Wilful Disregard (9 page)

The realization crashed in on her like a meteorite and its impact was as violent as the one seventy million years earlier that wiped out the dinosaurs. She no longer saw what was happening on the cinema screen in front of her as everything in her body went into reverse in a single dizzying second and the true state of affairs dawned on her. It was obvious yet inconceivable: naturally he was with his woman in Malmö this weekend. The last time had been a fortnight ago and he was there every other weekend, always had been. Atomic clocks could be set by his trips to Malmö. The previous Saturday they had met at Ester’s house and this weekend it was Malmö’s turn again. The thought had not occurred to her even once during the preceding week because the act was too preposterous, but it explained his behaviour in recent days.

The film was only halfway through. She sat on while the blackest anguish she had ever felt rolled through her in wave after wave of arsenic and lead.

Why was she staying? Because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go anyway, in that moment at which her suspicions had been confirmed. She might just as well sit in a cinema.

After the film she walked up to his street. The weather was raw and drearily grey, no temptation to evening strollers. The street lights were on, the shopkeepers were switching off the lights in their back rooms, locking up with jangling bunches of keys and sighing with relief at the prospect of their free Sundays. Ester headed towards his block to find out for sure.

The reason it had taken her so long to realize was that she could not understand how a person who did that sort of thing looked on life and on other people. Her whole idea of humanity as one, and psychically homogenous, had been rocked to its foundations. This way of dealing with the material world was too strange.

Even from a distance she could see that the studio was bolted and barred. Clearly she had still been nourishing a glimmer of hope in spite of everything, because the certainty inflicted more pain. It was only when he was away that the studio was shut up and the wrought-iron outer gate was locked. There were no sets being built here this evening. She went across the yard and up to his flat and peered in through the letterbox. No light anywhere.

Hugo had given her to understand there were people at work in the studio from morning to night and every day, weekends too. He had let her believe he was a busy man, a relentlessly working artist who was not to be disturbed and on whom no one could place any demands because he was working for art, which was all about how human beings behave towards one another, about casual evil, the exercise of power and powerlessness. But just now he was taking a rest from that.

There were patches of ice on the ground and the wind crept stealthily along the streets, whipped round corners and jabbed its malevolent needles into necks and wrists. The temperature hovered between melting and refreezing. Slush by day, a thin crust of ice by evening.

Once again she walked from his studio to the bus. As she took her seat she got out her phone and started composing a text message. She had finished it by the time she got off the bus a quarter of an hour later and she sent it off with no thought of refraining. It was a highly condensed communication, as strained as dread and panic become when they conceal themselves behind haughtiness. Its tone exuded contempt rooted in self-respect. It was a message you could cut yourself on. And she censured him with all the justification of the scorned.

But it was text, it was not her, it was her as text. In the physical world there was neither haughtiness nor self-respect. In this physical world, she was on the point of collapsing into a loose heap.

A brief triumph presented itself, however, once the message was sent. Both the act of writing it and the opportunity of directing her anger at him in hard, well-formulated thrusts eased the pain for a while. And it was contact, some form of human encounter that broke the unbearable silence. He would read the message and think of her, and answer.

But no answer came. Nothing came at all. Saturday evening went by. Sunday went by. On the Monday morning, thirty-six hours had passed without a word from Hugo. It was a perfect demonstration of how to kill a person by social means.

She went down to the Central Station in the middle of the day and positioned herself where the Malmö trains came in, but it was futile. There were hourly arrivals and her chances of striking lucky were slim. Crowds of people came streaming off the many carriages of the train towards a host of underpasses, exits and stairways, and she did not see him. She stood there waiting for two hours, three arrivals. Then she went back home and wrote an email in which she drily analysed the whole sequence of events.

‘The more you stay silent the more I speak, it’s Hegelian,’ she wrote, and was embarrassed by her own pretensions but left them in anyway. She put forward all the objective eventualities she could think of to account for his acting as he had, and set out all the conceivable and self-critical points of view, future prospects and interpretations that her imagination could muster, except one: that she had no right to an explanation. She drew the line there. She wrote that she understood that you couldn’t speak the truth if you lived in a world where you would be punished for it, and that her moral rules were perhaps too strict for him to want to speak the truth. She suggested that she had gone too fast and not listened to his needs or tempo. But she considered she had the right to an explanation because they had a contract with one another. He had assumed responsibility by entering her body; that amounted to holding out to her the prospect that something had to be carried through. Hence she had rights, and they included hearing his explanation.

She left no perspective unexplored except the one that said she had no rights. It did not occur to her to have such a dispassionate relationship with life or to have such contempt for herself. Elements in the girlfriend chorus found it hard to put up with this lack of acceptance, or, as Ester saw it, this lack of self-contempt. They, having put so much effort into eradicating their needs in order to please, or behaving properly and not disturbing anyone, were irritated by Ester’s self-righteousness in not realizing that she was not wanted. He owes you nothing, they told her. She examined their argument and found that she did not share their analysis.

Strength and competence arouse admiration, but not love. It’s the shortcomings in a person that inspire love. But those shortcomings are not enough. They have to be complemented by autonomy and self-distance. Flaws create affection, but sooner or later aggressions will be generated by the very thing that arouses affection. Pure deficiency is in its helplessness as impossible to love as steely strength.

Ester got no answer, regardless of whether she felt strong, weak or ridden with flaws. The whole week passed with no sign of life from him.

Her breathing was shallow and she felt permanently tight across the chest. Every evening she took the bus to his street. Lights shone from the windows once more and work was in progress in the studio. The person she had gone to sleep and woken up with, and two weeks ago had laughed with and talked to for hours, was now someone she had to stand and look at from a street corner, like before it all started.

On the Friday, a week after the last time they had seen each other, that last morning a thousand years ago, she made a decision and once more took the bus to his place. Enough was enough; she was not prepared to accept any more of this cowardly evasion.

It was six in the evening. She entered the studio without ringing the bell, and went upstairs. There on the first floor, behind the big, solid desk, she found him working. He looked over his glasses, neither dismayed nor afraid nor glad. He said:

‘You’re here.’

‘Yes. I am.’

He rested his elbows on the table, held his hands loosely clasped, and did not reveal what he was thinking. Ester asked if they could talk, said it was vital, and though he showed no great enthusiasm they crossed the road to the local restaurant where they used to sit by candlelight. It was now an unfamiliar place in her eyes. But the staff greeted them warmly as two regulars and immediately prepared their favourite table in the corner.

She heard him tell the waitress that they wouldn’t be staying very long.

Still on his feet, he ordered a glass of wine for himself. The waitress waited attentively but discreetly for another order. And when it did not come she moved towards the kitchen. At the same moment Hugo gave Ester a quick glance and said perhaps she wanted something as well? She nodded.

Hugo sat on the edge of the chair with most of his body weight on his lower legs and feet, he twisted and shuffled and looked at anything but her, poised for a hasty exit.

She saw it, but what she felt was love. There was no longer any need for explanations. Everything she had wanted to ask, all those breathless ideas, turned out to have been an excuse to spend time in his company. She wanted them to keep seeing each other, that was the long and the short of it. She wanted to have a relationship, that was all. She missed him enormously, it was as simple as that. She wanted them to sit together, talking for hours, and then go on home to his place and wake up in the morning with a long Saturday stretching before them. When they were together she lacked for nothing.

‘I’ll have to get back soon,’ he said, his flickering gaze bouncing briefly into her own. ‘Lots to do. A terrifically intense phase of work.’

The illusion shattered and the coolness returned. The meeting she had obtained by force had to be justified and explained anew with harsh imperatives like morality and the need to understand, not with the softness of her thoughts a moment before.

She had a good mind to say he had been in a terrifically intense phase of work the previous weekend, too, but decided not to be sarcastic. One always came to regret sarcasms.

‘I did all I could to make contact,’ she said.

‘I noticed.’

There was silence while she absorbed this snide remark.

‘Why didn’t you answer?’

‘What bit was I meant to answer, given everything you were asking? You were wondering about so much. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many questions all in one place.’

‘I texted you as well. And phoned.’

‘Yes. You did.’

‘Do you mean the email I sent on Monday?’

‘I don’t know what day it came. It wasn’t feasible to answer all those questions.’

‘Do you think there might be a reason why I’ve had so much to wonder about this past week?’

‘No idea.’

‘No. Sometimes it’s difficult to see how things are connected.’

He emptied his glass in a couple of hurried gulps.

Her breath came in little gasps.

‘The reason I had so many questions was that your behaviour’s been incomprehensible. For three months we’ve been seeing each other and developing some kind of intimacy. It culminates in three erotic encounters that I assume we both considered inevitable. Three erotic encounters in the space of six nights. Since then your behaviour has been obnoxious, and what’s more, obnoxious in a singularly mysterious way. So I’m left guessing. Anybody wanting to torture a person only has to do what you’ve been doing to me this past week.’

He said nothing. Twirled his empty glass, scanned the restaurant. He didn’t look as though he felt any sense of guilt and he didn’t appear to be keeping quiet because he was unsure what to say. All he wanted was to get out of the shackles she had put on him and he was keeping quiet in the way one does with somebody who isn’t going to understand in any case, who inhabits another world with different rules of play, pointless to discuss because of the gaping chasm in between.

‘I’ve been desperate all week. I don’t know what to do.’

‘If you’re down you ought to go and talk to someone.’

‘I am talking to someone. Right now.’

‘Someone who knows about these things. A professional.’

‘Who knows about broken hearts? There’s one person who can help me with my problem, and that’s you.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to work now.’

From the dull tone of his voice and the tired look in his eye she could detect that awareness of inadequacy again. An inadequacy that had ossified into an abstract loathing of women for their eternal amorous demands on a person like him, with bigger things to think about, their prattle and possessive impositions tossed out like lassoes, always excused in their view by their tenderly throbbing hearts.

‘It was passion,’ he said. ‘It seized us, as passions do. Perhaps you in particular.’

‘Thanks, it’s remarkably kind of you to say so.’

‘But true. You were clearly more affected than I was. I haven’t been feeling desperate.’

The ill will or hatred behind his words made everything swim, as if the oxygen were running out.

‘So passion isn’t love, in your world?’

‘They’re different things.’

‘Not even related?’

‘Distantly perhaps. But one doesn’t go on long summer holidays with an object of one’s passion or live with them for years.’

‘What an interesting definition. But it doesn’t seem universally applicable, which presumably makes it worthless as a definition. I’d be very happy to go on long summer holidays with you and to live with you for the rest of eternity. Winter holidays, too.’

‘But I wouldn’t.’

‘So it’s been nothing to do with love, what we’ve had? I’m so glad you’ve solved that one.’

He ran his teeth over his lips, a little dry and flaky from the cold weather, though the crack had healed. His body was tense but he let his shoulders droop with a sigh.

‘You got so bloody angry on Saturday. That text you sent was pretty scary. Enough to make anyone back off. Things could get too unpleasant.’

‘And you really can’t understand why I was angry?’

‘Well, maybe I can.’

‘You don’t think, after all there’s been between us, all we’ve done together and everything it implied, that I’ve got a right to be upset, that I’ve got a right to know what you think about you and me? You’ve laid claim to me. You’ve been inside my body. Don’t you think that puts me in some sort of privileged position in which your integrity has to yield and it’s kind of incumbent on you to talk to me about actions you take that affect me so badly I can actually hardly stand upright? The anguish of this is killing me.’