Since he liked to travel in comfort and stay in the most expensive hotels he would not have been able to undertake this trip if he had not received the Nylander grant of 80,000 kronor. It was a newly established grant, the donor a shirt manufacturer from Borås who had long nourished the dream of becoming a poet. He had been bitterly disappointed to see his dreams of poetry disappear in a lifelong battle with arrogant shirt designers, suspicious labour unions and unhelpful tax authorities. His time had been spent on button-down collars, colours and fabric swatches. In an attempt to come to terms with his own disappointment he had established the fund that would go to ‘Swedish writers in need of peace and quiet for completion of their work’. The first grant had gone to Jesper Humlin.
The phone rang.
‘I want a child.’
‘Right now?’
‘I’m thirty-one years old. We either have a child or it’s over.’
It was Andrea. She was a nurse anaesthetist and never knocked on doors. Humlin had met her at a poetry reading he had done a couple of years earlier when he had just sworn off the bachelor lifestyle and decided to settle down with one woman. With her slim face and dark hair he had immediately been attracted to Andrea. He had also fallen for her enthusiastic response to his poems. When she was angry at him, which was a fairly common occurrence, she liked to accuse him of having picked her in order to have constant access to someone in the medical profession, since due to his hypochondria he was always convinced that he was suffering from a fatal illness.
This time she was furious. Humlin wanted children, many children. But not right away and possibly not with Andrea. Naturally this was not something he was prepared to discuss with her, at least not by phone.
‘Of course we’ll have children,’ he said. ‘Many children.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re always changing your mind about everything. Except, apparently, about waiting to have children. But I’m thirty-one.’
‘That’s no age at all.’
‘For me it is.’
‘Maybe we could talk about this a little later? I have an important meeting coming up.’
‘What kind of meeting?’
‘With my publisher.’
‘If you think your meeting is more important than this conversation then I want to break up with you right now. There are other men.’
Humlin felt a pang of jealousy arise in him and escalate to painful proportions.
‘What other men?’
‘Men. Any men.’
‘You mean you are prepared to leave me for some man, any man out there?’
‘I don’t want to wait any longer.’
Humlin sensed that the conversation was spiralling out of his control.
‘You know, it’s not good for me to have these kinds of discussions so early in the morning.’
‘And you know I can’t talk about these things at night. I need my sleep because I have a job that starts early in the morning.’
The silence travelled back and forth between them.
‘What did you do in the South Pacific anyway?’
‘I rested.’
‘You don’t seem to do anything else. Were you unfaithful again?’
‘I haven’t been unfaithful. Why would you think that?’
‘Why not? You’ve done it before.’
‘You
‘To rest from what exactly?’
‘I happen to write books, as you well know.’
‘One book a year. With about forty poems. What’s that — less than one poem a week?’
‘I also write a wine-tasting column.’
‘Once a month, yes. In a trade paper for tailors that no one else reads. Now,
‘I invited you to come with me.’
‘Since you knew I couldn’t get away. But I’m about to take some time off. There’s something I want to get started on.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘I’m going to write my book.’
‘About what exactly?’
‘About us.’
Humlin felt an unpleasant pain in his stomach. Of all the things he had to worry about, the thought that Andrea might prove the more talented writer seemed to him to be the worst. Every time she brought this up he felt as if his very existence was threatened. He sometimes lay awake at night and imagined the sensational reviews of her new book, how the critics embraced her as a new talent and wrote him off as a has-been. For this reason he always devoted an extraordinary amount of time to her whenever her authorial ambitions kicked in. He cooked her dinners, talked about the inordinate amount of suffering and hard work it took to complete a book and had, up until now, always been able to talk her out of her plans.
‘I don’t want you to write a book about us.’
‘Why not?’
‘I want my private life to remain private.’
‘Who said anything about your private life?’
‘If this book is about us, it involves my private life.’
‘I can call you Anders.’
‘What difference would that possibly make?’
Humlin tried to take the conversation in a different direction.
‘I’ve thought about what you said.’
‘About being unfaithful?’
‘I haven’t been unfaithful. How many times do I have to tell you that?’
‘Until I believe you.’
‘And when are you going to believe me?’
‘Never.’
Humlin decided to retreat from this topic.
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘What about?’
