The Lemon Table

  Gossip ceased, or at least diminished, when it was discovered that the reason Mrs. Lindwall had not gone to visit her sister was because she was pregnant with the Lindwalls’ first child. Gossip thought this a fortuitous rescue of Barbro Lindwall’s endangered reputation.

  And that was that, thought Anders Bodén. A door opens, and then closes before you have time to walk through it. A man has as much control over his destiny as a log stencilled with red letters which is thrust back into the torrent by men armed with spiked poles. Perhaps he was no more than they said he was: an oaf lucky enough to marry a woman who had once played duets with Sjögren. But if so, and his life, from now on, would never change, then, he realized, neither would he. He would remain frozen, preserved, at this moment—no, at the moment which nearly happened, which could have happened, last week. There was nothing in the world, nothing wife, nor church, nor society could do, to prevent him from deciding that his heart would never move again.

  BARBRO LIND WALL was not convinced of her feelings for Anders Bodén until she recognized that she would now spend the rest of her life with her husband. First there was little Ulf and then, a year later, Karin. Axel doted on the children and so did she. Perhaps that would be enough. Her sister moved to the far north, where cloudberries grew, and sent her pots of yellow jam each season. In the summer, she and Axel went boating on the lake. He put on predictable weight. The children grew. One spring, a labourer from the sawmill swam in front of the steamboat and was run down, the water stained as if he had been taken by a shark. A passenger on the foredeck testified that the man had swum steadily until the last moment. Gossip claimed that the victim’s wife had been seen going into the forest with one of his workmates. Gossip added that he was drunk and had taken a bet that he could swim right across the steamer’s bows. The coroner decided that he must have been deafened by water in the ears and recorded a verdict of misadventure.

  We are just horses in our stalls, Barbro would say to herself. The stalls are unnumbered, but even so we know our places. There is no other life.

  But if only he could have read my heart before I did. I do not talk to men like that, listen to them like that, look them in the face like that. Why couldn’t he tell?

  The first time she had seen him again, each of them part of a couple strolling by the lake after church, she was relieved that she was pregnant because ten minutes later she had a bout of sickness whose cause would otherwise have been obvious. All she could think of, as she vomited into the grass, was that the fingers which held her head belonged to the wrong man.

  She never saw Anders Bodén alone; she made sure of that. Once, spotting him board the steamboat ahead of her, she turned back at the jetty. In church she sometimes glimpsed the back of his head, and imagined hearing his voice separately. When she went out, she protected herself with the presence of Axel; at home, she kept the children close. Once, Axel suggested they invite the Bodéns to coffee; she replied that Mrs. Bodén would certainly expect Madeira and sponge cake, and even if that was provided would look down her nose at a mere pharmacist and his wife who were both incomers. The suggestion was not repeated.

  She did not know how to think about what had happened. There was no one to ask; she thought of similar examples, but they were all disreputable and seemed to have no bearing on her own case. She was unprepared for constant, silent, secret pain. One year, when her sister’s cloudberry jam arrived, she looked at a pot, at the glass, the metal lid, the circle of muslin, the handwritten label, the date—the date!—and the occasion for all this, the yellow jam, and she thought: that is what I have done to my heart. And each year, when pots arrived from the north, she thought the same thing.

  AT FIRST, Anders continued to tell her what he knew, under his breath. Sometimes he was a tourist guide, sometimes a sawmill manager. He could, for instance, have told her about Defects in Timber. “Cup shake” is a natural splitting in the interior of the tree between two of the annular rings. “Star shake” occurs when there are fissures radiating in several directions. “Heart shake” is often found in old trees and extends from the pith or heart of the tree towards its circumference.

  IN SUBSEQUENT YEARS, when Gertrud scolded, when the akvavit took hold, when polite eyes told him he had indeed become a bore, when the lake froze at its edges and the skating race to Rättvik could be held, when his daughter emerged from church as a married woman and he saw in her eyes more hope than he knew existed, when the long nights began and his heart seemed to close down in hibernation, when his horse stopped suddenly and began to tremble at what it sensed but could not see, when the old steamboat was drydocked one winter and repainted in fresh colours, when friends from Trondheim asked him to show them the copper-mine at Falun and he agreed and then an hour before departure found himself in the bathroom forcing his fingers into his throat to make the vomit come, when the steamer took him past the deaf-and-dumb asylum, when things in the town changed, when things in the town remained the same year after year, when the gulls left their stations by the jetty to scream inside his skull, when his left forefinger had to be amputated at the second joint after he had idly pulled at a stack of timber in one of the seasoning sheds—on these occasions, and many more, he thought of Mats Israelson. And as the years passed, Mats Israelson turned in his mind from a set of clear facts which could be presented as a lover’s gift into something vaguer but more powerful. Into a legend, perhaps—a thing she would not have been interested in.

  She had said, “I would like to visit Falun” and all he had needed to reply was, “I shall take you there.” Perhaps if she had indeed said, flirtatiously, like one of those imagined women, “I long for Stockholm” or “At nights I dream of Venice” he would just have thrown his life at her, bought rail tickets the next morning, caused a scandal, and months later come home drunk and pleading. But that was not how he was, because that was not how she was. “I would like to visit Falun” had been a much more dangerous remark than “At nights I dream of Venice.”

  AS THE YEARS PASSED, and her children grew, Barbro Lindwall was sometimes assailed by a terrible apprehension: that her daughter would marry the Bodén boy. That, she thought, would be the worst punishment in the world. But in the event Karin attached herself to Bo Wicander, and could not be teased out of it. Soon, all the Bodén and the Lindwall children were married. Axel became a fat man who wheezed in his pharmacy and secretly feared he might poison someone by mistake. Gertrud Bodén went grey, and a seizure left her one-handed at the piano. Barbro herself first plucked assiduously, then dyed. That she had kept her shape with little assistance from corsetry seemed to her a mockery.

  “You have a letter,” Axel said one afternoon. His manner was neutral. He passed it over. The handwriting was unfamiliar, the postmark was Falun.

  “Dear Mrs. Lindwall, I am in hospital here. There is a matter I would very much like to discuss with you. Would it be possible for you to visit me one Wednesday? Yours truly, Anders Bodén.”

  She handed over the letter and watched him read it.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I should like to visit Falun.”

  “Of course.” He meant: of course you would, gossip always called you his mistress; I was never sure, but of course I should have guessed, that is what your sudden cooling and all those years of absent-mindedness were about; of course, of course. But she heard only: of course you must.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I shall take the train. It may be necessary to stay overnight.”

  “Of course.”

  ANDERS BODÉN lay in bed deciding what to say. At last, after all these years—twenty-three, to be precise—they had finally seen one another’s handwriting. This exchange, this first new glimpse of each other, was as intimate as any kiss. Her writing was small, neat, school-formed; it showed no signs of age. He thought, briefly, of all the letters he might have received from her.

  At first he imagined that he might simply tell her the story of Mats Israelson again, in the version he had perfected. T
hen she would know, and understand. Or would she? Just because the story had been with him every day for more than two decades, this did not mean she would necessarily have any memory of it. So she might judge it a trick, or a game, and things might go wrong.

  But it was important not to tell her that he was dying. This would put an unjust burden on her. Worse, sympathy might make her change her reply. He too wanted the truth, not a legend. He told the nursing staff that a dear cousin was coming to visit him, but because of a fragility of the heart must on no account be told of his condition. He asked them to trim his beard and comb his hair. When they had gone, he rubbed a little tooth-powder into his gums, and slid his damaged hand beneath the bedclothes.

  AT THE TIME of the letter, it had seemed straightforward to her; or, if not straightforward, at least unarguable. For the first time in twenty-three years he had asked something of her; therefore her husband, to whom she had always remained faithful, must grant the request. He had done so, but from that point things began to lose their clarity. What should she wear for the journey? There seemed no clothes for such an occasion, which was neither a holiday nor a funeral. At the station, the booking-clerk had repeated “Falun,” and the stationmaster had eyed her valise. She felt entirely vulnerable—if someone should merely prod her, she would start explaining her life, her purposes, her virtue. “I am going to meet a man who is dying,” she would have said. “No doubt he has a last message for me.” This must be the case, mustn’t it—that he was dying? Otherwise, it did not make sense. Otherwise, he would have sought contact when the last of their children had left home, when she and Axel had become merely a couple again.

  She registered at the Stadshotellet, near the marketplace. Again, she felt the clerk examining her valise, her married status, her motives.

  “I am visiting a friend in hospital,” she said, although no question had been asked of her.

  In her room, she stared at the hooped iron bedstead, the mattress, the brand-new wardrobe. She had never stayed in a hotel by herself before. This was where women came, she realized—certain women. She felt that gossip could see her now—alone in a room with a bed. It seemed astonishing that Axel had let her come. It seemed astonishing that Anders Bodén had summoned her without any explanation.

  Her vulnerability began to disguise itself as irritation. What was she doing here? What was he making her do? She thought of books she had read, the sort Axel disapproved of. In books, scenes in hotel bedrooms were alluded to. In books, couples ran away together—but not when one of them was in hospital. In books, there were heart-warming deathbed nuptials—but not when both parties were still married. So what was to happen? “There is a matter I would very much like to discuss with you.” Discuss? She was a woman in late middle age bringing a pot of cloudberry jam to a man she had known a little, twenty-three years ago. Well, it was up to him to make sense of it all. He was the man, and she had done more than her part just by coming here. She had not remained a respectable married woman all these years merely by chance.

  “YOU HAVE lost weight.”

  “They say it suits me,” he replied with a smile. “They”: he obviously meant “my wife.”

  “Where is your wife?”

  “She visits on other days.” Which would be apparent to the hospital staff. Oh, his wife visits him on these days, and “she” visits him when his wife’s back is turned.

  “I thought you were very ill.”

  “No, no,” he replied cheerfully. She seemed very much on edge—yes, it had to be said, a little like a squirrel, with anxious, jumping eyes. Well, he must calm her, soothe her. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

  “I thought . . .” She paused. No, things must be clear between them. “I thought you were dying.”

  “I’ll last as long as any fir tree on the Hökberg.”

  He sat there grinning. His beard had been freshly trimmed, his hair stylishly combed; he wasn’t dying after all, and his wife was in another town. She waited.

  “That is the roof of the Kristina-Kyrka.”

  She turned away, walked to the window, and looked across at the church. When Ulf was little, she always had to turn her back before he would tell her a secret. Perhaps this was what Anders Bodén needed. So she looked at the copper roof blazing in the sun and waited. After all, he was the man.

  Her silence, and her turned back, alarmed him. This was not what he had planned. He had not even managed to call her Barbro, casually, as if from long ago. What had she once said? “I like a man to tell me what he knows.”

  “The church was built in the middle of the nineteenth century,” he began. “I am not sure exactly when.” She did not respond. “The roof is made from copper extracted from the local mine.” Again no response. “But I do not know if the roof was constructed at the same time as the church, or if it was a later addition. I intend to find out,” he added, trying to sound purposeful. Still she did not reply. The only voice he heard was Gertrud’s, whispering, “The club-button of the Swedish Tourists’ Union.”

  Barbro’s anger was now with herself as well. Of course she had never known him, never known what he was really like. She had merely indulged a girlish fantasy all these years.

  “You are not dying?”

  “I’ll last as long as any fir tree on the Hökberg.”

  “So you are fit enough to come to my room at the Stadshotellet.” She said it as harshly as she could, contemptuous of the whole world of men, with their cigars and mistresses and logs and vain, stupid beards.

  “Mrs. Lindwall . . .” All clarity of mind deserted him. He wanted to say that he loved her, that he had always loved her, that he thought of her most—no, all of the time. “I think of you most—no, all of the time,” was what he had prepared to say. And then, “I have loved you from the moment I met you on the steamboat. You have sustained my life ever since.”

  But her irritation made him lose heart. She thought he was just a seducer. So the words he had prepared would seem like those of a seducer. And he did not know her after all. Nor did he know how to talk to women. It enraged him, that there were men out there, smooth-tongued men who knew what best to say. Oh, get it over with, he thought suddenly, catching her irritation. You’ll soon be dead anyway, so get it over with.

  “I thought,” he said, and his tone was rough, aggressive, like a man bargaining, “I thought, Mrs. Lindwall, that you loved me.”

  He saw her shoulders stiffen.

  “Ah,” she replied. The vanity of the man. What a false picture she had carried of him all these years, as a person of discretion, tact, of an almost blameworthy inability to put his case. In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.

  Still facing away, she answered him as if he were little Ulf with one of his childish secrets. “You were mistaken.” Then she turned back to this abject, grinning dandy, this man who evidently knew his way to hotel rooms. “But thank you”—she wasn’t good at sarcasm, and searched briefly for a subject—“thank you for pointing out to me the deaf-and-dumb asylum.”

  She thought about taking back the cloudberry jam, but judged it unseemly. There was still a train she could catch that evening. The idea of staying the night in Falun revolted her.

  FOR A LONG TIME Anders Bodén did not think. He watched as the copper roof took on a darker hue. He removed his damaged hand from beneath the bedclothes and used it to make his hair disorderly. He gave the pot of jam to the first nurse who came into the room.

  One of the things he had learnt in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped— it was his only hope now—that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying, would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.

  When the heart breaks, he thought, it splits like timber, down the full length of the plank. In his first days at the sawmill he had seen Gustaf Olsso
n take a piece of solid timber, drive in a wedge, and give the wedge a little twist. The timber broke down the grain, from end to end. That was all you needed to know about the heart: where the grain lay. Then with a twist, with a gesture, with a word, you could destroy it.

  AS NIGHT FELL and the train began to skirt the darkening lake on which it had all begun, as her shame and self-reproach weakened, she tried to think clearly. It was the only way to keep the pain at bay: to think clearly, to be interested only in what really happens, in what you know to be true. And she knew this: that the man for whom, at any single moment of the last twenty-three years, she would have left husband and children, for whom she would have lost her reputation and her place in society, with whom she would have run away to God knows where, was not, and never would have been, worthy of her love. Axel, whom she respected, who was a good father and breadwinner, was much more worthy of it. And yet she did not love him, not if what she had felt for Anders Bodén was the measure of things. This, then, was the desolation of her life, divided between not loving a man who deserved it, and loving one who did not. What she had thought of as the mainstay of her life, a continuous companion of possibility, as faithful as a shadow or a reflection in water, was no more than that: a shadow, a reflection. Nothing real. Though she prided herself on having little imagination, and though she took no account of legends, she had allowed herself to spend half her life in a frivolous dream. All that could be said for her was that she had kept her virtue. And what sort of claim was that? Had she been tested, she would not have resisted for a moment.

  When she thought about it in this way, in clarity and truth, her shame and self-reproach returned, but the more violently. She undid the button of her left sleeve, and unwound from her wrist a length of faded blue ribbon. She let it drop to the floor of the carriage.