The Living and the Dead in Winsford

FIVE
54

I’m sitting at a round table set for six people. The other places are empty and so is the whole dining room come to that. An elderly, bald waiter in a red jacket comes in with my main course: Wiener schnitzel with potato cake and mushroom sauce. He fills my red wine glass without even asking.

It’s nine o’clock in the evening. The hotel is called the Duisburger Hof, and the city is Duisburg. Castor is lying on the bed in our room upstairs, having a snooze — we have been for quite a long evening walk. It’s a big hotel and in a room adjacent to the dining room a Rotary club is having a meeting: I can occasionally hear laughter and shouting from in there, which underlines my loneliness in no uncertain way. I think the waiter has caught on to that fact as he keeps coming over to ask if everything is to my satisfaction. Every time I tell him it is. Jawohl, alles gut.

The journey has gone smoothly and according to plan so far, but everything has felt more strange the further away from Exmoor we have come. The further away from England. I had to show my passport before we drove onto the train taking us through the Channel Tunnel from Folkestone, but a half-asleep policeman merely glanced at it. I didn’t even have to hide Castor away — it’s when you’re travelling in the other direction that checks are thorough. When you are about to enter the United Kingdom.

And then we drove through France, Belgium and Holland before eventually ending up in Germany. Trouble in finding the ring road around Antwerp, trouble in getting coffee out of an automatic machine at a petrol station just outside Ghent, but apart from that, no problems.

Apart from a nagging conviction that everything was unreal, that I was out of touch with the surroundings.

And as a consequence, a feeling of frailty that I haven’t experienced since the first few days on the moor. But I tell myself it is a weakness that can be transformed into a strength, in view of the role I have to play in the days ahead. A nervous breakdown wouldn’t be a minus — on the contrary. All I need to do is to postpone it for a day: as long as I don’t allow it to affect me too soon, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

After finally succeeding in extracting coffee from that automatic machine in Ghent, I devoted half an hour to finding somewhere to spend the night as there was a link to the internet at the petrol station, and I found this hotel. I rang them from the mobile I’d been given by Mark Britton and explained that I was travelling with a well-behaved dog, that my credit card had been stolen and that I would like to pay in cash. All that was accepted without question, and I am relieved to think that this is the last time I shall need to resort to that cheap trick. As soon as I land in Denmark I shall be able to resume my real identity and re-enter the real world, a fact that leaves me with mixed feelings. There is something attractive about the thought of booking incognito into a comfortable hotel, with or without a Rotary club party, with or without a Wiener schnitzel, but with red wine and a red-jacketed waiter, for the rest of my life.

I also realize, of course, that if anybody were to start checking up on all the details — our address in Morocco, the route we had travelled, our stops and overnight stays en route — then everything would collapse like a house of cards. But why would anyone want to start checking? Why?

This is in fact a stroke of genius in my plan: I can’t resist congratulating myself on it as I sit here in this secure German hotel dining room, chewing away at my well-earned schnitzel. All the focus will be on what has happened to Martin, nobody will question our stay in North Africa. It is too well documented in all the incoming and outgoing e-mails. All that is in store for me is sympathy and understanding, no impertinent questions. No checks.

I take a swig of wine. Think once again that I can allow myself a minor — or major — nervous breakdown: it would be regarded as perfectly natural.

Yes, very natural indeed in view of everything that has apparently happened. The poor thing, just imagine what she has had to put up with.

I smile, I can’t resist smiling in all my loneliness. All that remains is for tomorrow’s little bit of play-acting to be successfully concluded, and that isn’t going to be too difficult. I shall no doubt pull it off.

I drink the rest of my wine slowly, and since my waiter suggests that I might like a coffee and a cognac I drink that as well. I feel slightly drunk, and through the thin veil this creates in my mind I am able to observe everything from a convenient and comfortable distance. My life consists of so many different components: perhaps the whole of my stay on Exmoor is a closed chapter — and Mark Britton a short story, despite everything — and perhaps in the future I shall be able to look back on it in that way. In a year or so’s time these three months will be no more than an ingredient, a series of circumstances connected with Martin’s death. . Perhaps also I might recall with regret how vital and significant that period seemed to be while it was actually happening, but also how quickly it faded away.

Or perhaps I might actually return there. I twirl my glass of cognac in my hand, and try to imagine such a development. Perhaps what I partially suggested to Mark might in fact happen, perhaps I really will sell the house in Nynäshamn and leave Sweden. Tell the few good friends I have that I have been thinking of going to live in England for a few years: I need a change of scene now that I have become a widow. What could be more natural than that? Who would suspect that there was something odd about such a thought? You can’t continue trundling along as before when one wheel is no longer turning. I smile once more, this time at the formulation of my thoughts. I wonder if I made it up, or if it’s something I’ve read. When one wheel is no longer turning.

For some unknown reason, while I’m still sitting here in my splendid isolation and still have a drop of cognac in my glass, I start thinking about all the people I’ve met who are now dead. Wondering if they can actually see me and can follow my thoughts as I sit here in a slightly tipsy state in between two chapters. In between the fourth and the fifth act. Rolf. Gudrun Ewerts. My father and my mother. Gunsan of course, she was the first in line. Vivianne, the loony. Elizabeth Williford Barrett — I’ve never actually met her, naturally, but I have passed by her grave at least a hundred times during the last three months: what is she lying there and thinking about? And Martin. What is he mulling over, lying in his bunker? Or possibly in a Polish mortuary. Or is he sitting on a cushion of cloud, watching what I’m up to with a furrow in his brow, a deep and very familiar furrow?

At this point I feel a pang of discomfort and drink the rest of my cognac. I wave to my red-jacketed friend and explain that I’d like to pay. He asks if I want him to add it to my hotel bill, and I say that he might just as well. I leave him a ten-euro note on the table as a tip as I don’t have anything smaller, and take the lift up to my bedfellow.

Having come up to my room I make the mistake of switching on the telly. Apart from an occasional flickering image on a screen some distance away in various pubs, I haven’t watched any television for three months: and now when I see some sort of heavily made-up panel sitting bolt upright in front of an enthusiastic audience I feel an urge to throw up. A compère, who looks as if he’s combed his hair with a pitchfork and is wearing a glittering jacket, struts around in front of and behind the panel shouting out incomprehensible assertions that they have to respond to by pressing either red or green buttons. Then the one who pressed first comes out with something funny and the audience roars with laughter. Over and over again. I watch the appalling display for five minutes before switching off. And this is what I’ve devoted my life to, I think.

It is clear to me that whatever happens, this is not a path I shall continue to trundle along. Not this lonely path.

When I eventually collapse into bed I fall asleep more or less immediately and dream about a large number of people — living and dead — who simply won’t fit into set patterns: Mark Britton and Jeremy. Jane Barrett, Alfred Biggs and Margaret Allen. Tom Herold and Bessie Hyatt. Professor Soblewski. And the vicar in Selworthy, the one who painted his church white so that he would be able to find his way home no matter how drunk and disorderly he was. All of these characters wander into and out of my consciousness without ever stating why they are there or what they want; but they are insistent, as if they wanted to give me credit for something, and when I wake up in the morning it feels as if I haven’t slept a wink. Or a blink or a moment, or whatever it is one doesn’t sleep for.

But in many ways this is the last day, and it seems to me that as long as I don’t get involved in a crash on the autobahn, everything is going to turn out for the best. Thanks to patience and tact I have managed to negotiate every obstacle so far, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t overcome the final little stumbling block as well. All I need to do is to make sure I drink enough coffee.

I have a shower and then take Castor for a walk round the block: it’s drizzling, and he does his business on the first stretch of grass we come to. He then has a bite to eat in our room while I go down and sit at the same table as last night for breakfast. The waiter is different though: thirty years younger, but he is wearing a red jacket as well.

We leave the Duisburger Hof at half past nine and continue our journey northwards.