Lucca (27 page)

He waited for a long time on the terrace where she had sat with Lauritz, until he heard the slight tick from the point of her thin white stick. It made him think of the sound of Lauritz's pine cones rolling over the tiles the previous day, the prickly sound of the hard seeds. A nurse led her by the arm. She had been surprised when they told her he had come, not expecting him to visit her again so soon. Actually she had not been sure he would come at all.

She was wearing a long black dress with many little buttons, one of the dresses he had brought her from the empty house. Her hair was combed back and held in a pony tail just as in the picture from Paris, and she had put on lipstick. Someone had helped her. The nurse left them alone. Lucca put a hand on the parapet. Maybe they could go for a walk on the beach, if he felt like it. He took her hand and laid it on his arm, and thus they walked, in an old-fashioned way, he thought. She said it. Now we're walking like two old people . . .

The shadows had grown long and gathered in small, bluish puddles on the trodden sand. The foam of the waves shone in the low sunlight. Only a few holiday-makers remained on the beach. Up in one of the dunes he saw a white-haired man putting on his bathing robe. He resembled the barrister, but Robert could not decide whether it was really him. They walked at the edge of the beach where the sand was damp and firm. They walked slowly but he could see she was regaining the use of her limbs. It was the first time she had been down on the beach. Her white stick left little holes in the sand, a wavering track. She breathed in through her nose. Seaweed, she said. It was true. A salty, slightly rotten odour hung over the intertwined belts of dried kelp between the edge of the sea and the dunes. It was better than the smell of cleaning materials . . . She paused. Her hand slipped from his arm when she stopped. She couldn't bear being in hospital. She said it quietly, like a statement. No, he said.

They sat down on the sand, close to the sea. She bent her knees and pulled her dress down around her legs. The waves were small, and there was a silence after one had fallen before the next arched itself and collapsed. Fans of water and foam reached right up to the shadows of their heads and shoulders. He told her Andreas was back at the house, and what he had said that afternoon. That he was sorry. That he wanted to try again. He said nothing about what had happened in Stockholm. She picked up a handful of sand, closed her fist and let the sand filter down again in a fine stream like the sand in an hourglass. Was that why he had come? To tell her this? Robert was silent for a moment. Yes, he said.

The last grains sifted out of her hand, and she laid it flat on the sand. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something. She sat with her face directed at the breaking waves. She was no longer the person who could return. Her tone was hard and clear. She was no longer the one who could decide for that, she went on. She said no more. They fell silent. He took his cigarettes from his breast pocket, there were two left. Would she like to smoke? No, thanks. He lit a cigarette and looked across at Kullen. She didn't know . . . Now her voice was so low that half the sentence was lost when a wave broke. He asked her to repeat it. She cleared her throat. She didn't know anything any more. She drew a deep breath and put her head back, and he saw the tears running down under her big sunglasses. She wiped them away with her fingertips so the knuckles pushed up the edge of the sunglasses and he caught a glimpse of her glass eyes. She sniffed and breathed out through her mouth. It was like living in a waiting room, she said. Without knowing what she was waiting for.

He invited her to come and stay. That would make it easier to be with Lauritz while she thought over what to do next. She turned her face to him, and he looked out at the waves to avoid his reflection in her dark glasses. He had not thought of it before, but as soon as he had said it, it seemed the obvious thing. She could have his room, he could sleep in Lea's. After a week or two she might change her mind. When
she had spoken to Andreas. At some point they would need to talk.

She did not reply. Neither of them said anything as they walked back. She stopped in the foyer and let go of his arm. Had he meant it? He sounded more offended than he meant to when he replied. What did she think? She smiled apologetically and reached out for his arm again. It was just . . . unexpected. They went on across the foyer. Why should he care about all her problems? She directed the dark glasses towards him as if regarding him with an expectant look. Let's say I am someone with too much room, he went on at last. Too much room? Yes, he said. Too much room, too much time. She stopped again and tapped her stick on the floor, raising it and letting it go. And how did he intend to get her out of here?

He asked her to wait on a sofa in the foyer and went into the office to ask for the doctor on duty. He had gone home. Robert told the secretary he was taking Lucca with him. She looked at him incredulously over her reading glasses. They couldn't discharge a patient just like that. I am her doctor, said Robert. He took full responsibility. It sounded rash. The secretary pushed her glasses up her nose. It was against the rules. Don't you worry about that, replied Robert and promised her she could rely on him to witness that she had protested.

He went back to the foyer and took Lucca up to her room. She sat on the bed while he packed her bag. You must be crazy, she said. Not exactly, he replied. The secretary and a nurse came in sight at the door. Was he next of kin? Not really, he said. Lucca turned away, picked up the pillow and lowered her face. The secretary pulled the corners of her mouth down in an offended grimace and handed him a ball pen and a document. Would he kindly sign this? He did so without reading it through. When they had gone, Lucca collapsed over the pillow. It was the first time he had heard her laugh.

The sun had set and the sky was pink and lilac when they came out onto the motorway. He put on a tape, they sat listening to the music. After they had passed Copenhagen she felt hungry. He drove into a lay-by with a McDonalds. They ate in the car.
She got ketchup on her chin and one cheek, but he didn't say anything. In the end she discovered it herself. You must tell me when I mess myself up, for God's sake, she said, wiping her face with the serviette. There was still some ketchup on her cheek. He took her serviette and removed the red streak, started the car again and glided in to join the column of red rear lights between the pale yellow fields in the twilight.

Part Four

I
t was snowing again. They had thought winter was finally over. It was late March and there had been cloudless days with bright sunshine when they could sit outside in their coats. Lucca stretched out a hand and switched off the alarm clock. She pressed herself close to Andreas's back, he was still asleep, and snoring. As a rule that did not bother her, and when it did she just held his nose between two fingers. She snored too now and then, he said, and she barely stirred when he gently turned her onto her side. They knew each other, they were not shy about anything any more. They had even stopped locking the bathroom door. She had never thought she would be so much at ease with anyone that she could leave all the doors open. Only the door of his study was always closed. When he came out at the end of the afternoon the air in there was thick with cigarette smoke. She and Lauritz had grown used to him being in the house and yet miles away behind the closed door, inaccessible until he emerged late in the afternoon, pale and distrait.

He never spoke of what he was writing when he was engaged in it. He couldn't, he said. He was afraid of losing the scent of what he was trying to pursue with his words. What could not really be said at all. But when he finished a new play he couldn't wait for her to read it. He felt actually wounded, although he tried to conceal his disappointment, if she did not read it quickly enough and say something about it at once. She had plenty to do with Lauritz and the house, but he would gladly look after everything if she would only sit down and read his script. She dropped everything and took the sheaf of pages to bed. It irritated him, she could feel, but she had always preferred to read in bed, sitting cross-legged, with the duvet around her like a lined nest.

Sometimes she found it hard to understand what he wrote, but perhaps it was not necessary to understand everything. He had said so himself in an interview with a Sunday newspaper. That what was immediately understandable in fact stunted one's perception, whereas seeming obscurity put one on the track of something only glimpsed. Something silent and more profound that could not be contained and pinned down with simple concepts. He was so clever that people were sometimes quite frightened of him, but he didn't like her to remind him of that. He had made his mark, he was one of those who counted, and she was proud of him. She was not even ashamed of being proud of her husband when they attended a première. Why should she be?

As a rule she had a few critical comments on his scripts, it might be a dramaturgical ambiguity or something in the development of a character which felt contradictory, and he listened to her even though she only had her intuition as an actor to guide her. It made her happy when she persuaded him to alter or omit something, not because he acknowledged her to be right but because she felt that brought her into contact with what he was doing, with him. The part of him she could not reach because it expressed itself only in writing, and because he had to protect this secret side to be able to write at all.

She had always wanted to play a role in one of his plays, but Lauritz was born soon after they moved back from Rome, and in the years that followed she had only done a few radio plays. She had concentrated on the child and the house. She coped almost single-handedly in the periods when he was working on something new. Miriam scolded her for letting her career run to seed and slouching around like a country housewife in apron and wellingtons. Miriam almost gave her a bad conscience, and she didn't know what to say in her own defence, but that only lasted until they had put down the receiver or waved goodbye at the station. Afterwards she did wonder why she felt neither frustrated nor unhappy or oppressed, as Miriam obviously felt she should. It was rather the opposite feeling. A leisurely happiness to which she didn't give much thought,
related to the clouds that unnoticeably changed shape on their journey between the edge of the woods and the horizon. In the course of the day, while her hands were busy with all manner of practical things, her thoughts circled on their own like the swallows, now low around the house, now high up among the drifting cloud formations.

Lauritz had changed her. She had been ready, when she met Andreas, without herself being aware of it. He saw it before she did, and he had not been frightened by what he saw. He had gone on unremittingly, further than anyone else had dared. Right into her secret empty core, open to the way things might happen. He had turned out to be the one she had waited for, and so it had been Lauritz and not another man's child who had grown inside her until there was no longer any room for him. She had screamed so hard she thought she would die. She had felt as if she was being ripped open and turned inside out. Nothing had ever hurt so much, and no one had made her as happy as the small, creased, purple-blue child who was placed on her stomach so she could see his cross face and squinting little eyes and the heart hammering wildly in his frog-like body, covered with foetal grease, still linked to her by the twisted cord. Andreas wept, she had not seen him weep before, and she loved him more than ever, but she herself did not weep. She groaned and trembled and smiled all the time at this brutal, naked, screaming and bloody joy.

To Lauritz it didn't matter who she was, and yet he had never been in doubt. He could smell and taste who she was long before he learned to focus his eyes on her and recognise her face. People asked if it wasn't hard having to get up in the middle of the night and adjust her whole life to the boy's needs. They clearly did not understand it was a relief. She was relieved when she realised she had ceased to care about her own bungled ambitions and egocentric dreams. She forgot time, it was no longer divided into hours and days. The child had become her clock, time did not pass any more, it grew before her eyes.

Else was worried and Miriam almost indignant. They let her understand, each in her own way, that in their opinion she
was exaggerating her newly acquired maternal feelings all too willingly, indeed, almost fanatically, subjecting herself to the child and to Andreas. They almost despised her because she allowed him, the great sensitive artist, to withdraw to his study and go to Copenhagen to tend his career or travel about Europe in search of inspiration, while she trotted around with the buggy out there in the country. She did not respond, merely smiled infuriatingly. Miriam did not begin to understand her until she herself became pregnant. She was eight months gone now.

Else had fallen silent on the telephone when Lucca called from Rome and told her mother she was pregnant. Wasn't it a bit soon? After all, they had only known each other for a few months. She felt hurt at her mother's cautious reaction. How long was she to wait? How reluctant and choosy did you have to be when life finally offered the simplest and most basic of all questions? Her entire life had gathered into a single moment when she lay beside Andreas one morning behind the closed shutters and told him she was pregnant. The future had begun just there, when he asked if she wanted a child, and she replied by asking if he did. He said yes without hesitation. Yes, with her.

Else asked if she realised that at best it would put a brake on her career and at worst put a stop to it. Just when she was about to make it. Lucca remembered what her mother had said when Otto dropped her. That there was more to life than love – work, for example. She remembered Else's bitter mouth and sunken face when she sat, eyes shut, sunning herself. Later on, as her stomach began to expand and her legs and face swelled up, she thought several times of their conversation that time at the cottage. In fact, she resembled a cow, a pale cow who looked questioningly at her in the mirror with her amiable eyes. When Andreas took her heavy breasts in his hands, milk seeped from her nipples, and he kissed them and let her taste the milk on his lips. She would never have believed it, but she felt a secret pleasure in seeing and feeling how the unknown child quietly and laboriously ruined her figure. Men had clutched it so often, but now they no longer
looked at her, and soon she too forgot to note whether they did or not.

Andreas mumbled in his sleep when she kissed his throat. Your train, she said. He shot up in bed and looked at her in confusion. She stroked his cheek and smiled. He would still be in time if they got up now. He sat for a while on the edge of the bed, looking like a child in the morning, hair on end and narrowed eyes, a sulky child. She put on her bath-robe and looked out of the window. The snow whirled in spirals around the dark branches of the plum tree. It had settled already in white strips along the furrows arching over the roof ridge of the neighbouring barn. The sky was as uniformly white as paper.

Lauritz lay on his stomach, his rump in the air. His cheek was rosy and swollen with sleep, and a little patch of saliva had fallen onto the pillow beneath his soft mouth. His toy elephant stood in place with its trunk stuck between the bars of the bed-head, staring intensely at him out of its button eyes. She called to him softly and took his hand as he woke up. She made the coffee while he ate his porridge, Andreas had a shower, and she read the paper. As she leafed through the film and theatre supplement she recognised Otto. He was kneeling on a railway track, in breeches, check shirt and a sleeveless woollen slipover. His hair was cropped and he had a watchful expression in his eyes, tense as a hunted beast of prey.

She sipped the scalding coffee. The caption said he was playing the lead in a film about a resistance group in World War Two. She had to look at the picture for a long time before she could connect the watchful partisan with the face she had once kissed and the eyes she had once looked into as if they held the answer to every question. She had been so sure he was the one she was to love, and be loved by, and yet he had merely been the latest on the list. She had known there would be others after him when it was over, but had not believed it. She remembered how hard-headed she had been, completely unreceptive to what everyone could see for themselves. Was it just because he had dumped her? Perhaps, but surprisingly soon it had opened up again, that vacant spot within her, her
secret openness to whatever might appear, though still not present.

Andreas had time only for half a cup when he finally emerged from the bathroom. They would have to leave at once if he was to catch his train. He stood fidgeting at the door while she struggled to get Lauritz's coat on. She asked if he had remembered his ticket. He sighed impatiently. When they went into the drive the boy put his head back and opened his mouth to let snowflakes melt on his tongue. She drove. Neither of them said anything much, they were too tired. Andreas drummed on the lid of the glove box. The snow blew across the asphalt and along the ditches and the black fields faded on both sides into the falling snow. He said he had left his address on his desk. He had borrowed an apartment in Paris, he would be there for just over a month. They had arranged for her to join him at Easter. Else had promised to come and look after Lauritz.

The lights of the train were already in sight behind the snow. The rails seemed to end in nothing but whirling drifts. He lifted Lauritz up and kissed him. See you at Easter, she said, looking into his eyes. At Easter, he smiled, picking up his suitcase, as the rows of carriages stopped behind him. He would call when he arrived. They kissed. Doors opened and people got in and out. As he was turning round, I love you, she said. He hesitated and looked at her again. She smiled and he regarded her for a moment as if taking a photograph with his eyes. Perhaps to take the picture with him, of her standing on the platform holding Lauritz by the hand, with snow in her hair. He stroked her cheek. He loved her too, he said, and hurried into the train a second before the doors closed with an automatic slam.

He often went away to work. He needed to be alone when he was finishing something or starting something new. He had been working on his new play for six months and at the same time attending rehearsals of one of his earlier pieces. Since the new year he had been in Malmö several times a week. He had made almost no progress on his script, which he had promised to deliver at the beginning of April.

She was glad he was leaving. He had been withdrawn and irritable for the final weeks before the première in Malmö. He had grumbled about unimportant trifles and generally been impossible to be with. She knew his awkward times and had herself suggested he went away. Else had a woman friend in Paris who was going to Mexico for a month, he was staying at her apartment. He had worked in Paris several times before, in cheap hotel rooms. He liked being alone in a big city where he didn't know anyone. She looked forward to going down there to disturb his solitude. She visualised how they would surrender to their pent-up hunger for each other, as they usually did when they had been apart for a while.

Lauritz went on waving until the train had disappeared into the snow. When he was sitting on the bench in front of his locker in the nursery-school cloakroom he asked if Andreas would be in Paris now. She kissed him goodbye, and a pretty young woman took him by the hand and led him off. Lucca recalled the time when she had worked at a nursery and lay on her mother's bed in the afternoons with a grown man who played badminton. The snow melted at once in the streets among the drab houses, but outside the city the landscape was white, and as she drove along the side-road, the dark edge of the woods resembled a cave opening up in the whiteness into a night filled with falling stars.

She switched on the radio and started to tidy the kitchen. Last night's dishes had not been washed up. She filled the dishwasher, scoured the pots and pans, made coffee and sat down to smoke a cigarette. The noise of the dishwasher blended with the music from the radio. The floor of the living room was covered with piles of books. They'd had a bookcase made to cover one wall, she planned to paint it while Andreas was away. They had agreed on grey, white would be too difficult to maintain. Lauritz left his fingerprints everywhere on the newly painted doors and sills. The door of Andreas's study was open. She looked at the cleared desk where his portable computer usually stood. She missed him already, although she was used to being alone, whether for a day or a month. Up to now there had always been something in
the house that needed finishing off, leaving her something to get going on when he was away. To her surprise she had discovered she was quite competent at do-it-yourself, and she had enjoyed setting the house in order. It had come to interest her more than acting, and it gave her satisfaction in a quite primitive way when she looked at a wall or door panel she had repaired and painted herself.