Things Out of Place

In February the light came back.

It did not come all at once. It came the way a tide comes into Vågen, by half-inches, a little more of the mountain every morning, a little more of the long gray water, until one Saturday she opened the shutters at eight and the whole of Nordnes was lit from underneath like a paper lantern, and the wet slates shone, and a gull stood on the ridge of the Pettersens’ roof with its beak open, shouting about it. She stood at the kitchen window in her dressing gown with a mug in her hand. The mug was blue. It hung on a hook beside the stove, the second from the left, which was where it had hung since her first week in the flat, and she took it down, and filled it, and sat, and watched the day arrive, and realized that she had been happy for ten minutes without once looking over her shoulder.

It was a thing one noticed, afterwards, like the absence of a noise. She had stopped setting the clock. The little gray brute lay face down in the bottom of the wardrobe under a pair of winter boots, and she had not taken it out. The bolt was shot every night; she would have felt undressed without it. But she slept now. She slept from ten until a quarter to seven, in a long warm unbroken line, with the cat on her feet and the rain running down the window, and woke to a child’s bare feet crossing the floorboards and a voice, at her elbow, aggrieved.

“Mamma. It is morning.”

“So it is.”

“I have been awake for a hundred hours.”

“Have you.”

“And Kanin wants her breakfast. And I want to wave at the boat.”

It was Saturday. On Saturdays, since the autumn, they went down to the harbor and waved at the ferry.

* * *

She did not remember, afterwards, when it had begun. It had been Alma’s idea, as most things were. It had started in the autumn she was two and a half, on a day of thin sun, when the little ferry that crosses the Vågen from Munkebryggen to the far quay had come puttering across the water with its flag and its smoking funnel and its handful of tourists in orange life vests, and the child, who was then very small, had looked at it with the intensity of a theologian and said, gravely: Pappa.

She had not known what to say. She had said, what, love?

Pappa boat.

Yes, she had said, after a moment, with something shutting in her throat. Pappa liked boats.

Alma had considered this. Then she had put up one fat fist and waved it at the ferry, solemnly, from side to side, as one waves at a king; and the ferry, as ferries will, had waved back, in the person of an elderly Dutchwoman in a rain hat. And that had been that. For two years and some months, on every Saturday that it did not snow, the two of them had walked down the hill and along the quay, past the fish stalls and the pigeons, to the last bollard, and stood in a row with the other families, and waved. Hei, Pappa! She had learned to say it very cheerfully. She’d learned to let it go out over the water as a thing with no weight at all, like a kite, like a hello; and every Saturday something in her chest had gone, very slightly, the wrong way.

Today the quay was loud with gulls. Alma ran ahead in her red coat with the yellow hat pulled down to her eyebrows, her gray-green eyes enormous under it, her free hand held behind her like a small professor, and stopped at the end by the iron ladder, and turned round to see if she was being watched.

“I’m watching,” said Corinne.

“You must watch now.”

“I’m watching now.”

The ferry was coming, white and small, nosing out of the haze at the foot of Fløyen with its flag stiff in the wind. There were people at the rail already, a family in matching anoraks, a man with a camera. A tall man stood alone at the end of the quay, ten yards from them, with his back to the water and his shoulder to the wind, and she noticed him only because he was standing so exactly still. He wore a dark coat and a dark knitted cap. He had his hands in his pockets. He was looking, she thought, at nothing in particular, at the middle distance, in the way of men on quays who have been left with an hour to fill.

“Hei, Pappa!” shouted Alma. “HEI!”

The ferry gave one cheerful hoot. The child hopped from foot to foot and waved with her whole arm.

The man turned his head.

It was a small movement; the turn of a stranger who has heard a child’s voice. She saw the line of his jaw and a quarter of his face under the cap, and then he’d turned back again to the water, and she was watching a back, quite unmoved. He stood another half minute. Then he took his hands out of his pockets, and put them back in again, and walked away up the quay, without hurry, against the wind, and was lost behind a stack of fish crates.

“That man heard me,” said Alma.

“Lots of people hear you, love. You’ve got a very good voice.”

“He went like this.” She stopped, and stiffened, and froze in place with her arms at her sides and her chin up, with an expression of the profoundest solemnity. Then she giggled. “Like a policeman.”

“Like a policeman. Come on. Let’s go and get a snail.”

She took the small mittened hand. They walked up the quay together in the thin bright wind. And it was not until they were half way up the hill, with the cinnamon smell of the bakery coming down to meet them, that she realized she had been holding the hand a good deal harder than the child liked, and let go.

* * *

“You’ve ordered it,” she said.

“I have. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

It was Sunday, in Solveig’s kitchen, with the stove roaring and the windows steamed to the top and the plates cleared away, and Henrik had a green-and-black paperback on the oilcloth in front of him and the look of a man who is waiting to be told off. He had come to Sunday dinner every week since December. He brought fish. He brought a pot of something that he said was a Cambridge custom and that Solveig said was a Cambridge crime. He sat now at the end of the table with his sleeves rolled and his long hands flat on either side of the book, and the afternoon light coming slantwise through the steam on his glasses, and said, with great humility:

“I wished to see your name. I know it’s absurd. Ingrid sent you a copy, I know, and you put it in a biscuit tin; Solveig told me. I wanted to hold one that had been bought in a shop.”

“It’s not my name.”

“It’s the one on the cover.”

“Henrik —”

“Please. Let me.” He turned it to the title page, and put one finger on the line. Translated from the Norwegian by Nora Lind. “I have taught English for nineteen years. I have read a great many translations. It is rather a thing with me, a vice, I can’t pick one up without feeling for the seam. And I opened this on Thursday night with the intention of finding fault, to be honest, because I was prepared to be ashamed on your behalf. And I have not slept properly since.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s very good, you know. It’s alarmingly good. The first forty pages are like looking through a window you have cleaned. And then somewhere about the hundredth page something happens, and the glass goes away, and there is a person standing at the other side of it, and she is terrified. I do not know how you did that. In a translation of a crime novel.”

She said nothing. She was looking at the cover: the small lit window, the figure in the raincoat. She had held it in her hands once, in July, at the kitchen table, for ten minutes, and put it away.

“It’s like someone being very careful to walk quietly,” Henrik said. “And you can hear every footstep.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“I know. I could tell. Ingrid said it was the best thing you had done.” He put his glasses on. “I’d like to read you the end. May I? Just the last paragraph. And then I shall stop talking and let Solveig give me a cross look.”

“I am giving you one now,” said Solveig, from the sink, without turning round.

He read it. He read well; he read the way he taught, without pushing, as though the words were already there and he was only showing them where to stand. She stood in the doorway for a long time, listening to her daughter breathe, until the light came up the wall and touched the quilt and the small fist and the hair; and then, very quietly, so as not to wake her, she went in, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and stayed.

He closed the book.

“You do that,” he said. “Did you know? You put the weight at the end. On the last word. Every time, when you can get away with it, and it’s always a verb. Sat. Went. Stayed. It’s like a stone on a letter, to keep it from blowing away. I noticed it on page two hundred and noticed it again on three. I thought, she has a hand.” He smiled at her, shyly, over the rims. “I find that very beautiful. You must forgive me. It is an occupational perversion.”

A translator leaves a fingerprint.

She was smiling. She felt it on her face, a proper one, and under it, a long way down, something small and cold turned over once, like a fish in dark water, and was still.

Nobody reads us that closely. Who would?

Ingrid would. Henrik would. A boy in a patch of June sun, once, with a cup of tea going cold at his elbow. She looked down at her hands, and told herself that three was not a number, and that the boy was three thousand miles away in a house at the end of a lane, mourning a child who had never died; and the thing in the dark water sank, and the kitchen came back, hot and bright and smelling of fish and clean linen.

“Thank you,” she said. “For reading it.”

“I should like to read the next,” said Henrik. “If you’ll let me. I should like, if I’m honest, to read all of them.” He looked at his hands. “I wondered if I might ask you something again. I told you I wouldn’t say that phrase. I shan’t. I’ll say the other, I think. Ask me in the spring.”

She was very still.

“I was going to say that,” she said.

“Were you?”

“I was going to say, ask me in April.” She heard her voice come out low and slightly cracked. “She’ll be five. And I think — I think there’s a thing I have to find out first. About whether I’m allowed.”

“Allowed by whom?”

“By someone who isn’t here.”

Henrik looked at her for a long time. He had a mild, long, patient face, the face of a man who had spent his life being kind to teenagers, and it did not change.

“April, then,” he said. “I am a very good waiter. I am told I am the best in Hordaland.” He pushed back his chair. “Aunt Solveig, I am going to wash up, and you are going to let me, and we are all going to behave as if nothing whatever has happened.”

“Selvfølgelig,” said Solveig to the window. She had been wiping the same plate for four minutes. Her shoulders were shaking.

* * *

It was on Wednesday that she saw the coat again.

She had gone by the long way, through the Strandkaien and up behind the Bryggen, because she had made a habit of it, because Rule Four had been a skeleton in the cupboard for so long that she walked it now without thinking, the way one walks a path in a wood one has stopped noticing is a path. She was carrying a string bag of onions. She had her head down against a sleet that was not quite rain. And in the window of a shop that sold old charts and brass instruments, between the barometers, she saw a reflection that made her stop.

A tall man in a dark coat, on the other side of the street, looking at a map.

It could have been anyone. It was a city of two hundred and eighty thousand people, built on a harbor, and its streets were full of tall men in dark coats; she had passed six on the Strandgaten alone. The cap was gray, not black. The coat was a different cut. He was standing at an angle, his face turned away. She did not know this man at all.

But she watched him, in the glass, without turning round, for the length of time it takes to count to forty. He did not move. He did not look at the map. He stood with one shoulder dropped a little lower than the other, and his weight balanced a shade forward on the balls of his feet, as a man stands who is used to a deck.

Then a tram came, and slid between them, and when it had gone, the pavement was empty.

Twice, said a voice in her head. It was a dry, wry, tired voice, with a little crack of laughter in it. If a stranger is on your street more than twice.

“No,” said Corinne aloud. A woman with a pram looked at her. She smiled, and went on up the hill with her onions, at a perfectly ordinary pace.

It is a harbor town, she told herself. Half the men in it have just come off a boat.

* * *

It was Billett who told her.

She’d have said, afterwards, that she’d been asleep. She was; she had gone to bed at ten with the bolt shot and the lamp out and the good warm weight of the child’s hot-water bottle against her ankles. But the cat was a creature of regular habit, and slept on her feet from eleven until six, and at some time after one in the morning she became aware, in the heavy dark, that the weight was gone.

She lay and listened.

The flat was quiet. The stove ticked. The rain was lighter, a thin fall in the roots of the rose. There was a faint sound, a small hollow tock, of a claw on tile, and then nothing. She sat up. She put her feet over the edge of the bed, and the floor was cold, and she crossed it in her nightgown to the door of the bedroom and looked into the kitchen.

The cat sat in the middle of the floor with his tail wrapped round his feet and his back to her, quite upright, as he sat at the mouse-hole in the pantry. He was looking at the garden door. He was looking at it fixedly, steadily, with his ears flat and his whiskers pushed forward and the lowest, most contemptuous rumble in his chest that she’d ever heard from him, and he did not look round.

If the cat looks at a door.

She went to the window.

She did not turn on a light. She stood to one side of the curtain with her back to the wall, as she’d learned to do in this room in the first week, and moved the edge of it an inch with one finger. The little garden lay under it in the dark, gray and wet and silver, with the rosebush black against it and the rabbit hutch a pale square by the fence. Beyond the fence, the lane. It ran down the hill between its leaning houses to a single street lamp at the corner, which made a cone of yellow light in the rain, and in the cone of light, at the very edge of it, a man was standing.

He was tall. He stood quite still, with his hands in his pockets and his head a little bent, and he was not looking at her window. He was looking at the water. You could see a sliver of it from there, a strip of black between two roofs with a few lights on the far shore. He looked at it as a man looks at something that is a long way off and that he knows exactly how to reach.

She stood for four minutes.

She did not breathe. Her whole body had gone cold and light and perfectly clear, as it had gone at a locked door in Maine, in the dark, with a bent wire in her hand; and the thoughts moved through her head in order, like beads on a string. Do not move. Do not turn on the light. Do not wake the child. He cannot see you. The bolt is shot. Your key is round your neck. Solveig has a stick. Henrik has a car.

And then the man took one hand out of his pocket, and rubbed his face with it, slowly, wearily, as a person does at the end of a very long day, and turned, and went away up the lane, and was gone.

She let out her breath. She found she was gripping the curtain so hard that she’d pulled it half off its rail.

She went to the telephone.

* * *

“I could be wrong,” she said.

“You could.” Henrik was sitting on the end of the sofa in his coat, which he had not taken off. He had arrived eleven minutes after she called, with his hair on end and his scarf crossways and a torch the size of a rolling pin, and had gone out through the garden door, and up the lane, and down it, and round the corner to the lamp, and returned, white with cold, to report that there was a lamp and a drain and a very disapproving seagull, and nothing else. He’d made her sit. He had made tea. It was not chamomile. She had said so, with some vehemence, at the kettle; and he had looked at her, and said of course, and poured peppermint. “You could be wrong, Nora. I don’t think you are. But I think we ought to allow for the possibility that you could be.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t — I’m sorry. I didn’t mean —” She put her hands on her knees. They were not quite steady. “I’m sorry. I’m being ridiculous. It was a man, on a street. A person can stand in a street.”

“Yes.”

“A person can be tall.”

“And look at the sea. We are very fond of it.” He took off his glasses and polished them on his scarf. “I’m going to sleep here tonight. On this. Don’t argue; I have slept on worse. I slept for a year on a futon in Trondheim. And in the morning, if you wish, we can go to the politi, and say that a tall man stood in a lane for four minutes, and watch them write it down.”

“They’d want a name.”

“Yes, they would.”

“I haven’t got one for him.”

“Then I won’t ask for it.” He said it so mildly that for a moment she did not take it in. He sat with his long hands hanging between his knees, looking at the stove. “I have never asked who. You’ll have noticed. I think it is the one useful thing I do. But I should like to say, since we are sitting here at two o’clock in the morning with a cat, that I am not an idiot. I know there is someone. I have known since the first week. A woman does not fit a bolt like that on her own door, and a child does not learn at three to be quiet when the postman comes, unless somebody taught them both.” He turned his head. “I know he is not a good man. I don’t need his name. I’d only like to know if I should be afraid of him.”

She looked at the stove too. It ticked. It threw a small orange quiver on the ceiling, and the cat, who had come to sit in front of it with the air of a creature who has made his point, shut his eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“That is an honest answer.”

“He was —” She stopped. She tried again. “There was a time he was the best thing that ever happened to me. I thought so. For a whole summer. And then he was a thing I can’t talk about. And now he — I think he believes our baby died, and that I ran. I think he’s grieving.” The words came strange in the dark. “I hope he is. I keep hoping. And somebody I loved very much said, before she died, that he would let go as long as he could. And she did not say how long.”

“Ah.”

“That’s the whole of it. That’s all I know. It’s the only thing in the world I don’t know.”

Henrik was silent. He was a man who could be silent without it becoming an event. After a time he rose from the sofa, took off his coat at last, and laid it over her shoulders, where it smelled of chalk and rain and clean wool, and sat down beside her, a hand’s breadth off.

“Would you like me to say something about the weather?” he said.

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. It broke out of her in a wet, appalled, helpless bark, and she put her hand over her mouth, and the cat opened one eye.

“I’m so sorry —”

“Please. It is the national sport. It is what we do instead of conversation. You said you didn’t care for conversation just now, and I thought, well, I can offer meteorology.” He cleared his throat. He addressed the stove. “It is a wet night. It is, as you have observed, a wet night in a wet month in the wettest city in Europe. There is a depression to the southwest which is deepening in a manner I do not like. Tomorrow, rain. And then, I regret to say, on Friday —”

She laughed again, with the tears running down her face. And she thought of a gray phone line, and a car on a dark highway, and a voice, dry and absurd and unflagging, reciting the temperature at Hartford for eleven minutes to a girl with no shoes; and she put out a hand without thinking about it, and found his, and held it.

He did not move. He kept on looking at the stove and talking, quietly, about the weather, all the way through to Saturday.

* * *

It was Alma who gave it to her. It always was.

It was the following Wednesday, a gray afternoon at the end of the first week of March, and Corinne had collected her at half past three from the green wooden building on the corner, as she did every day now, at the door, in person, taking the small hand herself. She did not say why. She had not told the teachers anything. She had told Henrik, and Solveig, and no one else, and they had gone about it in their separate ways, Solveig by sitting up at the window with her stick across her knees and Henrik by arriving on the porch every evening for his supper with a watchful look and a bag of fish. Nothing had happened. A week had gone by and nothing had happened, not a coat, not a lamp, not a step; and she had begun, very slowly, to let her shoulders down.

They were in the bathroom. Alma stood on the stool in her vest with a toothbrush in her mouth. Corinne sat on the edge of the bath with a flannel. The light was yellow. The tap dripped. There was the whole warm humming bathroom-ness of the end of a day, and Alma took the toothbrush out of her mouth and examined it, and said, as if she were reporting on the weather:

“The man at the playground talked to me.”

The flannel stopped.

“Which playground, love?”

“The one on the hill. After school. When you were talking to Randi.” She stuck the brush back in. “On Monday.”

It took Corinne a moment to find her voice. She had learned over five years to produce it in the dark, in any condition, cold and flat and kind. “What man, sweetheart?”

“The tall one.” The words came muffled round the brush. “He sat on the bench by the slide. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He was just looking. And then I went to get my ball and he said —” She spat. She rinsed. She held on to the edge of the basin with both hands and said, with perfect gravity, in a perfect small imitation of a man’s deep voice: “That’s a good ball.”

“In Norwegian?”

“Yes. Like Tante Solveig.” She thought. “But slow. Like he’d got it in a book.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said thank you. And he said what’s your rabbit called. I said Kanin. He said that’s a good name for a rabbit. He said I’ve got very gray eyes.” She turned round on the stool and stood with the foam on her chin and her wet hair in her eyes, looking at her mother. “I said you said never go with anybody. He said that’s a very good rule. He said it’s the best rule there is. He said he knew a lady who had the same one.”

The bath was cold under Corinne’s hand. The whole world had gone very bright and a long way away, like something seen down the wrong end of a glass.

“Alma,” she said. “Did he touch you?”

“No. He didn’t. He sat on the bench. He was sad, Mamma. He looked at the ferry the whole time. He wasn’t scary.” She frowned, as at an injustice. “He had a boat on his sleeve.”

“A boat.”

“A little one. Orange.” She held up one hand and drew a shape in the air with a wet finger: a circle, a short tower, a sort of spray at the top. “Like this. Like a boat that stands up.”

“Like a lighthouse?”

“Yes! A lighthouse.” The child’s face lit. “I told him about Tante Solveig’s lighthouse book. He said he had a real one.”

Corinne did not move. She heard the tap. She heard the small clock in the next room tick, and the rain in the roots of the rose, and the whole old house settling about her on its stones, quite peaceful. She saw a patch the size of a playing card on the sleeve of a thermal jacket, hanging on a hook behind a kitchen door in Maine in the dark, with the orange of a lamp in a circle, and the words in white thread beneath: PORT ELLIS RESCUE.

“Alma. Look at me. Did he say his name?”

“No.” The child considered it with the honesty that was the whole difficulty of her. “He said I could call him a friend.”

“A friend.”

“A friend of a lady.” She yawned enormously. “Can I have my story? I want the one about the whale. He said —” She stopped, and rubbed her eyes with a small wet fist. “He said it was nice to meet me. He said, see you soon, Alma.”

Alma.

He had had the name since August, in a notebook, as a thing that might be. Nobody had ever put it into his hands attached to a child. It was on the door of a green wooden building and in a file at a clinic above a pharmacy and nowhere else on the face of the earth, and a child had handed it to him, with the greatest ease, over a ball, like a coin out of a pocket.

“Mamma? Your face is going funny.”

“Is it?” said Corinne.

She got up. She took the child, in her vest, with the toothpaste still on her chin, and gathered her up against her shoulder, hard, and carried her into the bedroom. She laid her in the bed and drew the quilt up and sat on its edge with her hand on the warm small back and the other hand flat on her own chest, as if to keep something in. She told the whale. She told it in a perfectly steady voice, all the way through, the whole old story of the whale who swallowed the moon, and did the voices; and when the child’s breathing slowed and lengthened and went small, she bent and kissed the damp hair. And she went out, and shut the door, and stood in the passage with her back against it and her mouth open, soundless, like a woman who has been struck.

He sat on the bench. He asked about the rabbit.

He did not touch her.

She understood it, then, quite clearly. It came down on her not as horror but as a sort of exact cold lucidity, like the moment at the locked door. He had not touched the child. He had not come to the door. He had not broken a window, or taken a photograph, or left a threat. He had sat on a bench in a public park, and looked at the ferry, and spoken pleasantly to a four-year-old about a ball. There was not a policeman in Norway who could have been made to write it down. It was, in every particular, an act of the most scrupulous restraint, and it was the most frightening thing that anyone had ever done to her.

He is keeping his promise, thought Corinne. To the letter. Every word of it.

She went into the kitchen. She did not turn on the lamp. In the dark she opened the wardrobe door, and knelt, and put her hand under the winter boots, and took out the little gray clock with its luminous face, and wound it, and set it for three.

Then she took the electricity bill off the nail by the stove, and a pencil, and turned it over on the oilcloth, and wrote across the bottom of the list of nine rules, in capitals, pressing so hard the point went through:

FRIDAY. THE 7:56 TO OSLO.

She looked at it. It was Wednesday. There was the bank to do, and the money in Solveig’s tin, and Ingrid’s envelope, which would be ready at noon on Thursday at the office on Strandkaien, and a suitcase to pack, and a note for Henrik; there was a great deal to be done in a single day. But she had been ready for five years. She had had the bag half-packed in her head since a bench at Gate B22.

Run, said Pip. Run, and keep running.

In the morning she would take the child to the barnehage as always, because a child who suddenly does not appear is a thing that is noticed, and be dull was the eighth rule. She would tell the director at the door, in plain Norwegian, that nobody but herself, Henrik Dahl or Solveig Arneson was to take Alma home, not for anything, not if the Queen came. And at two, early, she would go back for her herself, with a story about the dentist.

She sat down at the table. She sat very straight, with the clock in her lap, and the thumb-turn at a quarter past in the dark behind her, and watched the window, and the rain run down it, and the light of the lamp at the end of the lane. It was quite empty. It stayed empty all night. At three the alarm went off, a hard thin brassy rattle, like a spoon in a tin, and for the first time in six months she was already awake.