It had grown warmer, the sunlight sparkled in the green mesh of the net and made the air over the red gravel quiver. After their game Robert and Jacob sat getting their breath back on a bench by the wire fence that separated the tennis courts. Jacob gave him a chummy nudge, he must do something about his backhand. Robert just smiled and screwed up his eyes against the strong light. From behind came the repeated clunk, now to left, now to right, of ball against racket, followed by duller thumps when a ball struck the gravel. Play was in progress on several courts at once so the sounds came unevenly and only sometimes fell into a syncopated sequence that was at once broken again.
What was it then? Jacob looked at him, bewildered. What were they going to talk about? Oh, yes . . . He sat scratching the gravel with his racket for a few moments. It wasn’t so easy. But he felt sure he could rely on it not going any further. Of course he could. He smiled shyly, he envied Robert sometimes. What for? Jacob looked at him. Well, he had his freedom. Oh, that. Robert leaned back against the fence and stretched out his legs. Jacob bent over and looked at his racket. It was different when you had a wife and child, it was a bit . . . well, he knew all about that. Robert smiled. Was it someone he knew? Jacob looked scared, as if Robert had suddenly shown he was clairvoyant. She was his eldest child’s gym teacher.
Robert was reminded of the young man in the baseball cap walking at the edge of the sea beside the librarian, and of the set designer in Stockholm with black hair and blue eyes who had unknowingly changed the course of Lucca Montale’s life. Everyone went around falling in love. But what then, was Jacob going to get divorced? Again the younger man gave him a startled look. He hadn’t thought of doing that. Surely it didn’t have to be either or. Besides, she was married herself, he smiled, it was a real mess. But what could he do? He was mad about her, and she . . . it was the same. It had been instantaneous, the moment they saw each other.
She had just started teaching at the school as stand-in for a teacher on maternity leave. He had met her at a parents’ meeting, he had gone along alone, she had a fantastic body. They had fallen on each other in the car when he drove her home. She had such boobs . . . Jacob gestured their size with his hands, but the word sounded unnatural, boobs, and his hands flopped down as if they were already exhausted by all the density they had tried to show. He got quite weak at the knees when he dropped the children at school. It was like being young again.
Robert looked at him. Jacob still looked very young with his fair hair and rosy cheeks. He reddened, both bashful and proud at the thought of the ungovernable and reckless passion inside him. And what he wanted to ask Robert now was whether he could take his rounds this evening. Her husband was away on a course. Robert hesitated a moment, not to tantalise the other man, rather not to disappoint him by making his willingness seem too trivial. It was no great sacrifice, he wasn’t doing anything. Jacob looked really moved. He knew he could rely on him. Robert thought of his wife, who always smiled at him with her grudging, cool eyes. What was wrong with her attractive face and well-groomed outlines? Surely only their constant availability.
It was many years since as a young doctor he had had fixed duties but, because of staff shortages, Robert and his colleagues were sometimes obliged to take a night shift. He rather liked the nocturnal silence broken by sporadic sounds, when a telephone rang or a nurse walked along the corridor in her clogs. It was a different silence from the one at home, when he had eaten and sat alone in his sitting room, and it did not make him feel isolated in the same way. Alone, yes, but not isolated. When he was on night duty he sometimes let himself imagine he was on the bridge of a great passenger liner. The gigantic oil-burning boiler in the basement was the ship’s engine room, the sleeping patients were passengers in their bunks, and the darkness outside was the darkness over an invisible sea. For some it was a journey to new adventures, for others the last voyage, but that did not alter the speed or the course of the ship.
He sat chatting to the night nurse, a slight woman in her late fifties. She talked about her son, who was travelling across the USA by car with a friend. Last time he called he had been in Las Vegas. She looked worried. She had two watches, one on each wrist. One showed what the time was in America. She had calculated how many miles her son covered every day, and synchronised the time on the American watch, at intervals putting the hour hand back one. She had never been to America, but could describe in detail what her son had experienced on his journey. As a rule he called home in the afternoon, local time, when it was night in Denmark and she was at work. He called collect. The nurse gave Robert a slightly scared look. He wouldn’t tell anyone, would he?
Robert smiled and gave her a friendly caress on the back between the prominent shoulder blades, thinking of Jacob who was no doubt in his car now, heart beating, on the way to his tryst with the gym teacher. They were often on duty together. She had lived alone since her husband died of stomach cancer ten years ago. He had been a builder, she nursed him herself for his last months. It had not been a happy marriage, but she spoke of it without bitterness, as you speak of chance misfortune. She had merely been unlucky in the great lottery. But her children were doing well, her daughter was a doctor in Greenland, and the youngest was a student at the Veterinary and Agricultural High School in Copenhagen, when he was not hurtling across the USA.
When she was young she had worked as a volunteer in a children’s clinic in the Sudan. He sometimes encouraged her to talk of her time in Africa, how she had been on the point of marrying an African when she discovered he had two wives already. She had believed she had met the real thing in the figure of a tall handsome Sudanese. Every time she told the story she smiled the same surprised, self-ironical smile, and Robert could suddenly see what she must have looked like as a young woman. A graceful, surprised young woman in the midst of black Africa. At other times she asked about Lea and gave advice on child-rearing in a slightly lecturing tone, but Robert listened without argument.
When she was called away to a patient he got out his walkman and played a tape of Haydn string quartets. He wound forward to the slow movement, misused as a national anthem long after Haydn’s death. He hummed the introductory bars, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, and smiled. Once again he had to admire the way the musicians, even as they played the first, lingering bars shrugged off the dead shell of ugly associations and liberated the music. He leaned back as Haydn whispered his civilised commentary through the earphones with the warm, crisp vibrato from instruments almost as old as the composer.
Jacob must have arrived by now. Robert pictured to himself how Jacob the naughty schoolboy with red cheeks lay in a strange house between a strange woman’s legs groping her boobs. The house would no doubt have been a family home like his own, and the woman would not have differed so much from his own well-shaped wife. A woman’s body like any other, in a bedroom probably furnished like most with pine and chipboard furniture covered with white laminate. And yet it was a drama that was nevertheless played out between them, forbidden in a completely irresistible way.
While the gym teacher spread her legs for Jacob, did he perhaps pause for a moment, on his knees as if in a sort of reverence, at the sight of her cunt. No doubt it resembled all other cunts, both the real ones and those in all the porno magazines and coloured diagrams in anatomical textbooks the world over. When he had been no more than a child Robert had felt there was something brutally prosaic about the female sexual organs compared with his vague daydreams of what awaited him when he grew up. On the other hand it was precisely their rather frightening reality that had made them so exciting to think about, the folds of the labia and their colour range of reddish brown and rose.
When he pictured Jacob gazing at the gym teacher’s cunt, lying open to him surrounded by the functional, easy-care furnishings, the organic folds of its form were as anachronistic to think of as an antique would have been, a quaint art décor casket lined with red velvet. Oddly striking in the orderly, mass-produced common sense in low-cost materials of the suburban house. If you lived the regular life of a doctor or gym teacher in a medium-sized provincial town, the female sexual orifice was the last romantic cavern, the last refuge for your debilitated imagination.
Earlier, when Robert had gone to bed with a woman for the first time, he had not only desired her body but also its