Death in a Cold Climate (2 page)

‘Oh. Do you want to come in?'

‘Just for a moment,' he said diffidently.

He shook the light dusting of snow off his overcoat, and took off his shoes by the front door. He caught his wife looking at his stockinged feet, and remembered that she always did like guests to bring slippers with them. He weathered the excited rush of his little girls and bore them upstairs to the living-room, his wife following behind.

The house was as it always had been: every little piece of brass was shining, every surface immaculately dusted, the carpet clean, glossy, its pile unnaturally erect. Everything was as usual, but Bjørn Korvald, perhaps oversensitive, thought he detected now in his wife's cleanliness a note of desperation, of fanaticism. Was it boredom, was it a visible piece of bravado, was she defiantly asserting that she was not abandoning her standards, was it done especially in anticipation of his visit, to remind him that she had always made him a very good wife?

He wished he could care. Sidsel had seated herself neatly in the other armchair, and when the little girls had borne off their parcels to their bedroom, to be gazed at and gloated over as part of their pile of bright paper packages, Bjørn took up the last parcel and (feeling the deadly fungus of hypocrisy clutching round his heart) said: ‘For you.'

‘Oh. Thank you very much,' she said, glancing at it, and putting it neatly on the side table. It was, Bjørn thought, about as much as it deserved.

‘Are you managing all right?' he asked.

‘Oh yes, perfectly well, thank you,' she said, with an impersonal polite smile, as if he were a welfare visitor.

‘Is there anything I can do for you before Christmas?' he asked, battering against her blandness without quite knowing why. ‘Anything you want fetched, any wood chopped?'

‘No, I don't think so,' she said, as before.

‘Of course, I could come round on Christmas Eve . . . '
he said, his heart in his mouth in case she accepted.

‘No,' she said calmly. ‘It would only disturb the children. They're just getting used to the situation. It will be better for you to have them on Boxing Day, as we arranged.'

He said to himself: she hopes I will be lonely. ‘Well, if you're sure you can cope–' he said.

‘Oh yes, I can manage quite well.' Her blonde, china impassivity never faltered, and her mouth was firmly set in an expression of sweet resignation. Her husband edged himself forward in his chair.

‘Have you thought of taking a part-time job?' he asked. He had not intended to ask it–it was one of those things that flash into the mind and are out before they can be considered.

‘Certainly not,' said his wife, her tone immediately edgy with opposition. ‘I suppose you're thinking of the money. You forget that Karen isn't five yet. I've never had any time for these women who go out and leave their children all day with just anyone. My business is here, making a home for them.' She looked him coldly in the eye. ‘Especially now,' she added.

‘Of course, if you feel like that about it . . . It wasn't the money–I thought you might find time hanging heavy. Thought you might be better for an outside interest.'

She looked at him with the old, painful bewilderment on her face, genuinely not understanding. ‘But I have the home,' she said. Suddenly he saw in her left cheek that involuntary nerve twitching, as it had in the few crises of their marriage. It gave her a cruelly lop-sided look. ‘I have friends,' she said; the pitch of her voice suggested carefully controlled hysteria. ‘I'm not lonely. I'm as free as you are, remember.'

But Bjørn Korvald knew she was desperately lonely. Had she had a man round, invited him round, scared him
off, perhaps, by that strange new desperation? The thought did nothing to him, but he thought it was time to go, before antipathy reverted to pity. Luckily his wife made the move.

‘I think you'd better go now,' she said, seeming unhappy that the beautiful china mask had slipped a fraction.

‘Yes. It is getting on. Perhaps if I can tiptoe out I needn't disturb the children.' He saw his wife looking down at his stockinged feet, as if he could do nothing else. She was always wonderfully good at making one apologetic. He slipped on his overcoat and shoes, and his wife opened the door for him. Standing there in the doorway, having regained all her blonde impersonality, she had as much individuality for him as an air hostess on a short-hop flight, and he had as much difficulty as any passenger in framing words of goodbye.

‘Well–Happy Christmas,' he said.

Sidsel Korvald smiled, a yuletide frosting over of the face, and closed the door. As he walked down the path, meticulously cleared of snow, a great wave of relief that the visit was over swept through him. He decided to celebrate by catching the bus into town and going to the Foreigners' Club.

• • •

Tromsø, properly considered, is the Norwegian equivalent of an outback town. To the east stretch the great open spaces of Finnmark, and the Russian border–the country of Lapps, mosquitoes, and the hardier breed of tourist. To the north, west and south are fjord and islands and fishing grounds. It is the gateway to the Arctic, but that is not a portal many have cared to go through. Its history is of fishing and whaling and subsistence agriculture, and it is only in the last decades that it has expanded, with pockets of industry, a university, and the threat of oil. Its expansion
has made it a city of exiles, vaguely nostalgic for the sun of East Norway, or the rain of Bergen. It has also acquired a rich sprinkling of foreigners.

The Foreigners' Club as such met once a month, for talks and musical evenings and little plays. The lonelier foreigners came there to meet, drink beer and coffee, and talk over with the others the iniquities of the Norwegian immigration laws and all the things one couldn't buy in Tromsø. But the club proper had an illegitimate offspring which met informally most evenings in the Cardinal's Hat, a Dickensian, cellar-like restaurant, where members ate snacks, drank beer and talked English, in a corner which by tradition had come to be reserved for them. Here the foreigners were often joined by Norwegians who liked to practise their English, or who had nostalgic memories from the war. Bjørn Korvald, who worked with a shipping company that ran one of the daily coastal steamers up the west coast of Norway, had plenty to do with tourists in the summer, and liked to stop himself from getting rusty in winter. An occasional visit to the Cardinal's Hat had become an agreeable variation on the pleasures of newly-won solitude.

Tonight the crop of English speakers was not very promising. Coming with his beer and hamburger over to the dark, wood-walled corner, with cushioned benches round the wall and two or three tables, he found only four people, and these included two young Americans deep in the sort of conversation only young Americans can ever get into.

‘I have this problem relating to people,' said the girl–shabbily dressed as if by conviction, with a thin, peaky, worried face and hair all anyhow–desperately earnest and (Bjørn suspected) hideously boring. She paused to throw a ‘Hi!' in his direction, as if marking him down for future use, and then went back to her subject, speaking
low and devoutly, as if at confession. ‘I do think the socialization aspect is vital, don't you, Steve?'

‘Right,' said Steve, without conviction. He was a boy in his early twenties, beanpole-thin, and gazing dejectedly down the expanse of dirty tee-shirt covering his upper half.

‘I just flunk out, somehow. I just never make the grade. I mean–well, how do I affect you? What sort of person do I strike you as, frankly, Steve?'

‘Sort of average.'

‘Yeah, well, you see. It's always like that. I don't reciprocate easily. I have such a restricted social set-up. I try to get in contact with people, and I just bomb . . . '

The possibilities for breast-beating on that topic seemed endless and infinitely dreary, and Bjørn, sinking down on to the bench by the girl, turned to his other neighbours.

Helge Ottesen was a local businessman, with a men's outfitters just off the main street. He was small, plump, balding, genial, hand-rubbing, and moderately trustworthy. His wife Gladys, acquired from Essex during the war, was matronly, jolly, and had a sort of English High-Street smartness about her, which showed she had kept contact with home. Bjørn knew the pair well. Helge had gone into local politics a few years ago, and now–in his fifties–was a leading light of the Tromsø Conservative Party, and constantly active to keep that light shining bright. Gladys revelled in the activity, and strove with all her jovial energy to play the part of Mary Ann to his Disraeli.

‘Nice to see you, Bjørn,' said Helge, speaking in English, as was the custom of the place. ‘How are you keeping? What have you been doing with yourself?' His bald head glistened reflections from the wall lamp, and his teeth flashed tradesman's sincerity.

‘Well, actually, I've just been taking Christmas presents round to the family,' said Bjørn Korvald. Helge Ottesen's face collapsed in several directions. He was a man who liked situations where one could be jolly, optimistic and encouraging, and he shunned death, disease and financial collapse as things unsuited to his personal philosophy of life. Separation was one of those nastily ambiguous things that upset him most: did one commiserate, or did one dig roguishly in the ribs? Anyway, Sidsel Korvald's father was a good customer of his. He tried to put his face into neutral.

‘It's awful for the kiddies,' said his wife comfortably. ‘But there, it might be worse if you stayed together, that's what I always say. How's the tourist trade?'

Helge Ottesen brightened up immediately. His wife was a jewel like that, and always knew how to steer the conversation round from the emotional uncertainties that he hated to subjects where his own particular brand of bonhomie could operate.

‘Yes–how about it?' he said. ‘I hear it's likely to be a good year, eh?'

‘I expect so,' said Bjørn. ‘Bookings are very good. Of course they always are. But the season seems to be lengthening. The boats are filling up from Easter on, and the bookings go on into late September. It makes up for the off-season.'

‘Yes, pity about the off-season,' said Helge, consoling himself with a sip of whisky. ‘Nothing much came of the attempt to attract a Christmas trade, did it?'

‘You mean “Spend Christmas in the Land of the Midnight Sun”? No. It wasn't really honest, and most people saw through it too easily.'

‘Pity, that. I'd have thought Americans might have gone for it.'

‘Once perhaps. That sort of trade's no good.'

Helge Ottesen looked uncertain again. ‘Anyway, as businessmen, we've got to admit that things aren't all that bad. Lots more trade than there was ten years ago, and if the oil comes, things will get better and better.'

‘In one way, perhaps,' said Bjørn dubiously.

Helge Ottesen did not like doubt to be cast on the great god oil, and became almost polemical. ‘You mark my words,' he said. ‘In spite of what people say, it'll transform the whole of North Norway!'

‘That is precisely what people do say,' said Bjørn. ‘That's what they're afraid of.'

‘That's just the carpers, the professional troublemakers. They said the same about the university, but it's done wonders for this town. The people there have money to spend.' He looked at the scraggy American boy with the dirty sweat-shirt and the jeans genuinely rather than artificially aged. ‘Not that they always do spend it,' he added sadly.

The exploration of personality problems at the next table was still in full swing, and involuntarily they paused to listen.

‘Some people like they just walk into a room and pow! everyone smiles, they feel better, they really do. When I go in, they just kinda wilt. Know what I mean, Steve?'

‘Errgh.'

‘Somehow I'm just not self-actualized. I mean, what do people say about me? What kind of social reciprocation do you think I set up?'

‘You piss people off,' said Steve. He looked up momentarily from his gloomy contemplation of his beer, as if he half hoped the girl would burst into tears and dash out into the night. But in fact there was an expression on her face of the deepest masochistic satisfaction.

‘Exactly,' she said. ‘Now I need to analyse those reactions, you see, and . . . '

Helge Ottesen had listened to this conversation as if he could not believe his ears. He shook his head, and looked uncertainly from Bjørn to his wife and back again. ‘I don't think I understand young people any more,' he whispered plaintively.

‘They're not all like that,' said his wife comfortably, sucking the lemon from her drink. ‘You meet lots of nice young people around.'

‘That's true,' said her husband, brightening. ‘You meet lots at the Club, and we've had some of them home, haven't we, Gladys? That's where the Club is so useful.' Helge Ottesen was a vice-president of the Foreigners' Club, and was used to defending it to his fellow townsmen who didn't particularly like the influx from abroad or want them to feel at home in Tromsø. ‘We bring them together, and make sure they're welcome. Then there's this place, too.'

‘That's right,' said his wife. ‘There was that English boy came in here the other night–two or three nights ago. Quite by accident, and heard us talking English. He seemed a nice type.'

‘That's right,' said her husband, subsiding into contentment. ‘He was a pleasant chap, fitted in very nicely. I think he enjoyed himself. He didn't say what he was doing here, but at least Tromsø gave him a great welcome.'

He smiled happily into his glass at the thought of Tromsø's great welcome.

On January 20 the sky over Tromsø was clear at midday, and the sun showed gloriously but briefly on the horizon and splashed orange gold over the fjord. All over town little ladies had coffee with each other in celebration, and men in shops and offices who had missed it because they forgot to look up from their desks nevertheless said that they had seen it, and how nice it was to have it back. Life, everybody felt, was returning.