Chapter 35
Jér?me’s care home lay between the city and Médoc, and consisted of a small building covered in pink plaster.
Bente and Didrik strolled through a fantastic garden with a small white marble fountain bubbling away.
Shortly after they entered the reception area, a nurse arrived and showed them to Jér?me’s room.
“I’m afraid Monsieur Fossey isn’t having a very good day today, but when we asked him yesterday, he said he’d be happy to see you.”
“I suppose it’s still worth a try,” Didrik said as they continued along the corridor. What else could they do, now that they were here?
“Your visitors, Monsieur Fossey,” the nurse said. A man with a cloud of gray hair was standing by the window watering some potted plants. He turned, and they saw dark-brown eyes behind his glasses, bushy eyebrows.
“My visitors?”
The nurse looked apologetically at Bente and Didrik.
“I hope it goes well. Try asking your questions and see what he says.” She turned to Jér?me.
“You wanted to see Bente and Didrik. Two young people from Sweden.” Bente couldn’t help smiling at the description.
“They want to ask you some questions about your vineyard.”
Jér?me’s face broke into a smile. “My vineyard, how nice. It’s not for sale,” he chortled. Bente wasn’t sure if he was joking.
“We’re making a TV show,” Didrik explained, sitting down opposite the old man. “We have one or two questions.”
“We’re trying to find out who sent a bottle of wine—this one.” Bente took the empty bottle out of her bag and showed it to him. Jér?me screwed up his eyes and took a step back, as if he needed to look at it from a distance.
“I don’t recognize it.”
“No, we didn’t expect you to, but we think it was sent by a Swedish man, Sven Steen, toward the end of the war. He was at Chateau de Chênes—he arrived there in connection with the resistance movement in 1944.”
Jér?me looked at them. First Bente, then Didrik, with an expression that suggested he was wondering whether it was worth talking to them or not.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
Didrik cleared his throat. “What about Mathieu Latorre, the son of Juliette and Hugo, the couple you bought Chateau de Chênes from? Do you know if he stayed on at the vineyard after the war?”
Jér?me shook his head. “No, he was sent to Paris after he came home from the front, and I think he stayed there.”
Bente and Didrik exchanged a glance.
“Do you know of anyone from Scandinavia who was living in Bordeaux during the war?” Bente ventured.
Jér?me appeared to be thinking. He gazed out of the window for a moment, then looked back at her.
“No. I don’t know anything about that.”
They took a detour and drove out to the coast. Didrik challenged Bente to take a dip in the sea; he didn’t think she would do it, but she made it clear that he had underestimated her, and she even managed to persuade him to do the same.
He bought two blue-and-white-striped beach towels from a tourist store, then they returned to the deserted shore and ran laughing into the water in their underwear.
It was absolutely freezing cold. Afterward they wrapped themselves in the towels and held each other until they were warm again.
Back at the hotel, they lay down on the bed in Didrik’s room and gazed up at the ceiling fan as it spun around and around. They’d hung the towels up to dry, and they flapped in the breeze from the open balcony door.
Didrik listened to the sounds of the city. The unmistakable sound of a French traffic jam, a cacophony of car horns. Laughing children on the way home from school. The scrape of chair legs on the concrete slabs outside the café down below.
He reached out and took her fingers in his.
“What cold hands you have,” he said.
“What warm hands you have.” He could tell that she was smiling, and he turned his head and looked at her.
“This is a very different work trip.” He stroked her cheek and laughed. “My best work trip ever.”
“All work trips should be like this.”
He thought about all the times he had traveled for work, conferences at other universities, guest-lecturing overseas, filming in Sweden as a guest on various TV shows.
At first he hadn’t minded the traveling; it had been an exciting aspect of his career.
Then he had found it boring being away from Lovisa.
What would life be like in the future? What would a life with Bente look like?
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
He smiled. “What my life is going to be like. What do you expect your life to look like in ten years’ time?”
“I’ll be doing a job I’m passionate about, possibly running Rendezvous, which by then will have become a fantastic wine bar. I might also be making the odd appearance on TV, but I’m absolutely not interested in fame.”
“And family?” He couldn’t help noticing that she hadn’t included him in her dreams.
“I don’t know . . .” She gazed at him. “I’m not sure if it’s right for me. Having children.”
When he saw her uncertain expression, his mind began to spin. Could he go through this again? With someone who wasn’t sure? Investing all his emotions in a person and a relationship that didn’t lead to where he wanted to go.
“So family life isn’t for you?”
Bente shrugged. “I just don’t think it’s my thing.”
He nodded slowly.
“Is that a problem for you?”
“No. Or rather, I don’t know. I don’t even know if I can have kids, but there are other ways to build a family.”
Bente didn’t say anything.
He wasn’t sure why he felt so awkward about the whole thing. Maybe it was because he had always imagined the future so differently. Was he ready to let go of the dream of a family?
“Why haven’t you told me this before? That you don’t want kids.”
“What do you mean? It never came up until now, when you started pushing me for information, as usual.”
“‘As usual’? I think I took a clear step back, and I’ve given you every chance to tell me.”
He took a deep breath. Tried to slow his racing heartbeat.
This was stirring up his emotions. Once again he felt shut out by Bente, excluded from her thoughts and innermost feelings.
It was as if she had suddenly become a different person.
He couldn’t help wondering what she really wanted. Did she even want to be with him?
“It’s just that I devoted several years to a marriage with a person who didn’t know what she wanted, or at least wasn’t honest with me,” he said eventually.
“But I have been honest.” Bente propped herself up on her elbows, looked at him. “I’ve been honest all along.”
“I don’t know if I have the energy to fight for it again.” He was thinking out loud.
“Fight?”
“Yes—I don’t know if I can do it.” He suddenly felt incredibly tired.
Should he really have to fight like this for love?
Shouldn’t it be simpler? If two people were meant for each other, surely that relationship developed spontaneously?
Everything went smoothly, and you just knew.
Wasn’t that what happened with true love?
“Are you trying to break up with me?” Bente’s expression was serious.
“I don’t know, but . . .” He took a deep breath. “I’m not sure if this is what I want.”
There it was again: a sense of constantly being changed by someone else. It seemed to him that he had found a new side of himself, something that Bente had helped him discover. Yet at the same time, he didn’t want to give up on other dreams. The dream of marriage and a family.
All his life he had tried to fit into a template that someone else had created for him—starting with his mother.
He had always made an effort to fit into her image of what her son should be like.
It had been the same in his marriage—Lovisa had been opposed to the person he was, to the person he became.
Of course Didrik realized that everyone has to compromise within a relationship.
But ever since the breakup with Lovisa, he had realized that their compromises had been about his entire personality.
About the way he wanted to live. This business of children and a family—could he really walk away from all that?
He didn’t want to change yet again within a relationship. He wanted to be himself, 100 percent.
“I don’t get it. What do you mean? Are you trying to find a way out of this?” Bente looked searchingly at him, her eyes burning into his.
“No, it’s not like that. I’m just questioning what we both want, wondering if our goals are too different.”
She nodded. “It’s fine. I understand if this was just a way for you to move on. To get over your fantastic ex-wife.” She got up off the bed.
“It’s absolutely not about that, and you know it.” He reached for her, but she pulled away.
“Oh, I know it, do I? Then why are you determined to invent some kind of conflict? This issue shouldn’t be a problem—you’re making it into a problem.”
“So my dreams of a family are invented?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t twist my words.” She sank down onto the bed, put her head in her hands, then looked up at him, her eyes shining with tears. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’re too different. Maybe we need time.”
His stomach contracted. Was she right? Did they need more time? Did he need more time? Was Bente right? He had no idea. He was completely confused. Why did love—life!—have to be so demanding all the time?
“I think we do,” he heard himself say. “I need to give this some thought.”
“And what about the summer party?” Bente said. “Are we . . . are we still going together?”
“The party?” She was asking him about a fucking party? They were in the middle of breaking up! “Why bring that up?”
“It’s not important, I was just thinking about the show. It will be good PR if we go, and—”
“How can you think about TV24’s summer party right now? What upsets you the most—the fact that we won’t be seeing each other anymore, or that you’ll be missing the party?”
Unbelievable. He’d thought that he had finally found his way to the person Bente really was, had gotten her to open up, to let him in. And now this.
He gazed at her in silence for a few seconds. “Like I said, I need to think. And maybe you should think about why you want to be with me—if you even do.”
Bente looked shocked, as if she couldn’t believe he was capable of raising his voice. But he was, and he had—and he had no intention of giving in. He wasn’t going to let anyone walk all over him again.
She simply nodded slowly.
“I’ll go back to my room,” she said quietly as she got to her feet.