Back in the old town, in one of the narrow cobbled streets, we went into an old-fashioned cafe called Den Gråtande Fisk and ordered a bottle of Zinfandel. The cafe was gloomy and paneled in dark oak, with even gloomier landscapes hanging on the walls. The windows were glazed with amber glass, so that the endless stream of passers-by looked like characters in a shadow theater.
‘You’re very quiet,’ said Kate.
‘I’m totally confused, that’s why. I was so darn sure that was Elsa.’
‘I know. But the poor girl had been floating in the water for three days.’
‘Kate, I can’t get my head round any of this. But whatever it is, I’ve had enough of it.’
Kate took hold of my hands. ‘I’ve explained to you, darling. You can see things that hardly anybody else can see – and feel them, too. You’re a very creative guy and you’re stressed out, that’s all. Remember that this is the first vacation you’ve taken in three years. Give yourself a few days and I’m sure you’ll feel better.’
‘No … I’m sorry. I’m going to cut this trip short. I don’t understand what’s going on and I don’t want to understand it. I’m packing my bags tonight, Kate. I’m going home. Are you going to come with me?’
‘You can’t leave, Gideon. Not yet.’
‘Oh, no? Give me one good reason why not.’
‘Because I’m asking you. Isn’t that enough?’
‘But why? This thing with Elsa and Felicia … it’s too weird for words. And I don’t think Axel has exactly warmed to me, do you?’
‘Please, Gideon, I need you. The Westerlunds need you, too. You don’t even know how much.’
‘You keep telling me that, but you never explain what it all means.’ ‘Because I can’t.’
‘You can’t, or you won’t?’
She was silent for a while, although she didn’t take her eyes off me. Eventually, she said, ‘I promise you, Gideon, everything will fall into place. Not tomorrow, maybe. Not the day after. But soon. So please don’t go. Not if you really do care for me.’
‘I do care for you. As a matter of fact, I love you.’
I waited for her to say something, but all she did was lower her eyes and part her lips slightly, as if she were finding it difficult to breathe.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ I asked her. ‘I love you. But you have to tell me what the hell’s going on.’
She looked up again. ‘Do you think we’re good together?’ she asked me. ‘Not just in bed, but in every other way.’
I thought how much I had changed since Kate and I had been together. Not just my music, but everything about me. Up until the day she had first come around for that lunch, I had always acted just like my father: clever, yes, but cynical. Kate had shown me that I was someone else altogether. I wasn’t exactly sure who – not yet, anyhow. But I was much more concerned about other people than I had ever been before, and much more sensitive to other people’s feelings. That was why I wanted to leave Stockholm. The Westerlunds were trapped in some kind of surrealistic madness, but if I couldn’t help them to escape from it, I didn’t want to be there.
Kate leaned forward a little, and lowered her voice. ‘Would you like it if we could spend much more time together?’
‘You mean—?’
‘You and me. It’s not impossible.’
‘What about Victor?’
She hesitated, and then she said, ‘It’s not impossible. Not if you decide to stay.’
I sat back. She had taken me by surprise. I had fallen in love with her much more quickly and much more inextricably than I had ever expected. It was like getting caught in a thorn thicket: the more I pushed my way forward, the more entangled I became. But I hadn’t yet considered the possibility that our relationship could be anything more than a clandestine affair, whenever Victor was playing squash, or out of town on business, or sleeping off last night’s orgy.
‘OK,’ I said, slowly. ‘I’ll stay. I hope I know what I’m letting myself in for.’
*
That night, Tilda served us smoked elk for supper – three thin slices each of dark, almost prune-colored meat, with sweet red lingonberry jelly, and potato salad.
She was exceptionally chatty, and told us about a patient of hers whose left foot had been amputated more than a year ago, but who insisted that it still gave him agonizing pain.
‘He says it is proof that ghosts exist. If I can feel a left foot that isn’t there, he says, why is it not possible to have a whole person who isn’t there?’
‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ said Felicia.
‘Neither do I,’ said Elsa. ‘If there were ghosts, where would they all live?’
‘And what did you two do today?’ Axel asked Kate.
‘I took Gideon to the Wasa Museum.’
Axel said, ‘Ah, ja,’ and carefully buttered himself another piece of rye bread, but said nothing more.
Tilda said, ‘You found it interesting, Gideon, the Wasa?’
‘Very interesting, Tilda, yes. Especially all of the stuff they found in her, like barrels that were still filled up with beer, even after three hundred years.’
I looked across the table at Elsa. She was staring at me, unblinking, almost as if she were challenging me to tell her mother what we had seen, when we visited the Wasa Museum. But she couldn’t have known, because Kate and I had decided not to tell the Westerlunds what had happened, and there had been no mention of it on the SVT news that evening.
Kate said, ‘Tomorrow we’ll probably go to the royal palace at Drottningholm.’
‘You will love Drottningholm,’ Tilda assured me. ‘The gardens are wonderful, with statues and fountains. The Swedish royal family still live there. Maybe you will meet one of them.’
Elsa was still staring at me, so intently that I began to feel uncomfortable. ‘I am going swimming with my school tomorrow,’ she told me.
‘Oh, yes?’ I replied. ‘Be very careful, won’t you?’
She didn’t answer me, but kept on staring. I almost had the feeling that she was trying to tell me something telepathically. You were right about that drowned girl, Gideon. That was me. But of course it couldn’t have been. I was just giving myself the willies.
*
We played charades that evening, until well past eleven o’clock. Axel mimed The Devil’s Eye, by Ingmar Bergman, by closing one eye and holding his fingers up over his head like horns.
Felicia’s mime was High School Musical 2, while Kate acted out A Doll’s House.
For her charade, Elsa lay on her back on the floor, with both hands held up, and her head slightly raised, swaying very slightly from side to side. She gave us no other clues but the pose was so distinctive that Kate guessed it immediately.
‘Ophelia,’ she said. ‘Hamlet’s lost love, drowning herself.’
Elsa looked up at me, from the floor. I still had the feeling that she was trying to tell me something, but I was damned if I could work out what it was.
*
All the same, I was much more relaxed by the time we went to bed. Three glasses of Merlot with my supper had helped to convince me that Kate was right, and that I had simply been suffering from stress. After my dad had died, I thought that I had seen him several times – once in Gristede’s grocery on Third Avenue, down by the deli counter, and once on 42nd Street, staring out of the rain-beaded window of a cross-town bus. Maybe I was suffering the same kind of delusion with Elsa and Felicia.
Kate and I made love that night in a very slow, stylized way, as if we were swimming, too. Kate came close to an orgasm time and time again, without ever quite reaching it, and after nearly an hour she was slippery with perspiration. Eventually, though, she pushed me over on to my back, and sat astride me, guiding me inside her with both hands. Then she moved up and down in a complicated rhythm, her thigh muscles clamping me harder and harder.
As she climaxed, she took a deep breath, and I thought she was going to scream. But she bent her head forward and bit my shoulder, very hard, and her teeth stayed buried in me while she quaked and quaked and snuffled through her nose.
‘Ouch,’ I said, when she had finished. But believe me, ‘ouch’ was an understatement.
‘Oh God, Gideon, I’m sorry.’ She switched on the bedside lamp. I could clearly see the marks of her teeth in my shoulder. She pulled a tissue out of the box on the nightstand and folded it into a pad. ‘I was scared that I was going to break a mirror or something.’
I winced and examined my wound. ‘Next time, try biting the pillow instead.’
‘I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.’
I held her close and kissed her. ‘Don’t worry about it. You can make it up to me before we get up tomorrow.’
She put her hand down between my legs and squeezed me. ‘That’s a deal.’
*
I had only just fallen asleep, however, when I was woken up by the sound of Axel shouting and Tilda screaming, and their bedroom door slamming – not once, not twice, but three or four times.
I sat up in bed. ‘God almighty! Those two seem so mild-mannered, don’t they? But listen to them now!’
Kate said, blurrily, ‘Typical Swedes. They bottle up all of their emotions, but then they explode.’
I lay back down. I don’t know what Axel was raging about. I couldn’t hear him very dearly and in any case he was yelling in Swedish. But Tilda was simply screaming, on and on, like a demented soprano in a Verdi opera.
After more than five minutes of this, I sat up again. ‘Do you think they’re OK? Maybe we should knock on their door or something, see if we can calm them down.’
‘Leave them,’ said Kate. ‘It’s none of our business, is it?’
‘But listen to Tilda! It sounds like he’s murdering her!’
‘Gideon, it’s nothing to do with us! We’d only embarrass them!’
I lay down for another three or four minutes. Axel stopped shouting so loudly, but now I could hear Tilda sobbing. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘What are we going to say to them tomorrow? “Have a restful night, did you?”’
At that moment their bedroom door opened again, and Axel shouted out, ‘Du djävul! Du demonen! Lov henne ensam!’
This was followed by a catastrophic crash, like a huge wardrobe falling over. Tilda screamed again, and kept on screaming.
‘Come on,’ I said, and vaulted out of bed. I opened our bedroom door wearing nothing but my blue stripy shorts. It was totally dark in the corridor, but Kate switched on one of our bedside lamps. Axel and Tilda’s bedroom door was half open, so I crossed over and knocked on it, and called out, ‘Tilda! Are you OK? What the hell are you guys doing in there?’
Axel gave a hoarse, desperate-sounding shout, and then Tilda came rushing out of the bedroom, screaming. She was wearing a long white nightgown, but the collar had been half ripped loose, and her sleeves were flying in ribbon-like tatters. Axel tried to seize her arm and I tried to grab her, too, but she pulled herself away from both of us and went running barefoot along the corridor, still screaming.
‘Axel!’ I shouted at him. ‘What the hell is going on?’
Axel didn’t answer. All he did was stare at me wildly, as if he didn’t even know who I was.
I went after Tilda. She had reached the hallway, and was flinging herself from one side to the other, colliding with the walls. It looked as if she was being thrown around by an invisible assailant, because she was hitting the walls so hard that she was bruising herself, and she crashed into one of the side tables, too, so that a lamp toppled on to the floor, and its glass shade smashed.
‘Tilda!’ I said, and managed to take hold of her wrists. ‘Tilda, you have to calm down!’
‘What?’ she said. Her eyes were darting from side to side, as if she were terrified.
‘Tilda, I don’t know what the problem is, but you’re really going to hurt yourself!’
She babbled something in Swedish, breathless and hysterical, like somebody begging for their life. Then she suddenly dropped on to her knees, pulling her arms down so that I lost my grip on her wrists.
‘For Christ’s sake, Tilda!’
But she ducked to the left, and then to the right, and then she half rolled and half scuttled away from me on all fours, like a wounded animal. She made it to the front door before I could catch her, opened it, and ran along the landing to the spiral staircase.
‘Tilda!’
She threw herself down the stairs so violently that I really thought she was going to break her neck. I went jumping down the stairs after her, three steps at a time, but she still managed to make it down to the hallway before I could catch her.
She tried to open the door to the street, but it must have been double-locked. She hammered on it in frustration, but it still wouldn’t open. Her eyes wild, her chest having, she turned around and faced me.
‘Inte röra jag!’ she shrilled. ‘Vill du höra?’
Then she clenched her fists and screamed louder and higher until my eardrums sang.
She screamed on and on, until suddenly the mirror on the wall beside me cracked all the way across, and then the glass lantern hanging from the ceiling above me burst like a bomb, and I was showered in sparkling fragments. I lowered my head and covered my eyes with my hand.
The screaming abruptly stopped. I took my hand away from my face and looked up. Tilda was gone. The door to the street was still closed, so she must have run back upstairs. I followed her, panting with effort. The apartment door was open, and I could see Kate standing in the hallway.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked me. She looked up, and said, ‘Your hair is all glittery.’
‘Glass,’ I told her, picking some of it out. ‘Tilda screamed and the lantern broke.’
‘It’s all right. Tilda’s in her bedroom.’
‘What?’ I couldn’t believe what she had just said to me.
‘Tilda’s in her bedroom, Gideon. Everything’s fine.’
‘But you must have seen her as well as I did. She came running down the corridor in her nightdress, and started to throw herself all over the place. Look – she knocked over that lamp.’
The lamp was back on top of the side table, although its shade was badly bent and it was missing several pieces of colored glass. But Kate said, ‘It’s been like that ever since we’ve been here.’
‘Kate, I know what I saw. Tilda broke it only a couple of minutes ago.’
Kate said, ‘I know she did. But she’s in bed now. And we ought to get back to bed, too.’
She reached up and carefully picked some more pieces of glass from my shoulders. I looked into her eyes while she was doing it, and they had that smoky lack of focus, as if I were a window and she could see right through me.
‘I need to see Axel and Tilda,’ I told her.
‘I don’t think you should disturb them. They’re quiet now.’
‘Maybe they are. But I still want to make sure that Tilda’s OK. She was throwing herself around like a rag doll. Then she broke the lantern, and the mirror, too.’
We walked along the corridor together, until we reached our bedroom door.
‘I’m telling you, Kate. Lanterns and mirrors don’t shatter by themselves.’
‘All right,’ said Kate. She went across to the Westerlunds’ bedroom door and softly knocked. There was no answer at first but then she knocked again and Axel opened the door. He blinked at us unhappily.
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘We wanted to make sure that you and Tilda were OK, that’s all.’
‘Of course we are. Are you going to keep us awake every night, while you’re here?’
‘We’re sorry,’ said Kate. ‘Gideon’s a little stressed, that’s all. He’s been working very hard and he just moved house.’
‘Well, I have a very important conference tomorrow, and I would rather try to sleep, if that is OK with you two.’
‘For sure,’ I told him, although my voice was shaking. ‘Sorry for disturbing you, OK?’
Axel closed his bedroom door, but before he did so I glimpsed Tilda sitting up on her pillow, staring at us. There was something strange about her face which really disturbed me. It was oddly out of focus, as if she had moved her head while having her photograph taken.
But there she was, no mistaking her. Somehow she had managed to run back up the spiral staircase into the apartment without Kate noticing her, and climb back into bed without Axel noticing her, either.
*
Kate switched the light off. We lay there in absolute blackness for a while, listening to the faint sounds of early-morning traffic, and the deep throbbing of a car ferry, crossing the harbor.
‘That settles it,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow. Are you going to come with me? I can’t go through another night like this.’
Kate put her arm around me. ‘We can’t leave, Gideon. We’re going to Drottningholm Palace tomorrow, and the day after we can go to Uppsala.’
I eased myself free from her. ‘I’m sorry, Kate. I’ve had enough of the Westerlunds for one lifetime, thanks all the same. I want to go back home. There may be people in New York who are just as crazy as the Westerlunds, but at least they don’t appear in two places at the same time.’
‘Please, Gideon. I’ve told you how much I need you to stay.’
‘Sorry, sweetheart. I’m leaving. I don’t know who’s real around here and who isn’t, and that seriously scares me. I don’t even know if I’m real any more. Am I real? Somebody chased Tilda down the staircase, even though Tilda never went down the staircase, and if it wasn’t me who chased her when she didn’t go, then who was it?’
Kate kissed me, six or seven times. ‘You’re tired. You’re not making sense.’
‘Nothing is making sense. And that’s exactly why I’m leaving. Are you coming with me?’
There was a very long pause, during which I could feel Kate breathing steadily against my shoulder. Then she said, ‘All right, then. We’ll leave. But can I ask you one favor?’
‘It depends what it is.’
‘When you fly back to New York tomorrow, can you make on, stopover on the way home?’
‘A stopover? Where?’
‘Only one night. Two at the most. I’ll have to call and find out first.’
‘Where, Kate?’
‘London. I have some old friends who live in South Kensington. I’d really love you to meet them. And we can take in some of the sights you missed. Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, the London Eye.’
‘Hold up a moment. You said when I fly back to New York tomorrow. What about you?’
‘My ticket’s non-transferable. But it’s OK. I’ll meet up with you at my friends’ house, when you get there.’
‘Why don’t you come with me on my flight? It won’t cost much.’
‘No. no. That’s OK. In any case, I’ve arranged to see some more people here in Stockholm before I leave.’
What people?’
She tapped the side of her nose. ‘Don’t be inquisitive. They’re just business acquaintances, that’s all, from Bleck magazine. And they’re all women, so you don’t have any reason to be jealous.’
‘OK … I said, reluctantly. Then, ‘These friends of yours in London … do they fight a lot?’
‘No … they’re devoted.’
‘Do they run and up down their apartment in the middle of the night?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘All right, then. London it is.’
Kate kissed me again. ‘You’re an angel, do you know that?’
I stroked her hair. It was so dark that I couldn’t see her at all, but I could feel her breathing. I thought about what my life had been like, before I met her. Could I really go back to it?
‘I’m not an angel,’ I told her. ‘I’m just a musician. But I don’t want this to end, that’s all.’