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.
It had taken longer than expected, and sometimes they had been about to give up, but she was stubborn, and now only details needed seeing to here and there. That might have been why she was already missing Andreas. She had forgotten herself while there was still enough to do, and the days passed like hours whether he was away or at his computer. When she was acting she had forgotten herself too, but only to become someone else. While she slogged away in her dirty overalls with the cement mixer and trowel she was no more than a hard-working body, and that was a release.
To start with it had been a mere dream, finding a house in the country. They had both grown up in the city. They started to talk about it in Rome, during the six months they lived in Andreas’s cramped apartment. She suggested it mostly for fun. It was the kind of thing you cooked up crazy stories about when you had fallen in love, a place in the country. She came out with it one late summer morning when they had stayed in bed because it was too hot to do anything but lie in the shade behind the shutters and caress each other very slowly. He took her at her word just as he did a few months later when she told him she was pregnant. How could he be so sure? He ran his hand lightly over her stomach, which would soon swell up and weigh her down to earth, making her break out in a sweat at the least exertion. Sometimes you must believe your own eyes, he said. Otherwise it would all come to dust and blow away while you looked at it. No one had talked to her before like that.
The apartment in Trastevere had only one room, and when he was working she went out walking. He worked a lot, and after a few months she knew every single street in that part of the city. She admired his gift for concentrating and keeping at it for hours on end. Apparently he could always write if he wanted to. At that ti
me he used a portable typewriter, and when she went upstairs late in the afternoon and heard the keys still tapping on the keyboard she went down to the bar around the corner and waited another half hour. It was almost like sitting in a living room, and she started to talk a bit of Italian. It seemed there was still something left in her of the language she had spoken with her father, hidden away in a fold of her brain or rolled up at the bottom of her spine. Soon she could talk to people in the street, in contrast to Andreas who never learned more than the most necessary phrases and was completely uninterested in talking to anyone but her.
She never thought of visiting Giorgio again, although now and then it did cross her mind that she was in the same country as he was, only a few hours away by train. Florence, the city where she had found him and then lost sight of him, was a different world from Rome, the city where her passion for Andreas slowly turned into something tougher, more durable, as an unknown being started to grow a nose, a mouth and eyes inside her. In the evening he read aloud what he had written during the day, and although she admired his arbitrary, stylised dialogue, she often forgot to listen. The sound of his soft voice was enough for her, feeling it like a quiver in her cheek when she rested her head against his chest. The voice spoke to her from a place she could not reach, where he had to be alone, but it was from in there that he had seen her come along and decided not to let her disappear from sight. His voice echoed within her when she walked alone in the shadows among the crumbling walls or sat in the sunshine on the Campo di Fiori. Only his voice was real, not the words, not his theatre. His voice and the unknown child filled her completely. He had believed his own eyes, and she believed in what he had seen.
The wind made the snowflakes circle in spirals over the yard. She suddenly realised it was Else she was listening to. Her mother was announcing the radio programme for the day in the cultivated voice Lucca had listened to since she was a child, alone at home with some nanny. It was the kind of voice that could say whatever you wanted it to. Every word sounded the same in Else’s mouth, as if tongue, lips and teeth were tools intended for breaking up the words and separating them from what they actually meant. Else had been sceptical when Lucca told her they were moving into the country. The poet and his mummy-nurse, she called them for almost a year, until she grew tired of smiling at her own mordant wit. She visited them occasionally in their cave, as she termed it, and Lucca was quite encouraged every time she saw her mother raise her eyebrows and suppress all the pointed comments jostling behind her tight, pinched lips. She had forgotten how to look at herself from outside and she enjoyed Else’s distaste for the dirty and chaotic building site where Lauritz tumbled around with a bare bottom and mud plastering his face.
Lucca had never imagined she would come to live out of town. When they moved in the house was barely habitable, and everyone said it was mad to settle with a child in a place which didn’t even have electricity. As if Lauritz wasn’t completely unplugged. At first they made do with paraffin lamps. They washed outdoors under a garden hose while the bathroom floor was being laid, and cooked on an open fire in the garden. In general they lived in a way the prairie settlers must have done. It was a point of no return. Everything they owned had been invested in the house and the building materials stacked up in the yard.
She had put the city behind her, the streets she had roamed, just a face among the shifting faces, always hunting for another pair of eyes to mirror her. She had put the city and the men behind her, those she had known and those she might have come to know. All the men she had doted on or left, all the grand or petty stories that had been so many blind alleys, wrecked beginnings and failed attempts to attain the life that was to be hers.
She had painted just one and a half shelves when the telephone rang. It was on the window sill. She had to stride over the piles of books on the floor, brush held aloft so it did not drip. It was Miriam, her voice thick and stifled with sobs, she had to talk to someone. Lucca asked what had happened. Miriam started to weep. While Lucca waited for her to calm down she caught sight of a grey streak of paint running down from the brush onto her hand. She held it vertically, but it kept on running like a melting, soft ice-cream. Miriam’s sobs subsided. Her partner had left her. He’d said he didn’t love her any more, and that it was a misunderstanding, the child they were to have. He’d been under pressure. She sniffed and moaned. He’d packed a bag with clothes and gone off in a taxi, she didn’t know where.
Lucca thought of the lanky jazz musician. He had always seemed feeble to her when Miriam bossed him around or plonked herself down on his lap demanding tongue kisses with everyone looking on, as if he owed her proof of his fiery passion for all the world to see. But he’d had the courage after all to back out, but why so late? Miriam had no idea. She had really believed the child would bring them closer together. He had even accompanied her to childbirth class. She began to weep again. Lucca pictured the skinny jazz lover sitting in stockinged feet on the linoleum floor with the bloated Miriam between his knees, surrounded by the other men and their wives, snorting in chorus, while he pondered on how to escape from the fix he had got himself into.
She recalled the night Otto threw her out and she sat drinking vodka at Miriam’s. She remembered her friend’s dreamy chat about having a child, and how outraged she had looked as she told her that her partner was afraid of losing his freedom. What did he want to use that for?! The way Miriam had imposed her pregnancy on him had been just as pigheaded and discordant as when she broke into his conversation and stuck her tongue down his throat. But they could not talk about that, especially not now. All Lucca could do was listen to the unhappy Miriam and explain that she was unable to go into town because she was alone with Lauritz.
After putting down the receiver she stayed by the window. The snow covered the garden and the field. It lay like white shadows along the dark ramifications of the plum branches and framed the little blue tractor Lauritz had left on the lawn. The sky was like granite. She studied the streaks of paint that had split into a branching delta over her hand and lower arm, like blood, she thought, if blood was grey. She would like to have shown more sympathy and her conscience nagged her because she had not invited Miriam to come and stay.
She laid the brush on the newspaper beside the paint pot, wiped her hand and sat down at the desk in Andreas’s study. On it were only some paper clips and the note of his address in Paris in his angular, slightly untidy handwriting. The room stank of old cigarette smoke. He smoked too much, especially when he worked, and always the same strong Gitanes. He coughed in the mornings, but paid no heed to her comments. Sometimes she could hear him trying to suppress his coughing in the bathroom so she wouldn’t notice it. She opened the window and breathed in the cold, raw air. The view was different from his room, you could just see the ends of the plum tree branches. She picked up one of the paper clips and straightened it out, gazing at the white slope of field partly hiding the roof of the neighbouring barn.
She felt she had let Miriam down on the phone, but had not known what to say, and couldn’t say what she thought. That probably what had happened was Miriam’s own fault, because she had obstinately pushed her pregnancy, deaf and blind to all warning signs. Miriam who always took what she wanted, and wore tight trousers even though her thighs were too fat. Lucca had never believed their relationship would last, and perhaps Miriam had doubted it too. Had she thought she could hold onto him by having a child? Naturally she would never admit that, not even to herself. And now a child was coming into the world, a child like all the others with the same demands for affection, the same urge to feel itself a genuine fruit of love and not merely the result of a mistake made by two confused people.
She could have said all that to Miriam if she had dared, but she had no right to say it. Who could distinguish between genuine feelings and illusions? Perhaps Miriam really did want a child, partner or no. Lucca recalled how soberly her friend had assessed her own future possibilities as an actor. A bit of cabaret here a
nd there, as a comic. And what about herself, Lucca? She had been furious when Else comforted her by saying that Otto hadn’t been right for her anyway, and that it was a good thing they had parted. Think, if they’d had a child! Now Lucca had to admit she was right. Her passion had been blind and immature. When she looked back on herself then it was like thinking of another person. As if she had been different from the woman she had become with Andreas and Lauritz. But if she really had changed, she could do so again. The idea sickened her, the idea that changes could just go on and on. And what if she was the same, after all? How could she be so sure that her love for Andreas was more real than her love for Otto had been? Was she so sure now, because Otto and Andreas, each in their respective order, had just been the latest man in the row? Did she feel sure because it only happened to be Andreas she had a child with?
She looked at the note with the address and telephone number in Paris. She felt the urge to call him, just to hear his voice, but it was too early. He would not arrive until late afternoon. It was a long time since they’d had a proper talk, she felt. There was always something in the way. She had so much to do, and he was always working. Besides, for the past two weeks he had been away most of the time, in Malmö. It worried her if they grew distant from each other for a while, on friendly terms but busy and slightly conventional when they kissed good morning or goodnight. She felt he had been distant recently. In Paris it would be different, surely. She longed for Easter.
She leaned over the table and closed the window. Suddenly she was hungry and decided to make some lunch before continuing to paint. As she negotiated the piles of books again on her way through the living room her eyes fell on a bundle of old scripts. The top one was bound in red card. The title was printed on it, The Father, by August Strindberg. She picked it up and leafed through the dog-eared pages with pencilled notes half obliterated. She took the script into the kitchen and put it beside the cooker while she heated water for pasta. Indirectly, Strindberg had been the beginning of her relationship with Andreas, but of course she had not known that then. Not even when they passed each other, he in the lift on his way up, she on her way down the stairs after she’d had tea with Harry and looked out at the thunderstorm over the town.
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