Chapter 31 #2
She realized how stupid it must seem to him: her not being able to tell him about a simple childhood dream.
It was just that if she started to talk about that kind of thing, about herself, her goals and her dreams, it seemed like she wouldn’t be able to avoid digging up everything else.
One question would lead to an answer that would lead to another question, and suddenly, she would find herself back at her father’s death.
But she had to let Didrik in. If she wanted to hold on to him.
“That’s very interesting,” he said.
“It’s hard to tell the story because it’s all connected to my dad. I find it so difficult . . .” She fell silent.
“But you still dream of running your own restaurant?”
“Sometimes, yes.” She thought about Rendezvous and Hanna’s offer. She wanted to accept. “When the opportunity to work in TV came into my life, I loved it. But the dream of a restaurant has always been there.”
“I like the sound of your dad, with his passion and his dreams, and the fact that you got those things from him. How were things before he died? What kind of person was he?”
“He was fantastic. Well, I thought so, but of course you don’t see everything as a child.
My sister and I were quite protected, I think.
I guess both Mom and Dad wanted to shield us from the worst, and Hanna and I didn’t realize how bad he actually felt.
We lived in our little suburb in a lovely community.
Everyone helped everyone else. If one person was painting their house, we all stepped in.
Three parents painted while a fourth watched the kids and a fifth took a group of teenagers down to the store, and afterward we all had a barbecue.
We were all welcome in one another’s houses.
It was like an Astrid Lindgren children’s book.
” She couldn’t help smiling at the memory.
Their house had been at the end of the street, closest to the lake in a residential neighborhood south of the city.
All the properties had been built in the early 1990s and purchased by families with children.
Bente’s family lived in a fairly modest wood-paneled house that was painted yellow and had a garden that was easy to look after, a fantastic lilac arbor, and a showy drive.
Dad had put up two columns on either side of the front door, like a frame.
He had done it just as the neighbor across from them did the same thing—part of a kind of suburban-dad competition.
A competition that her father eventually lost, in every possible way.
“But then a series of things happened. Their accounting firm . . . I don’t know all the details, but they were suspected of accounting violations.”
Everything had changed one windy Saturday afternoon at the beginning of November.
Winter was well on its way. When Bente headed home from handball training, darkness was already falling, and she expected to be greeted by appetizing aromas in the kitchen, homemade tomato sauce to go with the pizza she would help make, the sports roundup on TV, more sports live on the radio—the announcers’ tinny voices drowning out the TV commentary, because Dad thought the radio commentators were much better.
Plus music on the little CD player in the kitchen.
Bente hurried home, but when she got there, there were no appetizing aromas, no radio or TV, only murmuring voices upstairs. Something was wrong. Mom and Dad came down and told her to go and take a shower. They were going to buy burgers instead. That was the day everything changed.
“Soon everyone knew that they were suspected of a crime, and nothing was the same again. Everyone avoided us. We were no longer invited to friends’ houses for dinner; my sister and I weren’t asked to come over to movie nights or to hang out after our handball matches.
Then friends began to avoid me in school.
Nobody would talk to me anymore. It all happened so fast, within a few weeks.
In the end Mom and Dad were arrested. It was .
. . horrible. When they were taken out of the house .
. . all the neighbors came out onto the sidewalk and just stood there watching.
No one spoke to me and Hanna. No one tried to console us.
No one. They just stared as the police took our parents away, leaving us screaming and crying. ”
“Were there no adults to help you?”
“Social services came over until Lydia could get there. But no one on the street came to see how we were. None of the grown-ups we’d shared dinners with, the moms and dads who’d put a dressing on our knees when we fell off our bikes, or a bag of frozen peas on a swelling or a sprain.
People whose children Mom and Dad had helped with their homework.
I’d thought of them as family, but when the scandal broke, when we became tainted with shame, when that fluffy-pink Astrid-Lindgren life gave way to something bad, they withdrew completely. ”
“And then you moved away?”
She nodded. “They were convicted, and while they were waiting to be sentenced, Dad took his own life. The shame and everything else was too much for him. Once Mom was serving her sentence and Dad was gone, both Hanna and I felt we might as well move away. So we lived with Lydia on Gotland for a few years until Mom was released. She sold the house and bought a small apartment in the Soder district.”
She fell silent for a while. “It was hard for me to make close friends after that.”
“I’m not surprised—it’s difficult to trust after you’ve been treated so badly.” Didrik put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug.
They continued along Djurg?rdskanalen and Strandv?gen, before eventually reaching Skeppsbron. They then strolled along the southern shore of Lake M?laren, with the City Hall on the far side. The red sky had faded to a peachy hue, sending swirling reflections across the waters of Riddarfj?rden.
“Did he have a history of mental health issues?” Didrik asked tentatively, as if he were feeling his way in their conversation. She appreciated his tact but couldn’t help feeling sad that he seemed so uncomfortable. But maybe that was only natural? It was a difficult subject, after all.
She shook her head. “In hindsight I can see that he had his ups and downs, but there was nothing at the time to suggest he was capable of taking his own life.”
They stopped and he took her in his arms, held her tight. It was just what she needed, she realized. A hug. No more questions.
Didrik seemed to understand this, and afterward, they walked on in silence.
“Do you want to come back to my place?” Bente asked as they passed the rocky viewpoint known as Skinnarviksberget.
“Yes, please.”
“I mean my apartment.”
“Sounds great. So you got it back?”
She nodded. “It’s all happened really fast, and I’ve brought my stuff out of storage. I haven’t had time to sort it all out yet, though, so it’s a bit of a mess.”
Didrik was thrilled that she had asked. The conversation had been heavy, and he now understood perfectly why it was so hard for her to talk about her past. He shouldn’t have judged her so harshly.
She was the kind of person who brooded on things, and he liked the fact that he had discovered that side of her.
It made sense that it was a side she didn’t show to just anyone.
They bought Thai takeaway and took it up to her apartment.
There were boxes piled up everywhere, but behind them he could see pale-pink walls.
A dark-green velvet sofa stood in the middle of the living room on a cream-colored rug.
A large square mirror in a brass frame hung above the mantelpiece over the open fireplace, and a built-in bookcase covered one wall.
It was already partly filled with books from an open moving carton.
A small shelving unit with sections for storing LPs already housed a record player, and there was a speaker in the corner of one windowsill.
The rest of the sill was occupied by potted plants, and a couple of smaller plants hung in crocheted holders attached to hooks in the ceiling.
Bente grabbed a couple of brass candlesticks and put them on the highly polished walnut dining table. Then she found candles and lit them.
“This is lovely.” He looked around.
“Thanks. I’m guessing your place is a little . . . tidier?”
He smiled. “Right now I don’t really have a place, but I’ve found a rental apartment in G?rdet. This feels as if . . . as if we’re back in Paris.”
He loved her apartment. Could he live like this? He’d always dreamed of a house and garden, and had moved out of the city as soon as he could. He’d enjoyed city life, but moving to the suburbs had been the next step in wanting to move on with his life.
It had started to rain again, a light drizzle this time. They sat down at the table by the window and ate their food straight out of the plastic containers, using the chopsticks they had brought from the restaurant.
“Thank you,” he said after a while, reaching across the table to take her hand. “Thank you for sharing everything with me. Your story. And this.”
“Talking about his death and what caused it brings up so many emotions.” She picked up a piece of chicken.
“It always makes me think so much, I feel as if I’m processing it all over again.
All the whys . . . He had two children and a wife, he said he loved us, and I always felt loved when I was growing up.
And we loved him. But our love wasn’t enough. ”
Didrik had listened in silence. Now he wanted to say something consoling. “You do know it’s not because your love wasn’t enough. That it was all about how he was feeling,” he said cautiously.
She nodded. “Deep down I get that, but every time it comes up, my mind starts whirling again and I have to remind myself and it’s .
. .” She sighed. “Fucking hard work.” She put down her chopsticks, put her hands together on the table, and gazed out the window.
“After he died, I felt so terrible. There were days when I didn’t want to live, either, because he’d gone.
When the grief tore me to pieces, the pain and the sense of loss, I sometimes thought the only possible solution was to do the same thing.
Just take my life. But what stopped me was Mom and Hanna—I could never do that to them.
Because I love them. Which makes what my dad did even more inexplicable.
You don’t do that to the people you love the most. But that’s exactly what he did to us. ”
Didrik stood up, moved to the chair beside her, and pulled her close. She rested her cheek on his shoulder and let herself be held.
“I’m really sorry I behaved so badly the last time we were together,” he said after a while.
“Don’t apologize.”
“I have to. I realize now how emotionally draining it must be for you to process this over and over again. I’m so sorry I went on and on at you.”
“You couldn’t have known. And they say it gets easier every time you go through it all like this, putting your feelings into words.
” She raised her head, looked at him. “And I’ve never put it into words like this before, so thank you for making me feel safe enough to .
. .” Her voice trembled, she swallowed hard. “To take the risk.”
They gazed at each other for a long time, and then he kissed her gently. She kissed him back.
“A cup of tea would be good,” Bente said to him then. “The previous tenant left some behind, and I think I know where the cups are . . .”
She made the tea and dug out two cups, then she carried on taking things out of boxes. She hung several small pictures on a wall where there were already nails—motifs from France, Italy, Copenhagen, a small Alpine village. Memories of her travels.
“And . . .” She went over to a large leather bag next to the sofa, took out the picture he had given her, and hung it in pride of place.
She moved on to another box and began unpacking books with an air of concentration. “There’s an old one about Bordeaux in here somewhere, I think it’s from the fifties. It might contain old maps or something, pictures of what the area around the address in Médoc looked like back then.”
Didrik nodded and helped her unpack a number of cookbooks and books on wine, which she arranged on the shelves. Many were in French, they were all well thumbed, and in some cases the covers were falling apart.
“Here it is!” Her face lit up and she brandished a volume with a red woven cover.
Didrik’s phone buzzed with a news alert. He was taken aback to see Bente’s name in the headline. What the . . . ? He clicked on the article. TV sommelier on her grief after losing her father.
He grinned. Typical headline on a slow news day.
“That was quick. You’re topical again.” He showed her the article. She looked shocked, then anxious. Then she read the piece and managed a smile.
“I guess they had nothing more worthwhile to write about.”
He shrugged. “That’s usually what happens.”
They sat down and wrote up a schedule of the places they were going to visit in Bordeaux and the meetings they’d arranged, but he noticed she was a little quiet.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, it’s just . . . I’m not used to showing up in the media.”
She shook her head and went to sit on the sofa with the book open on her lap.
He joined her and they leafed through the pages together, reading selected passages that looked interesting.
After a while Didrik could feel his eyelids growing heavier.
It had been a long day. Beside him Bente was yawning too.
“Look at this!” she said suddenly, not a trace of tiredness in her voice now.
He followed her finger across an old map.
“This must be 16 Rue des Templiers, mustn’t it?”
He nodded.
“And this must be the stone building we saw on Google Maps the other night. I suspected it was a vineyard, and I was right!” She was beaming now. “Look at the name!”
Didrik did.
Chateau de Chênes