The Quarry

6

Burn them, Gerlof, Ella Davidsson had said when she was lying in hospital like a skeleton. Promise me you’ll burn them.

And he had nodded. But his late wife’s diaries were still here, and this Friday he had found them.

The sun had returned to the Baltic, just a week before Easter. Now all that was lacking was the warmth, then Gerlof would be able to spend whole days sitting in the garden. Resting, thinking, and building his ships in bottles. Slender blades of green were beginning to appear among the brown leaves around him. The grass wouldn’t need cutting until May.

The sunshine in the middle of the day was beginning to entice the butterflies out. For Gerlof they were the most important sign of spring. Even as a little boy he had waited to see the first butterflies appear, and to see what colour they were. At the age of eighty-three it was difficult to be filled with the same sense of anticipation as when he was a child, but Gerlof still waited eagerly for the first butterfly of the year.

He was alone at the cottage now; everyday life had resumed after the move, and he ambled around the small rooms, his stick in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The wheelchair waited silently in the bedroom, ready for the day when his rheumatic problems, caused by Sjögren’s syndrome, would take a turn for the worse. At the moment he could still get up and down the stone steps without any problem.

The previous week his furniture had been delivered — the small number of pieces he had wanted to keep from his room at the home — and all the mementoes from his thirty years at sea: the ships in bottles, the maritime charts, the name plates from some of the ships on which he had sailed, and beautiful examples of rope work, dark brown and still smelling of tar.

Gerlof was surrounded by memories.

It was when he had opened the cupboard next to the fridge in the kitchen to put away the log books and charts that he had come across the diaries.

They had been tied up in a bundle on a shelf behind Ella’s little jewellery box and old books by Karl May and L. M. Montgomery. Each one had a number in black ink on the cover, and when he undid the string and opened them, he saw densely written pages in his wife’s ornate handwriting.

Ella’s diaries — eight altogether.

Gerlof hesitated briefly. He thought about the promise he had made Ella. Then he picked up the top book and went out to the wooden seat in the garden, with a feeling that he was doing something dishonourable. He had seen her writing in her diary on the odd occasion, but she had never shown him what she had written, and had only mentioned her diaries on that one occasion, when she was dying.

Burn them, Gerlof.

He sat down, wrapped a blanket around his legs and placed the book on the table beside him. It was twenty-two years since Ella had died of liver cancer in the autumn of 1976, but here in the garden he often had the feeling that she wasn’t gone at all, that she was in the kitchen making coffee.

Ella had always set clear boundaries. For example, she had never allowed her husband in the kitchen, and of course Gerlof had never tried to change her mind. When their daughters Lena and Julia became teenagers at the beginning of the sixties they had made determined attempts to get him to help with the housework, but Gerlof had refused.

‘It’s too late for me,’ he’d said.

For the most part he had been afraid and unsure of himself in the kitchen. He had never learned to cook or do the washing, although he could do the dishes. These days Swedish men seemed to do just about everything; times had changed.

Gerlof turned his head. He saw a small fluttering movement in the long grass beyond the garden. It was the first butterfly of the year. It came flying towards him with the same jerky movements as every other spring butterfly he had seen over the years, flitting here and there with no apparent goal.

It was a Brimstone Yellow. A perfect sign of spring.

Gerlof smiled at the bright butterfly as it reached the lawn in front of him — but stopped smiling when he spotted another butterfly over in the long grass. This one was dark, almost black, with grey and white stripes; he didn’t know the name of it. Camberwell Beauty? Or did they call it the Mourning Cloak? This one was flying in a straighter line, and reached the lawn at almost the same time as the Brimstone Yellow. They fluttered around each other for a few seconds in a spring dance before flitting past Gerlof and disappearing behind the cottage.

A yellow butterfly and a dark-grey one, what did that mean? He had always regarded the first butterfly as a sign of what the rest of the year would be like: bright and hopeful or dark and gloomy, but now he wasn’t so sure. It was as if he had hoisted a flag that had got stuck at half-mast before continuing to the top.

When he opened the diary he heard the sound of a car engine. A big shiny car came along the road and turned off on to the gravel track leading to the quarry.

Gerlof caught a glimpse of a middle-aged man and woman in the front.

Probably some of the new neighbours who had built houses by the quarry. Summer visitors. No doubt they would be here only when it was light and warm; they were hardly likely to spend time here when it was freezing cold, chopping down the last of the trees along the coast as his own relatives had once done.

Gerlof wasn’t interested in the couple in the car. He looked down at the diary and began to read.

Gerlof realized these were holiday diaries. He knew that when he had been away at sea, Ella had often gone up to the summer cottage with their two daughters. Later, when they were older and wanted to go with Gerlof to Stockholm or stay at home in Borgholm, she had come here alone. That was probably why he had rarely seen her writing in them.

He read on:

‘The pasture’ was Ella and Gerlof’s name for the overgrown area beyond the summer cottage where the cattle used to graze before the war.

But what did Ella mean by a troll?

Suddenly Gerlof heard the sound of another car behind the trees. The engine died away, then the gate creaked. He quickly hid the diary under the blanket. He didn’t know why — a guilty conscience, perhaps.

A short, powerfully built man in his seventies was heading up the path. It was his friend John Hagman, dressed in the worn blue dungarees and the pale-grey peaked cap he wore winter and summer. He had been Gerlof’s first mate on the Baltic cargo ships once upon a time; these days he ran the campsite at the southern end of the village.

He came over with a heavy tread and stopped on the grass; Gerlof smiled and nodded at him, but John didn’t smile back — a cheerful, happy expression was not his style.

‘So,’ he said. ‘I heard you were back.’

‘Yes. You too.’

John nodded. He had been up to visit Gerlof at the home a few times during the winter, but otherwise he had been staying in his son’s small apartment down in Borgholm. He had seemed almost shame-faced when he explained that the village had begun to feel too cold and lonely during the winter. He couldn’t cope with it any longer, and Gerlof understood completely.

‘Anyone else here?’

John shook his head. ‘There hasn’t been anybody around in the village since New Year, apart from the odd weekend visitor.’

‘What about Astrid Linder?’

‘She gave up as well in the end, and closed up the cottage. I think she went to the Riviera in January.’

‘I see,’ said Gerlof, remembering that Astrid had been a doctor before she retired. ‘I should think she’s got a fair bit of money tucked away.’

They fell silent. Gerlof couldn’t see any more butterflies. He listened to the faint soughing of the wind over in the trees and said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be here much longer, John.’

‘Here in the village?’

‘No, I mean here,’ said Gerlof, pointing to his chest, where he presumed the soul and therefore the source of life was located.

It didn’t sound quite as dramatic as he’d expected, and John merely nodded and asked, ‘Are you ill, then?’

‘No more than usual,’ said Gerlof. ‘But I’m very weary. I ought to do something useful, a bit of carpentry, paint the cottage like I used to do... but I just sit here.’

John looked away, as if the conversation was hard work. ‘Start with something small,’ he suggested. ‘Go down to the sea and clean up the gig.’

Gerlof sighed. ‘It’s full of holes.’

‘We can fix it,’ said John. ‘And there’s a new millennium in two years, a new era. You want to be around for that, don’t you?’

‘Maybe... we’ll just have to see what this new era is like.’ Gerlof wanted to change the subject, and nodded in the direction of the fence. ‘So what do you think of the neighbours, then? Across the road.’

John said nothing.

‘Don’t you know them?’

‘Well, I’ve seen them. But they’ve hardly been here up till now, I don’t really know much about them.’

‘Me neither. But I’m curious — aren’t you?’

‘They’re rich,’ said John. ‘Rich folk from the mainland.’

‘Definitely,’ said Gerlof. ‘You need to let them know you’re around.’

‘What for?’

‘So you can do some jobs for them before the campers arrive.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

Gerlof nodded, leaning forward slightly. ‘And make sure they pay you well.’

‘Good thinking,’ said John, looking almost cheerful.