Lucca (33 page)

*      *      *      

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.