Lucca (32 page)

L
ucca was nervous as the plane came in to land at Charles de Gaulle airport. She was afraid Andreas would not be there as arranged on the telephone. She imagined he might have forgotten, preoccupied as he was when working. Maybe he had forgotten to look at his watch, maybe he had overslept because he had sat up writing all night. But she was also nervous at the thought of seeing him again. It was silly, they had only been apart for a fortnight and had talked on the phone several times. She was in the toilet when she heard the stewardess over the intercom asking the passengers to go back to their seats and fasten their seatbelts. She was putting on lipstick. There had been quite a lot of turbulence during the last part of the flight, it had spilt the coffee on her small folding table and almost made it drip on her clothes several times. Perhaps that was what made her nervous. The plane jolted again as she held the lipstick and pressed her lips down over her teeth, looking like a turtle. Her hand slipped and the lipstick left a long line on one cheek.

She was wearing a short beige dress she knew he liked. It was tight-fitting and fairly low-necked, and the skirt ended quite high up her thighs. He always had to touch her when she wore that dress. She had been in quite a state at the thought of getting coffee on it during the daft turbulence. Over the dress she wore a grey tailored jacket and a petrol-blue silk scarf he had bought for her when they lived in Rome. She had not looked so elegant for months, and it was equally long since she had put on any make-up.

As she was waiting to be checked in at Kastrup Airport she had felt like the typical provincial wife who had decked herself out just because she was travelling by air, but she wanted to look beautiful and sexy when he met her. She knew he had a
weakness for girdles and high-heeled shoes with ankle straps. Besides, it was seldom now that she had the chance of making something of herself. At home she mostly dressed in dungarees and wellies.

She had finished painting the bookcase and all the books were in place, even down to alphabetical order. The living room had been the last job. While the bookcase was drying she had managed to fill in the hole around the stove pipe with mortar and then paint it over. It was an old cast-iron stove they had found at a scrap merchant's and hammered the rust off. She and Else sat by the stove drinking red wine after Lauritz had been put to bed. Else said all her doubts had been put to shame. She looked affectionately at Lucca and stroked her cheek. The glow from the open stove door softened her lined features. So she had got herself a home at last . . . Did Else realise the implications of what she had just said? It seemed unlikely. There was not a shadow of heart-searching in her tender expression. Lucca got up to open another bottle of wine. She wasn't used to her mother getting sentimental.

She thought of Else's remark again as she watched Copenhagen grow smaller and vanish in the clouds. She leaned back in her seat and observed the massed clouds, dazzling white above, making her screw up her eyes. So she had got herself a home . . . at last. Else had said it in a loving tone and she would have liked to give herself up to the affection in her glance and the hand that brushed her cheek. Instead she had moved her face away and gone into the kitchen for more wine. She believed she had long since put her bitterness behind her. Bitterness at Else and Giorgio making such a mess of their lives and her childhood. She could see Else was hurt when she took her hand away and looked into the flames in the stove.

As she pulled the cork from the bottle she reproached herself for behaving like a rejected child. But she had felt that her mother was pawing at the life she had herself created. The home she had in fact made, at last, with Andreas. As if Else was invading her happiness in order to warm herself the way she sat and warmed herself by the stove that Lucca and Andreas
had had to hammer and scrape away at for days before getting rid of all the rust. Suddenly she was irritated because she was dependent on her mother to look after Lauritz while she was in Paris. She snapped at Else when she poured their wine and her mother asked how Andreas's new play was coming on. Else could not get over having a son-in-law who was an author and even starting to be famous.

Why couldn't she just share her happiness with Else in the home she had managed to get at last after all the wrong turnings and blind alleys? Why was she so touchy, now that she was supposed to have found peace in herself? She looked out of the small window at the wing. Suddenly she thought it looked like a diving board, a ten-metre diving board above a very large swimming pool filled with whipped cream. Surely the stewardess would soon bring her a plastic-wrapped swimsuit. The telephone had rung as she sat drinking red wine with Else. It was Miriam. They had chatted on the phone every day. Most of the time Lucca had just listened to her friend, who alternately wept, then furiously recited her jazz beloved's human failings, his egoism, his cowardice, his unfeeling and spoilt attitude to life. Miriam asked if she could come and see Lucca. A mutual friend had offered to drive her. Lucca explained she was on her way to Paris to visit Andreas.

After she had put down the phone she felt guilty again for not welcoming the deserted, heavily pregnant Miriam, and it did not improve matters that her excuse itself must seem like scorn. She hadn't time for her unhappy friend because she was flying down to her lover to walk around Paris arm in arm. But she felt even more guilty over her silent, inattentive reaction to Miriam's furious outbursts of sobbing. She could not hide it from herself. There was something repulsive about all that snivelling heartbreak. It was as if her friend was blowing her nose in Lucca's ear. She recalled how Else had stretched out a hand and caressed her cheek, as if she wanted to leave her fingerprints on her happiness and lick the butterfly dust from her fond fingers.

Suddenly she could not stand the idea of her mother lying
in the bed she and Andreas slept in every night. Perhaps Else would lie awake in the dark listening for a faint echo of their blissful sighs and moans from the walls. Through the years Else had been witness to all her failed relationships and affairs, and she had lamented them so enthusiastically that Lucca had sometimes suspected her of finding comfort and reassurance in her daughter's setbacks. She was in no doubt that Else rejoiced for her sake, but nor did she doubt that in her heart her mother envied her all that happiness and secretly thought it was really incredible after all the men she had gambolled with. She probably did not realise it herself, but Lucca had heard it as an undertone in her comments. Imagine, that she had got herself a home in spite of it all! When actually she did not really deserve it. How merciful life could be, after all . . .

She thought of Miriam who despite everything had believed so fervently in her jazz beloved that she had decided to have a child with him. She'd had the same faith in Andreas, in the certainty of his gaze and his voice one late summer morning in Trastevere when she told him she was pregnant. Was it just because she compared herself with her deserted friend that she felt so vulnerable in her own home? A few days before, when all the books were in place in the bookcase, she had looked around her not knowing what to do next. Now everything was as it should be. She called Andreas to tell him this, but she could feel she was disturbing him. Normally he called, in the evening. She asked him why he didn't just disconnect the phone. He mumbled that you never knew what might happen.

She missed him although there was less than a week to wait. She felt the lack of his presence, now she no longer had anything to throw herself into. The daily housework was quickly done, and the hours when Lauritz was at nursery school seemed longer than before. She sat and looked vacantly out of the window at the slanting ploughed furrows and the bare crown of the plum tree. She tried to read but put down the book after a page or two, unable to find any interest in the plot. She felt far too sensitive about the sudden emptiness. She had said that herself as an excuse one evening when she almost quarrelled with him
on the telephone. They hardly ever quarrelled. Afterwards she could remember precisely what it was that had made her cross. He had seemed distant, as if he hadn't anything to say to her, but of course he was far away in his mind, deep in his play.

She told him about Miriam and said it was probably her snivelling phone-calls getting on her nerves. He replied that when all was said and done Miriam had brought it on herself. She said she missed him. He missed her too, he replied after a pause. She laughed down the phone at him and asked why he said that when it wasn't true. He had his work and the whole of Paris to romp around in when he was free. He didn't go out much, he replied. But shouldn't she get going on something soon? Now her role of do-it-yourself-woman was played out? It couldn't be much fun for her to be financially dependent on him. She was hurt. As if she was a little kept housewife, and had only been playing a game, covered with paint and mortar. During the hours when he had been writing she was actually the one who had buckled down to it, and she had done a great part of the work on her own.

She didn't say anything, didn't want to quarrel with him, not on the phone while he was in Paris out of range. When, on rare occasions they did quarrel, as a rule they ended up going to bed together and erasing all disagreement with caresses. They had never been angry for more than half an hour at a time, and she did not want the conversation to end on a bitter note when she could not snuggle up to him afterwards and feel everything was all right again. Besides, he was right. She ought to get going again, the question was, on what. She had not had a stage part since Lauritz was born, only one or two radio plays when he was little, and some dubbing for a Disney film. She had probably been forgotten, it would be almost like starting out afresh. She had said no when she was offered a job with Lauritz on a television ad for nappies, chiefly because Andreas had made fun of it and had been against their child being made use of commercially. Maybe it was stupid of her.

She had not been given the role of Nora in Harry's production of
A Doll's House
. Andreas had intervened. At the time she had
not given much thought to it, newly in love as she was. She had merely thought it was the price she had to pay for the choice she had made. When she fell pregnant shortly after that, the role faded into insignificance. But she had paid the price.

When she and Harry had begun to show themselves publicly she could feel that people held their breath in shock and disgust over both her and the shameless old seducer. Lucca dared not think what they would have said if they had known she had been in his bed less than twenty-four hours after his wife died. But when the news spread that she had left Harry she felt people distanced themselves from her afresh. Suddenly everyone seemed to take his side, and the theatre magician's talented find was transformed into a calculating career prostitute who had ensnared the noble old artist in the midst of his loneliness and despair. They apparently forgot she had been given her role in
The Father
long before anything happened between her and Harry. Anyway, there were no more offers, and it felt as if she had been struck by a dangerous, infectious disease.

Harry had been right, then. She had ended up leaving him after all. But surely anyone could understand that sooner or later she would leave a man who was so much older. What if he had fought harder to keep her? To start with she had not cared much for his young disciple, and if anyone had told her he would be the father of her child, she would have laughed, both at the idea of having a child and the idea of having it with him.

She thought about that at Charles de Gaulle as she stood among the other passengers on the escalator in one of the plexiglass tubes. All these people, she thought. All of them had a place they called home, but how many of them would be able to say that they had been destined to get one particular home and not another? She thought about Otto again, that they had both had a child with just one year between them. What if he had not grown tired of her? Would those two children have been one and the same child, then? And what if it had not happened to be Andreas she ran into? It was hot in the tube, she was sweating and her impatience felt unbearable as she waited for her suitcase by the conveyor belt.

He was standing in the background in his shabby old leather jacket, which hung on him summer and winter. He waved and smiled, he looked like himself. Who else should he look like? She laughed at him and at herself. She could see he found her lovely and was glad she had taken pains with herself. He walked to meet her and tears came into her eyes as she put down her case and nestled into his embrace.

W
ouldn't she take their young guest down to the beach so he could take a dip? He must need one . . . Harry had obviously forgotten she was a few years younger than their guest. It was the day after his arrival. Andreas seemed almost terrified at the idea. He muttered something about forgetting his swimming trunks. He and Harry were still seated in the shade on the roof terrace when she went up there after her siesta. Harry would not be deterred, Andreas could just borrow a pair of his. Now there was no way out. The young guest seemed quite disconcerted at the idea of putting on Harry Wiener's very own swimming trunks. What about you? he asked Harry. He made a deprecating gesture with his hands, he would stay here. Young Bark had drained him of energy, he was going to take forty winks.

Come on, then, she said, smiling encouragingly at Andreas, as if he was a shy child. They went down to the car. The village houses glowed white in the low sun and the shadows on the reddish rock slopes were long and distorted. On the way down Andreas pricked himself on an agave that stretched its tough leaves across the path. His arm was bleeding, but he said not a word, merely smiled although she could see it hurt. She was irritated because he would not even allow himself to say Ow! They drove down the mountainside. Is he tough on you? she asked. Tough and tough . . . he replied. As long as it brought improvement he was glad of criticism. A play script wasn't a finished work, after all, just as a score was not in itself music. It only came to life when the conductor, or in this case, the director, got hold of it and gave it his interpretation . . . It sounded like something he had taught himself to say.

She had sunbathed as usual that morning, in her bikini. It annoyed her, she was used to lying naked and getting brown
all over. How modest . . . said Harry when he and Andreas came out on the terrace each with his coffee cup and each with his script under an arm. They went to sit in the shade. His teasing tone made her contrary and she took off her top before lying down again on the sun-bed. She caught sight of Andreas averting his eyes as her breasts came in sight, and she was sure Harry had seen it too. He smiled his foxy little smile. Could that really amuse him? She closed her eyes and listened to the cicadas, some close at hand, others further off, each chinking its rhythm, fast or lazy. She lay unmoving and enjoying the sunshine beating into her skin, making her sweat and feel heavy.

Harry treated Andreas in a different way from that he used with his actors. She felt he was being hard. He did not comment on anything he found good in the play, whereas he laid down in detail what did not work with no polite beating about the bush. For instance, how could it be that all the characters not only spoke alike but also just like their author? Andreas attempted to explain that he had tried to stylise the language in such a way that the characters, instead of expressing themselves in realistic language, used a poetic or grotesque form that flowed through them and at the same time defined their personalities. Harry cut him short. Perhaps they were meant to speak in tongues? Every character must have a
reason
for speaking and saying what he or she said. Besides, it was an advantage for the actors to understand their own lines. Not to mention the audience. After all, this was a play, not a poetry reading!

Andreas defended himself mildly by saying that the demand for simple, clear and unambiguous dialogue risked draining the play of finer nuances and tones . . . everything which in his opinion made the difference between art and message drama, he dared to add. Harry laughed hoarsely. Might he have one of his Gitanes? But of course! Lucca heard him fish a cigarette out of the pack and the little click of the lid of his silver lighter. Shortly afterwards she smelled the spicy scent of tobacco smoke wafting across the terrace.

Now listen . . . Harry's tone was friendlier now, almost fatherly. First of all he must never, never be afraid of being
simple. Clarity, he said, clarity is all. On the stage nothing could be too clear. Where that was concerned there was no difference between Sophocles and a well-turned musical comedy. Tones, he said, he could very well leave those to poets, and as for nuances, they were something the impressionist painters had taken care of . . . wimps with full beards! When it came to the crunch the most archaic myths and the flattest pub jokes were constructed in the same way. And furthermore . . . he paused to inhale . . . he should not be afraid of losing his personal characteristics, his precious voice.
Style
, he went on, enunciating the word curtly and sharply, style began where you renounced yourself in favour of your story. If you had anything at all to tell. And he obviously had . . . otherwise they would not be sitting here, would they?

This was meant to be disarming, but she could see in Andreas that he was not at all sure Harry was right, and instead was picturing to himself how in a little while his master would slam the script shut and send him home. She had got up and was sitting on the sun-bed, dizzy with the heat. This time Andreas looked stiffly into her eyes to avoid having to look at her breasts. Harry looked at her too and smiled, but it was a smile she could not recall having seen before. A boyish smile like the one Andreas had given her when she fetched him from the airport and he was surprised to find her and not his guru waiting for him. Maybe it was the heat that confused her, but for a moment she thought the smile of the young man had nipped across onto the older man's face, while the boyish smile's rightful owner stared vacantly at her, afraid of moving his gaze as much as a millimetre downwards and humiliated at the thought that she had heard everything Harry said.

Everything went black when she got up. She turned her back on them and stood with head bent for a second or two before going down the stairs and into the bedroom. She put on one of Harry's shirts and went on down to the kitchen to make lunch. She ran the tap until it grew cold and held her wrists beneath the running water. It was a big dark room, the coolest in the house, with an arched ceiling and an open fireplace. A door gave way to a steep passage leading up to the village. The crack
under the door was so big that the reflected sunlight from the alleyway fanned out over the uneven tiles on the floor. The light was reflected in the stream of cold water with a restless, silvery flickering. A bluebottle cruised lazily around the sticky ribbon hanging from the ceiling, thick with dead flies, but did not alight. She drank a glass of water. One of the sun rays struck an apron hanging on a hook, washed out pink, with printed yellow tulips.

According to Harry his wife had not been there for years, but her apron was still hanging up. There was a brown stain on it, where she must once have used it to hold something hot. Lucca had often felt like putting it on. She took smoked ham and olives out of the fridge and started to wash lettuce. The bluebottle kept on circling around the ham. She had found other traces of his wife around the house, a pair of old bathing slippers in the wardrobe and a small bottle of dried nail varnish on a shelf in the bathroom, and some faded women's magazines on the shelf beneath the bedside table, the newest ones four years old. Harry had told Lucca very little about her, and she had not asked. In the apartment in Copenhagen she had seen a photograph of an attractive, dark-haired woman with a triangular face, but the picture must have been taken at least fifteen years before, to judge from the dress. The bluebottle alighted on her upper lip, she spat and hit out with her hand. In the end she cut a small piece of fat from a slice of ham, put it on the chopping board and stood in wait with the fly swatter. She got it.

Harry was lively during lunch, almost jovial, and Andreas listened gratefully to his anecdotes. It irritated her to see him lapping it all up like a good little puppy getting his reward and comfort after Harry had given his script the full treatment. She was still amazed that this was the same guy who had seemed so free and spontaneous when they strolled around the wild west village. She went downstairs for her siesta. While she lay in the dark she thought of Harry's remark about her modest bikini and of his foxy face when she took off her top and Andreas averted his eyes. She pictured Harry's boyish smile again when she rose from the sun-bed after he had taught Andreas how to
write drama. It did not suit him, that smile. It was not at all like him. It had the effect of an indecent exposure, as if he had taken down his trousers and shown off his bare bottom. At the same time there was something conspiratorial in his expression, as if he wanted to enlist her confirmation that the two of them shared something, whether it was his bare bottom, her young breasts or the beaten expression in his disciple's eyes.

Why did he put up with it? She came out with the question after a long pause in which neither of them had said anything. They followed the coast road past the bars and discothèques on the beach and the low white concrete buildings on the other side with boarding houses, shopping arcades and complexes of holiday apartments. It was still out of season and in most places the shutters were closed. He looked at her. He didn't mind being criticised. She returned his gaze briefly. He spoke in a tired tone, neither evasive nor forthcoming, as an obvious statement. He knew why he had written his play the way he had. Even if he was not particularly good at explaining it. But the old man might well be right in some of his criticism.

She was surprised to hear him speak of Harry like that. Perhaps it was in return for Harry's
young guest
. He laughed out loud. She looked at him again. What? He smiled in the same sudden way he had done when they drove from Almeria. He was all right, the old man . . . he
was
theatre, through and through! Andreas nodded his acknowledgement and seemed as he did so to shake off the humiliation, all Harry's didactic and ridiculing words, rather as you shake your head to get snow out of your hair. They passed the fish restaurant where they had eaten the previous evening, down on the beach. She would have to forgive him for making a fool of himself. What did he mean? Look out for the dog! he said quickly. She managed to avoid a skinny dog running across the road. Yes, what he had said about the part . . .

They had sat inside the garishly lit place because the wind had got up. She was beside Andreas, Harry opposite. You could see the spray rising from the waves in the light from the open
windows. Harry leaned back with crossed legs, smoking, while they waited for their food. He told her about the play Andreas had written, and it sounded like a story he himself was inventing. Now and again he looked inquiringly at Andreas as if to assure himself that he did not get anything wrong. She loved to hear him talking in his deep hoarse voice, and she was so involved in listening to him that she was startled when the waiter arrived with their plates. Harry asked for an ashtray and the waiter went away. He pointed to the champagne cooler beside Andreas. Now he must see that his lady companion had something to drink. Andreas had been listening as intently as she had and turned to the wine bottle in confusion. Only to the brim! said Harry drily as he went on pouring.

The waiter came back with the ashtray and Harry put out his cigarette. They raised a toast. Andreas cleared his throat. He had been thinking of something. The part of the young woman . . . might that be a role for Lucca? Harry looked at him for a long time, and his eyes grew even narrower, as if he was thinking hard. He had considered it, he said finally, but had come to the opposite conclusion. It might well be seen as a trifle . . . he lifted his hands from the table cloth . . . overdone . . . if he gave the leading role in Andreas's play and in
A Doll's House
to his partner as well. He started to cut up his fish with great care. In any case we should never discuss casting in the presence of actors. He raised his eyes and looked out at the waves in the darkness, chewing. Andreas looked down at his fish.

She turned off the coast road along a track beside the cliffs that sloped steeply down to the surf. The water was jade green and blue black further out. No need to think of that, she said. Sure? She smiled soothingly. Of course . . . She drove round a point and negotiated a series of sharp corners down to the beach where she usually swam. It was framed by cliffs on both sides, forming a small cove. No-one else was there. She parked in the shade of a group of tall cacti.

When they had gone to bed the night before she had asked Harry why he was so worried about what people would say if he gave her the parts of both Nora and the woman in Andreas's
play. Usually he did not care in the least what people said about him. She had been sitting up in bed, ready for a discussion. He stroked her gently under the chin. It wasn't actually his own reputation he was worried about . . . Besides, he went on, it was not the right part for her. He could not understand where Andreas had got that idea from. It wouldn't be right for her, and certainly not at this point in her career. She must trust him, after all he had read the play. Nora, on the other hand . . .

But what did she think of him, by the way? He raised himself on one elbow. She lay down on her back. He let a hand slide over her stomach and one breast. He seemed rather pleasant . . . and rather young. Harry smiled. He's older than you are, he said. Handsome enough chap, isn't he? She turned on her side, he withdrew his hand and pulled the sheet over his hip. Why did he say that? As soon as she had spoken the words she felt she had fallen into a trap. Harry smiled again and looked in front of him. Well, but he
was
, why did she make such a fuss about it? She didn't! He looked at her and kissed her forehead. That's all right then, he said and switched off the light.

She moved close to him, he laid a hand on her hip. I'm just an anxious old man, he said, and she could hear him smile in the dark. She gave him a push. Rather she was the one to be nervous. He turned onto his back, and she rested her cheek on his chest and let her fingertips circle over his stomach. Perhaps she was right . . . He sounded thoughtful. Did she know what his last wife had once called him? Her fingers had reached the hairs in his groin. No, not if he hadn't told her . . . She played with his growing erection.
Woman junkie
, he said, lazily caressing her buttocks. But the strange thing, he went on, the really puzzling thing was that even if he knew it himself, he was still carried away every time he caught sight of an engaging girl's face and a pair of lovely legs. She carefully weighed his hanging testicles in her hand. So when was he going to find a new young and unknown beauty? He laughed. She needn't worry. She could go on for a long time yet. When her youth came to an end he would have long since kicked the bucket.