winter. On the way back to the hotel we buy an ice cream, the best ice cream in the world, Nellie says. I tell her that no one forgets the ice cream they had in their childhood. I tell her about the Green Parakeet Café in Fish Hoek, which sold only three flavours of ice cream.
‘Was it lovely?’
‘No. It was a dump. But it had a green parrot in a cage. I tried to speak to it.’
‘Successfully?’
‘No, it bit my nose.’
More and more often I think of my childhood. After the appalling bloodshed in my house, I am constantly reassessing my life as though I might have been responsible for what happened. As though I were wilfully courting disaster in some way. As though being a careless Retief may have been a factor in what happened.
We four dine together in the Wärdshus. We feel privileged to have Vanessa and Bertil with us. As you get older you need to be in proximity to young people, to fortify yourself with their youth. There is nothing more dispiriting than older people who have sunk below the horizon, from where they utter their muffled discontent.
Soon after noon the next day, the guests start arriving, and Nellie introduces me to her friends and relations. I imagine them looking me up and down, assessing, in their polite, intense Nordic fashion, if I am good enough for their home-grown Nellie. I imagine that they know what happened to us. I feel clammy and unwelcome and in some sense diminished. The men hardly speak at first, while the women go into huddles and exchange information about babies and divorces and children. After a few drinks the men become vocal. They have a chortling, communal laugh, uttered unexpectedly.
The blessing is given by a Lutheran priest; it is short and to the point, wishing us happiness and godliness. Why not? Both are desirable. And I need help. There are toasts in aquavit. Nellie’s two brothers and a cousin speak, saying what an exceptional sister and cousin she has been. The men make a roaring sound: whoar, whoar, whoar – expressing their approval without recognisable words. Then we move to another room where a huge smorgasbord of gravadlax and herring and Arctic char and cinnamon cakes spreads into the distance. The scents of cinnamon and dill float around us solicitously. Some of the friends and family are soon very drunk. I am drunk. I am actively seeking oblivion. We dance and we sing and we go to bed late. Lucinda sends us a text message, asking for photographs, and she says that little Isaac is fine and that she has already made progress in adopting him. His mother has died of an overdose.
There are aquavit headaches at breakfast: saunas and swimming are the favoured antidotes. On my way for a swim I see children gathering wild strawberries and stringing them on lengths of grass. It is the most innocent activity I have ever seen. In its simplicity there lurks a reproach for me. I think of Lucinda and her troubles; she hardly had a childhood and to add to the charge sheet I have, with my familial lack of judgement, subjected her to unimaginable hell. I start to sob, and head for some trees and shelter. She says she has adopted little Isaac. They will be coming in September.
We make our way back to Stockholm in the course of the following day. At the airport an email pings onto my phone: Alec has died of a catastrophic stroke. I can’t tell Nellie; I don’t want to upset her at this moment; she is staying on for five days in Stockholm with her family; Bertil and Vanessa are staying with her to see the sights. I need to be home, not for any obvious reason but because I feel that I should be home with my books and my paintings and my house where I will calm down and where, alone, I will possibly be able to shake off the fear that I am responsible for what happened.
Jaco is probably a psychopath. He suggested when I last saw him in Potchefstroom before going home that he had upheld the honour of the Retief family by killing the two Congolese. He sees himself as the victor of this particular Blood River. His view is that it was them or us. This is, of course, a natural law.
When I have unpacked I set out for Sotheby’s to pick up the wedding-present picture – now also a legacy – given to us by dear old Alec. I walk all the way from Kensington Gardens and on through the park, which is in full bloom; I see that the early daffodils have died off, so giving a rural effect to a gently billowing hillock in the grass; and in the famous flowerbeds, and climbing upwards on ropes and trellises, roses are heavy in promiscuous flower. Swans are landing heavily on the Serpentine as though it is their first ever attempt at this difficult manoeuvre. Egyptian geese are investigating potential nesting sites. Horses pass listlessly on the bridleway. They are chivvied into a canter and the sound of their hooves – perhaps I am imagining this – makes the earth resonate deep down. There are no Romanian gypsies to be seen.
I walk through Mayfair, past the casinos and oligarchs’ town houses and long-established restaurants and beautiful churches and unexpected small gardens.
Sotheby’s has delegated a tall slender Italian woman to lead me to my picture. She tells me her name is Ilaria. With long, delicate fingers – her nails a deep dark blue, almost exactly the blue of my Parker’s school ink – she unwraps the brown paper to reveal the painting.
‘I love this painting,’ she says. ‘It is so beautiful, so special.’
It’s a Howard Hodgkin. A banker friend of mine has a Hodgkin above his desk in his office and I have always admired it, as Alec knew. The banker, Julian Tubal, told me that his cleaner had reproached him for buying a painting by someone who is so hopeless that he paints all over the frame.
Ilaria is waiting for me to say something. I am silenced and disconcerted as I look at the painting.
‘I ’ave been tol-e-d that your friend ’as died, I am so sorry,’ Ilaria says, briefly placing her elegant hand to rest on my arm. ‘You will remember him by this picture I am sure.’
I accept her kindness gratefully. I need it at this moment. Ilaria is right: I will remember ridiculous, pompous, kind and generous Alec.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I will remember him. He gave me a job when I was young.’
‘Very special friend, for sure,’ she says, with her gaze directed to the picture.
She wears a lot of black and blue make-up around her eyes, giving her a Nefertiti appearance.
Now she wraps up the picture expertly. It’s a special talent to be able to wrap unruly parcels, one I don’t have. She hands me the parcel. I thank her. I want to embrace her. She strides away elegantly in her black dress, and turns back to me with one warm glance. I want to speak to her about the deeper meanings of art, but she has gone.
Also, I wanted to tell Ilaria that the deep red tide of my Howard Hodgkin, escaping over the frame of the picture, will remind me for ever of venous blood – dark red, depleted of oxygen. I am an expert on this subject. It has infiltrated my dreams for the last few months. It has entered my being. And I know that I will never be able to put behind me the memory of the torrents of blood that desecrated my beautiful house. Dark blood has been projected and fired right to the top of the walls to make awful congealed patterns. And the blood formed puddles and meres and eddies that overflowed out into the landscape in trickles to become rills and streams that in turn became rivers. Further down the hill, the blood was finally reclaimed by the dry soil, leaving, for a while, only a damp trace, which faded fast.
I saw that I had come full circle.