were so many tiny, almost fragment-like, islets and islands and skerries – Kris had once mentioned a figure of 30,000 – that on a map, they looked like smashed glass on a stone floor. Some were nothing but smooth rock plateaus, breaching the glassy surface like beluga whales; others were fully forested and bushy, like distant, dark clumps of moss floating upon the water.
This would be her third summer on the archipelago; it was where she had truly fallen in love with the country, why she’d decided to stay. Stockholm was great – smaller than London, friendlier than Paris, calmer than Rome, even cooler than Berlin – but experiencing the Swedes’ summer lifestyles at their island cabins and houses had been a game-changer for Bell. Her own childhood had been spent summering on the North Norfolk coast, sailing and crabbing and playing tennis, but the version here was even more stripped back, raw. Pure. Some of the islets were so incredibly tiny that there was barely enough room for a single-room cabin to perch on the rocks; clearly, electricity and heating and running water weren’t options. There was really nothing for the occupants to do but sit on the shore and read, fish, swim and watch the boats go by.
And there were a lot of boats to watch. Saturday mornings in particular looked like regattas, with low-lying yawls and ketches and sloops in full sail, small speedboats zipping over the water’s surface, some towing inflatables or water-skiers, jet-bikers carving into tight turns and trying to catch air over the ferries’ wakes.
Bell always loved the two months she spent with the Mogerts here. Their island – known in the family as Summer Isle – was still small compared to some; it took just fifteen minutes to walk around, whereas the larger ones would take perhaps an hour and the very smallest, just a couple of minutes. But they had a few neighbours, including Gustav Persson, an elderly man who spent ten months of the year in an almost defiantly rudimentary cabin on the northern tip; it got the worst of the weather and had been patched numerous times with squares of corrugated tin, so that the effect on approach was of a patchwork house. There was another house, too, further up from the main jetty on the eastern side, owned by a middle-aged couple, the Janssons, from Halmstad. It was painted in the traditional brownish-red, with white square windows and a Swedish flag flapping from a pole out front. None of the gardens had delineated boundaries, and it had taken Bell a while to adapt to the idea that the island was theirs collectively; people were largely sensible about respecting each other’s privacy without the need for fences, walls or gates.
Her own accommodation was a tiny cabin set twenty metres or so back from the family’s main house. They were both painted black, as though to demonstrate the connection to passers-by or trespassers. But where the main house sat dead centre, back from a curved private beach, her tiny cabin was tucked into a thicket of trees at the far end, with a path leading through the moss to a narrow inlet in the rocks. From there, she could step straight down into the water, and it had become something of a private ritual for her to skinny-dip under the midnight sun before bed each night.
The space was almost unimaginably small when she was away from it – just big enough for a bed, table and chair, and tiny kitchenette hidden in a cupboard. The toilet was housed in an add-on room around the back, old-school style, and the shower was outdoors, clad with rickety timber panels and prone to spitting water. It wasn’t the easiest way to live, but the vast majority of her time was spent in comfort at the family house anyway, and she was grateful for the brief respite of peace and solitude at the beginning and end of each day.
The truth was, she could hardly wait to get back there and she felt a small thrill as she began to recognize elements of the nautical landscape. Last year, she had spent a lot of time with Linus particularly, pootling around the neighbouring islands while the girls – only two years old at the time – played on the beach and napped with their parents. She and Linus had kayaked together along the coves almost every day, looking out for orcas and herons and choosing which houses