of his jeans after playing in the garden when he was seven. His eyes roamed the pale, striped rug, finding other marks of long-forgotten moments – the splash of coffee after his father trod on a Lego brick and stumbled, the small ash burn from his mother’s cigarette as she kissed him goodnight before a party, Nina’s make-up from where she would sit cross-legged on the floor and doll herself up as he watched from his bed, planning her midnight escape from his window (because unlike her, he had the veranda below), her own bed expertly stuffed with pillows; she had had a leather jacket that year: grey, with buckles. It was a curious thing, he marvelled, staring at the innocuous stains beneath their manservant’s feet, how great swathes of his memories remained defiantly blank, and yet others were as fresh and sparkling as this morning’s dew.
He watched Måns set down the tray in what had always been the usual place, when this had been his room – on the desk, now cleared of childish scribbles and notes. He stared at the platter: ham, honey, bread, apricot compote. As a boy, he had only ever been allowed to eat in his room if he was sick, and it still felt vaguely itinerant to be eating in here now, just because. But he had wanted to soak up the energy of this space once more before his child got here. He had missed out on so much of his son’s childhood – how could he connect except by remembering the boy he had been, living in this room?
His mouth was dry, and he crossed the room to gulp down the hand-squeezed orange juice. He felt sick with nerves and had scarcely slept. Was this the right thing?
‘I think he will love it here, sir,’ Måns said, reading his mind as he pushed one of the shutters back fully so that it sat flat to the wall.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Certainly.’
‘I’m worried there aren’t enough . . . gadgets.’ His gaze swung over the bookcases, the shelves stacked with puzzles, board games, craft projects . . . An old balsa wood aeroplane, hand-painted with red bullseyes, rested on one wing on top of the bookcase; a leather backgammon board was set out with the counters in play, as though a game had been momentarily interrupted. Wifi appeared to have become the world’s greatest commodity during his absence. Not oil, nor water. But bandwidth, 4G, download speeds . . . None of these things were easy to install on a glorified rock in the yawn of the Baltic. When he had made enquiries, mention had been made of laying cables along the sea bed, which sounded . . . excessive.
‘Perhaps not, but even ten-year-old boys don’t summer in the archipelago expecting gadgets.’
He picked up the red Nintendo that had been his own most treasured possession. ‘God, I loved this at his age. I think if I’d had to choose between this and the dog –’ His fingers ran over the buttons, muscle memory making the digits move quickly. ‘Does it still work?’
Måns came over with his hand out and took it from him. He pressed the buttons once, twice, but the screen stayed dark. ‘I’ll make sure it does.’
He stiffened, feeling the anxiety rise again. ‘He’s arriving in two hours. Ten o’clock, she said. I need everything to be perfect.’
‘Absolutely, sir. I’ll see to this right away.’
Måns’s feet were quiet even on the wide, aged boards, and he sank into the hard desk chair, wishing the wait was over. He felt perpetually on hold, always waiting for someone else to respond obligingly to a decision or to appear before him. He was at the universe’s mercy, a slave to its whims. For seven years, he hadn’t even been able to control his body, his own eyelids. How was he going to control his stranger son? What would they do? Say?
He was the parent; it would be up to him to lead. He ran over the itinerary for the day in his mind again, rehearsing his role, the things they would do, the words he would say: nothing had been left to chance. Måns had been thorough even by his high standards. He gazed around his old bedroom again, trying to glimpse the ghost of his own boyish self, trying to feel what he had once felt, to see once more, through the curious and open-hearted gaze that came with a child’s blank, unfounded optimism,