'It must be painful. Where are you actually? I tried to call you at home.'
Jon didn't answer.
'Mads is working late, so if you want I can walk over to yours.'
'No, thanks, Ragnhild, I'll manage.'
'I was thinking about you. It's so dark and cold. I'm afraid.'
'You're never afraid, Ragnhild.'
'Sometimes I am.' She put on her sulky voice. 'There are so many rooms here and there is no one about.'
'Move to a smaller house then. I have to ring off now. We're not allowed to use mobiles here.'
'Wait! Where are you, Jon?'
'I've got slight concussion. I'm in hospital.'
'Which hospital? Which department?'
Jon was taken aback. 'Most people would have asked how I got the concussion.'
'You know I hate not knowing where you are.'
Jon visualised Ragnhild marching in with a large bunch of roses during visiting time next day. And Thea's questioning looks, first at her and then at him.
'I can hear the sister coming,' he whispered. 'I'll have to ring off.'
He pressed the OFF button and stared at the ceiling until the phone had played its fanfare and the display was extinguished. She was right. It was dark. But he was the one who was afraid.
* * *
Ragnhild Gilstrup stood by the window with her eyes closed. Then she looked at her watch. Mads had said he had work to do for the board meeting and would be late. He had started saying things like that in recent weeks. Before, he had always given her a time and arrived on the dot, sometimes he was a little early. Not that she wanted him home earlier, but it was somewhat odd. Somewhat odd, that was all. Just as it was odd that all the calls had been itemised on the last landline bill. And she had not requested any such thing. But there it was: five pages with much too much information. She should have stopped ringing Jon, but she couldn't. Because he had that look. That Johannes look. It wasn't kind or clever or gentle or anything like that. But it was a look that could read whatever she thought before she had got as far as thinking it herself. That saw her as she was. And still liked her.
She opened her eyes again and surveyed the six-thousand-square-metre site of unsullied nature. The view reminded her of boarding school in Switzerland. The reflection off the snow shone into the large bedroom and covered the ceiling and walls in a bluish-white light.
She was the one who had insisted on building here, high above the city, well, in the forest in fact. It would make her feel less enclosed and restricted, she had said. And her husband, Mads Gilstrup, who had imagined the city was the restriction she was referring to, had gladly spent some of the money he possessed on the construction. The extravagance had cost him twenty million kroner. When they moved in, Ragnhild felt as though she were moving from a cell to a prison yard. Sun, air and room. Yet still confined. Like at boarding school.
At times – like this evening – she wondered how she had ended up here. Her external circumstances could be summed up as follows: Mads Gilstrup was heir to one of Oslo's great fortunes. She had met him during her degree outside Chicago, Illinois, where they had both studied business administration at a middling university that bestowed greater prestige than competent seats of learning in Norway, and anyway they were a lot more fun. Both came from wealthy families, but his was wealthier. While his family consisted of five generations of shipowners with old money, her family was peasant stock and their money still bore the whiff of printer's ink and farmed fish. They had lived in the interstices between agricultural subsidies and wounded pride until her father and uncle had sold their tractors and gambled their capital on a small fish farm in the fjord outside their sitting-room window on the southernmost, wind-blown coastline of Vest-Agder. The timing had been perfect, competition minimal, kilo price astronomical and in the course of four lucrative years they became multimillionaires. The house on the crag was demolished and replaced by a gateau of a house, bigger than the barn and boasting eight bay windows and a double garage.
Ragnhild had just turned sixteen when her mother sent her from one crag to another crag: Aron Schüster's private school for girls nine hundred metres above sea level in a town with a station, six churches and a Bierstube in Switzerland. The official reason was that Ragnhild was to learn French, German and art history, subjects that were considered useful as the kilo price of farmed fish was still hitting record levels.
The real reason for her exile, however, was of course her boyfriend, Johannes. Johannes of the warm hands, Johannes of the gentle voice and the look that could read whatever she thought before she had got as far as thinking it. Johannes, the country clod, who was going nowhere. Everything changed after Johannes. She changed after Johannes.
At Aron Schüster's private school she was freed from the nightmares, the guilt and the smell of fish, and learned all that young girls need to acquire a husband of their own or higher status. And with the inherited survival instinct that had enabled her to survive on the crag in Norway, she had slowly but surely buried the Ragnhild whose mind Johannes had read so well and become the Ragnhild who was going places, who did her own thing and would not be held back by anyone, least of all by upper-class French girls or spoilt Danish brats who sniggered in corners at the futile attempts of girls like Ragnhild to be anything but provincial or vulgar.