The Silence of the Sea

Chapter 6

The weather had deteriorated overnight and the yacht kept plunging, at the mercy of the waves. Heavy, dark clouds obscured the sun, presaging a downpour, and the sea had changed from blue to a threatening grey, reflecting the leaden sky. The mood on board was similarly muted, the girls scowling with boredom. It appeared the voyage was not going to be the adventure they had anticipated.

‘Why are the waves white on top, Daddy?’ Bylgja sat peering out of the window in the saloon where the family were gathered.

‘Because when the sea rears up like that the water mixes with air. And that’s good for the fish because they get their oxygen from the sea.’ Ægir didn’t actually know why – he had never gone in for natural history – but thought this sounded plausible. Arithmetic and mathematical problems were more in his line; a logical discipline with no room for exceptions. ‘Careful, sweetheart. Try to choose a route where there’s something to hold on to.’ He watched his daughter walk unsteadily across the saloon towards the sofas. The yacht pitched and rolled violently; they had all lost their footing at some point that morning. Ægir guessed he himself probably looked as peaky as the rest of the family. They were trying to put a brave face on things but their stomachs revolted at every new movement.

Lára was prostrate on a sofa, her face buried in her arms. She had complained of a headache and been unable to eat much breakfast. The girls in contrast had tucked in as if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, and Ægir hoped this meant their nausea had passed, at least for the time being. Seeing how wan and lethargic they looked now, however, he realised he had been optimistic. This time Bylgja was not the only one to be subdued; Arna seemed little better.

‘Does my head look bigger than normal?’ Lára shifted one hand. Her head appeared its usual size; the only difference was the red mark left by her arm across her cheek.

‘No, it looks perfectly normal to me.’ Ægir breathed out sharply to combat a sudden stomach cramp.

‘I think it looks bigger.’ Arna had leant forward to get a better view. Lára groaned.

‘You know what we should do?’ Ægir slapped his knees in an attempt to summon up the courage to move. ‘We’ll feel better if we go out on deck. Remember what Thráinn said? Fresh air works wonders and I reckon it wouldn’t do us any harm to try it. Afterwards we’ll have a nap and wake up feeling like new.’ The captain had not in fact mentioned anything about lying down, but Ægir felt confident that it would help. Nothing on the sailing course had prepared him for this. At the time he had thought of asking one of the instructors about seasickness but had been reluctant to expose his lack of experience, which was ridiculous considering that most of the other people on the course were amateurs too. No experienced sailor would need a pleasure craft competency certificate. ‘Come on, then.’

Their movements were slow. Ægir had to help Lára to her feet; her eyes were glassy and flickered as if she was having trouble focusing. ‘I think I’m dying,’ she mumbled in his ear as he helped her outside. ‘Aren’t there any drugs you can take to stop this torture?’

‘I’m afraid it may be too late now. But perhaps we should take some pills before we lie down. I’d throw up if I tried to swallow one at the moment, however small they were.’ Ægir paused to undo the catch on the door to the deck. It had taken him a while to get used to the fact that all the outside doors were fastened with catches both inside and outside, but he had finally learnt not to grab the handle and jerk it in vain until he remembered. ‘Halli’s out there.’ Ægir peered through the porthole in the door at the back view of the young man who was leaning over the rail. The smoke from his cigarette scarcely rose above his head before the wind snatched it away. This was just as well, as Ægir suspected that in their present state cigarette smoke would be the final straw. He opened the door, keeping a tight grip on it.

Halli turned his head. ‘Morning.’ He had still been in bed when they themselves got up, but now he was standing there with his short white hair flattened in whorls, his eyes a little puffy with sleep.

They exchanged greetings, the girls barely audible over the roar of the wind and waves, Lára hoarse and throaty. Only Ægir managed to sound more or less his normal self. ‘We’re hoping some fresh sea air will perk us up.’

‘Well, watch out. It’s very windy.’ Pinching his cigarette stub between finger and thumb, Halli flicked it into the sea. ‘People can be blown overboard – kids especially.’ The girls were uneasy under his gaze. Ægir felt Bylgja’s small paw slip into his hand and clasp it tight.

‘I’ll look after them.’ He reached for Arna’s hand as well. ‘How long does it take to get used to it? The seasickness, I mean.’

Halli shrugged unsympathetically. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been seasick.’

Ægir choked back the urge to swear at him. ‘And you’ve never seen anyone else suffer from it?’

‘Yeah. I just don’t remember how it turned out. Anyway, you look pretty chirpy for people who are sick – you should be hanging over the rail, chucking up your insides.’

‘Please, not another word.’ Lára clamped her lips shut as soon as she had spoken. She retched as Halli headed past her on his way inside, but managed to hold it down.

‘Deep breaths, darling. He’s gone and there’s nothing but clean sea air.’ Ægir kept a firm hold on his daughters although they seemed eager to pull free now that Halli had gone. ‘You must hold my hands – you heard what he said. We don’t want you to be blown into the sea.’ Immediately the small fingers ceased their wriggling.

‘There’s something wrong with that man. It’s as if he had a grudge against us.’ Lára inhaled deeply.

‘He’s just a bit uncouth.’ Ægir practised breathing steadily and it seemed to work. The discomfort in his abdomen abated slightly and the pain in his temples dulled. ‘Try to breathe like this, girls. It’ll help.’

‘If I breathe like that I’ll have to close my eyes and I don’t want to.’ Bylgja was even paler now than when they had first come outside. ‘If I do, I’ll see that woman.’

‘What woman?’ Ægir bent down, taking care not to release Arna’s hand.

‘The woman in the picture. I dreamt about her and if I close my eyes, I’m afraid I’ll dream about her again.’

‘What picture, sweetheart?’

‘The one in the saloon. In the frame on the wall.’ Her glasses were covered with tiny droplets from the spray that splashed over them at regular intervals.

Ægir tried to think which picture Bylgja could be referring to. He had limited interest in people, unlike Lára who could spend hours poring over pictures of strangers in the tabloids. She also spent an excessive amount of time on Facebook, studying her friends’ photos, a habit he found incomprehensible. ‘What’s she talking about, Lára?’

‘The painting of Karítas. The wife of the man who used to own the yacht. It’s on the wall beside the television. You must be off-colour if you haven’t noticed it.’ She gave a ghost of a smile, which made her look a little less wan. ‘Or are you so mad about your wife that you don’t have eyes for any other woman?’

Ægir didn’t know how to reply. He was afraid of agreeing in case that would be the wrong answer. Instead, he turned back to Bylgja who was pulling at his hand. ‘The woman with the necklace, Daddy. In the painting. She was wearing it in my dream. But her face looks different somehow.’

‘The necklace, right.’ Ægir had even less interest in jewellery than in people. He squeezed Bylgja’s hand. ‘We often dream about things we’ve seen during the day. That’s why the woman turned up. It’s perfectly safe to close your eyes, darling; dreams can’t hurt you. They’re only thoughts – thoughts that are a bit muddled because we’re asleep and our guard is lowered.’ He was about to add that it was like being drunk – when common sense goes out of the window and all kinds of foolish things seem like a good idea – but he caught himself in time. It would only have confused her.

‘I had a nightmare about that woman too. I told Mummy last night.’ Arna looked up at her father, who smiled and pressed both their hands. Instead of returning his smile, she added anxiously: ‘My friend Helga says dreams are trying to give you a message. If we both have the same dream it must mean something. Perhaps the woman’s hiding on the boat.’

‘I very much doubt it. You have the same dreams because you’re twins. You think alike even when you’re asleep. It’s not the first time, is it?’ He received no reply because at that moment the door suddenly opened outwards with a crash.

Halli appeared in the gap and pinned the door back with one foot. ‘Take these. They might make you feel better.’ He held out his fist and waited for them to come over. ‘They’re seasickness tablets I found in a cabin. Thráinn says they’re all right. The plasters work better but we couldn’t find any.’

Lára took the pills. ‘Thanks.’ She examined them, before closing her fingers over them. ‘I hope they work fast.’ Halli shrugged, removed his foot and let the door swing to behind him. They heard the catch snap back. ‘Oh, great. Are we locked out now?’ Lára asked.

‘No,’ Ægir reassured her. ‘The catches inside and outside both work on the same hinge. I’ve tested them.’ He had been afraid the girls might be locked in or out; you never knew what they would get up to when they wanted attention. ‘Now, how about grabbing a few more lungfuls of air, then going inside and taking the pills? I’m sure they’ll go down better if we wash them down with a drink.’ He expanded his chest as far as he could and exhaled gustily. As he repeated this, he fixed his gaze on the heaving sea in the hope that it would help. But he couldn’t interpret the movements of the waves and brace himself for what was coming next; their behaviour was too unpredictable. One minute everything appeared calm, the surface of the sea smooth; the next, the ship was tossing about like a cork.

He wondered how deep the water was at this point but couldn’t come up with a plausible figure. They had left the continental shelf behind some time ago, so it might be several kilometres to the ocean floor. Or perhaps not that much. Again he was stymied by his lack of knowledge about the natural world. It was the sort of fact that he should probably have picked up along the way but his mind was blank; perhaps even at its deepest it was only a few hundred metres down to the sea bed. He hadn’t the faintest idea. It had probably never formed part of the school syllabus. In any case, what did the depth of the ocean matter? If you sank, you sank; you would be just as dead whether you ended up a hundred or a thousand metres down.

Such reflections were hardly designed to raise the spirits, so Ægir banished them from his mind. There was no point letting his thoughts run away with him. He knew from experience that if he gave his worries free rein they could take on extremely colourful forms. Like the time he had let himself be talked into scuba diving while on a beach holiday with some university friends, long before he met Lára. The first day’s training had consisted of a short course in the swimming pool. But that night while his friends snored away, oblivious to the danger they were about to expose themselves to (and at considerable expense), Ægir had not got a wink of sleep. Countless possible variations of death in a diving accident passed through his mind as he tossed and turned, until eventually he decided it would be best not to go on the dive. But the following morning, unwilling to lose face in front of his friends, he had agreed to go out on the boat after all.

When it came to it, he had not done badly at all, perhaps because he had already resigned himself to drowning in the clear, aquamarine water. The instructor had even singled him out for praise because he had kept his head and remained relaxed during the dive. The only time he had come close to panic was when they reached the bottom and, viewing the alien surroundings and strange life forms through his goggles, he had experienced a strong aversion to the idea of leaving his bones there. However, by concentrating on taking deep, regular breaths through his mouthpiece, he had managed to master his fear. It was not until his ascent, when he saw the approaching light above him, that he was seized by an uncontrollable urge to breathe through his nose and had to force himself to look down and wait until he had reached the surface. A further shock had come when the instructor swam with them to the place where they could see the sea bed fall away into true darkness and barren depths. It had made his flesh creep. Why was he thinking of that now?

‘Let’s go inside.’ Lára pulled at him. ‘If I inhale any more, my lungs will fill up with salt.’

‘Let’s go, Daddy,’ Bylgja pleaded. ‘I don’t want to stay out here any longer.’ Ægir tried to hide how fervently he agreed with her. Suddenly, he felt a longing to sweep up his daughters in his arms and lock them as deep inside the yacht as possible. Keen as he was to avoid ending up on the sea bed, his fear that his daughters might share the same fate was infinitely stronger.

Later, Ægir thought the pills had probably helped. They had managed to take them before anyone was sick and that may have made all the difference. The Coke was tepid, and barely drinkable, but Ægir had insisted they each finish a can, if only to have something to throw up if the worst came to the worst.

‘Is that the picture you were talking about?’ Only now had his wooziness receded sufficiently for him to notice his surroundings. He pointed to an offensively ornate gilded frame containing a canvas of a young woman, presumably Karítas. The rather kitsch subject matter was totally out of kilter with the frame, which would have been more appropriate for an old master.

‘Yes. Beautiful, isn’t she?’ Lára was watching him beadily for his reaction.

‘I can’t really tell from here. She’s all right, I suppose.’

Lára reached out a foot from the armchair where she was sprawled and gave him a little kick. ‘Don’t talk rubbish. Take a better look.’

Ægir rose with difficulty. He felt weak, as if after a strenuous effort, perhaps as a result of constantly having to ride the waves. ‘The things I do for you.’ The twins looked up from the colouring books that had been hurriedly purchased for them in Lisbon. They had recovered much quicker than their parents and had soon grown bored of lying on their sofa. Karítas’s eyes seemed to follow Ægir, growing slightly larger once he was close to the painting. Although there was no denying that the young woman was gorgeous, she was not Ægir’s type: too perfect, too manicured, too conscious of her own beauty. Too plastic. Or at least that was the impression she gave. Her hair was what Ægir had chiefly noticed when he leafed past pictures of her in the papers. From what he recalled it was extraordinarily thick and healthy, perhaps the only part of her that hadn’t been artificially enhanced. The artist had clearly been of the same opinion, judging by the painstaking care he had taken over this feature. While the rest of the painting was executed in a rather perfunctory fashion, her blond mane cascaded over her shoulders in perfect waves which may well have been due to artistic licence. Ægir couldn’t remember whether her hair had been straight or wavy in the photos he had seen. The light paint tones were fairly successful in capturing her natural colour, so different from the bleached-out effect that so many young women seemed to favour these days. But the other colours in the painting were cruder and more garish, like the huge red jewel in the necklace Bylgja had mentioned, which looked more like a Christmas-tree decoration than a precious gem. The same applied to her clothes and the matching nail polish on her fingers and toes. Her tanned skin also seemed too uniform and flat, as if her slender limbs had been modelled on those of a Barbie doll, with unnaturally smooth joints. There was a hint of Barbie, too, in the way her bust was completely out of proportion to her slim figure.

He bent closer to examine the necklace, puzzled as to why it should have made such an impact on the women in his family. The chain was a simple affair of gold or white gold and the massive red jewel in its heart-shaped setting nestled between the sitter’s splendid breasts. It was studded all around the edge with white stones that Ægir took to be diamonds. Suspended from the bottom of the heart was a blue teardrop – presumably also precious. ‘What are red gems called again?’

‘Rubies,’ Lára replied, with surprising promptness for one who did not own much jewellery herself and as a rule took little interest in it. She had a few pieces she’d received as Confirmation gifts, as well as a ring and necklace he had given her when they were courting. Later she’d told him that it was a testament to the strength of her love that their relationship had survived those presents. He had not seen her wear any proper jewellery for years, not since the twins were born by caesarean section, when she had put on the necklace and forced the ring onto her swollen finger in the belief that they would bring good luck. Perhaps she hadn’t needed any luck since then, but Ægir found himself wishing suddenly that she had brought them along on this trip.

‘There was an article on that necklace in The Week. It cost her husband a fortune and she’s never parted from it. He gave it to her as a wedding present.’

‘What?’ Ægir swung round. ‘You mean I was supposed to give you a wedding present? For some reason I thought the guests took care of that.’

Lára grinned, looking much brighter. ‘No. Anyway, don’t ask me. Maybe it’s a custom among the super-rich abroad. Don’t worry, you didn’t commit any faux pas. Though, strictly speaking, according to Icelandic tradition you should have given me a bridal gift the morning after. Still, it’s not as if the wedding night was our first time and I needed some sort of reward.’ She sat up properly. ‘So, what do you think of her? Be honest.’

‘Nice looking, but not my type.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Lára’s disbelief was obvious. The girls looked from one to the other, waiting eagerly for their father’s reaction.

‘No, I mean it. She looks too perfect to be any fun. Besides, beautiful people tend to be a bit odd; everyone treats them differently, so they never develop their inner self.’ As he turned away from the painting he felt the woman’s eyes boring into his back. ‘I’m not saying it applies to everyone and it’s not based on any kind of scientific evidence, but I’m sure it’s true. She lacks some quality.’

Lára looked delighted. ‘You’re a pretty good judge of character. From what I can gather she’s a complete airhead. In interviews she comes across as really shallow and conceited.’

Arna was reproachful. ‘You’re always saying we’re beautiful, Daddy. Does that make us bad?’

His daughters’ little faces under their soft, fine hair were the most beautiful he had ever laid eyes on. But that beauty lay in their small imperfections: the slightly too-big teeth, the crooked smiles, the freckles and uneven eyebrows; Bylgja’s smeary glasses that she had wiped with her fingers after coming inside.

‘As I said, the rule’s not infallible. Far from it. But people who think about nothing but their appearance soon lose their charm. Not you, though. Never you.’

‘Good.’ Arna seemed satisfied.

Bylgja was pensive. She was holding a red wax crayon, which lay quite still in her unusually steady hand. ‘The woman in my dream wasn’t bad, just unhappy. Maybe it wasn’t her.’

‘Or I’ve got it all wrong and she’s actually a really nice person.’ Ægir grinned. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time I was mistaken.’

The red crayon sank towards the half-completed picture. ‘I hope so, Daddy. I hope she’s nice.’ Bylgja began colouring again. The red wax covered an ever-larger area of the page; from where Ægir was standing it looked as if the crayon was slowly bleeding to death.