Lucca

19

It was snowing again. They had thought winter was finally over. It was late March and there had been cloudless days with bright sunshine when they could sit outside in their coats. Lucca stretched out a hand and switched off the alarm clock. She pressed herself close to Andreas’s back, he was still asleep, and snoring. As a rule that did not bother her, and when it did she just held his nose between two fingers. She snored too now and then, he said, and she barely stirred when he gently turned her onto her side. They knew each other, they were not shy about anything any more. They had even stopped locking the bathroom door. She had never thought she would be so much at ease with anyone that she could leave all the doors open. Only the door of his study was always closed. When he came out at the end of the afternoon the air in there was thick with cigarette smoke. She and Lauritz had grown used to him being in the house and yet miles away behind the closed door, inaccessible until he emerged late in the afternoon, pale and distrait.

He never spoke of what he was writing when he was engaged in it. He couldn’t, he said. He was afraid of losing the scent of what he was trying to pursue with his words. What could not really be said at all. But when he finished a new play he couldn’t wait for her to read it. He felt actually wounded, although he tried to conceal his disappointment, if she did not read it quickly enough and say something about it at once. She had plenty to do with Lauritz and the house, but he would gladly look after everything if she would only sit down and read his script. She dropped everything and took the sheaf of pages to bed. It irritated him, she could feel, but she had always preferred to read in bed, sitting cross-legged, with the duvet around her like a lined nest.

Sometimes she found it hard to understand what he wrote, but perhaps it was not necessary to understand everything. He had said so himself in an interview with a Sunday newspaper. That what was immediately understandable in fact stunted one’s perception, whereas seeming obscurity put one on the track of something only glimpsed. Something silent and more profound that could not be contained and pinned down with simple concepts. He was so clever that people were sometimes quite frightened of him, but he didn’t like her to remind him of that. He had made his mark, he was one of those who counted, and she was proud of him. She was not even ashamed of being proud of her husband when they attended a première. Why should she be?

As a rule she had a few critical comments on his scripts, it might be a dramaturgical ambiguity or something in the development of a character which felt contradictory, and he listened to her even though she only had her intuition as an actor to guide her. It made her happy when she persuaded him to alter or omit something, not because he acknowledged her to be right but because she felt that brought her into contact with what he was doing, with him. The part of him she could not reach because it expressed itself only in writing, and because he had to protect this secret side to be able to write at all.

She had always wanted to play a role in one of his plays, but Lauritz was born soon after they moved back from Rome, and in the years that followed she had only done a few radio plays. She had concentrated on the child and the house. She coped almost single-handedly in the periods when he was working on something new. Miriam scolded her for letting her career run to seed and slouching around like a country housewife in apron and wellingtons. Miriam almost gave her a bad conscience, and she didn’t know what to say in her own defence, but that only lasted until they had put down the receiver or waved goodbye at the station. Afterwards she did wonder why she felt neither frustrated nor unhappy or oppressed, as Miriam obviously felt she should. It was rather the opposite feeling. A leisurely happiness to which she didn’t give much thought, related to the clouds that unnoticeably changed shape on their journey between the edge of the woods and the horizon. In the course of the day, while her hands were busy with all manner of practical things, her thoughts circled on their own like the swallows, now low around the house, now high up among the drifting cloud formations.

Lauritz had changed her. She had been ready, when she met Andreas, without herself being aware of it. He saw it before she did, and he had not been frightened by what he saw. He had gone on unremittingly, further than anyone else had dared. Right into her secret empty core, open to the way things might happen. He had turned out to be the one she had waited for, and so it had been Lauritz and not another man’s child who had grown inside her until there was no longer any room for him. She had screamed so hard she thought she would die. She had felt as if she was being ripped open and turned inside out. Nothing had ever hurt so much, and no one had made her as happy as the small, creased, purple-blue child who was placed on her stomach so she could see his cross face and squinting little eyes and the heart hammering wildly in his frog-like body, covered with foetal grease, still linked to her by the twisted cord. Andreas wept, she had not seen him weep before, and she loved him more than ever, but she herself did not weep. She groaned and trembled and smiled all the time at this brutal, naked, screaming and bloody joy.

To Lauritz it didn’t matter who she was, and yet he had never been in doubt. He could smell and taste who she was long before he learned to focus his eyes on her and recognise her face. People asked if it wasn’t hard having to get up in the middle of the night and adjust her whole life to the boy’s needs. They clearly did not understand it was a relief. She was relieved when she realised she had ceased to care about her own bungled ambitions and egocentric dreams. She forgot time, it was no longer divided into hours and days. The child had become her clock, time did not pass any more, it grew before her eyes.

Else was worried and Miriam almost indignant. They let her understand, each in her own way, that in their opinion she was exaggerating her newly acquired maternal feelings all too willingly, indeed, almost fanatically, subjecting herself to the child and to Andreas. They almost despised her because she allowed him, the great sensitive artist, to withdraw to his study and go to Copenhagen to tend his career or travel about Europe in search of inspiration, while she trotted around with the buggy out there in the country. She did not respond, merely smiled infuriatingly. Miriam did not begin to understand her until she herself became pregnant. She was eight months gone now.

Else had fallen silent on the telephone when Lucca called from Rome and told her mother she was pregnant. Wasn’t it a bit soon? After all, they had only known each other for a few months. She felt hurt at her mother’s cautious reaction. How long was she to wait? How reluctant and choosy did you have to be when life finally offered the simplest and most basic of all questions? Her entire life had gathered into a single moment when she lay beside Andreas one morning behind the closed shutters and told him she was pregnant. The future had begun just there, when he asked if she wanted a child, and she replied by asking if he did. He said yes without hesitation. Yes, with her.

Else asked if she realised that at best it would put a brake on her career and at worst put a stop to it. Just when she was about to make it. Lucca remembered what her mother had said when Otto dropped her. That there was more to life than love — work, for example. She remembered Else’s bitter mouth and sunken face when she sat, eyes shut, sunning herself. Later on, as her stomach began to expand and her legs and face swelled up, she thought several times of their conversation that time at the cottage. In fact, she resembled a cow, a pale cow who looked questioningly at her in the mirror with her amiable eyes. When Andreas took her heavy breasts in his hands, milk seeped from her nipples, and he kissed them and let her taste the milk on his lips. She would never have believed it, but she felt a secret pleasure in seeing and feeling how the unknown child quietly and laboriously ruined her figure. Men had clutched it so often, but now they no longer looked at her, and soon she too forgot to note whether they did or not.

Andreas mumbled in his sleep when she kissed his throat. Your train, she said. He shot up in bed and looked at her in confusion. She stroked his cheek and smiled. He would still be in time if they got up now. He sat for a while on the edge of the bed, looking like a child in the morning, hair on end and narrowed eyes, a sulky child. She put on her bath-robe and looked out of the window. The snow whirled in spirals around the dark branches of the plum tree. It had settled already in white strips along the furrows arching over the roof ridge of the neighbouring barn. The sky was as uniformly white as paper.

Lauritz lay on his stomach, his rump in the air. His cheek was rosy and swollen with sleep, and a little patch of saliva had fallen onto the pillow beneath his soft mouth. His toy elephant stood in place with its trunk stuck between the bars of the bed-head, staring intensely at him out of its button eyes. She called to him softly and took his hand as he woke up. She made the coffee while he ate his porridge, Andreas had a shower, and she read the paper. As she leafed through the film and theatre supplement she recognised Otto. He was kneeling on a railway track, in breeches, check shirt and a sleeveless woollen slipover. His hair was cropped and he had a watchful expression in his eyes, tense as a hunted beast of prey.

She sipped the scalding coffee. The caption said he was playing the lead in a film about a resistance group in World War Two. She had to look at the picture for a long time before she could connect the watchful partisan with the face she had once kissed and the eyes she had once looked into as if they held the answer to every question. She had been so sure he was the one she was to love, and be loved by, and yet he had merely been the latest on the list. She had known there would be others after him when it was over, but had not believed it. She remembered how hard-headed she had been, completely unreceptive to what everyone could see for themselves. Was it just because he had dumped her? Perhaps, but surprisingly soon it had opened up again, that vacant spot within her, her secret openness to whatever might appear, though still not present.

Andreas had time only for half a cup when he finally emerged from the bathroom. They would have to leave at once if he was to catch his train. He stood fidgeting at the door while she struggled to get Lauritz’s coat on. She asked if he had remembered his ticket. He sighed impatiently. When they went into the drive the boy put his head back and opened his mouth to let snowflakes melt on his tongue. She drove. Neither of them said anything much, they were too tired. Andreas drummed on the lid of the glove box. The snow blew across the asphalt and along the ditches and the black fields faded on both sides into the falling snow. He said he had left his address on his desk. He had borrowed an apartment in Paris, he would be there for just over a month. They had arranged for her to join him at Easter. Else had promised to come and look after Lauritz.

The lights of the train were already in sight behind the snow. The rails seemed to end in nothing but whirling drifts. He lifted Lauritz up and kissed him. See you at Easter, she said, looking into his eyes. At Easter, he smiled, picking up his suitcase, as the rows of carriages stopped behind him. He would call when he arrived. They kissed. Doors opened and people got in and out. As he was turning round, I love you, she said. He hesitated and looked at her again. She smiled and he regarded her for a moment as if taking a photograph with his eyes. Perhaps to take the picture with him, of her standing on the platform holding Lauritz by the hand, with snow in her hair. He stroked her cheek. He loved her too, he said, and hurried into the train a second before the doors closed with an automatic slam.

He often went away to work. He needed to be alone when he was finishing something or starting something new. He had been working on his new play for six months and at the same time attending rehearsals of one of his earlier pieces. Since the new year he had been in Malmö several times a week. He had made almost no progress on his script, which he had promised to deliver at the beginning of April.

She was glad he was leaving. He had been withdrawn and irritable for the final weeks before the première in Malmö. He had grumbled about unimportant trifles and generally been impossible to be with. She knew his awkward times and had herself suggested he went away. Else had a woman friend in Paris who was going to Mexico for a month, he was staying at her apartment. He had worked in Paris several times before, in cheap hotel rooms. He liked being alone in a big city where he didn’t know anyone. She looked forward to going down there to disturb his solitude. She visualised how they would surrender to their pent-up hunger for each other, as they usually did when they had been apart for a while.

Lauritz went on waving until the train had disappeared into the snow. When he was sitting on the bench in front of his locker in the nursery-school cloakroom he asked if Andreas would be in Paris now. She kissed him goodbye, and a pretty young woman took him by the hand and led him off. Lucca recalled the time when she had worked at a nursery and lay on her mother’s bed in the afternoons with a grown man who played badminton. The snow melted at once in the streets among the drab houses, but outside the city the landscape was white, and as she drove along the side-road, the dark edge of the woods resembled a cave opening up in the whiteness into a night filled with falling stars.

She switched on the radio and started to tidy the kitchen. Last night’s dishes had not been washed up. She filled the dishwasher, scoured the pots and pans, made coffee and sat down to smoke a cigarette. The noise of the dishwasher blended with the music from the radio. The floor of the living room was covered with piles of books. They’d had a bookcase made to cover one wall, she planned to paint it while Andreas was away. They had agreed on grey, white would be too difficult to maintain. Lauritz left his fingerprints everywhere on the newly painted doors and sills. The door of Andreas’s study was open. She looked at the cleared desk where his portable computer usually stood. She missed him already, although she was used to being alone, whether for a day or a month. Up to now there had always been something in the house that needed finishing off, leaving her something to get going on when he was away. To her surprise she had discovered she was quite competent at do-it-yourself, and she had enjoyed setting the house in order. It had come to interest her more than acting, and it gave her satisfaction in a quite primitive way when she looked at a wall or door panel she had repaired and painted herself.

It had taken longer than expected, and sometimes they had been about to give up, but she was stubborn, and now only details needed seeing to here and there. That might have been why she was already missing Andreas. She had forgotten herself while there was still enough to do, and the days passed like hours whether he was away or at his computer. When she was acting she had forgotten herself too, but only to become someone else. While she slogged away in her dirty overalls with the cement mixer and trowel she was no more than a hard-working body, and that was a release.

To start with it had been a mere dream, finding a house in the country. They had both grown up in the city. They started to talk about it in Rome, during the six months they lived in Andreas’s cramped apartment. She suggested it mostly for fun. It was the kind of thing you cooked up crazy stories about when you had fallen in love, a place in the country. She came out with it one late summer morning when they had stayed in bed because it was too hot to do anything but lie in the shade behind the shutters and caress each other very slowly. He took her at her word just as he did a few months later when she told him she was pregnant. How could he be so sure? He ran his hand lightly over her stomach, which would soon swell up and weigh her down to earth, making her break out in a sweat at the least exertion. Sometimes you must believe your own eyes, he said. Otherwise it would all come to dust and blow away while you looked at it. No one had talked to her before like that.

The apartment in Trastevere had only one room, and when he was working she went out walking. He worked a lot, and after a few months she knew every single street in that part of the city. She admired his gift for concentrating and keeping at it for hours on end. Apparently he could always write if he wanted to. At that time he used a portable typewriter, and when she went upstairs late in the afternoon and heard the keys still tapping on the keyboard she went down to the bar around the corner and waited another half hour. It was almost like sitting in a living room, and she started to talk a bit of Italian. It seemed there was still something left in her of the language she had spoken with her father, hidden away in a fold of her brain or rolled up at the bottom of her spine. Soon she could talk to people in the street, in contrast to Andreas who never learned more than the most necessary phrases and was completely uninterested in talking to anyone but her.

She never thought of visiting Giorgio again, although now and then it did cross her mind that she was in the same country as he was, only a few hours away by train. Florence, the city where she had found him and then lost sight of him, was a different world from Rome, the city where her passion for Andreas slowly turned into something tougher, more durable, as an unknown being started to grow a nose, a mouth and eyes inside her. In the evening he read aloud what he had written during the day, and although she admired his arbitrary, stylised dialogue, she often forgot to listen. The sound of his soft voice was enough for her, feeling it like a quiver in her cheek when she rested her head against his chest. The voice spoke to her from a place she could not reach, where he had to be alone, but it was from in there that he had seen her come along and decided not to let her disappear from sight. His voice echoed within her when she walked alone in the shadows among the crumbling walls or sat in the sunshine on the Campo di Fiori. Only his voice was real, not the words, not his theatre. His voice and the unknown child filled her completely. He had believed his own eyes, and she believed in what he had seen.

The wind made the snowflakes circle in spirals over the yard. She suddenly realised it was Else she was listening to. Her mother was announcing the radio programme for the day in the cultivated voice Lucca had listened to since she was a child, alone at home with some nanny. It was the kind of voice that could say whatever you wanted it to. Every word sounded the same in Else’s mouth, as if tongue, lips and teeth were tools intended for breaking up the words and separating them from what they actually meant. Else had been sceptical when Lucca told her they were moving into the country. The poet and his mummy-nurse, she called them for almost a year, until she grew tired of smiling at her own mordant wit. She visited them occasionally in their cave, as she termed it, and Lucca was quite encouraged every time she saw her mother raise her eyebrows and suppress all the pointed comments jostling behind her tight, pinched lips. She had forgotten how to look at herself from outside and she enjoyed Else’s distaste for the dirty and chaotic building site where Lauritz tumbled around with a bare bottom and mud plastering his face.

Lucca had never imagined she would come to live out of town. When they moved in the house was barely habitable, and everyone said it was mad to settle with a child in a place which didn’t even have electricity. As if Lauritz wasn’t completely unplugged. At first they made do with paraffin lamps. They washed outdoors under a garden hose while the bathroom floor was being laid, and cooked on an open fire in the garden. In general they lived in a way the prairie settlers must have done. It was a point of no return. Everything they owned had been invested in the house and the building materials stacked up in the yard.

She had put the city behind her, the streets she had roamed, just a face among the shifting faces, always hunting for another pair of eyes to mirror her. She had put the city and the men behind her, those she had known and those she might have come to know. All the men she had doted on or left, all the grand or petty stories that had been so many blind alleys, wrecked beginnings and failed attempts to attain the life that was to be hers.

She had painted just one and a half shelves when the telephone rang. It was on the window sill. She had to stride over the piles of books on the floor, brush held aloft so it did not drip. It was Miriam, her voice thick and stifled with sobs, she had to talk to someone. Lucca asked what had happened. Miriam started to weep. While Lucca waited for her to calm down she caught sight of a grey streak of paint running down from the brush onto her hand. She held it vertically, but it kept on running like a melting, soft ice-cream. Miriam’s sobs subsided. Her partner had left her. He’d said he didn’t love her any more, and that it was a misunderstanding, the child they were to have. He’d been under pressure. She sniffed and moaned. He’d packed a bag with clothes and gone off in a taxi, she didn’t know where.

Lucca thought of the lanky jazz musician. He had always seemed feeble to her when Miriam bossed him around or plonked herself down on his lap demanding tongue kisses with everyone looking on, as if he owed her proof of his fiery passion for all the world to see. But he’d had the courage after all to back out, but why so late? Miriam had no idea. She had really believed the child would bring them closer together. He had even accompanied her to childbirth class. She began to weep again. Lucca pictured the skinny jazz lover sitting in stockinged feet on the linoleum floor with the bloated Miriam between his knees, surrounded by the other men and their wives, snorting in chorus, while he pondered on how to escape from the fix he had got himself into.

She recalled the night Otto threw her out and she sat drinking vodka at Miriam’s. She remembered her friend’s dreamy chat about having a child, and how outraged she had looked as she told her that her partner was afraid of losing his freedom. What did he want to use that for?! The way Miriam had imposed her pregnancy on him had been just as pigheaded and discordant as when she broke into his conversation and stuck her tongue down his throat. But they could not talk about that, especially not now. All Lucca could do was listen to the unhappy Miriam and explain that she was unable to go into town because she was alone with Lauritz.

After putting down the receiver she stayed by the window. The snow covered the garden and the field. It lay like white shadows along the dark ramifications of the plum branches and framed the little blue tractor Lauritz had left on the lawn. The sky was like granite. She studied the streaks of paint that had split into a branching delta over her hand and lower arm, like blood, she thought, if blood was grey. She would like to have shown more sympathy and her conscience nagged her because she had not invited Miriam to come and stay.

She laid the brush on the newspaper beside the paint pot, wiped her hand and sat down at the desk in Andreas’s study. On it were only some paper clips and the note of his address in Paris in his angular, slightly untidy handwriting. The room stank of old cigarette smoke. He smoked too much, especially when he worked, and always the same strong Gitanes. He coughed in the mornings, but paid no heed to her comments. Sometimes she could hear him trying to suppress his coughing in the bathroom so she wouldn’t notice it. She opened the window and breathed in the cold, raw air. The view was different from his room, you could just see the ends of the plum tree branches. She picked up one of the paper clips and straightened it out, gazing at the white slope of field partly hiding the roof of the neighbouring barn.

She felt she had let Miriam down on the phone, but had not known what to say, and couldn’t say what she thought. That probably what had happened was Miriam’s own fault, because she had obstinately pushed her pregnancy, deaf and blind to all warning signs. Miriam who always took what she wanted, and wore tight trousers even though her thighs were too fat. Lucca had never believed their relationship would last, and perhaps Miriam had doubted it too. Had she thought she could hold onto him by having a child? Naturally she would never admit that, not even to herself. And now a child was coming into the world, a child like all the others with the same demands for affection, the same urge to feel itself a genuine fruit of love and not merely the result of a mistake made by two confused people.

She could have said all that to Miriam if she had dared, but she had no right to say it. Who could distinguish between genuine feelings and illusions? Perhaps Miriam really did want a child, partner or no. Lucca recalled how soberly her friend had assessed her own future possibilities as an actor. A bit of cabaret here and there, as a comic. And what about herself, Lucca? She had been furious when Else comforted her by saying that Otto hadn’t been right for her anyway, and that it was a good thing they had parted. Think, if they’d had a child! Now Lucca had to admit she was right. Her passion had been blind and immature. When she looked back on herself then it was like thinking of another person. As if she had been different from the woman she had become with Andreas and Lauritz. But if she really had changed, she could do so again. The idea sickened her, the idea that changes could just go on and on. And what if she was the same, after all? How could she be so sure that her love for Andreas was more real than her love for Otto had been? Was she so sure now, because Otto and Andreas, each in their respective order, had just been the latest man in the row? Did she feel sure because it only happened to be Andreas she had a child with?

She looked at the note with the address and telephone number in Paris. She felt the urge to call him, just to hear his voice, but it was too early. He would not arrive until late afternoon. It was a long time since they’d had a proper talk, she felt. There was always something in the way. She had so much to do, and he was always working. Besides, for the past two weeks he had been away most of the time, in Malmö. It worried her if they grew distant from each other for a while, on friendly terms but busy and slightly conventional when they kissed good morning or goodnight. She felt he had been distant recently. In Paris it would be different, surely. She longed for Easter.

She leaned over the table and closed the window. Suddenly she was hungry and decided to make some lunch before continuing to paint. As she negotiated the piles of books again on her way through the living room her eyes fell on a bundle of old scripts. The top one was bound in red card. The title was printed on it, The Father, by August Strindberg. She picked it up and leafed through the dog-eared pages with pencilled notes half obliterated. She took the script into the kitchen and put it beside the cooker while she heated water for pasta. Indirectly, Strindberg had been the beginning of her relationship with Andreas, but of course she had not known that then. Not even when they passed each other, he in the lift on his way up, she on her way down the stairs after she’d had tea with Harry and looked out at the thunderstorm over the town.

She felt like pasta al burro with grated nutmeg, the way Giorgio had taught her to make it. It was the only thing she had learned from him, her sad clown of a father, who had merely flung out his arms as if there was no more to say as he walked backwards beside the baptistery in Florence before turning and vanishing from sight. ‘In the midst of the moonlight,’ she thought, ‘surrounded by ruins on all sides.’ She looked at the torn script and began to smile. So she did remember something. But there had been no moonlight, it had been broad daylight, and the baptistery stood just as when it had been built, dazzlingly beautiful and geometric in its green and white marble. It was only that it hadn’t gone as expected, she thought, as the steaming water in the pan began to bubble and shake.

20

The room was in total darkness. She could hear the cicadas behind the shutter of the small window. They kept the shutters closed all day to retain as much as possible of the night’s coolness. She pushed off the sheet and stretched out a hand. He was not there. The hands of the alarm clock shone green, floating in the dark. It was only just past seven. He couldn’t sleep late any more. He had told her with a wry, apologetic smile, as if it was one of the things he had lost. She summoned her energy and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The tiles were smooth and cool. She reached for the kimono hanging over a chair, and fumbled her way through the darkness with a finger brushing the rough, white-washed wall until she found the door.

Daylight fell in a sharp triangle from the doorway to the roof terrace. She climbed the stairs and stopped at the top. He had not noticed her yet. His hearing was not too good, but he did not like to admit it. She stood still. He sat cross-legged under the canopy of woven bamboo. He was reading a book, his tea cup raised in his hand as if he’d forgotten the cup and left it in mid air. The bamboo wickerwork splintered the sharp sunlight into a frayed pattern on the stone table and the tiles, and splinters of light waved over his combed-back grey hair and lined brow, his face with its crooked nose and his brown torso with folds of loose skin around the stomach and below the chest cage. He was wearing the white linen trousers she had bought him in Madrid.

She waited. He had to discover her. It had become a game she played, more with herself than with him. Coffee’s ready, he said in his hoarse voice, without looking up from his book. But he had seen her. She went and sat down opposite him. He smiled, leaning his head back to look at her through the glasses on the tip of his nose. There you are, he said. Here I am, she answered, stretching out a hand to stroke his knee. She poured herself a cup of coffee, put in plenty of sugar and sipped it as she gazed over at the range of mountains lit by the slanting sunlight, which emphasised the folds and grooves with long, blue-grey shadows among the shades of rusty red and rose.

The houses looked alike, all white-washed with flat roofs and small barred windows, like scattered sugar lumps up the mountain-side. It sounded beautiful when you described it, and when you saw the village from a distance it did resemble a picture postcard, with orange trees and olive groves and everything you could expect, but as soon as you got up there the place had a depressing air. The cement road was broken up into craters lying in wait to trip you up, the electricity cables hung in untidy garlands, and the houses were either crumbling, on the verge of collapse, or being restored, with dreary concrete walls. During the day there was never a soul about except now and then a pale weary woman in a dressing-gown behind a kitchen window. The place seemed to be inhabited by housewives and scrawny cats lying in the dust, and the only other sign of life was the smell of frying oil and the noise of television sets churning out their advert jingles from the resounding semi-darkness of the dwellings.

Harry’s house was the last one in that part of the village, it faced east and from the roof terrace there was a view over a dried up river-bed with steep sides. The river-bed was cracked in deep fissures where oleanders and carob trees had rooted, and on the other side of the river, a couple of kilometres away, another chain of mountains sloped down to the plain. Seen from the terrace, the coastline was just a diffuse transition from ochre to blue in the heat haze. They had gone down there shortly after the last night of The Father at the Royal Theatre. At the same time Harry had staged a première of Uncle Vanya in Oslo. In the weeks before they left they’d been together only when he flew down to Copenhagen for the weekend. She had been offered a role in a film, the first shots were to be taken soon, in early spring, but Harry had advised her to say no. He knew the director, and it was likely to be not just mediocre, but downright awful.

It had been raining for weeks in Denmark, Lucca thought she had almost forgotten what the sky looked like. When they got out of the plane she felt a warm breath in her face, and the almond trees were flowering in white and pink against the red earth as they drove through the dry landscape. In some places the land changed into a desert with deep crevasses and crumbling rock formations like the brains of huge, prehistoric animals. Soon they would have been there two months. They were planning to spend the summer in a house he would be renting beside the Jutland coast, before rehearsals started on A Doll’s House. She was to play Nora.

When Harry was not directing a play he spent his time in Spain reading and writing. She didn’t know what he was engaged on now. Wish lists, he had replied with a teasing smile, when she asked him. When you were young you wrote wish-lists, he went on, but he had gradually forgotten all the things he had wished for through the years. It was hard enough to remember them, all those years. She had not spoken to anyone but Harry for weeks, and all the days seemed alike, but strangely she had not felt bored. In Copenhagen there were always people to see, people of Harry’s age. He was very attentive when they went out together, but even so she often felt just like a decorative appendage, instantly left out of the game because she was not born at the time their hilarious anecdotes had been launched.

Harry’s friends were writers, painters or film directors, and usually they were as famous as he, but had been part of the élite for so long that their laurel leaves were pretty withered by now. Behind their comfortable complacency lurked a small, bewildered disquiet at getting fewer mentions in the newspapers than twenty years ago. They could spend hours discussing it, how bad the newspapers had become, just as they worried a good deal about the young having an easy time of it, and how little it took nowadays for them to climb dangerously close to their own exalted position. Up to a point they were quite generous at including her in the conversation, some of them even took the trouble to seem not at all formidable, and yet something sly and avuncular appeared in the sudden interest of the grey old codgers after she had been left on her own for a while.

She could feel their wives frowning at her when the men bent intimately over her while investigating what she might bring to the conversation. Most of them had known Harry’s dead wife, but she was never actually mentioned. Lucca felt like an itinerant scandal, and when she was introduced she saw how their eyes flickered between disgust and envy at the indomitably lucky old dog. She had even been spared the attentions of the gutter press once when he was careless enough to take her to a première, and when she walked around town she sometimes felt she was recognised as Harry Wiener’s talented young lady friend.

Harry was always the centre of attention, maybe because he was one of the few whose fame had not begun to fade at the edges. But that couldn’t be the only reason, thought Lucca. People spotted him everywhere he went, and even when they had no idea who he was they were drawn to look at the elegant figure with his lined face, wavy grey hair and narrow eyes. He did not make any effort to arouse attention, on the contrary. He preferred to sit and listen while he observed the others, now and then folding the corners of his lips ironically around the colourless slit that served as his mouth. There was complete silence when he finally said something in his rusty voice and old-fashioned diction, which encompassed everything he said, even the most casual remark, with an exclusive and civilised atmosphere.

When they were in the car driving home one evening, after yet another dinner, she asked him why he bothered to spend so much of his time on that pack of burned-out old buggers. All they did was sit there nursing their bloodshot vanity, she said, sweating at the thought of being soon forgotten. She’d had too much to drink, because she was bored stiff. He laughed, looking at the road ahead. He was an old bugger himself… besides, everything was interesting to someone like him. She tugged the curls at his neck affectionately. At least he wasn’t burned out, anyway… He smiled but did not give a direct answer. The most banal things, and the most sophisticated as well, he went on, are often the most interesting. He gave her a brief look. She probably didn’t realise that yet, luckily. But even the utmost banality turned into a subject for sociology eventually.

They had met with Else once only, shortly before they left for Spain. Harry invited her to lunch one Saturday after he came back from Oslo. Lucca tried to dissuade him, but he just smiled at her. He really wanted to meet her mother. If she didn’t like it, she could stay at home… Else had tried to hide her disapproval when Lucca finally gave in to her inquisitive questions and told her who it was she so often spent the night with. After a month she had more or less moved into the rooftop apartment with its view over the harbour.

She was nervous as she and Harry waited at the restaurant, and once more she was taken aback by his unruffled calm when Else walked in and looked around her with an anxious gaze and too much powder on her cheeks. Harry rose, shook her hand in a friendly way and pulled out a chair for her, taking no notice of her tense, hectic manner. Lucca had not realised he was older than her mother. Her own nervousness changed into wonder when she saw how agitated Else was and how coquettishly she tried out her feminine wiles on the famous man playing the role of son-in-law. An hour later when Else kissed her cheek and said goodbye, Lucca could feel that her thunderstruck condemnation had given way to something like admiration.

Harry worked in the afternoon while she took a siesta. When she woke up they would drive down to the sea. He thought the water was too cold, but she went in almost every day. She did not need a swimsuit, they had the beach to themselves. She felt childish as he sat watching her, but only until she came out and he stood waiting with towel and kimono, as she approached smiling, dripping and stark naked. In the evenings they sat talking or reading. He told her about people he had known, some of them names she had heard before, actors and writers, semi-mythological figures from another age. Sometimes she felt dizzy when she realised he was describing events that had taken place ten years before she was born.

He gave her books he thought would interest her. The house was crammed with books from floor to ceiling, and she had never read so much in such a short time. He opened windows and doors for her onto ideas and notions she’d never had before, but he didn’t make her feel stupid, just very young. He did not lecture her nor did he ever use his age and experience as arguments. He contented himself with asking unexpected questions which produced equally unexpected answers from her. He guided without her noticing it, and let go of her again just as unnoticeably, so she had the feeling of having found her way on her own, she didn’t know how. He merely looked at her meanwhile with his narrow dark eyes.

That was the way he worked, by hardly saying or doing anything. That was how he had made himself famous, the Gypsy King, as Otto had so scornfully called him. She could not understand how all those stories about his tyrannical cruelty had arisen. He had not raised his voice once during the rehearsals for The Father. Most of the time he sat in the auditorium or stood at the edge of the stage as if lost in his own thoughts, taking note of every single change of tone and each movement of the actors’ features. Just occasionally he would come up to one or other of them and talk confidentially to each, at other times he would lay a hand on a shoulder, smile or raise his eyebrows with an expectant look. He seldom spoke to them all at once, and what he said was always so specific that none of them noticed the intrinsic lines in the picture he had envisaged from the start. Slowly they found their places in the picture, as of their own volition, apparently with no help from him.

She had sweat on her upper lip and her knees were trembling when she arrived for the audition one September afternoon. The porter was kind, he led her part of the way and pointed out a long corridor, but she still managed to get lost. When she finally found the rehearsal room the other actors were sitting at a long table watching her walk across the floor, the script pressed to her chest. She went up to Harry, who sat at the end of the table studying his hands, and apologised for being late. He waited for a moment before he took her hand without pressing it, as if indulging a childish whim on her part. He did not reply, merely smiled a little smile with his narrow lips as he regarded her out of the dark cracks of his eyes. He looked at her as if they had never met before, and it seemed inconceivable that she’d sat in his Mercedes one evening and asked if he might kiss her.

He was wearing an olive-green silk shirt that day, hanging loosely over the sand-coloured velvet trousers and his curly, steel-grey hair was carefully combed back from his forehead and ears. If there had been something frail and unprotected about him when he absent-mindedly received her in his roof apartment a few months earlier, in worn-out espadrilles and with his ruffled hair standing out at the sides in sleepy wings, that had quite vanished now. His motionless face was like a mask of baked clay. As she walked round shaking hands he sat leaning back at the end of the table caressing the silver lighter lying on his script beside his folded spectacles.

She knew their faces from the stage and the papers. Doubtless they were thinking that she must have lost her way. You didn’t arrive late for Harry Wiener. The actor who was to play her mother, the captain’s wife, sized her with a watchful glance over her reading glasses. For two generations of male theatre-goers the beautiful, generously bosomed diva had been the exemplar of feminine charm and mystery. There was something affected about her masculine reading glasses. Maybe she flirted with the idea that a little touch of ugly clumsiness would only add to her charming face and emphasise the mature dramatic sensuality of her eyes and lips.

The role of the captain was allotted to her male counterpart, the rebellious punk of the acting world, a notorious, rowdy drinker and seducer, with his eternal bedroom eyes, tousled hair and a voice like the morning after. Lucca could not see him without thinking of the line whispered in his ear by a buxom blonde in a television play from her childhood, in a somewhat outrageous bedroom scene for that period, as she rummaged in his unruly chest hair. Big bad boy! He smiled his very best professional bedroom smile as he pressed her hand until she was afraid it would be left in his horny paw. The big bad boy had turned grey and he too had acquired reading glasses, on a cord to prevent them getting lost. A small pot-belly had begun to show itself behind the tight-fitting denim shirt and he seemed to be constantly suppressing a belch.

She pulled out a chair and sat down beside the captain. He passed her a pencil. Watch out, it’s sharp! he whispered with a sly foxy glance, as if he was a schoolboy and she was the new girl. Right, let’s get going, said Harry Weiner, but he didn’t put on his glasses nor did he open his script. He sat leaning back with crossed legs while they turned to the first page. He stayed like that throughout the reading, his head bent slightly forwards, eyes half closed and fixed on a point on the floor, listening to the actors reading their parts. If one of them started to stress a sentence, already trying to make their mark on how the role should be played, only then did he raise his head slightly and smile a little, inscrutable smile. That made the reader subdue his tone again and content himself with reading the words. When they had gone through the text and closed their scripts there was a moment’s silence. Then he stood up, looked round and thanked them. They remained seated while he gathered his things and left. Again Lucca had the feeling of being in a classroom. As soon as Harry Wiener was out of the door conversation broke out all across the table.

That’s how he was! The captain stretched out his arms backwards and smiled in amusement at the bewildered look on her face. He rested his hands on his knees with his elbows pointing outwards. Lucca shrugged her shoulders. She had expected him to say something to them about the play and the roles. He never did that… the cavalry captain held his breath a moment before breathing out through his nose. But just you wait! He might well seem a bit cold to begin with, and he was never much of a chatterbox, you could get quite frightened of him, but he was a lovely person. Probably the reason for his reserve today was because of his wife. It was bloody awful, she wasn’t likely to see the new year. But he was taking it bravely… really there was something gentle… yes, gentle about him. You wouldn’t believe it, said the captain, but he makes you feel safe, even if he gives quite the opposite impression. That’s the secret, he smiled. Lucca nodded agreement, as if she was quite familiar with the situation. Harry Wiener put you at ease, but you didn’t get to be friends. He knew how to keep himself to himself! The captain held up his hands. The diva leaned forward, her breasts in the informal sweatshirt pressed flat on the table. She put her head on one side and smiled lasciviously. Well, darling, so what was it like in Borneo? The captain turned towards her. Brilliant!

Sitting slightly apart Lucca wondered why it was that actors always talked to each other so affectedly. It was darling or sweetheart the whole time, and she secretly questioned if they were all gay. Even the women sounded gay because they seemed to mimic gay men’s parody of women. She promised herself never to start talking like that. On her way down the corridor the diva caught up with her on high, clicking heels. The high-heeled shoes seemed like a feminine comment on the blue jeans, relaxed sweatshirt and ugly, mannish spectacles. It went very well, she said with a motherly smile, as if Lucca had been up for an exam. But do take care with your consonants! People don’t learn to articulate properly any more… She held open the street door for her young colleague and put her head on one side again. Nice to have met you!

The captain had been right. Harry Wiener never exchanged jovialities with the actors that other directors might at the start of the day’s rehearsals, to warm them up and maybe redress the ghastly old-fashioned authority they still represented. But although he did nothing to ingratiate himself with them or put them at ease, after a week Lucca discovered she felt perfectly safe with this undemonstrative, discreetly attentive man. She lost her fear of appearing foolish. Every bid, every suggestion was permitted, and if they could not be used, they dropped out by themselves, she didn’t know how, for he never directly criticised her way of playing the part, a raised eyebrow was enough. Nor did he praise her, simply smiled now and then with unexpected mildness, almost gratefully, as she felt warmth spreading through her.

He preferred to express himself in simple and very physical images, always based on the current passage. Before and after rehearsing a scene he spoke to the actors separately. He seldom interrupted them when they were acting and if he did, it was with a specific question or a single word that might seem irrelevant or puzzling to the others, like a private code meant only for the one he was addressing, which helped the actor get back on the track. On the track of what? To begin with they didn’t know. They thought they were approaching the unknown core of their character, but little by little they each discovered they were merely following the outlines of something they had known all the time without thinking about it, since it involved hidden aspects of themselves.

Lucca gradually came to respect the diva and the captain. She saw their concentration at work, and they saw her when she felt most vulnerable and naked. She had still not worked long enough to feel it on her own body, but she imagined their affected manner must be a shield. They were obliged to act in their own lives in order for them to be themselves on the stage. In the real world they had to allow themselves to play ironically and without commitment, employing the most grotesque and comical attitudes, because the stage was the only place where they could not allow themselves the least simulation or absent-minded, fashionable convention.

Lucca was completely exhausted after the rehearsals, and when she woke up in the evening having slept for an hour or two, she discovered she had spent yet another day without thinking of Otto. Thinking of him brought no particular feelings. She felt as if she’d had a local anaesthetic, and on the nights she had dinner with Else she hardly listened to what her mother said. Most of the time they left each other in peace, and there were days when they just met in the hall if one was leaving and the other coming home. Miriam called now and then, but if Lucca started to tell her anything she always noticed a shadow of envy beneath her friend’s enthusiasm. For a year Miriam had had nothing but a minor part in a television series for children, disguised as a kangaroo. She had laughed at herself, but nevertheless she tried to present the role in a serious light when she explained how hard it actually was to hop around in a costume like that, legs together. She had been highly praised for it.

When Miriam thought they had talked enough about Strindberg and Harry Wiener she asked if Lucca still thought about Otto and, as if to make the most of it, she announced one day that after all there didn’t seem to have been so much between Otto and the mulatto model he had been seen with. Lucca could sense Miriam didn’t believe her when she said she hardly thought of him any more. She ought to go on suffering when everything else was going so well. Or had she fallen for the Gypsy King, in fact? When Miriam hinted at that for the third time Lucca shut her up. There was really more to life than everlastingly falling in love, she said, surprised to hear herself quoting Else. Work, for instance, she went on. That made Miriam change the subject.

Only at rehearsals did she felt completely alert. She no longer doubted that she had been given the role because Harry Wiener had faith in her talent. She had been reassured when she went to tea with him in his rooftop apartment, and her trust in him increased when he sometimes took her hand or put an arm round her shoulder as they talked. There was nothing in the least suggestive or underhand in his touch, it came as a natural extension of the conversation and his explanations when he went through a scene and showed her how he visualised her entrance and where she should stop.

She never spoke to him about anything but her part, and he left as soon as the day’s rehearsal was finished. Nothing in his professional manner betrayed that she had sat on his sofa one afternoon talking about herself while outside thunder crashed and rain fell. It strengthened her feeling of laying herself bare on the stage, delivered to his eyes down in the semi-darkness of the auditorium. There was a small lamp on his desk, but its light illuminated only his torso, not his face. She wondered whether the other actors had been to tea with him too, and if he knew as much about their lives as he did about hers.

One day she was in the canteen with the captain and the diva, the two of them enjoying a teasing, comradely banter. They must have known each other since youth. Lucca felt an outsider. It was still strange to have lunch with them, although they were her colleagues. She had known their faces since she was a child, and here she was watching the diva pick up shrimps from her plate with her red nails and pop them between her red, red lips. She and the captain couldn’t agree whether Harry Wiener’s present wife was number three or four, and they helped each other count up the names of the women he had married, and those he’d had on the side. They even argued over the order. He changes wives as others change their cars, said the diva. She had been friends with the previous wife, that is, number two or three. Wasn’t there one they had forgotten?

The captain filled up his beer glass. Anyway, Wiener would soon have to look around for a new one. He had foam on his nose when drinking. The diva removed it with an affectionate finger. Well, you are exquisitely sympathetic, she laughed with her moist lips and turned to Lucca. She had better take care or she would be the next! But maybe the crafty old bugger had already tried it on? Lucca felt her cheeks burn. Well, they’d better not go into that now! The captain made a poker face and raised an index finger at his friend. The young weren’t like that — any more! The diva let out a whinny. One-love, she said and gasped for breath with a groan of ecstasy. But what was it he had called Wiener, that time they did A Midsummer Night’s Dream… Yes, come on now! She gave his arm a pat of encouragement. The captain scratched his neck and raised his glass. She picked up the remaining shrimps from her plate and sucked mayonnaise from her fingers, looking at him expectantly. We call him the Gypsy King, said Lucca. The captain held out his glass and bent forwards as if his beer was going down the wrong way. They laughed.

As she cycled home she felt irritated with herself for blushing when the diva asked if Harry Wiener had made a pass at her. Had they seen through her? Was that how he tracked down new talent? But why then had she got the part? Was it only because it would be too painful if she put it around town how she had sent off such an old ape? Not because he was ashamed of his approaches, but because he was ashamed at being rejected. Had he given her the part simply to keep her mouth shut? That seemed too complicated, she thought and regretted having angled for such a cheap laugh with the hackneyed nickname. She had slipped that in to assure them she had not been to bed with him. But why was everyone convinced she had, Otto and Miriam and now the diva and the captain as well?

She could not make the image of the notorious womaniser match her impression of the calm, concentrated man with the lined face. Nor could she make her own image of him match the episode in his Mercedes when he had driven her home and quite openly made advances. Probably he had just felt lonely. His wife was incurably ill and he didn’t know how long she had to lie suffering. Was it any wonder that he lost his bearings for a moment? Looking back at it now she felt he had opened a crack into something human in his otherwise controlled and impenetrable façade. Just as when he received her a month later, confused and half asleep in a frail and touching way.

Suddenly she pictured him again clearly, in the car when they stopped at the kerb outside the Egyptian restaurant. The vulnerable look in his eyes when he bravely gave himself away and asked for a kiss. He must have known what he was exposing himself to, the gossip and ridicule, but he had not cared. She kept on going back to the mixture of courage and vulnerability there had been in his expression. She couldn’t possibly be just a firm young cunt, yet another in the series, if you were to believe the diva and the captain.

She recalled what he had said. That she was both talented and attractive, and she was wrong if she believed one had nothing to do with the other. When he said that she had thought he was merely trying to manipulate her or overwhelm her with his cynicism. But perhaps there was no difference, with a man like Harry Wiener. Maybe he had wanted to test her and see if she had sufficient substance and ability to resist. He must have seen something more in her that night. He must have seen the same thing he had patiently waited for from the start of rehearsals, down at his desk in the semi-darkness, until she too began to see it in the bright light up on the stage, as she gradually took possession of her part. Another side of herself which so far had remained hidden.

She slowly turned off the hot water until it became icy cold. For a moment her heart seemed to stop beating. She gasped but forced herself to stand still, eyes closed, completely stunned by cold. When she had turned off the water she stepped in front of the wide mirror fitted into the wall between the Moorish tiles. The window behind her was open, the mosquito net reflected the sun and the mountains faded behind a white fog. She had gained a little weight, her hips were rounder and her breasts bigger. For once she was brown all over, without the usual pale strips from her bikini. She lay naked, sunning herself on the terrace in the afternoons. No one could see her except Harry when he sat in the shade reading. The scratching sound of cicadas intensified outside the window, escalating rhythmically. She rubbed her face with her hands and pressed water out of her black hair.

She could still feel surprised when she looked at her black hair in the mirror. One day after rehearsal Harry had taken her aside and, as if in passing, asked if she would consider dyeing her hair black. It would make her look like the captain, her father in the play. When he saw her terrified look, he immediately laughed it off. It was just a thought. She forgot it again, but a week or two later when she was standing in front of the mirror memorising her lines it suddenly struck her that she ought to have black hair. Only when she’d suggested it did she recall it had been his own idea, but he made no comment, not so much as a twitch. He merely gazed at her as he considered it, until he nodded agreement, as if it was something she herself had discovered. She was both fascinated and alarmed. He said nothing when the play had been performed for the last time and she had her hair dyed black again because her own colour had begun to show at the roots. But at that point she knew he liked her with it.

She pretended not to have seen him when he came into the bathroom, at first only a silhouette against the shining mosquito net. He stepped into the light from the lamp above the mirror and embraced her from behind, laying his hands on her cool breasts. He gave a wry smile and met her eyes in the mirror. Beauty and the Beast, he said. She could feel his growing erection against her buttocks, through the linen trousers. She would have to go, she said. If she wanted to be on time… They had arranged for her to drive to Almeria and fetch their guest from the airport. He let go of her. She kissed his forehead and pulled the curls at his neck consolingly. Poor beast, she mumbled tenderly.

When she got into the car she realised she had no idea what he looked like, the man she was going to meet at the airport. She went back to the house. Harry looked at her ironically as she tore the lid from a cardboard box and wrote on it with a biro. Andreas Bark, she wrote. He nodded approvingly. Smart… She drove down the winding road from the village and out onto the main road. There was hardly any traffic. The landscape was grey and ochre-yellow in the sharp light. She put on her shades, stepped on the speedometer and turned up the volume on the radio.

21

She was on the stage in The Father. Half-way through the play she dried up. She could not remember a single line, and complete silence fell in the theatre, such silence that she couldn’t even hear the prompter’s whisper. The captain looked at her expectantly in the silence, and she felt her pulse beating softly behind her ear. The diva stood out in the wings gazing at her, dressed up as the white clown with a ruff, conical hat and white, painted face, smiling, with her head on one side. And suddenly a hole opened in her ear drum, that was how it felt when she heard Else’s cultivated radio voice, reverberating like a loudspeaker at a railway station: Take care with your consonants!

The dream left a hollow, crushed feeling in her stomach, but she could not eat anything and managed only to swallow a cup of coffee when she went down to the kitchen. She sat looking out at the neglected garden. It had rained in the night and the sky hung heavy over the stripped tree crowns. The gale tore at their outermost branches and moved the greasy leaves around on the grass. There were two hours left before she had to be at the theatre. She decided to go at once. She did not know what else to do with herself.

The set design had been finished some days previously and she wanted to see what it looked like from the auditorium. She found her way through the labyrinth of corridors and emerged in the dimly lit theatre with its empty seats. There was light on the stage. Harry Wiener sat on a Victorian sofa covered with black chintz, he was dressed in black himself. The set design had the effect of being both realistic and dreamily strange. It was very simple, designed in black and grey except for a single armchair covered with red velvet. He sat deep in thought with one arm resting on the back of the sofa and his hand under his chin, looking down at the shabby stage floor. He had not seen her. She stood there gazing at him from a distance.

Again she remembered the sympathy she had felt between them when she was in his apartment, with rain foaming on the balcony and lightning brightening the sky above the harbour. The warmth of his manner when he spoke to her, and the frailty he exhibited when he greeted her, slightly dazed because he had fallen asleep on the sofa. It had made her forget her nervousness over meeting him. She had forgotten everything else as she sat there high above the city surrounded by his books, captured by the calm gaze resting on her as she told him about herself and listened to what he said about Strindberg in his subdued, hoarse voice. He had opened up to her, not only when he briefly explained that his wife was dying, but also when he talked of the captain in the play. Of man’s unhappy love for woman and of how life belonged to women because they had the ability to pass it on. Of the deserted boy-child, who grew up to fear women and mistrust them because in his heart he cursed the mother who had once rejected him. Afterwards she had realised he hadn’t spoken only of Strindberg and his captain, but of himself.

She had expected him to make some little sign to show her he remembered how they had sat and talked, but he kept her at a distance, as he did with all the others, kind, expectant and deeply concentrated on the work. With each week that passed she felt more defenceless, exposed to his eyes that apparently apprehended everything that stirred within her. He seemed to know her, but she herself knew so infinitesimally little about him. She felt in contact with him only when he occasionally came up to her and cautiously laid a hand on her shoulder as he put a question which took her unawares, anticipating what she felt without being able to express it clearly. But she was not the person he spoke to, it was the cavalry officer’s daughter he had slowly drawn out in her from some forgotten, shadowy corner of her personality.

Perhaps he had invited her for tea to study her at close quarters before he set out to make use of her for his own purposes. Why would Harry Wiener be interested in her as more than a tool for his art? That must have been what he meant when he said she was both talented and attractive, and that one could not be separated from the other. He had been attracted to her as a sculptor might feel towards a lump of clay. He had asked to kiss her simply because he wanted to see what she looked like when being kissed.

He rose from the sofa, pushed it a little so it stood more at an angle, and sat down again. As he leaned back he caught sight of her. He smiled and waved her forward. Sit down, he said and patted the sofa cushion as she walked across the stage. He looked at her attentively. Was she nervous about the première? She said she was. That’s how it should be, he smiled and looked down at his hand, carefully stroking the smooth chintz of the sofa. You’re good, he said, that’s why you’re nervous. It was the first time he had praised her directly. He looked at her again. Still living with her mother? Lucca was amazed. She could not remember telling him where she lived. It had become quite difficult to find an apartment, had it? He had bought a freehold apartment for his daughter in Vanløse. Of course it was a dreary place, but she could afford the regular expenses there. He smiled kindly. What about her? Couldn’t her mother help her with a payment? It was about the only way to get somewhere to live. Buying…

He stood up, the audience was over. She followed him into the wings, wondering what all that talk about owning property was for. Did he think the town was full of millionaires? Or had he asked about her accommodation situation because he wanted to be kind or had no idea what else to talk to her about, now she had burst in on him as he sat meditating before the rehearsal? He walked with head bent so she only saw the famous grey curls at his neck. Suddenly he staggered and stretched out a hand as if to find something to support him. She took his hand, just as he seemed about to sink to his knees. He put his arm round her shoulder and hid his face with the other hand. Everything went black, he said and removed the hand. He looked at her and smiled faintly, pale as paper. He wasn’t getting enough sleep at present…

She stood there, still with his arm resting on her shoulder, looking into his eyes and without thinking she laid a hand over his and stroked it lightly. She recognised his gaze, it was the same as in his car that evening a few months before, the same vulnerability, but also something wondering and sad, as if he was not merely looking at her but also observing himself from outside. He let go of her shoulder and sat down on a box under the cables and control panels on the wall. Just go ahead, he said, closing his eyes. I’ll sit here for a bit…

During the curtain calls after the première, as she stood among the other actors, each with their bouquet wrapped in cellophane, he finally allowed himself to be persuaded by the deafening applause to come up on the stage. He kissed all of them, even the male actors, on the cheek and when it was her turn he took her hand and walked forward on the proscenium with her in front of the others. The diva and the captain also started to clap, as well as they could with their huge bouquets, and soon all her fellow actors were clapping. Harry Wiener bowed one single time to the audience, still with her hand in his. She curtsied as she had seen the diva do, one foot behind the other, and when she straightened up the thunderous sound from the auditorium seemed stilled as he bent his face to hers. Thank you, he whispered and pressed her hand. When the curtain fell for the last time he had gone. The captain had been informed, the others crowded around him. Things were going badly with Wiener’s wife, her condition was critical. Lucca stayed at the party only as long as she felt necessary.

It had been a huge success, but there was nothing very strange about that. The Gypsy King was condemned to eternal success, as Otto had once said with a sarcastic twist. The special thing about it for Lucca was that overnight she was transformed from a promising fringe talent into one of her generation’s most shining dramatic lights, a new star in the theatrical sky, a brilliant cornucopia of emotional intensity, according to one critic. The newspapers were still fragrant with printer’s ink the following night when she leaned against her bicycle in the town hall square and feverishly leafed through the culture sections, greedy for more. She was almost run down by a bus on the way home. She woke Else. They sat in the kitchen reading the reviews aloud to each other. Her mother put her glasses down on the pile of papers and said: There, you see! There is more to life than love! Lucca did not know how to reply.

December passed, and the days were almost uniform. Even the weather was the same, murky, wet and raw. She slept all morning and spent the afternoons watching television before she set off for the theatre. The garlands of light and Christmas hearts seemed alien and irrelevant. Miriam went to visit her parents in Jutland with her jazz boyfriend, and Else flew down to a Greek island. Lucca said no thank you, slightly brusque, when Else invited her to go too. What would she do there? Be with me, her mother replied, pained. But they were together all the time! Else looked at her sorrowfully. Were they? Lately she seemed only to be together with herself. It was almost impossible to get a single word out of her daughter. She would have to watch out or her work would take up her whole life.

Lucca smiled ironically but she could see Else did not understand why. She was about to say something about all the evenings she had spent alone as a child with some nanny or other, because her mother was broadcasting or out with a friend, but she held her tongue. Fortunately, she thought afterwards, glad that she hadn’t allowed herself to be drawn into a quarrel she wasn’t even anxious to win. Else threatened to call off her trip, but in the end she did fly down to the white houses and the blue, blue water, as she used to say, apparently doubting whether the word would be blue enough on its own.

Lucca felt confused when she thought about Harry Wiener. She thought of him with a mixture of gratitude and suppressed anger. She had become a success only because of his genius, she knew that, but all the same he had been the one to whisper his thanks during the curtain calls after the première, when he took her hand and presented her to the audience, his discovery. Thank you and goodbye, he should rather have whispered, for the next moment he had gone. He had got what he wanted from her. With his gaze and his voice he had surrounded her with a chrysalis of attention, he had almost hypnotised her and then woken her with a snap of the fingers. Now she could flutter around up in the light. When she was on the stage she became one with her role, everything in her was pervaded with its movements, moods and colour changes, but when she went home she was no more than a listless body that collapsed in front of the television empty of all thought.

The diva had seen what was happening to her. One evening after the performance when they sat together in the dressing room, she suddenly laid a hand on Lucca’s arm. She really mustn’t look so sad, she was the best ever! Lucca turned to her. Was she? Now, stop that, said the diva, starting to spread cleansing cream over her face with deft movements. Wiener had been absolutely ecstatic over her. She just must not take it personally. She must understand that she was here to be used. Indeed, he had used her, squeezed everything out of her, and she should be glad of that. Glad and proud. The diva leaned back her head as she put cream on her chin and neck. But she knew it well. One day you had all his attention, and you wallowed in it, you gobbled it up, and the next day you stood there and had to cope on your own. That was how it was! She smiled optimistically and put her head to one side, her face all white with cream, and suddenly she looked like the white clown in Lucca’s dream.

Lucca smiled bitterly, thinking of the morning when she had met him before the rehearsal and seized his hand when he felt faint. As they faced each other in the wings there had been a moment when she believed he did look at her differently, and when he had whispered his little thank-you in her ear during the curtain calls, she had referred that to more than her performance. But what else should he have thanked her for? It was her place to thank him! How stupid she was! She felt ashamed when she thought how she had put her hand on his and stroked it as he leaned on her for support.

One morning a few days after the première Else knocked at her door. There was a telephone call for her. She said she was asleep. It was a journalist, said Else, something about an interview. On the way downstairs Lucca felt annoyed that Else had answered the phone. It must seem absurd for her to be living with her mother at the age of twenty-seven. The journalist wanted to come the next day, bringing a photographer. Her voice was irritatingly maternal. They arranged a time when Lucca was sure Else would not be in. She went through her wardrobe but couldn’t decide what to wear. The search ended with an old T-shirt stolen from Otto. He would recognise it, she thought, since she was being photographed.

The journalist was a hefty lady of Else’s age wearing a heavy amber necklace. She wanted to know what it had been like to be directed by Harry Wiener, and while Lucca was telling her, she had the feeling that it was really Harry who was being interviewed, through her. Harry Wiener was famous for never giving interviews. She was just as excited about the interview as she had been about the reviews of the performance, but everything was wrong, she felt, when she saw the picture of herself, which took up half a page, with her hands stuck out in the air like a jumping jack because she was explaining something. The printed words were not hers, but the journalist’s. She could hear the wheedling, motherly tone as she read, and how the amber necklace rattled between the lines. Everything she had said was stuck together with sugary adjectives. It almost sounded as if she was head over heels in love with the great Harry Wiener, and the description of her was even worse. The boyish, gazelle-like Lucca Montale, who opened the door in her washed-out aubergine-coloured T-shirt, casual and enchanting with her mercurial gaze, her honey glow and the sparkling black hair which revealed her Italian background… she hurled the newspaper into the waste bin.

The day before Christmas Eve she went into town in the afternoon to go to the cinema. When she left after the film it was dark. She walked through the pedestrian streets, where people struggled past laden with all the parcels that twenty-four hours later would be unwrapped again by other people who had toiled along with similar parcels, just as red in the face with effort and irritation. Now all she needed was to run into Otto and his divine photo-mulatto, or whoever he had replaced her with if Miriam was right that their affair had already ended. Once that had occurred to her she couldn’t get it out of her head again. Of course she would meet Otto at any moment with Christmas presents under one arm and a gorgeous doll under the other, and then she would have to stand and smile all over her face to convince him of what actually was the case. That for weeks she had hardly given him a thought and had already begun to wonder why she had loved him so much.

She went round Magasin du Nord’s food halls without finding anything to buy. Finally she decided on fillet steak. There were two steaks in each tray, obviously they thought no-one would be so extravagant as to buy fillet steak for themselves alone. But she could always eat the second one tomorrow, she thought, and now she was pushing the boat out she also put a tin of foie gras and a jar of caviar in her basket. As she approached the wine department she caught sight of a man standing with his back to her studying the labels. He wore a camel-hair coat and the grey curls at his neck fell over the turned-up collar.

She thought of turning round, he must have read that embarrassing interview, but she went on. The Gypsy King was not going to stop her drinking red wine on Christmas Eve. He glanced up from the bottle he held in his hand. He was pale and looked tired. She tried to smile but he did not smile back. Catching up with the shopping? he said finally. She held up her basket. My Christmas dinner, she said, launching into an over-elaborate explanation of why she would be alone, regretting she had disturbed him. He smiled wryly at her efforts and she stopped talking. Neither of them said anything, and when the silence grew too strained she found the courage to ask after his wife. She had not given her a thought since the première celebration. He put the bottle back on the shelf. She died this morning, he replied dully.

Afterwards Lucca could not have said how long they had been standing like that, looking into each other’s eyes, she with her plastic basket, he with his hands in the pockets of his coat. He cleared his throat. She shook her head rapidly as if waking from a trance. He looked down at his shoes and then back at her. His wife had been alone, he had overslept. He looked away. They had phoned, he had gone out there as quickly as he could, but too late. He had come too late for her death.

For a moment his face seemed about to collapse. He turned his back and took a step or two between the shelves of bottles, and she heard a half-strangled throaty sound. She went towards him but stopped as he turned back again. He dried his eyes with the backs of his hands and looked at her. I’m sorry, he said. She said he needn’t be. Would he rather be alone? He avoided her eyes and took another bottle from the shelf, desultorily studying the label. I don’t really have any choice, he mumbled. But she supposed he needed something to eat… the words tumbled out of her mouth. He looked at her blankly. She pointed at her basket of fillet steaks. There are two of them, she said. He looked at her in surprise. Did she mean it? She shrugged her shoulders. He had better find something drinkable, then. He walked slowly along the shelf, carefully inspecting the labels, suddenly shy at having her standing there.

She made a bowl of salad while he fried the steaks. To start with they were a little stiff with each other. He said he had read the interview. She had said some nice things. She told him what she thought of the journalist. He smiled. A journalist like that wants to show she is someone too. You mustn’t grudge her that… Now and again they fell silent and avoided each other’s eyes, as if they took it in turns to regret she had gone home with him. They spoke about the performance, he said she had earned her success. If she wasn’t too terrified he was thinking of asking her to work with him again next year. He felt like doing a new production of A Doll’s House. It was fifteen years since he had last worked on the play, and he had actually considered it was passé since, according to their friend Strindberg, marriage had long since become ‘a partnership with economic activity’. He smiled tiredly. But she had given him the courage to try. He had thought of her as Nora. She held her breath a moment. Yes, thank you, she said. He shook his head. She had nothing to thank him for.

When they had eaten they sat for a long time looking over the lights of the city. He told her about his wife, but not at length. They had lived apart for several years, she at the villa north of the town, he in the rooftop apartment. For years it hadn’t been a real marriage, he said. There had been too much… how to put it? Too much and too little had been said between them. He put down his wine glass and walked over to the French window at the terrace. Either she should go now, or stay.

She stayed. Everything happened very slowly, as if through water, with long pauses when they just lay side by side until they had to give in to what they had so hesitantly begun. His body was different from any other body she had known. His skin was looser, but very soft, and his arms and legs were more sinewy than she had imagined. He did not let go of her eyes as she straddled him, and she recognised the open, vulnerable expression that had made her speculate so much. As if he marvelled over what she was doing to him, at the same time taking hold of her buttocks. There was something unfeigned, at once reckless and completely stripped bare over his face when he groaned and she felt that he came. She lay awake while he fell asleep in her embrace. It was a terrible thought, but she did think it. She thought that she was glad his wife had died before this happened. Since she was dying anyway.

22

The plane from Madrid had landed when she entered the arrival hall with her cardboard placard. She placed herself at the front of the group of people waiting. The first passengers came in sight with their luggage and looked around them, searching. People called out greetings and kissed each other. She recognised him at once, before he caught sight of her placard, it must be him. Andreas Bark looked pale, as Danes do when they emerge from winter and screw up their eyes against the bright light. He wore black jeans and a shabby leather jacket of the kind sported by the Copenhagen in-crowd of young artists and film-makers. But at least he wasn’t shorn like the really hard-boiled arty types with their cropped pates that made them look like convicts. In fact he was not bad looking with his dark, unruly hair and prominent chin.

She waited until his gaze lit on her. His smile expressed surprise in a boyish, slightly flustered way. He knew very well who she was but he had not expected to meet her here. Andreas Bark probably did not read glossy magazines and obviously did not go in for gossip. He talked a lot as they drove, but his voice was pleasant. It had been snowing in Copenhagen when he left. I ask you! No wonder there was something abject, somehow aggrieved about the Danes. Each time you stuck out your nose for a whiff of spring you were put in your place with a shock of cold. He took off his leather jacket, he was sweating. He had spent the winter in Rome. His arms and wrists were surprisingly slender. Rome… wasn’t it a place for old ladies? He laughed, but made no reply. He said he had seen her in The Father. The production had impressed him, its rhythm and clarity… And she had been good, he hastened to add, like something he almost forgot to mention.

They left Almeria behind them. At the end of the stony plain you could see the snow-clad ridge of the Sierra Nevada. Andreas gave free rein to his delight, genuinely bowled over. He caught sight of one of the mock-up towns left among the furrowed rocks after being used for a spaghetti western. Couldn’t they stop by there? They walked among the wooden houses consisting of mere façades, with name-plates reading Sheriff or Saloon in faded lettering. The façades had wooden pillars and planked walkways, where the sheriff and the loafers of the town had sat tilting their chairs with their hat brims pulled down over their eyes. In the middle of the set there was a gallows with a rope that swung lightly back and forth in the wind. Andreas put the noose round his neck and stuck out his tongue. She laughed. He beckoned her with a familiar gesture, as if they already knew each other. From where he stood, beneath the gallows, you couldn’t see the supporting beams against the backs of the flats. It was an authentic scene from a western, where the dust had just subsided after a horseman had ridden off.

Harry was disgruntled when they finally arrived back and joined him on the roof terrace. Did it really take so long to cover the hundred kilometres? Andreas was disconcerted at the grudging welcome and politely tried to defend her. He talked about their visit to the wild west town. He had led her astray, he said apologetically. She was annoyed that he was suddenly so smarmy. He had been more himself as they drove, she felt, but how could she tell? After all, she didn’t know him. Well, Harry growled, it was time for a drink, anyway. Did he like white wine? Andreas shrugged his shoulders with an embarrassed smile. He liked everything. Harry stopped on his way across the terrace and turned towards him. Everything? That was quite a lot… They sat on the parapet while he went down. Andreas was less talkative than he’d been in the car. He avoided her eyes and studied the view. The riverbed was in shadow, the pink flowers of the oleander bushes glowed on the steep cliff sides. The cicadas rattled away as usual. Why were they suddenly lost for words?

Harry came back with a tray of glasses, a dewy bottle of white wine and a bowl of black olives. He placed the tray on the stone table and turned towards them. Come along then, children! He had recovered his good humour, and Andreas seemed more relaxed, but she could tell from his tone of voice how much he respected Harry, and took pains to find the right words. He spoke in a different way here on the terrace, his voice was more cultivated, and he did not smile boyishly as he had done at the airport. It was the master and his apprentice sitting in the flickering light under the canopy, drinking white wine and chatting about a Verdi opera Andreas had seen in Verona. Harry knew the director, a German. Andreas listened intently as Harry talked about the German director’s staging of Schiller’s The Robbers at the Burgtheater in Vienna.

Lucca was not listening. Andreas took a pack of Gitanes out of his bag and put a magazine on the table. Harry asked if he could have one. It was a long time since he had smoked a French cigarette. As many as you want! Andreas was a model of generosity. She picked up the magazine without asking leave and riffled through it. It was one of those so-called men’s magazines with the latest in watertight watches and instructions on how to fasten a tie in fourteen ways, and how to find the most authentic run-down hotel in Havana with damp-stained columns in colonial style and mahogany ventilator fans. There was also an interview with a racing driver and a mountain climber, and at the end, between two whisky advertisements, there was one with Otto. She rose, saying she was tired after the drive. Harry looked up at her as if suddenly remembering she was there. She took the magazine to the bedroom and lay down on the bed.

Otto and his girlfriend were photographed in front of an American camper-van from the Fifties, rounded and shining silver. It was chocked up in the corner of a field. They went out there, said the caption, when they just needed to get away from it all. The girlfriend was a reflexologist. She looked sweet, she was four months gone. Lucca looked at the picture more closely. It must have been taken in the autumn, the sunlight was white and sharp, and there seemed to be a cluster of withered leaves hanging in the foreground. She counted on her fingers. Otto had dropped Lucca in June. If the picture had been taken in October, he must recently have become a father. He hadn’t wasted any time. He could not have known the reflexologist for more than a couple of weeks before she became pregnant, unless…

Otto confided to the readers that it had been like a revelation when he met the reflexologist. She was the woman in his life, and she had taught him what life was about. It had just been wham! He hadn’t doubted they were made for each other. Lucca imagined what it had sounded like when he said wham! He explained that for years his life had felt unreal. Today he realised he had been through a depression. He had been concerned with external things, success and prestige, it had all happened much too fast. He had not had genuinely close relationships with anyone, and he had been about to lose his faith in love. Until he met the reflexologist. It had felt like being pulled down to earth and shot out into the galaxies at one and the same time. Otto felt as if only now was he starting to grow up. Now, when he was to be responsible for a new little person, totally entrusted to him. A little one like that, it was just a miracle. It was a boy, they had seen it when she had had a scan. He was already looking forward to the day when they would play football together…

Lucca put down the magazine. She thought of the American boy who had been given a red car for his birthday and sent his unknown father a drawing. She was glad she had persuaded Otto to send Lester that advent calendar. Otto… the twenty-fourth man in her life. She had really believed he was Father Christmas. It was less than a year since she had still believed that. At that time the Gypsy King was merely an old goat who had sneaked up on the pretext of his interest in her youthful talent. She took off her clothes and stretched out on the bed in the semi-darkness, thinking of Otto. He did not remember much, or else their memories differed. In any case she had made a mistake when she thought he was the one, hadn’t she?… She pulled herself together and wished him luck.

A child. They had never talked about that. It was not something which could ever arise with Harry. He had said so, without her asking. He didn’t want to be one of those pensioner fathers who were moved to tears over themselves, but who nevertheless took to the rocking chair before their children had passed their driving test. She felt he was right. There was more to life than children. There were enough of them anyway, more than all the adults in the world could provide with happiness. Her own childhood had not been particularly happy. She could say that now, matter-of-factly, without being upset. She had said it to Harry, and he had looked at her without comment. She was grateful he had not been sorry for her. Then she thought of Otto’s pious chatter about the little boy who would depend on him completely. Poor child, she thought, and not only because of the thought of Otto as a father. He would probably be just as good or bad a father as anyone else. It was the dependence itself, the helplessness of the little child, that repelled her.

She heard Harry’s hoarse voice behind the door when he came in from the terrace, saying something to Andreas. He walked downstairs, but the sound of his moccasins stilled halfway down. He had taken off his shoes, he must have thought she was asleep. She heard the dry skin under his bare feet rubbing against the tiles, his thoughtfulness made her smile. A gecko sat on the wall beside the door. Its white, rubbery, almost transparent body made her think of the foetuses she had seen in biology class at school, preserved in spirit. Anonymous abortions that would have been twice as old as she was if they had been allowed to live. She turned on her side and bent her knees. The mosquito net in front of the small window filtered the sun’s afterglow, and the dim light was reflected in the smooth skin on her thigh and knee, surrounded by the soft swaddling of shadows.

She thought of Harry’s gentleness in bed, his calm, confident hands and the vulnerable nakedness in his eyes when he let her do to him what she knew he was waiting for. Even when he was entirely defenceless, delivered over to her young, provocative body and his own desire for it, without his well-considered, civilised words, even then he was himself. Not someone different according to the situation, but wholly and completely himself. In contrast to Andreas Bark, who had been boyish, almost skittish, in the car and the wild west village, but who became precocious and anxious to please when he was in the presence of his master. She almost wished he was not there. She almost wished Harry would come to her as he did sometimes in the afternoons, when she lay in half darkness. He would stretch out beside her with closed eyes as if asleep. It was a game, when she caressed him slowly and his body began to admit what his unmoving face would not yet acknowledge.

She stretched out a hand and closed the window shutter so the room was totally dark. Only the hands and the circle of figures on the alarm clock shone green, far away. It was so dark that she saw no difference when she closed or opened her eyes. She remembered the first time she woke up in his bed. He was not there. She rose and pulled the curtains aside, at first slightly confused to be standing without a stitch on, looking out over the town from Harry Wiener’s rooftop apartment. It was snowing, with big, woolly flakes. When she turned round he stood in the doorway holding a tray. He had made tea, he did not yet know she preferred coffee in the morning.

She sat cross-legged with the hot cup in her hands, looking out at the snow over the harbour. When she turned towards him, he was leaning against the wall regarding her sorrowfully with his narrow eyes. She began to think of his wife. She did not know what to say and asked if he would like her to leave. He smiled tiredly and sent a finger sliding down her spine. If you’d like to, do stay, he said. You will leave me one day anyway. She put the cup down on the tray and lay down with her head on his lap. Not willingly, she mumbled. We’ll see, he replied, slowly stroking her coal-black hair.

23

Lucca was nervous as the plane came in to land at Charles de Gaulle airport. She was afraid Andreas would not be there as arranged on the telephone. She imagined he might have forgotten, preoccupied as he was when working. Maybe he had forgotten to look at his watch, maybe he had overslept because he had sat up writing all night. But she was also nervous at the thought of seeing him again. It was silly, they had only been apart for a fortnight and had talked on the phone several times. She was in the toilet when she heard the stewardess over the intercom asking the passengers to go back to their seats and fasten their seatbelts. She was putting on lipstick. There had been quite a lot of turbulence during the last part of the flight, it had spilt the coffee on her small folding table and almost made it drip on her clothes several times. Perhaps that was what made her nervous. The plane jolted again as she held the lipstick and pressed her lips down over her teeth, looking like a turtle. Her hand slipped and the lipstick left a long line on one cheek.

She was wearing a short beige dress she knew he liked. It was tight-fitting and fairly low-necked, and the skirt ended quite high up her thighs. He always had to touch her when she wore that dress. She had been in quite a state at the thought of getting coffee on it during the daft turbulence. Over the dress she wore a grey tailored jacket and a petrol-blue silk scarf he had bought for her when they lived in Rome. She had not looked so elegant for months, and it was equally long since she had put on any make-up.

As she was waiting to be checked in at Kastrup Airport she had felt like the typical provincial wife who had decked herself out just because she was travelling by air, but she wanted to look beautiful and sexy when he met her. She knew he had a weakness for girdles and high-heeled shoes with ankle straps. Besides, it was seldom now that she had the chance of making something of herself. At home she mostly dressed in dungarees and wellies.

She had finished painting the bookcase and all the books were in place, even down to alphabetical order. The living room had been the last job. While the bookcase was drying she had managed to fill in the hole around the stove pipe with mortar and then paint it over. It was an old cast-iron stove they had found at a scrap merchant’s and hammered the rust off. She and Else sat by the stove drinking red wine after Lauritz had been put to bed. Else said all her doubts had been put to shame. She looked affectionately at Lucca and stroked her cheek. The glow from the open stove door softened her lined features. So she had got herself a home at last… Did Else realise the implications of what she had just said? It seemed unlikely. There was not a shadow of heart-searching in her tender expression. Lucca got up to open another bottle of wine. She wasn’t used to her mother getting sentimental.

She thought of Else’s remark again as she watched Copenhagen grow smaller and vanish in the clouds. She leaned back in her seat and observed the massed clouds, dazzling white above, making her screw up her eyes. So she had got herself a home… at last. Else had said it in a loving tone and she would have liked to give herself up to the affection in her glance and the hand that brushed her cheek. Instead she had moved her face away and gone into the kitchen for more wine. She believed she had long since put her bitterness behind her. Bitterness at Else and Giorgio making such a mess of their lives and her childhood. She could see Else was hurt when she took her hand away and looked into the flames in the stove.

As she pulled the cork from the bottle she reproached herself for behaving like a rejected child. But she had felt that her mother was pawing at the life she had herself created. The home she had in fact made, at last, with Andreas. As if Else was invading her happiness in order to warm herself the way she sat and warmed herself by the stove that Lucca and Andreas had had to hammer and scrape away at for days before getting rid of all the rust. Suddenly she was irritated because she was dependent on her mother to look after Lauritz while she was in Paris. She snapped at Else when she poured their wine and her mother asked how Andreas’s new play was coming on. Else could not get over having a son-in-law who was an author and even starting to be famous.

Why couldn’t she just share her happiness with Else in the home she had managed to get at last after all the wrong turnings and blind alleys? Why was she so touchy, now that she was supposed to have found peace in herself? She looked out of the small window at the wing. Suddenly she thought it looked like a diving board, a ten-metre diving board above a very large swimming pool filled with whipped cream. Surely the stewardess would soon bring her a plastic-wrapped swimsuit. The telephone had rung as she sat drinking red wine with Else. It was Miriam. They had chatted on the phone every day. Most of the time Lucca had just listened to her friend, who alternately wept, then furiously recited her jazz beloved’s human failings, his egoism, his cowardice, his unfeeling and spoilt attitude to life. Miriam asked if she could come and see Lucca. A mutual friend had offered to drive her. Lucca explained she was on her way to Paris to visit Andreas.

After she had put down the phone she felt guilty again for not welcoming the deserted, heavily pregnant Miriam, and it did not improve matters that her excuse itself must seem like scorn. She hadn’t time for her unhappy friend because she was flying down to her lover to walk around Paris arm in arm. But she felt even more guilty over her silent, inattentive reaction to Miriam’s furious outbursts of sobbing. She could not hide it from herself. There was something repulsive about all that snivelling heartbreak. It was as if her friend was blowing her nose in Lucca’s ear. She recalled how Else had stretched out a hand and caressed her cheek, as if she wanted to leave her fingerprints on her happiness and lick the butterfly dust from her fond fingers.

Suddenly she could not stand the idea of her mother lying in the bed she and Andreas slept in every night. Perhaps Else would lie awake in the dark listening for a faint echo of their blissful sighs and moans from the walls. Through the years Else had been witness to all her failed relationships and affairs, and she had lamented them so enthusiastically that Lucca had sometimes suspected her of finding comfort and reassurance in her daughter’s setbacks. She was in no doubt that Else rejoiced for her sake, but nor did she doubt that in her heart her mother envied her all that happiness and secretly thought it was really incredible after all the men she had gambolled with. She probably did not realise it herself, but Lucca had heard it as an undertone in her comments. Imagine, that she had got herself a home in spite of it all! When actually she did not really deserve it. How merciful life could be, after all…

She thought of Miriam who despite everything had believed so fervently in her jazz beloved that she had decided to have a child with him. She’d had the same faith in Andreas, in the certainty of his gaze and his voice one late summer morning in Trastevere when she told him she was pregnant. Was it just because she compared herself with her deserted friend that she felt so vulnerable in her own home? A few days before, when all the books were in place in the bookcase, she had looked around her not knowing what to do next. Now everything was as it should be. She called Andreas to tell him this, but she could feel she was disturbing him. Normally he called, in the evening. She asked him why he didn’t just disconnect the phone. He mumbled that you never knew what might happen.

She missed him although there was less than a week to wait. She felt the lack of his presence, now she no longer had anything to throw herself into. The daily housework was quickly done, and the hours when Lauritz was at nursery school seemed longer than before. She sat and looked vacantly out of the window at the slanting ploughed furrows and the bare crown of the plum tree. She tried to read but put down the book after a page or two, unable to find any interest in the plot. She felt far too sensitive about the sudden emptiness. She had said that herself as an excuse one evening when she almost quarrelled with him on the telephone. They hardly ever quarrelled. Afterwards she could remember precisely what it was that had made her cross. He had seemed distant, as if he hadn’t anything to say to her, but of course he was far away in his mind, deep in his play.

She told him about Miriam and said it was probably her snivelling phone-calls getting on her nerves. He replied that when all was said and done Miriam had brought it on herself. She said she missed him. He missed her too, he replied after a pause. She laughed down the phone at him and asked why he said that when it wasn’t true. He had his work and the whole of Paris to romp around in when he was free. He didn’t go out much, he replied. But shouldn’t she get going on something soon? Now her role of do-it-yourself-woman was played out? It couldn’t be much fun for her to be financially dependent on him. She was hurt. As if she was a little kept housewife, and had only been playing a game, covered with paint and mortar. During the hours when he had been writing she was actually the one who had buckled down to it, and she had done a great part of the work on her own.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t want to quarrel with him, not on the phone while he was in Paris out of range. When, on rare occasions they did quarrel, as a rule they ended up going to bed together and erasing all disagreement with caresses. They had never been angry for more than half an hour at a time, and she did not want the conversation to end on a bitter note when she could not snuggle up to him afterwards and feel everything was all right again. Besides, he was right. She ought to get going again, the question was, on what. She had not had a stage part since Lauritz was born, only one or two radio plays when he was little, and some dubbing for a Disney film. She had probably been forgotten, it would be almost like starting out afresh. She had said no when she was offered a job with Lauritz on a television ad for nappies, chiefly because Andreas had made fun of it and had been against their child being made use of commercially. Maybe it was stupid of her.

She had not been given the role of Nora in Harry’s production of A Doll’s House. Andreas had intervened. At the time she had not given much thought to it, newly in love as she was. She had merely thought it was the price she had to pay for the choice she had made. When she fell pregnant shortly after that, the role faded into insignificance. But she had paid the price.

When she and Harry had begun to show themselves publicly she could feel that people held their breath in shock and disgust over both her and the shameless old seducer. Lucca dared not think what they would have said if they had known she had been in his bed less than twenty-four hours after his wife died. But when the news spread that she had left Harry she felt people distanced themselves from her afresh. Suddenly everyone seemed to take his side, and the theatre magician’s talented find was transformed into a calculating career prostitute who had ensnared the noble old artist in the midst of his loneliness and despair. They apparently forgot she had been given her role in The Father long before anything happened between her and Harry. Anyway, there were no more offers, and it felt as if she had been struck by a dangerous, infectious disease.

Harry had been right, then. She had ended up leaving him after all. But surely anyone could understand that sooner or later she would leave a man who was so much older. What if he had fought harder to keep her? To start with she had not cared much for his young disciple, and if anyone had told her he would be the father of her child, she would have laughed, both at the idea of having a child and the idea of having it with him.

She thought about that at Charles de Gaulle as she stood among the other passengers on the escalator in one of the plexiglass tubes. All these people, she thought. All of them had a place they called home, but how many of them would be able to say that they had been destined to get one particular home and not another? She thought about Otto again, that they had both had a child with just one year between them. What if he had not grown tired of her? Would those two children have been one and the same child, then? And what if it had not happened to be Andreas she ran into? It was hot in the tube, she was sweating and her impatience felt unbearable as she waited for her suitcase by the conveyor belt.

He was standing in the background in his shabby old leather jacket, which hung on him summer and winter. He waved and smiled, he looked like himself. Who else should he look like? She laughed at him and at herself. She could see he found her lovely and was glad she had taken pains with herself. He walked to meet her and tears came into her eyes as she put down her case and nestled into his embrace.

24

Wouldn’t she take their young guest down to the beach so he could take a dip? He must need one… Harry had obviously forgotten she was a few years younger than their guest. It was the day after his arrival. Andreas seemed almost terrified at the idea. He muttered something about forgetting his swimming trunks. He and Harry were still seated in the shade on the roof terrace when she went up there after her siesta. Harry would not be deterred, Andreas could just borrow a pair of his. Now there was no way out. The young guest seemed quite disconcerted at the idea of putting on Harry Wiener’s very own swimming trunks. What about you? he asked Harry. He made a deprecating gesture with his hands, he would stay here. Young Bark had drained him of energy, he was going to take forty winks.

Come on, then, she said, smiling encouragingly at Andreas, as if he was a shy child. They went down to the car. The village houses glowed white in the low sun and the shadows on the reddish rock slopes were long and distorted. On the way down Andreas pricked himself on an agave that stretched its tough leaves across the path. His arm was bleeding, but he said not a word, merely smiled although she could see it hurt. She was irritated because he would not even allow himself to say Ow! They drove down the mountainside. Is he tough on you? she asked. Tough and tough… he replied. As long as it brought improvement he was glad of criticism. A play script wasn’t a finished work, after all, just as a score was not in itself music. It only came to life when the conductor, or in this case, the director, got hold of it and gave it his interpretation… It sounded like something he had taught himself to say.

She had sunbathed as usual that morning, in her bikini. It annoyed her, she was used to lying naked and getting brown all over. How modest… said Harry when he and Andreas came out on the terrace each with his coffee cup and each with his script under an arm. They went to sit in the shade. His teasing tone made her contrary and she took off her top before lying down again on the sun-bed. She caught sight of Andreas averting his eyes as her breasts came in sight, and she was sure Harry had seen it too. He smiled his foxy little smile. Could that really amuse him? She closed her eyes and listened to the cicadas, some close at hand, others further off, each chinking its rhythm, fast or lazy. She lay unmoving and enjoying the sunshine beating into her skin, making her sweat and feel heavy.

Harry treated Andreas in a different way from that he used with his actors. She felt he was being hard. He did not comment on anything he found good in the play, whereas he laid down in detail what did not work with no polite beating about the bush. For instance, how could it be that all the characters not only spoke alike but also just like their author? Andreas attempted to explain that he had tried to stylise the language in such a way that the characters, instead of expressing themselves in realistic language, used a poetic or grotesque form that flowed through them and at the same time defined their personalities. Harry cut him short. Perhaps they were meant to speak in tongues? Every character must have a reason for speaking and saying what he or she said. Besides, it was an advantage for the actors to understand their own lines. Not to mention the audience. After all, this was a play, not a poetry reading!

Andreas defended himself mildly by saying that the demand for simple, clear and unambiguous dialogue risked draining the play of finer nuances and tones… everything which in his opinion made the difference between art and message drama, he dared to add. Harry laughed hoarsely. Might he have one of his Gitanes? But of course! Lucca heard him fish a cigarette out of the pack and the little click of the lid of his silver lighter. Shortly afterwards she smelled the spicy scent of tobacco smoke wafting across the terrace.

Now listen… Harry’s tone was friendlier now, almost fatherly. First of all he must never, never be afraid of being simple. Clarity, he said, clarity is all. On the stage nothing could be too clear. Where that was concerned there was no difference between Sophocles and a well-turned musical comedy. Tones, he said, he could very well leave those to poets, and as for nuances, they were something the impressionist painters had taken care of… wimps with full beards! When it came to the crunch the most archaic myths and the flattest pub jokes were constructed in the same way. And furthermore… he paused to inhale… he should not be afraid of losing his personal characteristics, his precious voice. Style, he went on, enunciating the word curtly and sharply, style began where you renounced yourself in favour of your story. If you had anything at all to tell. And he obviously had… otherwise they would not be sitting here, would they?

This was meant to be disarming, but she could see in Andreas that he was not at all sure Harry was right, and instead was picturing to himself how in a little while his master would slam the script shut and send him home. She had got up and was sitting on the sun-bed, dizzy with the heat. This time Andreas looked stiffly into her eyes to avoid having to look at her breasts. Harry looked at her too and smiled, but it was a smile she could not recall having seen before. A boyish smile like the one Andreas had given her when she fetched him from the airport and he was surprised to find her and not his guru waiting for him. Maybe it was the heat that confused her, but for a moment she thought the smile of the young man had nipped across onto the older man’s face, while the boyish smile’s rightful owner stared vacantly at her, afraid of moving his gaze as much as a millimetre downwards and humiliated at the thought that she had heard everything Harry said.

Everything went black when she got up. She turned her back on them and stood with head bent for a second or two before going down the stairs and into the bedroom. She put on one of Harry’s shirts and went on down to the kitchen to make lunch. She ran the tap until it grew cold and held her wrists beneath the running water. It was a big dark room, the coolest in the house, with an arched ceiling and an open fireplace. A door gave way to a steep passage leading up to the village. The crack under the door was so big that the reflected sunlight from the alleyway fanned out over the uneven tiles on the floor. The light was reflected in the stream of cold water with a restless, silvery flickering. A bluebottle cruised lazily around the sticky ribbon hanging from the ceiling, thick with dead flies, but did not alight. She drank a glass of water. One of the sun rays struck an apron hanging on a hook, washed out pink, with printed yellow tulips.

According to Harry his wife had not been there for years, but her apron was still hanging up. There was a brown stain on it, where she must once have used it to hold something hot. Lucca had often felt like putting it on. She took smoked ham and olives out of the fridge and started to wash lettuce. The bluebottle kept on circling around the ham. She had found other traces of his wife around the house, a pair of old bathing slippers in the wardrobe and a small bottle of dried nail varnish on a shelf in the bathroom, and some faded women’s magazines on the shelf beneath the bedside table, the newest ones four years old. Harry had told Lucca very little about her, and she had not asked. In the apartment in Copenhagen she had seen a photograph of an attractive, dark-haired woman with a triangular face, but the picture must have been taken at least fifteen years before, to judge from the dress. The bluebottle alighted on her upper lip, she spat and hit out with her hand. In the end she cut a small piece of fat from a slice of ham, put it on the chopping board and stood in wait with the fly swatter. She got it.

Harry was lively during lunch, almost jovial, and Andreas listened gratefully to his anecdotes. It irritated her to see him lapping it all up like a good little puppy getting his reward and comfort after Harry had given his script the full treatment. She was still amazed that this was the same guy who had seemed so free and spontaneous when they strolled around the wild west village. She went downstairs for her siesta. While she lay in the dark she thought of Harry’s remark about her modest bikini and of his foxy face when she took off her top and Andreas averted his eyes. She pictured Harry’s boyish smile again when she rose from the sun-bed after he had taught Andreas how to write drama. It did not suit him, that smile. It was not at all like him. It had the effect of an indecent exposure, as if he had taken down his trousers and shown off his bare bottom. At the same time there was something conspiratorial in his expression, as if he wanted to enlist her confirmation that the two of them shared something, whether it was his bare bottom, her young breasts or the beaten expression in his disciple’s eyes.

Why did he put up with it? She came out with the question after a long pause in which neither of them had said anything. They followed the coast road past the bars and discothèques on the beach and the low white concrete buildings on the other side with boarding houses, shopping arcades and complexes of holiday apartments. It was still out of season and in most places the shutters were closed. He looked at her. He didn’t mind being criticised. She returned his gaze briefly. He spoke in a tired tone, neither evasive nor forthcoming, as an obvious statement. He knew why he had written his play the way he had. Even if he was not particularly good at explaining it. But the old man might well be right in some of his criticism.

She was surprised to hear him speak of Harry like that. Perhaps it was in return for Harry’s young guest. He laughed out loud. She looked at him again. What? He smiled in the same sudden way he had done when they drove from Almeria. He was all right, the old man… he was theatre, through and through! Andreas nodded his acknowledgement and seemed as he did so to shake off the humiliation, all Harry’s didactic and ridiculing words, rather as you shake your head to get snow out of your hair. They passed the fish restaurant where they had eaten the previous evening, down on the beach. She would have to forgive him for making a fool of himself. What did he mean? Look out for the dog! he said quickly. She managed to avoid a skinny dog running across the road. Yes, what he had said about the part…

They had sat inside the garishly lit place because the wind had got up. She was beside Andreas, Harry opposite. You could see the spray rising from the waves in the light from the open windows. Harry leaned back with crossed legs, smoking, while they waited for their food. He told her about the play Andreas had written, and it sounded like a story he himself was inventing. Now and again he looked inquiringly at Andreas as if to assure himself that he did not get anything wrong. She loved to hear him talking in his deep hoarse voice, and she was so involved in listening to him that she was startled when the waiter arrived with their plates. Harry asked for an ashtray and the waiter went away. He pointed to the champagne cooler beside Andreas. Now he must see that his lady companion had something to drink. Andreas had been listening as intently as she had and turned to the wine bottle in confusion. Only to the brim! said Harry drily as he went on pouring.

The waiter came back with the ashtray and Harry put out his cigarette. They raised a toast. Andreas cleared his throat. He had been thinking of something. The part of the young woman… might that be a role for Lucca? Harry looked at him for a long time, and his eyes grew even narrower, as if he was thinking hard. He had considered it, he said finally, but had come to the opposite conclusion. It might well be seen as a trifle… he lifted his hands from the table cloth… overdone… if he gave the leading role in Andreas’s play and in A Doll’s House to his partner as well. He started to cut up his fish with great care. In any case we should never discuss casting in the presence of actors. He raised his eyes and looked out at the waves in the darkness, chewing. Andreas looked down at his fish.

She turned off the coast road along a track beside the cliffs that sloped steeply down to the surf. The water was jade green and blue black further out. No need to think of that, she said. Sure? She smiled soothingly. Of course… She drove round a point and negotiated a series of sharp corners down to the beach where she usually swam. It was framed by cliffs on both sides, forming a small cove. No-one else was there. She parked in the shade of a group of tall cacti.

When they had gone to bed the night before she had asked Harry why he was so worried about what people would say if he gave her the parts of both Nora and the woman in Andreas’s play. Usually he did not care in the least what people said about him. She had been sitting up in bed, ready for a discussion. He stroked her gently under the chin. It wasn’t actually his own reputation he was worried about… Besides, he went on, it was not the right part for her. He could not understand where Andreas had got that idea from. It wouldn’t be right for her, and certainly not at this point in her career. She must trust him, after all he had read the play. Nora, on the other hand…

But what did she think of him, by the way? He raised himself on one elbow. She lay down on her back. He let a hand slide over her stomach and one breast. He seemed rather pleasant… and rather young. Harry smiled. He’s older than you are, he said. Handsome enough chap, isn’t he? She turned on her side, he withdrew his hand and pulled the sheet over his hip. Why did he say that? As soon as she had spoken the words she felt she had fallen into a trap. Harry smiled again and looked in front of him. Well, but he was, why did she make such a fuss about it? She didn’t! He looked at her and kissed her forehead. That’s all right then, he said and switched off the light.

She moved close to him, he laid a hand on her hip. I’m just an anxious old man, he said, and she could hear him smile in the dark. She gave him a push. Rather she was the one to be nervous. He turned onto his back, and she rested her cheek on his chest and let her fingertips circle over his stomach. Perhaps she was right… He sounded thoughtful. Did she know what his last wife had once called him? Her fingers had reached the hairs in his groin. No, not if he hadn’t told her… She played with his growing erection. Woman junkie, he said, lazily caressing her buttocks. But the strange thing, he went on, the really puzzling thing was that even if he knew it himself, he was still carried away every time he caught sight of an engaging girl’s face and a pair of lovely legs. She carefully weighed his hanging testicles in her hand. So when was he going to find a new young and unknown beauty? He laughed. She needn’t worry. She could go on for a long time yet. When her youth came to an end he would have long since kicked the bucket.

* * *

For a moment she considered putting on her bikini top, but decided not to. He must be used to the sight by now. He stood a little way off with a towel round his waist as he took off his underpants. He stumbled a bit and almost fell down. His skin was white and he was so thin she could see his ribs and the muscles moving under the skin of his calves. He looked comic in Harry’s bathing trunks, they flapped around him and she couldn’t help laughing. He didn’t seem to mind, he laughed himself as he pulled the drawstring to tighten them. She suggested they should swim out to the rock that reared out of the water at the end of the cove where the mountainside sloped vertically into the sea. He overtook her, he was a good swimmer. He crawled out with quick rhythmic strokes and soon disappeared round the point.

The water was calm and the sparkling folds on the surface changed from turquoise to mint green. The horizon was only a milky mist. Andreas came in sight at the top of the rock. He stood with legs together, bent down and dived head-first, and his body made a shining arrow in the low sunlight. When she got to the rock he was on his way up. He stretched out a hand and pulled her towards him. The sharp edges cut into her soles as she climbed after him. It was a long way down. They dived by turns once or twice. The pressure made her ears hum. She doubled up with her head against her knees each time she sank through the green shining mist passing into darkness beneath her. A moment later she stretched out again as she was pressed up into the vibrating white mirror. They sat on top of the rock drying themselves in the sun, looking at the beach. The mountain ridge and the car and clumps of cactus were nothing but flat silhouettes, and the light from behind shone in the dust on the car windows.

He asked what it was like to live with Wiener. He called him Wiener. It must be difficult to create your own space. She shaded her eyes with a hand, looking at him. Your own space? He shrugged his shoulders, the drops sparkled on his arms. She thought of the role in his play she would not get and the film role she had refused because Harry was sure it would be a bad film. Andreas smiled and nodded in the direction of the beach. He could do with a fag now. A drop fell from his wet forelock and landed on his upper lip, he removed it with his tongue. She asked if he wanted to go back. He could wait.

Actually she felt free, she said, with Harry. Maybe just because he was so much older. Andreas looked at her. How? She talked about Harry’s calm, his lack of illusions, and repeated what he had said. That she would leave him one day. She looked down at her fingers stroking the rough surface of the rock. It might sound strange, but his saying that made her want to stay. He kissed her, and he did it so quickly that she hardly realised what was happening. She smiled in surprise, but when his face approached again she returned his kiss. His mouth tasted of salt and tobacco. She narrowed her eyes and took hold of his chin, which really was very prominent. Wasn’t it about time for that fag?

They chatted about everything under the sun while they dried themselves on the beach and later in the car on the way back. As if it had not happened. She spoke of Ibsen and A Doll’s House and what she thought of the role of Nora. He said it was brave of Wiener to put on that particular play. Women’s liberation had lost its punch now, at least as something open to discussion, and you had to ask yourself if the play was still relevant. She said there was another side to Nora, but hadn’t time to tell him what it was before the village came in sight round a bend. Soon they stopped below the house. The sun had gone down behind the mountains, the first street-lights had come on. Harry was in the kitchen stirring one of his Andalusian casseroles with chick peas and black pudding. She kissed him on the neck and went for her shower.

It was dark when she went up on the terrace. They talked quietly as they ate. Harry chatted to Andreas about Rome and let him describe it without showing off his own knowledge of the city, as she feared for a moment he would. When she was making the coffee in the kitchen Andreas came down with the dishes. He stood for a few seconds beside her but she did not look at him and he went up again. She served their coffee and said she wanted an early night. When Harry came into the room a few hours later she pretended to be asleep.

Andreas caught a bus to Almeria the next day. They had originally planned for him to stay on another day. He said there was an exhibition in Madrid he wanted to see before flying home. Harry drove him to the bus stop. She lay sunbathing on the terrace when he came back. He sat on the parapet beside the sun-bed looking down at the dried up river-bed, scratching his neck. He was in a great hurry… had he been too hard on him?

As the weeks went by it seemed more and more unreal to her that she had sat on a rock and kissed Andreas Bark. In her memory it had almost not happened. Everything was exactly the same between her and Harry. Before they went home they spent three days in Granada. He showed her round the Alhambra and described how the Catholic kings had driven out the Moors and the Spanish Jews in turn. That was how she discovered he was Jewish. He had not been circumcised. Thank God, he said, smiling. Think what I would have been like if they had cut my cock! He didn’t care where he came from or what he was called, he said. No one was going to tell him who he was, and in any case, family was just one great crushing mill. They were in a roadside restaurant somewhere between Granada and Malaga. He bent over his plate of pork chops in sherry sauce. ‘I know not how to tell thee who I am: My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself.’ She laughed at his old-fashioned punctilious diction and wiped sauce from his chin with her napkin. She had just finished Romeo and Juliet. When they were back in the car it occurred to her that she might be the only one who allowed him to forget now and then that he was Harry Wiener.

One afternoon a few months later Lucca was sitting at a pavement café on Gammel Strand. She was waiting for Miriam. It had begun to drizzle but she stayed on under the umbrella breathing in the scent of wet asphalt. Harry had driven to Skagen in Jutland, they had arranged for her to join him a fortnight later. She had been planning to visit Else at the holiday cottage. She had not seen her mother since they went to Spain, but put it off every day and didn’t feel like going up there. She enjoyed having the roof apartment to herself and being alone for the first time in six months. As she sat looking out for Miriam she noticed a woman standing on the pavement some distance away looking in her direction. Only after a while did Lucca realise the woman was gazing at her. She turned her head towards Thorvaldsen’s Museum as if she was engaged in observing the frieze of pictures on the side of the building.

After her success in The Father and being photographed with Harry for the gossip columns she had grown used to people recognising her sometimes in the street, but she had never been stared at for so long before. When she turned round again the woman was standing beside her table. They must have been about the same age, but she seemed older. Her face was lined and pale and she looked unhealthy. Her greasy hair stuck to her forehead, carefully set in an unbecoming but very straight parting, and she had a dark moustache. She fixed Lucca with her gaze through the raindrops on her spectacles, digging her hands into the pockets of her woollen coat. It was buttoned right up to the chin although it was early July. Suddenly Lucca realised the woman must be mad.

She sat down opposite Lucca with an artificial smile. I know very well who you are, she said. You are my father’s whore. You are the one who killed my mother… A waitress came up to take her order. Lucca waved her away and smiled at the woman. I haven’t killed anybody, she replied calmly. She was reminded of what Harry had told her when they sat on the stage chatting one morning before rehearsal. This must be the woman he had bought an apartment for. He had mentioned his daughter only once, and as far as she knew he had no other children. You’re lying, said the woman. You were fucking him when my mother was admitted to hospital! Lucca bent forward and lowered her voice as she tried to explain it was a misunderstanding, and that she had not started living with her father before her mother died. It felt wrong to say living with.

The tense shoulders in the woollen coat dropped, and Harry’s daughter stared crestfallen. She couldn’t understand it, she had seen them coming out of his building arm in arm. She looked up. It must have been her she had seen coming out the day her mother went to hospital. She had been tall and slim and black-haired… Harry’s daughter raised her voice again and struck the table, making Lucca’s cup rattle on its saucer… Like you! At that moment Lucca caught sight of Miriam. She stood up so abruptly that the chair fell over, called the waitress, passed her the change she had in her pocket and ran to meet her bewildered friend. Behind her she heard Harry’s daughter call out in a despairing voice. Couldn’t they talk? As she took Miriam’s arm and walked on along the pavement she cursed his idea of having her hair dyed for the part in The Father. At the same time she wondered who she could be, the young black-haired woman Harry’s daughter had seen him with. Was it the strange girl he had thought of when he made the suggestion? Had she been the substitute for an unknown woman?

The telephone rang next morning while she sat in bed reading A Doll’s House, now and then looking over the harbour that appeared and disappeared again every time the wind lifted the curtains in front of the open sliding door. She decided not to answer it, afraid it was Harry’s daughter. It went on ringing and in the end she stood up. It was Andreas. She was taken by surprise at hearing his voice and said Harry was in Skagen. He knew that. He was in Copenhagen, could he come round? Five minutes later the doorbell rang. She had to smile when she saw his silhouette behind the plate glass of the elevator door. She had seen the same silhouette exactly a year before on her way down the stairs after having tea with Harry. He wore his leather jacket and smiled his boyish smile, but he didn’t seem shy.

Harry had called him a few days before, about his play, and during the conversation had told him she was in town. That was why he had come. He had to see her, and the next day he had caught the train, and here he was. She looked at him. You must be crazy, she said. He knew that. But he had thought of her a lot… it had been so strange, what happened on the rock that afternoon. Either it was nothing or… he had to see her again to find out what it was. If it was anything.

They sat on the balcony looking at the clouds over the harbour and at each other, suddenly shy. He had blurted it all out, and now he didn’t know what to say. She wondered at his initiative and courage. She hadn’t thought about him as much as he had about her, and she said what she thought straight out. She said she had not known what to make of what happened on that rock. As they sat there it felt as if she had spent the past six months in a kind of trance. She felt she was being honest as she said that.

They sat in silence for a few minutes. There was quite a strong wind and he could not get his cigarette to light however much he turned this way and that. She suggested they go inside. She went first, and in the middle of the room she turned to face him. It was as if they’d been forced to get up from those chairs out on the balcony. He looked at her expectantly, the man who had come by train all the way from Rome merely because he had been thinking of her and knew she was alone.

It surprised her that she did not feel any guilt towards Harry, and how easy she felt it was to talk to him when he called. She thought the ease was a sign in itself. She felt as if all the muscles in her body had relaxed after a tension that had gone on so long she had confused it with rest. She felt untroubled with Andreas. They did things she would never have done with Harry. One morning they went to Tivoli even though it rained, and rode on the Ferris wheel in the wet, grinning like children. One day they took the hydrofoil over to the island of Hven and hired bicycles. They lay kissing on a grassy slope, from where you could see the towers and power station smoke-stacks of Copenhagen in the distance. The same view she had seen a year before from the bathing jetty, on her last day with Otto. That day seemed as far away now as the city skyline seen from Hven.

Andreas went back to Rome a week later. She asked him to go. She had to be alone, she said, to be able to think. He gave her his telephone number. If she felt like calling him when she had done her thinking. That same day she packed her things and took a taxi to the villa in Frederiksberg. As she drove through town it occurred to her that her things took up no more room than they had done when she left Otto’s apartment the year before. Two suitcases, some zip bags, some plastic bags. She had tried to call Harry, but he did not answer that afternoon. It was a relief. Instead she sent him a letter. Not a long one. He did not reply, and she never heard from him again.

Years later she asked herself if he had wanted it that way. Perhaps he had foreseen it was possible when he invited Andreas to come and visit them in Spain. She pondered on whether he had unconsciously wanted to hasten the inevitable, because he could not make the break abruptly himself. But it was only a thought. She had felt heavy inside when she heard the letter land in the letterbox with a dull thud, but it also made her more sure of her intentions, and she sensed that at last she was taking her life into her own hands. He wasn’t her only sacrifice. She had left the script of A Doll’s House on his desk.

She spent a week at home in the villa without anyone knowing she was there. She was just as alone as she had been the summer before when Otto threw her out and Harry called to invite her for tea. Just as alone, she thought, as when she was on her own in the evenings listening to Else speak to all and sundry over the air while she looked through the black and white pictures of young Giorgio in a square in Lucca, in front of a church wall speckled with the fleeting shadows of swallows. She talked to no one, nor did she give way to her need to hear Andreas’s voice again. She was quite proud of that when she did finally call to tell him when her plane would land in Rome.

25

He had not shaved for several days, and her scarf caught in his long stubble when they embraced. You’ve still got this, have you? he mumbled, smiling pensively and touching the soft petrol-blue silk. It had been the first present he gave her, shortly after she arrived in Rome, one afternoon as they were walking up the Via Condotti. The stubble scratched her face and made her feel she was waking up. She had been going around like a sleepwalker, alone in the house when Lauritz was at nursery school, left to all the needless worries she had been embroidering because she had nothing better to do. They faded and vanished like the images of a meaningless dream when Andreas picked up her suitcase and they left the airport building to find a taxi. She repeated the funny things Lauritz had said and described how she had repaired the hole in the wall around the stove pipe and arranged the books in alphabetical order. So now Harold Pinter had his place beside Pinocchio! As she gradually ran out of things to report on they contented themselves with exchanging kisses on the back seat of the taxi, a little shy as they usually were when they had been away from each other and were picking up the threads again.

She nestled into his arms and breathed in the scent of his leather jacket as his hand slid up her thigh under the short skirt. He caressed the bare skin between the top of the stocking and her suspender belt. Only the taxi driver’s ironic gaze in the back mirror stopped them throwing themselves at each other. She could see her forehead and her dishevelled auburn hair falling over his leather sleeve beside the driver’s dark African eyes. Beneath the motorway, in an anonymous district of neglected housing blocks, she saw a half-demolished house and a crane with a lead ball swinging against a building where the front wall had been cut away. The multi-coloured squares of wallpaper and paint on the smashed storeys were all that remained of one-time apartments. A second later the wall was pulverised in a grey cascade of dust and broken bricks.

She had lived with him in Trastevere for a month when she woke up one morning to find his fingers running through her hair down to the scalp. He looked at her as if he had caught her in the act. But your hair is fair, he said. Her own hair colour had begun to grow out and displace the black dye she had worn for months. I am not the person you think I am, she smiled mysteriously and told him why it had been a black-haired woman he met in Spain. Was he disappointed? He looked at her teasingly. And he had been dreaming about a fiery gypsy lass… he had even travelled all the way from Rome to Copenhagen!

She shook her head so her hair fell down over her eyes. She could easily learn to dance flamenco. He kissed her and said it wasn’t worth the trouble. A few weeks later, when her hair had grown and she really looked skewbald, she went into a barber’s shop in Trastevere and asked to be shorn. At first the barber refused with a pained gesture, but when she left the shop she was as bare-headed as an Arab boy. Never before had she known the feeling of air on the top of her head and her temples, and as she walked along the street enjoying people’s glances she felt as if her head was weightless and at any moment could take off like a balloon over the roofs of Rome.

The apartment was in a quiet, narrow side street to the Rue de Rennes. It was an attic apartment on two floors with one window from floor to ceiling looking out on a cramped courtyard. From the studio a staircase led up to a bedroom with French windows and a balcony with a view over the slanting zinc roofs and rows of chimney pots ranged close together. Everything was in shades of grey, the sky, the roofs and the walls. Behind a sooty party wall you could glimpse the Tour de Montparnasse far away, with lit windows in the evening. That was the only light visible from the balcony, in the middle of that enormous city.

She lay in the dusk listening to the distant sound of traffic. The air was cool on her bare shoulders, but she couldn’t be bothered to get up and close the balcony doors. She wanted to lie feeling the air, listening to the sounds of the city while she waited for him to come back. He had gone shopping, she was too tired to go out to eat. She had got up early to catch the plane, Else had driven her to the station with Lauritz. He had cried on the platform, but Else had said she should just go. The train was about to leave without her, as she kneeled down to the boy and tried to comfort him.

She considered calling home, but decided to wait. It might make him miss her still more, now he most probably had stopped being miserable. The light from Andreas’s laptop computer shone in the semi-darkness of the room. A shining white square floating among the dim outlines of furniture. He had not turned it off when he left for the airport, and as soon as they entered the apartment they fell into bed. But it had not come up to her expectations in the taxi, sitting with his hand between her thighs while she pressed her palm against the hard bulge in his trousers. She had kept her suspender belt and stockings on in bed, and the shoes with ankle straps, in the way she knew he liked and had maybe imagined her in the weeks he had been alone. When she dressed in the morning she had remembered to put her pants on outside the suspender belt. It seemed a bit comical to her now, when she took off her shoes and stockings and cuddled up to him under the duvet, wondering if he was disappointed.

It had not been as wild and passionate as she had wanted it to be. It had been the way it was when they were both tired and did not make love because they were completely swept away by desire but rather because they desired the idea of being close again instead of just falling asleep. He asked if she had come properly. She smiled at him fondly. It didn’t matter. She was happy just to lie here and feel him beside her. He stroked her hair, she pushed her head under his chin. She asked if he had finished his play. Almost, he said. There was only the end to do now. When she went back to work, she said, she would like to have a part in one of his plays. It wouldn’t need to be a leading part, she would be happy with a small one. She could come in with a letter!

She felt the need of a cigarette and got out of bed. The Tour de Montparnasse had turned into no more than a stack of little, shining cubes in the blue darkness. She switched on the lamp on the writing desk and took the carton of cigarettes out of the plastic bag from the airport. She couldn’t find her lighter and there wasn’t one on the desk either. She walked downstairs with the cigarette hanging from her lips, still naked, and thought that if she had a spotlight on her now she would look like a stripper coming down to ask one of the men in the audience for a light, as part of the show. There must be a lighter somewhere. Distrait as he was, Andreas always kept two or three plastic lighters going at the same time. She caught sight of his tweed jacket on a hanger behind the front door. The one he occasionally wore when he dropped his image of the young rebel. His Arthur Miller jacket, she called it. He did look a bit like Arthur Miller when he wore it, if you left out the horn-rimmed spectacles. It must be the prominent chin they had in common. As she searched through the pockets she heard a rustling sound. An envelope was sticking out of the breast pocket.

She might have just let it go, she thought later. She had never been through his pockets before, and never read his letters. She knew it was wrong, but she did it all the same. Was it intuition that made her take the envelope from his pocket, or was it ordinary, thoughtless curiosity? It was an airmail letter with a Swedish stamp, posted in Stockholm just over a week before. She could still have changed her mind as she held it in her hand. The letter bore no sender’s name, but the writing on the envelope was a woman’s, she could see, a young woman’s. Andreas’s name and address in Paris was written in felt tip and architectural capital letters, regular, very clear and with a weakness for calligraphic curlicues.

After she had read the letter three times she folded it up, put it back in the envelope and stuck it in the breast pocket of the tweed jacket, taking care to see that the stamp bearing Carl Gustav’s puppyish playboy face was on the left side of the pocket, as she had found it. She went into the bathroom, kneeled down in front of the lavatory pan and vomited until she was empty. The cold of the floor and the spasms in her stomach made her shudder. She locked the door, sat in the bath and crouched with her knees under her chin and one foot on top of the other. She turned on the hot water and held the shower against her head until the scalding water made her cry out with pain. Only then did she start to weep. She turned on the cold tap, not too much, and sat sobbing under the hot stream of water that surrounded her like a steaming cloak. She closed her eyes and pictured the house she had seen being torn down on the way into Paris. The remains of a condemned suburban building with gaping window openings, flapping remnants of wallpaper and gnawed-off storey divisions that sank soundlessly in a cloud of pulverised bricks, a grey waterfall of dust.

She was still sitting in the bath weeping when she heard the front door slam and Andreas calling. She stopped sobbing. Soon afterwards he turned the door handle and said through the door that he was going to start cooking. She turned off the water and slowly stood up, stiff from sitting in the same position for so long. The steam had misted up the mirror over the wash basin. She wiped it with her hand and looked at her tear-stained face. Her eyelids were red and swollen. She wrapped herself in a towel and went into the kitchen. He raised his eyes from the steaks frying in the pan and looked at her worriedly. She said she had been sick. It must have been something she ate on the plane. He stroked her cheeks sympathetically, first one, then the other, and concentrated on the steaks again. She opened the window to let out the odour of cooking. He told her about a Japanese chef who had committed hara-kiri when the passengers on a plane had fallen ill because he had cooked with an infected finger. He showed her both his hands, grinning. No infection! She went upstairs to dress.

She had decided not to say anything. The decision had almost made itself when she heard him come in. She would wait and see what happened. She could not get down a single mouthful of the steak he served up for her. She managed a little salad, but drank up quickly when he refilled her glass. The red wine had a calming effect and soothed the clutching feeling in her stomach. She was impressed at his cold-bloodedness. He said he wanted to go up to Belleville next day and take photographs of the Arab district. If she felt better, he added kindly. She nodded. That would be good, she felt fine now. It had helped to empty out her stomach. He even stroked her hand, which lay beside her plate of cold steak.

They watched a film on television, she went upstairs before it ended. She undressed and lay down on the bed naked. She heard him pull the cord in the bathroom and water running in the wash basin, and shortly afterwards his step on the stair. She closed her eyes. The sound of steps stopped in the doorway. She told him to cover her face with the blue scarf. He hesitated before complying. The light from the lamp on the desk penetrated the closely woven silk threads and took on their colour. She heard the sirens of an ambulance on the Rue de Rennes and someone shouting in the street. She lay like that, without a face, delivered to his gaze, with empty eye sockets and a dark slit between her lips where the silk was sucked in each time she drew breath.

When she woke up next morning Andreas was working at the dining table in what had once been a studio and was now furnished as a living room. She made coffee and placed a cup beside his computer. He caressed her thigh vaguely without looking up from the screen. She took her own coffee up on the balcony. She leaned over the railing, looking at the occasional pedestrians. It was a long way down. Would you pass out before you hit the ground? The sun was shining and if she pulled her coat round her shoulders it was warm enough to sit outside. She leaned back with closed eyes.

It probably did not occur to him that she would go through his pockets. Actually it was her own fault that everything between them was suddenly changed. But to him it might be just a harmless affair, otherwise he would mention it. She was not sure though. In the letter at least it did not sound like a digression, a single bonk to freshen things up a bit. How passionate they were, the words written in neat, architectural block letters. They were even garnished with graceful little drawings as proof of the sender’s feminine charm, here a bird, there a star and a naked lady, rather à la Matisse. She wrote that the colours around her had grown brighter since she had met him. She couldn’t sleep at night, she was afraid of going off her head. She had been living in a daze for too long, in a relationship that made her feel she was invisible. Just as he had, if she had understood him rightly. When she stood in front of the mirror it felt as if the mirror was looking at her with his gaze. As if she was seeing herself for the first time.

Lucca had sat for a long time studying her while Andreas was out shopping. She could well understand when she saw the polaroid picture that fell out of the envelope. His correspondent was pale and had blue eyes and curly, jet-black hair. A gypsy with blue eyes, of course that had been irresistible. After all, he did have a weakness for black hair. She sat on a double bed, her hair glittered in the morning sun which reached exactly to her breasts. Andreas had hardly been the one who had taken the photo, if so he would have kept it. She must have sent him a picture taken by someone else. But who had snapped her naked in an unmade bed? Andreas must have wondered about that too.

Even though the letter lacked any prosaic details as to who or what the woman was in real life, Lucca could work out that they must have met in Malmö during the rehearsals for Andreas’s play, which had been so important for him to attend several times a week. Perhaps she was an actor. A Swedish colleague! Lucca remembered his impatience in the morning, when he was leaving and had promised to drive Lauritz to nursery school first. How irritated he had been when the boy sat over his porridge half asleep. There were several references in the letter to something Andreas had said or written to her. In one place she actually quoted him. He was right, she wrote. Sometimes you did have to believe your own eyes. Otherwise you risked everything around you becoming as fleeting and unreal as a film. She too would like to meet him again. Unfortunately she could not get to Paris for the week after Easter.

Lucca shaded her eyes with a hand and gazed at the Tour de Montparnasse, rising from among the slanting zinc roofs and thronging chimney pots like a big, dumb prick of smoke-coloured glass. Did she feel shattered? She put the question in the same way as if she had leaned over the balcony rail and seen herself lying in the street in a pool of blood. She was beside herself. The expression had never seemed more apt, but it did not only cover the sorrow that kept on trickling out inside her from a gash so agonising she could hardly breathe. She was beside herself because she was observing herself like an outsider.

She recalled Andreas’s words about believing your own eyes. He had said almost the identical thing in Harry’s apartment in Copenhagen when he had gone rushing up from Rome, and later in Trastevere when she had told him she was pregnant. So those were the words he used for celebrations. But then again, why invent the wheel each time? They worked, those words. His own home-made version of love’s magic formula, which apparently created what the words suggested, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had not the same words brought them all the way to Paris, she on the balcony, he in the studio bent over his play, while their little son might be making a snowman out of the Easter snow at home, with his grandmother?

Of course there had been more to it than words. Ambiguous feelings and mysterious glances, a peculiar restlessness, an unexpected ease and the alluring powers of physical attraction. But the words had made the difference, encouraging her to dare give herself once more. His words about believing what you saw, instead of being sceptical and cautious because you were no longer a spring chicken and had tried all this before. And yet the words had no more weight or meaning than those glances and feeling jittery, intoxicating carnal dizziness. The words were the same, just as the glances and feelings had been, from time to time. Only the faces had changed on the way. The faith in what you saw, that Andreas had spoken of, was itself faithless. You could believe in so much and so many. He had probably been sincere when he said it.

She thought of what the dark curly-haired charmer had written in her letter, despite her romantic rapture. She could not come to Paris after Easter, unfortunately. Something was apparently more important than looking into Andreas’s wonderful eyes again. Had that made him stop for a moment and think about the one at home wielding her paint brush and mortar trowel? Did he give a thought to the fact that they had a child? She had hoped the years would gain the weight the words lacked. Lauritz was living proof that there was more than words and sensations between them. Or was he? Their child and their home had not prevented Andreas from saying those same words the years had made so precious, to someone he had known for a mere few weeks.

The weather was mild and spring-like as they walked around the Arab quarter in the afternoon. The scents of spices, the shrill music of tape recorders and the hoarse Arabian voices almost made them forget they were in Paris. They talked about it. That it was like walking through a North African town. Colourful fabrics, videos and cheap kitchen equipment were on sale. Andreas took pictures of people, all portraits. The women giggled or turned away, the men posed with hands to their sides and stomachs pushed out. She kept a little distance between them, without losing sight of him. Everywhere people were doing business, and notes were exchanged between brown or black hands. The women’s palms were painted with henna and their silver jewellery glinted palely in the misty sunlight. They wore long garments and some had tattoos on their faces. Most of the men wore European clothes. They looked at her, some of them out of the corners of their eyes, others directly, with an impudent air that made her feel she was being pawed at. She regretted putting on her short skirt. The voices, the glances, the music and crowds brought her out in a sweat, and she told Andreas she would go back to the boulevard and wait for him at a café they had passed.

She sat down on the glass-roofed terrace and ordered coffee. Only a few customers were in the café or on the pavement outside. She looked at the patchy bark of the plane trees, resembling the pattern on camouflage suits. Each breath made her feel she was encased in armour. She wanted to weep but was not sure she would be able to even if she permitted herself. A pantechnicon was parked on the other side of the street. The removal men carried furniture out of the house and into the vehicle. An entire home passed by on the pavement as if assembled at random. So that was how they had chosen to arrange things, the unknown people who had lived on one of the floors over there. Two of the men helped each other carry a large gold-framed mirror, and as they struggled with it, turning it first one way, then another, fragments of clouds, cars, trees and shutters whirled through the gold frame in quickly shifting glimpses. When the mirror caught the sun for a moment a sharp spot of light leapt jerkily over the asphalt and its dazzle forced her to close her eyes.

Twenty-four hours earlier he had been in Charles de Gaulle airport waving and smiling when she came in sight. He must have forgotten his Swedish girlfriend for a moment, it wasn’t possible for anyone to smile with such tender devotion and think of another woman at the same time. She shook the little packet of sugar, tore off the top and watched the lump of sugar settle on the beige-coloured foam of the coffee, then sink slowly through the surface. Maybe he really was able to remember and forget on command, as if he had a television set inside himself and his will was a remote control that could zap back and forth between channels that were separate from each other. Wife and child on one channel, Swedish romance on the other. Could he be the same person on both channels?

Perhaps you could really change yourself as easily as the words changed their meaning according to who said them to whom, and when they were said. You had the same face, the same body, but inside you were a different person, according to whether the woman you were with was black-haired or auburn. Now what was it his exotic princess had written in her letter? That she had lived in a daze without being seen as she was. Just as he had… Until she met him and felt he woke her with his gaze and reminded her of the person she was in her heart. Lucca picked up her teaspoon and stirred the small coffee cup. She went on stirring long after the sugar had dissolved. The words were not only those of his lover and himself, they were also hers, Lucca’s. She had almost said the same words to him when they were getting to know each other.

He had turned up one day as an option, although at first she didn’t see him that way. She had believed Harry was the one she was meant to be with. The Gypsy King, who had opened up a vulnerable crack in his frighteningly self-confident mask, seeing an unknown side of her and liberating it on the stage. She had imagined that what he did with her on the stage could happen in real life as well, and for a few months it did. Recalling her two years with Otto she shook her head over how naïvely she had confused her own dream images with the Otto who hauled her so painlessly into his life and then dumped her again. Harry’s cynical honesty had been a release, and although sometimes his experience and status oppressed her the imbalance was cancelled out as soon as they were alone. In bed she saw in his eyes the insecurity she had seen for the first time in his Mercedes, when he tried to seduce her, and the second time on his balcony, with lightning flashing over the harbour.

Andreas disturbed her settled life with his boyish smile, his sudden kiss on the rock and his rash arrival a few months later. She suddenly realised she must have over-interpreted her enchantment by the legendary Harry Wiener. If Andreas travelled all the way from Rome for the sole purpose of seeing her again, that in itself was a question she had to answer not just with words but with all her being. And two weeks later when she was reckless enough to fly down to join him, she had come to believe that his eyes were the only ones that could net her in after the aimless flutterings of her early youth. Just as she had believed Otto’s eyes were hard and blue enough to make their image of her more solid than a confused reflection from a mirror in the sun, flitting aimlessly around like a firefly in broad daylight.

But she herself had been little more than a mirror. A homeless mirror which two breathless removal men had been at a loss to know how to deal with. They had collected the mirror from a house in the Copenhagen suburbs without any directions for where it was to be taken. A lady had telephoned. Unfortunately she could not be there when they came, she had to make a broadcast. The key was under the mat. The removal men had set off, unsuspecting, and whenever a passer-by threw a vain or worried glance at himself in the mirror they thought they might finally get rid of their heavy, gold-framed burden. But no, each time the stranger walked on in the opposite direction, if he did not simply vanish from sight, because the weight of the mirror caused the removal men to stagger, or because the one in front thought it best to go to right or left. New faces and views constantly skimmed over the shining surface, on which no one and nothing left any lasting trace.

They discovered it was easier to carry it horizontally like a bed, and they got quite a long way like that, while the mirror only reflected the clouds in the sky. White as a sheet, said one removal man to the other. Like snow, said the other, like newly fallen snow. To pass the time they talked about how lovely it was to go out of your house on a winter morning when it had snowed in the night, and how you could hardly bring yourself to tread on the snow no-one had yet walked on. They had stopped to rest and for a moment it seemed really like standing on the threshold of one’s house and watching the virginal snow. But they couldn’t go on standing like that holding the mirror, which resembled both a bed and a snow-covered landscape. The removal men began to lose heart but they did their best to cheer each other on. After all, the mirror was bound to find a home at last. They didn’t really believe that any more, but they kept on saying it.

Lucca…

She looked up from her coffee cup when she heard Andreas calling. He stood among the tables with his camera held up, so she could not see his eyes. Click, it went.

The plane circled in above the tangled web of Copenhagen street lights. In an hour she would be in the train on the way home. Else and Lauritz would be waiting at the station as arranged. She did not know how to get through it without cracking up. She could already hear Else’s words of consolation. Andreas was having an affair, so what? It was bound to happen to one of them sooner or later. Had she really imagined they would live together until their hair turned grey without one or the other having a fling on the side? It was quite predictable, Else would say, after you had lived together for a few years. If she was wise she would keep mum and see it through. He would soon tire of his Swedish fairy-tale.

Lucca wouldn’t be able to explain to her mother what she was feeling behind the pain and the outrage and her wounded vanity over Andreas falling in love with someone else. She could not even explain to herself what she felt beneath the emotions everyone would anticipate. Through the general, inevitable pain she glimpsed a black abyss whose depths she could not contemplate, nor could she see what lay at the bottom of it, if it had a bottom. For a moment she imagined that the darkness among the threads of lights beneath her did not hide buildings but a bottomless chasm into which you could keep on falling. How was she to make her mother understand that it was not merely Andreas she feared to lose?

They had strolled around in the Marais quarter looking at the Jewish shops and had spent a few hours at the Picasso museum. In the evening they went to the cinema and afterwards ate at a Vietnamese restaurant. It rained the following day, he worked, she read. She was sure he did not suspect anything. She had behaved as usual and imagined she would have done if she had not felt the need of a cigarette and searched in the pocket of his tweed jacket for a lighter. It was not hard to picture. The hard thing was to play the part completely, so he did not glimpse as much as a crack into the void where she was beside herself with pain and bitterness, dizzy at suddenly seeing everything at a distance. A distance she felt simultaneously with the suffering, and which made her suffer still more, not on account of Andreas, but of herself.

She went to Charles de Gaulle on her own. She wasn’t sure she could go through with an emotional parting scene in the same place where three days earlier all her worries had paled when she saw him smiling and waving. He insisted on seeing her to the airport bus at L’Etoile. He kept asking whether he should go with her, but it did not alleviate her pain at all to see how guilt tore at him and made him exaggeratedly considerate. She looked at him as if he was no-one in particular as she waved a final time. As he turned and walked back towards the Arch of Triumph she looked at him just as she had done at Almeria airport when she held up a placard with his name on. He had appeared smiling among the crowd of passengers, as unknown and strange as they were.

She had a long wait in baggage reclaim at Kastrup. Her stomach ached at the thought of arriving home, putting down her suitcase in the kitchen and sitting down to eat with Lauritz and Else. She considered calling home and saying she had been delayed. But what would she do with herself? She did not want to go to Miriam’s and take it in turns to weep. She smoked a cigarette while waiting. I loved him so much, she said to herself. It was not out of revenge that she put it in the past tense. She had been happy without thinking about it, without having to pursue her own thoughts and feelings all the time.

The letter from Stockholm had made her wake up, as if her years with Andreas had been only a dream. When people had asked her whether she really was as happy as she sounded, the question had taken her by surprise. It told her she had long since been released from herself. But that was all in the past. Now she was back again, locked up in her own head, puzzled over where she had been all this time.

Lucca…

She turned. She did not recognise him at once, the man who had spoken her name.

26

He had changed. He had grown a full beard, his hairline was receding and there were touches of grey in his beard and curly hair, but he was just as stooping and thin as before, and he wore spectacles again, oval and unframed. She noticed that in the taxi. You’ve stopped wearing your contact lenses, she said. He smiled, shy at her commenting on his appearance. Barbara had made him wear contact lenses. He said it in a way that told her they were no longer together, but she asked all the same. He met her eyes as he shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile like someone who has overcome the blows he had received. She leaned back and looked ahead.

He had just come back from Reykjavik. One of his compositions had been performed at a festival for new Scandinavian music. Although I don’t feel so young any more, he added. He might have been right there, sitting with his well-trimmed beard and unframed glasses, grizzled and in a herring-bone coat. Was it Daniel? The short-sighted, unworldly Daniel she had once made so unhappy. She pictured him at the piano in his little apartment, as she stood at the window and made an end of it.

She told him about Andreas and Lauritz, about the house they had renovated, and how relieved she had been to move out of town and forget all the brooding over her career, totally absorbed in watching her son grow, seeing their home taking shape… Well, it must sound boring… He shook his head. He didn’t think so. Incidentally, he had seen her on stage, in The Father. He had followed her progress. She borrowed his mobile and called Else to say she would be delayed. They walked beside the canal, he insisted on carrying her case. The reflections from the old street lamps trembled on the restless black water. The wind had got up, the boats rocked beside the quay and tugged at their mooring ropes, making them creak.

She watched the cobblestones sliding to meet her through the lamps’ circles of light. I wasn’t very nice to you, she said. He made light of it, it was so long ago. They walked for a while in silence. How strange it is, he said, that we should meet, out of the blue! Yes, she replied, I meet you every time I am deserted. It leaped out of her. He looked at her in a way that made her lower her eyes. She told him how Otto had dropped her a few hours after she ran into him and Barbara one evening in a bar. He had thought she was the kind who did the dropping. She shrugged her shoulders. She had thought so too. He smiled ironically. If only he had met her the next day instead! She smiled back. Well, he was not free then. The cold made him shiver. Every time… he said cautiously. Did that mean?… He looked at her inquiringly. She told him briefly about Paris and the letter. What kind of daft shit had she married? She looked at him. Sorry, he just felt…

Daniel’s houseboat was at the end of the quay. He crossed the gangway first, put the cases down on the deck and gallantly took her hand. It was an old barge. There’s no electricity, he said on the way down the stairs. She stood still while he lit the oil lamps and a gas stove in the middle of the floor. The piano was on a dais at one end of what had once been the hold. At the other end there was a galley and a door into the cabin where he slept. She recognised his grandmother’s teacups on a shelf above the kitchen table, with a rowing boat in moonlight and a romantic couple. The handle was missing from one of the cups. The place was covered with varnished boards that shone in the glow from the lamps and candles, and there were small portholes in the walls from which you could look out over the canal and the quay. He uncorked a bottle of wine, they sat on safari chairs. A chest between them functioned as a table.

He was quite frank. He had had one or two brief relationships since Barbara left him, but they had never turned into anything permanent, he was probably not fit for that. He poured out the wine. Gradually he had grown used to living alone. It had its advantages, he could do as he pleased. She told him how surprised she had been when she met him with Barbara. Just imagine how surprised he had been himself! She took off her shoes and pulled her feet up in the chair. The red wine and the slight rocking beneath her had a calming effect.

Barbara had found herself a stockbroker. He smiled, but without bitterness. That probably suited her better… But he did not regret their relationship, she had been rather sweet, and she had helped him to get on. She had made him believe he was not entirely impossible. But he had been impossible back then, he could see that quite well… Lucca smiled. He raised his eyes and she regretted her smile when she saw the expression in his eyes. Now he had to smile himself. It’s like a disease, he said, being hopelessly in love. And you almost go crazy, he went on, because you can’t get it into your head that your disease isn’t infectious.

Had it gone on a long time? He shrugged it off. A year and a half, two years, until he met Barbara. She cured him. He laughed and shook his head at himself, raising his glass again. Lucca tried to remember the girl with the big red lips and bulging breasts. That was what it took, obviously. But two years… exactly the same time she had been with Otto. In all that time Daniel had been thinking of her even though he knew it was hopeless. She almost smiled again but stopped herself. He looked as if he thought it was quite funny himself when he thought back on the heartbreak of his youth. But who had ever loved her so faithfully, knowing well he hadn’t the ghost of a chance to have his love requited?

It was odd to be on Daniel’s houseboat drinking red wine. Their chance meeting and the unusual surroundings matched her feeling of observing her life from outside, as if she was someone else. She felt strangely untouched by what had happened in Paris, as if she was divided in two. Her twin sister took all the pain on herself and gave herself up to all the unanswered questions about what would happen if Andreas left her, and what was wrong with her to make him fall for a Swede with black curls and blue eyes.

How different they were, she and Daniel. He had gone on loving her long after their relationship had ended, although he knew she had met someone else. His love had not lessened when he no longer had her near him. It had merely grown stronger and more faithful in her absence, away from his reach. The loss of her had filled him to the brim with love, when she was no longer there to receive it. It had grown and grown, and he had been at bursting point because he could not get rid of it. Whereas she had started to think of her love for Andreas in the past tense as soon as she realised she could no longer count on him.

Daniel had loved her in spite of himself and in spite of her, until it was driving him mad, his love turned into a disease. She was not like that. What made her twin sister suffer was not the fever of emotion, apart from jealousy at the thought of the polaroid picture of the pale beauty sitting on an unmade bed with a halo of morning sun in her unruly hair. What hurt wasn’t anything inside her, but the feeling that something had been amputated, leaving only a bleeding wound.

Reading the terrible letter had been like the stroke of an axe, and that axe had been so sharp and slashed so hard and unexpectedly that several minutes passed before she felt pain and realised that a part of herself had vanished. Even more time passed before she understood that it was not like losing an arm or a leg. Not until next morning when she sat sunning herself on the balcony and trying to imagine what it would be like to jump off, not until so many hours later did it strike her that the axe had cut her in two. One who could actually have swung her legs over the rail, and another to whom that was merely an unreal idea. One was already in the train bound for home, leaning her forehead against the window as she stared despairingly into the darkness. The other sat on a safari chair on Daniel’s houseboat drinking red wine.

She rose and looked at her watch and realised it would have looked more convincing if she had looked at it before getting up. She said she would try to catch the last train. He fetched her coat and held it out for her while she put her arms in the sleeves. He carefully lifted her pony tail so it fell over the collar. When she turned round he looked quite frightened at his own intimate gesture. It had been good, she said, to see him again. He smiled and looked into her eyes. It had… She walked towards the stairs, he followed. She had already taken two steps up when he said it. She stopped and turned round. She wasn’t sure she had heard aright. He wished she didn’t have to go. He looked at her without blinking. Bravely, she thought, as he raised his hands to the side a little with an apologetic movement. Now it was said. He caught hold of her without faltering when, slightly theatrically she had to admit, she let herself fall into his embrace.

She still had her coat on when she lay back on his bed. She closed her eyes as he kissed her. It was an unusual feeling, she had never had a lover with a full beard. He unbuttoned her with practised fingers. She recalled how she had admired his confident hands when they struck even the widest chords. He stripped off her pants and tights. As he kissed her nipples she regretted not leaving. She suddenly felt she was a retrospective reward for his faithful, fruitless love.

The bed rose and fell in time with the rocking movements of the boat, and she felt the rough prickling of his full beard on the thin skin of her thighs. In a detached flake of a second she saw the waving tufts of pine needles. She locked her thighs around his neck and felt his scratchy beard and the firm grip of his hands round her ankles, and once more she was carried on a pair of broad shoulders in the same rocking rhythm among the tree trunks towards the dunes and the sea.

It rained all the way from Copenhagen. The raindrops crawled sideways across the windowpane as houses, trees and fields rushed past under the low clouds. When she stepped off the train she noticed a young girl humping a heavy bag. The girl broke into a run when she caught sight of a tall man in his forties coming towards her. They had the same colour hair, chestnut brown. The man embraced her slightly clumsily and took her bag. Probably a divorced father, thought Lucca and followed them out of the station where they got into a car. She tried to picture what it would be like if she and Andreas took turns to have Lauritz. She couldn’t imagine living alone in the house. But where then? She thought how she had moved away, first from Otto and then from Harry, with her cases and bags. There were no taxis. She rang for one and stood in shelter for a long time in the cold, gazing at the depressing, unchanging square with its provincial shops and parked cars.

Else sat in the kitchen reading the paper. She hadn’t yet cleared the breakfast things. As usual Lauritz had shaken out more cornflakes than he could eat. The orange flakes had gone soft in the yellowish milk. Else put her head on one side with a worried look in her eyes. Lucca put down her suitcase and leaned against the fridge door as she slid down onto the floor and began to weep. Her mother rose and went to kneel beside her. What had happened? Lucca pulled herself together, got to her feet and walked into the living room. She tore off her coat on the way and let it fall on the floor. Else followed her, they sat down on the sofa. Lucca bent over. The weeping broke out of her throat again in cramped contractions, as if she was vomiting. Else put an arm around her and stroked her back.

Lucca explained in disconnected sentences interrupted by sniffing. Else clasped her close. I suspected as much, she said, stroking her hair. Lucca snatched her hand away with an angry movement, rose and went to one of the windows looking onto the garden. What did she mean, she thought as much? Else made no reply. It had stopped raining. Lauritz’s little plastic tractor lay overturned on the muddy lawn. The branches of the plum tree dripped. She turned round. Else stood beside the stove, she bent down and picked the coat up. What do you mean by that? repeated Lucca, herself surprised at her accusing tone. Else laid the coat over one arm and stroked it slowly with her hand. Say it then! shouted Lucca as she went to sit on the sofa. Else sat down beside her in the opposite corner.

Now she must try to calm down a bit. She had not exactly gone around expecting it, but she had to admit she had had her ideas through the years. You’re sure to be cross with me, she said, pausing. She brushed dust off the stove with the flat of a hand. In a way she had been asking for it herself. That was probably an awful thing to say, but… She looked firmly at Lucca. Now I’m being honest, she said. Lucca looked out of the window again. She could see the neighbour’s horse in the meadow beside the drive, unmoving except for its tail fluttering limply like a pennant. She had worshipped him far too much. Else’s voice had grown cool and confident, it was the voice she used on the radio to all and sundry. A small bird flew over the black field, itself black against the grey sky. It rose and fell in arcs, as if it wanted to imitate the curves of the plough-land.

She had become subservient to him. What did she think it was like, to be worshipped in that way? She had completely neglected herself for the sake of him and the boy. Lucca squeezed up her eyes. The rainwater had gathered in pools on the lawn, and the grass blades were reflected in the quiet water, black against the greyish mirror image of the sky. She breathed evenly again. Good Lord, there were enough suckers about who thought it was lovely to have a sweet, home-loving woman always ready and waiting. But Andreas was no sucker, he was an intelligent and sensitive person, and an artist too. He needed challenges, even opposition, and she had not given him any. When all was said and done he was only a man, and men tended to grow tired of women who clung to them and only yearned and sighed for confirmation. It was no surprise to find he had succumbed to temptation. Lucca looked at her. What do you want me to do then? she said. Else fell silent and looked at her for a long time, as if reading her face for an answer. Get yourself a lover, she said.

Lucca pulled up her feet and stretched out for a cushion, she clutched it to her stomach with her arms crossed over it. She looked down at the floor. The cloud cover was thinning, and pale sunlight lit the floorboards in softly outlined squares. What about you? she asked. Else smiled. What did she mean? Lucca hesitated for a moment before going on. What about the time she was with Ivan and suddenly started wearing completely different clothes and changing all the furniture? As for her friends, she had exchanged even them for Ivan’s advertising chums. Else looked past the stove into the kitchen. She had even demanded a church wedding although Ivan didn’t want that at all. She who had always held bourgeois traditions to scorn and talked of marriage as a form of prostitution. That hadn’t hindered her from parading as a fifty-year-old bride with a white veil and naughty underclothes.

Who said Ivan didn’t want a wedding? Else’s well-modulated voice suddenly sounded dry. Lucca prodded the cushion cover with a nail. He had said so himself… Else cleared her throat and looked at her. When? Lucca laid down the cushion, put her feet on the floor and crossed her legs. She swallowed and met her mother’s eyes. She explained that she had gone into the country one summer’s day not knowing Else was in town. She described how she had had dinner with Ivan and talked to him more easily than ever before, and how for the first time she had understood what Else saw in him. Until she had gone to bed, drunk with all the white wine he had poured into her, only to be woken up by his paunch rubbing her back and his stiff prick between her thighs.

She went on despite the tears that ran down Else’s cheeks. She had noticed how he looked at her in the mornings when she was on her way to the bathroom, but she had to admit she was pretty surprised to wake up with her stepfather in her bed and her stepfather’s prick between her thighs. That was why she had gone to Italy so suddenly to find Giorgio. And maybe in the end that was the reason, and not so much because he had found himself another tight delicious twenty-year-old, for Ivan finally making off. For fear of her letting the cat out of the bag some day.

Else had got up. She stood for a moment without moving, one hand resting on the cold stove pipe, before going into the bedroom. Soon afterwards she came back with her suitcase. She went into the hall to put on her coat. Lucca said there would not be a train for another hour. Else wanted to leave at once. Neither of them spoke in the car. Lucca went onto the platform with her. Maybe, she said, maybe you were asking for it. Maybe you worshipped him too much… Else turned round and slapped her soundly. Lucca staggered. Her cheek still burned as she walked to the exit. She turned in the station entrance. Her mother was sitting on a bench with legs crossed and her head leaning back. An elegant, lone female figure at a station in the provinces. Lucca could not see whether her eyes were open or closed.

A week later she stood on the opposite platform holding Lauritz by the hand and waiting for the train from Copenhagen. It was a dry day but windy and the passing clouds made shadows appear and fade again by turns. Lauritz played with the shadow of the roof as they waited. He placed himself with the tips of his toes in line with the edge where the shadow was succeeded by sunshine on the asphalt. He was equally excited each time another cloud had passed the sun and he still stood balancing like an acrobat with his toes on the boundary between light and shadow.

She still had the feeling of being cut in two. One who feared Andreas was going to leave her, and one who had started to disengage herself from the moment she had read the letter from his lover. But they no longer lived side by side, her two halves, they took turns to rule over her feelings and thoughts. She had hardly slept since getting back from Paris, and as she stood waiting for Andreas she was dizzy with exhaustion.

Lauritz did not understand why she lay in bed weeping, or why she pushed him away when he tried to comfort her. She grew irritable and reacted harshly with cross words to his persistent attempts to make contact. At other times she completely ignored him and sat for hours gazing dejectedly out at the garden and the field, torturing herself with elaborate fantasies about Andreas and the black-haired letter writer. When she was in that state everything about the boy seemed unbearable, his very existence seemed like a hindrance to her, a parasitic organism that drained her of energy and life. She came to regard him as a frightful mistake who suddenly represented everything that had made Andreas tire of her. All the routines, all the dull cud-chewing, all the washed-out and sloppy details of daily life.

But Lauritz was still more confused a few minutes later when she took him on her lap and hugged him or sat on the floor building a house with his Lego bricks, completely involved in the activity. It was not only guilt at her unexpected hatred of him that made her so attentive and devoted. She was kind to him again because she was thinking of Andreas in the past tense. She doubted that her love for him had been anything other than a craving, a self-obsessed dream. When she embraced her son she also passed into herself, into the vacuum Andreas had left when he took his love away from her and gave it to someone else. There was nothing left there, not even the shadow of love, and maybe her love had been just a shadow of his. As she buried her nose in her son’s soft neck and licked the fair down, she imagined herself another life somewhere else, alone with Lauritz. He was the only one whose love she did not need to doubt, and the only one she knew she loved more than herself.

Her thoughts about Daniel and what had happened on his houseboat went through the same fluctuations as her feelings for the boy. When she slammed the door in Lauritz’s face and lay down on her bed to weep she heard Else’s words again, inflamed with venomous female spite. Get yourself a lover! She despised herself for having yielded to Daniel’s pleading dog’s eyes. Their chance reunion had broken open the poor man’s old wound again. She had ministered to his needy loneliness merely to take revenge on Andreas and create a balance in their shared account, but that had just made her an even greater traitor. She felt she had not only betrayed Andreas but herself as well.

Daniel called one evening after she had put Lauritz to bed. Could she speak freely? It offended her to be drawn into the low-voiced mood of intimate conspiracy. She quite forgot to ask how he had got hold of her number. Did she feel very bad about what had happened? No… she just hoped he was not sorry about it himself. He was not. He still cared for her, so why should he regret it? Because… said Lucca, but did not finish the sentence. He understood. She must not think that he in any way… Now he was the one who interrupted himself. She didn’t. He gave her his mobile number, but she didn’t write it down. He hoped she would call him one day. He shouldn’t rely on that, she answered coldly.

When she had replaced the receiver she immediately regretted not having noted his number. Lauritz called from his room. He asked if it was Andreas. Yes, she said. Andreas had not telephoned since she came back from Paris. That in itself was proof, she thought and kissed the boy’s cheek. Later when she sat in front of the stove gazing dully at the glowing coals, she pictured her life without Andreas, but not alone. It was just a foolish fleeting daydream, but for a moment she saw herself and Lauritz on the houseboat with Daniel. She stood on deck hanging out washing on a line. The boy was fishing with a rod, and Daniel sat in the hold strumming on his piano. Furious with herself, she kicked shut the door of the stove so the cinders dropped down inside.

Lauritz called again. She went to him. He asked why she was making a noise. It’s because I miss your dad, she said. He did too. He would like to make a noise too. Do, then, she said. Lauritz crawled out of bed and turned his box of Lego bricks upside down. She asked if it helped. He didn’t know yet. She tucked the duvet round him and told him gently to try and fall asleep. When she could hear his even breathing, she went outside. The moon was almost full and its pallid light fell leaden and faint over the grass and the branches of the plum tree.

Nowhere, she thought, nowhere in the whole world did she belong. She felt no pity for herself at the thought, she merely thought it, slowly stating the fact as she watched the lights of a car pass the end of the gravel road. A dog barked further away. A subdued soughing came from the woods. But not so far away someone had loved her in spite of himself and in spite of her. After all those years he was still so fond of her that he was not afraid of humiliating himself yet again.

She recalled what Harry had said one night about his career as a seducer. How he had long ago seen through himself and yet kept on pursuing one unknown beauty after another. As if his knowledge and his desire were unable to communicate. But perhaps it was not only desire that had made him reach out time and again for a new, strange face. Perhaps it was hope as well, which something inside him had refused to give up, although his experience told him it was useless to go on hoping for a meeting that would change everything. She would like to believe that was why he had reached out to her the night before Christmas Eve when she turned up unexpectedly.

As she stood in front of the house hunching her shoulders against the cold she decided that Harry had been a victim both of his own hope and of hers, when she met Andreas. Had Daniel’s phone call made her hope again? After all, she had been receptive to him despite the knowledge of how many times her hopes had been disappointed by one man or another. If she thought of Daniel it was possibly in spite of herself, but it was also thanks to the hole Andreas had left in her. It made her suffer, that hole, not so much because of him as of its own yawning emptiness. But it was not only the emptiness in which something was missing, it was also the opening where someone else might show his face. It hurt to go on hoping, but would she ever be able to do anything else?

Stretching out her hand as she lay in bed, she felt the T-shirt Andreas had slept in. She put it to her face and breathed in the faint smell of sweat, his smell. She began to weep again. She could not explain to herself why she felt so sure it was over. She had no inkling of what would follow. There was nothing to imagine, nor was there anything to hope for.

He looked pale, and he avoided her eyes when he stepped out of the train and Lauritz ran to meet him. The boy’s delight and hundreds of questions lasted all the way home. When they were inside Andreas said he needed a rest before dinner. They had still not exchanged more than generalities. She opened a bottle of red wine while cooking. Lauritz lay on the living room floor with a fire engine Andreas had brought him. The feeble but constant sound of its siren made her feel like screaming and smashing something, but for once she controlled herself. When the food was ready she had drunk the best part of the bottle. She went into the bedroom to wake Andreas. He sat on the edge of the bed looking out into the twilight, he had not heard her. He turned round with a start and tried to smile.

All seemed as usual after he had returned from a trip. The boy fired questions and Andreas talked about what he had done. He asked who had called and what had happened while he was away. He had finished his play. Quite finished, he said, with an exhausted air. After dinner he brushed Lauritz’s teeth and put him to bed. She cleared away and sat down again while he read a bedtime story. Her eyes fell on the notice-board where they had put pictures of themselves and Lauritz. She looked at the one he had taken of her in the café in Paris. He had given her the film to take home for developing. She sat for a long time meeting her own surprised, searching gaze that seemed in itself impenetrable, as if it was not her. When at last he joined her she had drunk a bottle and a half of wine. She went to kiss Lauritz goodnight. He stroked her cheek and asked if she was happy now. Yes, she said and felt a smarting sensation around her eyes. I’m happy now… She hastened to switch off the light and stood for a moment in the darkened room until she was sure she was not going to cry. The telephone rang in the living room. Andreas had already risen but she managed to get there first. Did she know it was Daniel? She had guessed it was. He asked if he was interrupting. Yes, she said. He had thought a lot about her. Could they meet? She asked where he was calling from. The boat, he replied. She raised her voice as she said goodbye and put the receiver down before he could say more.

Andreas looked up as she went into the kitchen. Who was that? He had lit a cigarette. My mother, she said and sat down opposite him. The cigarette smoke made her feel sick. He looked out of the window. It was pitch dark now. What is it? she asked. Her voice sounded thin and unnatural. He turned to her. He had lost weight, and he had a pimple on his forehead, red and swollen. I want to live alone, he said. She was perfectly calm now. Was there someone else? He looked away. No, he said. She did not take her eyes away. Why did he want to live alone, then? He watched the smoke of his cigarette, curling upwards in the lamplight. Because he didn’t love her any more.

She rose from the table and went out into the hall, put on her coat and made sure the car keys were in the pocket. He followed her outside. She could not just go off, they must talk about it. He had been thinking a great deal about this… She slammed the car door in the middle of his sentence and started the car. He shouted her name as she drove down the drive. It was cloudy and the road was dark. She thought of calling Daniel from a phone box but decided to surprise him instead. She looked at the clock beside the speedometer. She could be in Copenhagen in an hour.