He had a meal with them sometimes when he was in town, it meant something to Lea. It was surprisingly easy, all three were very civilised, but he usually left after kissing Lea goodnight. Sometimes they referred to the divorce, but always in abstract terms and without mention of the little mishap that had brought about the change, when he arrived home too early one winter Sunday. Robert wondered occasionally whether he and Monica might still have been together if he had not caught her out. If he had just left a message on the answering machine when he called home from Oslo. Then his colleague might have had time to take himself off and everything would have seemed different. Perhaps she would have grown tired of her lover, tired of all the emotional turmoil, secrecy and practical lies. To exchange one doctor for another wasn’t exactly revolutionary, anyway.
They did not seem passionately in love, she and Jan, but of course that might just be tactfulness, to make it look as if their relationship was already as much a matter of routine as his and Monica’s marriage had become. They did not even refrain from kissing each other heartily when he was there, the way married people kiss, like siblings. Perhaps it was really some kind of sophisticated consideration, thought Robert, a blind to conceal their erotic hurricanes. Unless that was how you ended up in any case, like siblings, because in the end establishing a family was like returning to the family you thought you had left.
Lea sat on the sofa watching television while he unpacked the shopping in the kitchen. As usual he had bought too many things for lunch and too many biscuits, as if the larder had to overflow with abundance when Lea was coming. He could not find the leg of lamb. He went outside again and opened the boot, but there was nothing in it except the first aid box, the jack and the spanner for changing wheels. Andreas Bark must have taken the bag with the leg of lamb when they carried his things in. He could not face driving out to the house in the woods a second time that day, and he certainly could not face the other man’s drama again.
He had forgotten to close the gate in the garden fence. Behind the wide panorama window onto the terrace he saw Lea’s turned away figure and the television screen trembling like a drop of quicksilver, floating in the semi-darkness of the living room behind the grey hatching of the rain. She was watching Flipper. As a child he had also loved the plucky dolphin’s adventures, and now the series was being repeated it was his growing daughter sitting there dreaming of Florida’s blue lagoons. It had become a classic. What a cultural inheritance! He had cautiously tried to introduce her to such varied offerings as Vivaldi’s Seasons and Debussy’s Children’s Corner, but they could not compete with the Spice Girls and Michael Jackson.
He stood there in the rain for a few moments reminiscing over the graceful dolphin and the sun-tanned, well-organised family it had rescued from so many criminal plots against their sun-warmed happiness. The bright technicolour of the films had faded with the years, and the whole thing seemed pretty naïve, but he clearly remembered how he had meditated over the wise playful dolphin Saturday after Saturday. Its feats of grace when it reared and turned somersaults over the coral-blue water expressed pure unsullied joy. Neither more nor less exhilarating and jubilant than Vivaldi’s trilling, violin-shimmering springtime.
He cooked the burgers they were to have had the next day. They would have to go and get a pizza when that time came. Lea was still watching television. He would really have liked to have her help in the kitchen. She did that sometimes, it was a pleasant way of spending time together, but there was something about her motionless and almost melancholy concentration that made him leave her alone. Perhaps she was tired.
She did not have much to say over dinner. If it stayed fine, he said, they could make a start on the kitchen garden, and he reeled off the list of seeds he had bought, but she didn’t seem particularly keen on going out to dig. Last time she had been enthusiastic, it had actually been her idea. He asked her about school and what she had been doing since last time and she responded, slightly dutifully, he felt, but she did not volunteer anything herself. She had begun to go riding and almost made a little story out of her account of how a young horse had thrown off one of her friends, but the girl had not been hurt, and since then her horse had behaved perfectly. She ate nicely, that was something Monica considered important. Yes, she loved the roller skates, they were ace.
He couldn’t help smiling at the word. It was like seeing her in nylon stockings for the first time when six months ago she had played the princess in the school play, with mascara on her eyes, dark red lips and a beauty spot on her cheek, when he didn’t quite know what to think. And the trip to Lanzarote? Monica had said something about the beginning of July and when she came home, there was her friend with the summer cottage. He did not want to dig away at the subject too much, but he felt a stab of sadness at the prospect of not seeing her during the holidays. Or was it just as much the thought that Monica and Jan would have a monopoly on her? He asked if she would like some dessert, he had bought ice-cream and made a fruit salad. She chose the fruit salad. He wondered whether it was out of politeness, because he had taken the trouble.
She seemed sad, but perhaps he was merely over-interpreting her recurring silence and withdrawn expression. He was always afraid of being inattentive. After a while, as she sat pushing the last slice of banana around her plate with her spoon, he asked if anything was worrying her. She avoided his eye. No, nothing. He gently stroked the back of her hand with his index finger. Anything at school? At home?
She left his hand there, stroking cautiously. She looked away, into the twilight of the garden. Then she said it had stopped raining. She was right, the swishing of the rain had ceased and the evening sky brightened behind the silhouetted birches, a soft yellow under the hurrying frayed blue clouds. She helped him clear away and fill the dishwasher. He asked if she would like a game of table tennis. She looked at him for a moment. Okay, she said, smiling, and the smile seemed genuine. They played for twenty minutes, she was tough, he started sweating, out of breath. It was silly to play straight after dinner, but she seemed to enjoy it and he liked to watch her quick, lithe movements.
Afterwards he made himself some coffee. They sat down to watch television. She leaned against him on the sofa as usual, covered with the rug. Neither said anything much, again her gaze was distant and abstracted. Now and then he raised some subject or other in an attempt to get a proper conversation going, but she just responded with brief comments as if to get it over with, apparently absorbed in what was happening on the screen. After she had gone to bed he poured himself a whisky and listened to one of Bach’s cello suites in an old recording by Pablo Casals. He regretted being so direct in his questions over dinner. The old music wove its logical web around him and he followed every one of the crisp trembling threads in anticipation of their nodal point until he felt he was the spider.
When he went into the bathroom in the morning she had carefully hung her wet bath towel to dry on the bar above the heater. She was nowhere to be seen. She had made her bed as neatly as a housemaid would do. When they lived together she had always left towels crumpled up in a corner of the tiled floor, and her room looked as if it had suffered an earthquake, but of course she was older now. She was out in the garden with her fingers dug into the front pockets of her tight jeans, her face lifted to the trees. He couldn’t see what she had caught sight of. A bird, maybe, or a cloud. He went into the kitchen to make coffee. When she came in by the scullery door soon afterwards she wiped her feet on the door mat as thoroughly as a guest.
It had cleared up during the night, the sun was drying the grass, and if not for the wind, it would almost have been warm. She spent the morning in the kitchen