The Farm (30 page)

Returning with the coffee and two thin ginger biscuits, each lonely on a separate plate, I could smell his lime cologne for the first time and wondered if he’d dabbed some on while waiting for the coffee to brew. He told me that guests were arriving from the church to stay in his spare room, so unfortunately he could give me no more than an hour. It was a lie, one he’d devised in the kitchen in order to limit the amount of time I could talk to him. I had no right to be upset. I’d shown up unannounced and unexpected. Nonetheless, to be set a time limit was a rejection and hurtful. I smiled:

‘No problem.’

While he poured the coffee I offered a brief account of my life by way of introduction, hoping he’d latch on to some element of interest. He picked up his gingerbread biscuit and snapped it neatly in two, placing both halves beside his coffee. He sipped the coffee, ate one half of the biscuit, and said:

‘How’s Tilde now?’

He wasn’t interested in me. There was no point wasting time on trying to build a connection. We were strangers. So be it.

‘She’s very ill.’

If he couldn’t offer emotion, I’d settle for facts:

‘It’s important that I find out what happened in the summer of 1963.’

‘Why?’

‘The doctors believe it could help with her treatment.’

‘I can’t see how.’

‘Well, I’m no doctor . . .’

He shrugged:

‘The summer of ’63 . . .’

He sighed:

‘Your mum fell in love. Or in lust, I should say. The man was ten years her senior, he was working on a nearby farm, a summer labourer from the city. Little Tilde wasn’t even sixteen at the time. The relationship was discovered. There was a scandal—’

I sat forward, raising my hand to interrupt as I’d done when my mum was telling her version of events. I’d heard this story before. But it had been told about Freja. Perhaps my grandfather had muddled the names.

‘Don’t you mean Freja fell in love with the farm labourer?’

My grandfather was suddenly alert. So far he’d addressed me with a melancholy weariness, not so now:

‘Freja?’

‘Yes, my mum told me that Freja fell in love with the farm worker. Freja – the girl on the nearby farm, the girl from the city, that scandal was about Freja, not my mum.’

My grandfather was troubled, rubbing his face, repeating the name:

‘Freja.’

‘She was my mum’s closest friend. They ran away together once.’

The name meant something to him. I couldn’t tell what.

‘I can’t remember the names of her friends.’

I found the remark extraordinary:

‘You must remember! Freja drowned in the lake! My mum never got over the idea that you believed she was responsible for Freja’s death. That’s why she left. That’s why I’m here.’

He looked up to the ceiling, frowning, as though there were a fly that had caught his attention. He said:

‘Tilde is sick. I can’t unpick her stories for you. I won’t sit here trying to make sense of her nonsense. I’ve done enough of that in my life. She’s a liar. Or a fantasist, take your pick. She believes her own stories. That’s why she’s ill.’

I was confused, partly by the vehemence of his reaction, mostly by the inconsistency. I said:

‘I shouldn’t have interrupted. Please finish telling me what happened.’

He was only partially soothed by this request and concluded his summary with a new-found briskness:

‘Your mum’s head was full of dreams. She imagined living happily ever after on a farm, with her lover, just the two of them. The rules of society and decency be damned! The farmhand had told her romantic lies to persuade her to sleep with him and she’d believed them. She was gullible. After the affair was terminated, the farmhand was sent away. Tilde tried to kill herself in the lake. She was rescued from the water, spending many weeks in bed. Her body recovered, her mind never did. She was shunned. She was an outcast. At school her friends disowned her. The teachers gossiped about her. What did she expect? She shamed me terribly. I was disgraced. I put aside my dreams of running for a national government post. The scandal ruined my ambitions. Who would vote for a politician with a daughter like that? If I can’t bring up my own child what right do I have to make the laws for others? I found it hard to forgive her. That’s why she left. It’s too late for regrets. Consider yourself lucky she suffered a breakdown this summer and not sooner, when you were a child. It was only a matter of time.’

It was remarkable that my mum had brought me up with such love and affection – she couldn’t have learned those sentiments from him.

Even though we’d been speaking for only forty minutes of the allotted hour my grandfather stood up, ending our talk:

‘You must excuse me. My guests will be here soon.’

In the gloom of the hallway he gestured for me to wait. At a side cabinet, using a fountain pen dipped in a pot of ink, he wrote his telephone number on a card:

‘Please don’t turn up uninvited again. If you have any questions, ring. It is sad that it must be this way. We are family. And yet we will never be family. We lead separate lives now, Tilde and I. She chose that way. She must live with the decision. As her son, so must you.’

Outside I walked to my car, turning back for one last glance at the farm. My grandfather was at the window. He let the curtain fall, a declaration of the finality of this goodbye. He wanted me to understand that we’d never see each other again. Taking out my keys, I noticed a smudge of ink on my finger from where I’d clasped his card. In the daylight I saw that the ink wasn’t black, it was a light brown.

• • •

In a nearby town I booked into the only available accommodation, a family-run guesthouse. I sat on the bed and studied the brown ink smudge on my thumb. After having showered and eaten a cold meal of potato salad, rye bread and ham, I phoned my dad. He knew nothing about Mum’s alleged affair with the young farmhand. Like me, he queried my grandfather’s memory, reiterating that Freja had engaged in the affair. I asked for the name of my mum’s old school.

Situated on the edge of town, the school building appeared to be new, the old premises demolished. I worried that too much time had passed. The school day was over and there were no children in the grounds. I rattled the gate, expecting it to be locked shut, but it swung open. Inside I wandered the corridors, feeling like an intruder, unsure whether I should call out. I heard the faint sound of singing and followed it upstairs. Engaged in an extracurricular class, two teachers were leading a singing rehearsal with a small group of students. I knocked on the door, quickly explaining that I was from England and looking for information concerning my mother, who’d attended this school over fifty years ago. The teachers were young and had only worked at the school for a few years. They explained that I wasn’t authorised to access the school records so there was nothing they could do to help. Despondent, I remained at the door, with no idea how to overcome this obstacle. One of the women took pity on me:

‘There is a teacher from that time. She’s retired now, of course, but she might remember your mother, and if she does, she might agree to talk to you.’

The teacher’s name was Caren.

Caren lived in a village so small I guessed there were no more than a hundred houses, a single shop, and a church. I knocked on the door, relieved when it opened. The retired teacher was wearing knitted moccasins. Her home smelled of freshly baked spiced bread. As soon as I mentioned my mum, Caren reacted:

‘Why are you here?’

I told her it would take time to explain. She asked to see a photograph of my mum. I showed her my phone, finding a photograph taken in the spring before she’d left for Sweden. Caren put on her glasses and studied my mum’s face before saying:

‘Something’s happened.’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t seem surprised.

Her home was warm, but unlike the electric warmth in my grandfather’s farm this heat was welcoming, emanating from a log fire in the living room. The Christmas decorations were handmade. There’d been no decorations in my grand father’s house, not even an Advent candle in the window. In further contrast with my grandfather’s farm, there were photos of her children and grandchildren on the walls. Despite her telling me that her husband had passed away last year, this was a home full of life and love.

Caren made me a cup of honey-sweetened black tea, declining to speak while making the tea and forcing me to be patient. We sat by her fire. Steam rose from the bottom of my trousers, wet from the snow. With a touch of the schoolteacher about her, Caren instructed me not to rush, to tell her everything, in the proper order – her prescriptions reminding me of my mum’s rules for narration.

I told the story of my mum. At the end, with my trousers dry, I explained that I’d travelled here to test my theory that the death of Freja, accidental or not, might be a defining event at the centre of my mum’s illness. Caren stared into the fire while speaking:

‘Tilde loved the countryside more than any child I’ve ever taught. She was far happier playing in a tree than in a classroom. She’d swim across lakes. She’d collect seeds and berries. Animals adored her. But she did not make friends easily.’

I asked:

‘Except for Freja?’

Caren turned from the fire, looking directly at me:

‘There was no Freja.’

• • •

Under a full moon I returned to my grandfather’s farm, parking far enough away that the engine couldn’t be heard. I walked through snow-covered fields, arriving at the clump of trees near his farmhouse, the place where my mum had constructed a shelter and where, she’d told me, she and Freja had spent time. A hundred or so pine trees grew among moss-covered boulders, a pocket of wilderness that couldn’t be farmed. And though my mum had described climbing a tree and looking down on Freja’s farm, there were no buildings nearby. I decided to climb anyway, to see the world as my mum had seen it. The branches of the pine tree were at right angles to the trunk, like rungs on a ladder, allowing me to reach two-thirds of the way up before they became too fragile. Perched there, looking out across this landscape, I saw that I was wrong. There was a building nearby, much smaller than a farm, camouflaged by thick snow. From high above I saw the spine of the roof – a black notch cut into the blanket of white.

As I climbed down, the building once again disappeared from sight. I walked in its rough direction and before long I could, beyond the heaps of snow, distinguish timber walls. It had been built using silver birch wood. By its size I guessed it was a toolshed or workshop, probably connected to my grandfather’s farm by a dirt track. There was a rusted padlock on the door. Using the edge of my keyring, I unscrewed the hinge from the timber, removing the padlock and stepping inside.

Having found the cabin under the light from a full moon, for the first time I needed my torch. Directly in front of me I saw a distorted reflection of myself. My stomach appeared swollen, twisted around the curved side of a giant steel container. This was where my grandfather collected his white honey. The space was functional. The only decorative item was an elaborately crafted cuckoo clock on the wall. It no longer told the correct time. I toyed with it until the mechanism sprang to life. There were two doors, one on either side of the clock face, one high and one low. When the clock chimed, the doors opened at the same time, two timber figures emerging, one male and one female. The man was at the top, he stared down at the timber woman and she stared up at him. Instinctively I added the dialogue:

Hello up there!

Hello down there!

The couple returned inside the clock and the cabin was silent again.

Around the back of the steel drum I saw, hanging on a peg, my grandfather’s beekeeping outfit, the protective clothes he’d wear when retrieving honey from the hives. The outfit was made from white leathery material. Placing the torch on the floor, I dressed myself in the clothes, the trousers, the top and gloves. I put on the hat with the black protective netting, turning to study my distorted reflection. Before me was the troll my mum had described, with dinosaur-thick skin, pale webbed hands, extended fingers, and instead of a face, a single huge black eye that stared and stared and never blinked.

Taking off the outfit, I noticed a second locked door. I didn’t bother with stealth, kicking the door with the sole of my heavy boot until the timber fractured. Squeezing through, I shone a light on a floor covered in wood shavings. There were saws and chisels – this was the place where my grandfather would repair and restore the beehives. It was also the place where he made cuckoo clocks. There were several incomplete clocks on the floor and a stack of half-finished timber figures. Faces jutted out of planks of wood. I held one in my hand, running my finger over the long curved nose. A few of the figures were fantastical creatures, exhibiting an imagination I would never have associated with my grandfather. This was a space to be creative, where he could shut the door on the world and express himself. Crouching down, I picked up a coarse coil of wood.

I don’t know how long my grandfather stood at the entrance, watching me. On some deeper level I’d known he was coming, perhaps my kicking down the door had been a way of calling him, beckoning him from the farm. With a deliberately unhurried pace, I finished my examination of the workshop, imagining that he’d used fear before, when bringing my mum here, but he wouldn’t have fear at his disposal now. I crushed the coarse coil of wood in my hand as I heard him shut the outer door.