The Quiet Mother

46

It was as if the bottom had dropped out of their conversation, and after a slight hesitation, Konrád said he should be going. It was late and he didn’t want to keep her up. Eygló was still holding the gadget, distractedly pressing and releasing the spring, completely in her own world. Konrád looked over the printouts lying on top of the piano. They seemed to be obituaries.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Eygló finally said. ‘That’s right. It’s late.’

‘I hope I haven’t... haven’t been too brusque. That wasn’t my intention.’

‘No, of course not,’ said Eygló. ‘It’s late,’ she repeated. ‘You should go.’

Konrád made no move to go. He didn’t want to leave her in such a sad state.

‘Of course, I’m familiar with such swindles,’ said Eygló, handing him back the object. ‘That’s what they were known for, pretty much.’

‘I’m sure it was my father who decided how they’d go about it,’ Konrád said.

‘No, they were clearly both immersed in this,’ said Eygló. ‘I don’t know why I thought Engilbert had been any better. I was hoping maybe it had all been in your dad’s hands and Engilbert tried to counterbalance the fraud. Tried to be a bit more honest. He had the gift of clairvoyance. I know he did. I felt as if he always tried to be honest. But maybe that was just with me. I don’t know. He instilled those views in me. Knew what I had in me, that I resembled him, and he taught me not to fear it. Told me to be honest with myself, and then everything would be all right.’

Konrád didn’t know what to say.

‘I thought he was speaking from the heart,’ she continued. ‘Poor Stella,’ she then said. ‘It’s no surprise that she shovelled her money at them.’

‘I didn’t mean to... I’m sorry that this should bring you so much disappointment,’ Konrád said. ‘If I’d known...’

‘No, it’s good to have this all out in the open. Anything else would have been impossible,’ said Eygló. ‘He’d started to drink heavily around that time. I don’t know if that’s an excuse. Stella. Hansína. God knows how many others.’

‘They didn’t make any friends, doing what they did. That’s quite clear. Are you collecting obituaries?’ Konrád asked, pointing at the papers on top of the piano. ‘Who’s she?’ he asked, taking one and skimming it. ‘Did you know this Hulda?’

‘No, and she’ll be of no interest to you,’ Eygló replied.

‘Anything to do with séances?’ Konrád asked.

‘She was a friend of Málfríður’s. They were both in the Society for Psychical Research. I never met her, but I found an obituary online that Málfríður wrote about her. Others wrote about her, too. I was just collecting them all.’

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to see what was said about her. That’s all. You have no interest in such matters.’

‘Are you going to be all right?’ Konrád asked.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Eygló.

They said their goodbyes and she sat at the piano for some time after he’d gone. Before he arrived, she’d planned to tell him what she experienced in the cemetery and the promise she gave Málfríður about being open to messages. Now, however, she knew better than ever that it was useless to talk to Konrád about such matters. At the moment, he’d have the upper hand in any such discussions.

She’d tried to open his mind a bit with her stories, the ones that were important to her. He’d listened to them and tried to show interest, but the realist in him didn’t allow him to go any further than that. From the way he responded, she could read his opinion, that what she saw, heard and felt were just her own fantasies, but they were so powerful that she believed, knew, them to be real.

Eygló reached for the obituaries and ran her eyes over them. The one by Málfríður had appeared in Stories of Icelanders, a supplement to one of the morning newspapers in the old days, which only published obituaries. Eygló remembered people making fun of it, calling it by the Danish term ‘Dödens magasin’ — Death’s magazine. She smiled to herself. She liked the old tradition of saying goodbye to one’s loved ones by publishing words of remembrance in the papers. For many, it was part of the grieving process.

Málfríður wrote that she and Hulda had been childhood friends who had grown up together on Laufásvegur Road, not far from where the old Teachers’ College stood. They were Reykjavík girls to their fingertips, she wrote proudly. They’d stuck together through life, both with an unwavering interest in ghosts and ghost stories and accounts of the afterlife, and both were members of the Society for Psychical Research, attended countless séances and experienced many things that could never be explained. They’d talked a lot about life after death, and both were convinced of its existence. Málfríður said she was confident that Hulda would be waiting for her when it came to her final days, and that she had a place next to her in the cemetery on Suðurgata Road. So they would stick together through all eternity.

Eygló regarded the photograph of Hulda that accompanied the obituary and had no doubt that she was the same woman she’d seen in the cemetery, standing at Málfríður’s grave. They’d even exchanged words, and Eygló tried to remember something that Hulda said. Eygló hadn’t heard her very well because a tourist had walked by at that moment and asked her for directions. When she turned back to the grave, the woman was gone and the sentence hung half finished in the air: What she was looking for...

‘...she has now found,’ whispered Eygló.

She shook her head and stood up, picked up a jacket tossed over a chair and took it to the coat cupboard in the hall. She grabbed a hanger and hung it up, then noticed the sea-green coat she’d bought around Christmas 1971, but had never worn. It was in a clear plastic garment bag and was as spanking new as the day it was purchased. Eygló hadn’t liked the garment, after all. It was beautiful and fitted her, but Eygló didn’t feel comfortable in the coat for reasons she was at a loss to explain. She’d bought it at the Kjörgarður shopping centre on Laugavegur High Street, where there’d once been shops of all sorts, and when she was on her way out of the shop with it, she’d heard one of the girls working there say that the coat was an unclaimed order.

Eygló shut the cupboard door. Sometimes, it crossed her mind that the reason she’d never worn the coat was because of the unease that came over her the few times she tried to wear it, a feeling that she wasn’t its rightful owner.