It was a glittering blue morning; the sun warm but not yet the air. I finished breakfast early and got out for a quick stroll along the quayside before Kari arrived. Past the old wooden warehouses, the red-tiled chandlers' shops, through the bright umbrellas of the flower and vegetable market and into the sudden aroma of the fish-market. But it wasn't until then that I'd realised the weird thing: there'd been no salt sea smell in the air. That was taking the Scandinavian passion for cleanliness a bit far.
Kari was there just before nine and we walked out around the quay to the north side, where the ferries started. The place was like Piccadilly Circus on water, with every size of ferry loading cars and trucks for trips half a mile across the bay or fifty miles up the coast, 'It is how we travel in Norway,' she said. 'Do you know how long it would take me to drive to Bergen? Three days, and even that would need one ferry crossing, and I cannot do it now anyway because the roads are blocked with snow.'
Just beside us, a scruffy little trawler-shaped boat was unloading a whole family, furniture, potted plants, and cat. A removal van. Why not?
We walked aboard our own boat, one of the smaller jobs, fitted to carry about six cars and maybe forty passengers. It did a regular round tour of the smaller islands up to about ten miles away; we sat down on a wooden bench and bought tickets off the conductor. The romance of the Viking country.
Saevarstad, according to the tourist map I'd nicked from the hotel, was about five miles away, a kidney-shaped blob marked for a church and a circuit road that couldn't have been more than four miles in all. We weaved towards it, never seeing a real horizon, never more than half a mile from some other island and stopping briefly at two of them. After three-quarters of an hour, we were there.
It looked like a neat little wooden village with the quay itself as the village square. There were a few parked cars and trucks, a storage shed, a heap of crates and oil drums, and two shops. One was half hardware, half ship's chandler for the dozen or so motorboats moored at the quayside, the other the post office and everything else. It was the only one open, so we started there.
A middle-aged spinsterish-looking bird told us that the sanatorium was a couple of kilometres out along the coast road southwards. Big yellow house. And she was sorry the island taxi wasn't around – would we like her to phone hither and yon to try and find it?
I said, 'Nevermind. But if it comes, send it on after us.'
T will. Does Doctor Rasmussen know you are coming, or shall I ring to him?'
'He knows,' I said quickly. And we started walking.
The road was narrow – barely wider than a car – but properly made up. And around us, the land was lush and green and neat and, in a small way, prosperous. Once we were clear of the village it became a series of small holdings, some with rows of well-kept greenhouses, others with a couple of cows or a small flock of sheep. How they could scratch even a living out of plots that size I couldn't guess, but every house was in good repair and freshly painted.
Kari explained, 'They are all also fishermen, in winter. For prawns and lobsters as well.' Well, maybe that told me something. Certainly we passed three or four tiny landing-places, with or without a small fishing-boat moored alongside.
It took about half an hour to the sanatorium itself, a three-storey-and-semi-basement wooden house with a steeply pitched tile roof built, at a guess, by a rich Victorian family. It was painted primrose yellow, with the carved bits under the eaves and the balustrades of the roofed porch that ran the width of the front picked out in white.
There was a Volkswagen Microbus painted up as an ambulance standing in the gravel drive, a Saab 99 parked around the side of the house. We walked up the half-dozen wooden steps on to the porch and I rang the bell. There were a couple of weather-worn old rocking-chairs out there, where maybe you sat on a summer evening and dreamed of the dry martinis and whisky sours gone by for ever. Or maybe not; when you got close to the house, you could see that every window, right to the top, was barred.
The door opened with a complicated clicking and clacking of locks and a matronly woman in crisp white uniform stared woodenly out at us.
Kari said something quick in Norwegian, then introduced me. No handshake, just a brief starched nod. Then we switched to English.
'We would like to visit Engineer Nygaard,' the girl explained. 'We are friends.'
'We do not have visitors in the morning.'
'We have come from Bergen,' Kari explained.
'If you had telephoned you would have been told. You should have telephoned.'
I chipped in my piece, 'Sorry, that's my fault. I've come from London in a bit of a hurry. Can I have a word with Doctor Rasmussen?'
Somewhere inside the house somebody screamed. Not just in pain; a long, wavering, sobbing howl of simple terror that practically tore off my scalp.
But not with matron. She cocked her head and listened thoughtfully, like somebody trying to identify a tricky bird-call. Feet clattered on the stairs and a door slammed.
She sighed briefly. 'I will see if the doctor can speak with you. But he is very busy. Please to come in and wait.'
We waited in a big, bright, well-furnished room that still had that impersonal look you get in even the best of doctors' waiting-rooms. The pile of magazines, the chairs arranged so you didn't have to chat to anybody else waiting there, the carefully placed ashtrays.
We waited. Kari said in a carefully hushed voice, 'Perhaps we should have telephoned."
'I doubt it. They'd just have told us not to come at any time yet.'
It was another five minutes before Dr Rasmussen came in. He must have been about fifty, but very fit with it: deep-chested and solid-shouldered, with a bouncy gait and a rich tan on his knobbly face. He wore a short-sleeved white coat showing thick forearms covered with fine blond hairs, though the top of his head was a careful arrangement of thin grey.
This time we shook hands. He said, 'I am sorry you have come all this way for nothing. If you had rung up, I could have told you.'
'I wouldn't say it was for nothing, Doctor. At least we've established that Engineer Nygaard is still alive. I suppose he still is?'
He looked briefly startled, then laughed jovially. 'Of course. Did you really come all this way to prove that?'
'Maybe. When an elderly man in not very good health suddenly vanishes without telling somebody who's been helping look after him-' I waved a hand at Kari '-or his ex-employer, who's paying his pension, the least anybody can do is get a bit worried. There's an obvious chance that he's fallen into the harbour or frozen to death sleeping it off under a bush in the park.'
'I understand. Naturally a man in his state is rather careless about leaving messages. I must see that he writes letters to everybody who is concerned with him.'
'It runs to quite a number by now. You did know he was a star witness in a big court case? '
Kari was looking at me with a slightly schoolmarmish frown.
Rasmussen just nodded. 'He did tell me something. One does not know what to believe with such cases.' He turned to Kari. 'You were very clever to find him here, Froken Skagen. Or did he remember enough to leave a message with somebody?'
I said quickly, 'We were very clever. Can we have just a quick word with him so that I can tell my superiors in London that he is still alive and… as well as can be expected?'
The grin was gone now. 'We allow no visitors in the morning, Herr Card. And for Herr Nygaard, at his stage of treatment, we allow no visitors at all. You must understand that.'
'What stage is he at by now? '
'I cannot discuss a patient's symptoms, of course.'
'Good for you, Doctor. But I've also got the shreds of professional ethics. You don't discuss a patient. I don't tell anybody he's still alive unless I've seen him.'
I started buttoning my coat.
His big, muscular face was twitching with indecision. Finally he said, 'Wait, please,' did an about-turn, and strode out.
Kari whispered, 'What is happening?'
I shrugged, but I unbuttoned my coat again and sat down.
After a few minutes Rasmussen came back. He looked calm but serious. 'You may see him for a moment only. To reassure yourself. After that I hope you will leave me to complete the cure in peace.'
We followed him out into the hall and up a flight of broad, shallow stairs, with a big window at the turn. Even that was covered with a heavy wire mesh.
'Do many of them try to jump?' I asked cheerfully.
'Not from here. That comes later,' he said soberly. 'It is still about seven per cent that succeed.'
Kari was looking puzzled. 'Seven per cent? Of what? '
Rasmussen said, 'Cured male alcoholics who commit suicide – whosucceed, not just who try. We can – often – take away the drinking. We cannot put back what he has drunk away. A marriage, a family, a fortune, sometimes.'
Kari frowned. Rasmussen added, 'But, of course, some say an alcoholic is trying to commit suicide, subconsciously, by his drinking. So perhaps I meet only those who have suicidal tendencies already.'
I said, 'Perhaps you're saving ninety-three per cent rather than losing seven, you mean? Pretty good, that.'
He gave me a disapproving glance. 'You are forgetting those who fail to be cured.'
'Ah, yes.'
The corridor was broad and well lit and empty of furniture except for a couple of the metal tea-trolleys that you see carrying drugs and stuff around in hospitals. And the doors weren't the original ones. These were painted in nice bright colours, but it didn't hide their blank solidity, the heavy lock, the central port-hole at eye level.
Rasmussen peered in through one, then motioned me up to take a look.
Nygaard was lying in the bed, on his back with his mouth open, apparently asleep. Around him was a room such as you'd expect in a private sanatorium: walls freshly painted a gloss primrose, a heavy wooden wardrobe and cupboard, soft chair for visitors, a water-bottle, mug, and flower vase all in plastic. No glass for Dr Rasmussen's patients. No seven per cent while in his care.
I nodded, and let Kari take a look. While she was doing so, I leaned inconspicuously on the door-handle. It moved, all right.
Rasmussen asked, 'Are you satisfied now?'
Kari looked at me. 'It is him.'
I nodded. 'I agree. Thank you, Doctor.' He looked momentarily surprised, then led the way back to the stairs.
Then somebody screamed again – the same long, shaking screech that went through your head like a file across your teeth.
Rasmussen stopped, listened briefly, and shouted, 'Trond!'
Big feet clattered on the hallway below and a vast man in a short-sleeved white jacket came around the bottom of the stairs and pounded up towards us. He was built like Hermann Goring, with much the same bloated frog face, but he was fast on his feet and barely puffing when he reached the top. Mind, he was only in his middle thirties, I'd guess, so maybe most of his shape was hereditary.
The scream reached out again and Rasmussen raised his voice to cut through it. Trond got his orders, nodded, and charged off down the corridor without giving Kari or me a glance.
The doctor looked at me and smiled wanly. 'What do they see? – we can never know. Hell is aprivate place.'
Kari was looking startled and bewildered. Rasmussen said, 'The symptoms of withdrawal, that is the most likely time for the delirium tremens. Then they start to meet the terrors. We try to soften it with drugs, but… each body is different, we cannot always make it the perfect dose.'
He started downstairs. Behind us, the scream started, wavered, and drifted into a muffled gulping sound.
'Often,' Rasmussen said, 'it is just somebody to touch them, like Trond, to make them know there is a world still around them.'
'Trond must be a great comfort to you,' I said.
He looked at me sharply, then bent his head in agreement. 'A good boy. And very strong. For a few, very few, we need that.'
'Who committed Nygaard to you, Doctor?'
He stopped and frowned. 'There was no "committing" – this is not prison or insanity.'
'Sorry, Doctor. I'd just read something about a Sobriety Board that can commit alcoholics for a cure. If they're given the right evidence.'
He shrugged and started down again. 'It happens for perhaps one per cent of cases.'
'Ah, I wonder how he came to hear of you, though?'
'Alcoholism is not rare with sailors. The cheap drink, the long boredom… He is not the first seaman officer in this house.'
'I'll bet.' We reached the hall and the doctor kept going towards the front door. Nothing we could do but follow.
There was another car in the drive – a tattered old Ford Cortina with a youngish driver leaning across the bonnet breathing cigarette smoke at the sky.
Kari said, 'The taxi. We asked for it.'
Of course." Well, anything's better than exercise. I turned to Rasmussen. 'Thank you for letting us barge in like this, Doctor.
But try and get him to write those letters soon, huh?'
He nodded stiffly, not much liking somebody else telling him what to do, but having to take it this time. We shook hands – a firm, dry hand – and I paused at the top of the porch steps and looked around. Off to both sides, beyond the flower beds with the first daffodils and the driveway, there were thick clumps of laurel and rhododendron and conifer bushes.
'Must be nice in summer,' I commented. 'I hope your patients appreciate their luck, Doctor. Thanks again.' I walked across to the taxi.
Kari had been chatting up the driver. 'The next boat is not until an hour, but he will drive us around the island if you like. He does not speak English.'
The face was young, bony, friendly, and somehow it was nice to meet a Norwegian who didn't give a damn aboutmy language. 'Okay, let's drive around the island.'
'He says there is a very interesting church of the twelfth century.'
'If you want to see, go ahead.'
'I would like to.' She took the front seat.
The island itself went on being just as it had in the distance we'd walked: small bright houses and rich grass – but just the occasional raw rock poking through. Driving round it took twenty minutes and exactly nine kilometres on the clock, and we were almost back at the sanatorium when we came to the church.
To me it was just a whitewashed stone barn with narrow arched windows, even if it had been built by Eric the Red, so I wandered outside while she went in. Even at that time of year the grass in the churchyard was thick and wet around my ankles, and the stone wall was the same slate grey as the church roof and the gently restless sea a couple of hundred yards down the slope and past the road. Did they call it the Norwegian Sea up here? It didn't matter; it was really the same grey Atlantic, and the same stone church just beyond its reach that you see a hundred times on the west coast of Scotland and Ireland and wherever else the fishermen come home to be buried – some of them.
Inside, the tablets would say 'Lost at sea'; here outside were the ones that would translate 'drowned', the ones the sea gave back – but maybe after a month or two of quiet revenge from the cod and the hungry gulls. The ones identified from a bracelet or a gold tooth, the ones you'd like to turn away again, but never can. Any fishing village – or island – writes its history on stones like these.
Then the taxi driver gave an exaggerated cough and, when I looked up, glanced conspicuously at his watch. I nodded and walked slowly among the tombstones towards him; Kari came out as I reached the gate.
We'd been back in the car for five minutes before she said, 'Inside that church, I saw names on the… the stones.'
'Me too, outside.'
'Ah. Bang?'
'Bang.' After a while, I added, 'Probably she inherited a good part of this island as well as the shipping line. She could own the sanatorium.'
'Then – she must know Engineer Nygaard is here, no?'
'She must have put him here.'
Kari thought about that all the way down to the dock. Our ferry was just coming in around the corner of the island, hooting gloomily.
As we walked aboard, she asked, 'But then she is… hiding him while he becomes cured, ja?'
'She's certainly hiding him. But he's no more taking the cure than I am.'