The coffin had been adorned with a spray of red roses. A woman from the parish, accompanied by a restless young boy in the organ loft, sang a couple of hymns; Agnes said a few words, and she had asked the vicar not to go on unnecessarily about a conciliatory and omniscient God.
When I heard that the grave would only bear a number, I offered to pay for a headstone. Jansson later delivered a letter from Agnes with a sketch of the stone, how she thought it ought to look. Above Sima’s name and dates, she had drawn a rose.
I rang her the same evening and asked if it shouldn’t be a samurai sword instead. She understood my way of thinking, and said she had considered it herself.
‘But it would cause an uproar,’ she said.
‘What shall I do with her belongings? The sword and the suitcase?’
‘What’s in the suitcase?’
‘Underclothes. A pair of trousers and a jumper. A scruffy map of the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland.’
‘I’ll come and collect it. I’d like to see your house. And above all, I want to see the room where it happened.’
‘I’ve already said that I ought to have gone down to her. I shall always regret not having done so.’
‘I’m not accusing you of anything. I just want to see the place where she began to die.’
Initially she planned to visit me during the last week of May, but something cropped up. She cancelled her visit twice more. The first time Miranda had run away, and the second occasion she was ill. I had put the sword and the case with Sima’s clothes in the room with the anthill. One night I woke up out of a dream in which the ants had engulfed the case and the sword in their hill. I raced downstairs and wrenched open the door. But the ants were still continuing to climb and conquer the dining table and the white tablecloth.
I moved Sima’s belongings to the boathouse.
Jansson later told me that the coastguards had found a stolen motorboat moored in the Sighs. Hans Lundman was as good as his word.
‘One of these days they’ll be all over us,’ said Jansson menacingly.
‘Who will?’
‘These gangsters. They’re everywhere. What can you do to defend yourself? Jump into your boat and sail out to sea?’
‘What would they want to come here for? What is there around here worth stealing?’
‘The very thought makes me worry about my blood pressure.’
I fetched the monitor from the boathouse. Jansson lay down on the bench. I let him rest for five minutes then strapped up his arm.
‘It’s excellent. 140 over 80.’
‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘In that case I think you should find yourself another doctor.’
I returned to the boathouse and stayed there in the darkness until I heard him backing away from the jetty.
I spent the days before the oak trees started to turn green sorting out my boat at last. When I again managed to remove the heavy tarpaulin, which took considerable effort, I found a dead squirrel beneath the keelson. I was surprised, as I had never seen a squirrel out here on the island, and never heard it claimed that there were any.
The boat was in much worse condition than I had feared. After two days assessing what needed to be done I was ready to give up even before I’d started. Nevertheless, the following day I began scraping off all the old, flaky paint on the rest of the hull. I phoned Hans Lundman and asked him for advice. He promised to call on me one of these days. It was slow going. I wasn’t used to this kind of exertion, my only regular activities being a morning bath and writing up my logbook.
The same day that I again started scraping off the paint, I dug out the logbook I’d kept during my very first year out here on the island. I looked up today’s date. To my astonishment I read: ‘Yesterday I drank myself silly.’ That was all. I now remembered it happening, but very vaguely and certainly not why. The previous day I had recorded that I’d repaired a downpipe. The following day I had laid out my nets and caught seven flounders and three perch.
I put the logbook away. It was evening now. The apple tree was in blossom. I could picture Grandma sitting on the bench beside it, a shimmering figure that melted into the background, the tree trunk, the rocks, the thorn thicket.
The following day Jansson delivered letters from both Harriet and Louise. I had eventually brought myself to tell them about the girl who had come to my island, and her death. I read Harriet’s first; as always, it was very short. She wrote that she was too tired to write a proper letter. I read it, and frowned. It was difficult to read her handwriting, much more so than before. The words seemed to be writhing in pain on the page. And to make matters worse, the content was bewildering. She wrote that she was better, but felt worse. She made no mention of Sima’s death.
I put the letter to one side. The cat jumped up on to the table. I sometimes envy animals that don’t have the worry of disturbing mail. Was Harriet befuddled by painkillers when she wrote the letter? I was worried, picked up the telephone and rang her. If she was drifting into the very last phase of her life, I wanted to know about it. I let it ring for ages, but there was no answer. I tried her mobile number. Nothing. I left a message and asked her to return the call.
Then I opened the letter from Louise. It was about the remarkable cave system in Lascaux in the west of France, where in 1940 some boys stumbled upon cave paintings 17,000 years old. Some of the animals depicted on the rock walls were four metres high. Now, she wrote, ‘These ancient works of art are under threat of being ruined because some madmen have installed air conditioning in the passages because the American tourists cannot handle the temperature! But freezing temperatures are essential if these cave paintings are to survive. The rock walls have been attacked by a strain of mould that is difficult to deal with. If nothing is done, if the whole world fails to unite in defence of this, the most ancient art museum we possess will disappear.’
She intended to act. I assumed that she would write to every politician in Europe, and I felt proud. I had a daughter who was prepared to man the barricades.
The letter had been written in short bursts on several occasions. Both the handwriting and pen used varied. In between serious and agitated paragraphs, she had interposed notes about mundane happenings. She had sprained her foot while fetching water. Giaconelli had been ill. They had suspected pneumonia, but now he was on the mend. She sympathised with the sorrow I felt at the death of Sima.
‘I’ll be coming to visit you shortly,’ she concluded. ‘I want to see this island where you’ve been hiding yourself away all these years. I sometimes used to dream that I had a father who was just as frighteningly handsome as Caravaggio. That is not something anybody could accuse you of being. But still, you can no longer hide from me. I want to get to know you, I want my inheritance, I want you to explain to me all the things that I still don’t understand.’
Not a word about Harriet. Didn’t she care about her mother, who was busy dying?
I tried Harriet’s numbers again, but still no answer. I called Louise’s mobile, but no answer there either. I climbed the hill behind the house. It was a beautiful early-summer day. Not really warm yet, but the islands had begun to turn green. In the distance I could see one of the year’s first sailing boats on its way to somewhere unknown from a home harbour that was also unknown. I suddenly felt an urge to drag myself away from this island. I had spent so much of my life wandering back and forth between the jetty and the house.
I just wanted to get away. When Harriet appeared out there on the ice with her walker, she shattered the curse that I’d allowed to imprison me here, as if in a cage. I realised that the twelve years I had lived on the island had been wasted, like a liquid that had drained out of a cracked container. There was no going back, no starting again.