The Living and the Dead in Winsford Read Online Free PDF Page B

his lawyer, despite the fact that he is one of the leading members of his fraternity in Sweden and normally can’t keep his mouth shut.
    The preliminary investigation was abandoned, and the whole matter shelved.
    I didn’t have much to say about the matter either, but when the uproar was at its height I counted more than twenty photographers and journalists camped outside our house in Nynäshamn. Late one evening Martin fired two shots of his elk-hunting rifle through the window, straight up into the heavens over the forest. The press mob had something to report now, and promptly disappeared in the direction of Stockholm to leave us in peace for a while. Being a star reporter and having to hang around outside a house in Nynäshamn is no sinecure.
    I recall Martin trying to look pleased with himself as he put his gun away. ‘So there!’ he said. ‘Shall we have a glass of wine?’
    But he sounded anything but upbeat, and I declined the offer. For some reason he was never prosecuted for shooting a gun inside a built-up area.
    We spoke about what had happened – or perhaps hadn’t happened – only once, and never again. That was my choice, on both counts.
    ‘Did you have sex with that woman?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes, I had sex with her,’ said Martin.
    ‘Did you rape her?’
    ‘Most certainly not,’ said Martin.
    That was the day it was first written about in the newspaper: I hadn’t been able to bring myself to ask before then, even though I knew about it. Neither of our children was in touch that evening. None of our friends either. I thought the telephones were remarkably quiet.
    Apart from calls from unknown numbers, of course; but we didn’t answer those.
    ‘That woman up in Umeå,’ I did get round to asking a few days later when it was being widely discussed. ‘Did you?’
    ‘Surely you don’t believe what she says?’ said Martin.
    One of the things that felt remarkable throughout the summer – much more remarkable than difficult, I ought to stress – was that I couldn’t make up my mind what the truth was. I suppose it was somehow outside my range of comprehension, I couldn’t really grasp it, and what you don’t understand is not something you can pin down. At least, that’s what I tell myself was the situation. I used to wake up in the morning and after the first few seconds of blankness the situation I found myself in would hit me. I would realize why I was feeling so tired and melancholy – and then as I tottered to the bathroom on unsteady feet I would feel like an actress who had ended up in the wrong film. The wrong film altogether, and twenty-five years too late.
    Both Martin and I had been unfaithful once before, and on each occasion we had managed to hold our marriage together. He was first, and then it was me as a sort of revenge. It was while the children were still at home, and it’s possible that we might have reached different decisions if they had flown the nest. But I don’t know, and it’s difficult to speculate about it. In any case neither of us would have continued the relationship with the new partner if such a possibility had presented itself. That is something we have convinced both ourselves and each other about during the years that have passed since it happened. Sixteen years and fourteen, to be precise. Good Lord, I blush in embarrassment when I recall that I was forty-one years old when I went to bed with that young recording technician. He could have been a mate of Gunvald’s, if Gunvald had knocked around with types like him.
    After the worst was over, from about the middle of June or thereabouts, I noticed that I really did want to know what had happened. I needed to know exactly what my husband had been doing with that waitress in the hotel.
    That night.
    The problem was that it was too late to ask Martin. An invisible borderline had been passed, a sort of ceasefire had been proclaimed, and I felt I had no right to tear it up. I am not all that interested in sex