Italian Shoes

Chapter 1

It was the beginning of April before the thaw came. This was the longest the sea had been frozen during all the years I had lived here. I could still walk over the channels to the mainland at the end of March.

Jansson came by in his hydrocopter every third day, and reported on the condition of the ice. He thought he could recall a winter in the 1960s when the ice had remained for as long as this in the outer archipelago.

The white-painted landscape was dazzling when I climbed up the hill behind the house and gazed towards the horizon. Sometimes I hung Grandfather’s ice prods round my neck, collected an old ski pole and went for wintry walks around the skerries and rocks where the old herring-fishing grounds used to be: my grandfather and his father before him used to land catches that nobody nowadays could even dream of. I walked around the skerries where nothing grows and remembered how I used to row out to them as a child. You could find all kinds of remarkable flotsam and jetsam hidden in the crevices. I once discovered a doll’s head, and on another occasion a watertight box containing several 78 rpm gramophone records. My grandfather asked somebody who knew about such things, and heard that they were German songs from the war that had ended when I was a little boy. I didn’t know where the records were now. On another rocky islet I had found a large waterproof logbook that some raving or desperate sea captain had thrown into the sea. It had been from a cargo ship taking timber from the sawmills of northern Sweden to Ireland, where it was used for housebuilding. The vessel had weighed 3,000 tons and was called Flanagan. Nobody could say how or why the logbook had ended up in the water. Grandfather had spoken to a retired schoolteacher who used to spend his summers on Lönö, in what used to be the cottage of a former pilot, Grundström. He had translated the text, but there was nothing unusual noted in the logbook on the day it had been thrown into the sea. I can still remember the date: 9 May 1947. The last entry had been a note about ‘greasing the anchor gear as soon as possible’. Then nothing more. The logbook was incomplete, but had been thrown into the sea. It had been on its way from Kubikenborg with a cargo of timber for Belfast. The weather was fine, the sea almost dead calm, and a note made that morning said there was a south-easterly breeze blowing at one metre per second.

As the long winter progressed, I often thought about that logbook. It seemed to me that my life after the catastrophic error was a bit like throwing my unfinished logbook into the sea and then sailing on without leaving any trace behind. The insignificant notebook I was now keeping, recording such things as vanished waxwings and the ill health of my pets, wasn’t even of any interest to me. I made notes because it was a daily reminder of the fact that I was living a life of no substance. I wrote about waxwings to confirm the existence of a life in a vacuum.

I suddenly started to think about my parents. I would often wake up during the night with my head full of remarkable memories, long since forgotten, that had returned in my dreams. I could picture my father on his knees, lining up his tin soldiers and moving them in a reconstruction of Waterloo, or Narva. My mother was generally sitting in her armchair, watching him with an expression of great tenderness — his games always took place in absolute silence: she just sat there.

The march of the tin soldiers ensured that there would be moments of genuine peace in our home, albeit only occasionally. In my dreams I relived my fear of the arguments that sometimes flared up. My mother would be crying, and my father making a feeble attempt to show his anger by cursing the restaurant owner who employed him. I was slowly dreaming my way back to my roots. I had the feeling that I was walking along with a pickaxe in my hand, searching the ground for something that had gone missing.

Even so, it was a winter characterised by things that had been reclaimed. Harriet had presented me with a daughter, and Agnes didn’t hate me.

It was also a winter of letters. I wrote, and I received answers. For the first time in the twelve years I had lived on the island, there was now a point in Jansson’s visits. He still regarded me as his doctor, and demanded consultations for his imagined pains. But now he brought me mail, and sometimes I would hand him a reply.

I wrote my first letter the very day I got back home. I had walked over the ice in the grey light of dawn. My animals gave the impression of being starved, despite the fact that I had left more than enough food to feed them properly. When I was satisfied that they had eaten as much as they wanted, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Agnes.

‘I apologise for leaving so abruptly. I suppose I was overwhelmed by meeting the person who had suffered so much because of me. There was a lot I would have liked to talk to you about, and you might well have had a lot of questions for me. I am now back again on my island. The sea all around me is still frozen hard. I hope that my sudden departure will not result in our losing contact with each other.’

I didn’t change a single word. The following day I asked Jansson to post it for me. He didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d been away. He was curious about the letter, of course, but said nothing. He didn’t even have any pains that day.

In the evening I started writing a letter to Harriet and Louise, despite the fact that I’d not had a reply to my previous one. It became far too long, and it had become clear that I couldn’t write a letter addressed to both of them: I didn’t have much idea how close they were. I tore the letter up, and started again. The cat was lying on the sofa, fast asleep, the dog was lying next to the stove, breathing heavily. I tried to see if it had pains in its joints. It probably wouldn’t live beyond the coming autumn. The same applied to the cat.

I wrote to Harriet and asked how she was. It was a silly question, as I knew that she was ill, of course. But I asked, even so. The impossible question was the obvious one to ask. Then I wrote about the journey we had made together.

‘We went to that forest pool. I very nearly drowned. You pulled me out of the water. It’s only now, when I’m back at home, that I realise fully how close I was to drowning.’

I shuddered at the thought of drowning. But that didn’t prevent me from opening up the hole in the ice for my bath every morning. However, after a few days I realised that I didn’t need my bath as badly as I used to do. Having met Harriet and Louise, it didn’t seem as essential for me to expose myself to the cold. My morning baths became less frequent.

That same evening I also wrote a letter to Louise. I read about Caravaggio in an old encyclopedia from 1909, the so-called Owl edition. I started my letter with a quotation from the encyclopedia: ‘His striking, albeit sombre colours and his bold reproductions of nature aroused widespread and justified attention.’ I tore the sheet of paper up. I couldn’t pretend that what I had written was my own opinion. Nor did I want to admit that I had stolen the quotation from a reference book almost a hundred years old, even though I had updated the language.

I started again. It turned out to be a very short letter.

‘I slammed the door of your caravan as I left. I shouldn’t have done that. I couldn’t handle my confusion. I apologise for that. I hope we shall not continue with our lives pretending the other doesn’t exist.’

It was not a good letter. I discovered two days later just how badly it had been received. The telephone rang in the middle of the night. I groped around half asleep, stumbling over my frightened animals, before I was able to lift the receiver. It was Louise. She was furious. She was shouting so loudly, she almost burst my eardrums.

‘I’m so angry with you. How could you write such a letter? You slam the door shut the moment things turn unpleasant.’

I could hear that she was slurring her words. It was three in the morning. I tried to calm her down. That only made her more furious. So I said nothing. I let her carry on ranting.

This is my daughter, I kept telling myself. She’s saying what she needs to say. And I knew my letter was not a good one.

I don’t know how long she carried on screaming down the line. But suddenly, in mid-sentence, there was a click and the call was over. The silence echoed. I stood up and opened the door to the living room. The anthill was growing bigger. Or so I fancied, at least. But do anthills really grow during the winter when the insects are hibernating? I knew as little about that as I did about the best way to respond to Louise. I understood why she was angry. But did she understand me? Was there anything to understand, in fact? Can you regard a grown woman, whose existence you knew nothing about, as your daughter? And who was I to her?

I got no more sleep that night. I was gripped by a fear that I was unable to cope with. I sat at the kitchen table, clutching at the blue waxed tablecloth that had covered it ever since Grandmother’s day. I was overwhelmed by emptiness and powerlessness. Louise had dug her claws deep into my innermost being.

I went out as dawn broke. It seemed to me it would have been better if Harriet had never appeared out there on the ice. I could have lived my life without a daughter, just as Louise could have got by without a father.

Down by the jetty I wrapped myself up in my grandfather’s old fur coat and sat down on the bench. Both the dog and the cat had wandered off on their separate ways, as their tracks in the snow showed. They seldom went anywhere together. I wondered if they sometimes lied to each other about their intentions.

I stood up and bellowed straight out into the mist. The noise died away into the grey light. My routine had been disturbed. Harriet had appeared from nowhere, and turned my life upside down. Louise had shouted a truth into my ear, and I had no defence against it. Perhaps Agnes would also attack me with unexpected fury in due course?

I flopped back down on to the bench. I was reminded of Grandma’s words, her fear. If you went out walking in the mist, you might disappear and never be heard of again.

I had lived alone on this island for twelve years. Now it felt as if it had been invaded by three women.

I ought really to invite them all to visit me when summer comes. One beautiful summer’s evening they could take it in turns to attack me. Eventually, when there was barely anything left of me, Louise could don her boxing gloves and knock me out for the final count.

They would be able to count up to a thousand, and still I wouldn’t get up.

A few hours later, I opened up my hole in the ice and stepped into the freezing cold water. This morning I forced myself to stay there for an unusually long spell.

Jansson turned up on time but he had nothing for me, nor I for him. Just as he was about to leave, I remembered that it was ages since he had complained of having toothache.

‘How are your teeth?’

Jansson looked surprised.

‘What teeth?’

I asked no more. The hydrocopter vanished into the mist.

On my way back from the jetty, I paused by the boat and raised the tarpaulin once again. The hull was going rotten. If I left it untended for another year, it would be beyond repair.

That same day I wrote another letter to Louise. I apologised for everything I could remember and also for everything I’d forgotten, and for the annoyance I would cause her in the future. I concluded the letter with a few lines about the boat:

‘I have an old wooden boat that used to be my grandfather’s. It’s on trestles under a tarpaulin. It’s a disgrace that I treat the boat so badly. I just haven’t looked after it properly. I often think that ever since I came to live on this island, I’ve also been lying on trestles under a tarpaulin. I’ll never be able to sort out the boat until I’ve sorted out myself.’

A couple of days later I gave the letter to Jansson, and the following week he brought a reply. After a few days of thaw, it had turned cold again. Winter refused to loosen its grip. I sat down at the kitchen table to read the letter. I had shut the cat and the dog out — sometimes I simply couldn’t bear to see them.

Louise wrote: ‘I sometimes feel that I’ve lived my life with dry and chapped lips. Those are words that came to me one morning when life felt worse than usual. I don’t need to tell you about the life I’ve led because you already have an indication of what it’s been like. Filling in the details would change nothing. Now I’m trying to find a way of living with the knowledge that you exist, the troll who emerged from the forest that turned out to be my father. Even though I know Harriet ought to have explained, I can’t help feeling upset with you as well. When you stormed off, it felt as if you’d punched me in the face. At first it was a relief you’d gone. But the feeling of emptiness became too much. And so I hope we might be able to find a way of becoming friends at least, one of these days.’

She signed the letter with an ornate L.

What a mess, I thought. Louise has every reason in the world to direct her anger at the pair of us.

The winter wore on, with letters travelling back and forth between the caravan and the island. And occasionally I would receive a letter from Harriet, who was back in Stockholm by now. It was not explained how she got there. She said she felt very tired, but the thought of the forest pool and the fact that Louise and I had met at last kept her going. I asked questions about her condition, but never received an answer.

Her letters were characterised by quiet, almost reverential resignation, in stark contrast to what Louise wrote, where between the lines there was always a hint of imminent anger.

Every morning when I woke up, I resolved to start making a serious attempt to put my life in order. I could no longer allow the days to slide past without anything constructive being done.

But I got nowhere. I made no decisions. I occasionally lifted the tarpaulin over the boat and had the feeling that I was in fact looking at myself. The flaking paint was mine, as were the cracks and the damp. Perhaps also the smell of wood slowly rotting away.

The days were getting longer. Migratory birds started returning. The flocks usually passed by during the night. Through my binoculars I could see seabirds on the outermost edge of the ice.

My dog died on 19 April. I let him out as usual when I came downstairs to the kitchen in the early morning. I could see that he had difficulty in getting out of his basket, but I thought he would live through the summer. After my usual dip through my hole in the ice, I went down to the boathouse to look for some tools I needed to repair a leaking pipe in the bathroom. I thought it was odd that the dog hadn’t appeared, but didn’t go in search of him. It wasn’t until around dinner time that I realised he hadn’t been seen all day. Even the cat seemed concerned. She was sitting on the steps outside the front door, looking pensive. I went out and called for him, but he didn’t appear. I realised something must have happened. I put on a jacket and started searching. After almost an hour I found him on the far side of the island, by the unusual rock formations that rose up out of the ice like gigantic pillars. He was lying in a little depression, sheltered from the wind. I don’t know how long I stood looking at him. His eyes were open, glistening like crystals — just like the seagull I had found earlier in the winter, frozen to death by the jetty.

He could hide from the wind, but there was nowhere to hide from death.

I carried his body back to the house. It was heavier than I had expected. The dead are always heavy. I fetched a pickaxe and slowly hacked a big enough hole under the apple tree. The cat sat on the steps, watching the whole procedure. The dog’s body was stiff as I pressed him down into the hole, then filled it in.

I leaned the pickaxe and the spade against the house wall. The morning fog had returned, but now my eyes had misted over too. I was grieving for my pet.

I noted the death in my logbook, and calculated that the dog had been nine years and three months old. I had bought him as a puppy from one of the old trawlermen who used to breed dogs of doubtful descent.

For some time I considered acquiring another dog; but the future was too uncertain. Before long my cat would also be gone. Then there would be nothing to tie me down to the island if I no longer wanted to stay here.

I wrote to Louise and Harriet about the death of the dog. Both times I burst into tears.

Louise understood how I must miss him, while Harriet wondered how I could possibly feel sad about an old cripple of a dog who was finally at peace.

Weeks passed, and still I didn’t start work on the boat. It was as if I were waiting for something to happen. Perhaps I ought to write a letter to myself, and explain what my plans for the future were?

The days became longer. The snow in the rock crevices started to melt. But the sea was still frozen.

In the end, the ice began to lose its grip. I woke up one morning to find navigable channels running all the way to the open sea. Jansson arrived in his motorboat: he had put the hydrocopter in store. He had decided to buy a hovercraft in time for next winter. I’m not sure that I understood what a hovercraft was, despite the fact that he gave me a detailed description without my asking for it. He begged me to examine his left shoulder. Could I feel that there was a lump there? Might it be a tumour?

There was nothing. Jansson was still as fit as a fiddle.

That same day I removed the tarpaulin from the boat, and started to scrape the shell. I managed to clear the stern of old paint.

My intention was to continue the following day. But something happened to prevent that. As I was on my way down to take my morning bath, I discovered that a little motorboat was beached by the jetty.

I stopped dead and held my breath.

The door to the boathouse was open.

Somebody had come to pay me a visit.

Chapter 2

There was a glint of light inside the boathouse. Sima emerged from the darkness, sword in hand.

‘I thought you were never going to wake up.’

‘How did you get here? What’s that boat you’ve beached down by the jetty?’

‘I took it.’

‘Took?’

‘From the harbour. It was locked. But the chain that can stop me hasn’t been invented yet.’

‘You mean you stole the boat?’

My cat had come to the jetty, and was observing Sima from a distance.

‘Where’s your dog?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘What do you mean, dead?’

‘Dead. There’s only one kind of dead. When you’re dead, you’re not alive. Unalive. Dead. My dog is dead.’

‘I had a dog once. It’s dead as well.’

‘Dogs die. My cat won’t live much longer either. She’s also old.’

‘Are you going to shoot it? Do you have a rifle?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of telling you. I want to know what you’re doing here, and why you stole a boat.’

‘I wanted to see you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I didn’t like you.’

‘You wanted to see me because you don’t like me?’

‘I want to know why I don’t like you.’

‘You’re mad. How come you know how to handle a boat?’

‘I spent some time at a reform school on the shore of Lake Vättern. They had a boat.’

‘How did you know where I lived?’

‘I asked an old bloke sweeping up leaves outside the church. It wasn’t hard. I just asked about a doctor who’d hidden himself away on an island. I told him I was your daughter.’

I gave up. She had an answer to every question. Hugo Persson was employed to keep the churchyard in good order, and I knew he was a gossip. He had presumably told the girl how to get here — it wasn’t difficult: straight out towards Mittbåden where the lighthouse was, then through the Järnsundet channel with the high cliffs on either side, and so to my island, where there were two broom beacons close to the rocks at the mouth of the inlet to my boathouse.

I could see that she was tired. Her eyes were dull, her face pale, her hair carelessly pinned up with cheap hairslides. She was dressed entirely in black, and her trainers had a red stripe.

‘Come with me to the house,’ I said. ‘You must be hungry. I’ll get you some food. Then I’ll call the coastguards and tell them that you’re here, and that you’ve stolen a boat. They can come and fetch you.’

She said nothing, nor did she threaten me with her sword. When we’d settled down in the kitchen, I asked her what she wanted.

‘Porridge.’

‘I didn’t think people ate porridge any more.’

‘I’ve no idea what people do. But I want porridge. I can make it myself.’

I had some oats, and a tin of apple sauce that wasn’t too far past its use-by date. She made the porridge very thick, pushed the tin of apple sauce out of the way and filled up her bowl with milk. She ate slowly. The sword was lying on the table. I asked if she wanted coffee or tea. She shook her head. She wanted only porridge. I tried to work out why she’d come to the island to visit me. What did she want? The last time we’d met, she had come running at me with the sword brandished over her head. Now she was sitting at my kitchen table, eating porridge. It didn’t make sense. She rinsed out her bowl and stood it on the draining board.

‘I’m tired. I need to get some sleep.’

‘There’s a bed in that room over there. You can sleep there. But I should warn you that there’s an anthill in the room. And as it’s spring now, they’ve started to become active.’

She believed me. She’d been doubtful about whether my dog was dead, but she believed what I said about the anthill. She pointed at the sofa in the kitchen.

‘I can sleep there.’

I gave her a pillow and a blanket. She didn’t take any clothes off, nor did she remove her shoes; she just pulled the blanket over her head and fell asleep. I waited until I was sure, then went to get dressed.

Accompanied by the cat, I went back to the inlet. The boat was a Ryd with a Mercury outboard motor, 25 h.p. The bottom of the boat had scraped hard against the stones on the seabed. There was no doubt that she had beached the boat intentionally. I tried to see if the plastic had split, but I couldn’t find any holes.

It was a post day: Jansson would notice the boat. I had only a few hours in which to decide what to do. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that I would in fact call the coastguards. If possible, I would prefer to persuade her to go back to Agnes without the authorities being involved. I also had my own interests to think about. It was hardly appropriate for an old doctor to be visited by runaway girls who stole boats.

With the aid of a boathook and a plank used as a lever, I managed to get the boat back into the water. I used the boathook to propel it as far as the jetty and tied it to the stern of my little rowing boat. There was an electric starter, but it needed a key and, needless to say, that hadn’t been in the ignition when Sima stole the boat. She had used the drawstring, and I did the same. The engine started at the fourth attempt. The propeller and pinion were undamaged. I reversed away from the jetty, and aimed the boat at two rocky skerries known as the Sighs. Between them was a small natural harbour hidden from view. I could leave the stolen boat there for the time being.

It is not clear why the two skerries are known as the Sighs. Jansson maintains that a long time ago, there was a wildfowler in these parts by the name of Måsse who used to sigh every time he shot an eider.

I don’t know if it’s true. The skerries are not named on any of my charts. But I like the idea of barren rocks rising out of the sea being called the Sighs. You sometimes get the feeling that trees are whispering, flowers murmuring, berry bushes humming unknown melodies, and that the wild roses in the crevices behind Grandma’s apple tree are playing beautiful tunes on invisible instruments. So why shouldn’t skerries sigh?

It took me almost an hour to row back to the jetty. No chance of a morning bath today. I walked back up to the house. Sima was asleep under the blanket. She hadn’t moved at all since lying down. As I watched her, I heard the throbbing sound of Jansson’s boat. I walked back down to the jetty and waited for him. There was a gentle north-easterly breeze, the temperature was around plus five, and spring still seemed a long way off. I noticed a pike near the end of the jetty, but then it darted away.

Jansson had problems with his scalp today. He was afraid that he was starting to go bald. I suggested he should consult a hairdresser. Instead, he unfolded a page he’d ripped out from some weekly magazine or other and asked me to read it. It was a whole-page advertisement for a miraculous potion that promised immediate results; I noticed that one of the ingredients was lavender. I thought of my mother, and told Jansson that he shouldn’t believe everything he read in expensive advertisements.

‘I want you to give me some advice.’

‘I already have done. Consult a hairdresser. He will no doubt know a lot more about hair loss than I do.’

‘Didn’t you learn anything about baldness when you trained as a doctor?’

‘Not a lot, I have to admit.’

He took off his cap and bowed his head as if he were suddenly expressing subservience. As far as I could tell his hair was thick and healthy, not least on the crown of his head.

‘Can’t you see that it’s getting thinner?’

‘That’s only natural as you grow older.’

‘According to that advert, you’re wrong.’

‘In that case I suggest you order the stuff and massage it into your scalp.’

Jansson crumpled up the page.

‘I sometimes wonder if you really are a doctor.’

‘Whatever, I can tell the difference between people with genuine aches and pains, and hypochondriac postmen.’

He was about to respond when I noticed that his gaze deviated from my face and focused on something behind my back. I turned round. Sima was standing there. She had the cat in her arms, and the samurai sword was hanging from her belt. She said nothing, only smiled. Jansson stared. Within days the whole of the archipelago would know that I was being visited by a young lady with dark eyes, tousled hair and a samurai sword.

‘I think I’ll go ahead and order that lotion,’ Jansson said in a friendly voice. ‘I’d better not disturb you any longer. I haven’t got any post for you today.’

I watched as he backed away from the jetty. When I turned round, Sima was on her way to the house. She had put the cat down halfway up the hill.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, when I entered.

‘Where’s the boat?’ she asked.

‘I’ve moved it to where it can’t be seen.’

‘Who was that you were talking to down by the jetty?’

‘His name’s Jansson, and he delivers mail out here in the archipelago. It wasn’t good for him to have seen you here.’

‘Why not?’

‘He gossips. He blabs.’

‘That doesn’t bother me.’

‘You don’t live here. But I do.’

She stubbed out her cigarette in one of Grandma’s old coffee saucers. I didn’t like that.

‘I dreamt that you were pouring an anthill over me. I tried to defend myself with the sword, but the blade broke. Then I woke up. Why do you have an anthill in that room?’

‘There was no reason for you to go in there.’

‘I think it’s pretty cool. Half the tablecloth has been swallowed up by it. In a few years the whole table will have been covered.’

I suddenly noticed something I had overlooked before. Sima was agitated. Her movements were nervous, and when I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, I could see that she was rubbing her fingers together.

It struck me that many years ago I had seen that same strange, nervous finger-rubbing in a patient whose leg I’d been forced to amputate, because of complications to do with his diabetes. He had an acute fear of germs, and was unstable mentally, suffering deep depressions.

The cat jumped up on to the table. Until a few years ago I always used to shoo it down again, but I no longer did. The cat has beaten me. I moved the sword so that she wouldn’t injure her paws. When I touched the hilt of the sword, Sima gave a start. The cat rolled up into a ball on the waxed cloth and started purring. Sima and I watched her in silence.

‘Come clean,’ I said. ‘Tell me why you’re here and where you think you’re going to. Then we can work out the best way of proceeding without unnecessary problems.’

‘Where’s the boat?’

‘I’ve moored it in a little cove between two small islands known as the Sighs.’

‘Why would anybody call an island a sigh?’

‘There’s a reef out here called the Copper Bottom. And some shallows just off Bogholmen are called the Fart. Islands have names just like people do. Sometimes nobody knows where they come from.’

‘So you’ve hidden the boat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I don’t know if that’s anything to thank me for. But if you don’t come clean soon I shall pick up the phone and ring the coastguard. They’ll be here within half an hour and take you away.’

‘If you touch that phone I shall cut your hand off.’

I took a deep breath and said: ‘You don’t want to touch that sword because I’ve had hold of it. You’re afraid of germs. You’re terrified your body is going to be invaded by contagious diseases.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I was right. A sort of invisible shudder passed right through her body. Her hard exterior had been penetrated. So she counter-attacked. She grabbed my ancient cat by the scruff of its neck and threw her in the direction of the firewood box. Then she started screaming at me in her native language. I stared at her, and tried to tell myself that she wasn’t my daughter, wasn’t my responsibility.

She suddenly stopped yelling.

‘Aren’t you going to pick the sword up? Aren’t you going to take hold of the hilt? Cut me to pieces?’

‘Why are you so horrible?’

‘Nobody treats my cat the way you’ve just done.’

‘I can’t stand cat fur. I’m allergic.’

‘That doesn’t give you the right to kill my cat.’

I stood up to let the cat out. She was sitting next to the outside door, eyeing me suspiciously. I went out with her, thinking that Sima might need to be alone for a while. The sun had broken through the cloud cover, it was dead calm, and the warmest spring day so far. The cat disappeared round the corner of the house. I glanced surreptitiously in through the window. Sima was standing at the sink, washing her hands. Then she dried them carefully, rubbed the hilt of the sword with the towel and put the sword back on the table.

As far as I was concerned, she was a totally incomprehensible person. I couldn’t imagine what was going on inside her head. I hadn’t the slightest idea.

I went back inside. She was sitting at the table, waiting. I didn’t mention the sword. She looked at me and said:

‘Chara. That’s what I’d like to be called.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s beautiful. Because it’s a telescope. It’s on Mount Wilson, near Los Angeles. I shall go there before I die. You can see stars through the telescope. And things you could never imagine. That telescope is more powerful than any other.’

She started whispering now, as if in raptures, or as if she wanted to confide in me a highly valuable secret.

‘It’s so powerful that you can stand here on earth and make out an individual person on the moon. I would like to be that person.’

I sensed what she was trying to say. A harassed little girl running away from everything, especially from herself, thought that although she was invisible here on earth, she might become visible through that powerful telescope.

I had the feeling I was beginning to grasp a small fragment of who she was. I tried to keep the conversation going by talking about the starry skies we had here in the islands on clear, moonless autumn nights. But she drew back into her shell, not wanting to talk; she seemed to regret having said what she had.

We sat in silence for a while. Then I asked her once again why she had come here.

‘Oil,’ she said. ‘I intend going to Russia and becoming rich. There’s oil in Russia. Then I shall come back here and be a pyromaniac.’

‘What do you intend burning down?’

‘All the houses I’ve been forced to live in against my will.’

‘Are you intending to burn down my house?’

‘That’s the only one I shall leave alone. That and Agnes’s. But I shall burn down all the rest.’

This girl was mad. Not only did she run around brandishing a lethal sword, she also had the most confused ideas about her own future.

She seemed to read my mind.

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘To be honest, no.’

‘Then you can go to hell.’

‘Nobody speaks like that in my house. I can have the coastguards here faster than you think.’

I slammed my fist down on Grandma’s old coffee saucer that Sima had used as an ashtray. Shards of china shot across the kitchen. She sat there motionless, as if my outburst had nothing to do with her.

‘I don’t want you to get angry,’ she said calmly. ‘I only want to spend one night here. Then I shall go away.’

‘Why did you come here at all?’

Her reply surprised me.

‘But you invited me here.’

‘I’ve no recollection of that.’

‘You said you didn’t think I would ever come. I wanted to prove to you that you were wrong. Besides, I’m on my way to Russia.’

‘I don’t believe a word you say. Can’t you tell me the truth?’

‘I don’t think you want to hear that.’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘Why do you think I have the sword with me? I want to be able to defend myself. There was a time when I couldn’t. When I was eleven.’

I realised that this was probably true. Her vulnerability cut right through her anger.

‘I believe you. But why have you come here? You can’t really mean that you are on your way to Russia?’

‘I know I shall be successful there.’

‘What will you do? Dig for oil with your bare hands? They won’t even let you into the country. Why can’t you stay with Agnes?’

‘I have to move on. I left a note saying I was heading north.’

‘But this is south!’

‘I don’t want her to find me. She’s like a dog sometimes. She can sniff down anybody who runs away. I only want to stay here for a short time. Then I shall be off.’

‘You must realise that this isn’t possible.’

‘I’ll let you if you allow me to stay.’

‘Let me what?’

‘What do you think?’

It suddenly dawned on me what she was offering.

‘Who do you think I am? I shall forget you ever said that. I didn’t hear anything.’

I was so upset that I stormed out. I thought about the rumours that Jansson was no doubt busy spreading all over the islands. I would be Fredrik, the man who was secretly taking advantage of young girls imported from some Arabian country or other.

I sat down on the jetty. What Sima had said didn’t only embarrass me, it also saddened me. I was beginning to understand the scale of the burdens she was dragging around with her.

After a while she came down to the jetty.

‘Sit here,’ I said. ‘You can stay here a few days.’

I could feel her anxiety. Her legs were shaking. I couldn’t just throw her out. Besides, I needed time to think. A fourth woman had now invaded my life, and she needed my help, though I had no idea how to give it.

We ate the last hare steak from the freezer. Sima poked around at the food rather than eating it. She didn’t say much. Her worries seemed to be increasing all the time. She didn’t want to sleep in the room with the anthill. I made a bed up for her in the kitchen. It was barely nine o’clock when she said she wanted to turn in.

The cat would have to spend the night out. I went upstairs and lay down on my bed to read. It was all quiet down in the kitchen, but I could see light coming from the kitchen window. She still hadn’t switched the light off. As I drew my curtains, I could see my cat sitting in the light from the kitchen.

She would soon be leaving me as well. It was as if she had already turned into an ethereal being.

I was reading one of my grandfather’s books from 1911 about rare birds, especially waders. I must have dozed off without putting the light out. When I opened my eyes, it still wasn’t eleven o’clock. I had been asleep for half an hour at most. I got up and opened the curtains slightly. The kitchen light was out, and the cat had vanished. I was just going to lie down again when I heard something. There were sounds coming from the kitchen. I opened my door and listened intently. Sima was crying. I hesitated. Should I go downstairs? Did she want to be left in peace? After a while the sobbing seemed to fade away. I closed the door as quietly as I could, and went back to bed. I knew exactly where to put my feet in order to avoid making the floorboards creak.

The book about waders had fallen on to the floor. I didn’t pick it up, but lay in the dark and wondered what I should do. The only right and proper thing to do was to phone the coastguards. But why should I always do the right and proper thing? I decided to phone Agnes. She could decide. Despite everything, Agnes was the person closest to Sima in this life, if I had understood the facts correctly.

I woke up as usual shortly after six. The thermometer outside the bedroom window showed plus four degrees. It was foggy.

I got dressed and went downstairs. I was still treading carefully as I assumed Sima would still be asleep. I thought I would take the coffee pot with me to the boathouse where I have an electric hotplate. It’s been there since my grandfather’s day. He used it to boil mixtures of tar and resin to make his boat watertight.

The kitchen door was ajar. I opened it slowly as I knew it creaked. Sima was lying on top of the bed in her underclothes. The lamp in the corner by the sofa was switched on and acted like a spotlight to reveal that her body and the sheet were covered in blood.

I couldn’t believe what I saw. I knew it was true, but it felt as if it couldn’t possibly have happened even so. I tried to shake some life into her, at the same time looking for the deepest cuts. She hadn’t used the sword, but one of my grandfather’s old fish knives. For some reason that made me even more desperate, as if she had dragged him, the friendly old fisherman, into her wretched misery. I yelled at her to wake up, but her body was inert, her eyes closed. The worst wounds were around her abdomen, her stomach and her wrists. Strangely enough, there were also wounds in the back of her head. How she had managed to stab herself there was beyond me. The most serious one of all was in her right arm — I had noticed the previous day that she was left-handed — she must have lost a lot of blood. I made a pressure bandage from some kitchen towels. Then I took her pulse. It was faint. All the time I was trying to shake her into life. I didn’t know if she had taken any pills as well, or perhaps used some drug or other — there was a smell in the kitchen I didn’t recognise. I sniffed quickly at an ashtray, another of Grandma’s old coffee saucers that she had taken from a cupboard. She had presumably been smoking hash or pot. I cursed the fact that all my medical instruments were down at the boathouse. I ran out, stumbling over the cat sitting just outside the door, fetched a blood pressure cuff and returned to the kitchen. Her blood pressure was very low. She was in a serious condition.

I phoned the coastguard. Hans Lundman answered. I used to play with him in the summers when I was a child. His father, who was a pilot, and my grandfather were good friends.

Hans is a sensible man. He knows people wouldn’t ring the coastguard in the early hours of the morning unless it was urgent.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I have a girl in my cottage who needs to be taken to hospital immediately.’

‘It’s foggy,’ said Lundman, ‘but we’ll be there within half an hour.’

It was thirty-two minutes before I heard the powerful engines of the coastguard boat. They were the longest minutes of my life. Longer than when I was mugged in Rome and thought I was going to die. I was powerless. Sima was on her way out of this world. I had no way of assessing how much blood she’d lost. There was nothing I could do for her apart from the pressure bandage. When it became clear that my shouting at her to wake up didn’t help, I pressed my mouth close to her ear and whispered that she had to stay alive, she couldn’t just die, it wasn’t right, not here in my kitchen, not now when spring had arrived, not on a day like the one that had just begun. Could she hear me? I don’t know. But I continued whispering in her ear. I told her fragments of fairy tales I remembered from my own childhood, I told her about the lovely smells that filled the island when the hawthorn and lilac had come into blossom. I said what we would be having for dinner, and described the remarkable birds that waded along the water’s edge before darting forward to snap up their prey. I was talking to save her life, and my own — I was terrified that she might die.

I heard Hans Lundman and his assistant approaching and shouted to them to hurry. They quickly transferred her into a stretcher from the bed, and we were off without delay. I ran down to the boat in my stockinged feet, carrying my cut-down wellington boots in my hand. I didn’t stop to close the door behind me.

We sailed into the fog. Lundman was at the wheel, and he asked me how things stood.

‘I don’t know. Her blood pressure is falling.’

We were off at full throttle, straight into the whiteness. His assistant, whom I didn’t know, was looking in anguish at Sima, strapped in the stretcher. I wondered if he was about to faint.

An ambulance was waiting on the quayside. Everything was enveloped in the white fog.

‘Let’s hope she makes it,’ said Lundman as we left.

He looked worried. Presumably he knew from experience when a person was close to death.

It took us forty-three minutes to get to the hospital. The ambulance woman sitting beside the stretcher was called Sonja, and in her forties. She set up a drip and worked calmly and methodically, occasionally communicating with the hospital about Sima’s condition.

‘Has she taken anything? Tablets?’

‘I don’t know. She might have been smoking pot.’

‘Is it your daughter?’

‘No. She simply turned up out of the blue.’

‘Have you contacted her relatives?’

‘I don’t know who they are. She lives in a foster home. I’ve only met her once before. I don’t know why she came to me.’

‘Ring the care home.’

She reached for a mobile phone hanging from the wall of the ambulance. I rang directory enquiries and was put through to Agnes’s house. When the answering machine responded, I explained the situation precisely, said which hospital we were heading for, and left a telephone number that Sonja had given me.

‘Ring again,’ she said. ‘People wake up if you keep on trying.’

‘She might be out in the shed.’

‘Doesn’t she have a mobile?’

I didn’t have the strength to phone any more.

‘No,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t have a mobile. She’s unusual.’

It wasn’t until Sima had been taken into A&E and I was sitting on a bench in a corridor that I got through to Agnes. I could hear her anxious breathing.

‘How is she?’

‘She’s in a very bad way.’

‘Tell me exactly how things are.’

‘There’s a risk that she might die. It depends how much blood she’s lost, how deep the trauma is. Do you know if she took sleeping pills?’

‘I don’t think so.’

I passed the nurse the phone.

‘It’s the girl’s guardian. Talk to her. I’ve explained that it’s serious.’

I walked along the corridor. An elderly man naked from the waist down was lying on a trolley, whimpering. The nurses were trying to calm a hysterical mother with a screaming infant in her arms. I continued until I reached the A&E entrance. An ambulance was standing there, empty and unlit. I thought of what Sima had said, about the telescope that could home in on an individual person standing on the moon. Try to stay alive, I whispered to myself. Chara, little Chara, perhaps one day you will become that person who went unnoticed here on earth, but got her own back standing on the moon and waving down to the rest of us.

That was a prayer, or perhaps an invocation. Sima, lying in intensive care and trying to stay alive, needed all the help she could get. I don’t believe in God. But you can create your own gods whenever you need them.

I stood there appealing to a place near Los Angeles called Mount Wilson. If Sima survived, I would pay for her to go there. I would find out who this Wilson was, the man who had given his name to the mountain.

There’s nothing to prevent a god having a name. Why shouldn’t the Creator have the name Wilson?

If she died, it would be my fault. If I’d gone downstairs when I heard her crying, she might not have injured herself. I’m a doctor, I ought to have understood. But above all else, I am a human being who ought to have recognised some of the enormous loneliness that a little girl can feel.

Without warning, I found myself longing for my father. I hadn’t done so since he died. His death had caused me great pain. Even though we had never spoken intimately to each other, we had shared an unspoken understanding. He had lived long enough to experience my success in training to become a doctor — and never concealed his surprise and pride over it. During his final days, when he was confined to bed with his excruciatingly painful cancer that had spread from a little black spot on the heel of his foot to become metastases all over him that he compared to moss on a stone, he often spoke about the white coat that I would be privileged to wear. I thought his concept of power being embodied in that white coat was embarrassing. It was only afterwards that I realised he envisaged me as the one who would gain revenge on his behalf. He had also worn a white jacket, but people had trampled all over him. I would be the means through which he got his own back. Nobody belittled a doctor in a white coat.

I missed him now. And that magical trip to the black forest pool. I wanted to turn the clock back, I wanted to undo most of my life. My mother also flitted before my eyes. Lavender and tears, a life I had never understood. Had she carried around an invisible sword? Perhaps she was standing on the far bank of the river of life, waving to Sima?

In my mind, I also tried to talk to Harriet and Louise. But they remained silent, as if they thought I ought to be able to sort this out myself.

I went back inside and found a small waiting room that was empty. After a while, I was informed that Sima’s condition was still critical. She was going to be moved to an intensive care ward. I shared the lift with her. Both men in charge of her trolley were black. One of them smiled at me. I smiled back, and had an urge to tell him about that remarkable telescope on Mount Wilson. Sima was lying with her eyes closed; she had a drip and was being fed oxygen through a nose catheter. I bent over her and whispered into her ear: ‘Chara, when you are well again you will visit Mount Wilson and see that there is somebody standing on the moon who looks remarkably like you.’

A doctor came and said nothing was certain, but that they would probably need to operate and that Sima was not reacting to anything they attempted. He asked me several questions, but I had to tell him that I simply didn’t know if she was suffering from any illnesses, or if she had tried to commit suicide before. The woman who would be able to answer questions like that was on her way here.

Agnes arrived shortly after ten. It occurred to me to wonder how she could drive a car with only one arm. Did she have a specially adapted vehicle? But it wasn’t important. I took her behind the curtain to where Sima was lying. Agnes sobbed quietly, but I didn’t want Sima to hear anything like that and took Agnes out again.

‘There’s no change,’ I said. ‘But the very fact that you’ve come makes everything better. Try talking to her. She needs to know that you’re here.’

‘Will she be able to hear what I say?’

‘We don’t know. But we can hope.’

Agnes spoke to the doctor. No illnesses, no medication, no previous suicide attempts as far as she was aware. The doctor, who was about my age, said that the situation was unchanged but slightly more stable since Sima had been admitted. There was no reason for the moment to be unduly worried.

Agnes was relieved. There was a coffee machine in the corridor. Between us we managed to scrape together the necessary small change for two cups of awful coffee. I was surprised by the adroitness with which she used one hand where I needed two.

I told Agnes what had happened. She shook her head slowly.

‘She might well have been on the way to Russia. Sima always tries to climb mountains. She’s never satisfied with walking along normal paths like the rest of us.’

‘But why should she want to come and visit me?’

‘You live on an island. Russia is on the other side of the sea.’

‘But when she gets to the island I live on, she tries to take her own life. I don’t get it.’

‘You can never tell by looking at a person just how badly damaged he or she is inside.’

‘She told me a few things.’

‘So perhaps you have some idea.’

At about three o’clock, a nurse came to say that Sima’s condition had stabilised. If we wanted to go home, we could. She would phone us if there was any change. As we had nowhere to go to we stayed there for the rest of the day and all night. Agnes curled up on a narrow sofa and dozed. I spent most of the time on a chair leafing through well-thumbed magazines in which people I’d never heard of, pictured in dazzlingly bright colours, trumpeted to the world how important they were. We occasionally went to get something to eat, but we were never away for long.

Shortly after five in the morning, a nurse came to the waiting room to inform us that there had been a sudden change. Serious internal bleeding had occurred, and surgeons were about to operate in an attempt to stabilise her condition.

We had taken things too much for granted. Sima was suddenly drifting away from us again.

At twenty past six the doctor came to see us. He seemed to be very tired, sat down on a chair and stared at his hands. They hadn’t been able to stop the bleeding. Sima was dead. She had never come round. If we needed support, the hospital offered a counselling service.

We went in together to see her. All the tubes had been removed, and the machines switched off. The yellow pallor that makes the newly dead look like a waxwork had already taken a grip of her face. I don’t know how many dead people I have seen in my life. I have watched people die, I have performed post-mortem examinations, I have held human brains in my hands. Nevertheless, it was me who burst into tears; Agnes was in so much pain that she was incapable of reaction. She grasped my arm; I could feel that she was strong — and I wished that she would never let go.

I wanted to stay there, but Agnes asked me to go back home. She would stay with Sima, I had done all that I could, she was grateful, but she wanted to be on her own. She accompanied me to my taxi. It was a beautiful morning, still chilly. Yellow coltsfoot were in bloom on the verge leading up to A&E.

A coltsfoot moment, I thought. Just now, this morning, when Sima was lying dead inside there. Just for a brief moment she had sparkled like a ruby. Now it was as if she had never existed.

The only thing about death that scares me is its utter indifference.

‘The sword,’ I said. ‘And she had a case as well. What do you want me to do with that?’

‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Agnes. ‘I can’t say when. But I know where to find you.’

I watched her go back into the hospital. A one-armed sorrowful angel, who had just lost one of her wicked but remarkable children.

I got into the taxi and said where I wanted to go to. The driver eyed me suspiciously. I realised that I made a dodgy impression, to say the least. Dishevelled clothes, cut-down wellington boots, unshaven and hollow-eyed.

‘We usually ask for payment in advance for long journeys like this,’ the driver said. ‘We’ve had some bad experiences.’

I felt in my pockets and realised that I didn’t even have my wallet with me. I turned to the driver.

‘My daughter has just died. I want to go home. You’ll be paid. Please drive slowly and carefully.’

I started to weep. He said nothing more until we pulled up at the quayside. It was ten o’clock. There was a slight breeze that hardly disturbed the water in the harbour. I asked the taxi driver to stop outside the red wooden building that housed the coastguard. Hans Lundman had seen the taxi approaching and had come out of the door. He could see from my face that the outcome had not been good.

‘She died,’ I said. ‘Internal bleeding. It was unexpected. We thought she was going to make it. I need to borrow a thousand kronor from you to pay for the taxi.’

‘I’ll put it on my credit card,’ said Lundman, and headed for the taxi.

He’d finished his shift several hours previously. I realised that he had stayed on in the hope of being there when I got back to the quayside. Hans Lundman lived on one of the islands in the southern archipelago.

‘I’ll take you home,’ he said.

‘I don’t have any money at home,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to ask Jansson to take some out of the bank for me.’

‘Who cares about money at a time like this?’ he said.

I always feel at ease when I’m at sea. Hans Lundman’s boat was an old converted fishing vessel that progressed at a stately pace. His work occasionally forced him to hurry, but he never rushed otherwise.

We berthed at the jetty. It was sunny, and warm. Spring had sprung. But I felt devoid of any such feelings.

‘There’s a boat out there at the Sighs,’ I said. ‘Moored there. It’s stolen.’

He understood.

‘We’ll discover it tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It just so happens that I’ll be passing there on patrol tomorrow. Nobody knows who stole it.’

We shook hands.

‘She shouldn’t have died,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Lundman. ‘She really shouldn’t.’

I remained on the jetty and watched him reverse out of the inlet. He raised his hand in farewell, then was gone.

I sat down on the bench. It was much later when I returned to my house, where the front door was standing wide open.

Chapter 3

The oaks were unusually late this year.

I recorded in my logbook that the big oak tree between the boathouse and what used to be my grandparents’ henhouse didn’t start turning green until 25 May. The cluster of oaks around the inlet on the north side of the island — the inlet that for some incomprehensible reason had always been known as the Quarrel — started to come into leaf a few days earlier.

They say that the oaks on these islands were planted by the state at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so that there would be ample timber to make the warships being built in nearby Karlskrona. I remember lightning striking one of the trees when I was a child, and my grandfather sawing down what remained of the trunk. It had been planted in 1802. Grandfather told me that was in the days of Napoleon. I had no idea who Napoleon was at the time, but I realised that it was a very long time ago. Those annual rings had dogged me throughout my life. Beethoven was alive when that oak was still a sapling. The tree was in its prime when my father was born.

As so often out here in the archipelago, summer came gradually, but you could never be certain that it was here to stay. My feeling of loneliness usually decreased as it grew warmer. But that was not the case this year. I just sat there with my anthill, a sharp sword and Sima’s half-empty suitcase.

I often spoke to Agnes on the telephone during this period. She told me that the funeral had taken place in Mogata church. Apart from Agnes and the two girls who lived with her — the ones I had met: Miranda and Aida — the only other person to attend was a very old man who claimed to be a distant relative of Sima’s. He had arrived by taxi, and seemed so frail that Agnes was afraid he would drop dead at any moment. She had not managed to establish just how he was related to Sima. Perhaps he had mistaken her for somebody else? When she showed him a photograph of Sima, he hadn’t been at all sure that he recognised her.

But so what? Agnes had said. The church ought to have been full of people bidding farewell to this young person who had never had an opportunity to discover herself, or explore the world.

The coffin had been adorned with a spray of red roses. A woman from the parish, accompanied by a restless young boy in the organ loft, sang a couple of hymns; Agnes said a few words, and she had asked the vicar not to go on unnecessarily about a conciliatory and omniscient God.

When I heard that the grave would only bear a number, I offered to pay for a headstone. Jansson later delivered a letter from Agnes with a sketch of the stone, how she thought it ought to look. Above Sima’s name and dates, she had drawn a rose.

I rang her the same evening and asked if it shouldn’t be a samurai sword instead. She understood my way of thinking, and said she had considered it herself.

‘But it would cause an uproar,’ she said.

‘What shall I do with her belongings? The sword and the suitcase?’

‘What’s in the suitcase?’

‘Underclothes. A pair of trousers and a jumper. A scruffy map of the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland.’

‘I’ll come and collect it. I’d like to see your house. And above all, I want to see the room where it happened.’

‘I’ve already said that I ought to have gone down to her. I shall always regret not having done so.’

‘I’m not accusing you of anything. I just want to see the place where she began to die.’

Initially she planned to visit me during the last week of May, but something cropped up. She cancelled her visit twice more. The first time Miranda had run away, and the second occasion she was ill. I had put the sword and the case with Sima’s clothes in the room with the anthill. One night I woke up out of a dream in which the ants had engulfed the case and the sword in their hill. I raced downstairs and wrenched open the door. But the ants were still continuing to climb and conquer the dining table and the white tablecloth.

I moved Sima’s belongings to the boathouse.

Jansson later told me that the coastguards had found a stolen motorboat moored in the Sighs. Hans Lundman was as good as his word.

‘One of these days they’ll be all over us,’ said Jansson menacingly.

‘Who will?’

‘These gangsters. They’re everywhere. What can you do to defend yourself? Jump into your boat and sail out to sea?’

‘What would they want to come here for? What is there around here worth stealing?’

‘The very thought makes me worry about my blood pressure.’

I fetched the monitor from the boathouse. Jansson lay down on the bench. I let him rest for five minutes then strapped up his arm.

‘It’s excellent. 140 over 80.’

‘I think you’re wrong.’

‘In that case I think you should find yourself another doctor.’

I returned to the boathouse and stayed there in the darkness until I heard him backing away from the jetty.

I spent the days before the oak trees started to turn green sorting out my boat at last. When I again managed to remove the heavy tarpaulin, which took considerable effort, I found a dead squirrel beneath the keelson. I was surprised, as I had never seen a squirrel out here on the island, and never heard it claimed that there were any.

The boat was in much worse condition than I had feared. After two days assessing what needed to be done I was ready to give up even before I’d started. Nevertheless, the following day I began scraping off all the old, flaky paint on the rest of the hull. I phoned Hans Lundman and asked him for advice. He promised to call on me one of these days. It was slow going. I wasn’t used to this kind of exertion, my only regular activities being a morning bath and writing up my logbook.

The same day that I again started scraping off the paint, I dug out the logbook I’d kept during my very first year out here on the island. I looked up today’s date. To my astonishment I read: ‘Yesterday I drank myself silly.’ That was all. I now remembered it happening, but very vaguely and certainly not why. The previous day I had recorded that I’d repaired a downpipe. The following day I had laid out my nets and caught seven flounders and three perch.

I put the logbook away. It was evening now. The apple tree was in blossom. I could picture Grandma sitting on the bench beside it, a shimmering figure that melted into the background, the tree trunk, the rocks, the thorn thicket.

The following day Jansson delivered letters from both Harriet and Louise. I had eventually brought myself to tell them about the girl who had come to my island, and her death. I read Harriet’s first; as always, it was very short. She wrote that she was too tired to write a proper letter. I read it, and frowned. It was difficult to read her handwriting, much more so than before. The words seemed to be writhing in pain on the page. And to make matters worse, the content was bewildering. She wrote that she was better, but felt worse. She made no mention of Sima’s death.

I put the letter to one side. The cat jumped up on to the table. I sometimes envy animals that don’t have the worry of disturbing mail. Was Harriet befuddled by painkillers when she wrote the letter? I was worried, picked up the telephone and rang her. If she was drifting into the very last phase of her life, I wanted to know about it. I let it ring for ages, but there was no answer. I tried her mobile number. Nothing. I left a message and asked her to return the call.

Then I opened the letter from Louise. It was about the remarkable cave system in Lascaux in the west of France, where in 1940 some boys stumbled upon cave paintings 17,000 years old. Some of the animals depicted on the rock walls were four metres high. Now, she wrote, ‘These ancient works of art are under threat of being ruined because some madmen have installed air conditioning in the passages because the American tourists cannot handle the temperature! But freezing temperatures are essential if these cave paintings are to survive. The rock walls have been attacked by a strain of mould that is difficult to deal with. If nothing is done, if the whole world fails to unite in defence of this, the most ancient art museum we possess will disappear.’

She intended to act. I assumed that she would write to every politician in Europe, and I felt proud. I had a daughter who was prepared to man the barricades.

The letter had been written in short bursts on several occasions. Both the handwriting and pen used varied. In between serious and agitated paragraphs, she had interposed notes about mundane happenings. She had sprained her foot while fetching water. Giaconelli had been ill. They had suspected pneumonia, but now he was on the mend. She sympathised with the sorrow I felt at the death of Sima.

‘I’ll be coming to visit you shortly,’ she concluded. ‘I want to see this island where you’ve been hiding yourself away all these years. I sometimes used to dream that I had a father who was just as frighteningly handsome as Caravaggio. That is not something anybody could accuse you of being. But still, you can no longer hide from me. I want to get to know you, I want my inheritance, I want you to explain to me all the things that I still don’t understand.’

Not a word about Harriet. Didn’t she care about her mother, who was busy dying?

I tried Harriet’s numbers again, but still no answer. I called Louise’s mobile, but no answer there either. I climbed the hill behind the house. It was a beautiful early-summer day. Not really warm yet, but the islands had begun to turn green. In the distance I could see one of the year’s first sailing boats on its way to somewhere unknown from a home harbour that was also unknown. I suddenly felt an urge to drag myself away from this island. I had spent so much of my life wandering back and forth between the jetty and the house.

I just wanted to get away. When Harriet appeared out there on the ice with her walker, she shattered the curse that I’d allowed to imprison me here, as if in a cage. I realised that the twelve years I had lived on the island had been wasted, like a liquid that had drained out of a cracked container. There was no going back, no starting again.

I walked round the island. There was a pungent smell of sea and soil. Lively oystercatchers were scurrying about at the water’s edge, pecking away with their red beaks. I felt as if I were walking round a prison yard a few days before I was due to emerge through the front gates and become a free man again. But would I do that? Where could I go to? What kind of a life would be in store for me?

I sat down under one of the oaks in the Quarrel. It dawned on me that I was in a hurry. There was no time to waste.

That evening I rowed out to Starrudden. The sea bottom was smooth there. I laid out a flounder net, but didn’t have much hope of catching anything — maybe the odd flounder or a perch that would be appreciated by the cat. The net would be clogged up by the sticky algae that now proliferates in the Baltic.

Perhaps this sea stretching out before me on these beautiful evenings is in fact slowly deteriorating into a marsh?

Later that evening I did something I shall never be able to understand. I fetched a spade, and opened up my dog’s grave. I dug up the whole cadaver. Maggots had already eaten away the mucous membranes around its mouth, eyes and ears, and opened up its stomach. There was a white clump of them clustered around its anus. I put down the spade, and fetched the cat that was fast asleep on the kitchen sofa. I carried her to the grave and set her down next to the dead dog. She jumped high into the air, as if she’d been bitten by an adder, and ran away as far as the corner of the house, where she paused, wondering whether to continue her flight. I gathered a handful of the fat maggots and wondered whether I ought to eat them — or would the nausea be too much for me? Then I threw them back on to the dog’s body, and filled in the grave as fast as I could.

It made no sense. Was I preparing the way for opening up a similar grave inside myself? In order to summon up enough courage to face in cold blood all the things I’d been burdened with for so long?

I spent ages scrubbing my hands under the kitchen taps. I felt sick at what I’d done.

At about eleven I phoned Harriet and Louise again. Still no answer.

Early the next morning I took in the net. There were two thin flounders and a dead perch. As I had feared, the net was clogged up with mud and algae. It took me over an hour to get it somewhere near clean and hang it up on the boathouse wall. I was glad that my grandfather hadn’t lived to see the sea he loved being choked to death. Then I went back to scraping the boat. I was working half naked and tried to make peace with my cat, who was wary after the previous night’s meeting with the dead dog. She wasn’t interested in the flounders, but took the perch to a hollow in the rocks and chewed away.

At ten o’clock I went in and phoned again. Still no answer. There wouldn’t be any postal delivery today either. There was nothing I could do.

I boiled a couple of eggs for lunch and leafed through an old brochure advertising paints suitable for a wooden boat. The brochure was eight years old.

After the meal I lay down on the kitchen sofa for a rest. I was worn out and soon fell asleep.

It was almost one o’clock when I was woken up with a start. Through the open kitchen window I could hear the sound of an old compression-ignition engine. It sounded like Jansson’s boat, but he wasn’t due today. I got up, stuck my feet into my cut-down wellington boots and went outside. The noise was getting louder. I had no doubt now that it was Jansson’s boat. It makes an uneven noise because the exhaust pipe sometimes dips down under the surface of the water. I went down to the jetty to wait. The prow eventually appeared from behind the rocks furthest away. I was surprised to note that he was only travelling at half-throttle, and the boat was moving very slowly.

Then I understood why. Jansson was towing another craft, an old cow ferry tied to the stern of his boat. When I was a child I had watched ferries like this one taking cows to islands with summer pasture. I hadn’t seen a single ferry like this during all the twelve years I’d lived on the island.

On the deck of the cow ferry was Louise’s caravan. She was standing in the open door, exactly as I remembered seeing her the first time I met her. Then I noticed another person standing by the rail. It was Harriet, with her walker.

If it had been possible, I’d have jumped into the water and swum away. But there was no escape. Jansson slowed down and untied the tow rope, giving the ferry a push to ensure that it glided in towards the shallowest part of the inlet. I stood there as if paralysed, watching it beach itself. Jansson moored his boat at the jetty.

‘I never thought I’d have a use for this old ferry again. The last time I had it out was to take a couple of horses to Rökskär. But that must have been twenty-five years ago, if not more,’ he said.

‘You could have phoned,’ I said. ‘You could have warned me.’

Jansson looked surprised.

‘I thought you knew they were coming. Louise said you were expecting them. We’ll be able to tow the caravan up with your tractor. It’s a good job it’s high tide, otherwise we’d have had to pull it through the water.’

This explained why nobody had answered my telephone calls. Louise helped Harriet ashore with her walker. I noticed that Harriet was even thinner and much weaker now than when I’d left them so abruptly in the caravan.

I clambered down on to the shore. Louise was holding Harriet by the arm.

‘It’s pretty here,’ said Louise. ‘I prefer the forest. But it’s pretty.’

‘I suppose I ought to say “welcome”,’ I said.

Harriet raised her head. Her face was covered in sweat.

‘I’ll fall if I let go,’ she said. ‘I’d like to lie down on the bed among the ants again.’

We helped her up to the house. I asked Jansson to see if he could start my old tractor. Harriet lay down on the bed. She was breathing heavily and seemed to be in pain. Louise gave her a pill and fetched a glass of water. Harriet swallowed the pill with great difficulty. Then she looked at me.

‘I haven’t got much longer to live,’ she said. ‘Hold my hand.’

I took her warm hand.

‘I want to lie here and listen to the sea and have you two close to me. That’s all. The old lady promises not to give you any unnecessary trouble. I shan’t even scream when the pain becomes too much to bear. When that happens, I shall take my tablets or Louise will give me an injection.’

She closed her eyes. We stood watching her. She soon fell asleep. Louise walked round the table, contemplating the expanding anthill.

‘How many ants are there?’ she whispered.

‘A million, perhaps more.’

‘How long have you had it?’

‘This is the eleventh year.’

We left the room.

‘You could have rung,’ I said.

She stood in front of me and took a firm hold of my shoulders.

‘If I had you’d have said no. I didn’t want that to happen. Now we are here. You owe it to my mum and me, especially to her. If she wants to lie listening to the sea instead of to hooting motor cars when she dies, that’s what she’s going to do. And so you can be grateful that I won’t need to harass you for the rest of your life complaining about what you did.’

She turned on her heel and went outside. Jansson had managed to start the tractor. Just as I had suspected all these years, he was pretty good at starting difficult engines.

We tied a few ropes to the caravan and managed to unload it from the cow ferry. Jansson was in charge of the tractor.

‘Where do you want it to stand?’ he shouted.

‘Here,’ said Louise, pointing to a patch of grass beyond the narrow strip of sand on the other side of the boathouse. ‘I want a beach of my own,’ she went on. ‘I’ve always dreamed of that.’

Jansson displayed great skill with the tractor as he manoeuvred the caravan into position. We placed old fish boxes and driftwood where necessary until it was level and steady.

‘It’ll be OK now,’ said Jansson, sounding satisfied. ‘This is the only island out here with a caravan.’

‘Thank you. You’re invited to coffee,’ said Louise.

Jansson looked at me. I said nothing.

It was the first time he’d been inside the house as long as I’d lived there. He looked inquisitively around the kitchen.

‘It looks just as I remember it,’ he said. ‘You haven’t changed much. Unless I’m much mistaken this is the same tablecloth as the old couple used to have.’

Louise brewed some coffee and asked if I had any buns. I didn’t. So she went to her caravan to fetch something.

‘She’s a very elegant woman,’ said Jansson. ‘How did you manage to find her?’

‘I didn’t find her. She’s the one who found me.’

‘Did you advertise for a woman? I’ve considered doing that.’

Jansson isn’t exactly quick-witted. You couldn’t accuse him of indulging in too much activity behind the eyes. But it was beyond belief that he could imagine that Louise was a lady I had somehow picked up, complete with caravan and a dying old woman.

‘She’s my daughter,’ I said. ‘I told you I had a daughter. I distinctly remember doing so. We were sitting on the bench by the jetty. You had earache. It was last autumn. I told you I had a grown-up daughter. Have you forgotten?’

Jansson had no idea what I was talking about. But he didn’t dare to argue. He didn’t dare to risk losing his personal physician.

Louise came back with an assortment of buns and biscuits. Jansson and my daughter seemed to hit it off from the start. I would have to explain to Louise that she could hold sway over her caravan, but when it came to my island, nobody but me was allowed to lay down the law. And one of the laws that applied was that Jansson must on no account be invited to drink coffee in my kitchen.

Jansson towed away his cow ferry and disappeared round the headland. I didn’t ask Louise how much she’d paid him. We went for a walk round the island as Harriet was still asleep. I showed her where my dog was buried. Then we clambered southwards over the rocks and followed the shore.

Just for a short time, it was like having acquired a little child. Louise asked about everything — plants, seaweed, the neighbouring islands barely visible through the mist, the fish in the depths of the sea that she couldn’t see at all. I suppose I could answer about half her questions. But that didn’t matter to her — the important thing was that I listened to what she said.

There were a few boulders on Norrudden, a headland on the north side of the island, that centuries ago the ice had shaped into throne-like constructions. We sat down.

‘Whose idea was it?’ I asked.

‘I think we both hit on it at about the same time. It was time to visit you, and for the family to get together before it was too late.’

‘What do your friends in the forest up north have to say about this?’

‘They know that I’ll come back one of these days.’

‘Why did you have to lug the caravan with you?’

‘It’s my shell. I never leave it behind.’

She told me about Harriet. Harriet had been driven to Stockholm by one of Louise’s boxer friends called Sture who made a living by drilling wells.

Then Harriet suddenly took a turn for the worse. Louise travelled down to Stockholm to look after her mother, as she had refused to go into a hospice. Louise had insisted on being authorised to administer the painkilling drugs Harriet needed. All that was possible now was palliative care. Every effort to prevent the cancer from spreading had been abandoned. The final countdown had begun. Louise was in constant touch with the home-nursing authorities in Stockholm.

We sat on our thrones, gazing out over the sea.

‘I can’t see her lasting more than another month at most,’ said Louise. ‘I’m already giving her enormous doses of painkillers. She’s going to die here. You’d better prepare yourself for that. You’re a doctor — or, at least, were one. You’re more familiar with death than I am. But I’ve realised that death is always a lonely business. Nevertheless, we can be here and help her.’

‘Is she in a lot of pain?’

‘She sometimes screams.’

We continued our walk along the shore. When we came to the headland reaching out towards the open sea, we paused again. My grandfather had placed a bench there: he’d made it himself from an old threshing machine and some rough oak planks. When he and Grandma had quarrelled, as they sometimes did, he used to go and sit there until she came to fetch him and tell him that dinner was ready. Their anger had always subsided by then. I had carved my name on the bench when I was seven years old. My grandfather was no doubt less than pleased, but he never said anything.

Eider and scoter and a few mergansers were bobbing up and down on the waves.

‘There’s a deep underwater ravine just offshore here, where the birds are,’ I said. ‘The average depth is fifteen to twenty metres, but there is this sudden abyss fifty-six metres deep. When I was a lad I used to lower a grappling iron from the rowing boat, and always imagined that it was bottomless. We’ve had visits by geologists trying to work out why it exists. As far as I can understand, nobody has been able to give a satisfactory answer. I rather like that. I have no faith in a world in which all riddles are solved.’

‘I believe in a world where people fight back,’ said Louise.

‘I assume you’re thinking about your French caves?’

‘Yes, and much more besides.’

‘Are you writing protest letters?’

‘The latest ones were to Tony Blair and President Chirac.’

‘Have they replied?’

‘Of course not. But I’m working on other courses of action.’

‘What?’

She shook her head. She didn’t want to go into that.

We continued our walk and came to a stop at the boathouse. The sun was shining on the lee wall.

‘You fulfilled one of the promises you made to Harriet,’ said Louise. ‘She has another request now.’

‘I’m not going back to that forest pool.’

‘No, she wants something to take place here. A midsummer party.’

‘Meaning what?’

Louise was annoyed.

‘What can you mean by a midsummer party apart from what the words say? A party that takes place at midsummer?’

‘I’m not accustomed to throwing parties here on my island. No matter whether it’s summer or winter.’

‘Then it’s about time you did. Harriet wants to sit out on a sunny summer evening with some other guests, to eat some good food, drink some good wine, and then go back to bed and die soon after.’

‘That’s something we can arrange, of course. You, me and her. We can set up a long table on the grass in front of the currant bushes.’

‘Harriet wants guests. She wants to meet people.’

‘Who, for instance?’

‘You’re the one who lives here. Invite some of your friends. There don’t need to be all that many.’

Louise set off for the house, without waiting for a reply. I could invite Jansson, Hans Lundman and his wife Romana, who works as an assistant at the meat counter in the big indoor food market in our nearest town.

Harriet would be able to partake of her last supper out here on my island. That was the least I could do for her.

Chapter 4

It rained more or less non-stop until midsummer. We established simple routines based on Harriet’s deteriorating condition. To start with, Louise slept in her caravan; but when Harriet screamed out two nights in succession, she moved into my kitchen. I offered to help by giving Harriet her medication but Louise wanted to keep that responsibility. She used a mattress on the kitchen floor, and stored it in the vestibule every morning. She told me the cat would sleep at her feet.

Harriet slept most of the time, lost in a trance induced by the drugs. She had no appetite, but with boundless patience, Louise forced down her a sufficient amount of nutrition. I was touched by the extra ordinary tenderness she displayed towards her mother. It was a side of her I’d not seen before. I kept my distance, and would never have dreamt of intervening.

In the evenings, we would sit in Louise’s caravan or in my kitchen, talking. She had taken over the cooking. I would phone in her shopping lists and Jansson would deliver the goods. The week before midsummer, it was clear that Harriet didn’t have long to go. Every time she woke up, she asked about the weather, I realised that she was thinking about her party. The next time Jansson came, when it had been raining constantly with winds blowing in from the Arctic, I invited him to a party the following Friday.

‘Is it your birthday?’

‘Every Christmas, you complain that I haven’t put up any lights. Every midsummer you moan because I decline to drink a toast with you on the jetty. Now I’m inviting you to a party. Is it that hard to understand? Seven o’clock, weather permitting.’

‘I can feel in my bones that warm weather is on its way.’

Jansson claims that he can divine water using a dowsing rod and that he can feel the weather in his bones.

I didn’t comment on his bones. Later that same day I phoned Hans Lundman and invited him and his wife.

‘I’m working then, but I should be able to swap shifts with Edvin. Is it your birthday?’

‘It’s always my birthday,’ I said. ‘Seven o’clock, weather permitting.’

Louise and I made preparations. I dug out some of my grand parents’ summer furniture that had been stored away for years. I painted it and repaired a rotten table leg.

The day before Midsummer Eve, it was pouring with rain. A gale was blowing from the north-west, and the temperature sank to twelve degrees. Louise and I struggled up the hill and saw boats riding out the storm in a sheltered bay on the other side of Korsholmen, the island nearest to mine.

‘Will the weather be like this tomorrow as well?’ Louise asked.

‘According to Jansson’s bones, it will be fine and sunny,’ I said.

The next day, the wind dropped. The rain ceased, the clouds dispersed and the temperature rose. Harriet had had two bad nights when the painkillers didn’t seem to work. Then things appeared to improve. We prepared for the party. Louise knew exactly what Harriet wanted.

‘Simple extravagance,’ she said. ‘It’s a hopeless task, of course, trying to mix simplicity and extravagance, but sometimes you have to attempt the impossible.’

It was a strange midsummer party that I don’t think any of those present will ever forget, even if our memories of it differ somewhat. Hans Lundman rang in the morning and asked if they could bring with them their granddaughter, who was paying them a visit and couldn’t be left on her own. Her name was Andrea, and she was sixteen years old. I knew that she had a mental handicap, and that she found it difficult to understand some things, or to learn. But she also had boundless confidence in people she’d never met before. She would shake anybody at all by the hand, and as a child was more than happy to sit on the knee of total strangers.

Of course she was welcome. We set the table for seven people rather than six. Harriet, who by now was practically bedbound, was sitting in her chair in the garden by five in the afternoon. She was wearing a light-coloured summery dress chosen by Louise, who had also combed her grey hair into a pretty bun. Louise had made her up as well. Harriet’s haggard face had regained some of the poise it had possessed earlier in her life. I sat down beside her with a glass of wine in my hand. She took it from me and half emptied it.

‘Serve me some more,’ she said. ‘To make sure I don’t fall asleep, I’ve reduced my intake of all the stuff that keeps my pains at bay. But I do still have pain, and it’s going to get worse. However, what I want now is white wine instead of white tablets. Wine!’

I went to the kitchen, where a row of bottles were uncorked and ready to serve. Louise was busy with something about to go into the oven.

‘Harriet wants some wine,’ I said.

‘Give her some, then! This party is for her. It’s the last time she’ll be able to drink herself tipsy. If she gets drunk, we can all be happy.’

I took the bottle out into the garden. The table was laid very attractively. Louise had decorated it with flowers and leafy twigs. She’d covered the cold dishes already on the table with some of Grandma’s worn-out towels.

We toasted each other. Harriet took hold of my hand.

‘Are you angry because I want to die in your house?’

‘Why ever should I be?’

‘You didn’t want to live with me. Perhaps you don’t want me to die in your house either.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if you were to outlive the lot of us.’

‘I’ll be dead before long. I can feel death tugging at me. The earth is pulling me down. Sometimes, when I wake up during the night, just before the agony gets so bad that I need to scream, I have time to ask myself if I’m scared of what lies in store. I am. But I’m scared without being scared. It’s more of a vague worry, being on the way to open a door without being at all sure what’s behind it. Then the pains strike home, and that’s what I’m scared of. Nothing else.’

Louise came and sat down next to me, glass in hand.

‘The family,’ she said. ‘I don’t know now if I want to use the surname Welin or Hörnfeldt. Maybe I’ll be Louise Hörnfeldt-Welin. Occupation: letter writer.’

She had a camera with her, and took a picture of Harriet and me sitting there, with glasses in our hands. Then she took a picture with herself in it as well.

‘I have an old-fashioned camera,’ she said. ‘I have to send the films away to be developed. But now I’ve got that snap I’ve always dreamt about.’

We drank a toast to the summer evening. I thought about the fact that Harriet was forced to wear a pad under her flimsy summery dress, and that the beautiful Louise really was my daughter.

Louise went to her caravan to change her clothes. The cat suddenly jumped up on to the table. I shooed her down. She looked offended, and slunk away. We sat there in silence, listening to the muted murmuring of the sea.

‘You and I,’ said Harriet. ‘You and I. And then, suddenly, it’s all over.’

By seven o’clock it was dead calm and plus seventeen degrees.

Jansson and the Lundmans arrived together. The boats formed a friendly little convoy of two, both with flags fluttering from the stern. Louise stood waiting for them on the jetty, looking radiant. Her dress was almost provocatively short, but she had pretty legs and I recognised the red shoes she had on — she’d been wearing them when she stepped out of the caravan and I saw her for the first time. Jansson had squeezed himself into an old suit that was on the tight side, Romana was glittering in red and black and Hans was dressed all in white and sported a yachtsman’s cap. Andrea was wearing a blue dress with a yellow hairband. We moored the boats, spent a few minutes on the little jetty chatting about the summer that had arrived at last, then proceeded up to the house. Jansson’s eyes looked slightly glazed and he stumbled a couple of times, but nobody minded — least of all Harriet who heaved herself up off her chair without assistance and shook hands with everybody.

We had decided to tell the truth: Harriet was Louise’s mother, I was her father, and once upon a time Harriet and I were almost married. Now Harriet was ill, but not so bad that we couldn’t all sit out under the oak trees this evening and have dinner.

On reflection, it seemed to me that, at the beginning, our party was reminiscent of a little orchestra, with all the individual members tuning their instruments. We talked and talked, and gradually achieved the right sound. At the same time we ate, drank toasts, carried dishes back and forth, and sent our laughter echoing across the skerries. Harriet seemed in perfectly good health while this was all happening. She spoke to Hans about emergency flares, about the price of groceries to Romana, and she asked Jansson to tell us about the strangest delivery he’d made during all his years as a postman. It was her party, she was the one who dominated, conducted and blended all the sounds to form a melodious chord. Andrea said nothing. Soon after the start she had clung tightly to Louise, who allowed herself to be held. We all got drunk, of course, Jansson first — but he never lost control. He helped Louise to carry plates and didn’t drop a single one. As dusk fell, he was the one who lit the candles and the citronella spirals Louise had bought to keep the mosquitoes away. Andrea was giving the adults searching looks. Harriet, who was sitting opposite her, occasionally stretched out her hand and touched Andrea’s fingertips. I felt very sad as I sat there, watching those fingers touching. One of them would soon die, the other would never really understand what it meant to live. Harriet noticed me watching them and raised her glass. We touched glasses and drank.

Then I gave a speech. It wasn’t prepared at all, not consciously anyway. I talked about simplicity and extravagance. About perfection, which may not exist, but whose existence can be sensed when in the company of good friends on a lovely summer’s evening. The Swedish summer was unpredictable, and never very long. But it could be stunningly beautiful, as it was this very evening.

‘You are my friends,’ I said. ‘You are my friends and my family, and I have been an inhospitable prince on this little island of mine, and never welcomed any of you here. I thank you for your patience, I shudder to think what you may have thought in the past. I hope this will not be the only time we meet like this.’

We drank. A gentle evening breeze blew through the crowns of the oak trees, and made the candle flames flutter.

Jansson tapped his glass and stood up. He was swaying slightly, but was able to stand upright. He said nothing. But then he started singing. In a staggeringly sonorous baritone voice he sang ‘Ave Maria’ in a way that sent shivers down my spine. I think everybody around the table had a similar reaction. Hans and Romana looked just as astonished as I must have done. Nobody seemed to know that Jansson had such a powerful voice. I had tears in my eyes. Jansson stood there, with all his imagined aches and pains, in a suit that was too small for him, singing in a way that gave the impression that a god had come down to join us and celebrate this summer evening. Only he could explain why he had kept this voice of his a secret.

Even the birds fell silent and listened. Andrea was open-mouthed. These were powerful, magic moments. When he had finished and sat down, nobody said a word. In the end, Hans broke the silence and said the only thing it was possible to say.

‘Well, I’ll be damned!’

Jansson was bombarded with questions. Where did he learn to sing like that? Why had he never sung before? But he didn’t answer. Nor did he want to sing any more.

‘I’ve delivered my thank-you speech,’ he said. ‘I sang. I only wish this evening would go on for ever.’

We carried on drinking and eating. Harriet had put down her conductor’s baton, and now conversations criss-crossed haphazardly. We were all drunk. Louise and Andrea sneaked down to the boathouse and the caravan. Hans got it into his head that he and Romana should dance. They hopped and bounced round the back of the house dancing what Jansson maintained was a polka, and reappeared round the other side doing what looked more like a hambo.

Harriet was enjoying herself. I think there were moments during the evening when she felt no pain, and forgot that she would soon die. I served more wine to everybody except Andrea. Jansson staggered off to have a pee behind the bushes, Hans and Romana began an arm-wrestling match, and I switched on my radio: music, something dreamy for the piano by Schumann, I thought. I sat down beside Harriet.

‘Things turned out for the best,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We would never have been able to live together. Before long I’d have tired of all your eavesdropping and searching through my private papers. It was as if I had you under my skin. You made me itch. But as I was in love with you, I ignored that. I thought it would pass. And it did. But only when you’d gone away.’

She raised her glass and looked me in the eye.

‘You’ve never been a good person,’ she said. ‘You’ve always shrugged off your responsibilities. You’ll never become a good person. But maybe a bit better than you are now. Don’t lose Louise. Look after her and she’ll look after you.’

‘You should have told me,’ I said. ‘I had a daughter for all those years without knowing.’

‘Of course I should have told you. I could have found you if I’d really tried. But I was so angry. It was my way of getting revenge. Keeping your child for myself. I’m being punished for that now.’

‘How?’

‘I feel regret.’

Jansson staggered up to us and sat down on the other side of Harriet, oblivious to the fact that we were deep in conversation.

‘I think you’re an extraordinary woman, no hesitation in coming aboard my hydrocopter and then venturing out on to the ice.’

‘It was an experience,’ said Harriet. ‘But I wouldn’t want to repeat that journey out to the island.’

I got up and walked up the hill. The sounds from the other side of the house reached me in the form of clinking crockery and sporadic shouts. I thought I could see Grandma sitting down there on the bench by the apple tree, and Grandfather on his way up the path from the boathouse.

It was an evening when the living and the dead could have a shared party. It was an evening for those who still had a long time to live, and for those like Harriet who were standing close to the invisible borderline, waiting for the ferry that would transport them over the river, for the final crossing.

I went down to the jetty. The caravan door was open. I walked over to it and peered in surreptitiously through the window. Andrea was trying on Louise’s clothes. She was tottering on high-heeled light blue shoes, and was wearing a strange dress covered in glistening sequins.

I sat down on the bench, and suddenly remembered that evening at the winter solstice. When I’d been in the kitchen thinking that nothing in my life would ever change. That was six months ago, and everything had changed. Now the summer solstice had begun to project us back towards darkness. I was listening to voices on my island that is normally so quiet. Romana’s shrill laughter, and then Harriet’s voice, as she raised herself above death and all that pain and shouted for more wine.

More wine! It sounded like a hunting call. Harriet had mobilised the last of her strength in order to fight the final battle. I went back to the house and uncorked the bottles we had left. When I came out, Jansson was embracing Romana in a swaying, semi-conscious dance. Hans had moved over to Harriet. He was holding her hand, or perhaps it was the other way round, and she was listening as he laboriously and unsuccessfully tried to explain to her how lighthouses in shipping channels made it safer for vessels to sail along them even at very high speeds. Louise and Andrea emerged from the shadows. Nobody apart from Harriet noticed pretty Andrea in Louise’s imaginative creations. She was still wearing the light blue shoes. Louise saw me looking at Andrea’s feet.

‘Giaconelli made them for me,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Now I’m giving them to that girl who has so much love inside her but nobody will ever have the courage to accept it. An angel will wear light blue shoes created by a master.’

The long night passed slowly in a sort of dream, and I no longer recall clearly what happened or what was said. But on one occasion when I went for a pee, Jansson was sitting on the front steps, sobbing in Romana’s arms. Hans was dancing a waltz with Andrea, Harriet and Louise were whispering confidentially to each other, and the sun was climbing unobtrusively out of the sea.

The band that made its way along the path to the jetty at four in the morning was anything but steady on its feet. Harriet was supported by her walker and assisted by Hans. We stood on the jetty and said our goodbyes, untied the mooring ropes and watched the boats leave.

Just before Andrea was about to clamber down into the boat with the light blue shoes in her hand, she came up to me and hugged me with her thin, mosquito-bitten arms.

Long after the boats had vanished round the headland I could still feel that embrace, like a warm film round my body.

‘I’ll go back to the house with Harriet,’ said Louise. ‘She needs a really good wash. It’ll be easier if we’re on our own. If you’re tired you can have a lie-down in the caravan.’

‘I’ll start collecting the plates and things.’

‘We can do that tomorrow.’

I watched her helping Harriet back to the house. Harriet was exhausted now. She could barely hold herself upright, despite leaning on the walker and her daughter.

My family, I thought. The family I didn’t get until it was too late.

I fell asleep on the bench, and didn’t wake up until Louise tapped me on the shoulder.

‘She’s asleep now. We ought to get some sleep as well.’

The sun was already high over the horizon. I had a headache, and my mouth was dry.

‘Do you think she enjoyed it?’ I asked.

‘I hope so.’

‘Did she say anything?’

‘She was almost unconscious when I put her to bed.’

We walked up to the house. The cat, who had disappeared for most of the night, was lying on the kitchen sofa. Louise took hold of my hand.

‘I wonder who you are,’ she said. ‘One day I’ll understand, perhaps, But it was a good party. And I like your friends.’

She unrolled the mattress on the kitchen floor. I went up to my room and lay on the bed, taking off nothing but my shoes.

In my dreams I heard the cries and shrieks of sea gulls and terns. They came closer and closer, then suddenly dived down towards my face.

When I woke up I realised that the noises were coming from downstairs. It was Harriet, screaming in pain again.

The party was over.

Chapter 5

A week later the cat vanished. Louise and I searched every nook and cranny among the rocks, but found nothing. As usual I thought about my dog. He would have found the cat immediately. But he was dead, and I realised that the cat was probably dead now as well. I lived on an island of dead animals, with a dying person who was struggling through her final painful days together with an ever growing anthill that was slowly threatening to take over the entire room.

The cat was never seen again. The heat of high summer formed an oppressive blanket over my island. I used my outboard motor to get the boat to the mainland, and bought an electric fan for Harriet’s room. The windows were left open all night. Mosquitoes danced on the old mosquito windows my grandfather had made long ago. There was even a date, written in carpenter’s pencil, on one of the frames: 1936. I began to think that despite the poor start, this July heatwave would turn the summer into the hottest I’d experienced here.

Louise went swimming every evening. Things had gone so far now that we were always within earshot of Harriet’s room. One of us needed to be on hand at all times. Her agonising pains were coming increasingly often. Every third day Louise phoned the home health service for advice. The second week in July, they wanted to send a doctor to examine her. I was on the porch changing a light bulb when Louise talked to them. To my surprise, I heard her say that a visit wouldn’t be necessary as her father was a doctor.

I made regular trips to the mainland in order to collect new supplies of Harriet’s medication from the chemist’s. One day Louise asked me to buy some picture postcards It didn’t matter what of. I bought the entire stock of cards from one shop, and postage stamps to go with them. When Harriet was asleep, Louise would sit down and write to all her friends in the forest. Occasionally she would also work away at a letter I gathered was going to be very long. She didn’t say who it was to. She never left her papers on the kitchen table, but always took them with her to the caravan.

I warned her that Jansson would certainly read every single card she gave him for posting.

‘Why would he want to do that?’

‘He’s curious.’

‘I think he’ll respect my postcards.’

We said no more about the matter. Every time Jansson moored his boat by the jetty, she would hand him a bundle of newly written cards. He would put them in his sack without even looking at them.

Nor did he complain about his aches and pains any more. This summer, with Harriet lying in my house, dying, Jansson seemed to have suddenly been cured of all his imagined ailments.

As Louise was looking after Harriet, I was responsible for the cooking. Of course, Harriet was really the key person in the house, but Louise ran the household as if it were a ship and she was the captain. I had nothing against that.

The hot days were a torment for Harriet. I bought another fan, but it didn’t help much. I rang Hans Lundman several times to ask what the coastguard’s meteorologist had to say about the weather forecast.

‘It’s a strange heatwave,’ he said. ‘Ridges of high pressure usually move on, pass over, albeit sometimes very slowly. But this is different. It’s just hanging there. Those who know about these things say it’s similar to the heatwave that covered Sweden in the incredibly hot summer of 1955.’

I remembered that summer. I was eighteen and spent most of my time sailing in my grandfather’s dinghy. It was a restless summer for me, and my teenage pulse had been racing. I often lay naked on the hot rocks, dreaming of women. The prettiest of my women teachers kept wandering through my dreamworld, and one after another had become my lovers.

That was almost fifty years ago.

‘There must be some kind of prediction as to when it will start getting cooler?’

‘Just at the moment there is no movement at all. Fires are starting all over the place. There are fires in the most unexpected places.’

We had to struggle through it. Dark clouds would sometimes gather over the mainland, and we could hear the sound of distant thunder. We sometimes found ourselves without electricity, but my grandfather had devoted a lot of time to creating a clever system of lightning conductors which protected both the main house and the boathouse.

When the electric storms finally came to the island, one evening after one of the hottest days of all, Louise told me how scared she was. Most of our alcohol had been drunk at the midsummer party. There was only a half-bottle of brandy left. She poured herself a glass.

‘I’m not making it up, you know,’ she said. ‘I really am scared.’

She sat under the kitchen table and would groan as another thunderclap shook the house. When the storm had passed over, she crept out with her glass empty and her face white.

‘I don’t know why,’ she said, ‘but nothing scares me as much as the lightning flashes and then the thunderclaps they fling at me.’

‘Did Caravaggio paint thunderstorms?’ I wondered.

‘I’m sure he was just as scared as I am. He often painted things he was scared of. But not thunderstorms, as far as I know.’

The rain that followed the thunderstorms freshened up the soil and also the people who lived here. When the storm had passed over, I went to check on Harriet. She was lying with her head high in an attempt to ease the pains coming from her spine. I sat on the chair by the side of her bed and took hold of her thin, cold hand.

‘Is it still raining?’

‘It’s stopped now. Lots of angry little becks are running down from the rocks into the sea.’

‘Is there a rainbow?’

‘Not this evening.’

She lay quietly for a while.

‘I haven’t seen the cat,’ she said.

‘She’s vanished. We’ve looked for her, but haven’t found her.’

‘Then she’s dead. Cats hide themselves away when they sense that their time is up. Some tribesmen do the same thing. The rest of us just hang on for as long as we can while others sit around and wait for us to die at long last.’

‘I’m not waiting for that.’

‘Of course you are. You have no choice. And waiting makes people impatient.’

She was speaking in short bursts, as if she were climbing up an endless staircase and had to keep stopping to get her breath back. She reached tentatively for her glass of water. I handed it to her, and supported her head while she drank.

‘I’m grateful to you for taking me in,’ she said. ‘I could have frozen to death out there on the ice. You could have pretended not to see me.’

‘The fact that I abandoned you once doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d do the same again.’

She shook her head, almost imperceptibly.

‘You have told so many lies, but you haven’t even learned how to do it properly. Most of what you say has to be true. Otherwise the lies don’t work. You know as well as I do that you could have abandoned me again. Have you left anybody else besides me?’

I thought it over. I wanted to answer truthfully.

‘One,’ I said. ‘Just one other person.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Not a woman. I’m referring to myself.’

She shook her head slowly.

‘There’s no point in going on and on about what has passed. Our lives turned out as they did, it’s all behind us. I shall soon be dead. You’ll carry on living for a while longer, but then you’ll be gone too. And all traces will fade away.’

She reached out her hand and took hold of my wrist. I could feel her rapid pulse.

‘I want to tell you something you’ve probably gathered already. I’ve never loved another man in my life as much as I’ve loved you. The reason why I tracked you down was to find my way back to that love. And to give you the daughter I robbed you of. But most of all, I wanted to die close to the man I’ve always loved. I must also say that I’ve never hated anybody as much as I’ve hated you. But hatred hurts, and I’ve more than enough pain to be going on with. Love gives a feeling of freshness, of peace, possibly even a feeling of security which makes facing up to death not quite so frightening as it would otherwise be. Don’t respond to anything I’ve just said. Just believe me. And ask Louise to come. I think I’ve wet myself.’

I fetched Louise, who was sitting on the steps outside the front door.

‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said. ‘Almost like the depths of the forest.’

‘I’m scared stiff of big forests,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been frightened of getting lost if I strayed too far away from the path.’

‘What you’re scared of is yourself. Nothing else. The same applies to me. And Harriet. And the lovely little Andrea. Caravaggio as well. We are scared of ourselves, and what we see of ourselves in others.’

She went to change Harriet’s pad. I sat down on the bench under the apple tree, next to the dog’s grave. In the far distance I could hear the dull thudding from the engines of a large ship. Had the navy already started their regular autumn manoeuvres?

Harriet had said that she’d never loved anybody as much as she’d loved me. I felt touched. I hadn’t expected that. I was beginning to appreciate just what I had done.

I abandoned her because I was afraid of being abandoned myself. My fear of tying myself down, and of feelings that were so strong that I couldn’t control them, resulted in my always drawing back. I didn’t know why that should be. But I knew that I wasn’t the only one. I lived in a world where many other men were just as afraid as I was.

I had tried to see myself in my father. But his fear had been different. He had never hesitated to show the love he felt for my mother and for me, despite the fact that my mother wasn’t easy to live with.

I have to come to grips with this, I told myself. Before I die, I must know why I’ve lived. I have some time left — I must make the most of it.

I felt very tired. The door to Harriet’s room was ajar. I went upstairs. When I’d gone to bed, I left the light on. The wall behind the bed had always been decorated with sea charts my grandfather had found washed up on the shore. They were water-damaged but you could make out they depicted Scapa Flow in the Orkney Isles, where the British fleet was based during the First World War. I had often followed the narrow channels surrounding Pentland Firth, and imagined the British ships sitting there, terrified of the periscopes of German U-boats.

I fell asleep with the light still on. At two o’clock I was woken up by Harriet’s screams. I stuck my fingers in my ears and waited for the painkillers to kick in.

We were living in my house in a silence that could be shattered at any moment by a roar of intense pain. I found myself thinking more and more frequently that I hoped Harriet would die soon. For all our sakes.

The heatwave lasted until 24 July. I noted in my logbook that there was a north-easterly wind and the temperature had started to fall. Troughs of low pressure queuing up over the North Sea brought changeable weather. In the early hours of 27 July, a northerly gale raged over the archipelago. A few tiles next to the chimney were ripped off the roof and smashed on the ground below; I managed to climb up on to the roof and replace them with spares that had been stored in a shed since the barn was demolished in the late 1960s.

Harriet’s condition grew worse. Now that the weather had started to deteriorate she was awake for only short periods of every day. Louise and I shared the chores, but Louise washed her mother and changed her pads for which I was grateful.

Autumn was creeping up on us. The nights were getting longer, the sun was losing its strength. Louise and I prepared ourselves for the fact that Harriet could die at any moment. When she was conscious, we would both sit by her bed. Louise wanted her to see the pair of us together. Harriet didn’t say much. She might ask about the time, and if it would soon be time to eat. She was becoming more and more confused. Sometimes she thought she was in the caravan in the forest, at other times she was convinced she was in her flat in Stockholm. She was not aware of being on the island, in a room with an anthill. Nor did she seem to be aware that she was dying. When she did wake up, it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. She would drink a little water, perhaps swallow a few spoonfuls of soup, then drop off to sleep again. The skin on her face was now stretched so tightly round her cranium that I was afraid it might split and expose her skull. Death is ugly, I thought. There was now almost nothing left of the beautiful Harriet. She was a wax-coloured skeleton under a blanket, nothing more.

One evening at the beginning of August, we sat down on the bench under the apple tree. We were wearing warm jackets, and Louise had one of my old woolly hats on her head.

‘What are we going to do when she dies?’ I wondered. ‘You must have thought about it. Do you know if she has any specific wishes?’

‘She wants to be cremated. She sent me a brochure from an undertaker’s some months ago. I may still have it, or I might have thrown it away. She had marked the cheapest coffin and an urn on special offer.’

‘Does she have any sepulchral rights?’

Louise frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Is there a family grave? Where are her parents buried? There’s usually a link to a particular town or village. In the old days, they used to talk about sepulchral rights.’

‘Her relatives are spread all over the country. I’ve never heard her mention visiting her parents’ grave. She’s never expressed any specific wish regarding her own grave. Although she did say quite firmly that she didn’t want a headstone. I think she would prefer to have her ashes cast into the wind. You can actually do that nowadays.’

‘You need permission,’ I said. ‘Jansson has told me about old fishermen who wanted their ashes scattered over the ancient herring grounds.’

We sat without speaking, thinking about what to do. I had bought a plot in a cemetery: there was probably no reason why Harriet shouldn’t lie by my side.

Louise put her hand on my arm.

‘We don’t really need to ask permission, in fact,’ she said. ‘Harriet could be one of those people in this country who don’t exist.’

‘Everybody has a personal identity number,’ I said. ‘We’re not allowed to disappear when it suits us.’

‘There are always ways of getting round things,’ Louise said. ‘She will die here, in your house. We’ll burn her just like they cremate dead people in India. Then we’ll scatter her ashes over the water. I’ll terminate the contract on her flat in Stockholm and empty it. I won’t supply a forwarding address. She’ll no longer collect her pension. I’ll tell the home health-care people that she’s died. That’s all they want to know. Somebody might start to wonder, I expect, but I shall say that I haven’t had any contact with my mother for several months. And she left here after a short visit.’

‘Did she?’

‘Who do you think is going to ask Jansson or Hans Lundman about where she’s gone to?’

‘But that’s just it. Where has she gone to? Who took her to the mainland?’

‘You did. A week ago. Nobody knows she’s still here.’

It began to dawn on me that Louise was serious. We would take care of the funeral ourselves. Nothing more was said. I got very little sleep that night. But I eventually began to think it might just be possible.

Two days later, when Louise and I were having dinner, she suddenly put down her spoon.

‘The fire,’ she said. ‘Now I know how we can light it without giving anybody cause to wonder what’s happening.’

I listened to her suggestion. It seemed repulsive at first, but then I began to see that it was a beautiful idea.

The moon vanished. Darkness enveloped the archipelago. The last sailing boats of summer headed back to their home ports. The navy conducted manoeuvres in the southern archipelago. We occasionally heard the rumble of distant gunfire. Harriet was now sleeping more or less round the clock. We took it in turns to stay with her. While I was a medical student, I had sometimes earned some extra pocket money by doing night duty. I could still remember the first time I watched a person die. It happened without any movement, in complete silence. The big leap was so tiny. In a split second the living person joined the dead.

I recall thinking: This person who is now dead is someone who has in reality never existed. Death wipes out everything that has lived. Death leaves no trace, apart from the things I’ve always found so difficult to cope with. Love, emotions. I ran away from Harriet because she came too close to me. And now she will soon be gone.

Louise was often upset during those last days. I experienced an increasing fear that I myself was approaching the end. I was afraid of the humiliations in store for me, and hoped I would be granted a gentle death, one which spared me from having to lie in bed for a long time before I reached the final shore.

Harriet died at dawn, shortly after six o’clock, on 22 August. She had endured a restless night — the painkillers didn’t seem to help. I was making coffee when Louise came into the kitchen. She stood beside me and waited until I had counted up to seventeen.

‘Mum’s dead.’

We went to the room where Harriet lay. I felt for a pulse, and used my stethoscope to search for any sign of heart activity. She really was in fact dead. We sat down on her bed. Louise was crying quietly, almost silently. All I felt was a worryingly selfish feeling of relief that it wasn’t me lying there dead.

We sat there without speaking for about ten minutes, I listened again for any heart activity — nothing. Then I draped one of Grandma’s embroidered towels over Harriet’s face.

We drank coffee, which was still hot. At seven o’clock I telephoned the coastguard. Hans Lundman answered.

‘How’s your daughter?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘And Harriet?’

‘She’s left.’

‘Andrea is staggering around on those beautiful light blue shoes. Pass that message on to Louise.’

‘I’ll do that. I’m ringing to say that I’m intending to have a big bonfire today, to get rid of lots of rubbish. Just in case anybody contacts you to report a fire on the island.’

‘The drought’s over for this year.’

‘But somebody might think that my house is on fire.’

‘Thank you for letting us know.’

I went outside down to the boathouse and collected the tarpaulin I’d prepared as a shroud. There wasn’t a breath of wind. It was overcast. I had soaked it in tar. I spread it out on the ground. Louise had dressed Harriet in the pretty dress she’d worn at the midsummer party. She’d combed her hair and made up her face. She was still crying, just as quietly as before. We stood for a while, embracing each other.

‘I shall miss her,’ said Louise. ‘I’ve been so angry with her for so many years. But now I realise that she has opened up a gap inside me. It will remain open, and blow sorrow over me for the rest of my life.’

I checked Harriet’s heartbeat one last time. Her skin had already started to assume the yellow colour that follows death.

We waited another hour. Then we carried her outside and rolled her up in the tarpaulin. I had already prepared the bonfire that would transform her body to ashes, and placed at the ready a drum of petrol.

We lifted her up into my old boat, and balanced it on top of the pyre. I soaked the body and the worn-out hull with petrol.

‘We’d better make ourselves scarce,’ I said. ‘The petrol will flare up. If you stand too near, you could catch fire.’

We stepped back. I looked at Louise. She wasn’t crying any more. She gave me the nod. I lit a ball of cotton waste soaked in tar, and threw it on to the boat.

The fire flared up with a roar. There was a crackling and sizzling from the tar-soaked tarpaulin. Louise took hold of my hand. So my old boat had come in useful after all. It was the vehicle in which I sent Harriet into another world, in which neither she nor I believed, but which we no doubt hoped for, deep down.

While the fire was burning away, I went to fetch an old metal saw from the boathouse. I started to cut Harriet’s walker. It soon became obvious that the saw wasn’t up to the job. I put the walker in the dinghy, together with a couple of herring-net sinkers and chains. I rowed out towards Norrudden, and heaved the walker with its chains and sinkers overboard. Nobody ever fished or anchored there. So nothing would ever hook it and reel it back to the surface.

The smoke from the fire was billowing up into the sky. I rowed back to the island, and remembered that before long Jansson would arrive. Louise was squatting down, watching the boat burn.

‘I wish I could play an instrument,’ she said. ‘Shall I tell you what kind of music Mum liked to listen to?’

‘Wasn’t her favourite music traditional jazz? We used to go to jazz concerts in the Old Town in Stockholm when we were going out together.’

‘You’re wrong. Her favourite was “Sail Along Silvery Moon”. A sentimental song from the fifties. She always wanted to hear it. I wish I could have played it for her now. As a sort of recessional hymn.’

‘I’ve no idea how it goes.’

She hummed the tune hesitantly. Maybe I’d heard it before, but not played by a jazz band.

‘I’ll have a word with Jansson,’ I said. ‘Harriet left the island yesterday. I took her to the mainland. Some relative or other came to collect her. He was taking her to hospital in Stockholm.’

‘Tell him she sent him her greetings,’ said Louise. ‘If you do that, he won’t wonder why she left.’

Jansson was on time, as usual. He had with him a surveyor who had official business to carry out on Bredholmen. We nodded in acknowledgement. Jansson stepped on to the jetty and stared up at the bonfire.

‘I phoned Lundman,’ he said. ‘I thought your house was on fire.’

‘I’m burning my old boat,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t make it seaworthy again. No point in having it lying around for another winter.’

‘You did the right thing,’ said Jansson. ‘Old boats refuse to die unless you cut them up or burn them.’

‘Harriet has left,’ I said. ‘I took her to the mainland yesterday. She sent her greetings.’

‘That was kind of her,’ said Jansson. ‘Pass on greetings from me. I liked her very much. A fine old lady. I hope she was feeling a bit better?’

‘She had to go to the hospital. I don’t think she was any better. But she sent her greetings anyway.’

Jansson was pleased to hear Harriet had thought of him. He continued on his way with the surveyor. A few drops of rain started to fall, but it soon cleared up. I went back to the fire. The stern of the boat had collapsed. It was no longer possible to distinguish between charred wood and the tarpaulin with its contents. There was no smell of burnt flesh from the fire. Louise had sat down on a stone. I suddenly thought of Sima, and wondered if my island somehow attracted death to it. Sima had cut herself here, Harriet had come here to die. My dog was dead and my cat had vanished.

I felt despondent. Was there anything about me that I could be proud of? I wasn’t an evil person. I wasn’t violent, I didn’t commit crimes. But I had let people down. My mother had been in a care home alone for nineteen years after my father died, and I only ever visited her once. So much time had passed before I got round to seeing her that she no longer knew who I was. She thought I was her brother, who had died over fifty years before. I made no attempt to convince her that I was me. I just sat there and went along with her. Yes, of course I’m your brother who died such a long time ago. Then I deserted her. I never went back. I wasn’t even present at her funeral. I left everything in the hands of the undertaker, and paid the bill when it eventually came. Apart from the vicar and the organist, the only other person present in the chapel was a representative of the undertaker’s.

I didn’t go because nobody could force me to do so. I realised now that I had despised my mother. Somehow or other, I had also despised Harriet.

Perhaps I felt nothing but contempt for everybody. Most of all, though, I despised myself. I was still a small, scared creature who had seen in his father the brutal hell that ageing could bring.

The day passed, just as slowly as the clouds drifted across the sky. When the fire began to die down, I added branches that I had first soaked in petrol. It took time to cremate a human being in the open.

Dusk fell and still the fire burned. I added more wood, raked around in the ashes. Louise came out with a tray of food. We drank what was left of the brandy, and were soon drunk. We cried and laughed with sorrow, but also with relief at the fact that Harriet’s pain was at an end. Louise was closer to me now. We sat there in the grass, leaning against each other, watching the smoke from the funeral pyre drifting up into the darkness.

‘I’m going to stay on this island for ever,’ said Louise.

‘Well, stay until tomorrow at least,’ I said.

Only when dawn broke did I allow the fire to die down.

Louise had curled up on the grass and gone to sleep. I spread my jacket over her. She woke up when I poured buckets of seawater over the embers. There was nothing left now of Harriet or the old boat. Louise scrutinised the ashes I raked out.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Not long ago she was a living person. Now there is nothing left of her.’

‘I thought maybe we could take the rowing boat and scatter the ashes over the water.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t do that. I want her ashes at least to be preserved.’

‘I don’t have an urn.’

‘A jar, a tin can, anything. I want her ashes to remain here. We can bury them next to the dog.’

Louise headed for the boathouse. I felt uneasy about creating a graveyard under the apple tree. I could hear rattling noises coming from the boathouse. Louise appeared, carrying a tin that had once contained grease for the engine of my grandfather’s old boat. I had cleaned it up and used it for nails and screws. Now it was empty. She blew out the dust, put it down next to the pile of ashes and started filling it, using her hands. I went to the boathouse and fetched a spade. Then I dug a hole next to the dog. We placed the tin at the bottom of it, and filled it in. Louise went off among the rocks, and after a while returned with a large stone on which sediment had created something that looked like a cross. She placed it on top of the hole.

It had been a tough day. We were both tired. We had dinner in silence. Louise retired to her caravan for the night. I searched around in the bathroom cupboard and found a sleeping pill. I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept for nine hours. I couldn’t remember when that had last happened.

Louise was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs the next morning.

‘I’m off,’ she said. ‘Today. The sea’s calm. Can you take me to the harbour?’

I sat down at the table. I wasn’t at all prepared for her intention of leaving so soon.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I have several things to see to.’

‘But surely Harriet’s flat can wait for a few days?’

‘That’s not where I’m going. Do you remember the cave with the wall paintings that have been attacked by mould?’

‘I thought you were going to bombard politicians with letters about that?’

She shook her head.

‘Letters don’t do any good. I have to take some different action.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Then I shall go and look at some Caravaggio paintings. I have money now. Harriet left nearly two hundred thousand kronor. She used to give me some money now and then. And I’ve always been thrifty anyway. No doubt you wondered about all the money you found when you went snooping around in my caravan. Thrift, nothing more. I haven’t only spent my life writing letters. I’ve occasionally had a paid job like everybody else. And I’ve never thrown money about.’

‘How long are you going to be away? If you’re not going to come back, I’d like you to take your caravan with you. This island is no place for it.’

‘Why do you get so angry?’

‘I’m sad about you clearing off like this, and I don’t think you’ll come back again.’

‘I’m not like you. I’ll be back. If you won’t allow my caravan to remain here, I suggest you burn that up as well. I’m going to pack now. I’ll be ready to leave in an hour. Are you going to take me, or aren’t you?’

It was dead calm, and the sea like a millpond, when I took her to the mainland. The outboard motor started coughing soon after we left the jetty, but then recovered and behaved normally for the rest of the trip. Louise sat smiling in the bows. I regretted my outburst.

A taxi was waiting in the harbour. All she had with her was a rucksack.

‘I’ll phone you,’ she said. ‘And send cards.’

‘How can I get in touch with you?’

‘You have my mobile number. I can’t promise it will be switched on all the time, though. But I promise to send a card to Andrea.’

‘Send one to Jansson as well. He’ll be thrilled to bits.’

She squatted down so as to be closer to me.

‘Keep my caravan neat and tidy until I get back. Clean it regularly. And keep brushing my red shoes — I’ve left them behind.’

She caressed my forehead then got into the taxi, which set off up the hill. I took my petrol can to the chandler’s to have it topped up. The harbour was almost deserted. All the summer boats had left.

When I got back home I took a walk round the island, looking for the cat again. But I didn’t find it. I was now more alone on the island than ever before.

Several weeks passed. Everything went back to the way it had been before. Jansson would arrive in his boat, occasionally bringing a letter from Agnes, but I didn’t hear a word from Louise. I phoned her several times, but there was never an answer. The messages I left became like short, breathless diary notes about the weather, the wind and the cat who remained missing.

Presumably the cat must have been taken by a fox, which must have swum away from the island.

I grew increasingly restless. I had the feeling that I wouldn’t be able to stick it out for much longer. I would have to leave. But I didn’t know where to go.

October arrived with a storm from the north-east. Still no word from Louise. Agnes had also stopped writing. I spent most of the time sitting at the kitchen table, staring out of the window. The landscape out there seemed to be becoming petrified. It felt as if my whole house was slowly being swallowed up by a gigantic anthill that grew silently higher and higher.

Autumn became harsher. I waited.