The Susan Effect

  I spoon out the fruit salad.

  ‘There’s another little detail,’ says Thit. ‘While she was searching I was looking at this picture she had on the wall. Old-fashioned, but cool, all the same.’

  ‘Hammershøi,’ Laban says. ‘Christiansborg seen from Gammel Strand.’

  ‘It was on the wall behind her. So I stand there looking at it with my back to her, doing my make-up at the same time.’

  Thit’s relationship to make-up is hard to explain. It’s passionate, but also exotic. She daubs it on the same way she dresses: extravagantly, especially around the eyes, as if bent on demonstrating that, to her, every day is a celebration of Cleopatra’s ascension to the throne. And always she has with her a palette in a compact case in order to touch up the overall impression.

  In that compact case is a little mirror. Thit spends a lot of time in front of mirrors. And like anyone else in that habit, she is used to orienting herself in a world in reverse. In her case, she can read a three-page back-to-front email as fast as any regular one.

  ‘I couldn’t help noticing her three passwords,’ she says.

  Laban pauses, spoon in hand.

  ‘Susan. Would you say a few words?’

  All families have their little rituals. In ours, the others have always wanted me to present the food, to attach a brief description to each dish. I’ve done it a thousand times. But no more.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Those days are gone. Gone to the place of eternal memories.’

  All three put down their spoons.

  ‘Even in the darkest dictatorships,’ Laban says, ‘the condemned are allowed a final meal. And some choice words about the menu.’

  The few individuals in this world fortunate enough to have been genuinely loved as children inhabit a universe apart from the rest of us and are unable to seriously entertain the notion of rebuttal.

  ‘Any fruit salad comprises a system of coordinates,’ I say. ‘The bananas are the horizontal, the X-axis, the bass tone. Bananas are earth, they provide a rich, creamy foundation for the sunny fruits, the oranges and the pineapple, that inhabit the Y-axis. Citrus provides upward lift, that tangy, near-displeasurable zest. The strawberries are the Z-axis. They deliver the spatial element. Even now in December they taste so very much of Danish summer. They expand this tropical encounter of opposites into a global project. Acacia honey and whipped cream are the fourth dimension. Both cream and honey add a dash of the animal. They raise this modest little dessert up out of the mire of Newtonian three-dimensional banality into the complexity of Einsteinian spacetime.’

  ‘You forgot the raisins,’ says Harald.

  ‘The raisins add bite. Resistance. They remind us of dentures to come. The care home. Spoon food.’

  We exchange glances and think about the wrecked Passat. The excavator.

  And then we eat.

  ‘I’m going to miss it,’ says Harald. ‘Not just the fruit salad, but the presentations, too. If you’re going to be put away for twenty-five years, Mum, I’m going to wish we’d got some of this on tape.’

  Laban has cleared the table.

  ‘What about that priest?’ I say. ‘From the Kali temple?’

  The room freezes. There is a very small handful of pedagogical principles on which Laban and I unusually have always agreed. One of them is to stay well out of our children’s love lives.

  Until now it’s always seemed like the matter of Thit and boys was something that sorted itself, like a train running according to a timetable rather better organised than the one that has shaped the life of her mother.

  When she was four years old she brought a boy home for the first time from kindergarten to stay the night. I put an extra duvet out for him in Thit’s double bed, thinking that when you’re four years old and you’ve got playmates sleeping over, the nicest thing in the world is to sleep next to each other in the same bed.

  Thit cast a single glance at the set-up, before pointing at the floor and calmly and unemotionally, though without allowing even the slightest possibility of contradiction, stating: ‘He’s sleeping there. On a mattress.’

  When she was fourteen and had met her first boyfriend, I once offered my help and advice. We were in the car, of course, because I’d picked her up from school. I took a deep breath.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do for you,’ I said, ‘with regard to Thomas, any advice you need, or guidance, you know you can come to me.’

  A stretch of Svendsen silence ensued.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Mum.’

  I sensed immediately this was merely a prelude to some more combative reply.

  ‘When you wanted to know about physics, Mum, you went to Andrea Fink, didn’t you?’

  I didn’t answer. The suburb of Ordrup flashed by the windows, snow-covered, neat and respectable.

  ‘And Dad told us how he went to Bernstein with the first musical he wrote. So if you want to know something, you ask someone who knows. Am I right?’

  I said nothing.

  Then I felt her hand on my arm.

  Not in apology, because no living creature on earth will ever hear Thit apologise to anyone. But mildly placatory.

  Since then I have not broached this prickly subject. Until now.

  Thit stares at me pensively.

  ‘The order he belongs to isn’t one of celibacy,’ she says, spelling it out slowly. ‘So no rules were broken.’

  She looks at each of us in turn. Potentially, this is a situation that may evolve in a number of ways, some disastrous.

  But then she smiles.

  ‘He was so sweet!’

  13

  WE BUILT THE house on Evighedsvej intending it to be a quiet place with four separate living spaces. Or rather four and a half, counting Laban’s annexe in which he composes: a small structure in the garden with room for a Bösendorfer piano and a Jensen bed, and still enough floor space for him to dance the rumba whenever the feeling of being a genius gets too much for him to be able to sit still, which it does with great frequency.

  The four living spaces are separated by doors soundproofed to sixty decibels. Normally, when the four of us have retired to our own quarters, you can’t hear a peep.

  But tonight is different. I am sitting up in the living room, everyone else has gone to bed, and yet I hear the rhythm of their breathing. It means they’ve left their doors open, all the way in to their bedrooms.

  It’s because of all our troubles.

  I enjoy the feeling of the house at rest, of Charlottenlund asleep, the more distant city gradually settling down and turning in.

  I have switched off all the lights. I like the moon to shine in through the great, paper-thin limewood window blinds. The dissolution of yet another koan: how to sit with a clear view and yet behind lowered blinds.

  As on most such nights, I drink a small glass of scalding-hot mint tea, sweetened with honey to the point where the fructose begins to wonder if it ought now to crystallise and deposit itself directly onto the spoon.

  Our days are filled to the brim and beyond, with tastes, sounds and smells, with people, and impulses of hope and fear. There is a need for the simplicity of mint tea, for the encroaching stillness of night, geometric shadows cast by the moon on the white-painted walls.

  We used clay paint. I mixed it myself. Clay absorbs excess moisture, releasing it again as soon as the steam pressure drops. From the day we applied it we could sense the walls breathing. The texture of clay-painted surfaces possesses an inexplicable beauty, like the surface of a bowl as yet still wet, resting on its potter’s wheel.

  We painted directly on top of a layer of smooth natural-fibre wall covering. While some structural movement must surely have occurred, the walls remain perfect.

  I smooth my hand over the white surface. If a house is a living organism, then there can be nothing wrong with petting it. Indeed, it can hardly do anything but good. I must remember to make a point of saying so to the Academy of Sciences and Letters.

  But
then I put my mint tea down. Something isn’t right.

  I run my fingers across the wall again, and encounter a very slight bump, perhaps only a couple of micrometres, invisible in the moonlight, and yet so discernible. The nerve endings in my fingertips are capable of registering irregularities down to a few hundredths of a millimetre.

  I pull up a floor lamp, position it close to the wall and switch it on. A faint shadow becomes visible. A straight line running from a metre off the floor to the ceiling.

  In my stockinged feet I tiptoe into my own space. In the drawer of my desk I find a Stanley knife, an illuminated magnifying glass and a small Phillips screwdriver. I get the big ladder out of the utility room, the one I use to polish the skylighting. Returning to the living room it takes me a while to find the bump again. It’s as inconspicuous as that.

  Carefully, I cut along the shadow. The wall gives almost immeasurably, cushioning the motion of my hand. I put my nose to the incision and sniff. It smells of what it is: recently applied acrylic sealant.

  I pick at it with the screwdriver, and a wire appears. Not the everyday kind used by your average tradesman, but a tissue-like length of tape, thin as gossamer, a millimetre and a half in width and with a core of copper.

  I pull it away from the wall, and find it runs all the way up. I tug, and the finest dust descends from the ceiling, the wire following the arc of one of its arches, camouflaged by a spray-on sealant of exactly the same colour.

  The ladder extends like a telescope. I secure the legs and climb aloft. From the top, I can just reach the skylighting. And the light fixture in the ceiling.

  I flip off the cover. Inside is a tiny plastic box, less than one and a half by one centimetre. I remove it and climb down, seating myself at the dining table, the box still connected to its wire. I examine it with the magnifying glass.

  But then there’s a knock at the door. Or rather, a faint pecking. Like a little bird on the birdtable outside the kitchen window. Nevertheless, it almost gives me a heart attack. I cover the device with a cushion from the sofa and go to see who it is.

  It’s Dorthea Skousen, our neighbour.

  ‘I saw the light was on,’ she says. ‘I hope nothing’s the matter, only we weren’t expecting you home for another five months.’

  Evighedsvej slopes down towards the Øresund at Skovshoved. Once, back in some pre-history, the road was a narrow right-ofway meandering among half-timbered fishermen’s cottages with limewashed walls and nets hung out to dry in the garden. Now the plots are occupied by fancy wedding-cake homes from the time nouveau riche profiteers erected their summer residences along Strandvejen and gave them names like Villa Palermo. Or else by bragging architectural structures such as our own. The only exception to all this is the house belonging to Dorthea and Ingemann. Theirs is still a fisherman’s cottage.

  They lived there when we arrived, and they will remain there until carried out feet first, which more than likely will be rather soon, he being ninety and she well into her eighties.

  Despite all odds, and against all expectations, they have taken us into their hearts. To all intents and purposes they are Thit and Harald’s proper grandparents.

  People taking you into their hearts always involves some cost. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with either of them, but particularly not with Dorthea. Maybe it’s them knowing so much about us. They were the ones who looked after the children when Laban and I were going through relationship therapy. When we had to go to the bank and ask for extensions on our loans. It was they who let the bailiff in on the two occasions we’ve had property seized by distraint.

  So they don’t just know a bit about us, they know everything, the way people who look after your children always do. And when children are small, they are, by the very nature of things, an open picture book presenting in colourful detail all the entangled and unsavoury innards of their grown-ups.

  Besides, both Dorthea and Ingemann are unfathomably different from us. They may be our next-door neighbours, but the reality of the matter is that they belong to another galaxy altogether.

  But they understand me, and that’s the problem. Dorthea especially understands me, I sense that very strongly. She has this unobtrusive and yet piercing way of scrutinising me. And she’s doing it now.

  ‘Everything’s fine, really,’ I say. ‘We just came back a bit early because of some important matters to attend to.’

  She stares past me into the hall. I’m afraid she might be able to see into the living room, that she possesses some kind of X-ray vision.

  ‘It was kind of your friends to get the place ready.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘They even checked the electrics. Ingemann saw them from his cabin. They’d pulled the blinds down, but he was able to see them through the skylight. Not without his binoculars, though.’

  She hands me a jam jar. It’s full of roasted almonds. She’s given us one every year at Christmas ever since we moved in. The almonds are exquisite. Dorthea must surely have access to some very special alchemy. She can make the sugar crystallise into an utterly clear, homogenous film that clings to each almond the way seven layers of immaculately applied marine varnish cling to the spars of a rowing boat.

  ‘There were four men and a woman. Two of them spent half an hour in the garage.’

  ‘They’ll have been recharging the car batteries.’

  ‘That’ll be it, yes. And while they were at it they mounted a little flat box on the wall behind the first-aid kit.’

  She blinks her eyes and peers at me. The worst thing about her, the very worst thing, is that she’s a pleb, like me. But whereas I have endeavoured to work my way up and above my station, she has steadfastly remained faithful to hers.

  ‘I’ll wish you a peaceful night, then.’

  It’s her ritual farewell.

  ‘The same to you, Dorthea. And give our love to the captain.’

  When I return to the living room, Laban is seated at the table.

  14

  HE’S WEARING SLIPPERS and a dressing gown. And he’s removed the sofa cushion I’d placed on top of the device.

  I fetch a set of optician’s precision screwdrivers and a pair of tweezers from the utility room. Then I open the tiny box.

  I extract the minutest black bead from its mounting and place it on the table. Then, next to it, a grey disc, quite as minuscule, and thin as a printed letter of the alphabet. I examine them with the illuminated magnifying glass. The bead is a lens, the smallest I’ve ever seen. The disc is a microphone. Underneath it is a colour filter. I remove it with the tweezers. Then come the photovoltaic cells, underneath them the processor, next to which is a transmitter, and alongside the transmitter a circuit board so tiny its details elude me, even in the magnifying glass. One of the conductive traces is a bit longer than the others and must be the aerial. Next to it is a voltage stabiliser. And the two tiniest lithium cells I’ve ever laid eyes on.

  ‘This is a camera,’ I announce. ‘And a microphone. My guess is it saves images and sound for no more than a few minutes, before compromising them and sending them as a very short signal. That would make it very difficult indeed to trace, as well as saving energy. Batteries this size tend to run flat rather quickly.’

  ‘How come they didn’t hook it up to the light fixture in the ceiling?’

  The question comes from Harald. He and Thit are stand ing in the doorway in their pyjamas. Laban and I exchange glances.

  ‘Your dad and I installed the electrics ourselves,’ I tell them. ‘When we finished doing the painting, I realised we’d forgotten to allow for the wiring to be recessed into the light fixture. I wanted to do the whole thing again. But I was pregnant with you and big as a house. So your dad wouldn’t let me. He said that if a Zen master had completed a piece of work to perfection, the artist would have to apply an edge. A little dab here, a splodge there. Only the gods are perfect. Perfection is superhuman. It was a night just like this. To begin with we almost fell out about it. But the
n we settled on a solution. That light fixture has never been connected to the mains. That’s the necessary human flaw.’

  ‘They’ll have discovered the fact when they installed their device,’ Laban says. ‘It was meant to give them a full view of the whole room.’

  ‘So they had to chase out the plaster,’ I say. ‘And then fill in the recess with acrylic sealant. Not the best of alternatives. That was the reason I noticed. They must have been rather busy.’

  We’ve moved three extra beds into Thit’s space. Tonight we’re all sleeping together, for the first time in years.

  I led them all out to the garage, where I unscrewed the firstaid kit from the wall, then removed the flat, black, oxidised aluminium box that was concealed behind it and took it back with us into the house. I disassembled it on the round table, where we discovered it contained a receiver and a powerful transmitter. The little device in the light fitting has only a very short range and limited storage. It sent its data to the garage, from where it was transmitted on. To people of seemingly serious conviction. The aluminium box and its contents have the sort of finish you’d expect of a lighter, updated version of the old Swiss Nagra tape recorders the Niels Bohr Institute used for the dictation of provisional lab reports when I was quite young, and which at the time, in the early nineties, would knock you back fifty thousand Danish kroner a piece.

  Laban has made tea and toast. He has cut the bread in thick slices and toasted it to the extent that here and there its surface is charcoal, while inside it remains soft and palatable.

  He lays thick curls of cold butter on the hot toast. We are a family of butter-lovers, and Laban’s butter curls, cut with the cheese slicer, are at least five millimetres thick. I’ve never had my cholesterol levels measured. I prefer to put that off until the autopsy.