Then I gave a speech. It wasn’t prepared at all, not consciously anyway. I talked about simplicity and extravagance. About perfection, which may not exist, but whose existence can be sensed when in the company of good friends on a lovely summer’s evening. The Swedish summer was unpredictable, and never very long. But it could be stunningly beautiful, as it was this very evening.
‘You are my friends,’ I said. ‘You are my friends and my family, and I have been an inhospitable prince on this little island of mine, and never welcomed any of you here. I thank you for your patience, I shudder to think what you may have thought in the past. I hope this will not be the only time we meet like this.’
We drank. A gentle evening breeze blew through the crowns of the oak trees, and made the candle flames flutter.
Jansson tapped his glass and stood up. He was swaying slightly, but was able to stand upright. He said nothing. But then he started singing. In a staggeringly sonorous baritone voice he sang ‘Ave Maria’ in a way that sent shivers down my spine. I think everybody around the table had a similar reaction. Hans and Romana looked just as astonished as I must have done. Nobody seemed to know that Jansson had such a powerful voice. I had tears in my eyes. Jansson stood there, with all his imagined aches and pains, in a suit that was too small for him, singing in a way that gave the impression that a god had come down to join us and celebrate this summer evening. Only he could explain why he had kept this voice of his a secret.
Even the birds fell silent and listened. Andrea was open-mouthed. These were powerful, magic moments. When he had finished and sat down, nobody said a word. In the end, Hans broke the silence and said the only thing it was possible to say.
‘Well, I’ll be damned!’
Jansson was bombarded with questions. Where did he learn to sing like that? Why had he never sung before? But he didn’t answer. Nor did he want to sing any more.
‘I’ve delivered my thank-you speech,’ he said. ‘I sang. I only wish this evening would go on for ever.’
We carried on drinking and eating. Harriet had put down her conductor’s baton, and now conversations criss-crossed haphazardly. We were all drunk. Louise and Andrea sneaked down to the boathouse and the caravan. Hans got it into his head that he and Romana should dance. They hopped and bounced round the back of the house dancing what Jansson maintained was a polka, and reappeared round the other side doing what looked more like a hambo.
Harriet was enjoying herself. I think there were moments during the evening when she felt no pain, and forgot that she would soon die. I served more wine to everybody except Andrea. Jansson staggered off to have a pee behind the bushes, Hans and Romana began an arm-wrestling match, and I switched on my radio: music, something dreamy for the piano by Schumann, I thought. I sat down beside Harriet.
‘Things turned out for the best,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We would never have been able to live together. Before long I’d have tired of all your eavesdropping and searching through my private papers. It was as if I had you under my skin. You made me itch. But as I was in love with you, I ignored that. I thought it would pass. And it did. But only when you’d gone away.’
She raised her glass and looked me in the eye.
‘You’ve never been a good person,’ she said. ‘You’ve always shrugged off your responsibilities. You’ll never become a good person. But maybe a bit better than you are now. Don’t lose Louise. Look after her and she’ll look after you.’
‘You should have told me,’ I said. ‘I had a daughter for all those years without knowing.’
‘Of course I should have told you. I could have found you if I’d really tried. But I was so angry. It was my way of getting revenge. Keeping your child for myself. I’m being punished for that now.’
‘How?’
‘I feel regret.’
Jansson staggered up to us and sat down on the other side of Harriet, oblivious to the fact that we were deep in conversation.
‘I think you’re an extraordinary woman, no hesitation in coming aboard my hydrocopter and then venturing out on to the ice.’
‘It was an experience,’ said Harriet. ‘But I wouldn’t want to repeat that journey out to the island.’
I got up and walked up the hill. The sounds from the other side of the house reached me in the form of clinking crockery and sporadic shouts. I thought I could see Grandma sitting down there on the bench by the apple tree, and Grandfather on his way up the path from the boathouse.
It was an evening when the living and the dead could have a shared party. It was an evening for those who still had a long time to live, and for those like Harriet who were standing close to the invisible borderline, waiting for the ferry that would transport them over the river, for the final crossing.
I went down to the jetty. The caravan door was open. I walked over to it and peered in surreptitiously through the window. Andrea was trying on Louise’s clothes. She was tottering on high-heeled light blue shoes, and was wearing a strange dress covered in glistening sequins.
I sat down on the bench, and suddenly remembered that evening at the winter solstice. When I’d been in the kitchen thinking that nothing in my life would ever change. That was six months ago, and everything had changed. Now the summer solstice had begun to project us back towards darkness. I was listening to voices on my island that is normally so quiet. Romana’s shrill laughter, and then Harriet’s voice, as she raised herself above death and all that pain and shouted for more wine.
More wine! It sounded like a hunting call. Harriet had mobilised the last of her strength in order to fight the final battle. I went back to the house and uncorked the bottles we had left. When I came out, Jansson was embracing Romana in a swaying, semi-conscious dance. Hans had moved over to Harriet. He was holding her hand, or perhaps it was the other way round, and she was listening as he laboriously and unsuccessfully tried to explain to her how lighthouses in shipping channels made it safer for vessels to sail along them even at very high speeds. Louise and Andrea emerged from the shadows. Nobody apart from Harriet noticed pretty Andrea in Louise’s imaginative creations. She was still wearing the light blue shoes. Louise saw me looking at Andrea’s feet.
‘Giaconelli made them for me,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Now I’m giving them to that girl who has so much love inside her but nobody will ever have the courage to accept it. An angel will wear light blue shoes created by a master.’
The long night passed slowly in a sort of dream, and I no longer recall clearly what happened or what was said. But on one occasion when I went for a pee, Jansson was sitting on the front steps, sobbing in Romana’s arms. Hans was dancing a waltz with Andrea, Harriet and Louise were whispering confidentially to each other, and the sun was climbing unobtrusively out of the sea.
The band that made its way along the path to the jetty at four in the morning was anything but steady on its feet. Harriet was supported by her walker and assisted by Hans. We stood on the jetty and said our goodbyes, untied the mooring ropes and watched the boats leave.
Just before Andrea was about to clamber down into the boat with the light blue shoes in her hand, she came up to me and hugged me with her thin, mosquito-bitten arms.
Long after the boats had vanished round the headland I could still feel that embrace, like a warm film round my body.
‘I’ll go back to the house with Harriet,’ said Louise. ‘She needs a really good wash. It’ll be easier if we’re on our own. If you’re tired you can have a lie-down in the caravan.’
‘I’ll start collecting the plates and things.’
‘We can do that tomorrow.’
I watched her helping Harriet back to the house. Harriet was exhausted now. She could barely hold herself upright, despite leaning on the walker and her daughter.
My family, I thought. The family I didn’t get until it was too late.
I fell asleep on the bench, and didn’t wake up until Louise tapped me on the shoulder.
‘She’s asleep now. We ought to get some sleep as well.’
The sun was already high over the horizon. I had a headache, and my mouth was dry.
‘Do you think she enjoyed it?’ I asked.
‘I hope so.’
‘Did she say anything?’
‘She was almost unconscious when I put her to bed.’
We walked up to the house. The cat, who had disappeared for most of the night, was lying on the kitchen sofa. Louise took hold of my hand.
‘I wonder who you are,’ she said. ‘One day I’ll understand, perhaps, But it was a good party. And I like your friends.’
She unrolled the mattress on the kitchen floor. I went up to my room and lay on the bed, taking off nothing but my shoes.
In my dreams I heard the cries and shrieks of sea gulls and terns. They came closer and closer, then suddenly dived down towards my face.
When I woke up I realised that the noises were coming from downstairs. It was Harriet, screaming in pain again.
The party was over.
CHAPTER 5
A WEEK LATER the cat vanished. Louise and I searched every nook and cranny among the rocks, but found nothing. As usual I thought about my dog. He would have found the cat immediately. But he was dead, and I realised that the cat was probably dead now as well. I lived on an island of dead animals, with a dying person who was struggling through her final painful days together with an ever growing anthill that was slowly threatening to take over the entire room.
The cat was never seen again. The heat of high summer formed an oppressive blanket over my island. I used my outboard motor to get the boat to the mainland, and bought an electric fan for Harriet’s room. The windows were left open all night. Mosquitoes danced on the old mosquito windows my grandfather had made long ago. There was even a date, written in carpenter’s pencil, on one of the frames: 1936. I began to think that despite the poor start, this July heatwave would turn the summer into the hottest I’d experienced here.
Louise went swimming every evening. Things had gone so far now that we were always within earshot of Harriet’s room. One of us needed to be on hand at all times. Her agonising pains were coming increasingly often. Every third day Louise phoned the home health service for advice. The second week in July, they wanted to send a doctor to examine her. I was on the porch changing a light bulb when Louise talked to them. To my surprise, I heard her say that a visit wouldn’t be necessary as her father was a doctor.
I made regular trips to the mainland in order to collect new supplies of Harriet’s medication from the chemist’s. One day Louise asked me to buy some picture postcards It didn’t matter what of. I bought the entire stock of cards from one shop, and postage stamps to go with them. When Harriet was asleep, Louise would sit down and write to all her friends in the forest. Occasionally she would also work away at a letter I gathered was going to be very long. She didn’t say who it was to. She never left her papers on the kitchen table, but always took them with her to the caravan.
I warned her that Jansson would certainly read every single card she gave him for posting.
‘Why would he want to do that?’
‘He’s curious.’
‘I think he’ll respect my postcards.’
We said no more about the matter. Every time Jansson moored his boat by the jetty, she would hand him a bundle of newly written cards. He would put them in his sack without even looking at them.
Nor did he complain about his aches and pains any more. This summer, with Harriet lying in my house, dying, Jansson seemed to have suddenly been cured of all his imagined ailments.
As Louise was looking after Harriet, I was responsible for the cooking. Of course, Harriet was really the key person in the house, but Louise ran the household as if it were a ship and she was the captain. I had nothing against that.
The hot days were a torment for Harriet. I bought another fan, but it didn’t help much. I rang Hans Lundman several times to ask what the coastguard’s meteorologist had to say about the weather forecast.
‘It’s a strange heatwave,’ he said. ‘Ridges of high pressure usually move on, pass over, albeit sometimes very slowly. But this is different. It’s just hanging there. Those who know about these things say it’s similar to the heatwave that covered Sweden in the incredibly hot summer of 1955.’
I remembered that summer. I was eighteen and spent most of my time sailing in my grandfather’s dinghy. It was a restless summer for me, and my teenage pulse had been racing. I often lay naked on the hot rocks, dreaming of women. The prettiest of my women teachers kept wandering through my dreamworld, and one after another had become my lovers.
That was almost fifty years ago.
‘There must be some kind of prediction as to when it will start getting cooler?’
‘Just at the moment there is no movement at all. Fires are starting all over the place. There are fires in the most unexpected places.’
We had to struggle through it. Dark clouds would sometimes gather over the mainland, and we could hear the sound of distant thunder. We sometimes found ourselves without electricity, but my grandfather had devoted a lot of time to creating a clever system of lightning conductors which protected both the main house and the boathouse.
When the electric storms finally came to the island, one evening after one of the hottest days of all, Louise told me how scared she was. Most of our alcohol had been drunk at the midsummer party. There was only a half-bottle of brandy left. She poured herself a glass.
‘I’m not making it up, you know,’ she said. ‘I really am scared.’
She sat under the kitchen table and would groan as another thunderclap shook the house. When the storm had passed over, she crept out with her glass empty and her face white.
‘I don’t know why,’ she said, ‘but nothing scares me as much as the lightning flashes and then the thunderclaps they fling at me.’
‘Did Caravaggio paint thunderstorms?’ I wondered.
‘I’m sure he was just as scared as I am. He often painted things he was scared of. But not thunderstorms, as far as I know.’
The rain that followed the thunderstorms freshened up the soil and also the people who lived here. When the storm had passed over, I went to check on Harriet. She was lying with her head high in an attempt to ease the pains coming from her spine. I sat on the chair by the side of her bed and took hold of her thin, cold hand.
‘Is it still raining?’
‘It’s stopped now. Lots of angry little becks are running down from the rocks into the sea.’
‘Is there a rainbow?’
‘Not this evening.’
She lay quietly for a while.
‘I haven’t seen the cat,’ she said.
‘She’s vanished. We’ve looked for her, but haven’t found her.’
‘Then she’s dead. Cats hide themselves away when they sense that their time is up. Some tribesmen do the same thing. The rest of us just hang on for as long as we can while others sit around and wait for us to die at long last.’
‘I’m not waiting for that.’
‘Of course you are. You have no choice. And waiting makes people impatient.’
She was speaking in short bursts, as if she were climbing up an endless staircase and had to keep stopping to get her breath back. She reached tentatively for her glass of water. I handed it to her, and supported her head while she drank.
‘I’m grateful to you for taking me in,’ she said. ‘I could have frozen to death out there on the ice. You could have pretended not to see me.’
‘The fact that I abandoned you once doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d do the same again.’
She shook her head, almost imperceptibly.
‘You have told so many lies, but you haven’t even learned how to do it properly. Most of what you say has to be true. Otherwise the lies don’t work. You know as well as I do that you could have abandoned me again. Have you left anybody else besides me?’
I thought it over.
I wanted to answer truthfully.
‘One,’ I said. ‘Just one other person.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Not a woman. I’m referring to myself.’
She shook her head slowly.
‘There’s no point in going on and on about what has passed. Our lives turned out as they did, it’s all behind us. I shall soon be dead. You’ll carry on living for a while longer, but then you’ll be gone too. And all traces will fade away.’
She reached out her hand and took hold of my wrist. I could feel her rapid pulse.
‘I want to tell you something you’ve probably gathered already. I’ve never loved another man in my life as much as I’ve loved you. The reason why I tracked you down was to find my way back to that love. And to give you the daughter I robbed you of. But most of all, I wanted to die close to the man I’ve always loved. I must also say that I’ve never hated anybody as much as I’ve hated you. But hatred hurts, and I’ve more than enough pain to be going on with. Love gives a feeling of freshness, of peace, possibly even a feeling of security which makes facing up to death not quite so frightening as it would otherwise be. Don’t respond to anything I’ve just said. Just believe me. And ask Louise to come. I think I’ve wet myself.’