It had been a tough day. We were both tired. We had dinner in silence. Louise retired to her caravan for the night. I searched around in the bathroom cupboard and found a sleeping pill. I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept for nine hours. I couldn’t remember when that had last happened.
Louise was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs the next morning.
‘I’m off,’ she said. ‘Today. The sea’s calm. Can you take me to the harbour?’
I sat down at the table. I wasn’t at all prepared for her intention of leaving so soon.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I have several things to see to.’
‘But surely Harriet’s flat can wait for a few days?’
‘That’s not where I’m going. Do you remember the cave with the wall paintings that have been attacked by mould?’
‘I thought you were going to bombard politicians with letters about that?’
She shook her head.
‘Letters don’t do any good. I have to take some different action.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Then I shall go and look at some Caravaggio paintings. I have money now. Harriet left nearly two hundred thousand kronor. She used to give me some money now and then. And I’ve always been thrifty anyway. No doubt you wondered about all the money you found when you went snooping around in my caravan. Thrift, nothing more. I haven’t only spent my life writing letters. I’ve occasionally had a paid job like everybody else. And I’ve never thrown money about.’
‘How long are you going to be away? If you’re not going to come back, I’d like you to take your caravan with you. This island is no place for it.’
‘Why do you get so angry?’
‘I’m sad about you clearing off like this, and I don’t think you’ll come back again.’
‘I’m not like you. I’ll be back. If you won’t allow my caravan to remain here, I suggest you burn that up as well. I’m going to pack now. I’ll be ready to leave in an hour. Are you going to take me, or aren’t you?’
It was dead calm, and the sea like a millpond, when I took her to the mainland. The outboard motor started coughing soon after we left the jetty, but then recovered and behaved normally for the rest of the trip. Louise sat smiling in the bows. I regretted my outburst.
A taxi was waiting in the harbour. All she had with her was a rucksack.
‘I’ll phone you,’ she said. ‘And send cards.’
‘How can I get in touch with you?’
‘You have my mobile number. I can’t promise it will be switched on all the time, though. But I promise to send a card to Andrea.’
‘Send one to Jansson as well. He’ll be thrilled to bits.’
She squatted down so as to be closer to me.
‘Keep my caravan neat and tidy until I get back. Clean it regularly. And keep brushing my red shoes – I’ve left them behind.’
She caressed my forehead then got into the taxi, which set off up the hill. I took my petrol can to the chandler’s to have it topped up. The harbour was almost deserted. All the summer boats had left.
When I got back home I took a walk round the island, looking for the cat again. But I didn’t find it. I was now more alone on the island than ever before.
Several weeks passed. Everything went back to the way it had been before. Jansson would arrive in his boat, occasionally bringing a letter from Agnes, but I didn’t hear a word from Louise. I phoned her several times, but there was never an answer. The messages I left became like short, breathless diary notes about the weather, the wind and the cat who remained missing.
Presumably the cat must have been taken by a fox, which must have swum away from the island.
I grew increasingly restless. I had the feeling that I wouldn’t be able to stick it out for much longer. I would have to leave. But I didn’t know where to go.
October arrived with a storm from the north-east. Still no word from Louise. Agnes had also stopped writing. I spent most of the time sitting at the kitchen table, staring out of the window. The landscape out there seemed to be becoming petrified. It felt as if my whole house was slowly being swallowed up by a gigantic anthill that grew silently higher and higher.
Autumn became harsher. I waited.
WINTER SOLSTICE
CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST FROST came in the early hours of 3 October.
I checked through my old logbooks and found that there had never been minus temperatures as early as this all the years I had lived on the island. I was still waiting to hear from Louise. I hadn’t even received a postcard from her.
That evening the telephone rang. A woman asked if I was Fredrik Welin. I thought I recognised both her dialect and her voice, but when she said her name was Anna Ledin, it said nothing to me.
‘I’m a police officer,’ she said. ‘We’ve met.’
Then the penny dropped. The woman lying dead on her kitchen floor. Anna Ledin was the young police officer with her hair in a ponytail under the cap of her uniform.
‘I’m ringing in connection with the dog,’ she said. ‘Sara Larsson’s spaniel. We couldn’t find anybody to adopt her, so I took her in. She’s a lovely dog. But unfortunately I’ve met a man who’s allergic to dogs, and I don’t want to have her put down. Then I thought about you. I had made a note of your name and address, and so I’m phoning to ask if you could possibly consider taking the dog on. You must be fond of animals, otherwise you wouldn’t have stopped as you did when you saw her by the roadside.’
I had no doubt when I replied.
‘My dog died just a few months ago. I can take on the spaniel. How will you get her here?’
‘I can bring her in my car. I discovered that Sara Larsson used to call her Ruby. Not exactly a common name for a dog, but I continued using it. She’s five years old.’
‘When would you come?’
‘At the end of next week.’
I didn’t dare to try and ferry the dog over in my own boat as it was so small. I made an arrangement with Jansson. He asked me all kinds of questions about what kind of dog it was, but all I told him was that I’d inherited it.
Anna Ledin arrived at the harbour with the dog at three in the afternoon on 12 October. She looked quite different when she wasn’t in uniform.
‘I live on an island,’ I said. ‘She’ll be the sole ruler.’
She gave me the lead. Ruby sat down beside me.
‘I’ll leave right away if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll get upset if I don’t. Can I ring now and then to see how she’s getting on?’
‘Of course you can.’
She got back into her car and drove off. Ruby didn’t start pulling at the lead in an attempt to run after the car. Nor did she hesitate to jump down into Jansson’s boat.
We sailed back home through the dark waters of the bay. Cold winds were blowing up from the Gulf of Finland.
When we had landed and Jansson had left again, I let the dog loose. She disappeared among the rocks. Half an hour later she returned. Already the loneliness felt less oppressive.
It was now well and truly autumn.
I still wondered what was happening to me. And why I’d heard nothing from Louise.
CHAPTER 2
I DIDN’T LIKE the dog’s name.
It didn’t seem that she thought much of it either, as she seldom responded when I called her.
No dog can possibly be called Ruby. Why had Sara Larsson given her that name? One day, when Anna Ledin rang to ask about how the dog was doing, I asked her if she knew how the dog had acquired the name.
I was surprised by her answer.
‘Rumour has it that when she was a young woman, Sara Larsson had a job as a cleaner on a cargo ship that often visited Antwerp. She was paid off there and got a job as a cleaner in a diamond-cutting workshop. Maybe it was her memories of her time there that inspired her to give the dog that name.’
‘Diamond would have been better.’
I su
ddenly heard lots of banging and clattering in the background. I could hear distant voices yelling and screeching, and somebody apparently banging away at a sheet of metal.
‘I’ll have to hang up now.’
‘Where are you?’
‘We’re about to arrest a man who’s running amok in a scrapyard.’
The line went dead. I tried to conjure up the scene: delicate little Anna Ledin with her pistol drawn, and her ponytail jumping up and down behind her uniform cap. I certainly wouldn’t have liked to be on the receiving end of whatever she dealt out in circumstances like that.
I decided to call the dog Carra. Obviously, part of the reason for that name was a reference to my daughter, who never kept in touch, but was interested in Caravaggio. Why does anybody give a pet a particular name? I don’t know.
It took several weeks of intensive training to persuade her to forget all about Ruby, and instead become a Carra who would run up somewhat reluctantly when I called for her.
October passed by with changeable weather – some days very hot, a sort of delayed Indian summer, but others characterised by bitterly cold winds from the north-east. Sometimes when I looked out to sea I could make out the flocks of migrating birds gathering, before suddenly setting off on their long journey southwards.
There is a special sort of melancholy that accompanies a flock of migrating birds. Just as we might feel uplifted when they return. Autumn is closing its books. Winter is approaching.
Every morning when I woke up, I could feel the aches and pains of approaching old age manifesting themselves. I sometimes worried that I could no longer pee as forcefully as I used to be capable of. There was something especially humiliating about the thought of imminent death because I could no longer pee properly. I found it hard to accept that the ancient Greek philosophers or the Roman emperors died of prostate cancer. Even if they did, of course.
I thought about my life and at times made an insignificant entry in my logbook. I stopped making a note of wind directions, or how hot or cold it was. Instead I made up the winds and the temperatures. On 27 October I made a note for future consumption that my island had been hit by a typhoon, and the temperature in the evening was plus thirty-seven degrees.
I sat in my various thinking places. My island was so marvellously formed that it was always possible to find a spot sheltered from the wind. I found such a place, sat down there and wondered why I had chosen to become the person I was. Some of the basic reasons were not difficult to find, of course. I had taken the opportunity to flee the poverty-stricken environment in which I grew up, where the daily reminder of the vulnerable life led by my father gave me sufficient strength to make the effort. But I also realised that I could be grateful for the fact that I had been born into an age in which such flights were possible. A time when the downtrodden children of humble waiters could go to university and even become doctors. But why had I become a person who always looked for hiding places instead of companionship? Why had I never wanted to have children? Why had I lived a life like a fox, with so many alternative exits from its lair?
That confounded amputation that I didn’t want to accept responsibility for was just one of those things. I wasn’t the only orthopaedic surgeon in the world to whom something like that had happened.
There were moments that autumn when I was struck by panic. It led to endless nights stuck in front of the mind-numbing television, and sleepless nights during which I both regretted and cursed the life I had lived.
In the end a letter from Louise finally arrived as a sort of lifebuoy for a drowning man. She wrote that she had spent many days emptying Harriet’s flat. She enclosed several photographs she had found among Harriet’s papers, snaps she had known nothing about. I sat staring in astonishment at the pictures of Harriet and me taken almost forty years ago. I recognised her, but was put out, almost shaken by what I looked like. In one of the photographs, taken somewhere in Stockholm in 1966, I had a beard. It was the only time in my life that I’d grown a beard, and I’d forgotten all about it. I didn’t know who’d taken the picture, but was intrigued by a man who was standing in the background, swigging vodka straight from the bottle.
I remembered him. But where had Harriet and I been going to? Where were we coming from? Who had taken the picture?
I thumbed through the photographs and was fascinated. I had locked my memories away in a room that I had sealed, and then thrown the keys away.
Louise wrote that she had rediscovered a lot of her childhood during the days and weeks she had spent emptying the flat.
‘What struck me most of all was that I had never really known anything about my mother,’ she wrote. ‘I came across letters, and occasional diaries that she’d never kept going for very long, containing her thoughts and experiences that she had never passed on to me. For instance, she’d dreamt about becoming a pilot. She always used to tell me that she was scared to death whenever she was forced to take a flight. She wanted to create a rose garden on Gotland, and she’d tried to write a book but never been able to finish it. But what affected me most was that I discovered she had told me so many untruths. Memories from my childhood kept cropping up, and over and over again I realised that she had lied to me. Once she told me that one of her friends was ill and she had to visit her. I remember crying and begging her to stay, but she said her friend was so seriously ill that she really had to go and see her. I now realise that, in fact, she went to France with a man she hoped to marry – but he soon disappeared out of her life. I won’t bore you with all the details of what I’ve discovered here, but one lesson I’ve learned is that it’s essential to sort out your belongings and throw away a lot of stuff before you die. I’m surprised that Harriet didn’t do that when she’d known for such a long time that she was going to die. She must have known what I would find. The only explanation I can think of is that maybe she wanted me to realise that, in so many ways, she wasn’t who I thought she was. Was it important to her that I should know the truth, despite the fact I would see that she had lied to me so often? I still can’t make up my mind if I ought to admire her for that, or despise her. Anyway, the flat is now empty. I shall post her key through the letter box and go away. I’m going to visit those caves, and will take Caravaggio with me.’
The last sentence of her letter confused me. How could she take Caravaggio with her? Was there something between the lines that I couldn’t detect?
She had not given me an address to which I could send a reply. Nevertheless, I sat down that very same night and started writing. I commented on the photographs, told her about how my own memory had let me down, and also told her about my walks with Carra around the rocks. I tried to explain how I was feeling my way through my past life, a bit like battling through thick, thorny bushes that were almost impassable.
Most of all I wrote that I missed her. I repeated that over and over again in my letter.
I sealed the envelope, stuck a stamp on it and wrote her name. Then I left it on the desk, hoping that she might one day send an address.
I had only just gone to bed that night when the telephone rang. I was frightened, my heart was pounding. Anybody ringing me at that time of night couldn’t have good news for me. I went down to the kitchen and picked up the receiver. Carra was lying on the floor, watching me.
‘It’s Agnes. I hope I didn’t wake you.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I sleep too much anyway.’
‘I’m coming now.’
‘Are you standing on the quay?’
‘Not yet. I’m intending to come out tomorrow, if it’s all right with you.’
‘Of course it’s all right with me.’
‘Can you collect me?’
I listened to the wind and the sound of the breakers crashing on to the rocks at Norrudden.
‘It’s too windy for my little boat. I’ll arrange for somebody else to fetch you. What time will you be on the quay?’
‘Around midday.’
She ended the call just as abrup
tly as she’d started it. She sounded worried and evidently wanted to see me urgently.
I started cleaning at five the next morning. I changed the bag in my ancient vacuum cleaner and realised that my house was covered in a layer of dust. It took me three hours to get it anywhere close to clean. After my usual bath, I dried myself, turned up the heating and sat down at the kitchen table to phone Jansson. But I rang the coastguard instead. Hans Lundman was out, doing something with one of the boats, but rang me back a quarter of an hour later. I asked if he could pick somebody up from the harbour and ferry them out to me.
‘I know you’re not allowed to take passengers,’ I said.
‘We can always send out a patrol past your island,’ he said. ‘What’s his name?’
‘It’s a she. You can’t miss her. She only has one arm.’
Hans and I were very similar in some ways. Unlike Jansson we were people who concealed their curiosity and didn’t ask unnecessary questions. But I doubt if Hans poked around in his assistants’ papers and belongings.
I took Carra with me and went for a walk round the island. It was 1 November, the sea was growing greyer and greyer, and the last of the leaves had fallen from the trees. I was really looking forward to Agnes’s visit. I realised to my surprise that I was excited at the prospect. I imagined her standing naked on my kitchen floor, with her one arm. I sat down on the bench by the jetty, and dreamt up an impossible love story. I didn’t know what Agnes wanted. But I didn’t think she was coming here to tell me about her love for me.
I carried Sima’s sword and her suitcase from the boathouse to the kitchen. Agnes hadn’t said anything about staying overnight, but I made up the bed in the room with the anthill.
I had decided to relocate the anthill to old pasture, which was now overgrown and covered in shrubs. But, like so much else, I’d never got round to it.
At about eleven I shaved but couldn’t settle on what to wear. I was as nervous as a teenager at the thought of her visit. I eventually decided on my usual clothes: dark trousers, cut-down wellington boots and a thick jumper that was threadbare in places. Earlier in the morning I’d already taken a chicken out of the freezer.