Death In Oslo

VIII

Johanne had no idea what time it was. She felt as if she had been transported to a parallel universe. The shock she had felt when Mary appeared with the half-dead President the night before had changed into a feeling of being completely disconnected from the world outside the flat in Krusesgate. She had watched the news, but she hadn’t even been out to buy the papers.

The flat was like a fortress. No one came in and no one went out. It was as if Hanne’s resolve to honour the President’s request not to raise the alarm had created a moat around their existence. Johanne really had to concentrate to remember whether it was morning or evening.

‘It has to be something completely different,’ she said suddenly. ‘You’re focusing on the wrong secret.’

She had been silent for a long time. She had quietly listened to the other two women. She had followed their conversation, which was at times eager and at other times hesitant and pensive, for so long without saying anything that Helen Bentley and Hanne Wilhelmsen had almost forgotten she was there.

Hanne raised an eyebrow. Helen Bentley frowned, a puzzled expression that made the eye on the bruised side of her face close.

‘What do you mean?’ Hanne asked.

‘I think you’re thinking about the wrong secret.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Helen Bentley said, leaning back and crossing her arms, as if she had been offended in some way. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand.’

Johanne pushed her empty coffee cup to one side and tucked her hair behind her ear. For a moment she sat staring at a mark on the table, with her mouth half open, without breathing, as if she didn’t really know where to begin.

‘We humans are deluded,’ she said finally, and added with a disarming smile, ‘We all are, in some way or other. And perhaps especially… women.’

She paused to think again. She cocked her head and twisted a lock of hair round her finger. The two other women still looked sceptical, but they were listening. When Johanne started to speak again, her voice was lower than usual.

‘You said that you were woken by Jeffrey, who you knew. Obviously you were very tired. Judging by what you’ve said, you were pretty confused at first. Very confused, you said. Which isn’t in the slightest bit strange. The situation must have felt very… extraordinary.’

Johanne took off her glasses and peered short-sightedly at the room.

‘He showed you a letter,’ she continued. ‘You don’t remember the exact contents. What you remember is that you panicked.’

‘No,’ Helen Bentley said decisively. ‘I remember that-’

‘Hold on,’ Johanne said, raising a hand. ‘Please. Hear me out first. That’s actually what you said. You keep stressing that you panicked. It’s as if you’re hopping over a link. It’s as if you… you’re so ashamed that you couldn’t deal with the situation that you can’t even reconstruct it in your mind.’

She could have sworn that she saw a blush pass over the President’s face.

‘Helen,’ Johanne said, and reached her hand over towards the other woman.

It was the first time she had addressed the President by her first name. Her hand lay palm up, untouched, on the table, so she withdrew it again.

‘You are the President of America,’ she said in a gentle voice. ‘You have literally been in the wars before.’

The hint of a smile crept over Helen Bentley’s face.

‘To panic in a situation like that,’ Johanne continued, drawing breath, ‘is not particularly, well, president-like. Not in your view. You’re being too harsh on yourself, Helen. You don’t need to be. To be honest, it’s not very helpful. Even a person like you has weaknesses. Everyone does. The only disaster in this situation was that you thought they had found yours. Why don’t we try to go back a bit further? Let’s see what happened in the seconds before you felt the world tumbling around your ears.’

‘I read the letter from Warren,’ Helen Bentley said succinctly.

‘Yes, and it said something about a child. You don’t remember any more than that.’

‘Yes, I do. It said that they knew. That the Trojans knew. About the child.’

Johanne polished her glasses with a serviette. There was obviously some grease on them, because when she put her them on again, she saw the world through a veiled filter.

‘Helen,’ she tried again, ‘I appreciate that you can’t tell us what all this Trojan stuff is about. I also respect the fact that you want to keep your secret about the child to yourself, the secret that you thought they knew about and that made you… well, panic. But could it… might there…’

She hesitated and pulled a face.

‘You’re getting yourself in a tangle now,’ Hanne said.

‘Yes.’

Johanne looked at the President. ‘Could it be that you automatically thought about your secret?’ She was talking quickly now so that she wouldn’t lose her thread. ‘You thought about that one because it’s the worst. The most shameful.’

‘I’m really not following you here,’ Helen Bentley said.

Johanne got up and went over to the sink. She put a drop of washing-up liquid on her glasses and let the hot water run while she rubbed the lenses with her thumb.

‘I have a daughter who’s nearly eleven,’ she said, drying her glasses meticulously. ‘She’s mentally handicapped, but we don’t know what it is. She’s my… she’s my Achilles heel. I feel that I never understand her well enough. That I’m not good enough for her, good enough with her. She makes me so incredibly vulnerable. She makes me so… deluded. If I overhear a conversation about poor parenting or neglect, I automatically think that they’re talking about me. If I see a TV programme about some miracle cure for autism in the US, I feel like I’m a bad mother because I haven’t looked for anything like that. The programme becomes an accusation against me personally, and I lie awake at night and feel terrible.’

Both Helen Bentley and Hanne were smiling now. Johanne sat down at the table again.

‘There you go,’ she said, returning their smiles. ‘You recognise yourselves in that. That’s what we’re like, all of us. To a greater or lesser extent. And basically, Helen, I think that you thought of your secret because it’s your Achilles heel. But that’s not what the letter was referring to. It was something else. Another secret, maybe. Or another child.’

‘Another child,’ the President repeated, nonplussed.

‘Yes. You insist that no one, absolutely no one, can know about… about this incident in the distant past. Not even your husband. So then it’s logical that…’

Johanne leant forward over the table.

‘Hanne, you were a detective for many years. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that when something is impossible… well… it is in fact impossible! And then you have to look for another explanation.’

‘The abortion!’ Helen Bentley exclaimed.

The angel that passed through the room took its time. Helen Bentley stared into space. Her mouth was open and her frown was deep. She didn’t seem to be in anyway frightened or ashamed, or, for that matter, embarrassed.

She was concentrating, hard.

‘You’ve had an abortion,’ Johanne said eventually, very slowly, after what felt like minutes of silence. ‘That’s never come out. Not that I’m aware of. And I keep my eyes and ears open, to be honest.’

There was a light chiming sound. Someone was ringing the front door bell.

‘What should we do?’ Johanne whispered.

Helen Bentley froze.

‘Wait,’ Hanne said. ‘Mary, you open the door. It’ll be fine.’

All three held their breath, partly due to the suspense and partly because they wanted to hear the conversation between Mary and whoever it was who had rung the bell. None of them could make out the words.

About half a minute later the door closed. A second later, Mary was in the kitchen, holding Ragnhild on her hip.

‘Who was it?’ Hanne asked.

‘One of the neighbours.’ Mary sniffed and picked up a glass of water from the worktop.

‘And what did one of the neighbours want?’

‘To tell us our storeroom was open. Bugger. Forgot to go back down last night. Lordy, couldn’t just drop the lady for something as mosaic as locking the storeroom, could I?’

‘And what did you say to the neighbour?’

‘Thanks for the information. And when he started going on about one of the doors down there having been busted, and did I know anything about it, I told him to mind his own business. That’s all.’

Then she put down her glass and disappeared.

‘What? What was all that about?’ Helen Bentley asked eagerly.

‘Nothing,’ Hanne said, waving her hand. ‘Just something about a cellar door being open. Forget it.’

‘There was another secret,’ Johanne pressed.

‘I’ve never thought of it as a secret,’ Helen Bentley said in a calm voice. The idea seemed to surprise her. ‘Just something that was no one else’s business. It was a long time ago. Summer 1971. When I was twenty-one, a student. It was long before I met Christopher. He knows about it, of course. So it’s not really a… secret. Not in the truest sense.’

‘But an abortion…’ Johanne ran her finger across the table and repeated: ‘An abortion! Wouldn’t that have been disastrous for your campaign if it got out? And couldn’t it still make life very uncomfortable for you? The abortion issue creates a great and virulent divide in the States, to put it mildly…’

‘I actually don’t think it does,’ Helen Bentley said firmly. ‘And in any case, I’ve always been prepared for it. Everyone knows that I’m pro-choice. It’s true that my position did almost cost me the election…’

‘That’s the understatement of the day,’ Johanne said. ‘Bush did what he could to knock you on that one.’

‘Yes, it’s true. But it all turned out well, mainly because I managed to win lots of votes from women who are… how should I put it, less fortunate. Surveys show that in fact I had support from an impressive number of women who weren’t even registered as voters before. And I made a point of the fact that I’m strongly against late abortions, which made it more palatable for even the anti-abortionists. But I was always quite clear that there was a possibility that my own abortion would become public knowledge. It was a risk I had to take. I’m not ashamed of it. I was far too young to have a child. I was in my second year at college. I didn’t love the father. The abortion was carried out legally; I was seven weeks pregnant and I went to New York. I was and am a supporter of a woman’s right to have an abortion within the first trimester, and can stand up for what I did.’

She took a deep breath, and Johanne noticed a tiny tremble in Helen Bentley’s voice as she continued.

‘But I paid a high price. It made me sterile. As you know, my daughter Billie is adopted. There’s no discrepancy here between words and reality, and at the end of the day, that’s what counts for us politicians.’

‘But I’m sure there are some people who would think it was dynamite,’ Johanne said.

‘Definitely,’ Helen Bentley agreed. ‘Plenty, I’m sure. As you said, abortion is something that splits the US in two, and it’s an incredibly sensitive issue that will never be resolved. If it did become known that I’d had an abortion, I would certainly have to work for my money. Like I said, I-’

‘Who knows about it?’

‘Who…’

She thought about it, furrowed her brow.

‘No one,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Well, Christopher, of course. I told him before we got married. And my best friend at the time, Karen, she knew. She was fantastic and a great support. She died a year later in a car accident. When I was in Vietnam and… I can’t imagine that Karen would have told anyone. She was…’

‘What about the hospital? There must be records somewhere.’

‘The hospital burnt down in 1972 or ’73. Pro-life activists went a bit far during a demonstration. It was before the technology revolution, so I assume…’

‘The records aren’t there,’ Johanne said. ‘Your friend’s no longer here.’

She ticked them off on her fingers and paused before daring to ask her next question. ‘What about the father? Did he know?’

‘Yes, of course. He…’

She broke off. There was an unfamiliar gentleness about her, a softness to her mouth, and her eyes narrowed, making all her wrinkles disappear. She looked years younger.

‘He wanted to get married,’ she said. ‘He really wanted to have the child. But when he realised that I was serious, he supported me in every way. He came with me to New York.’

She looked up. The tears spilled over. She made no attempt to dry her eyes.

‘I didn’t love him. I don’t even think I was in love. But he was the kindest… I think he is the kindest man I have ever met. Thoughtful. Wise. He promised me that he would never tell anyone. I can’t imagine that he would ever break his promise. And if he has, he must have changed radically.’

‘It does happen,’ Johanne whispered.

‘Not with him,’ Helen Bentley said. ‘He was a man of honour, if ever I met one. I’d known him for nearly two years before I got pregnant.’

‘It’s thirty-four years ago,’ Hanne said. ‘A lot can happen to a person in that time.’

‘Not him,’ Helen Bentley repeated and shook her head.

‘What was he called?’ Hanne asked. ‘Can you remember?’

‘Ali Shaeed Muffasa,’ Helen Bentley said. ‘I think he changed his name later. To a more… English-sounding one. But to me, he was just Ali, the kindest boy in the world.’