The Wednesday Club

by Kjell Westö, Neil Smith

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

1938. Hitler's expansionist policies are arousing both anger and admiration, not least in Helsinki's Wednesday Club. The members of this relaxed gentleman's club are old friends of lawyer Claes Thune. But this year it is apparent that the political unrest in Europe is having an effect on the cohesion of the group. Thune has recently divorced and is at something of a loss, running his law practice with no great enthusiasm. Luckily he has the assistance of an efficient new secretary, Matilda Wiik. But behind her polished exterior Mrs Wiik is tormented by memories of the Finnish Civil War, when she experienced horrors she has been trying to forget ever since. And one evening, with the Wednesday Club gathered in Thune's office, she hears a voice she hoped she would never hear again. She is suddenly plunged back into the past. But this time she is no longer a helpless victim . . .

Release date: May 5, 2016

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

When Mrs Wiik failed to turn up for work that morning, at first he felt irritated.

Perhaps there was also a remnant of irritation from his failed excursion to Kopparbäck the previous evening. He had kept quiet about his thoughts so as not to upset Jary, then had lain awake all night worrying, before making his way to the office two hours earlier than normal.

He was exhausted, simple as that. The Club meeting that evening felt like a burden, and his work was starting to pile up. Three new clients in two weeks, a difficult case in the City Court, outstanding invoices, lingering formalities as a result of Rolle’s departure, letters to be dictated and sent: without Mrs Wiik he was stranded.

He had arrived at the office before half past seven. He was not usually there before nine, he preferred to work late into the evening. But he knew that Mrs Wiik arrived at eight o’clock on the dot, even on Saturdays.

His irritation failed to disperse as he waited for her to appear, and was still gnawing away at him at half past eight, when it occurred to him that perhaps he ought to call her at home to reassure himself that she had not broken her leg, gone down with flu or lost her voice, something like that.

When he dialled the number the first time he was not really concentrating. As he waited for her to answer, he thought about that evening’s meeting, and about the things he wanted to speak to the others about in private. He would ask Arelius to stop criticising his political opinions in front of his mother, Esther. And, above all, he wanted to talk to Lindemark about Yogi Jary: there had to be something they could do.

When Mrs Wiik didn’t answer he assumed she must be on her way to the office. He would hear footsteps on the stairs and her key in the lock any time now.

But she did not come. And when he had rung three times without getting any answer, he began to get worried.

She was punctuality personified. And she always asked for his permission when she wanted to take longer for lunch or arrive late in the morning.

It was not yet nine o’clock, but he decided to travel up to Tölö and knock on her door. Once he had taken the decision he acted quickly. He pulled on his ulster and gloves, took his hat from the shelf, went down the stairs and jogged to the tram stop.

Only when he was sitting on the tram did it occur to him how stupid he had been. The car was standing on Kaserntorget. Why had he not gone down there and then driven straight to Mechelingatan? That would have been much quicker.

It was a sleepy sort of morning, misty and wet.

Like a sagging cord, Miss Milja thought, a sodden grey rope carelessly slung up between the dying winter and a still distant spring.

Much later she would remember that she had been daydreaming about going home early, that she had had a clear plan of how the day would transpire.

*

The dream: leaving the office at three o’clock and walking the few blocks to the Academic Bookshop in Stockmann’s darkly gleaming building. Buying a magazine, preferably the latest issue of Elokuva-Aitta, the one with film star Rolf Wanka on the cover. Then trying to get an appointment for a manicure with Mrs Tuomisto at the Salon Roma, even though she hadn’t booked in advance.

She had treated herself to a manicure for the very first time the previous summer, in July, when Hoffman & Laurén had given her two weeks’ holiday on full pay. Now her hands were looking worn again, her nails chipped and uneven as a consequence of handling all those papers and files for Thune, as well as the housework at home. But what was the point of lying? When little Miss Milja felt uneasy and no-one was looking, she would bite them, that’s what made her nails ugly, and then stylish Mrs Wiik would end up embarrassed, and try to hide them as best she could.

Miss Milja bit the tips of her fingers as well, late in the evenings when the curtains were drawn for the night. Then she could lose herself in a book or sink into Milja-thoughts, to the point where she did not notice herself start to chew on the outer layer of skin on her fingertips, nipping it off with her teeth. The skin came off in flakes, and Miss Milja had become accomplished at it over the years, knowing exactly when she should stop pulling, and always managing to bite off the thin layer of skin before the fingertip started to bleed, then spitting the fragment out onto the floor, unless it happened to land beside her in bed.

She had not succumbed to doing that for a while now. Her nails were uneven, but otherwise her hands were in good condition and intact, and she would put them to good use in the salon when she began to read the cinema magazine while Mrs Tuomisto performed the manicure, one hand at a time, allowing her to turn the pages with her free hand. She would pick out one article to read, perhaps the international column with all the gossip from Hollywood and the U.F.A. studios in Berlin. She would look at pictures of stars like Leslie Howard and Cary Grant, and just enjoy herself.

*

In her purse she had a yellowed cutting of Grant, and Randolph Scott, in bathing trunks, it was three years old and she had never shown it to anyone. She was ashamed. Almost thirty-seven years old, but Miss Milja still idolised American actors with pomaded hair, white teeth and a perfect little dimple in the middle of their chin. I am a very great lover of your art and I should be the luckiest. Miss Milja would have liked to write to Grant and Scott and Howard and the others and ask for photographs. She would have liked to write to Rolf Wanka as well – Ich bin eine grosse Verehrerin. But so far she had not written to anyone at all.

Santeri Soihtu actually had just as perfect a dimple in his chin as Cary Grant and Rolf Wanka. But that was not the same thing. Santeri Soihtu did not live in a distant, fairy-tale city of cinema, but in a flat in the Tölö district with his wife. You could see him in Helsinki any day of the week, you could see him going into a bank or eating dinner at the Kämp or Monte Carlo or another of the city’s finer restaurants. On the screen Soihtu might play a courageous activist fighting against Russian oppression in 1902, or an honest jaeger officer from the winter of 1918, but in reality he was not exciting at all.

Unless perhaps he was after all? Elokuva-Aitta had printed that Santeri Soihtu was a stage-name, and that the star wanted to keep his real identity secret. So that he was left in peace, it had said. It would not have made the slightest difference to her had she found out that Cary Grant’s real name was not Archibald Leach but Bronomir Mankulovsky, or that Leslie Howard had been born Yoram Kardashian rather than Leslie Steiner. But here in Helsinki, Miss Milja wanted to know where people really came from. If no-one knew Santeri Soihtu’s real name, then no-one could know what he had been doing twenty years ago, during the Civil War. He must have been a boy then, just a child, but imagine if he had been in one of the camps despite that? Maybe he had been an errand boy, or had polished the soldiers’ boots to earn money for food. Things had been chaotic back then, hardship and fear reigned, people did things that they kept quiet about afterwards.

*

Once the manicure was finished and she had paid Mrs Tuomisto, she would go to a delicatessen. One of the exclusive ones, Klimscheffsky’s or Marstio’s. She would treat herself to something nice for later on, a tin of peaches preserved in syrup, or a cone of assorted sweets. Or perhaps some Da Capo chocolates, she liked the sunshine-yellow wrappers and the dark chocolate inside.

Then she would take the tram out to Tölö.

The smell of rusting iron, damp clothes and unwashed bodies during the journey.

She would buy groceries from the shop on Caloniusgatan. Make dinner, eat it, do the washing up. Wait until the evening concert began on the radio, turn the volume down slightly, switch on the reading lamp, settle into the red armchair with the pale wooden arms, wrap her shawl around her and read, with the chocolates or a dish of peach halves within easy reach.

She would let herself drift off. To Brentwood and Beverly Hills, to villas with twenty rooms, open-topped luxury cars and swimming pools, to a world of manicured gardens with palm-trees and acacias and bougainvillea, chauffeurs in full-length uniform coats, buxom black housemaids who were always ready with a sharp but comforting remark.

A different world from the blunt, grim, grey one she inhabited.

She would let herself be swallowed up by the articles, only coming round when the national anthem played. Concert over, back to reality. Switch the radio off, turn off the reading lamp, perform her evening ablutions, check the gas stove was off. She was scared of being burned alive, gas explosions were common and the ensuing fires deadly: she checked the stove every time she left the house, and every evening before going to bed.

It would be cold in the bedroom, her little two-room flat was always cold and draughty well into May. The bed would be empty, the way it had been ever since Hannes left her, when he had simply had enough and walked out without a word. She would lay out her clothes, get under the covers, roll onto her side, pull up her legs and curl into a foetal position, maybe put a hand on her stomach between the covers and her nightgown to get more warmth.

She would feel alone, of course, she would feel it deep in her bones.

But she would feel happy as well.

Happy because she had got somewhere. Away from everything that no-one – above all not Claes Thune the lawyer, and his smart clients – would ever imagine when they cast surreptitious glances (or so they thought!) at her simple but well-cut skirt suit and her glossy hair and the slender ankles that stretched up from her high-heeled shoes.

And, as of tomorrow: at her manicured hands, her filed and red-varnished nails.

Yes. Tonight one of those newly smart hands would rest against her stomach for more warmth, and Miss Milja would be nice and quiet and Matilda would fall asleep quickly and carry on dreaming. About something better. Something even better than what she already had.

Half an hour after lunch she had typed up the letters, put them in envelopes and franked them. Matilda looked up and gazed out across Kaserntorget. The fog had got thicker: she could only just see the Radio House on the far side of the square.

She got up from her chair, about to go and knock on the lawyer’s door and ask if she could leave at three o’clock. Thune had met several clients during the morning, and she had shown them into his room, but had hardly seen him otherwise. He had dictated two letters to her, that was all. The letters had been short and measured in tone, on the verge of terse. Thune had eaten his lunch in his office, liver pâté and pickled gherkin sandwiches wrapped carelessly in greaseproof paper; she had noticed him take them out of his briefcase that morning. The sandwiches had looked dry and curled, and she had wondered silently what he drank with them. A soft drink, perhaps – there was a cold-store in the wall beside the window and she had seen brown bottles inside. She knew Thune had recently separated from his wife: it looked as if he had not yet found a new routine.

The door opened and the lawyer’s long, narrow, almost bald head appeared in the opening. Matilda quickly sat down again and waited for him to say something. Thune looked a bit like Stan Laurel; she had noticed that during her job interview. Now, as he leaned one shoulder against the door-frame with his hands in his pockets, he looked almost snake-like. Matilda thought that the resemblance was an illusion, a Milja-thought, just something that had popped into her head. Thune’s suit was as ill-fitting as usual, today’s colour a badly creased blue.

She quite liked Thune. He could be arrogant sometimes without actually realising it, and he dressed badly and occasionally said strange things. But he was also friendly, and he seemed fair. Intelligent and kind, not a combination to be taken for granted. At least not among the clients who visited Thune’s office. Pushy but pretending to be nice, was Matilda’s impression. Some of them looked right through her like she wasn’t there, while others looked at her in an improper way.

“Mrs Leimu has a bad cold,” Thune said, sounding agitated as he went on: “She’s at home in bed. I have an appointment with Grönroos in a few minutes, and the Wednesday Club is meeting here at the office this evening. Mrs Wiik, do you think you might be able to go down to the Market Hall to get things for the meeting on my behalf?”

Mrs Leimu was Thune’s housekeeper, and his right hand since the separation. Without her, Thune would have been overwhelmed by practical worries. And Leopold Grönroos was one of the members of the Wednesday Club, very possibly the wealthiest. Landlord, rentier, miser, bon viveur – all terms Matilda had heard used to describe Grönroos, even though she had only been working for Thune for a month and a half.

Grönroos arrived punctually the same time each week, every Wednesday at half past two. He and Thune would sit down in the innermost room, the Cabinet, and talk at length about Grönroos’ investments. Every so often Grönroos would make a gesture of annoyance, drumming his fleshy fingers nervously on the desk. Every time Thune calmly pointed out any risk of a lower dividend, a wrinkle would appear above Grönroos’ nose. When the meeting had gone on for an hour or so, Thune would call Matilda and ask her to bring in the port, whisky and appropriate glasses from the drinks cabinet in his room. He would suggest a “cheeky little drink” and Grönroos would decline at first out of consideration for his gout, which was getting worse with each passing year. But then Grönroos would change his mind, and soon he and Thune would be on their second, then third cheeky little drink. By this point they would no longer be talking about money, but would have moved on to long-distance runners and composers, and eventually, by the time they reached the fourth or fifth cheeky little drink, they would be drunk. Matilda had observed all this as she carried files in to them and served their drinks. It was always gloomy in the Cabinet; a fire would be burning in the stove, with just one table-lamp lit. That was how Thune preferred it. But she would have been able to observe them unnoticed even if the lighting had been brighter; they were so absorbed in their discussion they scarcely noticed her coming and going.

She was disappointed at the turn the day had taken, but hid her feelings as best she could. The Wednesday Club was a group of Thune’s friends who took it in turns to host drinking sessions on the third Wednesday of each month. Matilda knew little more about the Club than that. But she realised that if Mrs Leimu was ill and the March meeting was going to be held here in the office, she would not be allowed to leave early.

“What would you like me to get from the market, Mr Thune?” she asked.

“Rustic pâté, preferably a strong one,” Thune said. “A couple of mature cheeses. Salty biscuits, those British ones. And pitted green olives. Italian, not Spanish. Two tins of those.”

Thune pulled his glasses down to the tip of his nose and looked amiably at her: “And I’ve told you before, you don’t have to keep calling me Mr Thune. There’s really no need to be so formal.”

He took out his wallet from the pocket of his creased jacket, flicked through the notes and pulled out a fifty-mark note. Then he changed his mind, put the fifty back and took out a hundred-mark note instead.

“Could you buy some drink as well? Two bottles of port and two of whisky. Ask for the manager, Lehtonen. He was the one who took my order, they didn’t have what I wanted in stock.”

Matilda took the note, giving it a quick glance. In the foreground was a group of naked, athletic people, while in the background factory chimneys billowed thick smoke. Had Thune noticed that the woman on the far left had a well-shaped rear? Probably, Matilda thought, silently answering her own question.

*

She would later recall that the grey mist had a smoky, almost friendly quality that day. Not the usual March greyness, rugged and harsh, with sheets of ice and smaller blocks jostling in the inner harbours where the water was still completely black. Instead it was a milder greyness, a blanket to wrap yourself in. Like September, when the heat was over and the last of the thunderstorms had passed.

An unreal atmosphere had settled over the city. Life as a dream, a shapeless mirage. There was that word again, she wondered why it kept occurring to her, over and over again. Then she suddenly thought of Konni. He had written to her in February, from Åbo, where Arizona had been engaged at the Hamburger Börs all winter. He had told her about the new songs he had written, among them one called just that, “Mirage”.

Konni had written that he wanted to record “Mirage” with Arizona, but that he was short of money and was thinking of selling the song to Dallapé or the Ramblers. He had sold songs before, when Arizona’s records were not selling. Konni, her beloved little brother. They had not seen each other for almost a year now, and Matilda missed him. They had spent many years living in different places without knowing what was happening to the other, when Matilda was almost grown-up and Konni just a child – he still was a child, really. But they were close nonetheless, and wrote letters when they could not see each other. But Konni rarely wrote anything about his feelings or deeper thoughts. He and Tuulikki had had yet another child in November, the third one, and they had been short of money from the outset. Sometimes Matilda wondered how Konni really was.

She thrust the thought aside and carried out her errands mechanically. She was not upset at having to rethink her plans. That was the way of things: life seldom worked out the way you expected. She was used to fitting in with other people’s plans, which was one of the reasons why she was so good at her job. Besides, the evening would not have been as much fun as she had envisaged. Her stomach and thighs had already begun to ache as she hurried across Kaserngatan. She would soon start her period, probably that very evening, and she usually had a stomach ache for the whole of the first day.

It started to rain and suddenly there were queues everywhere, and it took her much longer to buy everything than she had expected. By the time she got back to the office Thune and Grönroos were no longer alone. The Wednesday Club had arrived, she could hear a lively hubbub of animated male voices as she headed up the stairs. The building dated from the turn of the century and had no lift, and she struggled up with Mrs Leimu’s woven birch-bark basket in one hand and the string-bag of bottles in the other. She could hear the voices more clearly now, the men were probably crowded inside the vestibule, with the door to the stairwell open. She heard Thune’s voice, then Grönroos’, and several unfamiliar voices: they were talking loudly, with the exaggerated bonhomie of men who had not seen each other for a while.

She stiffened.

Among the unfamiliar voices was one that she recognised. At first she could not place it, but it made her feel uneasy, and soon she began to get an idea of who the voice belonged to. And when she heard the man say something light-hearted – she could not tell what he was talking about, or who he was addressing – and then laugh at his own words, she was sure. The voice might have been slightly deeper, but the laugh was exactly the same.

The men’s voices echoed in the stairwell, pouring over her like an unstoppable torrent. She was transported to another time. An open window. Summer. Outside the window a sandy yard, a wide, sun-drenched, dusty exercise yard. Just one solitary, lofty tree, an old pine, broke the monotony of the yard. She had heard them call it the Sahara. She felt sick, and longed to be outside. Longed to be out there, even though she knew that someone died every day of starvation or exhaustion in the course of their labours. She could hear voices; they were in the same room as her, talking several different languages. Her eyes were stubbornly fixed on the view outside the window. The seat sticking to her thighs. Her feet, cold and bare.

She was standing on the stairs. She heard quick footsteps, then the door above closed. The voices shrank to a low murmur, then grew even fainter as the men left the lobby and went into Thune’s office. Matilda stood still as silence settled, mute and deafening. Her whole body was chilled, and her legs felt shaky and weak, as if they would never bear her weight again.

Then she pulled herself together, took a firm grip of the net bag and the basket containing the cheeses and other food, and went up.

For a few short moments, before he spoke to her or even came into view, just after he had nudged the door open and saw her standing indecisively in front of the desk in the anteroom, while he was still standing in the semi-darkness, Thune remembered their reserved exchange during the job interview. He had found Mrs Wiik intelligent, but also mysterious. Her typed application had not told him much. She was thirty-six years old, and Thune, who had just turned forty, would rather have employed someone younger. And more beautiful, although he had difficulty admitting this to himself: after all, that was not what having an office clerk was about.

Not that Mrs Wiik was unattractive. Far from it: her features were regular, she dressed simply but neatly, had a fine figure, and looked younger than she was. And her skills were beyond reproach: a certificate from business college, good at typewriting and stenography, excellent Swedish and Finnish, reasonable German, not bad English, and a lengthy period of employment at a well-regarded shipping agency, Hoffman & Laurén. But there was something unsettling about her, something chilly that made Thune cautious and wary during the interview.

He: “Your name is Milja Matilda Aleksandra Wiik?”

She: “Yes.”

“But you prefer to be called Matilda.”

“Yes, I prefer that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just happened. Matilda is a nicer name.”

“And you’re a Swedish-speaker?”

“My father was. My mother spoke only Finnish and Russian.”

“Do you speak Russian?”

“No, I’m afraid not. I can understand perhaps a hundred words. But understanding isn’t the same as speaking.”

He had smiled at her and said: “And speaking about a subject isn’t the same as understanding it.”

There had been the very faintest twitch in her mouth when she replied: “No, it isn’t.”

He: “And your parents . . .?”

She: “No longer alive.”

He had expected her to go on, but nothing came. His curiosity got the better of him:

“What happened to them? If I might be permitted to ask?”

“They died young. Illness. I grew up with . . . relatives. Is it important?”

Thune had been taken aback by her blunt counter-question. He chose to draw a veil over his insensitivity, and asked instead:

“Why did you leave Hoffman & Laurén?”

“I’d rather not talk about that.”

“But they’ve given you a glowing reference. If they had such faith in you, why . . .?”

She had looked at him with the expression of someone listening to a defiant and rather stupid child. And replied:

“Can’t you just choose to believe that everything in the reference is true?”

He had seen it: the loneliness that surrounded her. But there had also been something appealing about her curt, precise answers. He had taken a risk and given her the job, and she had not let him down. She did her job impeccably, he had had no cause to worry about her competence so much as once during the seven weeks that had passed.

That Wednesday Thune saw three clients before lunch. He asked Mrs Wiik to arrange a number of telephone calls to other countries, one of them to the Finnish legation on Stankovich Street in Moscow, another to a bank in Stockholm. He dictated two letters to her. They were tersely phrased, and he saw Mrs Wiik raise her left eyebrow slightly at one particularly sharp formulation. Otherwise everything was much as usual. He made use of her services without sparing a single thought as to who she was and what might be going on inside her.

She was quick-witted.

She was clever.

But she was also staff. She was available, she did things on Thune’s behalf, that was the whole point.

When he stood in the doorway and pulled out a hundred-mark note and sent Mrs Wiik off to the Market Hall to buy food and drink, Thune was not thinking about his own duties either. They were simple, routine tasks that he could have done in his sleep.

He was thinking about the fact that the Wednesday Club would be meeting in the Cabinet in just a few hours’ time.

And about the fact that before then he would once again have to try to calm Polle Grönroos, and his manic fear that his fortune might stop growing. If Thune had not been so furious with Robert Lindemark, he would have sent Grönroos to see Robi long ago. What Grönroos needed was a nerve specialist, not a financial adviser.

The German march into a jubilant Austria would be that evening’s topic of conversation, he had no doubt about that. Several days had passed now, but everyone was still talking about it. As for Thune, he had been sitting by the window of his deserted bedroom thinking about Gabi and listening to the church bells ring for Sunday mass, while the newsreader from the Finnish National News Agency read out Hitler’s triumphant words over the radio. A Greater Germany, rightful heir to the Roman Empire, a Global Reich with a thousand glorious years ahead of it. That sort of language was in the spirit of the times: Thune had colleagues who liked to imagine a Greater Finland, with its eastern border set beyond the Urals, as they drank themselves silly during dinners hosted by the Lawyers’ Association.

*

Thune was in the process of re-evaluating his life. Sometimes, such as now, he thought about the six young men who had founded the Wednesday Club, and then the six middle-aged men who remained. The first six were not the same as the latter; two had fallen away as the years passed, and two more had joined.

They had founded the Club in the autumn of ’27, just a few months after Thune had married his Gabi, in the middle of the boom years when the city was full of new jazz bars and the dancer Ida Bedrich performed as good as naked at the Lido on Fabiansgatan. They had all left student life behind – all apart from the lazy Guido Röman – and taken employment in solid businesses and institutions. Among the statutes of the Wednesday Club was a statement that its purpose was “to contribute to the maintenance and exploration of political and cultural conversation in the Swedish language in the city of Helsinki”, but its true purpose was to afford its members an opportunity to drink. The Club had been very lively until early 1933, when it had dwindled while Thune served at the legations in Stockholm and Moscow, but now the Club had become more active again.

Thune was not a boastful man. He was never aggressive, and seldom chose to lead discussions, and to outsiders he was happy to downplay his role. But he knew he was important to the Wednesday Club.

Poor Bertel Ringwald had fallen victim to the capricious waters of Vidskär Sound in the Åbo archipelago during the summer of ’31: he was attempting to sheet a mainsail in heavy weather and fell overboard and drowned. One year later Hugo Ekblad-Schmidt married a Parisian woman and was appointed deputy director of his father-in-law’s agency, based in a side-street in Le Marais.

Of the founding members, that left the psychiatrist Robert Lindemark, the journalist Guido Röman, the poet and actor Joachim “Yogi” Jary, and Thune.

Leopold Grönroos, a businessman, and Lorens “Zorro” Arelius, a doctor, had joined the group later on, Arelius as recently as 1936.

A mixed company. But united by strong bonds.

They would not be at full strength this time either.

Robert Lindemark was going to attend, for the first time since the business with Gabi. Lindemark had been invited pro forma on the past several occasions, but had declined. No-one knew if he had said no out of consideration for Thune, or out of fear or shame. But there was no doubt that it was because of Gabi.

Gabi and Robi. Gabi and Robi and nice, stupid, blind Claes. Thune could still feel jealousy flash deep inside him, like a glinting steel blade, it happened at least once a week. But he had made up his mind. It was time to be magnanimous. He had telephoned Lindemark and personally invited him. The conversation had been awkward, but Thune had insisted, and a somewhat surprised Robi had accepted the invitation.

As one member returned to the Club, another was unable to attend. Joach. . .