Astrid and Veronika Read Online Free PDF Page B

copper hair blew around my face and I could feel the muscles in her back move with each push on the pedals. Our shoes were in the basket on the handlebars and she kept telling me to keep my feet wide, away from the wheel. ‘Astrid, watch your feet!’ she cried, turning her head to look quickly over her shoulder. The sky was absolutely clear; there was a smell of soil in the air from the potato fields either side of the road. It was such a happy day, but as I buried my nose into my mother’s back I was fighting tears.
    That afternoon she came downstairs, dressed to go out and with her hair tucked into her hat. In the kitchen she lifted me up, held me and pressed her face against my neck. I could feel her lips moving, but there was no sound. I looked out over her shoulder and saw the hoya on the windowsill, covered in clusters of velvety pink flowers. All these years I have kept a hoya in that spot in the kitchen window and each summer when the flowers open the perfume brings back that moment. I sat by the window, my nose pressed against the glass, and watched my mother climb into Mr Larsson’s carriage. I kept watching as he whipped the horses and the carriage rolled off down the road. My mother never turned around to wave. It looked as if she was holding her gloved hands to her face.
    They found her in a small hotel in Stockholm. She had cut her wrists and laid herself down by the window where there was no carpet. She had been lying there for three days. In the warm weather the blood had dried around her and they had to soak her skirt with water to get if off the floor. She was twenty-seven. I was six.
    That evening, after my mother had left, I lay awake in my bed. It was still light outside, a pale summer night. The window was open and there was a breeze that made the cord of the roller-blind bounce against the windowsill. It was such a sad sound. Tap, tap, irregular and lonely. I lay on my stomach with my face pressed into the pillow and it was when I stuck my hands underneath that I felt the pendant. The little oval gold locket that my mother used to wear on a short chain around her neck. Inside, there was a lock of her hair. I sat in my bed, twisting the soft strands between my fingers, brushing them against my cheek, while the blind moved in the breeze. Tap, tap, tap against the window. I only found out what had happened to her many years later, but instinctively that night I knew that I had lost her for ever. I knew the moment she looked at me by the lake. I knew as I watched her come down the stairs. And I knew when she covered her face with her hands. I accepted the loneliness as a new state of life. Inevitable and permanent.
    Perhaps that was when I became one with this house. It became my skin. My protector. It has heard all my secrets; it has seen everything.
    I was an only child, like both my parents. After I lost my mother there was just the two of us, my father and I. There was a time when I longed for a family, for sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins. Now I am pleased there is nobody else. Just the house and me.
    I am not sure whether my grandfather built the house with love, but I like to think so. I like to think he built the grandest house because he loved his only son. Because he wanted to give him the most beautiful view, the sweetest meadows with flowers, the fertile fields with flax and potato, the vast forests with trees to fell in the winter. I like to think there was love. I don’t know what kind of man my grandfather was — he died before I was born. I don’t know if it would have pained him to know what has become of his gift. To know that his son was not a farmer and had no love for the land. That money ran through his soft, slender hands like water, leaving only a dying house for the grandchild. To me, it seems right. It is all coming to an end.
    When and where is the beginning? All these years while I have nurtured the memory of my mother, I think I made that moment the