‘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.