In the Name of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

wife worked in a hospital?’ he said one day.
    Dan didn’t bother asking him how he knew. Probably everyone on the island knew. He said, ‘Södersjukhuset. Physiotherapist.’
    ‘Ah! I had a lassie once – you don’t know half the muscles in your rump until an expert begins to loosen them up. Or a simple neck massage. God, how I miss her!’
    ‘Connie’s patients were mostly elderly.’ Dan heard the defensiveness in his own voice and thought: Jesus Christ! What now? He remembered how she liked to teach them to coax out the forgotten pliancy of their old limbs. How she enjoyed talking with them, listening to their life stories, their memories. Often she became friends with them. His brain slewed round when he thought of this. Sune Isaksson’s watery eyes stayed on him. The whisky glass looked diminished in his big hand as he lifted it and sipped. He put it down. ‘If ever you need somewhere to kip in Stockholm you can have the keys to my place.’ Dan told him he didn’t go into Stockholm any more.
    Another time Isaksson talked about his divorce. ‘A dragged-out slagging match,’ he said. Against his wife’s opposition he had ended with legal right of access to his sons. ‘Three weeks in the summer and two weekends a month.’ So every second Friday morning he took the early bus and the two ferries and then the bus from Norrtälje to Arlanda airport, a four-hour road trip, before he joined the weekend queue to check in and fly to Copenhagen, arriving in the evening. He and the children spent much of the weekend watching TV in his hotel room. They ate potato chips and peanuts from the minibar. Drank Coca Cola.
    ‘You fly to Copenhagen to watch TV with your children?’
    ‘There are series and stuff Jytte says they mustn’t miss.’
    ‘What? Pippi Longstocking with Danish subtitles?’
    ‘Football too. And ice hockey. Otherwise they can’t keep up during the breaks at school, Jytte says.’
    Dan asked him if he didn’t ever say no, and do something else.
    ‘To Jytte? We fought all through the last years of our marriage. Day and night. Now we’ve got to the stage where we’re admitting it wasn’t necessarily all the other’s fault. Not a hundred per cent and not all the time. Worth gold, that. I’m not going to risk ruining it.’
    ‘A marital truce based on TV and potato chips.’
    ‘Truce is probably taking it a bit far. More a cease-fire, I’d say. We can talk to each other now on the telephone without automatic screams. Under certain conditions.’
    ‘Does she watch TV with them too and eat potato chips? When it’s her weekends?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You haven’t asked her?’
    ‘No, I couldn’t ask her about things like that.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘She’s moved in with a Danish journalist. Cultural affairs. What they watch, where they go. No. There are limits.’
    His marriage had been in trouble long before the divorce, he said. ‘It took us a few years to discover we were incompatible in everything but sex. By then we had the kids.’ It finally came apart when a woman friend who started to comfort him told Jytte what they were up to. Not directly, she was too sophisticated for that. More in the form of intimations, allusions. Elliptical phrases. Metaphors. The language of literature. ‘Jytte brings out the cultural side of people. It’s always been her strong point. Theatre, books, stuff like that. I could never keep up.’
    His sporadic affairs after the divorce had mainly been with younger women at the Institute of Technology where he worked. Secretaries, assistants. Usually married. Though some time ago he’d stopped.
    Nothing of what he said surprised Dan any longer. Some­times it felt as though they were prisoners together in a cell the night before execution. But he felt no desire to return the confidences.
    ‘We were interested in the same thing,’ Sune Isaksson told him once, talking about these young women at the Institute. ‘Lust and its satisfaction. I’ll