By the same author
Silence in October
Lucca
VIRGINIA
Jens Christian Grøndahl
Translated by Anne Born
CANONGATE
First published in Great Britain in 2003
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
First published in Danish in 2000 by
Rosinante, Copenhagen.
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Jens Christian Grøndahl, 2000
English translation copyright © Anne Born, 2003.
The moral right of Jens Christian Grøndahl and Anne Born to be identified as respectively the author and translator of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
ISBN 1 84195 410 1
eISBN 978 1 78211 711 7
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Polmont, Stirlingshire
Contents
You could never get used to the sound, the distant drone of aircraft engines passing high overhead in the night. It was hot under the sloping timber roof, and she kept her window open. She lay with one leg outside the duvet, breathing in the stuffy holiday cottage air and feeling the cool breeze on her calf and thigh, listening to the small dry click when the wooden edge of the black-out curtain bumped against the window-frame. She’d just had her sixteenth birthday that summer, the only time she stayed at the house by the sea. She didn’t belong here. She slipped out of our life and we slipped out of hers.
Every night she waited for the planes. She wasn’t afraid, she knew they wouldn’t drop any bombs here, where there was nothing but beach and fjord and scattered houses. To start with, the sound could hardly be distinguished from the beat of the waves behind the sand dunes. Shortly afterwards it flew over the roof the sun had heated up in the course of the day, so the room was heavy with stale air, the smell of dust, mattress and forgotten summers. Many years later she said that smell always reminded her of the war. She is dead now. I am the only one able to piece the story together after a fashion. Only she and I knew about it, and for years we only knew our own side of it.
The house is still there. Several more cottages have been built around it, but at that time it stood by itself, a little apart from the cluster of houses beside the road, where there was a grocer’s shop and a pub. The countryside has not changed, the sea and the beach, the dunes with marram grass and the semi-flooded stretch of meadow-land running inwards behind the coastline, at the end of the fjord. There are the same tufts and grass-covered tongues of land crowded with birds, taking off above the quiet water and gathering between the clouds and the water surface in flashing flocks that remind you of huge, revolving radar screens.
She was not familiar with this part of the country. Brought up in Copenhagen, she had lived there alone with her mother in a small flat near the harbour for as long as she could remember. Her father had left them when she was a month or two old, she had never met him. Her mother worked at home, she was a dressmaker. Half the living room was taken up by the big table with the sewing machine, clothes stands, dressmaker’s dummies and shelves for bolts of cloth. When one of her mother’s customers came she had to do her homework in the kitchen. Sometimes she withdrew to the small bedroom, where their beds stood, so close to each other and the walls so that you had to edge between them sideways. In the evenings they cleared half the table so there was a space for them to eat, the mother and the daughter – the daughter who stayed at a house beside the North Sea one summer listening to the sound of the waves behind the dunes and the English aeroplanes.
Maybe she would think about her mother, who had stayed in town. Maybe she would think about the flat they lived in, and the things she had known as far back as she could remember. The shining wheel of the sewing machine and the heavy scissors on the work table. The view between the house plants to the block opposite and the view from the bedroom, which looked onto the courtyard. The sweetish rotten smell of rubbish from down there in summer. The fog that descended in autumn like a grey veil in front of the grey walls and dark windows. The sound of ships’ fog horns out in the Sound, muffled and long drawn out, like an empty bottle makes when you blow into it.
One afternoon her mother had knocked at the bedroom door as she sat on her bed reading. Her mother didn’t usually knock. She asked her to come in for a moment, her voice sounded almost polite. A lady sat in the living room, she had passed the time of day with her several times before. One of her mother’s regular customers. The lady had been kind enough, her mother said, to ask whether she might like to spend the summer holidays with her and her husband.
She didn’t understand, she had only spoken a few times to the strange woman and then only to answer the usual questions about school. Nor could she understand her mother, who suddenly seemed like a stranger herself. She wondered at the way her mother introduced the surprising offer with: ‘had been kind enough . . .’. They could hardly look each other in the eye, she and her mother, who sat on the edge of her chair with her hands in her lap and drooping shoulders. The other woman had already put on her hat.
‘We have to help each other, don’t we?’ she said. She had painted lips, they smiled between her vigorous cheeks, as if by their own volition. As if the smile was a kind of involuntary twitch in her otherwise motionless face.
Sitting in the train, the girl thought of her mother, and later, when she lay awake at night in the cramped bedroom they assigned to her. They had emptied a drawer in the chest where she could put her clothes. The drawer rattled so loudly it must have been audible all over the house. She thought of the little flat near the harbour as the train carried her through the landscape.
At that time the journey took the best part of a day. You could hardly see there was a war on. Only at the stations and in the brief glimpses of streets beside the railway lines passing through the provincial towns could you catch a glimpse of the strange uniforms and military vehicles now and then. It was the same landscape as before and then later, with corn fields and forest and water sparkling in the sunshine.
As she looked out at it she thought of her mother’s frail shoulders, the grey hairs in her chignon and the sewing-machine wheel in the semi-twilight of the room at early evening, when the sun was only an afterglow on the façades opposite. After the lady left they had eaten, without speaking much, as usual.
‘Well, that is one way,’ her mother had said as they washed up. The summer could seem so long in town.
A powerfully built man in a light suit and straw hat met her at the station. He picked up her suitcase and carried it out to a large open-topped car. She noticed he was wearing driving gloves of pale-coloured leather.
He had built the holiday cottage after the earlier war, when he had been appointed a consultant surgeon. He and his wife had never had children, but for a number of years they asked their nephew to stay every summer in the red-painted wooden house by the North Sea. They might have invited the dressmaker’s daughter on holiday to keep him company, the lanky fourteen-year-old boy who lay on his stomach in a sand dune watching the car stop in front of the house and the strange girl getting out. The consultant