Lucca Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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