Gefordson Airplane

The Night Watch is Sarah Waters's fourth novel and something of a departure from her usual area of historical fiction. Anyone expecting another costume romp full of twists and turns and titillating erotic interludes will be sorely disappointed. Waters first three novels (Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith) are all set in the Victorian era. Night watch brings the lesbian action forwards and sets it in the 1940's during and after World War II. With the change of setting comes a change in mood: Night Watch is a sober, introspective read. One element alone remains the same: the writers stated aim to put lesbian love at the heart of history.

The novel's most striking aspect is how, in this book, Waters makes a serious stylistic departure from previous work in that she chooses to re-tell her story by reversing events. We first meet the main characters in 1947, a group of individuals drained by the war and exhausted by personal dramas. The book then proceeds through two sections (1944 and 1941) to dig back into their pasts to uncover not simply what happened but why. For many people this device has proved too 'tricksy' and reviews often suggest the book's full impact can only be gained from a careful re-reading. This may do both the book and the writer a disservice.

Waters has mentioned in interviews how as a child she had a passion for archaeology and we see here how by re-ordering events, reversing the chronology we engage with the process of uncovering history, digging backwards into the past, like archaeologists who brush away the dust to reveal new and surprising finds. The work of the reader is to uncover unexpected elements from the past, which inform and reshape the present. Kay, a young lesbian who has enjoyed the war as a release, a time allowing her to dress in suits and act gallantly in masculine ways, says about entering cinemas halfway through a film to watch the ending first, "I almost prefer them that way - people's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures." Waters is asking us to trust the writer to make the past more interesting than the future.

Night Watch revolves around the inter-related lives and loves of five main characters : three lesbians (Helen, Julia and Kay) , a straight woman (Vivien) and a young man imprisoned for attempted suicide (Duncan). Through Helen, Kay and Julia the book explores how love pursued is often love unreciprocated. Some readers may find these three central characters to be Virginia Woolf/Bloomsbury types, teetering on the edge of caricature. Their introspection and well-bred struggles to own their sexual identity occasionally slip into narcissism: they care too much for themselves and too little for a world at war. That aside Waters usually succeeds in making this corrosive love triangle believable, the characters genuine and their affections real.

In contrast the character of Vivien is a near faultless creation, an ordinary woman whose beauty attracts a married sweetheart (Reggie). Vivien is described as a 'glamour girl' but her struggles with family, work and love are far from glamorous. Her brother (Duncan) has been imprisoned for attempted suicide. She feels a fish out of water at work in the typing pool, a place reserved usually for refined ladies who know not to say 'toilet' when the word 'lavatory' is called for. We see how Vivien is trapped in and yet strives to transcend her class. Her ultimately doomed love life is perhaps the most fully realised relationship in the book taking the reader on a journey from laughter and attraction to pain and resignation.

The fifth member of the central quintet, Duncan is perhaps the most problematic and here it can be argued that Waters' reach exceeds her grasp. Imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for a botched suicide attempt the frail young man becomes something of a martyr to man's inhumanity to man, more a symbol than a fully realised character. His homosexuality is confusingly hinted at but left unclear in the reader's mind. Around him swirl some of the book's large themes (wrongful imprisonment, the need for people to hide their true identity, the question of conscientiously objecting to all war) and at times Duncan becomes trapped, the sheer weight of ideas smothering his unhappy life. His relationships with Fraser, a well to do, well-educated 'conchy', Mister Mundy an ex-prison officer and the mildly deranged suicidee Alec are all ultimately disappointing.

Against this can be set the books real strength and that is that Waters, an assiduous researcher, has the ability to deploy her knowledge effectively to evoke both the time (the Forties) and the place (a war ravaged London). We step back through the dialogue and description into a vividly realised past. We enter a world where people say 'Blimey!" "Crikey!" and "Chum!, where men wear "dark blue demob suits already shiny at the elbows" and women are dressed in headscarves, "decorated with faded tanks and spitfires". We enter houses where 'there were yellow, exhausted photographs,' or where 'the walls of the room were done in lincrusta, painted a glossy chocolate brown' . We fall headlong into the blitzed city where a burnt, bomb injured man sits 'with glass on his face 'dainty little glints', a dark world where a dentist, can be an abortionist who does 'this other thing on the side'. We watch workers through Duncan's eyes leaving their menial jobs in a candle factory, rushing home to leave an empty space, a yard 'like a sink with its plug pulled'. We weave through the 'handsome higgledy piggledy red-bricked' streets of London and confront the horror of a woman impaled of railings whilst St Paul's stands tall a symbol of 'elegance and reason and … great beauty'. We become caught up in a visceral world, whether it be the central crisis in Vivien's life where blood falls from her 'thick and dark and knotted as a length of tarry rope' or as we arrive alongside Kay at the blast scene where a 'man's head had rolled out and landed at her feet'. We are convincingly in a world where, as Viv remarks, "We might all be dead tomorrow."

Amidst the constraint of war Waters has effectively recreated a world where paradoxically people felt the possibility of escape. In the wrong hands the notion that war licences excess might become clichéd. But in Water's hands some of her characters do, for a time, transcend their constraints. Helen, Julia and Kay find love in the shadow of the Blitz and Kay, a masculine lesbian, is free to behave with 'gallantry' and manliness. Vivien finds passion with Reggie and Duncan's life may change with the promise of a friendship forged initially through kindness in the bleak harsh world of Wormwood Scrubs.

Ultimately this is a serious book where people who had extraordinary lives must continue to strive to come to terms with their past, must struggle, exhausted, to move towards an unknown and unknowable future. As the first line of the book suggests, in life it may not be possible to see a way ahead but only be possible to understand 'the sort of person you've become'.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

17 January 2008
I started listening three days ago – and I’m already a third of the way through. I love it, again. In 1969 – eight years before I first read it, on a plane – it must have seemed extraordinary: this omniscient author who keeps stepping out of the story to let us know he’s no more omniscient than we are. He’s a bloke writing a novel… and whatever ideas he might have had about where his characters are going, they’re going to make up their own minds. The great thing is, of course, this might be just another metafictional trick: when he says he expected Charles to do one thing, but he turns out to do a different thing, he might be giving us a genuine insight into what it’s like to be a writer. Or he might be having a laugh.

What really appeals to me is the way Fowles lets you in on one particular aspect: if he’s working hard to make a character’s behaviour seem convincing, he has a chat with us about it. He’ll even draw modern-day parallels to help. And it makes us like the author, makes us want to believe his argument that a century ago this kind of character (who Fowles makes as alien as possible in some ways, like the clothes and the mid-Victorian moral stance he has to keep up) really would behave like this. Which is the trick: we like the way this author talks to us, so we buy what he’s selling.

The alienating, step outside the narrative stuff helps him to place the other characters as well. He pretends to take nothing as ‘given’, so we don’t simply have to take characters at face value. He tells us how that stereotypical ‘Victorian’ set of attitudes arose, so that Mrs Poulteney – who really is no more than a stereotype – becomes believable. So… although Fowles tells you he’s made these characters up, we believe him when he pleads that his creations have a life of their own. Not a Greek god, then, like those in Hardy (especially in Mayor of Casterbridge) but a Christian God, whose people possess free will. Well, if it works – which I think it does – good luck to him.

21 January
Just read Chapter 27. Charles is besotted by Sarah so, being a good Victorian, he’s gone to the doctor to help him sort himself out. This gives Fowles a chance to play another game: the doctor summarises, in role as if he is Sarah speaking, all of her motivation as a character as we might have already surmised it for ourselves. (He’s a forward-thinking Darwinist with a precocious interest in the infant science of psychology, so he’s allowed to get it spot on.) This is clever, because for several chapters Fowles has kept himself pretty well hidden, so the novel has been allowed to go on its almost parodic Victorian-style way without the usual interruptions. Shit, there’s even a lightning storm to accompany the revelations about himself that Charles has to face. And... and what? Sarah will be put in a liberal asylum (or whatever), so Charles is given the chance to step back from the brink and swallow his petty upper-class dissatisfactions like a man. Except we’re not even half-way through yet, and he can’t stop picturing those eyes. Just because he knows he’s been trapped doesn’t mean he’s free of her. Reader... you’d better play the tape.

[Later] A couple more chapters. 28 is a short history of hysterical women and the scrapes they got themselves and others into. In other words, Evidence, capital E: upping the plausibility rating. 29 is a flashback: Sarah, a character we can’t help but sympathise with – she is a 20th Century woman in a 19th Century body, after all – tells it like it is to her high-horse boss, Victorian Values personified. It’s a bit like the moment in Chapter 27 when the doctor says what’s going through our mind, except this time it’s the scene we’d like to witness, not what we already think (without quite having put it into words). Clever stuff.

27 January
I’m three-quarters of the way through, and Fowles has just delivered the first ending – identical, in that everything is resolved without the crises needing to come to a head – to the ‘fictional’ ending in Atonement. But this time we aren’t given the story as written and published by one of the characters in it; it’s the story Charles has written only in his head, and only Fowles the god – he even consigns Mrs Poulteney literally to hell – is privy to what’s going on inside the head of another human being. Being an author, he tells us: that’s his job…. But this is a playful god and at first he pretends it’s what, as it were, ‘really’ happens. Then, like Eric Idle as the wag in Life of Brian he shows us how he was pulling our leg. He’s playing metafictional games again, and it’s with the lightest of touches.

This is not at all like clunky you-know-who, who has Briony the ageing author pretending she’s going for a deeper literary ‘truth’, one that’s more satisfying for everybody than the messy stuff of reality. To be fair to McEwan, he does show the reader a degree of respect: we have to work out for ourselves the extent to which old Briony’s redemptive ending comes about from her own needs, specifically her need for the atonement of the title. In the ‘real’ story – which she also tells us about in a different act of atonement, this time to all us readers who bought the happy ending – her attempt to atone for her lie is merely an empty gesture. Who am I to say that it would have been a more honest way to end without the feelgood ‘false’ ending? Briony has her cake – the world thinks she really did atone for what she did – and eats it too. But so does McEwan: he lets us have the old-fashioned ending and he lets us know he’s really a postmodernist.

[Later] Well, he’s done the deed… but only after Fowles has had some more fun messing about with the idea of the fictions we live by – as in, We’re all novelists, and this time it’s Charles who’s decided to change the ending, not me. Moi? says Fowles. I’m just a humble writer telling you what he did. Fowles knows it’s a game, we know it’s a game, so everybody’s friends. And then, just when we thought we knew whose side we were on, Fowles disabuses us. This is a novel, stupid, and you’re not supposed to know everything in advance. For instance, that bit where Sarah told us about Varguennes (or whatever his name is), the nasty French lieutenant…. Turns out she’s an unreliable narrator of her own story, Charles was a fool to believe her – and so were we. She isn’t a victim, she’s a spider, Charles is the fly – and so are we. Just because it’s an old trick doesn’t make it any less effective: the reader, like Charles, is floored by the sucker punch. Shit, even the twisted ankle was just another strand – I’ve started this metaphor so I’ll finish – of her web.

This is a re-read for me, remember, and I knew there was something dodgy going on. But I’d sort of unremembered the details, and I was as just as impressed this time as I was when I first read it 30 years ago.

29 January
It turns out that the joke ‘false’ ending inside Charles’s head was just a dry run for an even more outrageous bit of exhibitionism. This time, Fowles doesn’t pretend he’s only the messenger; he puts himself right inside the story, as a character on the train that Charles catches on his disgraced way back to London. He tells us there’s a choice. He could give us the Victorian ending or the modern ending: all problems neatly solved and tidied up; or problems faced, acknowledged, unresolved and messy. He pretends to toss a coin – but it isn’t to decide which ending to give us: he’s already decided we can have both, but can’t choose which one to end with. That’s the one we’ll take away with us as the more ‘true’ one, after all.

And if you believe he really can’t decide, well, you haven’t been paying attention.

30 January
End of Chapter 60. I’ve just reached the end – I think – of the right-hand fork in the road. But this is Fowles, and he makes us think we’re on the rocky road before we reach the longed-for resolution. At Rossetti’s house there’s a tortured conversation between them, and it looks as if Charles’s hopes are to come crashing to pieces against Sarah’s – what? – stubbornness, or inscrutability, or… well, he doesn’t know what’s going on any more than the reader does. When he does think he’s got it at last it turns out he’s wrong: she isn’t immured within some mystical proto-feminism with Charles forever locked out; she’s discovered… motherhood. Charles is the father, they are a family at last –and Fowles makes a joke of the moment as the cloying sound of ‘a thousand violins’ is interrupted by the percussion of their baby’s cry. Aww.

It’s no bloody wonder, 30 years after first reading it, that I couldn’t remember how the scene ended. Talk about a merry dance.

[Later]
Finished. The other road only takes a few pages, and Fowles makes another appearance, this time as an impresario. He winds back his magic watch and – hey, presto – we’re back at a crucial point in the tortured conversation. Except this time Sarah doesn’t stop him from leaving, and doesn’t tell him about the baby. In this scenario she really is the arch-manipulator, offering Charles only companionship. By refusing her self-serving offer, Charles becomes a more complete person, achieves a kind of growth. And we really are in the 20th Century, where we know the difference between cheap fairytales and – what? – more expensive, reader-flattering ones. As Charles sails into the west (I’m not making this up – Charles will go back to America, across ‘the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’) we know he’s man enough to take it. And, as thoroughly modern readers, so are we.

I loved it. It might only be a firework display, a showcase of literary pyrotechnics, but I’ve always liked fireworks and I’ll give it 11/10. Sometimes we can just be too solemn.

Atonement – Ian McEwan

5 December
Started it again yesterday, having first read it God knows when and having seen the film a few weeks ago. It was seeing the film that made me want to look at it again: there was so much I’d forgotten, especially about the endings. Plural. This morning came the first real McEwan moment: Briony’s realisation that it’s not only in her writing that she creates fictions. There’s what must be two or three pages of McEwan setting out a kind of stall: he lets the reader know that we aren’t simply reading a fiction, but a bildungsroman. ‘Six decades later’ she will write about how crucial this summer’s day was to her formation as a writer. It will be bound up with the realisation that hers is not the only version of the world that exists: she’s not the only consciousness, and the incident by the fountain could be seen in two quite different ways. She’s discovered the multiple point of view. (In fact, of course, we’ve already had Cecilia’s version, given to us by the omniscient narrator we’d assumed to be McEwan. We’re not so sure now, especially since we’ve only just seen the film and can remember the end….)

But is this no more than a McGuffin, something to tell McEwan’s arthouse readers that this isn’t just another costume drama? And do his novels always need the kick-start of a McGuffin? In Atonement it’s the succession of incidents that Briony doesn’t have the experience to understand, combined with her determination not merely to write, but to create viable narratives based on what she sees. (The manifesto-like seriousness of the section sits rather unhappily with the frankly unconvincing childishness of the Ruritanian romance she’s just written as a welcome home present for her darling older brother. McEwan tries to sell us this as the unintentionally comic Young Visiters ‘before’ stage of her development, but it’s the sort of thing a girl like Briony would have given up at primary school. And I should know. Writers like that don’t depend on moments of epiphany – That’s when I became a writer – they develop over time. And they’re always ahead of the crowd.) anyway, McEwan tells us, she knows she’s fictionalised the moment – but it’s a trick. We’re hooked like the readers of a whodunit – that’s what McGuffins are for, after all, and it’s what McEwan always does – but we know we’re not going to get a slow revelation of ‘the truth’. He’s told us, or reminded us, how different people’s consciousness turns any truth into a ghost – and the contingency of truth is what this book is obviously going to be about. And, being the trickster he is, he’s also made the idea into the aged Briony’s, with her (McEwan-like?) reputation for ‘amorality’ and a neat get-out clause for her own guilt.

But I’m jumping the gun. All we know is that this moment, and Briony’s attempts to understand it, will be crucial. Time to read on.

8 December
What’s McEwan’s attitude to class? In some ways he’s obsessed with it, and it slides around in everything he writes. It’s always present, and somewhere along the line he always knocks it about a bit. His working class characters have made some kind of success of their lives: Robbie in this novel, Edward (?) in On Chesil Beach- although he was an outsider in other ways , countrified and from a struggling aspiring family down on its luck – and… and others, I’m sure, like the Jonathan Price character in The Ploughman’s Lunch. To complicate matters there are things for us to sneer at in the upper-middle classes. The money in Atonement is third generation (the Tallises) or trade (Paul, the chocolate magnate) with a whiff of war profiteering. And the house is ugly. And Cecilia only managed a Third compared to Robbie’s celebrated First. And… you get the picture: McEwan’s literary leftiness is unimpeachable. But he does love those posh settings: this house, even in politically right-on decline; the big house, part of the missus’s inheritance, in Saturday; those Successful People’s places in Amsterdam. (Interestingly, Kate Grenville uses architecture to suggest disapproval in Secret River when she makes the successful land-grabber’s new villa not only ugly but also careless of the pre-colonial heritage, as represented by the covered-over rock painting in the cellar. House as symbol of… something. Maybe the White man’s hubris: the rock painting will still be there long after the ugly house has been mercifully demolished.)

McEwan has his cake and eats it. Non-middle class backgrounds can be sketched in very, er, sketchily; the Heritage bit, like the loving and no doubt carefully researched details of Cecilia’s1935 dresses, is still there – as gratefully received in the movie, along with a highly photogenic house, perfect for the film’s target audience. As, I suppose, McEwan’s knowing, conspiratorial asides to the reading group members he has in mind.

12 December
I reached the end of Part 1 and I’m… tired of listening to McEwan persuading me that the whole thing isn’t a preposterous charade, a drawing-room conceit like the 30s whodunnits it borrows from. We’ve got all the characters, all with their reasons for behaving as they do – and, crucially, reasons for covering their tracks as they do. Must this is McEwan-land, not Miss Marple-land, so motives are in line with late 20th Century mores. There's the needy Lola, persuaded by the cynical capitalist – hiss, boo – that what he’s like from her is what she wants to give him; there’s the literally absent father, busy with government affairs and whatever other affairs his morally absent wife will happily tolerate; there’s the bored little rich girl, down from Cambridge and frustrated in every way, ready for the attention of… Mr Perfect, whose only fault is too much honesty.

Overlaying all this, of course, is the precocious consciousness of the child who wants to write the story. But instead of harmlessly misconstruing events, she is led via a series of tortuous coincidences to a position where her made-up story is believed. I could start at least three sentences with the words ‘She just happens to….’ Four. Five. But I won’t, because – as I have to admit – on a first reading it’s possible to be carried along: if a story seems interesting enough it’s part of the contract to allow the writer a bit of licence. But by the time Briony makes her accusation McEwan has already spent pages on persuading us how such a story, told by such a girl, at such a point in history – and doesn’t he just love history, with all its convenient oddities of behaviour? – such a story will have its own momentum, and the girl’s motives do not have to be at all malign… etc. etc.

On nearly every page there’s another careful bit of plotting (in McEwan novels these should be abbreviated to BoPs) to make her story more convincing. One example: she finds Robbie’s letter in Cecilia’s room and runs down to give it to – whom? She was going to give it to her brother, but she changes her mind and gives it to the police inspector. Who, in exactly the way we readers of 1930s whodunnits know he would, gets it wrong and sees it as damning evidence. Her brother would have dismissed it as the bit of risqué fun it sounds like – as McEwan the spreadsheet plotter tells us a paragraph or so later – but he’s too late. The damage is done. (All this relies, of course, on the assumption that 1930s police officers lived in the same drawing-room world as those in Agatha Christie novels, particularly its general incompetence. I suspect a real officer would see Briony’s testimony for what it was…. And, for that matter, what we see of the questioning is shown to be perfectly competent: Never mind what you know, the officer replies to Briony’s ‘I know it was him,’ What did you see? But McEwan has told us, endlessly, that the momentum of her story, the class deference of the 1930s and all those circumstantial details, would be enough to sustain a whole trial. Yeh, sure. What McEwan does is use our own liberal prejudices to trick us into believing what quickly becomes an upper middle-class conspiracy. They never did like the upstart, of course they didn’t.)

One other thing. This bit of the novel is set in 1935, which is when the trial scene in To Kill a Mockingbird also takes place. Harper Lee was using the historical moment to make a point about the background to the emerging Civil Rights movement as it stood when she was writing in 1960: Look at what the Blacks had to endure only a generation ago. And what is McEwan doing? Persuading us that the class tolerance of a liberal middle-class family is only skin-deep. In fact, as we later find out, there was no assault, but once one is alleged it’s all too easy to pin it on the son of the cleaner. Ok. But… so? The thought that keeps occurring with regard to all the persuasive details is, What’s this guy selling? He obviously feels he has to, but so much layering of extra psychological evidence, or whatever, makes you realise it’s there to shore up an incredibly creaky premise.

18 December
Briony is now a nurse, and we’ve had plenty of that McEwan-style detail concerning wounds and pain… to go with the detail concerning death and its ugly banality in the Dunkirk retreat chapters. He seems to have done his research: I suspect the retreat really was something like that, just as I suspect that the life of f probationer nurse really was that much of a grind in 1941. [Note: after writing this I read how the ‘nursing’ sections are taken almost verbatim from published accounts. He’s a slippery bugger.]

And now Briony the aspiring writer has had a letter from ‘CC’ (Cyril Connelly, I suppose): a highly detailed critique of why her novella based on only the harmless parts of the Triton fountain story isn’t as good as a proper novel would be. It needs more of a story, more development. And here’s clever Ian and his clever readers – is he just patronising us? – having a sage little nod over the literary joke. CC’s letter is a pastiche of a 40s critic describing McEwan’s own novel, taking in many of the concerns the reader already has about it: Is it deliberately old-fashioned, like a pre-Modern novel? Does the choice of points of view work? Is there too much plot (as opposed to not enough in the failed effort by the immature Briony…)?

22 December
I’m near the end of side 19, out of 20. (Did I mention I’m listening to this on tape?) ‘BT’ has signed the manuscript, London 1999. And we’ve had our old-fashioned pre-Modern – i.e. essentially 19th Century – resolution. The meeting between Briony, her sister and Robbie is a terrible strain, but the lovers are now together, they’ve had their long deferred Wiltshire moment, they know who the real villain of the piece is: the fat cat coining it as our brave lads die.

I wish I could remember what I thought about the final ‘old Briony’ section when I read it the first time around. Did I know? Did I guess, from all the clues that seem highly obvious in hindsight, that the truth is in the hands of whoever writes the story? Dunno. When I saw the film I was surprised all over again by the appearance of Vanessa Redgrave in barmy old woman mode (surely modelled on Doris Lessing, whose surprise over the Nobel Prize some months later was filmed for all to see). I was surprised all over again: I’d forgotten the black joke of the ‘other’ ending.

Hmm. False endings. This one made me think of the French Lieutenant’s Woman – and I think in the movie version Harold Pinter gave a happy ending to either the on-screen or the off-screen couple, and the more troubling ending to, er, the other couple. Must get the DVD. But I think my favourite’s Villette: not so much a false ending as a challenge to the reader: believe it if you want to, but we all know what life’s really like….

All suffering to end.

I’d be lying if I said I was surprised by Oskar’s death. It had been coming for months. He started to look grey, his cheeks sunken, his eyes bruised around the edges. I’ll say this for him, he never lost his sparkle. Even on his death bed there was a light in his eyes. I don’t know why we had to do Hamlet again.
‘What about Miss Julie?’
‘No. It has to be Hamlet. They expect it,’ he blustered.
‘Well can’t you at least do less. Why don’t you do Osric? You used to make a wonderful fop.’
‘No.’
‘It’s just you get so carried away.’
He was silent and for a moment I thought he would reconsider.
‘They expect me to give them everything. I am the ghost,’ he had said and we left it at that. I almost told him to go and see the doctor but I knew he would pick Henrik. That would be no good.
When he left I looked across to the corner of the room at the horse. Over the years I fool myself and say I've become better at interpreting it’s slightest signs. Looking back I think it knew what would happen.

When they brought Oskar back from the theatre and he was dying I wanted to scream into his face, ‘I told you, you were too weak.’
The moment they carried him in you could see he was done for. Of course, we did everything and got the good doctor, not Henrik. We tried medicines, prayed even. We tried as you do but I don’t think anyone said, ‘Don’t worry Emilie, he’s strong, he’ll pull through.’
It was all, ‘He won’t suffer. He’s slipping away.’
In the time it took him to die Oskar seemed to be quite happy. Maybe there is something to Henrik’s thinking. Maybe believing makes a difference in the end. If this had happened five years earlier we would have had Henrik by the bedside, gentle, kindly, wise Henrik who gave Alexander the magnet for his little theatre and showed the boy how it attracted things.
'Attraction is a mystery, between metals, between men and women,' Henrik said and laughed, pinching Alex's cheek.
I thought of that when they bought Oskar back. He had an attraction that drew others close.
We couldn't call Henrik to attend because these days he’s ‘distracted’. If you met him now and hadn’t known him before you would say his brain’s addled but even after he changed, we still went to see him again and again.
The last time, no more than a week before Oskar’s death, Henrik was in his garden, sitting out in the freezing cold, surrounded by his ‘texts’. For whatever reason he was convinced the world was ending, that his sums were right and other people’s were wrong.
‘Millenarian nonsense. The world will end but they got the figures wrong. It’s all in the bible. The end is coming and soon,’ he had said and tapped a tract under his hand. He was wearing blue woollen gloves with the fingers missing. His blackened nails tapped the sheet and I remember the title on the front page, ‘All suffering to end’.
He drummed the table as he spoke, ‘But it’s not going to be the Christian nonsense people spout. The end will be wonderful for everyone, everyone who is decent. These priests who wish for a hell? Well maybe they are the ones who will get to meet the devil when the time comes. Be careful. That’s what I always say Oskar. Be careful what you wish for.’
He handed over the yellowing sheet and on the way home my husband said, ‘He may have a point the old man. He knows a thing or two.’
Well it was right for you my husband. Your suffering ended. In fact, as we waited in the bedroom you hardly suffered at all. You just died.

Your mother sat in the corner of the bedroom in that horrible purple outfit and watched me swab your poor mouth. The 'good' doctor wandered around with his head bent like some kind of large bird and the horse stood by the Japanese screen. At times it’s brown coat glows and at that time, as it stood next to the yellow of the screen it seemed to begin to disappear. For one moment I felt faint with hope and thought this would be it, the release, the moment the horse would leave. I had this overwhelming rush of optimism that made the hair on my neck rise and my skin tingle. The old woman looked at me and nodded, thinking I was shivering with fear. Then you died and the horse stayed, tied to my life.

There was only one time I was tempted to tell someone about the horse. I had it all prepared. To being with I would explain how it appeared in the country when we went out to Arhus for the summer. I was eight and we stayed at my twelve year old cousin's farm. Katerina was a real Tomboy and it's ironic that I'm the one who got saddled, if you'll excuse the pun, with the horse. She loved riding.
'It's wonderful. To have such a magnificent beast under your control. It makes me feel strong,' she said the day before the accident.
I hated the country. When we went through one village I cried at the smell of the children and the stink of some drunken men. On the day of Katerina's accident I saw the dead badger, lying in a ditch on its back like a stuffed toy, rigid, it's limbs stiff in the air it's black and white fur as coarse and sharp as thorns.
I was waiting by a hedge when it happened. Something spooked the horses, they think a gunshot from two men out fowling and Katerina's horse bolted and turned for home. The poor girl had no control and clung on as she headed across the field back towards the farmyard. Every rider talked about 'the tree', a big old oak with one deadly low branch that you had to avoid coming back to the farm. Katerina hit it at full speed. The branch smashed into her back, picked her off the horse and threw her to the ground. She broke her collarbone and shoulder. One mended but the other wouldn’t set, I can't remember which, and she simply withered away, a sickly invalid, dying at eighteen.
I first saw my horse standing by that tree when the accident happened. Ever after, all my life, it appeared, the same small, perfect animal, everywhere but not all of the time.
I had this story prepared a few years ago for Henrik. It was summer and we three were in the garden with Oskar off down by the river fussing over bees. I had Henrik to myself and waited for the moment. He began to talk.
'Did I tell you about Susannah? Her husband has taken her to Austria to see some Jew. The poor woman. Hysteria. I've read about it and they say it only affects women. At least that's one thing electricity's good for, hysteria. A few shocks and she'll be cured.'
Needless to say I decided not to tell my story.

I don’t care what people thought that night when Oskar died. I know I screamed for hours like an animal. I couldn’t use words. I couldn’t scream to his corpse, ‘I just wanted you to say to me once that you saw it. It is the only thing I ever wanted Oskar, my only wish.’
I screamed so hard I couldn’t speak for hours afterwards. My voice came out as a faint high croak until the words disappeared. I stood by your body and the horse waited by the coffin. That day its coat seemed to darken, a black brown like horse chestnut. When it moved I could pick out and count every rose, every lily, every long thin candle against its skin.

When the Bishop came I expected his condolences but not the comfort. The children, smart in their matching outfits, behaved well although I worried for Alexander because he can be such a mouse. I sat whilst the Bishop spoke to us about heaven and redemption and the promise of a good life hereafter for the just and, as he spoke, I watched the horse. It did nothing. What did I expect? A sign? Without turning I could sense the man near to me, sense him reaching out to touch and in that instance I saw without seeing, like a vision, Katerina, broken in the spindly wheeled contraption, crippled, smelling of decay. I felt revolted, sickened, nauseous and he must have seen me shiver with pity and disgust. All the time he was with me the horse never moved.

And then came the dinner and it was the same. The horse gave no sign. . I called that meal Oskar's last supper, with all the town there to eat one last time at his table. My mother-in-law sat at the centre in her glory but I could hardly begrudge her this moment, again in the spotlight.
I wouldn’t say I was surprised by what happened. It was more than that.
One moment small talk, the ordinary stuff of life, observing the funeral rites and then, the Bishop leaning quite close to me and saying, only for my ear, 'I think you have a beautiful horse.'