The Shelter of Neighbours (8 page)

Now all those people have died, too. The place is full of ghosts. Walking around, Olivia sees dead people regularly – that is, she sees someone and thinks she knows them, then, with a start, remembers that they're gone. But Alex has survived, to write the articles for the historical journal, to preach his friendly, wise sermons on Sundays to the congregation of a dozen (on good days). He does this even though his own belief has been veering towards atheism for many years.

‘Two things are good for man,' Alex says.

Olivia knows what he is going to say. He knows reams of poetry off by heart, is always quoting something. She waits. But he doesn't finish the line. Instead, he sighs again deeply. Olivia finishes it for him. ‘The heat of the sun, and the fire on the hearth.' Those are the two things that are good for man, according to an Icelandic poet, writing in the Middle Ages. She says the lines, and squeezes Alex's hand, and thinks it's just a stove, for God's sake. But she doesn't say that.

They stand and look at their small field, and at the bungalows below, and the foaming ocean. It is the middle of July. You have to keep reminding yourself of that. There is still some hope that some sort of a summer will come. Winter is a long way off.

It is the last weekend before the schools reopen. Let's call it the feast of the First Harvest. Everyone is celebrating, with wine and schnapps and shellfish, with paper hats and Chinese lanterns. But what good is any of that if you have no children? And no friends.

‘We should have thrown a party,' Sara says to Thomas, her partner. Thomas smiles and says cheerfully, ‘We are throwing a party. At each other.' He picks up his wine glass and pretends to toss it to Sara. She raises hers and says, ‘Cheers', not for the first time this evening.

Thomas is wearing a baggy yellow T-shirt printed with a photograph of a moose and the words ‘Cheer up! Everything will be
ok
!' A few years ago the company that insures his car gave their customers badges and T-shirts and caps decorated with this silly mantra. Thomas wears the T-shirt whenever he's in festive mood, and at many other times as well.

‘Two's company!' He pats Sara on the bottom. He has hung Chinese lanterns on the porch and has put on an Abba
cd
in the living room. He forgot to the get paper hats.

‘Yes,' Sara says wanly. Sometimes she finds Thomas's proverbs and maxims comforting, wise and profound. At other times, they annoy her to death with their unbelievable predictability. Thomas is not unaware of the range of her reactions but he loves his clichés far too much to abandon even a single one. On the contrary, he is constantly adding to his collection, savouring particularly trite specimens.

He squeezes her arm and chuckles.

She pushes his hand away. ‘I'm going for a swim,' she says.

‘What, now?' Thomas is taken aback. It's almost nine o'clock and he's just about to cook the crayfish.

‘Just a quick dip.' Sara is pleased. It's not easy to dent Thomas's complacency. ‘My last evening here!'

She slips down the path to the lake before he can stop her. Not that he would. Not that he would dream of it. He looks after her for a few seconds, bemused and as hurt as he ever can be, and then he finishes setting the table for dinner.

The mosquitoes bite. They are mustered in smudged clouds over the reeds, ready to stab as soon as she approaches the water's edge. But Sara takes off her old robe, hangs it on its hook at the edge of the dock, and lets them do their worst. She's well sprayed with insect repellent, so that only the bravest, most relentless, monsters succeed in puncturing her skin. Still, they hover around her, as always at this time of evening, making her itchy, until she slides from the wooden steps into the soft, cold water and swims away from the shore.

She swims out into the lake, keeping her head above the water so that she does not lose a second of the sunset – the sky behind the dark fringe of trees on the western shore is a lovely orangey colour. It looks edible, like a dark chocolate filled with sweet cream. She'd love to eat it or grasp it or somehow hold onto it, but as she swims towards it the colour melts away and vanishes much faster than you'd think it could.

The lamps are already lit in some of the lakeside cottages, and on many docks summer torches flicker. She can hear feathery music floating across the water from someone's garden, its source sheltered by reeds, by trees. All around the lake, the parties are starting.

Her movements are lazy as the evening, and the water laps against her skin. A small fish jumps, plopping close to her with a quick, quiet flip, a surprisingly comforting sound. She feels a kinship with the fish; she feels a kinship with the water itself, and with the colours and the rhythms and the sounds of the evening. Only when the sun vanishes behind the black spiky rim of the forest, and the moon – full – takes its place in the dark blue sky, does she turn and swim back to the shore, faster than she had swum out.

Their torch is lit on the porch when she returns, and she can see candles flickering on the table there. The flames keep the mosquitoes at bay.

‘We can eat whenever you're ready,' Thomas says, as she passes into the house, wrapped tightly in her robe. He is happy again and has decided to forgive and forget, as usual. It's going to be
ok
.

‘I won't be a minute.' Sara pats his head. Swimming always lifts her spirits and she knows he likes having his hair ruffled.

She flip-flops into the bedroom and pulls on loose cotton trousers and a muslin shirt with long sleeves. Her wet hair she pulls out of its band and brushes quickly, then ties back up again, in a tight, mean little black knot on top of her head. In the small mirror she looks worn and old, although her body feels rejuvenated after the swim. How she feels is not necessarily how she looks any more.

They sit on the wooden porch, overlooking the unkempt garden and the long, narrow strip of white flowers and long grass and reeds that stretches down to the lake. Ten o'clock and it is quite dark, just the flicker of lights on the docks and the ripple of moonlight on the black water relieve the heavy velvet autumn dark. The music is louder now, and occasional bars of laughter come floating across the lake, like silver canoes of joy.

But the bulging red eyes of the crayfish stare accusingly at her over the edge of the white dish. She eats them purposefully. Little Turkish crayfish, frozen until an hour ago, they consist mainly of shell; you have to bulk out the fish with bread and butter and salad, and wash it down with plenty of white wine, to make a meal of it. Their music – it's still Abba, ‘Dancing Queen' – plays at a low volume in the background. The mosquitoes buzz around but don't descend onto the table; the Chinese lanterns grin, yellow and blue and red, from above.

Sara eats and drinks, and thinks that although the food is good and the setting lovely, although she likes sitting here with Thomas, she feels she would just as soon be reading, or watching television, as being here, pretending to have a party. And she knows he feels exactly the same. But it's the harvest festival and they are obliged to celebrate it just like everyone else. As the level of the wine decreases, their mood lifts; they feel better, they talk more. By the time they have drunk two bottles and the moon has moved around to the side of the house, they feel they really have had a party, as good a party as anyone could wish for. Then they tumble happily into their separate beds.

Thomas is a writer; every Christmas, without fail, a new work appears and sells about five thousand copies, after which it disappears without trace. In addition to the royalties, he gets a grant from the Writers' Union, which supplements his income, and as a result, he is reasonably well-off. How he can find topics for so many books – most of them novels – is a mystery to Sara, since he has difficulty in coming up with new topics of conversation, at least with her. They have been together for ten years and have grown so alike that people sometimes ask if they are brother and sister.

Sara works in a library. She has been working in a library, the same library, for fifteen years, ever since she arrived in this country. Initially, the work was very challenging: she had to master the language, and she had to take a course at the university, for two years, which she managed to do while working thirty hours a week in a supermarket, stacking shelves. The transition from supermarket to library was gratifying, was wonderful, when it came. She does not stack shelves in the library. She doesn't even catalogue books; that's all done centrally these days. Her days are spent talking to the customers, the readers, about books, and other things. Many of the readers are old people who want to tell her about their grown-up children or their illnesses, to hint at the condition of their routine bodily functions or to discuss their plans for the important calendar festivals, such as Christmas or Midsummer or the Harvest Moon.

Sara's library encourages this sort of thing. It is furnished with sofas and easy chairs, and a pot of coffee is always at the ready, so some old folks spend a good part of their day with her, drinking coffee and chatting. Her function is as much social worker as librarian. But there is, of course, more to it than that. She checks books in and out; she decides what to display on the ‘New Books' rack; and she organises things: lectures, book clubs, storytelling sessions. Readings by popular writers – or not so popular writers who happen to be local.

It was in this way that she met Thomas, who came to read from his latest novel before Christmas one year. Only about five people came to the reading. So afterwards, Sara treated him to a glass of sherry and home-made marzipan biscuits, even though she would have preferred to go home. He talked to her about his life. He had just come back to town from his summer cottage on the lake, where he had been the only resident at this time of year. The lake was frozen, the garden snowed up, and the house heated by a huge log fire.

This all sounded very romantic to Sara. She pictured sitting by the fire, with the flames flickering like friends and casting interesting shadows on the walls. In her picture, she was reading and listening to classical music. There were candles, and mulled wine, and Christmas was in the air. Thomas was not actually in this scene but, then, she hardly knew him at the time.

A week after the reading fiasco, he telephoned her, and they ended up spending Christmas Eve together. Sara could not return to her own family, since they did not celebrate this feast, and she had no plans of her own. Neither had Thomas. The reason was, he had been divorced less than a year – news that surprised Sara, who could not picture him married. His parents were dead and he did not feel like inflicting himself on his sister and her family, just because he no longer had a wife (the sister had invited him).

He treated Sara to pickled herring and meatballs and cold beer, in his flat, which was full of books and smelt musty. No decorations. Not a tree, or even a card. No fire. But one large window overlooked the river. The trees on its banks were festooned with lights, which glittered like stars against the black sky. Sara munched her meatballs and thought of the cottage by the lake.

The relationship prospered. Now she and Thomas have a house on the outskirts of the town, perched on a rock among pine trees, and a view of a lake from the kitchen window: this country is full of lakes. You can't get away from them. Everywhere you go, there is a lake, glittering like a knowing eye at you from among the rocks and the dark trees.

She still works in the library, spending much of her time there, while Thomas sits in his own library at home, typing up his novels.

Sara feels her heart sink when she drives out of the cottage garden and honks goodbye to Thomas, who stands beside the flagpole, flapping a big white handkerchief in big childish waves. Now that she is leaving, a gush of love overwhelms her. Both he and his cottage, which is ramshackle, like an abandoned magpie nest in its untidy cluster of trees, grab at her heart. Sadly, she makes her way along the narrow dirt track that connects the lakeside to the main road, sneaking hungry looks at the neat summer houses, all with lacy white facing boards and fancy porches, baskets of nasturtiums and late roses. They're sweet, but she hasn't felt particularly drawn to them during the past month, as she cycled along in her shorts and T-shirt, inwardly contemptuous of the whole place, its ritualistic certainties, its bourgeois safeness. Everyone rushes down here the day before Midsummer's Day, like migratory birds, or clockwork toys controlled by some remote authority. They stay for at least a month if they're workers, for three if they're pensioners, which a lot of them are. But what do they do once they get here? Go for a walk or a cycle. Some of them swim. There are occasional gatherings, which you'd hardly call parties: coffee and seven kinds of cake in the afternoon; sometimes someone has a birthday and then there's wine and smoked salmon, seven kinds of salad. They like to count things, and measure: their lives are measured in walks and cycles; summer succeeds summer, they come to the cottage in June, they return to the city in August, they come to the cottage in June. Then one summer they're too old to drive and they stay in the city for the summer. And then – very soon after this, because what is the point of living if you can't go to the summer house? – they die.

So what's wrong with that? she's thinking now, as she leaves it all. The petunias and the fresh paint, the woodland walks? Now it all seems like the very pinnacle of civilisation. Peaceful and harmonious, warm and luminous, it is heaven on earth. She can't stand the idea of going back to the bustle of the city. It is still summer, but autumn will descend very soon. Quick like a curtain it will fall and the iron-cold fogs of November will put a lid on the year and usher in the snow.

Lucky Thomas, whose work allows him to milk every last drop of summer, to stay here in the country, walking in the woods and swimming in the lake. At night he will light his candles and listen to the lap of water on the shore and the buzz of the mosquitoes. All for another month, at least.

If he loved her, wouldn't he sacrifice that and come home with her? Now?

She's there, home, by mid-afternoon, and she is opening the windows to let the fresh air into the living room when Lisa, her friend at work, telephones and asks if she can call around.

‘Yes,' says Sara. ‘Of course.'

It's an unusual request. Normally she chats with Lisa only at work – at coffee breaks, sometimes during lunch time in a café. They don't visit each other's houses. In fact, unarranged visits by anyone are rare in these suburbs.

Lisa's life is dominated by her two children, who are in their early twenties. They are students and whenever Sara has met them they have been taciturn, sulky even. But Lisa adores them and spends most of her life rushing around looking after them, although that is not how she sees it herself. ‘I've got to hit the supermarket,' she cries, as she dashes out of work five minutes early. Or ‘There's a mountain of washing to be done!' More often than not, she is rushing home so she can give one of the children a lift somewhere. An unpaid chauffeur, that's what she is. She doesn't mind. Even though she claims to be feminist and liberated and assertive, she admits to being an unpaid chauffeur, an unpaid cook, an unpaid washerwoman and unpaid charwoman, as well as a badly paid librarian. ‘How long can it go on for?' she asks good-humouredly. ‘I thought I'd be pursuing my hobbies as soon as they got to be fifteen! I thought I'd be doing the round-the-world tour, and writing a novel!' But it's pretty clear to Sara that Lisa has no real wish to do hobbies. She thrives on all this rushing around, juggling, hard work. She enjoys grumbling about the children, and Anders, her husband, or ex-husband – he left, or was turfed out, years ago. They got a legal divorce but never quite separated. ‘He never darkens my bed!' Lisa says, waving her hands in the air to underline her words. He never darkens her bed but he darkens her kitchen door almost every day, and eats dinner with his ex-family five days out of seven.