Edward is picturing Frejya’s face again now, an inexorable habit of thought that sucks him down into the quicksand. He sees her slow, languid blink, the one that he has noticed Hannah also does. It always made Frejya look composed. It makes Hannah look as if she is doing an impersonation. Now he feels, for the first time, a sense of shame that he robbed his wife of her composure. Ruined her life. He killed her by breaching her heart.
And worst of all, he hadn’t been there to look after her when she needed him, when she was most under stress – stress he caused her by his absence.
A memory of her half-smile comes to him. Their few years together had been happy, especially their time in Oslo where he had been deputy head of mission at the British Embassy and she had been his interpreter.
They had been introduced to each other on his first day, at a small reception held for his benefit. He had just emerged from the Embassy’s secure room, where the ambassador, a thin-lipped veteran of the Cold War, had been giving him a briefing on sexual liaisons. The essence of it was, ‘You’re a young chap and you’re bound to have flings, but remember the golden rules: keep it female, keep it single, keep it white, and keep it in Nato. Any questions?’
When she had introduced herself – ‘Hello. My name is Frejya Ødegaard. Do you speak any Norwegian?’ – her voice had seemed so weightless it was like hearing a warm spring breeze folding over itself to form shapes that resembled words. She held out her hand and, when he took it, it felt as smooth and cold as flour. He was transfixed. Beguiled. He simply stared at her, smiling. When she repeated her question he pulled himself together and told her he had just completed an intensive two-month course in the language. She then asked him something in Norwegian and, when he looked blank, she laughed.
Their first project together had been the shipping of the Christmas tree to Trafalgar Square, the annual gift from the Norwegian people to the British. They had accompanied it to London and taken adjoining rooms at Brown’s Hotel. That had been the first time they kissed. They slept together upon their return to Oslo. Oslo, where they met. Oslo, where they married. Oslo, where they had been happy.
But had their happiness back then been enough to compensate his wife for the years of frayed loneliness that followed his disappearance? The grief when she was told, after ten years of waiting for him to return, that he had been declared officially dead? As he looks at the crate now, he thinks he knows the answer. No.
He realizes he has been so absorbed with self-pity at his own suffering he has rarely thought of hers. In agreeing to go on the UNESCO mission he had been selfish. He knows that now. He could have pleaded other commitments, but he had been too eager to please the head of his department. Too ambitious. His wife had been sacrificed on the altar of his ambition.
She had been so young when they married. Four years his junior. Still a girl. And he had taken her youth and her happiness and left her with nothing but grief and the ache of separation. Shame on him for that.
As he places the plastic folder carefully back in the box he realizes that it also contains his own archives. His A level certificate. His degree. A copy of his diplomatic credentials, stamped with a
Foreign Office watermark. And then something he hasn’t seen before, his death certificate. He stares at it in appalled fascination, holding it by the edge, as if it is doused with poison.
As he has done many times before, he wonders whether he did indeed somehow die in that cave, as Hannah said; that the passage of time since his release has been some telescoped dying moment, a lingering death throe. Or is he now the wandering ghost of a man not yet dead, looking for his home? He is sure that this is where the word ‘haunt’ comes from. To haunt: to search for your home.
Seeing some tissue paper wrapped around something at the side of the box, he reaches for it. There is a small glass stem and a bowl. Removing a layer he sees it is a wine glass. There is a lipstick print on its rim. Hannah must have preserved this. He puts his own lips to the mark and closes his eyes for a couple of seconds before wrapping up the glass again.
Now it reaches him, a thought he has been avoiding. He will never see his darling wife again. Never. Those non-negotiable syllables. She is only a photograph and his only connection with her is to read letters she has written, hold paper she has breathed upon, touch a wine glass that she has touched.
‘We only missed each other by a year,’ he says in a clenched whisper. ‘If only you had waited.’
He runs a bath and lies in it, staring at the tap, listening to the echoey drip-drip.
After half an hour, perhaps an hour, he pulls the plug by wrapping the chain between his toes. He remains in the bath as the water runs out, feeling the gravity return to his body, waiting for his skin to cool.
Can he really go through with this?
He gets dressed, walks stiff-legged back downstairs and looks intently at the letter he has written to Hannah, folded into an envelope yet to be stuck down. He opens it and, as he re-reads, feels ashamed that he hadn’t even had the strength to write it out in longhand. It is a printout from his laptop.
I’m sorry, Han. I know this will be as hard for you to read as it is for me to write. The truth is, I cannot live without Frejya. I’ve tried. I’ve failed. Please forgive me. I love you. Dad
He knows it is too perfunctory, too selfish and cowardly, but what else can he write? How else can he phrase it? He has considered writing ‘your mother’ instead of ‘Frejya’, but the words make him wince. ‘Frejya’ seems less personal. Somehow less hurtful.
He unscrews the top of his fountain pen, writes ‘Hannah’ on the envelope, licks it down and places it in the middle of the sitting-room table. No. He props it up on the chimneypiece instead. No again. It will be better to leave it in Hannah’s bedroom. She will find it when she gets home. Before then he has a few hours alone, enough time for the sedatives to do their work. He has already emptied what he thinks will be a sufficient number of benzodiazepine capsules into an envelope and now he pours himself a large Scotch and adds ice cubes that crackle in the tumbler. The powder turns the liquid cloudy when he stirs it with his finger. After drinking it he should have time to walk to Brompton Cemetery and lie down unseen behind a tombstone and wait, so that Hannah doesn’t have to be the one to find him.
He walks upstairs and stands for a moment in the doorway of her bedroom. The bed is unmade and there are clothes and shoes scattered all around the floor. A bass guitar with a rosewood fingerboard is propped against an amp. There are framed posters of Steve McQueen and a female singer he doesn’t recognize, and on another wall prints of paintings by Lucian Freud and Mark Rothko. On a shelf sit school photographs and badly stacked books, and a doll with one eye missing and biro scrawled over its face. On the desk lies a blister pack of pills, half used, the rips of tinfoil indicating which have been taken. He crosses the room and examines them. The Pill. There is also an opened packet of Tampax, a bottle of shampoo and a laptop with a screensaver running. It is forming patterns that look like the aurora borealis. He sits down and touches the mouse. It is open on Hannah’s Facebook page. There
are photographs of her drinking in bars with friends, at parties dancing, pulling faces and blowing kisses at the camera. She will be OK, he tells himself. She has friends. He closes the laptop with a snick and heads back downstairs.
Feeling a familiar tightness around his heart, the ache that means his thoughts are spiralling back towards Frejya, he collects the tumbler, opens a cupboard door in the sitting room and sits cross-legged again as he stares at the black pewter urn that contains her ashes. His hands reach out for it but hover in mid-air. He clenches them. He can’t bear to feel the coldness of the metal.
Tilting his head, he can see there are fingerprints on it. Hannah must have been holding it. She has told him two or three times that she wants to scatter the ashes off Doyden Point, but every time she raises the subject he changes it. The thought of scattering Frejya anywhere is agonizing.
He downs the adulterated Scotch in four gulps, gags and wipes his mouth.
The heat from his fingertips now creates pools of condensation on the surface of the urn. Once they have shrunk his hand returns and this time he unscrews the lid. The ashes are paler than he imagined. Almost eggshell. He feels a sensation in his stomach of rising and falling, as if driving over a hill at speed, then he dips his fingers in and finds the heavy, fine texture as soft and cool as her hands had been.
He wants to get as close as he can to the ashes, rub them into his hair, consume them. If only he can shed tears into the urn, and have some contact that way. But he has not been able to cry for years.
Feeling hot and dizzy, on the blotchy edges of hallucination, he rubs his temples, smearing them with grey powder. He then puts the urn back in the cupboard.
‘
No!
’
He turns to see Hannah making a hard chopping motion, one hand against the other as she stands in the doorway. He hadn’t heard her come home. Why is she back early? His letter is open in her hand.
‘Don’t you
dare
do that to me! Don’t you
fucking
dare!’ She marches over and slaps his face. When he rolls with the impact, she makes a fist and punches the side of his head. As he cowers, she brings the fist down on his crown. When he looks up, his hands covering his face, he sees her eyes are wild with energy.
‘I screwed up my A levels because …’ She draws a ragged breath. ‘Because of her, and I had to drop out of my foundation course to look after you, and now …’
They hold each other’s gaze as they try to regulate their breathing. Then, as he tries to get to his feet, she launches herself at him, knocking him off balance again. She is lying on top of him now, her fingers circling his wrists and tightening, her hair dangling in his face. ‘I can’t,’ she says breathlessly. ‘I can’t lose you again.’
After half a minute she loosens her grip and, turning her head, raises his wrist to her lips. ‘I can help you,’ she says in a whisper. ‘I can make you happy.’ She raises his other wrist and kisses that too. ‘I will do whatever it takes to make you happy again.’ She lets go of his hands and sits up, her knees astride his waist. ‘I can make you happy like she made you happy.’
PART THREE
I
Alsace-Lorraine. Summer,1941
FOR A FEW NUMB SECONDS, AS THE WHISTLE PENETRATES HIS SLEEP
, Anselm is confused. He blinks repeatedly. Where is he? Whose stinking feet are these in his face? Why can he smell shit?
It is the same every morning.
Reveille comes at exactly 4.30. At least he thinks it does. He has a vague memory of being told once that reveille came at exactly 4.30, but perhaps he dreamed it. Not that he has dreams any more. His sleep is too deep for that, the dreamless sleep of the exhausted, of the still-breathing dead, of the dead who do not know they are dead.
A second whistle slashes through the nothingness like a machete through powdery snow and the frantic activity begins: the vibrating of the hut as the men who are half-men half-ghosts make their beds, shake out their blankets, raise clouds of fetid dust. Anselm has to wait for the occupants of the two beds that lead to the aisle to move first before he can get out. The narrow wooden bunks have three tiers and are pushed tightly together. He sleeps on a middle bunk, three in. Shares it with a Frenchman whose name he does not know. Nor does he know what age the man is – his hair is white and thin and he could be twice as old as Anselm. All he knows is that they sleep head to feet, and the Frenchman’s feet
smell ripe. Under the same blanket, the strangers exchange their flatulence and their sweat; the flat and sour odours of their bodies. Bony hips meet in the middle and fight for space, applying a progressive pressure at the base of the spine.
Anselm gathers his bundle: a bowl and clogs wrapped in his jacket. He uses this as a pillow, for fear the possessions will otherwise be stolen in his sleep. After performing his ablutions, he endures the agony of putting his sore feet into the clogs. While still only half dressed, he limps outside into the dirty dawn and, as he joins the procession of the damned, breaks into a run. Some urinate as they move, to save time, because time can be a matter of life and death here. To be late means a beating, and the more beatings you receive the more likely you are to die. Each beating makes you slower, which makes you more likely to receive another beating.
There has been rain in the night and the dust has turned to orange mud. Anselm stands with shoulders dropped, his hands dangling by his side, his neck rigid. He is shivering. The straw he has used to pad out his jacket is no protection from the cold this morning. The rags he has wrapped around his feet are not preventing them from aching either. They are too calloused, too raw, too swollen from chafing. He is as rotten as the rags and, with his emaciated limbs and distended belly he looks like he belongs to another species, something inhuman, something bestial.
Under a sky pregnant with rain, he checks his wide collar is not raised and that his buttons – big ones, like a child’s – are properly done up. There must be five. Even one less will mean a beating. And now the
Appell
, roll call, begins. It will last for an hour, an hour of standing to attention that will seem like a day. Anselm has no watch. It was taken from him when he arrived and, with it, his last vestige of human identity. For the first few days he still looked at his bare wrist to check the time. Phantom watch. Phantom time.
The guards, he has worked out, belong to the Totenkopf or Death’s Head division of the SS. The rankers wear a skull insignia on their caps, jackets and olive-green uniforms. The officers tend to
wear the more traditional black uniforms of the SS: the long leather overcoats in winter, the black jodhpurs, the jackboots. They, too, have been stripped of their identity. It may explain why they are so efficient in the way they strip the prisoners of theirs.