‘I’m not going to get undressed in front of my father,’ she said. ‘Go outside. I’ll bang on the wall once I’ve snuggled down under the covers.’
I did as I was told.
The starry sky was spinning round. I stumbled and fell down in the snow. I had acquired a daughter, and perhaps she would come to like, perhaps even to love the father she had never met before.
My whole life flashed before my eyes.
I’d managed to get this far. There might be a few crossroads yet to come. But not too many. My journey was nearly over.
Louise banged on the caravan wall. She had switched off all the lights and lit a candle standing on the tiny refrigerator. I could see two faces beside each other. Harriet was furthest away, and my daughter lay next to her. There was a narrow strip of bed left for me.
‘Blow the candle out,’ said Louise. ‘I don’t want to use it up the first night I’ve ever slept with my parents.’
I undressed, but kept on my vest and pants, blew the candle out and crept into bed. It was impossible to avoid touching Louise. I noticed to my horror that she was naked.
‘Can’t you put on a nightdress?’ I asked. ‘I can’t possibly sleep with you next to me, naked. Surely you can understand that?’
She clambered over me and put on something that seemed to me to be a dress. Then she came back to bed.
‘Time to go to sleep now,’ she said. ‘At long last I’m going to hear my father snoring. I shall lie awake until you’ve gone to sleep.’
Harriet was muttering in her sleep. Whenever she rolled over, we had to adjust as well. Louise felt warm. I only wished she had been a little girl sleeping soundly in a nightdress. Not a fully grown woman who had suddenly entered my life.
I don’t know when I finally fell asleep. It was a long time before the bed seemed to stop spinning round. When I eventually woke up, I was alone.
The caravan was empty. The car was gone.
Chapter 3
I could see from the tracks in the snow how Louise had turned the car round and driven off. It occurred to me that all this had been planned in advance. Harriet had collected me, taken me to meet my unknown daughter, and then the pair of them had taken my car and vanished. I’d been dumped in the forest.
It was a quarter to ten. The weather had changed, and the temperature was above freezing. Water was dripping from the dirty caravan. I went back inside. I had a headache, and my mouth was parched. There was no sign of a message saying where they had gone. There was a Thermos flask of coffee on the table. I took out a cracked cup advertising a chain of health stores.
All the time the forest seemed to be creeping up on the caravan.
The coffee was strong, my hangover painful. I took my cup of coffee out into the fresh air. A cloud of damp mist hovered over the forest. A rifle shot echoed in the distance. I held my breath. It was followed by a second one, then nothing more. It seemed that all sounds were having to queue up before being allowed into the silence — and then only tentatively, one at a time.
I went back inside and started searching methodically through the caravan. Although it was small and cramped, there was a surprising amount of storage space. Louise kept everything in good order. Her favourite colour for clothes seemed to be chestnut brown, although some items were a shade of deep red. Most garments were in earth colours.
In a simple wooden chest with the year 1822 painted on the lid, I was amazed to find a large sum of money — thousand-kronor and five-hundred-kronor notes amounting to 47,500 in all. Then I began investigating drawers containing documents and letters.
The first item I found was a signed photograph of Erich Honecker. It said on the back that it dated from 1986, and had been sent by the DDR Embassy in Stockholm. There were several more photographs in the drawer, all of them signed — Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Africans I had never heard of, but presumed were statesmen. There was also a photograph of an Australian prime minister whose name I couldn’t make out.
I moved on to the second drawer, which was full of letters. After having read five of them, I began to understand how my daughter spent her time. She wrote letters to political leaders in all parts of the world, protesting about the way in which they were treating their own citizens and also people in other countries. In every envelope was a copy of the letter she had written in her sprawling hand, and the reply she had received. She had written to Erich Honecker in passionate English to the effect that the Berlin Wall was a disgraceful scandal. In reply she had received a photograph of Honecker on a podium waving to a blurred mass of East Germans. Louise had written to Margaret Thatcher urging her to treat the striking miners decently. I couldn’t find a reply from the Iron Lady — in any case there was nothing in the envelope apart from a photograph of Thatcher clutching her handbag tightly. But where had Louise got all that money from? There was no clue here to answer that question.
That was as far as I got. I heard the sound of a car approaching, closed the drawers and went outside. Louise was driving fast. She braked abruptly in the wet snow.
Louise took the walker out of the boot.
‘We didn’t want to wake you up. I’m delighted to discover that my father is an expert in the art of snoring.’
She helped Harriet out of the car.
‘We’ve been shopping,’ said Harriet with a smile. ‘I’ve bought some stockings, a skirt and a hat.’
Louise lifted some carrier bags from the back seat.
‘My mother never did have any dress sense,’ she said.
I carried the bags to the caravan while Louise helped Harriet to negotiate the slippery slope.
‘We’ve eaten already,’ said Louise. ‘Are you hungry?’
I was in fact, but shook my head. I didn’t like her borrowing my car without permission.
Harriet lay down on the bed to rest. I could see that the trip had done her good, but had exhausted her even so. She soon fell asleep. Louise produced the red hat that Harriet had bought.
‘It suits her,’ she said. ‘It’s a hat that could have been made specific ally for her.’
‘I’ve never seen her wearing a hat. When we were young, we were always bare-headed. Even when it was cold.’
Louise put the hat back in its bag, and looked round the caravan. Had I left any traces? Would she see that I’d spent the time they were away going through her belongings? She turned to look at me, then at my shoes that were standing on a newspaper next to the door. I’d had them for many years. They were very worn, and several of the lace-holes had split. She stood up, gently placed a blanket over her mother, and put on her jacket.
‘Let’s go out,’ she said.
I was only too pleased to do so. My headache was painful.
We stood outside the caravan, breathing in the bracing air. It struck me that I had failed to write anything in my logbook for several days now. I don’t like breaking my routine.
‘Your car could do with a service,’ said Louise. ‘The brakes are out of balance.’
‘It’s good enough for me. Where are we going?’
‘We’re going to see a good friend of mine. I want to give you a present.’
I turned the car round in the slush. When we came to the main road, she told me to turn left. Several lorries laden with logs whipped up clouds of snow. After a couple of miles she told me to turn right: a sign indicated that we were heading for somewhere called Motjärvsbyn. The pine trees came to the very edge of the road, which was badly ploughed. Louise was concentrating on the road ahead. She was humming a tune: I recognised it, but couldn’t remember what it was called.
We came to a fork, and Louise pointed to the left. After half a mile or so the forest receded and the road was lined with a row of cottages: but they were empty, dead, no smoke rose from their chimneys. Only the cottage at the end of the row, a two-storey wooden building with a battered, green-painted porch, showed any signs of life. A cat was sitting on the steps. A thin wisp of smoke rose up from the chimney.