He saw her again in the afternoon before going home. She lay with her face towards the window. The blinds divided up the sunlight into slanting strips, and one of them fell on her face. She must have felt its warmth on her skin. He sat down beside the bed. She asked what time it was. He told her. She thanked him. For what? For staying with her. He asked how she had known it was him when he came in just now. She smiled faintly, she had recognised his step. She had grown good at that sort of thing, lying here. He suppressed a yawn, but a small sound escaped him. She said he must be tired. He said yes. He didn’t know what to say. Would she like to listen to the radio? No, she would only risk hearing her mother’s voice. And she didn’t dare run that risk? He observed the anonymous mouth and chin in the strip of sunlight, beneath the gauze that covered eyes, forehead and top of the head. Why? She turned her face away, it sank into the pillow.
He sat on, neither of them spoke. He was not sure if she was still awake. He sat listening to the snarling sound of the gardener’s small tractor that was alternately distant and then louder when the tractor crossed beneath the window, up and down the lawn between the wings of the building. She turned her face to him again. Did he smoke? Yes, he replied, bewildered. Would he light a cigarette? She felt like smoking. He lit one and placed it carefully between her lips, which tightened around the filter. She inhaled deeply. The smoke caught the strip of sunlight in a pale mesh as it seeped out between her lips. He opened the window. Grass, she said. He looked through the slats of the blind to the lawn, divided by the mower into long, parallel tracks of cut grass blades. He himself could not smell the grass. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Now and then she made a sign with her mouth, he placed the cigarette between her lips again.
He fell asleep on the sofa when he got home, and did not wake again before the sun had disappeared behind the birch trees and the fence. He was hungry, but had not managed to do any shopping. It was half dark in the room already. On the terrace the garden chairs stood about casually just as he, Andreas and Lea had left them on Saturday. It seemed like several weeks ago. The chairs were white in the twilight, fatuous and mysterious at the same time. He considered going to get a pizza, but couldn’t be bothered. He thought of Lucca. Would she lie awake again tonight, alone with her tears and her thoughts? She didn’t even want to listen to radio. But she might like to hear music. She could borrow his walkman, he could make a tape for her. He decided on piano music and went to look out some records. He chose to start the tape with a couple of Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings and to follow that with a programme of pieces by Debussy, Ravel and Satie. He enjoyed doing it and quite forgot to get something to eat. On the other side of the tape he recorded Chopin nocturnes, as many as it would take. The telephone rang in the middle of Chopin.
He hadn’t spoken to Monica for several weeks. Lea was their only link now, and she had long ago learned for herself to pack her bag and catch a train out and back every other weekend. As usual Monica was matter-of-fact on the phone. She sounded friendly enough but there was not the least hint in her voice of their once having been together, neither bitterness nor placatory nostalgia. She was as practical and direct as ever, she had called to talk about the summer holidays. She and Jan had thought of taking Lea with them to Lanzarote, but perhaps Lea had already mentioned it? He asked when. The dates came promptly. It was at the same time he was on holiday himself. He tried to hide his disappointment, but she could hear it, after all she knew him. He could have Lea for the autumn holiday.
He made no protest, he had never done that. Ever since that winter morning when his successor nodded at him in confusion as he made his way out, in the most literal sense caught with his trousers down, Robert had been determined to avoid rows. Sometimes he suspected Monica had found his acquiescence frustrating. A spot of aggression on his part would probably have relieved her uneasy conscience. She had been allowed to keep all the furniture. On the whole she had everything she wanted, with Lea and everything else, and in her astonishment she chose to persist with her demands, always ready with some uncompromising argument or other. Nevertheless he went on giving way each time she trampled all over him, for Lea’s sake as he would say to himself, but also, he had to admit, for his own. It eased his smouldering feeling of guilt and he could feel almost chagrined when she realised she had gone too far. As if she prevented him from paying off a debt she knew nothing about.
He was sure she had never discovered anything about his affair with Sonia, neither while it was going on nor later when it was over. He was convinced she would have asked, fearlessly direct as she was. It was of no consequence now, but through the years his secret had lain rotting in a corner of his consciousness along with the knowledge that had been forced upon him that she was only Monica’s half-sister. No one seemed to notice anything when he went up to her parents’ holiday cottage the weekend after he and Sonia had spent their first night together in the empty, newly painted apartment. So it was that easy, he had thought, visualising Sonia on Lea’s mattress, naked in the glow from the candle he had thrust into the wine bottle.
When the barrister looked at him over his unframed spectacles he felt they had not one but two secrets between them. Otherwise all was as usual, the herrings were too sweet, and what had happened faded and grew transparent in his memory like something he had simply dreamed. He even succeeded in being sufficiently passionate at night so that the intimate tenderness in Monica’s eyes the next day made her blind to his evasive, restless mood. He was amazed at how hard-boiled Sonia was when she lay on the beach chatting to Monica or played tag with Lea. Even if they happened to be alone together, she made no sign. She made small talk and replied indolently to what he said. Apparently she had forgotten everything, or else considered it of no importance.
It went on for a couple of weeks. Sometimes she spent the night with him, at other times she came in the afternoon and left late in the evening. When she stayed the night he always woke up lying half on the floor because the narrow mattress was too small. Once or twice they went for a walk together. They lay sunning themselves among the stripped-off people in the King’s Garden, and sometimes she suddenly rolled over on him and kissed him just like the other lovers did. He was afraid of their meeting someone he and Monica knew, and pushed off her arm in embarrassment if she affectionately put it around him. She teased him about it and more than once he asked himself if she actually hoped someone would recognise them. It was odd to walk beside her as if they were a couple, and he was alternately delighted and irritated at her giddy impulses, such as balancing on a fence in the park or pouncing on a puppy and raving over it with the flattered owner looking on.
He went to the airport with her when she left to go back to New York. He was relieved when she went, but he grew quite intense in the departure lounge, even if it was mere politeness. He had not been in love with her for a second, but that had made his desire all the wilder, as if he was punishing her because he wanted her. When he watched her doing her self-important tai chi in her parents’ country garden he couldn’t understand how he could be having an affair with her, and when he waited for her in the empty apartment, he sometimes hoped she would not come. But every time he stood in the doorway watching her come up the stairs with her sly expression, he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by her body again, by its uncoordinated mixture of strength and frailty.
Maybe it was not her body in itself which fascinated him so much. Perhaps it was simply its tangible and yet unlikely presence. The provocative and dizzy fact that it was possible, that he only needed to take the few steps over to Lea’s mattress, where she lay naked waiting for him. Later, when he sat among the toy animals reading Lea her bedtime story, he sometimes recalled it was on that same mattress in that same room he and Sonia had lain together, sweating and groaning. It might just as well have been a dream.
They