The Day She Came Back(94)

‘Can you tell her . . . tell her it’s her daughter. Her daughter, Victory . . . and I’m here to see my mum.’





EPILOGUE

Victoria guessed that, for some people, the graveyard on the Ekeberg slope might be a strange destination for a family hike, but not for her. Not only was the view one of the most beautiful and worth making the climb for, but also, she had lived for so long with the lines between the living and the dead a little blurred that she felt quite at home here.

The three of them climbed the last of the incline and Victoria sat down hard on the wooden slatted bench, breathing in the clean, fresh air that invigorated. Her husband caught the edge of her coat under his bottom, trapping it against the seat. She let her eyes sweep the blue vista below, marvelling at the treeline, where the pointed green spires of the birch and spruce reached up into the sky as they stood like sentinels along the bank of the fjord. It was on a much grander scale, of course, but nonetheless reminded her of the lake at Rosebank, the family home they had sold some years ago. It had been cathartic moving on, and quite joyous selecting which pieces of art and furniture to hang and keep in their own wooden cottage with its wonderful parcel of untrained land.

‘I like it up here.’ Stina kicked her long legs, inherited from her pappa, against the side of the bench, sitting between her parents, who she knew liked to sit here and natter, and had been doing so since long before she was born.

‘Why do you?’ Victoria thought it was a strange choice for a six-year-old, who some might think would have an aversion to graveyards.

‘I like the view and I like all the dead people.’

‘You like all the dead people?’ Victoria laughed and exchanged a look with Vidar, who raised his eyebrows.

‘I think it’s nice to chat to them,’ her little girl explained. ‘And tell them what’s going on, because they can’t read papers or see a computer when they are under the ground, can they?’

‘No, they can’t.’ Vidar nodded earnestly. ‘You are absolutely right. So, what would you like to tell them today? Anything in particular?’

Stina seemed to give this some thought. ‘I would like to say we have nice weather.’ She twirled the end of her long blonde braids, a habit that was beyond cute and something she did when she concentrated.

‘Always a good talking point.’ Vidar nodded his approval and Victoria felt a rush of love for the man who would never mock but always embraced his daughter’s ideas and thoughts, giving her a wonderful confidence that Victoria, at the age of twenty-eight, would like a pinch of. It was just one of the reasons she loved the man she had fallen for on her nineteenth birthday, a day when she and her mum had rushed home from her office and he had been invited to a small party where four people had sat around the table in the flat across the hallway from his and eaten a very grand home-made chocolate cake as they sipped champagne. She had blown out the candles on the cake and made a wish, a wish that had come true. She twisted the gold band on the third finger of her left hand, taking comfort from it.

Vidar was a man who essentially liked her for her, all of her: warts and all. His love provided a kind of universal acceptance that was the greatest of comforts. And once she recognised it as love and knew she was loved in return, she stopped worrying about the future. In fact, she stopped worrying about most things, because she knew that with Vidar Larsen by her side everything would be just fine. In fact, so certain was she of that future that she had waved goodbye to him one cold, sunny day to travel the world with her best friend, Daksha. The time with her best friend, spent wandering the planet with a pack on their backs and sturdy boots on their feet, still provided some of her very best memories.

It was a great source of joy to everyone, other than Dr and Mrs Joshi, that Daksha had decided, after seeing the world, that university wasn’t for her after all, puncturing their dreams of her medical career, and she now lived in the south of France, running a bakery school and patisserie with her wonderful wife, Margaux. Where cake was always on the menu, of course.

Stina leaned back against her and Victoria folded her form into hers like a warm and comfortable cushion. Proximity to her child made her heart beat a little faster and a smile form on her face. She might be a tutoring assistant in mathematics at Universitetet i Oslo, but being Stina’s mamma was still her very best job.

‘And I would also like to tell the dead people that it is not nice to make anyone eat vegetables they really don’t like. And I would tell them that Bestefar Jens agrees with me.’

‘Give it up, Stina. Firstly, Bestefar Jens is your grandfather and therefore agrees with whatever you say and do – you have him wrapped around your little finger; and secondly, we have talked about this – you have to eat vegetables!’ She looked over her little girl’s head and tried to stifle her laughter.

‘Anyway’ – Victoria reached along the back of the bench and held Vidar’s hand – ‘people aren’t really dead if you still talk about them.’ She looked down over the fjord that swept to the left. The wispy clouds seemed perfectly placed in the clear blue sky and birds, with wings stretched, hovered on the breeze, low on the water as they scanned for fish.

‘Like you still talk to Prim?’ Stina asked, quite matter-of-factly.

‘How do you know I still talk to Prim?’

It made her laugh to hear her little girl talk so confidently about the woman she had never met, her great-grandma, who had shaped all of their lives in ways her little girl could only guess at.