Хеннинг Манкелль - Italian Shoes

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.’

‘Can you collect me or can’t you?’

‘I’ll be with you in half an hour.’

When we had reached the mainland, I told him I’d probably be returning the same day, but I couldn’t say precisely when. Jansson was ready to burst with curiosity, but I said nothing.

When I arrived at the health centre I explained what had happened. After a short wait I underwent the usual examinations and an ECG, and spoke to a doctor. He was probably one of the locums who nowadays move from one surgery to another because they can never manage to attract a doctor on a long-term basis. He gave me the medication and instructions I had expected, as well as a referral to the hospital for a more detailed examination.

I called Jansson from reception and asked him to collect me. Then I bought two bottles of brandy and returned to the harbour.

It was only later, when I was back on the island, that the fear kicked in. Death had taken hold of me and tested my powers of resistance. I drank a glass of brandy. Then I went out and stood on the edge of a cliff and yelled out over the sea. I was shouting out my fear, disguised as anger.

The dog sat some distance away, watching me.

I didn’t want to be alone any longer. I didn’t want to be like one of the rocks on my island, observing in silence the inevitable passage of days and time.

I had a hospital appointment for 3 December. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with my heart. Medication, exercise and an appropriate diet should keep me going for a few years yet. The doctor was about my own age. I told him the facts, admitted that I had once been a doctor, but had then gone to look after an old fisherman’s cottage on an offshore island. He displayed a friendly lack of interest, and as I was about to leave, told me that I had a slight touch of angina.