Lucca (37 page)

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.

Epilogue

O
ne morning in October Robert woke up while it was still dark. He peered at the hands of the alarm clock. It was twenty past five. He sank back on the pillow feeling sleep rising from below again. He pictured the water trickling out of the soil between the grass blades under their boots as they walked along the isthmus towards the reed-bed further out. It had begun to drizzle. He had taken her hand to show her the way along the strip of land between the shallow stretch of sea and the flooded meadows. She put her head back to feel the light prickling of the rain on her forehead and cheeks. The dark glasses were spotted with drops. She had folded up her white stick and put it in her coat pocket.

Lucca had never been out to the headland. She wondered why they had never been there, she and Andreas. They had been able to see the sand bank and the rushes from the beach where they went to swim. Listen, she said, stopping, and now Robert too heard the airy, rhythmical whistling of wing beats. He looked up and turned round, but did not catch sight of the flock before it was far out on the horizon, where the calm water and clouded sky converged along a blurred edge of reflections.

The alarm started to beep. He had been on the point of falling asleep again. Half past five. He must have set it at the wrong time. He did not usually get up before seven. He was about to switch off the alarm when he caught sight of the packed travel bag standing in front of the wardrobe. They had planned to leave at six o'clock to catch an early ferry. He rose, put on his dressing gown and opened the curtains. It had rained all night, the trees were laden with rain. He met Lucca in the corridor. She wore her sunglasses, she never showed herself to him without them. She had heard his alarm even though Lea's room was at
the opposite end of the house. He asked if she would like the bathroom first. She made an evasive, sleepy gesture and went back along the corridor, her hand brushing the wall. She had grown used to the house by now.

She often heard sounds he had not caught. Her hearing had grown sharper as she trained herself for blindness. That was her own expression. He took night duties so he could drive her to the Institute for the Blind once or twice a week. She was a good student, and so far the only impediment was her firm refusal to have anything to do with dogs. She couldn't stand dogs, particularly Alsatians, she would not dream of making friends with one. But she had started to learn Braille. One morning she sat in the kitchen moving her fingertips over the breadcrumbs on the table. What does it say? he asked. She smiled secretively. I'm not telling!

He went into the bathroom and took off his dressing gown. He leaned against the basin as he brushed his teeth and now and then glanced at himself in the mirror. A solid tousled man in his forties with foam round his mouth. He felt as heavy as the weather, but within the weight of his body he felt a lightness he had not noticed for a long time. It was the prospect of travelling that made him light, the thought of the endless motorways that would take them south, away. If he drove hard they could get through most of Germany before midnight, perhaps right down to the Stuttgart area.

He had scarcely been anywhere abroad since his divorce from Monica, on the contrary he had worked so hard for the past two years that he usually had some holiday due to him. Once only he had taken Lea to the Algarve. It was pretty awful, but she had seemed to enjoy herself. As a rule she went away with Monica and Jan, and he had not felt like going alone. He could not see himself trailing around some picturesque town and going to a restaurant in the evening. A solitary tourist secretly spying on the inhabitants, grateful if anyone smiled at him.

It was his idea for them to go away, and Lucca had agreed at once. He felt the trip might get something in her to loosen its grip. Something that had firmly embedded itself and made her
life, during the past months, seem like a closed circle. She had been staying with him since he visited her at the orthopaedic hospital. He had surprised himself by his sudden whim, when he saw how deep her despair was, and invited her to stay with him. He had not known what to say when she asked why he made such an amazing offer. Too much room. That had been his modest reason. That he was someone who had too much room. But it was still the best explanation he could hit on.

Luckily she had not asked him again. He did not think it was because she had started to take him for granted. She behaved more like someone afraid of upsetting the temporary and precarious state of things with too many questions. She often kept to herself in Lea's room or on the terrace, until it grew too cold to sit outdoors. When it began to get dark early he found her several times sitting out there in her coat or wrapped in a rug. Sometimes he asked her to come inside. He did not like the thought of her staying outside in the dusk so as not to impose on him. At other times he left her alone, relieved that she did not feel obliged to be sociable.

As he rinsed the toothpaste from his mouth his gaze fell on some of her things that had found their place on the bathroom shelves, bottles of perfume and skin lotion, her nail file, hairbrush, shower cap and bag of sanitary towels. There wasn't a name for their chaste life together. You could say she was his guest. Since the accident he had gradually been drawn into her life, until he discovered he had moved far outside his medical sphere of action. The expression made him smile as he tidied away some used cotton wool sticks she had dropped on the floor beside the waste bin.

She had not seen Andreas or as much as talked to him on the phone since he came back from Paris and confirmed what she already knew. Robert was still playing the part of messenger, and several times he'd had to ask Andreas to be patient and stop ringing. Give it time, he kept saying to the grief-stricken man, but he could feel Andreas growing ever more despondent at the thought that he might have left it too late to repent and
show goodwill. Robert himself had no idea what the future would bring. He defended Lucca's decision to isolate herself from everyone except her son without wholly understanding her fierce resolution, and he did not press her to explain herself. The accident had stopped her in her course, and no one could tell how long her stupor would last. She did not even know that herself.

At times he felt like a living fortress against what she must feel was a siege. Andreas kept on insinuating himself with his eager guilt, impatient for her to relieve him by at least meeting him and hearing how fluently he could talk about his error. She made no comment when Robert passed on what he had been asked to tell her. She never asked what he knew about Andreas's trip to Stockholm. Nor did she ask him to respond to the messages her mother and Miriam got him to deliver.

Robert had long telephone conversations with Else when she called to hear how things were going, and to ask if Lucca wouldn't at least come to the phone. He had to smile when this woman with the cultivated voice tried out her mature charm on him in the hope that he might happen to reveal the nature of his relationship with her daughter by his tone of voice or some unconsidered word. He also spoke to Miriam and heard her baby wailing in the background. Still less could she comprehend why her friend had no use for her now that everything in her life had fallen apart. Else hinted darkly that they'd had a kind of row, but that it was of no importance now. He pretended not to know what she was talking about. Robert also concealed his knowledge from Andreas, although he sometimes almost interrupted his grief-stricken monologue when he went out to the house in the woods to fetch Lauritz or take him home again.

They would sit in the kitchen where the pictures of Lucca still hung on the notice-board. The sighted Lucca, building the house or swinging her son around or sitting at a Parisian café and smiling, her eyes surprised and yet aware. Andreas could be so full of remorse and self-pity that Robert found it hard to keep quiet. He remembered the shame he had heard in her voice
and read on her face when she told him what had happened on Daniel's houseboat. He could see and hear that her shame related not merely to Andreas, to whom she had been unfaithful, or Daniel whom she had misused. Something had been shattered that night, a week before she had driven herself into disaster, and Robert was the only one who had any inkling of it. He was relieved each time he drove home without having betrayed her confidence, even though he had seen Andreas in all his misery, sincere but also hollow.

One evening it was Daniel on the phone. He presented himself as an old friend and said he had been given Robert's number by Else. He asked how she was. He did not say Lucca, but
she
. His intimate tone surprised Robert, seeing they had never talked to each other before. How many times had he phoned the house in the woods and slammed the receiver down because Andreas answered? Or waited until the connection was broken off because no one answered? Daniel paused. Are you . . . he asked and interrupted himself before trying again. I mean . . . you and Lucca . . . Robert almost sympathised with the irrepressible need for clarity beneath the other man's heavy-hearted stammer.

Lucca sat in an easy-chair wearing headphones. He went over to her and laid a cautious hand on her shoulder. She was alarmed, for once she had not heard him, she who otherwise heard everything. He could faintly hear the crescendo in the last movement of Brahms's third symphony. He said it was Daniel, and as he spoke he wondered at himself for not telling the caller as usual that Lucca did not want to speak to anyone. She hesitated a moment before rising and walking over to the telephone, orientating herself as was now her habit by brushing the furniture with her hand en route. He took care not to change the position of anything when he did the housework. She waited to pick up the receiver until he had gone out of the room and closed the door behind him.

He went into the kitchen and started clearing up the dinner things. One of the plates clattered as he put it into the dishwasher, and at the same moment he heard a corresponding
clatter from the other end of the house, like an echo. She squatted in the middle of the room surrounded by tulips, water and fragments of glass. She used one hand to search for the pieces and collected them in the other, curving it like a cup. Two of her fingers were bleeding, he led her into the bathroom. She had a deep cut on one fingertip. I'm sorry, she said. I just needed to smash something . . . When he had bandaged the cut finger and put a plaster on another, she collapsed onto the lid of the lavatory seat. What was I thinking of? she mumbled. What could I have been thinking of? She bent forwards and began to weep. He looked at her for a moment before going into the scullery to get a dustpan and brush.

He stood waking up under the shower for a long time. It felt as if the hot water slowly made his fatigue crackle and fall away from him in invisible flakes. His own life was the same, almost. He went to the hospital every morning and came home in the late afternoon, but whereas previously he had spent his leisure hours vegetating and listening to music, now he helped Lucca get accustomed to her new existence. He had stopped playing tennis, and not only because he had no time. His friendship with Jacob had cooled after he had let him wait in vain at the tennis courts one summer day, and after Jacob had stood in his garden an hour later and seen him through the window talking to Lucca on the telephone. One day when they were together in a queue in the hospital canteen Jacob asked Robert what he was up to with his former patient. Someone must have seen them together in town, although Lucca seldom went out, for fear of meeting Andreas.

To spare her pride he tried to help her as little as possible. He cleared up discreetly after her small accidents and behaved as if he had not noticed them. Now and again, before she was familiar with the house, he took her arm cautiously when she was about to run into a door or crack her head on the open door of a cupboard, and the episode with the flower vase was not the only time he had to put a plaster on her, like a clumsy child. She said that herself. That it was like learning everything
over again, just like a child. At first he'd had to help her in the bathroom in the morning. He guided her under the shower and took her hand to show her how to regulate the water. Her nakedness made them shy and very correct.

He turned off the shower and opened the window to let out the steam. It resembled the smoke from a fire as it billowed up and blew away into the cold damp murkiness. It had been dark when they arrived at his house for the first time. He asked her to wait in the hall while he went in and switched on the lights. She asked him to show her the house. He took her arm and led her round. She wanted to know what each room looked like, and he described the furniture, the pictures on the walls and the other things. She smiled when he got to the ping pong table in what should have been the dining room. As he described it in detail, he suddenly felt he was seeing his home like a stranger.

Later in the evening she grew hungry, and he suddenly realised he had not done any shopping. He offered to make an omelette. She insisted on breaking the eggs and beating them. She needed to cook again after months of insipid hospital food. He set a bowl and a tray of eggs on the kitchen table and put a whisk into her hand. When she knocked the first egg on the edge of the bowl, the yolk slid down onto the table, and so it went on. In the end she had broken almost all the eggs in the tray and half the shells lay in the bowl with the yolks that had been lucky enough not to land on the table. She broke down, convulsed with sobbing as she bent forwards, the tips of her hair dipping into the pool of egg yolk on the table top. He cleared up after her, washed the bowl and suggested she start again. This time she succeeded. She whisked the eggs, he fried the omelettes. Don't worry, he said. I'm not sorry for you. She turned her dark spectacles towards him. That's good, she said in a muted voice.

He did not know how she passed the time when she was alone in the house. He asked her when he got home one afternoon and found her sitting on the threshold of the terrace. I'm remembering, she said. He taught her to work the stereo, and she sorted his extensive record collection into piles on the floor, which she memorised, as she tried them all out to find the music
she liked. She kept returning to Chopin, but one day when he arrived back in the afternoon, the passionate voice and crisp guitar of José Feliciano reached him out in the drive. He had forgotten that one. It was filled with childhood memories, she told him. Her mother had been mad about José Feliciano, and now he had become a kind of colleague as well. When she had played
Che serà serà
for the fifth time he suggested that she might like to try what it sounded like listening through his earphones for a change.