The Quarry (23 page)

After almost an hour, the door opened and Marika and her new husband came in. Georg was tanned and was wearing a dark suit, just as he had been on the two previous occasions when Per had met him.

‘We’ve come to see the doctor,’ said Marika.

Per didn’t recognize the doctor who was on duty this evening. His name was Stenhammar and he was younger than Nilla’s previous doctor, but his expression was serious as he took them into his office and sat down at the desk.

‘Well, I have good news and bad news.’

Nobody said anything, so the doctor went on: ‘The good news is that we’ve managed to bring down her temperature; Pernilla will be coming back from intensive care shortly.’

‘Can we take her home this evening?’ said Marika, in spite of the fact that this was Per’s weekend.

Dr Stenhammar shook his head. ‘That’s the bad news,’ he said. ‘Pernilla won’t be coming home … she needs to stay here.’

‘How long for?’ asked Marika.

The doctor didn’t speak for a few seconds. Then he began to elaborate at length on the thorough examination they had done, on Nilla’s test results, and on what they had found. He talked and talked, and he kept using long words.

‘Epithelioid … what was it again?’ said Per.

‘The usual abbreviation is EHE,’ said Dr Stenhammar, ‘and it’s very rare, an extremely uncommon type of cancer that usually affects the soft tissues. I know it’s no consolation to you, but as a doctor I—’

‘What does this mean for Nilla?’ Marika interrupted.

The doctor started to speak again. Afterwards Per could remember only two words:
malignant tumour
.

‘… so it’s best if she stays here until the surgery,’ said Stenhammar, linking his hands on the desk.

Surgery
. Per could feel the floor swaying beneath his feet.

‘So you’re going to operate?’

The doctor nodded. ‘We have to, radiotherapy alone won’t be enough, unfortunately … We’re on the way to a vital indication.’

Per didn’t ask what the final words meant, but they didn’t sound good.

‘When?’ Marika asked quietly.

‘Soon, very soon.’ The doctor paused. ‘And I’m afraid it’s not a straightforward operation.’

‘What are the odds on her recovery?’ asked Per. A terrible question – he wanted to take it back. But Dr Stenhammar merely shook his head.

‘We don’t bet in here.’

They walked out into the corridor in silence. Georg went to get some coffee. Per had nothing to say to his ex-wife, but Marika suddenly looked around.

‘Where’s Jesper?’

‘Back at the cottage.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, my father’s with him.’

‘Jerry?’

Marika had raised her voice in the empty corridor. Per lowered his: ‘Gerhard, yes. He came to us a few days ago …’

‘Why?’

‘He’s sick,’ said Per. ‘He’s had a—’

‘He always has been, hasn’t he?’

‘… and he needed some help,’ Per went on. ‘But I’ll be taking him home soon.’

‘Well, don’t bring him here,’ Marika snapped. ‘I don’t want to risk meeting that dirty old sod ever again.’

‘Dirty old sod? Well, he might be,’ Per said quietly, ‘but as far as I recall you were very curious about Jerry and his activities when we met. You thought it was exciting, or so you said.’

‘I thought
you
were exciting at the time,’ said Marika. ‘I soon got over that as well.’

‘Good,’ said Per. ‘That’s one problem less.’

‘It’s not me who has a problem with you, Per. It’s you who has a problem with
me
.’

He took a deep breath. ‘I’m just going to say goodbye to Nilla.’

Marika stayed in the corridor while Per went in to see Nilla before setting off for home. The room was quiet. She was lying in bed beneath a white sheet, and of course the drip was back in her arm. He bent down and pressed his cheek against hers. ‘Hello, you.’

‘Hi.’

She was pale now, her chest trembling with shallow breaths.

‘How are you doing? How do your lungs feel?’

‘Not too bad …’

‘You’re looking good.’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t find my black stone, Dad.’

‘What black stone?’

‘My piece of lava from Iceland … Mum bought it, it’s my lucky stone. It was in my room. I thought I put it in my pocket, but it’s not there now.’

Per remembered; it was a smooth, coal-black stone, and Nilla had let him hold it; it fitted perfectly into his palm.

‘I’m sure it’s in the house somewhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll find it.’

When he got back to the cottage half an hour later, Jerry and Jesper had cleared away the food and removed the stained cloth. But the dishes were piled up in the kitchen, and Per had to deal with them.

His father and son were sitting on the sofa in the living room watching some American sitcom. Jerry seemed captivated, but Jesper turned his head as his father walked in.

‘How did it go, Dad?’

Per rubbed his eyes. ‘Well, Nilla has to stay in Kalmar tonight, but she’s feeling better now.’

Jesper nodded, and turned his attention back to the TV.

Later
, thought Per.
I’ll tell him about the tumour later
.

He turned away.

‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Jesper.

‘I’m going to look for a stone, a lucky stone.’

Then he remembered something, and turned back. ‘By the way, what was it you found, Jesper? A piece of bone?’

‘Mmm. It’s in my room, on the bookshelf.’

Per went into his son’s room. He tried to ignore the mess, but opened the window to let a bit of air in. Then he looked at the bookshelf.

The piece of bone lying there amongst Jesper’s books and games was very small, just four or five centimetres long. It was greyish-white and felt rough to the touch, as if it had been lying out in the open for many years and had become dry and fragile.

And Per could see that Jesper and Nilla were right; the piece of bone did actually resemble a broken-off human finger.

As their parents were dead and they had no children together, Max and Vendela would be celebrating Easter alone in their new summer home. It didn’t really matter, Vendela felt. Easter wasn’t that important.

Her grown-up daughter Caroline had phoned from Dubai to wish them Happy Easter, but she wouldn’t be home until midsummer. Max had three children with his first wife, but his daughter had fallen out with him after Max had made some comments about her mother a couple of years earlier. Then she had got her two brothers on her side, so at the moment none of them were in touch with their father.

And of course the children were particularly poisonous towards Vendela as their stepmother, she knew that. Things had always been the same.

She had brought some birch twigs from the old farm, and although they triggered her allergy she took them into the house to use as her Easter decoration. Nothing more was needed to create a festive atmosphere.

Then it was time for dinner. Vendela was tired of cooking – both the fridge and the freezer were full of leftovers from the party – but she still had to come up with some kind of celebratory Easter meal. Some eggs, some herring and potatoes, a little wine. A Bordeaux – she had already opened the bottle and poured herself a glass.

The door of Max’s study was closed; he had been sitting at his thinking desk all day, and didn’t wish to be disturbed. He was charging his batteries before a small book tour which he was due to undertake after Easter, and the first hundred pages of proofs for
Good Food to the Max
had just arrived from his publisher. Yesterday they had sent the final recipes to the editor, so the project was almost finished. Sooner or later Max would no doubt emerge and ask her to proofread the pages.

The fan was whirring away as the eggs and potatoes simmered on the hob. Vendela thought about Max’s children; they hadn’t even called to wish him Happy Easter.

The kitchen timer started buzzing behind her; the eggs were done. She lifted the bubbling pan off the hob and ran cold water into it.

There were twelve hard-boiled eggs, but Vendela wouldn’t be eating any of them. She had won the struggle against hunger since she came to the island, and as long as she boiled enough eggs, Max wouldn’t be able to keep track of whether she’d eaten any or not.

Vendela saw a small movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned her head. ‘Hello Ally,’ she said.

Aloysius had come into the kitchen – without bumping into the door frame with his nose, as he often did. He shuffled across the floor towards her, slowly but in a straight line.

‘How’s my boy?’ said Vendela, smiling at him. ‘Happy Easter, little one.’

The poodle sat down slowly, his stiff front leg extended to the side.

‘There’ll be something nice for you tonight – you’ll like that, won’t you?’

The dog licked his nose and looked over at Vendela.

It was unbelievable, but Aloysius actually seemed to be
looking
at her. His gaze seemed to be focused, he could see it was her. She stepped quickly to one side, and watched his eyes follow the movement.

Vendela dropped her pen and whirled around. She rushed over to Max’s thinking room, ignoring the fact that the door was still closed.

‘Max, his eyes are better!’ she shouted, hammering on the door. ‘Ally’s eyes are better, Max, come out and see!’

The grandchildren had spent the whole of Easter Saturday painting hard-boiled eggs. There were yellow eggs with blue stripes and red eggs with green spots – but most of them had so many layers of colour they had ended up black.

Gerlof ate a couple with plenty of salt and fish roe, but he preferred spiced herring with potatoes and crispbread. He had a couple of glasses of schnapps too, flavoured with wormwood picked down by the shore, and noticed that no one else at the table was drinking spirits. Good. (From time to time over the years he had been worried about his younger daughter Julia, but this evening she had only milk in her glass.)

After the eggs and the schnapps Gerlof felt so good that he started talking about how miserable life on the island had been back in the old days.

‘
Saturday slops
, do you know what that was?’

The grandchildren shook their heads.

‘It was a very special dish,’ said Gerlof. ‘The recipe was simple … you just collected a whole week’s worth of leftovers in a wooden bowl, then you put plenty of salt in, boiled the whole thing up in a pan and ate it. The whole family!’

Julia shook her head. ‘You’ve never eaten Saturday slops, Dad. You weren’t that poor!’

He frowned at her. ‘I’m talking about my grandfather, he used to have it when he was little. Things were bad enough when I was little, mind you … We had no running water, we had to pump the water into a bucket out in the yard.’

‘I remember that pump,’ said Lena. ‘It was still there in the sixties … and I thought the water from the well tasted better than tap water, anyway.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Gerlof, ‘but sometimes it was all brown, and you had to pump until it ran clear again. And of course we didn’t have a proper toilet, just the outhouse with a big bucket that had to be emptied into a hole when it was full. It all splashed up your legs if you weren’t careful, and if you slipped you got—’

Lena put down her fork. ‘We are still eating, Dad.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Gerlof, winking at the grandchildren. ‘But in the spring it was the opposite way round, we had far too much water. Sometimes there would be great big lakes out on the alvar … I can remember swimming in them now and again. And once my brother Ragnar and I found an old tin bath; we made a sail from a sheet and launched it in the spring floods.’ He laughed. ‘It got up such a good speed that it capsized – it was my first shipwreck!’

‘Were there cars then?’ asked one of the children.

‘Yes,’ said Gerlof, ‘there have been cars as long as I remember. They came to the island quite early on, long before electricity. There were cars up here before the First World War, but some farms didn’t get electricity until the forties. And some people didn’t want it – it cost too much. They carried on using paraffin lamps as long as they could.’

‘At least you didn’t have any power cuts if you were using paraffin lamps,’ said Julia.

‘Yes, and with the electricity everybody was terrified whenever we had a thunderstorm. People would go into each other’s houses, or go and sit in the car until it was over … We just weren’t used to electricity.’

When almost all the eggs had been eaten, the grandchildren left the table. It was much quieter, and Gerlof stayed there with his daughters.

He had something to tell them. Something that felt like a confession. ‘I’ve started reading your mother’s diaries.’

‘They’re in the attic, aren’t they?’ said Julia.

‘No, they were at the back of a cupboard. Do you want to read them too?’