I parked in the yard. From where I was sitting I could see my father in the barn. For almost three years he’d been working on a dovecote. It was going to be a replica of the Leaning Tower, in Italy. He’d got the idea from one of Axel’s magazines. He’d torn the page out and pinned it to the wall above his tool-rack. But every time he got the angle right, the tower fell over. And it didn’t even have any doves inside it yet. Sometimes he thought he should have been less ambitious — but it was for Karin; only something out of the ordinary would do. I decided not to tell him what Mazey had done, at least for the time being. It wouldn’t be hard. He’d never had too much curiosity, even about his own family; and now that he was in his late seventies and partly deaf, he had good reason to dispense with it altogether. I opened the door and got out of the car.
When I drove away an hour later, Mazey wasn’t with me. I’d chained him to the truck, the truck that Axel had crashed in all those years ago (it was almost unrecognisable now, most of its paint stripped by the weather, and brambles coiling over the radiator grille and through the broken windscreen like snakes around a skull). Mazey didn’t seem to mind being made a prisoner. He didn’t seem to notice any loss of freedom. I’d hung his string of door-hinges from the roof of the goat shed. If he stood up, he could touch them. Or he could sit with his back against a tyre and whittle at his bits of wood. I told my father to put him in the barn if the temperature dropped — but I insisted on the chain at all times, as much for Mazey’s safety as for Karin’s. I wanted to keep him out of sight. There was no concealing the truth from Kroner and, when he found out, it was quite likely he would want to wreak some kind of vengeance.
I pulled into the hotel car-park. Kroner’s van was there. I sat behind the wheel and stared at it. It had KRONER CONSTRUCTION painted on the side. A new business he’d started up, which tied in with the quarry. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. Those reliable blue letters. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I could’ve sat in the car all night and I still wouldn’t have known.
I found him in the kitchen. He was wearing his work-boots and overalls. He said he’d been up to Karin’s room. The door was locked; she wouldn’t answer. He wanted to know what was wrong. I explained it as best I could. It was only a few words. I felt it should have taken longer, somehow, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I hadn’t been there when it happened. Nobody had told me much.
He sat still for a moment, then he reached out slowly for the broom that was leaning against the wall. He stood up and began to break the kitchen windows, one by one. When he’d broken all the windows, he started on the crockery. Then it was the glasses, the vases, the new electric clock. There was a determined look on his face. Sometimes he blinked. At one point he turned and looked at me, as if trying to decide what I was made of, whether I would smash. Though he was breathing hard, his head was motionless; blood ran from several small cuts on his face and arms. I stepped backwards, towards the door. Still looking at me, he hurled the broom sideways. It landed among the saucepans, knocked them to the floor. There was a movement behind me, and Karin pushed past me, into the room. She went to her father and carefully laid her cheek against his chest. He looked down at her. He seemed surprised to see her there. It was almost as if he’d forgotten she existed. Then his eyes closed.
‘I’m all right,’ she murmured. ‘Really. I’m all right.’
His chest heaved; tears poured down his face.
She kept on murmuring to him. ‘I’m all right, Dad. I’m all right. Really …’
Maybe she was. But he wasn’t. That evening, while I was taping newspaper over the broken windows, Karin ran into the kitchen.
‘It’s Dad,’ she panted. ‘Something’s happening to Dad.’
She took me out to the front of the hotel. The light from the doorway made a kind of V-shape on the grass. Kroner was lying in the darkness just beyond it, his boots lit up, the rest of him invisible. I hurried over. His arms were at strange angles to his body, and they were bent at the elbows; he could have been practising semaphore, communicating with someone in the sky. I felt for the pulse in his wrist. It was faint, irregular, but it was there. I told Karin to stay with him, then I ran to the phone and called Holbek.
In ten minutes the doctor was kneeling on the grass beside us. Kroner’s eyes were open, and saliva was spilling from one side of his mouth. The doctor examined him briefly, then asked if he could use the phone. As I followed him into the hallway to show him where it was, he turned to me.
‘He’s had a stroke. I’m going to call an ambulance.’
When I saw Kroner the next morning, in the hospital, he looked as if he’d aged twenty years. I thought the shock must have done it, the way earthquakes are said to. His hair went white overnight. Close up, though, I realised I’d got it wrong; it was just that he was still covered with limestone dust from the quarry. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to know us. He was still very weak, the Sister said. We weren’t allowed to stay for long.
The doctor told me that the stroke had been a major one. A blood vessel in Kroner’s brain had ruptured, resulting in a haemorrhage. It meant one side of his body would be paralysed. It also meant he’d lost the power of speech — temporarily, at least. He would be kept under observation for the next few days. Before too long, however, he’d be sent home, where he’d be in my charge. The doctor wanted to know if I understood the implications of this. I said I did (it was like Mazey, only worse; it was almost funny). According to the doctor, Kroner would have to begin again, from the beginning, like a child. To walk, to talk. To tie a shoelace. Drive a car. This would be more difficult, he thought, because they’d detected a stubborn streak in the patient, an unwillingness to return from where he was.
‘We can only do so much. In the end, it’s up to him.’
Three weeks later Kroner had another stroke. It was less significant, the doctor said, but the date of his release was postponed indefinitely. He stayed in hospital all summer. Two or three afternoons a week I would drive down there, usually alone (the sight of Karin seemed to upset him; once he even wet himself). If the weather was fine, they lifted him into a bath chair and let me push him through the grounds. These days I hardly recognised him. The left half of his face had slipped, and one of the nurses had put a side-parting in his hair and brushed it flat. He looked like a different person. Nobody I knew, though. Sometimes, as I wheeled him round, I found myself believing it: we were strangers, and I was just being neighbourly, doing a good deed. Other days I pitied him, the state he was in, but at the same time I could see the justice of it. What he’d done to Mazey, him and his people up at the quarry, while I was weighed down with his child — or afterwards, when the child was born and my mind was nothing but a misted-over pane of glass. Sometimes the men who seem the most respectable and decent are the worst. There are whole parts of them kept secret. But he’d drunk deep from his own medicine, and the taste of it had altered him for ever.
I was on my way to visit him once when a hub-cap came loose and ran on ahead of the car. I watched it leave the road in a straight line, bouncing across uneven ground, confident but ludicrous. I thought no more about it until I parked outside the hospital. But then I saw the wheel, and I stood there in the sunshine, staring at it. You never know how strong somebody is, and if they’re against you, how long the struggle will last. Looking at the wheel, black instead of silver, blind, somehow, I knew it was over. Kroner had come to the end of the cruelty that was in him, and it hadn’t worked. There were straps to hold him upright in his chair. I remember fingering the leather that afternoon and thinking back: that drive across the county years before, the knife glinting on the seat beside me … There’d be no need for knives, not any more.