But I don’t really like to eat at lunch, she said, and Ella is fussy, so Jonathan ends up eating most of it on his own.
Her own parents had cooked a rotating menu of dishes that had become as familiar to their children as the days of the week. The cadences of her childhood could almost be expressed in those recurring flavours and textures, and in the longer, slower repetition of seasons, the nuances and gradations of summer and winter foods, punctuated by the birthday cake that never changed, a different cake for each of them and the five cakes always each year the same. She was born in summer: her cake was a beautiful tiered structure of meringue and berries and fresh cream, the best of them all. One reason she disliked returning to Sweden was because of the food, which overwhelmed her with memories while leaving a bitter taste in her mouth, for it seemed familiar while being, in fact, entirely alien.
I asked what it was that had caused that dissonance, and for a while she didn’t reply, fingering the green stone she wore on a silver chain around her neck that had evidently been chosen for its resemblance to her eyes.
It was true, she said, that at a certain point – when she was perhaps twelve or thirteen – something had altered in her participation in their family life, something so subtle and imperceptible that she struggled even to give it a name. Yet she remembers quite clearly the moment when this change occurred, walking home from school on an ordinary grey weekday afternoon. She was stepping off the pavement into the road and she felt it, a sudden sense of dislocation, almost a sensation of something giving way. She waited for the feeling to pass but it didn’t: she returned home with it, and when she woke the next morning it was still there. She couldn’t, as she said, give a name to it, but one consequence of it was that from that day she felt she was watching life from the outside rather than being part of it. She began to watch her parents and her siblings as they sat talking and eating around the table, and though she wanted more than anything to get back inside those dinners and conversations, she couldn’t. It was perhaps this feeling of unreality that had caused her, at a certain point, to begin recording her family without them realising. She used a cassette player she’d been given, positioning it on a shelf near the kitchen table and changing the tape each day. Her parents never noticed it, but after a while her siblings did, and for a time it became a sort of obsession for them, listening to the repetition of the hour or more they had spent sitting around the table eating dinner. None of them was particularly interested in hearing their own voices: what they were listening for were the voices of their parents. Sometimes they would make her play a particular snatch of conversation between their mother and father over and over again. They would analyse it thoroughly, trying to unravel every possible meaning behind the words. They were trying, she now realises, to penetrate their parents’ relationship, and persistently failing to do so, because night after night they made new recordings and started the process again. They must in the end have listened to hundreds of hours of their parents talking, and never once did either her mother or her father utter a word that provided a crack or opening into the mystery of their love.
I asked her whether she still had the tapes.
Of course, she said. I had them digitised several years ago. The originals are all filed by date in a big cabinet in my office. When our mother died, she said, my siblings asked for them back and I refused. We quarrelled over it, she added. It’s a little sad. Now we don’t see each other any more.
After her mother died, she went on, her father quickly married again. A woman had come to the house one day selling cleaning products door to door and he had married her just like that. They had sold the beautiful home of her childhood and moved to a hideous bungalow in a bad part of the town. The woman was hideous herself, coarse and obese, the very opposite of Birgid’s slim and lovely mother. These days her father lived like a tramp, ragged and unwashed, all his money gone. Her siblings had tried to take the woman to court but it turned out that their father had freely given her everything, including all the artefacts of their family life, which she had either sold or thrown away. She allowed him to remain in the bungalow with her but she treated him like a dog. Birgid herself had already left for England when these events occurred: in her absence, her whole past had been dismantled. Even the photograph albums were gone – she would never have been able to prove that it had happened at all, were it not for the tapes.
Lawrence was calling us to the table to eat and the others rose from the sofa.
I asked her whether she still had the feeling of unreality, and why she thought it had come in the first place. Ella had returned to stand beside us and she presently slipped herself on to Birgid’s lap and rested her head against her chest, sucking her thumb. Birgid absently stroked her dark hair and lifted her strange eyes to meet mine.
‘I like it that you ask these questions,’ she said. ‘But I don’t understand why you want to know.’
Lawrence called us again and she tried to put the child down but Ella clung to her, protesting, and so she struggled to her feet with Ella still in her arms and stood there somewhat helplessly, until Lawrence came to take her.