‘Do you know what I have in all those wet shopping bags? I have gifts for my sisters Saffron, Jubilant, Cleopatra and Severo, and my brother Aurelius, and my little adopted brother Min, and presents for my father Harry, and his later wives, Mandy and Debbie and Peacock, a transsexual, and my ex-stepfather Richard, and his boys Charles, David and Bill, and my new stepfather Gavron and his sister Cassandra, who’ll be upset if she’s left out – she is suicidal. And there are so many grandparents on all sides, not to mention aunts, uncles, cousins, I don’t know what to do, but those you forget don’t forgive. And Saffron and Jubilant are both pregnant and what worries me is that now the next generation is coming along and, as with the flat-folded non-destructible prion, growth of family members will be exponential and podatch frenzy never be at an end, and how will I ever find time or strength to save the world? I blame my mother. And the shops are shut and I have no gift for Saffron’s partner or Jubilant’s husband and I can’t even remember their names. I’m so tired.’ And Clarissa’s tears were renewed.
‘What we regret for the dead, the poor and distressed,’ said Miss Jacobs, ‘is that they are not alive, spending and happy. We might as well have a good time while we can, in their honour, if indignation will allow. There’s such a thing as going too far, I do agree, but all will yet be well.’
When Clarissa was calm again she and Miss Jacobs both put on raincoats, and went down the street to where there was a skip and emptied out the contents of the carrier bags – a myriad packages and parcels, gold and red and green, all glittery with Christmas goodwill – so they tumbled down into wet rubble and in between paint-peeled planks of worm-eaten wood. And if the minute Miss Jacobs and Clarissa were gone a host of shadowy figures stretched skinny arms out of the damp dark to retrieve them, so much the better.
The woman drove. The man was the passenger. She was English. He was German. She was in her fifties, tough and bright and not yet finished with sex. She wore a vivid green shirt and jacket. His hand rested on her knee. He was thirtyish, blond, gentle-eyed; sharp, childish features clouded by a soft fuzzy beard. He thought she was invincible, wonderful, and often told her so.
Stella had things to do in Oslo, she said: a couple of people to see: a few loose ends to tie up. She’d appreciate company. Lothar was a children’s book illustrator; a couple of commissions had fallen through: he had time to spare. They’d met in a bar in his home-town, Berlin, and gone home together. She was in business, she said; he was not sure what it was. She lived in Ipswich, England.
She knew her way through the backstreets of Oslo; the ship had docked at 6 a.m.: early: they’d picked up the hire car at the port, a BMW, executive style, glossy black, bullet-proof windows. Lothar didn’t drive – he did not, he often said, wish to be an accomplice in the pollution of the planet; besides, he enjoyed his passenger status. He thought her hands gripped rather tightly on the wheel as they approached Grunnerloekka.
‘I hate this place,’ she said.
Early sun shone on snow-sprinkled trees. Lothar looked round for any possible source of her hate, but could find none. It was a district much like the one he himself lived in, only in Oslo, not Berlin. A run-down, attractive village-within-the-city, where artists and academics clustered, and now the immigrants moved in because rents were cheap. Already people were about. A bouncy blonde mother wheeled out twins in a high, well-sprung pram: a group of shrouded Islamic women hurried by; a pale young man with ringlets played folk-songs on a flute. A Turkish foodstore stood next to a shop selling Japanese paper lampshades and beeswax candles: there was an espresso bar next to a clinic offering Chinese medicine and acupuncture. A gang of children raced along the shop fronts, banging hands against shutters and doors as they went – clang, clang, reverberating – but otherwise they kept silent, as if like a flock of birds they could read each other’s minds. Vietnamese, he thought: lithe, graceful and dangerous; those, you could be sure, whom earlier generations had wronged, now thriving on the guilt of the descendants.
‘It seems much like anywhere else,’ said Lothar cautiously.
‘It’s going down in the world,’ she said. ‘Black faces everywhere.’
He felt shocked. He’d been on the verge of falling in love with her. He moved his hand away from her knee. She felt it go and smiled.
‘I am concerned for property prices, that’s all,’ she said.
‘Rentals and so forth.’
They came to a park. An untidy slope of snow, thawing, green and brown tussock showing through the white, ran down to a partly frozen stream, tree-lined. Ducks swam in patches where the ice had melted, milling around, uncomfortably close to one another. Stella parked the BMW on the gravel verge. On the other side of the road, overlooking the park, stood turn-of-the-century apartment blocks, balconied, shabby but attractive in their deep Hanseatic colours. They had been built in an age where there was more space, fewer people; the buildings stood at a leisurely distance from one another, their proportions pleasant.
‘How attractive,’ said Lothar, who would always rather praise than blame. Good humour, he felt, made the world go round.
‘I lived here for eleven years,’ said Stella. ‘Up there on the fourth floor. The balcony with all the house plants.
I was married to a musician.’
‘What happened?’
‘He betrayed me,’ she said, and seemed disinclined to say more.
‘Did you love him?’ he pressed.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said bleakly.
She made no move to get out of the car. They sat there in silence. A duck made an aborted landing on the ice down below, and took off again directly. That made her laugh.
‘I moved out so she could move in,’ said Stella. ‘It was the sensible thing to do. So sensible, the Norwegians. She was Miss Oslo, a long time back. She had a degree in anthropology, and could play the bassoon besides.’
‘Miss Oslo?’ he was confused.
‘I’m talking the old world, not the new,’ she said. ‘I’m talking Beauty Queens. Hers was the female face and form Norway chose to present to the world. My husband served the same function, but as a musician. He would take his orchestra abroad: how everyone applauded: cut out clippings back home. They were made for each other. Though I think now there are financial problems. They are getting older: the young tread hard upon their heels. Incomes fall. You know how it is.’
A man came out of the wooden doors of the apartment block. He was in his early sixties, perhaps: thin, a little bent, gentle, elegant, a man of some dignity and authority. He carried a violin case. He did not notice the BMW or its occupants, though they should have been noticeable enough.
‘There he goes,’ said Stella. ‘There goes George. His mind on other things, as usual. Music, most likely. Miss Oslo had to all but lie on her back and wave her legs in front of him, before he so much as noticed. But such long legs, in the end he couldn’t help it. I don’t blame him, I blame her.’
‘Don’t you want to speak to him?