Lucca Read online

  In the days that passed between their meetings she felt she was moving in a different world. The dangerous and dramatic world where each of them carried the secret of the other. She thought of him practically all the time, both when she was alone and in the playground listening with half an ear to what the teachers were saying. She watched his son running around among the other children, knowing nothing of what his father got up to with her in a strange house when he had kissed him goodnight and cycled off with his racket. Was she in love? She did not know. She always remembered him somewhat differently from what he was when they were once again in Else’s bed. She felt more in love with him when they were not together and she cycled through town alone, surrounded by the invisible aura of their secret.

  He did not come for his son so often any more, but the few times he did she was surprised at how good he was at seeming natural. Her legs started to tremble when she caught sight of him. He even looked into her eyes as he bade her a smiling farewell with the boy on his arm, as if they had never been closer than that. Usually his wife came. She had short hair and looked like a mouse with her pointed nose and receding chin. It seemed a bit strange to greet her, but not as strange as she had feared. The trysts with her husband took place in a world where the mouse-faced woman did not exist. Just as Lucca did not exist either in the safe, everyday world in which she was only the assistant who looked after the woman’s child.

  The mahogany bed in the quiet villa was a white island in the twilight, an enchanted island where you forgot what you had left behind. A secret island where you could live a whole life without becoming a day older than you were when you went ashore. He was only a dark figure on the white sheet in the dusk, and she felt she put everything she had known behind her when she slowly undressed before him and felt the air from the open window on her skin. She closed her eyes and he caressed her cautiously until she could wait no longer. When at last he penetrated her it felt as if she split in two lengthways and her limbs and bones parted from each other, light and delicate as birds’ bones. She imagined they were held together by his hard sinewy arms, that she would float away on the wind if he let go, and she clung to him so that he should hold her still tighter and pierce still deeper inside her and split her into even smaller, even more splintered and vanishing fragments.

  One evening when she lay listening to the water running onto the bathroom tiles, she heard a muted sobbing from in there. She went into the corridor and opened the door. He was crouching under the shower with his head between his knees and his hands folded around his neck. The water trickled down his back, which shuddered rhythmically in time with his sobs. She squatted down beside him and was about to put her arm round his shoulders, but something made her stop, she didn’t know what. Maybe it was the sight of a grown man sitting on the tiled floor weeping. He stood up, found a towel and went into the bedroom. She sat on the bed watching him dress. When he had laced up his shoes he said they would have to stop meeting. He was suddenly very calm. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. What? He glanced at her briefly. Nothing . . . She followed him with her eyes from the window as he disappeared on his bicycle with his badminton racket sticking out of the sports bag on his luggage carrier. The next day she called the nursery school and handed in her notice.

  She went up to the holiday cottage that afternoon. Ivan sat reading in the garden. He had on a faded T-shirt and sandals, almost playing the part of an ageing hippie with a haircut, and not the dynamic advertising chief who talked like an energetic pilot. She had never seen him with a book before. He got to his feet when she went into the garden, not specially surprised, it seemed. He explained, almost apologetically, that Else was working late and would probably come the next day. But she would stay? He had bought a large steak, there would be enough for two. Actually he was one of those people who could get a bit sick of fish. Lucca smiled, and he looked inquiringly at her, awkwardly waving the book he still held in his hand. It was a yellowing paperback, he had found it on the book shelf, The Outsider by Camus. He hadn’t read it for years. He had read a lot when he was young, he added, as if frightened she might not believe him.

  He was different, more subdued than usual, friendly without seeming to launch a charm offensive. It struck her that he behaved like someone at home with himself. They were both at home, but they behaved very politely, as if they were also each other’s guest. He opened a bottle of white wine, she brought glasses. They sat in the garden talking of Camus. The best thing in the book was the beginning, he thought. The descriptions of an oddly stupefied life, the heat and the sea, the women, the monotony. The feeling of being anonymous, as if everything was at one and the same time very close and yet distant. That was how he had felt for years, until he met her mother.

  He had worked and worked, he hadn’t really done much else, there hadn’t been time for private life, nor had it interested him. In fact nothing had interested him. Maybe his work, when he was immersed in it, but otherwise . . . He had known various women, but each time he had let it fall apart. He had had the feeling of being adrift, as if in a boat without oars, taken by the current, just on and on, he had no idea where.

  He had never believed he was suited to living in a permanent relationship. Perhaps he wasn’t, he added with a smile, time would tell. He looked down at his glass, embarrassed. It wasn’t always easy, he went on after a pause. Her mother was demanding, but she knew everything about that, of course. And when you both had a past . . . they weren’t so young any more. Enthusiasm alone . . . he smiled again and left the sentence hanging in the air.

  Lucca looked at him, attentive to every single word and gesture. She felt her gaze made him shy, he dared only respond to it for a second at a time. The rest of the time he looked ahead or studied the creases in his trousers, smoothing them thoughtfully with his palm. For the first time she glimpsed what Else must have seen in him behind the façade of self-confidence, shaving lotion and expensive habits. Something lonely and unguarded which at moments came in sight on his face, almost innocent in his appeal for understanding or at least acceptance.

  He opened another bottle at dinner time. They ate outside as they did when Else was there. He asked her what she was going to do. She didn’t know what to say. Travel, she said. Maybe she wanted to be an actor. It sounded naïve. She had not really thought through the idea herself, and Else had not been particularly encouraging when she heard that her daughter was thinking of repeating the foundered ambitions of her own youth. She did not consider it the right thing for Lucca and asked what made her think she had any acting talent? But Ivan seemed to take her seriously.

  She had radiance, anyway. He didn’t know anything about drama, but he knew something about radiance, about presence. She seemed very mature, he felt, older than she was. But luckily she was still too young to mind being told that. He smiled and winked at her. Lucca was about to get irritated at his wink and the way he pronounced the word presence when he asked why she didn’t go and look for her father. She said she didn’t even know where he lived. But she could probably find out! It was important for her, more so than she might realise. He had eyes in his head . . .

  He looked at her, and now it was Lucca’s turn to look down. But who was he to sit here and talk twaddle, he went on reassuringly and started to talk about his childhood. His parents had sent him to boarding school when they were divorced. His mother was said to have found someone else. His father prevented him from seeing her but he didn’t discover that until he had grown up and it was too late. Imagine living in hatred of your mother, he said, and then finding you had been wrong. Again she caught a glimpse of something vulnerable in his eyes, as if a boarding-school boy stood on tiptoe inside him, in shorts and with grass on his knees, squinting through the cracks in the hardened mask his face had turned into with the years.

  He had bought strawberries. He opened the third bottle of wine, although she protested. Had their wedding been ghastly? She shrugged her shoulders and let him fill her glass. It had been Else�
�s idea. She put her feet up on the chair and leaned back, supporting her glass against her knees. She felt drowsy in a pleasant way. To have a white wedding, he went on, lifting his glass. She thought of Else’s thighs, bulging out in the bare patch between her stockings and suspender belt when they met in the kitchen on her wedding night. He looked over at the edge of the woods before drinking.

  He could well have done without such an exhibition, himself. He sought her eyes again. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, sipping her wine. He perfectly understood why she had made herself scarce. He himself had felt like heading off just then, he smiled, that is, if it hadn’t been for Else. But she had been so happy that day. Lucca nodded. The strawberries were big and dark red, she ate them with her fingers and bit them off at the stalk. The juice made her lips sting slightly. He asked if she would like coffee. She said she felt like an early night. It had been nice, he went on. Yes, she replied, and met his eyes. He thought they understood each other better.

  Not until she lay down did she realise how drunk she was. The air was hot and stuffy in the little room. She opened the window and threw off the duvet, felt the coolness on her naked body, curled up with her knees under her chin as she had done when as a little girl she had crept up close to Giorgio in the mornings. The wine made her dizzy although she lay quite still. She felt the room turning slowly around her, if she herself wasn’t turning, as if she was in a boat without oars, adrift on the whirling currents that carried her along in circles, on and on through the half-dark summer night.

  She thought of the weeping badminton player under the shower and of his strong arms that had crushed her and at the same time held her together so she should not break apart and be blown away like the almost weightless remains of a disintegrated bird. It already seemed so remote, something she had long since left behind. She turned and turned, floating unceasingly on the current, and with a little, strangely happy pain it came to her that she had felt his hands for the last time when she lay like this curled around herself, as he lay beside her with his tensed stomach against her spine and pressed his warm, hard cock between her thighs.

  But it was neither his hands nor his cock she felt and it was not like gliding from a doze into a dream. It was like awakening, not to reality, but from a misty dream to one that was crude and sharp, when, as if struck by an electric shock, she turned round and kicked. Ivan fell on the floor with a crash, pale in the dim light and with an erection that looked both comical and macabre in the midst of his flaccid nakedness. She had pushed herself into the furthest corner of the bed and pressed against the wooden wall with the duvet held tightly around her. Out, she screamed, out, get out! He rose, swayed and looked at her in despair before going out and closing the door behind him. She remained in her corner, shaking all over. Soon afterwards she heard his car start and the gravel on the road crunch beneath the tyres as he drove away. When she began to breathe calmly she got out of bed and dressed.

  She walked along the cycle path through the plantation although it was a detour, shivering among the spruce trees in the dim light. When she came down to the harbour she looked anxiously around her, but could not see Ivan’s car anywhere. No one was about. She sat on a bench near the ferry quay and looked across at the fishmongers’ empty window-panes, where a crooked little moon shone above the marble counter and the posts along the quay and their floating shadows on the undulations of the calm water. The last ferry had sailed. She was afraid of falling asleep while she waited, and it was like a cut in a film, dreamless and without transition when the sun roused her and she rose, dazed, from the bench and saw the cars boarding the ferry, clattering over the steel ramp.

  She put her hands on the varnished rail and felt the faint quivering of the engine’s vibrations drumming through the hull. Slowly the wake opened its fan of foam in the increasing distance from the wharf beneath the little red lighthouse that had always made her think of a clown in a red jersey, with a white stripe on his stomach and his clown’s nose in the clouds. She recalled how she had stood between Giorgio and Else screwing up her eyes against the reflections on the water, like needles in a chaos of flashes. She remembered that it had been like travelling for real, far away from everything she knew.

  Her mother never found out what had happened. Lucca waited before going home to the villa until she was sure Else was at work. She was thinking of the last postcard she had received from Giorgio a few days after her birthday. It was as brief as ever and written in the usual careless handwriting. The card showed an early Renaissance painting, an altarpiece with the Madonna and child, blue-white and with set features, slim, with narrow eyes, against a golden background. The card had been stamped in Florence like the others he had sent in recent years. He probably lived there. Anyway, it was all she had to go on.

  She packed a bag with essentials and left a note to Else saying she was going away for a week with a friend. Then she found her passport, went to the bank and withdrew all her money. That evening she was in a train travelling south. She changed in Hamburg and slept through most of Germany, leaning on her bag. In the morning she arrived at Munich where she changed again. A few hours later she was gazing out at the spruce-clad slopes of the Tyrol.

  The brakes squealed underneath her, the train stopped abruptly and she was jerked forwards. There was blood all over her thighs. A droning voice from the loudspeakers drowned out her sobs with its list of town names. The sun shone horizontally through the frosted window glass of the toilet, golden like the background to the stiff-necked Virgin Mary and her chubby child on Giorgio’s postcard. In her haste she had forgotten her period was due. She had put down the leaden feeling in her stomach to the shock, the delayed anger and sense of being left completely on her own. She had woken up in a tunnel through the Alps feeling a stickiness in her crotch, and cursed herself when the train emerged into the light and she saw blood trickling down her legs under her skirt. She placed her jacket over the dark patch on the seat and rummaged feverishly in her bag for a pair of clean briefs.

  The toilet stank and the floor was soiled around the lavatory pan where male passengers had stood swaying in time to the movements of the train. She threw the blood-soaked briefs in the refuse bin, pulled a handful of tissues from the holder on the wall and stuffed them into the clean briefs, but she bled through them at once. She had sat there bleeding for the best part of an hour when the train stopped. Several times impatient hands had rattled the door handle. For the past twenty-four hours she had eaten nothing but a dry ham sandwich in Munich station, and had thrown half of that away because the bread swelled like a sponge in her mouth. Hunger, pains and loss of blood made her tremble, and her forehead was covered with cold drops of sweat.

  The train did not arrive in Milan until the evening. Her legs buckled under her when she tried to stand up. She took off the long-sleeved blouse she wore under her denim jacket, and tied it like a loin cloth under her skirt, buttoned the jacket over her bare torso and looked at herself in the mirror. She resembled a pregnant drug addict, pale and sweating, with red circles round her eyes and a swollen stomach. Her head swam as if she was doped when she climbed down to the platform clutching her bag.

  She found the way to the ladies’ cloakroom with a bag from the station pharmacy. A bent old woman in a blue overall was washing the floor with a gigantic mop. Her face was dark and wrinkled and her eyes were big and black beneath the headscarf she had pulled right over her forehead. She looked Lucca up and down and shook her head, smiling. Half her teeth were missing and her cooing voice sounded more like that of an infant than an old woman.

  She put down her mop, took Lucca by the wrist and led her out of the door. Her hand was crippled with rheumatism. Maybe she was a real witch, thought Lucca, letting herself be led along a dark passage and further on down a corridor with dirty walls. The witch went on mumbling to herself in her cooing baby’s voice without letting go of Lucca’s wrist for a moment, rocking from side to side like a little tugboat.

  The last
door along the corridor led into a whitewashed room with a shower and a basin. Lucca started to undress and the witch clapped her small crooked hands. She picked up the bloody clothes and went out. Lucca gasped when the streams of icy water struck her. She turned on the hot tap and closed her eyes as the heat went through her, into her flesh.

  She wondered how Else would have reacted if she had told her what had happened. She wasn’t sure her mother would have sided with her as a matter of course, remembering what Else had said the night of the wedding when she found her sitting on the kitchen table in her corset and silk stockings. She was going to try to be happy, and Lucca was not going to stop her. Maybe she would even have looked at her sceptically, in the way she briefly and secretly glanced at her firm, slim body and taut breasts.

  She might even have asked whether Lucca had not herself played up to Ivan, possibly without realising it. She was still so young that she probably did not fully understand the extent of the impression she made on an adult man. Lucca recalled the glances Ivan had given her now and then, if he went into the kitchen as she bent over the dishwasher, her breasts visible in the neck of her blouse, or when they met in the corridor on their way to the bathroom, he in a dressing gown, she in briefs and a T-shirt. Veiled glances he felt ashamed to acknowledge. She had not allowed herself to take any notice of those glances, and when she thought of them she felt sticky. She tried to remember whether she had made any wrong moves as they sat in the garden drinking white wine. Whether she had looked into his eyes in an ambiguous way or allowed a smile to stay on her lips a second or two longer than necessary, marvelling as she did that he could talk so sensitively about himself.

  She wasn’t ignorant of the impression she made on adult men. She provoked them, she felt that, whether because of her long-limbed slenderness or her courageous eyes that dared to meet and hold a stranger’s gaze. Perhaps it was the contrast between her young fragility and the fearlessness in her eyes that was so provocative. Sometimes it amused her, at others she was alarmed at how little was needed for the sight of her to make cracks in their armour of even-tempered maturity. It might be a chance exchange of glances on the street, it might be the father of a friend or one of Else’s acquaintances she chatted to with a girlish smile, but it was only a game, as when you pick up a knife and feel how sharp it is, with a cautious finger along the edge of the blade. She herself felt a thrill, but also a touch of fright, when mature men opened the door to give a glimpse of their experienced, slightly superior façade. In fact there was something distasteful in their betrayal of themselves as they interviewed her about her future plans, as if that could interest them. She was only attracted to those men who did not allow themselves to be provoked by her youth. Serene men resting confidently in their ageing skins.