The Seducer

Rattrap

Dagny M.’s exhibition had been the talk of the arts scene in the high summer, a furore which gave rise to all manner of inquiry and analysis in the press, all of it dominated by philistine celebrities, and panel discussions on television in which those few who could actually wield a brush were drowned out by all of the other windbags. It had been a long time since Jonas had visited an exhibition, now that his grandmother had wound down her activities as a patron of the arts, but he did make a point, not surprisingly, of taking in Dagny M.’s controversial debut, although he chose to ignore the invitation to the opening. He spent a whole morning at the Art Society keenly surveying walls hung with what one might call travel pictures, or perhaps it would be better to say: pictures which had travelled — vague, hazy monuments and antique buildings, possibly in ruins, canvases covered in layer upon layer of colour, colours which seemed quite, quite new, shimmering and yet triggering associations with aircraft aluminium and railway-carriage panels and bearing such titles as Caravan of Dreams and Hadrian’s Trail.

‘There was one portrait there, not particularly flattering,’ said Veronika, while Jonas, utterly hypnotized, studied the way in which she stuck her tongue far out to meet the food as if wishing to satisfy herself as to the taste long before the contents of the fork entered her mouth — if, that is, it was not an indication of her forked tongue, her viperish streak or her duplicity. ‘A face caked with brushstrokes and paint splotches,’ she went on. ‘Journey over J.W. it was called. That wouldn’t have had anything to do with you, would it, Jonas?’

‘It might have,’ said Jonas.

‘Well, you always did have bloody awful taste,’ said Sir William, to Jonas’s satisfaction stuffing another forkful of deadly mushrooms into his mouth. ‘This is delicious, Rakel. I really think marriage has been the making of you.’ And the food truly was worth remarking on; if anyone had served filet de boeuf en croûte at a family get-together when Jonas was a boy it would have been considered every bit as bizarre as those dishes said to have been served in Ancient Rome, where whole roasted oxen were slit open and live birds flew out.

There was one reason, and one reason only, for Sir William’s ridicule of Dagny M. and, through her, Jonas: that reviewers had slated her exhibition. In fact, they had well and truly torn it to shreds, as they say. And as far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned, this just about summed up his uncle, that is to say Norway, in the guise of an expensive blazer and a flamboyant silk cravat: that it was quite beyond his grasp that a painter who had received bad reviews might, nonetheless, be good.

All in all Sir William had the ability constantly to amaze Jonas and fill his head with questions and thus was forever challenging his notions of what was actually possible. His uncle lived up on the hill next to the Heming sports stadium, on Gråkammen — ‘the best part of the west side’ as he put it — in a house where the books were arranged by colour and the pictures on the walls purchased by an interior designer with a flair for harmonious tonal schemes. Whenever Jonas visited this part of town there were two things in particular which fascinated him: one was the garages, which spoke of an interest, totally alien to Jonas, in all things sporty, crammed with everything from dozens of pairs of slalom skis to obscure accoutrements for sailboats and even, now and again, a real live horse. The other was the rooms of the houses, so stuffed with traditional rustic furniture that Jonas could not help thinking that every stick of old furniture from every Norwegian farmhouse for centuries must have found its way to this area around Holmenkollen Heights. Jonas had been given some little insight into the enigma which was Sir William on the day his uncle opened the door of an age-old rose-painted cabinet to show off his new set of golf clubs.

‘Well all I can say is, buying one of those pictures would be a really rotten investment,’ said one of the Brothers Grimm.

‘There’s absolutely no way of knowing what those daubs are supposed to represent,’ said Sir William, who had happened across a couple of reproductions in the newspapers. ‘A dose of realism would have worked wonders there.’

‘Realism ought to be defined as the opposite of art,’ retorted Jonas quick as a flash, and suddenly all eyes were on him. ‘The only thing which could save realism from being something other than an empty word would be if all people had the same idea and were of the same opinion on absolutely everything.’ Although he did not say so, Jonas was quoting the French painter Eugène Delacroix, from an entry in his diary for 22 February 1860, if anyone is interested.

‘Yes well, you always were so bloody smart,’ said Sir William. ‘I don’t know where you get it all from. Funny that you’ve never amounted to anything.’ Jonas dropped his eyes and bit his lip. This was one of his uncle’s favourite hobbyhorses: belittling Jonas for his shilly-shallying, harping on about him being ‘a perpetual student’, quizzing him, cross-examining him on how things were going with his music studies, his plans for the College of Architecture, while Veronika and the Brothers Grimm hugged themselves with malicious glee. ‘You’ll never get beyond the bloody Entrance Exam,’ he confined himself to saying. ‘Pity you had to get such a prize wimp for a son, our kid,’ he said to Jonas’s father.

I do not intend to delve much deeper in my attempt to describe Jonas Wergeland’s uncle and his three children, not that it does not, for all its brevity, say something about these people, but because Jonas — who is, after all, my main concern — did not really know these relatives, a fact which never ceased to intrigue him, all through his life. Take, for example, the Brothers Grimm at the dinner table, plying their toothpicks so one could be forgiven for thinking that they were afraid that even the tiniest morsel stuck between their teeth would be regarded as a blot on their immaculate facade. Jonas never did discover what they did, whether they were in shipping or property or what, whether they were speculators or in business in some way. All he knew was that they belonged to the ranks of the paper brokers, people who made their money by ways other than through the production of goods and who could make a fortune simply by being in possession of the right currency at the right time. The Brothers Grimm did not move stones or steel about, they moved money; they did ‘light labour’, as Rakel called it, ‘legitimate fraud’. For this reason these two also seemed abstract in Jonas’s eyes, and every time the two families were together it was this particular aspect of them he studied, his relatives’ indeterminacy, their indefinable contours, their extraordinary impenetrability, their limp handshakes which somehow made him feel as if he were shaking hands with a shadow.

At this point in the dinner Jonas asked his sister, as they had agreed and just by the way, as it were, whether she had also put into the stuffing some of those other mushrooms, the little ones which they had not been too sure about and had been meaning to have an expert to look at, just out of interest. Rakel replied, resisting the temptation to glance in Sir William’s direction, that yes, she had used them, but what harm could it do, there were so few of them.

Sir William’s eyes flickered ever so slightly. He had not realized that they had picked the mushrooms themselves, and he had been thinking they tasted a bit odd, but he pushed this thought away, not wanting to let Dagny M. off the hook so easily: ‘D’you know what I call people like her? Parasites. Living off the rest of us. It’s a disgrace. Who pays for her oil? Daylight robbery if you ask me. Grants and all that. She doesn’t know how lucky she is to live in Norway.’ Sir William knocked back half a glass of red wine, made a face. ‘God-awful bilge water,’ he muttered.

‘Has it never occurred to you,’ Jonas said, ‘that you are actually stealing the oil from which you make such a packet?’ He just threw the comment in purely on instinct; he knew nothing for sure. Sir William just laughed, did not even bother to reply.

But Jonas Wergeland was actually onto something here: an important point. While people in Norway were ranting and raving about the EEC, the really crucial moves were, as always, being made on the quiet: in this case, the setting up of Statoil, Norway’s very own government-run oil company. Jonas’s casual accusation was prompted by the fact that Sir William was now working for Statoil, in fact not only working for them, but practically running the company, one reason why he was also toying with the idea of selling the house on Gråkammen and moving to Stavanger for good. And here I would like to insert my second little discourse on the subject of Norway and its good fortune, the ‘lucky sod’ syndrome, this time as it relates to the nation’s oil. It was just around this time that Norway, believe it or not, suddenly and inconceivably began to show the highest level of economic growth in Europe, and it started to dawn on people what fabulous wealth the oil represented, so great that fairytale metaphors were all they had to fall back on, talk of the Ash Lad and the like, in endeavouring to explain what was going on. You see it was not only that Norway, due to its situation on the outskirts of Europe, was able to share in the more or less blatant tapping of resources in other parts of the world without getting its fingers dirty, as it were; in addition Norway discovered oil, thereby adding — if you will forgive me — yet another unspoken crime to its national record.

Which brings me back to the Netherlands and its golden age, since it was thanks to the father of international law, Hugo Grotius, who wrote that ‘the sea is common to all, being so boundless that it cannot be the property of any one nation’, that the oceans were for so long considered to be mankind’s common heritage until, that is, in the wake of the Second World War, certain countries demanded greater disposition rights over their part of the Continental shelf. But the Norwegians were slow to catch on, thinking, as usual, mainly about fish, and I can safely say, without treading on too many toes, that there was a distinct dearth of expertise, interest and, above all, imagination. In the fifties, when the Norwegian Institute for Geological Surveys received an inquiry from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as to the commercial potential for the nation of the Norwegian Continental shelf, back came a reply which was both short and to the point, a classic example of professional incompetence: ‘Any possibility of finding coal, oil or sulphur on the Continental shelf bordering the Norwegian coastline can be ruled out.’ Not until 1962 when, as luck would have it, foreign oil companies contacted the Norwegian authorities, did it occur to anyone that there might be something afoot, and shortly afterwards an Order in Council was issued, establishing Norway’s rights to its part of the Continental shelf. A couple of years later Norway entered into delimitation agreements with Great Britain and Denmark and had the luck of the devil once again — I almost said it goes without saying — when the median line principle was introduced, although this was by no means a matter of course, thus securing for Norway, among other things, the rich EcoFisk field. All this thanks to luck and a handful of prescient and, above all, open-minded public servants, first and foremost among them the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Jens Evensen. The Netherlands may have had Hugo Grotius, but Norway boasts its own legal brain in Evensen. It would not be at all unreasonable if every Norwegian, out of sheer gratitude, were to have a bust of Jens Evensen displayed in their home.

And what were the gains from this? The gains were colossal; the gains were so high that they transcend the bounds of even the most chauvinistic imagination. In terms of geographical area, Norway is about the sixtieth largest country in the world. But take into account the area of the sea now coming under Norwegian dominion and suddenly only eleven countries in the world exceed it in size. Nowadays Norway lays claim to a section of the Continental shelf four times as great as its mainland, corresponding to one third of the entire European shelf — in other words, Norway has secured control over untold resources.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that the most improbable things happen all the time without anyone being aware of it.

The ‘nationalization’ of the sea and the seabed represents the most radical carving up of geographical areas and commodities since colonial times, and this is a point which never ceases to amaze me: in a country where people will march and protest against just about everything under the sun not one single citizen opened their mouth to question the gigantic area gain which fell straight into Norway’s lap thanks to the efforts of others and, in fact, this phenomenal expansion of Norway has not so much as figured on the public agenda. Unbelievable! I say again: Unbelievable! It may be that Norwegians will take exception to my use of the word ‘crime’ and indeed think it quite fair that Norway should receive such a big slice of the cake and equally fair that fifty-five countries in the world, to all intents and purposes, receive nothing at all, thus proving that we have long since realized Peer Gynt’s motto: ‘be sufficient unto oneself.’ Nonetheless if I might be so bold as to remind the reader of how these days everyone laughs at the Tordesilla treaty, signed at the end of the fifteenth century, under the terms of which Spain and Portugal simply split the Atlantic Ocean and thereby the world, between themselves. If we are to learn anything from history then we ought perhaps to question whether anyone today would view the nationalization of the continental shelf in the same light. In any case, I do not mean to preach, I merely want to point to luck as being the key factor in modern Norwegian history.

Dinner at the new villa in Grorud was drawing to a close. Sir William was looking a touch glassy about the forehead and seemed remarkably preoccupied with the heavy ring on his little finger, set with a blue, not black, stone which, to Jonas’s mind spoke of sorcery, of his uncle’s penchant for secret societies or perhaps rather his amazing luck. Jonas was just about to press on to the next phase of their plan when Veronika unexpectedly came to his aid: ‘Am I right in thinking,’ she said, sounding a mite anxious, ‘that some mushrooms can be confused with fly-agaric, especially when they’re small?’

‘That’s right,’ said Jonas. ‘Weird, isn’t it, how the poisonous ones grow right next to the edible ones?’

‘How can you actually tell if you’ve been poisoned?’ asked Veronika, trying to sound casual, but with a note in her voice which betrayed that she, too, had eaten a couple of mouthfuls of the stuffing that had been intended solely for Sir William.

‘Well, nausea for starters,’ said Jonas. ‘I’ve heard it can come on pretty quickly.’ He cast a sidelong glance at Rakel, who was having trouble keeping her face straight.

And that, basically, was all it took. There was one ghastly moment when Sir William realized that he had eaten fly-agaric and that one of the most lethal of all poisonous fungi was being absorbed by his intestine, thence to pass into his bloodstream. Sir William was in a bad way, he felt a wave of nausea building up inside him. To some extent he had good reason for thinking he had been poisoned inasmuch as Rakel had given him a very generous portion of stuffing. Granted, it had contained nothing but harmless mushrooms, but it had been laced with a substance procured from a pharmacist acquaintance of Rakel’s which made the stuffing taste a bit odd and acted as a mild, but undeniable, emetic.

Sir William rose to his feet, white as a sheet, and started to walk, to stagger towards the bathroom. ‘Is something the matter, Uncle William?’ Rakel asked. ‘Shut your mouth, Rakel, and just get out of my way or I’ll smash your face in, you bloody bitch, damn whore!’ Sir William was almost weeping with rage, but he was also scared stiff; brutishly he knocked a couple of chairs out of his way en route to the bathroom, making it abundantly plain that beneath the veneer of a modern lifestyle dominated by information and science, by expertise on Africa and oil technology, by higher education and every conceivable material advantage, that under all of this lurked primitive forces which, when given outlet, were ruthless in their ferocity.

Sir William made a dash for the bathroom, clearly nauseated, ashen-faced; and since in his haste and his desperation he forgot to shut the door behind him everyone could see him crouched under Kittelsen’s picture of Soria Moria Castle, spewing out chunks of beef and pastry and mushrooms which he happened to believe to be fly-agaric, all mixed up with red wine; some of it landing on the white tiles, some going into the pan. And even while kneeling there, or hanging over the lavatory pan, he still had the presence of mind to curse his brother’s damnable family, who had always wanted to do away with him, who weren’t even fit to tie his shoelaces and who, if he lived through this, would never see his shoes again either.

It was not the knowledge that the symptoms of fly-agaric poisoning should have made themselves felt much later which aroused Veronika’s suspicions, but the strained expression on Rakel’s and Jonas’s faces, which could be put down to triumph at having done what they set out to do, tinged with disappointment at not having succeeded in shutting up Sir William. Not even with a mouth full of vomit did he stop talking.

Veronika eyed them accusingly, especially Jonas — a look he remembered well, expressing as it did such unequivocal sorrow over the fact that Jonas was still alive. It was a look he had seen at least twice before in his life and was to see again at least once more.

Buddha was the only one who had not risen, he sat and observed the whole performance with a smile on his face.

Sir William yelled from the bathroom, where he knelt in a pool of his own mucilaginous vomit, whipped into a panic by the power of psychosomatic suggestion. He roared for someone to ring for an ambulance, or no, that there wasn’t time and at that, he came out, spattered with vomit and yelling that one of his sons would have to drive him to casualty, drive like blazes, it wasn’t all that far away, thank heavens, bloody family, rotten sods, c’mon Preben, here’s the key, step on it, lad. They barged their way out.

What Jonas Wergeland liked best about the whole evening was a little detail that caught his eye as his uncle tottered past him: a speck of vomit smack in the middle of the badge on the breast-pocket of his expensive blazer.

Jonas stood on the front steps as his uncle and his three children threw themselves into the Mercedes with one of the Brothers Grimm at the wheel. The last they heard was a ‘Perfect, Preben’, so even on this occasion Sir William did in fact have the last word.

Jonas shook his head before going back to the bathroom and pulling the plug, watching the vomit partially disappearing in a swirl of water.