Always pleasant. Always calm, with a subtle smile that smoothed the edges of the odd sharp word that might slip out on those rare occasions when Eva Karin Lysgaard became too involved.
As a rule, this concerned the issue of abortion.
Eva Karin Lysgaard held extreme views in only one area: she was against abortion. Totally and completely and in all circumstances. Not even after a rape or when the mother’s life might be in danger could she countenance interference to put an end to a life that had been created. For Bishop Lysgaard, God’s creation was sacrosanct. His ways were unfathomable, and a fertilized egg had the right to life, because God willed it so.
Strangely enough she was respected for her views, in a country where the debate on abortion had actually ended in 1978. The small minority that had continued to oppose the law legalizing abortion were largely regarded as ridiculously conservative and – at least in the eyes of the general public – fairly extreme. Even the feminists toned things down when they were in a debate with Eva Karin Lysgaard. By sticking so firmly to her principles, she distanced herself from the idea that the issue of abortion was anything to do with women’s liberation.
For her, abortion was a question of the sanctity of life, and nothing to do with gender.
‘I wonder what happened to her out there in the forest?’ Johanne said suddenly.
‘The forest? I thought she was murdered on the street?’
‘I don’t mean the murder, I meant that time… there was a profile of her in the Saturday supplement last week, did you see it?’
Lina shook her head and topped up her glass.
‘We were up at the cottage over the weekend. We did lots of skiing, but didn’t read a single newspaper.’
You never do anyway, wherever you are, thought Johanne, smiling as she went on.
‘She said she met God in the forest when she was sixteen. Something special happened, but she didn’t say what it was.’
‘Isn’t it Jesus they usually meet?’
‘What?’
‘I thought when somebody was saved they said they “met Jesus”.’
‘God or Jesus,’ Johanne muttered. ‘Same thing.’
She got up quickly and went into the bedroom. She came back with the supplement, and turned to the interview as she sat down again.
‘Here,’ she said, taking a deep breath.
‘I was in a very difficult situation. We human beings often find ourselves in this position when we are teenagers. Things become too big for us. And that’s what happened to me. Then I met Jesus.’
‘Ha!’ Lina exclaimed. ‘I was right!’
‘Shut up. What actually happened? That’s the journalist asking.’
Johanne glanced quickly at Lina over the top of her glasses and went on:
‘That’s a matter between me and God, the Bishop says with a smile, revealing dimples deep enough to hide in. We all have our secret rooms. That’s the way it should be. That’s the way it will always be.’
She slowly folded up the magazine.
‘And now I want to watch a film,’ said Lina.
‘We all have our secret rooms,’ Johanne repeated, gazing at the close-up of Eva Karin Lysgaard on the cover.
‘Not me,’ Lina said breezily. ‘Shall we watch What Happens in Vegas, or would you rather go straight for The Devil Wears Prada? I haven’t actually seen it yet, and I can watch Meryl Streep in anything.’
‘I’m sure even you have a couple of rooms with secrets in them, Lina.’ Johanne took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then added: ‘It’s just that you’ve lost the keys.’
‘Could be,’ Lina said amiably. ‘But what you don’t know can’t hurt you, as they say.’
‘You’re completely wrong there,’ said Johanne, pointing half-heartedly at The Devil Wears Prada. ‘It’s actually what we don’t know that does hurt us.’
Vanity Fair
The worst thing of all would have been not knowing, thought Niclas Winter. He had lived on the verge of financial collapse for so long that the certain knowledge his buyer was no longer interested had once again made him drink a little too much, a little too often. Not to mention all the other stuff he took to keep his nerves under control. In actual fact he had knocked all that crap on the head long ago. It dulled his senses and made him lazy. And listless. Unproductive.
Not the way he wanted to be.
When the financial crisis hit the whole world in the autumn of 2008, it didn’t have the same effect in Norway as in many other countries. With billions in the bank, the Red-Green coalition government introduced the sort of expensive counter-measures that few could have imagined a few months earlier. Norway had been pumping money out of the North Sea for so long that it seemed more or less fireproof after the financial collapse in the United States. The property market in Norway, which for some time had been over-inflated and overactive, did indeed hit rock bottom in the early autumn. But it had already recovered – or there were signs of life, at least. The number of bankruptcies had rocketed in recent months, but many people regarded this as a healthy cleansing process, stripping away the companies that were never really viable. Unemployment was growing in the building industry, which was naturally taken very seriously. However, it was an industry that relied largely on an imported workforce. Poles, Swedes and workers from the Baltic states had one especially attractive quality: they were happy to go back home when there wasn’t any work – at least, those who hadn’t actually realized that they could pick up plenty of money through the Norwegian social security system. There were also enough economists who, quietly and in private, regarded an unemployment rate of around 40 per cent as good for the flexibility of the total labour market.
On the whole, Norway plc was moving forward; things may have changed, but at least the global financial crisis had not been a major catastrophe for the country and its people. They were still buying food; they still needed clothes for themselves and their children; they treated themselves to a bottle of wine at the weekend as usual and they were still going to the cinema just as often as before.
It was the luxury goods that were no longer attracting a significant number of buyers.
And, for some reason, art was regarded as a luxury.
Niclas Winter tore the foil off the bottle of champagne he had bought the day his mother died. He tried to remember if he had ever purchased such a bottle before. As he fumbled with the wire around the cork, he decided this was the first time. He had certainly drunk his fair share of the noble French wine, particularly in recent years, but always at others’ expense.
The champagne foamed up and he laughed to himself as he poured the bubbling, gently fizzing drink into a plastic glass on the edge of his overfilled desk. He put the bottle down on the floor to be on the safe side and raised the glass to his lips.
The studio, which measured almost 300 square metres and had originally been a warehouse, was flooded with daylight. To an outsider the room would have given an impression of total chaos, with light coming in from above and from the huge bay windows in the wall facing south-east. Niclas Winter, however, was in complete control of everything. There were welding torches and soldering irons, computers and old toilets, cables from the North Sea and half a wrecked car; the studio would be a paradise for any eleven-year-old. Not that such a person would ever have been allowed through the door. Niclas Winter, installation artist, suffered from three phobias: large birds, earthworms and children. It had been difficult enough to get through his own childhood, and he couldn’t cope with being reminded of it by seeing children playing and shouting and having fun. The fact that the studio lay just 200 metres from a school was a tragedy that he had somehow learned to live with. In every other way the location was perfect; the rent was low, and most of the kids kept out of the way once he put a BEWARE OF THE DOG sign with a picture of a Dobermann on the door.