“Did you like it? London and your job?”
“I loved it. The noise, the people hurrying all the time, the theater, parks, nightclubs, museums, shops. Everything. It was exhilarating. And I loved my stressful job at the bank and the after hour drinks and happy banter with my colleagues.”
“Did the job involve a lot of risk taking?” Clarice asked. She was genuinely interested.
“Yes, of course. Hedge-fund-managing is a high risk, high-return trading game. And it lures plenty of dreamers, believe you me. Everyone is aware of the galling sums of money hedge-fund managers can pull in. Here´s a popular joke about hedge-fund managers: What´s the difference between a hedge-fund manager and a dove? One sits in a hole and shits on people, the other is a bird.”
Clarice could feel that he had inwardly finished with that part of his life.
I was no dreamer, though,” Sören continued “I made money in my sleep and got out while I was still making money.”
“Why? Why did you get and out and move back here? Not that I blame you. This place is beautiful but since you loved London so much and everything?”
Sören squirmed a little in his chair. “I became a little discontent. I hardly noticed in the beginning, but then this feeling persisted. And then one morning I woke up to find myself homesick. Which I had wanted to avoid under all circumstances but I couldn´t ignore it anymore. I just wanted to go home. I missed the tranquility of Öland. I missed the slow stressless feeling of it and the flatness of the landscape and the view over the Kalmarsund. And I missed Vickleby. And I missed my people. The people here who sometimes take whole minutes to finish a sentence and don´t even know how to spell words like “stress” and “hurry”.”
Clarice smiled at him warmly, “And yet they mysteriously manage to get things done in their own unhurried, slow but efficient way. At least that´s what I´ve noticed, since I´ve been living here.”
“Precisely”, he smiled back.
“So how long were you in England then?”
“About eight years.”
“ Really, that long? I wondered why you speak English with a British accent.”
Sören laughed, “Yes, it did rub off on me.”
“I´ve noticed that most Swedish people speak English with an American accent.”
Sören nodded, “That´s because of all those American programmes on television, of course.”
“What did you mean when you said your parents were still able to afford a good education for you then? Did they lose all their money later?”
“More or less, yeah.” .Sören looked down at the table and didn´t say anything for a little while.
Then he continued“My father was a drunk and a gambler. But my mother had always had a firm grip on his drinking and gambling excesses, but then she got sick. She had breast cancer and she got too sick to manage the affairs of the gård. So my father drank and gambled a lot of it away. When I came back eight years ago, I was appalled by the state of neglect and dilapidation Rettinge had fallen into. My mother died soon after and I tried to keep a firm grip on my father. It was hard though. Then he died about a year after my mother.”
“And then you set about getting the place back into shape? And you started your business in Kalmar?”
Sören looked up, “Yes that´s right. I worked myself to the bone, putting in fifteen to sixteen hour workdays. I established the company in Kalmar and got the gård back on track with the ostrich farm, the sawmill, which was already in place but inoperative and the herb shop, the örtagård. And I succeeded, but it was a tough time.”
Clarice nodded. “That´s very impressive. It really is.”
Sören leaned in a little closer to her, “So now you know almost everything about me, Clarice.”
“Oh, I seriously doubt that, Sören , she interrupted him, but he continued unperturbed, “If there´s anything about your past you´d like to share with me, please feel free to do so now or any other time.”
Clarice looked at her watch, “Didn´t you say you have a meeting in Kalmar?”
Sören looked at his own watch and cursed, “Damn, so I have and I´ll be late if I don´t leave right now. Thanks for the coffee and the conversation, Clarice. See you soon, I hope. Hejdo”
“Hejdo”.
Clarice watched him get into his bronze coloured Volvo S60 convertible and speed off, roof down, since the weather permitted it. It was still fairly warm for September in Sweden. Although dark clouds were gathering on the horizon.
Chapter 3
While speeding down the alley away from the main house Sören noticed Per Nielson lurking by the side of the örtagård. Something really needed to be done about him, he was becoming a real pest. Per Nielson was the living personification of the fate that would have beheld Sören´s father if he had lived. Once a fairly prosperous milk farmer, Per had owned and run the smaller gård Ludbyholm which was situated to the south of Vickleby, while Rettinge stood to the north of Vickleby. But worse than Sören´s father, Per had not only been a drunk, he had been a violent woman and child beater, too. Sadly his wife had waited until their two girls were almost grown-up and had moved out, before leaving him.
There was also a son, a boy, who had still been small when his wife Gunhild had left him. She had already been in her late forties when she had given birth to him and everyone had been extremely surprised and also a little horrified at the thought that the woman was not just subject to her husband´s physical abuse, which had more or less been an open secret, but also still had to comply to his sexual needs.
And then the biggest shock was yet to come. Eric, the boy, was born with Down syndrome.åå
Soon after the farm had gone bankrupt and was taken over by the bank. Gunhild Nielson had moved to a small apartment in Färjestaden, where she still lived today with Eric, their son.
One of Per Nielson´s daughters, Tilda lived at Rettinge and worked for Sören. She was his cleaning lady and occupied the second of the smaller houses on the estate.
As is so often the case with children who grow up with violent fathers, Tilda had married a man at a very young age who had displayed the same violent tendencies as her father. But unlike her mother she had not waited until their son Oscar was grown up to leave him. After a particularly violent attack on her and their son she had called the police and Henric Johannson, her ex- husband, was right now serving a three year sentence. Sören didn´t really know the technical term which warranted such a verdict and it didn´t matter as long as the man was locked up.
Sören´s father and Per Nielson had been good friends once, which was why he tolerated the man´s presence on Rettinge. Not so long ago he had done the odd little job here and there, repairing fences, light gardening work, helping in the stables, but his alcoholism had made him more and more unreliable and in the end even Sören had lost patience with him. Per lived in a tiny cottage in the woods which was the only thing left of his once substantial property. And yet he insisted on returning to Rettinge almost daily and annoying the hell out of everyone who worked and lived there. Tilda of course wanted nothing to do with him and didn´t want her son anywhere near him, either.
What was he going to do about Per, Sören pondered while driving along, this couldn´t go on forever until his liver finally gave up on him. He was a resistant fellow, he might live for years and years to come. He had to get rid of him somehow, he couldn´t continue to lurk around Rettinge, listening in on conversations, disturbing people while they were working. And he spied on everyone without shame or discretion. He was also drunk out of his head half the time. Alma was upset because he had started to harass some of her customers and Tilda was downright terrified of him.
Sören drove along