The Living and the Dead in Winsford

43

During the thirty or more years we have spent together we have socialized with lots of people — of course we have.

But we don’t have many lasting friends. I don’t feel especially worried or frustrated about writing that, it’s just a statement of fact. When we have attended private dinner parties or sessions in pubs, it has nearly always been a case of meeting colleagues and their associates. My colleagues or Martin’s colleagues. Mainly the latter. Indeed, I think I can say that I’ve been introduced to about three times as many academics as he has been to television folk of one kind or another, colleagues who in response to my smiling introduction have felt obliged to shake hands with my husband, the literature professor Martin Holinek.

But of course colleagues can also be friends, and there was one couple who were quite close to us. Whom I didn’t hesitate to confide in during the whole of the eighties and into the nineties. They were called Sune and Louise. Sune and Martin had become acquainted at grammar school, and had begun studying literary history at the same time at the same university. Incidentally, Sune is that lecturer who maintains he saw Jacqueline Kennedy drinking coffee at a cafe in Uppsala.

Louise entered Sune’s life at about the same time as I became intimate with Martin, and they moved into a shared flat in Åsögatan in the Söder district of Stockholm about six months after Gunvald was born. Louise was working at a bank in those days, and as far as I know she still does — or at least still works in the bank world.

Sune had a very poverty-stricken childhood. He grew up as the only child of a single mother who managed to just about make a living as a cleaner in a little village in Värmland. Thanks to a woman teacher who realized how gifted he was, he had a decent education: she supported both Sune and his mother financially while he was at grammar school as a boarder, and continued to finance his advanced academic studies. Sune always referred to this teacher, whose name was Ingegerd Fintling and had been dead for about a year when we first met, as an angel in human guise. In the seventies both Sune and Martin were naturally very left-wing, and I think that Sune was a sort of political alibi for Martin. Martin himself came from the upper middle-class, but it would be hard to imagine anything more lower-class than the son of a cleaner. For several years Martin was almost jealous of his friend.

But as time passed, needless to say the red paint faded away from Martin, even though he liked to insist for many years that he was a social democrat. In any case, we socialized with Sune and Louise quite a lot during those decades: after all, we lived only a few blocks away from them in the early eighties; and they had their first and only child, Halldor, about halfway between our two.

I remember being very fond of Louise without really understanding why. She was an unusually quiet and friendly person — perhaps that was why. She didn’t seem to expect much from life, and was always satisfied with herself and her circumstances. Whenever we met she was happy to allow Sune and Martin to make the elaborate gestures, lay down the political manifesto and go on about politics — but not in a submissive sort of way. She often laughed at them, and we sometimes did so in partnership; but there was never any trace of malice or irony in Louise, just a sort of mild and amused tolerance. Boys will be boys, after all.

It was several years before I realized that she was religious. Deeply and privately so, without any fuss. When the penny dropped I asked her why she hadn’t told me, and she said it was because I had never asked.

And she added that she felt no need to advertise her beliefs. Nor to discuss them. She didn’t go to church, and she didn’t believe in organized religion. She and God had a relationship of their own, it didn’t need any augmentation.

I wanted to know how she had achieved that relationship, if it was something she had experienced ever since she was a child: she explained that she had a revelation when she was fifteen, and it just went on from there.

I wondered how she reconciled her faith with all the left-wing chatter, and pointed at our living room where Martin and Sune were absorbed by an analysis of some radical political subtlety or other. Louise and I were standing in the kitchen, preparing the dessert as the gentlemen had been responsible for the main course. We were both stone-cold sober as I was pregnant with Synn and Louise was breast-feeding. Halldor and Gunvald must have been fast asleep in our warm bedroom.

‘It’s not a problem,’ said Louise. ‘I have no desire to sit there debating Our Lord and socialism with Martin, but inside my head everything is straightforward. God comes first, if you understand what I mean.’

‘And what about Sune?’ I asked of course. ‘Opium for the masses, or whatever it is they say?’

‘Sune is number three,’ explained Louise, and giggled — she really could giggle like a thirteen-year-old. ‘Halldor is number two. Sune knows the ranking order, and accepts it.’

For some reason I never mentioned Louise’s religious beliefs to Martin, and long afterwards, when we no longer met, I sometimes wondered why. It wasn’t as if it were a secret she had trusted me with. Louise and I didn’t talk about it between ourselves either, not even when she was holding my hand during the difficult period after Synn’s birth. I guessed of course that she was sitting there praying for me in her own quiet way, but I never asked nor commented on it.

Perhaps I kept it to myself simply because I had no wish to hear Martin’s exposition and analysis of the circumstances: yes, that was probably the top and bottom of it.

Sune eventually got a post in Uppsala and they moved there. We visited them several times: they had managed to buy a house in Kåbo, the district of Uppsala where high-ranking academics are supposed to live — Martin used to tease Sune for what he called a betrayal of his lower-class roots, but I always had the feeling that there was a grain or two of jealousy in his comments. Sune had completed his dissertation before Martin, and hence at this stage was probably a step or two ahead of him in his career. I recall Martin occasionally — especially when we were still living in Söder — confiding in me comments on Sune’s so-called research which suggested that he really wasn’t up to standard.

But even if we didn’t meet so often we were still in touch throughout the nineties. They occasionally came to visit us in Nynäshamn and we went to Uppsala. Our children were friends, and I think they regarded themselves as sort of cousins. Halldor turned out to be extremely talented, and he completed sixth-form courses in maths, physics and chemistry while he was still in the fifth form. As far as I know he’s now a researcher at a university somewhere in the USA — in any case he won a scholarship and went there shortly after taking his school-leaving examinations.

Anyway, both Martin and Sune applied for the same professorship. It was just after the turn of the century, and for some reason I don’t know about there was a delay before a final decision was made. As I understood the situation, it was clear early on that one of the pair of them would get the chair: none of the other applicants could match Sune’s and Martin’s qualifications.

It was a strange time. For several months in the autumn it was as if war was in the offing. As if something major and unstoppable was on its way, and there was no way of avoiding it. Martin had submitted various extra items to the appointment committee after the closing date — I never asked what it was all about as I preferred not to know, and sometimes when I observed him at the breakfast table, or when he was absorbed by the television, I had the impression that he was somehow half-paralysed. As if he had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage but the only after-effect was this numbness. This sudden emptiness, or absence — I don’t know what to call it and didn’t know at the time, but at least it was clear to me that if it didn’t pass soon I would have to contact a doctor.

But it did pass. One day at the beginning of November it was announced that Martin had been awarded the chair, and almost immediately everything was back to normal again. The paralysis lifted, war was called off. We celebrated, of course, but not excessively. We went to a pub in the Vasastan district of Stockholm with a few of his colleagues, and sank a glass or two.

A few days into December Louise rang and hoped we could meet for a brief chat — she was going to be in Stockholm the following day, and wondered if I had some time to spare.

Of course I had. We met at the Vetekattan cafe in Kungsgatan: I recall that she was wearing a brand new red coat and that she looked younger than when we had last met, which to be honest was a few years back. I also thought that she radiated a sort of glow — that really was an unusual thought for me to have, which is probably why I remember it.

‘Anyway, there’s something I want to tell you,’ she said when we had found a quiet, out-of-the-way spot and started sipping our coffee. ‘I wasn’t at all sure that I ought to, but Sune and I spoke about it and he thought the same as me — that you ought to know.’

She smiled, and shrugged as if to indicate that it wasn’t the most important thing in the world despite everything. Not in her and Sune’s world, at least. I expect I probably raised an eyebrow, and asked what it was all about.

‘He cheated,’ said Louise. ‘Martin cheated. He got that professorship because he lied about something. Sune could report him, but we’ve agreed that we’re not going to do so.’

I stared at her.

‘That was all. But I think you ought to know about it. Nobody else knows, and Sune isn’t going to say anything.’

I opened my mouth, but couldn’t find any words.

‘We’ve agreed about that. You don’t need to worry. You know that you can trust Sune.’

I ought to have taken the matter up with Martin, of course I should; but yet again, as if it had become a sort of golden rule in our relationship, I chose to say nothing.

Or perhaps that was the very moment when I lay down the golden rule. In any case, I soon realized that my silence meant that I was also guilty. I wasn’t sure of what, but it was simply not possible for me to doubt anything that Louise had told me in confidence.

Anyway, I became an accomplice. I had buried something and cemented over an injury that would have needed light and air in order to heal. It seems to me that it is very much in keeping with so much else that I have failed to do during my journey from the cradle to the grave.

That really is the story of my life.