Wilful Disregard (5 page)

One of those evenings when they stayed at the restaurant until it closed and then stood talking in the kitchen in his studio, he broke the pattern of their passivity for the first time and said:

‘So what shall we do now?’

She was too nervous to hear that it was not a question but an invitation.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, thus killing what he had tried to bring about.

‘We’ll carry on talking the way we always do, presumably.’

‘Yes. Presumably we will.’

Silence ensued and then she said:

‘You could show me your flat.’

But it was too late. She had muddied the waters too thoroughly.

‘You can see that another time, but not now,’ he said tersely and dismissively. ‘It needs clearing up.’

‘You’ll have to see my flat as well. I moved in on Thursday.’

‘Perhaps. I’ve got to get to bed now.’

She walked home, mortified. I catch on too slowly and rely on talk when action is what’s called for, she thought, feeling utterly desperate. She knew that words were her shield and the screen she ran to hide behind. She also knew that words did not solve everything, even though she considered that they ought to. A touch of verbal awkwardness would have been to her advantage sexually. Then her body would have been obliged to do some work, too. Now words would have to compensate, as always. Words were simpler, more attainable.

Her agony was acute for several days. She lay on the floor in her new apartment, whimpering.

She heard nothing. A week passed. The anxiety and self-reproach made her intensely queasy. The girlfriend chorus told her an opportunity is not that easily lost. If this were worth anything, he would still be there. She had done nothing wrong and he could take the initiative, too, it was not always up to her. The girlfriend chorus comprised the collective good advice and exhortations of her dearest friends. They helped her to endure for a few more hours when the blackness descended like a shroud on life itself.

On the Monday evening of the following week, Hugo was due to give a lecture on the eye’s perception of colours. She had known about this for a long time and he had asked her to come. One of his major interests was colour and perception, and how the human eye discerns nuances of shade. It was not her area but his lecture took such a pedagogical approach that she understood what he was saying and felt she had learned something.

Once he had finished speaking and taken the applause, they waved and nodded shyly to each other. She stayed in the background while the audience flocked around him. When he had not disentangled himself after ten minutes, she forced herself to leave the building. They had not arranged to meet afterwards and she did not want to expose herself to the answer that he was not available. She must show her independence even at the cost of a missed encounter. She must not be the obedient dog that she felt like. A behaviouristically autonomous dog, albeit phenomenological.

The lecture had been held in a school on Banérgatan. She walked as slowly as she could towards Karlavägen to get to the underground. Or the bus. Or anything. She hoped he would catch sight of her when he came out of the front entrance and hurry to catch her up.

She reached the crossroads and turned cautiously to look back. He had not yet emerged. On this street corner the evening was to be decided, she knew, and perhaps their future life, since every meeting could be decisive. Once she went round that corner he could no longer see her and the opportunity of spending the evening together would be lost.

Now she was out of sight. Now it was too late. She went for a prowl, circling the block so she came back to the same corner again. She rounded it for a second time and thought that she could not do another circuit in anticipation of his arrival.

At that moment she heard his voice. He called her name, looked both ways for cars before venturing into the road and cut across on the diagonal, walking fast. Even in the dark, broken up by street lights and snow, she could see his big, warm smile.

‘You weren’t going, were you?’

‘No. Well yes. I was on my way home.’

‘I got stuck with some of the audience. They wanted my view of one thing and another. One has to be pleasant to people who take an interest. What did you think of the lecture? Was it OK?’

He frowned doubtfully, as he did when he was seeking confirmation but also worrying that his contribution had been weak. She praised his lecture in well-rounded sentences with plenty of content-rich bolstering. It seemed to make him happy.

‘Shall we go for a bite to eat?’ he said.

‘Aren’t you going to work? You generally work late.’

She wanted this so much that she felt she had to make him these offers of freedom. They could easily have been interpreted as a polite brush-off. The fact that he did not view them as such meant he must have felt confident of her feelings.

‘Haven’t I done my bit with the lecture?’ he said. ‘I thought I’d finished work for the evening.’

‘Yes, of course you have.’

‘Don’t you ever relax?’

His tone was jocular and gentle. Ester felt light-headed and giddy and said:

‘Oh, all the time. I’ll do anything.’

They hunted round for a bit and ended up at a little local restaurant on a side street that crossed Kommendörsgatan. There was a buzz of chatter inside and the windows were steamed up; the volume of the other diners was low enough for them to talk but loud enough for no one to eavesdrop. The decor felt warm compared to the frost outside. There were no free tables but he knew the owner, or perhaps the staff recognized him, and all of a sudden a table for two stood ready, with thick drinking glasses and the cutlery in a ceramic pot; it was that sort of place, down to earth.

She perceived them now, and this evening in particular, as entirely equal in their will to be together. The distanced laughs and amused facetiousness were gone. All evasiveness was gone. He wanted something of her. He had moules frites, she had scampi.

‘You once told me you mainly ate plants,’ he said. ‘But I see you eating animals all the time.’

‘Only invertebrates. It’s hard to restrict yourself to plants when you’re eating out.’

‘But there are always plant options, aren’t there?’

‘Drowned in cream, milk and eggs. That amounts to the same as eating animals. But I think of shellfish as almost like a plant. A marine plant.’

‘Perhaps I ought to go in for plants, too,’ he said.

‘I think so.’

‘Or for only eating invertebrates. But why is someone more worthy of protection just because they have a backbone?’

He had a crack in his lower lip with a thin streak of dried blood. The crack widened as he smiled. It looked rather painful. When she got to her feet to hang up her coat, which had slipped off its hanger, she could feel him following her body with his eyes and how much she liked it.

Between the main course and the dessert he looked at her and said:

‘When shall we have that dinner at your place? So I can see your new apartment.’

She gripped her glass, not the stem but the bowl, with both hands and drank some of the wine in order to be utterly present with all her senses at this moment of breakthrough, so as not to sabotage it all again with her words and impetuosity.

‘How about Saturday?’ he said.

‘But I’ve only got one chair,’ she said, and was struck at the same instant by the realization that this was not the sort of thing you had to say aloud simply because the thought popped into your head.

‘We’ll take it in turns to sit on it,’ he said.

The split in his lip opened again.

He reached out his hand and stroked her hair.

Then Saturday came. It was early February and the drips from the roofs were just starting to question their future as icicles. Ester had not gone out to buy a chair, but she had a stool that she could sit on while they ate. It was uncomfortable but it would do. After all, they would be lying rather than sitting. They had done enough sitting on chairs. She was washed out by all the expectation but blissfully happy in every pore.

She had just added the grated Gruyère to the sauce, which also contained crème fraiche, white wine, paprika and the pan juices from frying the chicken – the plant kingdom would be left in peace tonight – when he called, at quarter to seven. It did not occur to her that he might be going to cancel. Confidence had still not deserted her.

The nervousness in his voice and actions made her calm, almost reckless.

‘I’m here at a taxi rank with a chair,’ he said.

‘Is it cold?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is the chair freezing?’

‘No, because I’ve given it a blanket.’

‘What about you?’

‘I haven’t got a blanket.’

‘So you’re freezing?’

‘I’m shaking. But not with cold.’

‘Because you’re coming to see me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You need never be nervous of me.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘We’ve met each other so often.’

‘But not in the presence of a chair.’

‘Get here as soon as you can. The sauce is waiting.’

As they were talking she stirred the sauce and poured it over the chicken fillets. Now the whole thing had to go in the oven for fifteen minutes, the time it would take him to get to her.

When you love and someone receives that love, the body feels light. When the opposite happens, one kilo weighs three. Love that is just beginning is like dancing on a finely honed edge. It can happen that a kilo never regains its proper weight, which generates a degree of apprehension in the fearful, the experienced and the far-sighted. And in those who do not have Ester’s extraordinary capacity for hope.

Ester had bought something with which she was not familiar in order to mix a dry martini. She had heard that this could be drunk before the meal when you had guests and she thought they ought to do so to mark the particularly special nature of this dinner. She could hear that her voice was shrill with embarrassment as she introduced the aperitif. He was not impressed and she felt more stupid still as she sensed that he thought she was being pretentious. He held his glass awkwardly as she showed him round her new lair, which took ten uncomfortable seconds. He made no comment on the apartment and seemed to be wondering why he was being shown it.

They sat down at the table and ate her chicken in a cream and Gruyère sauce with rice and green salad. He praised it all but not enough and she detected ironic overtones in his appreciation of the chicken dish.

‘This has got a backbone,’ he said.

‘I made an exception tonight.’

‘And why was that?’

After the chicken they moved to the sofa in front of the television, where they had two sorts of ice cream from an Italian ice-cream parlour, chocolate stracciatella and zabaglione, and with it some Italian biscuits called cantucci, and black coffee that was also Italian. Much like his attitude to her aperitif, he now seemed indifferent to her carefully composed dessert. She would have liked him to be as fond as she was of the heavenly kingdom of desserts, their rich fullness, their palate-filling consistencies which made her eat them with her eyes closed. She had wanted to meet a man who could share that with her. But Hugo was more preoccupied with alcohol.

She had to make do with his politely sampling both sorts of ice cream and helping himself to two cantucci.

They watched the Winter Olympics, which had just started. This evening they were showing the first skiing race, the men’s thirty kilometres. He appeared to treat this, too, with a degree of disengagement and bemusement, as if he wondered how anyone could expect him to want to watch skiing on television. And one might indeed think it rather strange, but in view of the fact that their conversation during dinner had been somewhat absent-minded (which had never happened before), they needed something to occupy them. She also wanted to usher normal life into their relationship. They could not sit in restaurants all their lives, looking into each other’s eyes and conversing. At some stage they would have to start watching television together as well. But he appeared to be in a constant state of doubt as to what he was doing there. She, too, wondered why he had come when everything they did, ate and said appeared immaterial to him. Or was he in fact insecure, nervous even, on foreign territory where he had no control over what happened? Until now they had always been on his stamping ground, in his venues and haunts, among his associates and in his world.

Once an hour he went to the window for a smoke. Every time she stood beside him, leaning out into the winter night. They talked quietly while the glowing point consumed the cigarette. At the window, the conversation flowed more easily.

The stars sparkled impatiently, almost insistently. With every cigarette break she edged a little closer. Hugo said he ought to give up, and he didn’t really smoke anyway. Ester thought really was a strange word. How could you not
really
be doing things and yet be busily doing them? She wanted to touch his body. She wondered whether he was planning to stay the night after they made love or whether he would go home, however late it was.

The fifth cigarette of the evening looked like all the others though their legs were touching, but it was the last cigarette before they went to bed and allowed their bodies to be united.

She thought five cigarettes was a lot for someone who did not really smoke. She thought about the illnesses the cigarettes would give him and how awful it would be to worry constantly about these from that imminent day when they started living together. But by her love she would make him stop smoking.

He seemed uneasy and restrained. She was baffled. Naturally she had protection, otherwise she would not have let him in. But of course he did not know how much she valued freedom, even though she felt she had spoken of little else, one way and another.

‘We’ve got to be careful,’ he said, resisting as she moved more urgently.

She stopped in mid-movement.

‘Why?’

‘So you don’t get pregnant.’

‘You can rest assured I won’t do that. I don’t want any children. I want adult love alone. Love that’s equal and linear, not vertical.’