The Long and Spectacular Life of Agnes Magnusdottir 15

1961

 

"Can Uncle Vickers read to me? Please mum. Please dad."

    Vickers precluded the question by pushing himself up and putting a hand flat on Agnes’s head. "How old are you now?" he asked.

    "Not too old for a story," said Agnes tartly. "There was a study. I read about it in daddy’s paper. Children who are read to on a nightly basis are likely to be more well adjusted than children who aren't."

    A look passed between Mary and Edmund and they smiled at each other. It was an uncomplicated smile although things these days were complicated between them. For a start they no longer shared a bedroom. The official reason was ’daddy snores’. The unofficial reason was Vickers.

    They were living in Scotland now, in a small town called Wick. The move had been Mary’s idea. As had that they change their names. When Edmund had come back from Brighton he had told Mary some of what had gone on. He had told her about Wolf and how Wolf had mentioned someone called Jónsson and how this Jónsson wanted Agnes.

    "It's all nonsense, isn't it?"

    But already he had been able to see that it wasn't. Mary had gone deathly pale and said, "Jónsson is a very bad man. If only you knew the half of it. I'm beginning to think he will stop at nothing. He actually said you were to hand over our daughter?"

    "That's what he said," said Edmund. "It was all I could do to shake him off." 

    A week later Mary had come up with plans for their move. She came back one evening and put the train tickets on the table.

    "Do this for me," she said, "and you can keep Vickers."

    Edmund didn't know how Mary knew about him and Vickers but when she said ’keep Vickers’ he knew that she knew everything. Well, everything except that he had killed a man. He had left out that part of the story.

    "What book is it tonight?" asked Vickers.

    "Wuthering Heights," said Agnes. 

    "Right ho," said Vickers in that simple jolly way of his. "I think I know that one. Isn’t it about the nanny."

    "Oh uncle," said Agnes in a voice that was old above her years. "You're thinking of Jane Eyre. Although she wasn’t a nanny exactly. Wuthering Heights is about a passionate love that won't die. It goes on forever and ever."

    "Out of the mouths of babes," said Mary as Vickers and Agnes disappeared up the stairs. 

    "I do love you, you know?" said Edmund reaching for Mary’s hand. "And she is hardly a babe."

    "You're right," said Mary. She smiled ruefully and interlinked her fingers with Edmund’s. "When did our little baby grow up?"

    The truth was, despite what might be considered to be a very awkward ménage a trois, all three of them looked forward to Vickers’s quarterly visits. When he was there there was a new lightness to the air and even the Scottish fog seemed bearable.

    "And the problem is," said Mary. "I think she's beginning to guess."

    Edmund looked up sharply, a haunted look in his eyes. The last thing he wanted was for Agnes to find out about him.

    "Don't worry," said Mary. "I won't say anything but one day you're going to have to."

    That night as Vickers climbed into bed next to him Edmund considered how something that felt so good could be so wrong. He loved everything about Vickers. He loved his fingers and his toes, his nose and his mouth, and his hairy arsehole and his heavy cock. 

    The first night of their reunion was always the best but this evening Vickers put a hand on Edmund’s chest as he moved up to kiss him.

    "You know what?" said Vickers. "Don't think me paranoid but I think I'm being followed."

    "Followed?"

    Outside one of the fishing boats pulled against its mooring ropes. Edmund had heard this sound a thousand times but this evening it sent a shiver down his spine. 

    "There's this chap," said Vickers. "Wears a coat with a collar turned up and a bowler hat. I've seen him outside my work a few times and then outside my flat too. You can't mistake him. He is swarthy and foreign looking. He doesn't suit a bowler hat. Imagine an Alsatian dog in a bowler hat. He's not an Alsatian dog but you know what I mean. Well the thing is," said Vickers, "if I didn't see the blasted fellow on the train from London to Edinburgh too."

    "He followed you to Scotland?" said Edmund. His penis which had remained hard up until this point suddenly went as soft as a digestive biscuit dunked into hot tea. 

    "Don't worry I lost him at Waverley," said Vickers. "I did that hop into and out of a taxi and then onto a bus only to get off at the first stop and double back to where you started from trick you taught me. The thing is, what does he want?"

    That night Edmund was unable to sleep. He and Vickers had never talked about the night he had killed Wolf, not directly. It had, however, served to bring them closer together. 

    On going back to the bed and breakfast they had pushed the two beds together and had made love for the first time. It had been wonderful. More than wonderful.

    The morning after Vickers's arrival and subsequent shocking revelation Edmund was awake well before his alarm. He kissed Vickers lightly on the cheek so as not to wake him before pulling on his warmest clothes. Old McClafferty had warned him there was going to be an icy northwester that day. 

    Before leaving the room he stopped and returned to the bed. He pulled back the covers and stood admiring his friend’s naked body. "I love you," he said. "I love you so much." Then he went to work. 

    The transition from a civil servant concerned with fish to an actual fisherman had been easier than he’d expected. 

    The Scottish fisherman had welcomed him if not with open arms then with a certain gruff acknowledgment and had quickly given him the soubriquet ’the fucking mad Englishman’. 

    He always fished the longest and went out the furthest. He was determined to make this new life work. Having a beautiful wife certainly had helped. In those first difficult weeks she had come down with him when he went out and was there waiting for him when he came back. She looked like something from a Greek tragedy. All he had to do was get eaten by a shark or something and she could have lived the role for real. 

    "I'm telling you," said one of the fishermen once, pulling Edmund to him and leering toothlessly into his face, "if I had a lassie like that waiting for me at home I’d never get in my boat, I fucking wouldn't."

    As for Agnes she had adapted remarkably well to be being torn from her London life. She loved her new school. All the children, of all ages, were taught in the same class and when the snows came, and the snows in that part of the world were frequent, Mr Philpot, the head and only teacher, would bring those children whose parents weren't able to come and collect them home on a sledge. It was a proper old wooden thing with glistening skis. 

    "I feel like I'm a character from an adventure story," Agnes would say every time. "I hope we have snow again tomorrow." 

    The school had quite an extensive library, the books largely donated by former students who never forgot the pleasure of going to that library themselves, and Agnes was working through the books one by one. She had a system by which she chose the next book but that system was highly secret and she had vowed never to tell it to anyone. She had developed into quite a quirky, strong-minded, individual girl. Just like her mother.

    When Edmund got home from that day’s fishing he spoke to Agnes more sternly than he intended. 

    "Can you go to your room please Agnes," he said. 

    When he heard her door shut he told Vickers to tell Mary what he had told him.

    Once he had finished Mary said, "And you are sure he didn't follow you on from Edinburgh?"

    "Cross my heart and hope to die," said Vickers. 

    "This is not a game," said Mary. She went and got the bottle of whiskey which was only for special occasions and poured them each a large shot. "You mustn't tell what I'm going to tell you to anybody else."

    She then told them what she had vowed she would never tell anyone, about how her father had dragged her and her mother away from their home in Iceland and how he had joined the Nazi party. 

    "My father was a very cruel man, a talent that took him very far under National Socialism." She knocked back her drink in one. "By 1943 we actually had a home on one of the death camps. If I told you the name then you would know it but even now I cannot bring myself to say it." She shuddered, the movement seeming to pass through her whole body. "When finally it seemed the Nazis were going to lose the war chaos erupted within the camp. There were certain Germans there who wanted to destroy everything, to cover up any evidence of what had been happening. Although I was only a young child I took the opportunity of this chaos to convince my mother to flee. She was a weak women. Over the years my father had beaten any resistance out of her. But on this occasion she listened and we left. And I vowed on that day that I would never see him again." She slammed a fist down on the table. "And certainly he will not see my daughter. God only knows what he wants with her."

    She took out the letters, she had them hidden in a cupboard in the kitchen, and she showed them to Edmund and Vickers.

    "But why didn't you tell me about this," said Edmund. He wasn't sure whether to be angry or upset. "I always thought your father was dead."

    "We all have secrets," said Mary and she looked first at Edmund and then at Vickers. Her meaning was clear. 

    After this Vickers continued to visit every three months but now he was more careful than ever. Sometimes he traveled on the sleeper, sometimes he traveled on the morning train, sometimes he traveled on the evening train. In Edinburgh he always went to great lengths to make sure he wasn't followed and all three of them kept a special eye out for a man in a bowler hat. 
 

 

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