‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ he thought, directed to the people whose house he was now hastening towards. ‘The young woman will never stand in the window again. Maybe I have been hoping for two days that she will stand in the window again, but she isn’t going to. She is dead. She is murdered. The curtains are drawn. And when they get drawn back, it will be the murderer who is standing in the window, peering out. It’s impossible for me to play a part in his capture. I can’t commit such an offence against a man who has murdered,’ he thought, horrified at what he was actually thinking, but at the same time longing to talk about it to a friend, so he hurried up Maridalsveien. Yes, he almost ran through the snowy weather and the winter darkness and the city’s lights, for an opportunity to share his opinion on the irreversible thing that had happened.
He was out of breath when he rang the doorbell at the Halvorsens’. Bernt opened it. ‘Heavens, are you here already?’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, wasn’t it at seven o’clock then?’ answered Professor Andersen innocently. ‘Yes, but it’s a quarter to six now,’ said Bernt, and he laughed. ‘Oh, damn, I must have got the time wrong,’ muttered Professor Andersen. Bernt opened the door wide, and Professor Andersen shuffled in, crestfallen. This wasn’t how he had imagined it. He had thought that when Bernt Halvorsen looked surprised and said that he had come far too early, that he would, of course, have answered: ‘Yes, I know that, but I have something important to talk to you about.’ Why had he not said that?
Maybe because it struck him as being a little impetuous. He had, after all, enough time before the other guests arrived to talk to Bernt about this. He would try to bring the conversation round to it in a natural way. But that proved to be impossible. He couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, even though he and Bernt had ended up sitting in the living room with a drink each (as he had imagined in advance), while Nina was out in the kitchen making food, now and then asking her husband to come and help with something or other. Each time Bernt went into the kitchen, Professor Andersen had an abundance of time to consider how he might ease the conversation round to the subject he was dying to tell a friend in confidence, either by summoning up his courage and coming straight to the point, or by finding a lead which would allow Professor Andersen to drop an opportune remark lightly and easily, even though it was dreadful. But when Bernt Halvorsen returned to the living room, that remark did not present itself. The time was getting on for 7 p.m., and the other guests would soon be arriving. Professor Andersen expected the doorbell to ring. The doorbell might just as well ring. Because he understood. He knew now; he wasn’t able to confide in his good friend Bernt Halvorsen, not about this. About a lot of other things, but for some reason or other not about this.
The other guests arrived. They were all acquaintances of Professor Andersen. There was the actor Jan Brynhildsen, who had become a marvellous interpreter of comic roles at the National Theatre, and his second wife, the somewhat faded air hostess Judith Berg, and there was the senior psychologist Per Ekeberg and his partner Trine Napstad, the top civil-service administrator in the Ministry of Culture. All the guests were in their fifties like their hosts Nina and Bernt Halvorsen, and had known each other for years. Professor Andersen was glad Nina and Bernt hadn’t invited an additional female guest, who would have been his table companion, as he thought it much easier to relate to social occasions without having imposed on him the duty of entertaining a single woman, who, in advance, one had to assume, had looked forward to an eventful evening, and whose expectations he therefore would have had to do his utmost not to disappoint. He felt much freer as a single guest without a single woman accompanying him at the table, it also made him wittier, because then he could throw himself into the role of being an affable participant in the party as a whole, instead of having to be a tense, though gallant, cavalier.
They sat down at the dinner table. The seating arrangement had been fixed elegantly and with an experienced hand so that their being an odd number went unnoticed, but gave them an added sense of well being, since Nina, their hostess, had two companions at the table, Jan Brynhildsen, sitting on her left, and Per Ekeberg on her right, both of whom could then cheerfully compete to win her favour and attention, while Bernt, their host, had one female companion, Judith Berg, on his left, who for her part could enjoy this, while at the same time she had Per Ekeberg on her left. Trine Napstad could likewise enjoy having Professor Andersen as a table companion, but she also had Jan Brynhildsen, the comedy actor with leading roles at the National Theatre, on her right side, and he could converse with her if, or rather when, their hostess Nina was deep in conversation with Per Ekeberg sitting on her right, and in that way was able to relieve Professor Andersen, who then could take the opportunity to exchange a few words with his old friend Bernt Halvorsen, the host, whom he had sitting on his left, or just to stare vacantly into space, if the latter was deep in conversation with Judith Berg, his table companion. In this manner the conversation could flow easily from one to the other, with plenty of opportunity for all of them to get involved in one single topic, if most found it sufficiently interesting, because the responsibility of having a fixed female table companion hadn’t been laid on anyone, apart from Bernt, but since he was the only one, a clear responsibility rested on him to ensure that the whole table was engaged in conversation, and preferably the same one at that, and thus it was evident yet again that on social occasions it is an advantage, and not a drawback, to have an odd number, thought Professor Andersen, and therefore it is so peculiar that those who take it upon themselves to invite people to a party worry time and again very much about inviting couples; remarkable, thought Professor Andersen, who could scarcely recall the last time he had been at a successful dinner party with an even number seated round the table.
They had rakfisk as a starter and the main course was grouse. Beer and a chaser of aquavit were served with the rakfisk; a Spanish red wine, a good Rioja, with the grouse. Before the starter was served, Nina their hostess complained of an irresolvable problem which they had encountered while drawing up the menu. Rakfisk as a starter, and grouse afterwards, they go together, not least if one considers that both the rakfisk and the grouse come from the same geographical area, Valdres. But as for the beverages, beer and a chaser of aquavit first, followed by red wine — Nina didn’t think that was an ideal combination, but what else could they have done? Thought of a different starter before the grouse? No, she didn’t want to do that, she said, when one has rakfisk in one’s larder from Valdres, and grouse from the same area, both of them obtained in a personal way, considering that Bernt had shot the grouse, right there in Valdres, and the rakfisk was procured by one of their close acquaintances in Valdres, so it had to be done like this, ‘And so you will just have to put up with drinking beer and a chaser with the rakfisk now, and going over to red wine later,’ said Nina decidedly.
They ate rakfisk. They skolled with beer and aquavit. Professor Andersen was at a Christmas dinner party at his good friends’ Nina and Bernt Halvorsen. Bernt he had known ever since his youth, and they had grown up together in a town somewhere near the Oslo Fjord. They had come to Oslo to study at the same time, Bernt medicine and he the arts and humanities, and they had remained close throughout their student days, despite belonging to different faculties. After a while Bernt found his Nina, who also studied medicine, and Professor Andersen had got to know her too. He had found a wife who also studied the arts and humanities, and from the end of their student days the two newly married couples had spent much time together. They had continued to see each other often, with intervals when one or other of the couples had been living outside Oslo — Nina and Bernt because they worked at a hospital out of town, he because he was abroad, either on a research grant or as a Norwegian visiting professor in Strasbourg, right up until he got divorced ten years ago, and then he had continued to see Nina and Bernt on his own. Both he and Bernt had been successful in life, he had secured a post at the university early on, had done a PhD and become a professor while still relatively young, at the same time as Bernt had made a career for himself in the hospital sector, where as a young man he had become a consultant, a position he held today at Ullevål Hospital.