Nothing But Fear Read Online Free Page A

would be pulverized to a heap of dust and rubble, and the day of vengeance would have come. A tribunal would be set up in the Market Square, and they would find out who my mother was, and the neighbours and the baker’s shop-girls and the butcher and the greengrocer and the priest and the children and all the others would kneel with a single neck on the block. We would smile to each other, Mother and I, and then we would say
‘Hopla!’
and the heads would roll on and on forever.
    M y father’s mother, Karen, we called Farmor, and she had a broad, serious face. She had lost her mother when she was twelve, and managing a girl and two half-grown boys as well as the farm ended up being too much for her father. He sent her off to live with her Auntie Bondo in Store Heddinge, and she grew up in her drapery shop, which was an offshoot of the Flensborg Department Store. Auntie Bondo was old and would forget that Karen was there at all. Most of the time she was left to her own devices and went around missing her father and her brothers, piningfor her mother and having really no one at all. In the afternoons she would sit in the shop among the underwear, the dresses, the rolls of fabric, and wait for the right man to come and carry her off. She dreamt of romance wrapped in tulle, of passion in chiffon, of love eternal crocheted in lace, and she was sold the moment Carl showed up. He was tall and handsome and told her stories about Canada, promising to take her with him and planning it all in the minutest detail. And she crawled out from under the piles of tulle and chiffon and lace, said yes and gave him her first kiss.
    It was the spring of 1902 when Farmor and Grandfather had got engaged. They then ran off to Copenhagen together without Auntie Bondo noticing – or maybe she just didn’t care. They were married in the Garrison Church. Once his military service was over, Karen was pregnant, and they returned to Falster and leased Orehoved Hotel. It looked out across the Great Sound, and Grandfather’s eyes could follow the tongue of water to Masned Island and, further out, to Zealand. He could see the railway ferry sailing in and he pinned his hopes on transport, having read in the papers that there was no stopping its growth. Trade and tourism were the future and would transport them off and away, right across the Atlantic!
    Guests were few and far between at the start, but that was how it always was. It took time for a place to get a name. Grandfather spread the word as best he could and stuck signs with arrows on the roadside, while Karen looked after the child, cleaned and cooked and ran a hotel that had no guests. She changed sheets that had not been slept in, putfresh flowers in vases no one would see, and Grandfather placed advertisements in the papers and gave the hotel five stars. He described all its comforts and mod cons, pouring praise on a landscape that was flat and fog-bound, inventing attractions where there was nothing worth looking at, and every evening Karen took her place in reception and prepared to receive travellers who never came. The ferry docked, and the traffic drove past the hotel. No one had anything to stop for in Orehoved.
    After a couple of seasons in an empty hotel their plans lost their romantic glow, and they decided that they would rely on local trade instead, on running an inn – dinners and parties, perhaps even music and dance to attract a wider clientele. That would do the trick! They’d have guests for lunch and a dish of the day and the week’s menu and the wine of the month and seasonal seasonings, and Grandfather hired a dance band for the Saturday and hung posters up. When they got to the end of the week, the tables and chairs stood untouched, and Karen took the lunches, the dish of the day, the week’s menu and the seasonal seasonings and poured them all on the compost heap, and Grandfather still stood in the doorway with a roll of tickets and the