Free The Living and the Dead in Winsford by Håkan Nesser Page B

labelled food poisoning, and he refused to receive visitors.
    Kirsten had taken the children with her – my grandchildren – and moved back to her parents’ home in Horsens. And announced that if Gunvald made any claims on them, she would report him to the police. She wrote that in an e-mail to me.
    I don’t know what she would have reported him for, she didn’t explain when I spoke to her a few days later. Neither did Gunvald, of course.
    As we sat there in the car, driving through the night, it was exactly two years since that had happened, and Gunvald had moved into a flat of his own in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen – he had evidently got it through a colleague at the university. Martin had visited him twice in Copenhagen, and I had met him once in Stockholm when he gave a lecture at Södertörn. That was all. It occurred to me that if Martin doubted whether he was Gunvald’s father, I had as much justification for doubting that I was his mother.
    I had met my grandchildren, the twin girls, once after their father’s food poisoning. I went to their home in Horsens on Jutland, and stayed for three days. I spoke a lot more to Kirsten’s parents than to Kirsten herself: they were pleasant and I had the impression we were on the same wavelength. But then, I don’t have anything negative to say about Kirsten either.
    Which makes the equation somewhat problematic.
    ‘Maybe he’s sorting his life out now, despite everything,’ said Martin. ‘It’s not up to us to pass judgement.’
    I knew they were in occasional contact by e-mail and on the telephone, but Martin never said anything about what they had discussed. Work, presumably. The academic duckpond, both here and there. Stockholm and Copenhagen. Probably not as you would expect between father and son, but more likely between two colleagues – one young and ambitious, the other old and experienced. An arts assistant lecturer and an arts professor. Linguistics versus literature history. Yes, I’m pretty sure they restricted themselves to that neutral playing field.
    On my part I endured so many sleepless nights for Gunvald’s sake, from puberty and for about ten years thereafter, that it very nearly drove me mad. That was probably when I lost my good looks – that quality that first fitted the bill for television screens, but then no longer did. And over time I had also developed a thick skin, hard and effective, and I had no intention of peeling it off. Certainly not. The day Gunvald comes of his own accord and asks me to, I might consider it: but not off my own bat. The impotent, misdirected primeval powers of a mother: I’m not going through that again.
    But I still wondered what Martin was after, and couldn’t resist pressing him a little harder.
    ‘Have you ever mentioned it to him?’ I asked.
    ‘Mentioned what?’
    ‘That you didn’t think you were his father.’
    ‘Bloody hell!’ barked Martin, smashing his hand hard on the instrument panel. ‘Are you out of your mind? I only raised it for a bit of fun. Let’s forget it.’
    ‘A bit of fun?’
    He didn’t respond. What the hell could he have said?
    And I had nothing to add. I reclined the seat, inflated my travel pillow and announced that I was going to try and get some sleep. He slid a Thelonious Monk disc into the CD-player, then neither of us spoke again for several hours.
    *
     
    But I didn’t sleep. Just closed my eyes and thought how odd it was that we were sitting in this same car, on our way southwards. After all these years. After all those occasions when we didn’t measure up to each other, all those manoeuvres to ensure we ended up in the same place. How odd it was that we were still together. And that my life had come to the point where I no longer wanted anything apart from being left in peace and quiet – I thought about that as well. Perhaps that was the price of being the person I have been. That we have been the people we have been. The premier league, as my