The Pearlkillers Page 16

  ‘How hideous,’ Lina said.

  ‘Is it an animal?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘It’s a woman,’ he told them. ‘Perhaps a goddess. And very heavy. It’s solid gold.’

  Lina reached for the statue and then withdrew without touching it. The thing was foreign to her understanding of what a work of art should look like. Elsie stretched out her arm. She moved the figure closer, tried to pick it up, and expressed astonishment at its weight.

  He stared at the gold. The statue was almost square, the head and body appearing to be one. The eyes were rectangular slits, the lips drawn back over large, ferocious-looking teeth. The two breasts and swollen belly bulged from the point where a neck might have begun. And underneath, it ended. There were no hips, legs or feet. It was like a fist seen from some odd angle that prevented it from being recognized for what it was.

  ‘Barbaric,’ Elsie said.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Wonderful, in a way. Very strong-looking.’

  ‘Horrible,’ Lina said. ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘There’s more to come,’ Anders told her. ‘Oh, yes. I lost the expedition but I came back with a good deal of money. And I earned it quite prosaically: I got a job as a riverboat captain and then I gambled with my earnings. Unbelievable, really. We’re worth millions now.’

  Elsie squeezed his right hand and put her head against his shoulder. Lina, on his left, burst into tears and threw her arm around his waist. His eyes remained on the squat idol in front of him. In all the time he had carried it with him, he’d been unable to determine whether it had the face of a god or goddess, an animal, or even the face of an enemy.

  *

  He waited until the next day to visit his grandfather’s sisters. Although twice his age, they were so tiny and shrunken now that they’d almost regained the look of youth. And it seemed strange to him that in a way they had hardly changed, whereas he felt himself so greatly altered by the intervening years, and also thought of himself as having grown old. In their long dresses with the lace sleeves and collars, the old ladies looked like dolls, or children dressing up, or – he was reminded – like a couple of chimpanzees he had seen in a German zoo that he’d been to as a child.

  They recognized him. Emmelina said, ‘You haven’t been to see us in a long while.’

  ‘Oh, it’s Anders,’ her sister said.

  ‘I’ve been away,’ he told them.

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ Irmintrude shot back at him. ‘What did you bring us for tea?’

  ‘Cream cakes, I think. Is that all right?’

  ‘We used to have lovely cakes in Paris,’ Emmelina said. ‘Remember?’ Both sisters had once taken him out for a stupendous tea party in a restaurant, where he’d eaten everything in sight and been sick afterwards. The aunts at that time had been plump and tightly corseted and had disposed of nearly as much as he, but had held on to it better.

  ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘With the pink sugar-mints in the shape of strawberries.’

  ‘And the walnut cake with stripes of butter-icing,’ Irmintrude added.

  ‘The chocolate mice,’ her sister recalled.

  ‘That was a great day,’ he said.

  ‘For all of us,’ Emmelina told him.

  He left them, feeling that he had made them happy, but thinking that as soon as he walked out the door they’d forget that they had enjoyed his company, or perhaps forget that he had been there at all. And the next time they saw him, they might spend all the time bickering, or accuse him of saying things he hadn’t said, or mix him up with someone else – his father, or even his grandfather, which they’d been in the habit of doing long before he’d set out on the expedition: so frail was one’s hold on age, memory, character, consciousness, sanity. He was exhausted by the meeting. He wanted to sit down somewhere and cry.

  He put on his warm clothes and tramped out to the boathouse. It was the place he used to go to when he wanted to be alone.

  He was astonished when he let himself in and found that the building had been turned into a one-room house: the kind of bohemian barn full of curtains and paintings and cushions that he had hankered after during his years at the naval academy, when what he’d secretly longed for was escape to France and to the life of an artist in an atelier.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, my. What have we here?’

  Erika stood up from a desk at the far end of the room. She said, ‘Of course, this is all new since the last time you saw it. Come in, Uncle Anders.’

  ‘This is just the way I used to dream about student life.’

  ‘Good. Sit down over here and we’ll make it even more like the real thing: we’ll have a long discussion. I keep looking for people to talk with. They all seem to peter out after five minutes or so.’

  ‘I’m not such a great conversationalist myself.’

  ‘But you have a great story to tell.’

  ‘No. I’ve told Elsie and Lina already – I can’t keep going over it. I don’t care to think about it much, either. I’ve got to start moving forward again. What I’d really be interested in is hearing about you.’

  ‘I want to be a doctor.’

  ‘What kind of doctor?’

  ‘A doctor of thoughts.’

  ‘A difficult profession. Would you use bandages or pills?’

  ‘That’s just my joke. I’m studying pharmacology. I’d like to know all about the vegetation – everything you saw, and the arrow poisons they’re supposed to have over there.’

  ‘I don’t know about the poisons. They exist, all right, but I’ve no idea which plants they’re extracted from. I brought back some drawings. I don’t think they’ll be any use.’

  ‘Of course they will. Why not?’

  ‘Because they’re mine. I don’t even know how to draw very well. I did them to pass the time on the river.’

  ‘When can I see them?’

  ‘Any time. After luncheon.’ He looked around, as if dazzled. ‘Everything’s so bright here.’

  ‘Mamma says it’s gaudy.’

  ‘I like it. I like colours. I used to think I’d had too much of the sun, forever blazing – it never stopped; you thought it was going to burn out your eyes. But in the jungle there isn’t any sun. At least, not in the part we were in. There are different kinds, you know: the rain forests of the East, the African jungles, and so on. Where we were, everything was covered high up. The light doesn’t penetrate very far. It’s grey. Or dark; black-green and purple, blue. It’s almost like being underwater, but hot.’

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘Terrible. It was terrible.’

  She put out a hand and touched his arm, saying, ‘It must have been terrible to lose your friends. I was sorry to hear that.’

  He dropped his eyes. He thought for a moment he was going to faint. He muttered, ‘Thank you, my dear.’

  ‘I should brew you some of my special tea. I’ve got dozens of different kinds. Each one cures some particular ailment.’

  ‘They really work?’

  ‘Oh, yes. All based on old wives’ tales, and they’re all true.’

  ‘That’s sometimes the way with folk remedies. Brown paper and cobwebs still do the job, no matter what the scientific journals say nowadays.’

  ‘But that’s probably because there’s some scientific principle at work that we don’t understand yet.’

  ‘Are you really studying the subject – going to lectures, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But I expect you’ll get married in the end.’

  ‘I expect so. Why not? I can do both.’

  ‘Yes, well that’s the new way now, I understand. Do you have a young man?’

  ‘I’ve got three.’

  ‘One for pleasure, one for duty, and – what else?’

  ‘One for show, of course. We attend all the right dances together. We make a lovely couple. He’s like a plaster mannequin in a tailor’s window.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘F
or duty – that’s easy. The family chose him. And for pleasure, that’s secret.’

  He went for a short walk by the side of the lake. The wind ruffled the waters. It was cold, but soon spring would change everything: there would be swans on the lake, the grass would come back, the leaves. The only trees that didn’t look like skeletons now were the pines. Spring would change the world and money would change it, too. He could buy back the lands, the paintings. He could add to what there had been before. For the first time since his homecoming, he gave a long sigh of relief.

  In the afternoon he went to the top of Sightseer’s Hill, from which he could see the bay, the islands and the town inland, and he made out a trace of smoke coming from the gamekeepers’ cottage. He set out to walk there, but well before he reached the hut, he was challenged by Haken, who didn’t recognize him, nor for an instant did he recognize Haken, who had become an old man. He knew him only from his companion, Erik.

  The three of them walked back to the cottage together. They sat around the tiled stove and drank aquavit.

  Haken said, ‘We’ve had some bad years since you left us.’

  ‘So have I,’ Anders said.

  ‘The fourth winter – was it? No, the sixth. It was so bad, the wolves came back.’

  ‘There haven’t been wolves in these parts in over a hundred years.’

  ‘Well, they were here four years ago. Weren’t they?’ He kicked Erik’s chair.

  ‘That’s right,’ Erik said. He’d been a boy, almost still a child when Anders had gone away. Now he was a surly young man, held down and criticized and taunted by Haken, who used to be a giant of a man but was now ageing fast and losing his strength. Ten years had turned the apprenticeship into a slavery. Now the old man was jealous and the younger one hated him.

  ‘Big, fat wolves,’ Haken said.

  ‘How were they so fat, if it was such a hard winter?’

  ‘Eating people, of course.’ Haken crowed with laughter. He took out a pipe that Anders suddenly remembered. Erik stared into space as if he were trying to deny his presence in the room.

  ‘Looks so dazed like that,’ Haken muttered, ‘I sometimes don’t know if he’s right in the head.’

  Erik paid no attention to him. Anders said, ‘I used to think sometimes about the bear hunts. Do you remember?’

  ‘Oh, those were the times,’ Haken said. ‘I recall your grandfather telling us how he’d been on the bear hunts in Russia and how they’d be all lined up afterwards, the dead bears. They’d get dozens. Really big hunting over there.’

  ‘But I remember it here.’

  ‘A little. Two or three at a time, that was something exciting for us.’

  ‘I thought even one was exciting. I was just a little boy. I was scared of the bear. And I thought the hunters were such romantic characters.’

  ‘Rogues and villains. Paid in drink.’

  ‘I dare say. But they looked like wild men, with their long hair and their headbands. One of them had a bearskin cloak, I remember. And they all had their rifles decorated in special ways. I thought they were like the tales I’d heard about the American Indians out West.’

  ‘Yes, I expect so,’ Haken said. ‘They weren’t much use living in the towns, though. They didn’t know anything but the forests.’

  ‘The dogs were wonderful, too. Grandfather knew every one by name.’

  ‘That’s what counts – the dogs. We’ve still got the men, Master Anders, but not the dogs. They’ve died out of this region. There isn’t a decent strain anywhere near here. You have to go miles to the north for them.’

  ‘My cousin’s got some good hunting dogs,’ Erik said.

  ‘Your cousin couldn’t find his face in a looking-glass,’ Haken told him. Erik’s head moved slightly, but his eyes were still dulled and inattentive. He didn’t glance directly at either of them.

  This is the way it happens, Anders thought. Two people tied together for one reason or another, tied by work or love or blood; they don’t speak what’s in their minds, just pester each other from dawn to dusk until one day the more persecuted one – or perhaps the other one – goes berserk. Maybe soon it will happen to Haken: Erik will just pick something up and hit him or stab him.

  He walked back to the house, breathing deeply, thinking about the spring.

  In the late evening Lina said she wanted to go to bed early. He put down his newspaper and stood up.

  ‘You stay,’ she said. ‘I’m just feeling tired, that’s all.’

  ‘So am I,’ he said. He kissed the others goodnight: Elsie, Erika, Hannah, Astrid; and Louise, who had wept hysterically when she’d heard of Ib’s death, and whose eyes were still red. He would have thought she’d guess after all that time, or be able to imagine it, but apparently the blow had come as if totally unexpected. There was no telling what people kept locked away as hopes or dreams. Sometimes they really thought the impossible was only a matter of faith – that it would happen because they wanted it to, or that they could escape it simply because they hated the idea of its happening.

  He climbed the stairs after his wife, his eyes on the silk hem-flounce of her black dress. They were all still in black after three years. It was the way people lived out in the country.

  He shut the door behind them.

  ‘I really am tired,’ she said.

  ‘We can sit here and talk. You can tell me what’s on your mind. Or we can plan the renovations. And I was just thinking how solemn you all look in your black. You and Elsie need some new clothes, don’t you think? And the girls too, of course.’

  ‘That would be nice.’ She stood rigid against the windows, looking into the green pattern of the drawn curtains. He had to go up to her, take her by the arm and steer her to the couch. She sat down without resisting, but she sat, as she had stood, stiffly.

  He seated himself beside her, leaning lightly against her, and said, ‘Tell me.’

  She unclasped her hands, pressed them together again, and sighed. He thought about how well she knew all the bankers and lawyers in town and how often she’d had to visit them while he was gone. There was no knowing what a woman could get up to if she needed money badly enough.

  ‘Something that happened while I was away?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really. There was enough, but most of it unimportant now. The bank, the lawyers, the formalities when we had to have you all declared dead.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s what didn’t happen. You could say that I’ve been on an expedition, too. Ten years. My youth left me in those ten years.’

  ‘No. You’re still beautiful.’

  ‘I’m no longer young. Physically: my body, my hair, my teeth, my eyes. For ten years I was a woman without a life. Like a fly in a bottle.’

  ‘Oh, Lina.’

  ‘You spoke of isolation. Well, I was waiting so hard for you that I didn’t notice. But now – did you know that when Sophie got married to that man, we all disapproved so much that we couldn’t bear to be near her? We were glad when she moved to her in-laws’ before the wedding. We attended, but we all still disapproved. And when I think of that now – after all, she waited till he was declared dead. Even his parents didn’t hold it against her, but we did. And now that you’re back, I know why we did. Because it was so hard for us to remain, willingly, in isolation: just to wait. Of course there was the threat of public opinion, but that’s always there.’

  ‘Not if you’d remarried. Why didn’t you marry someone else after I was declared dead?’

  ‘Once was enough.’

  ‘Do you wish you’d had a lover?’

  ‘Yes,’ she burst out. ‘I wish I’d had them all the time, for the whole of the ten years. Anyone, no matter who. You know how I’ve loved you all these years, every moment; but I wish that now.’

  ‘Maybe if you’d gone ahead and had the lovers, you’d have felt sorry for it later. Or maybe you’d have stopped loving me and begun to love somebody else instead. That’s how it starts.’

  ‘
And you? Didn’t you love anyone in ten years?’

  ‘Not enough to worry about,’ he said. ‘Hardly enough for me to remember.’

  She relaxed a little. She leaned back and said that soon they had to have a talk about the children. ‘Sometimes they seem complete savages to me. They haven’t been given the training they should have had, they don’t take anything seriously and they don’t have the kind of strength that can keep them steady without supervision. Erika’s different: she’s an unusual girl. But our two, I’m afraid, are two ordinary flighty young things.’

  ‘But rather nice.’

  ‘Oh, enchanting. But utterly lacking in polish.’

  ‘That too can have its charm.’

  ‘No, dear. That must be seen to as soon as possible.’

  She nodded her head once, decisively, as he could remember seeing her mother do when she had made up her mind. Her mother had also used a fan to great effect, tapping it on chair arms to drive home a point, flicking it from side to side when she was being flirtatious.

  ‘This houseful of women,’ she said. ‘We should have had a son.’

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘Think of the burden that would have fallen on him while I was away. I had enough of that myself when I was the only one. I know what it’s like.’

  *

  He went into town to make all the formal declarations. Elsie and Lina went with him. Often they stood or sat so that he was in the middle, they remained for long periods on either side of him. It was like being in the centre of a triptych or having guardian angels the way they were drawn in the old book his grandfather had had of the lives of the saints. He couldn’t have gone through the business alone. He was surprised at how readily they seemed to understand his need to be reticent, to get through all the explanations as quickly as possible, and then to forget.

  The snows melted, the skies took on bluer shades. Plans were made to send the girls to Paris at the beginning of the summer. It wouldn’t be the right time of year to go, but the trip might be the better for that and, as Elsie said, it was in any case a great deal better than not getting to Paris at all. All the women in the household were to go along, except the older servants and the great aunts. And Anders might either accompany his family, wait till they were settled in and then join them later, or stay at home, seeing to the estate. He hadn’t made up his mind yet, but he was already looking forward to being on his own for a while.