The Living and the Dead in Winsford

4

Early in the morning of the tenth of April my husband raped a young woman in a hotel in Gothenburg. Her name was Magdalena Svensson, twenty-three years old, and she had been working at the hotel as a waitress since the beginning of the year. She reported the incident to the police after about three weeks mulling it over, on the second of May.

Or perhaps he didn’t actually rape her. I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t there.

Martin was interrogated, spent a night and a day in police custody and was then released on bail.

Just over two weeks later, on the eighteenth of May, a tabloid newspaper became aware of the situation — the fact that the well-known polemicist, author and professor of literature, Martin Holinek, had been charged with rape — and by the following week the whole of Sweden knew about it. Magdalena Svensson talked about what had happened that night to a large number of media outlets, and for five days running it made the headlines in the evening tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet. My husband refused to comment and was given sick leave by the university; but it was widely discussed on the radio and television and in the press. But above all it was a hot topic on social media: in one blog, for instance, another woman claimed she had also been raped by ‘that sleazy professor’ — in a hotel in Umeå almost a year ago. He was alleged to have been ‘as randy as a bloody chimpanzee’ — an expression she had obviously borrowed from an earlier case involving a French banker and politician — but she had not got round to reporting the incident because she was afraid. Two other women wrote in their blogs that they had also been raped by different professors, and comments were as numerous as grasshoppers in Egypt.

To crown it all one of the commercial television channels offered me and Martin 50,000 kronor if all three of us would agree to take part in one of their evening discussion programmes. By ‘all three’ they meant the rape victim, the rapist and the rapist’s wife. They considered it to be a matter of considerable public interest. We declined the offer. We never discovered whether or not Magdalena Svensson accepted. Or at least, I didn’t.

On the tenth of June Miss Svensson withdrew her rape accusation, and for a few days the incident had new wind in its sails in the media. There was speculation about her having been threatened, about the rapist having bought himself free in accordance with time-honoured practice, and various other theories similar in nature. A demonstration against men who hate women attracted two thousand people to Sergels Torg in Stockholm. Somebody posted a condom full of shit through our letter box.

To be fair, a handful of voices made themselves heard in Martin’s defence — the usual ones. But he held fast to his decision to make no comment. So did 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 any longer: somewhat lazily I had assumed it would be sufficient for Martin to masturbate in the shower and imagine he was penetrating some willing accomplice’s pussy. But in fact it wasn’t quite as easy as that.

Ask for a divorce? I would be fully entitled to do that, of course. But it didn’t appeal to me. There was something basically banal about such a reaction: after all, we had been married for thirty years, we had been living parallel lives with a sort of shared mutual understanding, and we had booked a shared grave at Skogskyrkogården cemetery.

But in the end I phoned her. Magdalena Svensson. I found her details on the Eniro website. She was at home in Guldheden, Gothenburg, and answered on her mobile.

We met three days later, on the twentieth of August, in a cafe in the Haga district. It was an exceptionally warm day, and I had taken a morning train from Stockholm. As I arrived a bit early, I decided to walk all the way from the central station, and felt unpleasantly sweaty when I reached the cafe. Moreover a vague feeling of disgust had grown up inside me; I doubted whether what I was about to do was sensible, and very nearly turned back as I approached Haga. I had my mobile in my hand, was ready to ring her number and explain that I had changed my mind. That I didn’t in fact want to speak to her, and that it was best if we both forgot all about the whole business.

But I didn’t. I pulled myself together.

She was sitting at an outside table under a parasol, waiting for me. She was wearing a light green dress and a thin, white linen scarf, and even though I recognized her from the pictures in the newspapers, it was as if I were meeting a quite different person. She was young and pretty, but not especially sexy. She looked shy and uneasy — but considering the circumstances that was perhaps not so odd.

She stood up when she saw me. She obviously belonged to the fifty per cent of the Swedish population who recognized me. I nodded to her to indicate that I had identified her, but it was only when we shook hands and introduced ourselves that I was struck by the paradoxical hopelessness of the situation. Either this cautious little creature had been raped by the man I had been living with for the whole of my adult life, in which case one had to feel sorry for her. Or she had voluntarily agreed to have sex with my husband, in which case there was no need to feel sorry for her in the slightest.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

Apart from saying her name, those were the first words she spoke: I thought she was going to continue, but she said nothing more. It seemed to me that if she had been sitting there waiting for me — the older woman who had been betrayed — she ought to have had time to think of something more pregnant to say than that she was sorry. That television programme that never happened would have been a bit of a disaster.

‘So am I,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t come here to tell you how I feel.’

She smiled unsteadily without looking me straight in the eye.

‘Nor have I come to hear about how you feel. I just want you to tell me what happened.’

We sat down.

‘If you have nothing against that,’ I added.

She sucked in her lower lip and I could see that she was close to tears. It was not difficult to work out how all those quotations from her in the newspapers had come about. Journalists had telephoned her, and she hadn’t had the sense to replace the receiver.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. ‘It must be awful for you. I didn’t think about that.’

When, I wondered. When didn’t you think about it?

‘How old are you?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer.

‘Twenty-three. I shall be twenty-four next week. Why do you ask?’

‘I have a daughter who is five years older than you.’

‘Really?’

She didn’t seem to understand my point — nor did I, come to that. A waitress came to our table. I ordered an espresso, Magdalena Svensson asked for another cup of tea.

‘I understand that this is difficult for you,’ I said. ‘It’s hard for both of us. But it would make things easier for me if I got to know exactly what happened between you and my husband.’

She sat in silence for a while, scratching her lower arms and trying not to cry. Her lower lip was sucked into her mouth again, and it was almost impossible not to feel sorry for her. So that’s it, I thought. He did rape her.

‘It was my sister,’ she said.

‘Your sister?’

‘Yes. She was the one who persuaded me to go to the police. I regret doing so. Nothing has got any better. I’ve felt so awful all summer, I just don’t know what to do.’

I nodded. ‘Same here,’ I said.

‘She was also raped, my sister,’ said Magdalena, blowing her nose into a paper tissue. ‘That was five years ago. We have that in common. But she never reported the man who did it. That’s why she encouraged me.’

She suddenly sounded like a schoolgirl. A secondary school pupil who had been caught pilfering or playing truant. Just for a second the image of her and Martin’s naked bodies in a hotel bed flashed through my mind’s eye: it looked so absurd that I had difficulty in taking it seriously.

Was it possible to take something like this seriously? What does seriously mean?

‘She said you should always report the perpetrator, otherwise women will never be liberated. Will never be rehabilitated. . Or something like that. And so I did report him. She came with me to the police station. Her name’s Maria, by the way — just like you.’

I nodded again. ‘So you and your sister have that in common, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maria and Magdalena.’

‘Yes — what’s special about that?’

I brushed the thought to one side. ‘But then you retracted your accusation later?’

‘Yes. I did.’

‘Why?’

‘It became too much.’

‘Too much?’

‘Yes, with the newspapers and all that.’

Our coffee and tea were served, and we sat without speaking for a while.

‘Forgive me,’ I said eventually, and now I really did feel like a stern headmaster questioning a pupil at his secondary school for girls about some petty offence or other. ‘Forgive me, but I don’t really understand. Are you saying that you really were raped by my husband?’

She thought for a moment. Then she said: ‘I was drugged.’

‘Drugged?’

‘Yes. That must have been what happened. I was away with the fairies. And afterwards I could hardly remember anything about it.’

‘Couldn’t remember? But didn’t you say that-’

‘I woke up in his bed. And I had his sperm on my stomach.’

I drank my espresso in one gulp. Concentrated my gaze on the back wheel of a bicycle leaning somewhat untidily against a green wall, and felt that I really ought to throw up.

‘It must have been in a drink. . That drug.’

I gesticulated, inviting her to continue.

‘I finished work at nine o’clock that night, but a few of us stayed behind in the restaurant. One of my workmates, another girl, had a birthday, and we’d planned it as a surprise for her. .’

She fell silent and produced another tissue. I thought that this detail must have been reported in the media, but I’d evidently missed it.

‘Are you suggesting that my husband put some drug or other into your drink, then enticed you into his room and then. . Well? Is that it?’

‘Somebody must have done it,’ said Magdalena. ‘They were sitting at the table next to ours. And we started talking to them, sort of. .’

‘You started talking to them?’

‘Yes.’

‘So there was a group of them, was there?’

‘A few men and women. About your age.’

I wondered who the others could have been. Most probably colleagues of Martin’s, some academics he’d met at the conference. But it didn’t matter, hardly anything mattered.

‘It wasn’t simply that you got drunk, then?’ I asked.

Magdalena Svensson started crying. We sat there in the cafe for another ten minutes, but I couldn’t get any sense out of her.

In the train back to Stockholm there was just one thing she had said that I couldn’t get out of my mind.

I had his sperm on my stomach.

It was when I got back home to Nynäshamn late in the evening after that conversation with Magdalena Svensson that Martin informed me about his plans for the winter. I felt a little bit like a being from outer space, and didn’t have anything much to say. Nor did I mention what I had been doing earlier in the day.