The Living and the Dead in Winsford Read Free Page A

since the death of his wife, Lydia, in 2007. So it was not the first time I had visited that messy office of his in Sveavägen. By no means, and on most of my visits we had drunk a few drops of amaro.
    When we left the publisher’s Martin announced that he had several other meetings booked in, and suggested that we should meet at Sturehof about six o’clock. Although if I preferred to go straight home I could have the car, as taking the commuter train was no problem as far as he was concerned. I said that I had already arranged to meet this Violetta di Parma who was going to stay in our house while we were away – something he ought to have known as I had mentioned it in the car on the way to town that morning – and that Sturehof at six o’clock would be fine for me.
    He nodded somewhat absent-mindedly, gave me a quick hug then continued walking along Sveavägen in the direction of Sergels Torg. For some reason I remained standing there on the pavement, watching him weaving his way through the crowds of unknown people, and I remember thinking that if I hadn’t happened to get pregnant when we spent Christmas with his awful parents thirty-three years ago, my life would have turned out differently from the way it did. So would his.
    But that was a thought about as banal as an itchy finger, and it lacked significance or comfort.
    I enrolled in the Department of Literary History in the autumn term of 1976. I was nineteen, and my boyfriend and first love Rolf enrolled at the same time. I studied literature for two terms, and I might have continued longer if Rolf hadn’t been killed in an accident the following summer, although I can’t be certain of that. I kept feeling at regular intervals that studying literary texts through a magnifying glass was not my true calling, and although I passed the exams without much difficulty – albeit without achieving top marks – I convinced myself that there were alternative arenas in which my life could take place. Or however you might like to express it.
    Rolf ’s death was naturally a crucial factor. He was the one of us who had been a bookworm enthralled by literature. He was the one who would recite Rilke and Larkin at night after six glasses of wine, he was the one who took me to seminars organized by the Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund – the Workers’ Educational Association, or the ABF as it was called – and the Asynja book club, and he was the one who would spend the last few kronor he possessed on half a dozen second-hand copies of Ahlin, Dagerman and Sandemose at Rönnell’s antiquarian bookshop rather than ensuring that we had enough to eat over the weekend. We never got as far as pooling our financial resources – and if we had done it would certainly not have been without its problems.
    But in the middle of August 1977, Rolf fell to his death fifty metres down a cliff in Switzerland, and so we never got round to considering such a venture. I abandoned my literary studies and after a few months of mourning, during which I spent part of the time living with my parents and the rest working as a night receptionist at a hotel in Kungsholmen, I signed up for a sort of media studies course at Gärdet in January, and that was the direction my career took. I was given a job by Swedish Television eighteen months later, and that was my workplace until three months ago – apart from two sessions of maternity leave and an occasional project at some other institution.
    It feels odd, being able to sum up one’s life so simply; but if you miss out your childhood and all the things you thought were so important at the time, it’s straightforward.
    Barely a year after Rolf ’s death I went to a garden party in the Old Town. It was the middle of July 1978. I somewhat reluctantly accompanied one of my fellow students on the media studies course, and that was the evening when I met Martin. I was the one who was reluctant, not my fellow student, and that had been the way of things