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5
    THE WIND CAME and went during the night.
    I slept badly and lay listening to the gale. Squalls coming from the north-west – I could feel the draught through the wall. That was what I would note down in my logbook the following day. But I wondered if I would record the fact that Harriet had come to visit me.
    She was lying on a camp bed directly underneath where I was. Inside my head, I kept going through the letter I’d found in her handbag, time and time again. She had stomach cancer, and it had spread. Cytotoxic drugs had only slowed things down a little, operations were out of the question. She had a hospital appointment with her consultant on 12 February.
    I still had enough of the medical practitioner in me to be able to read the writing on the wall. Harriet was going to die. The treatment she had received so far would not cure her, and might not even prolong her life. She was passing into the terminal and palliative phase, to use the medical terms.
    No cure, but no unnecessary suffering.
    As I lay there in the darkness, the same thought kept coming to me, over and over again: it was Harriet who was going to die, not me. Although it was I who hadcommitted the cardinal sin of deserting her, she was the one afflicted. I don’t believe in God. Apart from a short period in the early stages of my training as a doctor, I have barely been affected by religious considerations. I have never had discussions with representatives of the other world. No inner voices urging me to kneel. But now I was lying awake and feeling grateful for not being the one under threat. I barely slept for many hours. I got up twice for a pee and to listen outside Harriet’s door. Both she and the ants seemed to be asleep.
    I got up at six o’clock.
    When I went down to the kitchen, I saw to my surprise that she had already had breakfast. Or at least, she had drunk coffee. She had warmed up the dregs from the previous evening. The dog and the cat were out – she must have let them out. I opened the front door. There had been a light snowfall during the night. Tracks made by the paws of a dog and a cat were visible. And footprints.
    Harriet had gone out.
    I tried to see through the darkness. Dawn was still a distant prospect. Were any sounds to be heard? The wind came and went in squally gusts. All three sets of tracks led in the same direction: towards the back of the house. I didn’t need to look far. There is an old wooden bench in among the apple trees. My grandmother used to sit there. She would knit, straining her short-sighted eyes, or would simply sit with her hands clasped in her lap, listening to the sounds of the sea, which was never silent when not frozen over. But it wasn’t my grandmother’sghostly figure sitting there now. Harriet had lit a candle that was standing on the ground, sheltered from the wind by a stone. The dog was lying at her feet. She looked the same as when I had first seen her the previous day: hat pulled over her ears, a scarf wrapped round her face. I sat down next to her on the bench. It was below freezing, but as the overnight wind had faded away, it didn’t feel particularly cold.
    â€˜It’s beautiful here,’ she said.
    â€˜It’s dark. You can’t see anything. And you can’t even hear the sea, as it’s frozen over.’
    â€˜I had a dream that the anthill was growing and surrounding my bed.’
    â€˜I can move your bed to the kitchen if you’d prefer that.’
    The dog stood up and wandered off. It was moving cautiously, as dogs do when they are deaf and hence afraid. I asked Harriet if she’d noticed that the dog was deaf. She hadn’t. The cat came flouncing up. She took a good look at us, then withdrew into the darkness. The thought I’d had many times before came to me yet again: nobody understands the way cats behave. Did I understand the way I behaved? Did Harriet understand the way she behaved?
    â€˜You’re