The Cold Song: A Novel by Linn Ullmann

Author:Linn Ullmann [Ullmann, Linn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Mystery, Contemporary, Thriller, Fiction
ISBN: 9781590516676
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2014-04-07T23:00:00+00:00

JENNY HAD NODDED off on the bed but was woken by Siri calling her. “Listen to me now, you’ve got to come down! The party’s started and your guests are all waiting for you!”

She opened her eyes with a groan. Her head was pounding.

Siri. My little girl.

It was as if she could see the two of them right here in this room many, many years earlier, herself in front of the mirror, her little daughter right behind her, and she smiled remembering how she had let Siri brush her hair every evening. She could hear her daughter’s voice back then: Bend forward, Mama, and she would bend forward, sending her hair cascading to the floor. One. Two. Three. Four. Oh yes, there had to be a hundred strokes or it didn’t count. Five. Six. Seven. And Jenny remembered that it had hurt her back, standing like that, bent forward, but that it had been absolutely essential that Siri be allowed to finish brushing. The warm scent of her daughter’s skin, the eager little hands, the brisk strokes tugging through her hair. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. And how she had tried to think of other things: books she had read, men who had made her laugh, the trip to America that she had dreamed of making but that had never come to anything, Siri’s father who had run off and moved in with that Swedish whore in Slite, no, don’t think about that, think about something good, to help forget that she was doubled up like this with her back aching. Forty-four. Forty-five. Forty-six. That she was still young and beautiful, well, not quite so young, maybe, on the wrong side of thirty as Jane Austen would have put it, but beautiful, of that there was no doubt. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy. And how in the end all her thoughts twined together to form one thought, the one, constant thought. Eighty-four. Her boy. Syver. All thoughts ran into Syver. Ninety-one. Why had she let the children out on their own? Why had she insisted on their being outside? They’d been huddling there, knocking on the door, wanting to come in, but she’d needed a little time to herself, she’d needed peace, it was a lot to cope with, having two young children when you longed to do something else, she remembered how she had looked forward to both children being old enough to start school so that she could go back to work, and she had told them that in this house we have inside time and outside time, and right now it’s outside time, come back at two o’clock. Her only boy. Those blue eyes. That gray woolly hat. Those slender, delicate hands and long fingers. That soft body. That piping voice. Those heavy bangs, with the cowlick that always stuck straight up. And that it wasn’t possible to end it all, even though life without him was, and would always be, bereft of light. It wasn’t true what they said, that it gradually became easier to cope with loss, that time would work in her favor.

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