The Young Heart by Helena Halme

Author:Helena Halme
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781999892968
Publisher: Helena Halme

Eleven

Matti insisted on driving Kaisa to Helsinki airport, even though he had to swap his shift at the Customs House. Kaisa tried to be less annoyed with him; she knew he was only looking after her. As she sat in the front seat of his old green Opel Kadett, his mother’s car, she felt guilty for looking forward to a whole week without him. She’d been surprised that, in the end, Matti had agreed to this holiday with her mother and sister in the Åland Islands. He’d asked her several times how much it cost, even though her money had nothing to do with him. If one of the women in the bank hadn’t tipped her off about the student discounts the airline gave she would not have been able to afford to fly. Instead, she would have had to take the train to Turku, and catch one of the Swedish ferries to the Åland Islands. It would have meant a journey lasting the best part of a day, whereas on the mid-morning flight she’d arrive in Mariehamn, the capital of the islands, just before 11am. Kaisa leant back in the car and closed her eyes. In a few minutes’ time she’d be at the airport, on her own, free with her own thoughts.

‘How can your mother afford to rent a big holiday cottage in Åland?’ Matti’s voice startled Kaisa. She’d dozed off, and was half-asleep, dreaming of the holiday. She’d been sitting on a sandy beach, with the sun shining from a bright blue sky and water lapping at her feet.

Kaisa turned to her fiancé. ‘She has a good job in Stockholm.’

‘Hmm,’ Matti said, his voice full of scepticism.

Matti, and his well-bred, wealthy mother, had been suspicious of her divorced mother from the beginning. Kaisa remembered the awkward questions the first time her mother and Sirkka had met Mrs Rinne.

Matti and Kaisa had been engaged to be married for almost two years before she’d invited Kaisa’s mother and Sirkka for coffee at the house in Munkkiniemi, the diplomatic quarter of Helsinki, close to where President Kekkonen had a summer residence. Kaisa hadn’t minded that her two worlds had been kept apart; Matti’s life at home seemed to belong to the 1950s, with its Finnish dance music, crystal chandeliers and French rococo-style furniture. The thought of Matti’s mother visiting the small flat in Lauttasaari with its tiny rooms, or seeing the kitchen, with its old table that her mother had painted black to go with the pattern of the curtains, which had large red, yellow and purple flowers on a charcoal background, filled Kaisa with dread. She could hardly imagine what Mrs Rinne would have made of the fish netting, complete with starfish and coloured polystyrene floats hanging off the ceiling in the living room. One of Sirkka’s boyfriends had found the netting and given it to them. Where it came from, Kaisa had no idea. On a rainy Sunday afternoon, Sirkka, Kaisa and their mother had decided to nail

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