Her father had abandoned an existence of fur trapping with his father to go the long way south to Gothenburg at nineteen. Lina’s grandfather, meanwhile, had lived his entire life bound in ice and liquor. She had a picture of the old man, grinning broken-toothed from inside the layers of his furs, standing on the edge of a white forest, white mountains behind, white sky, surrounded by dead animals neatly fanned out in the red-stained snow before him. And so it was from her father’s side that Lina had received the gift of tranquility—or, more accurately, the gift of silence. For Gabriel knew that she was without doubt the most silent human being he would ever meet—not silent as in “a bit quiet” or “sometimes shy” but silent, when the mood took her (twice, three times a year), as in utterly wordless for days at a time. He had known her to say nothing for entire weekends, wrinkling her nose, smiling, and blinking after they made love and then wandering off, towel loosely held like an afterthought, to find a drink, her bath, her music. And it wasn’t erotic primarily, or even sexy (though both these things), but it was somehow ancient and intense.
The relationship deepened. Lina was kind, unbelievably generous, and supportive. She gave him all the freedom he wanted. She was as honest as Archean rock, and almost weirdly straight—quite without artifice or any sort of emotional deviousness. For a while Gabriel wasn’t sure if this was a side effect of her being forever in her second language, but her English was perfect, better than her Swedish, she said, and the only errors that she made—“tempting faith,” “a leap of fate”—were too few and far between to bear any wider significance. So next he wondered if it might be that in fact she was entirely normal and it was just his own background that caused him to consider everything short of fabled espionage, intrafamilial hostility, and deceit as “straight.” But eventually he came to see that she was indeed wholly guileless. She was clever, but logically so, clever in straight lines, clever at recognizing the trail; she was quick-witted, but not witty; she was insightful, wise, socially observant, but somehow tone-blind, or rather blind to the effect she was having on the people around her. Then again, she didn’t actually care, which he found more and more attractive.
Except, perhaps, when this blindness translated itself into the Lina who would notice (and comment upon) the shabbiness of a pianist’s shoes after he’d just finished playing the last three Beethoven sonatas from memory. Or the Lina who would be talking about the lack of good customer service at the petrol station they had just left as they drove north for their holiday into the purple-peaked Pyrenees with Elvis playing on the radio and the sun sinking in the west like Cleopatra’s barge burning for the beauty of its love-struck queen.
True, the correlative of this was that she was the most capable woman he had ever met—a facilitator. There was nothing she could not sort out. (After college, she’d joined the same advertising agency that had previously made her the face of Swedish Lapland and sorted that campaign out too.) Indeed, so much of his life did she ease and improve (as the first three years disappeared) that he sometimes felt as though he were being corralled, trained, domesticated according to some grand plan that he could never know. And now and then he did resent being managed as if he were an awkward account. He suspected that if he were to allow her to do so, she would get up an hour early every morning to wash, dress, groom, and perfume him. Her man-doll. But then, not one of her requests was in the slightest bit unreasonable: dry his feet before he left the bathroom, stop eating everything at three hundred miles an hour, be on time when he said he was going to meet her, replace the garbage bags when he carried out the trash. And so on. She was never, ever unreasonable.
They walked together now, beneath November skies of pond-sodden bread. The rain had stopped since he had been out for the permit, and London seemed to be prepared to make a go of it again. It was not yet eight-fifteen. Already Frank was assiduously under way with the plumbing and Gabriel was feeling a little better. He knew Lina well enough not to try anything when he was covered in mud and bleeding. So instead he had merely told her how pretty she looked, then dutifully taken a shower, dressed in his favorite shirt, and asked her about her trip as they moved around the bedroom, before telling her that he had transferred all her music to her new MP3 player, which won him a kiss.
Lina took his arm and he crooked it for her, as he always did. They crossed Tufnell Park Road, solid at this hour with precious mothers off-roading precious children to precious schools, and began to make their way toward the main junction. Traffic wardens were swarming on the corner. In the middle distance, the sirens sounded like eight-year-old girls making fun of their friends’ boy stories. Gabriel could scarcely believe that he was the same person who only an hour ago had been cycling, bleeding, having a breakdown. And it wasn’t anything Lina had said—it never was; they seldom talked about feelings, his or hers—but now, for the first time, he smiled rather than flinched as a memory of his mother entered his head: a policeman parking illegally to nip in and get a pizza in Highgate village, his mother remonstrating, he embarrassedly waiting so that they could hurry up and buy the promised tennis racket, policeman catching schoolboy’s eye, mutual sympathy. Yes, though light on his arm, Lina felt steadfast and certain. He was glad to be with her this morning. Glad the world contained her. Glad that she was here with him. Maybe it was because she had been away for a couple of days, but he was struck again by how calm and together and resourceful he felt in her presence. There was nothing he could not do with this woman at his side. Oh God.
Breakfast was already well under way in Martha’s Café. His hangover was hungry. They were greeted by the welcoming aroma of fresh-ground coffee as they opened the door, which gave way to a delicious smell of bacon toward the kitchen at the back. They sat at one of the miniature tables under the blackboard on which the menu was scrawled. They had been coming here most days since the work on the kitchen had started.
She ordered some inscrutable confection of muesli and he went for the half English, which, after all, was what he was. Conversations of football crises, of such and such a figure in the news getting exactly what he deserved, of so and so needing to get her act together, of problems, rumors, plans, and hopes reached his ears. To Gabriel, the whole experience already felt as though it would be something that they would look back on and remember… Someday, twenty or so years from now, when visiting one of their children at university perhaps: breakfast at the local college café, newly independent child assuming parents had never dreamed of eating such a thing, mute parental complicity as child talked through the menu as though it were the most recent thing on earth.
Lina reached up to remove a stray eyelash from his cheek and took the opportunity to hastily rearrange his hair more to her liking, a habit that he vehemently disliked.
“Lina. Pack it in.”
“What have you been up to, then—apart from throwing yourself at the local pavements?”
He grimaced. They had only talked about her trip so far—her real dad’s birthday.