“Birgitta, I want you to speak with the professor.”
Agnes had gotten up and hung her apron on the backside of the kitchen door. Birgitta and Liisa were still sitting at the table.
“Give your notice?”
Birgitta looked completely speechless.
“Yes, isn’t that what you say?”
Liisa nodded and smiled.
“That’s exactly what you say,” she said, and despite her agitation Agnes could see the contented look on the Finnish woman’s face.
“But why?”
Birgitta’s question was simple but hard to answer. Agnes did not really know herself. She thought she had formulated the reasons to herself. But now she just felt deathly tired of the professor’s carping and irritation. If he had won a prize he should be satisfied. Yet he had become even grumpier. She was also tired of the house, and she didn’t know exactly why.
She missed the sea, she could also mention as a reason, but that sounded too pompous and strange, and not particularly believable besides. She had actually lived in town for more than fifty years and never expressed any longing for something so vague as a view of “the sea.”
If she were to say something about the rock at Tall-Anna’s, where you could see so far, the professor would laugh out loud. Birgitta perhaps would not laugh but become worried and take it as a result of confusion. For her everything outside the pruned garden had constituted a threatening disorder since childhood.
“I want to be a pensioner,” said Agnes.
Liisa Lehtonen laughed heartily.
“Damn it, you’re right about that!” she hooted. “Be a happy pensioner!”
Birgitta looked at Liisa in amazement.
“This isn’t funny,” she said. “Do you understand what worries there will be?”
“For dear Bertram, you mean?”
“For all of us,” said Birgitta.
“I am actually over seventy,” said Agnes.
They had eaten supper and Agnes had as usual cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. The professor had retired. Liisa suggested they play cards, something that Agnes never did, except for Old Maid when the Ohler children were small.
No, she did not want to play cards. She did not want to do anything whatsoever other than go up to her room and call Greta. Her sister was the only one who would understand.
“Can I quit after this week?”
“Normally you give one month’s notice,” said Liisa, who had stopped laughing.
“You’ll perk up, right now you’re just worn-out,” said Birgitta, and Agnes understood that Birgitta was only repeating what the professor had said.
“Yes, that can easily happen here,” said Agnes, who felt that she had violated the established rules of the game.
There was so much involved in that simple sentence that neither Birgitta nor Liisa could say anything. It was as if the women in the kitchen were struck by an insight. Perhaps not the same one, but all three were silent for a few moments to take in and be able to properly handle what had happened. A new situation had commenced in the Ohler house.
It was Liisa who broke the silence, perhaps it was all the years of mental training that came in handy.
“We’ll call for a company to come in and clean the whole house, make it sparkling clean and then come back every week. Agnes will be the supervisor.”
“Good!” Birgitta exclaimed, who became enthusiastic as soon as she understood the import of the suggestion.
Agnes listened with growing impatience. She simply wanted to get away from it all. Didn’t they understand that?
Just then the bell rang. Birgitta fell silent. Liisa looked up with a surprised, slightly frightened look on her face, as if she did not understand what was jangling.
“The study,” Agnes said mechanically, and reached out her hand for the white apron she used outside the kitchen, but immediately let her hand fall, took a deep breath, and then let out the air with a sigh.
“I’ll take it,” said Birgitta, in a futile attempt to rescue the situation, for in that moment everyone realized that there was not a company in the whole world that could replace Agnes Andersson.
Birgitta left the kitchen. Liisa got up and went over to the kitchen entrance. Agnes studied the slender body and the short hair, tried to imagine her and Birgitta together. It didn’t work. It was as incomprehensible as so much else in the Ohler family.
“Now the last leaves are falling,” said Liisa abruptly, who had never commented on the garden before. She turned her head and looked at Agnes.
“Yes,” said Agnes, “it’s fall.”
My last apple cake, she thought.
“Maybe what’s happening is just as well,” said Liisa, but did not specify what she meant, whether that concerned the inexorable arrival of autumn or the fact that Agnes wanted to leave the household.
“When I was competing I used to think about sex,” Liisa went on. “It’s the opposite of what all the experts recommend; it’s calm you should try to achieve, a kind of peace that actually doesn’t exist. That’s what you aim for. I did the opposite, worked myself up. In my first Olympics, in 1984 in Los Angeles, I met a competitor from South Korea, we fell in love at first sight and met in secret. Then we met in the finals. I glanced at her and I wet my panties. Since then I always think about her at critical moments. I won in Los Angeles. She won on the home field four years later. That seems right, doesn’t it?”
Why is she telling me all this? Agnes thought with surprise. Does she want to shock me, or what? She was forced to turn around to conceal her disapproval.
“Now I’m thinking about the Korean,” said Liisa.
Agnes whirled around.
“Do you know what?” she exclaimed. “Now that’s enough of your vulgarities. And this is no firing range or Olympic Games. And wipe that grin off your face!”
“It’s there to cheer you up.”
The Finnish woman’s scornful tone and her own fury made Agnes leave the kitchen. Never again, she thought, will I cook for that bitch. She took the stairs like when she was young and was forced to catch her breath when she came up to the second floor.
Birgitta came out of the study at the far end of the corridor. She was crying. Agnes went in the opposite direction, slipped into the little drawing room, and closed the door behind her with a feeling of having escaped from a swarm of angry bees.
She collapsed in an armchair that had remained from years ago. The last daylight had disappeared and the room was in darkness. She closed her eyes. In her mind the house on the island emerged. She could picture Greta, how she had her coffee, and quietly felt the twilight in the kitchen and then went into the old drawing room, turned on the table lamp and the sconces on the wall, switched on the TV and settled in.
Agnes did not understand the curious attachment she felt for Greta. They had never been particularly close, but now the cottage and her sister stood out in a light shimmer that perhaps was not completely grounded in reality. The cottage was crooked and drafty, cold in the winter, the kitchen was old-fashioned, and her sister was often peevish and incommunicative.
But none of that mattered. She wanted to go home. She also wanted to settle down on the couch in front of the TV.
She did not know what Greta would think about having company, but there was no turning back. With that conviction she got up, turned on the ceiling light, went over to the telephone, and dialed the number to the island. Her sister answered after a couple of rings, which meant she had not yet sat down in front of the TV.
Agnes told her quite briefly and without superfluous comment that she would be quitting at Ohler’s and coming out to the island within a couple of days. She said nothing about the future, if her intention was to stay for good or if the visit was to be seen as an interim stop before she got something of her own.
To her great surprise Greta had no comment but instead simply asked if Agnes needed help. Perhaps Viktor’s cousin’s grandson Ronald could come with his big car so that Agnes could take everything with her? After a moment of hesitation Agnes accepted the offer and they decided that Ronald, if he was able, would come on Saturday morning. Greta insisted that she herself would show up during the day tomorrow to help pack. Agnes understood that Greta also wanted to see the house one last time.
Agnes’s hand was shaking when she hung up the phone. Something awful was in the process of happening, she felt it in her whole body. During the call with her sister she had taken great pains not to let her inner tension be known, but now she let out the worry and anxiety. She was forced to lay down, only to get up a short time later and restlessly wander around the room. At any moment the bell might ring, or perhaps more likely, Birgitta would knock and in her gentlest voice ask if everything was all right.
But they left her in peace. The whole house seemed to be holding its breath. Her decision to give notice had shaken things up properly.
It struck her as she stood looking out over the dark garden that Greta’s suggestion to come into town was also a way to support her little sister. Greta surely sensed that it was not a completely painless maneuver to leave the professor. The tension in her stomach remained but the trembling decreased somewhat. She was holding steady.
The lights were on at Bunde’s, likewise at the associate professor’s, but at Lundquist’s it was dark. She wondered for a while about the gardener but not for long, for why should she care about the professor’s apple trees and bushes? And his remark about time was not so astounding, it was surely more common than she had thought.
Instead, in her thoughts she planned her packing. She had not accumulated much and that was just as well. Ronald would carry it out to the car in a jiffy. The thought made her smile. How quickly they would disappear. Before the others really understood what had happened, she would be sitting perched in the passenger seat alongside Ronald in his gigantic car. Greta would do all the talking from the backseat. Ronald would as always sit silently. They had last met at Viktor’s funeral and she happened to think about everyone who had gathered at Gräsö Church. The majority she recognized, the others Greta had identified. Stronger than ever she felt that she wanted to go home to the island.
For the first time in many years, perhaps decades, she lingered in her drawing room for an entire evening and went to bed without having asked whether the professor wanted something before bedtime.