had said as they washed up. The summer could seem so long in town.
A powerfully built man in a light suit and straw hat met her at the station. He picked up her suitcase and carried it out to a large open-topped car. She noticed he was wearing driving gloves of pale-coloured leather.
He had built the holiday cottage after the earlier war, when he had been appointed a consultant surgeon. He and his wife had never had children, but for a number of years they asked their nephew to stay every summer in the red-painted wooden house by the North Sea. They might have invited the dressmaker’s daughter on holiday to keep him company, the lanky fourteen-year-old boy who lay on his stomach in a sand dune watching the car stop in front of the house and the strange girl getting out. The consultant held the door for her, his straw hat in his hand, like a hotel porter, with the afternoon sun shining on his bald pate.
She was broad-shouldered and had long arms and strong legs. She looked like a swimmer. Her summer dress was blue, she had bare shoulders and loose flaxen hair, which flew out behind her when she walked in the wind and the sunshine which made the marram grass glisten and sparkle. Her cheekbones were broad and her eyes blue, but he didn’t notice that until later, when he came down from his dune.
Her arrival had been announced a week earlier. He might already have had a presentiment of what it would feel like, the first time her blue eyes rested on him, briefly and expressionlessly. They had sat down to dinner and she replied to the questions they asked her about her journey and about herself, just as expressionlessly, but politely. He didn’t allow himself to look at the new arrival for more than a few seconds at a time. If he had known how she saw him it would have confirmed his worst forebodings.
She thought he looked funny with his bony body, close-set eyes and the wiry hair that constantly fell over his forehead even though he tried to comb it back with water. He hadn’t had much to do with girls yet, hardly anything in fact. He couldn’t look at them without feeling doomed. But they must have overcome their embarrassed silence, the young woman and the overgrown boy. A couple of years’ difference can be enough to decide which words to use. Woman. Boy.
When they were older they couldn’t remember what they had talked about that summer. They probably told each other what they had managed to experience, considering how young they were. Perhaps they also discussed what they imagined might happen to them when they grew up and the war was over. The conversations beside the sea had faded out and the words been forgotten. Only the sea and the beach remained, and the recollection by one of them that they had once walked together on the far side of all the years that would pass before they met again. But they could both remember lying on the beach and swimming together when the breakers were not too fierce. His aunt warned them again and again of the undertow. He was a good swimmer, in the water they were equals, but when they came out onto the beach he was again aware she was older than he was.
Many years later he told her he had suspected she had been friendly towards him only because in her eyes he was harmless, and then because he was her hosts’ nephew. She smiled when he said that but made no reply, and he came to think of the way she smiled and her expression that grew more preoccupied during the short time they spent together. She seemed so pensive when they walked beside the waves or sat on the beach playing with the sand that trickled between their fingers, until someone called her from the house.
There was no question of duties, come to that. It had been her own idea to lend a hand in the kitchen. The housekeeper was an elderly woman with thin lips and big hands. The consultant’s wife had actually taken the girl aside and said she must remember she was a guest. She had replied that she didn’t mind helping. She joined in preparing dinner and serving it before she sat down in her place at table and the housekeeper withdrew to the kitchen. Then she hastened to spread her napkin on her lap like the others. She was given her own silver napkin ring like theirs. They used the same napkins for several days before they were changed and washed and hung out to dry on the clothes-line behind the house among sheets and shirts.
She loved to sniff in the scent of clean linen that had hung on the line in the wind. Once he saw her, lost in meditation as she could be, engaged in taking in the laundry. She stood there behind the house with her face buried in a sheet. She saw him looking at her and he saw her cheeks blush slightly. He lowered his own eyes, but it had been strangely exciting to feel the unexpected power of his glance.
Perhaps he even confused it with the feeling of having stolen something from her, something he could take away with him and keep, one evening when she hadn’t bothered to close the bathroom window. She couldn’t see him out there in the twilight, herself white and indistinct in the dark bathroom, lifting her large, soft breasts gently and intimately to dry underneath them with her towel. Later, when the wet towel hung flapping by itself on the empty clothes-line, he couldn’t resist holding it up to his face. But then he only felt powerless again, and dropped it at once, afraid of being seen from inside the house.
She didn’t see him. When he was not present she did not think of him. She only saw him if he was actually there, but not because she wanted him to be there. She just didn’t give him a thought. Later on she could not remember what she had thought about during the weeks before her sudden departure, in the strange house in company with strange people she had not herself chosen to spend summer with. She could remember lying awake at night, and often thinking about her mother without actually missing her. She thought about the woman who happened to be her mother, and about the cramped, dark flat near the harbour that was her home.
She heard the bombers flying over Denmark and imagined them flying above the city and dropping their cargo. Perhaps one of the bombs would hit the block they lived in, and crash down through the living-room ceiling. Her mother would be sitting in the shelter down in the cellar as the bomb hit their home and the rest of the block and brought it crashing down in a cloud of rubble. They had been in the shelter several times with the other residents on the staircase when there was an air-raid warning. Some of them had been in night clothes and dressing gowns. Nothing had ever happened. The war went on somewhere else, far out behind the black-out curtains. It consisted of sounds, voices on the wireless and rumours in the street, sirens from the rooftops and the distant drone of the aircraft engines approaching from out at sea.
They must have cycled out more than once to the half-submerged meadows at the end of the fjord. He had often been there alone, both that summer and in earlier ones. The horizon ran almost full circle, broken only by a spruce plantation to the south, scattered clumps of reeds and the sand dunes to the west. Furthest out on an isthmus there was a wooden shed made of grooved planks. You had to leave the bicycles and continue on foot for the last stretch along the water-logged strips of earth. He showed her how you could get right out to the shed by taking a detour. It stood out like a solitary figure surrounded by cloud masses and their gliding reflections in the calm water, a distance so far it was hard to understand how anyone could have transported the long planks so far out or thought of building a shed out there at all.
When you turned round you could see nothing but water, grass and sky, where the meadows blended into the fjord. They stood quite still listening to the wind and the birds. There were narrow chinks between the planks of the shed, which dispersed the light into transparent fans. If you put your eye to the chinks you could look out. She was standing like that, with her eye to the crack between two planks, when he walked over to her and placed a timid hand on her back, just above the small of it. Later he could not comprehend how he’d had the courage. She had turned and thrown him a brief glance of surprised amusement before she pressed a forefinger to his nose and went outside.
She overtook him as they cycled back along the narrow path with flooded grass on both sides. Her frock tightened around her hips when she trod down on the pedals and her smooth calves shone in the sun. She had a large birthmark at the back of one knee, you could see it every time she stretched her leg. It seemed like a blemish, but at the same time it drew all his attention to the fleeting glimpses he had of the backs of her knees when they came in sight
