Last Train to Helsingør Read online

  At the cloakroom desk, he frowned on seeing that the girl who took his coat had left her station several minutes before the hour. He made a note to complain about this, already feeling a pleasant frisson at the prospect of standing up to speak in the wood-panelled room where members were treated twice a year to a glass of wine and a question-and-answer session with the gallery director himself.

  It wasn’t till he reached the gift shop that Leif felt a stab of unease. The shop with its rows of postcards and trinkets was dark, and there was no one behind the till. He frowned at his watch. It was still not six. Why would they have closed the shop before the gallery?

  By the exit he stood for a moment and scratched his head. The door was not in its usual place, or rather there was no door, merely a steel plate covering the entire opening where the door would have been. He pushed at it cautiously, to no avail. There was a red button to the side, but when he pressed it nothing happened, and he saw that it was operated by a key, and that the key was nowhere in sight.

  A cold feeling came over him. He remembered now that the gallery closed an hour earlier on Sundays. He was trapped inside.

  For a few seconds, a minute at most, Leif lost possession of himself. He hammered on the steel plate and screamed at the top of his voice: ‘Help! Someone open the door. Help me!’

  He made a terrific racket. The noise echoed around the vast hall, but nothing happened and no one answered him.

  He looked around for a telephone but saw none. He patted his pockets in vain, for he had left his mobile phone at home, not wishing to be disturbed by the staff at his mother’s nursing home for the few precious hours that he was going to spend at the gallery.

  There was no alarm button, nothing that could be used in any way for communicating with the outside world.

  It’s all right, he thought, trying to regain his composure. There will be a night guard, and he will let you out. In the meantime, you will not starve or die of thirst. There are plenty of shortbread biscuits and boiled sweets in the gift shop, and you can drink water from the tap in the men’s room.

  He calmed down at the thought of how he would make his complaint at the members’ evening: stoically, but leaving no doubt as to the horror of his ordeal.

  For an hour or more, he walked at pace through the dingy rooms, astonished at how different the gallery felt now.

  He called out, trying to stop himself from breaking into a run. He barely noticed the paintings now, all pleasure from them gone. As he reached the portrait room, he sensed the Duke observing him mockingly but could not find it in himself to look.

  Unless he and the night guard had persistently missed one another, it would appear that Leif was entirely alone in the gallery. There was nothing for it but to wait for someone to arrive in the morning.

  He returned to the Dutch landscape paintings and sat down and stared at the simple woman feeding the geese till his heartbeat slowed. The room felt colder now. Perhaps they turned off the heating at night?

  After a while, he lay down on the couch, and eventually managed to fall asleep, exhausted and hoarse from the shouting.

  It felt like it had been no more than minutes when something woke him. There was a noxious smell. Turpentine, he thought, his nostrils wrinkling. He opened his eyes and blinked at the vast room, trying to make sense of it. Then he remembered where he was and sat bolt upright on the couch. He immediately recoiled. There was a man standing nearby, a man wearing a black suit, a white shirt and a slim black tie.

  ‘Thank God, you have come,’ Leif said. ‘Where were you? It was dreadful. They locked me in, and there was no alarm button and no telephone. I was unable to call for help. Of course, I shall have to file a complaint.’

  He had got himself off the couch, somewhat creakily, brushed down his suit, which was terribly creased, and started to move off in the direction of the exit, but the night guard had not moved nor spoken at all.

  ‘Well, come on, man,’ Leif said. ‘Let me out.’

  The words rang out between them, but the night guard did not move. Finally, the man cleared his throat and spoke in a tired and thin voice.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The gallery gets locked at night. There is no way in or out. You have to wait until tomorrow morning.’

  Leif looked at his watch. It was only just after midnight. There would be at least another eight hours to wait. He took a step closer to the night guard, assuming his full height.

  ‘Now listen to me. I am a member of this art gallery,’ he said. ‘In all my years of coming here, I have never known impertinence like this. I can assure you, my good man, that this is not the last you will hear of it. Now use your key and open the door at once, or you will be in even greater trouble than you are already.’

  Still the night guard stood his ground.

  ‘I demand that you let me out this minute!’

  But the guard shook his head, looked at his feet and smiled sadly. There was something familiar about him that Leif could not put his finger on. He noticed that the man had an untidy beard and long curly hair gathered in a ponytail. Obviously, the gallery did not feel it necessary to be strict on the grooming of its night-time personnel. Well, they were wrong about that.

  Leif stepped a little closer to look for a name badge on the man’s jacket, but there was none. He noticed there were stains on the lapel, and on the man’s trousers and shoes.

  ‘Is that … paint?’ he asked, astounded.

  He thought again of the smell of turpentine that had woken him. The night guard was standing rather close to the painting of the woman and the geese. Almost close enough to touch it.

  Leif narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s going on here? Have you been messing with the paintings? Why that’s … that’s vandalism. It’s a criminal offence.’

  The man shook his head with an exaggerated movement. ‘No, no, not vandalism, improvement.’

  ‘Improvement? I never heard anything so absurd.’

  ‘All the little people in these paintings, no one knows them,’ said the guard, nodding at the pictures in the gallery – the peasants, the lovers, the dead sailors and the townspeople.

  Leif was losing his patience. ‘And what have they got to do with anything?’

  ‘I mean that no one knows them, except me.’

  Leif stared at the man uncomprehendingly.

  The guard smiled. ‘All the people that come to the gallery, I put their faces in the pictures. Only takes a little, the lightest of touches.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Leif said. ‘It’s preposterous. You could not have done such a thing without being discovered. People would know.’

  The guard smiled again, as though Leif had paid him a compliment. Why was the man keeping his hands behind his back? What was he hiding?

  Leif leapt forward, intending to snatch at the guard’s sleeve, but the younger man was faster, taking a few steps backwards and causing Leif to lose his footing. Then he turned and ran, but in his hurry dropped something on the floor.

  Leif bent down. It was a paintbrush. The tip left a vermilion smear, like blood, across his palm.

  For almost an hour, he looked for the guard. He searched the lavatories, the gift shop and the basement café. Once he thought he saw a glimpse of the man’s ponytail at the end of a gloomy corridor, but he was gone before Leif could catch up.

  Around two in the morning, he wearied, returned to the leather couch and lay back, staring at the ceiling, to rehearse his complaint. Given the grave circumstances, he thought that, as well as a speech, a written report would be appropriate, delivered by hand to the gallery director.

  The cleaners found him in the morning, wound into a tight coil, a streak of saliva staining the leather.

  However warranted, it was difficult to assert one’s authority with day-old stubble, a crumpled suit and stale breath. Leif hadn’t thought of that.

  The gallery director, who had been fetched to deal with the situation, was m
ost apologetic, wringing his hands, and protesting that nothing like it had ever happened before. But Leif could tell that the man and his embarrassed entourage wanted rid of him.

  Before he knew it, a taxi was parked outside the entrance waiting to take him home free of charge as a token of the director’s sincerest apologies, along with a life membership of the gallery, worth thousands of kroner.

  ‘Now,’ said the director, shepherding Leif towards the waiting car. ‘I’m sure that, as a friend of our gallery, you will not find it in the best interests of such a venerable institution to speak to anyone about this … unfortunate incident.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Leif, trying to remove the director’s firm hand from his shoulder.

  The complaint was not at all turning out as he had intended; everything was coming out in the wrong order. ‘I insist that you sack that horrible man. Refused to let me out, or call for help. And as for that nonsense about putting faces into the paintings …’

  ‘What man?’ said the director.

  He was so close that Leif could smell his aftershave and freshly laundered shirt. The man’s nostrils flared faintly.

  ‘Why, the night guard, of course,’ said Leif. ‘His uniform was stained, and his hair unkempt. Even at night, there ought to be standards.’

  The director smiled overbearingly, the way Leif had seen the nurses at the home smile at his mother, who no longer knew her own name.

  ‘We don’t employ night guards any more. Not since we installed these modern security doors, digitally controlled, and one hundred per cent reliable. No one enters; no one leaves,’ the director said. ‘Now, you have obviously had a terrible shock, and I doubt you slept much. Let’s get you home. What did you say your address was again?’

  There was nothing for it but to go home and forget it ever happened, Leif thought. No one here would believe him anyway. He was just a visitor, a nobody.

  Remembering something, he twisted himself free of the director’s grip and ran back into the gallery.

  ‘Back in a moment,’ he shouted at the astonished director and his attendants. ‘I forgot something.’

  He ran all the way to the furthest gallery on the second floor and the nineteenth-century portraits. No sooner was he through the door than he felt the Duke’s eyes on him, a little sad, almost apologetic. His curly hair was loose, the beard trimmed, but it was the night guard all right. The man had painted himself.

  Henning could hear footsteps and voices approaching, but there was one more thing he had to do. He ran back downstairs and found the painting of the woman feeding the geese. He leant in close with his eyes next to the canvas and peered at the man sleeping inside the cottage with the door open. The face was no larger than the nail on his little finger, but Leif recognised himself instantly from the long nose, the white eyebrows and the slightly protruding forehead. He looked happy, at peace, as though nothing could ever worry him again.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ said the gallery director, who had finally reached him with his minions, panting from the exertion.

  ‘No,’ said Leif, turning and covering the painting with his back as best he could. ‘There’s no problem at all.’

  The Bird in the Cage

  Erik stopped in front of the shop in Christianshavn to look at the bird in the cage. It had caught his eye as soon as he turned into the road, impossibly exotic on its black velvet cushion, lit by a single spotlight. There was nothing for it but to dismount from his bicycle and stare, his face bathed in the soft yellow glow from the window.

  The cage was golden with a domed roof and a square base decorated with a garland relief. Inside, on a perch wrapped in silk flowers, sat a stuffed bird, dull brown with a grey chest and rusty tail feathers.

  Erik looked up and down the street. No one else was stopping or giving the window a second glance. The bird seemed to be looking directly at him, its head cocked to one side, its beady eyes fixing him with an imploring stare.

  When he got to the office, he found that he could not concentrate on anything. In meetings, his mind drifted constantly to the bird. As soon as he could, he cycled back to the shop, relieved to find it still there in the window. Standing in the dark, with the bird’s huge eyes on him, he felt a quickening in his blood that he could not account for.

  He thought how he should like to polish the cage till it shone, remove the faded silk flowers and replace them gently with sprigs of cherry blossom from the park opposite his apartment. He saw himself reaching in and cupping the bird gently in one hand and, in his fantasy, its tiny heart fluttered and its beak scratched his palm.

  He had never bought anything for himself that wasn’t in some way practical, but he knew, with a certainty that grew day by day, that he wanted the bird in the cage. He even thought of the perfect place for it in his apartment: the little window nook with the round mahogany table that had been his mother’s. If the bird were his, he would pull up a chair and sit there all day and look at it as the sunlight passed through the bars of the cage and painted patterns across the floor.

  The next day, he parked his bicycle by the shop, removed his helmet and smoothed down his hair. An old-fashioned bell rang when he entered, his hand moist and trembling on the door handle.

  The shop was warm and smelled pleasantly of cigars and old wood. A grandfather clock was ticking loudly, drowning out the noises from the street outside. Erik stood for a while, adjusting to the dim light and the distinct sensation of having stepped outside of time.

  The few objects in the shop were displayed on plinths of varying height, each brightly lit. He saw a music box with a twirling ballerina in a pink dress, a porcelain vase decorated with flowers and dragons, a tall ship with its sails unfurled inside a bottle.

  ‘May I help you?’

  The shopkeeper startled him: an old woman, tiny and stooped in a knitted black dress with thick grey stockings and black lace-up shoes. She looked up at him shrewdly, reminding him of the little brown bird with its cocked head.

  Erik straightened his back, cleared his throat and spoke as commandingly as he could.

  ‘The bird in the cage, in the window. Can I see it?’

  The shopkeeper smiled indulgently. As she pulled back a velvet curtain and leant slowly into the window display, Erik fought an urge to push her aside and do it himself.

  But then he saw something he had not noticed before: a large brass key protruding from the base of the cage.

  ‘It’s an automaton,’ the shopkeeper said, following his gaze. ‘A mechanical nightingale made by master craftsmen in Paris one hundred and fifty years ago. They used the feathers and beak from a real bird. Watch.’

  She turned the key a number of times and let go. The bird began to nod its head and turn this way and that, singing trills that sounded surprisingly real, with only the faintest rhythmical clanging of the cogs below.

  They stood in silence and listened. Erik thought it was the most astonishingly beautiful sound he had heard in his life.

  The shopkeeper spoke softly, as though imparting a secret. ‘The nightingale is celebrated for its song. It’s the virtuoso of birds – few can match its range. You are familiar with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale?’

  Erik nodded. He remembered his mother reading the story to him when he was a boy. As the shopkeeper retold it, his eyes never left the bird.

  ‘When the emperor of China hears of the plain nightingale with the beautiful voice, he orders it to be brought to his palace. But soon his head is turned by a wind-up bird studded with jewels, sent to him by the emperor of Japan. While no one is looking, the real nightingale flies out of a window and returns to the forest. The emperor is angry and bans the bird from his kingdom. Years later, when the artificial songbird has broken, and the emperor lies dying, the nightingale flies back to the palace and sits on the windowsill and sings. Even Death is moved by the song, which makes him long for his own garden and leave the emperor’s bed. The emperor lives and the nightingale is free.’

  ‘Could y
ou make it sing one more time?’ Erik said, his voice croaky and thick.

  As the bird sang again, twisting and turning its little head, his eyes filled with tears.

  The birdcage did not have a price tag on it. There were no prices on any of the items in the shop, come to think of it.

  ‘How much is it?’ Erik said.

  The shopkeeper looked at him for a while before replying. When she spoke, the price she gave was almost the same as the new bicycle Erik had planned to buy. He was astonished.

  ‘How can an old thing made of a little brass and few feathers and cogs cost so much money?’

  The shopkeeper gestured around the room. ‘The value of these objects hinges upon the desire of customers to own them, not the materials they were made from. If someone wants something enough, no price is too high, and they will stop at nothing to get it.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Erik said. ‘People have more sense than that.’

  The shopkeeper said nothing in reply, merely smiled at him and waited.

  Erik thought, I want the bird, but I really need a new bicycle. I don’t need the bird.

  A shadow of these deliberations must have crept over his face, because before he knew it, the shopkeeper had gently picked up the birdcage and returned it to the window. Not knowing what else to do, Erik thanked her, left the shop and went home.

  When he woke the next morning, he knew that he had been wrong. He needed the bird more than he needed a new bicycle. A few minutes after nine, he was on his way to Christianshavn, pedalling hard.

  He almost fell through the door to the shop.

  ‘I have changed my mind,’ he shouted, holding up his wallet. ‘Please can I buy it, the bird in the cage?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  The shopkeeper did not seem surprised to see him. She went over to the window with no particular urgency, leant into the display and picked up the cage. Then she put it on the counter and rang it up on an old cash register Erik hadn’t noticed before.

  When the price came up, Erik thought there must be some mistake. The price was higher than the price of the new bicycle; it was almost as much as the new bathroom he had planned to buy.