He listened to his phone messages. His mother had called several times; she seemed to have forgotten that he was working on Gotland. Two of his three brothers had also left messages. He missed them and hoped that he’d have a chance to see them while he was back in Stockholm. Johan was the oldest and had consciously taken on the role of paterfamilias when his father died several years earlier. Luckily, his mother had now found a new love interest. She still lived in her own house, but she seemed to get on splendidly with her sweetheart, and that made Johan happy. Not just for her sake, but also for his own. She didn’t need him in the same way as she had in the past. He thought about how things would go now that he and Emma had decided to move in together and get married. Johan would be the first of his brothers to take a wife. It was a big step, a serious decision. He didn’t want to tell anyone about it. Not just yet.
A nxiety crept over him towards evening. Erik had always thought there was something unpleasant about Sunday nights. The weekend was almost over, and the working week was just around the corner, with its responsibilities, routines, commitments — and he had to be able to function. That alone could fill him with panic. He was lying on the sofa in the living room, staring at the ceiling. A whisky would deaden the feeling of emptiness, but he wasn’t going to drink today. He never did on Sundays.
Instead he got up and took out a few old photo albums from his childhood. He put on a CD of Maria Callas and began turning the pages. A picture of himself at the age of seven on the Moja boat dock. Hoisting the sail on the boat with his father, and with a friend in the dinghy. As a child he had loved the Stockholm archipelago. His family always went sailing for several weeks in the summer. They would go out to Moja, Sandhamn and Uto, attend the dances on the wharves, and eat dinner at the elegant inns. His father would come along, and that always made his mother happier and more relaxed. With her husband at her side she would forget about the irritation she felt towards Erik, although she made no attempt to hide her feelings when the two of them were at home alone and his father was off travelling. She liked to sunbathe on holiday, and her thin, taut body acquired a deep tan; she even put on a little weight. It was as if the tension in her face eased, and she became more like the cheerful girl she may once have been; the one Erik thought was still there under that stern exterior.
Erik grew up as an only child, living with his parents in a luxurious house in the fashionable suburb of Djursholm. He attended private schools and then majored in economics at Ostra Real secondary school. His future was decided in advance. He was going to follow in his father’s footsteps and go to business school, get top marks, and then start working for the family business. No other alternatives were ever discussed.
Erik managed fairly well during his school years, in spite of his cold-hearted mother and absent father. He’d always had an easy time making friends, and the socializing he did outside the house made it possible for him to survive, year after year. He longed fervently for the day when he could pack his bags and leave home.
It was when he was a teenager that the change happened. There was a new boy in class who was interested in art; he went to all the gallery openings in town, and he also painted in his spare time. He was so enthusiastic and captivating that several of his classmates joined him on the weekends when he would go to Liljevalch Art Centre and the National Museum, Waldemarsudde and small, obscure art galleries. Erik showed the most interest of any of the boys. He was particularly taken with Swedish art from the early twentieth century. It was then that he discovered ‘The Dying Dandy’ and became utterly overwhelmed by it. Back then he didn’t understand why the painting had such a strong effect on him; he just knew that it resonated with something in him that was deep and hidden and over which he had no control. He started reading everything he could find about Dardel and the paintings of the early 1900s in general. He even went so far as to begin studying art history along with his other subjects. He was planning to keep his interest secret from his parents for as long as possible.
But it wasn’t just his interest in art that complicated his life during those years. He began feeling himself drawn more and more to his own gender; he was totally uninterested in women. Whenever his friends talked about girls and sex, he would laugh along with them and contribute some tall tales about his own advanced sexual experiences. In reality, Erik was furtively looking at men. On the bus, on the street, and in the showers at the gym. It was the male body, not the female, that interested him. Since he was painfully aware of his parents’ old-fashioned and narrow-minded view of homosexuality, he did everything he could to suppress his attraction to men. But then one day he had his feelings confirmed.
His family was supposed to spend a weekend on Gotska Sandon, staying overnight in a cabin. On the ferry ride over, they met a pleasant family from Goteborg whose son was the same age as Erik. Late that night, while the adults were still up drinking wine, the two youths left the party and set off for a walk along the sandy beaches that surrounded the small island. It was just before Midsummer, and the night was bright and warm. They lay down next to each other on a sand dune and gazed up at the sky while they talked. Erik liked Joel, as the boy was called, and they had a lot in common. They soon began confiding in each other, and Erik told his new friend about his problems at home. Joel was kind and understanding, and all of a sudden they were lying in each other’s arms. Erik would never forget that night. They exchanged addresses and phone numbers, but they never contacted each other again.
Erik had gone back to his life in Stockholm truly shaken by his first homosexual experience. He was so terrified by his feelings that at university he began going out with a girl who had been giving him long looks during classes.
Her name was Lydia. They soon became a couple and in due course got married. At first their marriage was relatively happy, and they had three children in quick succession. Erik’s excessive drinking had begun much earlier, but it escalated with each year that passed.
His parents found nothing unusual about the fact that he was so self-absorbed, and they gave Erik and Lydia money so that they could live comfortably in a large, fancy flat in the Ostermalm district. Lydia was from a middle-class family in Leksand. She trained to be an art restorer and eventually found a job at the National Museum.
Erik got into the habit of not coming home until two in the morning, still under the influence of alcohol and drugs. One Saturday, Lydia decided that she’d finally had enough. She took the children and went to stay with her parents-in-law.
Erik’s parents were furious, of course, and they threatened to stop sending the money that they usually provided each month. Lydia wanted a divorce, and naturally his parents took her side. It was Erik who had behaved badly and broken his promises.
Erik didn’t care what his mother thought or felt; she had destroyed any love he might have felt for her when he was young through years of psychological tyranny and indifference. He thought about all the times when she had insulted and criticized him in front of teachers, neighbours, relatives and friends. He felt absolutely nothing for her, and was convinced that the feeling was mutual. If there was any emotion left to speak of, it might almost be described as deep contempt.
But he still had warm feelings for his father. Mr Mattson had never been actually unkind to Erik, yet he had always meekly submitted to his wife’s wishes, in spite of the fact that he was so successful in the business world. She was the one who ruled the roost for all those years, and he had seldom questioned her authority, letting her do as she liked. It was the best thing for domestic harmony, as Erik’s father would say with a good-natured smile before he fled the scene and left on yet another business trip.