‘Do they serve food?’ Harriet asked. ‘I can sleep anywhere.’
I went back in. I recognised the tune the man at the piano was churning out, something that had been popular when I was a young man. Harriet would certainly be able to name it.
I asked if they served an evening meal.
‘We have a wine-tasting dinner that I can thoroughly recommend.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Isn’t that good enough?’
His response sounded very disapproving.
‘We’ll take the room,’ I said. ‘We’ll take the room, and look forward to the wine-tasting dinner.’
I went out again and helped Harriet out of her seat. I could see that she was still in pain. We walked slowly through the snow, up the ramp for wheelchairs, and entered the warmth. The man was back at the piano.
‘“Non ho l’età”,’ said Harriet. ‘We used to dance to that. Do you remember who sang it? Gigliola Cinquetti. She won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1963 or 1964.’
I remembered. Or at least I thought I did. After all those solitary years on my grandparents’ island, I no longer relied on my memory.
‘I’ll sign us in later,’ I said. ‘Let’s take a look at our room first.’
The man collected a key and escorted us down a long corridor that led to a single door with a number inlaid in the dark wood. We were to occupy room number 3. He unlocked the door and switched on the light. It was a large room, very attractive. But the double bed was smaller than I’d expected.
‘The dining room closes in an hour.’
He left us alone. Harriet flopped down on to the bed. The whole situation suddenly seemed to me totally unreal. What had I got myself into? Was I going to share a bed with Harriet after all these years? Why had she agreed to go along with it?
‘I can find a sofa to sleep on,’ I said.
‘It makes no difference to me,’ said Harriet. ‘I’ve never been afraid of you. Have you been afraid of me? Scared that I’d stick an axe into your skull while you were asleep? I need to be left alone for a while. I’d like to eat in half an hour. And you don’t need to worry — I can pay for myself.’
I went out to the piano player and signed the register. From the part of the dining room sealed off by a sliding door came the buzz of conversation of the party welcoming their relative home from America. I went into one of the lounges and sat down to wait. It had been a long day. I was restless. Days on the island always passed by slowly. Now I had the feeling I was under attack and felt defenceless.
Through the open door I saw Harriet emerging from the corridor with her walker. It looked as if she was standing at the wheel of some strange vessel. She was moving unsteadily. Had she been drinking again? We went into the dining room. Most of the tables were vacant. A friendly waitress with a swollen and bandaged leg gave us a corner table. Just as my father had taught me to do, I checked to see if the waitress was wearing decent shoes. She was, although they could have done with polishing. Unlike earlier in the day, Harriet was hungry. I wasn’t. But I made up for that by drinking greedily the wine served by a thin youth with a freckled face. Harriet asked questions about the wine, but I said nothing, merely drank up whatever was put before me. They were mainly Australian wines, with some from South Africa. But so what? All I wanted just now was to get tipsy.
We toasted each other, and I noticed that Harriet became quite drunk almost immediately. I wasn’t the only one drinking too much. When was the last time I’d been so drunk that I had difficulty in controlling my movements? Very occasionally, when depression got the better of me, I would sit at the kitchen table and drink myself silly, then kick the cat and dog out, and crash out fully clothed on top of the bed. It hardly ever happened during the winter. Perhaps on a light spring evening or early in the autumn I would have an attack of angst, and would bring out the bottles.
The dining room closed. We were the last diners. We had eaten and drunk, and as if by tacit agreement had mentioned nothing about our lives, nor where we were heading. Even Sara Larsson and her dog were not discussed. I charged the meal to our room despite Harriet’s protests. Then we stumbled off. Somehow or other Harriet seemed to manage with her walker in a controlled manner, I had no idea how she managed it. I unlocked the door of our room, and said I would go for an evening walk before going to bed. It wasn’t true, of course. But I didn’t want to embarrass Harriet by being present when she went to bed. I suppose I was just as keen not to embarrass myself.
I sat down in a reading room. It was lined with shelves of old books and magazines. The man at the piano had disappeared, and the large party had dispersed. Sleep came without warning, as if it had ambushed me. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. I could see from the clock that I’d been asleep for nearly an hour. I stood up, staggered slightly as a result of all the wine I’d drunk, and went back to our room. Harriet was asleep. She had left the light on at my side of the bed. I undressed quietly, had a wash in the bathroom and crept down into bed. I tried to hear if she really was asleep, or just pretending. She was lying on her side. I felt tempted to stroke her back. She was wearing a light blue nightdress. I switched off the light and listened to her breathing in the darkness. I felt very uneasy inside. And there was something else that I had been missing for a very long time. A feeling of not being alone. As simple as that. Loneliness had been banished, just for a moment.
I must have fallen asleep. I was woken up by Harriet screaming. Half asleep, I managed to switch on the bedside light. She was sitting upright in bed, screaming from deep despair and pain. When I tried to touch her shoulder, she hit me — hard, and in the face.
My nose spurted blood.
We got no more sleep that night.
Chapter 7
Dawn rose over the white lake like grey smoke.
I stood at the window, thinking about how I recalled seeing my father doing the same. I’m not as fat as he was, even though I’ve acquired a bit of a pot belly. But who could see me? Only Harriet, who had plumped up the pillow behind her back.
You could say I was a half-naked man in a winter landscape.
I thought about going down to the frozen lake and creating my hole in the ice. I missed the pain involved in exposing myself to the freezing cold water. But I knew I wouldn’t do it. I would stay in our room, together with Harriet. We would get dressed, have breakfast and continue our journey.
I was intrigued by Harriet’s dream, which had woken her up screaming. What she said about it seemed extremely muddled. She could only remember fragments. Somebody had nailed her down, intent on ripping her to pieces because she had refused to let go of her body. She had resisted: she had been in a room — or perhaps it was outside — surrounded by people, none of whose faces she recognised. Their voices had sounded like cries from threatening birds.
And that’s when she woke up. When I tried to calm her down, or perhaps rather to calm myself down, she had still been in the borderland between dream and consciousness, and was defending herself against whatever had pinned her down. The punch she gave me was in the heavyweight class. Its effect reminded me of the pain I’d felt when I was beaten up and mugged in Rome.
But this time my nose wasn’t broken.
I stuffed rolled-up toilet paper into my nostrils, wrapped a handkerchief soaked in cold water round the back of my neck and, after a while, the nosebleed petered out. Harriet knocked on the bathroom door and asked if she could be of assistance. I wanted to be left in peace, so I told her ‘no’. When I eventually came out of the bathroom with two wads of paper in my nose, she had gone back to bed. She had taken off her nightdress and hung it over the bedstead. She looked me in the eye.