Lucca Read online

  After the others had gone to bed Robert remained sitting outside in the dusk with his host, chiefly out of politeness. They smoked small Italian cheroots, something they had in common. How about a whisky, then? He had a quite excellent single malt, a present from a client. He went inside. A purple glow lingered in the heather and the tall grass between the silhouetted pine trees and juniper bushes. He came back with the bottle and two glasses, stooping and tanned like old leather in the blue half-light. He really liked the Sibelius symphony Robert had given him for his birthday, the sixth, wasn’t it? He sat on for a while with the cheroot between his fingers. Usually music was something that somehow passed one by with its themes and variations and whatever you call them. Robert would have to stop him if he got too muddled. But with Sibelius it was quite the opposite. Like moving around in a vast landscape. It wasn’t that anything definite happened in the music, it just happened. He shook his head. That was probably a load of drivel. Robert smiled. Not at all. But he really liked it, indeed he did.

  He replenished their glasses. Good stuff, eh? Not the usual meths rubbish. They sat for a while listening to the grasshoppers and the cuckoo. A silhouette detached itself from the shadows and came closer. The lights shining out from the living room fell on Sonia’s round cheeks and pointed chin framed by her flowing hair. She had been for a walk. A little one to sleep on? She smiled indulgently. No, thanks. She turned on the threshold as she said goodnight. Robert could hear the floorboards creak and the dry sound of her bare feet on the stairs and far away a door being closed. His host sparked his lighter and sucked in his cheeks as he lit his cheroot again. Suddenly he looked very old.

  Being a dancer didn’t seem a very secure occupation. He held the cheroot vertically between two fingers watching the thin whirls of smoke. But still, he was glad she had at long last found out what she wanted to do. He paused for a moment. Sonia hadn’t been easy. Robert could feel the other man looking at him in the dimness, but couldn’t see his eyes. Well, they knew each other by now, he was sure he could rely on Robert not to let it go any further. He had never told anyone about it. He threw away the cheroot stub, a little red dot among the grass blades. Sonia was not his daughter. He had discovered it when she was small and their doctor, an old friend, had done a blood test on her for some reason. He had asked his friend to make the necessary analyses, confidentially. Neither of the girls nor their mother knew anything. But the tests had confirmed an old suspicion. And he could count on his fingers.

  Robert undressed without putting on the light. Lea slept on a divan placed against the opposite wall. Monica was awake when he lay down beside her. She pressed against him and kissed his neck, while her hand slid under the elastic on his underpants. They lay quite still when they heard her father’s heavy step on the stairs, like teenagers at a holiday camp, thought Robert. He felt burdened by the knowledge he had been laden with, and by having to lie here, constrained to keep it to himself. She pushed her tongue into his ear and took hold of his testicles. He really felt too tired but he knew what she was thinking. It was a week since they’d made love, and tomorrow night he would have left again. The longer their times apart were, the more important it became, as if they had something to prove. They didn’t speak of it as such, it just lay in the air, the oftener the better, and if too long a time went by he could feel her getting worried.

  There was so much he understood without her needing to spell it out. A glance was enough or a pause before she started tidying the living room or putting dirty washing in the machine, too energetically. But it could also be an ironic smile in the midst of the conversation and the partying faces if they were out amongst others. He knew immediately what she was thinking. They often laughed about their almost telepathic talents when one of them said something the other had been thinking the moment before, whether it was a reaction to what was going on around them or something they had talked about several days earlier.

  If their mutual wordless understanding was what bound them together, in a way they had been destined for each other long before they themselves came to see it like that, under the blanket in the Alps. The irony that for so long had prevented them from being demonstrative and restrained their potential desire from erupting was simultaneously a secret code, a portent of later intimacy. But in all their trustful security they left just as much unsaid as they had when they were slowly edging towards each other without realising it.

  They knew each other so well. He knew her excitability behind the cool façade and her reluctance to be the first one to stretch out a hand in reconciliation. She knew his awkward distraction and restraint, misinterpreted by those around him as arrogance. They made allowances for each other’s foibles, outwardly they came close to being invincible, and reciprocally they made use of their knowledge to both please and punish each other. A few words about Lea needing shoes, or where you could find the best tomatoes, could cover an ocean of tenderness, and a remark that the oven needed cleaning could cause quivers of indignation over something quite different. And it was understood, the purchase of small white shoes or firm dark-red tomatoes was transformed into a loving act, and when the oven was cleansed of congealed fat, every affront was expiated.

  It wasn’t necessary to say everything, he had thought, happy at understanding and being understood, but as time went on he wondered if there were certain things that just couldn’t be said. That was what he was thinking, with Monica lying at his side working away at him until he finally obeyed, almost by reflex, and began to grow hard in her practised hand. Now it was time, after a week of enforced abstinence. She sat on top of him, the bed creaked rhythmically as she started to glide up and down. Lea mumbled and turned over in her sleep, Monica stopped, giggling softly. She went on, more slowly, and the creaking sound gradually became a dry groaning each time he thrust against her cervix.

  He tried to summon passion and cupped his hands under her breasts. They had started to droop a little, not much, just a little, she still had a nice body. But it seemed that she noticed his hands’ hesitancy, the restraint in their light touch, for she took hold of his wrists and forced them down on the mattress on each side of the pillow moaning and pushing harder against him. That worked, he felt the blood vessels tensing to breaking point, and a tingling and trickling from below as she whispered to him encouragingly on its stiffness and hardness. For a fraction of a second he visualised Sonia, the drops of salt water on her pimpled, erect nipples as he passed her the towel. He jerked the image away as you brutally jerk a curtain, and finally they found release, soon after each other, she whimpered as she flopped down over him and buried her face between his neck and shoulder.

  She moved close to him again with her face against his chest. He kissed her forehead and his fingers ran through her hair. She whispered how good it had been. He repeated her words. She couldn’t know what he was thinking, yet he was worried she might notice. It was hot in the cramped room, he put one leg outside the duvet. Monica breathed in his face. Her breath was sweetish, a bit like hot milk. He kissed her again and turned over with his back to her. She put an arm around his stomach and pulled herself against his back. Intimacy – he thought of it again. At this moment it was no more than the feeling of being shut in together in a much too confined room. An enclosed space, he thought, in which the oxygen was gradually being used up. But that was only for now.

  The next evening he and Sonia went into town together. Monica drove them to the station. He had brought the Sunday papers, but she didn’t feel like reading. He sat wondering whether the golfing consultant in psychiatry was her biological father. As if that would matter to anyone except the barrister, who had been egoistic and self-pitying enough to initiate him into his small private hell. He tried to imagine her reaction if he were to tell her. Would she break down? Would she be relieved? She, who had accustomed herself to the role of the family’s unwanted rebel. His secret knowledge increased the distance between them and strengthened his impression of sitting opposite a lonely neglecte
d child.

  They exchanged casual remarks interspersed with long pauses, looking out at the lit windows of residential suburbs, the trees bordering the paths beside the railway and the blue strip of the Sound disappearing and reappearing. The lamplight gleamed violet in the dusk and shone through the leaves of the trees. They did not know each other although she was his sister-in-law. The word seemed quite wrong, like a silly hat. She told him to feel free to read the paper if he didn’t feel like talking. He unfolded a section and read haphazardly. He couldn’t concentrate, and at one point when he looked up he found her watching him. She didn’t look away, just smiled. He looked out at the station where the train happened to have stopped and stretched to read the sign above the platform as if he just wanted to see how far they had come.

  He was annoyed with himself to have thought of her when he was in bed with Monica. It had only been an image, like one of the slides that sometimes gets into the wrong order in the projector so the series of glimpses of a summer day are suddenly broken by Lea in a yellow raincoat standing with her hand stretched out as if she is pushing at the leaning tower of Pisa. You don’t know how it has got there and hurriedly switch to the next slide. Moreover, she wasn’t in the least attractive, Sonia, sitting opposite him in loose denim trousers and a sweatshirt with a hood. Again he noticed her coltish features, her habit of pulling her sleeves down over her hands and childish way of pronunciation, as if the consonants were choking her. Besides, they had nothing to talk about.

  The next day it started to rain. He left the windows open and breathed in the scent of fresh leaves and wet asphalt that blended into the smell of paint, with La Traviata echoing through the empty rooms of the apartment. When he thought about Monica it was not their routine intercourse in the creaking bed he visualised, but her profile in the afternoon sun, the remoteness in her grey eyes as she stood in his bath robe looking out over the Sound, as if contemplating her whole life. Their whole life. There was no difference, her life and theirs, they were one. Suddenly he missed her. He felt like getting up and going to her, untying the robe she had tied so tightly, pulling her to him and putting his hands on her hips. Even though it was merely an image.

  He had to turn the music down, he wasn’t sure whether he had really heard the doorbell. He stood motionless in the sudden stillness. The bell rang again. He went out and picked up the door telephone, it was Sonia. Shortly afterwards she was on the landing with wet hair and an uncertain testing smile. She was wearing high-heeled shoes, her thin silk skirt clung to her legs and her damp cardigan was a little too tight so her midriff was visible between the buttons. She carried a bottle of white wine. She had been close by and got caught in the rain, she thought he might be thirsty . . . The explanations poured out and fell over each other. He found her a towel and she rubbed her hair so it stood on end all over.

  He took the bottle into the kitchen but then remembered the corkscrew was at the bottom of one of the boxes. There was a screwdriver on the kitchen table, he pushed down the cork. There weren’t any glasses either, they would have to use mugs. When he went back to the corner room she was over by the window, clad only in bra and skirt. Her cardigan had been hung to dry over a floor sanding machine. She turned, he offered her a sweater. No need, it was quite warm. The black bra pushed up her breasts into two soft semi-domes so they looked larger than they were. He sat on the window sill, she on the top rung of the stepladder. They raised their mugs, slightly ceremonially, and both broke into a smile. The trees along the avenue threw their reflections on the shining asphalt. He had no idea what to say.

  She said it was a lovely apartment. He described a few of their plans for it. She nodded, looking at him with a teasing smile, and again he suspected her of not listening. She put down her mug on one of the steps and took a walk around the room. Her high heels made her taller and her muscular legs seem more elegant. She turned round and walked slowly towards him, arms swinging, as she bent her head forward and fixed him with a cunning scowl under the curling threads of her damp, towelled hair.

  The night nurse was still talking to her son in Arizona. He went for a stroll along the corridor, imagining a country highway in flickering sunlight, endlessly winging among the rocks. Made-up beds were ranged along the wall of the corridor, separated by windows overlooking the patches of light from the rows of street lamps nearing each other towards the city centre. The door to a sluice room stood ajar, a tap was dripping in there with a hollow, drumming pulse into the steel sink. He turned it off and went on.

  He passed the room where Lucca lay. He hesitated before cautiously opening the door. She was crying softly, he went across to the bed. She asked who was there. Her voice was faint and worn out with weeping, and her nose was blocked, so she gasped after each sentence. She asked what time it was, he told her. He wasn’t usually on duty at night, was he? Just occasionally, he said. He fetched a tissue from the shelf above the wash basin to help her blow her nose. Thank you, she said, moaning hoarsely. She couldn’t get to sleep. He sat down on a chair beside the bed.

  She asked why Lauritz hadn’t come that afternoon as usual. She missed him. The last words trembled and dissolved into a pent-up whimper, her mouth twisted. The muscles of her neck protruded beneath the skin, trembling with tautness, and her shoulders shook as she alternately gasped for air and expelled it in cramped sighs until she gave in to tears. He placed a hand on her shoulder and stroked it cautiously as if he could stop the cramp. She wept for a long time, he kept hold of her. Sometimes the weeping seemed to quieten down, then it broke out from her throat again.

  When she had stopped crying he told her Andreas and Lauritz had gone away. Where? He didn’t know. He told her he had been out to their house. She said they must have gone into Copenhagen to stay with some of his friends. Suddenly she was very composed and clear. He got a fresh tissue and again helped her blow her nose. That made her smile at herself a bit. Why had he gone to the house? He told her how he had met Andreas and Lauritz at the supermarket, about the rain and the mistake over the leg of lamb, about their evening with Lea and how surprised he had been when Andreas did not come to the hospital in the afternoon as usual. But he didn’t mention what Andreas had told him about Malmö and Stockholm.

  You have a nice voice, she said as he was talking. He thanked her. Then they both fell silent. He had not put on the light when he went in. The room was lit only by the dim light from the corridor falling through the half-open door. He could hear when she breathed through her nose, her breathing was calmer now. She asked him to put his hand on her shoulder again. Why hadn’t he told her they had visited him? It had not been planned, he said, and he had been a bit surprised himself. Normally he didn’t get involved in patients’ lives, they were not his business. No, she said after a pause, of course they weren’t.

  He asked her why she didn’t want Andreas to visit her. At first she made no reply. It was a long story, she said finally. But perhaps he already knew something of it? A little . . . he said. Again there was silence with neither speaking, before he finally managed to ask a question. Had she decided, that night of the accident . . . did she want to die? She did not reply at once, as if trying to remember. No, she hadn’t wanted to die. She had mistaken the direction when she reached the bridge over the motorway. She wanted to drive into Copenhagen, to go there. She stopped. He went on sitting there with a hand on her shoulder, even though it forced him to hold his arm up in an awkward, tiring position. He asked if she was thirsty. She didn’t answer, she had fallen asleep.

  The sister in charge smiled at him when he arrived at work next morning. So he was Santa Claus, then! He looked at her, uncomprehending, and she pointed at his jaw. He put up his hand and felt the little tuft of cotton wool still sticking to the dried blood clot where he had cut himself shaving. He had felt dazed when he woke up after only two hours’ sleep and almost collapsed when he got out of bed. It was strange to go back to hospital only a few hours after he had driven home early in the morning. The phone rang as
he opened the door of his office, it was Jacob. His wife had just gone off with the children, he only wanted to say thank you, it had been amazing. When Robert went in to see Lucca on his rounds he asked her the usual questions, and she answered as usual in monosyllables, as if he had not been sitting beside her bed in the night wiping her nose and holding her shoulder.

  He saw her again in the afternoon before going home. She lay with her face towards the window. The blinds divided up the sunlight into slanting strips, and one of them fell on her face. She must have felt its warmth on her skin. He sat down beside the bed. She asked what time it was. He told her. She thanked him. For what? For staying with her. He asked how she had known it was him when he came in just now. She smiled faintly, she had recognised his step. She had grown good at that sort of thing, lying here. He suppressed a yawn, but a small sound escaped him. She said he must be tired. He said yes. He didn’t know what to say. Would she like to listen to the radio? No, she would only risk hearing her mother’s voice. And she didn’t dare run that risk? He observed the anonymous mouth and chin in the strip of sunlight, beneath the gauze that covered eyes, forehead and top of the head. Why? She turned her face away, it sank into the pillow.

  He sat on, neither of them spoke. He was not sure if she was still awake. He sat listening to the snarling sound of the gardener’s small tractor that was alternately distant and then louder when the tractor crossed beneath the window, up and down the lawn between the wings of the building. She turned her face to him again. Did he smoke? Yes, he replied, bewildered. Would he light a cigarette? She felt like smoking. He lit one and placed it carefully between her lips, which tightened around the filter. She inhaled deeply. The smoke caught the strip of sunlight in a pale mesh as it seeped out between her lips. He opened the window. Grass, she said. He looked through the slats of the blind to the lawn, divided by the mower into long, parallel tracks of cut grass blades. He himself could not smell the grass. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Now and then she made a sign with her mouth, he placed the cigarette between her lips again.