The Living and the Dead in Winsford Read Free

living room, and eventually deciding that the events of the last few months had now finally come to an end. Or of the last few years, to be more precise.
    And to be even more precise: of my life as it had turned out so far.

2
     
    ‘I can understand that you both need to get away from it all,’ Eugen Bergman had said, peering over the rim of his remarkably outdated spectacles. ‘What with that mad woman and all the rest of it. And the literary timing is just about right as well. However it turns out, we shall be able to sell it.’
    This is not going to be an account of what has happened in the past, these unstructured notes – no more than what is necessary in order to understand the present. In so far as I have any ambitions at all, that is just about as far as they go. You write – and read – in order to understand things, that’s something I’ve often tried to convince myself about. There is a lot that I shall never understand: recent happenings have proved that more conclusively than I might have wished, but surely one should try to throw a bit of light on things? I’ve started to do that far too late – but you ought to do something while you’re waiting for death to carry you off, as one of my colleagues used to say on particularly bleak Monday mornings at the Monkeyhouse. Although I’m beginning to get confused already, words and times are becoming unclear. Back to Sveavägen in Stockholm, exactly one month ago. Eugen Bergman.
    ‘However it turns out?’ said Martin, as if he had failed completely to understand the indulgent irony in what the publisher had said. ‘Can I remind you that I’ve been sitting on this material for thirty years. If your bean-counters can’t grasp the value of that, there are bean-counters in other publishing houses who will.’
    ‘I’ve already said that we shall publish it,’ said Bergman with one of his wry smiles. ‘And you’ll get your advance. What’s the matter with you, old chap? I can assure you it will be translated into seven or eight languages without further ado. They might even put it up for auction in England. Get on your bike, for God’s sake – you have my blessing. And the deadline will be the end of April next year. Mind you, I’d quite like to read bits of it before then, as you know.’
    ‘Fat chance,’ said Martin, then nodded at me: ‘No bastard gets to read a single word until it’s finished.’
    It was time to leave, that was obvious. We’d been no more than ten minutes in the room, but needless to say everything had been prepared meticulously in advance. Bergman has been Martin’s publisher for twenty years, and is one of those old-fashioned, solid-as-a-rock types. That’s what Martin always used to say, in any case. Every new contract – there haven’t been all that many, only six or seven if I remember rightly – has been confirmed in Bergman’s office. Sign on the dotted line, shake hands, then sink a drop or two of amaro from one of the slightly worse-for-wear little glasses he keeps hidden away in one of his desk cupboards: that has always been the routine, and it was the routine that Friday afternoon at the beginning of October as well.
    The sixth, to be precise. An Indian summer day if ever there was one, at least in the Stockholm area. I’m not quite sure why Martin had insisted on my being there, but presumably because it was a rather special occasion.
    If so, it wasn’t difficult to understand why.
    To celebrate the fact that we were still together. That the turbulence of the last few months had not been able to undermine the solid base of our marriage. That I stood behind my husband, or wherever it was that an independent but good wife was expected to stand. By his side, perhaps?
    And I admit that ‘insisted’ is not the right word. Martin had asked me to be present, that was all. Eugen Bergman has been a good friend of both of us for many years, even if we haven’t actually been socializing together very much