wrenching sobs on Erica’s shoulder. After a while she raised her head. Her mascara had smeared even more, giving her an almost comical, clown-like look.
‘I’m sorry.’ Pernilla looked through her haze of tears at Erica’s shoulder, where the white jumper she was wearing had been coloured black by the mascara.
‘It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. Come in.’
Erica put one arm round Pernilla’s shoulders and led her into the living room. She could feel Pernilla shaking all over, and she didn’t think it was only because of the cold. For a second, she wondered why Pernilla had chosen her to go to. Erica had always been Dan’s friend much more than Pernilla’s. She thought it was a little odd that Pernilla hadn’t gone to one of her own girlfriends, or her sister. But now she was here, at any rate, and Erica had to do everything she could to help her.
‘I’ve got a pot of coffee on. Would you like a cup? It’s been on for about an hour, but it’s probably fairly drinkable.’
‘Yes, thanks.’
Pernilla sat down on the sofa and hugged her arms to her chest, as if she were afraid of falling apart and wanted to hold herself together. In a way this was probably true.
Erica came back with two cups of coffee. She placed one on the coffee table in front of Pernilla and the other in front of herself, sitting down in the big wing chair so that she was facing Pernilla on the sofa. She waited for Pernilla to begin.
‘Did you know?’
Erica hesitated. ‘Yes, but not until very recently.’ She hesitated again. ‘I urged Dan to tell you.’
Pernilla nodded. ‘What should I do?’
The question was rhetorical, so Erica let it go unanswered.
Pernilla went on. ‘I knew that from the start I was just a way for Dan to get over you.’
Erica began to protest, but Pernilla stopped her with a wave of her hand.
‘I knew that was true, but I thought things changed with time and that we really loved each other. We get on well and I trusted him completely.’
‘Dan loves you, Pernilla. I know he does.’
Pernilla didn’t seem to be listening to her; she kept talking while she gazed into her coffee cup. Erica saw that she was gripping the cup so hard that her knuckles were white.
‘I could live with it if he was having an affair and blame it on an early mid-life crisis or something. But I can never forgive him for getting that woman pregnant.’
The fury in Pernilla’s voice was so strong that Erica had to fight an impulse to move back. When Pernilla raised her head and looked at Erica, the hatred in her eyes was so fierce that Erica felt an icy premonition. She had never before seen such a white-hot, intense fury. For a brief moment she wondered how long Pernilla had actually known about Dan’s relationship with Alex. And how far she would be prepared to go to exact revenge. Then she rejected the idea as quickly as it had appeared. This was Pernilla, a housewife with three children, married to Dan for many years, not a raging fury acting as an avenging angel against her husband’s lover. But there was still a cold ferocity in Pernilla’s eyes that scared Erica.
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. I just had to get out of the house. That was the only thought I had in my head. I couldn’t even look at him.’
Erica sent a sympathetic thought to Dan. He was surely in his own private hell right now. It would have felt more natural if it were Dan who had come to her for comfort. Then she would have known what to say, which words would reassure him. She didn’t know Pernilla well enough to know how to help. Perhaps it was enough just to listen.
‘Why do you think he did it? What wasn’t he getting from me that he got from her?’
Now Erica understood why Pernilla had to come to her instead of going to one of her many close friends. She believed that Erica possessed answers about Dan. That she would be able to give Pernilla the key to why he’d acted the way he had. Unfortunately, Erica would have to disappoint her. She had always known Dan as honesty incarnate; it had never even occurred to her that he might be unfaithful. She was never as shocked as when she rang the last number called on Alex’s telephone and heard Dan’s voice on his voicemail. If she were really honest, she would admit to feeling a great disappointment at that moment – the disappointment of discovering that someone she was close to was not the person she had always thought he was. That’s why she understood that Pernilla, besides feeling betrayed and deceived, had also begun asking questions about who Dan really was – this man she had lived with all these years.
‘I don’t know, Pernilla. I was actually terribly shocked. It wasn’t like the Dan I know.’
Pernilla nodded. It seemed to console her a bit that she wasn’t the only one who’d been fooled. She nervously picked at invisible threads on her baggy cardigan. Her long, dark-brown hair with traces of a permanent had been hastily pulled back in a knot, giving her an unkempt look. Erica had always been a bit scornful about the way Pernilla looked; she should have been able to do a lot more with her appearance. She kept getting her hair permed even though permanents went out of fashion at about the same time mid-length men’s jackets did. And she always bought her clothes from cheap mail-order department stores, with low prices and a fashion sense to match. But Erica had never seen her look this shabby.
‘Pernilla, I know it’s incredibly hard just now, but you’re a family, you and Dan. You have three wonderful girls and you’ve had fifteen good years together. You shouldn’t do anything hasty. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone anything he’s done. Perhaps you can’t stay together after this. Maybe it’s impossible to forgive him. But wait to make any decisions until it’s sunk in a little. Think carefully before you do anything. I know that Dan loves you; he told me that as recently as today. I also know that he deeply regrets what he did. He told me that he wanted to break it off with her and I believe him.’
‘I don’t know what to believe anymore, Erica. Nothing of what I believed before was true, so what should I believe now?’
There was no answer to that, and the silence settled heavily between them.
‘What was she like?’
Once again Erica saw a cold fire burning far back in Pernilla’s eyes. She didn’t have to ask who she meant.
‘It was so long ago. I didn’t know her anymore.’
‘She was beautiful. I saw her here in the summertime. She was just like I wanted to be. Beautiful, elegant, sophisticated. She made me feel like a peasant. I would have given anything to be like her. In a way I can understand Dan. Put me and Alex next to each other and it’s obvious who would win.’
Pernilla tugged in frustration at her practical but unfashionable clothes as if to demonstrate what she meant.
‘I’ve always been envious of you too. The great love of his youth who moved to the big city and left him behind to pine away. The author from Stockholm who really made something of her life and who came back here and boasted to us normal mortals once in a while. Dan always looked forward to your visits for weeks beforehand.’
The bitterness in Pernilla’s voice
