‘I’d be telling a lie if I said I was sorry to disturb you.’
‘You’re not disturbing me.’
‘Of course I am. I’ve simply turned up here unannounced. But that doesn’t bother me.’
She sat more upright. I could see that she was in fact in pain.
‘How did you get here?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t you ask how I found you? I knew about this island, where you spent your summers, and I knew it was off the east coast. It wasn’t easy to track you down, but I managed it in the end. I phoned the Post Office, because I realised they must know where somebody called Fredrik Welin lived.’
I began to remember something. Early in the morning I’d dreamed about an earthquake. I’d been surrounded by extremely loud noise, but suddenly everything was silent again. The noise hadn’t woken me up, but I’d opened my eyes when silence returned. I must have been awake for a couple of minutes, listening for sounds outside in the darkness.
Everything had been as normal. And I went back to sleep.
I now realised that the noise I’d heard in my dream had been Jansson’s hydrocopter. He was the one who had brought her here, and left her on the ice.
‘I wanted to arrive early. It was like travelling in an infernal machine. He was very nice. But expensive.’
‘What did he charge you?’
‘Three hundred for me and two hundred for the walker.’
‘But that’s scandalous!’
‘Is there anybody else out here with a hydrocopter?’
‘I’ll see to it that you get half of that back.’
She pointed at her glass.
I refilled it with water. The crow had flown away from the bacon rind. I stood up and said I would go and fetch her walker. There were large pools of water all over the floor from my boots. The dog appeared from somewhere behind the house, and accompanied me down to the shore.
I tried to think clearly.
After close to forty years, Harriet had reappeared from the past. The protective wall I’d erected out here on the island had proved to be inadequate. It had been breached by a Trojan Horse in the form of Jansson’s hydrocopter. He had rammed his way through the wall — and charged a lot of money for doing so.
I walked out on to the ice.
A north-easterly breeze was blowing. A flight of birds could just be made out in the far distance. The rocks and skerries were all white. It was one of those days characterised by the mysterious stillness one experiences only when the sea has iced over. The sun was low in the sky. The walker was frozen fast in the ice. I carefully worked it loose, then started wheeling it towards land. The dog was limping along behind me. I would soon have to have him put down. Him and the cat. They were both old, and their ancient bodies were causing them a lot of pain.
When we came to the shore, I went to the boathouse and fetched a threadbare blanket that I laid out on Grandfather’s bench. I couldn’t go back to the house until I’d decided what to do. There was only one possible reason for Harriet being here. She was going to take me to task. After all these years, she wanted to know why I had left her. What could I say? Life had moved on, that was the way things turned out. Bearing in mind what had happened to me, Harriet ought to be grateful that I had vanished out of her life.
It was cold, sitting there on the bench. I was about to get up when I heard noises in the distance. Voices and the sound of engines travel a long way over water and ice. I realised that it was Jansson. There wouldn’t be any post today, but he was busy running his illegal taxi service, no doubt. I walked back to the house. The cat was sitting on the steps, waiting to go in. But I shut her out.
Before entering the kitchen, I examined my face in the mirror hanging in the hall. A hollow-eyed, unshaven face. Hair uncombed, lips squeezed together, deep-set eyes. Not exactly pretty. Unlike Harriet, who looked much the same as she had always done, I had changed with the passing years. I flatter myself that I looked pretty good when I was young. I certainly attracted a lot of interest from the girls in those days. Until the events that put an end to my career as a surgeon, I was very particular about what I looked like and how I dressed. It was when I moved out here to the island that deterioration set in. For several years, I removed the three mirrors that had been hanging in the house. I didn’t want to see myself. Six months could pass without my going to the mainland for a haircut.
I stroked my hair with my fingers, and went into the kitchen.
The sofa was bare. Harriet wasn’t there. The door to the living room was ajar, but the room was empty. The only thing in there was the gigantic anthill. Then I heard the toilet flushing. Harriet returned to the kitchen, and sat down on the sofa again.
Once again, I could see from the way she moved that she was in pain but I couldn’t work out where.
She had sat down on the sofa so that the light from the window fell over her face. She seemed to look just the same as she’d done when we used to wander around Stockholm in the spring evenings, when I was planning to flee without taking leave of her. The closer the day came, the more often I would assure her that I loved her. I was afraid that she would see through me, and discover my carefully planned treachery. But she believed me.
She was staring out of the window.
‘There’s a crow on the lump of meat hanging in your tree.’
‘Bacon rind,’ I said. ‘Not a lump of meat. The small birds vanished when the gale blew up, before it became storm force and brought the blizzard with it. They always hide away when there’s a strong wind. I don’t know where they go.’
She turned to face me.
‘You look terrible. Are you ill?’
‘I look like I always look. If you’d come tomorrow afternoon, I’d have been clean-shaven.’
‘I don’t recognise you.’
‘You’re the same as ever.’
‘Why do you have an anthill in your living room?’
The question was direct, without hesitation.
‘If you hadn’t opened the door, you wouldn’t have seen it.’
‘I didn’t mean to go snooping around your house. I was looking for the bathroom.’
Harriet transfixed me with her clear eyes.
‘I have a question to ask you,’ she said. ‘Obviously, I ought to have been in touch before coming. But I didn’t want to risk you vanishing again.’
‘I have nowhere to run away to.’
‘Everybody has somewhere. But I want you to be here. I want to talk to you.’
‘So I understand.’
‘You understand nothing at all. But I need to stay here for a few days, and I have difficulty in walking up and down stairs. May I sleep on this sofa?’
Harriet wasn’t going to reproach me. So I was prepared to agree to anything. I told her that of course she could sleep on my sofa, if that’s what she wanted. As an alternative I had a collapsible camp bed that I could set up in the living room. Assuming she had no objection to sleeping in the same room as an anthill. She said she didn’t. I fetched the camp bed and erected it as far away from the anthill as possible. In the middle of the room was a table with a white cloth, and next to it was the anthill. It was almost as high as the table. Part of the cloth hanging down over the edge had been swallowed up by the anthill.
I made the bed, and supplied an extra pillow as I remembered that Harriet always liked to have her head comparatively high when she slept.
But not only then.
Also when she made love. I soon learned that she liked to have several pillows underneath the back of her head. Had I ever asked her why that was so important? I couldn’t remember.
I laid out the quilt, then looked out through the half-open door. Harriet was watching me. I switched on the two radiators, checked that they were warming up, and went into the kitchen. Harriet seemed to be recovering her strength. But she was hollow-eyed. Her face was constantly on the alert, ready to parry pain that could strike at any moment.