Italian Shoes (33 page)

She put the knife down and stood in front of me. I could see her anger and her disappointment. There was nothing I could say. Suddenly I felt truly ashamed.

Agnes sat down in the corner of the kitchen sofa. She had turned her face away and was gazing out of the dark window.

‘I know it's unforgivable. I regret what happened, and wish I could undo it.'

‘I don't know what you imagine you were doing. If I could, I'd leave here immediately. But it's the middle of the night, it's not possible. I'll stay here until tomorrow.'

She stood up and left the kitchen. I heard her jamming the door handle with a chair. I went outside and tried to look in through the window. She had switched the light off. Perhaps she sensed that I was standing outside, trying to see her. The dog appeared out of the darkness. I kicked her away. I couldn't cope with her just now.

I lay awake all night. At six o'clock I went down to the kitchen and listened outside her door. I couldn't make out if she was asleep or awake. At a quarter to seven she opened the door and stepped out into the kitchen, rucksack in hand.

‘How do I get away from here?'

‘It's dead calm at the moment. If you wait until it gets light I can take you to the mainland.'

She started to pull on her boots.

‘I want to say something about what happened last night.'

She raised her hand immediately.

‘There's nothing else to say. You are not the person I thought you were. I want to get away from here as
quickly as possible. I'll wait down by the jetty until it gets light.'

‘Can't you just hear what I have to say at least?'

She didn't answer but hung her rucksack over one shoulder, picked up Sima's suitcase and sword, and vanished into the darkness.

It would soon be light. I could see that she wouldn't listen if I went down to the jetty and tried to talk to her. Instead I sat down at the table and wrote her a letter.

‘We could move your girls here. Leave the sisters and the village in peace. I have planning permission to build a house on the stone foundation of the old barn. The boathouse has a room attached that can be insulated and furbished. There are empty rooms here in the main house. If I can accommodate one caravan here, there's no reason why I shouldn't have another. There's plenty of room on the island.'

I walked down to the jetty. She stood up and clambered down into the boat. I handed her the letter without saying anything. She hesitated before accepting it and stuffing it into her rucksack.

The sea was as smooth as a mirror. The sound of my outboard motor ripped open the stillness, scattering a few ducks, which flew out to sea. Agnes sat in the bows with her back towards me.

I hove to by the lowest part of the quay and switched off the engine.

‘A bus goes from here,' I said. ‘The timetable is over there, on the wall.'

She climbed up on to the quay without saying a word.

I returned home and went to sleep. In the afternoon I dug out my old Rembrandt puzzle and tipped the pieces on to the kitchen table. I started from the beginning, knowing I would never finish it.

A north-easterly gale blew up the day after Agnes had left. I was woken up by a window banging. I got dressed and went to check that the boat was securely moored. It was high tide and waves were breaking over the jetty and slapping against the boathouse wall. I used a spare piece of rope to doubly secure the stern. The wind was howling around the walls. When I was a boy the howling gales used to scare me stiff. Inside the boathouse during a storm the noise is tremendous: like the voices of people screaming and fighting. Nowadays, strong winds make me feel secure. As I stood there I felt beyond the reach of anything and everything.

The storm continued to rage for two more days. On the second day, Jansson managed to reach the island. For once, he was late. When he finally arrived, he told me his engine had cut out between Röholmen and Höga Skärsnäset.

‘I've never had any problems before,' he said. ‘Typical that the engine should conk out in weather like this. I had to throw out a drag anchor, but even so I very nearly ended up on the rocks at Röholmen. If I hadn't managed to get the engine going again, I'd have been wrecked.'

I'd never seen him so shaken. For once, I asked him to sit down on the bench while I took his blood pressure.
It was a bit on the high side, but nothing like what one might have expected, given what he had been through.

He got back into his boat, which was bumping and scraping against the jetty.

‘I haven't got any post for you,' he said, ‘but Hans Lundman asked me to bring you a newspaper.'

‘Why?'

‘He didn't say. It's yesterday's.'

He handed me one of the national dailies.

‘Didn't he say anything at all?'

‘He just asked me to give it to you. He doesn't waste words, as you know.'

I pushed out the bows as Jansson started reversing into the teeth of the gale. As he turned he very nearly ran aground in the shallows. But at the last moment he squeezed enough power from the engine to get out of the inlet.

As I left the jetty I saw something white floating just off the shore where the caravan was standing. I went to investigate and saw that it was a dead swan. Its long neck slithered like a snake through the seaweed. I went back to the boathouse, placed the newspaper on the tool bench and put on a pair of working gloves. Then I picked the swan up. A nylon fishing line had dug deeply into its body and become entangled in its feathers. It had starved to death as it hadn't been able to search for food. I carried it up and laid it on the rocks. It wouldn't be long before the crows and sea gulls ate the carcass. Carra came to investigate and sniffed at the bird.

‘It's not for you,' I said. ‘It's for other hungry creatures.'

I suddenly grew tired at the prospect of the jigsaw puzzle, walked to the boathouse and fetched one of my flat-fish nets, sat down in the kitchen and started to repair it. My grandfather had taught me how to splice ropes and mend nets. The techniques and know-how were still there in my fingers. I sat there working until dusk fell. In my head I conducted a conversation with Agnes about what had happened. Reconciliation is possible in the world of the imagination.

That evening I ate the rest of the chicken. When I'd finished, I lay down on the kitchen sofa and listened to the wind. I was just going to switch the radio on and listen to the news when I remembered the newspaper Jansson had brought with him. I took my torch and walked down to the boathouse to get it.

Hans Lundman rarely did anything without a specific purpose. I sat at the kitchen table and started to scrutinise the newspaper to find what he wanted me to see.

I found it on page four, in the section devoted to foreign news. It was a picture from a top-level meeting for leading European statesmen – presidents and prime ministers. They had lined up to be photographed. In the foreground was a naked woman holding up a placard. Underneath the picture were a few words about the embarrassing incident. A woman wearing a black raincoat had succeeded in entering the press conference, using a forged pass. Once inside, she had taken off the raincoat and lifted up her placard. Several security guards had quickly hustled her away. I looked at the picture, and felt a pain in my
stomach. I had a magnifying glass in one of the kitchen drawers. I examined the picture again. I became increasingly worried as my suspicions were slowly confirmed. The woman was Louise. It was her face, even if it was slightly averted. There she was, making a triumphant and challenging gesture.

The text on the placard was about the cave, where the ancient wall paintings were being ruined by mould.

Lundman was a sharp-eyed individual. He had recognised her. Perhaps she had told him at the midsummer party about the cave.

I took a kitchen towel and wiped away the sweat from under my shirt. My hands were shaking.

I went out into the wind, shouted for the dog and sat down on Grandma's bench in the darkness.

I smiled. Louise was out there somewhere, smiling back. I had a daughter I could really be proud of.

ONE DAY IN
the middle of November, the letter I had been waiting for arrived at last. By then the whole of the archipelago knew that I had a daughter who had caused a stir in front of Europe's leading statesmen.

No doubt Jansson had contributed to spreading and exaggerating the rumours: Louise was alleged to have performed a striptease and wiggled back and forth in erotic fashion before being led away. Then she had viciously attacked the security guards, bitten one of them, apparently splashing Tony Blair's shoes with blood. And then she was eventually sentenced to prison.

Louise was in Amsterdam. She wrote that she was staying at a little hotel near the railway station and the city's red-light district. She was resting, and every day visited an exhibition at which the works of Rembrandt and Caravaggio were compared. She had plenty of money. Lots of anonymous people had given her gifts, and the press had paid vast sums for her story. She had not been punished at all for her demonstration. The letter ended with the news that she intended coming back to the island at the beginning of December.

Her letter contained an address. I wrote a reply without
further ado, and handed it to Jansson together with the letter I had been unable to send earlier. He was curious when he saw her name, but he said nothing.

The letter from Louise gave me the courage to write to Agnes. There had been no word from her after her visit. I was ashamed. For the first time in my life I was unable to find an excuse for my behaviour. I simply couldn't brush aside what had happened that evening.

I wrote to her and begged for forgiveness. Nothing else, only that. A letter containing nineteen words, each one carefully chosen.

She rang two days later. I had dozed off in front of the television and thought it must be Louise when I picked up the phone.

‘I received your letter. My first thought was to throw it away without opening it, but I did read it. I accept your apology. Assuming you really mean what you wrote?'

‘Every word.'

‘You probably don't realise what I'm referring to. I'm asking about what you wrote regarding your island and my girls.'

‘Of course you can all come here.'

I could hear her breathing.

‘Come here,' I said.

‘Not now. Not yet. I have to think things over.'

I replaced the receiver. I felt the same kind of exhilaration as I'd felt after reading Louise's letter. I went out and looked up at the stars, and thought that it would
soon be a year since Harriet had appeared on the ice, and my life had begun to change.

At the end of November the coast was hit by another severe storm. The easterly gales reached a peak on the second evening. I walked down to the jetty and noticed that the caravan was swaying alarmingly in the wind. With the aid of a few rocks normally used for anchoring the nets, and some logs that had been washed ashore, I managed to stabilise it. I had already installed an old electric fire in the caravan, to make sure it was warm and cosy when Louise got back.

When the storm had passed I went for a walk round the island. Easterly gales can sometimes result in a lot of driftwood littering the shore. This time I didn't find any big logs, but an old wheelhouse from a fishing boat had been blown on to the rocks. At first I thought it was the top of a vessel that had been sunk by the storm, but when I investigated more closely I found that it was this battered old wheelhouse. After a moment's thought I went back home and rang Hans Lundman. After all, what I had found might have been the remains of a sunken fishing boat. An hour later, I had the coastguard on my island. We managed to drag it ashore and secure it with a rope. Hans confirmed that it was not a new wreck and that there had been no reports of missing fishing boats.

‘It has probably been standing on land somewhere, but the gales have blown it into the sea. It's rotten through and
through, and can hardly have been attached to a boat for many years. I should think it's thirty or forty years old.'

‘What shall I do with it?' I wondered.

‘If you'd had any little children, they could have used it as a playhouse. As it is, I don't think it's of much use for anything apart from firewood.'

I told him that Louise was on her way home.

‘Incidentally, I've never been able to understand how you noticed her in the newspaper. It was such a poor picture. But even so, you could see that it was her?'

‘Who knows how and why we see what we see? Andrea misses her. Not a day passes without her putting on those shoes and asking after Louise. I often think about her.'

‘Have you shown Andrea the picture in the newspaper?'

Hans looked at me in surprise.

‘Of course I have.'

‘It's hardly a suitable picture for children to look at. I mean, she was naked.'

‘So what? It's bad for children not to be told the truth. Children suffer from being told lies, just as we adults do.'

He went back to his boat, and engaged reverse gear. I fetched an axe and started chopping up the old wheelhouse I'd been lumbered with. It was quite easy as the wood was so rotten.

I had just finished and straightened up my back when I felt a stinging pain in my chest. Since I had often diagnosed coronary spasms during my life, I realised what the pain indicated. I sat down on a large stone, breathed deeply, unbuttoned my shirt and waited. After about ten minutes the pain went away. I waited for another ten
minutes before walking very slowly back to the house. It was eleven in the morning. I phoned Jansson. I was lucky: it was his day off. I said nothing about my pain, simply asked him to come and fetch me.

‘This is a very quick decision,' he said.

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘You normally ask me to pick you up a week in advance.'