Lucca

1

One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A petrol station attendant in a neighbouring village, beside the bridge over the motorway to Copenhagen, had seen her car take the wrong slip-road onto the carriageway and drive at high speed against the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to manoeuvre around her, but about 200 metres after the junction she collided head-on with a truck.

The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 metres before the crash, while the car approaching him actually increased speed for the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck fast between the carriageway and the lorry’s cow-catcher, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for the emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived.

On arrival at hospital the woman was pronounced close to death, and it was 24 hours before she was out of danger although still critically ill. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she had lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale.

Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance, from the photograph on her driving licence. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. In build she was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen.

Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couple’s home was an old farmhouse in an isolated woodland setting seven kilometres from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. When he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking quite a lot, he could not remember how much. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used, and he was not questioned further on that point.

Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating theatre into intensive care, her husband still sat in the foyer with the sleeping boy’s head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down beside him. Andreas Bark merely went on staring into the grey morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed to be slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he wore a shabby leather jacket.

Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the small perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realised he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. The other man looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke up and asked where he was, bewildered. His father stroked his hair slowly, mechanically, as the doctor spoke.

When he got home Robert had a shower, poured himself a whisky and walked about the house for a while. Apart from a faint twittering, the only sounds were those he made himself, the parquet blocks creaking under his bare feet and the ice cubes clinking in his glass. He never went straight to bed when he came home after a night shift. He sat on the sofa as it grew light outside, listening to the new recording of Brahms’s third symphony bought last time he was in Copenhagen. He gave in to fatigue and imagined he was floating on the peaceful, swelling waves of the strings, studied the palings of the fence at the end of the garden, the birch leaves fluttering in the breeze, and the hesitant little hops on both legs of the sparrows on the cement paving stones, between the plastic garden furniture on the terrace outside the wide panorama window.

The house was actually too large. It was intended for a family with two or three children, but it had been going at a favourable price. Moreover, Lea came home every other weekend. He had furnished a room for her with everything she might need. She had gone to buy the furniture with him and chosen the colours herself. He had given her a bicycle too, which awaited her in the car port, and a ping pong table he had set up in what was intended as the dining room. He preferred to eat in the kitchen. Lea was becoming a dab hand at table tennis, she could beat him now every other time. She was just twelve.

He had become used to living alone. It wasn’t as hard as he had feared, he worked long hours. He had moved out of Copenhagen two years ago, when he was divorced. At that time he and Lea’s mother had worked at the same hospital. Six months after the divorce Monica moved in with the mutual colleague she had begun a relationship with while still married to Robert. He didn’t like constantly coming across them in the corridors.

He had moved to this particular town by chance, never having envisaged taking a job at a provincial hospital, but he liked his work, and although the town depressed him with its red-brick suburban houses and provincial town properties with small bay windows and absurd zinc spires, after a time he learned to appreciate the qualities of the place. It boasted a white-washed medieval church, where organ recitals were given in summer, flanked by a couple of half-timbered merchants’ houses, at the end of the main street, and there were the woods, the seashore and a bird reserve at the end of a peninsula past an area of half-flooded meadowland. He liked to take a walk out there, surrounded by the huge vault of sky above the tufts of grass in the smooth calm water reflecting the cloud masses and the wedge formations of migrating birds.

Now and then he would visit one of the couples among his colleagues. They were all married and most had children. As a newly-arrived singleton he was met with friendliness and courtesy, but he always felt like a guest in their world, and he noticed that the women in particular confused his slightly reserved manner with arrogance. One woman had made a pass at him, she was a librarian and a few years younger than he was. He found her attractive and went out with her a few times, but when it came to the point he rebuffed her advances. It was not that he missed Monica. For the last year or two of their marriage they had lived silently side by side like two anonymous passengers, when the silence was not broken by sudden pointless quarrels.

Not that there was anything wrong with the librarian. She had a beautiful figure and a sense of humour. He actually made the initial moves himself when he went up to her one day to ask for a biography of Gustav Mahler. But he ended up by rejecting her. Naturally she was hurt, and since that episode he had stopped going to the library. It left him feeling chagrined, but he had been unable to explain either to her or himself why he had asked her to go, one evening after dinner when they had sat on his sofa listening to the adagio from Mahler’s fifth symphony.

She was in a short low-necked dress and black stockings that night. She had taken off her shoes and drawn up her legs beneath her on the sofa, and she looked meaningfully at him out of her large, appealing eyes as they sipped their brandy. It was so obvious, everything seemed to have been arranged without a single word, and he lost the urge to have anything to do with her. After she had gone he told himself he could at least have gone to bed with her, as she had plainly offered, but when he woke up next morning, alone as usual, he was relieved. He ran into her in the street now and again, that was unavoidable in such a small town. They greeted each other politely and, as they passed each other, she tried to catch his eye.

Robert was responsible for Lucca Montale’s treatment. It fell to him to tell her, a few days after the accident, that she was unlikely to see again. Her arms and legs were in plaster, and most of her head was covered with bandages, so only the lower part of her face was visible. She made no reply. For a moment he thought she had fallen asleep, then she moved her lips, but uttered no sound. He sat down on the edge of the bed and asked what she wanted to say. The words came slowly, with difficulty. Her voice was faint and uncertain, it threatened to crack the whole time, and he had to bend over her to hear what she said.

She asked what the weather was like. He told her the day was grey but promised to clear up. He said it had rained. Yes, she replied, she had heard it. Had it rained in the morning or during the night? In the night, he said. For a time neither of them spoke. He would have liked to say something encouraging to her, but could not think of anything. Everything that occurred to him seemed either foolish or blatantly unsuitable.

She asked whether Andreas was there. She used his first name, as if assuming Robert would realise who she meant. He told her Andreas would probably come later in the day. It felt odd to mention her husband like that, as if he knew him. He said Andreas had been there several times with their son, while she was unconscious. The boy’s name was Lauritz. She wanted to see him. Then she corrected herself. He must come. Robert suggested she should arrange it with her husband. The next thing she said was very surprising. She did not want Andreas to visit her. Only Lauritz. Could she rely on that being respected?

Robert did not know what to answer. He said yes without thinking. If that was what she wanted. It sounded very formal, almost solemn. He looked at the trees, just coming into leaf. She did not want anything. He looked at her again. Her voice was expressionless, without bitterness or self-pity. He stood up to go, she asked him to stay a little longer. He stayed by the window, waiting for her to say something more. Was it certain? He asked what she meant, feeling foolish. That she would never see again? He hesitated. As good as certain, he replied. He said he was sorry, at once regretting it. She said she would like to be alone.

He relayed Lucca Montale’s wishes to the sister-in-charge and asked her to arrange with the husband to let their son visit her. A few hours later Andreas Bark was sitting in Robert’s office. He was pale and unshaven, his dark hair tousled. He slouched in his chair with exhaustion and asked if he could smoke. Robert assented with a wave of his hand, which he placed on the pile of case notes in front of him. Andreas Bark took a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, he smoked Gitanes. There was something aggressive about the spicy smell of dark tobacco. Andreas Bark looked out the window. It really was clearing up. Robert gazed at the silhouette of a gypsy woman twirling in a dance with a hand on one hip and a tambourine held above her head, through the sinuous veil of cigarette smoke.

He must apologise. Robert looked up, met the other’s eyes and said there was nothing to apologise for. He understood. It was really the wrong thing to say, but now he had said it, and the other held onto his calm gaze with his tired eyes behind the eddying cigarette smoke. It struck Robert they must be about the same age. There was something in the other’s expression which in a mute, acquiescent way was trying to remind him of it. As if, in some transferred sense, they were old schoolmates, who could rely on each other’s sympathetic insight.

Had she explained why she did not want to see him? Robert cleared his throat and brushed a hair from his white coat. Whether his patient had said anything about it or not, as a doctor he could not permit himself to pass it on. But in fact she had not said anything that could explain her decision. Why should she confide in him, anyway? Robert immediately regretted his question. That was making too much of the point. The other man sank into his chair still further and again looked out the window, where the pale sun created a chiaroscuro of shine and shade, then shine again on the grass and the wings of the hospital as clouds kept passing over it. He pressed down the loose tobacco at the end of his cigarette with his finger. He could bring Lauritz to see her during afternoon visiting hours. Robert said he would have to arrange that with the sister in charge. But would he… Silence fell, and he was obliged to look the unhappy man in the face again. Yes? When he spoke to her, wouldn’t he say that… Andreas Bark broke off and said it didn’t matter. They shook hands. Then he left.

Robert did not go straight home in the afternoon. Instead he drove out to the beach, as he did occasionally when he needed exercise. He parked in the fir plantation before the road got too sandy, and continued on foot through the dunes. The shore was deserted as usual. The sky was just as grey as the sand between the belts of dried seaweed with little air bubbles that Lea liked to crush between her fingers to make them crackle when they sat together on a Sunday looking out over the sea before he drove her to the station. The water was calm, it had a granulated surface in the offshore wind, and in the smooth, icy blue stretches the fishing stakes stood like trim markings from the coast and outwards towards the sharply defined horizon. Robert walked with long strides, head bent, absent-mindedly observing what passed through his field of vision, battered soaked herring boxes with rusty nails, crumpled starfish, milky jellyfish and empty white plastic bottles. Little waves lapped wearily at the edge of the water and made the silence seem deeper, more intimate.

He walked right out to the point where, in a gentle, indefinable transition, the beach gave way to sand spits, tussocks of grass, reed beds and narrow meadows stretching inland, everything separated by the bluish white mirror of the water. In one place a dinghy was moored to a pole in the midst of the folded calm of the water-mirror, merely a small silhouette against the emptiness of sea and sky. Robert had a definite objective, a rotting spar covered with little holes from ships’ worms, where it was his habit to sit among the tall reeds to think, or just listen to birds’ cries and the rhythmic, faintly whispering rush of wings, as he picked at the rotten wood.

He could well have been more sympathetic to the man in his office with his cigarette and his despair. He had felt really sorry for him. He caught sight of a bird sitting in among the reeds. It jerked its small head from side to side and forward and backwards with a mechanically ticking motion. He didn’t know its name, he was not very good on birds. Several times he had thought of buying a bird book with coloured drawings which he could take on his walks, but the idea did seem a bit comical. Should he also get himself a pair of binoculars and some green wellies and tramp around like a typical enthusiast?

He remembered he was to have Lea the following weekend. If it kept on raining they could always play table tennis and hire some videos. And they had been talking of making a kitchen garden. He had already bought garden tools from the hardware shop and been to the garden centre for seeds. The tools were in the scullery beside the washing machine, painted red, with beechwood handles. He hadn’t even removed their stickers with bar codes. If the weather was reasonable they might get started. He hadn’t wanted to do it on his own even though he had the time. The idea was for them to do it together.

The librarian had questioned him about Lea, he had even shown her some pictures. While he talked about his daughter she had smiled and looked at him with her nice eyes, and he could sense that the small anecdotes raised him in her feminine esteem. That embarrassed him, and he shied away from talking to her like that. Her encouraging gaze and understanding smile made him feel pathetically disarmed.

He lit a cigarette. Andreas Bark’s masculine but painfully vulnerable face came to mind again. He didn’t know what he should have said to him. After all, his wife was not dead. With a bit of luck and a few months’ rehabilitation she would be able to go on, blind but alive. The untold marital drama being acted out behind the man’s tragic mien and her refusal to see him was a far cry from his medical field of action.

Throughout his years as a doctor it had often occurred to him that it was the reverse side of life with which he was occupied, the side with the seam. Just like tailors of old who had only an indirect glimpse of the glittering world of fine ladies, it was the sad moments in people’s lives that he shared with them, when some functional fault or accident prevented them from getting on with their dramatic or uneventful existence.

After he had moved to the provinces and by degrees accustomed himself to his new and quieter lifestyle, he had to admit that Monica had been right when she reproached him for not being more ambitious. Naturally he wanted to be proficient, and he did try to improve, but he never dreamed of being a virtuoso. The appointment at a provincial hospital was anything but progress in his career, and he discovered, to both his surprise and relief, that he didn’t mind. The hospital was the innermost sphere in his world, it was there he spent most of his time, and it was from there that he looked out on the world where other people moved. Now and again they passed through his, but to them that was an unpleasant parenthesis, which they hastened to forget as soon as they escaped.

Their lives were not his concern, only their bodies, and he had grown used to working with the human body as a closed circuit separate from the life it lived. The organism was sufficient to itself and unaffected by the dreams and ideas raging within it. That was an idea he found encouraging. He liked his work, he liked vanishing into it, completely engrossed in finding out what was wrong with people, and what should be done about it. He liked observing how every aim for beauty and social status was irrelevant when it came to the body’s own solitary life, the vegetation of the organs in time to the soft, meaningless rhythm of the pulse. In his eyes the anonymous innocence of the interior organs offset the broken illusions of the exterior, socialised body, its ugliness, obesity and wear and tear. But the anonymity of the organs was also a cunning commentary on the spoilt, exacting beauty of other and luckier bodies.

One day he had shown Lea an anatomical atlas with detailed colour plates. He described what she was looking at and carefully explained the function of the organs, but she wrinkled her nose and asked him to close the book. She thought the pictures were distasteful and protested when he reminded her that she herself looked like that inside, like everyone else, whether they were beautiful or ugly. It amazed him that the interior of the body could be as terrifying as its exterior seemed seductive. Perhaps it was not the organs that caused the disgust but the anatomical dissecting gaze that by revealing them so matter-of-factly also showed how vulnerable they were.

To the patients the hospital was an ominous place with its clinical atmosphere of linoleum, white coats, disinfectant and rust-free steel, and all of them had the same anxiety in their eyes, whether they tried to hide it or give it free rein. Hospital reminded them that whatever happened they would have to die sometime, regardless of how many wiles the doctors used to stave off the inevitable. When they relinquished themselves to his authority and placed all their hope in his white coat, he sometimes had to ask himself if it was the terror of being admitted that made them so meek rather than the hope of being discharged again.

But he knew very well that horror and hope walked together, and he had probably become hard to scare only because he had seen so many sick people and despite everything had cured a good many of them. He had even grown less horrified by incurable diseases simply by encountering them regularly. Sometimes he thought that one day it could be he himself lying there afraid of dying, but identifying with the dying did not make him more fearful than he would otherwise have been, rather the reverse.

Horror and hope. Perhaps you had to be really frightened to know what hope was. Perhaps. He didn’t hope so much for his own sake, and Lea was the only person in his life more important than himself. The only thing which could terrify him was the thought that she might get meningitis or be run over by a truck.

The reeds whispered and swayed from side to side when a bird suddenly flew up with feverishly flapping wings. He threw away his cigarette stub and heard the glow fizz in the muddy water. Again he thought of the mutilated Lucca Montale, how he had patched her up to the best of his ability. She had driven along the dark side-roads, the road markings, the grass verges and the black trees had rushed past her long-distance lights, and a cat or a fox might have seen her, stiffened with phosphorescent eyes, with one forepaw raised. Not even at the utmost limits of her inflamed mind could she have imagined that twelve hours later she would wake up swaddled like a mummy to be told she had seen the sun shining on the grass and through the trees’ foliage for the last time. She had been utterly electrified by the drama that had sent her out on the roads the worse for drink, and in her impassioned state she had ignored the fact that the most violent changes are brought about just as often by chance as by the violent travesties of the emotions.

She didn’t want to see him, her unhappy, unshaven husband, who had waited for her ravaged body to decide whether to live or die. She insisted on this, throughout all the outward havoc her impulsive inebriated journey had occasioned. He must really have upset her. Again Robert visualised the silhouette of the dancing gypsy through the fog of tobacco, with her snaking hips, her tambourine raised in a fervent gesture, among the pile of case notes. He recalled the insistent gaze of the other man, the restrained desperation in his eyes. Andreas Bark had been sweating, and Robert had had to open the window when he left to get rid of the odour of his desperate body and his French cigarettes.

He heard voices from behind the reeds, a young woman’s laugh. Robert stood up. He did not want to be seen hunched on his spar in the forest of reeds like some queer fish sitting there dreaming. His legs tingled and felt slightly stiff. He went out into the open along a narrow spit that divided the submerged meadowlands from the lake. There was no-one to be seen. Further along where the spit widened out there was a tall wooden shed, and when you walked past, the sky and the water on the other side glittered in the gaps between the perpendicular tarred planks of its walls. He could hear them in there, now the man laughed. The young woman said something in a fond, low voice. Then silence. Robert could make out their outlines in the narrow, bright spaces between the planks. He had stopped, but walked on hastily when he realised they might be keeping quiet because they had seen him out on the path.

Before his rounds the following morning the sister told him that Lucca Montale had had terrible nightmares in the night followed by long bouts of weeping. They had given her a sedative. Two large bouquets were on her bedside table. The previous day there had been only the one that Andreas Bark had asked them to take in to her. A thoughtless gesture, thought Robert. What use were flowers to her? Weren’t they rather a signal to the people around her that others were thinking of her? The nurse asked how she was. She wrenched her mouth sideways in something meant to be a sarcastic smile. She really did look like a mummy, swathed as she was in plaster and bandages, reduced to a pale mouth that uttered brief answers when she was spoken to. Her condition had stabilised, now it was just a question of waiting.

For what? The nurse looked at him, perplexed, as he considered how to reply. He sat down on the edge of the bed and cautiously put a hand on her right shoulder, the only visible part of her body apart from her jaw which was not bandaged or plastered. Well, he couldn’t say, he said, surprised at the gentleness in his voice. She made no answer, her mouth lay still in its folds, as if she were asleep. The nurse told her Lauritz would be coming in the afternoon. She spoke in an earnest, entreating voice. It was probably the best answer to give her. Lucca Montale asked her to take the flowers away, the stench was choking her. Robert and the nurse looked at each other.

As they walked along the corridor she told him the patient’s mother had visited Lucca the previous day. She had not stayed in the room for more than a couple of minutes before coming out again, visibly shaken. The nurse had offered her a cup of coffee, but she had driven back to Copenhagen at once. She had looked surprisingly young, according to the nurse, who had recognised her voice but been unable to recall where she had heard it before, this beautiful, expressive female voice. Later in the day she had remembered. Lucca Montale’s mother was a broadcaster. The nurse had asked Lucca if she was right, but the patient had been very curt and replied that she did not want visits from her mother or anyone else apart from her son.

Her decision did not need to be enforced, her mother did not come again, nor others. When Lauritz visited her, Andreas Bark waited outside the room, hunched in despair. Robert greeted him when he passed by and gave him brief reports of the patient’s condition, controlling his impatience to continue along the corridor and escape the other’s eyes. Andreas Bark must have registered his aversion and Robert was relieved to find he did not seek him out in his office again. Robert could not explain to himself what it was about the man that filled him with such revulsion. He did not try very hard to discover. There were other patients and their families to look after, and Lucca Montale took her place in the rows of prone figures in hospital gowns whose faces and sufferings changed at varying tempos, according to the seriousness of their cases and how soon they were discharged.

He only saw her for a few minutes during his daily rounds, and as a rule he was the one who spoke, when he repeated more or less what he had said to her the day before. Under the circumstances everything went on as it should do. He himself thought that sounded hypocritical, but why, in fact? If someone drank themselves senseless and drove at 150 km an hour along the wrong side of the motorway, there were limits to the miracles he could perform. She should be glad to be alive at all. Unless she had driven like a madwoman to get it over with once and for all. Get what over? Life, quite simply? Or whatever it had been in her life that had made her wish she were dead? She probably hadn’t made any distinction.

Every time he thought about her he grew more convinced that Lucca Montale must have decided to kill herself that evening she quarrelled with her husband and got into their car to drive towards the motorway. But it made no difference what he thought. His task was to get her on her feet again so she could be discharged to whatever awaited her outside. He knew no more about her, on the whole, than he knew about his other patients. Besides, he only thought of her now and then, in the intervals when he paused for a moment’s reflection in his office, dictaphone in hand, looking down on the hospital garden below. Otherwise not.

His days resembled each other. When he was at home he listened to music, Brahms, Mahler, Bruckner, Sibelius, the great symphonies that were like cathedrals, with the same shadowy heights, the same ribbed arches, and the same mysterious, coloured light divided into rays, cones and rosettes on the stone floor. Exactly like the real cathedrals in the south, which he and Monica had always visited in the days when everything was going well or at least seemed to be. She had not shared his taste in music, he had had to listen with earphones in the evenings when they were alone, and then she reproached him for isolating himself. At least it was some progress that now he could fill the empty house with one symphony orchestra after another without upsetting anyone. He did not think about anything when he listened to music. It poured through him like an impersonal energy, a huge, transforming power, and as long as it filled him it did not matter who or where he was. He watched the evening sky behind the birch trees in the garden, the grass in the wind, the children on cycles and the cars that occasionally passed along the road behind the fence, soundless as a silent film, while at the same time he felt both united and cut off from everything.

He went into Copenhagen once or twice a month and spent the afternoon and evening buying records, going to a concert or visiting some of his old friends. He had kept in touch only with friends from his life before he met Monica, and it was seldom he saw even those friends after he moved. Sometimes he went out to see his mother, she lived in a small flat in a block from the Thirties with a balcony where she could sit and look out over the harbour, the local heating station’s row of slim chimneys and the railway lines with the express trains’ shunting track.

His father had left her shortly after Robert was born and he had not seen him since; he had moved to Jutland and probably started another family there. He was a barber, thinking of him seemed quite abstract. He might already be dead. When Robert was fifteen he had decided to go in search of him. He succeeded in finding the address and telephone number. He could still remember the silence from the other end when he had told the strange man who he was. They arranged to meet in Århus, on neutral ground, as his father said in a tired voice that was hoarse and short of breath. He must be a chain-smoker. But when he was in the ferry crossing the Great Belt Robert began to lose heart, and he got off the train at Odense. What was the point of this?

Robert’s mother did not marry again. She looked after him on her own, at first by cleaning, later by working in the canteen of a large firm, where in time she was promoted to catering officer. The best time for her had been when she worked in a home for children with behavioural problems. She rarely went out. When she retired, she resorted to the world of novels. Robert was not sure how clearly she could distinguish between their fictional life and the life going on around her. She herself was a spectator, terribly modest, content to be a witness of the world seen from the humble corner she allowed herself to occupy.

She loved Dickens and the Russians, Tolstoy and Dostoievski, and she had a weakness for Mark Twain, but her favourite book was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. When Robert saw the familiar volume open on the arm of the shabby easy chair beside the balcony door where she liked to sit, he always asked if it wasn’t too sad. She smiled mysteriously, of course it was sad, but it was so entertaining too, and she said it as if in some secret way the one thing was a prerequisite for the other.

As a rule she hid her faded hair under a scarf. Time had made her stoop and she was very thin, but taller than most women of her generation, as tall as a man, and as long as he could remember she had worn the same kind of strong, mannish spectacle frames. She smoked about forty cigarettes a day, just as presumably her ex-husband had, thought Robert. That was the only thing they had in common apart from him. But they had come to a silent agreement that he should not comment on her smoking. He had almost come to the conclusion that she survived on a diet of cigarettes and novels.

She had always kept to a monotonous routine. The biggest event in her life had been the day he was admitted to university. Not when he finished but when he started, as the first one in the family. As far as he knew she had not been with a man since his father left her. But that couldn’t be true, he thought, and one day he asked her. She did not reply, merely smiled her mysterious smile in a way that prevented him from seeing whether she smiled to protect her feminine pride or to shield him from stories he did not want to hear anyway.

Now and then she looked after Lea. Then she made her all the fatty and unhealthy dishes with thick gravy which Lea loved and Monica and Robert refused to make, and afterwards she read aloud to her from Huckleberry Finn, always that and nothing else. When Robert came alone she asked him worriedly how things were. He was not just her only child, he was also her only contact with the outside world, and for over forty years he had been the one who imparted deepest meaning to her life.

Her ceaseless questioning made him impatient and irritable and as a rule he snapped out brief answers, at the same time feeling guilty at being so grudging. But at other times she did not ask questions when he came, on the contrary she seemed distracted, as if he disturbed her reading. Not until he was on his way down the staircase with its terrazzo flooring and marble-patterned walls did it occur to him that she might only question him out of politeness and old habit. As someone trying to hide the fact that in reality she had lost interest in the noise and bother of daily life in order to devote herself to her daydreams at long last.

On Lea’s twelfth birthday he was waiting in front of her school when she came out. She was surprised, it had not been arranged, he had gone into town on a sudden impulse. She stood there surrounded by her friends, who glanced at him shyly. She herself felt self-conscious. Her friends were going home with her, Monica was expecting them. He had bought her a pair of roller skates, and she tried them out at once there on the pavement, chiefly to please him, it seemed. He stood and waved as she went off to the bus stop with her friends, even though he was going the same way. He didn’t want to embarrass them more than was strictly necessary, so he waited until their bus had left and took the next one. Twelve years. At that time they had really believed it was possible, he and Monica. They had both been tired of mucking around. They had more or less tried what there was to try, they thought. When she found herself pregnant they had already known each other a long time. They had jumped into it with their eyes open.

That was how they had put it to each other. Eyes open. But it was already hard to recall what he had thought then. Monica had become a stranger again. She was friendly, there was no longer anything to quarrel about, and her new husband was equally friendly. That was how it could turn out. As simply as that. She had stopped loving him and started to love someone else, and Robert had long ago stopped pondering over whether the one thing was the cause of the other or vice versa.

If he sometimes thought to himself that love was like music, it was not because he was feeling poetic. But love was just as invisible and hard to understand, perhaps because there was nothing to understand. An impersonal, transforming force, which found the way by itself according to its own interior laws, uncaring of who and what it pulled with it or left behind in its calm or restless flow. Music cared just as little about who played, the notes could not help it if they were played beautifully or clumsily, on finely tuned instruments or a miserable broken-down honky-tonk in which half the strings were missing.

He did not think in this vein every day. There was no one he could confide such thoughts to. When he was alone he could almost fall into a kind of trance, in which the thoughts landed and took off as randomly as the irresolute sparrows on the terrace. In the evening he read his professional journals, when he was not too tired. There was always a pile of them he had not got through. He merely riffled through the newspaper, and when he let it fall on the floor he had already forgotten the details of what he had read.

The only person outside the hospital he talked to regularly was Jacob, a young colleague who lived with his wife and their two small children in a house matching his own not far away. They played tennis once or twice a week, and sometimes Jacob invited him over on a Saturday. Jacob was very popular on account of his frank, uncomplicated manner. He was one of the doctors the young nurses flirted with, boyish in appearance, well-trained, with hair like yellow corn. Robert could feel Jacob looked up to him because he was older and came from a big hospital in Copenhagen, and this status compensated for the irritation at his heavier body and poor condition when Jacob beat him on the tennis court yet again.

Jacob’s wife was dark-haired and had brown eyes, she was always well turned out in a relaxed way. She had an excellent figure, but there was something far too practical about her impeccable appearance which prevented Robert finding her attractive. Maybe that was why she did not like him, perhaps because as a divorced, single man he was a constant reminder of all the dangers threatening their domestic idyll. But it might also be that she had detected Robert’s suppressed distaste for sitting in their garden chatting about everything and nothing, while the children rushed around and clambered all over their father. Or was it quite simply because he smoked? As a rule she asked him to stay and eat with them, and Robert did his best to seem house-trained, remembered to pick his stubs off the lawn and tried to keep up the flow of talk with her when Jacob in his apron was grilling steaks.

Jacob treated him as a friend, and the slight twinges of conscience Robert felt over his trusting openness made him behave as if they really were close friends. When Jacob confided in him, he responded with some confidential story about himself as an example for recognition, letting the younger man mirror himself in his experiences and see in them what he found useful to see. He had gradually developed a sincere liking for Jacob, although he never quite got over the feeling that Jacob’s apparently uncomplicated and hygienic happiness was something separate from his own life. The games of tennis and the Saturdays in their garden became part of his routine, and neither Jacob nor his wife seemed surprised that he never worked up the energy to ask them back.

When Jacob once asked, Robert told him about his divorce and how he had discovered Monica was being unfaithful to him. It was a summer evening the previous year. They were in the garden, the children had been put to bed and Jacob’s wife lay on the sofa in the living room watching television. Jacob listened with a solemn expression quite unsuitable to his boyish face. He was obviously showing his sympathy and respect for the confidence his discreet friend was placing in him, but Robert felt he could detect a touch of inquisitive curiosity in the other’s attentive gaze. As he told his story he observed Jacob sitting under the garden umbrella in his trainers, his Bermuda shorts and the T-shirt from a Greek holiday island, as the glow from the barbecue died out. In the twilight, voices sounded from the gardens around them, and behind the hedges you could see the fleeting shadows of neighbours as they passed in and out through the lit terrace doorways.

While telling the story he felt it sounded like an episode from a Brazilian soap opera. He had been to a conference in Oslo, but when the last lecture was cancelled because of illness he decided to go home half a day earlier than planned. He did not know what to do with himself in Oslo on a raw Sunday in January. He called home from the hotel early in the morning before going to the airport. The answering machine was on. He asked himself later why he had not given a message instead of ringing off when he heard his own voice and the following long tone. When he let himself into the flat a few hours later Monica came out of the bedroom. She was naked, which surprised him, she always wore a nightgown in bed.

He asked where Lea was. She was staying over with a friend. He was going to go and kiss her but stopped when she looked at him with a stiff, almost hostile expression. It would be best if he went out again, just for fifteen minutes. At this stage of the story Robert made a point of describing in detail how he had stood in his own home in his overcoat, with snow in his hair, as his naked wife asked him to take a walk round the block, but Jacob held his serious expression. Monica remained standing there, fixing him with her unfamiliar gaze, and although it had begun to dawn on him that he had arrived at an inopportune moment, nevertheless he asked, almost as if to provoke her, why it was essential for him to go. For his own sake, she replied, and at that moment he heard through the door of the bedroom, which was slightly ajar, the jingling sound of a belt buckle.

What then? Robert smiled. Yes, what then? Jacob was becoming impatient. Did he go? No, he had gone into the kitchen and sat down at the table when Monica went back into the bedroom. He could hear their lowered voices in there. Shortly afterwards, steps sounded in the living room, they came nearer and he saw his hospital colleague pass the open door to the kitchen. And now came the wonderful moment in the story. Jacob leaned forward expectantly in his chair and quite forgot to look sorry for Robert, who paused before continuing.

It only lasted a moment, perhaps no more than a second, but his colleague, who had suddenly been in such a hurry to get away, still could not resist taking a look. Maybe he had imagined Robert would sit with his back to the door, broken by grief, or he wanted to make sure he was not ready to lunge at him with a bread knife. Anyway, the man did not lower his eyes, as you might have expected, when he passed the doorway and, when he met Robert’s gaze, he was so disconcerted that he nodded politely. As he would have done if they had passed each other, both in their white coats, in one of the hospital corridors. Jacob sat back in his chair, crestfallen. Robert laughed. In fact it had been a relief. Jacob looked at him wonderingly. How? That was hard to explain.

Lea was to arrive late on Friday afternoon. As usual they had arranged that he would fetch her from the station. He left the hospital some hours before and drove to a supermarket on the edge of town for the weekend shopping. He was tired, he was always tired on a Friday, as if the whole week’s fatigue had built up in him and weighed him down. As he pushed his trolley in and out among the others along the freezer counters he caught sight of Andreas Bark and his little son. They hadn’t seen him. He pushed his trolley behind the shelf of bread and cakes and went over to the big freezers with dairy products, trying to remember whether he usually bought blackcurrant or strawberry yoghurt for Lea.

Again Lucca Montale came to mind, lying as she had done for almost a week, with arms and legs in plaster and head wrapped in bandages. One of the nurses had several times offered to bring her some headphones so she could listen to the radio, but she had refused every time. She just wanted to lie quietly, she said. She could not do anything else, blind and cut off from moving as much as a centimetre, reduced to being fed by a nurse and otherwise left to herself, as she had wanted. Robert had prescribed plentiful painkillers for her, presumably she spent most of the day dozing.

With each day that passed she seemed more puzzling, not only because of her drastic action, but also her silence and self-chosen isolation. She seemed remarkably hardened, considering her condition. He could scarcely believe this was the same patient who, according to the nurse, had spent a night weeping heartrendingly and inconsolably until the calming injection started to work.

When he visited her on his round he asked if she would like to talk to a psychologist. She waited a while before replying. What about? He couldn’t help smiling. About her situation. Now she was the one who smiled or at least tried to with the twitch at the corner of her mouth he had learned to interpret as an expression of her hard-boiled sarcasm. Could a psychologist make her see again? He was about to reply with a pertinent affirmation, but stopped himself. It struck him that he didn’t even know what she looked like. The only thing he had to help him was the recollection of the glimpse he’d had of the little picture on her driving licence. A narrow face framed by reddish-blonde hair, smiling confidently at the photographer as if nothing bad could touch her.

He decided on blackcurrant yoghurt and put the carton down in the trolley with the New Zealand leg of lamb, Moroccan potatoes and Chilean red wine. When he looked up again Andreas Bark stood in front of him holding Lauritz by the hand. They had seen him, he said, as if that was sufficient reason for accosting him. Andreas Bark smiled a bit sheepishly and looked as if he regretted stopping. Robert didn’t know what to say. He felt unprotected faced with the other man’s appealing gaze, now he was out of uniform and they stood there each with their trolley, outside his domain, on an equal footing. The silence embarrassed both of them, but then Andreas Bark clutched at a possibility. Robert had not yet been introduced to Lauritz. The boy stretched out his hand politely.

The feel of the small soft hand caught him by surprise. It awoke an unexpected and vivid memory of Lea’s hand, when she was the same age. He had forgotten its weightless frailty and doll-like proportions. The recollection suddenly crossed his mind of how he had walked through streets and parks holding her slightly sticky little hand, alone or with Monica, when they were still a family. As Lea gradually grew bigger he had forgotten the various stages of her early childhood, until he had only snapshots to remind him, shiny and inconsequential, their colours already indistinct.

Robert resorted to the excuse of having to meet his daughter at the station, and at once regretted opening a door onto his private life. A white lie would almost have been better. Andreas Bark asked how old she was. The innocent question seemed like a far too intimate touch. Robert replied and smiled a goodbye, pushing his trolley off through the crowd with relief. Methodically and without looking from side to side he worked through his shopping list, past the cold counters with red meat and the shelves of brightly coloured packages, the displays of barbecues and flowered, folding garden furniture. All the time he had the feeling that Andreas Bark was watching his every movement.

Throughout the day the cloud cover had thickened. It hung low over the town and a cold wind tugged and tore at everything it could get hold of, making you think it was February instead of April. As Robert pushed his trolley through the check-out the car park was veiled in a shining mist of rain behind the fogged-up automatic glass doors, and each time they opened he felt cold air on his neck and around his ankles. He paid and pushed the trolley out under the porch roof where people stood waiting, hoping it was only a shower. A few plucked up courage, bent over and ran, the wheels of their piled-up trolleys rotating, sending them lurching over the asphalt, the men in shorts or jogging trousers, the women with bare legs under their summer dresses. Inveterate optimists, thought Robert.

A scarf of trickling water fell from the roof gutter and landed with small explosions at his feet. The wind turned the rain into a carpet rolling across the car park, and the dim light imparted a dull shine to the swells of rain-carpet. He glimpsed Andreas Bark in the group waiting there. He stood leaning against an old-fashioned lady’s bicycle looking out at the rain. The boy was seated on a child’s seat on the luggage rack with his helmet askew. The bulging shopping bags hung heavily from the handle-bars. Robert thought of the picture of the totally wrecked car, which a local paper had printed on the front page, without naming the victim of the tragedy. A thirty-two-year-old woman. It might have been anyone, struck down by one of the countless accidents recorded daily in the press worldwide.

It looked like turning into an all-night show… Andreas Bark smiled gratefully as if he did not deserve Robert’s taking pity on him, even speaking to him. His subdued, timorous expression seemed at odds with his pronounced features. That face seemed to characterise Andreas Bark as a man normally sure of himself. Now he was broken, and to add insult to injury he would have to cycle home in the rain like a Vietnamese rice-peasant, weighed down by his burdens. His gratitude had no end and several times he asked if Robert would be in time for his daughter’s train, as they unloaded their bags side by side into the boot.

They left the bicycle where it stood. Robert adjusted the safety belt on the back seat to fit Lauritz’s small body. As they set off Andreas Bark asked if Robert minded him smoking. Of course not… He opened the window a crack and lit one of his poisonous cigarettes, and Robert almost regretted his humanitarian impulse. He had no idea what they could talk about, but the rain on the roof made it easier to sit in silence. Andreas Bark’s leather jacket creaked a bit, and the indicators ticked when Robert prepared to turn. Otherwise there was no sound except the drumming of the raindrops and the wipers’ monotonous swishing on the windscreen. They drove over the railway line and on through the industrial district, Andreas Bark giving directions.

Suddenly he announced, out of the blue, Robert thought, that he had just had a première in Malmö. He was a playwright. Aha… Did he write in other genres as well? You had to ask about something. He had once written poetry. But that was long ago, he went on with a pawky grin. What was it about, his play? Oh, God, that was always hard to describe. The playwright smiled, and the smile seemed both shy and coy. That was why you wrote, wasn’t it? To find out why. If Robert understood. He didn’t, but he kept that to himself.

The tarmac shone as it ribboned through the black fields, and the ploughed furrows followed the gradual rise of the road towards the ridge ahead, where a brown-painted transformer station was outlined against the grey watercolour shades of the clouds. But now it was finished, anyway. So he must have some ideas about it, at least. Andreas paid no heed to Robert’s teasing tone, or he had not caught on to it. It was a psychological play. That is, not psychological in the traditional, psychoanalytical sense. It was rather, what should he say… existential. A sharp smell of liquid manure wafted into the car. Andreas closed his window and stubbed out his cigarette.

You could say it was about evil, he went on. Now there was no stopping him. On the cannibalism of emotions, on the repressed darkness, what was mute and unadjusted in us, beyond the social and linguistic order. When all was said and done, like all stories, it was probably about death. He fell silent, almost exhausted, thought Robert. Like someone bidding at an auction who at length realises he isn’t in a position to bid any higher. Then there was nothing but the sound of the screen wipers and the rain on the roof, while the farms and fields streamed past surrounded by trees, like islands in a black sea of earth with their grain silos and white-washed barns.

They turned off down a narrow gravel road leading towards the woods. A horse raised its head and watched them through the rain, its wet mane sticking to its neck. Robert glanced at the clock beside the speedometer. He had to be at the station in half an hour. It was tea-time. The nurse would give her a straw, and when she had gone away the playwright’s wife would lie motionless in her darkness, listening to the rain on the aluminium blinds at the window. The same rain that was falling on her home.

It was an old farm labourer’s house in red brick. Its thatched roof had been replaced with asbestos roofing. A clutter of toys was scattered around the courtyard and a tricycle lay on its side near a cement mixer and a pile of sacks covered with plastic. The woods lay close to the other side of the house, the wind rampaged in the sodden beech leaves. He helped Andreas in with his shopping. The kitchen and living room were painted white and could just as well have been part of a fashionable town apartment, with Italian furniture, art posters on the walls and rows of cast-iron pans.

On the kitchen wall hung a sheet of brushed steel with magnets from which hung shopping lists, recipes from magazines and a few photographs. It must be her, the auburn-haired woman with high cheekbones, pictured in several of them. Would he like a glass of red wine? He looked at his watch. Yes, please, just a quick one. Andreas sat down facing him under the notice-board and poured two glasses. They had finished furnishing the house a month ago. Andreas stopped talking and looked at the boy, he lay on the floor playing with Lego. Then he met Robert’s eyes and smiled tentatively. A vase of dead tulips stood on the windowsill gaping at the pane, several dry withered petals had dropped.

The house had been a ruin when they moved in. They had done most of the work themselves, they had really slogged at it. And now… He didn’t know. It was all so new. Robert said something about rehabilitation, where and how, shifting his gaze from Andreas to the notice-board behind him. Most of the photos had been taken around the house, which appeared at various stages of refurbishment. A sun-tanned Andreas mixing cement, in a mason’s cap with a bare torso. Lucca painting window frames, in overalls, her hair tied carelessly at her neck and splotches of paint on her cheeks. In another picture she was in a light summer dress with the low sun behind her, giving Lauritz a swing, the boy hung horizontally in the air and her skirt flew out like a pale flower of folds around her long legs.

He kept on asking himself if she did it intentionally… Andreas observed him in the pause that followed, wondering if he had gone too far. There was a picture of Paris as well. Robert recognised the red awning above the café table and the peeling trunks of the plane trees in the background. He said he had asked himself the same thing. She was pale and dressed in a tailored grey jacket, with a petrol-blue silk scarf round her neck. Her hair was tied in a pony tail and she wore lipstick. Had she threatened to do it? The colour film enhanced the red that framed the narrow dark slit of her mouth, as if she was about to say something. No, not exactly threatened. She was looking into the camera with her green eyes. Robert told him she had been offered psychiatric help several times. Had she… Andreas hesitated. Had she said anything about… them?

No, he replied. She had not confided in him, as he had said. The boy came over to Andreas, who lifted him onto his lap and kissed his hair. He sat there with his nose buried in the boy’s hair before looking up again. The terrible thing, he said, the terrible thing was that that very evening… He looked down into his glass before taking a mouthful. Robert looked at the picture of Lucca Montale in a Parisian café again. For a moment it seemed as if he met her gaze. He could not decide whether she looked surprised because she was unprepared for being photographed, or she had suddenly become aware of some connection he could know nothing about.

There was a large clock on the wall beside the notice-board. Lea’s train would arrive in ten minutes. The boy let himself slide down on the floor and ran into the living room. That very evening… Andreas went on and turned away his face. Robert stood up. The other man looked at him in confusion.

2

Lea stood on the platform beside her large bag, shivering in the cold and looking down at the shining tracks. He thought she had grown although it was only a fortnight since they had been together. Monica had bought her some new clothes. She wore a thin jacket, white jeans, white socks and white trainers. She did not see him until he was almost in front of her, then she smiled with relief and hugged him, but he could feel her disappointment at his arriving late. He carried her bag through the vestibule, feeling ashamed at the excuse he had fabricated on the spot about a queue in the supermarket. Two down-and-outs stood near the exit drinking beer. Their washed-out denim jackets were spotted with rain, one of them had the usual dog on a lead. The owner of the dog raised his glass in a friendly toast to Robert as they passed. Lea wrinkled her nose, assailed by the reek of beer and wet fur. On the way to the car she told him a friend had invited her to stay with her parents in the country during the summer holidays. He turned in his seat as he reversed out of the parking place. Lea struggled with the safety belt before getting it out to click in place. She could come and stay with him during the holidays too, he said, changing gear. But Monica had plans for them to go to Lanzarote. Wasn’t it too hot there in the summer? We’ll hit on something, she said, smiling at him in the mirror. It was a very adult remark. It sounded like something Monica might say. Lea did not really resemble either of them, apart from having his hair colour, chestnut brown. She had been utterly herself from the start, a totally complete person who had merely used them as assistants in her advent. She asked him what was for dinner. Leg of lamb, he told her and asked after Monica and Jan. They used first names, had done so since their divorce. She was to give him their regards.

He had a meal with them sometimes when he was in town, it meant something to Lea. It was surprisingly easy, all three were very civilised, but he usually left after kissing Lea goodnight. Sometimes they referred to the divorce, but always in abstract terms and without mention of the little mishap that had brought about the change, when he arrived home too early one winter Sunday. Robert wondered occasionally whether he and Monica might still have been together if he had not caught her out. If he had just left a message on the answering machine when he called home from Oslo. Then his colleague might have had time to take himself off and everything would have seemed different. Perhaps she would have grown tired of her lover, tired of all the emotional turmoil, secrecy and practical lies. To exchange one doctor for another wasn’t exactly revolutionary, anyway.

They did not seem passionately in love, she and Jan, but of course that might just be tactfulness, to make it look as if their relationship was already as much a matter of routine as his and Monica’s marriage had become. They did not even refrain from kissing each other heartily when he was there, the way married people kiss, like siblings. Perhaps it was really some kind of sophisticated consideration, thought Robert, a blind to conceal their erotic hurricanes. Unless that was how you ended up in any case, like siblings, because in the end establishing a family was like returning to the family you thought you had left.

Lea sat on the sofa watching television while he unpacked the shopping in the kitchen. As usual he had bought too many things for lunch and too many biscuits, as if the larder had to overflow with abundance when Lea was coming. He could not find the leg of lamb. He went outside again and opened the boot, but there was nothing in it except the first aid box, the jack and the spanner for changing wheels. Andreas Bark must have taken the bag with the leg of lamb when they carried his things in. He could not face driving out to the house in the woods a second time that day, and he certainly could not face the other man’s drama again.

He had forgotten to close the gate in the garden fence. Behind the wide panorama window onto the terrace he saw Lea’s turned away figure and the television screen trembling like a drop of quicksilver, floating in the semi-darkness of the living room behind the grey hatching of the rain. She was watching Flipper. As a child he had also loved the plucky dolphin’s adventures, and now the series was being repeated it was his growing daughter sitting there dreaming of Florida’s blue lagoons. It had become a classic. What a cultural inheritance! He had cautiously tried to introduce her to such varied offerings as Vivaldi’s Seasons and Debussy’s Children’s Corner, but they could not compete with the Spice Girls and Michael Jackson.

He stood there in the rain for a few moments reminiscing over the graceful dolphin and the sun-tanned, well-organised family it had rescued from so many criminal plots against their sun-warmed happiness. The bright technicolour of the films had faded with the years, and the whole thing seemed pretty naïve, but he clearly remembered how he had meditated over the wise playful dolphin Saturday after Saturday. Its feats of grace when it reared and turned somersaults over the coral-blue water expressed pure unsullied joy. Neither more nor less exhilarating and jubilant than Vivaldi’s trilling, violin-shimmering springtime.

He cooked the burgers they were to have had the next day. They would have to go and get a pizza when that time came. Lea was still watching television. He would really have liked to have her help in the kitchen. She did that sometimes, it was a pleasant way of spending time together, but there was something about her motionless and almost melancholy concentration that made him leave her alone. Perhaps she was tired.

She did not have much to say over dinner. If it stayed fine, he said, they could make a start on the kitchen garden, and he reeled off the list of seeds he had bought, but she didn’t seem particularly keen on going out to dig. Last time she had been enthusiastic, it had actually been her idea. He asked her about school and what she had been doing since last time and she responded, slightly dutifully, he felt, but she did not volunteer anything herself. She had begun to go riding and almost made a little story out of her account of how a young horse had thrown off one of her friends, but the girl had not been hurt, and since then her horse had behaved perfectly. She ate nicely, that was something Monica considered important. Yes, she loved the roller skates, they were ace.

He couldn’t help smiling at the word. It was like seeing her in nylon stockings for the first time when six months ago she had played the princess in the school play, with mascara on her eyes, dark red lips and a beauty spot on her cheek, when he didn’t quite know what to think. And the trip to Lanzarote? Monica had said something about the beginning of July and when she came home, there was her friend with the summer cottage. He did not want to dig away at the subject too much, but he felt a stab of sadness at the prospect of not seeing her during the holidays. Or was it just as much the thought that Monica and Jan would have a monopoly on her? He asked if she would like some dessert, he had bought ice-cream and made a fruit salad. She chose the fruit salad. He wondered whether it was out of politeness, because he had taken the trouble.

She seemed sad, but perhaps he was merely over-interpreting her recurring silence and withdrawn expression. He was always afraid of being inattentive. After a while, as she sat pushing the last slice of banana around her plate with her spoon, he asked if anything was worrying her. She avoided his eye. No, nothing. He gently stroked the back of her hand with his index finger. Anything at school? At home?

She left his hand there, stroking cautiously. She looked away, into the twilight of the garden. Then she said it had stopped raining. She was right, the swishing of the rain had ceased and the evening sky brightened behind the silhouetted birches, a soft yellow under the hurrying frayed blue clouds. She helped him clear away and fill the dishwasher. He asked if she would like a game of table tennis. She looked at him for a moment. Okay, she said, smiling, and the smile seemed genuine. They played for twenty minutes, she was tough, he started sweating, out of breath. It was silly to play straight after dinner, but she seemed to enjoy it and he liked to watch her quick, lithe movements.

Afterwards he made himself some coffee. They sat down to watch television. She leaned against him on the sofa as usual, covered with the rug. Neither said anything much, again her gaze was distant and abstracted. Now and then he raised some subject or other in an attempt to get a proper conversation going, but she just responded with brief comments as if to get it over with, apparently absorbed in what was happening on the screen. After she had gone to bed he poured himself a whisky and listened to one of Bach’s cello suites in an old recording by Pablo Casals. He regretted being so direct in his questions over dinner. The old music wove its logical web around him and he followed every one of the crisp trembling threads in anticipation of their nodal point until he felt he was the spider.

When he went into the bathroom in the morning she had carefully hung her wet bath towel to dry on the bar above the heater. She was nowhere to be seen. She had made her bed as neatly as a housemaid would do. When they lived together she had always left towels crumpled up in a corner of the tiled floor, and her room looked as if it had suffered an earthquake, but of course she was older now. She was out in the garden with her fingers dug into the front pockets of her tight jeans, her face lifted to the trees. He couldn’t see what she had caught sight of. A bird, maybe, or a cloud. He went into the kitchen to make coffee. When she came in by the scullery door soon afterwards she wiped her feet on the door mat as thoroughly as a guest.

It had cleared up during the night, the sun was drying the grass, and if not for the wind, it would almost have been warm. She spent the morning in the kitchen at her homework. He asked if there was anything he could help with. She looked up and smiled, there was nothing. After breakfast he took the new tools and the basket of seeds out to the small corner of the garden he had pegged off in a rectangle. To begin with she sat beside him watching him dig, absently plucking small handfuls of grass and dropping them again. He grew red in the face from slaving away bent over, and began to feel foolish. He certainly wasn’t a gardener.

Then she got bored with just sitting there and soon she was digging beside him until the sweat trickled down her forehead. She enjoyed it and made a mock grimace of disgust when she cut a worm in half and saw the two pink pieces wriggle off in different directions. He found an animal’s skull, and they squatted down with their heads together as he brushed earth from the domed periosteum. They could not agree on the kind of animal it belonged to. A weasel, she said. He thought it might be a badger. She gave his shoulder a friendly shove. How stupid he was! He carried the skull carefully indoors on his outstretched palm, and they found a little box which she filled with cotton wool, so she could take it to school. And get the matter settled, as she said with a pedantic air which made him smile.

When they went into the garden again they found Andreas and Lauritz on the lawn. Andreas held out a supermarket bag and smiled apologetically, either because he had called unannounced or because he had taken Robert’s leg of lamb. He had looked up the address in the directory, he explained, as if to account for his unexpected appearance. Lea looked expectantly from one to the other, Lauritz hid behind his father’s legs.

Robert felt obliged to show some hospitality. He suggested a beer. Andreas didn’t need a glass, thanks. The children had orange juice. They sat in the sun on the terrace, conversation hung fire. When Andreas leaned his head back to drink from the bottle Robert imagined he was taking in the whole property and the surrounding hedges and fence dividing it from the other houses and gardens. He who lived a free life in the woods, in his leather jacket, riding a rusty lady’s bicycle, dramatist and pioneer in one and the same person. It must be good to live in a house like this, where everything worked. Yes, it was actually. Robert picked up the signal behind the smooth reply. The other man persisted. Did it have a sauna as well? No, replied Robert, looking down at his tennis shirt with the crocodile. There was in fact neither sauna nor jacuzzi, and he didn’t have a parabolic reflector, either. Lea giggled and Andreas smiled fatuously. Robert loved her for that giggle.

Lea took the boy’s hand to show him round the garden, and he went along with her trustfully. She seemed very grown-up as she entertained the child and encouraged him to work the newly dug soil with a hoe, taking care he did not hurt himself. She talked to the boy in a cheerful friendly voice, kneeled beside him to be at eye level, watching him and sometimes smiling as he made faces and clumsy movements. She had pulled her hair off her face and tied it in a pony tail. Now and again she brushed aside a lock from her cheek and pushed it behind her ear with a feminine gesture.

What a pretty daughter he had. Yes, said Robert. Andreas picked at the label of his beer bottle. Robert must excuse him for being a nuisance the day before, but he had no-one to talk to, not here, and it was all… he sighed. Robert waited. Lea made the boy chuckle down at the end of the garden. The whole thing was such a mess… how could he put it? That was what he had been about to tell Robert yesterday, when Robert had to go. The night Lucca crashed he had told her he wanted a divorce.

The shadows were lengthening. Lauritz came running over the grass. Andreas rose to his feet, lifted him up and swung him round in the air, as Robert had seen Lucca doing in the photograph in their kitchen. Lea went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. How about asking them to stay for dinner? She smiled at him, her head on one side, as if she were his little wife. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? She would help with the cooking. They could go on with the digging tomorrow. Andreas sounded surprised at Robert’s suggestion. Now they had cycled all this way! But they didn’t have to urge him, and he insisted on taking over the cooking. Inside he looked around at the design furniture and the prints on the walls and said admiringly what a lovely house it was. It was very Scandinavian and timeless, and the projectile-shaped Italian furniture in the farm labourer’s house in the woods crossed Robert’s mind. In the other’s eyes he was obviously a true suburbanite.

Andreas turned out to be a practised cook, and he set Lea to preparing the vegetables while he stuffed the joint with garlic. There was nothing left for Robert to do, and suddenly the kitchen, where he usually ate alone, seemed small. Lauritz sat at the table drawing round-faced moon-men with shaven heads and matchstick bodies and he walked to and fro, poured out red wine, put some olives in a bowl to nibble and played extracts from Italian operas for them. Andreas sang along to several of the arias from Cavalleria Rusticana, wrinkling his eyebrows and shooting lightning glances that made Lea double up with laughter. Robert had to admit to himself it made him jealous, in the midst of his astonishment over Andreas’s familiarity with Italian bel canto. With his untrimmed bristly hair, black T-shirt and unshaven charm he looked more like a bebop fan. Robert felt he had been invaded, but most of all he wondered at the easy, almost light-hearted atmosphere his guest had suddenly generated so soon after he had come out with his guilty revelation.

In the midst of it all the telephone rang. It was Jacob. Robert asked him to hold on and went into the living room, turned down the music and picked up the receiver. He could hear them chatting in the kitchen and called out to Lea to put the phone down. Had he got visitors? Robert said some friends had called. It sounded authentic, he thought, yet awkward, somehow defensive. He hardly ever had guests. Jacob was disappointed, he could hear. He was going to ask them over. It was about time he introduced them to his daughter. Robert said it would have to be another time, and felt pleased Andreas and Lauritz had turned up. Jacob asked if he would like to play tennis on Monday. There was something he wanted to talk to Robert about. What? Jacob lowered his voice, he would rather not mention it on the phone. Robert said Monday would be fine.

They laid dinner on the pingpong table, it was Andreas’s idea. There wasn’t enough room at the small kitchen one. They sat around one half of the table and while Lauritz dropped the contents of his plate into his lap with methodical concentration, Lea asked his father how you could become an actor. Obviously the role of princess in the school play had put ideas into her head. Andreas answered her naïve questions patiently and she listened with a grown-up smile and a hand under her chin, holding the stem of her wine glass of coke. After dinner she tried to teach Lauritz to play table tennis. She stood him on a chair and didn’t give up until to his own surprise he managed to serve.

Lauritz fell asleep on the sofa. Lea served coffee like a real housewife. It was too weak, but Robert didn’t mention that. She listened while Andreas talked about Italy. He and Lucca had lived in Rome before Lauritz was born. He spoke of her as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t practically driven herself into death one night the previous week because he had told her he wanted a divorce. They had had a little flat in Trastevere, and Lea swallowed his anecdotes about the quaint inhabitants of the working-class district who shuffled out shopping in slippers and dressing gown, about the winding alleyways with peeling walls and washing lines, about the baker’s wife with her moustache and the blacksmith’s chickens. Yes, chickens… imagine, in the middle of Rome! Robert thought it all sounded rather too authentic. Lea said Lucca was an odd name. Andreas explained that really Lucca was a boy’s name. Her parents had been sure she would be a boy. But they had hung onto the name. Her father was Italian, she was named after the town in Tuscany where he was born. Lea thought it sounded beautiful and looked at Robert.

She began to yawn and reluctantly gave way to sleepiness. She kissed Robert on the cheek when she said goodnight, hesitated a bit and then gave their guest a kiss too. For a while the two men sat in silence over their coffee cups and Calvados. The easiness had disappeared with Lea. They could hear her gargling as she cleaned her teeth and soon afterwards the sound of her door being quietly closed. Lauritz turned over in his sleep, Robert put the rug over him. Again he felt surprised at how his guest could change expression from one moment to the next. Andreas lit a cigarette and flopped onto the sofa, blowing out smoke. The corners of his mouth drooped, a lock of hair fell over one eye and he fixed his vacant gaze on a point on the carpet beneath the sofa table.

Obviously, he said, he felt guilty, but… he was not to know she would… it couldn’t have come as a complete surprise to her. Just after he’d said it he thought she had taken it with a strange composure. They were still at the table after dinner. Lauritz had been put to bed. To start with it seemed they would be able to talk sensibly about it. It wasn’t hard for Robert to visualise, he had sat in the same kitchen, at the same table, and now he knew what she looked like. She had asked if there was someone else. He sighed deeply. He had said no…

Might he have another Calvados? Robert made a gesture. Andreas poured for both of them. Up to now everything had been so banal, the marital scene one night in the house beside the woods and the unfaithful husband sitting here on his sofa marinating his guilt in Calvados. He was not in the least sorry for him, though the banality of the other man’s story made Robert despise him. He was just so tired suddenly. Andreas downed the contents of his glass in one gulp and looked at him through the billowing veil of smoke from his cigarette. He leaned his sorrowful face on one hand so his cheek half closed one eye and made him look like a grieving Caucasian. What sort of seductive silhouette was dancing behind his despondent gaze? Was she playing a tambourine?

He had attended the rehearsals of his play in Malmö. The set designer was ten years younger than him, from Stockholm, one of the new bright sparks. Much was expected of her. Andreas cast a glance out of the panorama window to the sheer deep-blue patch of sky over the dark outline of the treetops. He would never have believed it would happen to him again. He had thought he was too old to fall in love. He looked down at his empty glass. He had not slept with anyone else since meeting Lucca, although there had been plenty of chances. In his world… he smiled and looked at Robert again. Yes, people were always hopping into bed. But it was probably the same in hospital, too? Robert shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

Ironically enough they had met each other in much the same way, he and Lucca. She was an actor. At the time she had been with a director, much older than herself. He had been to visit them at the director’s house in Spain. The old guy was going to put on a play of his, he was a big shot, it was an honour. And then suddenly she had been there, Lucca, and everything had become alarmingly complicated.

His eyes sought Robert’s. Everything had gone so fast, and in a flash she was pregnant. He lit a fresh cigarette and picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. When he had jumped into it he hadn’t dared to confront his doubts at first. Lucca just had to be the one, and so she was, at least for a time. As soon as they got to Rome they spoke of finding a house in the country. But how could he put it? It wasn’t just the routine, the inevitable jogging along when you had a child. It was something else, something deeper. A lack he could not explain and so had been able to ignore for long periods at a time.

He felt he could not share his innermost self with Lucca. She didn’t understand him, so she did not know how to bring out those depths in him he could hardly explain. He flung out his hand and almost upset the bottle. Robert threw a glance at the sleeping boy, covered by the blanket, the table tennis ball clutched in his small hand. Lucca had turned her back on the theatre after she had Lauritz, completely absorbed in the child and in building up their home with a trowel and great expectations. But what use was that, when she wasn’t… their mutual attraction had been mainly physical. Bed had always been good, as a woman she was very… well… he inhaled and blew out the smoke with a deep sigh. But there was something lacking.

That was when Malmö came into the picture. It wasn’t just a question of erotic fascination. Although she was very beautiful, he emphasised in passing. Her parents were Polish Jews, and she had that special blend of inky black hair, very white skin and ice-blue eyes. Robert couldn’t help smiling. Gypsy or Jewess, it came to the same thing, a tambourine would be almost superfluous. But there was something else that made a difference, something more… Andreas did not know how to describe what it was she did to him, the Jewish production designer. It was as if she touched on something inside him, deep inside. As if she made some string vibrate, a string he didn’t know he possessed. And each time he took the last hovercraft from Sweden he could feel his life’s centre of gravity had moved so that he left it behind when he travelled home to Copenhagen through the night.

He hadn’t even been to bed with her, in a way that was crazy, but it did convince him there was something different and more serious afoot. After the première she had gone back to Stockholm. He had called her on the quiet and they wrote to each other, he hadn’t written that sort of letter for years. Several weeks had gone by like that. He had been on the verge of collapse, surrounded by bags of cement and ploughed fields and Lucca’s anxious, searching eyes. Luckily he had planned a month’s stay in Paris to work. She must have noticed there was something wrong, but she did not question him, neither then nor when she went to stay with him for a few days. And finally he had made up his mind. He had just come back from Paris on the night he told her. He stopped talking and poured himself another Calvados, this time he forgot Robert. The production designer knew nothing about his decision. He leaned back his head and drank. He had wanted to make a clean sweep first, he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. And now… now he didn’t know what to do.

Robert needed a pee. It wasn’t because he did not want to listen, he said, going out to the bathroom. After he had flushed the pan and washed his hands he stood at the basin sceptically observing his own reflection. Why had he allowed this strange man to invade him, ingratiate himself with his daughter and keep him up late while he drank him out of the house? What were Andreas Bark’s romantic chaos and pathetic attempts to justify himself to do with him? He felt like having a cold beer, but let it pass. If they started drinking beer he would never get rid of him.

When he went back to the living room Andreas had put on his leather jacket. He kneeled down in front of Lauritz, who sat sleepily with his bicycle helmet over his eyes as his father tried to get his feet into his shoes. Robert asked several times if he should drive them home. On no account! Besides, it was fine now, Andreas smiled, the moon would light their way. Robert grew quite alarmed at the idea and told him to ride carefully, almost fussing over them. They went outside. The moon was full. He stood looking at Andreas’s silhouette as he bent over his bicycle. The playwright wobbled slightly as he disappeared into the shadows under the trees, until only his rear light could be seen. After a few moments he reappeared, still smaller on the silvery grey asphalt between the blacked-out houses.

3

As the train started to move he took a few steps alongside, continuing to wave to Lea through her window. Then she slid away from him, smiling and waving, and her face faded from his sight behind the reflection of the pale evening sky in the glass. He stood there under the station roof watching the train grow smaller and vanish at the end of the track, where the rails met, shining in the dusk. Everything around him seemed to stiffen. The nettles on the other side of the rails swayed slightly in the wind, but their rooted movement only emphasised all the surrounding immobility, the rusty goods wagons with unintelligible numbers and lettering in white, the empty platforms with their islands of bluish neon lights and advertisements for chocolate and life insurance picturing pretty women and resolute men. He walked back into the station, it was like a sleeping castle with its superfluous ornamentation and shining clock face beneath the comical spire on the roof ridge.

The station forecourt was deserted, but there were lights behind the windows of the red-brick apartment blocks dating from the early twentieth century, disappointingly uniform with their ground floors clad in sandstone or cement. A dairy had been replaced by a driving school, and in one corner there was a radio and television shop. The screens in the display window showed identical football players running around. The colours of the grass and the shirts varied slightly from screen to screen, and here and there he saw the blue light of other television screens behind the net curtains and tropical house plants with leathery leaves. The blue spots of light in the windows flickered in time with each other, according to who had the ball.

Maybe he had given in too quickly, too easily. He probably ought to have fought, tried to win Monica back, but he could not help smiling at the idea. He did not really believe you could bend others to your will once they had decided to love a new face or die behind the wheel, crushed beneath a Dutch truck. Moreover he would not have had the genuinely passionate conviction necessary to convince another person. His life had become simpler now he no longer had anyone to remind about unfinished business, and he had actually felt relieved when he left it behind him, all that bartering with meaningful caresses and vague promises. Nevertheless when he saw Lea in the train window, waving and smiling her all too brave, twelve-year-old smile, something seemed to wring his heart, an angry ownerless hand with white knuckles.

When he got home he made an omelette and ate it in the kitchen as usual. Afterwards he stretched out on the sofa and listened to the famous recording of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphoses by Karajan and the Berliners. He closed his eyes and let the wide, vast expanses of the strings overwhelm him as they displaced each other in soft avalanches, brooding and impenetrable like layers of earth and darkness. He felt something hard against his back and felt for it with his hand. It was the table tennis ball Lauritz had been squeezing when he fell asleep there the night before. He went over and switched off the music, then opened the sliding door to the terrace. He sat down on the doorstep with a cigarette. It was chilly, but he stayed there.

They had slept late, he and Lea. In the afternoon they drove out to the beach as usual. She gathered seagull feathers, a whole bunch, and he pulled out his pen-knife and showed her how to cut the ends, on a slant, with a vertical slit from the point, so she could use them as quill pens. She was more talkative than the previous day, the unexpected guests had obviously cheered her up. She spoke of being an actor, and he encouraged her. She had done well as the princess. The sun shone, and although it was still windy the sand was warm to sit on. Lea collected bundles of dried seaweed and snapped the bubbles between her fingers. There was an offshore wind, and the calm surface of the sea sparkled where the little waves swelled up, at first as long lines that slowly grew bigger until they broke into a small comb of foam which made trickling tracks through the pebbles on the shoreline.

How long had he been friends with Andreas? She liked him, and Lauritz was sweet. Robert smiled and watched a gull swooping past. Suddenly it started to flap its wings and the movement was reflected as a white flicker on the water. Not very long… Were they separated, Andreas and the woman with the strange name? She asked the question lightly, casually. The parents of half her friends were divorced, that was how it was, and the children adapted themselves. Yes, he said.

They had told her one morning, he and Monica, while they were still in the kitchen over breakfast and the sheaves of Sunday papers. She had merely looked at them, first at one, then the other, before going into her room and closing the door. When he went in she was sitting on her bed drawing on the back of her hand with a felt pen. Sometimes she and her friends drew on each other’s arms, but she was not drawing a flower, it was nothing, a growing, ever more complicated morass of turbulent lines crossing each other on her narrow hand. He sat down beside her and put his arm around her. She leaned away from him, looking down at the colourful duvet cover with an African pattern. He put his arm around her and sat there for a little while, trying to talk to her. Of course they both loved her. He looked at her, turned towards the stuffed animals leaning affectionately against each other. Both of them were still there. They just wouldn’t be together. She asked him to go.

Suddenly they had stopped quarrelling or just snarling at each other, he and Monica. By catching her in the act he had unintentionally and at one blow made every quarrel superfluous. After her new man had sent him the nod of a colleague as he passed the kitchen door and gently closed the front door with a cautious little click, everything between them had been fittingly businesslike. She had slept on the sofa in the living room until she moved. She even took charge of all the paperwork. There was clearly not a lot to discuss, and they both showed goodwill in getting it over as painlessly as possible. For Lea’s sake, as they said, almost conspiratorially, as if they suddenly had something in common.

He had had no suspicions, having assumed ups and downs were normal after ten years of marriage. He had not noticed that the downs had grown longer and longer, until everyday life was a treacherously calm sea in which shark fins shot up when you least expected them. An innocent exchange about cooking the dinner could suddenly end up in hair-raising accusations, and small oversights or chance errors mounted up like evidence in a long drawn-out trial before an imaginary judge. But who should condemn one and acquit the other? Crestfallen, they went back for a while to the everyday rhythm of trivialities until one of them again succumbed to accumulated boredom or despair and struck sparks at the slightest touch.

Afterwards he realised that her hypochondria and irritable outbursts had been a cover for her battered conscience, and he felt sorry for her with a backlash of sympathy. It must have been a nightmare, what for him was merely the numbed monotony of an extinguished cohabitation. When everything had fallen into place and they had adapted to their new reality, he was on the verge of telling her she had not needed to almost tear herself apart with tortures of conscience. He had had a secret as well, but that was an old story, and as he had never told her about it why do so now, when it could not possibly do anything to change things?

They went further along the beach towards the point. The wind sent fugitive cat’s paws over the water. Lea took his hand as they walked, chatting at random. He felt wistful to think they had only now become close, a few hours before she would have to take the train home. For that had become home, the house Jan and Monica had bought, a bit flashy, Robert thought, out in one of the northern suburbs. With him she was only visiting. She said they should do more about that kitchen garden next time, they might plant an apple tree too, looking at him with a smile as if she could read his thoughts.

At the end, where the beach melted into an isthmus and lakes, he saw two figures approaching. A swarm of birds rose from the rushes and turned in the air, the flock spread out. When they came closer he recognised the librarian. She was with a man who looked younger, wearing a baseball cap. She had an old sweater on, and carried her shoes, walking with bare feet at the edge of the sea. She had nice legs. He recalled them beside him on the sofa, in black stockings. It had been completely up to him. He looked at Lea when they passed each other with a brief, formal smile and conventional nods on both parts. Lea asked who she was. Someone from the town, he replied.

When Robert arrived at work on Monday morning, the sister told him that Lucca Montale had suffered another breakdown during Saturday night. They had given her the same sedative as the first time. Robert recalled how Andreas had sat on his sofa interspersing one Calvados after another into the tale of his unfaithfulness. On Sunday she had complained of pain and asked for more Ketogan, but the doctor on duty had refused to increase the dose. She lay in the same position as usual when he visited her, legs raised in the air, shrouded in plaster and bandages. The lower part of her face was still disfigured by swelling and effusions of dark blood. He asked if she was in pain. Yes, she replied dully. He heard she had been distressed during the weekend. Distressed… that was some understatement. He didn’t understand shit, was her scornful response.

As he lingered at the foot of the bed studying her battered face, he felt a twinge of guilt over the scraps of knowledge about her life he had unwillingly been made privy to. She was even more distressed than he’d thought, but he had no way of helping her. He sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed and asked if she was sure she did not need to talk to someone. She would have to accept her situation, he said, before she could make any headway. The words sounded meaningless. Make headway. He increased her daily dose of Ketogan as much as he felt was safe. The nurse sent him a brief sceptical glance as she noted it down. As he walked towards the door Lucca turned her face towards him. Thank you, she said. He hurried out.

Later in the day he was surprised not to see Andreas sitting in the foyer smoking his strong cigarettes as he usually did every day when Lauritz was visiting his mother. He asked the sister if she had seen anything of them. She had not, and the patient had asked for her son several times. When Robert was leaving later that afternoon they had still not turned up. He had an hour to spare before his tennis appointment with Jacob and didn’t know what to do with himself. He drove out of town past the industrial district until he reached the gravel road where he had turned off the last time. The horse was grazing in the same place, the sunlight shone on its flank as it raised its head to look at him. He went on to the edge of the woods and parked in front of the house.

There were no toys in the yard and the cement mixer had gone, but the old bicycle with the child’s seat was leaning against the house wall. He knocked several times. While he waited he caught sight of the electricity meter fixed into the wall beside the front door. The hand on the dial was not moving. He went over to the window and shaded it with his hand as he looked in. The kitchen was tidy, a shaft of sunlight shone on the floorboards and the table. The door of the fridge was wide open, the disconnected flex snaked across the floor in the sun, and the shelves were bare.

It had grown warmer, the sunlight sparkled in the green mesh of the net and made the air over the red gravel quiver. After their game Robert and Jacob sat getting their breath back on a bench by the wire fence that separated the tennis courts. Jacob gave him a chummy nudge, he must do something about his backhand. Robert just smiled and screwed up his eyes against the strong light. From behind came the repeated clunk, now to left, now to right, of ball against racket, followed by duller thumps when a ball struck the gravel. Play was in progress on several courts at once so the sounds came unevenly and only sometimes fell into a syncopated sequence that was at once broken again.

What was it then? Jacob looked at him, bewildered. What were they going to talk about? Oh, yes… He sat scratching the gravel with his racket for a few moments. It wasn’t so easy. But he felt sure he could rely on it not going any further. Of course he could. He smiled shyly, he envied Robert sometimes. What for? Jacob looked at him. Well, he had his freedom. Oh, that. Robert leaned back against the fence and stretched out his legs. Jacob bent over and looked at his racket. It was different when you had a wife and child, it was a bit… well, he knew all about that. Robert smiled. Was it someone he knew? Jacob looked scared, as if Robert had suddenly shown he was clairvoyant. She was his eldest child’s gym teacher.

Robert was reminded of the young man in the baseball cap walking at the edge of the sea beside the librarian, and of the set designer in Stockholm with black hair and blue eyes who had unknowingly changed the course of Lucca Montale’s life. Everyone went around falling in love. But what then, was Jacob going to get divorced? Again the younger man gave him a startled look. He hadn’t thought of doing that. Surely it didn’t have to be either or. Besides, she was married herself, he smiled, it was a real mess. But what could he do? He was mad about her, and she… it was the same. It had been instantaneous, the moment they saw each other.

She had just started teaching at the school as stand-in for a teacher on maternity leave. He had met her at a parents’ meeting, he had gone along alone, she had a fantastic body. They had fallen on each other in the car when he drove her home. She had such boobs… Jacob gestured their size with his hands, but the word sounded unnatural, boobs, and his hands flopped down as if they were already exhausted by all the density they had tried to show. He got quite weak at the knees when he dropped the children at school. It was like being young again.

Robert looked at him. Jacob still looked very young with his fair hair and rosy cheeks. He reddened, both bashful and proud at the thought of the ungovernable and reckless passion inside him. And what he wanted to ask Robert now was whether he could take his rounds this evening. Her husband was away on a course. Robert hesitated a moment, not to tantalise the other man, rather not to disappoint him by making his willingness seem too trivial. It was no great sacrifice, he wasn’t doing anything. Jacob looked really moved. He knew he could rely on him. Robert thought of his wife, who always smiled at him with her grudging, cool eyes. What was wrong with her attractive face and well-groomed outlines? Surely only their constant availability.

It was many years since as a young doctor he had had fixed duties but, because of staff shortages, Robert and his colleagues were sometimes obliged to take a night shift. He rather liked the nocturnal silence broken by sporadic sounds, when a telephone rang or a nurse walked along the corridor in her clogs. It was a different silence from the one at home, when he had eaten and sat alone in his sitting room, and it did not make him feel isolated in the same way. Alone, yes, but not isolated. When he was on night duty he sometimes let himself imagine he was on the bridge of a great passenger liner. The gigantic oil-burning boiler in the basement was the ship’s engine room, the sleeping patients were passengers in their bunks, and the darkness outside was the darkness over an invisible sea. For some it was a journey to new adventures, for others the last voyage, but that did not alter the speed or the course of the ship.

He sat chatting to the night nurse, a slight woman in her late fifties. She talked about her son, who was travelling across the USA by car with a friend. Last time he called he had been in Las Vegas. She looked worried. She had two watches, one on each wrist. One showed what the time was in America. She had calculated how many miles her son covered every day, and synchronised the time on the American watch, at intervals putting the hour hand back one. She had never been to America, but could describe in detail what her son had experienced on his journey. As a rule he called home in the afternoon, local time, when it was night in Denmark and she was at work. He called collect. The nurse gave Robert a slightly scared look. He wouldn’t tell anyone, would he?

Robert smiled and gave her a friendly caress on the back between the prominent shoulder blades, thinking of Jacob who was no doubt in his car now, heart beating, on the way to his tryst with the gym teacher. They were often on duty together. She had lived alone since her husband died of stomach cancer ten years ago. He had been a builder, she nursed him herself for his last months. It had not been a happy marriage, but she spoke of it without bitterness, as you speak of chance misfortune. She had merely been unlucky in the great lottery. But her children were doing well, her daughter was a doctor in Greenland, and the youngest was a student at the Veterinary and Agricultural High School in Copenhagen, when he was not hurtling across the USA.

When she was young she had worked as a volunteer in a children’s clinic in the Sudan. He sometimes encouraged her to talk of her time in Africa, how she had been on the point of marrying an African when she discovered he had two wives already. She had believed she had met the real thing in the figure of a tall handsome Sudanese. Every time she told the story she smiled the same surprised, self-ironical smile, and Robert could suddenly see what she must have looked like as a young woman. A graceful, surprised young woman in the midst of black Africa. At other times she asked about Lea and gave advice on child-rearing in a slightly lecturing tone, but Robert listened without argument.

When she was called away to a patient he got out his walkman and played a tape of Haydn string quartets. He wound forward to the slow movement, misused as a national anthem long after Haydn’s death. He hummed the introductory bars, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, and smiled. Once again he had to admire the way the musicians, even as they played the first, lingering bars shrugged off the dead shell of ugly associations and liberated the music. He leaned back as Haydn whispered his civilised commentary through the earphones with the warm, crisp vibrato from instruments almost as old as the composer.

Jacob must have arrived by now. Robert pictured to himself how Jacob the naughty schoolboy with red cheeks lay in a strange house between a strange woman’s legs groping her boobs. The house would no doubt have been a family home like his own, and the woman would not have differed so much from his own well-shaped wife. A woman’s body like any other, in a bedroom probably furnished like most with pine and chipboard furniture covered with white laminate. And yet it was a drama that was nevertheless played out between them, forbidden in a completely irresistible way.

While the gym teacher spread her legs for Jacob, did he perhaps pause for a moment, on his knees as if in a sort of reverence, at the sight of her cunt. No doubt it resembled all other cunts, both the real ones and those in all the porno magazines and coloured diagrams in anatomical textbooks the world over. When he had been no more than a child Robert had felt there was something brutally prosaic about the female sexual organs compared with his vague daydreams of what awaited him when he grew up. On the other hand it was precisely their rather frightening reality that had made them so exciting to think about, the folds of the labia and their colour range of reddish brown and rose.

When he pictured Jacob gazing at the gym teacher’s cunt, lying open to him surrounded by the functional, easy-care furnishings, the organic folds of its form were as anachronistic to think of as an antique would have been, a quaint art décor casket lined with red velvet. Oddly striking in the orderly, mass-produced common sense in low-cost materials of the suburban house. If you lived the regular life of a doctor or gym teacher in a medium-sized provincial town, the female sexual orifice was the last romantic cavern, the last refuge for your debilitated imagination.

Earlier, when Robert had gone to bed with a woman for the first time, he had not only desired her body but also its strangeness. When they lay together, he and a total stranger, it seemed as he touched her that he was fumbling his way into another, different world. Or rather, he found reality at last as his hands explored the warm unknown body beside him. As if he had been living in a dream from which he had finally woken. Until it was over and he sat on the edge of the bed gazing at his affectionate unknown lover asking himself if that was all. If it was the same body he was looking at now reality had resumed a depressing likeness to itself.

In a few hours Jacob would get up and dress in the strange but not in the least exotic bedroom, before the beauty who lay regarding him tenderly, pink and sweaty. Perhaps she had been like a mystery he had tried to solve as he penetrated her, as far in as he could get. But afterwards she was again merely a gym teacher lying there with her big boobs asking when they could meet again. Perhaps Jacob was not the sort to let himself be worried by the fickleness of life, perhaps he would just lean back in his seat with a little smile, his body satisfied, and drive home to his sweet unsuspecting wife. Or would he too, like Robert, trawl through his memory to rediscover the precious reasons for his tension and dizzy expectation as he drove in the opposite direction?

You couldn’t tell, and anyway what did it matter, thought Robert, as Haydn’s emotional strings vibrated through his head. Desire was like music, just as abstract, just as meaningless and just as overwhelming. As soon as the old instruments were played again the music woke anew and made its impact on her. Far away in the darkness he could see a shining yellow ribbon which doubled up and disappeared behind the opposite wing of the hospital. It was the motorway to Copenhagen. The red and white pairs of lights passed each other along the bright curve, just as they did every night and had done on the night when Lucca Montale tried to take her life. Unless, being the worse for drink, she had merely made an error and by pure chance had gone down on to the wrong lane. In that case, where had she thought she was going? He heard the telephone through the graceful intricacies of the strings, switched off Haydn and picked up the receiver.

A woman’s voice asked in English whether he would accept the call. She had an American accent. Robert assented and a moment later he heard a young man at the other end. Robert asked where he was. Arizona. What was it like there? The young man laughed, slightly delayed by the satellite connection. What it was like? He was calling from a truck-stop. There was a petrol station and a cafeteria, and outside were tall cactus and sharp red rock formations and a long straight road. Just like a film! Robert smiled. He could hear voices in the background, sounding as if their mouths were full of potatoes. He caught sight of the slight figure of the night nurse at the end of the corridor. He held up the phone and waved at her with it. She took off her clogs and ran holding them, eager as a girl. He felt a warm sensation in his stomach. Arizona, he said, grabbing one clog as he passed her the phone.

He put it on the floor, she smiled shyly and turned her back. He went out into the foyer and sat down on the sofa Andreas used. He lit a cigarette, and as he knocked his ash into the cement bowl he caught sight of some without filters among the stubs sticking out of the sand, they had dark shreds of tobacco on the ends. Andreas had probably gone to Stockholm to start a new life since his old one was now in ruins.

He glanced at his watch, it was a quarter past two. Jacob was quite likely not going home before night duty was ended as the gym teacher’s husband had so conveniently gone on a course. Maybe they were sleeping in each other’s arms as if in a trial marriage. Maybe he lay awake, maybe she snored. But would he stay in love with the gym teacher for her boobs’ sake or out of sheer enthusiasm at the thought of starting again from the beginning? Robert pictured Jacob announcing the sad news to his wife, one evening on the terrace while the glow of the grill died down, after they had kissed the children goodnight. How he would, weighed down with guilt, but also with enjoyable reverence, bow to the laws of emotion and move from one family home to the other.

It was not very probable, though Jacob did not have the bent for drama of an Andreas, nor did Robert believe that his practical sporty wife had the imagination to drive herself to destruction on the wrong side of the Copenhagen motorway. Perhaps she too had her little secrets. Robert brushed ash from his white coat. The windows at the end of the foyer stretched from floor to ceiling, and a long way into the pallid mirror of the linoleum flooring, along the empty ranks of sofas where he dimly glimpsed his white figure and crossed legs. He could be any doctor on night duty, sitting enjoying a fag. What was that, Jacob had said? It probably didn’t have to be one thing or the other. Again he visualised one particular face. It was a long time ago.

4

They had just bought a bigger apartment, where they lived until that winter day three years later when he came home too early. It had actually been somewhat beyond their means. It was large and needed a lot of decorating, but they could not afford to get it done professionally. It was in an old property just outside the city centre, near the harbour. There was a playground in the courtyard where some space had been made. Monica took Lea for a holiday with her parents while he did the painting. He joined them at weekends. Lea was to start in the first class at school after the summer holidays. He had installed himself in what was to be her room, with her mattress, a lamp, the stereo and a selection of tapes. The furniture and crates had been packed into one of the other rooms under plastic sheeting.

Monica called him every day. She had a bad conscience about lying in the sun while he was left in town slogging away, but in fact he enjoyed being alone. Most of the neighbouring flat dwellers were out travelling, and he could play music as loudly as he liked. He forgot the time, absorbed in the monotonous work while Verdi’s Requiem blew through the empty rooms. Lying on Lea’s mattress in the evenings reading the paper he felt like a nomad who had temporarily pitched camp in a chance spot. The feeling of a state of emergency had a cheering effect on him, and there were moments when he even wished it could go on, this pause between the daily life that had been packed up, and the one that would begin when he had finished painting.

Sometimes he said jokingly to Monica that when Lea had grown up they could leave the flat to her and move into a hotel. It was an old daydream, to live in a hotel room with only the most essential possessions, ready to move at a moment’s warning, and while he was painting it was like bringing the dream to life. He ate at a restaurant every evening, alone or with a friend, and afterwards cycled through the town as he had done in student days. The nights were light, the walls and asphalt still held a little of the sun’s warmth, and he sat in pavement cafés observing the passers-by, sunburned and lightly dressed, as if in a southern city.

One night, with one of his old student friends, he strayed into a discotheque. It was a long time since he had been in such a place, the music had changed, now it was even more fatuous and deafening, he thought. The girls wore the same kind of clothes as the big girls had at the beginning of the Seventies when he himself was still an adolescent schoolboy. Those fashions had become smart again but that only made him feel still more out of place. A new generation had taken over the town and he enjoyed standing at the bar wistfully thinking of the time he had lurched around himself with some unknown beauty, sweating and tipsy in the flickering lights, to Fleetwood Mac or The Eagles. He smiled, ‘Hotel California’, it was there, in the stupefied and weightless morning hours, that he had fantasised about moving in some day.

When the girls looked at him he could feel that in their eyes he was an oldish, slightly foozling guy on the wrong track. They were just as unapproachable and insecure, just as ingenuous and at the same time imperious as pretty girls always had been. They only had their dreams, their bright faces and their young bodies, but as long as the music played the lack of qualifications was a strength rather than a weakness. He threw them silent glances as he sat over his beer and soothed himself by thinking that luckily he no longer had anything to prove. He had never been unfaithful to Monica, the very thought seemed absurd.

He got together with her in his late twenties, while they were students. Up to then he had had four, perhaps five girlfriends, according to how strictly you interpret that definition, and apart from those there had been a handful of other episodes with no after-effects whatsoever. He could barely remember their names or distinguish one face from another. He had been shy when young, he had found it difficult to play the game, and he found it particularly hard to talk to completely strange girls when it was abundantly clear, at least to himself, that a conversation was the last thing he was trying to instigate. So he was all the more astonished when one of them offered her favours just like that and the Devil suddenly grabbed him as if he had never before done anything other than putting ladies down on their backs.

When he and Monica became an item they had already known each other for some years. They had been in the same circle of friends, and had themselves become friends, neither had believed they would ever be anything else. Maybe it was the reticent attitude in both that made them feel good in each other’s company and at the same time stopped them falling in love. But it was also the dry sense of humour they shared. They were known as the ironic observers in the group, amusing themselves over the excesses of the others. Otherwise they were very different, Robert with his modesty and his eccentric penchant for classical music, Monica with her cool, sharp-edged manner and tough way of expressing things, with no mollifying circumlocutions.

Her contours were so clear and sharp that she was almost mysterious. In a discussion her arguments were as penetrating as chain-saws, she swam like a fish and at tennis served harder than the most formidable guys. No-one had ever seen her dance and she always went to parties or dinners alone. She left alone too, and rumour had it that she might be lesbian. She never used make-up and dressed like a boy in jeans and roll necks all the year round, but she was actually rather good-looking. She was blonde and her profile was almost classical with a prominent nose and small, square jaw. It just didn’t occur to anyone to notice she was rather beautiful. You didn’t think that far because her energetic, masculine movements and challenging grey-blue eyes stopped you observing her in peace.

Robert had been afraid of her until he discovered he could make her laugh. Since then they had been inseparable at parties in summer villas in the north of Sealand, late into the night when people began to filter in pairs into bedrooms or down on the beach. They were always the last ones to sit over the half-empty bottles and flickering garden lights, but they both brought such consideration or animation to their repartee that the idea of so much as touching each other would have seemed plain comic. Even though several people had in fact asked him whether anything was brewing. He himself didn’t give it a thought.

At that time he was in a relationship with an architecture student who always dressed in black with make-up pale as a doll and blood-red lips. He never found out whether they were really a couple, she was unpredictable and disliked being shown off, as she called it. She insisted on his putting her in handcuffs when they made love, he hadn’t tried that before. Otherwise she was hard to pin down, but although she was so elusive she could just as suddenly take it into her head to surrender to him. He went on putting up with her whims merely to hear her scream like a madwoman and feel her bore her long red nails into his shoulders once more when she came. He had grown dependent on her nervous, frail body and her need for ritual subjection, and when he heard the handcuffs clink around her delicate wrists he couldn’t be sure who fettered whom. As a whole he was not sure of anything where she was concerned. He suspected her of continuing to see her former lover, an architect who in the end did not have the courage to leave his wife and children, but he never managed to find out for certain before she finally vanished from his life.

That had a depressing effect on him and he did not feel inclined to join the group of friends on their annual skiing trip to France. His relationship with the temperamental slave-girl had been so intense and hectic that he never had time to ask himself whether he felt anything for her beyond a passionate and confused desire. But after she had disappeared he plunged into melancholy and suddenly felt certain that the woman with her handcuffs held something profoundly inscrutable which he had not been man enough to elicit. Besides, he couldn’t ski at all, though finally he let Monica persuade him, after he had entertained her with his disappointed ruminations, grateful to her for listening to him. She undertook to teach him and after a day or two he braved the ski lift with her. A few hours later he was in the local casualty department with a broken ankle.

Monica had thought he would learn to ski quite easily, and to begin with he thought it was just a bad conscience that made her devote so much time to him. She went skiing only in the mornings, and spent the afternoons with him at the holiday flat in the ugly concrete block where their friends slept in sleeping bags all over the place and wet ski socks steamed on every radiator. She rustled up lunches and made vin chaud, and he was surprised at her gentleness when she asked if he was in pain, or supported him when he hobbled out to the bathroom. He had noticed this gentleness when she sat beside him in hospital while his foot was put in plaster. She looked at him and smiled, and suddenly she put out a hand and stroked the hair from his forehead with a brief, easy movement.

She lit candles when it grew dark. They sat with their red wine, wrapped in blankets looking out at the snow-clad mountaintops between the concrete blocks of the skiing hotels. They talked about everything imaginable between heaven and earth, exchanged childhood memories and described the books they had read. They were not particularly profound but for once they dropped the safe ironical distance that had brought them together but held them in check. One afternoon, after a long pause during which neither had spoken, she asked if he would hate her to kiss him.

It was different, it was a world away from handcuffs and screaming and sharp red nails. The transitions were milder and less noticeable, from words to pauses, from pauses to caresses, and from their hands’ indolent playful exchanges to the first time she straddled him and sank her blushing face to his under the blanket she pulled over them like a woollen Bedouin tent, with slightly narrowed eyes and a shy smile that he hadn’t seen before.

To begin with they didn’t let on, the others were too close and it was too delicate, too new. They gave nothing away, and he marvelled at the different faces she put on, and how good she was at keeping them separate. He went on wondering about it in the years that followed. When she showed him one face, the cool and distanced one, he was all the more attracted because he thought of the other one, and when she revealed her gentle, vulnerable side to him his tenderness increased at the thought that it was a face which showed itself only secretly, under cover, like that first time under the woollen blanket in the French Alps.

One warm Saturday morning he took a train north. The compartment was full of lightly dressed children and adults looking out impatiently at the glinting water and the little white triangles of pleasure boats leaning into the wind behind all the greenery racing past the windows. Monica had the car, she was meeting him at the station. She was in shorts and a bathing suit, leaning against the bonnet, absent-mindedly rattling the car keys. When he caught sight of her he realised he had been missing her. They were used to being together, a week was a long time. She smiled grimly and sent him an ominous glance as she started the car. He had something to look forward to, her father was in top form. But her little sister was home from New York, that should ease the situation. They got on so well together, said Monica with emphasis as if she was not quite sure. Robert had only met Sonia a couple of times.

Monica’s father was a barrister, and she had inherited his hawk nose and jutting chin, although to a lesser degree. She had also inherited his cool, spiky sarcasm and a touch of his aristocratic diction. In town he always wore a grey suit and bow tie, but he was as distrait as he was elegant, and more than once he had appeared in the Supreme Court with bicycle clips on his trousers. When he was on holiday he reluctantly conformed to the rules of holiday wear and put on a pair of khaki shorts, but his white legs ended in a pair of brown leather shoes with a dazzling shine, and his shirt always looked newly ironed.

He could be extremely cantankerous and every day over lunch in the garden he made sarcastic comments on the undesirable sweetness of the herrings. Year after year they grew noticeably sweeter, as if they were turning into children’s sweets! Apart from the sweet herrings he saw communists everywhere, and the fall of the Berlin wall had not cured his phobia. On the contrary, he ceaselessly complained about the reunification of Germany and the outrageous chaos apparent in his world picture. It almost sounded as if according to his view the Iron Curtain had existed to keep out the Asiatic hordes rather than fence them in. Robert had given up arguing with him, to his obvious disappointment.

Monica’s mother was a plump but comely woman, always in pleated or tartan skirts and a silk blouse buttoned up to the neck. She was a shadow, every single movement and each word she spoke corresponded to what the barrister did or said. She put up with his malicious arrogance and choleric attacks, she anticipated his slightest wish with a sweet smile and calming, motherly tone, and her only defiance seemed to show itself in attacks of migraine that forced her to spend whole afternoons in her bedroom behind closed curtains. According to Monica she had taken her revenge by having an affair for years with a psychiatric consultant. Everyone knew about it but no one mentioned it, said Monica. A bit of a mystery, thought Robert. Surely someone must have whispered, at least. Moreover the consultant was the living image of her father, she told him, with silver-grey hair and unyielding opinions, only he wore a silk scarf round his neck instead of a bow tie.

When she heard the car in the drive Lea came running. She was only in underpants, with gawky sunburned arms and legs, and her navel protruded from her belly. She leaped into Robert’s arms, almost knocking him over. The lunch table was laid under a parasol in the garden which sloped up to an undulating terrain covered with heather and juniper bushes. They sat down, and Monica’s mother called several times in vain to the younger sister, carping and impatient, as you call to a child who will not break off her game. She did not appear until the barrister shouted her name in his deep voice with his head half-turned towards the house, bent over and expectant, with restrained irritation.

She must have been in her early twenties. When she sat down between Robert and Monica, he felt surprised they were sisters. Where Monica’s movements were angular and effective, there was something indolent about Sonia. She moved at a slower tempo and lingered over each thing she did, as if she had to ask herself what she was actually engaged in, whether it was spreading cottage cheese on crispbread or pushing her untidy hair away from her soft, heart-shaped face. Her dark hair was a mass of curls and longer than Monica’s, which was smooth and cut in a practical style. She wore a silver ring on one big toe and spoke with a slight drawl, pronouncing the s’s like a schoolgirl in a way that irritated Robert. Her long batik dress had faded in the wash and hung loosely around her. Monica never wore dresses.

She was the wild one of the family. That’s what they had called her when she was small, the little wild cat. They had been unable to control her, the barrister and his check-skirted wife, and she was sent to boarding school at fourteen. After leaving school she went to Israel, stayed in a kibbutz for six months and when she grew tired of picking oranges she went to Jerusalem where she attended dance school and fell in love with an American. She accompanied him when he flew back to New York, their relationship was probably at an end then, but to everyone’s surprise she succeeded in getting admitted to Martha Graham’s school. Her father paid up without protest. To make sure she didn’t come back, Monica had said with a smile.

After lunch she pulled her dress over her head and started to do tai chi on the lawn dressed only in pants like Lea, who watched open-mouthed. The barrister changed his brown leather shoes for a pair of chunky clogs and began weeding the rose bed, his pipe clenched energetically between his teeth. Their hostess went indoors to lie down. Robert and Monica sat in deck-chairs reading. Now and then he stole a glance at Sonia, who went through her long drawn-out movements with a self-satisfied, contemplative expression. There was something frail about her torso, out of proportion with her strong arms and muscular legs. Her breasts were small and childish, as if not fully developed, and her hips were as narrow as a boy’s.

Late in the day Robert and Monica drove down to the beach with Sonia and Lea. Sonia sat in the back playing mouse with a hand on Lea’s back, tickling her neck and under her chin. They both giggled as if they were the sisters. When Sonia tickled Lea in the side she doubled up laughing and happened to kick the driver’s seat, which was too much for Monica who asked sharply if they wanted to end up in the ditch. Robert turned round. They sat quite still in their corners peeping at each other, red in the face with suppressed laughter. Monica bit her under-lip and gazed stiffly at the road in front of her. He laid a placatory hand on her knee, she jerked it aside and he took his hand away.

She seldom mentioned Sonia. She had left home when her sister was five, but even though the little wild cat then had her parents to herself she had nourished an implacable jealousy of her sister. Once when Monica had brought a boyfriend home Sonia bit his finger so hard he had to go to casualty. At that time their father was in his mid-sixties and more remote than ever before, and their mother, who was fifteen years younger, seemed to wilt at the prospect of starting from the beginning again. She did have a life herself, as she said sometimes to her grown-up daughter. Monica asked why on earth she had had another child then, but her mother merely assumed a distant expression. It had been an accident.

Little by little Robert heard the stories of how Sonia had cut their mother’s underclothes into small pieces with the kitchen scissors, poured ink over the case documents in her father’s study and emptied a bag of sugar into the petrol tank of his new Volvo. The high point had come when at the age of fourteen she got one of the boys in her class to telephone a bomb threat to the Supreme Court one day when her father was appearing there. Monica could recall how her sister had sat, arms crossed with her eyes on the carpet while her father asked her why she hated them so much. She made no reply, but when he asked if she would rather not live with them, she had looked up and said yes.

She was taken at her word. According to her own account Monica tried to persuade their parents not to send her to boarding school. But what she had feared did happen. Sonia’s hatred towards her had just grown formidably deeper. Her silence and enforced good behaviour when she was home on a visit was worse than all her terrorist whims. It was not until Sonia was at sixth-form college that they had come to an understanding, said Monica, yet Robert sensed a lack of genuineness in Sonia’s smile when she finished her tai chi and flopped down smiling on the grass beside Monica’s deck chair. At lunch-time he had noticed her sending brief, calculating glances at her elder sister, who listened intently to her father and replied to his questions in her higher and somehow diluted version of his antiquated diction.

The sun hung low above the pine trees behind the sand dunes and the orthopaedic hospital. It was an old seaside hotel from the Twenties, and Robert only had to look at the white-washed functionalist building to hear a distant echo of sentimental saxophones. More than once Monica’s mother had described how her husband had proposed to her on the dance floor there, in his white dinner jacket. He corrected her every time, it was black, but she persisted with rare stubbornness. It was white. After all, it had been the only time anyone had actually proposed to her. The foaming crests of the waves sparkled in the low sunlight. The Sound was dark blue and melted into the misty sky behind the Swedish coast. The Kullen promontory over there was nothing but a frail grey finger pointing out into the blue. Robert held Lea’s hands, she squealed when he pulled her through the surf. The sun cast a reddish glow on Sonia’s and Monica’s bare backs as they waded out. Monica was slightly taller than her sister but he thought they resembled each other seen from behind, sway-backed and slim. They laughed as they plunged in and vanished, each in a flower of foam and bubbles, to reappear a moment later a little farther out.

Sonia came out first, she thought it was too cold. Her lips were blue and trembling, she had goose-flesh on her thighs and breasts and her dark nipples stood on end with the cold. He handed her a towel. She smiled and turned her back while she dried herself. Monica crawled along the furthest reef with long, measured strokes. Her forehead and cheeks caught the sunlight when she turned her face towards them for a moment. He told Sonia she had changed since he last saw her. She certainly hoped so. She smiled again and wound the towel around herself and sat down beside him. He looked at their fluted shadows in the sand. Lea squatted a little way off, she had made a small hill of wet sand and was decorating it with mussel shells.

He offered Sonia a cigarette, she didn’t smoke, he lit one for himself. How long was she staying? For a month, then she would go back. She talked about New York, where she shared an apartment in Little Italy with a Belgian girl. Actually there wasn’t much Italian in Little Italy, the Chinese had taken over. Really… She asked if it wasn’t a strain for Monica and him to work at the same hospital. A strain? Yes… She smiled at his uncomprehending expression. He said it was really very practical. But didn’t they get on top of each other? He waved to Lea when she raised her head and looked at them. She had a shadow of wet sand on one cheek. You don’t get much time to do that, he replied, and anyway they worked in different departments. She nodded in agreement and looked at him with feigned attention, as if she was not really listening.

He had changed as well. She dug her toes into the sand. He smiled and gazed at his cigarette. The wind lifted the flakes of ash from the glowing tip and bore them away. Maybe he was a bit fatter. She regarded him for a moment. Yes, but it suited him. He started to question her about her dancing in order to change the subject. Monica came out of the water and ran up to them, shining and wet. Sonia interrupted herself and looked at him again. Why did he ask about that? Surely it didn’t interest him. She said it with a smile, seemingly not in the least put out. Monica groaned and pushed her wet hair off her forehead with both hands. She put on his bathing robe, tied it tightly around her waist and lit a cigarette, looking out over the water. The sleeves reached down to the tips of her fingers. She jutted her jaw and blew out smoke. Beautiful she looked, with wet plastered-back hair and sparkling drops in her eyelashes around the calm grey-blue eyes.

They had dinner on the terrace facing west, where there was a view over the hills. The last rays of sun shone through the grass and the glasses of white wine on the table. It sparkled on the cutlery and the barrister’s unframed spectacles resting on the tip of his sunburned hawk nose. The talk was of weather and wine. It was South African, a bit of an experiment but there was not much choice at the local grocer’s, and it was really quite drinkable. Monica yawned discreetly and Lea rocked her chair, ignoring frequent commands to stop. Sonia showed her how to turn her napkin into a white dove and a white rabbit by turns. They all had their own silver-plated napkin rings, including Robert. The napkins were not changed for several days, this was life in the country, of course.

After the others had gone to bed Robert remained sitting outside in the dusk with his host, chiefly out of politeness. They smoked small Italian cheroots, something they had in common. How about a whisky, then? He had a quite excellent single malt, a present from a client. He went inside. A purple glow lingered in the heather and the tall grass between the silhouetted pine trees and juniper bushes. He came back with the bottle and two glasses, stooping and tanned like old leather in the blue half-light. He really liked the Sibelius symphony Robert had given him for his birthday, the sixth, wasn’t it? He sat on for a while with the cheroot between his fingers. Usually music was something that somehow passed one by with its themes and variations and whatever you call them. Robert would have to stop him if he got too muddled. But with Sibelius it was quite the opposite. Like moving around in a vast landscape. It wasn’t that anything definite happened in the music, it just happened. He shook his head. That was probably a load of drivel. Robert smiled. Not at all. But he really liked it, indeed he did.

He replenished their glasses. Good stuff, eh? Not the usual meths rubbish. They sat for a while listening to the grasshoppers and the cuckoo. A silhouette detached itself from the shadows and came closer. The lights shining out from the living room fell on Sonia’s round cheeks and pointed chin framed by her flowing hair. She had been for a walk. A little one to sleep on? She smiled indulgently. No, thanks. She turned on the threshold as she said goodnight. Robert could hear the floorboards creak and the dry sound of her bare feet on the stairs and far away a door being closed. His host sparked his lighter and sucked in his cheeks as he lit his cheroot again. Suddenly he looked very old.

Being a dancer didn’t seem a very secure occupation. He held the cheroot vertically between two fingers watching the thin whirls of smoke. But still, he was glad she had at long last found out what she wanted to do. He paused for a moment. Sonia hadn’t been easy. Robert could feel the other man looking at him in the dimness, but couldn’t see his eyes. Well, they knew each other by now, he was sure he could rely on Robert not to let it go any further. He had never told anyone about it. He threw away the cheroot stub, a little red dot among the grass blades. Sonia was not his daughter. He had discovered it when she was small and their doctor, an old friend, had done a blood test on her for some reason. He had asked his friend to make the necessary analyses, confidentially. Neither of the girls nor their mother knew anything. But the tests had confirmed an old suspicion. And he could count on his fingers.

Robert undressed without putting on the light. Lea slept on a divan placed against the opposite wall. Monica was awake when he lay down beside her. She pressed against him and kissed his neck, while her hand slid under the elastic on his underpants. They lay quite still when they heard her father’s heavy step on the stairs, like teenagers at a holiday camp, thought Robert. He felt burdened by the knowledge he had been laden with, and by having to lie here, constrained to keep it to himself. She pushed her tongue into his ear and took hold of his testicles. He really felt too tired but he knew what she was thinking. It was a week since they’d made love, and tomorrow night he would have left again. The longer their times apart were, the more important it became, as if they had something to prove. They didn’t speak of it as such, it just lay in the air, the oftener the better, and if too long a time went by he could feel her getting worried.

There was so much he understood without her needing to spell it out. A glance was enough or a pause before she started tidying the living room or putting dirty washing in the machine, too energetically. But it could also be an ironic smile in the midst of the conversation and the partying faces if they were out amongst others. He knew immediately what she was thinking. They often laughed about their almost telepathic talents when one of them said something the other had been thinking the moment before, whether it was a reaction to what was going on around them or something they had talked about several days earlier.

If their mutual wordless understanding was what bound them together, in a way they had been destined for each other long before they themselves came to see it like that, under the blanket in the Alps. The irony that for so long had prevented them from being demonstrative and restrained their potential desire from erupting was simultaneously a secret code, a portent of later intimacy. But in all their trustful security they left just as much unsaid as they had when they were slowly edging towards each other without realising it.

They knew each other so well. He knew her excitability behind the cool façade and her reluctance to be the first one to stretch out a hand in reconciliation. She knew his awkward distraction and restraint, misinterpreted by those around him as arrogance. They made allowances for each other’s foibles, outwardly they came close to being invincible, and reciprocally they made use of their knowledge to both please and punish each other. A few words about Lea needing shoes, or where you could find the best tomatoes, could cover an ocean of tenderness, and a remark that the oven needed cleaning could cause quivers of indignation over something quite different. And it was understood, the purchase of small white shoes or firm dark-red tomatoes was transformed into a loving act, and when the oven was cleansed of congealed fat, every affront was expiated.

It wasn’t necessary to say everything, he had thought, happy at understanding and being understood, but as time went on he wondered if there were certain things that just couldn’t be said. That was what he was thinking, with Monica lying at his side working away at him until he finally obeyed, almost by reflex, and began to grow hard in her practised hand. Now it was time, after a week of enforced abstinence. She sat on top of him, the bed creaked rhythmically as she started to glide up and down. Lea mumbled and turned over in her sleep, Monica stopped, giggling softly. She went on, more slowly, and the creaking sound gradually became a dry groaning each time he thrust against her cervix.

He tried to summon passion and cupped his hands under her breasts. They had started to droop a little, not much, just a little, she still had a nice body. But it seemed that she noticed his hands’ hesitancy, the restraint in their light touch, for she took hold of his wrists and forced them down on the mattress on each side of the pillow moaning and pushing harder against him. That worked, he felt the blood vessels tensing to breaking point, and a tingling and trickling from below as she whispered to him encouragingly on its stiffness and hardness. For a fraction of a second he visualised Sonia, the drops of salt water on her pimpled, erect nipples as he passed her the towel. He jerked the image away as you brutally jerk a curtain, and finally they found release, soon after each other, she whimpered as she flopped down over him and buried her face between his neck and shoulder.

She moved close to him again with her face against his chest. He kissed her forehead and his fingers ran through her hair. She whispered how good it had been. He repeated her words. She couldn’t know what he was thinking, yet he was worried she might notice. It was hot in the cramped room, he put one leg outside the duvet. Monica breathed in his face. Her breath was sweetish, a bit like hot milk. He kissed her again and turned over with his back to her. She put an arm around his stomach and pulled herself against his back. Intimacy — he thought of it again. At this moment it was no more than the feeling of being shut in together in a much too confined room. An enclosed space, he thought, in which the oxygen was gradually being used up. But that was only for now.

The next evening he and Sonia went into town together. Monica drove them to the station. He had brought the Sunday papers, but she didn’t feel like reading. He sat wondering whether the golfing consultant in psychiatry was her biological father. As if that would matter to anyone except the barrister, who had been egoistic and self-pitying enough to initiate him into his small private hell. He tried to imagine her reaction if he were to tell her. Would she break down? Would she be relieved? She, who had accustomed herself to the role of the family’s unwanted rebel. His secret knowledge increased the distance between them and strengthened his impression of sitting opposite a lonely neglected child.

They exchanged casual remarks interspersed with long pauses, looking out at the lit windows of residential suburbs, the trees bordering the paths beside the railway and the blue strip of the Sound disappearing and reappearing. The lamplight gleamed violet in the dusk and shone through the leaves of the trees. They did not know each other although she was his sister-in-law. The word seemed quite wrong, like a silly hat. She told him to feel free to read the paper if he didn’t feel like talking. He unfolded a section and read haphazardly. He couldn’t concentrate, and at one point when he looked up he found her watching him. She didn’t look away, just smiled. He looked out at the station where the train happened to have stopped and stretched to read the sign above the platform as if he just wanted to see how far they had come.

He was annoyed with himself to have thought of her when he was in bed with Monica. It had only been an image, like one of the slides that sometimes gets into the wrong order in the projector so the series of glimpses of a summer day are suddenly broken by Lea in a yellow raincoat standing with her hand stretched out as if she is pushing at the leaning tower of Pisa. You don’t know how it has got there and hurriedly switch to the next slide. Moreover, she wasn’t in the least attractive, Sonia, sitting opposite him in loose denim trousers and a sweatshirt with a hood. Again he noticed her coltish features, her habit of pulling her sleeves down over her hands and childish way of pronunciation, as if the consonants were choking her. Besides, they had nothing to talk about.

The next day it started to rain. He left the windows open and breathed in the scent of fresh leaves and wet asphalt that blended into the smell of paint, with La Traviata echoing through the empty rooms of the apartment. When he thought about Monica it was not their routine intercourse in the creaking bed he visualised, but her profile in the afternoon sun, the remoteness in her grey eyes as she stood in his bath robe looking out over the Sound, as if contemplating her whole life. Their whole life. There was no difference, her life and theirs, they were one. Suddenly he missed her. He felt like getting up and going to her, untying the robe she had tied so tightly, pulling her to him and putting his hands on her hips. Even though it was merely an image.

He had to turn the music down, he wasn’t sure whether he had really heard the doorbell. He stood motionless in the sudden stillness. The bell rang again. He went out and picked up the door telephone, it was Sonia. Shortly afterwards she was on the landing with wet hair and an uncertain testing smile. She was wearing high-heeled shoes, her thin silk skirt clung to her legs and her damp cardigan was a little too tight so her midriff was visible between the buttons. She carried a bottle of white wine. She had been close by and got caught in the rain, she thought he might be thirsty… The explanations poured out and fell over each other. He found her a towel and she rubbed her hair so it stood on end all over.

He took the bottle into the kitchen but then remembered the corkscrew was at the bottom of one of the boxes. There was a screwdriver on the kitchen table, he pushed down the cork. There weren’t any glasses either, they would have to use mugs. When he went back to the corner room she was over by the window, clad only in bra and skirt. Her cardigan had been hung to dry over a floor sanding machine. She turned, he offered her a sweater. No need, it was quite warm. The black bra pushed up her breasts into two soft semi-domes so they looked larger than they were. He sat on the window sill, she on the top rung of the stepladder. They raised their mugs, slightly ceremonially, and both broke into a smile. The trees along the avenue threw their reflections on the shining asphalt. He had no idea what to say.

She said it was a lovely apartment. He described a few of their plans for it. She nodded, looking at him with a teasing smile, and again he suspected her of not listening. She put down her mug on one of the steps and took a walk around the room. Her high heels made her taller and her muscular legs seem more elegant. She turned round and walked slowly towards him, arms swinging, as she bent her head forward and fixed him with a cunning scowl under the curling threads of her damp, towelled hair.

5

The night nurse was still talking to her son in Arizona. He went for a stroll along the corridor, imagining a country highway in flickering sunlight, endlessly winging among the rocks. Made-up beds were ranged along the wall of the corridor, separated by windows overlooking the patches of light from the rows of street lamps nearing each other towards the city centre. The door to a sluice room stood ajar, a tap was dripping in there with a hollow, drumming pulse into the steel sink. He turned it off and went on.

He passed the room where Lucca lay. He hesitated before cautiously opening the door. She was crying softly, he went across to the bed. She asked who was there. Her voice was faint and worn out with weeping, and her nose was blocked, so she gasped after each sentence. She asked what time it was, he told her. He wasn’t usually on duty at night, was he? Just occasionally, he said. He fetched a tissue from the shelf above the wash basin to help her blow her nose. Thank you, she said, moaning hoarsely. She couldn’t get to sleep. He sat down on a chair beside the bed.

She asked why Lauritz hadn’t come that afternoon as usual. She missed him. The last words trembled and dissolved into a pent-up whimper, her mouth twisted. The muscles of her neck protruded beneath the skin, trembling with tautness, and her shoulders shook as she alternately gasped for air and expelled it in cramped sighs until she gave in to tears. He placed a hand on her shoulder and stroked it cautiously as if he could stop the cramp. She wept for a long time, he kept hold of her. Sometimes the weeping seemed to quieten down, then it broke out from her throat again.

When she had stopped crying he told her Andreas and Lauritz had gone away. Where? He didn’t know. He told her he had been out to their house. She said they must have gone into Copenhagen to stay with some of his friends. Suddenly she was very composed and clear. He got a fresh tissue and again helped her blow her nose. That made her smile at herself a bit. Why had he gone to the house? He told her how he had met Andreas and Lauritz at the supermarket, about the rain and the mistake over the leg of lamb, about their evening with Lea and how surprised he had been when Andreas did not come to the hospital in the afternoon as usual. But he didn’t mention what Andreas had told him about Malmö and Stockholm.

You have a nice voice, she said as he was talking. He thanked her. Then they both fell silent. He had not put on the light when he went in. The room was lit only by the dim light from the corridor falling through the half-open door. He could hear when she breathed through her nose, her breathing was calmer now. She asked him to put his hand on her shoulder again. Why hadn’t he told her they had visited him? It had not been planned, he said, and he had been a bit surprised himself. Normally he didn’t get involved in patients’ lives, they were not his business. No, she said after a pause, of course they weren’t.

He asked her why she didn’t want Andreas to visit her. At first she made no reply. It was a long story, she said finally. But perhaps he already knew something of it? A little… he said. Again there was silence with neither speaking, before he finally managed to ask a question. Had she decided, that night of the accident… did she want to die? She did not reply at once, as if trying to remember. No, she hadn’t wanted to die. She had mistaken the direction when she reached the bridge over the motorway. She wanted to drive into Copenhagen, to go there. She stopped. He went on sitting there with a hand on her shoulder, even though it forced him to hold his arm up in an awkward, tiring position. He asked if she was thirsty. She didn’t answer, she had fallen asleep.

The sister in charge smiled at him when he arrived at work next morning. So he was Santa Claus, then! He looked at her, uncomprehending, and she pointed at his jaw. He put up his hand and felt the little tuft of cotton wool still sticking to the dried blood clot where he had cut himself shaving. He had felt dazed when he woke up after only two hours’ sleep and almost collapsed when he got out of bed. It was strange to go back to hospital only a few hours after he had driven home early in the morning. The phone rang as he opened the door of his office, it was Jacob. His wife had just gone off with the children, he only wanted to say thank you, it had been amazing. When Robert went in to see Lucca on his rounds he asked her the usual questions, and she answered as usual in monosyllables, as if he had not been sitting beside her bed in the night wiping her nose and holding her shoulder.

He saw her again in the afternoon before going home. She lay with her face towards the window. The blinds divided up the sunlight into slanting strips, and one of them fell on her face. She must have felt its warmth on her skin. He sat down beside the bed. She asked what time it was. He told her. She thanked him. For what? For staying with her. He asked how she had known it was him when he came in just now. She smiled faintly, she had recognised his step. She had grown good at that sort of thing, lying here. He suppressed a yawn, but a small sound escaped him. She said he must be tired. He said yes. He didn’t know what to say. Would she like to listen to the radio? No, she would only risk hearing her mother’s voice. And she didn’t dare run that risk? He observed the anonymous mouth and chin in the strip of sunlight, beneath the gauze that covered eyes, forehead and top of the head. Why? She turned her face away, it sank into the pillow.

He sat on, neither of them spoke. He was not sure if she was still awake. He sat listening to the snarling sound of the gardener’s small tractor that was alternately distant and then louder when the tractor crossed beneath the window, up and down the lawn between the wings of the building. She turned her face to him again. Did he smoke? Yes, he replied, bewildered. Would he light a cigarette? She felt like smoking. He lit one and placed it carefully between her lips, which tightened around the filter. She inhaled deeply. The smoke caught the strip of sunlight in a pale mesh as it seeped out between her lips. He opened the window. Grass, she said. He looked through the slats of the blind to the lawn, divided by the mower into long, parallel tracks of cut grass blades. He himself could not smell the grass. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Now and then she made a sign with her mouth, he placed the cigarette between her lips again.

He fell asleep on the sofa when he got home, and did not wake again before the sun had disappeared behind the birch trees and the fence. He was hungry, but had not managed to do any shopping. It was half dark in the room already. On the terrace the garden chairs stood about casually just as he, Andreas and Lea had left them on Saturday. It seemed like several weeks ago. The chairs were white in the twilight, fatuous and mysterious at the same time. He considered going to get a pizza, but couldn’t be bothered. He thought of Lucca. Would she lie awake again tonight, alone with her tears and her thoughts? She didn’t even want to listen to radio. But she might like to hear music. She could borrow his walkman, he could make a tape for her. He decided on piano music and went to look out some records. He chose to start the tape with a couple of Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings and to follow that with a programme of pieces by Debussy, Ravel and Satie. He enjoyed doing it and quite forgot to get something to eat. On the other side of the tape he recorded Chopin nocturnes, as many as it would take. The telephone rang in the middle of Chopin.

He hadn’t spoken to Monica for several weeks. Lea was their only link now, and she had long ago learned for herself to pack her bag and catch a train out and back every other weekend. As usual Monica was matter-of-fact on the phone. She sounded friendly enough but there was not the least hint in her voice of their once having been together, neither bitterness nor placatory nostalgia. She was as practical and direct as ever, she had called to talk about the summer holidays. She and Jan had thought of taking Lea with them to Lanzarote, but perhaps Lea had already mentioned it? He asked when. The dates came promptly. It was at the same time he was on holiday himself. He tried to hide his disappointment, but she could hear it, after all she knew him. He could have Lea for the autumn holiday.

He made no protest, he had never done that. Ever since that winter morning when his successor nodded at him in confusion as he made his way out, in the most literal sense caught with his trousers down, Robert had been determined to avoid rows. Sometimes he suspected Monica had found his acquiescence frustrating. A spot of aggression on his part would probably have relieved her uneasy conscience. She had been allowed to keep all the furniture. On the whole she had everything she wanted, with Lea and everything else, and in her astonishment she chose to persist with her demands, always ready with some uncompromising argument or other. Nevertheless he went on giving way each time she trampled all over him, for Lea’s sake as he would say to himself, but also, he had to admit, for his own. It eased his smouldering feeling of guilt and he could feel almost chagrined when she realised she had gone too far. As if she prevented him from paying off a debt she knew nothing about.

He was sure she had never discovered anything about his affair with Sonia, neither while it was going on nor later when it was over. He was convinced she would have asked, fearlessly direct as she was. It was of no consequence now, but through the years his secret had lain rotting in a corner of his consciousness along with the knowledge that had been forced upon him that she was only Monica’s half-sister. No one seemed to notice anything when he went up to her parents’ holiday cottage the weekend after he and Sonia had spent their first night together in the empty, newly painted apartment. So it was that easy, he had thought, visualising Sonia on Lea’s mattress, naked in the glow from the candle he had thrust into the wine bottle.

When the barrister looked at him over his unframed spectacles he felt they had not one but two secrets between them. Otherwise all was as usual, the herrings were too sweet, and what had happened faded and grew transparent in his memory like something he had simply dreamed. He even succeeded in being sufficiently passionate at night so that the intimate tenderness in Monica’s eyes the next day made her blind to his evasive, restless mood. He was amazed at how hard-boiled Sonia was when she lay on the beach chatting to Monica or played tag with Lea. Even if they happened to be alone together, she made no sign. She made small talk and replied indolently to what he said. Apparently she had forgotten everything, or else considered it of no importance.

It went on for a couple of weeks. Sometimes she spent the night with him, at other times she came in the afternoon and left late in the evening. When she stayed the night he always woke up lying half on the floor because the narrow mattress was too small. Once or twice they went for a walk together. They lay sunning themselves among the stripped-off people in the King’s Garden, and sometimes she suddenly rolled over on him and kissed him just like the other lovers did. He was afraid of their meeting someone he and Monica knew, and pushed off her arm in embarrassment if she affectionately put it around him. She teased him about it and more than once he asked himself if she actually hoped someone would recognise them. It was odd to walk beside her as if they were a couple, and he was alternately delighted and irritated at her giddy impulses, such as balancing on a fence in the park or pouncing on a puppy and raving over it with the flattered owner looking on.

He went to the airport with her when she left to go back to New York. He was relieved when she went, but he grew quite intense in the departure lounge, even if it was mere politeness. He had not been in love with her for a second, but that had made his desire all the wilder, as if he was punishing her because he wanted her. When he watched her doing her self-important tai chi in her parents’ country garden he couldn’t understand how he could be having an affair with her, and when he waited for her in the empty apartment, he sometimes hoped she would not come. But every time he stood in the doorway watching her come up the stairs with her sly expression, he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by her body again, by its uncoordinated mixture of strength and frailty.

Maybe it was not her body in itself which fascinated him so much. Perhaps it was simply its tangible and yet unlikely presence. The provocative and dizzy fact that it was possible, that he only needed to take the few steps over to Lea’s mattress, where she lay naked waiting for him. Later, when he sat among the toy animals reading Lea her bedtime story, he sometimes recalled it was on that same mattress in that same room he and Sonia had lain together, sweating and groaning. It might just as well have been a dream.

They never had serious discussions, they talked nonsense and fantasised and he mumbled sweet nothings in her ear about how amazing and unique she was. He was aware that he lied. She was neither amazing nor unique, she was just there, and he could almost have been her father. He thought about it when he sat on the window-sill feeling the rain outside the open window like a cool breath on his back, while she came towards him, carelessly swinging her arms dressed only in skirt, bra and high-heeled shoes. He felt old when she stood between his knees and let him coax her young, slightly immature breasts out of the black, feminine garment. On the other hand he felt just as timid and impatient as he had been in his youth when, a little later, he lay between her thighs and she guided him inside her with an experienced hand. As if he didn’t know the way himself.

His dammed-up passion changed into anger, and as he worked like an over-heated piston he felt strangely alone, dumped between his lost youth and his laid back self-assured maturity. Afterwards she sat cross-legged looking earnestly at him, hollow-backed with her decorative hair hanging over one breast. She asked if he loved Monica. He didn’t know what to reply. She talked in a worldly-wise way about listening to your feelings and the other things you utter into the blue when you are young. He tried to smile like an adult, but the smile didn’t really work, now he had given in so willingly to her seductive arts.

And maybe she was right. Maybe he had grown short-sighted and a bit deafened by easy-going mundane daily life. Had he come to live permanently under a local anaesthetic? Suddenly colours seemed faded, and he caught sight of the worn shiny spots, the insidious wear and tear and the battered, peeling corners of his relationship with Monica. He felt disheartened and inert at the thought of everything that had previously been so attractive about her, and he dreamed vague dreams of major changes.

But the dreams faded again just as fast, everything in him was just temporary and changeable. Like the weather, he thought, unsure of how he would feel in an hour or a week. It worried him. If he could fuck his wife’s half-sister in his new home, and feel it meant so little, how much did it mean when he was together with Monica? But what was it he was questioning? After all, life was more than sex! Sonia must have infected him with her youthful fad for life philosophy, there was no need to make such a song and dance. He made light of it and the question stayed unanswered. Before long he thought no more about it. He quickly forgot her after she left, and when he did remember her he was amazed at how wild he had been about her. He recalled her childish way of talking and her school-girlish way of pulling her top down over her knees when she sat on the floor while he painted.

He was irritated with himself for having listened so devoutly, still sweaty after their amorous rigours, as she pretentiously analysed his emotional life. Not until afterwards did it strike him that he must have merely played the available supporting role in a domestic drama that had nothing to do with him. He felt ashamed on Monica’s account, she who did not know why her little sister had become so affectionate when they sat on the beach and Sonia dreamily put her curly head on Monica’s shoulder as they looked across at the blue strip of coast on the other side of the Sound.

He took his walkman with him when he visited Lucca on his round next morning. He put it on the duvet and placed the earphones outside the bandages on her head. She smiled expectantly. He carefully lifted the fingers sticking out from the plaster on her arms and showed her how to start and switch off the tape and move it forward or back. She was a quick learner. Thank you, she said, and again he noticed how she could accentuate the little words so they sounded either light or heavy. The nurse watched him, but he could not work out whether she was touched or merely surprised at his idea.

He saw her again in the afternoon before going home, as he had done the day before. She still had the earphones in place on her gauze turban. He could distinguish the faint, trembling sound of piano. He sat on the chair beside the bed, opened the window and lit a cigarette. Yes, please, she said. He placed the cigarette between her lips and she sucked at it greedily. Half past four, she said, and let the smoke trickle out between her lips. Half past four? Yes, it must be that time. How did she know? The sun, she said.

One of the strips of sunlight shining through the gaps in the blind sent a warm trail over the lower part of her face. Just like the previous day. She asked what she was listening to. He bent down to her face and put one ear to the earphone. Ravel, he said, Tombeau de Couperin. She smiled again. Paco Rabanne, she said. Is that right? Yes, he said, wondering if she was as knowledgeable about after-shave as she was ignorant of music. He felt his chin. The little tuft had fallen off during the day. There was only a rough spot of dried blood where he had cut himself shaving.

She switched off the tape and pushed out her lips. He gave her another drag at the cigarette and took one himself. She blew out the smoke with a long sigh. He put the hand holding the cigarette out of the window and tapped off the ash. The flakes of ash floated upwards and spread out. Her voice was little more than a whisper. Perhaps I did really love him, she said. He looked at her again. She turned her face towards him. Now she did not feel anything. Now it was merely a word. As if she had used up the words. He stubbed out the cigarette and threw it out the window. Used up, how? It was not just Andreas, she went on. Perhaps they had begun to run out long before she met him. Her fingers slid over the buttons on his walkman. They were the same old words, always the same. And every time she had thought that at last she understood what they meant.

When he rose to leave, the sun had disappeared behind the opposite wing of the hospital. He said he would come again tomorrow afternoon. She asked if he was wearing his white coat. He looked down at himself as if uncertain. Yes, he said, slightly surprised. Would he mind taking it off before he came? He didn’t come before he had finished work, did he? She smiled apologetically. He still stood at the foot of her bed. She didn’t know what he looked like, she went on. She only knew he wore a white coat, but she’d rather not know anything at all. Okay, he said. No white coat. She smiled again. Half past four? Yes, half past four.

For once he didn’t listen to music when he got home. He left the door to the terrace open and lay down on the sofa. He closed his eyes and recalled the picture of Lucca sitting at a pavement café in Paris looking into the camera with a surprised expression as if she wasn’t expecting to be photographed or had a sudden flash of realisation.

He thought of what she had said and what Andreas had told him. He tried to envisage the story they had been involved in, from the scattered sentences he could call to mind. They were still as fleeting and disconnected as the sounds that reached him from outside and left their marks and traces in the silence, the blackbirds and the leaves of the trees, a passing car, children’s shouts, a ball striking the asphalt. He lay like that for a long time, eyes closed. A bluebottle flew around the room hitting the panes with soft thuds until it finally found its way out through the open door and was gone. The second hand on his watch ticked faintly under its glass, close to his ear.