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again?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜I asked what you thought.’
    â€˜I don’t know what I thought.’
    â€˜You are just as evasive now as you were in those days.’
    She withdrew into herself. She always used to do that when she’d been hurt, I remembered that clearly. I felt an urge to stretch out my hand over the table and touch her. Did she feel an urge to touch me? It was as if nearly forty years of silence had started to bounce back and forth between us. An ant crawled over the tablecloth. Had it come from the anthill in the living room, or had it been unable to find its way back to the nest I suspect was inside the south wall of the house?
    I stood up and said I was going to let the dog out. Her face was in shadow. It was a clear, starry night, dead calm. Whenever I see a sky like that, I wish I could write music. I walked down to the jetty again – I’d lost count of the number of times I’d done so already today. The dog ran out on to the ice in the light from the boathouse, and stopped where Harriet had been lying. The situation was unreal. A door had opened into the life I had more or less considered to be over, and the beautiful woman I had once loved but deceived had come back. In those days, when I used to meet her when she’d finished work in the shoe shop in Hamngatan, she used to be wheeling a bicycle. Now she supported herself on a wheeled walker. I felt lost. The dog returned, and we walked up to the house.
    I paused at the back and looked in through the kitchen window.
    Harriet was still sitting at the kitchen table. It was a while before I realised that she was crying. I waited until she’d dried her eyes. Only then did I go in. The dog had to stay in the hall.
    â€˜I need some sleep,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m tired out. I’ll tell you tomorrow why I’ve come.’
    She didn’t wait for me to respond, but stood up, said goodnight and eyed me briefly up and down. Then she closed the door. I went to the room where I keep my television set, but I didn’t switch it on. Meeting Harriet had tired me out. Naturally, I was afraid of all the accusations I knew would come. What could I say? Nothing.
    I fell asleep in the armchair.
    It was midnight when I was woken up by a stiff neck. I went to the kitchen and listened outside Harriet’s door. Not a sound. And no strip of light under the door. I cleared up in the kitchen, took a loaf and a baguette out of the freezer, let the dog and the cat in, and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. The door that had shut out everything I thought was in the past was banging; swinging back and forth. It was as if the time we had spent together was using the wind to force its way in.
    I put on my dressing gown and went back down to the kitchen. The animals were asleep. It was minus seven degrees outside. Harriet’s handbag was on the kitchen sofa. I put it on the table and opened it. It contained a hairbrush and comb, her purse and a pair of gloves, a bunch of keys, a mobile phone and two bottles of medicine. I read the labels; it was clear that they were painkillers and antidepressants. Prescribed by a Dr Arvidsson in Stockholm. I began to feel uneasy, and I continued searching through her handbag. Down at the very bottom was an address book. It was worn and well thumbed, full of telephone numbers. When I looked up the letter ‘W’,I saw to my surprise that my Stockholm telephone number from the middle of the 1960s was there.
    It had not even been crossed out.
    Had she kept the address book all those years? I was about to put it back when I noticed a piece of paper tucked into the cover. I unfolded it and read it.
    After doing so, I went to stand outside the front door. The dog sat by my side.
    I still didn’t know why Harriet had come to my island.
    But I had found in her handbag a letter informing her that she was seriously ill and did not have much longer to live.

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