When he and Monica became an item they had already known each other for some years. They had been in the same circle of friends, and had themselves become friends, neither had believed they would ever be anything else. Maybe it was the reticent attitude in both that made them feel good in each other’s company and at the same time stopped them falling in love. But it was also the dry sense of humour they shared. They were known as the ironic observers in the group, amusing themselves over the excesses of the others. Otherwise they were very different, Robert with his modesty and his eccentric penchant for classical music, Monica with her cool, sharp-edged manner and tough way of expressing things, with no mollifying circumlocutions.
Her contours were so clear and sharp that she was almost mysterious. In a discussion her arguments were as penetrating as chain-saws, she swam like a fish and at tennis served harder than the most formidable guys. No-one had ever seen her dance and she always went to parties or dinners alone. She left alone too, and rumour had it that she might be lesbian. She never used make-up and dressed like a boy in jeans and roll necks all the year round, but she was actually rather good-looking. She was blonde and her profile was almost classical with a prominent nose and small, square jaw. It just didn’t occur to anyone to notice she was rather beautiful. You didn’t think that far because her energetic, masculine movements and challenging grey-blue eyes stopped you observing her in peace.
Robert had been afraid of her until he discovered he could make her laugh. Since then they had been inseparable at parties in summer villas in the north of Sealand, late into the night when people began to filter in pairs into bedrooms or down on the beach. They were always the last ones to sit over the half-empty bottles and flickering garden lights, but they both brought such consideration or animation to their repartee that the idea of so much as touching each other would have seemed plain comic. Even though several people had in fact asked him whether anything was brewing. He himself didn’t give it a thought.
At that time he was in a relationship with an architecture student who always dressed in black with make-up pale as a doll and blood-red lips. He never found out whether they were really a couple, she was unpredictable and disliked being shown off, as she called it. She insisted on his putting her in handcuffs when they made love, he hadn’t tried that before. Otherwise she was hard to pin down, but although she was so elusive she could just as suddenly take it into her head to surrender to him. He went on putting up with her whims merely to hear her scream like a madwoman and feel her bore her long red nails into his shoulders once more when she came. He had grown dependent on her nervous, frail body and her need for ritual subjection, and when he heard the handcuffs clink around her delicate wrists he couldn’t be sure who fettered whom. As a whole he was not sure of anything where she was concerned. He suspected her of continuing to see her former lover, an architect who in the end did not have the courage to leave his wife and children, but he never managed to find out for certain before she finally vanished from his life.
That had a depressing effect on him and he did not feel inclined to join the group of friends on their annual skiing trip to France. His relationship with the temperamental slave-girl had been so intense and hectic that he never had time to ask himself whether he felt anything for her beyond a passionate and confused desire. But after she had disappeared he plunged into melancholy and suddenly felt certain that the woman with her handcuffs held something profoundly inscrutable which he had not been man enough to elicit. Besides, he couldn’t ski at all, though finally he let Monica persuade him, after he had entertained her with his disappointed ruminations, grateful to her for listening to him. She undertook to teach him and after a day or two he braved the ski lift with her. A few hours later he was in the local casualty department with a broken ankle.
Monica had thought he would learn to ski quite easily, and to begin with he thought it was just a bad conscience that made her devote so much time to him. She went skiing only in the mornings, and spent the afternoons with him at the holiday flat in the ugly concrete block where their friends slept in sleeping bags all over the place and wet ski socks steamed on every radiator. She rustled up lunches and made vin chaud, and he was surprised at her gentleness when she asked if he was in pain, or supported him when he hobbled out to the bathroom. He had noticed this gentleness when she sat beside him in hospital while his foot was put in plaster. She looked at him and smiled, and suddenly she put out a hand and stroked the hair from his forehead with a brief, easy movement.
She lit candles when it grew dark. They sat with their red wine, wrapped in blankets looking out at the snow-clad mountaintops between the concrete blocks of the skiing hotels. They talked about everything imaginable between heaven and earth, exchanged childhood memories and described the books they had read. They were not particularly profound but for once they dropped the safe ironical distance that had brought them together but held them in check. One afternoon, after a long pause during which neither had spoken, she asked if he would hate her to kiss him.
It was different, it was a world away from handcuffs and screaming and sharp red nails. The transitions were milder and less noticeable, from words to pauses, from pauses to caresses, and from their hands’ indolent playful exchanges to the first time she straddled him and sank her blushing face to his under the blanket she pulled over them like a woollen Bedouin tent, with slightly narrowed eyes and a shy smile that he hadn’t seen before.
To begin with they didn’t let on, the others were too close and it was too delicate, too new. They gave nothing away, and he marvelled at the different faces she put on, and how good she was at keeping them separate. He went on wondering about it in the years that followed. When she showed him one face, the cool and distanced one, he was all the more attracted because he thought of the other one, and when she revealed her gentle, vulnerable side to him his tenderness increased at the thought that it was a face which showed itself only secretly, under cover, like that first time under the woollen blanket in the French Alps.
One warm Saturday morning he took a train north. The compartment was full of lightly dressed children and adults looking out impatiently at the glinting water and the little white triangles of pleasure boats leaning into the wind behind all the greenery racing past the windows. Monica had the car, she was meeting him at the station. She was in shorts and a bathing suit, leaning against the bonnet, absent-mindedly rattling the car keys. When he caught sight of her he realised he had been missing her. They were used to being together, a week was a long time. She smiled grimly and sent him an ominous glance as she started the car. He had something to look forward to, her father was in top form. But her little sister was home from New York, that should ease the situation. They got on so well together, said Monica with emphasis as if she was not quite sure. Robert had only met Sonia a couple of times.
Monica’s father was a barrister, and she had inherited his hawk nose and jutting chin, although to a lesser degree. She had also inherited his cool, spiky sarcasm and a touch of his aristocratic diction. In town he always wore a grey suit and bow tie, but he was as distrait as he was elegant, and more than once he had appeared in the Supreme Court with bicycle clips on his trousers. When he was on holiday he reluctantly conformed to the rules of holiday wear and put on a pair of khaki shorts, but his white legs ended in a pair of brown leather shoes with a dazzling shine, and his shirt always looked newly ironed.
He could be extremely cantankerous and every day over lunch in the garden he made sarcastic comments on the undesirable sweetness of the herrings. Year after year they grew noticeably sweeter, as if they were turning into children’s sweets! Apart from the sweet herrings he saw communists everywhere, and the fall of the Berlin wall had not cured his phobia. On the contrary, he ceaselessly complained about the reunification of Germany and the outrageous chaos apparent in his world picture. It almost sounded as if according to his view the Iron Curtain had existed to keep out the Asiatic hordes rather than fence them in. Robert had given up arguing with him, to his obvious disappointment.
Monica’s mother was a plump but comely woman, always in pleated or tartan skirts and a silk blouse buttoned up to the neck. She was a shadow, every single movement and each word she spoke corresponded to what the barrister did or said. She put up with his malicious arrogance and choleric attacks, she anticipated his slightest wish