I woke slowly, wondering why every muscle in my body hurt, and why, even though I had been asleep, I felt so deeply weary. I could barely open my eyes, and my throat and chest felt as if someone had attacked them with sandpaper. Was I sick?
It didn’t matter. I had to get up. I had to prepare breakfast and lay out Anders’ clothes for the day. If I didn’t, he would be angry – and then there was Eirik to get ready for school…
‘Mamma?’ a scratchy voice said beside me.
When I turned my head and saw Eirik right beside me, I felt a stab of pure panic. What was he doing in our bed? He wasn’t allowed. Anders wouldn’t just be angry – he’d be furious.
I tried to struggle into a sitting position, alarmed at how much effort it took. ‘Eirik!’ I hissed. ‘What are you doing in Anders’ bed?!’
My voice, as croaky as Eirik’s, faded as I took in my surroundings: not the bedroom I shared with Anders back in the little house in Kirkenes but a long hut with a curved roof and a row of beds on either side; the two we were lying in were nearest the door and had been pushed together. There were clothes hung on lines around each bed and pairs of boots – men’s boots – pushed underneath them. It was completely quiet apart from the odd crackle from the stove in the middle of the hut, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and damp wool.
I stared around me, trying and failing to make sense of it at all.
Then, all at once, everything came flooding back. Killing the Wehrmacht officer. Our mad flight from the barn. Arriving in the village by the fjord. The fisherman and his wife who had helped secure us passage on the fishing boat. The storm. The cabin filling up with water. The lantern going out.
Then nothing but fear, noise and pain, from which I couldn’t sort out any distinct memories, no matter how hard I tried.
And now I was here. But where was here? What had happened to the boat and its crew?
I sat up in the bed and pulled Eirik towards me, allowing him to snuggle into my arms. Someone had put me into a pair of pyjamas – men’s pyjamas in worn but clean blue flannel – while Eirik wore just a shirt that came down almost to his ankles. I leaned back against the pillows, looking around again at the other beds, the possessions everywhere, the pictures on the walls. I was so exhausted I felt as if I was in a dream. Perhaps I was. Perhaps, any moment, I’d wake up and be back in that pitch-black cabin with the storm battering the boat to pieces around us.
Then the door opened and a young woman came in. She was pretty, with light-brown hair and a good-humoured face, a leather bag looped over one arm. When she turned to pull the door closed behind her, I saw she was heavily pregnant.
‘Oh, good, you’re awake,’ she said, slipping out of her smart navy coat and draping it over the clothes line at the end of one of the empty beds. ‘I can tell you, it’s a lucky thing the soldiers saw you when they did. We’ll be making you feel better in no time!’
Although she spoke English, her accent was nothing like the cut-glass accents of the BBC announcers Ingunn and I used to listen to in secret, on the little radio she kept hidden in her kitchen. Her dialect was almost Scandinavian in its crisp rises and falls, ‘the soldiers’ coming out as ‘da sodjers’; ‘making’ as ‘makkin’’.
Moving energetically despite the size of her bump, she came over, smiling broadly. ‘I’m the island’s nurse, Isabel Thomson,’ she said. ‘What’s your name? And what about da peerie bairn?’
‘I’m Hedda Dahlström,’ I said, hesitantly, in English. ‘And this is Eirik. What – what do you mean, peerie bairn?’ Surely she had not just said the Norwegian word pirre, which meant tickle?
Isabel laughed. ‘Oh, I am sorry, I’m just spikkin’ a bit o’ Shaetlan. It means little boy.’
I still didn’t quite understand. Eirik burrowed against me, hiding his face. ‘It’s all right,’ I told him softly in Norwegian. Then I looked at Isabel again. ‘Please – can you tell me where we are?’
‘You’re at the RAF radar station at Svarta Ness, on Fiskersay.’
RAF. The Royal Air Force.
‘Where is Fiskersay?’ I said. ‘I am sorry – I don’t know how we got here – I don’t remember – we were trying to get to the Shetland Islands from Norway—’
‘That’s right! Fiskersay’s in Shetland – about as far north as it’s possible to get before you fall into the sea.’
It was then that I realised Shaetlan was Shetland. Of course. Oh, how slow my mind felt! I couldn’t gather my thoughts at all.
I let Isabel take my temperature, and Eirik’s. He began to cough, his thin shoulders shaking.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, I don’t like the sound of dat,’ Isabel said. ‘Now, where did Doctor Gaudie say he’d left that medicine?’ She looked around. ‘Ah!’
I watched as she marched to the little table at the far end of the hut, where, I noticed now, there was a large glass bottle on the table beside the radio set. Isabel could only have a few more weeks to go before her baby was born, but she glowed with good health. I thought ruefully back to my own pregnancy, where I’d become increasingly sick and exhausted as it progressed, my stomach growing while the rest of me shrank because I was unable to keep more than a few mouthfuls of food down at a time. It got so bad that Anders – usually reluctant to spend a single øre more than he had to – had summoned the doctor, who, much to his annoyance, had ordered me to stay in bed until Eirik was born. That was when the daily torrent of cruel words had begun, now that I thought about it; when he’d gone from being the distant, but mostly respectful man I married a month or so before – the man who knew Eirik was not his but had told me it didn’t matter, that he’d raise my child as his own – to short-tempered and sharp-tongued, until, almost before I knew it, every interaction with him was like walking across a field littered with land mines. That was also when it had dawned on me that he had really married me because he wanted a dogsbody to replace his first wife who had passed away – someone to cook his meals, clean his house, wash his clothes – and now he had to do all those things for himself again, he was furious with me. And after Eirik was born his resentment had continued, because Eirik was small and needy and it took me a long time to recover from his birth. I didn’t even know how much of the money my aunt had bequeathed to him was left; he had always refused to let me access the bank account, saying the husband should control the household finances. What a fool I’d been to think he loved me!
Isabel came back over with the medicine, and between us, we coaxed Eirik into taking a dose.
‘Those men that we came with,’ I said when Eirik had settled down again, closing his eyes and appearing to drift off to sleep. ‘Do you know what happened to them?’
Isabel’s sanguine expression grew grave. ‘I am afraid they were all drowned,’ she said softly, glancing at Eirik. ‘The sea was terrible, and a German plane shot at the boat – it drifted onto the rocks and was wrecked. Do you not remember?’
I tried, but my mind seemed to have blanked that out. I shook my head, filled with sudden grief for the men. I hadn’t even exchanged two words with them, yet they had been prepared to risk their own lives to help us flee Norway along with them.
‘Now.’ All at once, Isabel was back to her former cheerful self, leaning over a little awkwardly to adjust my covers. ‘Don’t fret. Let’s get you comfortable. If I go over to the dining hall to see what they’ve got, d’you think you can manage something to eat? The doctor will be calling in later, and it’s a lovely day now dat storm has blown over. If you feel up to it, perhaps you can get wrapped up later and sit outside in the sunshine for a while.’
‘When is your baby due?’ I asked as she plumped my pillows. Her smile grew even broader, and I smiled back. I couldn’t help it; her cheerfulness was infectious.
‘Oh, I’ve a month or so to go yet – at least, I hope so!’ she said. ‘There’s far too much to do here at the moment, what with so many sodjers down with dat flu and half the island, too. Archie – that’s my husband, he’s a clerk here at the station and we live in a cottage just down the road – he’s hoping for a boy, but I don’t mind either way as long as it’s healthy. Let’s see about getting you some breakfast, eh, and perhaps a cup of tea!’
And off she went.
*
Later, after Eirik and I had eaten, slept again, and been visited by Doctor Gaudie – a gruff little man whose accent was even broader than Isabel Thomson’s – we were allowed to get out of bed. A kind soul had donated some clothes that Isabel brought in to us: a jumper, skirt, blouse and coat for me, and a jumper, trousers and jacket for Eirik, along with a woollen cap and a scarf so long I had to wind it twice around his neck. There were underthings for both of us too, shabby but impeccably clean. I had no idea where our own clothes were; the only things of mine I appeared to have left were my shoes, which had been left under the stove to dry, and Eirik had nothing at all.
‘Shall we get some fresh air, like the nurse suggested?’ I said to Eirik once he was all wrapped up. Looking reluctant, he nodded slowly, and coughed.
‘It will be all right, lille vennen,’ I said, rubbing his back in slow circles until he’d caught his breath. ‘It’s safe here. No one is going to hurt us.’
He wound his fingers through mine, clinging on tightly. My heart ached as I thought about what he had been through. This damn war – those damn Germans, I thought bitterly as we made our way outside.
It was, as Isabel had said, a lovely day – chilly, with a stiff breeze, but nowhere near as cold as Kirkenes would have been at this time of year. The hut with the curved roof we had woken up in was one of four. Nearby was a jumble of other buildings, low and square, and a little further away, on top of a long, rounded hill just outside the camp, two tall structures made of criss-crossed metal struts – towers of some kind, which I guessed must be to do with the radar operations. The camp was up on the top of the cliffs and all around were breath-taking views of the hills and the sea, the water gleaming a soft silver in the watery winter sunlight.
The camp appeared all but deserted. Outside one of the buildings, in a sunny, sheltered spot, was a wooden bench. We sat down and I gazed out at the sea while Eirik leaned against me, swinging his legs. Which way was Norway? I had no idea. It seemed impossible to me that we could have come all that way, never mind that we’d made it in one piece, more or less. What would happen to us next? I’d talked, briefly, to Doctor Gaudie about it, and he’d told me that there’d been a few others who’d come to Fiskersay from Norway since the start of the war. From what he understood, as soon as we were well enough, we’d be taken to a place called Lerwick on the main island for something called processing, and from there, it was likely we’d be sent to London in England, as the other Norwegian refugees had been. Then, if all went well – he didn’t elaborate on what all entailed, but I suspected they’d want to make sure I wasn’t a spy – he supposed the authorities would find us somewhere in Britain to live.
I thought back over the conversation, replaying it inside my head. Where would we end up? Would we ever see Norway again? And what, I wondered reluctantly, was happening to Anders? Had the Germans arrested him too?
I hope so, a tiny, rebellious voice inside my head whispered, and I was immediately horrified at myself.
Lost in thought, and lulled by the soft boom of the sea breaking against the cliffs, I didn’t notice the man walking towards us until Eirik whispered, ‘Mamma, it’s the man who rescued us from the boat.’
I looked round and a wave of adrenalin went through my entire body as I saw a man in a smart blue uniform coming our way, making my hands tingle. Magnus? No, it can’t be. That’s impossible.
As the man got closer I felt the adrenalin ebb away, leaving me feeling slightly shaky. Of course it wasn’t Magnus. He was younger, for a start, around the same age as me. It was his hair, dark and curling slightly, and the slouching set of his shoulders, that reminded me of Magnus. But he didn’t appear to have Magnus’s confidence – the confidence that, as a naive eighteen-year-old, had drawn me in and held me under its spell until it was too late – or his arrogance. This man had lines in his forehead and around his mouth from anxiety, pain, or both; he walked with a pronounced limp, I noticed, perhaps from an old gunshot wound or a break.
‘Hello,’ I said, because I was sure that by now he must have realised I was staring at him.
He gave me a small smile. ‘Hello. You’re up and about, then?’
His accent wasn’t British. Was he American?
‘Bill Gauthier,’ he said. He gave me another small smile and stuck out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
I shook his hand. ‘Hedda Dahlström. This is Eirik. We’re very pleased to meet you too.’ I swallowed. ‘Eirik tells me you are the one who saved us.’
Bill gave a self-deprecating laugh. ‘Oh, that wasn’t just me. Practically the whole station was out there trying to get to you.’
‘Well, I am very grateful,’ I said, my face warming slightly. ‘Please tell the others thank you, too.’
‘Don’t mention it. And I will.’
There was a moment of silence that stretched out for just a little too long. Eirik clung to me, looking sideways at Bill from beneath his eyelashes.
‘Well,’ Bill said at last. ‘I’d better get going.’
I nodded. As he turned and limped away, I was again reminded overwhelmingly of Magnus, the man I’d given my heart to all those years ago and who had pulled it to pieces.
The man who had made me realise that love simply wasn’t worth it.