Deadheading

Free sample — the opening of Chapter 1, Sankt Hans Eve. The complete book (159 pages, 22 chapters) comes as DRM-free PDF + EPUB with purchase.

Chapter 1: Sankt Hans Eve

Merete Lund had learned, in forty-one years of teaching, that the truest sentences were written before seven in the morning, and she held to the habit still. At half past five on the twenty-third of June she sat on the step of her hut on plot 14 with the garden journal open on her knee, a pencil behind her ear and a cup of coffee cooling beside the watering can, and she wrote:

23 June. Sankt Hans Eve. Clear night, dew heavy. Peas want stringing. Blackbird back on the flagpole at 5.15, same as yesterday — punctual as a caretaker. Meeting tonight, 19.00. Watered before six, as one should.

That last clause was not law, exactly. Nothing at Haveforeningen Solvænget was exactly law except the hedge rule — one metre sixty, measured from the path side, no exceptions, not even for the chairman — but there were understandings, and watering before the sun climbed the S-train embankment was one of them. The colony lay in the long triangle between the railway and the harbour inlet, sixty-two plots stitched together by gravel paths and gooseberry hedges, and by seven the light came over the embankment like a lid lifting off a pot. After that, water on the leaves scorched. Everyone knew it. Everyone had been told it by someone older, in 1943 or 1968 or last Tuesday, and had passed it on with the key to the shared tap.

She watered. The peas first, then the potatoes Poul had always insisted on though neither of them had ever much liked potatoes, then the roses along the hedge, which she deadheaded as she went, thumbnail against stem, the spent blooms dropping soft into her apron pocket. Three summers now she had done this alone, and the strange thing was not the loneliness — the loneliness was ordinary, a low tide she had learned to walk out on — the strange thing was how often she still stepped aside on the path to let him pass with the heavy can.

The first train of the day went by at 5.42, a green worm above the elderflowers, and the whole colony seemed to shake itself and stand up.

From the inlet came the smell that meant high summer: warm reed, mud, a faint sweetness of tar from somewhere across the water. Down on the bonfire meadow two of the younger fathers were already building the Sankt Hans pyre for midsummer’s eve — pallets, prunings, a broken trellis Merete recognised as the Johansens’ — and their voices carried flat and cheerful over the dew. Tonight there would be the bonfire, the witch of straw and old tights on top of it, the midsummer song sung slightly too slowly, snaps in paper cups. But before the bonfire there would be the meeting, and the meeting sat on the day like a stone in a shoe.

Extraordinary general meeting, the notice on the board of the fælleshus — the colony’s clubhouse, whitewashed and flag-proud — had said for three weeks, in Gerda Vang’s careful capitals. Sole agenda item: the offer from Havnholm Ejendomme A/S. Below it someone had pinned a photocopied map with the colony shaded in developer’s grey, and below that Torben Skov had stapled the first of his posters. There were now eleven of them between the gate and the clubhouse. VOTE NO, they said, in letters that had been red and were going pink in the sun. SOLVÆNGET IS NOT FOR SALE.

Merete filled her can a second time at the shared tap and went, as she did most mornings, the long way home.

The long way took her past plot 9, which was the point of it, though she would not have said so. Plot 9 was Henning Dahl’s, and Henning Dahl’s dahlias were, even by the standards of a man who had chaired the colony for nineteen years and never let anyone forget either fact, worth the detour.

He was among them already, in pressed trousers at six in the morning, going down the rows with a soft brush and a magnifying glass like a customs officer. The dahlias stood in ranks — Café au Lait, Bishop of Llandaff, a dark unnamed one the colour of pickled beetroot — each stake labelled in a hand that was not Henning’s. Ingrid’s hand, still, nineteen years after Ingrid. He grew her flowers the way some men kept a dead wife’s coat on the hook.

“Earwigs,” he said, without looking up. “They come over from Skov’s compost like tourists. I’ve written to the committee about it.”

“You are the committee, Henning.”

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