Page 80 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
“You could miss the plane, if it’s so bad. Go back and fix it?”
Anna is pretty sure this can’t be fixed. An apology is due, but it would merely be a plaster, as this feels truly broken. A very red line was crossed there. She shakes her head. “I need to get back to my life in London. My new life.” She feels like she’s saying it time and again to solidify it in her head. Another mantra. Like the last one had served her so well…
“In my experience, most things can be fixed, Anna, if you talk them out. Rune and I are constantly talking things out.” Anna is taken aback. They’ve always seemed so solid and balanced as a couple.
“I think this is one of the other things,” Anna says. “Ultimately, I don’t think we were supposed to be more than this snow-in moment.” She would just give anything for it to have ended differently.
“What is it that has you scared?” Katrine asks, flat out. Bloody Danish directness.
“Nothing! I’m not scared. I’m being practical.” Why do people keep thinking she’s scared?!
“Hmmm,” says Katrine. “I had an aunt, Elsebet, who always had a new boyfriend and was devastated with each break-up. I asked her why she kept setting herself up for it. She told me ‘A broken heart is an open heart.’”
Anna doesn’t quite see the link here. Nor the message.
“What does that mean? That my defences are down and I’m easy prey or prone to let the wrong things in?”
“Anna, no!” says Katrine. “That’s not how I read it at all. It means that maybe it’s a heart that’s open to new opportunities, ready to be refilled by the right person. That’s how Elsebet saw it. I think her point was, you have to put yourself out there and risk it. You can protect your heart too much. And maybe eighteen months on, Jamie was exactly the right person for you to cross paths with, someone to risk the hurt for. Maybe this is why you snowed-in over here.”
Risk the hurt.Katrine says the words as if they are a logical combination, but not to Anna. Katrine has clearly not been hurt as she has. Anna shakes her head. She snowed-in here so she could help this handsome, kind man, who helped her out and definitely didn’t deserve what she said to him, to solve a problem he was having. That’s what she thinks.
“Talking of broken hearts,” she says, easing the subject away from Jamie because frankly, it hurts too much, “I saw Maiken.”
“Really?”
“Not willingly, but that’s another story. We talked. I told her what a rubbish friend she was.”
“Good.”
“But she seems to think Carl and I were already on the skids. That’s not how I saw it.”
Katrine sighs. “I think we all think friendships have to last forever and they don’t. We grow in different directions, life takes us to different places. Some relationships and friendships just die out, whether abruptly or petering out and that’s probably OK. Maybe you and Carl were petering out, but you didn’t spot it in the daily grind, and then the explosion happened. Add to that your relationship with Maiken blew up, too– and bigger– so you probably haven’t seen the similarity. Both were ending, just differently.”
Anna shrugs. “And I just had a run-in with Carl at Østerport.” What a day. “He hit me with Gaslighting 101, trying to tell me it was my fault we split. That he wanted marriage, and I’d just laughed it off, which hurt him and made him look elsewhere.”
Katrine snorts. Yes, they both know he’d looked elsewhere without having the courtesy to move out first.
“But here’s the thing: that day, I was about to tell him, I’d been speaking to a lawyer. My cat had recently died, and I suppose I’d been thinking about life and mortality etc., and I’d had paperwork drawn up to put him, Carl that is, not Pølse, on the deeds of the house. I couldn’t give him marriage because it’s just not what I want, but I was going to give him half of the house to show him I was committed. And then I walked into that.”
“Oh, Anna. I had no idea.”
“So apparently, Carl wasn’t content, but if he’d told me, communicated it better to me, rather than assuming I’d pick up on his hint, then things could have been different.”
Katrine spins in her seat, alarmed. “Anna. You’ve spotted the gaslighting already, do not let him mess with your head. Do you really want things with Carl to have been different?”
“Still be with him? Fuck, no. I see who he is now, what he’s capable of. Your Elsebet would say he wasn’t the one for me.” At that, saying it out loud, Anna feels a lightening in her, like she’s removed a cloak, one which, rather than protecting her, has dragged her down. That thing Jamie had said about letting things go that don’t serve him? Anna thinks she might just have done that.
“It’s OK,” she says. “I dodged a bullet, and I still have my whole house. Good timing, some would say.”
Katrine gives her an amiable knock to her side in agreement. “Luck in bad luck,” she says, using the Danish idiom. “Just remember Carl isn’t all men, or every man,” she adds.
The train has brought them up from the underground out into the open air and Anna is observing the houses as they pass by, knowing this is her leaving the city, heading towards the airport, back into the air and away from Denmark. It really isn’t bringing her the joy she’d thought it would. Something feels like it’s draining out of her. Craving comfort, she snuggles closer, knowing Katrine’s station is coming up soon. The tannoy announces the next stop is Amager and Katrine gives her boys the one-minute warning.
“Anna, I’ll be over in March for the London Book Fair. Let’s meet up,” Katrine says, pulling her bag onto her shoulder.
“Stay at mine.”
“Thanks, but work are putting me up in a fancy hotel. Let me have the joy of a sound-proof hotel room, a bathtub and the mini bar. Dinner, though. Definitely.”
