Waiting for Willa Read online

  “Thank you,” said Grace, knowing he was the kind of man who thought he had to say flattering things to a girl, knowing also that he didn’t mean a word of it. “That isn’t exactly the point.”

  “It’s always a point in a girl’s life. Don’t argue that one. And by the way”—he had stopped the car outside the house on Strandvägen and turned to look seriously at Grace—“don’t get it into your head that this could be a matter for the police.”

  “But I hadn’t thought any such thing!” Grace exclaimed, genuinely shocked.

  “I was only thinking—with your novelist’s mind—it wouldn’t do, you know, we couldn’t have a scandal. One’s country’s prestige and all that. Get me? Good night, Grace. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow evening.”

  Chapter 3

  THE DOOR OF THE GROUND-FLOOR flat opened an inch as Grace went in. So Fru Lindstrom was one of those irritating people, a listener, a peeper. It was not surprising, considering her interest already in Willa’s absence and Grace’s arrival. She was probably hoping Grace was going to tap on her door and report on her activities. When Grace, with ostentatiously loud footsteps, began to climb the stairs, the door closed softly, regretfully.

  Grace had no time at this moment for Fru Lindstrom. She was seething with indignation. Her novelist’s mind, indeed! Was Peter Sinclair mocking her concern for Willa? She hoped he was. She sincerely hoped so. Because if his warning about the police had been made in all seriousness, then it meant that he was afraid she might uncover something disturbing.

  Inside Willa’s quiet flat, with all the lights switched on for comfort, Grace sat down to think constructively.

  Willa had sent her secret SOS. She must have known it would bring an immediate response from Grace. But she hadn’t waited for the response. She had gone off even before Grace’s telegram had arrived. So either she was about to come back or she had left some message for Grace to find on her arrival.

  The flat must hold a clue. Willa was the kind of person who hid things in eccentric but obvious places. Her jewelry in an old teapot, for instance, her diary under her pillow. Grace gave an exclamation, surprised at herself for forgetting the most important clue.

  Willa’s diary was as much a part of her as her makeup, her conversation, her individual manner. She imagined herself a twentieth-century Fanny Burney, recording for posterity the life of an average young woman of modern times. It was not to be published until forty years after her death, she said in complete seriousness, which was a pity because Grace already had the pleasure of seeing her own work in print, and that was something to be envied.

  “But I am a diarist, not a novelist.” Willa had sighed. She had occasionally let Grace read some extracts of the previous volumes. (There were already ten of them locked away in a box among Willa’s possessions in England.) The writing was untidy and undisciplined, like her letters, but in places it had a strange power, especially the account she had written of her abortion. Her pain and anguish had started out of the page. To her, the diary was a confessional and an absolution. It somehow enabled her to keep her curious innocence in spite of her impulsive and not always admirable behavior.

  So there must be a current diary in the flat, unless she had taken it with her.

  Grace sprang up and began searching, throwing things about in her impatience. Was it hidden behind books on the bookshelf, in the drawers of the writing desk—no, too obvious—inside cushions that unzipped, under the floor rugs, behind the large dark painting on the wall, among plates in the sideboard, under the pillows or the mattress of the pretty bed, in the wardrobe, in the dirty linen basket in the bathroom, behind cans of sugar and tea in the kitchen cupboard, in the refrigerator.

  “I’m afraid it’s no use looking in there. Willa never kept enough food to feed a hungry mouse. I have taken the liberty of preparing something, which is here.”

  The tall man in the doorway was holding a covered tray. In her fright, Grace had dropped the bony joint wrapped in polyethylene.

  “Throw that away: It looks nasty,” the man said. “Do you want to get food poisoning? Then we would have another calamity.”

  “Another?”

  “Willa’s departure is already one, isn’t it?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Polsen. I live on the top floor.”

  “Just Polsen?”

  “I have a first name, but you would never be able to pronounce it. Now tell me who you are.”

  His ponderous manner was reassuring. Grace relaxed and said, “I’m Grace Asherton, Willa’s cousin. I’ve come to visit her and found her gone. What’s under that cloth?”

  Polsen whipped the cover off the tray, exposing the arranged dishes.

  “Soup. Soused herring. Cheese. Butter. Rye bread. Coffee, snaps, and beer. Okay?”

  Grace shut the refrigerator door with a bang. She sighed with pleasure. The diary could wait.

  “I’m starving. I hadn’t realized.”

  “So am I. We have enough here for two. May I sit at the table with you? Willa and I did this sometimes. But not often, I am sad to say, for my own sake. She led a very busy life.”

  Grace sat down, looking with frank interest at her visitor. He was very tall, with untidy dark hair and a long, bloomy bloodhound kind of face. He wore a shaggy high-necked pullover over corduroy trousers. His eyes looked myopic behind strong glasses. Grace wondered if he ever smiled. She wondered how much those myopic eyes, with their mild, impersonal gaze, really saw. She sighed again with pleasure, not only at the prospect of food, but at having another source of information to investigate.

  “Can we eat before I ask you questions?”

  “Sure. Questions with coffee? You can tell me about yourself in the meantime.”

  “I expect Mrs. Lindstrom told you about me?”

  “In this house, news flies. You must drink your snaps with the fish. Soup first.”

  Grace took a spoonful.

  “Delicious.”

  Polsen nodded his big head solemnly. “Oh, yes, I am a first-class cook when I have the time. I teach at the university, and I paint a little and do a little housework and ski in the winter and try to read all the books I want to.”

  “No wife?”

  “Not for present.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  The strange eyes behind the thick spectacles looked at her ringless fingers.

  “No husband?”

  “Not at present,” Grace retorted, then frowned at herself. “That was unfair. After your bringing me this lovely meal. No, I haven’t got a husband. So far I’ve spoiled my chances by being married to my typewriter. I’ve always been much more cautious than Willa. She goes too much one way, I the other.”

  He spent quite a long time looking at her. He was one of those slow reflective men who pondered immensely before he committed himself to speech.

  Then he gave an admiring smile and said, “That was clever.”

  “How?”

  “You are so honest that courtesy compels me to be honest, too. I have a wife, of course. After all, I’m nearly forty years old. But we live apart. I have a son, whom I see every Sunday. I wouldn’t want to lose that privilege. He’s a nice little fellow. I’m going to teach him to ski this winter. So that’s how it is.”

  “But if you should fall in love again?”

  “Me?” Grace thought his wry look was sad. She wondered what Willa had thought of him. Dull, but useful probably. Willa never despised usefulness in people.

  “Now the snaps.” He filled two glasses to the brim with the honey-colored liquid, and lifted his own. “Skål!”

  Grace imitated his action. She was feeling happier and relaxed. She had needed food and perhaps this undemanding conversation, too. It had been a long, lonely day.

  “I’m at least going to enjoy Stockholm, now that I’m here.”

  “Then you didn’t bring your uncomfortable bedfellow?”

  “My which?”

  “The typewriter you f
ind so inseparable?”

  Grace gave a small snort, acknowledging his joke, although it didn’t amuse her.

  Jokes about lady novelists never did, and she feared he was about to make one.

  She laid down her knife and fork and deliberately changed the subject.

  “Tell me what you know about Willa, Polsen. Did you meet her friends? This Gustav. Did you meet him?”

  “Gustav?”

  “That’s the name of the man she’s supposed to be marrying. Hadn’t you heard of him?”

  “No, I hadn’t.”

  Grace raised her eyebrows in astonishment.

  “You mean Willa never mentioned him to you!”

  “Well, she may have. She mentioned men a great deal. There could have been a Gustav. It’s a common enough name in Sweden.”

  “Yet you say you and Willa were good friends.”

  “I thought so.” Polsen wrinkled his brow, looking more than ever like a lugubrious bloodhound. “That didn’t mean she told me all her secrets, obviously. Besides, we didn’t live on each other’s doorsteps. I would have evening classes, or she would have dates. I’m not Fru Lindstrom, with my ear to the door.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Grace began, but was interrupted blandly.

  “I am quite happy to be cross-examined.”

  “I didn’t mean to do that either. I’m only so anxious to get any information. The smallest crumbs. For instance, all these expensive things that don’t go with a furnished flat.”

  Polson stooped to pick up the cushions from the floor.

  “Have you been looking for her under the sofa?”

  “Don’t make a joke of it, please. I was looking for clues. Willa had a habit of hiding things in strange places.”

  “But you haven’t found anything significant?”

  “Only this evidence that she was living beyond her means. How could she buy Persian rugs, for instance?”

  “I thought she had some private income,” Polsen admitted. “She said with the long dark winter coming, she must have color.”

  “Everyone seems to be neurotic about the winter.”

  “It depends.”

  “Then Willa obviously thought she would be spending the winter here. Fru Lindstrom said she intended getting a canary. What made her change her plans so suddenly?”

  “I can only suggest that love produces an unpredictable state of mind.”

  “Now you sound exactly like a professor! Tell me, did you meet any of the men who came here to see Willa?”

  “I don’t think so many came here. Willa went out. She had plenty of dates. She had a party here just before she dis—went away. There were so many people I couldn’t have told you who anyone was, with certainty. People from the embassy, mostly.”

  “No one called Gustav?”

  “Not that I can be sure about. It was a great party, though. Willa had her hair yellow for the occasion. We said she should be put in that pretty birdcage in place of the absent canary.”

  “That sounds like Willa,” Grace said. “Her hair has been every color except green at one time or another.”

  “It looked nice. She said she intended keeping it yellow all the winter. It would brighten the landscape. I mean, it will brighten the landscape.”

  Grace stared at him, not speaking, fighting her unreasonable apprehension again. She was suddenly having an uncomfortable picture of Willa with her sunflower head shivering in a landscape of snow and dark forest.

  “We had an arrangement,” Polsen went on. “She rapped on the ceiling in the kitchen with a broom handle. Two raps, she wanted to talk, because she got broody when she was alone; three, had I anything to eat because she was dying of starvation.”

  That all rang true. Willa and her games. The secret signature to letters, the way she hid things, the drama of her disappearance.

  “The same rules must apply to you while you stay here, Grace.”

  “Are you playing nanny to us?” Grace asked and was immediately remorseful, because of the hurt that came into his face. He didn’t understand what “nanny” meant. When told, he was no less hurt.

  “I didn’t think you would be so sensitive, Polsen.”

  His heavy head hung down self-consciously.

  “You can think me a fool,” he said at last. “For a man, I am ridiculously sensitive. But I wasn’t a nanny, as you express it, to Willa. She had long ago outgrown the need for that sort of person. I was only a friend. She talked too much, but that was good for a silent creature like myself. I liked her. She was mostly happy, I think.”

  “Only mostly?”

  “That’s what I said. Sometimes she needed to be cheered up. She would have a quarrel with a boyfriend—”

  “Which boy friend?”

  “How was I to know? But I can guess when a girl is crying over a man.”

  “Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

  He looked shocked, his dark eyes staring through the thick glasses.

  “Was she?” he asked after several moments.

  “The Sinclairs seem to think so.”

  He leaned forward earnestly. “Then what’s the fuss, Grace? The sooner she’s married, the better. There was never a better invention for a baby than a father. Why don’t you stop worrying about her? This could explain everything. So enjoy yourself until she comes back with her husband, and it doesn’t matter what his name is, Gustav, Jacob, whoever.”

  “Yes, that’s what everyone tells me to do.” Grace sighed. “I suppose there’s no alternative.” (Except to find Willa’s diary which she would succeed in doing when Polsen had gone. The diary simply must explain Willa’s cry for help.)

  She found it at last in the least obvious, yet for Willa the most obvious, place.

  There was a false bottom to the birdcage. The diary fitted exactly into the cavity. One could wonder if it was simply for this purpose that Willa had bought the birdcage. The diary had certainly been brought to record her Swedish stay, for it began on the day of her arrival. There were more than fifty pages of close writing, Willa’s tight, upright script that never lost its neatness even when she was making a comment that required three exclamation marks.

  Grace’s heart was beating fast with triumph and relief. Now the mystery would be solved. She could hear Willa crying in outrage, “Grace, don’t you dare read that! That’s only for future generations!” But the circumstances demanded that Willa’s privacy could no longer be respected. Grace was compelled to be an eavesdropper on the next century.

  Outside, a strong wind had begun to blow. It whined against the windows, and a trickle of cold seemed to come into the room. Grace turned up the heat, wondering if it would kill the pot plants. She hadn’t imagined that chill. The gusts of wind shook the windows, making the curtains billow slightly. Perhaps tonight the first snow of the winter would fall. It would be a pity if all those fragile yellow leaves were scattered from the birch trees. Then the countryside would indeed be somber, and the winter dark begun.

  It seemed to have begun already in this room when Grace switched off the lights, leaving only the one by the armchair burning. She was shivering a little as she sat down and commenced to read.

  Two hours later she closed the book and rubbed her tired eyes. The room was comfortably hot now, and the wind seemed to have died. At least it was no longer howling like wolves, which had been one of Willa’s expressions. There were many others.

  “All those dark trees go on forever, and the rain dripping on the roof is driving me mad…”

  That was written at the end of September. What had gone before was equally graphic, equally forlorn, except for occasional snatches of gaiety when Willa described a party she had given for which she had had her hair dyed canary yellow. But the diary, in actual solid facts, told exactly nothing. It might have been written in code. Sentences that began as if they were going to contain vital information ended in mystery.

  “Went to Gripsholm Castle, saw a portrait of Gustav IV, told him it was so like him that now I
would always call him Gustav…”

  Him. Who? Grace could have wept from frustration.

  The description of Fru Lindstrom. “That peeping Thomasina downstairs.” And Polsen. “The giant in the attic with his snaps, his old potato drink…”

  Comments about her job at the embassy. “I wish Peter wouldn’t be so mad at me when I make mistakes. He has no patience” And later, “This place is full of wolves” But whether that referred to the embassy was not clear.

  There were references to Kate Sinclair and the children. “Kate says I tell them stories that give them nightmares. Can’t I talk about anything but dark forests…” Then a strange little entry. “A house with a little gold dragon door knocker, so unlikely for the unfrivolous Swedes. In the old town, of course.” And then, unexpectedly. “I hate those melancholy cemeteries with the tall trees.” But she had been intrigued by “the king with two queens” although maddeningly, she had not explained what she referred to. Later there was another royal reference. “The poor queen kept in the attic.”

  After all those unconnected statements, a coherent entry was welcome.

  “The Backes invited me for a weekend. House by lake, dark wallpaper, dark pictures, lace curtains, fug. Papa watches me all the time. Mama very fat, hands like little white pillows. Ulrika doesn’t like Sven liking me, she is too possessive. Unhealthy. I see them both in that dark Strindberg house forever…”

  Sven. Was he Gustav?

  But that entry had been made in August. The ones that followed made no reference to the weekend at the Backes. There was a cryptic “Gustav doesn’t like my new hair color, says it makes me too conspicuous.” But obviously she hadn’t changed it for him.

  There was a comment on the endless dark-red and mustard-colored houses. “When I get my own, I am going to paint it pink.”

  Then “Axel with his staring eyes” and “Jacob, don’t underestimate. These quiet men…”

  The last entry but one was “I should have got that canary; this place is too damn quiet” and the last one of all, made exactly two weeks ago, said cryptically. “Almost time to leave. I hope it doesn’t snow. Otherwise, when will we ever get back?”