The Writing on the Wall

Twenty-five

SORROW BECAME SIDSEL SKAGESTØL. A kind of serene beauty had permeated her features, and she almost seemed taller, as if straightening her back against the harsh wind that was blowing.

I followed her into the large sitting room.

It was curiously silent in there. No radio, TV or CD-player was on, and the house was so far from the main thoroughfares that not even the distant roar of the traffic could be heard up here. It was as though she had decided not to let anything upset her contemplation of the situation she suddenly found herself in.

I almost felt embarrassed by the creak of the plum-coloured leather chair as I sat down, while she sat on the far side of a little round table with an inlaid, hand-worked brass plate in the centre, covered in some sort of hieroglyphs.

Sidsel Skagestøl was wearing a mixed grey, long-sleeved acrylic top with loose-fitting black trousers. With a quick sideways glance she took a cigarette from the edge of an ashtray, checked it was still alight and inhaled so slowly that her eyes almost seemed to take on the colour of the smoke.

With a sad smile she said: ‘We think we have them forever. But it’s a lesson we have to learn. We don’t.’

‘No.’

‘There’s something special about the oldest. She who was the only one for a while. I can still remember… I stood there watching her while she slept. Stood there listening to her breathing. Saw the little bump under the eiderdown with teddy bears on it.’ Her voice rose in intensity. ‘So innocent! So unblemished by – anything at all! And now, sixteen years later, here I sit, and she… She is…’ She made a vague movement of the hand holding the cigarette, making a kind of smoke ring, as though her daughter was somewhere in the room, invisible to us, but still present.

‘This must have been a very difficult time. I mean, even more difficult maybe, because of the press reports.’

She gave me a strangely distant look. ‘Oh, those… It was probably worse for Holger. Me, I’ve shut all that out in a way. But Holger…’

‘Did he take it hard?’

‘When the first report was published, I don’t know if you saw it, the one with the photo… he started to weep. And I mean weep, really weep. I hadn’t seen him do that since his father died, and that’s nearly twenty years ago now. He couldn’t even bring himself to weep over Torild, but that report shocked him so deeply that… Afterwards he talked about sorting them out then all he did was put me in a taxi and go off himself – to the paper, I assume. When he came back, he was ashen-faced. He looked ten years older as though it was only then that it had really hit him?

‘Where is he now?’

She shrugged. ‘Back at work. With the police. I don’t know.’

‘But he’s offered to help you, I mean, the last few days, hasn’t he?’

‘He offered to sleep here, yes. But what good would that do? That’s all over anyway.’

‘For good?’

She nodded silently, leaned forward and tapped the ash from her cigarette.

‘A situation like this can often patch up that type of conflict.’

‘Not this one.’

It was not the right moment to ask why. Besides, strictly speaking, it was no business of mine. Instead I said: ‘Anyway, the police have detained – a witness.’

‘Yes, Helge… Hagavik, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. I haven’t yet found out… Does it ring any bells?’

‘No.’ She shifted her gaze out through the large picture window, where we could see the western side of Gulfjellet Mountain, the new housing developments in Sandalen and the slightly more established one in Midttun and Øvsttun. ‘But I’m starting to see that my daughter… that Torild had a life, outside home – one I knew nothing about.’

‘Has somebody said something?’

She made a vague movement of the head. ‘Said anything about – what?’

‘Erm, I was thinking of… that young man. It was apparently someone she knew, wasn’t it?’

‘Apparently.’ She sighed. ‘Now, afterwards, you think of all the times you didn’t show up. You think that – maybe that’s why it happened – that if only you’d gone to that handball match, taken part in that cake raffle, in the election for the parent teachers committee at school, everything would have been different.’

‘Like when you didn’t go to visit her at Guides camp in Radøy last year?’

She looked at me puzzled, frowning in thought. ‘Radøy… But I was ill then, wasn’t I?’ She placed her hand on her stomach as though she could still feel the discomfort there.

‘Yes…’

She was suddenly more focused now. ‘What on earth made you bring that up now?’

‘Oh, er… nothing.’

‘On the contrary, I’m asking you for an answer!’ she said sharply. ‘This is no time to beat about the bush.’

‘I’m sorry, it’s just something that came up, I had a word with the Guides leader, Sigrun Søvik, and she happened to mention that it was just your husband and Randi Furebø who came to visit them.’

‘Oh yes? And with that dirty private investigator’s mind of yours, you immediately spied a – source of conflict?’

‘Oh no, I -’

Suddenly she laughed. But it was not genuine laughter. ‘To be honest, you look as though you’ve been caught with your pants down! Now I really regret having contacted you. If this is the result, then… I can assure you that if Randi and Holger had been up to something – inappropriate during that trip to Radøy, something I couldn’t imagine in my wildest dreams, the chemistry between those two has always been so good, I can promise you at any rate that that wouldn’t have been enough to tip me over the edge. The reasons why Holger and I are drifting apart go much deeper than that…’ She touched her temple with her finger ‘The whole way we think, our entire personalities, do you see? And that’s all I have to say about the matter. All!’

She stood up. ‘Now I think it’s time you were going.’

I threw up my arms as I rose from the leather chair. ‘You must believe me when I say that I had no intention of -’

‘Don’t bother to come back, Veum. I hope this is the last time I see you, is that clear?’

My face seemed to freeze and instead of an apologetic smile all I managed was a grotesque grimace.

In the outer hall I turned to face her again for the last time. ‘In that case, I wish you all the best for the future…’

‘Sincere thanks from all the family,’ she said with biting sarcasm and closed the door ostentatiously behind me.

As I walked down the short garden path I heard a sound I couldn’t quite make out behind me: as though she was banging her fists against the wall, stamping on the floor or writhing about in convulsions.

Then a door slammed so hard that the whole outer wall shook.

She could not have emphasised it more clearly. Partir, c’est mourir un peu, as the French say. But this was a full-blown execution.

When I got into the car it was with a feeling that something absolute and irrevocable had happened. It was just that I hadn’t grasped what it was yet.