Perhaps he should ask the retired doctor who sometimes showed his face in the pub, and where he would always tell the same joke. After all, doctors knew a bit about people. In view of his profession, he would be subject to a duty of confidentiality, but as with time, a duty of confidentiality was a different entity here on the island.
In the end, Roald decided to pay the family on the Head a visit. Alone.
He had never been there. It wasn’t a place you just dropped by, unless you had business there, and since Roald could carry out most repairs himself, he had never needed a man like Jens Horder.
Horder’s carpentry business – or whatever it was he did – seemed to have ground to a total halt. It was a long time since the sign down on the main island had been removed, and the Christmas-tree sales also seemed to have come to an end. However, the man himself could occasionally be seen with a truckload of junk, and it was said that he would still turn up at the junkyard or sniff around a car-boot sale. Sometimes people would actually pay him to take their junk away.
Roald wondered about the pickup truck, an ancient Ford F, which should have died a death a long time ago. Jens Horder had miraculously kept the beast alive. It was said that the pickup truck used to belong to his father.
Roald had only seen Maria Horder once, several years ago, when she was waiting at the chemist’s. He wouldn’t have known that it was her if it hadn’t been for Jens Horder next to her.
They were an odd couple, the pair of them. They just sat there holding hands, smiling a little shyly without saying a word. Jens Horder’s eyes seemed black, inscrutable. He was slim and well shaped – even beautiful, if such a word could be applied to a man – and he was wearing the finest ivory shirt. She, by contrast, had looked rather big next to her husband, but nevertheless she was really pretty. According to regulars at the pub, she had been slim when she arrived on the island. The more Roald furtively studied her from his place in the queue, the prettier she became. Her inscrutability lay in the smile at the corners of her mouth. Then it was Roald’s turn to be served.
Recently, however, Jens Horder had started to resemble an unkempt savage, and rumour had it that Maria Horder had grown enormous. At least the postman said so, and he was probably the last person to have seen her on the Head. That was a long time ago now.
Then again, the postman might not be the most reliable of witnesses. For instance, he had more than hinted that Horder received monthly letters from the Mafia containing huge sums of cash. To imagine that Jens Horder was in cahoots with the Mafia was pretty much as far-fetched as implying that the man had killed his own mother. Which was what the postman was also insinuating, though God knows how that idea had got into his head. Perhaps postmen were just prone to fantasizing more than other people because they carried so much information around, so many potential secrets, about which they could speculate but never prove, unless they had X-ray vision.
Roald had to come up with an excuse to go to the Head. It wasn’t a long trip; all he had to do was cross the Neck. Even so, it felt like quite an expedition.
His acquaintance with Jens Horder was so fleeting that he wasn’t even sure that Jens would recognize him. And he couldn’t just turn up without a reason. Should he be honest and say that he had seen a boy run towards the Head one night, and wanted to know if Jens and Maria knew anything about it? Perhaps they too had been burgled?
No, he had no wish to refer to the child as a thief and risk getting him into trouble. The boy had enough problems already, whoever he was. Besides, Roald couldn’t bear the thought of asking that particular couple about a child.
Perhaps he could invite them to some event at the pub? And then casually ask if they had experienced any break-ins, without mentioning anything about the child. No, that was feeble. Jens and Maria Horder were clearly not interested in socializing on the main island. Jens might have been a guest at the pub a long time ago, when Oluf ran it, but only to help Roald’s uncle with minor repairs, never to sit in the bar or join in darts nights, or the summer party, or the New Year’s Day lunch, or whatever occasion it was that people used as an excuse to drink a little more in slightly smarter clothes. Roald wasn’t even sure if Jens Horder drank alcohol, and he had stopped caring about his appearance long ago.
What on earth could he come up with as a pretext for his visit?
The dog. At some point Roald had expressed a desire to have a dog, and yet he was in two minds about taking on permanent responsibility for an animal. Lars, who usually turned up in the public bar to watch pools football, had told Roald that he was welcome to walk his hunting dog.
Lars suffered from gout and struggled to walk, and his wife never went anywhere but crazy; she had what could most charitably be described as an explosive temper. After she had slapped the postman across the face for turning up with a reminder letter, they had never been known as anything other than Lars and Short Fuse. People knew that she drank a little more than was good for her at home on the farm, but they would obviously never dream of mentioning it. At least not in Lars’s presence.
It was a German wirehaired pointer. The kind that looks like an old, distinguished, bearded gentleman, although it was only five years old and its temper was almost as explosive as its mistress’s. Its name was Ida.
But she was cute, Ida with the beard. And strong. Lars’s instructions were that Roald mustn’t let her off the lead until they were well clear of the tarmac road. Roald couldn’t wait for that moment to arrive because, after a mere ten minutes of being dragged down the road, his arm was close to dislocating from the shoulder.
As he approached the Neck, he reviewed his mission yet again. He wasn’t sure that he knew exactly what he was doing. But taking a dog for a walk up there was OK… or was it? He realized that he had no idea if he would be trespassing on private property. All of the Head couldn’t belong to Horder, could it? But where was the boundary? Was there even such a thing?
It wasn’t just time which had been suspended on the island, Roald had noticed. It was also physical barriers, which seemed to flow rather freely inside the boundaries delineated by the sea. The crops had undulated peacefully between neighbours for generations and boundary posts were mainly located in people’s memories.
It would never have worked on the mainland.
There were no crops undulating now, where the November sunshine rose above the landscape, and the golden leaves from a windbreak had long since scattered in the plough furrows on the field he passed.
When the tarmac finally turned into a gravel road, he released the dog. It galloped off over the Neck and on to the Head as if it hadn’t stretched out for years, and soon disappeared out of sight.
Perfect. He was looking for his dog, which had done a runner. That was his story. He would ask the Horders if they had seen it, and somehow manage to bring up the child in conversation.
The Neck was quiet. Roald looked down the verges of buckthorn and lyme grass and watched a couple of seagulls fight over a crab. The sea sloshed against the causeway from both sides in small, awkward kisses. To the east there was water, water, water until the sea disappeared in a light mist. To the west the blurred contours of the mainland. He didn’t miss it.