‘I’ll have a lie-down for a while,’ she said, and stood up.
I opened the door for her. I’d closed it again even before she’d lain down. I felt a sudden urge to lock the door and throw the key away. One day Harriet would have been swallowed up by my anthill.
I put on a jacket and went out.
It was a fine day. The gusts of wind were becoming less violent. I listened for Jansson’s hydrocopter. Was that a chainsaw I could hear in the distance? Perhaps getting fuel for a fire?
I walked down to the jetty and into the boathouse. A rowing boat was hanging there, suspended from ropes and pulleys, reminiscent of a gigantic fish that had been beached. There was a smell of tar in the boathouse. It was ages since I’d stopped using tar on the boats and fishing equipment out here in the archipelago, but I still have a few tins that I open now and then, just for the smell. It gives me a sense of tranquility — more than anything else is capable of.
I tried to recall the details of our farewell that wasn’t a proper farewell, that spring evening thirty-seven years ago. We’d walked over Strömbron Bridge, strolled along the quay at Skeppsbro, and then continued to Slussen. What had we spoken about? Harriet had talked about her day in the shoe shop. She loved telling me about her customers. She could even turn a pair of galoshes and a tin of shoe polish for old leather boots into an adventure. Memories of events and conversations came back to me. It was as if an archive that had been closed for ever had suddenly been opened up.
I sat on the bench on the jetty for a while before returning to the house. I peeped into the living room. Harriet was asleep, and had curled up like a little child. I felt a lump in my throat. That’s how she had always slept. I walked up the hill behind the house and gazed out over the white bay. It felt as if it was only now that I realised what I’d done on that occasion so long ago. I’d never dared to ask myself how Harriet had reacted to what had happened. When had it dawned on her that I would never be coming back? I had extreme difficulty in imagining the pain she must have felt when she knew that I had abandoned her.
When I got back to the house, Harriet had woken up. She was sitting on the kitchen sofa, waiting for me. My ancient cat was lying on her knee.
‘Did you get some sleep?’ I asked. ‘Did the ants leave you in peace?’
‘I like the smell of the anthill.’
‘If the cat is pestering you we can throw her out.’
‘Do you think I look as if I’m being pestered?’
I asked if she was hungry, and began preparing a meal. I had a hare in the freezer that Jansson had shot. But it would take too long to thaw out. Harriet sat on the sofa, watching me. I fried some cutlets and boiled some potatoes. We spoke hardly at all, and I was so nervous that I burned my hand on the frying pan. Why didn’t she say anything? Why had she come?
We ate in silence. I cleared the table and made coffee. My grandfather and grandmother always used to boil their coffee grains and water in a saucepan — there was no such thing as filter coffee in those days. I make my coffee like they used to do, and always count to seventeen once it starts boiling. Then it turns out exactly as I like it. I took out a couple of cups, put some cat food in a dish, and sat down on my chair. It was dark outside already. All the time, I was waiting for Harriet to explain why she had come. I asked if she wanted a refill. She slid her cup forward. The dog started scratching at the door. I let him in, gave him some food, then shut him in the hall with the walker.
‘Did you ever think we would meet again?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I asked what you thought.’
‘I don’t know what I thought.’
‘You are just as evasive now as you were in those days.’
She withdrew into herself. She always used to do that when she’d been hurt, I remembered that clearly. I felt an urge to stretch out my hand over the table and touch her. Did she feel an urge to touch me? It was as if nearly forty years of silence had started to bounce back and forth between us. An ant crawled over the tablecloth. Had it come from the anthill in the living room, or had it been unable to find its way back to the nest I suspect was inside the south wall of the house?
I stood up and said I was going to let the dog out. Her face was in shadow. It was a clear, starry night, dead calm. Whenever I see a sky like that, I wish I could write music. I walked down to the jetty again — I’d lost count of the number of times I’d done so already today. The dog ran out on to the ice in the light from the boathouse, and stopped where Harriet had been lying. The situation was unreal. A door had opened into the life I had more or less considered to be over, and the beautiful woman I had once loved but deceived had come back. In those days, when I used to meet her when she’d finished work in the shoe shop in Hamngatan, she used to be wheeling a bicycle. Now she supported herself on a wheeled walker. I felt lost. The dog returned, and we walked up to the house.
I paused at the back and looked in through the kitchen window.
Harriet was still sitting at the kitchen table. It was a while before I realised that she was crying. I waited until she’d dried her eyes. Only then did I go in. The dog had to stay in the hall.
‘I need some sleep,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m tired out. I’ll tell you tomorrow why I’ve come.’
She didn’t wait for me to respond, but stood up, said goodnight and eyed me briefly up and down. Then she closed the door. I went to the room where I keep my television set, but I didn’t switch it on. Meeting Harriet had tired me out. Naturally, I was afraid of all the accusations I knew would come. What could I say? Nothing.
I fell asleep in the armchair.
It was midnight when I was woken up by a stiff neck. I went to the kitchen and listened outside Harriet’s door. Not a sound. And no strip of light under the door. I cleared up in the kitchen, took a loaf and a baguette out of the freezer, let the dog and the cat in, and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. The door that had shut out everything I thought was in the past was banging; swinging back and forth. It was as if the time we had spent together was using the wind to force its way in.
I put on my dressing gown and went back down to the kitchen. The animals were asleep. It was minus seven degrees outside. Harriet’s handbag was on the kitchen sofa. I put it on the table and opened it. It contained a hairbrush and comb, her purse and a pair of gloves, a bunch of keys, a mobile phone and two bottles of medicine. I read the labels; it was clear that they were painkillers and antidepressants. Prescribed by a Dr Arvidsson in Stockholm. I began to feel uneasy, and I continued searching through her handbag. Down at the very bottom was an address book. It was worn and well thumbed, full of telephone numbers. When I looked up the letter ‘W’, I saw to my surprise that my Stockholm telephone number from the middle of the 1960s was there.
It had not even been crossed out.
Had she kept the address book all those years? I was about to put it back when I noticed a piece of paper tucked into the cover. I unfolded it and read it.
After doing so, I went to stand outside the front door. The dog sat by my side.
I still didn’t know why Harriet had come to my island.
But I had found in her handbag a letter informing her that she was seriously ill and did not have much longer to live.
Chapter 5
The wind came and went during the night.