In the Name of Love Read Online Free PDF

in. Their voices floated up, talking, laughing. Back on the jetty their bodies glistened red in the evening sun. Connie looked up and, seeing the men in the window, waved. Barefoot she climbed the grassy path, the wet bathrobe over her arm. Her body, with its slim waist, its sway of hips and breasts, was as beautiful as anything Dan had ever seen.
    She was still a schoolgirl when they’d met in London, eighteen years old to his nineteen in 1956. Once she’d gone back with her class to Stockholm the pale blue envelopes began to arrive, waiting on the little table in the hall when he got home. He’d take each one with him upstairs and, before opening it, wash his hands, scrubbing off the cement dust, the diesel oil, the smells of the building site. He lived in a cheap bedsit in Ealing then, saving money from his labour to travel through Europe and Africa the following year, before going home to start university. Each evening he sat at the little table, writing long letters back to her.
    Two months later he took a fortnight’s leave from the building site and hitchhiked to Stockholm. That autumn he left for good and went to stay. By now Connie had begun her first-year studies at Karolinska Hospital. On her days off she showed him the city. The old central island, still a near-slum then, had courtyards where strange bushes grew from cracks in the broken paving and, in one of them, with the sun slanting down its yellow seventeenth-century walls, she crouched beside him to examine a head of brilliant red petals. Her hand rested on his calf as she leant forward. And then, still holding on to his calf, she looked up at him with a smile that paralysed his brain. Without thinking, he heard his voice ask her if she would marry him. At once she said, ‘Yes,’ and, with her heart-stopping smile still in place, politely added, ‘Please.’

4
    Despite the roof collapse he continued to tap out his translations on the same boxy IBM PC, faxed off urgent jobs and sent the rest with the postman in the morning. At four thirty he stopped, drank tea and went for his walk, two hours minimum whatever the weather. Sometimes, not often, he saw a face he thought he recognized, someone seen in the island shop, come towards him on a forest trail. With a friendly wave he turned off, disappearing into the trees.
    The insurance company sent out an inspector – a young man with a machine-cropped beard. ‘You live alone here?’ he said, looking at the empty landscape and the forest around them. ‘All year? It’d drive me crazy.’ He gave the go ahead for the repair work. The local mason said he could start in early March. One way or another he and his mate would be finished before Easter.
    The man who claimed to be Dan’s nearest neighbour came back unannounced. A tap on the kitchen door and before Dan had time to react the man stepped in. He stood a moment, his body rigid as though with a stab of pain. Seen under the bare light bulb his bald head looked huge, close to animal. Then, still without a word, he sat down at the end of the kitchen table and flexed his fingers while he took a deep breath. Dan looked at him.
    ‘Are you all right?’
    ‘Do you happen to have alcohol in the house?’
    ‘Would whisky do?’
    The dome of the man’s skull shone as he moved his head back and slowly swallowed the glass of whisky. He said no to the offer of a refill and then, out of the blue, began to talk about his children. He said he’d just been to Copenhagen to see them over the weekend. Dan didn’t know what to make of him. It seemed clear though that he was in pain, even if the pain had now been dulled.
    After that Isaksson returned once or twice a week, resting on his way home from the ferry or from the island shop. That he was interrupting Dan’s work didn’t seem to occur to him. His skull gleamed pale as marble underneath the bulb. He gossiped about the island and tried to lure Dan into being more forthcoming about his own doings.
    ‘Your