Lucca (7 page)

She must have been in her early twenties. When she sat down between Robert and Monica, he felt surprised they were sisters. Where Monica's movements were angular and effective, there was something indolent about Sonia. She moved at a slower tempo and lingered over each thing she did, as if she had to
ask herself what she was actually engaged in, whether it was spreading cottage cheese on crispbread or pushing her untidy hair away from her soft, heart-shaped face. Her dark hair was a mass of curls and longer than Monica's, which was smooth and cut in a practical style. She wore a silver ring on one big toe and spoke with a slight drawl, pronouncing the s's like a schoolgirl in a way that irritated Robert. Her long batik dress had faded in the wash and hung loosely around her. Monica never wore dresses.

She was the wild one of the family. That's what they had called her when she was small, the little wild cat. They had been unable to control her, the barrister and his check-skirted wife, and she was sent to boarding school at fourteen. After leaving school she went to Israel, stayed in a kibbutz for six months and when she grew tired of picking oranges she went to Jerusalem where she attended dance school and fell in love with an American. She accompanied him when he flew back to New York, their relationship was probably at an end then, but to everyone's surprise she succeeded in getting admitted to Martha Graham's school. Her father paid up without protest. To make sure she didn't come back, Monica had said with a smile.

After lunch she pulled her dress over her head and started to do tai chi on the lawn dressed only in pants like Lea, who watched open-mouthed. The barrister changed his brown leather shoes for a pair of chunky clogs and began weeding the rose bed, his pipe clenched energetically between his teeth. Their hostess went indoors to lie down. Robert and Monica sat in deck-chairs reading. Now and then he stole a glance at Sonia, who went through her long drawn-out movements with a self-satisfied, contemplative expression. There was something frail about her torso, out of proportion with her strong arms and muscular legs. Her breasts were small and childish, as if not fully developed, and her hips were as narrow as a boy's.

Late in the day Robert and Monica drove down to the beach with Sonia and Lea. Sonia sat in the back playing mouse with a hand on Lea's back, tickling her neck and under her chin. They both giggled as if they were the sisters. When Sonia tickled Lea
in the side she doubled up laughing and happened to kick the driver's seat, which was too much for Monica who asked sharply if they wanted to end up in the ditch. Robert turned round. They sat quite still in their corners peeping at each other, red in the face with suppressed laughter. Monica bit her under-lip and gazed stiffly at the road in front of her. He laid a placatory hand on her knee, she jerked it aside and he took his hand away.

She seldom mentioned Sonia. She had left home when her sister was five, but even though the little wild cat then had her parents to herself she had nourished an implacable jealousy of her sister. Once when Monica had brought a boyfriend home Sonia bit his finger so hard he had to go to casualty. At that time their father was in his mid-sixties and more remote than ever before, and their mother, who was fifteen years younger, seemed to wilt at the prospect of starting from the beginning again. She did have a life herself, as she said sometimes to her grown-up daughter. Monica asked why on earth she had had another child then, but her mother merely assumed a distant expression. It had been an accident.

Little by little Robert heard the stories of how Sonia had cut their mother's underclothes into small pieces with the kitchen scissors, poured ink over the case documents in her father's study and emptied a bag of sugar into the petrol tank of his new Volvo. The high point had come when at the age of fourteen she got one of the boys in her class to telephone a bomb threat to the Supreme Court one day when her father was appearing there. Monica could recall how her sister had sat, arms crossed with her eyes on the carpet while her father asked her why she hated them so much. She made no reply, but when he asked if she would rather not live with them, she had looked up and said yes.

She was taken at her word. According to her own account Monica tried to persuade their parents not to send her to boarding school. But what she had feared did happen. Sonia's hatred towards her had just grown formidably deeper. Her silence and enforced good behaviour when she was home on a visit was worse than all her terrorist whims. It was not until Sonia was
at sixth-form college that they had come to an understanding, said Monica, yet Robert sensed a lack of genuineness in Sonia's smile when she finished her tai chi and flopped down smiling on the grass beside Monica's deck chair. At lunch-time he had noticed her sending brief, calculating glances at her elder sister, who listened intently to her father and replied to his questions in her higher and somehow diluted version of his antiquated diction.

The sun hung low above the pine trees behind the sand dunes and the orthopaedic hospital. It was an old seaside hotel from the Twenties, and Robert only had to look at the white-washed functionalist building to hear a distant echo of sentimental saxophones. More than once Monica's mother had described how her husband had proposed to her on the dance floor there, in his white dinner jacket. He corrected her every time, it was black, but she persisted with rare stubbornness. It
was
white. After all, it had been the only time anyone had actually proposed to her. The foaming crests of the waves sparkled in the low sunlight. The Sound was dark blue and melted into the misty sky behind the Swedish coast. The Kullen promontory over there was nothing but a frail grey finger pointing out into the blue. Robert held Lea's hands, she squealed when he pulled her through the surf. The sun cast a reddish glow on Sonia's and Monica's bare backs as they waded out. Monica was slightly taller than her sister but he thought they resembled each other seen from behind, sway-backed and slim. They laughed as they plunged in and vanished, each in a flower of foam and bubbles, to reappear a moment later a little farther out.

Sonia came out first, she thought it was too cold. Her lips were blue and trembling, she had goose-flesh on her thighs and breasts and her dark nipples stood on end with the cold. He handed her a towel. She smiled and turned her back while she dried herself. Monica crawled along the furthest reef with long, measured strokes. Her forehead and cheeks caught the sunlight when she turned her face towards them for a moment. He told Sonia she had changed since he last saw her. She certainly hoped so. She smiled again and wound the towel around herself and sat
down beside him. He looked at their fluted shadows in the sand. Lea squatted a little way off, she had made a small hill of wet sand and was decorating it with mussel shells.

He offered Sonia a cigarette, she didn't smoke, he lit one for himself. How long was she staying? For a month, then she would go back. She talked about New York, where she shared an apartment in Little Italy with a Belgian girl. Actually there wasn't much Italian in Little Italy, the Chinese had taken over. Really . . . She asked if it wasn't a strain for Monica and him to work at the same hospital. A strain? Yes . . . She smiled at his uncomprehending expression. He said it was really very practical. But didn't they get on top of each other? He waved to Lea when she raised her head and looked at them. She had a shadow of wet sand on one cheek. You don't get much time to do that, he replied, and anyway they worked in different departments. She nodded in agreement and looked at him with feigned attention, as if she was not really listening.

He had changed as well. She dug her toes into the sand. He smiled and gazed at his cigarette. The wind lifted the flakes of ash from the glowing tip and bore them away. Maybe he was a bit fatter. She regarded him for a moment. Yes, but it suited him. He started to question her about her dancing in order to change the subject. Monica came out of the water and ran up to them, shining and wet. Sonia interrupted herself and looked at him again. Why did he ask about that? Surely it didn't interest him. She said it with a smile, seemingly not in the least put out. Monica groaned and pushed her wet hair off her forehead with both hands. She put on his bathing robe, tied it tightly around her waist and lit a cigarette, looking out over the water. The sleeves reached down to the tips of her fingers. She jutted her jaw and blew out smoke. Beautiful she looked, with wet plastered-back hair and sparkling drops in her eyelashes around the calm grey-blue eyes.

They had dinner on the terrace facing west, where there was a view over the hills. The last rays of sun shone through the grass and the glasses of white wine on the table. It sparkled on the
cutlery and the barrister's unframed spectacles resting on the tip of his sunburned hawk nose. The talk was of weather and wine. It was South African, a bit of an experiment but there was not much choice at the local grocer's, and it was really quite drinkable. Monica yawned discreetly and Lea rocked her chair, ignoring frequent commands to stop. Sonia showed her how to turn her napkin into a white dove and a white rabbit by turns. They all had their own silver-plated napkin rings, including Robert. The napkins were not changed for several days, this was life in the country, of course.

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.