Italian Shoes (29 page)

‘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.'

I fetched Louise, who was sitting on the steps outside the front door.

‘It's beautiful here,' she said. ‘Almost like the depths of the forest.'

‘I'm scared stiff of big forests,' I said. ‘I've always been frightened of getting lost if I strayed too far away from the path.'

‘What you're scared of is yourself. Nothing else. The same applies to me. And Harriet. And the lovely little Andrea. Caravaggio as well. We are scared of ourselves, and what we see of ourselves in others.'

She went to change Harriet's pad. I sat down on the bench under the apple tree, next to the dog's grave. In the far distance I could hear the dull thudding from the engines of a large ship. Had the navy already started their regular autumn manoeuvres?

Harriet had said that she'd never loved anybody as much as she'd loved me. I felt touched. I hadn't expected that. I was beginning to appreciate just what I had done.

I abandoned her because I was afraid of being abandoned myself. My fear of tying myself down, and of feelings that were so strong that I couldn't control them, resulted in my always drawing back. I didn't know why that should be. But I knew that I wasn't the only one. I lived in a world where many other men were just as afraid as I was.

I had tried to see myself in my father. But his fear had been different. He had never hesitated to show the love he felt for my mother and for me, despite the fact that my mother wasn't easy to live with.

I have to come to grips with this, I told myself. Before I die, I must know why I've lived. I have some time left – I must make the most of it.

I felt very tired. The door to Harriet's room was ajar. I went upstairs. When I'd gone to bed, I left the light on. The wall behind the bed had always been decorated with sea charts my grandfather had found washed up on the shore. They were water-damaged but you could make out
they depicted Scapa Flow in the Orkney Isles, where the British fleet was based during the First World War. I had often followed the narrow channels surrounding Pentland Firth, and imagined the British ships sitting there, terrified of the periscopes of German U-boats.

I fell asleep with the light still on. At two o'clock I was woken up by Harriet's screams. I stuck my fingers in my ears and waited for the painkillers to kick in.

We were living in my house in a silence that could be shattered at any moment by a roar of intense pain. I found myself thinking more and more frequently that I hoped Harriet would die soon. For all our sakes.

The heatwave lasted until 24 July. I noted in my logbook that there was a north-easterly wind and the temperature had started to fall. Troughs of low pressure queuing up over the North Sea brought changeable weather. In the early hours of 27 July, a northerly gale raged over the archipelago. A few tiles next to the chimney were ripped off the roof and smashed on the ground below; I managed to climb up on to the roof and replace them with spares that had been stored in a shed since the barn was demolished in the late 1960s.

Harriet's condition grew worse. Now that the weather had started to deteriorate she was awake for only short periods of every day. Louise and I shared the chores, but Louise washed her mother and changed her pads for which I was grateful.

Autumn was creeping up on us. The nights were getting
longer, the sun was losing its strength. Louise and I prepared ourselves for the fact that Harriet could die at any moment. When she was conscious, we would both sit by her bed. Louise wanted her to see the pair of us together. Harriet didn't say much. She might ask about the time, and if it would soon be time to eat. She was becoming more and more confused. Sometimes she thought she was in the caravan in the forest, at other times she was convinced she was in her flat in Stockholm. She was not aware of being on the island, in a room with an anthill. Nor did she seem to be aware that she was dying. When she did wake up, it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. She would drink a little water, perhaps swallow a few spoonfuls of soup, then drop off to sleep again. The skin on her face was now stretched so tightly round her cranium that I was afraid it might split and expose her skull. Death is ugly, I thought. There was now almost nothing left of the beautiful Harriet. She was a wax-coloured skeleton under a blanket, nothing more.

One evening at the beginning of August, we sat down on the bench under the apple tree. We were wearing warm jackets, and Louise had one of my old woolly hats on her head.

‘What are we going to do when she dies?' I wondered. ‘You must have thought about it. Do you know if she has any specific wishes?'

‘She wants to be cremated. She sent me a brochure from an undertaker's some months ago. I may still have it, or I might have thrown it away. She had marked the cheapest coffin and an urn on special offer.'

‘Does she have any sepulchral rights?'

Louise frowned. ‘What does that mean?'

‘Is there a family grave? Where are her parents buried? There's usually a link to a particular town or village. In the old days, they used to talk about sepulchral rights.'

‘Her relatives are spread all over the country. I've never heard her mention visiting her parents' grave. She's never expressed any specific wish regarding her own grave. Although she did say quite firmly that she didn't want a headstone. I think she would prefer to have her ashes cast into the wind. You can actually do that nowadays.'

‘You need permission,' I said. ‘Jansson has told me about old fishermen who wanted their ashes scattered over the ancient herring grounds.'

We sat without speaking, thinking about what to do. I had bought a plot in a cemetery: there was probably no reason why Harriet shouldn't lie by my side.

Louise put her hand on my arm.

‘We don't really need to ask permission, in fact,' she said. ‘Harriet could be one of those people in this country who don't exist.'

‘Everybody has a personal identity number,' I said. ‘We're not allowed to disappear when it suits us.'

‘There are always ways of getting round things,' Louise said. ‘She will die here, in your house. We'll burn her just like they cremate dead people in India. Then we'll scatter her ashes over the water. I'll terminate the contract on her flat in Stockholm and empty it. I won't supply a forwarding address. She'll no longer collect her pension. I'll tell the home health-care people that she's died.
That's all they want to know. Somebody might start to wonder, I expect, but I shall say that I haven't had any contact with my mother for several months. And she left here after a short visit.'

‘Did she?'

‘Who do you think is going to ask Jansson or Hans Lundman about where she's gone to?'

‘But that's just it. Where has she gone to? Who took her to the mainland?'

‘You did. A week ago. Nobody knows she's still here.'

It began to dawn on me that Louise was serious. We would take care of the funeral ourselves. Nothing more was said. I got very little sleep that night. But I eventually began to think it might just be possible.

Two days later, when Louise and I were having dinner, she suddenly put down her spoon.

‘The fire,' she said. ‘Now I know how we can light it without giving anybody cause to wonder what's happening.'

I listened to her suggestion. It seemed repulsive at first, but then I began to see that it was a beautiful idea.

The moon vanished. Darkness enveloped the archipelago. The last sailing boats of summer headed back to their home ports. The navy conducted manoeuvres in the southern archipelago. We occasionally heard the rumble of distant gunfire. Harriet was now sleeping more or less round the clock. We took it in turns to stay with her. While I was a medical student, I had sometimes earned some extra pocket money by doing night duty. I could still remember the first time I watched a person die. It happened without any movement, in complete
silence. The big leap was so tiny. In a split second the living person joined the dead.