Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thirty-nine.
He’s sitting by the barbecue when I arrive.
The sky is the deepest indigo now, the sea black.
He’s got a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, the same blanket that used to cover his bed in Whitechapel all those years ago.
He’s playing music quietly on a small speaker.
Something ambient but upbeat—I never knew how to describe the sort of music he listened to, but I always liked it.
There’s a pot of salt on the table, a beer, matches, oil.
It takes him a while to notice me, but when he does, he smiles. A lighthouse in the darkening.
For a while neither of us moves. I stand at the corner of his house, the sea moving silently past, the reeds blowing gently.
“Hello,” he says eventually.
That voice.
“Hello,” I say.
I walk across the deck toward his table. Whatever he’s barbecuing smells good.
Johan’s feet, poking out of faded jeans, look tanned under the light of the lanterns rigged up around the table. So, too, does his face. I think he’s probably been out here all summer.
He pulls the blanket back up his shoulders. “Carrie Cole,” he says. “Do you want to come and sit down?” He doesn’t know why I’m here. When I contacted him last week I just said I was in town on business again and wanted to talk.
I sit on the bench, a couple of feet away from him.
He turns back to the barbecue and flips over the meat.
He has some onions loosely wrapped in foil on there, too, some corn.
Beside him there is a lovely-looking salad in the glow of his lantern.
He has always seemed so different to me, Johan Kullberg, but I do sometimes wonder if we’re perhaps more similar than I originally thought.
Even though he’s never approached his endeavors with the angst or pathological perfectionism that drove me, he’s not a man of half measures.
I saw his architectural designs when I looked him up the other week; they’re special.
Even if the pride and care he’s put into them weren’t obvious, he has numerous testimonials now, people writing effusively about his attention to detail and tireless pursuit of beauty and function.
He shifts the meat and turns back to me, and as he does I catch the smell of his skin for a moment. Earth, sun, timber. He is pure heaven.
“How’ve you been?” he asks, when I fail to say anything. “How is life?”
“Good. Bad, too. But definitely more good than bad.” I do up my coat; I’m not quite close enough to the barbecue to absorb heat.
“I’ve actually taken a job at Karolinska, under Yanika.
A proper job. For a year. By necessity it’s quite junior, but she’s giving me all sorts of training that I’d never get if I did this year in the UK. ”
He stops what he’s doing. “You’re living here? In Stockholm?”
“Yes.”
“What? Congratulations! I…wow. You always loved Yanika Hatziz. A little too much, in my opinion, but that’s another matter. I’m glad you’re together again.”
I laugh. That is not unreasonable.
I shift slightly to be closer to the barbecue. Not too near, but close enough for me to be able to feel him. Sure enough, my body switches on.
“Dare I ask how things have been? With Robin?”
“If you ask the kids, it’s been OK. If you ask me, or Mum, it’s been a car crash.
He’s been taking on all sorts of jobs for years.
Being paid eye-watering sums to help clean up reputations.
It’s amazing what a donation of a few million dollars can do for a corrupt-as-fuck multibillionaire.
But Robin, it seems, is the go-to guy for that.
He’s charming, he’s clean, he’s also very good at persuading charities to accept gigantic amounts of image-control cash. ”
“Christ.” Johan picks up his beer and takes a long drink. “Do you want one?”
“Oh, yes please. Just one, though. I’m not staying.”
I redden in the darkness. Of course I’m not bloody staying.
Johan goes and gets a beer from a wooden cool box by the table.
As usual, he looks strong, fit, and irrepressibly well.
I remember when I first met him, how unusual it felt to be in the presence of such a superbly healthy body, how drawn I was not just to those beautiful eyes but to the robust physicality of him, the outrageous health of the man.
He hands me a beer and we both take a drink. “Cheers,” I say, just as he says “Sk?l.”
He turns, then, and looks at me properly. “Would you like to do anymore small talk?” he asks. Those eyes are full of laughter, but I sense that he, too, is slightly uncertain. Maybe even nervous.
“Yes?” I say. “Or maybe no.”
Johan laughs.
I take a breath. “I came here to…I came here to clear something up.”
He nods encouragingly, waits for me to go on, but my speech has suddenly abandoned me.
After a while Johan turns back to the barbecue, transferring the meat to two plates. He adds potato, corn, onion, salad, then covers both plates with a tea towel and puts them to one side.
“Oh, please don’t let me stop you eating,” I say. “I’m—”
“Carrie. I couldn’t eat a thing right now.”
He rubs a hand over his face, and I can’t tell if he’s about to laugh or cry.
“You’ve just turned up here after eighteen months of total silence. And you’re telling me you’re living in Stockholm, and that you need to clear something up.” He laughs, but it’s a nervous sound. “I mean, do you want to eat now?”
“No. And sorry. But, you know me.”
After a moment, he smiles. “I do. This is peak Carrie Cole.”
I smile, too.
I wrap my arms around myself. I’m struggling to keep warm, even now I’m closer to the coals. Seeing this, Johan gets up again and lifts the grill off the barbecue. He puts two logs on, making a fire. He sits next to me and turns in my direction.
“I’m listening,” he says.
“OK.” Another breath. “The thing I needed to clear up was this. I’ve been back at work for more than a year.
I’m knee-deep in a very tricky divorce with a pathological liar determined to prove that he’s the ultimate Nice Guy.
I have a brilliant yet totally unreliable mother who suddenly wants to be in my life.
I have a very unpredictable forty-year-old au pair called Maya.
I’m trying to hold my children through several huge life changes and I am working long hours in a foreign language.
I am very busy. But I’m also happy again.
I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. Not just in my work, in everything. ”
“Well done, Carrie Cole,” he says. “Although—Maya? What?!”
I smile. “I know. But—another time.”
Johan says he’s looking forward to that update.
“So, yes, I’ve had a lot going on. Which is why I’ve had to work so especially hard not to think about being in the same city as you, breathing the same air, watching the same trees turn.”
He looks up at me.
“I’ve been trying to concentrate just on my children, my job, my sister, my poor grasp of the Swedish language.”
He starts to say something but I put up a hand to silence him.
“But the problem is, you’re just there. All of the time.”
Johan is perfectly still.
“What I’m trying to say is that I’ve had to accept that I love you, Johan. Just…so much. Still. I can’t help it. It’s been fourteen years and I still don’t know anyone whose company I crave more than yours.”
I pause. “I have to be honest, that does often include my children.”
Johan doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t say anything. He folds his arms across his chest, no longer looking at me, and I realize that, for all I’ve told myself about doing this in my time, at my speed, this ship may still have sailed.
I know he’s no longer with Freja. His work biography has been updated to say he lives in a cabin by the sea—no mention of anyone else—but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t started seeing someone. Or even sworn off all relationships, like I did eighteen months ago.
“So, that’s it. I’m a very poor prospect right now with two kids and a messy divorce, a still-tricky mother, no plans to live here beyond the end of my contract in September next year, and no clever suggestions for long-term relationship strategy.
But I’m here, with a very open heart, and…
that’s it, actually. I am here and my heart is open.
To you. I just needed to do it my way. In my time. ”
After a while, Johan turns to look at me again.
We stare at each other for a long time. Our faces, bodies, hands, are so close, but he’s not moving. He’s looking at me in that way he always looked at me, but something’s stopping him.
“I dreamed of this,” he says.
I swallow. His use of past tense hangs between us.
“Freja left me, of course. And I was very low for a while. I missed her. I missed Matteo so much; she wouldn’t let me see him for several months—she was too hurt. But she was right to be hurt. You were always there. Even before you came back into my life.”
“And now?”
“And now I’m…I’m thinking, Carrie! I wasn’t expecting this. I thought you were going to want to talk about Robin, or Thailand, or…I don’t know. This is a shock.”
“Of course.”
We look out into the solid black of the Baltic Sea. Johan leans forward and blows into the fire. Brave new flames creep upward, slender offerings to the deep purple bowl of sky.
I’m keenly aware that this may be a terrible misfire, that we may not be able to find our way back to each other. That I will drive back to the city with little more than his sympathy and well wishes. But if that happens, I believe I can handle it now.
Johan offers me the blanket. I tell him I’m OK and he laughs at me, because this is patently nonsense, but he doesn’t force the issue.
“So many things to say,” he says, after another long silence.
“Feel free to say them.”
He gives me a look.
“OK. Feel free to say one of them.” I give in and take part of the blanket to cover my legs.
Johan takes a breath. “For starters, Carrie, there are many things about me that have changed. Things your doctor side may not love.”
“I’m a very modern sort of doctor.”
“I meditate every day, for starters,” he replies.
“Oh, so do I.”
“Really?”
“I…well, it’s an ambition of mine. A very real one.”
“I also practice Reiki, and I use crystals for—”
“OK, stop there.”
He’s laughing now.
I try to backtrack. “Although, of course, if you feel some benefit then it doesn’t matter if there’s an evidence base or not.”
Johan glances at me, smiling, before looking back out to sea. “I also wonder if when you prepared your speech, you—”
“I didn’t prepare it!”
“Carrie.”
“I’m serious!”
“There’s no accompanying PowerPoint?”
“There’s not even bullet points in my phone.”
After another long silence, Johan says, “Anyway, look. What I wanted to know was, were you assuming I’d be single, when you decided to come down here? That I’d still be waiting for you?”
“No,” I say. “Not at all. I’ve come down because this was the first time it felt right for me to contact you. But I come with no expectations, Johan. If you’ve met someone else while I’ve been doing my own healing, that’s how it’s meant to be.”
He nods slowly. I cannot read him at all now, which may well be a bad sign.
The sea continues to move. The reeds sway. I think about the journey home, the grieving I will have to do all over again, but I trust I will heal much more quickly this time.
Neither of us moves, neither of us speaks.
Five, ten, twenty minutes pass as we sit here under the blanket, and I begin to feel drowsy.
Clouds roll in over an uncertain half-moon but the sea remains calm, visible in slowly swaying pools of light under the light bulbs Johan must have strung along the jetty since moving here.
Eventually, with cold hands, I remove the blanket from my knees and pat gently around my pockets for my keys.
“I haven’t been on a single date,” Johan says, just as I stand up.
I sit back down and look at him. The rest of the world has been turned down like a dial. We could be anywhere.
“Nothing. No one.” He smiles for a moment. “It’s still just you, Carrie. Only you.”
His finger traces along my hand under the blanket and warmth expands up my arm. I feel the steadiness of his pulse through his thumb.
“I am a bad catch right now,” I repeat. I can’t quite look at him. “But I’d do anything to make this work. I’d move mountains.”
“Carrie Cole,” he says gently. He runs that same finger down the side of my neck until, finally, I look at him again. “Of course you would move mountains.”
He smiles. I smile. There are only inches between us and my body is humming. The sea is calm, collapsing lazily against the jetty, much in the same way that it did on the beach when we danced together, newly married, all those years ago.
A few thousand turns of the earth. Grief, loss, birth, pain; nothing and everything has changed.
I return home and kiss him, at last, under the same moon, by the same sea—only the story before us is different.
His hands slide into my hair and I feel us keenly, that young married couple: drunk on love, on the starry night, on the feeling that we were the only two people on earth.
Just us. Now, as then, that is enough for me.