‘Why do you think I would have said something that didn’t in fact happen?’
‘I’m saying that I don’t know.’
‘Are you suggesting that I killed him? Is that what you mean?’
She stood up, with considerable difficulty. ‘I’m not saying that you are concealing something or that you’re not telling me the truth. All I’m saying is that I found the ice prods and they were bloodstained.’
‘I was trying to spare you from some of the truth. He used the ice prods to kill the cat. I found them on the ice.’
Silence.
‘So you thought I told you something that wasn’t true?’ he said. ‘Do you believe I would ever dare to do such a thing? Don’t you understand that I’m scared to death of losing you?’
To his surprise he recognised that this was exactly what he was frightened of.
She eyed him up and down. Then she decided to believe him.
The lid over the abyss had very nearly given way.
Chapter 169
That evening and for the rest of the night, he was completely calm.
Distance had no meaning any more. He had control over himself and Sara Fredrika. The ice prods had been explained away. She was no longer worried.
As night approached they talked about the baby, and what would happen afterwards.
‘When the time comes,’ he asked, ‘who’s going to help you?’
‘There’s a midwife on Kråkmarö called Wester. She knows I’m pregnant. But you’ll have to sail to Kråkmarö and fetch her.’
What she wanted to talk about most was the future, what would happen after the skerry. She could only associate the baby with Halsskär as the place where it was born, the place they left soon afterwards.
In his imagination he had worked out a plan for how they would leave for America. He talked about the danger from the naval fleets stalking the European shipping lanes leading to the west. But thanks to the contacts he had they would be able to travel on a Swedish ship along a secret route north of Iceland. Everything was planned. The only thing he could not be sure of was the date for their departure. They would have to wait and be ready to leave at short notice.
‘You mean we’ll have to wait here? Who will come to fetch us?’
‘The same ship that I was on when I came here for the first time.’
His reply made her feel secure. I am creating time, he thought. I am increasing the distance to the point when I shall have to make a definite decision.
He put his hand on her stomach and felt the baby kicking. It was like cupping his hand over a flounder on the seabed. The baby was wriggling away under the palm of his hand, as if it were trying to escape.
Is that how it was with babies as well? That they wanted to escape the inevitable?
He cupped his hand. The flounder wriggled away under his palm.
Chapter 170
One night she woke him up.
‘I can hear somebody screaming,’ she said.
He listened. There was no wind.
‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘There’s somebody screaming, a person.’
He put his trousers on and went out. The ground felt chilly underfoot.
Then he heard it, a distant scream. It came from the sea.
She had got out of bed with considerable difficulty and was standing in the doorway. Her face was white in the night glow.
‘Can you hear it?’
‘Yes, I can.’
They listened. There it came again. He was still unsure if it was a person or a bird. Birds can also get into difficulties — he remembered the gull frozen into the ice last winter. Frozen wings, he thought. We always need to thaw out our wings in order to fly. But in the end that is no longer possible.
There was the scream again. He went to the highest point on the skerry and looked south-westwards, where the scream had come from. In the end he was convinced that it was a human scream. He set off for the inlet intending to take the boat out, but it stopped. He waited. The sea was silent.
He went back to the cottage. She was cold, pressed up against him, he put his arm round her shoulders. They lay awake as day broke, wondering who or what it had been, a person or a bird.
He got up early and scanned the sea with his telescope.
There was nothing to be seen. Breakers rolled slowly in towards the islands.
He had the feeling that the sea was like an old woman in a rocking chair.
Chapter 171
A north-easterly storm bringing low temperatures raged over the archipelago.
Then followed dead calm. Sara Fredrika was finding it increasingly difficult to move, and she was in continous pain from her back.
He went fishing and imagined himself to be the lord of Halsskär. He rarely gave a thought to Kristina Tacker and the baby. His memory was like a vast vacuum.
Sometimes he would give a sudden start. Kristina Tacker, Ludwig Tacker were just behind him.
One morning when he went down to the inlet he heard voices. He followed the sounds, leaned over the edge of the rocks and discovered a small brown mahogany yacht anchored off the narrow headland projecting furthest to the south-west. Two little rowing boats were heading for land. In the boats were women dressed in white and with large hats, and men in blue jackets who were doing the rowing. He could see the glint of bottles, the women were laughing. In the stern of one of the boats was a man wearing a cap back to front, holding some sort of instrument in front of his face — perhaps a camera.
He hurried back to the cottage and told Sara Fredrika.
‘They look like summer holidaymakers,’ he said. ‘But are there any this far out? I thought they were only to be seen around Stockholm and on the bathing beaches along the west coast. And it’s getting late in the year, it will soon be autumn.’
‘I once heard about a man who used to come with a piano on the steamboat Tjust from Söderköping,’ she said. ‘It was always the beginning of May. He’d bring the piano with him from Stockholm, and it would be lashed down in the bows. The crew had trouble in getting it on to a cattle ferry. But once he’d settled he would sit on an island playing the piano and getting drunk every day until September, and then he would go back home again.’
‘This party doesn’t have a piano with them.’
‘What are they doing here? On my island?’
‘It’s not your island. And I expect they’d take no notice if anybody tried to stop them landing.’
She started to protest, but he cut her short.
‘They’ll wonder who I am,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t be seen, my orders are not to allow myself to be identified.’
‘How would they know you were anybody other than a man who lives here on this island with me? People judge people on their appearance. Take some of my husband’s clothes.’
That thought had already occurred to him. He took some clothes out of a chest. They smelled mouldy, of old sea.
‘You look as if you’re wearing hand-me-downs,’ she said. ‘You’re taller than he was, but not as bulky.’
‘I’m only borrowing them,’ he said. ‘When we leave Halsskär I shall burn them.’
‘I want to see these people,’ she said.
‘You can’t go scrambling over the rocks.’
‘If they are where you say, on that headland in the west, there are some flat ledges I can walk along. I want to see those hats.’
When they came to the headland they found that the party had already landed. They were squatting behind a big rock. It took him a while to realise that they were making a film, one of these newfangled inventions with people flitting about jerkily in moving pictures, projected on to a white screen. He tried to explain to Sara Fredrika in a low whisper, but she was not listening.