I slept badly and lay listening to the gale. Squalls coming from the north-west — I could feel the draught through the wall. That was what I would note down in my logbook the following day. But I wondered if I would record the fact that Harriet had come to visit me.
She was lying on a camp bed directly underneath where I was. Inside my head, I kept going through the letter I’d found in her handbag, time and time again. She had stomach cancer, and it had spread. Cytotoxic drugs had only slowed things down a little, operations were out of the question. She had a hospital appointment with her consultant on 12 February.
I still had enough of the medical practitioner in me to be able to read the writing on the wall. Harriet was going to die. The treatment she had received so far would not cure her, and might not even prolong her life. She was passing into the terminal and palliative phase, to use the medical terms.
No cure, but no unnecessary suffering.
As I lay there in the darkness, the same thought kept coming to me, over and over again: it was Harriet who was going to die, not me. Although it was I who had committed the cardinal sin of deserting her, she was the one afflicted. I don’t believe in God. Apart from a short period in the early stages of my training as a doctor, I have barely been affected by religious considerations. I have never had discussions with representatives of the other world. No inner voices urging me to kneel. But now I was lying awake and feeling grateful for not being the one under threat. I barely slept for many hours. I got up twice for a pee and to listen outside Harriet’s door. Both she and the ants seemed to be asleep.
I got up at six o’clock.
When I went down to the kitchen, I saw to my surprise that she had already had breakfast. Or at least, she had drunk coffee. She had warmed up the dregs from the previous evening. The dog and the cat were out — she must have let them out. I opened the front door. There had been a light snowfall during the night. Tracks made by the paws of a dog and a cat were visible. And footprints.
Harriet had gone out.
I tried to see through the darkness. Dawn was still a distant prospect. Were any sounds to be heard? The wind came and went in squally gusts. All three sets of tracks led in the same direction: towards the back of the house. I didn’t need to look far. There is an old wooden bench in among the apple trees. My grandmother used to sit there. She would knit, straining her short-sighted eyes, or would simply sit with her hands clasped in her lap, listening to the sounds of the sea, which was never silent when not frozen over. But it wasn’t my grandmother’s ghostly figure sitting there now. Harriet had lit a candle that was standing on the ground, sheltered from the wind by a stone. The dog was lying at her feet. She looked the same as when I had first seen her the previous day: hat pulled over her ears, a scarf wrapped round her face. I sat down next to her on the bench. It was below freezing, but as the overnight wind had faded away, it didn’t feel particularly cold.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said.
‘It’s dark. You can’t see anything. And you can’t even hear the sea, as it’s frozen over.’
‘I had a dream that the anthill was growing and surrounding my bed.’
‘I can move your bed to the kitchen if you’d prefer that.’
The dog stood up and wandered off. It was moving cautiously, as dogs do when they are deaf and hence afraid. I asked Harriet if she’d noticed that the dog was deaf. She hadn’t. The cat came flouncing up. She took a good look at us, then withdrew into the darkness. The thought I’d had many times before came to me yet again: nobody understands the way cats behave. Did I understand the way I behaved? Did Harriet understand the way she behaved?
‘You’re naturally wondering why I’ve come here,’ she said.
The candle flickered without going out.
‘It is unexpected.’
‘Did you ever think you would see me again? Did you ever want to?’
I didn’t answer. When a person has abandoned another without explaining why, there isn’t really anything to say. There is no abandonment that can be excused or explained. I had abandoned Harriet. So I said nothing. I merely sat there, watching the dancing candle flame, and waited.
‘I haven’t come here to put you in the dock. I’ve come to beg you to keep your promise.’
I understood immediately what she meant.
The forest pool.
Where I went swimming as a child, the summer when I celebrated my tenth birthday, and my father and I paid a visit to the area in the north of Sweden where he was born. I’d promised her a visit to that forest pool when I returned from my year in America. We would go there and swim together in the dark water under the bright night sky. I’d thought of it as a beautiful ceremony — the black water, the light summer sky when it never gets dark, the great northern divers calling in the distance, the pool said by the locals to be bottomless. We would go swimming there, and after that, nothing would ever part us.
‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten the promise you made me?’
‘I remember very well what I said.’
‘I want you to take me there.’
‘It’s winter. The pool will be frozen.’
I thought about the hole in the ice that I made every morning. Would I be able to chop away at a frozen forest pool in the far north of Sweden? Where the ice is as hard as granite?
‘I want to see the pool. Even if it is covered in snow and ice. So that I know it’s true.’
‘It is true. The pool exists.’
‘You never said what it’s called.’
‘It’s too small to have a name. This country is full of small lakes without names. There’s hardly a single city street or country lane without a name, but lakes and pools without names are plentiful in the forests.’
‘I want you to keep your promise.’
She stood up with difficulty. The candle fell over and went out with a fizzing noise. It was completely dark all around us. The light from the kitchen window didn’t reach this far. Even so, I could see that she had brought her walking aid with her. When I held out my hand to assist her, she waved it away.
‘I don’t want help. I want you to keep your promise.’
When Harriet and her green wheeled walker came to where the light illuminated the snow, it seemed to me that she was walking down a moonlit street. When we were together almost forty years ago, we’d somewhat childishly pretended that we were moon worshippers. Did she remember that? I watched her side-on as she worked her way through the snow-covered stones and rocks. I found it hard to believe that she was dying. A person approaching the ultimate border. A different world or a different kind of darkness would take over. She parked the walker at the foot of the three steps and held on hard to the rail as she struggled up to the front door. As she opened it, the cat scampered between her legs and into the house. She went to her room. I listened with my ear pressed against the closed door. I could hear the faint clinking noise from a bottle. Medicine from her bag. The cat miaowed and rubbed herself against my legs. I gave her something to eat, and sat down at the kitchen table.
It was still dark outside.
I tried to read the temperature on the thermometer attached to the outside of the window frame, but the glass containing the mercury column had misted over. The door opened, and Harriet came in. She had brushed her hair and changed into a new jumper. It was lavender blue. I was reminded of my mother and her lavender-scented tears. But Harriet wasn’t crying. She smiled as she sat down on the kitchen sofa.
‘I’d never have believed that you would become a person who lived with a dog and a cat and an anthill.’
‘Life seldom turns out the way you thought it would.’
‘I’m not going to ask you about how your life turned out. But I do want you to keep your promise.’